The Voice referendum was extremely wasteful, and not only in the mountain of taxpayers’ hard-earned money the Albanese government flushed, pointlessly, down the drain.

It was wasteful in time lost and worry caused to the rank-and-file, attempting to adjust to their significantly reduced standard of living while trying to find some detail on what exactly Anthony Albanese was pushing. No doubt many among the one in three who voted for him are now having second thoughts.

It also wasted the time of Canberra politicians whose attention span has been overloaded through their incursion, unique among the world’s federations, into matters intended to be reserved to the states. The bizarre result is that they have abandoned their very core duty and left the nation defenceless, even handing over Port Darwin to Beijing’s control.

At least the referendum allowed the people who keep the country going to denounce, so emphatically, Albanese’s folly.

It also encouraged some hitherto unknown elites, the BBB’s, ‘boardroom billionaire bolsheviks’, to reveal themselves. This was when they concluded from the early polls that the nation would support them. Actually such polls are of no predictive value , as anyone who has run a No case  knows.

Controlling some of our Top S&P/ASX 200 companies, the BBBs have abandoned  their fundamental duty to shareholders and therefore their customers. Instead, they’ve  endorsed the far-left notion of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, cover for playing far-left politics. (Simon Fenwick, the well-known  successful businessman, argues strongly against this on ADH TV).

At the same time, the BBB’s are not satisfied, as their predecessors were, with returns commensurate with, say, very hard-working top life-saving surgeons. They claim that if they’re not paid fortunes, they will be snapped up in New York or London.

So what are the ideas the elites-at-large believe in?

With the 20th-century decline in religion, an aphorism, wrongly attributed to Chesterton, now applies. My preferred form appears in a 2015 book, Give Us Back Our Country. This is that when a man stops believing in God, it is not that he believes in nothing. It’s that he will believe in anything.

And so with the elites. So how do they choose the ideas they will radiate and apply  from the various institutions they have captured?

Sadly, the governing criterion is certainly not about what is good for Australia.

As with clothing styles, the choice between ideas is determined by nothing more than fashion.

You can see what those fashions are in the  agenda of the Teals. Incidentally, they represent some of the few electorates who voted for the 1999 politicians’ republic.

In any event, just as women’s fashions are still often determined in Paris, so fashions in ideas are determined in the ideological salons inhabited by communist-influenced academics in US, and indeed local, universities.

In recent interviews on ADH TV, an Australian political adviser, Rick Brown, the late B.A. Santamaria’s close colleague, has insisted on the primal importance of ideas.

With an army of over 60,000 volunteers, a minuscule officer class led by Kerry Jones and David Elliott and an efficient central command, he was a splendid master of strategy in the 1999 referendum landslide.

He argues (borrowing the words but not the economics of John Maynard Keynes)  that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated, compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. While that will surprise many, what is happening today demonstrates the truth of that  aphorism.

What is curious is that the winning ideas which so attract our elites are essentially refined from failed communist ideology and are designed to undermine the very system  which has nurtured and enriched them.

Those winning ideas include climate catastrophism used by delinquent Western politicians to damage and weaken only Western economies while enriching the communists who must be laughing at us, as well as critical race theory and ‘gender’ ideology. All fashionable, they are spread through the education system and a significant part of the mainstream media. These two are of course the first targets of the latter-day communists’ march through the institutions.

Note that most of the winning ideas, but not climate catastrophism, are based on Marx’s class-based division of man into the oppressors and the oppressed who will eventually prevail in the inevitable revolution. But with the proletariat notoriously reluctant to play the role designated by Marx, latter-day Marxists have replaced class with race and sex, the latter involving the infantile fiction of chosen gender.

Our elites have fallen head over heels for these. With the recent instructions on respecting chosen pronouns and forms of address in many courts , the inability to define ‘woman’ and the time spent in Defence on suppressing the adjective ‘unmanned’, we can see that some judges, other eminences and generals have fallen for this nonsense.

Contrast that with the wisdom of the rank and file in overwhelmingly rejecting the Voice, a leading reason for which was a wariness about the High Court. Apart from the invention of native title and the ruling against the deportation of criminal aliens on the ground of their claimed indigeneity, such wariness is more than justified by the extraordinary primacy, almost canonisation of the indigenous, at the recent swearing-in of new High Court Chief Justice Gageler (a video is on the Court’s website).

The High Court’s obsession with the separation of powers could, incidentally, have one distinct advantage.

No constitutional court considering the government’s attempt to muzzle free speech in the draft Misinformation and Disinformation Bill could possibly allow the vesting of what is indisputably judicial power in the federal administrative agency, Acma.

Meanwhile, the Albanese government’s handling of the appeal by the rapist could not be more negligent. It should have been clear to at least three cabinet ministers that the High Court was heading towards overruling a 20-year precedent. Fortunately, the Dutton-led opposition forced the government to introduce then toughen emergency legislation to protect the people from dangerous criminals. A more  permanent solution is desperately needed. As for that, until next time.