For twenty years, the political class—Labor, Liberal, doesn’t matter—has abandoned the bedrock principles that once made Australia the envy of the world: limited government, low taxes, individual freedom, and personal responsibility.
What we’ve got now is a bloated, debt-riddled nanny state that’s left us weaker, poorer, and stripped of the liberties our forebears fought for.
Let's start with the social media age crackdown.
Remember when the internet was the wild west of free speech? Not anymore. The eSafety Commissioner—unelected, unaccountable—now polices what your kids can see online.
Platforms are forced to demand ID for accounts, effectively banning under-16s from X, TikTok, or Instagram.
This isn’t about “protecting children”; it’s about control.
The same bureaucrats who can’t keep paedophiles off the streets and let kids decide they are transgender, want to decide what a 15-year-old can read.
It’s the thin end of the wedge—today it’s age verification, tomorrow it’s a social credit score. Limited government? Try total government.
Then there’s the COVID-19 lockdowns—the greatest assault on freedom in living memory. Dan Andrews turned Victoria into a police state: curfews, 5km travel limits, playgrounds taped off like crime scenes. Queensland’s Palaszczuk locked borders tighter than Fort Knox.
And the federal Liberals? Morrison threw billions at JobKeeper while rubber-stamping state tyranny.
Small businesses were crushed—cafés, gyms, tradies—while Coles and Woolies raked it in.
The mental health toll? Skyrocketing youth suicide, domestic violence, and a generation of kids robbed of two years of education. All for a virus with a 99.97% survival rate for under-70s.
Responsibility? The state took it all and gave us house arrest in return.
Now consider the national debt. When Howard left office in 2007, Australia had zero net debt and a $20 billion surplus. Today? Over $1.2 trillion in gross debt—$50,000 for every man, woman, and child.
The interest bill alone is $22 billion a year—more than we spend on defence.
Labor’s racked up $900 billion since 2022, but let’s not kid ourselves: the Liberals never seriously tried to stop the spending spree that began with Pink Batts, school halls and Giving a Gonski.
Low taxes? Forget it. The tax-to-GDP ratio is at GFC highs, and bracket creep is silently pushing tradies into the 45% marginal rate. Every dollar borrowed is a future tax on your kids.
And the kicker? The almost total political dominance of the left. And little wonder when the Liberal Party isn’t Liberal anymore—it’s Labor Lite.
Net Zero by 2050? That’s a $1 trillion wealth transfer from workers to green grifters. The Voice referendum was defeated, but the cultural Marxists didn’t miss a beat—now it’s “truth-telling” commissions and UNESCO heritage listings for Uluru.
Universities churn out activists, not thinkers. The ABC is a taxpayer-funded propaganda arm. Even the Business Council pushes ESG nonsense.
The Overton window has shifted so far left that defending biological reality gets you cancelled.
The result? A nation of dependents. Home ownership for under-35s has collapsed. Real wages are stagnant. Energy prices are through the roof thanks to renewables madness. We’re importing doctors and engineers because our schools teach gender theory instead of STEM.
Freedom’s been traded for safety. Responsibility’s been replaced by entitlement.
This is no longer the country of shared values that our diggers fought for.
It’s time to demand a return to first principles: slash the public service, cut taxes, deregulate, and let people live. The alternative? More debt, more control, and a generation that’s never known the beauty of real liberty.
Thought for the Day
"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." Martin Luther King Jr.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
