Opinions: Are we Australians better off than three years ago?

Get the feeling these days that you don’t know what’s good for you, but others who are so much smarter have the answer, asks Mike O’Connor.

Donald Trump (left) successfully exploited the record of incumbent president Joe Biden.

Sometime over the next few months you are likely to be asked if you are better off now than you were three years ago.

Donald Trump asked a similar question of American voters, and we know how they answered, and while we have no way of knowing if Peter Dutton will pose the same question to us prior to next year’s federal election, I’d be surprised if he didn’t.

So as the lazy, hazy days of summer holidays roll on, there should be time to contemplate an answer.

Unless you live off the grid in a mud hut then your electricity bills are a lot higher than they were in 2021, in spite of that now infamous hand-on-heart promise by Anthony Albanese that they would drop by $275.

My wife has just come from grocery shopping. “Everything keeps going up,” she said as she dumped the carry bags on the kitchen bench.

Inflation has driven the cost of food, clothing and housing skywards, and on this basis alone the chances are you are worse off, particularly if you are parents with dependent children.

How are those kids doing at school? Let’s hope they are excelling, but it’s more likely they are failing to achieve their potential as the nation’s overall scholastic performance has continued to slide, thanks to flawed syllabuses and the controlling influence of the teachers’ unions.

Many of our young people have now abandoned their vision of home ownership and resigned themselves to a lifetime of renting unless their parents are in a position to offer financial help.

It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse, and the flood of immigrants over the past three years has pushed demand and prices higher while the iron grip of the construction unions in Queensland has added hundreds of thousands of dollars to apartment prices.

Feel safer in your home than you did three years ago? Probably not. Were Jewish places of worship being firebombed and were Jews frightened to leave their homes three years ago? We know the answer.

Scratching your head at the puerile antics of politicians sitting in the Senate in recent years and wondering how they ever got endorsed and just who it is in Australia that they are representing? You are not alone.

Alternative prime minister Peter Dutton (left) with incumbent Anthony Albanese

Some things you can measure in dollar terms and with statistics; others are more difficult to quantify but just as real.

Get the feeling these days that you don’t know what’s good for you, but others who are so much smarter have the answer, so sit down, shut up and let your betters run your life?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers keeps telling us that spending lots of borrowed money is a good thing, and that handouts are sound policy, and that everything will be hunky dory while the economy stagnates. To question this is to be branded an economic illiterate who just isn’t smart enough to see The Big Economic Picture.

Energy Minister Chris Bowen belittles anyone who questions his multibillion-dollar rose-tinted vision of solar and wind power.

There is no debate, just a sneer at the likes of us who would dare to point to developments overseas which fly in the face of his dogma.

We don’t belong to the political elite. We just don’t get it, an arrogance so much on display in last year’s Voice to Parliament referendum.

Did you think three years ago that your federal government would fund an Environmental Defenders Office to use the legal system to block approved gas projects worth billions to the economy, and create false Indigenous fairy stories to try and achieve this?

A judge recently ordered it to pay $9m in court costs to gas explorer Santos for doing just that.

It will be hot this summer, and there will be bushfires, and people like me will call it typical Queensland weather and be branded climate change deniers. We just don’t get it. We’re too dumb to see the Big Climate Picture.

The forces of woke have thrived over the past three years, but there are glimmers of hope, as Australian Venue Co discovered when it tried to ban Australia Day celebrations in more than 200 pubs.

The non-elites made their feelings known, and showed they were becoming less afraid to denounce hypocrisy, self-serving cant and intellectual pretentiousness for what it is.

Better off now than you were three years ago? You be the judge.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (centre) flanked by ministers (from left) Chris Bowen, Jim Chalmers, Richard Marles, Penny Wong and Tony Burke