When I wrote, in the early days of the Chinese virus, that “the real sheeple are the panic-stricken lemmings of the elite”, I argued that the common folk were keeping calm and carrying on, while the elite were losing their minds.
I naturally felt a bit foolish when, just days later, the Great Toilet Paper Pandemic started. But, as I wrote, even that was “a panic being driven by the media elite”. Time and again, the media whipped up hysteria and openly praised panic-buying.
The other great division between the elite and the hoi polloi is that, for all their self-assumed wisdom and technocratic mastery, the elite completely failed to foresee the impending disaster. The disaster I refer to is not so much the virus itself, but the peril and folly of investing so much, both economically and ideologically, in a communist dictatorship.
Once again, the pandemic has exposed the fraudulence and follies of the elite.
The panda-demic virus originating in China infecting Australia represents a tipping point similar to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the decision by British voters to endorse Brexit at the 2019 election[…]
When it comes to Australia, what the panda-demic is making obvious is how short sighted and inept governments of both political persuasions have been in embracing globalisation, closing local industries, increasing our dependence on overseas manufacturers and allowing our farms, real estate, primary producers and resource industries to be sold to overseas interests.
The fact that our economy is so dependent on China, that tertiary institutions like Melbourne and Sydney universities are reliant on overseas students for their financial survival and that we suffer shortages of essential items like baby milk formula, surgical masks, hand sanitisers and gloves in a time of most need illustrate the magnitude of the problem.
When ordinary Australians and their parliamentary champions like Pauline Hanson railed against manufacturing being “offshored” to China, and Chinese entities buying up real estate and farms, they were expressing what philosopher Roger Scruton called “oikophilia”. By this, Scruton meant the love of one’s people and place. Opposed to it is “oikophobia”, the favoured conceit of globalists who rail against borders and national sovereignty.
The current pandemic impacting on Australia is revealing a fault line between those committed to love of one’s country and the need to be sovereign and independent and those elites, politicians, business leaders and financiers committed to free trade and a reliance on overseas producers and manufacturers. Scruton describes oikophobes as seeing themselves as ‘defenders of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism’.
Along with the likes of Trump, Brexit, Orban, Bolsonaro, and Baudet’s FvD in the Netherlands, Australia’s 2019 election represented the triumph of the oikophiles over the oikophobes.
While cosmopolitan, privileged voters in wealthy electorates in Sydney and Melbourne voted for the ALP, working class and rural voters, especially in northern Queensland, backed centre-right, conservative candidates.
The final closure of the last vestiges of the Australian automotive industry was a visceral shock to oikophile Australians. The sight of Chinese companies secretly pillaging medical supplies and baby formula even as Beijing lied about the scale of the pandemic has raised anger to boiling point. The smirking conceit of the oikophobe intelligentsia has been brutally punctured – at least for those with the wisdom, unimpaired by university education, to see.
And for those arguing that Australian businesses and manufacturers do not have the resources and ability to innovate, just witness how quickly many have responded to the current panda-demic by retooling to produce face masks and other essential items.
As with all tipping points, once the panda-demic passes life in Australia will have been irrevocably changed. No longer will citizens accept that governments be complicit in allowing overseas countries and transnationals, especially China, to dominate and control our economy, our resources and our way of life.
The opportunity will be there for Australia to rediscover the ingenuity, resourcefulness and wherewithal to be independent and sovereign that for most of the immediate post-second world war period contributed to our prosperity, optimism and growth.
Ordinary people who have said for years that China could not be trusted and who have raised their voices against having their jobs and indeed the very land under them sold to communist-run enterprises were derided as xenophobes and luddites.
But they were right.
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