Before the 2007 federal election I posited that ‘Australians are all conservatives now’ (The Australian, 20 April).

It argued that thanks to years of reform by Coalition and Labor federal governments, whoever won the election did not matter ‘because during the past two decades conservatives have won all the key policy battles … Australia is on a one-way street of more deregulation, market-based reforms, greater global integration, and less welfarism’.