I expected this would generate some debate, but even I was surprised by the response.

The post surged past 400,000 views yesterday and is still being widely shared and commented on three days later, which by my standards on X is remarkably high.

PESSIMISM

I’d inadvertently struck a rich vein of pessimism.

Apart from a sprinkling of Leftists generously urging me to join the apparent exodus, the comments beneath the post were mostly from people whose friends or relatives had already moved and were glad they did; were seriously contemplating doing it themselves; and who wanted advice about the best countries in which to resettle.

And that’s where the debate becomes a little vague. If you look around, you still have to say Australia is a lucky country.

Our prosperity and freedom are still high by world standards – we aren’t being locked up for posts on social media at nearly the same rate as people are in Britain; work is plentiful for those who want it; and our regional centres (if not our cities) haven’t been spoiled by Third World immigration.

The climate is mostly wonderful even in winter; and, it goes without saying, we haven’t just embarked on a protracted war for our nation’s very survival, as Israel has (more on this later).

Some figures bear this out. Our average disposable income, for example, is US$37,433, which is 22 per cent higher than the OECD average of US$30,490. Unemployment is four per cent and inflation is two per cent.

Why would anyone leave?

Well, the inflation figure, for a start, is bogus. As anybody who has recently shopped for groceries in Australia knows.

Eggs are up 18 per cent in the past year. Bread is up 10 per cent. A cup of coffee is up 15 per cent, and some estimates predict the one-year increase will soon reach 40 per cent.

Meat prices are supposedly steady, but decent-quality Australian steaks and lamb chops have become prohibitively expensive for most of us, although not, for some reason, in China.

And, of course, the most significant measure of inflation, house prices, are up 8.9 per cent.

This is by far the biggest outgoing for any family trying to survive in Australia, but it is not included in the inflation calculation because to do so would expose Australia’s declining living standards, and the government can’t have that.

Speaking of declining living standards, the disposable income I mentioned is heading in the wrong direction. In the past two years it has decreased by eight per cent while the OECD average increased by 2.6 per cent.

DECLINE

This isn’t an outlier. All the other metrics reveal a country in consistent, seemingly irreversible decline. Australia now has the lowest level of manufacturing in the entire OECD.

Our education outcomes are appalling and getting worse, as anyone who has recently hired a junior employee will attest.

We are having fewer children. National debt is about to cruise past $1 trillion.

The NDIS and workers compensation insurance schemes in general both offer enormous and easy rewards for anybody wanting to opt out of a productive life.

Mental health among young people is so embarrassingly poor that Labor actually offered free counselling sessions as part of its re-election campaign.

In what sort of country is it considered a good idea to offer voters free mental health care?

The answer to that question is, according to many of the people who commented on my X post and can read the warning signs, is: the sort of country you want to leave.

Australia is changing in other ways, too.

Our Foreign Minister Penny Wong has handed tens of millions of dollars to the United Nations Relief & Works Agency, which harboured Gazan militants who joyfully participated in the barbaric rapes and murders on October 7, while this week ostentatiously imposing imperious sanctions on two elected members of the Israeli Government.

She advocates for a “two-State solution” in Palestine, which would merely re-legitimise Hamas’s overt goal of annihilating Israel.

In other words, she supports terrorism over democracy. This is an alarming position for a democratic politician to take, and it reflects a fundamental shift for the Australian Government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who made his Trump Derangement Syndrome apparent at a music festival eight years ago and has shown no sign of recovering from the condition, is now nonchalantly jeopardising our military alliance with the US by scoffing at their request to contribute more to defence.

INDIFFERENT

Albanese is also reportedly indifferent about meeting Donald Trump himself at the G7 in a few days.

This too is a fundamental shift for the Australian Government, and one that makes many Australians feel significantly less secure.

But the biggest decline is in our demographic composition.

Albo’s Government is flooding Australia with peasants from Third World countries whose interest in Australia is economic, not cultural.

These migrants move here to enjoy the prosperity of what is still, by their standards, an advanced nation while the government positively encourages them to contribute little while forming ethnic ghettos under the rubric of “multiculturalism”.