What The ACT Election Results Tell Us About Our Rulers In The Bubble

Last weekend's ACT election results have again revealed how out of touch our nation's capital city is with mainstream Australians.  While it is tempting to write off the ACT Legislative Assembly as little more than a glorified city council, ACT elections are one of the clearest indicators of elite opinion that we have ― and the results are alarming.

ACT Labor will continue to govern, as it has done since 2001, but the big winners were the Greens, who have more than doubled there representation.  The 25 seat ACT Assembly will have ten Labor members (down from 12), nine Liberals (down from 11), and six Greens (up from two).  The Greens already have a seat in cabinet, in exchange for propping up the minority Labor government, and will now be even more influential.  The radical Greens are a party of government in the ACT.

Overall, the ACT electorate is markedly out of step with the country.  Labor, the Greens, and minor left-wing parties received more than 58 per cent of the first preference vote ― a tally even exceeding the left's primary lower house vote in Victoria's landslide 2018 election (approximately 56 per cent).

Of course, this pattern diverges wildly from that seen in more conservative states.  At the 2019 New South Wales election, left-wing parties received only 44 per cent of the first preference vote (in the lower house), and at the 2017 Queensland election, the figure was 45 per cent.

Many Canberrans are transplants who have moved to the city to work in the federal bureaucracy, so the political differences are quite striking.  Canberra, it seems, both attracts a certain type of person and instils in people a certain set of beliefs and attitudes.  These sorting mechanisms have gradually separated the capital from the country over which it rules, encasing it in a bubble of ideology.

The left's stranglehold on Canberra poses two big problems for the rest of the country.

The first is that the residents of the Canberra bubble make policy for all of us.  Their detachment from the preferences and values of mainstream Australia has led to a range of policy disasters.

Perhaps most seriously, economic policy in this country increasingly favours the public sector and the corporate bureaucracies that oversee the enforcement of government regulation.

As my research has demonstrated, the COVID recession has made this trend worse.  Our country increasingly has a K-shaped economy, in which bureaucrats thrive even as the productive economy that sustains them is hobbled.

At the height of the recession, public sector wages in the ACT increased by 6.5 per cent.  The average wage in the ACT is $102,000, far exceeding other states and territories.  While the country has seen 600,000 private sector jobs lost this year, the ACT has largely been insulated from the fallout.

We also seem to be developing a K-shaped culture.  Consider, for example, the obscene and embarrassing fiasco that is national arts funding.  The ruling class amuses itself with deranged art, obscure research projects, and the self-flattery of the ABC, while traditional and elevating cultural pursuits are shunned and shuttered.

The second problem emerges from the unavoidable fact that the ACT electorate is highly educated.  The Canberra bubble represents, to a worrying extent, the best that our systems of education and moral instruction can produce, and they are turning against the values of the rest of the country.

This is one way that Canberra is similar to the rest of Australia: educated people are radicalising.  Just as we have seen in some wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne, the Greens in Canberra picked up votes mostly from the Liberal Party.  Our inner suburbs are filled with spiritual Canberrans.

Somehow, we have created a system that selects for these kinds of beliefs, or that fills the heads of many of our brightest people with bad ideas.  Maybe both.

The elite, the attitudes of which are made plain at ACT polling booths, is the main reason that elections in this country never seem to change anything ― a reminder that democracy means more than just elections.  If we want a democratic country in which policy aligns with mainstream values, our highest priority should be ending the miseducation of our ruling class.

A Day At The ABC

The following is a sneak peek into a day in the life of an intern at the ABC, based on content that has been published either by the ABC or the media about ABC staff.

Congratulations!  You have just started an internship at Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC.

At 9:00am you are ushered into your manager's office, who sits you down to run you through the ABC's editorial guidelines that all staff must follow.

You're asked to acquaint yourself with the updated editorial guidelines which were introduced late last year under the banner of "Hate speech, terrorism and mass killings".  It reads "It is important to avoid language that alienates religious or ethnic groups, therefore, do not speak of 'us' and 'our values' in ways that exclude minorities."

You question this, saying "What?  I thought we were all equal.  Isn't it unifying to include everyone in our portrayal of Australia?"  Your manager chuckles sarcastically and continues to read from the guidelines.  "Racism is now routinely applied to prejudice or discrimination based on a wide range of differences:  ethnicity, skin colour, religion, language, etc."

At 10:30 am you're given your first task, which is to assist with the ABC Radio National program.  This is a big current affairs program, so you're very excited to get started on it.

Your job is to book guests, which should be easy.  You decide that you will stick to the ABC's charter and try to balance out guests from the left and right to ensure impartiality.  But you find that your task is bogged down in red tape.

You are handed a "content tracker" which is part of the ABC's Diversity & Inclusion Plan.  "The ABC must look and sound like modern Australia, and include all Australians in what we do."  Thinking that seems pretty straight forward and without reading any further, you go to book Mark Latham, an elected member of the NSW parliament, on the program.

Within minutes however, you're tapped on the shoulder by your manager, who asks "Didn't you read the content tracker?  We don't mean diversity of opinion.  The content tracker allows you to see how you are including groups which might be under-represented in our content, including women, Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders, people from CALD backgrounds, LGTBI people, and people with disabilities."

"Isn't it dehumanising and undignified for the ABC to be making important editorial decisions based on someone's skin colour or superficial attribute rather than on their merit, hard work and journalistic integrity?" you ask.

Your manager points you to the following paragraph in the ABC's Editorial Guidelines:  "Electoral success does confer some legitimacy in a democracy ― it is hard to argue that support sufficient to elect politicians to federal parliament does not represent a 'significant perspective in the community'.  However, it does not exempt politicians from being vigorously challenged, nor does it oblige the ABC to broadcast hate speech.  However, fringe political players should not be elevated simply because they create controversy."

"This is why we cannot invite Mark Latham onto the program," he says.

At midday, the Community and Public Sector Union delegate addresses staff, calling on them to reject the six-month pay freeze that the rest of the public service has taken in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.  "You deserve the $5 million worth of pay rises.  It doesn't matter that the rest of the media has shed jobs at a great pace.  We are part of the cultural fabric of Australia, and it doesn't matter that 606,000 Australians have lost their jobs in the private sector.  We can keep saying 'we are all in this together' while taking a 2 per cent pay rise, because you deserve it!"

At 3:00 pm you get sent back to the main office and you take a seat next to Barbara Heggen, a radio producer who has started the "Climate Crisis Advisory Group".  Barbara takes you along to a working group meeting.  Armed with a notepad and pen you get ready to note down healthy discussion about the science and challenging of orthodox views.  Barbara introduces the group's aim, which is to:  "Gather together the brains trust of ABC staffers to develop ways to report on and inform Australians about the climate crisis using a solutions journalism approach.  To report back to ABC Management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally."

The first item on the agenda is what ABC staff members can do around the office to make a more climate friendly workplace.  Hands go up and voices start bemoaning the lack of solar panels in the Melbourne Southbank studios.  One staff member states, "There are so many other things that should be happening but aren't in this building ... We should be encouraging the café on site to charge much more for coffees in takeaway containers and a bigger discount for keep cups."  Another staff member from Hobart pipes in on the teleconference, "We have a large surface area of roofing, perfect for solar panels."  At this juncture, you decide to ask a question.  "Isn't Tasmania 100 per cent Hydro?  Why would we need solar panels if its 100 per cent renewable anyway?"  The group stares at you for a moment and moves on.

Another voice asks from Brisbane, "Sometimes when I'm on the late shift in Brisbane I go around and try to find remotes to turn the TVs off.  They're everywhere and no one is watching them, often during the day ... Best to avoid hypocrisy where possible."  "But surely, it's the main job of staff at a news station to monitor what's on our channel?" you ask, but once again, you are ignored.

The staff move on to discuss their journalism on the topic of climate change.  Many speak glowingly of what is commonly referred to as an internal newsletter, the Guardian Australia, and their model of "advocacy journalism".  "We need a solutions-based journalism approach.  Why don't we get one of the ageing Chaser boys to do a documentary about how our pesky politicians have failed on climate?"  "Great idea!"  The room applauds.

You have had enough.  You stand up and object:  "How can we expect the ABC to cover very serious policy discussions like the cost of climate policies impartially, when so many of you hold an activist position on the topic?  Just last year we had what many journalists in this room described as 'the climate election'.  Voters have rejected divisive climate policies at election after election.  You are funded by taxpayers to be impartial, yet you are clearly seeking to push a narrative, that is against the ABC's charter."

The room erupts with laughter.

At 5:00pm you then decide the public broadcaster is not for you and quit.  It is clearly not your ABC, it's not even ours, it's theirs.

Identity Politics Will Destroy The Arts

When Australia's most generous musical theatre scholarship, the Rob Guest Endowment, recently published the names of thirty semi-finalists who were in the running to win a $50,000 scholarship, fellow actor and performer Hayden Tee seized upon the list, scrutinised the names and arrived at the conclusion that the line-up did not meet his expectations of racial diversity.  Mr Tee then took it upon himself to write an open letter to the selection committee in which he described its choice of nominees as a "whitewash".  Presumably, the pun was not intended.

Instead of sticking to its guns, the Rob Guest Endowment swiftly capitulated, issued a grovelling apology, vowed to do better and cancelled the scholarship for 2020.  So much for supporting the younger generation and "helping them achieve their dreams" as the endowment proudly purports to do.

Worse still, it was not only the Rob Guest Endowment that took heed of Mr Tee's objections.  In what can only be described as the ultimate display of virtue signalling, the semi-finalists who had spent months of blood, sweat and tears working towards the competition, resolved collectively that their overwhelming whiteness indeed rendered them unworthy of financial assistance in the form of a scholarship.

By way of interest, Mr Tee, who has had a glittering international career thus far treading the boards of productions such as Les Misérables, Matilda the Musical and My Fair Lady has also pledged to "create an anti-racist and decolonised Australian Theatre Industry" and "to be a lifelong ally".  Interestingly, he is yet to add to his list of pledges the promise that he will "Reject any future lucrative offers to appear on Broadway or in the West End".  It seems that Mr Tee would like to be woke, but not just quite yet.

This total surrender by both the Rob Guest Endowment and the nominees to the forces which seek to undermine the culture of Western civilisation, including musical theatre, is hardly surprising.  In this day and age, it takes an immense amount of courage to push back against this fanatical element of our society which is going about the business of denigrating, deconstructing and cancelling everything we have with a prodigious and terrifying energy.

In Australia, the arts world is replete with activists who have embarked upon a path of career suicide from which there is no return.  Last year for example, a group of musicians and composers penned a peculiarly entitled petition, "Opera and the doing of women", in which they claimed that they had had enough of "entrenched bias, the structural nature of sexism and other exclusionary forces that are reflected in many of the norms, expectations and practices of opera as an artform" and demanded that Opera Australia do something about it.  Thankfully, artistic director Lyndon Terracini roundly rejected the hysterical calls, saying in no uncertain terms that "it would be irresponsible of us to decide that some of the major works in the Western canon shouldn't be seen".

Unfortunately, the Rob Guest Endowment does not have a Lyndon Terracini on their books to point out how ludicrous this all is.  Neither, it seems, does the Australia Council of the Arts.  Since April, the Council has generously dished out over $7.6 million worth of taxpayers' money under an emergency "Resilience Fund" to a range of artists clearly obsessed with identity politics and whose works range from sitting in cubes in order to express their disdain for conservative ideologies;  to smashing the patriarchy by sending things into outer space;  to knitting giant blue scarves as a protest about coal mining.

But perhaps the most pernicious venture that the Australia Council for the Arts is funding in conjunction with the Victorian state government's Create Victoria, is an organisation called Creatives of Colour.  This group operates under the assumption that the Australian arts scene is so dangerously racist that non-white artists need "survival strategies" in order to safely make it through each day without being lynched by the mob.

Among the many pieces of advice proffered to minorities, it says "Align yourself with those who have lost the most and who have the most to lose from colonisation, i.e. First Nations and BIPOC.  If it is not safe for them, it will not be safe for you.  If a predominantly White space does not treat a First Nations person or a 'Blak' person as a full human being, they will not see you as a full human being either".  It also warns the following:  "It is very rare to meet a White Ally whose actions are not self-serving in some form or another (e.g. they do what they do to make themselves feel good, rather than actually understanding that they have a responsibility to 'pay back' some of the privilege that has helped them to coast through life, by 'doing' as an ally would)".  The language used by Creatives of Colour is offensive and bigoted and there is no place for it in Australian society.

It would not be at all surprising to find out that the folk at Creatives of Colour have been taking notes from a document called "White Supremacy Culture in Organisation".  Currently doing the rounds in Canada, this piece of critical race theory thinly disguised as a management guide is being hastily adopted by a great many arts organisations who are vowing to use it as a manual to completely remake their organisational structures in the coming years.

The upshot of the document is that white people need to acknowledge that attributes like hard work, perfectionism, meritocracy, the written word and individualism are trappings of "white privilege" and thus need to be expunged from any organisation.

If it were it to be adopted by the Australia Council for the Arts, for example, it would signal the death knell for the entire arts community.  This kind of dangerous and short-sighted identity politics does nothing but create division and resentment.  It diminishes the quality of the arts, creates a resistance of highly talented people who are missing out on opportunities and is an insult to the talented and hard-working people of other cultures.

Where Were You When Democracy Ended?

When future generations ask when did Australians gave up on democracy and freedom, the answer will be 18 September 2020;  the date when the Andrews government in Victoria passed laws which contain the most significant violation of human rights in Australia's history.

Or perhaps the answer will be in the weeks that followed, when barely a whimper was heard from federal Coalition government, the press gallery, the state broadcaster, civil liberty groups, university intellectuals, and the rest of the credentialled class who would rather stand with Dan than with freedom.

The only chance for redemption is for the Victorian Upper House to reject the Bill when it is due to next sit on 13 October.

The COVID-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) and Other Acts Amendment Bill 2020 empowers the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who is an unelected bureaucrat, to appoint any Victorian to detain for an indefinite period of time any other Victorian, not on public health grounds, but on the vibe of it.

As eighteen bold, courageous, and eminent legal figures noted in their open letter published last Tuesday, "Authorising citizens to detain their fellow citizens on the basis of a belief that the detained person is unlikely to comply with emergency directions by the 'authorised' citizens is unprecedented, excessive and open to abuse."

The Bill says that a person can be detained where an "authorised officer" "reasonably believes" that a person is a high-risk person and is "likely" to refuse or fail to comply with the detention direction.

"Reasonably believes" and "likely" are entirely subjective assessments.

Under the suggestion of Daniel Andrews, for example, the Secretary of DHHS could classify a union official as an authorised officer who could use their powers to detain a small business owner who objects to the lockdown measures.

Labor Party apparatchiks could be empowered to prevent political opponents, such as the Liberal Party members, from gathering.

And powers could be given to certain "community leaders" based not on their health expertise, but on the colour of their skin.  Jill Hennessy, the Attorney-General of Victoria, admitted as much when she said that "leaders" of multicultural community organisations are intended to be the kinds of people that would be suitable for appointment as an authorised officer. 

Never before in Australia's history has a separate class of citizens been created on the basis of their ethnic origin.  This is like the Indigenous Voice to Parliament on steroids.

Worse, there is no provision in either the COVID Omnibus Bill or the Public Health and Wellbeing Act requiring a person who is detained to be brought before a magistrate.  This effectively abolishes the ancient right of habeas corpus, thereby removing a fundamental common law right dating back as early as the 12th century and codified in English legislation in 1640 AD.

This is just the latest in a long-line of unlawful behaviour by Andrews and his government, which I first identified in July when I obtained legal advice which found failure of the Victoria Police to enforce social distancing rules on Black Lives Matter protestors was potentially unlawful.

Also likely unlawful are the "stay at home" orders made under the Stage 4 restrictions because the Emergency Powers provisions under the PHW Act probably does not authorise directions of that kind.

And pregnant mother of two Zoe Buhler was put in handcuffs in front of her children and had her private possession confiscated for engaging in the lawful act of posting an opinion on social media.

Regardless, the "I Stand With Dan" crowd will go down with Daniel Andrews to the bitter end.  They have to.  Having rationalised every power grab, every lost job, every lost business, and every missed funeral, wedding, and birth as necessary to save lives, stepping back now would be an admission that perhaps six months of lockdowns was an over-reaction.

But ever since the Stage 4 restrictions came into effect in August, it became apparent that lockdowns had little to do with public health and everything to do with politics.

A total 696,000 Victorians, around 20% of Victoria's entire workforce, are likely to be put out of work by the lockdowns.

But these 696,000 jobs are being offered up to the gods of COVID elimination to save just one job, that of Daniel Andrews.

The Stage 4 restrictions were only ever based on salvaging the Labor government, attempting to clear the decks for 2021, and to have a clean run into the election not due until 2022.

Zero cases is the benchmark that has been set for success ― something no country has ever achieved, and few have contemplated.

No intervention is too draconian, no police enforcement too brutal, no dodged question too cynical, so as not to justify a third term of government.

Dan's Divine Rule Betrays Our History

Most Victorians wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about if you said Premier Daniel Andrews was acting like King Charles I.

Coronavirus or not, the government of the state of Victoria ― with its arbitrary police arrests, the locking of people in their homes and the bankrupting of their businesses by executive decree, and the suspension of Parliament to avoid any measure of public scrutiny of the government's actions ― now has more in common with rule exercised by the imagined authority of the divine right of kings rather than with any notion of liberal democracy.

Because so much of the Melbourne establishment ― including its business elites, its cultural leaders, and particularly the legal profession ― as well as Victoria's media have supported Andrews for as long as they have, they're reluctant to acknowledge this truth.

Paul Keating famously declared the upper house of the Federal Parliament to be "unrepresentative swill", but when Parliament isn't there, you notice it ― which is the situation now in Victoria.

This week, when Andrews, after spending the last six months trying to shut down the State Parliament, said he wanted to recall Parliament so his emergency powers could be extended for 12 months, it started to finally dawn on Victorians that enough was enough.  In a poll of 1000 Victorians, 60 per cent of participants said the Victorian Parliament should continue to sit during the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 per cent said it should not, and 28 per cent had no opinion.

That's an overwhelming result.  But if Australians took their parliamentary democracy more seriously, the poll result might have been even more overwhelming.

Taking the country's parliamentary democracy more seriously requires, for a start, knowing where it comes from.  And that is a topic almost entirely absent from Australia's education system.

Practically every aspect of the Westminster-style parliamentary democracy of the Australian Commonwealth and of the states derives from the English Civil War and its consequences.

Yet in the Australian national curriculum ― which is compulsory for all schools, government and non-government, to teach ― there is no reference to the English Civil War.  There are many mentions of Gandhi, Rosa Parks and Eddie Mabo ― but none of Charles I, or Cromwell, let alone Pym or Hampden.  (It's sometimes forgotten that dead white European males did have some role in the creation of Australia's democracy.)

LACK OF HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING

Today the average Australian 16-year-old would be shocked to discover that British history is responsible for something other than colonialism and slavery.

The absence of the origins of our parliamentary system from the education of young Australians is not an accident.  One of the authors of the national curriculum notoriously dismissed the relevance of the English Civil War to this country by claiming it was "arguably just a series of confused and confusing localised squabbles that may have a special significance for UK history, but not for anybody else (unless they like dressing up in period costume)".

Comments such as this betray precisely the same lack of historical understanding being bequeathed to Australian students.

There's another reason too why the English Civil War has no place in the nation's classrooms.

It has come to be profoundly unfashionable to argue that democratic rights are not the gift of the governments and the United Nations, but are instead inalienable to a country's citizens.  (As is to be expected, under the national curriculum Australian students are taught a lot about the UN.)

The situation is no better in our universities.  In 2017, I surveyed all 746 history subjects that were taught in the 35 Australian universities that offered history programs.  There were 41 subjects that taught the history of cinema and film, while 69 subjects examined the history of gender.  Seventeen subjects covered British history, and of those only seven dealt in any way with the English Civil War.

In other words, only 1 per cent of all history subjects offered by Australian universities dealt with the period of British history from which our parliamentary democracy was derived.

One of the benefits of that parliamentary democracy is that, compared with the fate that befell Charles I, elections are a better way of dealing with overmighty rulers.

Checked Out: When Activism Quarantines Common Sense

If you want to know what is going wrong in Victoria, all you need do is look at a job being advertised on Seek by the state's Department of Justice and Community Safety.  The department wishes to hire a "director, inclusion and intersectionality", for which it is offering a generous salary of $192,800-$249,700 plus superannuation.

According to the ad, the incumbent "will be responsible for providing authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality to justice ministers, DJCS executives and other senior stakeholders".

Furthermore, they "will be able to demonstrate an extensive knowledge of inclusion, intersectionality and society and understanding of historical and contemporary issues".

This ad epitomises everything that is wrong with the Victorian government.  In a single job description, it explains the reason the government is incapable of running a quarantine program or looking after the elderly.  Instead of doing what it should be doing, which is governing, it is putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.

We are now watching as Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, fails the Australian public.  This is because they have put identity politics, and the concept of diversity and inclusion, before the health of the people, with deadly consequences.

This has come to light in the past few days with revelations that the DHHS farmed out its responsibilities to the DJPR by putting it in charge of the hotel quarantine program.  As revealed in The Age newspaper, the DJPR and its international trade agency, Global Victoria, were responsible for engaging private security firms for hotel quarantine.  The reason for selecting Unified Security, an indigenous-owned security company that was not on the government's preferred panel of security suppliers, was supposedly driven by an attempt to provide jobs under "social inclusion" policies.

The bureaucratic elite in Victoria clearly did not see a problem in selecting a company for hotel quarantine based on where it ranked on the intersectionality pyramid.  This should have been a strict police or military operation.

According to the DJPR's secretary, who states in the department's Aboriginal Recruitment and Career Strategy 2020-23, "diversity in the workplace is not just a nice thing to have" ... It is "the foundation of good business principles and will ensure the department is best placed to deliver on its purpose".

Under no circumstance would we want the pilot of our A380 or the surgeon performing open-heart surgery on a family member to be selected on the basis of diversity and inclusion rather than merit.  Those in charge of the hotel quarantine approached the job at hand as if it were a lavish junket.  They even made a self-congratulatory video in which they referred to the task as "one massive inbound super trade mission which keeps rolling ... which has been a really exciting project" rather than a serious quarantine operation in which there was so much at stake.

It is not difficult to see where priorities lie for these Victorian departments.

Two years ago, the DHHS enforced "They Day" for all staff, which mandated that every first Wednesday of the month, its 10,000 employees were to use gender neutral pronouns such as "they" and "them" rather than he and she.  Former Victorian deputy chief health officer Annaliese Van Diemen revealed her ideological leanings when she compared COVID-19 to James Cook with her ill-informed and notorious tweet.

The DJPR even has its own deputy secretary for inclusion, which is extraordinary given that the main purpose of the department appears to be the promotion of business and trade.  It clearly adheres to the utopian intellectual elite theory that the workforce of the private sector economy can and should be controlled by government.

Victoria, indeed Australia, would not be in today's predicament had these departments spent time and resources on real issues, not activism.  We know from reports that the contact tracing and pandemic team in the DHHS was severely under-resourced.

The government of Daniel Andrews appears to be operating in a different kind of reality in which it is blatantly more concerned with social engineering than it is healthcare.  This is because most of the government departments are staffed and run by individuals who have spent years in the humanities departments of our universities, which, of course, are mired in identity politics, social justice, postmodernism and pseudo-Marxism.

According the DHHS cultural and diversity plan, it not only has 18 diversity "deliverables" but it also claims that its commitment to diversity is "central to our goal of achieving better outcomes to all Victorians".

Tell this to the people of Victoria who are now living under the most draconian measures imposed on an Australian population since days of the penal colony, thanks to the hotel quarantine fiasco.  Tell this to the thousands of Victorians who have lost their jobs — perhaps even family members.

The real crisis we are facing is not being caused by COVID-19 but by the elite's stubborn attachment to identity politics, which is obscuring the real problems and jeopardising the lives and livelihoods of mainstream Australians.

We're Not All In This Together

As Victoria is plunged back into lockdowns, with those in greater Melbourne facing unprecedented restrictions on their every move, the difference between the two Australias has never been so stark.

Since March, the elites have been out of touch with ordinary Australians.  Over four months ago, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told us that "we're all in this together", a slogan repeated by the political class ever since.  Meanwhile, while almost one million Australians have been forced out of work and countless small businesses have shut down, the Victorian government gave its employees a 2% pay rise plus an additional "mobility payment" worth between $757 and $2,800 each.

Many mainstream Australians have accepted pay cuts to keep their jobs.  According to a poll published in May 60% of 18-24 year olds had either lost their job or had their pay or hours cut in the previous six weeks.  For those aged 25-34, this rose to 63%.

The public sector has been completely insulated from the experience of mainstream Australians.  My analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics data published earlier this year found that between 14 March and 2 May the rate of job losses in the private sector was 4.5 times higher than the in the public sector.

Victoria is now the epitome of this divide between mainstream Australians and the elites.  The Minister for Health, Jenny Mikakos, refused to answer questions in parliament on Tuesday 4 August, clearly unhappy that she had to show up for work.  In April, Ms Mikonos argued that politicians were "working incredibly hard" and that she recognised that "many in our community are doing it tough".  It appears she lost her work ethic, along with any semblance of empathy, after receiving per 11.8% pay rise earlier this year, making her salary of $352,057 the equivalent of just over 7 times the median salary.

In another spurn of mainstream Australians, the Andrews government, without any proper scrutiny in the parliament, has imposed severe lockdown measures on the approximately 5 million residents of greater Melbourne.  I have estimated that these restrictions will cost the Victorian economy $3.17 billion each week, a 37% drop on the usual output of $8.58 billion a week in the state.  This is based on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand's estimate of equivalent stage four restrictions imposed in New Zealand.

For those who have been arguing for severe lockdowns all along, this cost means nothing.  To them, lives matter more than "the economy", and any cost is acceptable if it means preventing deaths from COVID-19.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the economy is.  The economy is lives.  It's the infinitely complex interdependencies between individual people, their families and their communities.  The $3.17 billion of missing economic activity is not an abstraction.  As NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet put it in a refreshing opinion article in the Daily Telegraph at the end of July, "In human terms, that's ... wages not being earned, bills not being paid, sales not being made, goods and services not being produced, all affecting the welfare of millions of people."

Mainstream Australians are the ones who will bear the costs of the Victorian lockdown.  The missing $3.17 billion won't be coming from the pockets of Dan Andrews and Jenny Mikakos, but from the pockets of hard-working tradies, students who work part-time in cafes, and the distribution centre workers who keep the essentials flowing to the rapidly-stripped shelves of supermarkets.

Ordinary Australians know that there has been no equality of sacrifice in this crisis.  That's why 74% of them think that politicians and senior public servants earning over $150,000 a year should take a 20% pay cut, according to a poll published at the end of April.

The new Victorian lockdown is going to amplify the harm inflicted on ordinary Australians, and the divide between them and the political elites will only grow.  By mid-July 170,000 Victorians had been forced out of work and an additional 80,900 were technically employed but working zero hours because there was no work, not enough work, or they had been stood down.

The Andrews government expects around 250,000 more people to be stood down as a result of lockdown 2.0.  The number is likely to be much higher, with The Australian on Friday 7 August reporting that Victoria's unemployment rate will reach almost 19%, meaning that approximately one in five Victorians will be out of work.  If the lockdown lasts even a few days longer than the anticipated six weeks this figure will be even higher.

The number one priority of governments across the country has to be getting Australians back into work.  For every additional week someone is unemployed, their mental and physical health deteriorate, and their chances of ever finding a job again diminish.

By refusing to acknowledge the suffering that mainstream Australians are experiencing, the elites, led by the likes of Andrews and Mikakos, are compounding the differences between the two Australias.

‘Sonic Anti-Colonialism’ Sounds A Bit Off

Last week, Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that the government will be dishing out $90.5 million worth of taxpayers' money to 100 of the 690 applicants who applied to the Australian Research Council for a Future Fellowship grant.  A perusal of the project descriptions reveals that the vast majority are extremely worthy ventures which will undoubtedly make a positive and indelible impact on both Australia and Australians' lives.

Predictably however, there is an interesting selection of humanities projects which, for reasons only known to the selection committee, have managed to make the cut.  The University of Sydney's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, which appears to be staffed entirely by individuals who have devoted their lives to deconstructing knowledge and language while fighting the invisible systems of power, has done pretty well.

Megan Mackenzie, who is Professor of a discipline called "Gender and War" in the Department of Government and International Relations has been awarded $1,052,328 for a project entitled "Eliminating Sexual Violence Within the Military".  According to Professor Mackenzie, "Military sexual violence, or sexual violence that occurs within national militaries" is "a complex and gendered international problem".  Meanwhile her colleague, Associate Professor Sarah Phillips has been promised $1,006,500 so that she can conduct interviews with people in Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan and Somalia to see how they feel about having to live under the yoke of such terrorists groups as al-Qa'eda, Isis, the Pakistani Taleban and al-Shabaab.  I would be willing to wager that they do not feel all that great about it.

While Professor Philips is busy talking to Yemenites in Yemen, anthropologist Associate Professor Holly High will be chatting with Laotians in Laos about socialism and reproduction, as the ARC has thought it prudent to support "Cultural values, birth and parenting.  Reproductive Health and Lao socialism" with a generous gift of $922,400.  Among other things, the project claims that "anticipated benefits include advanced understandings of Lao culture and society, socialism as it articulates with international health and economic agendas, and the anthropology of human flourishing."

It is of course, not just the folk at the University of Sydney who have received grants.  The University of New South Wales has been given $1,011,852 for "A Sonic Approach to Anti-colonialism in Interwar India" which will "apply the methods of Sound Studies to the history of anti-colonialism in India.  Extending on earlier work which draws extensively on visual archives to construct historical narratives, this project aims to explicitly trace the reverberations of sound ― especially mediated speech, slogans and song ― in anti-colonial mobilisation in the interwar period."  A researcher ensconced at the University of the Sunshine Coast has been awarded $1,014,155 for "Saving Lies:  Mapping the influence of Indigenous LGBITQ + creative artists".  This project will entail "Using queer and critical race theories and a positively charged mapping of complex identities found in art and art-making."

While this latest funding announcement has been very good news for these academics and their particular pursuits, especially given the extremely precarious state of the Australian university in 2020, it is very bad news for the Australian taxpayer.  This is because the Australian taxpayer is paying for a movement whose aim is to obliterate the Australian way of life.  As they go about their daily business trying to earn a living in these increasingly difficult times, Australians, through no fault of their own, are funding the very people who are engaged in a culture war which seeks to destroy the values and institutions of Western Civilisation.

Let us take Megan Mackenzie, who has long been generously funded by the taxpayer, as an example.  In 2014, she received an Australian Research Council Grant worth $434,692 to fund a project entitled "Women in Combat:  a comparative analysis of removing the combat exclusion".  Last year, she wrote an article for the taxpayer-funded ABC in which she proposed that masculinity is the biggest obstacle to climate action.  While Mackenzie has clearly bought into the notion of white supremacy and the patriarchy, she should be reminded that large numbers of Australian taxpayers who are funding her research are white men.  It is both ethically and morally wrong for researchers such as Mackenzie to continue to take money from hard-working Australians who they consistently deride in the public forum.

If academics such as these were to attempt to make a living from propounding identity politics, radical race and gender theory, they would not survive in this world.  This is because there is no market among the general populace who naturally have little desire to pay to be insulted or told that they are racist.  The harsh reality for those employed in the humanities is that without funding via other people's money, they would struggle to earn their keep.  We are in the middle of a very real crisis, yet these academics are still convinced that the most pressing issues of the day are patriarchy, heteronormativity and white supremacy.

The government needs to remember that it is spending the public's money.

Two years ago, Minister Tehan announced the introduction of a National Interest Test (NIT) in which applicants would be asked "the extent to which the research contributes to Australia's national interest through its potential to have economic, commercial, environmental, social or cultural benefits to the Australian community."

According to Minster Tehan, the NIT would give the minister of the day the confidence to look the Australian voter in the eye and say, "your money is being spent wisely".  It would certainly take someone of an exceptionally steely disposition to be able look the taxpayer in the eye and tell them that projects about "Lao socialism", "Indigenous LGBITQ + creative artists" or "A Sonic Approach to Anti-colonialism in Interwar India" is their money wisely spent.

By continuing to fund academics obsessed with Marxism and identity politics, the Coalition is supporting a divisive progressive ideology which is contrary to tradition and contrary to what mainstream Australians know is right and true.  As long as it keeps financing left-wing institutions, it will continue to lose the culture war.

Peter Ridd Challenge Goes To the Heart Of A Free Society

Peter Ridd has decided to fight last week's decision in favour of James Cook University, and the case is of such public importance that the High Court simply must allow the appeal to be heard.

The Ridd case is much more than a mere workplace relations dispute between an academic and his employer.  It is even bigger than a dispute about climate change.

It is about the free speech crisis at our universities, and goes to the heart of the "cancel culture" epidemic engulfing the Western world.

Ridd is a Townsville-based marine geophysicist and Great Barrier Reef expert, whose 30-year academic career effectively ended when he started disputing the conventional wisdom that climate change was "killing" the reef.  He subsequently took the university to court, winning $1.2m in compensation for his unlawful sacking.  Last week, the Federal Court overturned that win in a 2-1 decision.

In deciding whether to grant special leave for the appeal, the High Court will consider whether the case involves "a question of law that is of public importance".  The Ridd matter easily meets this threshold.  It would be the first time the High Court has been called upon to consider the meaning of "academic and intellectual freedom", which is used in enterprise agreements covering staff at almost all Australian universities.

The court's decision will therefore have very real consequences in terms of university governance, and the extent to which administrators tolerate controversial (and, often, commercially inconvenient) opinions from the professoriate.

Should "intellectual freedom" be limited by the whims of university administrators, as JCU is arguing?  Or should it be wide enough to allow for the kind of controversial, but honestly held opinions for which Ridd was ultimately sacked?

The Federal Court's answer to that question is deeply disturbing.  In its judgment last week, the majority seemed to suggest that free speech on campus is past its use-by date.

"There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts of academic freedom," scoffed justices Griffiths and Derrington.  For good measure, the majority judgment quoted — arguably out of context — from an academic textbook outlining "a host of new challenges", like "the rise of social media" and "student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces".

If nothing else, the Federal Court has exposed just how much our public institutions have been corroded by modern cancel culture.  The free speech crisis at our universities has been apparent for years, but now the hypersensitivity of woke undergraduates is being taken seriously by our penultimate court.  It sets a precedent, and a dangerous one.  While The Australian does not suggest the judges acted improperly, it is worrying that the idea the boundaries of free speech should be defined by self-appointed cultural arbiters and anonymous Twitter mobs is on the verge of formal legal recognition.

This is not about the polite notion of so-called "acceptable limits" to free speech.  It is a radical departure from how our society treats knowledge.  Former opinion editor Bari Weiss recognised this dynamic in her sensational resignation from The New York Times recently:  "I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history," Weiss wrote.  "Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing moulded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

You could replace the words "journalism" and "history" with almost any intellectual discipline.  Woke revisionism has trashed the humanities faculties almost beyond repair.  Now it is creeping into the "hard sciences".  That is how we have arrived at a situation in which a respected academic such as Ridd is put through hell for offering a critique of the "settled science" of climate change.

If our judicial system lets JCU get away with it, every academic in the country — present and future — will be forced to choose between speaking the truth and putting bread on the table.

And for students, the Ridd case will mean the difference between tertiary education as a rigorous intellectual pursuit that invites critical thinking, or as rigid dogma that must be internalised and regurgitated in order to secure an expensive piece of paper with one's name on it.

Intellectual freedom and free speech are not antiquated notions.  They are ancient and important rights, and "public institutions" that dispense with them are not public at all.

The issues raised by the Ridd matter must at least be considered by the highest court in the land.  The implications for our most basic freedoms give every Australian a stake in its outcome.

Vision Of Justice

"Justice is the end [goal] of government.  It is the end of civil society," argued James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers and the fourth president of the United States, in the Federalist No. 51.  Writing in the year that the First Fleet of British ships arrived at Sydney, Madison understood that citizens need to believe in the fundamental justness of a political regime for it to survive the test of time.

This is why it is short-sighted to dismiss as juvenile the tearing down of statues, cancelling of old movies and removal of products from shelves deemed offensive.

These actions are a part of a broader conception of justice based on identity politics, which holds that the primary moral unit and therefore that which is of most relevance to justice and politics is group identity.  What matters is not the content of one's character, but what biological, racial, or gender tribe one belongs to.

The identity politics view of justice is incompatible with the traditional Western notion of justice which is based on the inherent dignity and equality of all individuals, from which notions such as equality before the law and the rule of law are derived.

These two competing conceptions of justice were on display in the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Mainstream Australians who had been patiently and diligently obeying social distancing rules were exasperated that apparently an entirely different set of rules applied to the protesters.  But what actually happened was that two entirely different regimes were operating side by side:  the mainstream regime based on the equal application of the law and the identity politics regime based on grievance, victimhood and claimed racial injustice.

Worse, the elites either actively encouraged the protests which were attended by at least four federal Labor MPs and one Greens MP, or they permitted them to take place without consequence.  The argument that it was too difficult to enforce the law given the number of protestors was clearly a nonsense.  State and federal governments have shut down roughly 80 per cent of economic and social life since mid-March.  If they wanted to enforce the law, they could have.

The protests are just the latest example of a failure of the elites to take the side of mainstream Australians.

The principal institutions of cultural influence in Australia have for decades relentlessly foisted onto us the divisive framework of identity politics.  It permeates the editorials of the ABC, tutorial rooms of universities, board reports of major corporations, pre-game rituals of major sporting codes, memos written by public servants and reports authored by taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission.

From the boardroom to the classroom and everywhere in between, mainstream Australians are consistently berated as racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic climate deniers.

The reason why Labor, the Greens, and GetUp! campaign against any cut, or even a temporary freeze, to ABC funding is they know the ABC is the chief mouthpiece for identity politics.  This is why GetUp! worked hand in glove with Labor to make ABC funding a central issue at the recent Eden-Monaro by-election.

Winston, the protagonist in George Orwell's 1984, remarked that under Big Brother the past has been "abolished … every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed."  Regime congruence demands that the past must be brought into line with the present.

If Australia is irredeemably and structurally racist, as the identitarian Left contends, then justice demands it be deconstructed and re-written so that the British brought to Australia not liberty, democracy and equality, but violence, racism, and slavery.  This is why statues must be toppled, rather than more being added, and history books re-written, rather than to simply have more discussion of our history.  The point is not to debate, but to alienate mainstream Australians from their own country.

A sign of things to come is the New York Times' 1619 Project, whose objective it is to reframe American history, "understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."  The project argues modern America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619 when African slaves were first brought to the British colonies of North America.  The point being that America was founded on slavery not liberty.  A school curriculum with content based on the 1619 Project has to date been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states across America.

If this is not a culture war, then nothing is.

Fortunately, mainstream Australians have proven remarkably resilient to the division encouraged by the elites.  According to polling undertaken in 2019 and 2020, 71 per cent of Australians believe Australia has a history to be proud of, 88 per cent are proud to be Australian, and 92 per cent believe freedom of speech is an important Australian value.

This polling reflects a reality that there is more that unites than divides us as a country.

Two nurses or mechanics living in Dandenong, Penrith, Longreach, or Elizabeth of different racial backgrounds have far more in common than they do not.  Most likely they own a home and are raising their own family or they aspire to, they work hard and want a better life for themselves and their family, they are honest, dutifully pay their taxes and follow the law, they take people as they are, and if they don't themselves work in a small business one of their neighbours does.

The central debate today is a regime-level one about what it means to be an Australian, with mainstream Australian values on one side and identity politics on the other.  But a house divided cannot stand, and only one vision of justice for Australia will prevail.

How Coronavirus Is Killing Small Business ― And Threatening Our Values

The heart of the Australian way of life is under threat with small businesses fighting for survival as lockdown restrictions continue.  The crisis has hastened the ongoing decline of small business that functions as the fabric that holds local communities together.

A survey commissioned by the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia revealed a third of sole traders have been hit with an 80% decline in turnover, while three in four small businesses have experienced a decline in revenue since the beginning of the lockdown restrictions.

The restrictions over the last three months have placed a particular strain on small business.  Small outward-facing businesses, particularly in the accommodation and hospitality industries, who are dependent on tourism and foot traffic have been crippled by border and movement restrictions.  Small cafes and restaurants have seen their operations severely impacted with limits on patrons.  Businesses with limited floor space have been less equipped to accommodate social distancing measures.  And business startups have had their momentum arrested.  While the hit to revenue and operations has affected businesses big and small, in the long run it will likely be smaller and less established businesses that are disproportionately affected.

The plight of small business is cause for concern, especially when put in the context of long term structural decline.  Over the past 15 years, the number of workers employed by small business (businesses employing less than 20 people) has fallen from above 50% to 41%, and the share of self-employed workers has steadily declined from 20% to 16%.

Declining entrepreneurship and business creation reduces opportunity and competition that drives higher wages and product and service improvements for consumers.

But the decline is not just concerning for economic reasons.  Small business is at the heart of the Australian way of life and a healthy and vibrant High Street promotes mainstream Australian values.

Creating value for the community, innovation, independence and personal responsibility are fostered by widespread self-employment and involvement in small business.  The erosion of the ability to start and run a business will undermine community formation and a culture of self-reliance.

Being involved in small business instils an understanding of and appreciation for what goes into running a business.  Employees are personally connected with the inner workings of the business and understand the risk taken on by their employer to make their job possible.  They understand the relationship between the value they create for the business and their wage.  For those involved in small business, business is not an abstraction with an artificial divide between the interests of employers and employees.  They see first hand the destructive effects of red tape and understand that businesses are not a bottomless untapped tax source for governments.

Small business is foundational to the fabric and character of local communities.  The commitment of locally owned businesses to the local area cannot be replaced by distant large corporations at the national or even international level.  An important part of the life of local communities is lost when the only difference between suburbs and towns are the relative locations of the McDonalds, Woolworths, Bunnings and BP.

To foster small business, encourage job creation and reverse the concerning trend of small business decline, governments must remove the impediments that disproportionately impact small business.  Workplace regulation is in dire need of reform to allow small businesses to expand without the headache of navigating complex awards with onerous entitlements.  When the likes of Qantas, Coles, and the ABC with professional accountants on staff are falling foul of industrial relations requirements, it is no wonder that small businesses owners are put off from employing due to the complexity of the system.

The same applies to the taxation system and red tape in general.  Small businesses who lack the resources to engage professional expertise are put at a significant disadvantage.  Bold reforms for simplification across the board are required to level the playing field and allow small businesses to thrive.

Reversing the decline in small business is vital for the health of mainstream Australia.

There Is No Smoking Sceptre At The Palace

The release of the "Palace Letters" reveals Queen Elizabeth had as much to do with the dismissal of the Whitlam government as did the CIA.

The correspondence, now made public, between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace reveals very little that's new or interesting, other than that Kerr deliberately did not tell the Queen that he was planning to sack the prime minister.  But conspiracies die hard, and no doubt the myth-making about Gough Whitlam's martyrdom will continue unabated.

The relevance of the Palace Letters has less to do with their contents, and more to do with the efforts of some left-wing academics to prove to themselves that the somehow illegitimate actions of Kerr sanctify Whitlam and his government.  The truth is that during the constitutional crisis of 1975 Whitlam had as little regard for constitutional convention as did Kerr, and when Labor was comprehensively defeated at the subsequent federal election, Kerr's decision effectively received a democratic mandate.

The letters are shocking ― but only for those who put so much hope into them.  In a letter dated November 11, 1975 from Kerr to Sir Martin Charteris, the private secretary to the Queen, Kerr wrote:  "I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because under the Constitution the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance."

Charteris' response six days later confirmed the Queen was not informed of the dismissal in advance and noted Kerr acted with "perfect constitutional propriety".

The letters should go a long way in redeeming the reputation of Kerr.  He made the best choice available to him to navigate the political stalemate, while fulfilling his constitutional role and ensuring that the final decision was one made by the Australian people.

If anything, it is Whitlam whose reputation is diminished by the release of these letters.  The letters reveal that following his sacking before the election, Whitlam attempted to have the Queen recommission him as prime minister.  As constitutional expert Professor Anne Twomey of Sydney University has commented:  "So instead of the British interfering in Australia's constitutional system, [it] seems that Gough Whitlam was rather hoping the British would interfere into the system by making him Prime Minister."  This hardly fits the popular stereotype of Whitlam as a proud and independent Australian republican.

The Australian people understood that the cause of Gough Whitlam's dismissal was Gough Whitlam.  At the post-dismissal election in 1975 Whitlam was defeated in the biggest landslide in Commonwealth history, followed by another heavy defeat in 1977.

Despite this, and due in no small part to the angry response to the dismissal, the event has cast a shadow over Australian politics ever since.

No prime minister has changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam.  In a flurry of reform between 1972 and 1975, He established bureaucratic-run healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and increased public sector numbers and salaries.  He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 to 27 to administer all the extra Commonwealth activities.

When the Whitlam-led Labor party was elected in 1972, government spending was 19 per cent of Australia's GDP.  When Labor lost the 1975 election, the same statistic had soared to almost 24 per cent.  In 2019-20 federal government spending was 24.6 per cent of Australia's GDP.

Malcolm Fraser, who was a staunch opponent of the Whitlam agenda in parliament and was in the best position to roll back the Whitlam reforms, left them largely untouched.  Perhaps in response to the rage over Whitlam's dismissal, Fraser ensured his government was largely a continuation of the Whitlam era.  And no government has since challenged the Whitlam legacy in any effective way.

For those who are interested in the future of opportunity and prosperity of Australians, the letters are a reminder of the politically motivated fury that has effectively kept Whitlam's ideas in power for 45 years.

The Palace Letters will not advance the republican cause as it is a niche issue of interest to a relatively small group of people concentrated mainly in academia and the ABC.  Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese is wrong when he said on Tuesday the letters should prompt a renewed discussion about the republic.  Right now the Australian people have far more important things to worry about.

Sport Should Unite Us, So Why Are Its Pampered Pooh-Bahs Using It As A Tool Of Division?

Australians go to the footy to get away from politics and watch and enjoy the footy.  Elitist sports administrators would rather abuse their positions as custodians of our favourite games to grandstand about their own divisive beliefs and undermine the unifying force of sport in Australia.

In June in the AFL and the NRL, following the restart of their coronavirus-delayed seasons, players from all clubs participated in ritualistic pre-game kneeling in support of the international political movement, Black Lives Matter.  This was carried out with the express approval of the AFL and the NRL administrators and the club officials and egged on by a sympathetic media.

Behind the title Black Lives Matter is a radical set of ideas.  The entire premise of the BLM movement is that Western society structurally impedes racial equality and that this can only be fixed by fundamental structural change to the West.  Their cause is revolution based on the divisive ideology of identity politics.

Presumably, the players do not actually support BLM's demands for defunding and abolishing police, "disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", or dismantling capitalism as one of the "state structures" which disproportionately harms black people.  For the players, capitalism is one of the "state structures" which makes their lucrative playing salaries and sponsorship deals a reality.

But the AFL and the NRL should know better than to go along with this.  Aussie rules icon Sam Newman captured the mood well in a post to Twitter which said "Division, conflict, fury, rage, angst, anarchy, disruption, group guilt, group shaming, acquiescence.  Don't include everyone in the mob mentality, please.  AFL is sport!"

The administrators of our sporting codes are custodians of something of great value to Australians.  Sport displays man's competitive spirit in a noble contest which celebrates human excellence.  These values are universal, making sport a source of commonality that crosses racial and religious lines.

Because of this sport should be an escape from the things that do divide us.  And there are few things more divisive than the ignoble political contests.

In recent years our sporting codes have institutionalised political grandstanding and moralising to members and spectators as a central part of the game.  The AFL and the NRL have given their longstanding support to the campaign to divide Australians by race in the Australian Constitution and their support for changing the definition of marriage in 2017.

In 2019 Rugby Australia terminated the playing contract of star Israel Folau for making comments on social media which reflected his personal religious views.  At a code of conduct hearing in May 2019, then-Rugby Australia CEO Raelene Castle reportedly suggested she would have terminated Folau's contract if he had even "photocopied Bible passages" and posted them on social media.

New polling by market research firm Dynata confirms that Australians have had a gutful of our favourite past times being used as a vehicle to promote the narrow ideological obsessions of an arrogant elite.

The poll asked 1,011 Australians between 19 and 23 December 2019 to agree or disagree with the statement that "Sporting codes like the AFL and NRL have become too politically correct."  51 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement and just 17 per cent disagreed (the remaining third neither agreed nor disagreed).

This is not a case of the sporting codes simply reflecting the widely accepted views of the community.  The people who control sports and the people who enjoy them are different people with different kinds of beliefs.  It is a reflection of the broader disconnect between the elites and the mainstream.

The people who run Aussie rules, rugby league, or rugby union, are increasingly bureaucratic and as such are prone to the same biases and assumptions of those in academia, the ABC, and the major corporations who believe in identity politics, climate change, and central planning.  They could not understand why anyone would boo indigenous former Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes, use social media to quote the Bible, or get upset at players "taking a knee".  They probably haven't met anyone who didn't think Donald Trump was every kind of -ist and -phobe you can name.

Sport is a part of the cultural fabric that ties Australians together, but woke lecturers in the sporting codes are abusing their positions to divide us further.  Australians recognise the importance of sport and the simple wisdom that politics does not belong there.

So Buildings Are Racist Too, Now

Even though Victoria's goldrush city of Ballarat is purported to be the state's largest inland city, it is safe to say that it has more than its fair share of statues and monuments which honour heroes, icons, royalty, poets and goldfield pioneers.  So abundant are they, in fact, that the Ballarat Information Centre has thought it prudent to compile an extremely helpful self-guided historic statues walking tour for the curious visitor who would like to delve deeper into the city's impressive array of bronzes, busts and bandstands which line the main boulevard.

Three years ago, when some delinquents decided to daube the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park with the words "No pride in genocide" and "Change the date", I went to Ballarat and made a short, slightly tongue-in-cheek film entitled A Politically Correct Walking Tour of Ballarat based on the aforementioned brochure.

The upshot of the film was that by the time the history erasers had finished with its statues and monuments, Ballarat would be completely bereft of any visual reminders of the men and women who made the city what it is today.  It would be as if they never even existed at all.  The city would be left with nothing but a depressing parade of empty plinths and miserable patches of grass where tributes to the brave had once stood.

These days, the film's conclusion does not seem all that far-fetched after all.  Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time until the usual suspects in Australia decided to join the "topple the racists" crowd currently sweeping across the US and UK by coming up with their own list of early settlers, explorers and colonial administrators which they believe should be destroyed on the grounds that each and every individual who has been immortalised in stone, marble or bronze was a racist.

This list is not particularly discerning;  anybody will do.  In Adelaide, the statue of the city's founder Colonel William Light, who, if you are going to play the identity politics card, was half Malaysian, has twice been vandalised with "Death to Australia" and "No pride in genocide".  Charles Cameron Kingston, the 20th premier of South Australia between 1893 and 1899, has also been targeted for his support of the White Australia policy, even though he pushed to give votes to women and to extend workers compensation.  Captain Cook, also on the list, had of course died before the First Fleet arrived on the shores of Botany Bay in 1788.

Facts do not matter to this movement which chooses emotion and superstition over reason, caprice over common sense and barbarism over civilisation.  We have seen the masses on the streets of London and Bristol, whipping themselves up into a frenzied state of blind fury, persecuting stone and metal for the real and imagined sins of those so depicted.  It is an expression of a moral revulsion at the supposed racism and ideas of cultural superiority displayed by our forebears.  This behaviour is not just solely emotional, but to some extent it is also tactical.  By tearing down or vandalising statues, the movement is declaring ownership of the present because it has taken control of the past through defacing it or erasing it.  It is stating to the world in no uncertain terms that it is now the master of our destiny as it has the power to shape the future.

What we are seeing in the heart of the West itself is a cultural revolution to remove the very symbols that embody the essence of Western civilisation, by a minority in the West who hate their own countries.  When vandals graffitied the busts of former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, they were basically advertising their animosity towards Australia.

These modern-day Jacobins, who are proudly ignorant and dismissive of history, would like to replace what we have now, which are the values and institutions of Western civilisation, with ideological and whimsical group rights.  At the moment, all they are offering us is a combination of violence, anarchy and iconoclasm.

Everything has to go in a Rousseau-type purge where we can return to a native state of noble savagery in the false hope of a utopia.  As the late Sir Roger Scruton put it, "everything that does not conform to the egalitarian goal is to be pulled down and destroyed.  In this way, 'social justice' becomes a barely concealed demand for the clean sweep of history that the revolutionaries have always attempted."

One of the troubles with this particular revolution, as with all revolutions, is that it has no discernible end.  Once Ballarat is shorn of its statues and monuments, what will the mob turn to next?  Paintings and books?  According to a manifesto issued by a US architecture think tank, it will be buildings.

In its letter entitled "Un-making ARCHITECTURE:  An Anti-racist architecture manifesto" which was published in the Architect's Newspaper, the authors claim in Marxist prose that "buildings are never just buildings".  Rather, these structures are "part of an apparatus that rewrites, white-washes, legitimises, standardises and erases a history of genocide, destruction, and racism while maintaining the status quo."

Our buildings, the piece proposes, are pretty much the same as statues and monuments because they are both "avatars shaped after leaders of regimes of death, racism, and colonial exploitation".  Buildings "recreate the effect of the monument, albeit at a different scale:  train stations, palaces of colonial administrators, bridges, camps, fortresses, stadiums, and also buildings for schooling, endowments, and museums".  What is more, the architects who are responsible for these racist structures are, according to the article, "trained as yes men and women" as their "vocation mostly exists and subsists as an appendix of hegemonic power".  Buildings it seems, are racist too.

Ballarat should watch out.  While it does not boast a fortress, it does have wildly named Old Colonists' Club, which, if the mob gets its way, will undoubtedly be the first to go.

Memo AFL: Do You Play Footy ― Or Politics?

Australia is not a racist country and the Australian Football League should know better than to give its support to a movement that says that it is.

Before round two kicked off on 11 June, players from Collingwood and Richmond announced they would "take a knee" in support of Black Lives Matter, the international protest movement which claims to oppose police violence against black people.  By the end of the round, all players at every match had performed the ritualistic pre-game kneeling.  Like true rebels, this was all carried out with the approval and support of their clubs and the AFL administrators.

Black Lives Matter is on its face a phrase that is unobjectionable but masks a much more radical set of demands.  The entire premise of the Black Lives Matter movement is that Western society structurally impedes racial equality and that this can only be cured by fundamental structural change to Western institutions.

One wonders what is it that the AFL and the clubs and the players believe when they say they support Black Lives Matters' radical ideas to defund and abolish the police, "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", or dismantle capitalism as one of the "state structures" which disproportionately harms black people.  Surely if this is true and capitalism is immoral then the AFL must have some regrets about the corporatisation and professionalisation of Aussie rules and its transformation into an entertainment consumption product.  Likewise, the players should be happy to sacrifice their salaries and lucrative sponsorship deals and play as amateurs for the love of the game.

Perhaps the Aussie rules establishment is just hopelessly naïve about this but more realistically the AFL simply doesn't care.  In recent years the league has institutionalised political grandstanding and moralising to members and spectators as a central part of the game.  The league's longstanding support to the campaign to divide Australians by race in the Australian Constitution and its support for changing the definition of marriage in 2017 has coincided with a condescending mission to change the values of fans.  In 2019 the AFL allowed Behavioural Awareness Officers to patrol fans who were barracking a bit too passionately for their team at the AFL-owned Marvel Stadium.

Aside from the political moralising, the AFL also treats its supporters with contempt with the way it manages the game.  Aussie rules fans are by and large traditionalist about the game they love, but the AFL's constant and arbitrary rule changes have confused spectators and not only changed the look of the game but highlights the AFL's faith in its ability to micromanage the game to a state of perfection.

The AFL as an organisation holds all the biases, assumptions and blind spots of any group of people who studied social science degrees at university and watch the ABC.  Like many corporate entities in the West, they believe in central plans, identity politics, and climate change.  They can not fathom why anyone would boo Adam Goodes, get upset by players "taking a knee", and probably haven't met anyone who didn't think Donald Trump was a fascist dictator.

An enduring mystery is why it is that the AFL which is supposedly a membership-based competition can have the same resemble the divisions that exist between other elites and the so-called deplorables.  One explanation might make sense of the arrogance of the AFL.  To understand the nature of the AFL it is necessary to understand the nature of "swamps".  While swamps are usually associated with entrenched and self-serving public sector institutions, swamp-like behaviour can be observed in private sector bureaucracies such as sports administrators.  The ideal that the monopolistic AFL would act selflessly and in the best interests of members is unrealistic.  Individuals act in their own best interest, and this is no less true of the individuals in the AFL.  As American public choice theorist William A. Niskanen observed, the bureaucrat is "not entirely motivated by the general welfare" ― or in the AFL's case the wellbeing of the game and service to the members.

The ambition to establish and always expand the "national competition" highlights the AFL's obsession with increasing its own prestige.  In the 1980s and 1990s, the league's expansion into South Australia and Western Australia diminished the state leagues and left fans in those states with two teams to choose from in the national league.  The end result was less choice for fans in a more distant sport, but a more prestigious AFL.  In recent years, vast resources have been committed to creating new clubs in the rugby heartland of Western Sydney as well a second club in Queensland which despite the priority treatment they have been given, have had only limited or no success on or off the field after nearly a decade of operating.

All of this was possible because the AFL had monopolised the sport and without competition could rely on the automatic support of people who loved Aussie rules and had no other choice.  And when the state governments shut down the country in response to the pandemic we found out that the league was not so secure.  Reports suggested only four of the 18 clubs could survive if the 2020 season didn't go ahead, and the AFL itself had to take out a $500 million loan to get it through the year.

Contrast this with the enviable situation in the rugby states.  The National Rugby League Commission's new chairman Peter V'landys has been a champion for the return of sport in Australia.  Despite the catastrophist claims made by the likes of the Australian Medical Association, V'landys argued that rugby league should never have shut down during the pandemic and successfully set the 28 May as the NRL restart ― a fortnight before the AFL returned.  He told 2GB that he couldn't see why there couldn't be a crowd at the first NRL game back.  V'landys said "you have to base it on data, not emotional scare-mongering clichés … They've got no data to show.  The infection rate is less than half a per cent ― how low do we need to get it?"  Those are the words of a man that is committed to representing the fans, while Aussie rules fans are consigned to the AFL swamp.

Don't Know Much About …

Yesterday Education Minister Dan Tehan announced that university students will now be paying up to $14,500 per year to study the humanities, an increase of over 110 per cent.

On all likelihood, the fee hike will mean a larger bill for the Australian taxpayer as many humanities students leave university without the skills needed to get a job and start to pay back their HECS debt.

This news has of course been greeted with outrage and anger from the National Union of Students as well as the National Tertiary Education Union.

National President of the NUS Molly Willmott, for example, said "These degrees are important.  The jobs that come out of them are important.  These students deserve better from the government."

This is very true.  Students studying the humanities do indeed deserve better.  They deserve much, much better.  This is because Australian undergraduates who have been enrolled to study degrees in the humanities have not in any way been getting their money's worth.

Students are, in short, being swindled by their institutions.

The idea behind studying the humanities used to be so that students were equipped with the tools to try make sense of and understand the world through the Western tradition of art, culture and philosophy.  This is no longer the case.  If you think Australian undergraduates are getting Plato or Socrates, Shakespeare or Dante, think again.

Instead, students have been getting fed a very depressing and thoroughly predictable diet of "new humanities" subjects based entirely around the postmodern theory of identity politics.

All subjects, whether it be history, literature, art or geography, must be shoe-horned into the idea that everything in the world is simply a societal power struggle of class, race and gender.

For the entire duration of their university careers, students have the same thing drummed into them repeatedly, by ideologically driven academics who present this single world view to undergraduates.

Let's have a look at some of the courses which have been on offer.

At the University of Western Australia, students have been taking Community, Power and the Common Good in which they have, "explored the community engagement and community empowerment through … social justice, power, equality and inequality, ethical public behaviour (and) theories of community building".

Over at the University of South Australia, undergraduates have been learning about the "social construct of whiteness and representations of whiteness in contemporary Australia" in a unit called Identity and Representation.  Those same students, enrolled in Gender, Sexuality and Representation have been spending their days considering "ways in which cultural artefacts reinforce or challenge dominant beliefs about gender and sexuality".

Students studying history have been getting an especially raw deal.

At least if you sign up for a degree in gender studies, you expect a generous dose of feminist studies and Queer Theory.  However, students studying both world and Australian history have been finishing their degrees with a completely distorted view of the world in which the past is viewed as a contest between the oppressors and the oppressed.

Australian history especially, has been repackaged and relabelled as a social and political commentary on contemporary issues rather than a study of actual history.

At Monash University, those enrolled in Australian Stories:  People, Place, History explored "crime and punishment, gender and sexuality, the environment, family (and) race relations", while students at the University of New South Wales taking Inequality in Australia were asked to consider "how was inequality influenced by race, gender, sexuality, age and disability?" and "when and why did it become a political issue?"

It is clear that Australian taxpayers have been funding the creation of a social warrior underclass of disaffected young Australians who emerge from universities with a particular view of Australia's history which colours their view on Australian society.

It is no wonder that these Australians have been taking to the streets decrying "racism" and wanting to expunge our history by tearing down monuments and statues.

Rather than more technocratic tinkering with university fees, the government should simply cease providing taxpayer support to any organisation that attacks and undermines Australian values.

This not only means ending funding for humanities departments, but also for our national broadcaster, the ABC, which has been a cheerleader of division through its relentless editorialising based on identity politics.

And it means no more funding for government and quasi-government organisations, such as the Australian Human Rights Commission, which spends its days soliciting complaints from Australians about how racist this country supposedly is and censoring freedom of speech.

The main dividing line of our time is not left or right, but identity politics versus mainstream Australian values.

Mainstream Australians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or background value our egalitarian way of life, liberal democratic institutions, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, hard work, small business, home ownership, and seek a better life for themselves and their children.

There is far more that unites than divides us as a country.  The humanities departments at universities must stop their relentless attack on the Australian way of life or lose their funding altogether.

The Tyranny Of The Righteous Mob

"Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children" is a phrase relevant to what's happening to universities, media organisations, and even to fashionably "woke" comedians.  Another apposite phrase is to be "hoist by one's own petard".

The demand to remove from public life any acknowledgment of anyone or anything identified as potentially racist has existed in various forms for a number of years but has gained impetus in recent weeks through the Black Lives Matter movement.

The call to remove statues in the United States of Confederate generals, in the UK of slave traders, and in Australia of Captain James Cook is one aspect, and in the scheme of things is just one minor aspect in an intellectual project attempting to do nothing less than refashion our understanding of modern society, and by extension our understanding of ourselves.

In broad terms that project involves replacing the idea that the world we live in is, or should aspire to be, one built upon concepts such as political liberalism, egalitarian democracy and a market economy, with a different idea, namely that differences between people and peoples according to class, race and gender, and the oppression that's resulted across history because of those differences, have created an irredeemably and fatally flawed society.

Therefore the conclusion that follows from this claim is that only a fundamental restructure of society can eliminate the class conflict, and the racism and the sexism which are the foundations of the modern world.  This in a nutshell and without too much exaggeration, is what every undergraduate Arts student at every Australian university is today taught to believe.

The problem with this perspective on the world is that it is created by the very system that the woke view as illegitimate.  It is akin to attempting to disentangle the Liar's paradox of "this sentence is false".

Another problem with the perspective is that it knows no boundaries and allows no room for the application of judgment, and an understanding of the reality that human history encapsulates both the best and worst of what it is to be human.

Yes ― Winston Churchill believed India should be ruled by the British.  But 80 years ago he alone was the difference between a Europe of civilisation, or one of Nazism.

It was Jacques Mallet du Pan, an 18th-century Swiss journalist, who in the midst of the French Revolution talked about revolutions consuming their children.  Revolutions are rarely things of half-measures.

Until recently few Australian university vice-chancellors would have contemplated the possibility that after years of telling students that Australia is a racist country, eventually someone would take them at their word, as the Chinese government did a few days ago.

If those journalists at The Guardian who cheer the toppling of statues of slave traders were consistent in their beliefs, they would accept the newspaper they work for should be toppled too because it was once financed by profits from spinning slave-picked cotton.

The British philosopher John Gray, who once described himself as of the left, but who now quite correctly argues that in modern politics "left and right" are largely meaningless, a few days ago wrote perceptively about the assault on values of the modern world.

"Woke activists … have no vision of the future.  In Leninist terms they are infantile leftists, acting out a revolutionary performance with no strategy or plan for what they would do in power."

As Gray points out, the rejection of democracy and liberal freedoms "concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob".

Mobs are dangerous at the best of times and righteous mobs ― whether in the streets or on social media ― are the most dangerous of all.

Gray concludes:  "As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK [and Australia], it should be clear that this is no passing storm.  The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal West.  Perhaps it is time to consider to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born."

Universities Always Said We Were Racists, Now Look At Their Dilemma

Australian universities are in quite the pickle.  Not only are they watching as potentially $12bn in revenue from foreign student fees slips away, but they are also being accused of racism by the country they rely on for so much of their funding.  Last week, Beijing issued a statement in which it warned Chinese students to give Australian universities a wide berth because of both COVID-19 and endemic racism.

In response to Scott Morrison's suggestions that this amounts to "coercion", Beijing has retaliated with the suggestion that Australia needs to do some "soul searching" and that the "racist incidents" were "based on a host of facts".

This is a delicious irony.  For years so many Australian universities have been making money out of the racism industry.  Now they are on the back foot, having to defend themselves against an accusation that is demonstrably false.

For decades academics employed in our institutions of higher education, especially those in the humanities, have been using taxpayers' money to paint a picture of Australia as a country of racists.  They have been using their positions in various faculties to propagate the myth that we are a xenophobic nation.

They have taken every opportunity to berate mainstream Australians about how they should be both ashamed of their history and ashamed of themselves.  They have been telling Australians that it is somehow immoral to celebrate Australia Day, that Captain James Cook was an invader, and that the whole existence of the modern state of Australia is a terrible mistake, a crime to be endlessly deplored and for which we must constantly apologise.  They have insisted that the values and institutions of Western civilisation are racist, imperialist and outdated, and must be expunged from our society.

The University of Sydney leads the way in the business of race.  A couple of years ago, its academics infamously rejected the Ramsay Centre's bachelor of arts in Western civilisation as "white supremacy writ large".  The faculty of arts and social science boasts a taxpayer-funded "Resurgent Racism" project, which has concluded that unless something is done by the faculty, Australian society will face a dystopian future of white supremacy.  Last year, the university hosted a self-styled "anti-racism educator" from the US to lecture everyone on campus about how racist they all were.

The staff in the history faculty seem to spend significant waking hours thinking, writing and talking about race and racism, all at the expense of the taxpayer.  Since 2002, the faculty has received almost $9m from the Australian Research Council to fund 18 historical studies research projects that focus on racism in one form or another.

Nine months ago, the vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, Michael Spence, appeared to comment that anyone who dared question the existence of Chinese influence on his campus was basically a racist.  "We have to be careful that the whole debate doesn't have overtones of the White Australia policy," he told The Sydney Morning Herald.  In this way, he ensured next year's income — or so he thought at the time.  No one predicted that COVID-19 would wipe out, almost overnight, $884m in international student fees for the University of Sydney, a generous portion of which would come from Chinese students.

Spence is the highest-paid vice-chancellor in Australia, earning $1.5m a year.  As yet, he has not taken a pay cut like many of his colleagues.

This episode has revealed another crack in the crumbling facade of the Australian university, which is one of the crucial institutions of Western civilisation yet which fails the Australian public, having lost sight of its purpose.  Our universities are facing a systematic crisis and have been exposed as incompetently run businesses more interested in ­foreign dollars, social justice, diversity and identity politics than they are the pursuit of truth, freedom of speech and intellectual inquiry.  They are floundering in the midst of a free speech crisis, with a questionable commitment to academia and a terrible track record in dealing with academics and students who hold a contrary view to the established groupthink.  Last year's Independent Review of Freedom of Speech in Higher Education Providers (the French review) found that many of the higher education rules and policies in universities used broad language "capable of impinging on freedom of expression".

Not only have we seen the censure and unlawful sacking of Professor Peter Ridd by James Cook University, but to add insult to injury, JCU's court case is being funded by taxpayers, having already cost $630,000 in legal fees.  Meanwhile, the University of Queensland employed one of Australia's top legal firms to pursue philosophy undergraduate Drew Pavlou regarding his robust criticism of the university's connections with China as well as that country's history of human rights abuses.

Our universities have long ceased being institutions interested in the rigorous exercise of freedom or the scientific method and today better resemble elaborate public relations outfits.