Well, good morning CPAC and it is brilliant to be back here in Brisbane and back here in Australia and I’ve just come hot foot from London. I arrived last night and I want to tell you that I’m feeling optimistic because in London we saw the most amazing leadership.
We saw a leader who is advocating the deportation of illegal immigrants, who’s advocating low taxes, who’s advocating energy abundance, who’s advocating fracking, who says that men are men and women are women.
Yes, President Trump has been in Britain, and it was fantastic to see Chequers, the prime ministerial residence, had somebody who backs Britain in it for the first time in over a year.
And in fact, President Trump praised the influence that Britain and the British Empire had had on everything from free speech to parliamentary democracy to the American Constitution.
And we are seeing in America is a fantastic counter-revolution. You know, we’re seeing executive orders signed that are putting power back in the hands of people, that are cutting taxes, that are getting America fracking, that are dealing with many of the problems that emerged over years of democrat rule. But sadly, whereas we’re seeing huge progress in the United States, the rest of the Anglosphere seems to be competing for who can be the wokest country.
We’ve got Britain, Australia, and Canada run by terrible socialist leaders, that whether it’s ludicrous carbon taxes and net zero, whether it’s transgender ideology, whether it’s enabling people to kill other people, and we’re seeing the influence of assisted dying in Canada and the UK. Whether it’s curbs on our free speech, all of these things have been happening in our countries. But I think of all of these countries, Britain is probably the worst. I know you’re doing very hard to compete here in Australia, but really, really it’s worse in Britain. I mean, 30 people every day are being arrested for posting on social media.
We saw a comedian, Graham Linehan, arrested at Heathrow airport for posting about transgender or offending transgender people. We’ve seen a journalist, Allison Pearson, visited at her home for something she posted on X over a year ago. We saw a mother, Lucy Connelly, actually locked up, given a sentence of 31 months for posting on X, a post that she deleted 4 hours later.
And we don’t just have a free speech crisis in Britain. We also have an illegal immigration crisis. The government is failing to deport illegal immigrants. They’re being stopped by the judiciary. They are being stopped by the human rights lawyers and they’re being stopped by their own ideology.
We’ve also got the highest energy prices in the Western world, four times that of America. Even though we have gas, we could frack. Even though we have the North Sea reserves, and our economy is in dire straits, it could well be a competition between Britain and France as to who has to go to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) first.
And our Prime Minister Kier Starmer is the most unpopular prime minister on record. He is the most unpopular. I like to say he’s Anthony Albanese without the charisma.
Now if you remember we had a very bad leader once upon a time called King John. He was known as bad King John and he used arbitrary laws. He raised taxes unfairly and ultimately he was dragged by the Barons to Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta. And I believe that Kier Starmer is as unpopular and arbitrary as King John and I think we will see a counter-revolution in Britain as a result of his leadership.
Now I think we have to ask why are our countries – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and until recently the United States – in such a dire mess?
The answer is that the left has been working on a 50-year campaign pushing neo-Marxist ideology, whether it is wokeism, transgenderism, Islamism, mass migration, net zero zealotry, Keynesian economics. They have been pushing this agenda relentlessly for 50 years.
They started off by capturing our universities. They moved to capturing our bureaucracies. They then started capturing our corporations and they captured our media too. And they have been utterly relentless in their pursuit of ideological dominance.
What do all these ideologies have in common? Because one might ask, what is the common factor between transgender ideology that hates the family and Islamism which ostensibly is against transgender people?
Well, the answer is what both of those have in common is they fundamentally want to undermine Western civilization. They want to undermine our way of life. They want to undermine the things we believe in. Christian values, free speech, the nation state. That is what they are seeking to undermine.
They have been very effective in the way they have captured our organisations. I saw this myself as a Minister in the British government for 10 years. I was in numerous different departments.
What I saw when I became Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor is that the power that used to sit in the hands of Ministers had been handed to the Judiciary. It had been handed to the human rights lawyers.
And what I saw when I became Prime Minister is that power that used to sit in the hands of Ministers to make economic decisions about monetary and fiscal policy have been handed over to our unelected, unaccountable central bank – and our unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.
It’s what the Americans call the “deep state”. It’s what we in Britain call the “Blob”.
But when I sought to put through changes like keeping taxes low and cancelling tax rises, like fracking, like restraining our welfare bill, I had the most almighty backlash.
And what I saw was completely unfair tactics used against me.
So the night before we announced the mini budget, the Bank of England announced the sale of 40 billion pounds worth of UK Gilts. Afterwards when there was market turbulence, it turned out that they had failed to properly regulate the pensions industry. They subsequently admitted that two thirds of that market turbulence was down to them. But at the time they blamed me and they scape goated me for what they had done wrong.
What was so extraordinary – and what I hadn’t appreciated until I was in that position myself – is that so much of the media simply bought their narrative, because of the smears, because of the leaks, because of the briefings, and because people attach significance to independent institutions.
Now what we know, and what the great conservative philosopher John O’Sullivan has said, is that every organisation that is set up that isn’t explicitly right-wing becomes left-wing over time – and that is what has happened to British institutions. But the power these institutions have now becomes very great because of the economic power they exercise, because of the social power they exercise, and because of the institutional power they exercise.
But what we have now – it was three years ago since I was in office – so what we’ve been able to see is the counterfactual. What happens when taxes were raised as they were after I left office? What happened when we didn’t get on with fracking and instead made the North Sea prohibitive to extract oil from? What happened when we failed to restrain the welfare bill?
Well, the answer is that growth has been stagnant, that the British debt is higher than it’s ever been before because what we’ve had is unfunded tax rises. The Laffer curve does exist. And what we’re also finding is that our Gilt rates are higher than when I was in office. But none of the institutions – the Bank of England or the media – are raising any issues about that. So Britain is on a path now to becoming financially completely unsustainable. We will probably end up having to go to the IMF.
So this is what the left have done. But they haven’t just stopped at capturing our institutions. They have used every tactic in the book to try and undermine not just conservative values but the values of Western civilization itself.
They’ve used lawfare and we see this with the human rights lawyers stopping illegal immigrants from being deported. We see it here in Australia with things like the Giggle versus Tickle case and transgender ideology.
We see it in America with the Democrats using lawfare to try and persecute President Trump before he was re-elected.
But what the left are also using are tactics of social exclusion, trying to make it unacceptable to have conservative values. They’ve debanked people, from Nigel Farage to Republicans in the US to people here in Australia. They’ve tried to make it hard for people even to be employed. So, we’ve had nurses in the National Health Service attacked because they didn’t want to share a changing room with a male colleague who claimed they were a woman. So, what they have done is they’ve made life very, very hard for conservatives.
But now we’ve seen they’ve gone even further than that. That they are prepared to use political violence against conservatives.
Now, I met Charlie Kirk earlier this year in London. We were talking about how he could use his amazing communication skills, his message to help bring people on side in Britain, in Europe, and win the hearts and minds of young people.
He was a great man, a Christian. He was he was a patriot. He was a lover of America. He was also a lover of Britain. He wanted Britain to be great again. He wanted Britain to succeed.
And it is utterly horrific that he was assassinated because of how great he was.
And it’s also horrific that people have celebrated his assassination.
We’ve seen people like the president of the Oxford Union celebrating his killing. And I believe that he should be expelled from Oxford University. I don’t believe that people like that should be in an institution which was established on the values that underpin western civilization.
But what I want to say today, ladies and gentlemen, is this is what we’re up against. This is what we are up against.
We are not up against rational people who want to have a debate. We are not up against people who are prepared to compromise. We are up against ideologues who are literally prepared to do anything to implement their distorted vision of the world. And that is how we have to approach it.
It’s not a question of splitting the difference. It’s not a question of triangulation.
I want to quote something that Charlie Kirk said: “The left have never played by our rules. Only we play by our rules. Our rules are what keeps our side from winning. We either want to win or we will lose under some delusion that the rules mean anything.”
Charlie Kirk is absolutely right. And the reason that we have been losing on the right – and we have been losing. We haven’t just been losing for 10 years – we’ve been losing for decades. And the reason we have been losing is that we are playing by our rules and the left has completely ignored them. And this is why we need a major change in tactics.
As President Trump says, it is fight, fight, fight.
I do believe we are seeing a change. We’re seeing a change in the public in our countries. If people saw London a couple of weekends ago, they saw people raising the Union Jack, raising the St. George’s Cross. Our public have had enough. And we’re seeing similar in Australia. We’re seeing similar in the United States. We’re seeing people protesting outside migrant hotels. They are fed up of not being told the truth by politicians and having a political class running our country that simply is not taking control and delivering what they want to see happening.
But this movement we’re seeing in our country – and I do believe we are seeing a change and I do believe that the MAGA revolution in America is delivering change elsewhere as well – I think it is contagious in a good way. But it needs to be galvanized. There needs to be a point to it – and we need to be able to achieve change.
This is why I think CPAC is so vitally important. This is why I’m here at CPAC in Australia. This is why we also want to establish CPAC Great Britain. And I hope we’re able to welcome you there very soon.
But what does this mean? What does all this mean for our movement?
First of all, I think it means that we do need to part company with the Conservatives in name only, with the Liberals in name only, with the Republicans in name only, because these are the people to a large extent who have prevented us doing what is needed to take on the left. These are the people who are asking us to apologise for what we believe rather than being proud of what we believe.
The fundamental difference between us and them is we understand the left have captured our institutions and we need to take them back. We understand that these institutions cannot be viewed as neutral anymore. That we have to take them on and that we have to achieve what is a genuine counter-revolution to reverse the Marxism that has become part of what those institutions are.
There are too many people on the nominally conservative or nominally liberal side who have accepted things like transgender ideology, who have accepted things like Keynesianism, who’ve accepted things like extreme environmentalist ideology, who’ve even accepted things like Islamism.
There are too many people on our side – and they cannot be on our side. They are not on our side. And if we are to succeed, we need to part company with those people.
The second thing we need to do is change the way our countries are governed – and we need a major change. We are not in the 1980s or 1990s anymore where we sometimes had impartial civil servants.
Civil servants have been radicalised. These organisations have been radicalised. They are not the same anymore. And we either need to make sure that all of those people are accountable to the leaders who have been elected or they are abolished. Those are the only two choices.
And we also need to make sure we build an independent media that is entirely free of the Blob. And when we do see in Britain the ghastly Kier Starmer evicted from office, we need to defund the BBC. We need to – dare I say it – defund the ABC who I think are even worse than the BBC actually. I have been interviewed by the ABC and I can attest to how bad they are.
Last year I wrote a book called ‘Ten Years to Save the West’ and the clock’s ticking. We’ve only got nine years to go now.
I think we have made huge progress as a movement with the election of Donald Trump. I think that’s a gamechanger. If we were all here and Kamala Harris was in office, it wouldn’t just be Brits being arrested.
But what we need is that spirit – that revolutionary spirit to come to Europe and we need it to come to Australia. Because we need the kind of changes that we’re seeing in America to happen right across the world. Because can you imagine what an Australia controlled by the enemy looks like or a Europe controlled by the enemy looks like? America cannot win the battle for civilization on its own.
So let’s resolve today at this CPAC conference to fight a battle that will take decades. It’s a battle to reverse the takeover by the leftists of our institutions, of our media. And it will be tough. It will be hard. But we need to fight, and we need to fight, and we need to fight.
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.
Watch Liz Truss deliver her address to the CPAC Conference in Brisbane on September 20, 2025: