There is a growing realisation in the West that the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis is not the only hostile power.

There is what could well be an even greater danger, one from within. This was identified in the 2015 book I co-wrote, Give Us Back Our Country, as the AAA, an Anti-Australian Axis of home-grown elites.

With the rise of these, it seems that some in authority are prepared to subordinate our interests to hostile foreign powers in a way which would have been not only unimaginable to our forefathers, it would have led to their downfall.

Just over a dispute concerning one shipment of pig iron to Japan in 1938, R.G. Menzies earned the communist waterside workers union’s epithet, ‘Pig Iron Bob’.

Imagine the reaction if any Australian government in the Thirties or before 1914 had dared permit the Port of Darwin to be leased for 99 years to a company under the control and direction of Germany or Japan.

In a recent interview on ADH TV, one of the nation’s experts on defence and national security, Peter Jennings, lamented how Anthony Albanese had forfeited what he had  indicated  in opposition. This was the opportunity of defending Australia’s national security by resuming Australian ownership and sovereignty over our Port of Darwin.

But on the Friday afternoon following the failure of the Voice referendum, no doubt in the hope nobody would notice, a low-level departmental press release announced a Chinese-owned and controlled company, the Landbridge Group, would be allowed to continue its unbelievable 99-year lease. When President Obama remonstrated with Malcolm Turnbull over the granting of the lease in 2015, Turnbull is reported as saying the President should subscribe to the Northern Territory News.

Notwithstanding that it has an Australian board, claims to be autonomous and according to the ABC, at one stage employed the former minister who negotiated the free trade treaty, Andrew Robb, as economic consultant on an annual $880,000, there can be little doubt that Landbridge is under Beijing’s control. The communists make this very clear in their 2017 National Intelligence Law. (Andrew Robb, incidentally, headed a republican big business and politicians’ campaign group for the 1999 referendum, ‘Conservatives for an Australian head of state’, notwithstanding that we already had one.)

In addition to letting Beijing control our crucial northern port, the Albanese government disappointed a number of foreign allies by cancelling legitimate action within the World Trade Organisation against Beijing  for its flagrant breaches of international law which are separate from the breaches of our free trade agreement.

What are we gaining? A few crumbs from the dictator’s table, and another photo-op to add to Albanese’s bulging album? Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that Australia is less prepared for war than at any time in our history.

As to the danger from within, one of the nation’s leading political strategists, Rick Brown, paraphrasing Keynes, makes a fundamental, yet under-appreciated point.

This is that when compared with the encroachment of ideas, the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated. This is the subject of a recently published essay discussed on ADH TV.

Brown has a proven record. He presented a prescient and detailed case against the Beijing free trade agreement, which events have shown should have been followed by the politicians. And as ACM’s leading strategist in the 1999 referendum, he devised the  killer slogan, ‘Vote No to the politicians’ republic’ as well as a strategy ensuring Victoria crossed the line and voted No.

In what may surprise many, Brown also argues political parties have only a minor role to play in the cultural wars. He says the parties are only articulators, rather than the creators and incubators of ideas.

Yet despite their lesser relevance, politicians were in abundance at the recent London ARC conference.

This, says Spectator Australia’s Rebecca Weisser, may well explain why so little was said about the pandemic. Yet this was used as justification by many politicians for the most serious breakdown ever in our constitutional system, one still not the subject of anything but a fake examination. That said, there are unusual practising politicians who are not afraid of combatting ideas which are being pushed by the elites. Trump is the most prominent. He, almost alone, not only openly dismissed the fashionable but discredited theory of man-made global warming, he gave notice the US was withdrawing from the Paris Accord .

That is why his re-election and his thereby becoming Imperator Occidentis is crucial.

A major contribution at ARC came from leading founder Sir Paul Marshall, who denounced the emergence of woke capitalism – stakeholder capitalism. This was  manifest recently in Australia among too many in the ASX 200 companies in their attempt to impose on a reluctant nation that product of extreme-left, neo-communist critical race theory, the so-called Voice.

While this was the most recent manifestation in Australia of the division between the  well-off, far-left elites and the rank and file, the first actually occurred in 1999.

According to Malcolm Mackerras in The Inner Metropolitan Republic, this was essentially an inner-metropolitan phenomenon with a link to high socio-economic status.

This was well before the first significant manifestations of this same phenomenon either in the UK and the US.

They emerged later in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Trump election. In US elections, the use of primaries, at least among Republicans, neutralises the role of power brokers in controlling preselections while the absence of forced preferential voting arguably produces a truer result.

As a result of the 1999 referendum and the 2001 election, it seemed as though the elites were in retreat in Australia.

Accordingly, I penned a much-derided book, Twilight of the Elites, relying on the still fresh ‘elite’ concept introduced by US author Christopher Lasch. To him elite opinion is opinion typical of the upper-middle class ‘liberal’, that is liberal in the American sense, tending to be left-wing on social and cultural issues.

The elites never like to be exposed.