No doubt many among the one in three who voted for him are now having second thoughts.

It also wasted the time of Canberra politicians whose attention span has been overloaded through their incursion, unique among the world’s federations, into matters intended to be reserved to the States.

DEFENCELESS

The bizarre result is that they have abandoned their very core duty and left the nation defenceless, even handing over Port Darwin to Beijing’s control.

At least the referendum allowed the people who keep the country going to denounce, so emphatically, Albanese’s folly.

It also encouraged some hitherto unknown elites, the BBB’s (boardroom billionaire Bolsheviks), to reveal themselves.

This was when they concluded from the early polls that the nation would support them. Actually such polls are of no predictive value, as anyone who has run a No case knows.

Controlling some of our top S&P/ASX 200 companies, the BBBs have abandoned their fundamental duty to shareholders and therefore their customers.

Instead, they’ve endorsed the far-Left notion of “stakeholder capitalism”, cover for playing far-Left politics. (Simon Fenwick, the well-known successful businessman, argues strongly against this on ADH TV.)

At the same time, the BBBs are not satisfied, as their predecessors were, with returns commensurate with, say, very hard-working top life-saving surgeons.

They claim that if they’re not paid fortunes, they will be snapped up in New York or London.

So, what are the ideas the elites-at-large believe in?

With the 20th-century decline in religion, an aphorism, wrongly attributed to Chesterton, now applies.

My preferred form appears in a 2015 book, Give Us Back Our Country. This is that when a man stops believing in God, it is not that he believes in nothing. It’s that he will believe in anything.

And so with the elites. So how do they choose the ideas they will radiate and apply from the various institutions they have captured?

Sadly, the governing criterion is certainly not about what is good for Australia.

As with clothing styles, the choice between ideas is determined by nothing more than fashion.

You can see what those fashions are in the agenda of the Teals. Incidentally, they represent some of the few electorates who voted for the 1999 politicians’ republic.

ACADEMICS

In any event, just as women’s fashions are still often determined in Paris, so fashions in ideas are determined in the ideological salons inhabited by communist-influenced academics in US, and indeed local, universities.

In recent interviews on ADH TV, an Australian political adviser, Rick Brown, the late BA Santamaria’s close colleague, has insisted on the primal importance of ideas.

With an army of over 60,000 volunteers, a minuscule officer class led by Kerry Jones and David Elliott and an efficient central command, he was a splendid master of strategy in the 1999 referendum landslide.

He argues (borrowing the words but not the economics of John Maynard Keynes) that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated, compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

While that will surprise many, what is happening today demonstrates the truth of that aphorism.

What is curious is that the ideas which so attract our elites are essentially refined from failed communist ideology and are designed to undermine the very system which has nurtured and enriched them.

Those ideas include climate catastrophism used by delinquent Western politicians to damage and weaken only Western economies while enriching the communists who must be laughing at us.

There is also critical race theory and “gender” ideology.

All fashionable, they are spread through the education system and a significant part of the mainstream media.