I want Australia back

I started smoking when I was 16. Like many of my friends at the time. I don’t think I became reliant on them ‘til much later.

By the time I realised I was hooked, it was too late… and at $5 a packet of 30’s l, I didn’t much care. 20 years old and bullet proof.

Since that time, I have tried quitting many times; not because I don’t like smoking, or because of the costs, or health or the social stigma. No, because it is a pain in the backside having to go outside and walk 5kms to the nearest socially acceptable smoking ostracization post.

Even with all of that – all of it – I still smoke. I think I like it. It helps me concentrate, it gives me time to think, and more importantly, I want to. For me the benefits outweigh the risks.

That, and I am probably highly addicted to whatever it is that makes smokes stick.

Two packs a day, probably more now since the silly 20 stick pack rule has been implemented.

I feel more and more unwelcome in Australia every day. I do my best to be a good citizen. I pay my taxes. I work to build value for my clients and grow and develop my team of Australian employees.

I do my best to follow every rule, regulation and ritual required of me as I jump through the ever-increasing fire ringed hoops laid down by the overpaid Karen Government.

I quietly lament the end of the pub-rock scene, the replacing of stages with pokies. The lockout laws, the lockdown culture.

I do my best to be charitable, to donate and help. To invest in the nation for nothing more than the good of the nation.

However, the feeling of the ever-increasing ship of state bearing down on anyone with a sense of opportunity, a capacity for risk, an idea that might become a venture – an adventure – is becoming too much.

The naggy, whiny idiot culture growing – this blah blah harms others, that blah blah is not fair…

Equality… no. Equity… no. It was never about these concepts to the people who empower it. It is about taking more than what is fair and burning it in a pile in front of the world. As if it is a competition among Western leaders. Many of us who truly care see through the deceit, and feel the heat of the blowtorch that will burn us all.

Seriously… enough.

So many of the men that I know that have created, built and made elements of this country great are on the verge of giving up. Taking their capital, their talent and their families and going.

Our nation will be irrevocably poorer for it.

The rules are becoming more ridiculous every day and the enforcement heartless. That’s if the enforcement is even possible. The pestering of the innocent and ignorance of the truly guilty seems to be the way now.

Maybe I am just a cynic, but it appears to me that the increasing in pestering is never about its stated purpose. It has a horrendous impact, but not in the areas they purport for it to be.

Road regulations and enforcement on the most vulnerable seem to me to be a combination of revenue raising and life-destroying policy. It’s not at all about safety. It is almost impossible to keep a driver’s license now.

Soon, sneezing behind the wheel will be 12 points. A camera will snap it – and a bureaucracy will jam the fine up your nose with glee.

Just about every area of our lives are over regulated and there is an idiot Karen waiting around the corner to remind you it is for your own good. Our own good, the great collective…

It isn’t.

It never was.

As much a nonsense as the concept of glass cliffs.

I want us to push back. To restore our nation. To ensure a better tomorrow for the children of today.

After all, I just want Australia back.

Matthew Camenzuli started his own software company from the family home in Greystanes in 2002. Less than a decade later he was fighting lobbyists and corruption in the property development industry, and soon became an industry leader in the home building software space. He gained some notoriety in the Liberal Party when, as a member, he sued then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison over preselection appointments at the 2022 election. He ran as an independent candidate against Chris Bowen in 2025. You can follow him on 𝕏 or read more from his blog here.