As has been obvious since at least Tocqueville the most astute observations about the national character are often made from the outside. However much it hurts. But Australians are notoriously prickly to even constructive criticism from non-Australians (excepting New Zealanders: as our siblings, you’re allowed to pick on us just as much as we do you). Especially from Poms.
Which is a pity, because there are at least a couple of (ex-)Poms who’ve got some things to say that Australians would do well to listen to.
Notably: the “Australians” as we knew them are dead. Killed off by decades of left-wing social engineering.
[I] got married in Sydney in 1993, and I pledged my allegiance to Australia and received a little wattle plant at my citizenship ceremony a couple of years later.
Over the subsequent decades living here I’ve been struck by many wonderful aspects of the Australian character. Relaxed, irreverent, generous, open, laconic and unquestionably the wittiest people on earth (yet, puzzlingly, with the worst stand-up comedians), they are every bit the larrikins of legend.
Or were. Australians today too often seem to be supine, boot-licking sissy-Marys, forever looking to the gummint to save them from everything from mean words to a virus with a better-than-99-percent survival rate.
So it pains me to note that these qualities are being suppressed by second-rate governments and meddling third-rate bureaucrats. If you want to understand how we were so easily cowed into submitting to the idiotic restrictions of our coronavirus response, examine our recent history. Marked by patronising, infantilising, dictatorial, creeping social engineering, it looks like an ever-steepening 30-year slide from a dynamic, fearless individualism into a tepid bath of sullen conformity.
Just as our reaction to the arrival of COVID-19 morphed from “flattening the curve” of infections to the total elimination of the virus, so has our society moved to eradicate risk from our lives.
In the Australia I thought I knew, a stern warning from finger-wagging bureaucrats to not have household gatherings of more than five would have been met with block-parties from Hobart to Cairns and a massed middle-finger to the coppers.
Now, we snitch on our neighbours for not wearing a government-mandated muzzle.
The larrikin voices are muted but still there: that’s why our rulers need the threat of outrageous fines to prevent the rebellion that might otherwise erupt. And how eagerly their agents, the police, have embraced their expanded role as state-sanctioned bullies, dragging people out of cars, marching through markets and parks dressed like warriors from the future, directed by senior officers who look too fat to catch a cold, never mind a criminal.
It all began with worshipping at the altar of “Elfinsafety”. While the public campaign against smoking undoubtedly delivered a massive benefit to the nation, once the soulless bureaucrats got a taste for pushing people around, the die was cast. Who cares that Australia now has one of the lowest smoking rates in the world? Somewhere out there, some deplorable is enjoying a durrie: time to ban smoking anywhere except in a locked box at the bottom of a 20-metre bunker.
Of course it’s appropriate for society to agree on rules that protect its citizens: we are entitled to turn on to a 60km/h road and not encounter someone flying around the corner at 120; nor should we have to fear drunks crossing the centre line and hitting us head-on. But there’s a continuum of risk: most people are fine with seatbelt laws but don’t want to wear helmets in their cars like Daniel Ricciardo.
At some point, the restrictive outcomes begin to far outweigh the original risk.
For the moment, the creative genius of the health and safety zealots is focused on inventing ever more byzantine COVID regulations, but there are rich veins of perilous activity still unmined: motorcycling, rock climbing, ocean swimming, surfing, skiing, parachuting, using a ladder or power tools, operating a barbecue — all await their enlightened supervision.
Sadly, though, there’s less attention paid to the broader health of society, which is more than just physical. We have exchanged (or, rather, delayed) the potential impact of the virus for a brutal economic blow we have barely begun to feel, congratulating ourselves on an illusory victory that pays no heed to the damage our panicked over-reaction has inflicted, and is yet to inflict, on millions.
Look at the small businesses, the owner-operated shops and restaurants around you that are shut forever, and multiply that misery who knows how many times, if these vicious, simplistic restrictions remain in force[…]
This is where our inattentive tolerance of bureaucratic interference has led us, with the state reaching into every tiny crevice of our lives[…]
Do we recalibrate our self-image, admit there’s no Crocodile Dundee left in any of us, and resign ourselves to a timid, colourless life; or should we fight back, demand to be treated like adults, accept that risk, even a COVID zombie-apocalypse risk, is a part of being alive?
Baby steps, though. I daren’t mention helmets, but maybe let me ride my bike without a Noddy bell on it. Or let the man at the fish market open an oyster for me without having to rinse it under running water. Even allow someone from Wangaratta to leave home without a face mask — ha, joking, I know when I’ve gone too far.
The Australian
Is it even possible for us to begin to fight back? Absolutely – and, ironically, some of the “newest” Australians have tried to lead by example. When a few Melbourne suburbs erupted in protest at “Dictator Dan’s” repressive lockdowns, it was the Albanian Muslim Australians of Frankston who led the charge – singing the national anthem and waving Australian flags in the faces of the circling coppers.
Maybe, because their parents and grandparents had lived under the crushing fist of the totalitarian left, they could plainly see it where too many complacent Aussies couldn’t.
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