We are all socialists now, but weren’t we always?

Meanwhile, the federal government, unlike its predecessors, has been become a member of the pack rather than leader of the board; unwilling to use its fiscal muscle to overcome constitutional restraints to secure consistent policies across the states in the national interest.

The result has been repeated, unpredictable state-initiated border closures and indiscriminate lockdowns necessitating increased welfare payments and business subsidies largely funded by the Commonwealth.

Consequently, the very foundations of our modern free-market economy – the basis of our recent economic success with its free movement of goods, services and workers, deregulation, underpinned by individual choice, business entrepreneurship, and small business innovativeness – have been undermined. Instead, we are headed back to where we once were: a semi-socialist economy enmeshed in a mass of regulations overseen by committees of officials.

And productivity, that key indicator of economic health that for a brief time made Australia exceptional has gone into cardiac arrest. It has been flat-lined for a decade.

Our institutions too, have let us down badly.

Our parliaments have bent easily to executive government demands, freedoms have been too readily cancelled, while our politicised public services and treasuries have succumbed to their political masters' spending sprees.

Our political parties have betrayed their very reason for being. The Liberals, once the party of small business, have overseen its partial collapse under the weight of government-imposed lockdowns, regulations, border closures – and even fines.

Labor, caught in the grip of appeasing inner-city greens and public sector unions, has turned its back on its own workers; those in retail, services, resources, and transport who cannot 'work from home'. And who knows what the Nationals are doing for their hard-pressed farming and regional communities…

For a very brief time, Australia broke free from its protective semi-socialist past and its over-reliance on government. During the 1990s onward, the Australian model of reform based on market principles, an open economy, the free movement of people, budget restraint, targeted welfare and all achieved with a modicum of social disruption, was proclaimed around the world.

Look at us now. We have reverted so easily during the current crisis to type. We look to government even more than in the past. The protective state is back. We are all socialists now.