Do you remember the election debate between Morrison and Albanese?

Morrison effectively said that Labor had introduced great ideas but then the Coalition had to work out how to fund them. It was the ultimate uniparty love-in and it was all tosh. The major parties have been regurgitating each other’s ideas for years now. Not because they lack conviction. Because they have become – to use the Von Moltke model of leadership – stupid and industrious.

To make matters worse, the Labor Party is entirely unoriginal. Like the Fabian wolf in sheep’s clothing, Labor under Albanese has introduced their tired old playbook. Again.

Von Moltke classified leaders as smart and lazy, smart and industrious, stupid and lazy, and stupid and industrious. You could argue that from Turnbull onwards, the Libs have been stupid and lazy. What we have now is far worse.

Labor is proving to be stupid and industrious, the worst combination of all. Our political leaders are busily cocking everything up.

Sir Isaac Newton’s famous quote about standing on the shoulders of giants is an axiom for the development of human knowledge. Researchers must comprehend previous research that has been conducted and then add to it incrementally. It is almost Burkean in its intent, adding a little bit to the future by acknowledging the past.

It may not be how innovation happens in business, but the success of the species can be attributed to the steady development of human knowledge. The Darwin Awards are the antithesis of the Newtonian research method.

Labor deserves a Darwin Award. They’re standing on the shoulders of Lilliputians. Leftists develop idiotic ideas about human nature that even they cannot stomach. They then wonder why nobody gets with the pogrom. I mean program. Next thing you know we have the moral police, the thought police, and all the other idiotic things that are appearing before the courts. Innocent bystanders can only shake their heads in disbelief.

Meanwhile, Labor keeps running around industriously peddling their stupid policies that the bolshie petty bourgeoisie love to vote for. (Or, for the Churchillians, policies for which the bolshie petty bourgeoisie love to vote. Whatever floats your boat.)

The bolshie petty bourgeoisie are those who survive on government funds. In other words, they are leaners and not lifters. With so many people now living on government funds, that is, taxpayers’ money, these grifters are not the owners of the means of production. But they are communist in intent and dead set on milking the government teat dry. All while claiming they are productive.

It’s like the old joke about capitalism and communism. In capitalism, you have two cows. You buy a bull and create a herd. You sell your natural increase which produces protein. Everybody is happy – they have meat, you have money – and there is much rejoicing.

In communism, you have two cows. A public servant decides that veganism is great. You know they’re a vegan because they tell you straight away. Next thing you know the public servant takes your cows and shoots them because they are creating too much methane and causing climate change. You shake your head. But that is a microaggression and next minute you are forced to undertake retraining to become vegan.

You can watch how this works in the movie Idiocracy.

Leftists have tried communism so many times they meet the colloquial criteria for insanity. This time it will be different. Look at the Scandinavian countries where everybody pays high taxes and they love their governments. Yeah, right.

The RBA has warned they may not be able to fight inflation with monetary policy. Sound familiar? Is this another recession we had to have?

Standing on the shoulders of giants enables one to see a little further. Looking further than Paul Keating means you’re a spectator to sky-high interest rates.

After that shemozzle of a time when all was wrong with Australia, standing on the shoulders of leftists is not about looking forward. It is about looking back. You can see them in the backrooms of power, rubbing their hands while the Liberals are down and out:

‘Let’s target negative gearing, capital gains tax, and family trusts!’

Straight out of the Labor playbook. You can imagine them discussing policy while drinking a decaf soy latte:

‘Let’s focus on young people. We’ll build an NBN, then an internet filter, then when they both fail we’ll ban teenagers from accessing social media.’

‘Next we will raise taxes, and we will be like Norway. We will all drive EVs and we will be happy.’

‘We will build houses. But first we have to create demand. We will spend money on immigrant welfare and get everyone reliant on us. Then interest rates will rise so much nobody can afford their mortgage repayments. And we can make three-story walk-up apartments just like in the motherland and they will rent from us.’

Now that’s progress.

I wish I could say that Labor built Snowy 2.0, but sadly, the Coalition have been standing on their own version of leftists. Snowy 2.0 is a metaphor for all the reasons we aren’t and can never be like Norway.

The biggest problem with looking back is that the Labor Party only sees what it wants to see. Nobody. Nobody ran from West Germany to East Germany when the Berlin Wall came down.

I can’t say this enough but if you go to the DDR Museum in Berlin you will see that East Germany was backwards. To keep the charade going, they needed indoctrination backed up by secret police. A bit like the way the Wokerati have stitched up our education system and brought out the thought police. In the interests of not upsetting my editor in every piece I write, I won’t mention the defiance of common sense occurring in the courts lately.

I’ll never forget the story of Labor stalwart, Bill Hayden, as told by one of his biographers. Apparently, his parents travelled to the Soviet Union to see the glorious socialist experiment. When they returned, they never spoke about the Soviet Union ever again.

When I taught political ideologies, it made sense to distinguish between socialism and communism where socialists are focused on equality of outcomes. Effectively a group assignment at uni where you bust your arse and the bludger gets your high distinction. It’s weird that uni students seem to be loving socialism while hating group assignments.

Communism, on the other hand, is where you overthrow the state because the state is the reason you’re a peasant. But you’re too stupid to know that, so there needs to be a dictatorship of the proletariat to educate you, you dumb-arse.

The bolshie petty bourgeoisie have somehow become the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s the manifestation of modern communism. Their favourite tool is virtue signalling. I even heard a professor say that seeing someone drive around in an EV might inspire the prols to buy an EV one day so they too could protect the environment. I kid you not.

Standing on the shoulders of leftists is to regurgitate failed ideas while putting new faces in old hot seats. The virtue-signalling class that lives off the government teat somehow think they have new knowledge that nobody else can fathom. The only problem is they don’t produce anything, their best shot at innovation is government ownership, and yet they are on higher wages than everyone else or do nothing and receive taxpayer funds.

Which brings me back to my original point. This Labor government is unoriginal. They have no recipes for today’s kitchens. Marx would be turning in his grave. Not to mention he would have been there sooner if it wasn’t for the fact that liberal Britain allowed him to write his nonsense while he was persona non grata in his own country. Imagine if he didn’t have Engels. There would have been no welfare for little Karl. And no communism.

Standing on the shoulders of leftists doesn’t let you see further. It just gives you a better view of the same failed ideas recycled from the last century. While Newton’s giants built the modern world through patient, incremental truth, Albanese’s government stands on the shoulders of every socialist experiment that ended in bread queues, secret police, and disillusioned true believers who never spoke of it again.

This is not progress. It is industrious stupidity in action. It is the worst kind of leadership, busily cocking everything up while the bolshie petty bourgeoisie cheer on the government. They virtue signal with their EVs, their generational ‘equity’ (read: the family is a capitalist construct), and their concocted compassion. All funded by the lifters they quietly despise while living off the very liberal order Marx wanted to overthrow.

Australia doesn’t need more recycled Fabian dreams. It needs leaders smart enough to be lazy. To get out of the way, stop milking the productive, and let people stand on their own two feet. Until then, we’ll keep getting the same old wolf in sheep’s clothing. Only this time, it’s wearing a high-vis vest while robbing you blind.

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.