The Liberal party certainly had a close shave in getting rid of Malcolm Turnbull before the dreaded Covid-19 pandemic hit us. Just imagine what it would be like today if he were still prime minister. I assume he would have been re-elected and his award-winning memoir says it was a certainty. And if that inspiring volume did nothing else, it lifted the veil on what he really believes in, apart from himself. So, knowing him as we do, just imagine where we would be today if he still had the keys to the Lodge in his toga and was responsible for determining the national response to this ghastly disease.

Under Turnbull, we would have had rampant socialism, mountains of debt, bigger government, massive spending, handouts and endless schemes with silly names like JobSeeker, JobKeeper and JobMaker, all designed to turn the population into a nation of zombies with their tongues hanging out for a free drink. We would certainly not have the self-reliance, personal responsibility, small government and spending restraint with which we have been blessed under the muscular free enterprise regime of Scott Morrison. You would certainly never find young Scott advocating big government and handouts.

The first thing that Turnbull would have done to bring his pseudo-socialist dream to fruition would be to set up some gigantic national government, probably called The National Cabinet, which would lay down the law to everyone without ever having been elected. Then he would have turned this new Colossus into a permanent layer of government on top of the most over-governed country in the world.

His National Cabinet would then be set to work making thousands of rules and regulations. And they would have been cast in such mumbo jumbo that you would need the Rosetta Stone to work out when you could visit your grandmother. Lefties like Turnbull have always loved passing laws to make us behave, because they never think we are good enough to make decisions for ourselves.

Next step would have been destroying the notion of looking after yourself and standing on your own feet. So Turnbull would have increased the dole, as if we were not paying more than enough to people for not working. Then he would have given it a fancy new name like JobSeeker, to carry on the myth that people on the dole are supposed to be seeking employment. ‘Ok,’ he would have decreed, ‘during this pandemic you don’t have to look for a job or tell Centrelink how many jobs you have applied for, because you won’t have applied for any. And don’t study or do any community service. Take the money, stay home and watch Netflix.’ Only a socialist could devise a scheme to pay money to people who are not seeking a job and call it JobSeeker. Only a socialist would disqualify them if they took steps to find one.

And Turnbull would also have had a plan for those who were still employed. Naturally, they would also be paid by the government and more than they were paid before the scheme commenced. And it would also have been given a fancy name, like JobKeeper, because the only thing that can happen to your job if the government is paying your wages is that you will keep it.

In fact, Turnbull would have gotten so carried away with spending money that the numbers would have stopped meaning anything. Socialist plans are always like that. It sounds crazy, but my guess is he would have announced that Treasury research had shown his employment schemes would put six and a half million people on the government payroll at a cost of $160 billion. Then we would have found that it was only three million people at a cost of $100 billion! Such is the delusion of socialists that they would then have called the unspent $60 billion a ‘saving’, which it would be for them, as money loses all value and words have no meaning under a socialist government. And this monumental blunder would then be recast as a masterpiece in financial management.

The next target would have been child care. Mothers no longer look after their children, so governments have gone into the business of subsidising child-minding fees. But Turnbull would have set up a scheme to pay 100 per cent of everyone’s childminding fees with not even a hint of a means test. And he would have added a touch of delusion by announcing it was only an emergency payment, as if you could ever turn the tap off. Then there would have been a charmingly named Coronavirus supplement of $550 per fortnight in pensions and two special $750 payments to everyone on benefits. Businesses would be entitled to up to $100,000, because the new role of government would be to help them, when they would not help themselves.

Then he would really have hopped into private enterprise; private hospitals would have been factored into the public system; banks would be told to forget about recovering debts; and landlords not to dare evicting tenants for unpaid rent. By this time, the tap of government spending would have been well and truly turned on. My guess is that his highlights would have been: $90 billion for the banks, $750 for every social security recipient, $18 billion for 20,000 students in funny courses at TAFE, $500 million  for tourism, lots of quaint ‘industry assistance’, and millions for mental health because everyone is committing suicide. And being a tech whizz, he probably would have conned us to take up a telephone app so the government and Amazon could keep tabs on us before it was inevitably hacked.

Eventually Turnbull would have been asked how the government would pay for all this largesse and he would have replied: ‘Don’t worry. It will all snap back!’

How lucky we have been to escape socialism. But it was a close-run thing.