‘Like many of my fellow Australians I cannot believe what is happening to my country. In all my almost eighty-four years I have never been less optimistic, more fearful, about its future.’ Leo Maglen
I READ the transcript of a speech not so long ago that struck home hard from its opening line, ‘Australia’s past is a foreign country.’
Yes! That’s right! I used to be a citizen of that country, but the old Australia no longer exists, swept away by the Culture Wars which began in the 1970s. It’s impossible to put an exact date on the defeat because these things generally happen incrementally. However, if pressed to select the key moment, it would be the ‘It’s Time’ federal election of 1972. Whatever, there is no denying lost the Culture War way back then and the “old” Australia has since ceased to exist. Yes, some cultural artefacts still survive as reminders of what has been lost. But the cultural values of that vanished country are as good as gone. The values of this new and oh-so-enlightened modern Australia are quite foreign to me.
I now unbderstand why I feel as detached in Australia as any tourist visiting a foreign country. Like any tourist, I am essentially a spectator passing through some mysterious, often inexplicable culture, alternatively amused and bemused by it, but not engaged in any significant way. From this position of objective observer I, like Quadrant writers Mervyn Bendle and Leo Maglen, see a country heading inevitably towards failed-state status.
‘They have created the mother of all property bubbles on a scale like no other, that is now desperately being propped up by the mother of all immigration programs, causing a cost of living crisis, a deterioration of Australian wealth and a deterioration of our high trust society, a deterioration of our culture and a deterioration of our way of life at a pace unlike anything this country has seen before.’
By ‘failed state’ I mean a failed democracy, and when I predict Australia will officially achieve that status by 2052 it is in part, I must admit, because there is a pleasing personal neatness in the fall coming precisely 100 years from my date of birth, and also because it was almost exactly 100 years from the height of the Roman Republic and defeat of the Carthaginians to end of that same Republic and the beginning of the dictatorship under the Caesars (circa 146BC to 44BC). Others in my circle beg to differ and insist Australia has already arrived as a failed state, and their reasoning appears quite sound. They argue that every major institution in Australia — the parliaments, the courts, the police, the government departments, the quangos (CSIRO, ABC, BOM, for a start), the media, and the universities — are all following the same agenda, one not in the public interest but which primarily advantages themselves. Who could dispute that? This is the modern Australia that the Left’s primacy in the Culture Wars has delivered us unto.
Yes, the government still holds elections and everyone gets to vote, just as they do in North Korea, but the politicians elected have no intention of ever serving the interests of their electorates any more than their North Korean counterparts. Instead they pursue and promote high debt, high immigration, Net Zero, Covid lockdowns, etc. etc. When did Australians vote for any of that? Always, I suppose!
And yes, the Australia voting public have to bear some of the responsibility for the mess we are in. However, in essence, the politicians prey on their electorates for their votes, now using fear, now using bribery, now using shame and scorn to bend them to their will. What we see is not a parliament that serves the people, but one focused entirely on its own self-preservation, while instituting measures to bring about the complete acquiescence of and subservience to the preferred agenda.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that the agenda pursued by these institutions is same favoured and promoted by globalist oligarchs. I would argue that it is in fact those globalist oligarchs who are setting the agenda, not least by posting their edicts in the legacy media. The oligarchs determine what actions are acceptable and will be rewarded, and what actions aren’t. And all those institutions know it is in their interests to follow the agenda, to go with the money. To resist is to risk drawing unfavourable, career-destroying media attention on themselves.
This was made most obvious during the Covid panic-demic when almost every Western Government and every Western medical institution simultaneously and unceremoniously, dumped their own pandemic plans and unilaterally adopted the globalist agenda spelled out by the World Health Organisation. Those people who didn’t immediately get on board suffered serious career damage, many with their futures, health and livelihoods still in limbo. We even had the situation where some of the top scientists leading the vaccine push were privately refusing the shots themselves, while vigorously publicly promoting ‘the vaccine is safe and effective’ message, the lockdowns and mandatory vaccination. The same globalist oligarchs acting through the mainstream media generated the huge fear campaign that moulded popular sentiment and drove the implementation and acceptance of their agenda. It essentially forced the political and medical bureaucracies to keep in step, to stay the course or be swallowed by negative popular sentiment. They created and then reinforced the desired narrative. Nothing democratic to be seen here.And nothing more obviously symbolic of this can be seen by the granting of King’s Birthday honours to Scott Morrison, graduate of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) school for ‘Young Global Leaders’, as a reward for following the Covid lockdown narrative to the letter. Alex Kriel gives as good an explanation as you can find. As a independent observer I look at ‘modern’ Australia and see:
♦ Every Australian institution of any significance has been captured, one way or another, by the globalist messaging.
♦ These institutions, in effect, see the people as a potential threat to the favored positions that their adherence to the globalist messaging gives them, and therefore they seek more and more ways of suppressing actual and potential popular dissent.
♦ In order to maintain their positions of power and authority, the institutions have redefined democracy such that any popular criticisms of themselves, their institutions, or their agenda can be considered a direct threat to democracy itself that warrants a total crack down on their critics.
♦ In effect, the institutions now regard the people as the enemies of their version of democracy. One might argue that the Donald Trump phenomenon is an attempt by Americans, shocked into action by the $36 trillion federal debt hanging over their children’s heads (with no plan or prospect of ever paying it back), to re-take control from what Trump calls ‘the Swamp’ and who seem comfortable with national bankruptcy. Call me a pessimist, but I see little reason to believe MAGA will actually succeed in America. Yes, it’s way too early to call, but full marks Americans for trying! In Australia the prospect of national bankruptcy does not seem to play on the mind so much.
Should I resist the slide. But why? My Australia, its culture and values, have passed into history. I see little point in trying to preserve values that do align with my own. As British historian David Starkey points out, democracy used to mean rule by the majority – the reinforcement of the culture of normal people – and here I distinctly mean ‘normal’ in the mathematical sense of the word ‘norm’ as the centre of a ‘normal distribution’. Now democracy favours the protection and sponsorship of the mathematically ‘abnormal’ cultures/behaviours of the fringe elements. As Starkey pointed out in defining modern ‘liberal democracy’:
‘It is the idea that democracy is not the rule of the majority as we all think it is. It is the protection of minorities through the restraining of the majority by every source of law. Germany (after WWII) begins this policy for obvious reasons. In other words, what we have got to understand is that the entire EU, Germany, … everywhere in Europe, is fundamentally anti-democratic . . .’
And Australia too. Personally, I’m a ‘majority rule’ kind of democrat myself. But if the majority favour the euphemistically ominous ‘managed decline’, go your hardest. Of more interest now is the opportunity to speculate on just what happens afterwards. Will the globalists win and implement their AI-controlled, social credit-score tyranny, or will they fail and leave us to settle for anarchy instead? Brandon Smith favours the former:
‘If they are not stopped by the public, totalitarian carbon mandates will become the norm. The next generation, living in engineered poverty, will be taught from early childhood that the globalists “saved the world” from a calamity that never really existed. They will be told that the enslavement of humanity is something to be proud of, a gift that keeps the species alive, and anyone who questions that slavery is a selfish villain that wants the destruction of the planet.’
I think it more probable that a disruption of global supply lines will expose the vulnerabilities of the Australian nation before the oligarchs can take control, and it may not leave them much to fight over. Again, from Barrie
‘We import 90% of our liquid fuel through just two operational oil refineries, which only survive through federal government support and hold 49 days of fuel stocks onshore, well below the 90 day minimum requirement.’
We have 21 days of diesel and 27 days of petrol.
It would take a three week sea blockade and Australia would stop.
So, 1984 or Mad Max? Interesting choice. Interesting times!
This article was first published in Quadrant on June 11 and is republished here by and permission.
