Parliament is recalled, there is to be a Royal Commission, and, for so many Australians, life marches on.
The truth is that we live in a very dangerous time – one that, as a nation, we are not at all prepared for.
This reality, irrefutable as it is in the wake of recent events, should compel proactivity from our leaders.
Instead, Australia floats adrift.
Largely, this is due to Anthony Albanese, whose talents as a party room operative are indisputable but whose sense for geopolitics is non-existent.
Our now-prime minister’s long parliamentary career has seen him spend years as Manager of Opposition Business and Leader of the House, organising Labor’s factions and working with parliamentary procedure.
Whilst Mr Albanese has held these roles, as well as ministerial portfolios centred on local government, transport and communications, neither Kevin Rudd nor Julia Gillard placed him anywhere near foreign affairs, defence, immigration or trade.
The reason for his isolation is now quite clear.
Since its election in 2022, the Albanese government has demonstrated a consistent inability to respond strategically to emergent international developments.
Now, in the wake of October 7, Australia recognises a State of Palestine.
Historically, Palestine stands out as an arable region nestled between the Nile and Euphrates, which great, ancient empires have sought to control.
Today, it remains opaque under even the international law standards codified in the 1930s as to whether Palestine meets the requirements for statehood – something that, surely, Penny Wong was cognisant of when she voted to admit Hamas’ Gaza to the United Nations.
Owing to its Middle Eastern positions, as well as its failure to engage smartly with Donald Trump and the policies of his second administration, the Albanese government has hindered Australia’s relationship with the United States.
The incredible abduction of Nicholas Maduro, as well as President Trump’s even more incredible rhetoric concerning Greenland (itself a territory belonging to a European, Christian nation whose Crown sovereignty predates the discovery of America by several centuries), suggests that the West’s once ever-ready hegemon is determined to reevaluate its strategic priorities.
So too has Canberra met Beijing’s untrammelled aggression in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea with what feels like little more than indifference.
In February 2025, the Chinese Task Group 107 sailed through Australia’s exclusive economic zone in the Tasman Sea to conduct surprise live-fire drills off Hobart’s coast.
Richard Marles assuredly told us that “there was never any prospect of people being in danger” and that Beijing’s operations were “compliant with international law” – even though 49 flights, all carrying Australian passengers, needed to be hurriedly rerouted.
All this cannot be ignored – and nor can the deal, originally conceived during President Trump’s first term, that last year saw Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company invest US$100 billion to build new fabrication plants in America.
If the prideful Xi Jinping, now an elderly man, invades Taiwan, and the United States does not answer the call, where does that leave Australia?
There is, moreover, a further aspect to the Albanese government’s geopolitical ineptitude: it relies upon foreign affairs dominating the national conversation, so as to distract from its own domestic policy failings.
At first, this political sleight of hand is in the minds of those who peddle it a convenience that is seemingly without cost.
But there is a cost.
The cost is indiscriminate immigration, undertaken chiefly for electoral advantage and ignorantly predicated upon the assumption that multiculturalism is an equal of, even a competitor to, Australian sovereignty and the rule of law.
The cost is also lost time: time in which good public policy can be developed and implemented, productivity increased, security strengthened and, above all, national identity and purpose defined.
In Australia, we are spectators to the greatest, most inconceivable arms race humanity has ever known, a race that is now between the United States and China.
Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, quantum computing and autonomous warfare are silently redefining global civilisation.
At the same time as these disruptive strides, a kind of theistic reactionism has crystallised across the West, and this has served to compound our present societal divisions, whether intentionally or not.
The theistic quality to this reactionism is a reminder that the animating force of geopolitics is culture, a point I will revisit.
And all this, while, on the home front, house prices are ten, twenty, thirty times that of wages, natural resources are squandered, productivity and standards of education are in collapse, censorship is increasing, and government expenditure is reaching obscenity.
As for our defence personnel, after enduring years of civilian-led criticism, they must feel like unappreciated shadows of their former selves.
Those who consider Australia an opponent will not wait politely before striking until we are in a position of strength.
The dangers of our time cannot be overstated.
The good news is that it is not beyond us to turn around our national story.
The simplest first step we can take is ending our decadent obsession with pseudo-sociology: race politics, gender politics, critical theories and other radical ideologies that find their lifeforce in Marxism and postmodernism, doctrines that the twenty-first century is quickly rendering obsolete.
Then, with the national zeitgeist in focus, we can undertake a series of reforms that are in essence pragmatic, not political.
There must be widespread economic restructuring, right from land asset policies to trade, so that GDP through entrepreneurship can increase, debt can roll back, and the burden that is tax can lift.
Bureaucratic red tape and government expenditure must be slashed, on the provision that efforts are undertaken to stably reemploy the affected into national projects and the private sector.
Our borders must once again tighten, and, in mathematical terms, immigration levels must be considerably reassessed.
It is a federation principle that the Commonwealth of Australia have at its disposal, in the words of Sir Henry Parkes, “one great federal army”.
The capabilities and morale of the Australian Defence Force must be a chief concern of ours, as must recruitment into that force.
The ever-pagan Cult of Net Zero, led by its high priesthood of lobbyists, must be shelved for what it is: a superstition of a bygone and confused age.
Rather, the national interest demands that we have coal, solar, nuclear, gas, batteries, rare earth minerals – as much energy as is possible to power productivity into the one sector that our declining birth rate can sustain at scale: advanced technology.
Suddenly, with our house in order, we begin to look geopolitically useful.
Be assured that it is not outside the legislative power of the Albanese government to do any of this; it is outside its imagination and competency.
As world tensions escalate, Anthony Albanese is not the prime minister this country needs.
That is a fact in its own right, rather than an argument that his replacement should be one person or another.
However, it is beyond doubt that had the Coalition been elected last May, Peter Dutton – who had been a former defence minister, a former home affairs minister, and a former immigration minister – would have done a better job of steering us through the geopolitical tumults we now face.
We get what we vote for, and what the majority of us voted for has proved itself to be recklessly ignorant.
My last point is, as promised, on culture.
Culture provides us with the “why”; without the “why”, no one has cause to find a “how”.
Recently, I came across some fascinating Taoist literature from the fourth century BC, one teaching belonging to which is that tradition without virtue is like a flower without its roots: it withers and dies.
In our dangerous time, our challenges are not merely mechanical; they cannot alone be fixed by balancing numbers on pages and attaining life’s comforts.
It is virtue – authenticity, wisdom, courage – that is needed by our leaders, that Australia now depends upon, and that we must begin to vote for.
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