Australians’ pessimism about the future of the country is now probably at its highest level. Polling suggests an extraordinary two out of three Australians say the country is heading in the wrong direction.

This is hardly surprising. Despite our enormous wealth and the hard work of our people, the country is being led toward decline and ruin by a self-serving political class. This class has captured the two-party cartel and undermined our constitutional order to insulate itself from public accountability. They stage confected elections where the real choices have already been dictated by power brokers in factional pre-selections instead of the long-proposed, more democratic primaries. Meanwhile, the establishment insists that One Nation is unworthily enjoying a ‘populist’ surge. In fact, One Nation has long offered the solution. Alone among the leading political parties, One Nation would surrender the power that politicians wield between elections. They would turn the Australian people into what Alfred Deakin conceded would be the ‘masters of the situation’ – putting the political class under the control of the people 24/7, as in Switzerland.

The historical warning for Australia is urgent. As this column has long recalled, at the time of our Federation, Australians and Argentinians stood together as two of the wealthiest peoples on Earth. Argentina has since become the classic textbook example of a rich country falling into catastrophic decline and poverty.

The crucial difference between the two countries, as an Argentinian minister once observed on the ABC, is that Australia inherited remarkably durable and superior institutions from her English-speaking heritage: responsible and representative government, an independent judiciary, trial by jury, freedom of speech and the press, and equal rights including religious freedom. Argentina succumbed because it lacked this solid institutional anchor, falling victim to executive overreach, caudillismo – the Latin tradition of rule by a charismatic strongman – and institutional decay. To avoid the Argentine path, we must recognise the persistent danger: vital institutions and foundational beliefs can be hollowed out from within without being formally abolished.

That contrast is mirrored in modern Switzerland. Without our vast mineral wealth, the Swiss achieve a real income advantage exceeding A$25,000 per person annually over Australians – simply by keeping their politicians on the tight leash long championed by Pauline Hanson. Direct democracy has built enduring prosperity, whereas Australia’s political cartel threatens our inherited advantage.

That hollowing-out is precisely what the professional political class has accomplished. Through rigid party discipline and Bolshevik-style caucus control, they have inverted responsible government. This constitutional doctrine assumes ministers are held accountable in the House of Representatives and that individual MPs exercise independent judgement on behalf of their electors. Factional caucus rule reverses that relationship entirely, reducing MPs and the House itself to an obedient rubber stamp for party power brokers and donors. This breach of constitutional order went unnoticed because the failure of parliamentary accountability was compounded by the capture of the constitutional umpire.

The Constitution created a High Court to police the federal division of power between the states and the centre. Fortunately, the first bench – Griffith, Barton and O’Connor – was composed of men who had played central roles in the Federation movement and understood the constitutional bargain from the inside.

Here, however, lies a tragic constitutional design weakness. While successors are formally appointed by the Governor-General in Council, the real decision is taken in secret by the governing politicians without any control whatsoever. The High Court of Australia Act 1979 introduced a requirement to consult state attorneys-general, but this is cosmetic; the states have no veto.

The framers actually considered a far safer arrangement. At the 1898 Convention, South Australian delegate Patrick Glynn (who secured constitutional recognition of our Judeo-Christian heritage) proposed that the High Court consist of a chief justice and the state chief justices. This would have brought perspectives from beyond the Canberra–Sydney–Melbourne triangle. When Edmund Barton objected that state judges might represent provincial interests, South Australian Premier Charles Kingston countered that Commonwealth appointees would equally be suspected of a centralising bias – a prediction thoroughly vindicated by history, so much so that no High Court justice has ever been appointed from his state. Meanwhile, the original Court’s elegant federalist balance was destroyed in the 1920 Engineers case, cementing what would become a Canberra-dominated faux federation. Because section 74 of the Constitution insulated inter se constitutional questions from Privy Council appeal without High Court leave, the centralising Court was effectively immune from any correction.

This raises the ultimate constitutional dilemma: when the political class controls both the parliamentary caucus and the appointment of the judicial umpire that polices its power, where is the institutional counterweight?

The answer lies in the Federation debates of 1891. Kingston drafted a provision ensuring that no federal bill could receive assent if a referendum were demanded by one-third of either House, by two state legislatures, or by a petition of 20,000 qualified electors.

Deakin grasped its immense significance. At the 1891 Convention, he acknowledged that under such a system – akin to the Swiss model – electors would become the true ‘masters of the situation’, holding power 24/7 rather than surrendering it between elections. Deakin’s sole objection—unjustified, in my view – was that direct democracy contradicted responsible government. Whatever validity that claim had in 1891, it has vanished today. When rigid caucus voting and cartel politics have effectively destroyed responsible government, Deakin’s assumption collapses. Apart from its numbers determining who wins government, the House of Representatives is usually a totally useless and expensive rubber stamp, a barnacle on the taxpayer. This brings us to the remedy now championed by Pauline Hanson and One Nation: binding citizen-initiated referendums.

The idea is not an alien populist import; it was conceived at the very birth of our Commonwealth by Kingston. Kingston proposed the shield – the power of citizens to veto bad laws passed by Canberra.

Pauline Hanson goes one better. She provides both the shield and the sword: empowering citizens not only to reject political class overreach, but to initiate reforms Canberra refuses to touch. It is the single structural reform capable of halting our drift down the Argentine path, breaking the monopoly of the political class, and ensuring that Australians become in fact what they are in legal fiction: the sovereign masters of their own country. With this, Pauline Hanson will save the nation.