Commentary The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around almost without a thought over the past 18 months. But from lockdowns and border closures to the single largest peacetime budget line item—JobKeeper (A$90 billion)—was anything really unprecedented? Or was everything about our COVID-19 experience, including the onset of unquestioned rule by experts, in fact, very much precedented? For more than two decades, Australia has been run by a class of managerial elites who are largely unencumbered by the wishes of the Australian people as expressed at elections. Instead, they rule by technocratic mandate. For example, since the Global Financial Crisis, experts at the Reserve Bank of Australia have decided to place the official cash rate as close to zero as possible to revive business investment and create full employment. But the flipside of this has meant Australians have experienced the longest-running structural decline in new private sector business investment relative to …