The rot seems to have set in when a group of powerful right wing politicians and their business backers decided that climate change was a hoax and any attempt to mitigate it, such as taxing carbon pollution, was abandoned.

From there, Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers regressed even further to punish people who sought refuge from oppression, and even death, by escaping to our shores.

The creation of artificial borders to deal with these unfortunates sparked a political militancy that inexplicably led to increasing limitations on public freedom and the reintroduction of a policy based on discrimination and racism not seen since the 1950s.

The proponents of these retrograde endeavours then resorted to secrecy and corruption to entrench themselves in political control.

To any concerned citizen the speed and ease with which this political and social blitzkrieg was accomplished is truly frightening.

Even more frightening is the knowledge that, if the intervention of a deadly pandemic hadn’t occurred to expose the idiocy and toxicity of this creeping invasion, no one would have been the wiser.

How the social, economic and moral damage wreaked on the nation can be repaired is a difficult question.

How do you unwind the thinking that gave us a black-shirted Border Force, a truly sinister Department of Home Affairs and an intelligence network that openly dabbles in subversion, invasion of privacy and sabre rattling?

How do you break the linkages between powerful government and billionaire corporate elites whose bottom line is always profit over everything else no matter the human cost?

How do you reverse the galloping incidence of poverty and homelessness that is afflicting our most vulnerable citizens and also many regular people, like ageing single women, who thought they would never live to be in such dire straits?

How do you repair the international reputation of an Australian nation once thought so progressive and fair, a reputation that has been so comprehensively trashed by incompetence, corruption, depravity and a ludicrous arrogance in such a short time?

And how do you inspire and motivate all the disheartened and distrustful citizens to do something about the parlous state in which the nation finds itself?

Of all those questions, the last is probably the most important. There is a dark cloud of hopelessness and apathy hovering in the skies over Australia.

Young and old alike, people have withdrawn into their own little worlds. Drawbridges have been pulled up in the minds of too many people.

The sense of invasion by something maddeningly amorphous – moreso than an invisible virus - has rendered too many people impotent.

In an era of lockdown there is an accompanying pandemic of immobility that could prove to be equally as destructive as the Delta virus itself.

And to make matters worse those tools essential to repair culture and society have been homogenised or deteriorated to such an extent as to be meaningless and ineffectual.

A press that has long since become aligned with right wing politics and a public service that has done likewise, with weakened universities and a timid public broadcaster and churches that have experienced significant moral damage,

Nor does voting our way out of this crisis seem to be an option because it won’t change anything except the rhetoric and the colour of the empty promises.

We cannot even look for examples of what to do elsewhere because, with the possible exception of New Zealand in our region, they are the British and American phonies we blithely followed in the first place.

One thing’s for sure, ‘she’ll be right mate’ won’t save us this time. Blind optimism as a solution has long lost its potency.