Elites at war with the people

An important takeaway from the last four years for many governments is the surprising ease of winning public compliance with demands for intrusive behavioural changes that completely reset the balance of rights and responsibilities between citizens, society, markets, and the government. Instead of implementing policies to give effect to voter priorities, the emboldened dominant metropolitan elites are entirely dedicated to the proposition that citizens should be forced to live by their rules on what to say, think, read, watch, do.

A telling indicator is the abandonment in practice of the long-standing principle of informed consent that was codified by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last December and came into effect in January. The net result of this is likely to be a redoubling of efforts to institutionalise and normalise governmental control over additional sectors of public life. If successful, this will embed minority elite worldviews at the cost of majority preferences.

The Australian Election Commission released details this week of the funding received by the two sides campaigning for and against the referendum last October to entrench the Voice for Aboriginal Australians in the constitution. The Yes side received AUD 60 million in total and the No side got between 15 to 30 million. It truly was a David and Goliath battle both in funds and outcome. Yet such inconvenient outcomes of elections and referenda, even when delivered with a 60-40 majority, can simply be disregarded as if they never happened.

The Albanese government has just announced the appointment of the next Governor-General. A former staffer to several senior Labor politicians, Sam Mostyn campaigned for the Yes side in the Voice referendum and has, in a tweet now deleted, referred to Australia Day (26 January) as Invasion Day. Albanese seems to be governing in the Joe Biden mould, promising to unify the nation but exacerbating race and gender-based divisiveness instead. Does this constitute a two-finger salute by the prime minister to the Australian people?

The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen is on the mark with her biting comment:

‘Mostyn’s appointment is the crowning achievement for one of the country’s most outspoken quota queens.

‘Her main skills appear to be gender advocacy, networking and being a quota queen, with a helpful side order of ALP [Australian Labor Party] connections.‘

Recently I was browsing an Australian bookshop online looking for a book to buy and came across the familiar acknowledgement of the traditional owners and custodians of the land and respect to all First Nations people. The virtue signal ended with the assertion that ‘Sovereignty was never ceded.’ At that point I left the site, never to return, with my first and lasting thought being: Mate, the problem is your white guilt, not my white privilege for I have none.

The elites are also intent on telling the people which cars and heating appliances to buy. What news to consume and from which ‘trusted’ source. Thus Ofcom, the UK’s broadcast regulator, has knuckle-rapped the upstart broadcaster GB News whose success with viewers, one suspects, is threatening the cosy dominance of the legacy media with their unwatchable woke-t(a)inted broadcasts. In addition to the by now familiar censorship industrial complex that has gained a suffocating hold in the US, think of the proposed new censorship laws currently being enacted in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Scotland.

Mass Immigration Contradicts Claims of Embedded Structural Racism

The West seems to be in decline economically, militarily, and as a moral inspiration for much of the rest of the world. With self-confidence sapped, its major political parties compete over which of them can be trusted to best manage the decline in order to ensure a soft landing, with slowly depleting wealth, falling standards of living, and global clout and influence shrinking. A telling indicator is the lack of courage to adopt policies of tough love to undo the deadly consequences of pandemic management policies.

Another indicator is the loss of control over border security. Mass inflow of peoples from diverse cultures with radically differing belief systems, values, and rights is not the best recipe for creating an integrated, harmonious, and cohesive new community – who knew? Instead, other than in countries like Japan that refused to go along with the mantra that uncontrolled ‘immigration and diversity’ are always an unqualified good, existing bonds of cohesion are breaking down with alarming speed and creating fresh security headaches.

Nearly nine million illegal migrants have swarmed across from Mexico into the US during Biden’s presidency. The biggest millstone around the Rishi Sunak government trapped in a political death spiral is the hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal migrants. Some 550,000 migrants came into Australia last year. Yet still the cry is raised that the three countries are all irredeemably structurally racist. India is commonly and accurately touted as the world’s fastest growing major economy, yet the outflux of large numbers of its people into the West continues. More of my fellow-ethnics are exploring how best to bring over additional family members from India than are planning to return to the supposedly booming country.

I left India in 1971 to pursue graduate studies in Canada, returned for a year in 1975 to do some archival and interview research, but aborted the visit when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency to negate a court verdict invalidating her election and assume and exercise dictatorial power. Born and having grown up in independent free India, like most I had taken democratic freedoms for granted and was shocked by the overnight suffocation of the notoriously argumentative Indians, in Amartya Sen’s evocative phrase. My first academic journal publication explored that topic and, at a time when the fashion among young graduate students in North America was to sneer at democracies, I wrote a lament for its demise in India.

That is what decided the issue for me of migrating formally and becoming a Canadian citizen. I then experienced a déjà vu moment with the military coup in Fiji, having taught at the University of the South Pacific for a few years before moving to New Zealand and later Australia.

This is a long explanation of why my commitment to democratic governance, citizens’ rights, and state responsibilities owed to citizens rather than people owing obedience to governments, is grounded in ‘lived experience.’ It also explains my growing despair at the speed with and extent to which Westerners have lost the self-confidence to defend their values, heritage, institutions, and contributions to net human welfare. The fossil fuel-driven Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment between them freed peasants from the land, women from the home, and workers from the ancestral village. These developments helped to destroy feudalism, emancipate workers, and democratise citizenship.

Europe also became superior in the weapons of war and colonised vast parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. The colonial legacy is mixed rather than uniformly evil or virtuous. Every culture and civilisation has dark stains in its history and few borders today are not the result of the use of force in the past. That said, is there a country that contributed more to the end of slavery than Britain? How many people from developing countries owe gains in life expectancy, education, income, political rights, and life opportunities to intellectual and scientific revolutions in Europe? How many more decades will they blame colonial powers for the continuing misery of their lives instead of pointing the finger of responsibility back at their own rapacious regimes?

Yet, Westerners seem intent on feeding the bonfires that are consuming them. There’s almost a palpable end-of-Roman Empire fin de siècle feel in the air. The Wall Street Journal reported on 17 March that in the latest global self-reported happiness rankings, the Nordics once again took the top four positions. Australians are the tenth-happiest people. The US has dropped out of the top twenty, owing primarily to the self-focussed and social media-obsessed under-30s who ranked 62nd globally.

Reasons for this include indoctrination in schools and universities that their culture and history are evil and racist, attacks on their ‘privileged oppressor’ identity, and relentless climate catastrophising. At an appearance in parliament on 20 March, Rebecca Knox, Chair of Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Authority, said she agrees with a report which concluded that her force is ‘institutionally racist.’ Lee Anderson MP asked her if white people had any unfair advantages in her force. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Then how can you be institutionally racist,’ he asked. ‘Um, sorry, I might have to get back to you,’ she stammered.

While all Caucasians are taught to be ashamed of white privilege, males bear the extra stain of toxic masculinity. Yet this is the exact same trait that impels men rather than women to come to the defence of women under attack in public spaces. I would expect an overwhelming male dominance in the top ten professions ranked by mortality risk, as also in jobs that require hard labour over long hours for little pay. And also in jobs that call for frequent travel to take people away from family.

An article in Forbes in 2018 reported US Bureau of Labor statistics that men are twelve times more likely than women to be killed at work, 4.761 to 386 in 2017. The ten most dangerous jobs in America, the Washington Post reported last year, are fishing and hunting, logging, roofers, aircraft pilots and flight engineers, helpers, construction workers, refuse and recyclable material collectors, structural iron and steel workers, truckers, underground mining machine operators, and farmers and ranchers. Unsurprisingly, in general they are also paid much better.

A recent gender gap report on Australian businesses from the Orwellian-sounding Workplace Gender Equality Agency measured gender equity – that is, equality of outcomes – by the median earnings of men and women, not allowing for any other considerations. Effectively this is anti-choice in practice. For most pay differentials today, when paying differently for the same work to men and women with similar qualifications and experience is illegal, are better explained by lifestyle and life balance choices that women make, and very sensibly too.

In Cathy Newman’s train wreck interview of Jordan Peterson in January 2018 that has had almost 48 million views on YouTube, he made the powerful argument that the Scandinavian countries are possibly the most gender egalitarian in providing equal opportunities to women in the job market without the pressure of worrying about financial security. Turns out that when women have true choice freed of financial security concerns, family time, and low-stress occupations are more important to them than high-flyer positions with generous compensation packages.

In New Zealand, the progressive embrace of all things Maori is so deeply internalised that in cross-national group discussions, Kiwi colleagues unthinkingly resort to Maori greetings to start and end messages(kia kaha katoa, kia ora koutou, arohanui). They forget that this is gross bad manners because it’s rude and discourteous to speak in a foreign language that excludes some in the group from the conversation. Maybe I should respond in Hindi, including the foreign script?