Political Compassion Ladies

According to cinema legend, the most frightening element of the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist wasn’t anything to do with the film’s terrifying visuals.

Sure, viewers were traumatised by the graphic depiction of a little girl possessed by Satan, particularly when actress Linda Blair’s head rotation kicked in. But far scarier for 1970s audiences, apparently, were some peculiar sound effects layered over early, otherwise innocuous scenes.

Director William Friedkin aimed to unsettle viewers by using sounds derived from the buzzing of bees. “You don’t know why you’re uncomfortable,” an analysis of the film by Entertainment Weekly once reported, “but your fight-or-flight instinct tells you something dangerous is near.”

It sure did. Popular opinion at the time held that more people fled cinema showings of The Exorcist during those bee-sound scenes than later on when the full demonic monty was on display.

Perhaps fight-or-flight responses have become dulled over the years, or your correspondent’s hearing is failing, but a recent viewing of Friedkin’s terror epic failed to rouse any apiarian chills. Or perhaps The Exorcist, now more than fifty years post its initial release, simply isn’t hitting the right fright buttons in 2024.

No matter. If it’s primal panic you crave, just tap into my own personal reservoir of dread. Even the most intense and amplified insect attack noises are as nothing compared to the paralysing tones generated by Political Compassion Ladies.

You’ve seen and heard many of them over the years. Former Democrat leader turned Labor failure Cheryl Kernot was a prototypical Political Compassion Lady, but even with all her empathetic smiles and expressions of concern, Kernot’s been blasted aside by the compassion monsters who’ve emerged in her wake.

People ran from cinemas in the 1970s, driven to madness by Friedkin’s uncredited insect performers. Similarly, I fled the living room on July 1 when new Governor-General Samantha Mostyn delivered a genuinely harrowing swearing-in speech.

“These testing times call for an unstinting focus on kindness, on care and on respect,” our national Political Compassion Lady said. Kindness! Care! Respect! Even a few nearby bees, resting on the window sill between pollen excursions, immediately sprinted skywards.

But Mostyn wasn’t done. Soon followed a compassion avalanche in which our nation’s entire history was recast by the Governor-General as 236 years of ceaseless and senseless concern.

“Care has a deep and resonant place in our Australian identity,” she claimed, malevolently. “Care is the gentle thought and the outstretched hand that Australians have always been ready to share when great challenges present themselves.”

This opinion is open to debate. When great challenges have presented themselves, at least in the form of wartime Germans, Japanese and others seeking our destruction, the typical response from normal Australians was to shoot them.

Likewise, gentle thoughts aren’t much use when you’re trapped in a collapsed coal mine or beneath what had become of your home after Cyclone Tracy. And I’m not sure what distant era Ms Mostyn might be living in, but an outstretched hand these days usually ends up with someone copping a MeToo employment departure penalty.

“Care,” Mostyn concluded, “is the quieter, better part of ourselves.” Good. Maybe she’ll take her own advice and stop talking about it.

New Zealand certainly punches above its weight when it comes to not punching anybody and delicate avoidance of weight shaming. The joint was woke before woke was even known. As you’d expect, then, recent times have suited New Zealand well.

If the Covid virus was indeed designed in a Chinese laboratory, those commie scientists seemingly did so with a view to perfectly complementing Covid-era NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s complete compassion skill set.

Of course, she ended up just about crushing the place with love. Non-compliant citizens were effectively corralled within caring and compassionate freedom cages. And then there was Ardern’s skeleton-shattering Kiwi iksent, a sonic version of Guantanamo Bay waterboarding.

Listening to Ardern and her fellow Wellington-based oppressors throughout Covid lockdowns would’ve exceeded even the late director Friedkin’s appetite for torture. Not for nothing is New Zealand’s parliament known as the Beehive.

Kiwis eventually grew tired of being treated as delicate special-needs children by overprotective mother Jacinda, and turned against their formerly adored leader. Revelling in a freedom of decision-making long denied to her countrymen, Ardern quit as PM before she could be thrown out.

At which point it seemed that New Zealand’s pre-eminent Political Compassion Lady ordeal was over. But we soon learned that the country’s gain was the rest of the world’s loss, for Ardern is taking her love and tenderness show on the road.

“Dame Jacinda Ardern has announced a new initiative for global political leaders on leading with kindness and empathy,” a site called Women’s Agenda reported in June, “with the 12-month program designed to ‘rehumanise leadership’ in politics.”

Two points: yes, Ardern is now a dame. She says she felt “conflicted” about the honour, and believe me you do not want to hear exactly how she pronounced that poor word.

Second, why would any prospective politicians want to take instruction from someone who couldn’t properly manage a country the size of Parramatta for even two full terms and then bolted when opinion polls went south?

For what it’s worth, Ardern’s new empathy project is called Field, which in her words “will create a network of like minded political leaders who use pragmatic idealism, speak to people with hope and optimism rather than fear or blame, and want to unite, rather than divide as we look to solve the challenges ahead”.

It’s a mini-United Nations, then, with NZ’s sainted Ivory Mama at the helm.

As this column was written, it appeared that US Vice-President Kamala Harris would take over from Joe Biden as her party’s presidential nominee. Some people—sexists, probably—may assume that merely because Harris is female, she too will exhibit the typical traits of your Political Compassion Lady.

Happily, this is not the case. Harris seems to operate on a different level altogether. Unless “Compassion” is a Californian brand of legal hashish, Harris isn’t on it at all. Judge for yourself, from a prime sample of glorious Kamala-speak: “The significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do … and there is such great significance to the passage of time.”

As something of an expert in the occult—as noted above, I once saw a movie about it—I believe what we have here isn’t a case of excess compassion. Instead, we may have a case of demonic possession.

Call for the priests and holy water if you wish, but first ask yourself this: wouldn’t you really rather an actual tool of Satan be in charge than yet another one of those damned sympathy sheilas?

“It has become clear,” UK Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Lynn wrote in July, “that the EV industry is on the brink of collapse.

“Hundreds of billions of euros, dollars and pounds have been pumped into this industry by political leaders and the subsidy junkies that surround them—and it is surely time they were held to account for the vast quantities of taxpayer cash that has been wasted.”

I very much agree, if by “held to account” Lynn means “forced to supply cheap domestic labour to their moral and genetic superiors”.

With my bad luck, though, I’d probably end up with someone like Paul Barry, the soon-to-be-former host of the ABC’s Media Watch. He probably wouldn’t be much use cleaning the gutters, but he sure is a helpful little culture warrior when it comes to EVs.

The other week, Barry became upset by geologist Ian Plimer’s claim during a typically entertaining Sky TV appearance that an EV couldn’t easily handle the 600-kilometre run from Adelaide to Broken Hill. “It’s actually 516 kilometres from Adelaide to Broken Hill,” prissy Barry sniffed, “and plenty of EVs can travel 600 kms or more without charge if needed.”

Barry then presented a chart listing EVs and their respective ranges. It’s the strangest thing, but self-proclaimed “investigative journalist” Barry gave his professional scepticism a break during this assignment. The numbers he presented were estimates derived from protocols supported by EV manufacturers. Paul Barry was blindly accepting claims from Big Business. The peak range estimate, as it happens, was 654 kilometres for a Polestar 2 variant worth some $94,000.

But a real-world analysis by tester Tim Eden for the specialist EV website The Driven found that a Polestar 2 has a highway range of just 450 kilometres—crucially short of Broken Hill. If he was sticking around at the ABC, Barry should be compelled to drive one of these devices to that remote and charming mining city.

And to walk any remaining distance. But let’s not force the issue. Maybe Paul would prefer a shot at those gutters anyway.