It’s official. Our decline into Third World status is accelerating. Our students languish behind those of Kazakhstan and Bulgaria in maths and science, whilst our electricity, already crippled by being the world’s most expensive, is even less reliable than Jordan’s or Guatemala’s. Government spending is slightly more efficient than Ethiopia’s, business regulation more burdensome than Bulgaria’s and the cost of organised crime to business marginally better than Nicaragua’s.

The politicians won’t want these and other embarrassing findings by the respected World Economic Forum to be an issue in the coming election. Rather, they want us to be drooling idiots choosing between tax bribes funded by borrowing even more foreign money. How long before the politicians make us the Argentina, or even the Venezuela, of the South Seas?

Yet the politicians won’t need to worry. Beijing has worked out the most effective way to control other countries is not through imperial conquest nor giving away billions of taxpayer-funded aid, but rather, by buying the politicians who’ll do their bidding.

What Australians deserve at the coming election is a real choice, like the one Donald Trump offered Americans in 2016 and what Abbott could offer Australians if he were returned to the leadership.

The principal reason why we’re being dragged down into the Third World is because our elites are more willing  than most to roll over in the face of the demands of the Marxist juggernaut.

This is today’s mutation of  Churchill’s ‘bacillus plague’ which the Germans injected into Russia in 1917. Any doubt that Marxism has well and truly returned, despite its awful responsibility for up to 100 million deaths, was dispelled by the headline on Marx’s 200th birthday in the New York Times, ‘Happy Birthday Karl Marx—You were right’.

As Quadrant’s Keith Windschuttle points out, this return is manifested in the extraordinary youth appeal for those ancient socialists, Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders

Not that many of today’s Marxists have read Marx. Even under its earlier mutation, I only knew one person who claimed to have read all of the extremely tedious first volume of Das Kapital. The Communist Manifesto (or the dangerous psychopath Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism) are easier introductions. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is at least entertaining, while Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State gives us an idea of the fate those indolent bourgeois rogues were planning for the family.

If Marxists today think about the economy, it’s as a bottomless pit for their latest idiotic projects and as well, to buy the loyalty of an increasing number of dependents on the public purse.

Now that Beijing has shown the way, Marxists are more than  happy with Mussolini’s fascist corporate model which saved the communist regime from collapse.

This was because of the economic and political disaster, costing the lives of tens of millions, that Mao Tse-tung had bequeathed to the comrades.

As they always have, today’s Marxists demand freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly but only for themselves. Their enemy is no longer the capitalist, not least because so many Marxists are very wealthy, even billionaires. The enemy today is the non-communist white heterosexual male. This follows from their priority today which is to fulfil Marx’s and Engels’ plan to undermine that most fundamental institution of civil society, the family.

One of their principal tools is in the widespread acceptance by Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ of Orwell’s Newspeak.

I remember as a Law Dean in the Eighties challenging the use of ‘gender’ in the place of ‘sex’ in a university document. As Fowler, that great authority on English usage has ruled, such use is either a jocularity possibly justified by the context, or it is a blunder. Preferring a quiet life, the pro-vice-chancellor replied,  ‘That battle was lost long ago.’

Using the word ‘gender’ advances a sinister project against the family. This is that determining whether you are male, female or something in between, is no more than a matter of choice exercisable even by a child without parental involvement.

But if the word ‘sex’ is used, as it should always be, this indicates the eternal truth that being male or female is what we are born with and what we cannot change. (Similarly note the LINOs — Liberals In Name Only — fraudulent self-description as ‘moderates’ and of traditional Menzies Liberals as ‘hard right’.)

While most politicians and other elites are not Marxists, they find it easier to roll over rather than fight, especially with Gramsci’s long and successful march through our institutions.

This is exacerbated by the rapid decline of religion, itself  assisted by two developments.

The first was the surrender of too many naïve clergy to the Marxists, graphically illustrated when they and other fellow travellers clustered into the communist-front peace movement.

The second is not so much clerical sexual abuse, but the exaggeration of this in a mainstream media intensely hostile to religion.

The vacuum left is filled by the self-evident fact that man is programmed to believe. In words attributed to Chesterton, paraphrased here, ‘when a man stops believing in God it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he will believe in anything.’ Actually, the closest he wrote to this was ‘The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.’

Either explains much of what politicians propose and the elites go along with. This includes so many wasteful centralised government projects which will achieve little and will be immediately exploited by criminal elements. It also includes those based on fiction, for example that an LBQTIXYZ community exists, has appointed spokesmen and represents a vast demand for something hardly anybody had until recently ever heard of, but which must be immediately adopted to prevent Bill Shorten’s increased and imagined wave of suicides.

Only a complete lack of common sense would lead to official  support for any of these.

Unless Australians fight back against this appalling misgovernment, the result will be a moral and economic disaster for Australia.