Jim Molan is a living example of the quality of those great statesmen we once had in Australia. A distinguished general who held a series of commands, including the 6th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment and the Australian Defence College, he served in East Timor and Iraq, was military attaché in Jakarta, speaks Indonesian and in 2004 was made Chief of Operations of the mainly American 170,000-strong Multinational Force in Iraq.

Awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for ‘command and leadership in Iraq’ as well as the US Legion of Merit, few know the American military better and few are respected more by them, than Jim Molan. Made Special Envoy for Operation Sovereign Borders, he is generally credited with being the architect of the Coalition’s successful Stop the Boats policy which, despite predictions of disaster – even war – is now recognised world-wide (but clearly not by the delinquent Biden administration) as a model for blocking criminal-controlled illegal immigration.

There was a time when political parties would have competed to have a man of his calibre not only in parliament but on the front bench. Such is the woeful state of the party founded by the great Robert Menzies that the LINOS (Liberals In Name Only) who have seized control of it blocked Molan’s election until the demand of the rank-and-file was too strong to deny him the remnant of a senatorial term when the incumbent became US Ambassador.

Unsurprisingly then both sides of politics have failed totally in their very first duty, the reason why our predecessors came together in one nation on this vast continent, the defence of this realm.

But instead of this, the political leadership is obsessed not so much with the Wuhan virus, but with the dictatorial power this has given them over the once -free citizens; a dictatorship openly held out as the model, the Great Reset, to close down much of our agriculture and mining and what is left of manufacturing while communist and fascist dictatorships and their cronies flourish.

In the meantime the validity of the mandatory vaccination the politicians  plan to impose should not be determined merely though artificial and activist interpretations of constitutional documents without regard to the basis on which they rest. The truth is the Constitution has a greater and more fundamental meaning in moments when society is fundamentally challenged as when King James II tried to establish a French-style absolute monarchy which culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and when the British government unwisely failed to recognise the rights of American colonists as free Englishmen, which culminated in 1776 in the War of Independence.

It may well be that we are approaching a similar moment of truth when the people will demand to be liberated from a barnacle political class.

As Bolinbroke put it, by ‘constitution’ we mean that assembly of laws, customs and institutions by which the people have agreed to be governed. Note, Mmes and Messrs the Premiers and Prime Minister, that key word, ‘agreed’.

Add to that the wisdom of the American Founders in explaining that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, for which government is established to protect and if any form of government ‘becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government’.

So if the silver bullet of mass vaccination doesn’t work as the dictators suggest, as it will not, the political class would be well advised not to try to hold on to their unprecedented, exorbitant and dictatorial powers. The people have had more than enough. The politicians should be warned.

To return to the real problem, the defenceless state the politicians have left us in. In a recent interview with Jim Molan (an extract is on his Facebook page), he lamented to me the fact that despite the quality and courage of those who serve, without American help, all we have is a one-shot defence.

Unlike Israel which, with a smaller population, at times surrounded by enemies and at its narrowest point only fifteen kilometres wide, remains resilient and self-reliant, our politicians have ensured that our armed forces are neither large enough, lethal enough nor sustainable enough to defend the realm.

While praising the present government for increasing their commitment, Molan warns that since the end of the Cold War, US capability has decreased in real terms by 30 to 50 per cent.

Moreover, leaked results of wargaming over Taiwan are not encouraging. But Molan does not think the communists would be ‘stupid enough’ to get involved in a war only over Taiwan. Rather he says they are very clever and, their fundamental aim is to get the Americans out of the Western Pacific. The Chinese, he says, are ‘fabulously’ well-armed, and anybody who thinks they are not is living in the past. Indeed in rocketry and missiles they are the best in the world.

Asked whether their lack of experience in a major conflict since that with Vietnam in 1979 is relevant, he points out that we haven’t been involved in a serious naval operation since the end of the Korean War.

On the emerging Beijing-Moscow-Tehran Axis, he recalls the recent 10,000 troop Russian-Chinese joint exercise, as well as the fact that with most of our fuel coming from the Gulf, and with less than 30-days fuel in the country and about the same on tankers heading here, Tehran is central not only to the sustainability of our armed forces but also to the delivery of food into the supermarkets. We probably have not been so vulnerable since the original penal settlement was perilously close to running out of food.

I did not ask him about the politicians’ concentration on such idiocies as complying with the Paris Agreement on climate change while China builds up its industrial and military muscle.

He states a shocking truth.

We could defend ourselves; we (that is the politicians) just elect not to do so.