Dump The Two Party Monopoly

by Cheryl Lacey, DGSJ, Cheryl Lacey On Education™, ©2025

(Dec. 14, 2025) — In the wake of the 14 December Bondi terrorist attack, political commentators will inevitably point the finger at the government of the day and its alleged failures since 7 October 2023.

Don’t fall for this propaganda.

What Australians are witnessing is not the consequence of events over the last few years, but the culmination of a century-long, bipartisan project to erode responsible freedom.

Governments have steadily displaced personal, parental, and civic responsibility with command-and-control regulation – advanced through fear, perpetual crisis, political scapegoating, and ideological narratives that the two major political parties accept, repeat, enforce and use as a tool against citizens.

Australia has just been lauded as a model nation for its under-16 social media ban, just as it was in the late 1990s for the firearm buy-back scheme and the promised National Firearms Register.

These lauded measures are framed as matters of public safety, but in practice they function as blunt command-and-control interventions. The under-16 social media ban and the 1996 National Firearms Agreement both centralise authority, penalise the law-abiding, and fool the rest of us into believing more laws are more important than responsible freedom.

Yet here we are nearly three decades after the Port Arthur massacre, and there is still no register and Australia now has more firearms than it did in 1996 and children are already navigating around the ban.

This is not partisan incompetence; it is the operating model of a two-party protectionist monopoly, where successive governments take turns governing while converging on the same assumptions about citizens.

The right to own guns and the responsibility to keep them safe, along with the right to decide how and when to use digital devices, is not a matter for politicians. It’s a matter for the people, fully aware of the consequences of being irresponsible.

Political power has replaced responsible government, leaving Australians bereft of both personal and national security.

The bipartisan nature of this monopoly is even more evident in recent history.

Cast your mind back to the 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite and conscious vote. If a plebiscite was held, and it was, a conscious vote by Parliament was unnecessary. Yet it occurred. The conscious vote silenced every voting Australian, with every member of Parliament complicit in accepting this command-and-control measure.

This deceitful framing of public participation, enabled politicians to avoid necessary dialogue on the broader philosophical and moral questions, including how religious beliefs intersect with the legal and financial responsibilities between two consenting adults.

This bipartisan control has extended beyond social policy and into the very infrastructure and security of our nation.

In 2014, the Port of Newcastle was sold, followed by the Port of Darwin in 2015 and the Port of Melbourne in 2016.

Foreign investors now own strategic locations and infrastructure that compromise our national security.

And, consecutive governments have failed to speak in defence of the truth about the cost and longevity of energy security, with neither party having the courage to reverse the nuclear energy ban.

Education policy has been the major area used to compromise national security.

The 21st century landmark Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Act 2000 created economic incentives for schools and universities to recruit overseas students, including the introduction of CRICOS, compromising Australian citizens, domestic education priorities, while facilitating increased immigration and fostering economic incentives for political gain.

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