Following the tragedy at Bondi, and everything that has followed, one conclusion can no longer be avoided: Australians were fools to trust the two governing parties for as long as we did.
For two decades, we were assured that the great social and political experiments of our age were benign, inevitable, and above all, virtuous.
Mass immigration. Multiculturalism. National disarmament.
Each was presented not as a choice to be debated, but as a moral condition to be accepted. Dissent was treated as deficiency. Consent was assumed, not sought.
Multiculturalism was not merely a social policy, it was an administrative regime imposed against a settler/Indigenous population within its own sovereign country and framed as moral progress. This is historically distinctive because it institutionalised moral disinheritance.
The majority of Australia’s population has been recast as a suspect class whose interests, traditions, and cohesion are obstacles rather than obligations.
This distinction matters, particularly in Australia. Much of regional and remote Australia has known settlement for less than a century. Communities in the Pilbara, the Kimberley, and large tracts of the interior are not ancient imperial actors on the world stage. They are recent, interdependent, and grounded in lived cooperation rather than academic grievance. The metropolitan narrative that collapses all settlers into a single historical caricature bears little resemblance to how Australia was actually built or inhabited.
Australia did not operate plantation slavery. The great coerced labour crime of our history was convict transportation, imposed by the British state on those sent here in chains. To retrospectively recast their descendants as beneficiaries of a moral crime they did not commit is not historical reckoning. It is bureaucratic myth-making.
None of this was ever properly put to a vote.
Australians rejected the Voice at a national referendum, yet its logic has since been imposed administratively in South Australia and Victoria regardless. When voters object, they are told they can express themselves at the ballot box, even when no serious opposition has been offered. The choice repeatedly presented is not between alternatives, but between identical frameworks administered with different tones.
This is why the national conversation has begun to detach itself from the major parties. What we are witnessing now is not polarisation but withdrawal. Australians are increasingly unwilling to funnel their objections through rituals that reliably neutralise them. The old model of beg, vote, and hope has lost credibility.
The Prime Minister presides over this collapse of trust. The Labor government is not distrusted because it is uniquely cruel or incompetent. It is distrusted because Labor governs through moral assertion rather than consent. Their public language does not invite judgment. It pressures compliance. The result is a steady erosion of legitimacy.
Bondi exposed the cost of this arrangement. We have experienced a terrorist incident in which state protection failed at the point of need. The public was disarmed. The attackers were not. Across Sydney and Melbourne, and occasionally in Perth, illegal firearms circulate freely among criminal networks while law-abiding citizens remain prohibited from meaningful self-defence. Australians were warned that disarming the public would not disarm criminals. That warning has proven accurate.
The government’s reflexive response has not been to confront enforcement failure or policing capacity, but to further restrict the compliant. This is not public safety. It is risk displacement. Responsibility is shifted from the state to the victim, while the offender operates beyond the reach of moral instruction.
At the same time, immigration has been expanded at a scale never put to the electorate. Australians are told, after the fact, that this was necessary, humane, or inevitable. The country now contains a non-trivial number of individuals whose imported doctrines include holy war and antisemitism. This reality is neither speculative nor controversial. The failure lies not with individuals, but with a political class that believed social cohesion could be managed administratively rather than earned culturally.
Working Australians have been particularly poorly served by this order. The Labor Party long ago abandoned the industrial working class for the managerial and cultural middle strata. This was felt in places like the Pilbara, when old Labor governments refused to defend communities against elite legal campaigns that treated working livelihoods as expendable. Today, there are very few, if any, members of Cabinet who have worked with their hands. The party governs in the name of workers it no longer understands.
The Liberal Party offers no meaningful alternative. It shares the same assumptions, the same moral language, and the same fear of confronting the administrative structures it inherited.
This leaves only one serious path forward.
Australia requires direct democratic mechanisms that restore consent as a governing principle rather than a ceremonial afterthought. Citizens must be able to trigger recall elections for representatives or governments that have lost legitimacy. Petition thresholds must compel parliamentary debate. Major structural changes, including immigration settings, must be placed behind referendum requirements rather than administrative fiat.
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum conditions for a democracy that still claims to govern by consent rather than instruction.
If policies such as mass immigration, national disarmament, or multicultural administration are truly defensible, they should survive public judgment. If they cannot, they have no moral right to be imposed on future generations.
Australia must choose whether it wishes to be governed by ritual or by the people who live here. The events of the past year suggest that choice can no longer be deferred.
