Akerman: SVB’s failure a stark warning that virtue-signalling cannot trump expertise

A bank closing in Silicon Valley and a natural gas shortage are both caused by inane virtue-signalling, argues Piers Akerman.

A bank closes in Silicon Valley triggering an international panic and Victoria faces a natural gas shortage which will send prices across the nation through the roof.

The link is obvious to all but those ideologically committed to politically correct blindness. This is not a case of a butterfly flapping its wings over the Amazon and causing a typhoon in the South China Sea.

The link is the inane virtue-signalling which has captured corporate chieftains and left-leaning politicians the world over.

The statement “when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun” has been misattributed to a host of Nazis including Himmler, Goebbels and Goering but it actually came from a play written by fellow traveller of the Reich named Hanns Johst.

Left-leaning politicians have given into protests to meet environment, social and governance wokeness. Picture: Supplied

It has a certain cut-through and has been adapted by many including physicist Stephen Hawking, who used it to highlight his dislike of references to a theorem known as Schrödinger’s Cat. I would substitute the acronyms ESG and DEI for the word culture and the famous cat.

ESG stands for environment, social and governance and is now tagged by every woke CEO and company director, while DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion.

In a woke environment, companies are more interested in diversity than experience. Picture: iStock

Like all catchcries of the kumbaya crowd, the exact meanings of the words signified by these acronyms remain vague and the goals as ephemeral as most hopey-wishy aspirations have proven to be.

The business cases made for ESG and DEI are as distant from the realities of commerce and industry as arguments about the number of angels in Heaven – and just as unproven. However, they are having an impact on people across the Western World as the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and the promise of soaring gas prices demonstrate.

As the US government rushed to protect the SVB’s customers from the collapse, it was revealed that one, just one, director on the bank’s board had any actual banking experience.

The rest of the board members were individuals closely associated with the Democratic Party either as staffers in the Obama administration or as major donors to Democrats.

A Silicon Valley Bank office. Picture: Rebecca Noble/AFP

It is not surprising that even as the SVB was failing, it boasted of the diversity represented by its board.

One board member boasted that her experience in an improv group was key to her success, another has told of praying in tears at a Shinto shrine when she heard Donald Trump had been elected president.

The woke board was focused on social justice issues, not customers, and donated over $73m to Black Lives Matter-related organisations before going under.

In Australia, the federal and all state governments, have signed up to same woke nonsense and the failure of the education system, the endless procedures and red tape necessary to keep thousands of new bureaucrats busy, are choking our economy.

The looming energy crisis is merely the most obvious evidence of the problem and it is going to get far, far worse because despite the dire warming forecasts of the climate catastrophists and extinction rabble, current predictions are for colder winters this decade.

The price hikes in Victoria, where the Labor government has smugly banned all gas extraction, have already seen a 31 per cent increase in power disconnections this year.

Wait until the real bill shock hits.

During last year’s election campaign, Anthony Albanese boasted on 97 occasions that Labor would deliver a $275 decrease in power bills. He hasn’t mentioned it since he was elected because it is now and was always absolutely unachievable under his government’s policy to embrace virtue-signalling renewable energy policies.

Punters must wake up to the woke and stop this zombie-like march towards economic and cultural collapse.