The McKinnon Index was released November 3, 2026.

If you still had any faith left in the people running Australia’s governments, you can let it go now. The numbers are in, and they are ugly.

In just one year, trust in political parties fell 6.8 percentage points, to a pitiful 24.4 per cent. Trust in federal politicians fell 5.4 points, to 30.5 per cent. State politicians did even worse, down 6.1 points.

Roughly three in four Australians now look at the people begging for their votes and assume they are being conned. Funny how that happens when a Prime Minister rules something out 50 times and then does it anyway.

But the trust numbers are not the scariest thing in the report. It is this:

‘Around 54.3 per cent of 18-to-24-year-olds agree that democracy is preferable to other systems, compared with 91.9 per cent of Australians aged 65 and over.’

Read that again. Slowly. Then read it again.

It means 45.7 per cent of young Australians could not bring themselves to say democracy beats the alternatives. The obvious inference is that they would prefer something different.

This is not about tax policy or housing policy or which party they like. It is about the system itself.

Now put that next to the last election.

In 2025, Labor won just 34.56 per cent of the primary vote and walked away with 94 of the 150 seats in the House. That is a crushing majority built on barely a third of first preferences.

Meanwhile, nearly half of young adults appear to want something other than democracy, and that bloc is far bigger than the vote that handed one party near total control of the Parliament.

If 34.56 per cent can buy you the Parliament, what do you think 45.7 per cent can buy?

Young men are going backwards fastest. Their support for democracy fell 10.3 points in a single year. More than a quarter of men aged 18 to 24 now say violence can sometimes be justified to advance a cause.

One more time.

More than 25 per cent of men aged 18 to 24 now say violence can sometimes be justified to advance a cause.

Nobody should pretend to be surprised.

First the universities were colonised by socialists and communists.

Then those people took over the schools that train our teachers and lawyers, and the humanities.

Their graduates went out into the classrooms, the courts, the bureaucracy, and the newsrooms, and pumped the same poison into the community, especially into the school system.

Our kids were told for decades that the West is rotten, that our institutions are oppressive, and that freedom is a dog whistle.

Now a generation raised on that diet shrugs at democracy. Of course it does. It was taught to.

Australia is getting exactly what it paid for, and literally so.

It funded this with HECS, research grants and billions of taxpayer dollars, and the product shipped exactly as designed.

Remember Venezuela.

Nobody stormed the palace there. Voters elected Hugo Chávez at the ballot box in 1998, and Venezuelans have spent more than a quarter of a century paying for it.

Voting your way into tyranny is easy. Getting out is brutal, and millions of Venezuelans fled rather than wait.

There is a lot of trouble coming. The warning lights are flashing, and the people in charge are busy telling us to turn the heat down.

Have a good look at France and then pack your go bag.

First published on Substack. Read the original here…

The post Australia has spent billions teaching kids to hate democracy appeared first on The Spectator Australia.