What if they had a culture war and nobody came?

All good things must come to an end, even the Festival of Shameful Joy. And so, I lie here on my orgy couch, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from my brow with one trembling hand, while gently drumming the fingertips of the other on my hugely distended belly, engorged as it is on a magical, never ending string of victory sausages stuffed with schadenfreude. And I think to myself, it won’t always be like this, you know.

Some day they’ll be back.

Thus, I ask myself, more in self-interest than benevolence, what would a genuinely liberal Liberal Party look like? (Spoiler: probably not one welcoming Jacinta Price to the dark enchanted blood oath toga party for Fresher Week). I’m not thinking about Labor Lite, conservatism here. I mean a fiscally and socially conservative party that wasn’t, you know, nucking futs.

We’ve had decades of screaming into the culture war void now, foam-flecked, vein-throbbing, and utterly disconnected from the things most people actually give a shit about. Like, say, living indoors and not dying of measles.

That didn’t work out so well for them last weekend. Still, the first calls to double down on the screaming were swiftly overtaken by the second, third, and eleventy-twentieth demands for even more, even louder screaming from—and this may shock you—a very small, very wealthy cartel of super-screamy culture war profiteers.

But what if there were an alternative? What if a truly conservative party jumped out of the culture war bouncy castle, and swapped never-ending unhinged psychodrama for, I dunno, conservative principles or something?

Let’s take a look at what that could actually look like.

Climate Change Without the All-Caps Screaming

You can’t call yourself pro-market and then throw a tantrum because the market wants to stop turning the sky into a fucking malfunctioning microwave oven. A conservative approach to climate change doesn’t need to involve making up bedtime stories about imaginary small modular nuclear reactors. A conservative approach would recognise that there’s a trillion-dollar business opportunity here and the invisible hand of the market is fucking cramping with the need to get in there and start trousering the profits.

A true conservative party would get out of the way of those brave, risk-taking entrepreneurs and let them eat the fossil fuel industry alive - before charging them a modest rate of company tax to fund the base level civilisational amenities that gave us the space to invent solar panels and grid scale batteries in the first place.

Is there anything more conservative than getting rich and being righteously smug about it?

Immigration Without the Dog Whistles and Gulags.

You can totally have a migration policy that isn’t also a racist honk in G major. You can totes have strong borders without sounding like a clearance-sale Franco. It’s not hard. It starts with accepting that you have to let some people into the country; otherwise, demographic collapse would like a word with you. Having reached that acceptance, you then ask, “Awesome, what’s in it for me?”

How about a whole heap of skilled migrant workers (and their families, soz, because happy workers really are motivated little mofos), all of them beavering away to fatten the profit margins of, say, all of those energy start ups that suddenly happened when you got the fuck out of the way of smart, greedy people who were hungry for a slice of that trillion dollar energy transition.

Do you have to take in refugees? No, you don’t. But if you’re going to be a dick about it, maybe stop calling yourself a Christian and brace for a future with fewer entrepreneurs, lower birth rates, and, frankly, less interesting takeaway options. Because one of the most reliable engines of prosperity is a cohort of people who are not only grateful to be here, but also weirdly obsessed with proving that they deserved the shot you gave them.

Actual Free Market Policies, Not Ragebait and Oligarchy.

Imagine a conservative politics that gives a fuck about what government can do, since we’re kind of stuck with it anyway. Is there some way of running a healthcare system, for instance, that doesn’t look like you tipped the entire population of a continent into that Walking Dead episode, where to survive you have to brawl in the zombie pit with swarms of undead gladiators? I’m sort of losing control of this metaphor, but I’m sure you get the point. Letting people die just because they get sick and can’t afford to pay for medical care isn’t actually very conservative.

Neither is shaking down working families to reverse-Robin-Hood hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of elite private schools that their kids will never set foot in, unless they get a summer job on the janitorial staff. A truly conservative education policy might demand excellence in some very old-fashioned skills like writing and doing sums, but that government would probably insist that billionaires and multinational corporations not hide their money in offshore tax havens, so that schools are properly resourced to teach the basics to such a high standard.

Equality before the law is a very conservative principle, at least when we're talking about crime, punishment, and the inalienable right to be tasered for loitering at the mall in a hoodie. But for some reason, this whole 'equal treatment' thing has never quite taken hold in the realm of tax law.

The idea that wealthy people should actually pay more tax than everyone else isn’t some radical Marxist fever dream. It’s a return to first principles. If you benefit most from a functioning society—its courts, roads, investment subsidies, educated workforce, and their polite refusal to storm your mansion with pitchforks—logically, you should pay proportionately to support it. That’s not socialism. That’s literally what the conservative ideal of stewardship demands.

But somewhere along the way, 'personal responsibility' got replaced with 'structural advantage', and accountants who bill by the loophole. It’s not tax avoidance anymore; it’s wealth optimisation. It’s not a rort; it’s legacy planning. And when challenged, the defenders of this system pretend the only alternative is Venezuelan breadlines.

It’s not. It’s just fairness. The old-fashioned kind. The conservative kind that used to wear a tie and believe in paying for what you use.

Okay.

Fine.

I accept that I’ve wandered off into the realm of fantasy now, but eventually, these goons are gonna be back in charge, and I just think it’d be cool if they came back from their wilderness retreat and they weren’t half-feral, fully tumescent, and absolutely convinced that a Year 10 civics teacher with pink hair and a pronoun badge is living the crawl space behind their bedroom.

Because we don’t need them to be progressive. We just need them to be sane. And preferably a little less sweaty.