Welcome to 'Our Civilisational Moment'

Welcome to my Substack, which I’ve called ‘Our Civilisational Moment’.

What will it be about? Well, I particularly want to explore the most pressing issues facing Western Civilisation, and how they impact Australia. This Substack will offer my own thoughts on events and trends, as well as contributions from some very knowledgeable friends of mine from time to time.

Os Guinness calls the modern West a “cut-flower civilization”, and I am yet to hear a better metaphor for our times. Like a freshly cut flower, there is still evidence of its beauty and vitality, and yet it is rapidly wilting. I will return to this later.

It’s no mere conceit to suggest that Australia was the greatest achievement of the British Enlightenment.

By the mid-nineteenth century we had the highest living standards in the world. Melbourne for a time was the world’s wealthiest city. Our wool was the most sought-after in the world. Colonial governments had also built thousands of churches and schools that were full. And by the end of the 1860s almost all men, including Aboriginal men, had a right to vote in colonial elections.

This all culminated in 1901 in what Australians at the time called “the miracle” of Federation, the peaceful birth of a nation.

Indeed, Australia’s prosperity, national solidarity, sense of fairness, and general happiness made us one of the greatest countries in the world to live in. And make no mistake, Australia still is one of the greatest countries in the world. But for how long?

There are five future-defining issues that will form the primary concern of this Substack going forward.

Foundational Freedoms

Freedom is at the heart of Western Civilisation. And yet over the past generation a kind of managerial totalitarianism has been descending on the West, stripping us of our freedoms and prosperity in the name of safety, security, equity, diversity and inclusion.

Alfred Deakin, our second Prime Minister, exclaimed about our constitution that he helped draft, “What a charter of liberty is embraced within this Bill – of political liberty and religious liberty….” And yet we are rapidly going down the path of England as our freedoms of speech, conscience, religion, and association become ever-more fragile.

Although the Liberals managed to improve Labor’s recent Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, the original draft, with its deliberate lack of focus, shows how strong the appetite is within the Labor Party to whittle away Australians’ freedoms of speech and association.

Disgracefully the Greens wanted to include so-called hate speech against LGBTQ people in the legislation, a cynical attempt to take advantage of the Bondi massacre for their own ideological ends.

Australians still do not have a robust religious freedom bill, which was promised to them after the same-sex marriage plebiscite. In the meantime many Australians, particularly Christians, face discrimination because of their religious views.

As I said, this is usually done in the name of public safety and diversity, equity, and inclusion. But in reality a lot of this is just a power-grab by ideological elites to shape a society in their own image, whether Australians want it or not.

Social Fabric

Australia was once a happy, unified, and peaceful nation. But lately Australians have watched their country change rapidly and become fragmented under a reckless immigration system.

Time Magazine reported back in 2014 that Australia had produced more foreign fighters travelling to join ISIS than any other country per capita. The Islamist threat in Australia recently culminated in the abominable murder of 15 Jewish Australians at Bondi beach, with around 40 seriously injured. This was the most recent of a series of Islamist terror attacks in Australia, with many others thwarted by Australian intelligence over the years.

And yet while Islamist terrorist attacks are the most obvious evils of a poorly managed immigration system, there is a deeper threat to Australia that is harder to measure but felt by many. A sense of alienation as major cities in Australia lose a common Australian culture and increasingly become archipelagos of ethnic enclaves. This cannot be good for our national cohesion and, I’d suggest, our national security in the long run.

As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has recently shown in his timely history of Australia, Australia’s cultural foundation and most powerful cultural force until very recently was Anglo-Celtic. Arguably Australia, like Western civilisation in general, is a flower in the process of being cut from its own heritage. I submit that Australia needs a revival of interest in and appreciation of our Anglo-Celtic cultural heritage. Crucially, this should be accompanied by an immigration policy that complements Australia’s cultural heritage; not one that effectively undermines it.

Economy and Housing

House and property ownership has always been intrinsic to what we might call the Australian dream.

Foundational to Australia’s historical uniqueness was our high rates of home ownership. While most ordinary people throughout Britain and Ireland were locked out of property ownership in the nineteenth century, emancipated convicts and many settlers were given grants of land with the understanding that they would make the best of the opportunity by starting farms. They did and the rest is history.

And yet by all measures the median house price across our combined capital cities is predicted to hit around $1.3 million by the end of 2026, with Sydney’s median prices expecting to reach $1.9 million. The median salary in Australia is around $72,000 p/a, or $1396 a week. Younger Australians have almost lost sight of the great Australian dream of home ownership.

On top of this, Australians have been dealing with inflation to the point that the cost of living is utterly prohibitive. Wages have not increased in keeping with inflation, and the single biggest household expense – rent or mortgage payments – have proven almost crippling for many Australians, especially over the past 4 years under the Labor government.

One of the most destabilising trends that can happen in a country is when the younger generations feel there is no future for them. No meaningful jobs, no chance of owning their own property, no chance of saving, and worst of all, no chance of raising families of their own.

Just as bad is when they perceive that the older generation has borrowed against them to maintain their own high living standard and financial security, younger generations become resentful as victims of intergenerational theft.

Resentment and disenfranchisement is plaguing Australia now and it must be any government’s priority to resolve this crisis of spirit. It’s at this point that the lure of false, socialist utopias becomes most powerful.

Energy and Environment

Australia’s annual domestic carbon emissions make up 1% of the global total; on its own an insignificant amount. And yet we are hurtling down a renewables revolution path as though reducing global warming was entirely dependent on us.

The simple fact is that our elites’ renewables obsession is driven by politics and greed, not science or care for the climate.

Global renewables oligarchs fund environmentalist organisations to pressure governments to invest in and subsidise renewables, pumping billions of dollars into the pockets of renewables barons while Australians’ power bills increase. Worse than this, the breathtaking Australian landscape is evermore mutilated and outraged by unsightly wind turbines, not to mention the destruction of Australia’s beloved, unique native wildlife.

Australia has some of the world’s largest deposits of coal, gas, iron ore, lithium, gold, uranium, and other critical minerals. Given our comparatively small population, Australians should be paying the lowest energy prices in the world while profiting from exporting. And yet recently the Australia Energy Market Commission recently confirmed that Australians’ energy prices will go up over the next decade.

All the while, to add insult to injury, it’s common knowledge that China, whose annual emissions are a whopping 32.88%, openly plans to build many more coal stations. China’s projected carbon emissions are hard to gauge, with some saying that they will peak towards the end of this decade, and others saying they have peaked already. What no one is saying is that China’s emissions are definitely going to dramatically drop over the coming years.

In other words, our elites know that they are putting Australians through much pain with this energy revolution full-well knowing that it will actually do nothing to reduce global warming.

There are signs that much of the world is now backing away from the climate hysteria that has characterised much public policy in Australia over the past twenty years. The question is whether Australia will wake up to this disastrous policy or continue down the path of energy and economic self-sabotage.

Geopolitics

Finally, the world has entered a new period of global uncertainty as the post-Cold War US-dominated system has given way to a new order with China and the US as bipolar rivals. Some like historian Niall Fergusson call this Cold War II.

Whether we like it or not, Australia is caught in the middle as a nation within the Asian region, and therefore highly susceptible to China’s regional assertiveness, and as a long-time military ally of the US.

Realist analysis tells us that at least one state will stamp its influence on the world order, and in our context the choices are the US or China. Put another way, Australia has a choice of whether to grow close to a communist regime well-known for its brutality to its own people, or to the US, whose own political and cultural heritage springs from the same well as Australia’s.

We have three security imperatives. First and foremost, we must build up our own military capabilities in terms of military hardware and personnel. Second, as explored in a recent conversation with energy and security expert Dr. John Coyne, Australia needs to boost its liquid fuel reserves from the paltry current reserve of 34 days to a minimum of 90 days – especially our diesel reserves. The current war in Iran has shown how fragile the global fuel supply chains are, and Australia, as one of the world’s highest consumers of liquid fuel, is uniquely vulnerable. As long as we rely heavily on outside sources for fuel we are extremely vulnerable in terms of security but also producing and transporting food around our massive continent.

Third, it is an inescapable reality that cultivate our relationship with the US, assuring our American friends that we take our own defence seriously and that we are a valuable enough ally to protect. Australia must play a key role in what US Under Secretary for Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby calls the “strategy of denial”.

National security also touches the economic issue, demanding that Australia continue to diversify its trading partners away from the domination of China over our economy and therefore regaining our ability to make decisions in our own interest as a sovereign nation state.

We must be realistic and understand that without a strong US alliance, Australia with its great wealth finds itself very vulnerable in an increasingly predatory international order in which raw power is increasingly becoming the measure of right.

I quoted Os Guinness at the beginning, who likened modern Western Civilization to a cut flower. The task ahead is not just economic and military, it is spiritual. We must identify the nutrient-rich soil in which our wilting flower once grew. I believe this soil was Christianity, which was once, believe it or not, even very powerful in Australia.

This doesn’t demand that my readers must believe in the truth-claims of Christianity, as I do. Perhaps though, some will come to conclude that the reason Christianity had such a salutary influence on Western civilisation was not merely because it was good and beautiful, but also because it is true.

So once again, welcome to this Substack. Please subscribe and share our essays with your friends and family.

Let’s do everything we can to make Australia once again represent everything great about Western Civilisation, so we can hand a better country down to our children and grandchildren.