Alexandra Marshall is right to blink. ‘From oblivion to resurrection – wait, what?!’ is about the only honest response to the spectacle of Tim Wilson restored to the Liberal frontbench as Shadow Treasurer: a man who lost Goldstein to a Teal in 2022, clawed it back in 2025, and now presents himself as the custodian of the nation’s ledger. Her astonishment is well placed, albeit located a little deeper in the faith he claims to have recovered.

Alexandra is by all accounts one of the most insightful writers that I read. She is perspicacious beyond her years and why, because she doesn’t trade craft her trade with a ‘tin ear’. She’s not pushing ideology, she’s writing from first principles, which are, strangely enough, sufficient to tear down the edifice of modern political maxims.

The One Nation voter is not coming home merely because the mainstream press has decided, once again, to ridicule Pauline. I made the same argument in The West’s Circular Firing Squad. Alexandra is right, too, that the AI enthusiasts are drunk on their own exuberance, though drunk or sober, AI is the future, and no amount of Canberra hand-wringing will reverse it: and she is right about the carpet-baggers of the climate industry, the rent-seekers who discovered that virtue paid better than coal.

Where I want to push further is the diagnosis. The problem with Wilson (think moderates) and with Angus Taylor (think establishment) who appointed him, is not that they were bystanders to the collapse I described in Noblesse Oblige Died Last Night. They were among its architects and have not (really) repudiated a single one of the policies that killed the party.

Instead, they have a tenuous Grand Bargain, merely going cold on their disputed territory (think demilitarised zone) and going cold is not repentance.

In The New Rotten Boroughs I argued that a serious polity, like a serious science, must be willing to kill its darlings, to test a hypothesis, watch it fail, and discard it, the way physics let Einstein shatter Newton rather than doubling down to save face, or the way Fleming investigated the mould in the dish instead of hiding it.

That is how you make progress (think failure) but their attitude and tepid response to failure interrupts the self-correcting mechanisms that are essential for life in general and politics specifically. Our political class has swapped the scientific tradition discipline for theology. The policy is dogma; to concede an inch is to surrender the fortress; and so the eSafety star chamber, the Net Zero genuflection, and the settled conviction that the state should manage the citizen rather than trust him are never recanted, only slipped into the bottom drawer until the mood passes.

Going cold is simply the theological compromise: dust off the creed, appoint new interpreters, reach out to new fringe dwellers, lower the incense, open the doors, and hope nobody notices the church is empty because the congregation left through the vestry. (I’m really proud of this analogy.)

Here it helps to reach for Sartre: Yes, Sartre, in The Spectator Australia; indulge me. In Being and Nothingness he draws the line between facticity and transcendence. Facticity is what we actually are: the body, the past, the debt, the scarcity, the stubborn given facts of a situation we did not choose. Transcendence is our capacity to surpass it, to project, to imagine, to become. A whole life, Sartre says, is the honest negotiation between the two. To deny either is bad faith: that is to pretend you are pure circumstance and carry no responsibility, or to pretend you are pure possibility and are bound by nothing at all.

The drift of the last forty years, and I have traced it from Whitlam and Turnbull through True to Label, has been a slow national surrender to transcendence. We were told there was no limit we could not dream past. You could have the lob, the kids, the house, the lifestyle, the early retirement, the services of a Scandinavian social democracy on the taxes of a frontier economy, and someone clever in Canberra would make this happen.

Every gimmick, every rebate, every ‘investment’ announced with a lectern and a hi-vis vest is a small denial of facticity. This is the warning usually laid at Tytler’s door made flesh: a democracy endures only until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, after which both sides stop governing and simply bid. The bill, we were assured, belonged to the future, that convenient country where no one actually lives, in Tomorrowland.

The facticity piece is now arriving, as facticity does, dreams mugged by reality as Irving Kristol intimated. Commonwealth public-sector employment grew 5.6 per cent in a single year, from 365,400 jobs in June 2024 to 385,900 a year later, on the Bureau of Statistics’ own figures; a bureaucracy expanding faster than the economy.

Gross Commonwealth debt has climbed from $534 billion in 2019 to past a trillion dollars, forecast by the Parliamentary Library to peak near $1.2 trillion. We have swapped the rotten boroughs of the 19th Century for a rotten treasury in the 21st Century, in which the forgotten taxpayer, the man who funds the circus and is barred from the tent, is cannibalised to sustain an administrative state that is insulated, slow and largely unaccountable.

These are not the numbers of a nation balancing what it is against what it hopes to be. They are the numbers of a country living in permanent bad faith and asking its children to underwrite the transcendence.

And notice what the transcendent state does to responsibility, the other half of freedom, and the half we never mention. As personal responsibility has thinned, an apparatus has grown up to administer consequences that no human being will own.

We are now governed by life-changing decrees, agreements, and regulations that nobody signs up for: the automated debt notice, the algorithmic suspension, the platform takedown, the licence revoked by a letter without a name.

This tendency in humanity, if left unchecked, is apparent in the laboratory experiment conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961 of shock and punishment, where the teacher was instructed by a stern experimenter in a lab coat to administer an escalating electric shock every time the Learner answered a word-pair question incorrectly. A shocking 65 per cent of participants continued to administer the maximum, potentially fatal 450-volt shock simply because an authority figure told them to keep going.

The experiment once a scandal is playing out in real time today and has been quietly rebadged as service, safety, prudence, and of course just DEI. Pain dispensed by process, authored by no one, appealable to nobody.

A society still keeping faith with facticity would insist that every serious act against a citizen carry a signature. Ours has decided that accountability is longer relevant, even in the justice system where perpetrators are afforded the indulgences of sanctimony.

This is why Alexandra’s One Nation voter stays away, and why the ridicule only entrenches them. They are not confused. They have simply noticed what the commentariat won’t: that the party asking for their vote back has changed its tone but not its creed. They watched it decay into superlatives, yet now are invited to trust the same hands that are merely embarrassed by it.

Embarrassment is a fundamental defining characteristic of our consciousness. It defines what we think of ourselves and what we would like other people to think of us. It is not a philosophy, it is the moment that Freud alluded to when someone is caught looking through the keyhole. (Think Voyeur.)

Taylor and Wilson are products of the transcendent era, men who rose inside the apparatus, fluent in its language, personally implicated in its growth, and there is little reason to think either has the wit, or the stomach, to hit the reset button and step back into Adam Smith’s country where government is smaller because the citizen is trusted to be larger, and where the invisible hand is disciplined by the rule of law rather than replaced by a commissioner.

The Liberal Party has been caught looking through the keyhole by One Nation. The difference this time is that the voter finally accepts that they are repeat offenders.

That was the reset the moment demanded, but none of the current custodians attempted it. A genuine return to the two words the Liberal Party has spent a generation hollowing out: freedom and responsibility.

Freedom that is real because it is bounded by facticity, by what we can actually afford, actually build, actually defend. Responsibility that is real because someone, somewhere, is accountable.

Tim Wilson has risen from the political dead. Good for him. But resurrection, in the tradition he might care to remember, was supposed to be preceded by repentance and followed by a changed life. What we have been offered instead is a man restored to high office, professing the same faith, in a party that has quietly gone cold on its own convictions and hopes the electorate mistakes the chill for conversion.

The One Nation voter has felt that chill. They are not coming back.

The reset is not next term, or after the next review. The reset button has been pushed, just ask Pauline.

Scott WJ Heathwood, Former President of NSW Young Liberals

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