The official opening of the new Western Sydney Airport is a good time to reflect on the legacy of the Abbott government and the importance of actually making decisions and getting things done.

Successive governments had been talking about Sydney’s second airport since the early 1970s. The Whitlam government had announced that it would be built at Galston, only to give up in the face of sustained community opposition. The Hawke government had identified Badgerys Creek as a suitable site but, beyond some land resumption, didn’t proceed further. The Howard government semi-committed to building at Badgerys but, once more, the second Sydney airport project foundered in the face of the usual complaints about aircraft noise and NIMBYism. I recall the party room debate where at least one outspoken supporter of a new airport appealed to the then PM not to leave him high and dry with his constituents by reneging on any commitment.

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Nothing changes a country for better or for worse like migration. Australia’s early settlers created a country that was a pioneer of democracy with the world’s highest standard of living. Our post-war migrants, many refugees from war-torn Europe, worked hard in factories, farms and national development projects like the Snowy scheme and revelled in being described as “new Australians”—a term that Sir Frank Lowy said filled him with gratitude because it meant that, finally, he lived in a country where he belonged.

People who work hard and pay taxes; who embrace our language, our history and our way of life; who integrate from day one and who assimilate as quickly as possible, should always be welcome here. Indeed, they’re precisely the people who’ve made modern Australia great: a country with an indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character, starting with the settlers and continuing with people from all over the world who came here to join us, not change us, because they liked what they’d heard and seen and wanted to be part of it.

But rather than join Team Australia, too many people today are simply living in Hotel Australia and taking advantage of the facilities, especially the ability to work for extended periods of time, send remittances to family back home, and skip from visa to visa without necessarily ever becoming Australian citizens; or, if they do, without taking seriously the words of the citizenship oath: “from this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey”. Pretty obviously, anyone who believes in death to the infidels, a global caliphate, sharia law—or the leading role of the Communist Party for that matter—couldn’t take that oath in good conscience and can’t live happily in a liberal pluralist democracy.

The Bondi massacre is simply the worst manifestation of our country’s recent negligence in keeping migration under strict control—with one shooter coming here as a student in the late 90’s and remaining on a succession of visas; and the other, his son, born here and educated here but without ever embracing the fair-go-for-all that’s at the heart of Australia at its best.

Whether it’s an economically suicidal energy policy, its reluctance to stand up to intimidation from Beijing, and—especially—its mass migration policy, the Albanese government has been complicit in changing Australia for the worse. Was its bizarre early insistence that inadequate gun control (not Islamist fanaticism) was to blame for the Bondi massacre just a sustained failure to understand what the wrong sort of migration is doing to our country—or was it evidence of a desire to change our country by stealth, diluting and ultimately eliminating our core Anglo-Celtic culture (even though it’s the world’s most welcoming) and our foundational Judaeo-Christian heritage (even though it’s the world’s most universal)?

Because it was such a dismal milestone in our decline, for millions of Australians the Bondi massacre inspired a determination to retake control of our country. Early in the new year, in almost his first words as Liberal leader, Angus Taylor declared that migration numbers were too high and migration quality was too low. One of his first policy commitments was to an enforceable Australian values statement, to which all long term visa applicants would have to subscribe, with deportation for any serious failure to live up to it. Then, in his Budget reply, he said that only Australian citizens would henceforth be eligible for most welfare benefits as part of his overall commitment to put Australia first.

Now, he’s released further key elements of the Liberal-National Coalition’s immigration policy: ending temporary graduate visas, because over 50 per cent of overseas students never leave; dramatically cutting student visas, because most overseas students are coming for work and residency, not education; making it harder to apply for asylum onshore, because this has become a racket that’s exploited by unscrupulous people and their lawyers to stay here indefinitely; deporting immediately all non-citizens who’ve exhausted their rights of appeal; and requiring all who want to change their visa status to do so from outside the country. But for people with a definite job offer from a specific employer at above market wages, there will actually be more visas because truly skilled migrants boost our prosperity from day one. Together, these changes should reduce net overseas migration from record levels of about 300,000 a year (on a per capita basis, the highest in the world), to 100,000 initially, before stabilising at about the level of the Howard years. The Coalition hasn’t just railed against excessive migrant numbers, putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and straining both infrastructure and social cohesion, but provided a considered, costed mechanism to bring numbers down.

John Howard famously declared: “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come”. Twice now, Coalition governments have ended waves of illegal migration by boat—something no other governments have managed to achieve. Since then, out-of-control legal migration has become the business model for colleges selling work rights in the guise of education, and businesses that would rather import cheap labour than pay and train local workers. And because Labor regards recent migrants as its vote bank, only the Coalition can be trusted to get this right.

Is Australia ready for the war over Taiwan that Kevin Rudd has said has a one-in-three chance of happening within three years? The invasion that would almost certainly mean that all our exports to China stop, that all our imports from China stop, that our export income and our fuel supplies almost immediately dry up, and—quite possibly—that there are missile strikes on Australia itself against which we currently have almost no air defences whatsoever. And that’s before we’re called upon to join any American action in defence of Taiwan which could readily see combat losses on a scale unseen since World War Two.

Successive governments bear a great deal of blame for a decade of economic stagnation, societal fragmentation and strategic drift—underpinned by a deep loss of national self-confidence. A Taiwan crisis could turn national decline into an existential challenge if we turn out to lack the resilience to resist sustained economic and military pressure.

For at least five years now, Australian leaders have solemnly intoned that we face the worst strategic situation since the late 1930s, while taking almost no serious steps to deal with it. If anything, over the past five years, our military capability has been cannibalised for AUKUS submarines that will arrive long after the period of peak danger; our economic vulnerability to Chinese supply chains has increased; and our national torpor towards stirring ourselves for our own protection has deepened.

After a generation of brainwashing that Australia exists on stolen land, opinion polls show that about half of young Australians don’t believe our country is worth defending and would not fight for Australia should we be attacked. What’s perhaps even worse, after telling us that our strategic circumstances are alarming, our leaders then reassure us that there’s really nothing to worry about because war would be in no one’s interests—even though the real wars that are already taking place around the world, the shooting wars in Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, plus the grey zone war already being waged against Taiwan, show that economic logic and rational calculation alone do not determine the fate of nations.

The alarm needs to be sounded now—repeatedly and vigorously—if at the eleventh hour we are to ready ourselves militarily, economically and, perhaps most importantly, psychologically, for a potential struggle ahead. Preferably to avoid it altogether but, if not, to survive it as a sovereign independent nation, in the same way our forebears endured and triumphed in the epic struggles of the past. After all, the best way to keep the peace is to be ready to resist, because weakness is provocative. It’s not wishful thinking that deters aggression but fear that the price of aggression is just too high.

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There can be no disagreement with the proposition that, after 1788, and especially during the periods of pastoral expansion, there was much conflict between the original inhabitants of Australia and the incoming British settlers. But that’s not actually what’s at issue today. What’s at issue is whether this frontier bloodshed should properly be described as a war, and whether its commemoration should take place at the Australian War Memorial.

My short answer is “no” and “no”—but neither answer is meant to minimise the hardships imposed upon the first Australians, nor to diminish the importance of Australia’s indigenous heritage. Modern Australia has an indigenous heritage, a British foundation, and an immigrant character. It’s the working out of these elements that’s shaped our national story and it’s their evolving relationship that builds the bonds that must exist between us all as Australians.

Thankfully, our country’s modern story is one of cooperation and partnership between Australians old and new, at least as much as it is one of division and conflict. Modern Australia’s first leader was instructed by the British government to “live in amity” with its native peoples. For his time, Governor Phillip was remarkably liberal and humane. When speared in the shoulder at Manly Cove in the search for Bennelong, he put it down to a misunderstanding and declined the show of punitive force that might have been expected at that time. For all the initial gulf between them, there seems to have been a genuine friendship between Phillip and Bennelong. And if Bennelong represented cooperation, between the Australia that was building and the Australia that was changing, while Pemulwuy represented conflict, it’s worth noting that Governor King described the outlaw warrior as a “brave and independent character” as well as a “terrible pest to the colony”

.It’s near-inconceivable that there would not have been conflict between nomadic hunters, on the one hand; and, on the other, settlers with herds, crops, houses and fences. It was to quell further disturbances against farms on the Hawkesbury, that Governor Macquarie ordered a column of troops to sweep the Cumberland Plain, resulting in the first recorded massacre, near Appin in 1816, in a probably unprovoked dawn attack on a camp site, that left over a dozen dead. But this was the same Macquarie who also instituted an annual feast for Aboriginal leaders, and established the Native Institution at Parramatta, whose most distinguished student was the daughter of Yarramundi, who went on to marry a convict and farm substantial properties in western Sydney.

Likewise at Hobart, largely peaceful coexistence only degenerated into fighting once the settlement went beyond housing convicts and hosting sealers to expansion into the interior. In the 1820s, Tasmania endured what were described, even then, as the “Black Wars”, with frequent attacks on isolated shepherds and homesteads, culminating in a declaration of martial law and the so-called “black line”, where some 2000 soldiers and settlers attempted to corral the resistance.

The historian Henry Reynolds says that the martial law declaration plus the scale of settler casualties—almost 200 dead in a population of scarcely 20,000; with perhaps three times as many Aboriginal deaths—justifies it being called a war. On the other hand, benign interactions continued, with the widow Sarah Birch intervening on at least two occasions to save the warrior Kickerterpoller from prison or execution. And Governor Arthur, along with most of the citizens of Hobart, received the remaining warriors with honour after the eventual truce.

Although the colonial governors invariably stressed that Aboriginal people had all the rights of British subjects, often enough, on the frontiers of settlement, this was much more in theory than in practice. The most notorious atrocity took place at Myall Creek in northern NSW, where a party of stockmen murdered in cold blood up to 30 Aboriginal men, women and children. There was a sequel though. The perpetrators were put on trial; and after the first jury refused to convict there was a second trial with the new judge declaring it was an outrage crying out to heaven for justice. Against the weight of colonial opinion, seven white men were hanged for the murder of black people. In 1838.

This regrettably-rare show of British justice may have driven the worst of the violence underground. A decade on, near Grafton, a settler, Coutts, almost certainly killed some two dozen people with poisoned flour. He, too, was put on trial, but escaped conviction because the only witnesses were Aboriginal people, who were then regarded as incapable of testifying. And it was a further decade before this anomaly was fixed.

Perhaps the worst violence was in outback Queensland, where the native mounted police, largely recruited from distant parts, were deployed to “disperse” possibly hostile gatherings. In many cases, which seem to have been unrecorded as a matter of policy, this seems to have involved indiscriminate killing. In one of his early works, based on contemporary newspaper reports, Reynolds tallies close to 1000 settlers killed in north and central Queensland over some six decades to 1900 and speculates that perhaps 10,000 Aboriginal people would have been killed in retaliation.

The Massacre Map, that academics maintain at Newcastle University, claims that some 11,000 Aboriginal people were killed in more than 400 massacres around the country. Because much of this is based on subsequent oral history, it’s probably best described as an educated guess. Even so, in many parts of Australia, such as around Bathurst, in Gippsland, western Victoria, and the Kimberleys, the early years of settlement could be deadly for Aboriginal people who refused to embrace the new order.

What Reynolds calls “this whispering in our hearts”, settler disquiet at the gulf between humane theory and outback practice, eventually replaced dispersal with protection—but not before one last disgraceful episode, the Coniston massacre of 1928, when an attack on a stockman triggered the slaughter of perhaps 50 people; a slaughter subsequently whitewashed by an official enquiry. Remarkably, Senator Jacinta Price’s grandfather, who’d fled the massacre as a teenager, subsequently worked with the army during World War Two and then helped to found the Yuendumu mission.

If the undoubted violence of those much harsher times really constituted a war between two peoples, especially a genocidal one, it’s hard to explain the eagerness of Aboriginal men to join their fellow Australians in the First AIF. At least a thousand Aboriginal men talked their way past racial bans on recruitment, with up to 30 of them decorated for valour. Hundreds were killed in action, including a son of William Cooper, who cited these deaths for King and country in his bid for Aboriginal people’s full civic rights. It’s this Aboriginal contribution to Australia’s military campaigns, well before official discrimination ended, that has long been remembered and justly celebrated at the Australian War Memorial.

The War Memorial was the brainchild of Charles Bean, to honour the men whose exploits he’d chronicled, in the official history of the Great War. What these men did, he wrote, nothing now can alter: “the good, the bad, the greatness and smallness of their story will stand… It rises, as it will always rise, above the mists of ages, a monument to great-hearted men, and for their nation a possession forever”.

That’s been the role of the War Memorial ever since: to chronicle, to mourn, occasionally to admit and to explain, but above all to honour the deeds of the Australian armed forces, of the nation-in-uniform. It’s been intended as a place of unity and pride; rather than division and shame; a place to record and to commemorate what Australians have done together to defend our Commonwealth, to support our allies, and to uphold our values.

It’s never been intended as a place to note, other than perhaps in passing, the fights of some Australians against other Australians; and even then, say with the conscription debates, only in the context of our military campaigns. If the undoubted bloodshed between settlers and tribespeople is to be included, because the critics of colonialism now choose to characterise much of our history as a “war” between the British Empire and “first nations”, what about the fights between “first nations” which were frequent and often deadly. How could events such as the Eureka Stockade or even the apprehension of the Kelly gang be excluded, as at least they involved official direction, in a “war memorial” that would then have evolved from honouring our soldiers to questioning the character of the nation for which they fought?

Of course, it has to be accepted that we let ourselves down as a country, and betray our best ideals, when we fail to confront the whole story of our past. For instance, even though the subject matter of the Brereton Report is far from the whole story of our Afghanistan campaign, however contested, it is a part of it. So that’s a possible blot on our honour as a nation, that can’t be ignored, even in a place dedicated to the ideals of duty, service, and sacrifice.

And yes, for too long, the bloodstained frontier was amnesed from our history, in what WEH Stanner called the “great Australian silence”. Yet given near universal official goodwill, and the abundance of practical cooperation between people unknown and numberless over generations, the explorers who could not have traversed territory unseen by British eyes without Aboriginal guides, the settlers who could not have farmed without Aboriginal help, all the Australians from mission times to these who’ve dedicated their lives to Aboriginal advancement—given all this, the contemporary clamour about invasion and cultural genocide is a pendulum swing way too far.

In any event, given that none of the participants in any frontier “war” had Australian uniforms or the authorisation of an Australian government, the place to recall and to regret is not here; perhaps it’s at the Australian National Museum, or perhaps at a new wing of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU as Henry Reynolds suggested recently. But not here.

Of course, Tongerlongeter is no less a part of our Australian story than Simpson with his donkey. Of course, we should admire the spirit with which he defended a doomed way of life. No less than the Anzac story, his belongs to all Australians, whether their ancestors have been here for tens of thousands of years, or whether they’ve just emerged from their citizenship ceremony.

The only question is: where should it be enshrined; and the answer should be: “further down the lake”.

The Twilight of Exceptionalism: The Liberal and Conservative Era 2013–22, Paul Kelly, Melbourne University Publishing, hardcover, 764 pages, released 31 July 2026.

Australia’s best ever political journalist has finally delivered his considered verdict on the most recent period of Coalition government. It’s a lament for the political failures of the conservative side of politics and the consequent declining fortunes of our country. The Twilight of Exceptionalism contrasts the successful politics and transformational economics of the Hawke-Keating-Howard era with the revolving door prime ministerships and largely timid policy-making of subsequent years.

While Paul Kelly is right to dwell on the added difficulties of governing in the era of 24/7 social-media-driven polarisation and outrage, is it really economic stagnation and social fragmentation that’s making government more difficult or is it poor leadership and flawed character that’s creating the conditions for a more rancorous public debate, the triumph of opposition-ism, and the end of any Australian economic and social miracle?

One of Kelly’s qualities as a writer and thinker is his determination to give credit where it’s due—plus his appreciation for the fact that real leadership means providing the country with what it needs rather than simply giving voters what they are presumed to want. Kelly laments the passing of an era when good policy ultimately made for good politics and puts it down to a more adversarial public culture, the decline of social capital, and the rise of the sovereign self.

Yet he also writes: “Leadership turbulence over the 2013-22 era was pivotal to the party’s present malaise since everything is ultimately sheeted to leadership”. With hindsight, the success of the Hawke-Keating reforms would seem to owe at least as much to the broad support of the then opposition as to the brilliance of Labor’s leaders. And if it were actually the good character and collegiality of the key people at the top of both the Hawke-Keating and the Howard-Costello governments that was at the heart of their success, compared with the poisonous rivalries that blighted the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era, then our national decline might be less set-in-concrete than it seems from a close study of Kelly’s insightful-yet-elegiac doorstopper of a book.

After one prime ministership that didn’t last a single term, another that ended in a second party room coup, plus a third in heavy electoral defeat, it was probably inevitable that Kelly would dwell on the Liberal-National Coalition’s political failures: mine to keep the party room numbers, Malcolm Turnbull’s to craft a credible “progressive” Liberalism, and Scott Morrison’s to better read the nation’s mood. Still, he abundantly acknowledges the era’s successes: stopping a wave of illegal migration-by-boat, something that no other Western government has achieved in recent times; scrapping the economy-jeopardising carbon and mining taxes and keeping government spending sufficiently-restrained to deliver significant tax cuts; navigating the same-sex-marriage debate via a plebiscite that didn’t exacerbate social divisions; and the AUKUS agreement for Australia to obtain a nuclear powered submarine deterrent, which (if it ultimately comes off) will forever-alter-for-the-better the otherwise ominous geo-politics of our region.

I should leave it to my Liberal successors to offer detailed commentary on Kelly’s assessment of their time at the top. Here’s one, though, that Kelly quotes with evident approval, from Peta Credlin: “In the end the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years were a dreadful disappointment because a government that should have been as good as John Howard’s turned out to be on a par with Malcolm Fraser’s, more Labor-lite than distinctively Liberal, at least once Abbott had gone.”

As for my time, Kelly is right to identify the 2014 budget as its defining moment. According to Kelly, “when Abbott and Joe Hockey came to office, they proceeded on the assumption that government restraint, pro-market economic policies and striving for a budget surplus to maximise private investment were still the accepted keys to the future without realising the world had changed”. But was it the world that had changed or was it, rather, that a cabinet cabal used the budget, and the Senate’s rejection of its significant economic reforms (such as the Medicare co-payment, raising the pension age, reducing the indexation of welfare benefits, and stopping school leavers from going straight on the dole) as a catalyst to destabilise the leadership?

In the decade to 2022, writes Kelly, “opponents and critics of the Liberal Party accumulated growing influence… industry superannuation funds, the… university sector, the rapidly expanding renewable industries, those with professional and financial ties to climate change action, the expansion of… public sector employees, the rise of a feminised workforce… and conspicuously the alienation of virtually the entire arts and cultural sector”. This is all undoubtedly true; yet the heavy defeat of the Voice—ferociously backed by the entire new left establishment—shows that the Australian people still have a strong conservative instinct when given the right leadership on the right issues.

At least as much as changes in the national mood, lack of conviction is at the heart of the Coalition’s failings. As Peter Dutton told Kelly in 2023, “from the time that Tony Abbott was deposed by Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberal Party hasn’t stood for any substantive policy formation… over the period from Abbott’s loss of leadership we allowed ourselves to be defined by our opponents”.

Kelly details the Turnbull-Morrison plotting that had begun even before the landslide 2013 election win, and that Julie Bishop joined towards the end of 2014. It’s noteworthy, though, how little each trusted the other. For instance, he quotes Turnbull’s 2023 observation that Morrison is “a very political person, even among politicians… capable of extraordinary deceitfulness”. Turnbull went on: “at different stages… Scott’s duplicity was audacious particularly in the lead up to when I challenged Abbott. Scott was literally going out there saying ‘I’m with the prime minister’ and at the same time he was organising numbers to support me…I’m afraid I don’t have the ethical gymnastic skills to do that”. In fairness to Morrison, Kelly then notes Turnbull’s tendency to patronise the people he worked with; and Morrison, to his credit, is generous about his immediate predecessor.

At the time, my view was that the best response to this internal unrest was getting on with governing. John Howard’s semi-public advice that I should have sacked Joe Hockey in favour of Turnbull, Kelly rightly rejects as impractical and futile—as if replacing a reforming treasurer with someone who was often uncomfortable being in the centre-right would have improved the prospects of the government.

My declaration to SBS on the last day of the 2013 campaign, about “no cuts to health, no cuts to education…” etc has been taken as the equivalent of Julia Gillard’s fatal commitment that “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”. In fact, the 2014 budget made no cuts to most spending (as opposed to reductions in the rate of growth), or changes to anything that had been subject to election commitments, because Hockey and I were almost paranoid about repeating Gillard’s mistake. The final 2014 budget out-year “cut” that the Coalition premiers vociferously condemned (to the Gillard/Gonski flagged increases in hospital and school spending) had been flagged (and duly attacked by Labor) during the election campaign.

A fairer assessment of the 2014 budget comes from the BCA head, Jennifer Westacott, who told Kelly in 2022: “If this country had done the things Tony Abbott wanted, we would be more prosperous, with higher productivity and a more workable tax system… He had a fundamental philosophy that we had to be a more competitive nation, that we wouldn’t succeed if the budget was bleeding. He believed that the federation had problems that needed fixing and he made substantial progress though it was unfinished. He felt fairness was driven by opportunity not just government propping up every aspect of society… I believe his prime ministership was much better than a lot of people credit but in the end he tried to do too much too soon”. If the Coalition’s period in office does actually turn out to be the twilight of exceptionalism, the 2014 budget was its last twinkling.

Kelly frequently quotes the “ever present” Howard to contrast the successes of his government with the comparative failure of all his successors. There’s no doubt that Howard is one of our greatest prime ministers. Perhaps the very best. But the better policy and political outcomes of his era may owe less to his skilful and sustained policy advocacy plus attentive management of the backbench than to the absence of a white-anting rival. Indeed, Peter Costello has never been given enough credit for his part in the Howard government’s success—which Peter Dutton nails with this 2024 observation to Kelly: “I don’t think Howard would have survived… if Turnbull had been there in the Howard years. Costello could easily have been a Turnbull figure but instead was a person of decency”.

On my notorious knighthood for Prince Philip, Kelly correctly discloses the advice from people close to the palace—that the Queen wanted it. Whether the subsequent fury reflected genuine popular revulsion against an out-of-touch leader, or media briefing by internal rivals is perhaps best left to readers’ judgment.

Kelly’s researches with senior military leaders and with Kim Beazley, our then-US ambassador, cast light on the Abbott government’s determination to punch-above-our-weight in the wider world, such as Australia’s role in military operations against Islamic State and refusal to take-for-granted impotence in the face of atrocities such as the downing of MH17. He judges that my initial push to get our next submarine off-the-shelf from Japan was always doomed, given the cargo-cult mindset of the South Australian Liberals who saw naval ship-building as their state’s economic salvation—but there’s no reason why the second batch of six subs couldn’t have largely been built in Adelaide; and had my plan proceeded, Australia would be getting the first of the new subs now.

His discussion of my attempt to amend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (outlawing speech that “offends, insults, humiliates or intimidates” on the basis of race) illustrates the tension between “policy” Kelly, who sincerely wants governments to advance the national interest; and “politics” Kelly, who’s critical of governments whose reach turns out to exceed their grasp. He cites the judgment of former ABC chairman and NSW judge Jim Spigelman, that section 18C went way too far in restricting free speech, to justify the attempt to amend it; yet it’s the government that gets the blame for failing to get it done rather than the Coalition premiers who attacked it, the backbenchers who reneged on a policy that had been taken to the election, and Turnbull who was exploiting the issue to stir up trouble, only later to have an unsuccessful go at it himself when he needed to placate more conservative MPs.

Indeed, that’s clearly one of the key obstacles to the policy reform Australia needs: the insistent demand for it from people who can never quite specify exactly what reform they want and who tend to reject whatever reform might ultimately be proposed as going too far, or not far enough.

Kelly strives to see the good in each of the three Coalition PMs before concluding that Morrison was the most “significant”, due to the gravity of the Covid crisis he had to deal with. He rightly identifies the Turnbull coup as the key cause of the Coalition’s failure to be a successful long term government while under-estimating, in my view, the hit to Liberal morale from the Morrison government’s Covid-era role in the greatest restrictions on freedom in Australia’s history.

For all their failings, I suspect that the longer the Albanese government lasts, the better all three Coalition governments will look. Partly, because popular frustration usually focuses on the current incumbent, but mostly because modern Labor’s infatuation with the politics of climate and identity makes it all-but-certain that our economic stagnation, societal fragmentation and strategic peril will worsen. Likewise, I’m confident that my government’s position on emissions, migration and national security is already being vindicated by events. It’s now clearer than ever that governments can’t indefinitely spend their way out of trouble, that only the private sector can create wealth, that Australia’s emissions obsession is hurting the economy for no environmental gain, and that countries must be selective about migrants’ values if they’re to keep their culture.

At the 2014 launch of Kelly’s earlier book, Triumph and Demise, about the rise and fall of Rudd-Gillard, I said that it was the mission of the Abbott government to show that the age of reform had merely been interrupted, not ended, and that the revolving door leadership was an aberration, not the new normal. Modern Australia’s first century was a time of almost incandescent progress. Likewise, from the late forties to the GFC was another spectacular advance. Since then, we’ve largely been drifting backwards. And because green-left Labor is incapable of meeting the reform challenge, that’s now Angus Taylor’s task; and for the country’s sake, let’s hope he can succeed in recreating the exceptionalism that’s made Australia-at-its-best the envy of the earth.

I think Kelly overstates Australia’s cultural shift to the left and understates the human factor in the nation’s relative successes and failures but he’s certainly penned what will long be the definitive political study of the Coalition’s near decade in office but not really in power.

That started in 1994 and 1995, with spending a week each year in and around Alice Springs; including long talks with Charlie Perkins, then one of our most senior Aboriginal leaders, and Pastor Paul Albrecht, whose family had helped to found the Hermannsburg mission. It continued with regular week-long trips to outback Australia, as employment minister in the Howard government, especially to Cape York; and as health minister, especially to the APY lands in South Australia, for which my departments had “whole of government” responsibility for co-ordinating federal services.

Early in 2008, after becoming shadow minister for indigenous affairs, I called Noel Pearson, confessed that I’d visited dozens of Aboriginal settlements over the years, but had hardly spent longer than 18 hours in any of them, and asked if he would sponsor longer trips where I could actually be useful as opposed to being a glorified tourist. I was very conscious of not being a “seagull”, the term I’d first heard years earlier in Wujal Wujal, to describe official visitors: “white guys, who fly in, shit on us, and then disappear”.

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“Far from being the tale of near-genocidal oppression, the better story of Australia is how a convict colony, within a century, not only had the world’s highest standard of living but was actually the world’s leading pioneer of liberal democracy.”

The history of nations, how it’s presented, and how it’s thought of, matters to countries and their citizens, no less than our own personal history matters to us as individuals. Just as it’s hard for individuals to think well of themselves if they’re ashamed of their past, it’s hard for countries to be strong and self-confident if they’re constantly self-flagellating over their alleged historical crimes. This is what Orwell was driving at when he said that he who controls the past controls the future.

And there’s no doubt that the past of countries like Britain, the United States, and Australia too, is now being comprehensively recast as a story of shame. Americans are expected to angst over slavery, even though they fought their bloodiest war to be rid of it. Britons are expected to angst over the empire, even though it was actually the Royal Navy that stamped out the transatlantic slave trade. And Australians are expected to fret over the dispossession of the original inhabitants, even though British settlement marked the arrival on an ancient continent of science, technology, the rule of law, and the notions of human rights that have eventually given Aboriginal people a vastly better life.

Blackening a country’s history is one of the most effective ways to undermine the morale of its people. That’s why it’s been so prevalent over the past few decades, as the left’s long march through the institutions has intensified.

The most recent academic history of Australia, published last November, opens by declaring that the traditional notion of settlement, as a largely peaceful expansion, is no less than the “founding lie” of modern Australia, masking what the author claims was a brutal conquest. Even though it was always official policy—albeit imperfectly observed—that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia should enjoy all the rights and protections of British subjects.

Far from being the tale of near-genocidal oppression, the better story of Australia is how a convict colony, within a century, not only had the world’s highest standard of living but was actually the world’s leading pioneer of liberal democracy. By 1860, the then-self-governing Australian colonies had universal male suffrage – some 60 years before Britain. By the 1890s, in South Australia, people of both sexes and all races could not only vote, but run for office too. And in one of its very first acts, in 1902, the new Australian Commonwealth granted all women the right to vote, almost 30 years before Britain.

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And yes, there was conflict on the frontiers of settlement. At Myall Creek, in northern NSW, a group of stockmen brutally murdered up to 30 Aboriginal men, women and children. But there was a sequel. Eventually, seven white men were hanged for the murder of black people—in Australia in 1838—at that time almost unparalleled in any settler society.

So here’s the problem: countries supposedly tainted by original sin, whether slavery, imperialism, or dispossession of the original inhabitants, fundamentally lack legitimacy. And a country-so-tainted can hardly have the right to defend itself or to keep its culture, even if the country in question has actually been so colour-blind that it attracts migrants from all over the world. And even if it’s actually the long Anglo-American ascendancy, and the post-war Pax Americana that’s created the world that, despite everything, remains more free, more fair, more safe, and more rich, for more people, than at any time in history.

What then, might those persuaded that their country’s history is shameful do by way of atonement?

Well, in Australia, they could seek to amend the constitution to give people with some Aboriginal descent more say than others over the government of the country. They could delegitimise the national flag by flying it co-equally with indigenous flags on all government buildings and at all civic occasions. They could begin all public speeches by acknowledging the traditional owners of “what always was and always will be” un-ceded land. They could change the school curriculum so that every subject, from maths to Latin, is taught from an indigenous perspective. They could invoke a climate crisis to close down our main exports and to hobble heavy industry. They could defund the armed forces now, while claiming to boost them in the far distant future. They could insist that gender is a social construct, rather than a function of biology, to confuse and subvert troubled adolescents.

But for those with a grudge against their own country, it’s sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures, that’s the surest and swiftest way to change and punish a place that’s irredeemably tainted by unforgivable sin. This is done in order to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judaeo-Christian foundational ethos (which is actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere) that today’s left-establishment finds so suffocating and judgmental. And it’s to encourage migrants to “other” themselves by funding ethnic activism under Orwellian slogans like “our diversity is our unity” or “our diversity is our strength”.

In this regard, migrants from Islamic countries are especially useful, because belief in a global caliphate, and the conviction that it’s the Koran rather than the legislature that validates law, starts to make pluralist democracy unworkable. To green-left, cultural-Marxist governments, mass migration from the “global south” is not a problem; it’s the plan. It’s the way for supposedly unjustly rich countries to atone for their white privilege and to apologise to poorer ones by becoming more like them.

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The following is the transcript of a speech I gave to graduates at the University of Austin. I hope it speaks to Australians and indeed all constituent peoples of Western Civilisation.

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As the smoke from budget week clears, one thing is obvious: the era of the uniparty is over. And not before time, as it’s been the Liberal Party’s political timidity that’s driven the rise of One Nation, with conservative voters despairing of ever again having a champion to vote for.

Until now. Because by committing a future Coalition government to ending bracket creep — taxation by stealth — Taylor has made the next election wealth creation versus wealth redistribution, thereby pitching the Liberals as the party of aspiration rather than the party of resentment.

I doubt Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have quite grasped the scale of their blunder, especially after stressing how much this budget is a reflection of “Labor values”. Higher taxes on property and heavier taxes on wealth creation are not just broken promises with no redeeming policy feature (and no exculpatory circumstances beyond their control). They’re an assault on the Australian dream that people who strive to get ahead should not be punished for their efforts and that people who “have a go” should get a “fair go” from government.

After pretending in 2022 to be “safe change” and in 2025 to be protection against cost of living increases, Albanese Labor has revealed its class war instincts as the party of ever bigger government set on redistributing wealth from owners to workers — as if workers have no aspiration to become owners too. It’s a contemporary reflection of his youthful conviction that “accumulated income in the form of capital is, for all socialists, at least part of the source of many social injustices”. By contrast, after a decade of avoiding “culture wars”, the Taylor-led Coalition is resolved to be a clear alternative, keeping government within limits and unleashing the talents of the Australian people, via our proven ability to drill, dig, and grow our way to prosperity.

The competing tax policies make this clear: Labor’s higher taxes on assets in breach of commitments made repeatedly at two elections; versus the Coalition’s promise to index personal income tax thresholds, a commitment that it considered but was not brave enough to make at last year’s election. Finally both parties are showing their real colours after a decade when they mostly tried to be a slightly more attractive version of the other side, with the Coalition just a little less enthusiastic than Labor for big government, climate action, and mass migration.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Coalition’s inability to decide whether it was for or against the politics of climate and identity; being against, then for, and then against Net Zero; and being concerned, then indifferent, before being concerned again, about record migration, that’s fueled the rise of political alternatives. Especially after the Bondi massacre confirmed to many Australians that the country we thought we knew was quickly slipping away; and which seems to have triggered the sudden surge in poll support for One Nation from single digits to roughly that of both major parties.

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One of the reasons why Aboriginal disadvantage is so intractable is that “culture” keeps getting in the way of addressing it. “Culture” means that we can no longer refer to the five-year-old brutally murdered in an Alice Springs town camp by her real name, the name that will be recorded in the death statistics. “Culture” means that we can’t even identify her apparent assailant or his criminal record, even though his name and his record was plastered all over the media, prior to a Tuesday court ruling that, likewise, now can’t even be mentioned.

Other than when it suddenly can no longer be ignored, Australia collectively turns away from the reality of life as it’s lived in much of remote Australia. Our instinctive tendency is to nod politely when the airline steward says we’re landing in Naarm or acknowledges Eora country. And to criticise anyone who questions the need for letting “uncle this” or “aunty that” open a civic occasion, often now with a lengthy claim about “un-ceded” land. Yet the elders to whom we are accustomed to pay respects and the “country” about which we’re glad to be sentimental, as the town camp killing shows, is hardly hospitable when vulnerable children need protection against predators.

Even to ponder the policy implications of this horrific death is frowned upon, because the victim was Aboriginal. From the Prime Minister down, officialdom has brushed away questions about how such a death could have happened on the grounds that local people need time to grieve. Yet when the child’s father was in gaol, and when the child’s mother seems to have been hosting a late night party when she disappeared, and when the local community seems to have been protecting the perpetrator at least initially, refusing to discuss any of this looks less like respecting the bereaved than protecting the complicit.

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Below are my remarks at the launch of one such school, St John Henry Newman College in Queensland.

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As PM, I reluctantly accepted the official advice that efficient global markets meant that maintaining 90 days supply of liquid fuels onshore was no longer necessary. But the global scramble for masks, surgical gowns, and vaccines during the pandemic made it obvious that, in an emergency, it would be every country for itself. In its wake, the Morrison government asked the Productivity Commission to consider our supply chain vulnerability but—remarkably—its report hardly mentioned fuel security; even though no country on earth is as dependent on fuel imports.

The Prime Minister’s begging tour around Asia shows just how exposed we are to any disruption in global fuel supply. The month’s supply of petrol, diesel, avgas and jet fuel that we supposedly had at the start of the Iran war included only about three weeks’ worth that was actually onshore. The rest was cargoes at sea that, in extremis could be sunk, or possibly diverted to other destinations in the event of a major threat to shipping.

Iran’s denial of freedom of navigation through the Straits did not interfere with the actual delivery of refined products to Australia so much as the delivery of crude oil to the Asian refineries we buy from. Even so, the pump price of diesel in Australia almost doubled, about 10% of our servos ran out of some or all stock due to panic buying, airlines started to cancel flights, and ports, mines, and farms suddenly had to reconsider their operations. While the Albanese government gave assurances that supplies were guaranteed until May, there could be no assurances beyond that because friendly countries (like Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia) could not be sure of their own stock and unfriendly ones (like China) had already suspended deliveries.

The Prime Minister’s “fuel diplomacy coup” in securing two extra deliveries, each of 100 million litres, sounded impressive but actually constituted less than two days’ total Australian consumption. What’s more, it bordered on deranged for the government to insist that further electrification was the long-term solution to the fuel crisis, even while the PM was pleading for extra petrol and diesel.

Here’s the key point: a conflict in East Asia—such as Beijing attempting to coerce Taiwan—would not just close down deliveries of crude oil; it would close down the deliveries of refined products too.

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Plainly, these are disordered times.

People-who-should-know-better think that humans can change the planet’s temperature, much like Canute’s courtiers thought he could order the tides. Parliaments declare that gender is whatever someone says it is, even for minors. A couple of years back, world leaders, even the pope, took policy advice from a disturbed teenager. Perhaps the weirdest manifestation of this cognitive dissonance is “Queers for Palestine”, passionate in their support of a place where they’d be at risk of a push from tall buildings.

It was Chesterton who wrote, “the disintegration of rational society started in the drift from the hearth and the family”. The solution, he said, “must be a drift back”.

The modern world, tends to overlook that every person’s first source of nourishment and support, the first foundation for meaning amidst chaos, is the family.

Especially today, families come in all shapes and sizes, and unconventional families need be no less loving. But whatever their make up, they need to be strong, for society’s sake, because family is where the instincts of support and solidarity that nations need are first learnt. It’s the experience of family that feeds Burke’s key insight, of society, as a “partnership, between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born”.

In this chain of existence, it’s our children that are the culmination.

Yet if, indeed, the greatest act of faith in yourself, your family, your country, and your culture is to seek renewal through having children, every Western country is in the grip of existential crisis.

Consider current birth rates: France, the US, and Australia, roughly 1.6; and Britain, 1.39. Then there’s Italy at 1.2 and Spain at 1.1. Hungary’s birth rate, that was just 1.2 in 2011, rose to 1.6 after a decade of pro-natalist policy, such as exempting larger families from tax, but has now fallen back to just 1.3, suggesting that it’s societal morale, as much as economics, behind individuals’ instinct to reproduce themselves.

Throughout the West, receiving migrants has replaced having children.

Britain, for instance, had virtually no net migration prior to 1990. In the nineties it averaged about 100,000 a year; in the noughties about 200,000 a year; in the 2010s about 300,000 a year; and in 2022 and 2023 it exploded to almost a million a year, before falling back.

Migration to the US, much of it irregular, has averaged about a million a year since the 1990s, but exploded during the Biden presidency when perhaps 10 million people are thought to have entered the country, mostly illegally from Mexico.

Even Australia, that’s long-had a formal immigration programme, running at about 100,000 a year from the 1950s through to the early noughties, and about 200,000 a year till the pandemic, has since seen numbers explode to about 400,000 a year.

There are many good arguments for migration. Certainly, in all the settler societies, there’d be no nation but for migration. Migration can bring in new skills. It can open our minds to new ideas and ease our fear of difference. And by giving newcomers the chance to make a better life for themselves and their families, it can add a humanitarian dimension to a nation’s story.

The supreme patriotism of people from obvious migrant backgrounds, such as the two last British Conservative leaders Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch, testifies to the gravitational pull of English-speaking civilisation.

But these days, the main justifications for immigration are that it’s needed to sustain an ageing population; and to fill the jobs that locals won’t do, or at least, not at current wage rates. Plus, in countries like Australia, Canada and Britain, that it builds multicultural diversity, even though this risks creating “a nation of tribes” and watering down national identity.

And there are two further factors in modern migration.

Cheap air travel and the internet mean that it’s possible more-or-less to live in two countries at once, mainly resident in the new country, but frequently in the old one too, to build a house for the extended family, or to maintain business contacts. Rather than joining Team Australia, for instance, some recent migrants are merely living in Hotel Australia and taking advantage of the facilities.

Then there’s Muslim migration.

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No one should have been unprepared for the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz because the Iranian theocracy has been threatening precisely this for nearly five decades. And no country should have been more alive to this peril than Australia—given that we run on diesel and have lately had scarcely 30 days supply of liquid fuels onshore.

With declining local oil production and the closure of local refineries ongoing since 2012, we’ve been in breach of our treaty obligation to hold stocks onshore sufficient for 90 days. The Gillard government concluded, back then, that large scale domestic storage was unnecessary thanks to efficient global markets. Although this worried me as PM, I did not buck the official advice. For a country that uses more diesel per person than any other, this was always risky, but it surely became negligent once the pandemic highlighted the fragility of global supply chains in any serious crisis.

So here we are, scarcely four weeks into the Iran war: with about 10% of our servos wholly or partially out of fuel; with about 30% of farmers worried they lack the diesel or the fertiliser to sow or harvest their crops; with flights starting to be cancelled; with miners and transport facilities fearful for their ongoing operations; with no Australian-flagged fleet of tankers that could be tasked with a fuel rescue mission; with no naval ships capable of helping to break any Iranian blockade; and with no Australian air power yet despatched to the Middle East to help the US-Israel campaign against an apocalyptic theocracy, even though the Straits will never be secure while it lasts.

There are even proposals for leveraging our gas exports to bludgeon fuel supplies from East Asian refineries (even though it’s hardly their fault that the Straits are impassable) rather than resolving to make the most of our potential as a fossil fuel superpower and reliable source of energy security for the wider world.

Let there be no doubt about the reasons for our current predicament. Successive governments, especially the current one, have convinced themselves that an “unstoppable green energy transition” meant that access to fossil fuels was neither necessary nor desirable. All this despite the fact that fossil fuels are still responsible for 90% of our energy needs. Moreover, they are the essential feedstock for the fertilisers that keep alive the 8 billion people on this planet, not to mention the steel, cement, and plastic without which modern life is impossible.

Even if it’s mankind’s emissions that are slowly warming the planet (which I doubt), what’s the point of Australia’s manic drive to decarbonise? Of putting two of our three biggest exports at risk? Of driving our heavy industry offshore because of the increased costs inherent in wind and solar power? No one seems to remember that China’s annual increase in emissions exceeds our total.

So what should Australia do?

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The whole point of an alliance, as opposed to a protectorate, is that allies are prepared to take risks on each other’s behalf. Allies put their armed forces into combat to support each other, as opposed to simply subcontracting their national security to someone else. It’s precisely because America’s European allies have treated NATO as a protectorate, requiring almost no responsibility from them, that the durability of the world’s greatest alliance in now in doubt. And by opting-out of the Iran war, even Britain and Australia, formerly America’s most reliable brothers-in-arms, have become strategic shirkers, leaving the US to do all the heavy lifting without us.

What’s not to support in the American-Israeli strike on Iran? The mullahs’ regime has routinely threatened to obliterate both America and Israel (the two “Satans”); has waged direct or proxy war against nearly all its neighbours; has sponsored terrorism around the globe (including the fire-bombing of Jewish premises in Australia and attacks on anti-regime campaigners in Britain); and has killed untold numbers of its own citizens, tens of thousands just two months ago. Even if the current air-assault does no more than utterly destroy the Iranian war machine and further set back its nuclear ambitions, Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu have done the whole world a massive favour.

Australia says it supports the US action but has not lifted a finger to help. Indeed, by requiring our personnel on the USS Charlotte Los Angeles class submarine to stand down, we may actually have hindered US operations (even if only in a minor way). Imagine the captain being told that three of his crew were now passengers; imagine the Australian personnel facing the humiliation of standing aside from their crew mates’ mission?

Everything the Albanese government does exposes the fact that its senior members see themselves as social justice activists rather than the national security warriors these times demand. Even though Labor ministers, from the PM down, admit that these are the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the late 1930s, not only does the Albanese government stubbornly refuse to lift defence spending, it’s cannibalising every other element of our armed forces in order to pay for AUKUS submarines sometime next decade. This is despite the acknowledged immediate and multiplying threats to a “rules based global order” that’s only existed while America and its allies have been able to intimidate predators from challenging it.

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There’s been a Raisina Dialogue in Delhi every March since 2016. It’s the brainchild of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, Narendra Modi’s long-serving foreign minister. Like other global gatherings, it brings together political leaders, senior military commanders, prominent business people, leading journalists, and think tank chiefs to discuss key issues; but it’s better than Davos because it’s not so dominated by politically correct plutocrats; and better than the longer-running Chinese Boao Forum, because it not essentially an exercise in homage to the host government.

I started attending virtually, during the pandemic, and have been there in person since 2022.

Because it’s India, there’s a lot of emphasis on the “global south”; but equally, because it’s India, there’s a recognition that fine sentiment shouldn’t be taken too seriously, especially if it’s masking grievance and rent-seeking; and that, in the end, noble aspirations have to take into account hard power and economic strength.

To his credit, Jaishankar invariably attends numerous sessions, sometimes simply sitting in the audience, sometimes as a key note speaker, and sometimes as one of up to a half-dozen discussants on any particular topic; politely agreeing or taking issue with his fellow panelists, as the debate goes. Remarkably for someone of such accomplishment (successively India’s ambassador to China, the United States, and head of the Ministry of External Affairs, before becoming the Foreign Minister) Jai doesn’t talk down, and is on “receive” far more often than “transmit”.

Indeed, at this conference, rank has no privileges; it might get you onto the stage as a speaker or panelist, but it’s the quality of the contribution that counts. After all, no one has a monopoly on knowledge or wisdom and everyone should be there to justify ideas and to learn from the discussion.

At every dialogue so far, Prime Minister Modi has set the example, attending the opening session, to hear the principal guest – last year the Prime Minister of New Zealand; this year the President of Finland – but not speaking himself. After the US and Chinese presidents, he’s probably the most immediately powerful person in the world, yet he’s not too proud to listen as well as to lead. Despite over a decade in office, perhaps because of his youth as a kind of Hindu monk, Modi has thusfar managed to resist the hubris of power.

And as for this notion that India, under the BJP, has somehow become an authoritarian state — that’s total BS. No country with free and fair elections, a riotously free media, and a robustly independent judiciary is in serious danger of dictatorship. And no dictatorship would host a global conference where nothing is off-limits and no one is shouted down. This year’s dialogue, after all, heard from both the Israeli foreign minister (virtually) and the Iranian deputy foreign minister.

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Yet while illegal migration to Australia has been under control since 2013, that’s far from true of legal migration. In the first three years of the Albanese government, legal migration was at an all time record, averaging some 400,000 a year. That’s a city the size of Canberra, every year. Net Overseas Migration (that’s the numbers coming for more than 12 months, less the numbers leaving), is not being run by the elected and accountable government. It’s largely determined by language schools and universities selling work rights and residency rather than education; and by businesses that prefer foreign workers to paying and training locals for the jobs Australians won’t do.

The numbers are huge. About 2.5 million people, or about 10% of our total population, are temporary residents. There’s nearly a million people on student visas. There’s over half a million on temporary work visas. And there’s well over 100,000 on bridging visas, appealing against deportation.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not making a contribution to Australia. Of course they are. They’re carers, waiters, cleaners, drivers, and pickers. But is that really what’s best for our country: an economy dependent on temporary residents, and a society where a significant minority have made no formal commitment to Australia? This is especially worrying when you add in the fact that every person coming here needs something to do, somewhere to live, and a way to get about. At current numbers, that means downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and severe strain on infrastructure.

Immigration, like energy, is the economy. If it’s well-targeted to genuine skills, it makes us stronger as a nation. If not, the overall economy might grow, but wealth per person actually declines. However, unlike energy, immigration is our society too. If immigrants share our values, and want to join Team Australia, our country grows stronger. But if they just want to live in Hotel Australia and take advantage of the facilities, our country becomes more fragmented and more divided.

For many years, migrants to Australia were expected to integrate from day one and to assimilate as soon as possible. But lately, under the doctrine of multiculturalism, migrants have been encouraged to keep their culture. Indeed, the old view, that migrants should be grateful for gaining a better life in Australia, has been replaced by the view that Australians should be grateful that migrants have given us a more diverse society. It’s no surprise that the Prime Minister issued a statement welcoming the start of Ramadan this week; but not one for the start of Lent. These days, official Australia celebrates every culture but our own.

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