It is now abundantly clear that conservatives and a conservative opposition will be essential to prevent Australia becoming a quasi-socialist state whose bewildered populace looks back upon its former prosperity and vanishing freedoms with a mixture of envy and confusion, wondering ‘where did it all go wrong?’

Over the next three years, this once fiercely independent larrikin nation will likely transform itself into a mixture of modern New Zealand and Argentina, nations shackled by debt and welfarism, strangled by red and green tape and stifled from expressing democratic dissent.