The law is based on dialogue from Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, in which Mike Campbell, a misanthropic drunken loser, is asked how he went broke, and replies: “Gradually and then suddenly”.

This law was until recently cited ad nauseam to describe what was then the gradual demise of western civilisation.

TOO BUSY

But it’s not cited anymore because, sadly, we have now progressed to the “suddenly” phase and, frankly, anybody who is noticing is too busy keeping track to bother applying cutely prophetic literary quotes to the phenomenon.

Let’s see how “suddenly” we are now going downhill.

On February 4, federal politicians from both sides of the aisle joined hands to condemn as one the rising incidents of anti-Semitism in this country, and to pass laws that they thought would, to quote Victorian Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns: “fix this”.

The law essentially made it illegal to, regardless of intention, “recklessly” incite violence against people based on their race, religion, sexuality or, God help us, political opinions.

If this sample of the parliamentary debate is anything to go by, our very social fabric was at stake.

Less than two weeks later, however, the laws are already redundant.

There have been two widely-publicised instances in which violence has arguably been vehemently incited, and not just recklessly: Victorian Muslim Nasser Mashni declared at a pro-Palestinian rally that “Melbourne is ours. Australia is ours. The world is ours”. And, even worse, a nurse at a State-funded hospital apparently boasted about having killed Israeli patients.

Prime Minster Anthony Albanese was appalled: “Any attack on people on the basis of their faith or who they are is reprehensible, and I certainly hope that the perpetrators get tracked down and face the full force of the law,” he said of the nurses and the Islamic coloniser.

Just kidding! He was referring to a case of “Islamophobia” at a Melbourne shopping centre this week, the perpetrator of which has already been tracked down and charged, which is more than you can say about the supposed killer nurse or Nasser Mashni.

You have to ask: if laws passed under such desperately passionate circumstances by our parliament to prevent our social fabric unravelling are not being enforced, why have a parliament at all?

And if parliament isn’t running the country, who is? I could hazard a guess, but I think there are laws against saying it.

DECLINE

In other exciting civilisational-decline news, about a quarter of Australian adults are now either on the dole, the pension or some sort of disability allowance, which makes Australia literally one of the most retarded countries in the world.

One of our two remaining large steel-making plants, at Whyalla in South Australia, has just been placed in receivership because it turns out that you can’t run such a high-intensity industry on solar panels and unicorn farts. And three Chinese naval ships are hovering off our eastern seaboard.

These three developments are in fact closely intertwined. China has 370 ships in its navy to Australia’s 45.

Even if Australia had the steelmaking capacity to build new ships to rebalance the threat posed by China, it couldn’t make them anyway because too many of the workers required to do so are being paid by the dole or worker’s compensation to sit at home and scroll through Facebook instead.

To cap it off, ASIO boss Mike Burgess has warned that Australia is now in the most dangerous period since World War II, a period he says will be more “dynamic, diverse and degraded”.