It’s hardly surprising that Doris Day’s jaunty homage to Marcus Aurelius ‘Que sera, sera’ was one of the 1956’s best-selling records in Australia. This was, after all, a time when the future of most Australians looked particularly rosy. Even after the publication of the book which argued that our collective good fortune might not last forever, only those who actually read The Lucky Country saw the irony of the title, and up to the end of the last century, the closest most ordinary Australians got to political prognostication was saying, ‘She’ll be right’ – a phrase which (more irony) is heard much less now that we’re living with the long-term legacies of certain left-wing administrations. Today, only months away from an election which could return a government whose policies on issues like energy, defence and indigenous self-determination owe more to Whitlam than Hawke, Australians are as worried about the future as the populations of any other Western democracy and predicting the future is enjoying an unprecedented boom here. But as in those other democracies, many of us have lost faith in the mechanisms of divination our parents’ generation depended on to make informed electoral decisions. Thanks to nature’s refusal to ratify the predictions of climate alarmists, the colossal government gaffes about Covid, and the spectacular failure of pollsters to predict the outcomes of so many elections and referenda, our faith in so-called experts is at an all-time low. We know that when it comes to predicting political events we would do as well to consult fashion models as computer models, and that when it comes to weather events and mortality rates, tea leaves and chicken entrails are as oracular as the pronouncements of mandarins like Anthony Fauci and Tim Flannery.  As a result of which, people of all political persuasions are coming to a conclusion which is the defining oxymoron of conservatism; if you really want to see into the future you should take a good look at the past. Who’d have thunk, five years ago, that the one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts in 2025 would be dialogues between two British history dons? Australia has not been slow to catch this particular wave, but the tendency of most Australians to give the other bloke the benefit of the doubt has resulted in some very bad history getting traction here. And when bad history confirms bias it’s hard to abandon. It’s several years since the premise and claims of Dark Emu were comprehensively trashed, but the people running our national broadcaster and state-funded education establishment still revere its author. Fortunately, we do have national institutions and media organisations which can still be relied upon to accommodate real historical voices, and two weeks ago, readers of the Australian were treated to the opinions of Professor Niall Ferguson, one of the most respected of those voices. In ‘Riding the Trump Vibe’ Professor Ferguson was unusually prophetic in his analysis of recent geopolitical events, and for readers of a conservative disposition, reassuringly optimistic. A few days later, in the same newspaper, Tony Abbott expressed some of the same optimism when he sensed, in the collapse of left-wing governments in New Zealand and Canada, that ‘The winds of change are sweeping across the Anglosphere’.

It is certainly tempting to see the rise of populism and the demise of the influence of the far left as evidence that we have passed ‘peak woke’, but we should temper that optimism with the knowledge that it is not politicians who originated the ideologies which inform the policies they implement, but the institutions where they almost certainly imbibed those ideologies. Having seen their damaging effects on share prices, many corporations are busily purging DEI obsessions from their boardrooms. And in the past few weeks, the principals of most global social media giants have succumbed to Trump Rearrangement Syndrome in their desperation to emulate Elon Musk. But until we can remove the virus of Marxism which has so completely captured the institutions which moulded the world view of most of the leaders of most of those governments, platforms and corporations, we will only put Band-Aids on the problem. And for all Niall Ferguson’s positivity, nobody knows better than he does how difficult it will be to effect root-and-branch reformation of our universities. And that the decision of a few Ivy League schools to dismiss (or put on perpetual, full-pay sabbatical) their deans because they couldn’t bring themselves to condemn murder, is a false dawn. Professor Ferguson’s decision to abandon the most hallowed academic groves in Massachusetts and Connecticut to co-found a university in Texas – based on values which are anathema to the people running those older institutions – is testimony to the size of the task ahead. In the meantime, dispensing with a few bad presidents and prime ministers is not much more than woke-a-mole.