Labor is not building a stronger Australia. It is dismantling the social fabric that made the country workable, and many of its activists and politicians appear to enjoy the process.
Legitimate government, as the classical liberal tradition understood it, rests on a simple bargain. Citizens surrender some natural freedoms in exchange for the protection of life, property, and the impartial application of law. Hobbes saw the alternative as a war of all against all. Locke insisted that power exists only for the public good and must be limited. Mill defended free speech and eccentricity so that bad ideas could be exposed rather than driven underground. Montesquieu's separation of powers was meant to prevent any single arm of the state from becoming arbitrary. These ideas produced societies that were coherent enough to sustain prosperity and mutual obligation without requiring constant ideological policing.
Albanese's Labor operates as if that inheritance is the problem. High and sustained net overseas migration continues to outpace housing and infrastructure, placing pressure on cities already strained by rental shortages and service bottlenecks. Cultural cohesion is treated as optional or even suspect; the language of identity, grievance, and permanent division is elevated while the older expectation of shared citizenship is quietly sidelined. Institutions that once mediated conflict: schools, universities, the public service, parts of the media, are increasingly captured by progressive orthodoxy that frames dissent as moral failure. Economic policy expands the state's reach and the client base of welfare and regulation, while productive capacity and private initiative are treated as secondary concerns.
The result is not gradual reform within a stable framework. It is the progressive unravelling of the conditions that allow strangers to live together under common rules. When migration volumes remain elevated relative to housing supply, social trust erodes. When speech and association are policed according to ideological tests rather than neutral law, the marketplace of ideas shrinks. When government presents itself as the permanent manager of every disparity and offence, citizens learn that power, not mutual restraint, is the decisive currency. This is not the Fabian project of humanising capitalism. It is closer to the radical instinct that sees the existing social order as something to be broken so that a more "equal" and supervised society can be constructed in its place.
There is little evidence that the architects of this approach experience it as a grim necessity. For many on the progressive Left, the dismantling itself is the point. Each new boundary crossed: speech codes, demographic engineering, institutional capture, the framing of ordinary Australians as obstacles to progress, registers as moral advance. The friction, the resentment, the sense that the old country is disappearing, are not bugs. They are features of a project that measures success by how thoroughly inherited norms are displaced. Building housing, infrastructure, or a shared civic culture is hard and slow. Tearing down the remaining barriers to ideological dominance is faster and more satisfying for those who view the existing society as fundamentally illegitimate.
Australia still possesses the formal structures of liberal democracy. Elections, courts, and a free press remain. Yet the cultural and institutional ground on which those structures rest is being steadily eroded. A government that treats cohesion as expendable, migration as an unchallengeable good, and traditional expectations of citizenship as relics, is not governing within the social contract. It is testing how much of that contract can be discarded before the centre no longer holds. The classical liberals warned that unlimited power and the suppression of open contestation lead back toward the very anarchy they sought to escape. Labor's present course looks less like construction and more like the deliberate acceleration of that risk, while those driving it treat the resulting disorder as evidence of their own virtue.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/labor-is-not-building-anything-they-are-tearing-society-apart/