Once upon a time, Australia was the envy of the world. But, then again, so was Argentina. Before Javier Milei, Argentina was a socialist basket case. Australia is on a fast track to not even Peronist Argentina, but Chavismo Venezuela.
This country has lost its way. We know we are a lot poorer than we were in 2019 and things are getting worse. Something is profoundly wrong. But on another level this introspection is self-defeating. Like a neurotic person, we feel we are helpless victims of circumstance when we are the authors of our own misfortunes.
What does he mean by that? Simple: we kept voting for the same idiots.
When Donald Horne called Australia The Lucky Country, he meant that it was a country so blessed with natural resources that it could withstand even the most determined efforts of the most dunderheaded politicians. Challenge accepted, Australians apparently responded.
To adapt Harold Macmillan’s famous quip, we were not the victim of “events, dear boy, events” but ‘decisions, dear boy, decisions’.
The list of Really Bad Ideas That Screwed Australia is a long and odious one. But few things come close to the Big Four: Multiculturalism, Net Zero, the NDIS and Covid.
Multiculturalism, in tandem with turbocharged mass immigration, has almost fatally weakened Australian society, turning us into a collection of mutually hostile tribes where a nation once was. Its apotheosis was the Bondi Massacre.
Scott Morrison’s October 2021 decision to embrace net zero which he and the responsible minister, Angus Taylor, claimed could be achieved at little or no cost.
Net Zero has performed a complementary demolition job on the economy. While the green lobby congratulated itself on saving the planet, billions in taxpayer subsidies for solar panels and wind turbines flowed straight into the coffers of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, soaring energy prices systematically gutted what remained of our manufacturing base. We exported our industry and imported dependence.
Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott’s championing of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in 2012, an uncapped, easily rorted and constantly expanding entitlement program that today is a budget wrecking ball.
God save us from left-wing politicians desperate for a ‘legacy’ to put to their name. The NDIS was a catastrophe waiting to happen from the moment Gillard announced it. An uncapped, demand-driven entitlement with absurdly low barriers to entry was never going to stay solvent. It was never ‘fully funded’. It was a blank cheque tailor made for fraudsters: many of them recent arrivals who spotted an open trough and dived in headfirst. It’s already the single most costly item on the government’s books, and is on track to cost more than the rest of the budget.
Covid itself was never the existential threat the hysterics claimed. The real damage was inflicted by the ruling class’s Beijing-style lockdowns, the hundreds of billions in stimulus and the Reserve Bank’s enthusiastic money-printing. Zero Covid was the policy that legitimised it all.
These disasters did not arrive in isolation. Newly minted opposition leader Kim Beazley’s 1996 fatwa against ‘economic rationalism’ marked Labor’s formal abandonment of basic economics. The party has never recovered, sliding into little more than a slightly less unhinged version of the Greens. The 2014 Abbott-Hockey budget, for all its flaws, at least attempted to confront the spending addiction. The subsequent media and social-media pile-on taught every government since a simple lesson: don’t even try. Having educated the leaner class that they could vote themselves other people’s money, the political class discovered a perfect symbiosis of elites and welfare grifters. Serious fiscal repair became politically suicidal.
The result is an Australia that is poorer, more indebted, more inflation-prone and more dependent than it has any right to be. Progressive ideologies imported from Europe and America insisted we could equalise outcomes, expand the state and ‘save the planet’ at no economic cost. Business leaders who once stood up to Canberra now speak like bureaucrats and chase subsidies. A culture that once prized meritocracy now worships quotas and mediocrity.
Overseas, the backlash against this nonsense is gathering force. Here, One Nation’s rise is one early symptom. Yet the Albanese government responds to its own mismanagement by doubling down and even floating the family home as a capital-gains target.
Time is running out.
