It is now abundantly clear that conservatives and a conservative opposition will be essential to prevent Australia becoming a quasi-socialist state whose bewildered populace looks back upon its former prosperity and vanishing freedoms with a mixture of envy and confusion, wondering ‘where did it all go wrong?’

Over the next three years, this once fiercely independent larrikin nation will likely transform itself into a mixture of modern New Zealand and Argentina, nations shackled by debt and welfarism, strangled by red and green tape and stifled from expressing democratic dissent. That is clearly the goal of the new Labor government, as Anthony Albanese boasts that he intends not to waste a single one of the next thousand or so days as he ‘changes Australia’ and ‘ends the climate wars’. In other words, as he turns this country into something quite unrecognisable and uses ‘climate denialism’ to cancel legitimate democratic debate.

We only have to look to New Zealand to see the extraordinary damage being done by an avowed left-wing government obsessed with identity and race politics and, of course, climate change. Once former International Socialist Youth leader Jacinda Ardern and her government achieved power in their own right, she dramatically accelerated her turbo-drive towards socialism. Mr Albanese, a former hard-left leader of Young Labor, already has a majority in the lower house, and the Senate is flooded with Greens. Unlike Ms Ardern in her first term, there is nothing to hold his inner-communist in check.

A quick glance at the sorry history of Argentina shows how easily a wealthy, self-sufficient nation with an abundance of natural wealth and agricultural and mineral resources can squander the lot through bad political choices. With seven out of ten Australians having voted for parties other than Labor, it is difficult to see how the government can truly be regarded as representing the wishes of us all. Yet thanks to our ludicrous compulsory preferential voting system, which this magazine has long criticised, Labor is free to impose its hard-left ideological values across the land.

Climate change policies will ruin many a small business, hurt families and the vulnerable and threaten manufacturing and enterprise in this country, as has happened in Europe and the United Kingdom. The failure of the Coalition to use the recent election campaign to highlight and to fight against the insidious and destructive nature of green energy policies overseas is beyond shameful.

Labor will assault our freedoms and our rights on a variety of fronts. Under the guise of seeking a republic (they have even appointed an assistant minister for the republic – they are not mucking around), Labor will use every bureaucratic weapon in the government’s arsenal to propagandise a republic, demonise traditional values and to lay the groundwork for entrenching left-wing power into the Constitution. Part of which will be the elevation of the so-called ‘first nations’ – a purely ideological concept lifted holus-bolus from the Canadian and American Left – in order to create further cultural divisions within our country, our legal systems and our individual rights based on the principle that we ‘non-indigenous’ are all living on ‘stolen land’.

The shocking speed with which the New Zealand Labour government has created two classes of citizen based on genetics and elevated iwi rights above others will be the blueprint for Labor here and the impetus for a push towards any number of new institutions, bureaucracies and laws which will do plenty to enrich the activist classes but absolutely nothing to help real Australian Aborigines in remote townships achieve economic independence.

As for our education system, expect our children and our grandchildren to be blindsided by a massive onslaught of left-wing propaganda on socialism, climate change and white guilt as well as being thoroughly immersed – groomed might be a more appropriate word – in identity (i.e. gender and gay sex) politics.

History will come to recognise what this magazine sadly realised during the final years of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison Liberal government: that if you don’t actively fight the culture wars and support conservative values to the hilt, you have already surrendered every issue to the Left. Former prime minister Scott Morrison repeatedly took the coward’s approach and refused to defend even the most basic conservative principles. We will now all be the poorer for that pusillanimity.

It is clear that the fight for the soul of the Coalition still rages, with the asinine choice of the bed-wetting David Littleproud to lead the Nationals.

So the hope of the side remains new Liberal leader Peter Dutton. Never has the role of leader of the opposition been more critical to the future of this country.