RUTHFULLY YOURS

How times change. Dow plummets as Trump beats Clinton. Dow futures edged down when news just broke that Trump’s ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty to making hush payments to Trump’s putative casual squeeze before the election. Why the change? Well it isn’t because Trump has proved himself to be a sophisticate after all. It is because his policies are working and the market likes that and is nervous about him being undermined.

Trump has good policies. Here are just some of them. Lowering corporate taxes and red-tape regulations to get the private sector investing. Lowering regulatory burdens on the energy sector in order to produce more coal, oil and gas. Tightening immigration to fight terrorism and crime, to protect America’s social services, and to prevent cheap labour from undercutting wages for those at the bottom of the rung. Putting North Korea and Iran on notice of America’s resolve to prevent them ever using nuclear weapons. Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem to show solidarity with the only beacon of hope in the Middle East. Renegotiating trade deals to prevent America being ripped off by unfair tariffs. Putting the hard word on NATO allies to pay a fairer share of their own defence. Ensuring that the Supreme Court is not dominated by left-wing activists by appointing originalists to the court.

These are the policies that had Deplorables coming out to vote. I would have been lining up from the early hours to vote for these policies. And, totally unsurprisingly, they are working.

Let me switch to the ructions within the Liberal Party. Presumably Malcolm Turnbull won’t survive; though my political punditry is unreliable. I prefer Peter Dutton, obviously. But would he make a difference? He would be surrounded by the same wets who voted for Turnbull in the spill. How would policies change, leaving aside whether Dutton would have the same kind of ability as Abbott to strut the hustings.

The Liberals ‘believe in climate change’ apparently, whatever that means. They just intend trying less hard to ruin our economy with renewables than would Bill Shorten. The Liberals have apparently slightly slowed immigration by administrative means but otherwise are as committed to ruinously high immigration levels as Labor. And they are almost equally oblivious to the need to preserve Australia’s cultural coherency. They argue against Shorten’s new intended raid on the incomes of self-funded retirees from the position of having screwed them earlier in the piece. And the screwer-in-chief Scott Morrison is mooted as a (sic) failback leader if all else fails. They argue for the most faint-hearted corporate tax cuts in the history of public finance. So, its barely discernible tax cuts versus none at all under Shorten. (editor’s note: those cuts were officially abandoned as of a few minutes before this column was posted.)

I could go on but the situation is clear enough. There is hardly a sliver of daylight between the two sides on policy principles. Yes, Labor might be disastrous but so are the current lot. They are almost as equally bad as each other.

Never mind the policies look at the leader, doesn’t cut the mustard. That’s why Trump was and is so good. He has good policies – as did Thatcher as did Reagan. This Liberal Party has a dearth of good policies and bad ones aplenty. A better leader than Turnbull will not solve that. We need a new party.