The great John O’Sullivan, one-time speechwriter to Maggie Thatcher, editor of National Review in the US, Conrad Black’s choice to be the inaugural editor of Canada’s National Post, guest editor for a few years of Quadrant here in Australia, superb essayist, author of first-class books, currently think tank supremo in Budapest, and basically the best connected conservative in the Anglosphere, once made a point about how you can try to hoodwink people with seemingly anodyne, woolly, fluffy, but emotively attractive language. (By the way, it is the same John O’Sullivan who coined ‘O’Sullivan’s Law’ which is ‘that any organisation or body that is not overtly right-wing will, over time, become left-wing’. And experience has shown that to be true down the line in today’s world, including as regards a good few supposedly conservative political parties in the Anglosphere, big corporations, the lawyerly caste, churches, sporting administrators, TV networks, etc, etc.) O’Sullivan was comparing Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister to David Cameron. Thatcher had been described by others as a ‘moderniser’. So, of course, Cameron too – and all the moderate ‘wets’ around him – started describing their government as modernisers as well.

But O’Sullivan called this out for the sleight of hand it was. ‘This argument is essentially a semantic game: modernisation is an empty concept that needs filling with content before it can be assessed. Thatcher’s modernisation consisted of sound money, ending exchange rate control, cutting taxes, building up defence, privatisation, etc. Cameron’s modernisation consists of same-sex marriage, “ring-fencing” foreign aid, sharply cutting defence, allowing the UK financial sector to be regulated by Brussels, etc, etc. They are not quite the same thing.’

Bingo! We can make the same point as regards that beloved word of so many of the current crop of state and national Liberal party MPs here in Australia. I refer to those who self-describe themselves as ‘moderates’. The word no doubt is emotively attractive to users and delivers a frisson of approval and virtue-signalling self-worth, maybe even a tingle down the spine. But it is essentially an empty concept. You need to fill it with specific content before deciding if you approve or disapprove of the political positions of the person or political faction spouting it. So take former prime minister Morrison. His faction grouping notwithstanding, the man as PM purported to govern as a ‘moderate’. But what did that look like when it came to specific content? Well, Team Morrison & co. signed us up to the impoverishing net zero without signalling it before the election; they oversaw the biggest inroads on our civil liberties in the country’s history, all while never once finding it in themselves to criticise Dan Andrew’s outright thuggish and brutally heavy-handed response in Victoria (and if the honours system wasn’t broken beforehand it sure is after giving a gong to Chairman Andrews); they blew out the budget with massive spending and high taxes that created huge asset inflation and transferred big time wealth from the young to the old and from the poor to the rich and in a way that would make an ardent left-winger proud; they made appointments to the Australian Human Rights Commission, e-safety Commissioner post, the High Court, cultural bodies, and more, that Labor and on occasion the Greens could have made, with barely a single conservative amongst them; they oversaw a ballooning in the size of government and a surging in government spending as a percentage of GDP; they made huge payments to an activist Barrier Reef group over lunch while not lifting a finger to help Peter Ridd (who was correct down the line, just to be clear); and Mr Morrison made various disparaging but in fact vacuous and uninformed comments about the value of free speech while it was Liberal governments that gave us the first iterations of a number of woeful free-speech restricting Bills, including the absolutely outrageous Acma Bill. That is what ‘moderate’ delivers as far as the Morrison and indeed Turnbull governments were concerned. (And cards on the table, I have slowly come to believe that in the ‘worst Liberal PM ever’ stakes, Mr Morrison certainly ties Mr Turnbull for top spot and may in fact take the gold medal in his own right.) Yet incredibly, astoundingly even, the state Liberal parties, who all crawl over broken glass barefooted to describe themselves as ‘moderates’, are worse than their federal counterparts. The best of a woeful lot is Mr Crisafulli in Queensland. Yet he signed up to the recent Labor budget-spending orgy; he commits to not a single conservative fighting position bar some tough talk on youth crime; he won’t repeal the state bill of rights that Labor brought in without running on an election to bring it in; he won’t cut the grossly bloated public service; at best it’s a Tony Blair social democrat offering on the now tired refrain ‘well, at least we’re not Labor’. The other state Liberal party iterations are worse. John Pesutto in Victoria in my view disgraced himself with his treatment of Moira Deeming and the rest of the party’s offerings are to the left of what Tony Blair would offer. WA? Do I need to say anything about the dynamic duo there? New South Wales is worse than Queensland. In all of these states the Liberal offerings are devoid of any actual classical liberal or conservative content.

Hence the general point that O’Sullivan was making and that I am reiterating is that labels on their own can be empty, and void of content. Ignore all attempts by politicians to cloak themselves under the banner of ‘we are moderates’ and look at the actual offerings. The reverse of this applies as well, of course. The labels ‘far right’ and ‘hard right’ are now widely used by the mainstream media and even by some Liberal MPs at times to describe a set of policies that includes: 1) the entire Tony Abbott agenda, 2) believing that biological sex is real and imposes a mind-independent reality on the world that trumps subjective druthers and preferences, 3) being against the lockdowns and vaccine mandates (being against now proven to be the right position as it happens), 4) having grave doubts about virtue-signalling net-zero policies that will impoverish Australia while China and India build new coal-fired power stations weekly and we make zero difference to global temperatures (because, you know, we aren’t a moral beacon that other countries will copy as we travel back to the Stone Age), 5) wanting to control immigration and insisting GDP is largely irrelevant as it is GDP per person that matters, the list goes on. Voicing any and all of those can get you labelled ‘far right’ and ‘hard right’ by the legacy media. Voicing some of them has earned the ire of the Liberal-appointed eSafety Commissioner and increased her desire to censor such views. And all the five such positions, without an exception, would have been endorsed by John F. Kennedy. That is the specific content of what today gets one labelled ‘far right’.

Such labels are empty and without content. Ignore the trendy lefties who deal in such platitudes and, in a smug, self-satisfied, self-righteous way, shun debate in favour of cancellation.