In recent years Australians have been exposed to a succession of natural disasters and a global pandemic. These episodes have seen government powers greatly increased and state dependence become a substitute for personal responsibility.

Perhaps because it all seemed so innocent the people’s reaction to this growing interference in their lives has been muted. They reasoned desperate times call for desperate measures. They tolerated poorly administered disaster relief and obediently observed harsh Covid lockdowns because, ‘they kept us safe’. Official scaremongering, based on uninformed or withheld medical advice, was sufficient to excuse multiple affronts to our Constitution and values.

Our constitutional guardians, from former prime minister Scott Morrison down, watched our liberties being abused with cold indifference. Not even the abridgement of free movement between the states, the arrest of a young pregnant mother for protesting against draconian lockdowns on Facebook, the death of an unborn child because ‘Queensland hospitals are for Queenslanders’ or police firing rubber bullets at fleeing demonstrators, could stir the people’s representatives into protecting our Constitution and way of life. And while the emergencies have receded, emboldened governments remain.

This development is eerily reminiscent of 1930s Germany when journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote in his secret journal, ‘There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and, those like me, watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theatre’. Like Australians today, Germans believed talk of authoritarian rule was alarmist until it wasn’t.

Australian sceptics should note how the Racial Discrimination Act is being increasingly used to silence free speech. And how, in the public square, critics of the incessant wave of woke orthodoxies face demonisation as right-wing extremists, racists, climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers. Fear of being socially ostracised intimidates most. A tentative, ‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this’, is as far as most will go, even in private.

It’s the same in the corporate world. As Haffner observed, when an organisation’s future is inexorably linked to being on one ideological side, close attention is paid to the new doctrine.

So as guilt for past sins sees the NSW government commit $25 million for a token Aboriginal flag to fly permanently on Sydney’s Harbour Bridge, retailer, Coles Group ‘gets the vibe’ by acknowledging on its shopping dockets, ‘the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia’.

Similarly, big-business executives demonstrate their Green credentials by demanding limousine companies drive them to the airport in electric vehicles so they can take their umpteenth CO2-emitting flight.

It doesn’t take jackboots anymore. Spooked by social media and ‘ethical’ investors and wooed by government incentives, most boards and management have embraced ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ with alacrity. It includes the notion of a ‘social licence to operate’, a term invented by the political class to advance the goals of environmental sustainability in business practices. After all, serving ‘the people’s community’ sounds more noble than the  maximisation of financial return.

But don’t be fooled. Going Green is a trillion-dollar industry and a way in which virtue and profit can nicely intersect. Like moths to a flame, rent-seekers have quickly appeared and become part of a new privileged, self-reinforcing elite.

Indeed, having access to the political class is today’s pathway to fame and fortune. It requires a different skill set to the economic risk-takers of the past. It is a system which demands obedience, entrenches privilege and restricts social mobility. Bureaucracies may claim intellectual superiority, but their record demonstrates that intellect and competence are, too often, inversely correlated.

For example, no profit-seeking enterprise would have invested in unnecessary desalination plants, an obsolete NBN, or a poorly conceived Snowy Hydro 2.0, and inland rail, let alone waste $240 million on a now mothballed Queensland quarantine facility. Indeed it’s only because we still have a capitalist system that we recognise bureaucratic ineptitude parading as public interest. Capitalism ends waste. Governments perpetuate it.

We have reached the stage where big government now enjoys a life of its own. It continues to attract a growing army of self-interested, unaccountable, group-thinking bureaucrats. They are inward looking and process driven. They are difficult to fire or demote. Those who actively seek power over others do well. They are essentially anti-liberal and anti-market and pursue regulatory powers wherever possible. The more they intervene the bigger and more powerful they become.

Looking to the future, education bureaucracies are preparing today’s children to become state dependent. Schools are transmission belts for self-loathing propaganda. Students are indoctrinated through required-reading textbooks, anti-capitalist teachings, critical race theory and the vilification of Western society. As our international proficiency rankings in literacy and mathematics tumble, the emphasis is on ‘well-being’. In primary school everyone gets a gold star wherever they place and, in team sports, there are no winners or losers lest self-esteem should suffer. When adults, these children will hardly know disappointment and will lack the necessary resilience to deal with it. They will turn to Big Government for support.

Yet the bigger governments become the more disappointments there are. Prosperity and equity for all are ever-receding horizons. Indeed, a Productivity Commission report reveals economic growth and income per person over the past decade has slipped to its slowest rate in sixty years. Moreover, the wealth of the top 20 per cent of Australians has grown 68 per cent in the past fifteen years compared to six per cent for the bottom 20 per cent.

But like Haffner, we watch silently as high-minded, highly educated bureaucrats, arbitrarily drive the economic and social agenda, leaving politicians to market illusory fantasies with empty catchwords. We are assailed internationally and domestically with promises that big government is the solution, when even a cursory glance at the evidence reveals the opposite.

So we face a stark choice. Coercion and compulsion or freedom and self-determination. There is no third way. A revolution is taking place here and now and it’s not a stage play.