Maybe, Just Maybe, There’s a Glimmer of Hope

Illustrated by the 2023 Yes campaign for the Indigenous Voice to the Parliament, it’s obvious political correctness now infects Australian society to such a degree it determines how we use language, how public policies are debated, and how the nation defines itself and how governments legislate and act.

Instead of being reasonable and modest, as argued by Prime Minister Albanese, the Uluru Statement from the Heart embraces a radical narrative underpinned by post-colonial identity politics and victimhood. The assumption is Australian society is inherently racist and guilty of white supremacism, the arrival of the First Fleet was an invasion. and there is nothing beneficial or worthwhile about European settlement and colonisation.

Instead of reasoned debate, it’s also true Yes supporters stooped to personal abuse.  During the campaign Senator Jacinta Price was described by Noel Pearson as being caught in a “celebrity redneck vortex”, while the Liberal Party was condemned by Greens’ Leader Adam Bandt as a “small racist rump sliding into irrelevance”, and Ray Martin described those responsible for the slogan ‘If you don’t know, vote no’ as ‘dinosaurs and dickheads’.

Such is the power of Woke ideology even after 60 per cent of Australians said no to the Voice, Yes activists refused to accept the democratic result.  An unsigned statement written by indigenous leaders argues “deliberate disinformation and misinformation was unprecedented, and it proliferated, unchecked, on social media, repeated in mainstream media and unleashed a tsunami of racism against our people”.

Phillip Adams, with a thumb nail dipped in bile, argued the No result was ‘a dark victory for bigotry and wilful ignorance’. Adams’ refusal to accept the majority decision reminds one of Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘The Solution’, written after East Germany in 1953 suppressed a workers’ uprising with tanks and bullets. Increasingly disenchanted with communism, Brecht sarcastically wrote it was time to “dissolve the people and elect another”.

It’s important to realise there is nothing new or unique about the Yes campaign’s adoption of Woke ideology and language.

It’s important to realise there is nothing new or unique about the Yes campaign’s adoption of Woke ideology and language.  I first warned about the dangers of the cultural Left’s political correctness movement over 30 years ago in a newspaper article  defending the National Party Leader Tim Fischer. Echoing recent debates surrounding the Voice, Fisher’s crime was to argue the Aboriginal community benefitted from the generosity of the Australian taxpayer and that the Canberra based bureaucracy, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), was inefficient and corrupt.

In the article I defined political correctness as “the way in which the moral guardians of the Left attack and censor those who dare to criticise any of the movements championed by progressives over the last 20 years. Women’s rights, the environment, the gay-lesbian movement and multiculturalism have all become sacrosanct”.

At the same time the American academic Dinesh D’Souza in Illiberal Education argued political correctness was infiltrating universities and colleges and promoting a range of cultural-left ideologies including “black consciousness and black power, feminism, homosexual rights, and, to a lesser degree, pacifism, environmentalism, and so on.”

In another article, ‘Purely PC madness’ and published in 1995. I cited the example of the children’s story The Three Little Pigs as yet another example proving how political correctness was infiltrating society.  In a paper presented to the NSW Geography syllabus committee the story was condemned for promoting a Eurocentric, capitalist mindset. The author argued,

The story assumes a society with private property and individualised labour.  It applauds discipline and hard work and solid stone and brick houses of Europe.  It places non-material cultural pursuits second to material and its primary motivation comes from fear of nature, or wilderness, in the form of a wolf.

Since the early to mid-1990s political correctness has morphed into a highly infectious and dangerous form of indoctrination and mind control permeating every aspect of Western societies, including Australia. Cultural Left thought police monitor the language we use, control how people think and interact, what happens in schools and universities, and how government’s determine economic, political and social policies.

While wokeness has become more influential and all pervasive since the early 1990s, the resounding No vote to the Indigenous Voice proved the tide is shifting and sanity and common sense might yet prevail.  Anecdotal evidence suggests politically correct activists have overplayed their hand and more and more Australians are saying no to cultural Left indoctrination.  Enough is enough!

Anecdotal evidence suggests politically correct activists have overplayed their hand and more and more Australians are saying no to cultural Left indoctrination.  Enough is enough!

Those insisting our nation’s origins and subsequent history are riven with white supremacism and colonial exploitation, that society is structurally racist and gender and sexual identity are social constructs, not God-given and biologically determined, are now facing a counter-movement.

An ABC Australia Talks National Survey found 68 per cent of respondents believed “political correctness had gone too far”.  A second survey, conducted in 2022 on behalf of the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute, found 66 per cent of those surveyed believed political correctness was limiting free speech. The Modern Australian Manners Report by the Australian Seniors Insurance Agency concluded 87.9 per cent of those over the age of 50 believed political correctness was having an adverse impact on society.

An education forum held in Adelaide organised by the 4thekids movement attracted an audience of about 300 concerned parents and teachers worried about falling standards and their children being indoctrinated with radical sexuality and gender ideology.  In a second public forum involving the Victorian member of parliament Moira Deeming and held in Melbourne’s western suburbs over 400 attended to help freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.

While only in its infancy it is also true more and more parents and teachers are either home schooling their children or establishing their own schools dedicated to a classical, liberal/arts education committed to a rigorous curriculum based on Matthew Arnold’s concept of “the best that has been thought and said”.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Fellow at the ACU’s PM Glyn Institute and author of Wake Up To Woke: It’s Time, Australia.  The Hon Tony Abbott and Rowan Dean are launching the book in Sydney, August 21.  Registration is free at https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/944772488947?aff=oddtdtcreator