The election result will likely prove to be catastrophic for Australia. The Albanese Government is driving Australia to economic disaster and social division.

At the beginning of this year, the Coalition was poised to win but ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

What went wrong?

In a timely post-election podcast, former Nationals leader and deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott pick through the rubble of a disastrous Coalition campaign.

“Both sides of politics comprehensively failed in this election to analyse our national difficulties and propose feasible or even intellectually serious ways forward,” Anderson says.

“While I have enormous respect for Peter Dutton as a human being, and while you've got to give him credit for getting us into a remarkably competitive position, a few months ago, we completely blew it,” Abbott says.

The podcast is titled Rebuilding Australia, the path forward after defeat.

From the intergenerational theft that is debt and out-of-control government spending, to the electricity policy disaster that is driving the cost-of-living crisis, to our fractured social cohesion, to our reckless inability to mount a credible defence strategy – these elder statesmen lament the decline of modern Australia while pointing the way out of the mess.

Quite frankly, the Coalition’s failure on everything Anderson and Abbott traverse in this podcast – not just at this election – is why Family First exists.

Sadly, it is a given that the left of politics is making everything worse.

But the Coalition is failing to rise to the challenge of mounting and sustaining a counter vision for a better future.

The civil war playing out now over the Liberal leadership in the wake of Peter Dutton’s defeat is a battle between those who don’t know what a woman is and think net zero is good for Australia and those who share the Anderson and Abbott vision.

Sadly, the former forces have controlled the Liberals for the past decade or more, giving rise to the likes of Family First.

So, it’s worth summarising what Anderson and Abbott had to say on a range of issues. Family First agrees with these statemen. It remains to be seen if the Coalition leadership will turn over a new leaf and join the fight.

If you care about Australia’s political and cultural future, I highly recommend watching or listening to the entire one-hour conversation.

Here’s Family First’s summary of the big issues they discussed by topic.

Education

The curriculum needs to be revised to make it about education, not indoctrination.

Referring to Peter Dutton’s squibbing of this policy in the last week of the campaign, Abbott said: “In the end we didn’t do it”.

Cost of living

We had three years in succession of declining GDP per head and an out-of-control immigration program. We had a genuine cost of living crisis.

Net zero

No one wanted to look at the whole question of net zero and is it worth it.

We know from the research that the more renewables in the system the greater the reduction in our wealth. The more renewables you put into the system – the graphs are there – the higher electricity prices have been.

The idea that we would destroy so much of the planet in order to supposedly save the planet is bizarre. No one really wanted to look at the horror of the renewable roll out which is devastating so much of our countryside.

The current government is engaging in an act of economic vandalism.

Debt

Our government is spending more of our money than ever. Our tax system is the most dependent on personal taxation of any country in the world except for Denmark. There is a consistent trend in government overspending.

We’ve set a policy environment which we didn’t debate whereby whether we can live within our means. So we borrow from our children unborn as well as born.

So the tax burden that the fewer children that we are having will face is grossly unfair.

Immigration

We are an immigrant country; that’s part of what it means to be Australian. But this idea that we can just endlessly ratchet up immigration and that anyone from anywhere at any time is always going to be of benefit to the country shows a political and ultimately an intellectual cowardice behind the whole thing.

Social cohesion

Our unity is fracturing. We are in one sense a multicultural society because we have people in this country who've come from many different countries and cultures.

But in the end, we've got to be one country.

We've got to be one people. We've got to be coming together constantly. And frankly, we should be stressing our unity far more and any diversity that we might have far less.

Let's face it, our migrants didn't come here because they wanted to lead exactly the same life as they led back home. They came here because they wanted a better life. And this gives us not just a right, but indeed a duty, to do what we can to preserve the largely Anglo Celtic culture, which has been our great strength and to preserve the fundamental Judeo-Christian ethos which has been at the heart of our virtue and decency as a society and as a culture.

Defence

The whole thing is a mess. We are sitting ducks amid a return to great power competition.

We need offensive and defensive missile systems. We need more ships. We need more planes, and we need more men – with 5,000 below establishment in terms of the armed force numbers.

We should go ahead not with one, but with two new squadrons of F 35s.

We've been talking about getting light frigates urgently for 18 months.

Get things done. Let's not have the analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is killing us.

Indigenous

Indigenous policy is a sinkhole of money. How much difference does it make? In the end, in indigenous policy, if the kids don't go to school, if the adults don't go to work, if the communities aren't policed, nothing happens.

If the kids don't grow up in safety, if people continue to live in places where there is no economy, you can't have any decent community because we all know what happens. Regardless of people's cultural or ethnic background, if people are sitting in communities - so-called community settlements - where people have got nothing to do, they get up to mischief.

The above is just some of the diagnoses of Australia’s problems. The answer? Both men argued for leaders to lead, to advocate and sustain debate that makes the case for change.

Family First sincerely hopes the new Liberal leadership will take this up.

However, opposition to the ideas of Anderson and Abbott are so entrenched within the Liberal party, we believe Family First’s pressure from the fringes will be needed for some time.

We welcome the discussion and the clarity these two statesmen bring to the public discourse.

It emboldens and strengthens Family First’s resolve, as it should all thinking Australians.