“There’s never been a better time to be a first-time buyer,” she said.

Not in my lifetime has there been a better time to be a first homebuyer in Australia... I think there’s a generation of young Australians who are feeling this enormous sense of relief because they thought they were going to be renting forever. They’re feeling like it’s possible for them now to afford a home of their own. I think that is really important, not just for those individuals, but for our cohesion as a nation. Like, we made a promise to Australians that if they work hard and they save, they’ll be able to afford a home of their own. We’re keeping that promise.

Plibersek was spruiking the Albanese government’s 5 percent deposit scheme, and the recent declines in property prices following the 2026-27 Budget (those factors, taken together, mean that many young people who took up that scheme now have negative equity).

But her analysis is completely incorrect, and just another example of how out of touch the political class has become. It is this sneering attitude, telling young Australians that they’ve never had it so good, which is driving many young people away from the major parties and into the hands of the Greens and One Nation.

So, let’s establish some facts.

Plibersek was born in 1969, a year in which more than half of 25-29-year-old Australians were homeowners. The year she turned seven, the homeownership rate among 25-29-year-olds peaked at 54 percent.

In 2021, the homeownership rate among 25-29-year-olds was 36 percent, the lowest level Australia has recorded since 1933. The entire post-War homeownership boom brought about by Robert Menzies and likeminded state premiers has been entirely undone for young Australians.

As late as 1988 (that is, within Plibersek’s lifetime), almost half of the bottom 20 percent of income earners aged 25-44 (the prime home-purchasing and family-formation years) had bought a home. By 2016, that had fallen to just 34 percent.

In 2021, just under 25 percent of the bottom 20 percent of income earners aged 25-34 were homeowners, down from 45 percent in 1981. Homeownership has fallen for all younger people over these 40 years, but it is falling at an alarming rate among lower-income households.

In the 1970s, an ordinary home cost somewhere around three-to-four times average income. Today, it’s ten times or more.

Unsurprisingly, the time that it takes an average worker to save a house deposit has increased from around six years in the 1990s to over twelve years today. And what that deposit gets them has dwindled away; in the 90s Australians were buying 3–4-bedroom houses with a front yard and a backyard, with room to have and raise a family. Today, it’s more likely to be a 2-bedroom apartment, or a small townhouse with a bit of astroturf for the dog, should you be so lucky.

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Many people like Plibersek argue that young people have never had it so good – they have access to cheap technology and tools of convenience that are beyond the wildest imaginings of the youth of even a few decades ago. That is true. It is also true that international travel is far more accessible, and that many young people lack the virtues of frugality, hard work, and commitment which saw their parents and grandparents through tough times in their own lives. And it is likewise true that many young people have chosen a different lifestyle; they want to have avocado on toast every weekend and visit their friends in Europe each year, and see saving for a wedding and having children as unnecessary burdens.

But these kinds of generational claims are always going to be fraught, and they usually focus on strictly material measures.

The excellent wrote about this issue recently, pointing out that while on many material measures “it does seem as if the young are fine”, they are also a generation that is “not marrying, not buying homes, not having children, and seem pretty miserable.” I have quoted from him at length because he has done a fantastic job of summarising this argument many of us have made, but which is often hard to hear:

My argument is that previous generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.

Instead, the young must now buy back, item by item and at retail prices, what their grandparents received as a bounty of prior civilizational investments. The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality…

What actually got cheaper over the past fifty years? Electronics, entertainment, fast fashion, processed food, toys, screens of every kind. And what got more expensive, usually by many multiples? Housing, education, childcare, healthcare, insurance.

Absurdly, both of these movements register in the statistics as progress: one shows up as asset appreciation and the other as consumer surplus. But the lived reality for families feels like a pincer.

Yes, young people have phones, cheaper travel, and convenience and comfort unimaginable 50 years ago. Yes, some of them are lazy and entitled. But many of them have tormented souls, stripped of all the social and cultural infrastructure which was there for their parents and grandparents.

Plibersek is right that homeownership is important for our cohesion as a nation; ownership is vital for stable democracies.

But there has been a better time to be a first-time home buyer in Australia; three years ago was much better than today, and five years before that was even better. In fact, the further back you go into Plibersek’s life, the better it generally was. The added bonus is that she grew up in a time before the social and cultural infrastructure we all need was burned to the ground.

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That term has been doing the rounds since the insightful Helen Andrews made the case for it in a recent piece for Compact magazine. Race communism, she argues, “captures the fact that race holds something like the place in our ruling ideology that the working class held in communist countries.”

Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is the source of the state’s moral legitimacy; decisions about jobs, promotions, housing, and university admissions are all tilted toward favored groups. Proficiency in the ruling ideology is a criterion for advancement in any kind of career. Every large workplace has an ideological enforcer whose job it is to make sure the institution is aligned with the ruling ideology publicly and internally.

Under communism, the Soviet Union put “Marxism-Leninism at the center of society and judged every program, event, or phenomenon by whether it advanced its particular notion of progress.” The term race communism “is not meant to imply a hidden genealogy… to some discredited Marxist thinker”, but to more accurately describe the modern phenomenon of ‘positive’ discrimination based on race.

Andrews argues that the goal of those obsessed with so-called ‘justice’ – often referred to as wokeness – was never about things like “gender-neutral bathrooms.” It was about hard power and actual redistribution of resources, and that’s where the link to communism comes in. Under communism, wealth and power are redistributed based on class; under race communism, wealth and power are redistributed based on race.

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Many Australians think that multiculturalism means being tolerant and accepting of people who have different family backgrounds, who were born in a different country or raised in a different religion. They think that what it means – as Paul Keating once said it means – “the right to express and share our individual cultural heritage” while expecting “that the first loyalty of all Australians must be to Australia… [and to] the basic principles of Australian society.”

But that is explicitly not what multiculturalism means in 2026.

In a major address last year, Anne Aly, the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, said that multiculturalism could not mean “a monolith of common cultural values or even multiple common cultural values”. Instead, it must be defined as “democratic pluralism”, and “the adoption of diverse approaches to ensuring that all people can participate fully in social, political and economic life.”

Aly credited Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya as being the inspiration behind this conception of multiculturalism, and it is in his writing that we can find a definition of ‘democratic pluralism’ and unpack precisely what the Albanese government is trying to achieve.

In a 1990 essay, Jayasuriya wrote that democratic pluralism would require “a set of positive rights (i.e., those involving a claim on resources) leading to greater equality and justice by enabling equal access to resources as well as control of institutional structures.”

In practice, this sounds remarkably similar to what Andrews describes as race communism.

Aly has made it quite explicit that this is the stated policy goal of the Albanese government. The ‘old’ multiculturalism, which she dismisses as the “performative expression of culture and tradition”, has been thrown out for the ‘new’ multiculturalism which aims to ensure “equality of participation in political, social and economic life”. Equality of participation sounds innocent enough, until you start to think about what it means in practice: race-based bodies like the Voice to Parliament, and positions and resources set aside for people who belong to a particular race or ethnic group.

In another 2025 speech, Aly said that her appointment as Minister for Multicultural Affairs – for the first time as a standalone office – demonstrated that “we are at a pretty pivotal point right now.”

We have a platform with the creation of the Office of Multicultural Affairs. Let’s not waste this platform… This is a moment for us to embed into practices, services, service delivery, equity, equitable outcomes, and embed multiculturalism as something that defines our character, defines our identity. This is our moment.

So, taking Aly’s words at face value, the Albanese government views multiculturalism as an opportunity to provide “equitable outcomes” based on race and country of birth. Redistribution is the guiding principle here, and racial and ethnic differences are the qualifying characteristics to be a recipient. In other words, race communism. The Australian Public Service’s Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Employment Strategy, which has explicitly allocated positions to certain staff members based on their speaking a language other than English, is just one example of how this theory of multiculturalism is practised as race communism.

This is, of course, a world away from what Australians have always understood to be our sense of egalitarianism and the fair go. Labor’s Bob Hawke famously said on Australia Day 1988, celebrating our bicentenary, that “in Australia there is no hierarchy of descent: there must be no privilege of origin.” That Australia is gone.

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Mr Leigh, who was once a professor of economics, is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury (what a mouthful). But as an economist, he is no doubt horrified at the record of the government in which he serves.

The Australian Financial Review recently highlighted the fact that GDP per person has risen by just 4 percent so far this decade, making it the weakest period of living standards growth since the 1910s. But this analysis is charitable to the Albanese government; if you look at the record after May 2022 when it was elected, Australians’ average living standards have gone backwards.

On almost every economic measure, Australians are not doing well. There is a productivity slump, and inflation has eaten away wages growth (which has been further eroded by tax bracket creep); government debt and interest payments are up, and economic growth per capita is down. Energy prices have continued to rise despite price caps on gas and promises that government has been investing in “the cheapest form of energy”.

Which brings us to Mr Leigh and the Shann Memorial Lecture. Edward Shann (1884-1935) was one of Australia’s greatest economists, who established the economics program at the University of Western Australia and was a founder of the Australian economic history discipline. He was a key federal government adviser during the Great Depression, which he had predicted in his 1927 paper The Boom of 1890 – and Now (it is sometimes forgotten that Australia recovered relatively quickly from the Depression, largely due to astute economic advice provided by Shann and his colleagues, which rejected the kind of New Deal/Keynesian approach adopted in the United States).

Australia’s current economic malaise would not surprise Shann.

He warned, for example, of the consequences of higher government spending: it will inevitably “withdraw large bodies of men from the work that sets new exports flowing, to boost wages and material costs of construction and to retard the success of enterprise along established lines.”

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The Albanese government’s total expenditure last financial year, $812.1 billion, was well above what the Morrison government had originally budgeted for the year ($686.8 billion). Many of the inflationary pressures in the economy, including higher wages, materials, and construction costs, can be blamed on this excess of government spending (including outrageous largesse at the state level). This is exactly what Shann warned would happen.

Sometimes when things aren’t going well for governments, they like to interfere with prices to give the illusion that they can force down living costs. The Albanese government has been happy to do this if it might benefit them politically, or if it suits their ideological ends. They imposed a price cap on natural gas – which has gotten more expensive in large part because governments in the southern states refuse to approve new projects, creating an artificial supply constraint – and provide seemingly endless subsidies for solar and wind energy and electric vehicles to force them into their respective ‘markets’.

To Shann, such “schemes of price manipulation one and all bespeak a hazy appreciation of the function of prices in guiding the economic use of man’s resources.” Prices contain vital information because they “are the signs by which men learn from willing buyers their changing needs… A government or board of control that seeks to fake the world’s prices does so at the peril of the citizens and producers whom the faked prices mislead.”

Even on one of the measures Australia appears to have succeeded on in recent years – employment growth – Shann had a prescient warning. Some 82 percent of all new jobs created in the first two years of the Albanese government were in the non-market sector (i.e. funded by taxpayers). Shann argued that this was a sign of failure, because this kind of totalising state had an “incapacity to organize production adequate to support its liberal consumption.” In other words, government is excellent at consuming wealth, but it is shockingly bad at producing it.

Shann articulated two different paths forward for Australia: one based on free enterprise and the price mechanism, and another based on “collective action on compulsory lines” which had been a popular shortcut throughout Australian history. Only the former could generate prosperity, while the latter “collective, authoritative way” led to “uncontrollable wastes” and “massive debt”.

Shann would no doubt weep about the path the Albanese government has chosen for Australia. Minister Leigh probably needs to spend a bit more time reading Shann before he shares a stage with our great economist’s name.

The host, comedian Nikki Osborne, asked Albanese to nominate who he would shag, marry, and date from a lineup of Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, or Rhonda Burchmore.1 Albanese responded that “Kylie, clearly” would be his choice for “all of the above”.

The opportunity to score political points by criticising Albanese for being misogynistic or some other cardinal sin was too tempting for many commentators who should have taken a more principled stance. But all of the faux outrage – from both sides of politics – just shows how uncomfortable the elite class is with Australian culture.

Maybe it would have been better if Albanese had not answered the question (better still if he had not gone on the podcast at all), but he did, and his response was actually quite Australian: defuse the situation it by not answering properly and making a cheeky comment about how much he loves Kylie Minogue.

Albanese’s comment fits into a long tradition of our politicians making use of this Australian kind of humour. It was like Tony Abbott winking at a radio host when a pensioner who called in said she worked on an adult sex line to earn extra money. It was like Bob Hawke telling Australians after the 1983 America’s Cup victory that “Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum!”

It was probably objectively more offensive when Gough Whitlam told a voter during the 1972 election campaign that he was “for abortion and, in your case, sir, we should make it retrospective.” Like with Hawke, Abbott, and Albanese, every ordinary Australian immediately perceived this as exactly what it was: a joke.

We can trace this kind of irreverent humour all the way back to George Reid, who, when a heckler asked, “What are you going to call it, George?”, referring to our fourth Prime Minister’s large gut, responded: “If it’s a boy, I’ll call it after myself. If it’s a girl, I’ll call it Victoria. But if, as I strongly suspect, it’s nothing but piss and wind, I’ll name it after you.”

Commentators and members of the elite can pretend to be outraged by Albanese’s comments, but doing so says more about them than it does about Australians.

At the end of the day, we’re either a bunch of larrikins, or we’re not.

This kind of humour is part of our culture. We are not buttoned-up Brits, snobbish French, or outraged Americans. We are larrikin Australians.

If someone wanted to make a legitimate criticism about the Albanese government’s record on women’s issues, there is plenty of subject matter. They might point out the fact that it still refuses to provide a definition of what a woman is in the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the legislation which is supposed to promote equality between men and women.

The same week that Albanese was on the Bush Deep podcast, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard provided a confused defence of her government’s 2013 decision to strip the SDA of its definition of ‘men’ and ‘women’, which led to a recent Federal Court decision finding that it was a breach of gender discrimination laws to prevent a biological man from participating in a women-only space.

The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen wrote a great piece which made a similar point:

Faux outrage went viral. The most outraged and most faux being so-called teal party member Zali Steggall. Ms Indignation said Albanese’s silly game gave “young boys permission to view women solely through a desirability lens”.

…

This po-faced puritanism from Steggall and others like her is a bit rich. Steggall seems more outraged over a lame game that teenage girls play than the fact that the deeply flawed Sex Discrimination Act has expunged the rights of women to have their own spaces. But teal women don’t get mad about that far, far more serious issue.

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After years of political instability following Federation, the centre-right political parties had finally come together in order to present a united front and defeat their common foe: the Labor Party1 and its radical socialism. But then they lost the 1910 election.

The 1913 election was historic because it was the first time that a unified centre-right party won a federal victory. Joseph Cook, who had started his political career as a Labour Party representative in the New South Wales colonial parliament in 1891, led the Liberal Party to a one-seat majority but failed to gain control of the Labor-dominated Senate. In 1914, unable to govern effectively with Labor blocking even politically uncontroversial legislation in the Senate, Cook secured the first double dissolution election. The Liberal Party lost to Labor once again.

In his first public appearance as Prime Minister in 1913, Cook gave a speech to the Liberal Speakers’ Association in Melbourne in which he contrasted the vastly different paths forward for Australia under centre-right liberalism and left-wing socialism. These paths, he said, were “as diametrically opposed as light and darkness”.

Putting aside the lessons which centre-right politicians might draw from the post-Federation experience – including the sheer level of time, grunt work, and organisation it can take to unify the right, the enduring importance of believing in and highlighting the clear and obvious natural fault-line in Australian politics, the folly of fighting each other rather than a common enemy, and the sense of compromise and commitment to a greater purpose which requires personal ambition and blind service to a specific party brand to sometimes be put aside2 – there are other interesting parallels which we can see between the Australia of 1913 and the Australia of 2026.

In his history of this period,3 David Kemp noted that when Cook gave the speech unemployment was low and there was upward pressure on both wages and inflation, immigration levels had been running very high in the preceding years, and both unionisation and the number of days of work lost to industrial action were increasing.

With those parallels, one could imagine a leader on the centre-right today making some of the same arguments that Cook did. It is worth reading his speech at length, which I have copied below.

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Joseph Cook’s first speech as Prime Minister, 12 June 1913

We have been set down in a country which furnishes the most splendid opportunities of any country in the world. No country has the opportunities for the young man that Australia has, and very much will depend on how we shape ourselves to the future development of this country – the line of procedure, shall I say, political and social and economic, we pursue – as to what the future will bring forth.

We may make it a great country, saturated with freedom, the old-time principle of freedom, realising to the full the destiny which awaits us, making use of the powers given to us, and applying those powers to the material development of this country, building up here a sturdy manhood, full of vigour and vitality, with a wise, wide, and sane outlook; or we may cramp it, and make every man in the community a mere dependent upon the State, always looking somewhere to somebody other than himself.

There are two roads before us – one standing invitingly open for the fulfilment of powers of the individual and the destiny of the nation, and the other leading to a cramped and narrow national outlook and finally leaving us as a nation bankrupt amongst the stronger and more virile nations of the world.

Liberalism is as wide as the needs and outlook of the highest community. One of the gentlemen who proposed the toast said that the cause of Liberalism must still be fought. That is true; the price of liberty – I return to the old hackneyed statement – the price of liberty is still eternal vigilance, and our fight has only just begun. I regard this last contest as merely a skirmish, and we have yet to come face to face with the interests which we are opposing.

There will yet be in Australia – I believe; shall I say, I hope – a fight which will range these two principles up to an issue simple, if we may have it, but one which will enable us to throw everything into the scale – our interests, our men, our politicians, our everything. It must come sooner or later, this square, stand-up fight with the principles of socialism, which have been getting ahead in this country of recent years. There can be no compromise between these two contending principles; they are as diametrically opposed as light and darkness. One means slavery economically and socially to the individual, the other means the fullest and largest liberty. There is as much difference between them as between right and wrong.

Something has been said of the propaganda4 of the principle of Liberalism. There is nothing more important than that today. It seems as though the citadel had been captured by the young men of the community, and it was that that gives me so much pleasure to be present, and to see the men of the younger generation making a fight once more for the principles of freedom.

I am a little afraid it is for the want of emphasising the constructive side of our platform that so many young men have gone over to the other camp. There are thousands of young men there who should be in our camp. I am not sure if that, to some extent, is not also due to their superb organisation, an organisation that gets hold of the young men just as they are getting out of their teens, and fills them with ideas which we believe to be false, but which have a glamour of their own.

These young men belong to the Liberal camp, and it is your duty and my duty to get them back again. There is only one way to do that. We must show and tell them what Liberalism really stands for. We have not the name of Labour to conjure with; that word Labour has given the other side many thousands of votes. They have no right to it, for there is nothing that connotes labour in the right sense of the word as Liberalism does. Liberalism is labour, and concerns itself with labour and with the interests of the working man.

The traditions of Liberalism are traditions of a constant, continuous struggle for the betterment of the working man; and the pity is that we have allowed the other side, under the false glamour of the term Labour, to win people away from right principles.

However, I believe an awakening is coming. My impression is that we are only at the beginning of a process of disillusionment which will continue until Liberalism wins back all the triumphs of the past, and serves a yet wider field of usefulness and opportunity in the future.

Why should Liberalism be against labour? It is impossible. I should not be where I am if I thought that being where I am was in the slightest degree detrimental to the interests of the working man. I believe that it will yet come to be seen that the best fortunes of the working man are wrapped up with the Liberal cause, and that we are working really and truly in the interests of the working man.

Liberalism as I understand it interprets the future by the past. Experience is our guide. The future is what the young men care to make it with their boundless opportunities. All that is necessary is that your enthusiasm should remain, your wide outlook should continue, your industry should be cultivated, and your patience preserved.

Say what you will about Senator Pauline Hanson’s introduction of the term “monocultural” to public debate, but it shows two things which explain her appeal and why the political class have struggled to deal with the rise of One Nation. First, it shows her ability to cut through by tapping into issues which mainstream Australians are concerned about in a way that the Liberal Party have been completely unwilling to. Secondly, it rejects the very un-Australian technocratic jargon and manufactured complexity that the elite class love – she distilled the problems and frustrations ordinary Australians have been feeling and channelled them into one word.

In the days after Hanson’s address to the National Press Club where she said that Australia is “a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural” and “live under the one cultural umbrella”, the media and political class have been obsessing over what, exactly, it means.

But for this public debate to be meaningful, we must also ask what, exactly, multiculturalism means.

The most straightforward way to understand what multiculturalism means in Australia today is to turn to what the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Anne Aly, has said about it.

In a speech to the Alfred Deakin Institute in November 2025, Aly outlined her vision for a new multicultural Australia which she said must be defined “not as a monolith of common cultural values or even multiple common cultural values but through equality of participation in political, social and economic life.” The premise “must not be cultural pluralism but democratic pluralism recognising that difference is a hallmark of democracy… a diverse society necessitates the adoption of diverse approaches to ensuring that all people can participate fully in social, political and economic life.”

What exactly does this mean?

The fact that we have to ask is itself revealing – this language is borrowed from academic jargon which no mainstream Australian is familiar with. But this is part of the point, because if voters do not know what their political leaders are talking about then it is hard to voice their concerns.

Within the academic-level push for multiculturalism in the 1960s and 1970s (it was never something which Australians asked or voted for), one of the dividing lines was between “cultural pluralism” and “ethnic structural pluralism”.

Cultural pluralism is the kind of multiculturalism Australians often think we ended up with – tolerating, even celebrating, ethnic and cultural differences on the assumption that, at the end of the day, we are all on “team Australia”.

But it was “ethnic structural pluralism” that some radical academics pushed for. This meant going further than celebrating cultural differences and accepting migrants’ ethnic and cultural attachments to their ancestral homeland, for example by speaking languages other than English. It meant actively encouraging migrants to maintain distinct ethnic and cultural groups, separated from Australian society, each with their own religious, educational, economic, and civic institutions.

Aly said it in plain English: the premise of multiculturalism “must not be cultural pluralism”. She rejects having “common cultural values” to unite Australians from different cultural backgrounds. She even says that multiculturalism is incompatible with “multiple common cultural values”.

Aly comes down on the side of “ethnic structural pluralism” and its push for identity-based group rights and institutions. She does not say this plainly because this is clearly a radical idea which goes against Australia’s commitment to equality, the rule of law, and liberal democracy. But her call for “democratic pluralism” and “diverse approaches to ensuring that all people can participate” in social, economic, and political life gives her position away.

Aly took the idea of democratic pluralism from Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya, one of the key proponents of Australian multiculturalism from the 1970s through to the 2000s. Jayasuriya was a proponent of ethnic structural pluralism, upon which he built his idea of democratic pluralism. In a 1990 essay, Jayasuriya wrote that democratic pluralism would mean “a set of positive rights (i.e., those involving a claim on resources) leading to greater equality and justice by enabling equal access to resources as well as control of institutional structures.”

Translated for a lay reader, this means providing additional resources like taxpayer funding and guaranteed access to institutional power for particular cultural groups. “Equality” is invoked to legitimise distributing additional rights, resources, and institutional power to certain people based on their ethnicity.

The point of liberal democracy is supposed to be that everyone is treated equally, that no one gets greater privileges based on their race, class, gender, or religion, and that there are no identity-based group rights. Democratic pluralism turns these principles over. It is a radical, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic proposal.

Aly’s push for democratic pluralism means entrenching exactly the kind of divisions which the Albanese government tried to impose through the Voice to Parliament, which would have provided different political rights based on race. The Voice failed because Australians got to vote on it, and expressed firmly their fundamental belief in equality, democracy, and the rule of law.

Many Australians thought that then-Minister for Immigration Al Grassby’s 1973 comment that migrants should be able to “choose to live in their own established, and highly organised ethnic communities” was radical. The policy of the Albanese government, according to Aly, is to go further; it is no longer “if they choose” to live in separate ethnic communities, migrants are now being actively encouraged to do so.

Australians were never asked if they support this proposal. They were never given a vote on multiculturalism, much less this turn to ethnic structural pluralism. They were never even allowed to debate it.

In a 1995 interview with Mark Lopez, author of the highly respected The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics, 1945-1975, Jayasuriya outlined that multiculturalism was only implemented because it was “de-politicised”, meaning the major parties agreed not to discuss or debate it, depriving the Australian people of an opportunity to vote on it. Jayasuriya said that his concern in the 1970s was that having a parliamentary debate on multiculturalism would “tear it apart”; making it bipartisan policy “was the only way in which it could have ever got accepted in this society because it was such a radical idea.”

With one word, Pauline Hanson has opened a proper public debate for the first time in 50 years. She has cut through all the jargon and manufactured complexity to say something that the overwhelming majority of Australians believe: that as different as we all are we should be united by an overarching commitment to a shared Australian culture.

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That liberalism and wisdom can be found in a speech Menzies gave in parliament on 21 September 1965 in response to the Vernon report.

In 1963, Menzies announced a Committee of Economic Enquiry, led by Professor James Vernon, to provide “a piece of highly important research” covering Australia’s post-War economy and forecasts into the 1970s. The terms of reference gave the Committee scope to report on things such as population growth, the economic availability of known physical resources, and trends in costs, prices, wages, productivity, and the standard of living.

The Committee lobbied Menzies to expand the terms of reference to include suggested “steps which appear to be necessary or desirable to conform with and further the objectives of the Government’s economic policy.” They wanted to provide specific recommendations to government, but this was explicitly rejected by Menzies.

In their final report – known as the Vernon report – the Committee offered policy recommendations anyway. This led Menzies to launch into a full-throated defence of what it meant to live in a liberal, democratic society.

The statistical, technical, and objectively economic matters of the report were highly valuable, Menzies said, but where it strayed into providing advice on policy it went too far. In a “free and self governing country, [all] policies will be political”, and they therefore should be left to elected, representative politicians to decide on. “In no case is a political policy the product of purely expert opinion on technical matters.”

Expert insights and advice are helpful to politicians, but the recommendations of experts can never be implemented wholesale without being passed through the filter of an accountable parliament. “No government, from whatever side of the House it may come, and indeed no parliament, can abdicate its own authority and responsibility for national policy… Political policy in a democratic community does not depend upon purely economic considerations.”

True, it may be more efficient to simply implement the advice of ‘independent’ experts, but “if the only problems in dealing with economic policy in a nation were purely technical, Parliament, which is not technical, and a Cabinet which is not technical might as well hand over to a group of technicians. In such a case democracy would have ceased and a technocracy would have begun.”

The Vernon report recommended that the government establish an “independent Special Projects Commission” which would have the power to investigate proposals for major development projects, instigated by the Commonwealth or state governments, or on its own initiative. But Menzies did not want to give powers to a standing body of independent experts, even if its role was supposed to be limited to providing advice. It would inevitably result in governments being “subjected to pressure, and even coercion into the adoption of policies or projects which… they might not [otherwise] select at all”:

I do not believe that any government, responsible for its own budget and conscious of the impact of its own budget upon economic policy generally, would be content to transfer authority in these fields to an independent body acting on its own initiative and with no responsibilities to the government of the day.

Menzies also “unhesitatingly rejected” the Vernon report’s similar suggestion for an independent Advisory Council on Economic Growth.

In the Australian democratic system of government based upon the consent of a free community, no government can hand over to bodies outside the government the choice of objectives and the means of attaining them in important fields of policy, particularly when such bodies would, through the power of publication, come to exercise what I have described, I hope not extravagantly, as a coercive influence upon governments.

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Menzies explained that there was a difference between establishing a specific committee on an ad hoc basis to investigate particular areas of economic and public policy, with clearly established terms of reference (like the Vernon-led Committee itself) and an indefinite, independent body:

To have such a body continued in one form or another as a standing body of what would come to be regarded as authoritative advice would have the dangers I have described. Political policies cannot be based upon pure economics and, for the sake of the adequate handling of international problems, of defence, and of social and industrial justice and progress, we hope they never will.

In A Liberal State: How Australians Chose Liberalism Over Socialism, 1926-1966, David Kemp wrote that Menzies’ response to the Vernon report was “profoundly intelligent, and time showed that his liberalism had furnished sound guiding principles.”

Menzies was undoubtedly reluctant to provide a permanent elevated platform for ‘independent’ critics, however ‘expert’, to attack government policies. More than that, he was sceptical of the practicality of their proposals. His whole career had contained the lesson that economic policy was the veritable battleground of political philosophies and that, if there was any area of policy that was not purely a technical matter, it was economic policy.

But what disturbed him most about the report was its apparent willingness to see a permanent role for government in attempting to manipulate the futures of different sectors of the economy. This offended his fundamental liberal instincts and philosophy; it raised the danger of politicisation; and it would open the door for Labor to expand its interference with economic life once again.

In more recent times, members of the Liberal Party have forgotten these essential insights of Menzies. Liberals have forgotten that liberalism is incompatible with technocracy, expert rule, and state command over the economy.

Liberal Party members who were familiar with Menzies’ response to the Vernon report, and who believed in the principles of liberalism and democracy which he outlined, would have taken no time to reject the idea of a Voice to Parliament, for example. The Voice would have been exactly the kind of permanent, independent body which Menzies warned would exert a “coercive influence upon governments” and thereby undermine Australia’s system of parliamentary democracy (aside from any qualms liberals may have about granting political rights based on race).

The same logic applied to the litany of independent bodies which the Liberal Party has helped to establish. Each time it did so – and each time it conceded the ground to “experts” or “science” – it sacrificed another bit of parliamentary sovereignty and set itself up for failure in the future.

During the Second World War Menzies argued that “whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, the foundations of whatever new order is to come after the war are inevitably being laid down now. We cannot go wrong right up to the peace treaty and expect suddenly thereafter to go right.”

That is a warning that he effectively repeated in his 1965 response to the Vernon report. One could not, out of expedience or short-sightedness, remove power from the parliament and then expect to be able to govern in the future. Menzies provided an early warning against establishing a permanent administrative state of ‘independent’ bodies, each of which would justify the next, undermine parliamentary democracy, and make it harder for an actual liberal party to govern.

The Liberals should have listened to Menzies.

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The narrow policy of preserving, without any foreign mixture, the pure blood of the ancient citizens, had checked the fortune, and hastened the ruin, of Athens and Sparta. The aspiring genius of Rome sacrificed vanity to ambition, and deemed it more prudent, as well as honourable, to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found, among slaves or strangers, enemies or barbarians.

With this acceptance of new people, who would be absorbed into the Republic as it expanded across their lands, came an expectation that they would become fully participating members of their new society. “Their partial distinctions were obliterated, and they insensibly coalesced into one great nation, united by language, manners, and civil institutions, and equal to the weight of a powerful empire,” Gibbon recounts. “So sensible were the Romans of the influence of language over national manners, that it was their most serious care to extend, with the progress of their arms, the use of the Latin tongue.”

For the Republic to succeed, to stay united, and to provide the benefits of Roman citizenship to all who wished to enjoy it, its culture, its language, and its institutions would have to remain strong.

This program proved to be fruitful. Rome “gloried in her generous policy, and was frequently rewarded by the merit and services of her adopted sons. Had she always confined the distinction of Romans to the ancient families within the walls of the city, that immortal name would have been deprived of some of its noblest ornaments”. Neither Virgil nor Horace, Livy nor Cicero, Trajan nor Hadrian were born Romans. They became Romans.

Australia, at its best, has embodied the kind of spirit of “aspiring genius” seen in the Roman Republic. It has offered the benefits of citizenship and of its culture and institutions to people from across the world. Australia has sought “to adopt virtue and merit for her own wheresoever they were found”: among Australians whose ancestors were here before British settlement, among Australians whose ancestors were forced to come here against their will, and among Australians who made a new home by choice.

But it was a two-way street: Australia would make a commitment to you, no matter where you came from, but in return you were expected to make a commitment to Australia. That did not mean forgetting where you had come from, but it did mean embracing the culture of your new home, becoming a citizen, and taking an active part in social, economic, and political life.

In 1971, even after high levels of migration after the Second World War, a full 94.3 percent of residents were Australian citizens. But it was around this time that Australia’s cultural deregulation really got underway, and a new attitude to migration and assimilation set in.

In a January 1973 interview with The Age newspaper, the Minister for Immigration Al Grassby said that it was “obvious that not all migrants want to become like us”, and that this was fine. Grassby, who had only been in the job for a few weeks, said that there should be total “social, economic and cultural liberation for all migrants, even if they choose to live in their own established, and highly organised ethnic communities.”

Fast forward to today, and the share of Australian residents who are citizens has fallen dramatically. The Census later this year is likely to reveal that the resident population is now around 82 percent citizens. That is, close to one in five people who live in Australia are not Australian. Many are temporary with no intention of integrating into Australian life properly; many have chosen not to by rejecting the identity and responsibilities which come with citizenship.

Over the past three years, the Albanese government has conferred citizenship on an estimated 600,000 people. But even though those numbers are historically quite high, they cannot keep up with the government’s migration program which has been running at an average of over 420,000 each year.

The problem did not start in 2022, but the modern Labor Party has taken Grassby’s message to heart. The Albanese government’s 2024 Multicultural Framework Review argued that the Australian citizenship test should be available in languages other than English and that “an inability to speak English well or not at all should not be seen as a deficit; nor should it be seen as a risk to Australia’s national unity.”

And in August 2025 the English language standards of several visa categories were reduced. The pass mark for the Pearson Test of English was dropped from (an already low) 30 out of 90 to just 24. According to Pearson’s criteria, this means accepting those who can no more than “understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases.”

The result has been exactly as one might have expected: Australia has been torn apart by a lack of social cohesion and national identity. According to the Scanlon Foundation’s Social Cohesion report the share of Australians who report feeling a sense of belonging has fallen from 77 percent in 2007 to just 46 percent in 2025.

Grassby’s statement is being taken to its logical end, where there is no “us” for anyone to belong to.

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Hawker came from a prominent South Australian family; his ancestors were pioneers, farmers, and politicians. His grandfather George C. Hawker was a wealthy colonist who rose to become Speaker in the South Australian House of Assembly in the early 1860s. The Hawkers were not just establishment figures, though; they were great. Each generation of the Hawker family had held at least one army commission back to the reign of Elizabeth I, and when the First World War erupted, they lived up to this tradition. Ten of George Hawker’s grandsons (Charles among them) volunteered to fight during the First World War, while two more were already enlisted before the War broke out. All twelve saw action and several were commended, most notably Lanoe G. Hawker who was the first British fighter pilot to receive the Victoria Cross.

Hawker was born on 16 May 1894 at his parents’ station, Bungaree, in South Australia. After first being educated at Geelong Grammar, where he won academic prizes, rowed in the senior eight, and in his senior year became editor of the school magazine, Hawker went to England to study at Cambridge, the university his grandfather George had attended in the 1830s.

Fellow South Australian Stewart Cockburn later commented that “Hawker’s early life was that of the well favoured eldest son of a family of substance and position. It seemed he would never know want… He was free and well provided enough to travel and enjoy himself as he chose. He could work or be idle, accept life’s challenge or escape it, just as he liked.”

He was studying history at Cambridge when the War broke out in August 1914, and along with many of his male cousins he immediately signed up for service in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Hawker was commissioned as a temporary lieutenant, and, after training, first saw action in Ypres (where he arrived a few days after his 21st birthday). He quickly won praise from his men, and was promoted to first lieutenant on 1 August 1915.

On 16 August 1915 Hawker was struck in the head by shrapnel splinters, which were removed at a field dressing station. On 25 September at the battle of Loos, while leading a diversionary attack, he was wounded by a shell which burst close to him. “Am rather knocked about but nothing, I am glad to say, is serious,” Hawker wrote to his father. “Far and away the worst thing was my left eye – had an operation last night and they took it out.”

In fact, his wounds were so serious his doctors thought he would die. He didn’t. After 14 operations over the next five months, Hawker was discharged from hospital but declared unfit for active service. Unimpressed with that assessment, he tried to join the Australian Imperial Force, but they refused him because of his injuries (his left arm was partly disabled despite surgery to try and repair a severed nerve). He returned to his studies at Cambridge and was able to join a reserve training battalion, but this he found boring. As recounted in a profile written for the Great Australian series:

Against the advice of both his fellow officers and of his family he regularly petitioned to be allowed to return to the front; his mother implored him to accept his position, but Charles was not to be shaken, even after many refusals from the War Office. In May 1917 his persistence was rewarded, for the loss of officers and men had been heavy and reinforcements were badly needed.

Commissioned as a captain in the BEF, Hawker returned to France to command a company on the Western Front. On 4 October 1917, which the official German account records as “the black day of October 4th”, Hawker led his men on an attack against German pillboxes at the Battle of Broodseinde. A shrapnel bullet hit his spine and paralysed him from the waist down. Unable to move, and presumed dead by stretcher bearers, he lay where he fell for 12 hours before being taken to a field hospital.

Hawker was counted amongst the 20,000-odd casualties at Broodseinde (he was tallied with the British; there were some 6,500 Australian casualties alone that day). He was alive, but his doctors said that he would never walk again. He was confined to a water mattress for seven months, so bad was the pain from the vibrations of footsteps on the ward.

It was on this mattress that he resumed his Cambridge studies, but from which he was determined to get up again. During the slow recovery he would try to interest his nurses in the Greek poetry and Russian literature he was reading; they were impressed by both his intellect and courage. From the water mattress, he was confined to a hospital bed, and then home furniture in England. By October 1918 he was able to stand for a moment, and two months later he took his first steps. It was another year of slow and painful recovery before he could walk a mile. One of his friends recalled that, around this time, when he was offered sympathy for his injuries, Hawker said: “Silly asses, Corporal. That kind of talk is meant for people with no guts.”

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His legs remained in surgical irons for the rest of his life, but he learned to walk again (with much pain) and once he was back in Australia he insisted on riding his horse (he had to be tied to the horse). Bert Kelly, a later member for Wakefield and whose father was a friend of Hawker, later remembered how he:

surmounted his physical disabilities with a courage that I think we should all recognise, although he would be embarrassed to hear it now recognised… Those of us who have seen him climb on a horse, crippled as he was, fall off and climb on again and, in pursuit of his determination to live a normal life, ride about his property, will never forget the sublime example he set us all.

It was on one of these outings when he turned to his companion and asked “That’s a bit of Australia. Don’t you think it was worth fighting for?”

After obtaining his master’s degree from Cambridge and continuing his physical therapy, Hawker returned to his beloved South Australia to work the family properties and take up studies in wool classing, forestry, economics, book-keeping, and botany. In 1921 he joined the state council of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (now the RSL), and served as vice-president. He was also active during these years in helping to establish St. Mark’s College, a residential college at the University of Adelaide named to celebrate the Saint whose feast day is on Anzac Day.

In 1925, he travelled to England for another operation in which some remaining shrapnel fragments were removed from his hip. He didn’t let the trip go to waste, visiting wool mills and returning via the United States where he spent time studying their rural industries. Partly out of private interests and partly in a public spirited manner, he wanted to learn all he could about international trade and marketing Australian produce to the world. It was as a result of his accumulated knowledge of the agricultural industry and global markets, and no doubt with his family’s disposition toward public service in mind, that in 1928 he was made the South Australian member of the Commonwealth Board of Trade. In this position, he became an early and lonely advocate for dismantling trade barriers and removing extensive protective measures inhibiting trade within the British Empire.

At the 1929 election, having established himself as a leading figure in South Australia, Hawker was elected from 36.14 per cent of the primary vote as a representative of the Nationalist Party1 in the seat of Wakefield. He proved to be exceptionally popular with his constituents, increasing his primary vote share to over 65 per cent at the 1931 election and easily retaining the seat at the 1934 and 1937 elections.

Although Hawker was a conservative who had tried to unify the non-Labor side of politics in South Australia, it was after a short time in parliament that The Labor Daily complimented his obvious capability as an elected member. He provided “an object lesson to less energetic men”:

Badly knocked about in the war, he nevertheless infuses a vitality into his work which makes him one of the most vigorous men on the Opposition side of the House. Rarely does a debate occur without him taking some part in it, expressing his party’s point of view, and to this he adds a generous readiness to appreciate the other fellow’s case

In 1930, during the Great Depression, Hawker argued that the pay of politicians and public servants should be cut to share in the burdens being borne by ordinary Australians, and in particular by pastoralists and graziers. He asked his colleagues if politicians were “justified in using our privileged positions to maintain salaries which can be paid only by taxing other men out of employment?”

I should be ashamed to increase taxation, which can only be paid by rationing or sacking men engaged in industries, in order to continue the existing salaries of a pampered and privileged class of which Parliament is the head and front… We have to consider whence the money will come to maintain the present salaries of public servants… The maintenance of one large privileged class by taxation, which must be paid before any other liability of the taxpayer, is not public spirited, and honourable members would not sanction it if they fully understood the consequences.

Some politicians (who did not want to make such sacrifices) complained that this was fine for Hawker, as a wealthy landowner who had other sources of income, but that it would not be fair to them. But this was a dishonest mischaracterisation of his sense of duty and self-sacrifice. In fact, Hawker was struggling with the downturn in prices for wool and wheat on a property which he had bought with borrowed money during the boom years of the 1920s. He kept to himself the fact that he was struggling to pay the interest on the loan. When water was running low, he offered to share his supply with a neighbour who was even worse off. When asked what would happen if this finished off his water, Hawker replied “Then we’ll both be out together.”

It was his sense of duty which undid Hawker’s early political success. As part of the Scullin (Labor) government’s response to the Great Depression (implemented through the Premiers’ Plan), the salaries of senators and members of parliament were reduced from £1,000 to £800. During the 1931 election campaign, in response to a question from a voter about if their salaries should be cut even further, Hawker declared that he supported further cuts and that, while he would not put forward any bills or amendments to reduce them so drastically, he would support them being reduced to £600. He was elected as a member for the United Australia Party (UAP), which Joseph Lyons led to victory. Hawker was appointed Minister for Commerce; the youngest member of the Cabinet at 38.

In 1932, the Lyons government’s Financial Emergency Bill 1932 sought to further reduce politicians’ salaries to £750. The independent member for Angas, Moses Gabb, put forward an amendment to reduce them to £600 instead. True to his word, Hawker resigned his ministry and crossed the floor to support it (the amendment was voted down 8 to 55). “A man thoroughly inoculated with the virus of party can be exposed to the contagion of courage for an indefinite period without serious risk,” The Advertiser opined a few days later. Not so Mr Hawker, whose “refusal to compromise with his own exacting sense of duty to the electorate”, by resigning and voting for the amendment, was “an imperative reminder of what the base political virtues really are.”

When he appeared before his electors the following month, Hawker explained that although some might argue he could have had more influence on policy from within the Cabinet, to him the issue was “as clear as day that once I had given my word I would only have weakened my capacity to serve the producers if I had shuffled out of it to retain either power or pay.”

After Hawker’s act of “political virtue”, he never returned to the Cabinet, although he remained an important member of parliament. As the 1930s dragged on, newspapers and fellow parliamentarians called for him to be returned to the front bench; some said that Hawker, who was only 38 when he resigned his Ministry, would one day become Prime Minister.

Hawker spent the 1930s travelling around Australia and made several trips overseas, including a trip through Germany, Poland and Russia in 1935. He provided early and constant warnings thereafter about the threat of another great war, and how Australia’s inadequate defence funding and lack of compulsory military training left the country exposed. “Unfortunately the world is so upset by aggression and military plunder that the renovations and repair of our defence system is the transcending need of the next few years,” Hawker warned in October 1937, less than five months before the Anschluss:

My conviction is that we must… get all the essentials as soon as possible whatever the necessary exertion. Ships, guns, plans, equipment, plants to make them and trained men to handle them are all deplorably inadequate… It is security we must have; as soon as it is clear that the British Countries stand together and have both the means and the will to guard their homelands, the risk of war will be minimised.

Hawker was an outlier, of course, with most of Australia’s political class firmly on the appeasement bandwagon.2 In April 1938, Hawker argued for compulsory military training, saying that to “shirk the obligation to give the men sufficient training at the earliest possible moment would be to gamble in blood and lives because of political convenience… An adequate defence system makes a country secure by deterring attack, and shielding the younger generation from the danger of having to fight.” In response to Hawker’s impassioned plea, one Labor Party coward, Eddie Ward, who never served during the First World War, was part of the 1917 general strike, and was disciplined during the War for refusing to take part in compulsory military training, said that the “honourable member would not have to fight” in any such war. The one-eyed, permanently disabled Hawker, took the high road:

The honourable member may sneer at me as much as he likes. I have actually seen men blown to atoms because our guns had not the necessary munitions, and men’s lives were thrown away for want of experience and training. That is the thing we must avoid at any cost.

Hawker had demonstrated that he was an intelligent and capable politician. He had been warning ceaselessly about the threat posed by Nazi Germany, but meanwhile demonstrated his grasp of issues across rural production, international marketing and trade, and sea navigation. The Melbourne Herald remarked in October 1938 that “it is not easy to think of a portfolio, apart from the law, that Mr Hawker could not carry with distinction to himself and great profit to the Commonwealth.” The newspaper criticised Lyons for allowing him to “sit idle on the back bench”:

Today, with the vital defence problems on hand, with a great new development scheme with rising expenditure and falling revenue and all the troubles such conditions bring in their train, the call is for clear-headed, experienced men of action whose participation in the Government would revive and uphold confidence in and out of Parliament.

In one of his final contributions to the parliament, Hawker slammed the Lyons government for proposing to spend more money on “postal works” than on defence. In the face of “the danger which anyone who has common sense realises is in existence in the world to-day”, the government was displaying “lukewarm procrastination” by refusing to increase defence expenditure and deal with obvious issues like the lack of air bases in northern Australia and funding for training “a sufficient number of men for our adequate protection” (Australia remained woefully unprepared when it came to northern air bases, and there was a scramble after the bombing of Darwin on 19 February 1942 to build them).

On 24 October 1938, The Advertiser published an article written by Hawker in which he laid out his arguments about defence preparedness. He re-prosecuted the case he had been making in parliament for some time, arguing for a larger and better equipped navy, better infrastructure to host British ships, and more aircraft and bases to protect the homeland and to project power in the region, including to Singapore. “It was the A.I.F which made the name of Australia great,” Hawker wrote. “It is, therefore, all the more deplorable that personal inhibitions and political expediency should be preventing the Australian Military Forces from receiving either their financial requirements or the systematic organisation and training by which universal training would fit them for their all important task.”

That night, Hawker agreed to a last-minute request to address the Navy League’s Trafalgar Day celebration in Adelaide, and missed the night train to Melbourne. He instead boarded a plane the following morning, and along with 17 others died when it crashed into Mount Dandenong.

Billy Hughes, who led Australia through the First World War and was one of the few arguing alongside Hawker for greater preparations to be made for another great war, lamented the loss of this “great man”:

At this juncture, Charles Hawker was a man who could ill be spared in the public life of Australia. In the defence of Australia, his advice and co-operation were vital. I admired him for his courage… He knew his own mind, and his value to the country could not be over-estimated.

The Liberal and Country League in South Australia (of which Hawker was President between 1927 and 1930) mourned the “national loss, the extent of which cannot be gauged, that, at this moment, when Australia is crying for defence, and when his abilities were needed as never before, this splendid example to the men of his time should have been taken away.”

Hawker’s death was a political shock and a national tragedy. In the weeks leading up to it, political rumours were swirling that he could be made Prime Minister. At the very least, a Cabinet shuffle which would place him into a senior position was expected. On 7 November 1938 the shuffle came and Geoffrey Street (who had been awarded the Military Cross during the Gallipoli Campaign) was appointed Defence Minister, replacing the timid Harold Thorby (who did not serve during the First World War). In a move that Hawker would have welcomed, Street soon announced the construction of two new destroyers and twelve new torpedo boats, along with a new air force station at Townsville, a new dock in Sydney, and a naval and air base at Port Moresby, measures which pushed the federal budget into deficit on the eve of the Second World War. By the end of November, the Cabinet was discussing plans to implement compulsory military training.

Late in her life, Hawker’s sister Kathleen established the Charles Allan Seymour Hawker Memorial Scholarship Trust Fund to honour this Australian scholar, soldier, pastoralist and statesman, and to enable young Australians – and especially those from the country – to benefit from a residential university scholarship. Today, few aside from those scholarship recipients know his name.

Keith Hancock, who had surveyed Australia and its national character in the 1920s, wrote that Hawker was “the best that an Australian can do and be.” His physical and moral courage, appetite for hard and worthwhile work, patriotism, bravery, sacrifice, and spirit are the characteristics which all young men should aspire to. Hawker should be remembered as an Australian Hero, the kind we should tell young Australians about and upon whom political leaders should model themselves. Hawker is a bit of Australia. Don’t you think he’s worth fighting for?

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In 2013, Andrew (‘Twiggy’) and Nicola Forrest became the first Australians to sign The Giving Pledge, a public commitment to give away the vast majority of their wealth before or upon their deaths. “We felt that if our children were to inherit considerable wealth,” the couple wrote, “it would only get in the way of them striving for and achieving their best, and truly making a positive difference in other people’s lives.” The Forrests were worth around $3.7 billion at the time, which has grown to around $25.5 billion today.

These kinds of public promises to give away vast sums of wealth have become very popular among the self-made nouveau riche. The American restaurateur and TV personality Guy Fieri who is worth some US$100 million, for example, apparently told his children: “When I die, you can expect that I’m going to die broke, and you’re going to be paying for the funeral.” The British food writer and TV cook, Nigella Lawson, worth a more modest US$20 million similarly said that she was “determined that my children should have no financial security”.

These pledges may sound noble. They are usually couched in language about ensuring that the children of the wealthy “learn the value of hard work, just like I did”. In a supremely egalitarian culture like Australia’s, this fits neatly into our shared moral code. Everyone is equal, and it is therefore unfair if some people start life with the extraordinary advantages of vast wealth which they did not ‘earn’.

, who rose to prominence in the ‘new right’ through his Substack over the past few years, outlines why this view is all wrong in his first book Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.

Kurtz opens the book: “We stand on the verge of the greatest wealth transfer in history. The post-War generation—who built the modern West—are nearing the end of their lives. Their wealth will not go with them. Trillions of dollars will have to find a new home, a new purpose.” But at this crucial moment, the West is off track. Our “civilization has lost confidence in our values and our future. Our cultural heritage is attacked, our charities are ineffective, and the family is in decline.”

The core idea of Leaving a Legacy, and of the body of work that Kurtz has built up online over the past three years, is that, contrary to the modern, liberalist zeitgeist, inheritance is a powerful force for good and the key to building lasting, strong, and healthy communities. It is not only about inheriting money or businesses, but the values, traditions, histories, and even the physical possessions—no matter how modest—of our ancestors. If those who are going to transfer all this wealth want to leave a legacy they can be proud of—and if those who are about to receive it want to be proper stewards for their families and communities—then it is vital that they prepare properly.

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Kurtz begins the book proper with an exploration of charity, what it is (extending “love to our neighbors and friends”), and what it isn’t (“leaving assets in our will to impersonal organisations, to be executed by others upon our death for the theoretical benefit of those we do not know”). This conception of charity is rooted in a Christian understanding of the word (there are biblical references throughout the book), and Kurtz goes back to the Koine Greek the New Testament was originally written in to remind us that the word we read as “neighbour” in the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) comes from the Greek πλησίος (plēsion), which connotes being ‘near’ or ‘close to’. True charity, argues Kurtz, comes from extending your community to encompass those in need and undertaking specific, personal acts of love.

The book begins to lay the bedrock of the argument against generalised ‘philanthropy’, directed at helping “all men in general” and therefore “no one in particular”. When celebrities boast that they are going to give all their money away, and encourage others to do the same, they are not engaging in charity. They are not showing love for those physically close to them, to those who share their country or community, and whom they will personally encounter and ensure have benefitted from the charity (as the Good Samaritan, who returns to check on the robbed man, does). Instead, by transferring numbers from one of their screens to the benefit of someone else’s screen, somewhere halfway around the world, they hope that it may end up benefitting someone somewhere. “With this global mandate,” Kurtz writes, so-called philanthropists are “freed from any particular responsibility over their local poor.”

Throughout the book, Kurtz returns to examples of wealthy individuals and families who either succeeded or failed in building a legacy and undertaking charitable works. In the second chapter, Kurtz tells the story of Henry Ford’s charity—rooted firmly in Detroit where his company was based—and how his wealth and legacy were squandered by his descendants once they left local charity behind and started engaging in activism masquerading as philanthropy around the world.

Henry Ford gave widely to worthy causes in Michigan. He built a hospital in Detroit, created job programs for the handicapped and disabled veterans, and revived the town of Inkster which had been hard-hit by the Great Depression. The Ford Foundation, established by his sons in 1936, initially catered to similar “local investments and empowerment”. But when his sons died in the 1940s, the third-generation Ford, Henry Ford II, fully endowed the Foundation with his father’s and uncle’s bequests and set his sights on a “global mandate”. In 1950 the trustees of the Foundation signed up to five ‘areas of action’, which included “economic improvements, education, freedom and democracy, ‘human behaviour’, and world peace.” They stopped the charity in Detroit—even refusing to make donations to the very hospital Henry Ford had built—in favour of “socially conscious philanthropy”. By the 1970s it was funding experiments in eugenics and population control (which were tested in India).

During the height of the post-George Floyd summer of chaos in America in 2020, the Foundation boasted that it had “seen our grantees at the forefront of the change that’s taken place over the last few days— [like] the City Council of Minneapolis’s pledge to dismantle the police department”. The Ford story shows that “large bequests—severed from the ongoing control of a capable and responsible family—can have chaotic, unforeseen, and immoral consequences.”

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Kurtz then moves onto the thrust of the book, discussing how the modern liberal West has broken the chain linking one generation to the next. Some Baby Boomers are “the source of much discord between the generations”. Take for example the singer Marie Osmond (worth some US$20 million): “I just think all an inheritance does is breed laziness and entitlement. I worked hard and I’m gonna spend it all and have fun with my husband.” Meanwhile, younger generations “are struggling to buy homes, find rewarding work in globalized labor pools, and start families… The young believe that the old have abandoned their duty to posterity.”

Kurtz’s argument is necessarily full of generalisations, which some readers may combat with rival generalisations about lazy young people being unwilling to work hard and make sacrifices, or about selfish older people who were lucky to be able to support a family on a single income and buy a home which has increased in value many times over. But he does not seek to attribute blame to either generation. Kurtz acknowledges that each generation may have its perceptions of itself and their older or younger family members, and does not doubt the good intentions with which parents or grandparents make decisions about how to pass down (or not pass down) their accumulated wealth.

You want your children to be capable, disciplined, ambitious, and well-adjusted—even if they grow up with wealth… In desperation, many well-off parents—who have never been taught how to intelligently transfer wealth, and sensing that great riches will corrupt their unprepared children—decide to disinherit their family, in an attempt to prevent them from being spoiled… Their thesis is that being forced to return to ‘square one’ ensures that their children will learn discipline, industry, and the value of money.

But this approach is misguided. The harshest that Leaving a Legacy gets is in delivering this message forthrightly.

One cannot outsource parenting and the cultivation of virtue to the job market. What these parents are doing, whether they realize it or not, is resetting their children to an average position because this is easier than discovering how to make proper use of an exceptional one… This provides wealthy parents with the comfort that they will not have to expend radical effort and imagining in their children’s spiritual formation.

In sending each generation back to square one, we are not only harming our own families, but dealing a broader blow to our communities and Western Civilisation itself.

The West was built on multi-generational, divinely-inspired great works, which are impossible to continue if we perform a hard-reset every generation and consign our children to forevermore trawling LinkedIn while they are ruled over by nouveau riche tech and finance oligarchs.

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Three chapters are devoted to what exactly this kind of “multi-generational” work looks like. Kurtz discusses different evidence and case studies to show that the “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” claim is entirely wrong. Well-oriented, legacy-minded families can build and preserve wealth through many generations. Perhaps the most enduring example is the Grosvenor family (currently worth some £10.6 billion) who trace their ancestry back to the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Kurtz’s study of “great families” like the Grosvenors, reveals four key practices that they “live and breathe” to enable their continued success:

1. Never forget the normal practices and rituals of raising healthy children (this includes such simple tasks as being present with your children: “eat with them, play with them, listen to them”).

2. Ensure that your family has a strong faith and knows duties as well as privileges (children “must know that there are goods that their wealth cannot purchase for them, and punishments that their wealth cannot save them from”).

3. Impress upon your children your family’s identity, mission, and values (“It is not wealth as such that is spiritually poisonous, but the sense of pointlessness that can arise in a life in which man desires only what he can easily buy”).

4. Initiate children into structures beyond the atomic family (“you should invest a lot of time in strengthening bonds between your children and other influential, virtuous adults”).

Nothing happens by accident. Raising children who are worthy of their family’s inheritance (regardless of how much that is or for how long it has existed) requires careful, thoughtful work. Kurtz backs up his suggestions about raising “children worthy of empires” with practical insights into how they can be initiated into the world of work. The summary is to: pass on your inheritance gradually, but start while children are young; arrange your estate to bring powerful obligations, not just financial freedom; and develop a portfolio which is resilient against fluctuations in management quality.

In the final chapter, Kurtz broadens the scope out from the immediate family, getting very specific about ways that readers can benefit their community and future generations.

Charity requires personal contact and the bonds of community, so go out into your neighborhood and meet people. Find ways to mentor, apprentice, and support young people who find themselves shut out of the system of wealth creation. Buy and hire local to whatever extent you can, even when this is an inconvenience

Some ideas are lofty and targeted at those with significant financial means, including a call to “Save old buildings and create new ones which are worthy of growing old themselves” and to “Renovate local historic sites”. Others are achievable for those with modest means, such as helping to fund local tree planting, cleanups, and graffiti removal. For those without any material wealth, volunteering with a neighbourhood watch association or after-school programs to help troubled youth, and hosting the occasional dinner party with local guests and friends are achievable.

“These are all straightforward ways to begin building ties with other responsible members of your town—yet many fail to take them.”

Leaving a Legacy should be seen as a very specific piece of work from Kurtz. It is (purposely) his most widely accessible writing, and has a deliberate goal of trying to convince families to keep their wealth intact and to raise children worthy of inheriting it. He wants us to turn away from the modern and misguided notion of “meritocracy”, and instead build strong, close-knit families which have a multi-generational view of their legacy.

You may have a small or a great stake in the great wealth transfer occurring around us, but to the people close to you, you are important. They are suffering in ways that you can alleviate. Your decisions and actions matter.

Those who will get the most out of the book are probably those with the greatest financial resources to pass along. But there is plenty in there for others too. As someone who is still relatively early in my career (early in my sixth year), having inherited no material wealth (and with no prospect of inheriting any), and starting out on my own family life soon (I’ll be married by the time this is published), Kurtz has laid out a useful framework for how to start thinking about family, wealth, and legacy from the start.

Because much of Kurtz’s argument is about non-material aspects of life—family, charity, values, and traditions and rituals—it makes one wonder what our society would look like if more people oriented themselves toward leaving a legacy. It would be horrific to a politician so inclined, for example, to accumulate vast public debts that have to be paid by their children and grandchildren. A business leader might question the value of extracting wealth through abstract financialisation and paper shuffling, rather than by investing in tangible business ventures.

Kurtz concludes the book with a warning and a final call to action:

Everything beautiful our forefathers ever created risks being forgotten if new generations are not initiated to love and sustain it. If you can help even one person to form a family, or allow one parent to provide a more beautiful childhood for their young, you have succeeded, and can rest easy.

Buy the book here, read Johann’s work here.

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In 1970, Keating launched a strident critique of the Liberal Party’s reliance on immigration to prop up population and economic growth. “The Government hopes to be able to offset the present population situation by immigration,” he said. “It is time we considered the enormous cost of bringing migrants to this country.”

Keating was alarmed that, in 1969, net overseas migration was 140,000. He did not think that such a high migration number was in Australia’s best interests. He thought that the government was letting itself off the hook by propping up headline figures of economic and population growth. He suggested that the government should introduce policies like mortgage subsidies to make it easier for Australian families to have more babies. The cost of such a program “may sound high,” Keating said, “but they are not when we compare them with the cost of bringing migrants to this country. After all, the best migrant is the infant Australian.”

In the final years of the Hawke government, from 1987 until 1991, net overseas migration ran at an average of 123,000 per year. Keating must have maintained his same views on migration – although he didn’t repeat his statement from 1970 – because once he became Prime Minister at the end of 1991 he cut migration levels drastically.

In 1991, net overseas migration was 51,300. In 1993 it was just 34,800. In fact, Keating oversaw some of the lowest migration since the end of the Second World War.

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There is no denying these facts, but now that the Liberal Party (like the vast majority of Australians) wants to see lower migration levels, Keating says that to question the number and values of migrants is to adopt “racism with its shabby appeal to differentiation”.

Angus Taylor has rightly stood by the Liberal Party’s new policy. “To suggest it is ‘racist’ to put Australian values at the centre of our immigration policy shows just how out of touch [Keating] is with Australians,” Taylor said.

“Immigration numbers are too high. Immigration standards are too low. And both must change.”

That is a reasonable position which, until recently, both sides of politics were happy to articulate when the times called for it. Paul Keating’s extreme intervention is just the latest in a series from the elite class which seeks to undermine the democratic process by saying that certain issues are not up for debate and denigrating voters if they question the elite class’s preferences.

When ordinary Australians protested against mass migration in 2025, for example, the Multicultural Affairs Minister, Anne Aly, said that they were “clearly racist”. The taxpayer-funded ABC published an article claiming that these protesters – made up of an ethnically diverse group, including many migrants – were part of a “re-emergent white nationalism” with a “Hitler-glorifying agenda”.

The Institute of Public Affairs recently commissioned a poll which found that 79 per cent of Australians want a migration program of 100,000 or less per year. Among migrants themselves, 75 per cent said the same thing.

The argument that these migrants are just being racist is made in bad faith. Ordinary Australians, whether they migrated or were born here, overwhelmingly think that the current migration program has been running too high. That’s understandable in the context of an alarming decline in social cohesion and a crisis of housing affordability. Unlike Keating, Australians spend more time thinking about the cost of bills and rent than about the cost of antique French clocks.

In the year to September 2023, net overseas migration was 555,800. Under the Albanese government it has been running at an average of around 424,000 per year. This is many multiples above the levels which Keating as Prime Minister allowed.

Keating knows that questioning migration is not racist, because not only did he question migration levels and the costs of migration, he slashed migration levels to some of the lowest levels in our post-War history.

Perhaps what he is really concerned about is the popularity of the Liberal Party’s new migration policy and the impact this could have on the Labor Party. The major parties have for decades prevented Australians from having a say over migration levels, operating as a uniparty where certain subjects are not up for democratic debate. The uniparty is being fractured with the emergence of One Nation and a more mainstream Liberal-National coalition under Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan. That is only a good thing for Australians and for the health of our democratic system.

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This impulse is embedded deep within our culture. As the historian Zachary Gorman has argued, by “the early 1860s most of the Australian colonies had established popular control of government, which was directed towards the implementation of a unique mix of Chartist liberalism and a home-grown populism that sought to entrench egalitarian values.”

It was these early efforts to obtain self-government and then use it as an instrument of “vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number”, in the words of W. K. Hancock, that most obviously expressed our desire for practical solutions. Whether because they needed to simply get along and fix things in a fledgling society on a harsh and remote island, or because they were free of some of the experienced cultural asphyxiations of Britain, our ancestors established a unique and quite utilitarian approach to government. Since then, Australians have turned time and again to this vast and dutiful instrument and it has met their desires.

This has sometimes confounded foreigners, to whom theory often precedes action. The French intellectual (and later minister) Albert Métin was surprised by the extent to which Australians had implemented policies which Europeans had spent decades discussing. The “main desire is above all to be practical,” Métin wrote after visiting Australia in the late 1890s. “Western Europe is richer in doctrines, Australasia in realities… it is in Australasia that we must study the application of bold measures which, among us, have often been proposed. It has not produced much social philosophy, but it has gone infinitely further than any other country in the path of experimentation.”

To Australians, there often are simple solutions to problems. Their governments are not only capable of implementing them but are required to do so.

This sits uncomfortably with many members of the current ruling class (which includes the political elite and the ‘clerisy’ in academia and the media who support them). Over decades, they have suppressed the ability of Australians even to voice their desire for simple solutions. They have mired Australians in a web of rules and confusion. In a very un-Australian way, they love complexity. Complexity requires specialist knowledge, such as that held by the wildly over-credentialed members of the political class, and means that decision-making can be taken away from the people and vested in an unelected group of experts.

The plebs, you see, are just too dumb to even understand how complex modern problems are, and how complex the required solutions therefore must be.

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It is over the issue of immigration that the ruling class’s desire for complexity is causing so much frustration amongst the Australian people, who desire a simple (and obvious) solution.

Giridharan Sivaraman, Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, in an article for The Guardian titled “Australia doesn’t need another migration ‘debate’”, told Australians that “real and complex problems” couldn’t be solved by reducing migration.

Similarly, an academic, from Deakin University, bemoaned “simplistic and potentially dangerous solutions to extremely complex problems”. A colleague from Deakin elsewhere warned that “housing shortages and a lack of opportunities are making some susceptible to groups offering simple solutions to complex problems.”

With house prices spiralling out of control at the same time as there are record migration levels, Australians have settled on the obvious and simple solution: reduce migration levels until we can build more houses. Instead of offering this simple solution, the ruling class have tried to make out that migration levels have nothing to do with house prices, and that some combination of supply issues and complex taxation rules if expertly adjusted will bring relief.

In the wake of the Islamic terror attack in Bondi, Australians sought a simple message that there is no place in Australia for those who do not sign up to our values and way of life. They were questioning the place of multiculturalism, which necessarily insists that those values do not particularly matter and that Australians must be tolerant of intolerance. But they were shut down by the political class which instead wanted to focus on so-called hate speech laws. In the days after the attack, the Prime Minister said: “When you come to Australia, you are here to support our society, which is diverse, but that diversity is a strength.”

What, precisely, that means is not quite clear. But it was clear to Australians that their political leaders had broken the long-existing pact to “provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number”. Growing levels of distrust of the major political parties and the meteoric rise of One Nation, in this context, are not that hard to understand. Australians have never trusted those who make things out to be more complicated than they really are, and they will seek out political leaders willing to undertake the “duty” of the state.

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Before he was Prime Minister, in 2020, Anthony Albanese said that “Australia is an island nation and fuel security should be our top priority.” Now he is Prime Minister and has the ultimate responsibility for this. So, given Australia is firmly in the grip of a fuel security crisis (which is only going to get worse in the coming weeks) Albanese should take some advice from his former self and declare: “I’m not interested in excuses. We got it wrong.”

Only days after insisting that there was no problem with fuel supply, the Labor government released 20 percent of Australia’s strategic reserves and set up a Fuel Supply Taskforce. They are still insisting that the fuel crisis is manageable. Anyone with eyes to see could tell you that with the price at the servo up by around $1 a litre over the past month, Australia has clearly been caught off-guard.

The real crunch may not come for a few weeks, as we burn through private stocks and run through new shipments. The status of shipments beyond mid-April is uncertain.

Regardless of the political spin, Australia’s domestic reserves are far too small to withstand more than very minor disruptions to supply. True to form as the Lucky Country, Australia has been too refined to refine fuel, living on the industrial capabilities of other countries to power our economy.

As a member of the International Energy Agency, Australia has made a commitment to maintain domestic oil stocks of no less than 90 days of net imports. But we are the only country to so comprehensively fail this requirement, keeping just 49 days’ worth. This compares to 88 days in New Zealand (the only other country to fall short) and is well below Japan’s 208 days and Korea’s 200 days.

Unlike the Australia of 25 years or more ago, when we were almost entirely self-sufficient, we currently import some 80 percent of our refined fuel needs.

A number of factors contributed to this reliance, including the incremental, rational decisions of refineries to close over time because of high costs. But these closures happened in an environment where Australia’s political class were increasingly obsessed with reducing carbon emissions.

Each refinery closure was therefore seen as a moral victory. To our misguided political class, the virtue of reducing domestic emissions outweighed the economic and national security benefits of being able to refine fuel in Australia.

But this feeling of virtue was always based on a falsehood. After over a decade of efforts, increasingly stringent in recent years, we still rely on coal, oil, and gas for over 90 percent of our energy requirements. That number comes directly from Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen’s department, so we know that he knows what the reality is.

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Australia exports around 200 million tonnes of thermal coal per year, for example. That is enough to power Australia twice over at the current rate of electricity consumption. Our political class is happy for coal to be burned, just so long as this happens in some other part of the world so they can point to some fake ‘carbon budget’ and say that our emissions are going down.

We know it is all performative because every 12 days, China emits more carbon than Australia does in an entire year. Australia could shut down every factory, every power plant, every train line, and every truck delivering food to every supermarket tomorrow. And before any one of the hundreds of thousands of workers forced to stay home could collect their first Centrelink cheque, all their sacrifice would be undone by China.

Our political class knows this, but they got themselves in too deep. They think that because they were committed to net zero that they need to remain committed to it. Most of the Australian right have dropped their support for net zero, but now the Labor Party has an out they can use while saving face.

The fact is, net zero was only implemented to placate a very small elite class and it is only maintained to keep them happy. At no election ever has Australia supported net zero. Australians have never cared about carbon emissions as much as they have cared about the cost of fuel.

The political class could adopt the same attitude. They would not only be forgiven, they would also experience something many of them have been missing for their entire political careers: public support.

Albanese has already written the script, he just needs to say it and then act on it: “I’m not interested in excuses. We got it wrong.”

The decline in living standards we have experienced over the past five years or so is well-documented, and the causes easily identified. But because GDP per capita has gone down instead of up, inflation has eaten away at wages, and buying a home has been placed beyond reach for most young people, Australians have become very unAustralian in their demeanour.

As I said on the Human Ecology podcast recently, Australians have been forgiving of social disruption in the past because we have been relatively wealthy:

Whereas in the past we’ve always been able to rely on our material prosperity and very high standards of living… we’ve tolerated issues of social cohesion and cultural change in the past when we’ve been very wealthy. But I think it’s an open question of how long Australians will tolerate that kind of change while there’s also economic stagnation, economic decline, going on.

Among the young this economic decline, and the feeling that they are not being given the ‘fair go’ which they were raised to believe in, is making social deracination harder to tolerate.

An article published in early 2026 in The Quarterly Journal of Economics explored the effect that GDP growth has on trust in governments around the world. The authors concluded that “strong lifetime growth experience builds trust in government” while “low growth fosters low trust in government”. The levels of GDP growth one experiences over their lifetime, therefore, is “an important determinant of trust in government, which can in turn drive social cohesion”.

I’ve compiled some relevant data about GDP growth in Australia, shown in the chart below. Along the x-axis is birth year, and the line shows what the average lifetime GDP per capita growth has been for Australians born in that year. An Australian born in 1960 has experienced annual average GDP growth of 1.8 percent over their lifetime. For those born in the year 2000, it is just over 1.1 percent. It’s harder to get data going back earlier, but those born between the end of the Second World War and about 1965 experienced very high growth rates during their formative years.

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Even though Australia’s economic growth has been anaemic in recent years (dragging everyone’s average experience down), older Australians still remember the good times of the past. They also had better access to the Australian way of life, because housing was more affordable, there were genuine material rewards to higher levels of education, they could readily obtain a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, and they lived through periods of greater cultural cohesion.

Young Australians have not shared in this experience, and it shows.

They have seen much lower economic growth rates than their parents and grandparents. They graduated into a job market characterised by growing low-paid, part-time work in the so-called “services economy”. And they are more likely to be perpetual renters. Consider that in 1988, even among the lowest income earners aged 25-44 (born between 1944 and 1963) almost half were homeowners. In 2016, it was barely one-third.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that a majority of Australians aged 18 to 24 say that they are dissatisfied with democracy. Nor should we be surprised that almost 70 percent of Australians born after 1996 do not feel a sense of belonging to their homeland. These are alarming findings for anyone who cares about Australia’s social cohesion and about the future of the country.

How much more alienated young Australians will become remains to be seen. Unless turned around, our poor economic performance - really a kind of managed decline under the bipartisan consensus of mass migration, net zero, and a fake taxpayer-funded services economy - will only further undermine the faith young Australians have in our economic and political systems.

Wolahan was the member for Menzies between 2022 and 2025. He served in East Timor and Afghanistan as a Commando, but before entering parliament he had been working as a barrister in Melbourne (a profession to which he has returned since losing his seat). Although he has rejected the label in the past, the columnist Niki Savva has described Wolahan as being on the left of the Liberal Party.

In his maiden speech to parliament in 2022, Wolahan said that the Liberal Party “has a true north of principle over power”, but it appears that he no longer believes this. “The Liberal Party exists to do two things: win elections and govern well,” Wolahan now declares. Not to be a custodian of liberal and conservative values, or to be a voice for mainstream Australians; not to be a vehicle for advocating for the Australian national interest, or to provide values-based leadership, apparently.

Even though he sometimes mentions the importance of “values”, the “foundations” which “do not change with fashion”, the essay is not really about the values which can guide the Liberal Party into the future. It’s about putting power ahead of principles. It is about the “essential” task of becoming a “diaspora-focused machine”, about how to “reconcile” (read: focus-group) “our values for modern Australia". What emerges is Wolahan’s view that elections can be won with just the right level of technocratic algorithmic programming to deliver just the right message and just the right handout to each sectional interest.

Wolahan argues that “A data-driven analysis will almost certainly conclude that [swinging voters] fall into two cohorts: tertiary-educated millennials locked out of home ownership, and migrant families who feel, fairly or not, that the Liberal Party does not fight for them.”

The phrase “will almost certainly” is revealing. Neither Wolahan nor the Liberals have conducted such an analysis. The Liberals’ 2025 election review hasn’t been made public yet, but in their 2022 election review they did not bother to undertake this kind of analysis. In fact, they just copied tables and graphs verbatim from the ANU’s Australian Election Study, accepting without further interrogation the insights about their political fortunes offered up by a group of academics.

If he or his former colleagues had conducted their own analysis, they might be surprised. For example, at the 2025 election home-owning Millennials1 were more likely to vote for the Greens than the Liberals. That is, those who have been successful in getting on the property ladder, who in decades past would have almost certainly settled into voting Liberal, have in fact abandoned the Party along with seemingly everyone else.2 So Wolahan’s “almost certainly”, once interrogated, becomes much less certain.

To be fair, Wolahan does argue that the Liberals should build capacity to analyse data. The Party needs “a separate cell that works with the secretariat and parliamentarian wings, fusing data, demography, geography, psychography, polling, mapping, as well as human-to-human feedback from members and candidates”.

But that’s not to say that such “data-driven analysis” has been totally unavailable to the Liberals. Nor is it to say that, unwilling or unable to become a values-based organisation, they would have known what to do with such an analysis. Wolahan acknowledges that while “the teal phenomenon is real, it is not the dominant metropolitan story.” True, but this insight is five years too late. It was obvious to the researchers at the Institute of Public Affairs (who coined the term ‘teal’) after the 2019 election. In May 2021, for example, my then-colleague Kurt Wallace summarised what we had derived from our “data-driven analysis”:

The Coalition is currently faced with two main electoral strategies. They can continue with a ‘teal strategy’ of defending inner-city seats by moving ever closer to the Greens, or they can pursue a ‘heartland strategy’ to win working-class seats from Labor in the regions and outer suburbs.

We traced an emerging realignment. I wrote in October 2021 that “Blue collar workers, those who have not been to university, and lower income earners are increasingly turning their backs on the Australian Labor Party (the former worker’s party) that has become obsessed with identity politics and climate alarmism.”

This showed the value of using data analysis. Not to work out how to best appeal to (or buy off) each ‘group’ in society, but to recognise that the base of the Liberal Party was shifting. Data can reveal reality, but it cannot provide principles. In 2019, the Liberals lost votes in what were to become the teal seats, but they gained votes in the outer suburbs. Instead of recognising and then capitalising on this, and enabling the realignment to happen, the Liberals did the exact opposite. They signed up to net zero and alienated those budding working-class voters.

Wolahan does not argue that data-driven analysis would have helped them to avoid the mistakes that came after the 2019 election. Instead, he suggests that a data team could have helped them to avoid “the acknowledged missteps on tax cuts, HECS, and work from home at the last election.” This shows that he isn’t serious about “values”; a values-based organisation would not have made “missteps” about policies, because they would be built on the foundation of values rather than focus groups or political expediency.

Wolahan has bemoaned the fact that “Australia has changed faster than the Party”, to which a critic might respond: “yes, and you were the ones who changed it!”

“A worrying portion of the political failure of the Liberal Party in urban Australia has been structural, driven by changes in migration, education, and home ownership,” Wolahan writes. That is true. Those changes were also driven largely by the Liberal Party, which during its time in government between 2013 and 2022 oversaw a massive wave of migration, extended support for putting anyone and everyone into universities, and a collapse in homeownership.

Wolahan is not wrong about some of the effects of these structural changes. As I wrote in July 2025 (based on data from the 2022 Australian Election Study):

While those without post-school qualifications are about evenly split between the very left wing (18.3%) and the very right wing (18.1%), those who have been to university are much more likely to be very left wing (30.7%) compared to very right wing (7.6%). This data supports the long-existing observation that universities tend to make people more left wing, but the concerning insight is that it makes them both radically left wing and out of touch with their lesser educated compatriots.

If a given cohort of people are likely to punish your political party, why would you adopt the policy of pushing more people into that cohort? In the context of the data above, one wonders why Wolahan thinks that opposing Labor’s policy of cutting HECS debt was a “misstep”. Would the kind of “evidence-led decision making” he is calling for have led the Liberals to believe that they could go further than Labor in offering handouts to a particular group of Australians in order to try and purchase their vote? Given the primary purpose of the Liberal Party, according to Wolahan, is to “win elections”, this may well be the case.

Wolahan should be commended for taking the time to think through and write a thoughtful contribution about the future of the Liberal Party. He is right that Australia has changed. He is right that the Liberals need to do a better job of communicating with voters. He is also right that the Liberals should be making better use of data analysis. But he is wrong when he says that the results of such analysis should be what guide that communication.

In the aftermath of the Voice to Parliament referendum, Wolahan said that he was “looking to see if the Chinese Australian community in my electorate went one way or another, but I don’t think it’s decisive either way… Some leaned to Yes, others to No. I found the community engaged with both sides of the debate with interest and respect. I don’t think any broad conclusions can otherwise be drawn.”

If the Liberals had approached the Voice campaign driven by the kind of “diaspora-focused machine” focused on “data, demography, and psychography” Wolahan recommends, they would have been hopeless (and pointless). Remember that after the 2022 election, some 80 percent of Australians said they intended to vote Yes. Australians supported the Voice, until they didn’t. But they did not just change their mind randomly. It took leadership from values-based individuals and organisations to achieve this change. Australians, as Wolahan put it, “have a finely tuned ear for authenticity”. So how would they have viewed a Liberal Party which changed track on the Voice, after the data machine told them it might be beneficial, running after voters saying “wait for us, we’re your leaders!”?

Australia has changed and structural challenges to the Liberal Party appear to have emerged. But the Voice campaign demonstrated the kind of success that can come from having clear values, and then leading from that basis. Success lies in treating Australians as Australians, rather than as a collection of disparate interest groups each to be appeased in their own way.

I thought that it was worth reviewing the book given the seismic changes underway in both British and Australian politics, and given the ‘hook’ of Kruger’s defection.

Since it was published, support for the Liberal Party has dropped off a cliff and One Nation has gained a record level of support from disaffected Liberal and Labor voters. On 11 February 2026, Sky News Pulse (conducted by YouGov) put Labor at 30 percent, One Nation at 28 percent, and the Liberal-National Coalition at 19 percent of the primary vote. Among the working class, One Nation were the top party at 34 percent of the vote. On 13 February, Angus Taylor replaced Sussan Ley as the leader of the Liberal Party, and he shifted a change in focus going forward to win back the more than two million Australian voters the Party had lost since the 2025 election.

As I wrote in the review, because “of the differences between Australia’s and Britain’s voting systems, we are unlikely to get a Reform-style party here. Even if we did, they would not rocket to prominence as they have done in the UK.” The polling looks like it has proved me otherwise, but translating such strong polling results into seats at an election is much more achievable in the UK given its first-past-the-post system.

The reason why Kruger’s defection was so important is because he has spent time thinking deeply about the West’s cultural malaise and dealing with the reality that the modern era of liberalism is undoing itself. He has laid out a framework for how a post-liberal future could be culturally, economically, and spiritually restorative (although he doesn’t call himself a post-liberalist).

For Australian readers, the contrast with members of the Liberal Party is clear. As I wrote:

It would be something for a Liberal MP to write a book like Covenant, to engage deeply with history and philosophy, untangle the post-Enlightenment political order, pose fundamental questions about the way we live and govern ourselves, and present a serious view of how modern conservatives can sell their message to the public. That’s not necessarily to say that we need a framework for a post-liberal future in Australia. But the ability to study, write about, and communicate these kinds of issues requires an intellectual depth that is missing in Australian politics.

Read the full review, reproduced below, or on the IPA’s website here. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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The British political establishment was shocked by Conservative MP Danny Kruger’s defection to the Reform UK Party, Nigel Farage’s blockbuster political outfit. Kruger was the first member of his party to do so, but surely not the last. He has made a bet on a political realignment that places Reform as the main opposition party to Labour, if not the party of government after the next general election, scheduled for 2029.

Unlike many politicians today, Kruger is a deep thinker. In 2023 he published Covenant: The New Politics of Home, Neighbourhood and Nation, a short book which reveals some of his political philosophy and his diagnosis of the deep cultural malaise facing the United Kingdom. Although it was published two years ago, Covenant is worth revisiting given the seismic changes underway in British politics since then, and the key role Kruger assumed in them.

First, some political context in which to situate the book and Kruger’s future role in British politics. In 2018 the long-time Member of the European Parliament and grandfather of Brexit, Nigel Farage, formed the Brexit Party after the political establishment’s dither, delay, and apparent desire to cancel Britain’s departure from the European Union. The Party won 29 of the 73 British seats in the European Parliament in May 2019 (to the Conservatives’ four). Some 53 per cent of 2017 Conservative voters switched to the Brexit Party. The Tories got the message. Prime Minister Theresa May resigned and was replaced by the pro-Brexit Boris Johnson to “get Brexit done”.

As the 2019 general election approached, Farage announced the Brexit Party would not stand against sitting Conservative MPs. It was the politically wise thing to do, preventing a split of votes that would have made it harder to achieve the Brexit Party’s broader goal.

The election delivered the highest popular vote for any party in four decades; the Conservatives secured 365 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons and demolished the so-called ‘red wall’ of post-industrial, pro-Brexit, traditionally anti-Tory seats. One MP elected in the 2019 Tory landslide was our man, Mr Kruger. After university, Kruger worked for the Centre for Policy Studies (the think tank formed by Margaret Thatcher) and as a policy advisor to the Conservative Party. He was briefly employed at The Daily Telegraph before becoming then-Opposition Leader David Cameron’s speechwriter in the mid-2000s for two years. With his wife Emma he co-founded and later ran full-time a youth crime prevention charity, and served as Boris Johnson’s political secretary before the 2019 election.

Kruger recognises many of the issues facing Britain, and the British, as evidence of cultural failure. While policy failure clearly played a role—evident in mass migration, easy monetary policy, and high welfare dependence—the root cause of all this is a kind of cultural ‘system error’. Covenant starts out big and broad, with what might appear to be a radical argument: post-Enlightenment liberalism has failed us.

“In Britain and Europe at this time [the 18th century], the late medieval distrust of abstract universal claims about knowledge or existence became a more hostile antagonism towards mystery, revelation and religion itself,” Kruger writes. He adds:

The hunt was on for a set of principles to govern human society, founded on solid ground: rules that could be seen and proved to be true… In the light of the Enlightenment, everything real or established, any accepted beliefs, anything that people felt or knew to be true, became suspect. Validity had to be conferred according to a new revelation: the logic that proceeds from the minds of intellectuals.

The roots of our modern malaise lie in this shift from tradition to rationality. Rather than accepting the basis for a stable and good society would be to continue doing things mainly as they have been done, changing only marginally and incrementally, the Enlightenment opened every field of human endeavour to upheaval in the name of rationality. To ‘post-liberal’ thinkers, the kind of William F. Buckley conservatism to which this might be likened is thin, in fact just the other side of the coin of liberalism that their opponents are espousing and therefore unable to ever stop anything.

Long-time readers of the IPA Review might recognise this ‘post-liberal’ argument most famously made in recent years by the American political scientist Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed, reviewed in these pages in October 2018 by IPA Research Fellow Andrew Bushnell. The foundations of liberalism were laid by the moderns who threw out the ancient (classical and Christian) conception of liberty as self-rule in favour of individual autonomy based around purely consensual constraints and maximum freedom from the interference of positive law.

The moderns’ “central aim was to disassemble what they concluded were irrational religious and social norms in the pursuit of civil peace that might in turn foster stability and prosperity, and eventually individual liberty of conscience and action,” Deneen wrote. The ‘moderns’ refers to Western thinkers after Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Deneen calls out Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and René Descartes (1596-1650), who “argued that the rule of irrational custom and unexamined tradition–especially religious belief and practice–was a source of arbitrary governance and unproductive internecine conflicts, and thus an obstacle to a stable and prosperous regime.”

Kruger does not call himself a post-liberal, a label which is probably still too cutting-edge for a sitting politician, but clearly that is what he is. He calls himself a ‘communitarian conservative’, and through Covenant he calls for a return to an older ‘Order’ whose intellectual and cultural roots lie deep below those set down in the 17th century by Hobbes and Descartes. Kruger does not make a new intellectual contribution in Covenant, but his framing of the fundamental issue as the Order versus the Idea cuts through.

The Order was based on a belief in God. Human beings were part of nature but had dominion over it, and their obligations to God and to each other would help them to build virtue and exercise restraint. The Idea which replaced it had its origins in a shift from belief in an external God to an internal god of self. The Idea says human beings are quite separate from nature, they can reason their way to self-government, they do not need God or unchosen obligations to keep themselves well-ordered, and working out what a good and moral life looks like is just an intellectual exercise. When the intellectuals failed to complete the task set for them by their Enlightenment ancestors, they turned it over to individuals and the Idea reached its final form: it would be up to each and every person to work out for themselves what they would like the Idea to look like, and the role of the state would be to ensure each of them could do so.

“In replacing the Order with the Idea we replace the centrality of relationships with the centrality of the self,” Kruger writes. “The culture no longer expects us to live for others, and we no longer expect to be fulfilled through our memberships: we live for ourselves, and we expect to be fulfilled by the realisation of some personal goal.”

A culture where everyone can self-worship, and where no idea of ‘the good life’ can be either inherited from the past or placed above any other, is exhausting. It breeds anxiety and division, rather than tolerance and harmony:

Differences become a source of offence, and a contest of power, of who has aggrieved whom. We struggle to live together… For a scheme of moral autonomy, the right of everyone to inhabit their own moral universe does not lead to a society of tolerance.”

According to Kruger, the Idea begets the Idea. With primacy placed on the individual and how he can operate in the world as his most ‘authentic self’, policy caters to this framework. Think of something like taxation policy: as more women entered the workforce, the UK shifted away from household taxation to recognise ‘the individual’. This encouraged families to have two income earners and punished those with a stay-at-home parent. We organised society not around the family, but around the atomised individual—which is both a response to reality and self-reinforcing:

… as the cultural and economic forces of the Idea do their work of dissolution, as more children grow up without the support of a stable family life, as fewer people marry or sustain their marriages and more elderly people live alone, the state and the market adapt to cater for them.

Kruger offers some practical ideas about what a new political program to return to the Order would look like, although it is not the specific list of policies some may like to see. Non-specific suggestions about childcare reform include giving subsidies directly to families to enable more stay-at-home parents instead of committing their children to institutional care. He seems to suggest family-based tax, or ‘income splitting’, without explicitly calling for it. More forcefully, schools “should reflect the values of the family, the neighbourhood and the nation, not those of activists trying to change the basis of society.”

Kruger recommends a deliberate effort to “drive the transgressive ideology out of schools by top-down action to ensure the curriculum reflects the customary values of the country”. Finally, power should be transferred from the state to local places, and local government strengthened and made more directly reflective of local priorities. This would include compulsory council service of all citizens, who should see it as a civil duty, like jury duty.

Ultimately, returning to the Order is not really a question of politics. Kruger is not satisfied with the surface-deep solutions that the technocratic contest over policies and their outcomes provides: “We are reduced to a dispute, simultaneously technical and impassioned, about the effective administration of provision (care) and allocation (fairness). We argue, both sentimentally and aggressively, over production and distribution, using the thin vocabulary of utility, efficiency and choice, of cost and benefit.”

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The kind of deeper cultural fix Kruger calls for cannot be mandated or imposed from the top down. The 500-year project of technocratic rationalism, increasingly inward-facing, individual and atomised, cannot be overturned at the ballot box or by repealing one law and introducing another. “We don’t need more rules; we need habits of right living, to arrange our relationships for peace and prosperity.” Kruger calls for a new “social covenant”, based in community, relationships and love, rather than the rationalist “social contract” that Enlightenment intellectuals prescribed for us.

Responsibility for this task lies with each of us. It means choosing to participate in the relationships and institutions that make a community, taking responsibility and encouraging those around us to do so too. Fundamentally, this means re-embracing Christianity, something which is already happening across the West, especially among younger people. Church attendance, baptisms, and conversions are up strongly across Australia, Europe, and the United States. The Economist reported that 21 per cent of young, Christian, British men now attend church, up from four per cent in 2018.

Writing in The Telegraph after his defection, Kruger described these trends as part of “a great renaissance of conservatism in the real world”. He noted, however, that the Conservative Party was unable or unwilling to grasp this and what it means, but that Reform was best placed to strengthen and encourage this chosen shift toward restoring the Order:

… the spirit of Reform is restoration, not revolution. Like a traditionalist architect looking at the ruins of a once-great city defaced by post-war brutalism, the job for the next government is to clear away recent mistakes and rebuild on the old pattern. And the paradox of conservatism is that this preference for the past fits us best for the future.

The Brexit Party was renamed Reform UK in 2020, and has exploded in popularity as the Conservatives have imploded. Reform won 14.3 per cent of the vote at the 2024 general election but only secured five seats in the House of Commons due to first-past-the-post voting. At the 2025 local government elections almost a year later, Reform won 31 per cent of the vote, securing 677 of 1,637 seats, a majority of seats on 10 councils, and two of the six mayoral spots up for grabs. A late-September 2025 poll by YouGov predicted Reform would win 311 seats if an election were held that day, just 15 short of an outright majority. Some more recent polls even predict they could form a government.

Reform UK is seeking to end the Conservative Party and reorient British politics. With a strong foothold in local power—which is key to one of the few specific areas of policy reform in Covenant—Reform and Kruger have placed themselves at the heart of this reorientation.

Are there any lessons for us here in Australia? The IPA has long noted the pressing need for a political realignment on the right side of Australian politics. Since well before the 2022 election, the IPA has emphasised that chasing Labor down a pathway of energy insecurity and unaffordability through net zero is an electoral dead end. At the encouragement of its political opponents, the Liberal Party doubled down on net zero to win back the ‘teal’ seats it once held. This strategy failed comprehensively.

Because of the differences between Australia’s and Britain’s voting systems, we are unlikely to get a Reform-style party here. Even if we did, they would not rocket to prominence as they have done in the UK.

As I wrote on Substack earlier this year: “Past experience has shown that a successful realignment is far more likely to come from existing political leaders rather than from an outsider.” The centre-right in Australia has missed this opportunity because of its “short-sightedness and unwillingness to change”.

In large part, this is because the parliamentary centre-right has given up on intellectual work. As the IPA’s John Roskam wrote in The Australian Financial Review earlier this year: “As a rule, Liberals hate ‘theory’ and fear anything to do with ‘philosophy’… No one in the party has done any thinking about how the Liberals’ principles and brand fit the reality of 21st-century Australia.”

It would be something for a Liberal MP to write a book like Covenant, to engage deeply with history and philosophy, untangle the post-Enlightenment political order, pose fundamental questions about the way we live and govern ourselves, and present a serious view of how modern conservatives can sell their message to the public. That’s not necessarily to say that we need a framework for a post-liberal future in Australia. But the ability to study, write about, and communicate these kinds of issues requires an intellectual depth that is missing in Australian politics.

The final words of Kruger’s final chapter offer a fitting conclusion and call to action: “This is your neighbourhood: take responsibility for it, and make it the place you want it to be.”

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The first face is what we would commonly think of as power: “Of course power is exercised when A participates in the making of decisions that affect B.”

The other face of power, the second face, is more discreet, more covert:

Power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.

This second face of power was demonstrated in what Baratz and Bachrach termed ‘nondecision-making’. That is, “the practice of limiting the scope of actual decision-making to ‘safe’ issues by manipulating the dominant community values, myths, and political institutions and procedures”:

… nondecision-making is a means by which demands for change in the existing allocation of benefits and privileges in the community can be suffocated before they are even voiced; or kept covert; or killed before they gain access to the relevant decision-making arena; or, failing all these things, maimed or destroyed in the decision-implementing stage of the policy process.

This nondecision-making can take several forms.

The first, the most direct and extreme, is the use of force to prevent demands for change. That may include things like, for example, arresting a pregnant woman in her home for creating a social media post protesting against government policy.

Second is the exercise of power, which is just as direct but less extreme. The use of power can be negative (punishing those who seek change) or positive (rewarding those who don’t ask for change). It ranges from outright intimidation (overt threats) to cooptation (“hey, you asked for this!”). Intimidation could include things like “denial of bank credit, dismissal from employment, revocation of draft deferment, etc.” (How prescient).

Cooptation occurs when “the activities of non-elites in decision-making and policy implementation are channeled toward the pre-conceived goals of higher authorities.” Participatory democracy is a “particularly potent form of cooptation”, because it “gives the illusion of voice without the voice itself.” One might think here of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s statement, after securing barely one-third of the primary vote in 2025, that the promises he took to the election were “not the limits of our responsibilities or our vision.”1

The third form of nondecision-making is invoking an existing bias of the political system, “a norm, precedent, rule or procedure”, to squelch issues. “For example, a demand for change may be denied legitimacy by being branded… unpatriotic, immoral, or in violation of an established rule or procedure.” When ordinary Australians participated in protests against mass migration in 2025, for example, the Multicultural Affairs Minister, Anne Aly, said that they were “clearly racist”. The taxpayer-funded ABC published an article claiming that these protesters – made up of an ethnically diverse group, including many migrants – were part of a “re-emergent white nationalism” with a “Hitler-glorifying agenda”.

As an additional part of this third form, challenges can be “deflected by referring the demands or issues to committees or commissions for detailed and prolonged study or by steering them through time-consuming and ritualistic routines that are built into the political system.” When the Albanese government, and then the broader political class, came under intense public scrutiny for the millions of dollars they were billing taxpayers to fly their families around the country, politicians hid behind “the rules” (which they of course “did not write”). They then deferred the issue, commissioning advice from the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, and then referring it to the independent Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal. The political heat was taken out of the issue, and essentially nothing changed.

The fourth form, the most indirect one, “involves reshaping or strengthening the mobilisation of bias in order to block challenges to the prevailing allocation of values.” Providing funding to academics, NGOs, and other organisations to uphold and promote the status quo, for example. An entire private sector bureaucracy has been built upon this premise, ensuring that there is an army of technically non-government stakeholders willing to uphold the status quo and challenge any narratives before they become popular and present a challenge.

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It would, of course, take university academics to come up with an intellectual framework to describe something that mainstream Australians know and articulate plainly: “they don’t allow us to have a say.” But that does not mean it isn’t useful. The framework of nondecision-making provided by Baratz and Bachrach helps us analyse what has gone wrong with Australia’s political system.

The examples given here of nondecision-making are just a selection; dozens could be given for each form. And it should be no surprise that as these techniques have been deployed more readily and across a broader range of desired political debates, Australians have expressed increasing dissatisfaction with the political system.

Australians have been searching for a new avenue to express their views for some time. The share of the primary vote going collectively to the Labor, Liberal and National parties was relatively constant between the 1950s and the late 1980s at around the 90 percent mark. Since then, however, it has declined significantly, reaching a new low of 66.4 percent at the 2025 election. Meanwhile, between 1967 and 2025 the share of voters stating that they have no political partisanship has risen from 11 percent to 25 percent, with the bulk of this increase coming after 2010.

The opportunity is ripe for a third force, for a new (or highly reformed) political party that rejects this kind of elitist exercise of the second face of power, and which is willing to speak for the mainstream.

I lived in an Islamic country for six months, and I know that many of the women living there and the (male and female) Australians who were with me would express a very different point of view. Its easy to say that all cultures are equal, but until you try living outside of Australia, I’ll take your no-doubt well-intentioned point with a pinch of salt.

This view that all cultures are equal is pervasive among Australia’s elite. Most of our political class, business leaders, and opinion-makers in the media think that there is nothing particularly unique or worthy about Australian culture. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made this explicit when he said that the Labor Party’s “vision” was for Australia to be “a microcosm of the world”. It was an alarming statement for those who think Australia is an objectively good country, with a unique culture built upon the best parts of our British inheritance of the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, and individual freedom.

Countless Australians among the more than six million who have migrated and become citizens since the end of the Second World War were not only running to Australia, they were running from their country of birth. They want Australia to be Australia, not a microcosm of the sectarian conflict, totalitarian regimes, and arbitrary rule in the countries from which they fled.

Our leaders, from both sides of politics, have made a mistake in forgetting this. They have contributed to the declining sense of national identity and belonging shown by both Australian-born and migrant Australians in recent years.

According to the Scanlon Foundation, almost 70 percent of Australians born after 1996 do not feel a sense of belonging to their homeland. At a similar time in their lives, only 36 percent of Millennials said the same thing, meaning that in just over a decade, the share of young people who feel alienated from Australia has almost doubled. The share of Australian-born Zoomers who feel alienated from Australia is only slightly less bad than the share of foreign-born Australian Zoomers, at 74 percent. We should be alarmed at the fact that we live in a country where, regardless of where they were born, young Australians do not feel a sense of national identity and belonging.

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Our political class has failed comprehensively in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack. In a rushed and highly politicised response to Bondi, the Labor government introduced the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026, which they claimed would “further criminalise hateful conduct, and ensure that those that seek to spread hate, division and radicalisation are met with severe penalties.”

But the problem of addressing “hate, division and radicalisation” cannot be fixed with these laws. As I’ve written previously, adding new laws and regulations is a sign of cultural decay: “replacing local cultures with a ‘cultureless multiculturalism’, [is] the kind of ‘liberalising’ policy which requires a massive expansion in state control to force cohesion.” In early 2025, the Premier of New South Wales, Chris Minns, said that Australia could not have robust freedom of speech protections “and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace.” The Hate and Extremism Bill is just the latest example of this kind of attempt to force cohesion.

But it is impossible to legislate away a cultural problem. It runs deep, and cannot be addressed by a political class that is unwilling to admit that for years they have got it wrong on multiculturalism and tolerance of intolerance.

In his 2026 Australia Day address, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “Whether we are Australian by birth or by choice, we all share the opportunity, the privilege and also the responsibility of being part of something quite extraordinary.” Quite right. The unfortunate thing is that it took Australia’s most deadly terrorist attack for him to say this.

Australian knights and dames existed until 1975 when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam scrapped them as part of Australia’s broader cultural deregulation.1 In reviving this highest civil honour for Australians, Abbott said that he wanted to acknowledge those “who have accepted public office rather than sought it; and who can never, by virtue of the office they have held, entirely return to private life.”

Australia was founded upon the principle of egalitarianism if it was founded upon anything. The idea that we would elevate certain citizens above others by giving them the official title of ‘Sir’ was jarring. Commentators reminded Australians that they had long ago rejected a “bunyip aristocracy”, as Daniel Deniehy labelled William Wentworth’s proposed hereditary aristocracy.

This egalitarian principle comes from a good place; from a belief that we are all of equal worth and should be treated the same. It has been standard up to which Australians have constantly, consciously, held ourselves, and has generally been a sound guiding principle. Except for when it perhaps isn’t.

Egalitarianism equalises not just in time, but through it. It prevents us from properly acknowledging our past because it prevents those who have made important contributions to our country and to our culture from being acknowledged. These people, who don’t necessarily come from wealth or a fortunate family, are then forgotten.

This was, in part, what Wentworth was trying to avoid. But the fact that more Australians would recognise the names John Adams and Alexander Hamilton than William Wentworth speaks to the cultural cost of egalitarianism. (In 2019, students campaigned to tear down a statue of Wentworth and rename buildings with his name at the University of Sydney, which he helped to establish. The students complained he had an “aristocratic upbringing”, meaning he was tarred from birth by his father’s bloodline even though his mother was a convict and he did more than almost anyone else to secure self-government for Australians.)

One of the great contributions of aristocratic families of the past was to be a living part of history. They made efforts to preserve history and national pride not only because it was all of our history, but because it was actually their history, comprised of the tales of their ancestors. Winston Churchill, for example, was proud to be British and sought to preserve British history and institutions, to all our benefit. But this desire was not based on abstract knowledge gained through history books and school lessons, it was built on pride in his family’s role in events. His great ancestor John Churchill the first Duke of Marlborough was one of the greatest ever British military leaders.

It might just be that it is harder to maintain a sense of national pride without these kinds of families who take ownership of our history and dedicate resources to preserving and telling these stories. Alexis de Tocqueville, the French diplomat and aristocrat, made this point in Democracy in America, arguing that:

Amongst aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often on the same spot, all generations become as it were contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers, and respects them: he thinks he already sees his remote descendants, and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter; and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him.

When Churchill’s time to lead Britain came, he was, as de Tocqueville put it, “contemporaneous” with those who came before him and with those who would come after, hence his insistence on preserving the cultural inheritance of which he was a temporary steward. His ancestors had preserved the British way of life for him, so he would do the same for his descendants. In June 1940 Churchill warned that upon the coming Battle of Britain “depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties”.

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De Tocqueville argued that it is much harder to achieve this kind of understanding of the past and care for the future in democratic nations which don’t have an aristocracy because the connection between generations is constantly disrupted when the old families of which Churchill was a member cease to exist:

Amongst democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity [proximity] to himself.

Wentworth was trying to establish self-government for Australians. He wanted us to live in a free and democratic society, but he understood that to preserve this system, and a stable and self-confident nation to host it, in the long run, it had to be joined with a cultural mechanism for elevating those who made vital contributions. He didn’t envisage an aristocracy open only to the wealthy, but to anyone who made a worthy contribution. Wentworth would have been delighted to see Don Bradman knighted in 1949, for example.

De Tocqueville argued that egalitarian democracy severs the ties between the past, present, and future. Once this happens, how do we even know what we are supposed to be preserving, let alone why or how?

As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich enough nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellow-creatures, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants

The sometimes-forgotten original Liberal Party came about as a result of the 1909 ‘Fusion’ of the Protectionist and Anti-Socialist parties. The latter had changed its name from the Free Trade Party three years earlier under the leadership of George Reid, who could see that the Federation-era contest between free trade and protectionism was over (protectionism had won), and that the non-Labour1 side of politics would have to rally together to oppose radical socialism.

As David Kemp recalled in A Democratic Nation: Identity, Freedom and Equality in Australia 1901–1925, those who formed the first Liberal Party in 1909 increasingly concluded “that the main domestic policy debate was over the very survival of the liberal governmental, economic and social system. They strongly opposed the growing pressures from Labour to centralise government, to weaken the separation of powers and to subordinate the individual to powerful group identities”.

When Robert Menzies formed the Liberal Party in 1944, he had a similar goal. He was concerned that the federal Labor government’s war-time economic controls would be extended into the post-war era and fundamentally change the Australian economy and system of government. At an October 1944 conference, which ultimately begot the current Liberal Party, he outlined the problem with central planning and government control. “We recognise that in the post-war economy there will be room for much more thought and planning than ever before,” Menzies told the conference:

But if a planned economy means a perpetuation of government controls, then it will unquestionably lead to a totalitarian system.

As we know, authority tends to feed upon itself.

Certain temporary Government controls will no doubt be needed, but in the long run the function of Government should be to guide and encourage industry to do its own planning in the light of its own expert knowledge and experience.

Ahead of the 1949 election, which he won handsomely and which set the Liberal Party up for 23 years in government, Menzies said that the election was a choice between “the Socialist State, with its subordination of the individual to the universal officialdom of government” and “the ancient British faith that Governments are the servants of the people.” A future under a planned economy would be bleak, and doomed to failure, “for unless people do what they are told, work where they are told to work, learn what they are drafted to learn; in a sentence, fit obediently into their appointed place, the Socialist ‘planned State’ falls to pieces like the false and shoddy thing it is.”

The Liberal Party is supposed to stand for liberty. It is supposed to stand against government centralisation and control. Menzies would have opposed net zero because he knew that unless everyone “fit obediently into their appointed place” under such a policy of control, the whole thing would fall apart “like the false and shoddy thing it is.”

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I recently wrote an article for The Spectator Australia pointing this out, highlighting that the policy of net zero is il-Liberal, and that the only option open to members of that Party is to oppose it:

Australia’s political class has for too long failed to properly discuss the profound nature of the policy of net zero. It doesn’t just mean changing our electricity generation from coal-fired power to solar panels and windmills. It means changing every single component of our lives – from the food we eat to the cars we drive; from the homes we live in to how and where we can visit family members or take a holiday.

Opposing net zero is the only option open to those who believe in liberalism because it can only be achieved through a massive expansion of the state, ever-growing interference of bureaucrats in the economy and in our lives, and the deployment of legislation and regulation to control every aspect of production.

This point is so often obfuscated by those promoting net zero. Yes, it is technically possible to reduce carbon emissions in electricity generation by using different technologies, but even if the electricity grid was driven to zero emissions (cutting some 147.5 million tonnes of annual emissions), that would still leave 362 million tonnes of emissions that do not come from electricity generation. How, precisely, would the 79.6 million tonnes of carbon from our agricultural industry be reduced to zero? What about the 98.4 million tonnes from the transport sector? We have seen emissions from industrial processing decline to around 30 million tonnes a year as a result of a policy of deindustrialisation, not from electrification or decarbonisation of factories; are we to continue that process of deindustrialisation until our manufacturing emissions (and capabilities) hits zero too?

The (very few) Liberals supporting net zero on the basis that they can “do it better than Labor”, in the words of Senator Andrew Bragg, is like if Menzies went to the 1949 election saying that he didn’t oppose Labor’s socialism outright but instead would do a better job of implementing it. It misses the point that net zero is not a policy of choosing one kind of technology over another; it is a policy of choosing a system of government control over a system of individual liberty.

In his policy speech ahead of the 1946 election, Robert Menzies had stern words for the kinds of internal critics who, if they were alive today, might say that the Liberal Party should just do the same thing as Labor, only better:

I make no apology for directing your attention to the basic character of the current political argument. If there has been a degeneration in the standard of politics, it is chiefly because we have tended to move rather blindly from expedient to expedient. In the long run there can be no high politics unless all parties have a sense of direction.

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