In a brilliant speech delivered three days before he died of a heart attack in March 2017, my cartoonist friend Bill Leak said that the unprecedented level of stupidity then prevailing among the nation’s politicians was presenting an enormous, if ironic, challenge to his profession.
“If you’re starting at the point of absurdity, where are you supposed to go from there?” he asked. It wasn’t a rhetorical question, and Bill didn’t even try to answer it. He was genuinely perplexed, although his efforts to overcome this challenge during the final three years of his career were as hilarious as they were gentle reminders to his grateful readers that, contrary to appearances, sanity was still attainable in this insane world. His son and successor at The Australian, Johannes, is maintaining the family trade with equally stoic humour.
But it’s fair to say that, eight years since Bill posited this conundrum, the answer is finally apparent. In hindsight, it was subliminally there all along, but perhaps a feeling of dread prevented us from admitting it. The answer is: nowhere.
By that I don’t mean we stand still, bumblingly repeating mistakes to our own eternal amusement. I mean, we wind up nowhere, as in amounting to nothing. Zilch. Dust.
On the bright side, we won’t wind up like the vast and trunkless legs of stone in Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, the go-to poem for those who tell of the self-destruction embedded in excessive human vanity. If only vanity were our problem, instead of complacency. Rather, the colossal wreck of our civilisation will be festooned with graffiti declaring the land “Always was, always will be” Aboriginal, and will still be occupied by the dregs of whichever of our current disparate demographics are content to do nothing but grow vegetables between fields of solar panels and barbecue the birds chopped down by the few giant windmills that remain spinning. It’s just a guess, but I think certain of our less skilful recent migrants will find adapting to this dull, pointless existence easier than we will.
It’s astonishing to be nostalgic for the era that Bill lampooned so cleverly. It was only eight years ago, yet its mere dysfunction seems blissfully tolerable compared to the deliberate self-destruction that has emerged in its place.
Bill was an emphatic opponent of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, for example, which criminalised offensive remarks based on gender, sexuality, race and so on, the penalty for which was mostly to be forced by a harridan from the Human Rights Commission to apologise for one’s rudeness. Though it is an infringement against a fundamental right, 18C constitutes a mere irritation compared to its successor, the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which empowers government apparatchiks to define the truth and jail anybody who dares to post anything to the contrary online.
Labor tried to pass this dystopian legislation during the previous term of government, and almost succeeded. It shows every sign of wanting to give it another crack during this term, right after it has gagged everyone on social media, especially its critics, which it will do later this year. To restore our free speech from there will take the sort of resolve we currently don’t seem to have.
The scenes on the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the weekend were another sign of our terminal decline. Had he returned from the dead and seen the bridge overrun by people waving green-and-red flags, Bill would have wryly remarked that the Rabbitohs had finally won another NRL Premiership, and were marching on the bridge because if they stayed at home in their Redfern ghetto nobody else would notice or care.
In fact, the hordes on the bridge on Sunday were waving Palestinian flags, and most of them were angry protagonists of the religion of peace. For a day, they owned the structure that once symbolised our free and prosperous nation. The message was clear and intentional: Australia was no longer the country of Paul Hogan, who in the 1980s went from painting the Harbour Bridge to embodying Aussie larrikinism in Crocodile Dundee. If Hollywood produced another Dundee sequel that reflected modern Australia, it would need to replace the famous “That’s not a knife” scene with teenage migrants attacking each other with machetes at a shopping centre. Not as funny, granted, which is probably why Hollywood has given up on the franchise.
Australia’s famously robust and prosaic style still exists, in places. Drew Pavlou, for example, responded to the bridge march with the sort of amusingly unadorned language for which we were once renowned: “Get the fuck out of my country.” But such responses have, in the past three days, been overshadowed by more prominent members of the media naively celebrating the subjugation of their own culture.
There are myriad other signs of Australia’s deliberate decline: the flood of Third World Deliveroo riders coming here as “students” and bringing their extended families; destruction of our energy sector; endless government debt; explosion of public servants while industry shifts offshore and productivity declines; the property Ponzi scheme; and our estrangement from the United States while we cosy up to our regional adversary, China. Oh, and there is a case before the Federal Court in which a man is suing a woman for calling him a man. His case has received tacit endorsement from the Human Rights Commission. Every day, the relative bliss of what Bill called absurdity gets smaller in the rear-view mirror and the approaching armageddon through the windscreen becomes larger and larger.
You wouldn’t know it if your sole source of information was the mainstream media, but there is much talk about civil war in Britain these days. Matt Goodwin says the government is pushing the British people into a “dark and dangerous” form of civil unrest. Professor David Betz says the country is beyond the point of avoiding civil war, which will eventually involve British natives fighting on two fronts, against ethnic invaders and their own oppressive government. Mark Steyn says the government’s strategy is to provoke a backlash from ordinary people, then double down, and repeat. But the elites don’t know who they’re messing with, says Steyn, and urges them to “bring it on”.
Those forces are unlikely to meet the same resistance here because, as a culture, there’s not much worth fighting for any more. As I said recently: “Multiculturalism, environmentalism and a Rousseauian elevation of indigenous culture to the level of spiritual enlightenment fill the vacuum for now, but are — what’s that word they use? — unsustainable, especially against Chinese imperialism and Islamic jihad.”
One could add our own government to that pair of adversaries now, given that it displays more affection for Chinese President Xi Jinping and the terrorists of Hamas than it does for its own constituents trying to stay warm this winter.
We’re on the road to nowhere. There is no doubt about that. Unlike in Britain, however, it’s still not too late to change course.
