Price is a threat to the city-based power structures because she rejects the moral foundations on which the existing Aboriginal industry has been created. She is prepared to articulate an alternative moral framework as the pathway to genuine reconciliation and eventual union. This is why veteran Australian journalist Paul Kelly’s takeaway from the NPC address was: “Australia’s elites are in the process of being administered a huge shock.”
Call it the public-private tyranny partnership. Traditionally coercion and tyranny have been the preserve of states, with citizen consent the exclusive preserve of liberal democratic states. The private sector has been the domain of choice and competition where the customer is always right. Now the citizen must hew to state-dictated morality and the customer must bow to the corporate moral compass.
This is a slim, wickedly funny satire of 126 pages organised into ten chapters of rollicking hilarity. It’s a hugely enjoyable book for all those who were critical of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines. As the Brits say, it takes the piss out of all the self-proclaimed Covid experts, the public health clerisy, the media, and people with blind faith in the experts.
Permanently codifying racial grievance into the Constitution will guarantee it is weaponised sometime in the future by activists with increasingly radical agendas, followed by monetisation by grifters to demand compensation, reparations, and rents. This will stoke resentment and backlash.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. “The Government is my enemy,” laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. “They lie for a living,” says the cynical reporter.
Permanently codifying racial grievance into the Constitution will guarantee it is weaponised sometime in the not too distant future by activists making increasingly radical demands and stoking resentment and backlash. If approved, the Voice will not mark the end of a successful process of reconciliation but the beginning of fresh claims for co-sovereignty, treaty and reparations, using the constitutional voice as the enabling mechanism.
Every affirmative action produces an equal and opposite sectarian reaction. If a government frames public policy in a group-conscious way, it cannot expect groups suffering relative deprivation to ignore group identity. For any one student admitted under a racial quota, only one alternative person would have succeeded in a merit system. But hundreds of rejected students end up feeling aggrieved and resentful for having lost out due to preferential policies.
Reports and videos of the smoke and haze from the intense wildfires enveloping Canada and drifting down south into the US bring back vivid memories of Australia’s two-month long bushfires (in the Australian vernacular: Canberra is the country’s bush capital) three and a half years ago and floods last year. And so does the claim that the fires and floods validate the apocalyptic warnings and the ensuing impassioned debate over how much this is evidence of a climate emergency owing to anthropogenic global warming.
The political implications of DeSantis and Kennedy’s successful challenge against the establishment narrative on all things Covid would reverberate in many other Western democracies and encourage other major parties to differentiate themselves from the ruling establishment as lockdown and vaccine sceptics and opponents.
To no one’s surprise, the rising and revisionist powers wish to redesign the international governance institutions to inject their own interests, governing philosophies, and preferences. They also wish to relocate the control mechanisms from the major Western capitals to some of their own capitals. China’s role in the Iran–Saudi rapprochement might be a harbinger of things to come.
Among the many startling aspects of the topsy-turvy world that we have lived through since early 2020 is the extent to which the media and social media, often with the active collusion and indeed under requests-cum-instructions from national governments and international organizations, denied space and voice in their columns, letter pages and online commentary to questioning and criticism of the official narrative.
