The dumbing down of Australian politics. By Damien Costas in The Spectator.
Older, bolder, richer Australia:
Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, John Howard, and John Hewson … could be arrogant, evasive, and unbearable. But they were serious people making serious arguments. They understood policy and defended positions under pressure. …
There was a minimum intellectual standard.

Rhodes scholar
The same was expected of political journalists. Government is complicated. Tax, trade, defence, and industrial relations can’t always be explained between mattress advertisements. It requires people who can read a brief, recognise what matters and translate it for the public. …
Journalists like [Laurie Oakes] could dissect budgets, expose contradictions, and leave ministers wishing they’d developed a sudden diplomatic commitment in Paraguay.
That entire ecosystem has deteriorated.
Australia today:
The intelligence, command of detail, and capacity for argument among our politicians appear to have halved. Too many speak in slogans because that’s all they possess. Ask a second question and the machinery begins to smoke. …

Midwit
Independence is dangerous. Intellectual confidence is troublesome. Far safer to promote the factionally obedient, the ideologically house-trained, and those who control the numbers in a suburban branch.
The result is a Parliament populated by people who have spent their adult lives preparing to enter it without developing a reason why they should.
The education system can’t escape responsibility. … Students learn the vocabulary of certainty before acquiring the knowledge to justify it. They emerge with opinions on everything, expertise in very little and a touching faith that the former compensates for the latter.
Then came the collapse of journalism. …
The old political journalist wanted to catch ministers lying. The new model wants to catch the audience thinking incorrectly.
That failure gave independent media an opening. The internet broke the monopoly of complacent, ideological and distrusted institutions. …
Across the political spectrum, commentary comes in angry, expletive-ridden monologues from people with about as much class as a baboon in a ball gown. Every thumbnail announces that somebody has been destroyed, exposed, or humiliated, usually by a man alone in a spare bedroom. …
Yes, some are courageous. Many are passionate. Several have identified genuine failures that established journalism ignored. That is precisely why independent media matters. I don’t want fewer dissenting voices. I want better ones.
They should research carefully, speak precisely, and understand that profanity isn’t punctuation. Anger can alert people to a problem, but it can’t substitute for knowing what caused it or what should be done. A country can’t meme its way to competent government.
Sadly, Australia’s small market makes it difficult. Only a fraction of our population follows politics seriously, so few capable people can earn a living from independent commentary. Doing it properly is full-time work, requiring research, preparation, judgement, and expertise. In America or Britain, a specialist can find an audience that makes the work pay. Here, the intelligent lawyer continues practising law, the economist remains in finance, and the microphone is left to whoever wants it most.
On top of that, that average IQ continues to drop at one or two points per decade, having peaked in the late 1800s (the genetic component that is, so no, the Flynn effect does not mitigate this steady erosion). No wonder our politics increasingly resembles that of 1600s or 1700s England. Perhaps modernity and the standards of the last century are simply unsustainable already.











