From Myeongdong, Seoul: Across the road from me is the original Bank of Korea building, the nation’s central bank. It is now the Bank of Korea Money Museum. It has a computer that demonstrates the impact of economic events. If government spending increases, inflation increases. If employment increases, then inflation increases, and so on.

Surely Jim Chalmers knows all of this. If the government spends more on government jobs and puts the rest of the country on welfare, then you don’t need one of these computers anymore. Capitalism is gone and you are living in a socialist economy. You know, that repulsive economic system that never works?

Like many Australians, the RBA’s interest rate increase this week has me worried. We have the most socialist of Labor governments in charge, and an ineffectual opposition. The leadership changes in the Coalition haven’t eased the pain.

There’s been no change in attitude and the by-election at Farrer is shaping up to be a contest that will fracture the conservative vote and we’ll end up with another Teal.

Matt Canavan came out of the gates attacking One Nation, proving the Coalition isn’t interested in us. I fear that One Nation is our only hope. Which means we will get more of Labor’s socialism unless something breaks.

But let’s stop pretending this is mere incompetence or bad luck.

The only way Australia can now be saved is by hitting rock-bottom first. It is my opinion that Labor has engineered our decline deliberately, not to govern but to dismantle the liberal democratic system that built the luckiest country on Earth. Every major policy choice since 2022 has accelerated that demolition through ballooning national debt, engineered inflation, energy sabotage, mass immigration without infrastructure, and a relentless transfer of power from individuals and states to Canberra and globalist bureaucracies.

Look at the evidence in plain sight. It could be argued the RBA’s latest hike appears to be the direct result of Labor’s reckless spending binge. Approaching $1 trillion in debt since taking office, much of it has been poured into green fantasies and welfare expansion that fuel demand without supply.

Our once-cheap energy advantage has been surrendered through the renewable-energy targets and coal-phase-out ideology. Factories close, power prices soar, and families cannot heat their homes or fill their cars. This is not accidental. It is the textbook method of creating dependency by making private enterprise nonviable, then positioning the government as the only saviour.

The current fuel crisis provides yet another glaring example. As the Middle East conflict, exacerbated by Labor’s weak foreign policy stance, disrupts global supplies, petrol and diesel prices have surged by $1 per litre, with regional stations running dry amid panic buying.

Rather than bolstering domestic production or stockpiles years ago, Labor’s Net Zero obsession has left us with insufficient fuel reserves, forcing Energy Minister Chris Bowen to release emergency stocks and allow our national transport fleet to be ruined by dirty fuel. This government-orchestrated vulnerability turns a global shock into a local catastrophe, fostering reliance on state handouts amid rationing threats.

It’s socialism in action. Erode self-sufficiency through green regulations, then swoop in with centralised control to ‘save’ us. All while blaming consumers for the shortages their policies created.

Housing is the same story. Record net overseas migration, with over 500,000 in a single year, has been encouraged while the government tries to put everyone in state-built and state-owned communist-era styled apartments.

The results are skyrocketing rents and mortgages that trap young Australians in generational poverty. Meanwhile, older Australians who cannot access their superannuation yet are fearful of losing their mortgaged houses. Again, deliberate. And conveniently, Labor has set up the RBA as the scapegoat.

A dependent, urbanised population reliant on public housing subsidies and cost-of-living handouts is far easier to control than a prosperous, independent middle class.

Even the cultural front fits the pattern. The failed Voice referendum was never abandoned. It morphed into treaty talks, reparations demands, and ‘truth-telling’ commissions that divide rather than unite. Speech is chilled through disinformation laws and hate-speech expansions.

Australians have to provide electronic copies of their identification documents to foreign companies just so they can access some internet services. The ABC and government-funded universities pump out narratives that portray our liberal democratic inheritance of property rights, free markets, and individual responsibility as inherently oppressive.

This propaganda is blatantly obvious. As I wrote in my recent chapter in the Robert Menzies Institute’s The Menzies Legacy, we would only have state-owned media if Labor had gotten their way back in the day.

Our current Machiavellian wet dream is not the result of policy errors. It is ideological warfare aimed at eroding the very legitimacy of our political and cultural heritage.

The Coalition offers no resistance because it has been captured by the same elite consensus. Their new conservative leaders are hamstrung. Leadership spills changed the faces, not the direction. Attacking One Nation while courting Teals proves the point. The mainstream right would rather lose power than risk real disruption.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation remains the only party willing to name the problems. These are clear – open borders, foreign ownership of critical assets, Net Zero zealotry, and the abandonment of Australian workers. One Nation’s platform of national sovereignty, energy realism, and reduced government interference is our last democratic lifeline. However, regrettably, frustratingly, and in my opinion, One Nation has a long way to go before it can be a party of government.

Here the tragedy deepens. One Nation may win seats, may force debate, but the structural damage is now so advanced that the eventual reckoning will arrive too late for an orderly rescue. Australia must hit rock-bottom. This will be a full-scale recession morphing into stagflation, energy blackouts, sovereign debt warnings, and even social unrest as the welfare state runs out of other people’s money.

Only then will the broader electorate, comfortably numb for decades, finally understand that the post-war liberal democratic bargain of freedom and prosperity cannot coexist with Labor’s socialist transformation.

It’s like we’ve forgotten that a bargain is between two parties. Freedom is not a gift, it is something you must continually fight for.

History is littered with examples of rock-bottom bounces. Weimar Germany, 1970s Britain (no doubt 2020s Britain), and Venezuela all had to collapse before sanity returned. Nations rarely reform at the first warning. They reform only after the pain becomes unbearable. Labor knows this. That is why they accelerate the decline.

A crisis of Labor’s own making allows them to argue for even more control. Price caps, wealth taxes, centralised planning, death taxes, perhaps even emergency powers. Oh, and taxing you on money you haven’t even earnt yet. Our liberal democratic guardrails including federalism, property rights, and parliamentary sovereignty (where the people are sovereign) will be tested to breaking point.

So prepare for the worst, because it is coming. I would build resilience now. Reduce personal debt where possible, stockpile skills and community networks, teach children self-reliance instead of entitlement. Support One Nation candidates ruthlessly at every election, but not delude myself that a few Senate seats will reverse the trajectory in time.

The system must break before it can be rebuilt. When the lights go out (and they will if this continues), Australians will finally demand the restoration of the country we once knew. We will demand a return to secure borders, affordable energy, low taxes, and a government that serves the people rather than remakes them in its image.

Until that rock-bottom arrives, the pain will only intensify. The question is no longer whether Labor is deliberately ruining us. The evidence is overwhelming. The real question is whether we have the fortitude to survive what they have unleashed, and we allowed to happen.

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.