John Howard was a conservative. He won, again and again and again. Tony Abbott was a conservative. He won a landslide. Scott Morrison dressed himself up as a conservative and won his first election before shedding his conservative clothes and lost his second one. Turnbull, the luvvies’ preferred Prime Minister, only survived by the skin of his teeth and lost Abbott’s huge majority.

Virtually every state election across the nation in the last decade has seen Woke Liberal parties getting thrashed. Dominic Perrottet is just another in the long list of non-conservative conservatives. Can we please stop this errant nonsense that the Liberal party needs to become more like its opponents in order to win?

What Liberals actually need to do is to start fighting for the freedoms and values at all levels of our daily lives that are being daily tossed onto a Labor and the Greens bonfire of virtues and vanities.

Leftist parties will always win on emotional issues and utopian fantasies. The job is much harder for conservatives. Conservatives must argue from sound principles grounded in hard-earned experience and sell concepts that are anathema to the laptop class – concepts such as thrift, hard work, sacrifice, the Protestant work ethic, dedication, individual freedoms, resilience, and above all equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.

Conservative values, by recognising the weaknesses of human behaviour as well as the strengths, are grounded in reality. Leftist values, grounded in fantasies, lies, and fabrications, are easy to sell but impossible to deliver. Only a strong, single-minded conservative convictions-based leader can ever point this out.

(A classic example: in the Sky News Australia debate, despite performing well, Dominic Perrottet allowed his opponent to repeatedly trash ‘privatisation’, without once pointing out that the only alternative to a market based on the notion of profit is socialism, which always leads to more inequality, not less. How can Liberals ever hope to succeed if they refuse to defend and more importantly explain even the most basic economic free market principles?)

Traditional Australians should be very angry with the Liberals. The factional warlords have squandered the genuine faith mainstream Australians put in the Liberals to be the party to protect them from the ravages of the Left. Instead, they have time after time simply pandered to them. Name a cultural issue, and you’ll find the Liberals have simply vacated the field.

(Another example: after correctly resisting Labor’s calls to stick the Aboriginal flag on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – a hugely important symbolic victory to the Indigenous activist class of ceding sovereignty – Mr Perrottet, as Premier, turned around and did exactly that before compounding the error by supporting the Voice. Or another: Kean and Morrison capitulated to the climate cult and were lauded by the activist classes, but not only went on to lose the next election but in one fell swoop destroyed their most powerful weapon the Liberals once had against the Left.)

Only Peter Dutton can save the day. Only Peter Dutton can return the Liberals to power within the next three years. But to do so he must fight with every sinew in his being. He must expose the vile agenda behind the extremist trans movement. He must oppose the Voice without further ado. He must insist on the removal of the nuclear moratorium. He must abandon Net Zero. He must rescue our children from the permissiveness of the more extreme parts of the LGBTQ+ activist agenda within our schools. He must fight for small business in the face of Labor’s hard-left industrial relations regime and the unions. He must denounce Labor’s fantasies about EVs and green hydrogen for the snake oil that they are.

No more excuses. No more flirting with the Teal agenda to try and pacify the doctors’ wives. No more selling out conservatives in the name of the supposed ‘broad church’. No more putting ‘moderates’ into key economic or political positions.

Fighters win fights and only fighters win the future. Cowards and appeasers are destined for the dustbin of history. Take a look around you, Liberal Australia. Wall-to-wall Labor. Wokeness means weakness. You have betrayed the people who put so much faith in you. Conservatives want a party they can believe in.