If nothing else, it’s certainly been a year of living in interesting times, here in Australia. High-profile court cases, election surprises and natural disasters aplenty: we had it all. Even worse, we suffered the unspeakable ignominy of being outdone by the sheep-botherers at the rugby and cricket world cups. I dimly recall some minor sporting contretemps called the “Bledisloe Cup” or something, but that’s probably not important.
If nothing else, though, Australia once again lived up to timeless truth of Dorothea Mackellar’s magnificent My Country: “Of drought and flooding rains”. True to Mackellar’s verse, in January, the ongoing mega-drought caused mass fish die-offs in the Murray-Darling basin. Yet, just weeks later, four died and thousands were evacuated as historic floods washed through Townsville.
Australia’s beauty once again turned to terror at the other end of the year, as the first fires of the massive 2019 bushfire crisis began in September, in Queensland and NSW. As we head into 2020, the fires are still raging along the eastern seaboard.
On the political front, Australia joined the worldwide trend of conservative upset victories that began in 2016, with Trump and Brexit. In May, Prime Minister Scott Morrison defied the conventional wisdom of pundits and media-elite talking-heads alike, and shocked the political left, by defeating the Bill Shorten-led Labor party in the 2019 federal election. Labor had been so confident of victory that it is said that Shorten had already started packing for the move to the Lodge, the prime minister’s official residence.
But, Morrison’s was not the only conservative upset. Just two months earlier, NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian had likewise defied smugly confident pundits by defeating Labor, to win the NSW state election.
However, 2019 was not a good year for religious conservatives in Australia. In March, Australia’s most senior Catholic clergyman, Cardinal George Pell, was convicted of historic child sex abuse charges. The conviction, and the loss of the subsequent appeal in August, shocked legal observers on both sides of the political divide, with some likening it to the Chamberlains’ wrongful conviction for the murder of their baby daughter in 1982. The High Court of Australia will hear another appeal sometime early in 2020.
A less harrowing, but possibly just as consequential case erupted in May, when Rugby Australia terminated the contract of rugby star Israel Folau, for quoting Biblical teachings about sins such as drunkenness, lying, fornication, atheism, and, as it happened, homosexuality. Unfortunately, as Dave Chappelle notes, you’re not allowed to upset the “alphabet people”. Drunks, liars, atheists and fornicators shrugged and yawned, but the screaming mee-mees of the alphabet brigade had a collective hissy-fit – earning Folau an instant dismissal.
The case ultimately became a kind of litmus test for free speech in Australia, for good and ill. While Folau humiliated Rugby Australia in the courtroom, the Morrison government reacted in exactly the wrong way, with its Religious Freedom bill. Instead of simply cutting the Gordian Knot and winding back the suffocating strictures of “vilification” laws, the government imposed an unwieldy kludge of legislation which will almost certainly strangle free speech in Australia even further. Leftists were, meanwhile, once again exposed as authoritarian hypocrites.
And so we lurch in 2020, eyes smarting from the smoke of yet another of the intermittent mega-fires which have periodically blanketed Australia since European settlement – and ears aching from the din of the collective screeching of parasitic Green opportunists once again scavenging the wreckage of tragedy for cheap political points. Now, we can look forward to the annual circus of cretinous leftist faux-outrage around Australia Day.
So, just another year, really.