Nothing strikes as much fear through the establishment’s fact-checkers and hate-vanquishers as the rise of ‘populism’. Democratic backlashes against dominant ideologies and policy agendas are the natural and inevitable reaction to the intransigence of those who advance them. These reactions, which look likely to sweep many populist parties to power in elections this year, are seen by incumbents as the re-emergence of ‘dark historical forces’, but our leaders have no other words for the challenges to their authority than ‘far-Right’. The reason they cannot grasp what’s really going on – indeed, one of the causes of their unpopularity – is that they’ve placed too much faith in what has turned out to be really bad science.
According to the narrative of anointed pundits, tractors on their way to Europe’s capital cities and the EU Parliament are like so many Nazi tanks rolling across the continent. The EU Parliamentary election is at risk of a ‘far-Right takeover’ as polling shows voters beginning to reject the liberal consensus. This paranoid fantasy is not wholly without a basis in fact – the benighted really are changing the political landscape. Following Giorgia Meloni’s 2022 victory in Italy, Geert Wilders’s PVV became the largest party in the Netherlands last year but has been unable to form a Government. Since 2020, AfD has doubled its polling to around 20%, pushing Germany’s SPD and Greens into third and fourth places. The German Government is now contemplating banning the party, so bereft of ideas is it about how to counter its criticisms in the public square. France’s longstanding spectre haunting global blobists, Marine Le Pen’s party, would, according to recent polling, win a majority of seats in the National Assembly if an election were held tomorrow.
According to the establishment view, science is at loggerheads with the populism now sweeping across Europe. But to pit science against ideology in this way is false. Science has been used to legitimise numerous contemporary political agendas, invoked in the same way that God used to be to legitimise a particular political platform. Most notably, ‘climate science’, which is invoked by increasingly remote elites struggling to overcome yawning democratic deficits claim that ‘saving the planet’ is in the best interests of their electorates. Yet, to those being forced to pay the price for these economically ruinous policies, it’s obvious that the Net Zero agenda is, at root, an ideological crusade designed to advance the interests of wealthy elites. And many are now wondering if the ‘climate change’ we’re constantly being warned about will be as devastating as the policies designed to mitigate its effect, which seem to require the suspension of democracy, the transformation of society and the draconian regulation of lifestyles insofar as they require energy.
As politicians and others have met resistance to their agendas based on ‘unimpeachable science’, they have sought an explanation. The answer they found is epitomised by a 2011 article by liberal science warrior Chris Mooney, who helpfully set out ‘The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science’. Neuroscientists and social psychologists, explained Mooney, had identified differences in the structure of brains owned by liberals and conservatives, which made the latter more prone to ‘motivated reasoning’ and therefore to ideology, whereas liberals were biased only towards truth. This explained why Republicans were more sceptical of climate change then their Democrat counterparts who obediently recognised the authority of ‘the scientific consensus’. Mooney’s essay, which followed his 2005 book, The Republican War on Science, was itself worked into a book in 2012, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality.
Mooney’s work, born in the pre-Obama era of ‘muscular atheism’ and a regrouping of Left-of-centre ideas around scientism, though largely inconsequential, marked the completion of cognitive and behavioural scientists’ entry into the political sphere. Only somebody with insufficiently developed neural circuits – a.k.a. Republicans – could disagree with climate propaganda, or they were funded by Big Oil, or both. It didn’t really matter, because Science had spoken.
But Mooney’s confidence was misplaced. Whereas the scientific consensus on climate change had been broadly (and falsely) reported as being as indubitable as ‘basic physics’, the new lab-coated recruits of this political, and increasingly cultural war, could not claim anything so tangible. First, studies confirmed that academic psychology was experiencing a ‘replication crisis’ – barely a third of published science in the field could be reproduced experimentally. Second, psychological science was revealed to be dominated by Left-wing scientists, with measurable impacts on peer-review. Conservative scientists were less likely to be published. A soft science – and perhaps the softest science – was now being used to supposedly explain why more people didn’t believe in hard science, although, to complicate things, the hard science wasn’t that hard after all.
In Britain, where politics was less polarised under a suffocating Blairism, this naked scientism had a much easier ride into the establishment. A consensus on climate change – and pretty much everything else – had formed in Westminster, excluding any inconvenient influences from politics. In a 2010 report, jointly produced by the Cabinet Office and the Institute for Government, Cabinet Secretary, then Sir, now Lord Gus O’Donnell, who had commissioned it, wrote in the foreword:
Many of the biggest policy challenges we are now facing… will only be resolved if we are successful in persuading people to change their behaviour, their lifestyles or their existing habits.
The report, citing “major advances in understanding the influences on our behaviours” argued that “influencing behaviour is central to public policy”, and that in tackling “crime, obesity or environmental sustainability, behavioural approaches offer a potentially powerful new set of tools”.
But there had been no development in the behavioural sciences – they remained mired in the depths of the replication crises and obvious ideological bias. The only change that occurred was a dim view of individuals’ competences had developed and become fashionable within policy circles, displacing a view that had hitherto constrained technocratic paternalism. Barely a year following its publication, Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness had become the British Establishment’s operating manual. The Nudge Unit, properly known as the Behavioural Insights Team, was born.
After all, something had been lacking in public life since before even Blair’s triumphant arrival at Downing Street and politicians struggled to put their finger on it. In the early days of New Labour, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott declared that the state’s performance would now be measured by a ‘quality of life barometer’. Even the amount of birdsong – a metric of ecological sustainability and subjective wellbeing – would be measured. Sadly for Prescott, the plans for happiness were shelved in favour of a ‘War on Terror’, and so it was a touchy-feely David ‘hug-a-husky’ Cameron who finally seized the therapeutic initiative. He had convened a Quality of Life policy group in 2007 to investigate the policies required to make us adjust our behaviour to make life better for everyone, e.g. use less fossil fuels. And having taken office in 2010, the nudgers were the very group to help him make the ‘difficult’ choices required to save the planet.
The coalition ‘greenest Government ever’ brought together the two opposition parties that had convinced themselves they were planet savers. But the strongest constituency in Britain (ever) had a very different idea about what was lacking in politics. Worse, the Leave vote having won, no less an earthquake in the form of Donald Trump sent a second panic through the anointed classes. How could the nudgers, either side of the Atlantic, have got it so wrong? In the wake of these catastrophes, psychologists set to work developing new hypotheses to explain the public’s lack of gratitude.
Then, the most curious intervention from psychologists in the years between the Referendum and the Covid pandemic came from the green quarters. In 2018, an obscure 2016 paper by clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon came to the attention of climate protesters. The paper called for the creation of a “climate emergency movement”, which would “lead the public into emergency mode”. This “mode is the mode of human psychological functioning that occurs when individuals or groups respond optimally to existential or moral emergencies”, claimed the psychologist. Thus, having had the ‘truth’ of the ‘climate emergency’ explained to them, the public would rise up and force governments to act to save the planet. Klein-Salamon’s hypothesis spawned Extinction Rebellion and its franchises, and Greta Thunberg’s Schools Strike movement. But the public, in their millions, stayed at home. Rather than rising up, they became impatient with the failure to clear the mere dozens of protesters from the streets.
A more successful intervention by social psychologists was the infamous survey which claimed that 97% of academic papers on climate change supported the consensus position. Cook et al.’s 2013 study was routinely cited by Obama as representing the “overwhelming judgement of science”. It’s authors believed, like Klein-Salamon, that the public would be more receptive to the ‘climate emergency’ scaremongering if they knew it had the backing of most climate scientists – a contentious hypothesis of science communication known as the Gateway Belief Model. “An accurate perception of the degree of scientific consensus is an essential element to public support for climate policy,” explains the paper’s introduction. The paper was not accurate, but it created an article of faith around which its adherents could organise their arguments. It was political communication, not science communication.
But how effective has this psychological ‘science’ been?
Across the Atlantic, polls suggest that voters will return Donald Trump to the Whitehouse and terminate Justin Trudeau’s hyper-woke regime. Further to the south, the chainsaw-wielding libertarian Javier Milei won 56% of the popular vote in last year’s presidential election in Argentina. One in three Europeans now vote for anti-establishment parties, bleats the Guardian. Its sister paper nervously awaits the results of 40 elections around the planet that threaten to undermine the global order and all life on Earth. The Guardian, again, uncritically reported the words of John Kerry: “The populist backlash against Net Zero around the world is imperilling the fight against climate breakdown and must be countered urgently or we face planetary destruction ‘beyond comprehension’.”
It’s beginning to look like the advice of behavioural ‘scientists’ about how to engage the public on Net Zero and other policies is a bit duff. Big promises are made by these academics about their ability to influence the public. But what are they really capable of achieving?
Extremely limited evidence underpins behavioural scientists’ claims. The classic example of ‘nudge’, for example, is the discovery that the image of a fly painted onto a urinal helps men to take better aim, thereby leaving conveniences in better condition. Away from the toilet, psychologists discoveries are difficult to quantify in wider society. Some psychologists, observe their critics, have used exotic and inappropriate statistical methods to report greater effects than can realistically be detected and expressed in conventional terms. Even in the lab, an attempt to quantify the Gateway Belief Model found that consensus messaging yielded just a +1.7% change in support for climate policies. This result was later disputed by other researchers in the field, who conversely found ‘reactance’ in studies of consensus messaging – an awareness of being manipulated, which increased rather than overcame polarisation.
It is a peculiar debate between academics on the green-Left about how best to manipulate climate-sceptic conservatives, rather than have it out with their enemy in the democratic open. And this cod-science’s hostility to democracy and the hoi polloi, which is conceived of as an unthinking, malleable mass, is reproduced in countless governments’ policies and communications. Perhaps then, they have not merely failed to manufacture consent but have actually helped to turn electorates against their would-be masters.
It would be too much to say that the global ‘populist backlash’ is wholly caused by green blob head-shrinking. But behaviourists’ work seems more intended to legitimise intransigence and to justify draconian policy to politicians than to win over the public, whose reaction to it does not require a PhD to understand. Many millions are poured by governments into research which hasn’t merely produced some ‘reactance’ but ultimately looks set to be near-terminal for the green cause, if progressive governments and politicians suffer the catastrophic defeats at the ballot box that many predict. If the intention was to win over the public, then the psychologists are even more out of touch than their clients. Academic psychology epitomises, rather than rescues, elite intransigence.
People can be hectored and punished into lockdowns and forced by high prices to reduce their energy usage, and democracy can be slowly eroded. But academic psychologists have been unable to turn insight about men peeing on flies into preventing a pissed off public reciprocating official sentiments.
When presented with actual choice, rather than one dictated by ‘choice architects’, the public do not choose either heat pumps or EVs, nor green technocratic globalists. Britain, for the moment, looks set to buck the trend sweeping the rest of the planet. But that’s partly because successive Conservative governments have placed far too much faith in propaganda informed by behavioural science, just like their progressive counterparts abroad. There’s a lesson here for Keir Starmer – but you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll ignore it.
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I keep coming back to Iraq War II. Like the Americans then, the Zero COVIDians have won their “victory” but are now faced with governing a broken country with a divided and demoralised population, and they don’t appear to have any plan for the future.
I expect China has plans for the minerals. And the kangaroos can all go into their woks.
Or wokes.
Good they deserve it there wasnt that much force used it wasnt gun point more like a stroppy doorman
I really do not understand why Australians and New Zealanders are allowing this situation to carry on. It is quite baffling and undermines the view that our antipodean cousins are resourceful, tough and independently minded. Quite the opposite seems to be the case now.
Unless there has been serious opposition, but the controlled media is suppressing this information and keeping it from the rest of the world… And as per the London rallies throughout 2021.
They’ve had big protests, they have also had small ones that are completely crushed, check out the amount of police checking everyone’s papers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Dul2aKqVYQ
The NZ government had a lot of encouragement at the start, my cousin thought it was wonderful that quarantine escapees, were finally tracked down and returned, the nation cheered. Now its sinking in what it means but they look over here at the numbers, ‘at least we havent had that number of deaths’, even though I explain about the lack of excess deaths and that pneumonia disappeared when covid came, they look at the dinghies coming in, “at least we dont have that”…..
Too much fucking sun i think
The “nose-thumbing to Authority” Antipodeans of the 19th century and two World Wars are a thing of the past. Apparently, Australia now has close to 50% of first and second generation immigrants, from all four corners of the world, and I think they have a completely different attitude to that of the preceding “larrikin” generations.
In the early 1970’s, I did a lot of advertising work for the State Governments, much of it recruitment from the UK (doctors for Victoria, boilermakers and brickies for WA), and spent a fair bit of time around the Aldwych, getting my ears chewed off by the Agents-General and their staffs. Notwithstanding, they stood in sharp contrast to run-down Britain in that decade, and I long thought they were a beacon of true democracy, stability and burgeoning prosperity. Verily, it seemed to be God’s Own Country, and a number of my colleagues moved there. It is appalling to see how this has changed so much.
One result of the experiment has been to put the lie to entrenched national stereotypes.
Believe me, we are trying. It is very very hard to counteract the Jacinda cult. The “media” here is totally on the side of the government and any attempts to speak with a different voice get cancelled and ridiculed. The government has an absolute majority and an ineffectual Opposition. It is a hard row to hoe.
Just like the UK then!
Don’t give up, please. Truth can only hide for so long.
My sister and her husband, both full blown, converted Kiwi citizens, are high fliers he is a senior director in a large corporation she a fully qualified solicitor.
Both are convinced that Jacinda Ardern is a super-hero and has saved all of their lives as well as their childrens from a deadly plague that is sweeping the rest of the planet, they celebrate the fact that their ‘girls’ my nieces (both now young successful women) have each had both jib-jabs. Doesn’t make sense to me. My sister had always been exceptionally independent minded. It’s as if they have been utterly enthralled or bewitched somehow. I daren’t even suggest they simply question the narrative…just a teeny bit. Don’t want to go there.
NZ was near to the top of my “must visit” countries. Sadly on the maybe list now.
Having spent more than half my quite long life in Australia until five years ago – I think it’s tall poppy syndrome conflated with an Asia leaning techno larrikin waving a wet flag for freedom via the jabs – if u don’t like it then LEAVE (although you can’t) – I thank god every day I left when I did – many of my highly articulate /educated blah friends are hypnotised by the media etc. And it will take mass unemployment, property market crash etc to wake them – maybe – I will never be allowed back in unless I succumb to the madness – on balance I could live without being there again
i dont rrally understand how anybody has really put up with it .It was almost illusory in terms of impact and most govrnments admitted they were basically experimenting which should have rang alarm bells .I wouldnt let my 10 year old son run an experiment let alone an X factor contetstant goverment
The problem those two countries face are their locations – they are far away from the rest of civilisation as well as the fact most of the inhabitants live near the sea and so density of the population is spread around their coastlines, this I think creates a problem when trying to organise a fightback, at least that’s my thought on the matter.
‘Controlling Covid through lockdowns and closed borders was a triumph to start with.’
Was it? The UK never closed borders – just put a lot of people under house arrest. Australia and NZ have put in place irrational policies which have seen a lot of deaths, but not through Covid!
True, I would love to hear their explanation about the UK closed borders, how when and where.
speaking of hermits, apparently a Serbian cave dwelling hermit got injected and urged other hermits to do the same.
Silly hermit. He should swap his cave for a pillar a la Saint Simeon Stylites, thereby saving himself from disease and the Injecters.
I read about that guy. The bloody idiot has just committed suicide and he has absolutely no idea he’s done it. Yet.
NZ bedwettery was a triumph?
Yes, if turning your entire country into a prison camp was a triumph.
As for Australia… Well, Cromwell promised the Irish hell or Connaught. If Australia had been known in his time, he could just have promisedthem Victoria.
I’m an expat Aussie. I love my country, but I’ve seen this coming for years in the supine stupid way that Australians have embraced the idiocy of climate change and every insane woke agenda item. The simple answer is that they’ve lost their freaking minds down under. The worst offenders are the intelligentsia, (if Australian intelligentsia is not an oxymoron), who embrace the worst of this. Pursuing zero COvid, as if humans can control the distribution of molecules on a continent, is an absurd hubristic joke. TISM memorably encapsulated the country’s mindset with their impeccable titled 1993 LP Australia The Lucky Cunt. Well, that dumb luck is running out. Oz is toast.
have another. One of the many reasons I left – people used to be surprised when I said I had no thoughts of returning. I guess they may understand now.
The Bledisloe Cup was on last night. Everyone pretending everything is ok and normal. I’m afraid the line “For we are young and free” in the Aussie national anthem just doesn’t have the same ring to it anymore. Sad.
And it won’t even achieve Zero Covid, as the highly vaccinated countries have shown. All for nought.
You know – it doesn’t take a bleedin’ rocket scientist to know that you simply cannot shut down your entire economy and then expect to restart it when you feel like it – the economy is not a light switch you can simply turn On and Off as and when you need it – this potential for economic disaster was warned about last year when the very first lockdowns were announced but either this was deliberate attempt to trash the economies in order to ‘build back better’ as some are saying or we are currently being led by some of the most naive, most inept, most idotic, most stupidest people on the planet ever in the history of the world that ever got their hands on the levers of power.
I really can’t believe that western leaders with all the special advisors they surround themselves with can really be this impossibly dumb – but then I look at Boris Johnson and think to myself yes it is possible that an idiot buffoon can get elected to run a country – but then I think who is more fool? The fool Prime Minister or the fools who voted for him?
Including me.
It was ever thus. Don’t forget Nero. And, of course, Hitler was elected. People really don’t learn from history.
I go with stupid, with a bit of opportunistic “Build Back Better” thrown in for “luck”. It’s depressing, but some of us are doing our darndest to try and remedy it. Wish us luck.
Much luck.
Australia was the first country to make wearing bicycle helmets compulsory.
That tells you all you need to know. It’s WussCuck Central.
They also have random breath tests and hidden speed camera sites. Very unpleasant cops,. especially in Victoria.
We are not all meekly accepting our new covidian overlords here in Lockdownunder. I attended the speech given by Professor Augusto Zimmerman this afternoon. I have seen a few videos online that refer to section 51 23a of the Constitution – Professor Zimmerman addressed this directly and confirmed it has validity against the imposition of mandatory vaccinations. He cited cases also where this section has been upheld in subsequent legal actions.
The meeting was very well attended. The hall was packed to capacity.This article from the Cairns News is a good introduction to the professor and his views. https://cairnsnews.org/2021/08/11/prof-zimmerman-warns-government-covid-measures-are-unlawful/
Dr. Reiner Fuellmich talks to Australians about the situation. File it under S for Stuff You’ll Never Hear From The MSM.
https://xyz.net.au/2021/08/video-covid-situation-in-australia-dr-reiner-fuellmich-interviewing-aussies/
Just read they’re tightening restrictions in NSW and the zombies are moaning it’s too late.and not tough enough.
It’s weird, isn’t it :O I mean if people are scared of COVID then they are welcome to barricade themselves into their homes and have groceries delivered, while other people get on with their lives and build natural immunity through a delta outbreak, it would all be over in a few weeks.
Is that the same propaganda the media used in this country, where the majority were out and about but they told us the streets were empty
could be the same cheerleaders
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Wow!
My mind would boggle, if it hadn’t become unboggleable.
Whilst I wish no ill to the ordinary citizens of these countries, it probably needs their economies to collapse to wake up the governments and, indeed, the brainwashed zombies, and bring an end to the mass hysteria.It might even make our own self-righteous prigs think a bit.
It OK for the media talking-heads raking over these irrelevant issues but none of this addresses the real problem.
Economic collapse is baked-in , that’s part of the motivation for all this, and that’s EVERYWHERE.
People are lazy and stupid , even supposedly clever ones think 2008/9 is behind us and we’re now over the worst of the covid “misunderstanding “
The World economy is in the final stages of a take over by the global lending institutions in concert with WHO/UN actors.
what people don’t realise is that in NZ Aussie Canada there is a culture war going on (we have it at home as well it’s just different and too involved to detail here)
The Ideologues who’ve been slowly positioned into power are carrying out policies to reshape these societies into templates for the new global society .
The majority UK/European basis for these countries is being systematically demolished to make way for multi ethnic structures based on the UN indigenous peoples directives.
Don’t think smuggly it’s not happening in the UK . Blair set it going at warp speed with the “new young country” BS , and people laughed. Not so funny now a rag-bag of rentamob anarchists aided and abetted by embedded academics are toppling statues and blowing great holes in our society.
This is a global take-over. Every country is participating and every govt is enforcing the prescribed agenda onto their bewildered populations, it’s just done differently in different places.
We are in the eye of the storm , a brief period of relative calm before the next front hits.
For those who haven’t been in a hurricane (I have) the next blast will be stronger and from the opposite direction to the first.
This isn’t over, it has hardly begun and the tempest these people intend to unleash is expected to demolish everything we have known . People will then be expected to run to the “saviour government “ to pledge allegiance and eternal gratitude for the meagre crumbs of life those who survive will be allowed.
The sustainability agenda next due date is 2030 but the TOTAL implementation is expected by 2050, that’s why all the hogwash about cars/gas boilers etc way before then. Smart Cities are coming to a town near you, look around.
Local council reorganisation, local mayors , it’s all part of the plan to remove direct democratic control. You won’t be voting in national elections, and it won’t matter because the “local” mayors will be in direct control of the UN . PLEASE research into these structures. Look at your local council webiste , you will see affiliation to various UN bodies etc. research these .
wake up before it’s too late.
The Chinese will step in with large cash injections against future mining products. Bought & paid for then. Canberra will have a couple of Chinese reps on the board, and NZ will become a giant Disneyland for tourists. From China, mainly.
Australia is turning into the most alarming totalitarian state. At Covid news conferences in NSW the health minister and premier are snapping at journalists who ask questions. Mandatory vaccination is being introduced in many workplaces now, construction workers from poorer areas of Western Sydney are being forced to take a vaccine before returning to work and are falling into poverty if they don’t comply. Only one or two politicians are supporting freedom of choice such as Tanya Davis MP. There are many terrified people here especially in the large wellness and health sector who have been told that they will no longer be able to participate in life if they don’t take the vaccine.
https://youtu.be/qgo5u76Mtvc
If the reporters are asking questions that get angry responses, I’d say they’re finally doing their job.
Has anyone reported, in NZ or Aus, Pollard’s declaration that the vaccines don’t stop infections or transmission? How anyone can hear that clear, unequivocal statement to a parliamentary committee, by the head of the team who created the AZ, and still think zero covid can be sensible should be put in a strait jacket.
Isn’t pushing these countries into ‘slumps’ the real, covert, intention? The pseudopandemic is surely the fake ‘thesis’ or problem, for which useless NPIs like ‘lockdowns’ are the antithesis, giving the chance to collapse these economies as the ‘synthesis’ and introduce a draconian technocracy and new monetary system?
We’ve seen the way this works time and time again.
It really is depressing Downunder. When a maverick Liberal backbench MP in the national parliament, George Christensen, asked “when will the madness end?” and said that “masks do not work”, “lockdowns don’t work” and “domestic vaccine passports are a form of discrimination”, and that “our posturing politicians and the sensationalist media elite and the dictatorial medical bureaucrats need to recognise the facts and stop spreading fear .. so COVID-19 is going to be with us forever, just like the flu. And, just like the flu, we will have to live with it, not in constant fear of it”, he was officially condemned in a Labor ‘Opposition’ motion which was eagerly endorsed by the ‘Liberal’ government because Christensen’s comments were ‘misinformation’ which would hinder the ‘defeat’ of Covid.
PM, Scott Morrison, has said in the last week that “short—hopefully—but strong lockdowns … [are] now our first response when it comes to dealing with the Delta strain.” This is a lockdown-first strategy, even as Australia is meant to be in Phase One of a Four Phase Agreement in which lockdowns are a ‘last resort’. As Morrison was speaking, the suicide prevention hotline, Lifeline Australia, received its highest monthly number of calls in the organisation’s history.
Our dumb luck in getting Covid during our 2019-2020 spring/summer season in the southern hemisphere, fooled the numbskulls in parliament that lockdowns and border closures were the bees knees and they have remained wedded to the Zero Covid fantsay ever since.
It’s not all grim news, however. A survey of 1,000 New South Wales residents at the end of July, early on in that state’s current seven-week lockdown, showed 59% of respondents believing that the media have been alarmist in its reporting on the Covid situation in Sydney, with only 21% disagreeing. Not everyone has been sucked in by the hype. Nothing is set in stone, including the consent to be governed by authoritarians.
Phil
South Australia
I spent some time in both OZ and NZ in 1974 when I travelled the world on general cargo vessels with my husband, a marine engineer, and have great memories of both. I often took the Manley Island ferry from Sydney harbour just for the ride through that lovely harbour, watching window-cleaners at work on the opera house. On the way back to the ship, a burger and milkshake from one of the many piecarts that were seemingly on every corner. Delightful. I’m told that ‘elf & safety has put an end to the pie-carts now (another symptom of a tightening noose around the neck of freedom).
I’m sure I would recognise neither the place nor the people today. Where has the “she’ll be all right mate!” attitude gone, or the invitation to “stop being a whingeing Pom!”, or the implied offence taken at any perceived slight against Australia?
The answer in part, of course, is multiculturalism, same as here in the UK. Dilute the population and you dilute the culture, especially with a rabid Left which has no love of homeland and seeks to eradicate it from everybody else. The Left is a poison which is present in every generation, and which must be destroyed over again in every generation.
Hear hear. Got family in Aus and I loved the piecarts- pies for brekkie! Socialism is indeed a poison which sows hatred and impoverishes everything it touches. Australia looks chillingly like a socialist state right now. Sadly, we are not far behind.
It is no surprise that Australia is trying to follow a zero covid policy. Covidism is like Nazism and communism a totalitarian cult and a feature is such cults is an enemy for whom can never be tolerated and any methods are justified in dealing with the enemy. For instance, in Nazi Germany, jews, gypsies and political opponents were seen as such a threat, putting people into camps and mass murder were justified as these enemies could never tolerated. Covidists in Australia are prepared to turn Australia into an open prison to reach zero covid as any accomodation with covid can’t be accepted.
Lockdowns were never a triumph – in fact it was a dumb thing to do but hey we are dealing with the political class as well as institutionalised academics who seem to live on a different planet to the rest of us.