Mum’s best advice to me, in her honest Queensland way, was that if you think life is bad now, don’t worry, because it could always get worse.
This advice occurred to me after seeing three alarming figures in recent weeks.
Firstly, diesel prices reaching more than $3 a litre.
Secondly, joblessness in Australia is rising.
Third, overseas arrivals in January were the highest on record.
In isolation, each of these figures is a problem.
Together, they could morph into a full-blown crisis.
After spending the last few years complaining about high inflation, the high cost of living, and high immigration, I should have remembered the golden rule: it could always get worse.
Diesel isn’t just about spending more at the petrol station, it is effectively the lifeblood of the economy.
Yet for some reason the government decided after Covid there will never be another global crisis ever again and we could confidently keep our fuel reserves far below recommended levels.
Then the Strait of Hormuz closed – life happens! – and the government talking points went from using the words “no need for panic” to using the words “fuel crisis”.
Now economists are saying that more inflation – and further rate rises – could be on their way.
To be clear, the economy was already barely puttering along, becoming increasingly strange and contradictory, something systems in their final stages tend to do.
For example, house prices rose by 8.6 per cent in 2025, yet the economy grew by only 2.6 per cent.
For comparison US house prices grew by a much healthier 1.8 per cent between Q4 2025 and Q4 2025, versus their 2.1 per cent growth in GDP for the whole of 2025.
Australia’s economy appears to be built on a house of, well, houses.
The situation has become so strained that one stray rocket in the Strait of Hormuz now threatens to bring the whole thing crashing down.
But there were signs the foundations were beginning to crack beforehand anyway.
Rising unemployment in Australia, now at 4.3 per cent, could be a disaster for an economy dependent on people buying homes with smaller and smaller deposits.
Since launching their five per cent deposit scheme, Labor has encouraged mostly younger Australians to burden themselves with an enormously expensive debt burden for an asset that could now fall in price at any minute.
Labor has created a dangerous mix of a faltering economy, rising unemployment and an unpopular mass immigration program.
Social cohesion, already at record lows, is about to get even lower.
By keeping immigration high while in the middle of a worsening economic crisis, Labor is pouring precious fuel on a dumpster fire.
Mass immigration only really works – insofar as it does – when the economy is growing just enough to paper over the negative second-order effects, like crime, demographic change and cultural tensions.
But the sugar high an economy gets from importing hundreds of thousands of foreigners a year quickly diminishes the moment that economy stops growing.
When the music stops and the party’s over, everyone will be left glaring at each other.
It used to be that in times of disasters, from bushfires to floods, Australia had the capacity to come together as a nation.
Remember the 2011 Brisbane floods, when thousands of people turned out to clear mud from shop fronts and homes.
Or the Black Summer bushfires, which saw hundreds of millions of dollars raised for Australians in need.
Yet more and more, it feels like the nation is frayed, broken into different competing groups and cultures – connected only in a vague economic way.
Labor may not be directly to blame if another crisis hits, but they will share blame for the chaos that will ensue immediately after.
It will be a situation marked by desperation, paranoia, and distrust.
Australia has always seen itself as uniquely stable, compared to the politics of Europe, the United States and elsewhere.
That stability seems to be on its last legs – eroded by decades of undemocratic mass immigration, and mixed with a deteriorating economic situation.
If the global economic situation sorts itself out this time, good.
But thanks to successive governments and their misplaced faith in a faltering system, Australia will always be one small bump away from teetering into chaos.
If you think things are bad now, remember.
They could always be worse.
Jordan Knight is an adviser and director of the National Conservative Institute of Australia. He is a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute, known as the nerve centre of the American right, and the founder of Migration Watch Australia.