More than ever before, politicians should only be judged by what they have done or seriously tried to do.

As for young Australians, the politicians have loaded them with massive and wholly unnecessary debt. Had they followed world’s best practice concerning the Wuhan virus, as this column long argued, Australia, with the additional advantage of being a remote island nation would today have had no debt, effective home quarantine and suffered only 10 per cent of the deaths we have.

As to education, no matter which Party is in power, this is controlled by neo-Marxists. Now to those who, like a recent caller to a radio station after I had signed off, want to know what I mean by neo-Marxism, this is nothing more than various strategies adopted to overcome Marx’s biggest mistake.

WRONG

This was to declare the workers’ revolution inevitable. Like some modern Labor politicians, Marx rarely mixed with real workers and did not appreciate that they are inherently conservative. This was, incidentally, something we relied on in the republic referendum. It was also self-evident my the arguments that the polls were wrong and Labor would lose the 2019 election.

Trying to achieve the revolution without the working class has led neo-Marxists like Gramsci and Marcuse to move into education. Apart from a few exceptions, our politicians have readily accepted neo-Marxist-inspired “expert” advice that modern education needs a vast amount of money, curriculum change, new teaching methods and the breaking down of order and discipline.

We now have one of the world’s most expensive education systems, but student standards are sinking before our eyes. The teaching of real history and values has been abandoned, the curriculum filled with such dogma as encouraging gender fluidity and the preaching of the discredited theory of anthropogenic global warming, all while young Australians’ skills in reading, science and mathematics are in significant decline.

Compared with the OECD’s highest performing country, Singapore, Australian pupils are now over a school year lower in reading, almost two in science and about three in mathematics.

In addition to formal education there is also a significant decline in apprenticeships which coincided with the decline in manufacturing, itself resulting from the politicians making our once cheap electricity among the most expensive in the world.

CRIMINAL

In addition, the politicians have long funded programmes which take away the independence and character of the young, but which make them dependent on the State. Thus, with all those people not working in the last year, very few would do what was once normal, help to bring in the harvest. We now have experts proposing that the way to deal with youth crime is to raise the age of criminal responsibility. We might as well raise it to 65 to make the nation crime-free.

In the meantime, the great dream of the young of having their own home is now seriously imperilled. According to the Grattan Institute, ownership rates among those aged 25-34 are falling significantly.

Although this is the world’s most sparsely inhabited continent, Australian housing is now among the world’s most expensive. According to a comparative study on middle-income housing affordability in 92 major housing markets in eight nations, the 2021 Demographia International Housing Affordability Report, all of Australia’s major housing markets are severely unaffordable. Sydney is the third worst in the world, Melbourne the sixth.

Rather than calming markets down, the authorities are pushing prices up with cash grants and tax exemptions and an out-of-control Reserve Bank expropriating most of the deposit income of self-funded retirees to subsidise almost interest-free loans to borrowers.

TRIGGERED

The politicians will of course hide behind the so-called independence of the Reserve Bank. Not so; they can readily change this through the Federal Executive Council under section 11(4) of the Reserve Bank Act, 1959.

But the politicians’ big failing is their long-term abandonment of development outside of State capitals. This can only be triggered with a vigorous programme of dam building. The plans to do this have long been there in the Bradfield, Beale and Bridge Schemes which are vital for the future housing, agricultural and manufacturing development of Australia.