Could this be a turning point in Australia’s fortunes? In the space of two weeks we have seen two superb speeches from the leaders of the No campaign, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, and as if that weren’t enough to get excited about the despot Dan Andrews has finally departed public life. All in all, a momentous fortnight.

Sceptics suspected that Labor’s media strategists deliberately chose to announce Dan’s departure midway through Warren Mundine’s National Press Club Speech as a way of robbing Mr Mundine of the following morning’s news headlines. If that was indeed the plan, it backfired. If anything, a fired-up Mr Mundine forthrightly laying out everything that is wrong with the current state of indigenous affairs and – more importantly – four clear ways in which to fix them contrasted superbly with the pusillanimous Mr Andrews scurrying off into a no doubt lucrative retirement on some super fund board before the full implications of the destruction he has wrought upon the once proud state of Victoria become glaringly apparent.

As Rebecca Weisser points out in this week’s cover story, the eye-watering debt that Victorians have been saddled with will blight that state and its inhabitants for many years to come, but that is only the beginning. Worse is the damage done to Victoria’s (and by extension Australia’s) international reputation courtesy of the Andrews government’s tyrannical regime of police thuggery and bureaucratic terrorism during Covid. Apart from Mr Andrews’ beloved People’s Republic of China, it is hard to think of anywhere in the world that treated its own citizenry as appalling as did Victorian Labor.

The hotel quarantine fiasco was followed by Australia’s worst Covid fatality numbers in Victoria, which also saw horrendous punishments being meted out to all those brave individuals who dared to speak up against the madness of vaccine, masking and lockdown mandates. To the eternal shame of Dan Andrews and his acolytes, Zoe Buhler was arrested in her pyjamas in front of her kids because of a Facebook post, Monica Smit spent 22 days in solitary confinement for her commitment to free speech and another poor woman was filmed being choked and thrown to the ground by a burly police officer for not wearing a mask (she had an exemption). Any number of individuals suffered horrendously during draconian lockdowns and insane regulations that were amongst the world’s worst. Add in the suicides and mental breakdowns, the rubber bullets and brutality on a regular basis by an out-of-control police force, the enforced closures of a non-union food company on spurious health grounds and the alleged planting of a slug by health authorities, the squillions of hard-earned tax dollars squandered on cancelled infrastructure projects, numerous scandals and investigations, several dubious personal stories and the creepy associations with China and what emerges from the Andrews years is a harrowing tale of despotism, cronyism and corruption. One must hope and pray that Australia never again sees a government or a premier of that ilk.

Unlike every other media outlet, The Spectator Australia alone protested from day one against all the authoritarian overreach and the abuse of power during Covid, not only in Victoria, as any number of our covers from that ghastly period can attest to. In particular, our writers including Rebecca Weisser, James Allan, Ramesh Thakur, David Flint, Alexandra Marshall and many others were bravely prepared to do what so many other journalists and commentators in the mainstream were either too scared or too blind to do: expose the truth.

Let us hope that the end of Dan Andrews offers the many, many Victorian citizens and businesses that suffered so egregiously under his socialist regime some sense of respite, although the sad reality is that in all likelihood he will never be held to account.

Rejoice instead at the ‘emerging’ two visionary indigenous leaders who, should the referendum be soundly defeated, offer a positive and proud way ahead for all Australians to work together and give every indigenous Australian the opportunities of education, work and enterprise they both urgently need and richly deserve.