But our government ignored all this and focused instead on one even more pertinent inconvenient truth: that in this age of social media, having sycophantic, lying TV broadcasters and newspapers on your side is no longer enough to get an unpopular candidate over the line.

So how does our government respond to this disturbing realisation? By rushing communist-style censorship legislation through parliament so it can control what you are allowed to discuss during the forthcoming federal election campaign.

POWER

It is the only way for them to guarantee retaining power against the increasingly obvious wishes of the electorate.

These people have made no secret of their intention to become socialist dictators, and now they are behaving like them.

They are determined to make the next federal election the first post-democratic “election” in the history of the Australian federation.

If they succeed, democracy will die in their darkness, and the nation that once produced ratbags and misfits will become a benighted population of timid conformists, at least until the ghettos hosting the most aggressive migrants burst forth and take control, as they are already close to doing in Britain.

The censorship legislation, which now has only a compliant and largely retarded Senate to pass through, will grant government-appointed bureaucrats power to decide whether a comment posted on social media is true or harmful in relation to four vague but wide-ranging areas of public interest, the first of which is “public health”.

That’s like appointing the Ayatollah Khomeini as the editor of Playboy magazine.

As we all now know, the greatest threats to public health in Australia since federation were the various health ministers, prime ministers, premiers, “experts” and media corporations who discovered to their sadistic delight in 2020 that a virus created in a lab in Wuhan had suddenly given them licence to behave like the tyrants they had fantasised about being since childhood.

The Albanese Government, acting on a whimsical election promise made in 2022, commissioned an inquiry into the nation’s response to the COVID virus, but made sure it first did no harm to its friends in the medical-industrial complex.

DEBACLE

Its terms of reference were reduced to a soft-focus retrospection of the debacle, which cynically excluded any investigation into whether the ill-informed decisions of politicians, bureaucrats and media commentators might reasonably be collectively construed as the worst criminal act against the Australian people in the nation’s peacetime history.

So, the government that contributed to, then whitewashed, this public health catastrophe now wants to give itself the power to decide which public health topics you can discuss, and which opinions you can form.

And it wants to implement this on the eve of an “election”.

That’s just one aspect of this undemocratic, tyrannical legislation.