Once with a boundless future, Australia has fallen under the control of a political class that has betrayed those who built the nation, those who defended it, and even those who gave their lives for it.

The country is regressing economically, educationally, and even as a safe and law-abiding nation.

With increasingly wasteful spending by federal and state governments causing the largest fall in living standards among advanced countries, let us hope this can still be reversed.

Despite defence being the government’s first duty, Australia is now virtually defenceless.

Because of the Long March by the hard left through the institutions, education has long been turned into expensive taxpayer-funded indoctrination, delivering an unacceptable number of effectively illiterate and innumerate students.

This has simultaneously produced an electorate whose default view of history and society tends towards the ‘progressive left’, as well as a media with a similar bias, the major exceptions being commercial talk-back radio and an unfortunately dynastically endangered Murdoch media.

With agriculture and mining on the blacklist of climate catastrophists, and with an overregulated economy, Canberra’s interference in matters constitutionally intended to be the preserve of the states threatens whole industries, as we have already seen with the demise of the nickel industry.

It is little wonder that investors are avoiding Australia. As Gina Rinehart recalls, just to get to the pre-construction stage of that more than $10-billion tax bonanza, Hancock’s Roy Hill mine, required ‘more than 4,000 government approvals’, etc, and more for actual construction.

With out-of-control immigration totally unrelated to need, housing is now beyond the means of average young Australians.

And with no effective water policy on a continent where the water needed tends to fall in the wrong places, all the political class does is offer faux sympathy to those damaged and even destroyed by flooding instead of damming rivers to provide both electricity and water in vast new food bowls, with new cities for many more to settle.

Meanwhile, the 2025 election suggests that unless an opposition offers a genuine and attractive alternative, clearly delivered, the electorate may well choose to remain with an unimpressive establishment.

What has emerged from the election and its aftermath is that the present two-party system seems incapable of producing the leadership the country desperately needs.

This was demonstrated by the overreaction to Liberal eminence Alan Stockdale’s recent attempt to neutralise calls for female candidate quotas with light-hearted banter, suggesting that the rise of ‘assertive’ women may well justify ‘reverse quotas’ for men.

The problem is not the sex of the candidates. It is that their selection has fallen under the control of shady power brokers, a scandal that was replaced in the US, early last century, by primaries where supporters choose who stands for Congress.

This corruption of elementary democracy has resulted in the Liberal Party deviating far more from the principles under which the Party was established than when the retired founder, Sir Robert Menzies, famously decided, due to a lesser deviation, that he would vote for the Democratic Labor party.

Directed to the ‘forgotten people’, those who had neither great wealth nor union protection, those principles have nothing to do with American progressive liberalism. Rather, they come from classical English and European liberalism. The principles are threefold: limited government, individual liberty, and free enterprise.

The party, incidentally, was named ‘Liberal’ not only to associate with those principles, but also to honour the Commonwealth Liberal party, the 1909 fusion of Andrew Deakin’s Protectionist and Joseph Cook’s Free Trade parties.

Those principles remain necessary to ensure we do not become what this column has long warned about, the Argentina of the South Seas. They are of no interest to the government led by Anthony Albanese, who, despite being presented as a centrist, was always a member of and even rose to head Labor’s hard-left sub-faction, the one that is fulsomely reliant on and inspired by Marxist thought.

A good minister, Peter Dutton’s mistake was to choose only policy acceptable to the Liberal left, the misleadingly self-described ‘moderates’. That misleading nomenclature is no doubt designed to suggest that everyone else is immoderate.

While it was sensible to call for the repeal of the ban on nuclear power, the choice of fuel should have been left for each provider and should have ranged from coal to gas, nuclear, and hydro.

One suspects that nuclear was only chosen to indicate support for unattainable and unscientific net zero policies, thus confirming a belief in anthropogenic global warming. However, so discredited is this theory that its name had to be altered to something more ambiguous, ‘climate change’.

The electorally declared support for such a policy suggested that this latter-day Liberal party was an impotent mirror of Labor, something that in the eyes of the electorate easily paled in comparison with the real thing.

What then is the solution for future elections? It is, I believe, to adopt the approach taken by the Americans over a century ago.That is, take preselection away from shady power brokers and give it to primaries of Liberal (and Labor) registered supporters.

Meanwhile, notwithstanding the built-in bias for the two-party system, the election did at least allow the emergence of one new natural, indeed exceptional leader.

On the 249th Senate count, with 634,982 votes, a self-trained multilingual expert, a Sandhurst graduate who served in the British Parachute Regiment and the 22nd Special Air Service Regiment, and later in the Australian Commando Regiment, and who also served as a military consultant in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, and who holds a university medal, was declared the sixth senator for New South Wales ahead of Labor by 17,326 votes. Spectator contributor and constitutional monarchist, One Nation Senator Warwick Stacey, is erudite and eloquent, with vast business experience, including many years in responding to kidnap for ransom and various international extortion attempts.

With Andrew Hastie in another portfolio, Senator Stacey will no doubt become the parliamentarian best qualified to speak on defence.