Trumpism is Working

The writer is in Australia.

Maybe, just maybe, we owe defenestrated Liberal Party leader Sussan Ley a small apology. For her ‘out there’ views on numerology, if nothing else. After all, she was rolled as leader on Friday the 13th. I have no idea if she also foolishly walked under an upright ladder, then kicked a black cat while gazing into a broken mirror before heading to the partyroom spill vote. But come on Sussan with two ‘S’s! Even we sceptics of numerology know you should have made sure the spill was held on a different day of the month.

Facetiousness aside, notice that the now ex-leader of the Libs couldn’t even live up to her crazy views about the world. It was the same when it came to sane, real-world political positions and being a leader of a party with the name ‘Liberal’. You’d think she could have made sure the party lived up to its supposed views and, you know, adopted actual liberal positions on free speech and freedom rather than cave in to the worst speech-inhibiting Labour ‘hate’ law since c.18th century (which, again, the Libs never tried hard to repeal in nine years in government). Alas, no. Or maybe Ley could have pushed for some low taxes, less government spending, smaller government, complete renunciation of the idiotic Paris Accords and stopping the mass immigration tidal wave. Or some sanity in the culture wars? Were any of those positions adopted under leader Ley? Nope. That said, and to be fair, we didn’t see them under the woefully pusillanimous rein of Peter Dutton either.

So it’s on to Angus Taylor in the last chance saloon. Yes, we’re hearing all the comforting generalities and disagreement-finessing bromides the Libs have perfected since knifing Abbott over a decade ago. The general tone is good. The platitudes are, well, platitudinous and hackneyed. The vibe is in the right, vaguely conservative direction. But that is nowhere near enough to win back people like me who have migrated to One Nation. Heck, if you were cynical you’d say the Libs are trying to have it all ways at once. Trying to eat their cake and have it too. Trying to avoid hard, specific promises that will enrage the ABC and half the Liberal partyroom. Trying to keep the Tim Wilsons with inner city postcodes happy while winning the outer suburbs too. That’s not possible I’m afraid. We need to hear hard, detailed, ‘we will go to a double dissolution if we have to in order to bring these about’ promises. We need specifics, not vague, amorphous generalities because, quite frankly, there’s not a lot of reason to believe the Libs have rediscovered that old time religion. They are in the exact same position as the Conservative Party in Britain. Having seen them in office for years and years selling out their core voters, why believe them now? Only hard specific promises with a pledge to do anything and everything needed to enact them (double dissolution elections included) will start to turn the tide.

So let me suggest a course of conduct that is now rampant in Australian universities. Copying. The path to victory is clear. Just copy big chunks of the Trump nationalist agenda. Yes, yes, yes the entire serried ranks of the legacy media and prognosticator caste will, at these words, lose their minds, having long ago succumbed to the most virulent variety of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Still, keep an open mind and let me remind you where things stand in the US right now.

Year one of Trump finished with 4.4% GDP growth, 2.4% inflation, the lowest murder rate since somewhere around 1900 (and that is plainly due in part to deporting illegals and sending in the National Guard to cities like Memphis and Washington DC), a booming all-time stock market, and the most secure border in US history. But that’s not all folks. Trump has presided over a 10% fall in federal government jobs – around 40,000 such jobs gone. Meanwhile private sector jobs grew by 170,000. That is why US productivity growth is booming. So, in the US, government is shrinking, the private sector is growing and real wages are finally, and noticeably, outpacing inflation. (For comparison, Australia has record mass migration and 83% of all new jobs are non-market, taxpayer funded ones.)

Speaking of inflation, in the US it is, as noted, down to 2.4%. The Nobel prize for economics is about as indicative of merit as the Nobel Peace prize, given how many Nobel laureates in economics assured us that Trump’s tariffs would see inflation skyrocket. It plainly has not done so. (Recall, too, the many distinguished economists who promised us Argentina’s Milei reforms would fail. Or going back a while that Maggie Thatcher’s would too. The Keynesians are failing in the real world.)

Meanwhile Trump has overseen net negative migration. Middle of the road estimates are that some three million illegals were deported or left the US voluntarily in just The Don’s first year. That has significantly boosted the per capita GDP of Americans: the measure that matters and that shows Australia’s woeful plight. And real wage growth has gone up 189% from Biden to Trump – having been –1.4% under Sleepy Joe to today’s +1.25% under Trump. The average American’s weekly paycheque buys 2% more than it did a year ago when Trump was inaugurated. (It fell 4% under Biden.)

Notice that Trump did not cave in to the pleas of universities running Ponzi schemes that rely on overseas students knowing they’ll get visas. And notice he paid no attention at all to the mass migration snake oil salesmen. That is why rents in the US have also gone down by 1.4%. Trump has done more for the less well off in society – the working class if you prefer that language – than any Left-wing government in the Anglosphere. And it’s not even close.

And this is without getting into Trump’s shunning of transnational bodies that destroy a country’s democracy. His leaving all sorts of international bodies that truly deserve to be left such as the WHO and Paris and the UN Human Rights Council fiasco. His fighting full-on the transgender lobby and the DEI anti-merit brigades (who, I can report, have fully captured all of Australia’s universities).

On the other side of the ledger though? Hmm. Well, the TDS types always come back to ‘he’s just so uncouth, boorish and not one of us, old boy’. Because no one can deny that Trump ruthlessly does whatever he can to keep his promises, something Australian and British conservatives never get to experience of late. More to the point, before the last election Trump made specific promises, all sorts of them. No waffle. No platitudinous generalities. No dealing in ‘the vibe’.

That, Mr Taylor, is what Australia needs. Detailed specifics and a willingness to fight, to take on the legacy media and, alas, half of your own partyroom. Because I want what the Yanks have. And so do the Japanese (see the recent election), the Argentinians, more and more of South America and Europe. Say it with me, Angus. ‘We need to copy big chunks of the Trump playbook.’

Or One Nation will do it instead.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.