Happy New Year to all Speccie readers. Let’s start the year with a bit of forward-and-back recapping of how 2025 is shaping up. I’ll start in my native Canada. Justin Trudeau has been Prime Minister for almost a decade having been first elected in 2015 with a big majority. He then won minority government in 2019 and again in 2021. Readers will remember the way in which the legacy media idolised the man who came into office mouthing every progressive piety going. ‘Every Cabinet would be comprised of exactly 50-50 men and women.’ Every transgender view would be embraced, as would the entirety of climate hysteria tenets. When Trump was President the first time, Trudeau (along with a fair few European leaders) mocked him. And when Trump was out of office Trudeau’s Liberals vilified him. In 2022, Trudeau invoked the Emergency Act against truckers protesting against his government’s vaccine mandate that made the jab necessary to keep their jobs. Put simply, Trudeau along with New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, was portrayed by the vast preponderance of journalists as the ideal leader for a supposedly brave new ‘progressive’ world where every virtue-signalling position was embraced and mouthed. As I said, the legacy media – yes, the same one that recent US studies show to be comprised of only three (yes, 3) percent Republicans, such is the wall-to-wall capture of the mainstream media by the political left – loved Justin.

But boy oh boy didn’t the world change of late. Trudeau is today loathed by a big majority of Canadians. He and his Liberal party are over 20 points behind in the polls and facing political annihilation. Trudeau has just fired his female Treasurer (Finance Minister) for disagreeing with him. In fact, he’s fired other women Cabinet ministers for disagreeing with him. (Woke, ‘right-on’ feminist virtue-signalling, you see, is about what you say, not what you do.) The incoming Trump administration makes no bones about loathing Trudeau Jr and some even openly call him names. In fact, Trump has threatened to impose a 25 per cent tariff against Canada for not controlling its border and allowing drugs, criminals and terrorists to make their way easily into the US. Trudeau caved immediately and pledged to spend $1.6 billion on the border but the tariff threat remains. (Related point: Mexico’s response to the same threat was to pledge to stop all illegal immigrant caravans before they get to the border.) Better yet, early in 2025 Trudeau’s government seems certain to be brought down by its even-more-left-wing coalition partners and have to face an election. Some pollsters think this could be a near-death experience for the Trudeau-led Liberal party. My bet is that few Canadian truckers will be shedding any tears for the lockdown thug extraordinaire, second only to our Dan Andrews.

In my books, things are most definitely moving in the right direction in Canada in this new year.

How about the US? Well, right up through most of 2024 Donald Trump was facing unprecedented lawfare from the Biden Department of Justice, third-world style attacks on their main political opponent. In my view, every legal case was flat-out garbage. Still, the Dems brought cases in Manhattan where the jury pool was over 80 percent Democrat-voters. They weaponised the FBI. The military had never-before-seen recruitment problems because their core pool is working-class white men and inner-city black men and neither wanted anything to do with the social engineering, DEI, pro-trans policies Biden was injecting into the armed forces. (This was a canary in the coal mine indication that Trump would win for the Republicans the biggest slice of the young black male vote in decades.)

And today? The lawfare has collapsed against Trump. The senior FBI, CIA and military generals will be replaced by Trump and some could, and should, face criminal charges. The military will be completely de-wokified. Trump has nominated Cabinet people whom the DC establishment loathes. Bhattacharya (let’s get the facts about the lockdown thugs). Gabbard. RFK Jr. Hegseth. Bondi. Wright (for Energy, and he’s an open and vocal sceptic of renewables and climate disasterism). No genuflecting before DEI concerns in making appointments. Picking people who are loathed by the left-wing press and the universities (which is the single most important criterion for conservative appointments across the board because if someone has not shown spine already by standing up to left-wing progressivism you’ll get our Liberal party-type appointees, the ones they made to the AHRC, top courts, e-Safety Commissioner, all of them). Trump’s pledged to leave the WHO. He will almost certainly pull out of Paris. I’ll be blunt. Things are going even better than I’d hoped in the US of A as we enter 2025.

We can sadly pass over Britain in silence with its ‘two-tier Keir’ justice system (which seems undeniable, in some ways at least). And with its mania for destroying the economy by bowing down before renewables madness. At least Nigel Farage and Reform are on the up and up and have a party membership that will overtake that of the Tories in the next few months.

And what about Australia? At the risk of falling victim to hubris after predicting far in advance both the Voice referendum and US election outcomes let me say that I think our editor has been correct for some time. Dutton and the Libs will win. This will not deliver the sort of big-ticket changes we’ll see in the US and even in Canada. Dutton is equivocating on slashing immigration numbers. Why? This is plain stupid as that sort of pledge is winning elections and popularity around the democratic world – and deservedly so. We can speculate that at least three lobby groups might have influenced Mr Dutton’s hedging on this. It could be big business that loves mass immigration because it keeps wages comparatively low. But Dutton owes big business nothing after their disgraceful embrace of the Yes case on a party political constitutional referendum. Or maybe it’s the university lobby. The tertiary sector lives off overseas students, many of whom – let’s be blunt – are here for the visas. Again, cowering before the university sector is bonkers. Our universities are not that good – ignore the rankings systems, they even make the numbers of overseas students a criterion, assuming they come for quality not a visa. Grade inflation in my 20 years here has been massive. Undergraduates get a terrible product. The uni DEI bureaucracies are out of control. And well over half of employees are neither teachers nor researchers but administrators, with the world’s highest pay for vice-chancellors. And this sector hates conservatives. A Liberal government should be wanting to blow up the present university structures, not genuflect to their concerns. Or maybe the problem Dutton has is the wets in his own party room? That’s a big, big problem indeed.

That said, 2025 will sweep in a Dutton government and my oh my will that be a huge improvement on the Albanese mess. So welcome to a new year filled with optimism on many fronts. Good to be alive in 2025.