After four years away, it first hit me how much Australia had changed when I landed in Sydney and had to sit through Qantas’s routine acknowledgment of country upon landing.
As seven of my great grandparents were born in Australia, and the other one in New Zealand, it grated on me. I can’t obtain a passport from any other country through lineage; as far as I’m concerned, I’m indigenous to Australia.
Leaving the airport a little later I saw a new sign, Welcome to Gamay, confirming that virtue-signalling had truly ramped up in my absence. Flicking on the ABC a little later I noticed the local news bulletin was for Dharug Country.
Australia’s embrace of woke ideology was even starker for me coming from the US, where for all the Democratic Party’s new-found zeal for extreme racial and sexual politics, a few things remained off limits in the interests of national unity. Joe Biden would never have addressed the nation in front of multiple flags and I never heard one welcome to country anywhere during the Biden administration, a practice that could also be applied in the US, with its numerous Native American nations.
Indeed, in the US, veteran comedian Bill Maher, a long-time Democrat, regularly lampoons a practice seemingly unique to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. “Where they say, I’m standing on land that was stolen from the proud Indigenous people of the Chumash tribe,” Mr Maher joked in one of his monologues last year, “I say give it back or shut the f. k up.”
The same criticism could be levelled here, but it rarely is. The furore over the Anzac Day booing should’ve been an opportunity for the Coalition to decry the divisive ritual, which Australians have already indicated they overwhelmingly reject considering the voice referendum.
If only Marcia Langton’s warning in this newspaper that welcomes to country would cease following a resounding no vote had actually come to pass!
Last week I happened on a trans rights protest in Melbourne, where maybe a few hundred masked, furious far-left agitators screamed abuse at police, who had even shut off Bourke St for their dummy spit. I can’t recall anything so feral in my time in Washington, which consistently votes 93 per cent Democrat.
Australia has changed dramatically in the few years I was away, certainly more than any time in my lifetime. The hubris of the political, media and academic classes has become so manifest.
Australians have endured the biggest decline in living standards since World War II, as consumer prices soared, exceeded only by the explosion in the cost of housing. Living standards have crashed for the typical family more than in any other OECD nation since 2022.
Over the past few years the currency has steadily crashed against the US dollar, the pound and the euro, as the China-powered resource boom that’s greased government coffers for 20 years has begun its decline.
The old economic models would have heralded a boom for exports, but we don’t make anything anymore.
Victoria, once a manufacturing and cultural powerhouse, has become the epicentre of dysfunction. The state’s fiscal position is far worse now than in the Kirner years of the early 1990s, practically necessitating federal intervention at some point.
With barely any scrutiny, the Victorian parliament has recently made “severely ridiculing” sexual or racial groups a criminal offence, a law contrary to even the most de minimis notions of free speech and one guaranteed to become an arbitrary cudgel to destroy the lives of politically disfavoured individuals.
Yet despite all these signs of economic and cultural decline, voters have just endured the most uninspiring election campaign in memory. The only options are more of the same: more regulation, bigger government and a bipartisan dedication to net zero, which even Tony Blair has realised is economic madness.
The Coalition, supposedly the party of small government, didn’t have the courage to commit to indexing the income tax scales, something most other mature nations do; it also appears ashamed of reductions in spending proposed a decade ago that are far more necessary today.
Labor, unsatisfied with the extra billions bracket creep brings every year, is even trying to legislate a world-first tax on unrealised capital gains in superannuation that will ultimately see more money ploughed into housing. No wonder the number of bright young Australians leaving has been increasing, adding to the pool of a million-plus who live and work overseas and who are less and less likely to return, except perhaps at retirement.
Australia is on the road to becoming a pleasant place for rich people to retire on the beach.
Wrenching the country away from this path won’t be easy, but tearing apart an already fraying social fabric with hundreds of thousands of new immigrants every year is not the way to go.
It’s common to exaggerate Canberra’s influence but in two areas it wields huge power: taxation and immigration. Both have become excessive, and without a major reduction in each the nation’s steady decline will continue.
The second-rate people Donald Horne said run Australia are rapidly running out of luck.
In the 1980s Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, once said Australia was in danger of becoming the poor white trash of Asia. For decades we proved him wrong, rocketing up the global league tables for incomes and quality of life.
Unless our political system throws up some charismatic reforming leaders soon, capable of making tough decision, he’ll ultimately be proved right.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
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