The Liberal Party under Sussan Ley are sleepwalking into oblivion, being guided by opinion polls and by shallow advice from the very same people that led them into the wilderness in the first place.

People like Senator Andrew McLachlan, who has told Sussan Ley that a true conservative would back strong action on emissions reductions and by polls like the Guardian Essential Poll, which claims that even liberal voters want their party to be more progressive and that most Australians back net zero. Everywhere you look amongst the pundits and the polls and the media, the Liberal Party are being urged to be cowards, to chase votes from a mythical middle and to go along to get along with everything from awokeness to net zero.

This is also true at the state level of the Liberal Party as well with the Liberal Party leader in New South Wales, Mark Speakman, saying that backing out of net zero would be disastrous for their chances at the next state election. And as a result, the Liberal Party Australia wide has found itself in a wilderness with no compass to guide them. They forgot where they were going so long ago that they’ve lost any reference point to even figure out where they are. And Australian voters simply don’t have a reason to care about whether or not the Liberal Party survive or whether they perish because their existence has become pointless.

In any case, in contrast, reform in the UK are surging to the front, not only in the polls, but also in local elections, thanks to a fearless stand for what they believe in, and thanks to pole-defying courage, the willingness to do what the polls said they shouldn’t. And on that theme and on the other side of the planet, Argentine President Javier Milei has just won a resounding victory in this week’s midterm elections, defying months of media speculation and doom mongering about the end of his grip on power. Well, he’s actually strengthened his hold on power as his bold and courageous libertarian experiment has been given a resounding vote of confidence by the Argentine people.

And did I mention the new prime minister in Japan, who is joining Giorgia Meloni in Italy in making Margaret Thatcher look like a pussycat? All over the world, from Italy to El Salvador, Japan to Argentina, the UK, and of course the US, we are seeing the rise of courage of parties and politicians who reject wokeness, reject net zero, and actually stand up for their people in a way that frankly we haven’t seen in Australia for perhaps ever. And yet here in Australia, we see no evidence of any such boldness or courage from the current Liberal Party leadership. Which begs the question, why not?

Well, if I put that question, why not to Sussan Ley personally, I’d be pretty confident that she would point to polls like this Red Bridge one published on X by Kos Samaras and she would say it’s different here. The polling clearly shows that we have to chase the votes in the middle. Thing is these polls are useless. Yes, really. Oh, Topher, you don’t really think you know better than the professional pollsters, do you? Yes. Yes, I do. And by the end of this video, you’ll understand why. No disrespect to the pollsters, by the way. I know that the vast majority of pollsters, including Kos, take their jobs very seriously. They do all they can to ensure that their polls are representative and accurate and segmenting the population correctly and slice and dice the data in all manner of intricate ways so that they can spit out page after page of findings.

But the reason why this is useless is that polls can only reveal what people prefer out of the options that are available the options that they can actually conceive of in that poll.

Polls by their nature cannot reveal what people would do if they were offered something new, something different, something that perhaps they didn’t even realize that they wanted until someone offered it to them. Imagine doing market research on the mobile phone market the day before Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone. You’d be polling people and doing demographic analysis on which age groups and professions prefer Nokia versus which ones prefer BlackBerry. And industry professionals would then study that data broken down by demographics. And they’d be making multi-page predictions of the impact of demographic shift on sales over time. And the share prices would rise and fall and hang on every word that these professional market pollsters said.

And then 24 hours later, Steve Jobs shows the iPhone to the world. And all of those predictions aren’t worth the paper that they are written on. No amount of polling can show you what will happen if you offer people something that they weren’t being offered before. The only way we can predict what people might do if you offer them that new thing is by looking at what people have done when that has happened already in history. And between Japan, Italy, the UK, Argentina, El Salvador, and indeed the USA, recent history and indeed current events around the world show us very clearly that the fastest way, I would contend the only way for the Liberal Party to become a contender again is for it to offer the voting public something that they haven’t seen in decades a Liberal party that actually stands up for them.

In the same way that Trump is standing up for America, Malay for Argentina, Meloni for Italy, and Farage for the UK, that means a Liberal party that doesn’t play nice or this silly go along to get along cowardice. It doesn’t offer half measures and compromises with wokeness and with net zero madness, but rather a Liberal party that rejects the nonsense outright with boldness and commits itself to doing whatever it takes to slash the cost of living, slash the cost of housing, slash the cost of energy, and to cutting government down to size so that we can be free of all that red and green tape and the taxes so that Australians can actually afford to live and to get back to making things in this country again.

If the Liberal Party could find its spine and its voice, then all these polls, they would be instantly obsolete and the Liberal Party would be back in the running, if not leading, within months, which is exactly what reform have already achieved in the UK. Think it can’t happen here? Well, let me break down for you not only why it can, but why it must. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense and keep up with the world as it changes around you. I’m 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate what I do, then please buy me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books, DVDs, and merch, which you will find at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy will help me to keep the Topher project going.

The people saying that the Liberal Party can’t do what others have already done in their countries are forgetting that the media and the pollsters and the pundits all said that what’s now been done in those countries couldn’t be done before it happened. Javier Milei was never supposed to win the Argentine presidency according to the experts and the polls and the pundits. And since he took power in December 2023, he has slashed the size of government, cut spending, reduced welfare, which were all things that were supposed to make him unpopular, that was supposed to hurt him in the midterms. Time magazine earlier this month confidently predicted that Milei was losing his grip on power. But it seems that the Argentine people perhaps don’t read Time magazine because they had other ideas.

Now, the Argentine electoral system is very different to ours.

This is what’s called a midterm election, which means that the president, Javier Milei, was not himself on the ballot, up for reelection. He’s only halfway through his first term as president. But 24 of their Senate seats and 127 of their lower house seats were up for grabs, and Javier Milei’s Liberty Party got more than half of both the Senate seats and the lower house seats that were available in these midterms. Now, that doesn’t mean he has a majority now. Again, their system is different to ours, but it does mean that he’s now going to be able to press on with even more of his legislative agenda with fewer roadblocks and less obstacles and more confidence from the business sector and international investors.

Javier Milei broke the rules. He did what they said couldn’t be done. He slashed government spending. He slashed welfare programs. He showed exactly the kind of courage, boldness, and vision that is missing in Australia. And the people of Argentina love him for it. He was an iPhone in a world of Nokia and Blackberries. Do I need to mention Trump and his incredible journey to the White House in 2016, winning again in 2020, but being denied, and then winning again in 2024 by such a margin that his win was undeniable. I often hear Democrats and Trump haters lament that they can’t understand why anyone likes Trump. He’s brash. He’s loud. He’s a womanizer. He’s an out of touch billionaire. Yes, he’s all of those things. And he’s also showed incredible courage, boldness, and vision. He is an iPhone in a world of Blackberries.

And all the analysts and all the polls and all the experts said he’d never make it and that he’d never make it back in a second time. And yet here we are. Nigel Farage’s public career is being pronounced dead a dozen times now. Mr. Brexit was a fool for believing that the UK would ever leave the EU, but then it did. And since then, Farage has transformed the UK political landscape completely thanks to reform. And time and time again, we see breathless headlines predicting the end of the line for Farage or for reform. But in reality, they are going from strength to strength. In France, Marine Le Pen has been on the receiving end of every kind of imaginable attack and yet is now viewed by many French voters as the sensible choice given just how shambolic their own government has become.

Do I need to mention the AFD in Germany? All of these groups and parties, they’re all being attacked as some sort of extremist right-wing neo-Nazi group.

But that’s just the howls of a dying media and a political swamp screeching from the sidelines as they start to realize that they’re losing the game that they thought they owned. The truth is that what unites these parties and these people, these movements, is courage, boldness, and vision on behalf of their own people. They dared to offer their respective voters something that wasn’t available to the people that were previously responding to the existing polls until they put it in there and then the polls responded because the people were finally offered a real choice.

These parties thrived because they offered an iPhone in an age of Nokia and Blackberries and there was no sign in advance that it would work. If they’d used the old polls as the basis to make their decisions, they would never have taken the risk to do what they did and they would never have found out that it was going to work if they did it. No one imagined Milei could win and then strengthen his lead in the midterms in Argentina until he put himself out there and the voters said yes. No one imagined Nigel Farage could become the most powerful man in English politics until he dared to offer the people something they could not find anywhere else. No one in the Democratic Party thought that Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2016 was serious until they cried their eyes out on election night.

The polls in Australia cannot show what people want. They only show what people would choose from the options that are being put in front of them, Nokia or BlackBerry. For reasons that I’ve covered in detail in past videos, Topher Project episode 75, if you’re interested, Sussan Ley cannot offer the people of Australia a real choice. She nailed her flag to the master of the woke climate warrior ship a long time ago, and she cannot disembark now. She isn’t just a swamp creature. She is the swamp, which is another way of saying that the Liberal Party cannot show courage, boldness, or vision for Australia under the leadership of Sussan Ley.

But the people of Australia would flock to a courageous, bold, and vision filled no net zero major party if they were given the choice. No one believes in net zero anymore, except when they’re being asked by pollsters and they feel like they’re obliged to give the right answer. No one believes the BS headlines and the studies that are being churned out on the taxpayers’ dime. Headlines like this one based on an A&U study. These get laughed at online and mocked in the comments. The answer to questions like this one, well, they’re a resounding no. Even Australians that claim to support climate action don’t agree that they’re gonna to spend a lot of money or change their lifestyle in response to it. Even Bill Gates, a man who has long profited from the climate scare, has just changed his tune in a big way, coming out and point blank saying that it is not an existential threat and that we probably need to ease up a little on the apocalyptic rhetoric.

All over the world, we are seeing net zero targets being delayed or dumped.

And the electorate supports the politicians and the parties that have the courage to do just that, dump net zero. But the Liberals can’t do that with Sussan Ley at the helm. If she does that, then she’ll water it down into some sort of compromised position, a rebranded net zero with sprinkles on top, some kind of mealy-mouthed, play both sides of the fence, finger to the wind policy shift. And that is not going to inspire voters. That is not going to get anyone’s attention. It’s not going to feel like, oh, we’re finally being offered an iPhone in a market full of dog[….]. It won’t get the results that we’ve seen in the UK and elsewhere.

But the Liberal Party do have people in their ranks who can pull off a policy shift like this. They can do it boldly, loudly, uncompromising, and unashamed. People who are willing, people who are electable, but most importantly, people who have courage and boldness and vision on behalf of the Australian people. But the key is this. The Liberal Party need to act soon because waiting in the wings ready to fill the void are the likes of One Nation and the Libertarian Party. Parties which many pundits and pollsters wrote off a long time ago just like they wrote off Javier Milei, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage.

But these are the parties where courage and boldness and vision for Australia can be found. And with each passing day, the Liberal Party play a dangerous game. Because if they don’t reinvent themselves like the way that the US Republicans did under Trump, then instead they will be replaced the way that reform have done in the UK. The movement that we are watching unfold around the world will come to Australia in one form or another. And the only decision left for the Liberal Party of Australia is whether they have the courage, the boldness, and the vision to be a part of the solution to be the iPhone or whether they will forever remain a relic, one of the Nokia and the Blackberries that are forgotten in history and forever lost in that wilderness.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you appreciate my no-nonsense approach to my videos, then you will love my books. There’s my first best-selling book, Good People Break Bad Laws, which is all about the role of civil disobedience in the modern age. Then there’s Good Christians Break Bad Laws, all about the theology of civil disobedience. These are both Amazon bestsellers, by the way, and you’ll find them on Amazon. But also you’ll find them at my website goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com where you’ll also find the DVD of my multi-award-winning internationally acclaimed documentary Battleground Melbourne as well as my t-shirts, my hoodies in a range of different designs. Some are funny, some are serious, and all are designed to be thought-provoking conversation starters. And all of it is available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And everything you buy will help me to keep the Topher project going.

One last thing, thank you for watching all the way to the end. But if you’re wondering how you can help this country, I’m often asked by my viewers, should I become a member of the Liberal National Party or should I become a member of a minor party? And if that’s your question, then my answer is, yes. Because if you’re asking, then you’re not a member of either, are you? Just pick one and do it. Cuz I don’t know if the Liberal Party have what it takes to reinvent themselves and find their spine. But we should at least try. Give them a chance. But also, if they don’t, well, that’s when we’re going to need these other parties, One Nation and the Libertarians in particular, but there are others as well. We are going to need them to hold the Liberal Party to account. And if necessary, and the Liberal Party don’t rise up fast enough, we need these minor parties to replace the Liberals, just like what reform are doing right now in the UK.

So, if your question is which one should I join, my answer is, yes. We need both, which means we need good people like you to pick one and join. Please remember to like, share, make sure you’ve subscribed to my channel, and be sure to check out this video that YouTube thinks you will also like.

And as always, think free.