Not long ago, while I was waiting on a ferry moored at Circular Quay before an evening cruise across Sydney Harbour, a sudden commotion broke out along the concourse. I should point out that this was before the legacy media reluctantly noticed the One Nation surge. A crowd of young Australians had gathered and spontaneously began chanting: ‘Pauline, Pauline, Pauline!’ As Senator Pauline Hanson walked down the gangway, she was greeted with genuine warmth and enthusiasm. To anyone relying solely on the legacy media, this scene would seem impossible. To those who understand the deep, subterranean currents running through ordinary Australia, it was entirely predictable.

Before that cruise, in the 2025 election campaign, this column called on patriotic voters to cast their first preference for One Nation and then prefer the Coalition over the Labor-Greens. In the Senate run-off, One Nation’s Warwick Stacey prevailed over Labor with 51 per cent, while in Labor’s long-held blue-ribbon seat of Hunter, Stuart Bonds scored a remarkable 41 per cent of the two-party vote. This was the first and clear indication of One Nation’s surge. Not only has it fundamentally changed politics, it can save the Australian nation from becoming the Argentina of the South Seas.

It has long been evident that national success has nothing to do with race, colour, or even sheer natural endowments. Rather, as my co-author and I argued in Give Us Back Our Country, a nation’s enduring success can be traced directly to the quality and integrity of its institutions. Australia is one of the world’s oldest, most stable democracies, built upon ancient traditions, individual liberties, and the Crown.

Yet in recent decades, these institutions have been systematically hollowed out, captured by factional powerbrokers – ‘faceless men’ exercising political power in the major parties, and almost never in the national interest. Loyal rank-and-file members, once our civic backbone, have been reduced to unpaid foot soldiers raising funds and letterboxing brochures, under threat of expulsion should they dissent.

Meanwhile, the elites who have marched through our universities, schools, bureaucracies and state broadcasters found it convenient to strike a bargain with these powerbrokers. In exchange for the elites tolerating their personal perks, power and backroom wealth, the machine politicians agreed to advance the elites’ radical cultural agenda, forming together what can best be described as an anti-Australia axis.

On commercial talkback radio, hard-working Australians began asking the same bewildered question: ‘Why do they hate Australia?’

How else can one explain the systematic surrender of our national sovereignty? When John Howard and Tony Abbott retook control of our borders, the anti-Australia axis answered this with the present out-of-control immigration, which too often allows the entry or return of proto-terrorists. We have seen the reckless winding down of our national defence, and massive waste and corruption in the administration of financially out-of-control programs. We have witnessed the suppression of free speech, the decay of basic law and order, the discharge of the mentally ill onto the streets, and the constant denigration of the ethical teachings from our traditional Judeo-Christian heritage.

Central to this managed decline is the dogmatic enforcement of an absolute, quasi-religious, trillion-dollar orthodoxy on climate. It rests on three absurd tenets: first, that human-source carbon dioxide is the sole driver of all weather, rendering every flood, frost and heatwave an apocalyptic event; second, that natural historical cycles of warming and ice ages are totally irrelevant; and third, the supreme conceit that politicians can alter the planetary thermostat by impoverishing their own citizens, even where national emissions are a minuscule one per cent of the global total.

Under this dogma, Australians must surrender suburban family homes and motor cars, cramming into high-density high-rises with curtailed power and rationed air-conditioning. Meanwhile, the righteous elites jet across the globe in maximum luxury to liturgical Earth Summits and similar events, ones paid for by enormous grants extracted from taxpayers, to render homage to high priests, and climate billionaires like Al Gore. Worse still, in league with international merchant banks, they construct artificial carbon markets designed to harvest private wealth including prime agricultural land, even as Australia exports millions of tonnes of coal and gas to foreign competitors who enjoy the cheap, reliable energy our own citizens once had but are now denied by traitorous politicians.

Any scientist, economist or citizen who dares question this insanity is promptly smeared, ridiculed and cancelled. We no longer live under a functioning Westminster democracy, but an Australian variant of managed democracy – reminiscent of the ‘Guided Democracy’ introduced into Indonesia by Sukarno, where democratic forms are retained while the ruling apparatus ensures the public cannot derail the predetermined agenda. Electing a self-confessed lying government in modern Australia has become tantamount to signing a blank cheque drawn on your home, your savings and your income – and worse, a blank cheque on the inheritance of your children and grandchildren.

The historic outcome of the Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia not only destroys the commentariat mantra that One Nation’s surge will only serve to keep Labor in power. With One Nation defeating Labor for the sixth NSW Senate seat and now two by-elections, it is clear this is nonsense.

The victory of One Nation’s Luke Herdegen in what was once considered unassailable Labor territory is not a mere protest vote; it is a seismic political realignment. It is the revolt of the forgotten Australians: the tradesmen, the farmers, the small business owners, the self-reliant retirees, the veterans – in fact anyone who does not want to be dependent on funding taken from other taxpayers, and who are so loathed and despised by the Albanese government. It is also a blunt repudiation of the ‘Labor-lite’ faction within the Coalition, who have spent years accommodating the anti-Australia axis rather than confronting it.

On issue after issue – from out-of-control immigration to domestic energy security – Pauline Hanson and One Nation have set the national agenda while the legacy parties scramble behind. Patriotic Australians who wish to save their country understand what must be done: use the power of the preferential voting system to place One Nation first, while ensuring subsequent preferences flow strictly to the Coalition ahead of the Labor-Greens anti-Australia axis.

Australia remains an extraordinarily blessed and wealthy country. It is being brought to its knees not by external enemies, but by a self-serving anti-Australia domestic establishment.

Secret Harbour has sent an unmistakable signal across the continent: the Australian people have awakened, and the reclamation of our nation has begun.