Congratulations on your elevation to leadership of the Liberal party of Australia. It is a position of great honour, although it has to be pointed out that it has not always been honourably held or honourably achieved, especially in the last decade or so. It goes without saying that you face enormous challenges and, indeed, it is testament to your self-belief and courage that you are prepared to take on this challenge at this time, one of the lowest points in the Liberal party’s history, when rebuilding the party is the chief goal. It is also testament to your talents and abilities that your colleagues have selected you for this task.

Some points, if we may. There will be many individuals keen to point to this or that policy, this or that pronouncement, this or that decision, as the reason for the election loss. Picking away at those particular scabs could easily become the focus of the next eighteen months, and if so, will prove futile and fruitless. Regardless of what the Labor party may claim, it wasn’t your policies that lost the Liberal party the election. It was you. And by you, we mean the parliamentary Liberal party and leadership, not you as an individual, obviously.

The reason the Liberal party was ignored by the voters at the recent election was because the Liberal party demanded that it be ignored. The leadership team ran from every position that they feared would be controversial and instead offered up a bland, half-baked smorgasbord of mismatching ideas floating in watery ideological gruel. Even those ideas that may have been appetising were served up in such meagre portions that they held zero appeal. A 25-per-cent cut in immigration? Why not a total ban for two years? Something people could get their teeth into. And a petrol discount for 12 months as your main economic policy? Seriously?

Just as dentists are expected to fix teeth and airline pilots are expected to fly you safely from A to B, oppositions are expected to oppose. In no dictionary anywhere on Earth is ‘to oppose’ defined as ‘to mimic in a slightly watered-down fashion’. And yet that is precisely what the Liberal party has been doing since the defenestration of Tony Abbott in 2015 – mimicking Labor rather than opposing Labor. Indeed, the one and only time the Coalition did oppose Labor, on the Voice referendum, it defied all the opinion polls and went on to win a magnificent victory. Yet, astonishingly, the simple formula for political success –oppose to win – has been scrubbed from the Liberal party’s DNA.

If your plan is to try and win back government by beating the Teals in three years time and then beating Labor in six years time, it is doubtful whether you will a) succeed in either venture or b) survive very long as leader. Unless the goal of your leadership is to save Australians from the hell of a socialist Labor government and see them turfed out as rapidly as is humanly possible, you are wasting everybody’s time.

The Albanese government is teetering on the shaky foundations of a trillion dollars worth of debt, an insane energy policy built on the fraudulent climate scare campaign, increasing social chaos due to rampant immigration and left-wing loathing of our culture, and defence forces that are not fit for purpose. If you are incapable of crafting a sure-fire election-winning strategy out of those horrors then you will fare no better than the hapless Mr Dutton.

To win you must be bold. To be bold you must slay the left’s ideological dragons. Have you got it in you? Mr Dutton did not. Mr Morrison did not. And Mr Turnbull did not.

The first and most important dragon that must be slayed is net zero. There is no intellectual, scientific, economic or political reason why Australia should be pursuing this ideological nonsense. Even Tony Blair is now calling net zero a disaster. If the Liberal party carries on lying to the people of this nation that net zero is both achievable and desirable then you deserve to keep on losing. Net zero is poison to your brand. As Rebecca Weisser writes in her column this week, ‘A responsible government would legalise nuclear energy but be technology-neutral on power generation. It would remove itself from net zero or any commitment that did not have an economically feasible technological pathway.’

The second dragon is the ABC and our schools and universities. If you are not prepared to fight the blatant leftist cultural indoctrination of our society at its source then you deserve what you get – a generation of young left-wingers who will condemn you to the political wilderness. Indigenous activism, trans activism and pro-Palestinian activism must all be relentlessly denounced and opposed.

And the third dragon is the Ponzi scheme of immigration. Australia cannot continue importing vast numbers from the Third World, and especially those from certain parts of the Middle East and north Africa, without seriously damaging the social fabric of this nation, for a variety of reasons.

Dear Sussan, it is not unfair to say that you have been in parliament for nearly a quarter of a century and risen to the top job in opposition more or less without a trace. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The public have yet to form an impression of you (other, of course, than the irrelevant fact that you are a woman). The hard decisions you take over the next six months will prove whether or not you are prepared to fight tooth and nail to throw out this abomination of a Labor government. Or whether you are simply there to warm the seat for someone who can and will.

We sincerely hope it is the former, and we wish you well.