“Diversity is our strength” is the robotic mantra of woke, multi-culti left. The Australian state of Victoria is a stark rebuttal of this “progressive” nostrum.
In selecting who should run its critical hotel quarantine regime, Victoria placed “diversity and inclusion” far, far ahead of any other consideration. Now, nearly 300 Victorians are dead, 15 000 infected, Melbourne is under military curfew for the first time in its history, and the rest of the nation is picking up the multi-billion dollar tab.
If you want to know what is going wrong in Victoria, all you need do is look at a job being advertised on Seek by the state’s Department of Justice and Community Safety. The department wishes to hire a “director, inclusion and intersectionality”, for which it is offering a generous salary of $192,800-$249,700 plus superannuation.
According to the ad, the incumbent “will be responsible for providing authoritative, strategic and innovative advice in relation to inclusion and intersectionality to justice ministers, DJCS executives and other senior stakeholders”.
Furthermore, they “will be able to demonstrate an extensive knowledge of inclusion, intersectionality and society and understanding of historical and contemporary issues”.
This is the outcome of the everybody-gets-a-gender-studies-degree generation.
This ad epitomises everything that is wrong with the Victorian government. In a single job description, it explains the reason the government is incapable of running a quarantine program or looking after the elderly. Instead of doing what it should be doing, which is governing, it is putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.
For too long, we were content to laugh off the nonsense pullulating from the left-fringes of the Humanities as mere ivory-tower nonsense. We’re only now learning the deadly consequences of leftist ideological circle-jerking.
We are now watching as Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, fails the Australian public. This is because they have put identity politics, and the concept of diversity and inclusion, before the health of the people, with deadly consequences.
This has come to light in the past few days with revelations that the DHHS farmed out its responsibilities to the DJPR by putting it in charge of the hotel quarantine program. As revealed in The Age newspaper, the DJPR and its international trade agency, Global Victoria, were responsible for engaging private security firms for hotel quarantine. The reason for selecting Unified Security, an indigenous-owned security company that was not on the government’s preferred panel of security suppliers, was supposedly driven by an attempt to provide jobs under “social inclusion” policies.
It’s not as if the Victorian government had no other option. Despite denials from premier Daniel Andrews down, leaked emails make it damningly clear that Victoria was offered Australian Defence Force (ADF) assistance from the get-go. Assistance it turned down in favour of diversity hiring.
Presumably there aren’t enough transgender, non-binary, pansexual, indigenous Muslims in the ADF to satisfy Victoria’s woke bureaucrats.
The bureaucratic elite in Victoria clearly did not see a problem in selecting a company for hotel quarantine based on where it ranked on the intersectionality pyramid. This should have been a strict police or military operation[…]
Under no circumstance would we want the pilot of our A380 or the surgeon performing open-heart surgery on a family member to be selected on the basis of diversity and inclusion rather than merit. Those in charge of the hotel quarantine approached the job at hand as if it were a lavish junket. They even made a self-congratulatory video in which they referred to the task as “one massive inbound super trade mission which keeps rolling … which has been a really exciting project” rather than a serious quarantine operation in which there was so much at stake.
Yet, still the Victorian government careens along on its magical unicorn ride into an alternative reality where skin colour, gender and sexual preference trump competence.
Diversity is our strength?
Tell this to the people of Victoria who are now living under the most draconian measures imposed on an Australian population since days of the penal colony, thanks to the hotel quarantine fiasco. Tell this to the thousands of Victorians who have lost their jobs — perhaps even family members.
The real crisis we are facing is not being caused by COVID-19 but by the elite’s stubborn attachment to identity politics, which is obscuring the real problems and jeopardising the lives and livelihoods of mainstream Australians.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.