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.

It’s an honour to be addressing a group of high-achieving students and their justly proud teachers, as you go on improving your minds and then making an impact on the wider world. When I was in your shoes, speeches such as this had an impact on me; and I hope this might have an impact on you. This is especially the case if, as I did, you think that your duty is to make a difference, in a world that could, and should be better.

Challenged from without and from within, there’s now a real danger that we might be living through the twilight of the West, which is facing not just geopolitical challenges, but a civilisational eclipse as people lose the beliefs that once sustained them.

A vicious dictator has invaded Ukraine as part of his dream to restore the Russia of Peter the Great; communist China daily threatens practically independent Taiwan and shouts its determination to be the world’s top power within 25 years; and Iran’s apocalyptic Islamism might have had its war machine degraded, but in the process has badly damaged Western economies and divided America from its key allies. Beijing, Moscow and Tehran are in an informal alliance, a “no limits partnership”, with the sole objective of humbling the West and imposing some version of militarism, Communism, or Islamism.

It’s hard for us, focussed as we are on our families, our neighbourhoods, our workplaces, and a better life for our own people, to grasp the will to power that animates dictators with no comparable domestic constituency to persuade and conciliate. This goes even more so when our countries are grappling with economic stagnation and social division that successive governments seem unwilling or incapable of tackling.

It’s these internal challenges that are actually more serious than the external ones. Since the Global Financial Crisis (but especially since the pandemic), Western living standards have been stagnant or falling, heavy industries have fled offshore, mass migration has changed neighbourhoods and challenged long-held beliefs, and established political parties are disintegrating because they can’t persuade voters that they’re not part of the problem.

Left-wing governments are exacerbating economic stagnation and societal fragmentation because of their addiction to climate action and identity politics. Right wing governments are failing their strongest supporters because they’re hamstrung by quangos and legislation designed to tie their hands and because much of their programme is labelled “racist” or “victim-blaming”, causing many decent people to wash their hands of public life.

Meanwhile, more and more people feel that their country is changing before their eyes through mass migration, de-industrialisation, trans activism and family breakdown.

In a recent essay, the former Labour leader Tony Blair analysed the problems of his country—which, he candidly admitted, the current British government is manifestly failing to address. Essentially, he said there was an economic problem, created by too much regulation and tax, exacerbated by climate ideology, that was comprehensively destroying energy affordability. This compounds a societal problem caused by a morale-sapping welfare system that made it too easy for people not to work; and by out-of-control mass migration, especially illegal migration, which—by “whatever it takes” he said—just has to be brought under control.

For Australia, the issue is not illegal, but legal migration, at sustained record levels (largely set by universities and colleges selling work and residency rather than education and businesses dependent on foreign workers for jobs locals won’t do at current wages). All this endures in the face of the reality of modern Australia. Australia is a settler society, later joined by people from all over the world, attracted by our core Anglo-Celtic culture, the world’s most welcoming, and the foundational Judaeo-Christian ethos, the world’s most universal.

Once upon a time, “new Australians” as we called them, were expected to integrate from day one, invariably by getting a job, paying taxes, and mixing with their fellow Australians. Now, under the doctrine of multiculturalism, they’re officially encouraged to maintain their old identity, not so much joining Team Australia as living in Hotel Australia, and making the most of the facilities, presumably because the Australia they joined is needs changing or diluting.

In many Western countries, there are now minority monocultures uncommitted to any coherent national project, either because they reject the civic values once taken for granted or because they doubt their nation’s fundamental legitimacy. Western Civilisation, especially its English-speaking variant, once seemed unassailable; because what else has produced societies that were free, fair, rich, and safe in a way that no others were.

But that restless curiosity and capacity for self-criticism, that protean capacity for growth and renewal; has now metastasised into a corrosive form of civilisational self-loathing: Americans angst over slavery; Britons angst over the Empire; and Australians and Canadians angst over indigenous dispossession. Even though Americans fought their bloodiest-ever war to be rid of slavery; the British Empire, as Macaulay said, was to enable the native peoples to walk alone in the path of justice; and modern Australia (and Canada) brought science, equal rights, and the rule of law to lands where these fundamental goods had never been known.

This is the deeper malaise bedevilling efforts at economic reform, building social cohesion, or military rearmament—why strengthen that which is not worth strengthening?—even though by any objective standards the countries of the West, the Anglosphere especially, are the most successful the world has ever seen. Billions are eager to call them home. Unlike, say, China, where no outsiders want to live, and those who can strive to get Western passports and potential boltholes. As President Trump said at the recent event for the King, “the sons and daughters of the British Isles went on to found more countries and spread more civilisation than any nation before. They built an English-speaking world upon which the sun never sets and provided an example to which free people will always turn”.

So lest we despair, as an antidote to despondency, let’s remember that these are not the first vexing times, or even the worst.

When I was your age, the Western world was likewise at a low ebb. Saigon had fallen; the Soviets had captured Afghanistan; much of Africa was in the hands of Marxist liberation movements; and the Iranian theocracy had shown its contempt for America by holding hostage its Tehran embassy staff. Stagflation was rampant; a US president had been hounded out of office over Watergate; and after a miners’ strike and a three day working week, Britain had needed an IMF bailout. It was a grim time.

Yet within scarcely a decade, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II had reinvigorated economies, strengthened militaries, and reminded people that there was a fragrant alternative to soulless materialism: namely love of neighbour, love of country, and love of God. It’s a reminder that change can come quickly with the right leadership. With leaders at every level who encourage people to be their best selves. Because in the end, the world changes, for better or worse, person by person.

There was rapid improvement in the 1980s and beyond, because a myriad of individuals, most notably these three great global leaders, decided in their own particular circumstances, “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. Western Civilisation is worth believing in, and it is worth fighting for, but that presupposes a widespread appreciation of its strengths as well as its weaknesses.

This is where you come in: the students of the University of Austin, Texas. UATX is a university especially set up to imbue tomorrow’s leaders with the best that’s been thought and said, starting with the Western canon: the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Romans, and all the other thinkers that have stood the test of time. It’s your great privilege to attend a university where the intellect has been “properly trained and formed to have a connected view of things” in Cardinal Newman’s words; that will “make itself felt in good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self command and steadiness of view”.

In some, said Newman, “it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others, it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation… In all, it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession”.

Religion, philosophy, literature, and, perhaps most of all, history—that’s your study here, because the study of history is the study of how the best people of each age have tried to make their times better based on all they knew then.

Along with the ever-pressing question: what does it mean to be human? Is human flourishing best guaranteed by limited or unlimited government; is prosperity best advanced by free markets or government control; is freedom best preserved by strict rules or by the interplay of legislature, courts, and a free media; is safety best safeguarded by license or by law; these are the great questions that you ponder.

Because we best approach the true, the beautiful, and the good by interrogating the best thinkers of the past, in the light of the present. We must ask ourselves: “What do their times have to say to our times?”; and then clearly-yet-humbly putting forward a view, in the hope that it will resonate with others.

Human history is not a linear progression. Three steps forward can be followed by four steps backward, as the Dark Ages, the Black Death, the Thirty Years War, and the Great War show. In part, because the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, including our own. Yet, each of us has a sacred duty, derived from God and conscience, to strive for a better world.

A Jesuit mentor routinely reminded me “genus humanum vivit paucis”; Latin for “the human race lives by a few”. Your studies have given you a depth of insight that few others have, because they’ve been critiquing learning rather than savouring it. You’ve largely been spared the paradox of these times: in which never has there such abundance of information, yet rarely has there been such scarcity of the things that really matter: wisdom, judgment, character and a sense of the transcendent. We might very well have been “made weak by time and fate”; but some are, as yet, “strong in will”.

So your job is less to make money and to win acclaim than to build the better country and the better world, that should always be within reach, if each of us, and if all of our countries, are to be our best selves.

And to grasp the moral order, even if only “through a glass darkly”.

Remember: “to whom much is given, much is expected”.

Ask yourself: what sort of a world do you want?

Focus on that, strive to make it happen.

And you might be surprised to discover just how much you can achieve.

Someone will lead America 30 years hence.

Someone will have started the next Amazon or SpaceX.

Someone will have written the book that most uplifts the contemporary world.

Likewise, many could be parents to large families, “ambitious for the higher things”.

That just might be you; so, soberly assess yourself, then put no limits on what you can achieve.

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.

At one level, this is simply the foundation of another Catholic school in the archdiocese of Brisbane. But at a deeper level, this is a new beginning, a rededication of education to the best that’s been thought and said, the great principles which have driven our civilisation since time immemorial.

John Henry Newman has always been one of my favourite Catholic thinkers. Not quite in the league of Augustine, with his immortal plea, “give me chastity but not just yet, but very apt for these times. At about the time of the First Vatican Council, Newman declared that “the pope is not infallible when chooses his necktie”. That thought might have occurred to President Trump recently. It was Newman who said that if truth and Catholicism are in conflict, either it’s not really true, it’s not really Catholic, or there’s no real conflict. And it was Newman who declared that “ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt”.

That’s so relevant for today. The complexities of the modern world can’t paralyse us from decision and from action. It’s this blend of awareness and resolution, that the modern world needs now. At a time when our country is drifting backwards and when our very civilisation may be fading.

That civilisation has rested on three pillars, all of which have a deep scriptural inspiration. First, the insight that all of us are made in the image and likeness of God, which is the foundation for our concepts of human equality. Second, the injunction to do unto others, what you would have them do unto you, to “love your neighbour as you love yourself”, which is the foundation of our concepts of justice. And most important of all, the imperative to seek the truth. “Know the truth”, we’re told in the gospel, “and the truth will set you free”.

It’s this restless quest for ever deeper truth, that animated the life of John Henry Newman, and that will be the spirit of this school. Indeed, it’s this quest for ever deeper truth that, until very recently, has been at the heart of Western civilisation. Yet that capacity for self criticism and for renewal, that I always thought would guarantee that our civilisation would endure in a way that previous civilisations have not, has now metastasised into a corrosive self loathing.

This college aims to restore what’s best in our culture: the best that’s been thought and said; the true, the beautiful and the good. It’s that focus – in common with that of other fine institutions, such as Campion College in Sydney, and the Great Hearts network of schools in the United States – that’s our best hope for the survival and revival of the civilisation that, for all its faults, has been mankind’s best achievement yet.

Underlying the comparative economic stagnation, the relative societal fragmentation, and the intense strategic peril of these times is a spiritual malaise. We have lost faith: in God, in our country, and in ourselves. That’s why the foundation of a college like this is so important. It’s not a political project. It’s not even a national project. It’s actually more important than that. It’s a project to revive the human spirit.

Every John Henry Newman College graduate will also be a citizen. Better people will be better citizens and better citizens will make a stronger country. That’s why this is a great day, not just for the Catholic Church, here in Brisbane, but for our country, and for the wider world.

Forty plus students and two buildings is just the beginning. The start of something magnificent. And decades hence, when John Henry Newman College is one of Australia’s best schools, all of us will be able to say, that “we were here”.

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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Only a president who called a spade a “bloody shovel” could even begin to dispel the complacency that had Britain and Europe and Canada free riding on the US for their security.

As the world’s 14th largest economy, Australia can hardly be America’s most powerful or most important ally, but we have been its most reliable one.

Ever since US troops went into action for the first time on the Western Front, on 4 July 1918, at the battle of Le Hamel, under the command of Sir John Monash, Australians have served in every one of America’s wars. No other country has.

We were there in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. When Islamic State burst out of Syria to the gates of Baghdad, I told President Obama that we would be there in force. And we were: our special forces were in Mosul, our regular army was in Taji, and our strike fighters pounded Islamist positions across the war zone.

That’s why our refusal, in December 2023, to send a frigate to the Red Sea was so telling. It was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was sealed in 1951, that Australia had declined a US request for military assistance.

Ostensibly because our ships were all committed elsewhere, but really because our current government didn’t want to be in a fight against Islam – and if Australia was a reluctant ally under Biden, think how the reservations would have grown since.

The global situation has not been so fraught since the late 1930s.

A militarist dictatorship in Moscow aims to dominate Eastern Europe, recreating the Russia of Peter the Great.

An apocalyptic Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, though weakened, is still fanatically committed to a global caliphate and the destruction of the little and the great “Satans”: Israel and America.

And a communist dictatorship in Beijing has repeatedly declared its ambition to become the world’s top power by 2050; in the process, dominating East Asia and seizing Taiwan. Because this practically independent country of nearly 25 million people, a rich, free, fair, liberal democracy, is living, breathing proof there’s no totalitarian gene in the Chinese DNA.

All that links these revisionist powers is a hatred for the West. What makes them more dangerous is that many influential people in the West are hardly less jaundiced against their own countries, for their supposed crimes against climate and identity.

Should Ukraine fall, at the very least there will be a new iron curtain in Europe. Should Israel be in jeopardy, there will be convulsions way beyond the Middle East. And should Taiwan be attacked, the economic and strategic disruption will be many orders of magnitude greater than the impact of the Ukraine war.

Ukraine will only survive as an independent country with credible security guarantees from its neighbours; the Middle East will only have peace once the ayatollahs are toppled; and Taiwan will only flourish if protected by an alliance of democracies strong enough to make adventurism across the straits not worth the risk.

So the American alliance system has never been more necessary, yet it’s never been in such disarray.

Due partly to a president who says exactly what he thinks, at that moment, unscripted, and normally without diplomatic varnish. And partly to allies still wedded to mistakes the Trump administration is trying to correct: economic decline from bloated welfare budgets and fixing a non-existent climate crisis; societal fragmentation due to mass migration unconnected to nation building; and strategic weakness due to supply chain vulnerability and lack of military spending.

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Yes, Australia remains as free, fair and prosperous as any comparable country. Yes, it remains the case that to have the right to live in Australia is to have won the lottery of life. Yet we are changing fast and not always for the better. It should have been clear on the night an angry mob screamed “F—k the Jews” on the Sydney Opera House forecourt that something was seriously wrong. It should have not taken the subsequent widespread vandalism, the fire bombings of synagogues, and the routine mass protests demanding “death to the IDF” and “globalise the intifada” – let alone the worst terrorist attack in our history – to alert us to declining respect for Australian values.

If this is successful multiculturalism, what would failure look like?

Long before the doctrine of multiculturalism was imported from Canada, Australian Jews were the exemplars of how to reconcile maintenance of a distinct identity with wholehearted commitment to Australia. Only on a superficial level, was the post-October 7 explosion of anti-Semitic rage directed against Israel and against Jews. At a deeper level, it’s been a rejection of the fairness and decency that has always characterised Australia at its best, and to which Jews have made such an extraordinary contribution. Partly, it’s a vicious form of identity politics in which Jews are always to blame; and partly, it’s the advent into this country of people who, in the Prime Minister’s words, have not “left their hatreds in the customs hall”. As yesterday’s “invasion day” protest will doubtless show, there’s now a toxic alliance between the anti-Israel activists and the anti-Australian ones.

Multiculturalism was originally pitched as a way of making migrants from diverse backgrounds feel welcome but has become a mechanism for changing our country by stealth. At its best, multiculturalism has meant reassuring new migrants that they could become Australian in their own way and at their own pace. In its more strident forms, institutionalised through though a plethora of grants to ethnic community groups, as Geoffrey Blainey foresaw, it’s fostered a “nation of tribes”; or as Noel Pearson has just described it, “plural mono-culturalism”.

The vast majority of migrants don’t come to Australia to change us, but to join us. It’s hardly a favour to them, therefore, to change the country they’ve joined to make it more resemble the countries they’ve left. Unsurprisingly, the chief advocates of multiculturalism, other than activists on government grants, have rarely been the most recent migrants themselves, who have invariably been keen to become Australian as quickly as possible. Multiculturalism’s champions have mostly been left-wing academics with a grudge against our supposedly sterile Anglo-Celtic core culture and our supposedly oppressive Judaeo-Christian ethos.

The problem is not that we are in fact multi-ethnic, because that’s been the case since the beginning of modern Australia. The problem is the ideology of multiculturalism that so emphasises difference that there’s nothing left to bind Australians together other than carrying the same passport and vacuous slogans such as “our strength is our diversity”.

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The shooting down of 15 people attending a Hanukkah celebration was an act of depraved evil, relieved only by the heroism of some of the bystanders, especially Ahmed el Ahmed, who heroically wrestled a gun off one of t…

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What’s generally regarded as his greatest failure, his loss of the 1968 leadership contest to John Gorton, might better be considered as a triumph of character. Unlike his rival, he refused to lobby his colleagues for votes, thinking that they should choose their leader based on what they knew of the candidates rather than any blandishments that might be offered to them.

Leadership ballots should not turn on flattery or the promises of promotion made to MPs; just as elections should not be won by the candidate offering voters the biggest bribe. For instance, had there been more than 12 hours or so between announcing my candidature and the actual ballot, I doubt I’d have become Liberal Party leader in December 2009, as it’s hard to respect colleagues who don’t know their own minds; or worse, who expect a job in return for their vote. Six years on, when I was myself challenged, I made the mistake of suggesting that Scott Morrison might replace Julie Bishop as deputy leader, only subsequently to be accused of throwing Joe Hockey under the bus – even though there’s no rule that the deputy leader has to be treasurer.

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“As a democracy under the rule of law, that’s well and truly assimilated the best of its heritage from Britain, India was always a more natural fit with the West than with the old Soviet Union.”

While there’s much to cheer in the second Trump presidency’s foreign policy, such as the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the freeing of the Israeli host…

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