Key to conservative revival: Drop climate change fixation, end mass migration
Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition and Britain’s Conservative Party have just crashed to their worst defeats; and in Canada a likely Conservative landslide turned into a narrow loss due to a downside of Donald Trump, namely heavy new tariffs on friends and allies. Some conservative voters are leaving the mainstream for disrupters, supposedly more truly conservative and untainted by failure.
There is no mystery to the conservative eclipse: revolving-door prime ministerships, careerist MPs, policy incoherence and a sense of impotence against the unelected and unaccountable administrative state. We have to face up to the fact it’s not our opponents’ brilliance but our own deficiencies that are to blame.
One lesson we can learn from Trump is the need for strength; the need to have better answers to voters’ problems than the other side.
Indeed, that should be the mark of a conservative political movement: we address the issues facing our country and try to make what’s bad better, in ways that voters might be expected to support, in line with principles that have been proven to work.
It’s pragmatism based on values. Voters expect us to deliver more jobs with higher pay, lower taxes and better prospects for young people to buy a home and start a family. So, to succeed politically, our job is to stop what governments are doing to make that harder; to adhere to the cardinal principle of politics: First, do no harm.
Let’s start by dropping the climate change fixation and the commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, which even former British Labour prime minister Tony Blair has said is “doomed to fail”. As the US Energy Secretary has said: “There is no climate crisis and there is no energy transition.”
Sure, we have only one planet and should pass it on in better shape to our descendants. And climate does indeed change, as shown by the ice ages, for instance. But why do we assume that mankind’s carbon dioxide is the only or even the main factor in climate change; and even if it is, why are we turning our economies upside down to decarbonise given that China, India, Russia and now America, too, have made no commitment to reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050?
This futile green gesture is driving up power prices, sending heavy industry offshore and making us even more dependent on China, which produces nearly all the solar panels and the wind turbines, disfiguring landscapes, supposedly to save the planet.
Then let’s end the mass migration that is driving down wages, pushing up housing costs, putting massive strain on infrastructure and services, and in some places making citizens feel like strangers in their own country.
Australia is the only country that has ended a wave of illegal migration by boat. Then there’s Hungary, under Viktor Orban, which has managed the harder task of ending a wave of illegal migration by land plus insisted that legal migration, too, be controlled so that Hungary keeps its culture.
In becoming citizens, migrants to Australia have to swear that “from this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its citizens whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”. They need not just say it but also mean it.
The migrants we should welcome are those who are committed to joining our team, not just taking advantage of life in a free country.
And as for the argument that migrants are needed to fill the jobs locals won’t do, then improve the incentives for work, through higher pay or ending virtually unconditional welfare payments.
As conservatives, we need to break the something-for-nothing entitlement mindset that is so corrosive of societies’ morale, as people in low-paid jobs deeply resent their neighbours earning almost as much from welfare as from work.
For people under 50 who had been unemployed and on welfare for six months or more, the Howard government in Australia introduced something called work for the dole – they had to do two days’ work experience every week to keep getting their money. It meant that younger unemployed people had to go back to work, preferably for a wage, but if not for the dole. And it distinguished our side as the real working-class party while our opponents – who hated it – were exposed as the welfare-class party.
It is conservatives who don’t really know where they stand and what they’d do differently that voters are over. It’s when political calculation stops us doing what we know is right that conservatives fail. Our challenge is to be a strong and clear alternative to the green-left parties that have exported manufacturing jobs to China, created vast ineffectual bureaucracies, made too many citizens dependants on government and let our armed forces run down to the extent that we can’t give the Ukrainians the weapons they need to fight for everyone’s freedom.
These are fraught times. But as Margaret Thatcher famously observed, the facts are conservative. Before the lights go out, people will wake up to the climate cult. Before passing new blasphemy laws, people will finally grasp the folly of mass migration. And right before the International Monetary Fund is called in, we’ll rein back the welfare state.
But in the meantime we’ve got to “fight the good fight, stay the course, and keep the faith”. If mainstream conservative parties keep failing, it won’t just be fringe parties of the right that supplant us. Unhappy voters will keep replacing incumbents even if it means jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. That’s why pluralist democracy under the rule of law needs its champions to be strong – that’s us – if it is to survive.
Tony Abbott was prime minister of Australia, 2013-15.
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