It couldn’t happen here, could it? By Maurice Newman.
This development is eerily reminiscent of 1930s Germany when journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote in his secret journal, ‘There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and, those like me, watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theatre’. Like Australians today, Germans believed talk of authoritarian rule was alarmist until it wasn’t.
Australian sceptics should note how the Racial Discrimination Act is being increasingly used to silence free speech. And how, in the public square, critics of the incessant wave of woke orthodoxies face demonisation as right-wing extremists, racists, climate change deniers or anti-vaxxers. Fear of being socially ostracised intimidates most. A tentative, ‘I probably shouldn’t be saying this’, is as far as most will go, even in private. …
How to make money today:
Having access to the political class is today’s pathway to fame and fortune. It requires a different skill set to the economic risk-takers of the past. It is a system which demands obedience, entrenches privilege and restricts social mobility. …
For example, no profit-seeking enterprise would have invested in unnecessary desalination plants, an obsolete NBN, or a poorly conceived Snowy Hydro 2.0, and inland rail, let alone waste $240 million on a now mothballed Queensland quarantine facility. Indeed it’s only because we still have a capitalist system that we recognise bureaucratic ineptitude parading as public interest. Capitalism ends waste. Governments perpetuate it.
The new rulers:
We have reached the stage where big government now enjoys a life of its own. It continues to attract a growing army of self-interested, unaccountable, group-thinking bureaucrats. They are inward looking and process driven. They are difficult to fire or demote. Those who actively seek power over others do well. They are essentially anti-liberal and anti-market and pursue regulatory powers wherever possible. The more they intervene the bigger and more powerful they become.
Looking to the future, education bureaucracies are preparing today’s children to become state dependent. Schools are transmission belts for self-loathing propaganda. …
Prosperity and equity for all are ever-receding horizons. Indeed, a Productivity Commission report reveals economic growth and income per person over the past decade has slipped to its slowest rate in sixty years. Moreover, the wealth of the top 20 per cent of Australians has grown 68 per cent in the past fifteen years compared to six per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. …
So we face a stark choice. Coercion and compulsion or freedom and self-determination. There is no third way.
The political spectrum is primarily from individualism on the right to subordination to the group on the left. Fascism is up the latter end. The Nazis were socialists — highly nationalistic, yes, but they promoted collectivism and ignored individual rights. Left wing academics in the West have always pretended the Nazis were right wing, but they were only right-wing compared to their competitors, the communists (who were the darlings of academic historians).
