Piers Akerman: Loud leftists are making too much noise
“loud” Australians are shouting that the “quiet” Aussies are disenchanted with Scott Morrison’s prime ministership. But “quiet” Aussies live with the fact that this nation is a democracy, Piers Akerman writes.
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Shhh, the “loud” Australians are shouting that the “quiet” Australians are massively disenchanted with Scott Morrison’s prime ministership.
How they would know what “quiet” Australians think is a mystery, as “quiet” Aussies don’t jump onto their keyboards to flood the idiots’ echo chamber, Twitter, every time they have a passing thought. And they rarely, if ever, glue themselves to pieces of public infrastructure, or block traffic, in an attempt to draw attention to themselves.
“Quiet” Australians live with the fact that this nation is a democracy and, by-and-large, they respect the system that gives them the vote and they respect those elected, even if they disagree with their policies.
“Quiet” Australians are generally civil. They discuss issues, they don’t shout down those whose views they disagree with. They don’t try to have rational debates cancelled.
They don’t mind diverse points of view, unlike those in charge of the ABC and the Nine media, who make sure that anyone who isn’t reading from the Marxist song-sheet is either barred or held up to ridicule.
In today’s media, desperately searching for clickbait, it’s the noisiest who are often given the microphone, no matter how wacky or abusive their contribution may be.
That’s why Nine promotes that ludicrous parody of political correctness, Bandanaman Peter FitzSimons, and engages hate-filled souls like Clementine Ford, whose shrieks of outraged offence lack decency and all the other attributes beloved of the “quiet” Australians she deplores.
MORE FROM PIERS AKERMAN:
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“Quiet” Australians make judgments based on available evidence.
Morrison was ill-advised to take his overseas vacation when it appeared this year’s fire season would be magnified by the drought and the lack of fuel reduction carried out in Victoria and NSW — contrary to the recommendations of every previous post-bushfire inquiry.
But he did return, and he did smartly cover the thousands of kilometres, and he did call out the military — though NSW had previously claimed to have the crisis in hand.
This wasn’t the only wrong call made by the NSW authorities but this is not the time to apportion blame — as some Twitterphiles and Guardian correspondents rushed to do from beaches on the south coast.
Maybe some of those “loud” Australians should have considered how fire-prone their bushy forest retreats were, and perhaps they should have heeded the warnings and left when that was an option.
The “loud” Australians blame climate change for the bushfires. Morrison hasn’t fallen for that line but he will have to watch the green pressure that will be applied when inquiries are held into their cause in the states because the premiers, both Labor and conservative, will be trying desperately to shift the attention from their own lack of prophylactic action to the ephemeral and totally immeasurable claimed effects of human-induced climate change.
Erratic premiers such as South Australia’s Steve Marshall and NSW’s Gladys Berejiklian haven’t gone as far as Victoria’s Daniel Andrews or Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk in pandering to the “loud” enviro-activists but they have made placatory murmurings (in Berejiklian’s case) and impassioned pleas (in Marshall’s) to the climate warmists.
South Australia is, of course, a mendicant state. Taxpayers from other states are bled to keep its agrarian socialists in the lifestyles they have chosen, just like others who choose to live in remote communities where there is no sustainable economic activity.
Marshall likes to think his state can rely on solar and wind energy sooner than 2050 but it can only do so if there is a better link to states with more reliable sources of power — and though he has uranium in his backyard he lacks the courage to champion it as the cleanest, most dependable option currently available.
The full mechanics of the deal between Morrison and Berejiklian to get more gas into the domestic market are yet to be revealed but, while the cost of power should be reduced in NSW, the cost of the project is estimated at about $3 billion and we’ve seen how these estimates blow out.
If the “quiet” Australians are turning on Morrison, it isn’t apparent in the suburbs where couples are trying to raise their families, those areas the ABC can’t quite understand because they’ve lost touch with the people who bankroll their monolithic organisation.
Few things exemplify the gulf between the values of the “quiet” Australians and those who wear their leftist credentials on their tattered T-shirts than the outburst that greeted Labor MP Tanya Plibersek’s Australia Day proposal that schools teach the pledge of allegiance.
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi called the proposal “sad” while social commentator Jane Caro condemned Plibersek for endorsing pride in “spurious geography”, whatever that means. Support for Plibersek came from “quiet” Australians and Morrison.
The pledge, which is taken by new Australians at citizenship ceremonies, states that: “From this time forward, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”
“Quiet” Australians agree with every word; it’s the “loud” types who noisily disagree.
Morrison has little to worry about at the moment but he mustn’t betray his under-the-radar supporters.