In the shadow of our sunburnt country, an insidious force is at work, dismantling the very fabric of what it means to be Australian.

It’s not the bushfires or the floods that threaten our identity. Those are the battles we’ve always fought and won.

No, the real enemy is the creeping tide of modern communism, disguised as progressive virtue and unchecked mass immigration, that seeks to erase our unique cultural heritage in favour of a homogenised, globalist grey.

From the demolition of our Federation houses to the silencing of political opinion, and now the swamping of our suburbs with endless arrivals, this ideology doesn’t just hate Australia, it loathes the rugged individualism that built it.

Let’s start with the architecture that once defined our suburbs, the Federation house perched upon a quarter-acre block. These were more than mere dwellings, they were monuments to our Federation spirit, born in the early 20th Century when Australians dared to dream of a united nation.

With their verandahs for lazy summer days, hallways big enough to host a cocktail party, and spacious yards that invited kids to kick a footy or mums and dads to grow their own fruit and veges, these homes embodied self-sufficiency and community. They were the physical manifestation of the Aussie battler – practical, unpretentious, and built to last.

Today, these blocks are carved up into matchbox apartments, squeezed into high-density hives that prioritise profit over people. The quarter-acre dream is condemned as ‘sprawl’, a relic of colonial excess, by urban planners infected with communist collectivism. They preach density as salvation, forcing families into vertical cages where privacy is a luxury and the horizon a distant memory.

This isn’t progress, it is punishment, exacerbated by mass immigration that floods our cities with hundreds of thousands each year, driving relentless population growth.

Modern communists, those self-appointed guardians of the ‘greater good’, view our sprawling suburbs as symbols of inequality, yet their solution is to level everything to the lowest common denominator, importing waves of newcomers to justify the concrete jungles.

Gone are the Federation houses, bulldozed for soulless walk-up apartments that could be in Communist Eastern Europe, indistinguishable in their sterility. Our architecture, once a celebration of Australian ingenuity, is now a casualty of this ideological war, with immigration’s pressure cooker effect on housing prices ensuring the old ways are priced out forever.

And what of the backyard?

The sacred chook run, replete with chokos, where generations of Aussies raised chooks not just for eggs, but for lessons in life. There’s something profoundly Australian about scattering the chook food each morning, teaching kids responsibility while the dog bays at the fence.

Chickens in the backyard weren’t a hobby, they were a hedge against hard times, a nod to the Anzac ethos of making do. In my own childhood in suburban Penrith, our coop was a hub of family lore from Dad’s failed attempts at fox-proofing to Mum’s triumphant lamb sauce from the mint bush nearby. It fostered independence, a quiet defiance against reliance on faceless supermarkets.

Now the eco-warriors and their communist manifesto have rebranded high-density housing as ‘sustainable living’. This isn’t about the environments, it’s about control, amplified by overcrowded suburbs where mass immigration has turned quiet backyards into contested zones of cultural clash.

Modern communists despise the self-reliant Aussie who doesn’t need the state’s teat. They want us herded into apartments where every meal is delivered by a delivery rider, every thought vetted by an algorithm. The chook run, like the quarter-acre, is vanishing. Not because it’s obsolete, but because it reminds them of what they’ve never understood. Self-reliance.

Worse still, mass immigration itself is the sharpest blade in this cultural assault, wielded by globalist elites under the communist banner of borderless solidarity. With permanent migration locked at 185,000 for 2025-26 alone, our once-cohesive nation is being diluted into a patchwork of enclaves where the fair dinkum Aussie way – barbies on Sundays, footy on Saturdays, and a cold one with mates – is drowned out by imported customs that demand accommodation rather than assimilation.

This isn’t the enriching multiculturalism we were sold, it’s a deliberate erosion of our identity, fostering parallel societies that fracture the mateship that glued us together through wars and depressions. Protests erupting across cities, with Aussies crying out to ‘take our country back’, are dismissed as bigotry by the chattering class, but they signal a deep unease.

With 31.5 per cent of us now born overseas, our national soul is being reshaped into something unrecognisable. Two years on from the terrorist attack on Israel, Palestinian flags and antisemitic chants are expected to shame our cultural icons once again. Modern communism thrives on this chaos, using immigration as a Trojan horse to import dependency, grievance culture, and a rejection of the self-made spirit that defined us. It’s disgusting.

This cultural sabotage is abetted by those who should be our watchdogs: the journalists. Once, the fourth estate championed the little people – the shearers, the surfers, the single mums scraping by on the Gold Coast. They exposed corruption, amplified the voiceless, and held power to account with a larrikin grin.

But today’s press? They’re not interested in protecting the battlers, they’re too busy chasing corporate-approved morality tales that spawn a weak, complaining populace, while turning a blind eye to the immigration juggernaut overwhelming our communities.

Consider the relentless drumbeat against ‘toxic masculinity’ or ‘racism’, narratives imported wholesale from Silicon Valley boardrooms. These aren’t homegrown concerns, they’re globalist edicts, peddled by media outlets that profit from our downfall and who cheer the endless influx that lines their pockets.

A journalist sniffing out a scandal in Parliament? Rare as hen’s teeth these days. Instead, they pursue stories that shame the average Joe for his Aussie-loving ways, branding barbecues as carbon sins or calls to save Aussie culture as hate speech, all while ignoring how mass arrivals strain schools, hospitals, and our very social fabric.

What annoys me most is that the journos not only pride themselves on bringing down Aussie heroes, but these cowards have their books ready to be released as soon as the unelected courts rule in favour of their cowardly smugness. It’s shameful.

Attacks on great Australians who dare to have a political opinion that doesn’t fit the modern communist narrative fosters entitlement over endurance, victimhood over victory. The result is a generation of whingers, glued to their screens, demanding safe spaces instead of building sheds.

Modern communists in the press hate Australia, but worse, they hate us, the resilient core that refuses to kneel. By prioritising corporate platitudes over the struggles of the little people, they manufacture fragility, ensuring we’ll crumble under the weight of our own complaints as they demand we apologise for having a political opinion.

It’s time to reclaim our culture before it’s too late.

We must resist this communist creep, from the drawing boards of architects to the newsrooms of the elite, and slam shut the gate to mass immigration that threatens our soul.

Bring back the Federation house, the chook pen, the unapologetic Aussie spirit that laughs in the face of adversity. Let the journalists remember their roots or let them fade into irrelevance. Australia isn’t a laboratory for ideological experiments or an open-door experiment in dilution, it’s a sunburnt paradise forged by dreamers and lifters. If we let modern communism win, we’ll wake up in a country that looks like everywhere else and feels like nowhere at all.

But most importantly, we must never apologise for having an opinion about how we want our country to be.

Dr Michael de Percy @FlaneurPolitiq is the Spectator Australia’s Canberra Press Gallery Correspondent. If you would like to support his writing, or read more of Michael, please visit his website.