Australia stands at a critical inflection point, with a defining choice to be made. The liberal order is under assault. Will we defend it, or will we politely and complacently allow it to erode?

Much of human history has been one of grinding poverty and early, often painful death. Infant mortality rates well exceeded fifty per cent, and those fortunate enough to survive beyond their fifth birthday could expect a life of perhaps thirty to forty years. War, feudalism, deprivation and pestilence were not aberrations but the norm.

Then, during the 17th and 18th centuries, a cluster of ideas and institutions emerged in north-western Europe and something remarkable happened. These ideas produced the liberal open society, a system of social organisation grounded in equality before the law, representative government, private property, free exchange and freedom of expression. Though the spread of these ideas was uneven and the failures real, the consequences were extraordinary.

Building upon the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution it helped make possible, life expectancy rose dramatically. Extreme poverty collapsed. Literacy spread from a privilege of the few to the inheritance of the many. Infant mortality plummeted.

For the first time in human history, sustained, broad-based prosperity became not merely possible, but the ordinary expectation of ordinary people.

This achievement, however accidental its origins, has not endured by chance, nor is it guaranteed to persist. Yet rather than appreciate, study, conserve and promote the factors behind humanity’s ascent, an influential class, often those who have benefited most, now seeks to tear the system down and to deny its blessings to those who would follow.

Criticism of liberalism is not new, but it has taken on a different character. Increasingly, the critique is not that liberal societies have failed on their own terms, but that their successes are themselves suspect.

Prosperity is reframed as inequality, free expression as a source of harm, property as an instrument of exclusion, differences in outcomes deemed racist and inequitable.

This tension was anticipated long ago. In 1942, the economist, Joseph Schumpeter, argued that capitalism, and the liberal order intertwined with it, would be undermined not from without but from within. He identified two pressures in particular:

The first is the rise of the bureaucracy, corporate and governmental, which hobbles the entrepreneurial class by starving it of financial and human capital. Schumpeter’s prediction has been borne out. In many developed economies, Australia included, government spending now accounts for a substantial and ever rising share of GDP. Inclusive of the states, it is now about 40 per cent.

Regulatory complexity has markedly increased over time. The administrative state has erected tall barriers to entrepreneurship, and the productive minority shoulders an ever heavier load while being told, regularly, that it is not paying its fair share.

The deeper effect is cultural. Too many citizens, rather than creating wealth, are content to live off wealth created by others or to occupy themselves administering it. Economic dynamism is systemically suppressed, not only by the rules and the costs, but by the steady erosion of the impulse to build. The tall-poppy syndrome is crushing entrepreneurship.

The second pressure is the rise of an intellectual class sustainable only by the wealth liberal capitalism produces. It was this class that drew Schumpeter’s sharpest scorn.

Intellectuals, he argued, are instinctively hostile to the very system that permits their existence because it fails to deliver the status and rewards they believe are their due.

Thomas Sowell later described intellectuals as those whose end product is intangible ideas, judged not by outcomes but by the applause of other intellectuals.

Nassim Taleb calls them people without skin in the game. Intellectuals, in Schumpeter’s telling, lack responsibility and accountability for the consequences of their ideas.

This is not an argument against intellectual life. A healthy liberal society depends on criticism and debate. But it does raise a question about incentives.

In parts of the academy, particularly in some social science and education faculties, the emphasis has shifted from understanding inherited institutions to interrogating and often undermining them.

Colonialism, for example, for all its supposed faults, often raised the living standards of peoples who had lived at subsistence level for generations. It is now blamed for most of the world’s troubles. Yet the progress of nations should be assessed not against utopia, but against what might otherwise have been.

Australia is a case in point. Our institutions, the common law, parliamentary democracy, and relatively open markets, are not indigenous inventions but inheritances from British colonisation.

They have been adapted and improved, but they remain the foundation of our prosperity and stability. To treat that inheritance as a source of shame rather than gratitude is to misread the historical ledger.

Public debate, whether over speech regulation, education, energy, or housing, increasingly reflects this tension between reforming our inherited institutions and replacing them wholesale.

The distinction matters. Liberal systems are not static and require reform to endure. But reform is not repudiation. To dismantle secure property rights, open inquiry, and equality before the law in pursuit of abstract ideals is to risk losing the conditions that made progress possible.

None of this is to suggest that liberal societies are beyond criticism. It is to suggest that the historical record deserves more weight. The greatest and most sustained improvements in human welfare have occurred in societies that, however imperfectly, approximated liberal principles. Where those principles have been abandoned, the results have rarely been benign.

The challenge, then, is not to defend liberalism as flawless, but to recognise it as fragile. Its norms, tolerance, open inquiry, and institutional restraint, are easily taken for granted and, once weakened, not easily restored.

The time has come for reason to vanquish rhetoric. Anti-liberalism arrives dressed in a red bow, promising a world without struggle, inequality, or burden. What it delivers is something else entirely.

The greatest privations and losses of life in human history have not occurred in liberal societies. They have occurred in those that abolished them. Every generation that forgets this pays the price again.

Australia must choose. The liberal order will not defend itself. It is sustained only by people who understand what it cost to build, and what its absence would cost to recover. The choice before us is not abstract. It is whether we are still capable of defending our inheritance.