Piers Akerman: ‘Our universities are filled with idiots who can vote’
VOTERS in Wentworth are more than twice as likely to hold a bachelor degree or higher, which shows they’re good students but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re very smart, Piers Akerman writes.
VOTERS in Wentworth are more than twice as likely to hold a bachelor degree or higher, which shows they’re good students but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re very smart.
Arguably, the more time you spend in an Australian university these days, the greater the likelihood that you’re actually not very bright at all, at least in terms of common sense.
Our universities are jammed to the rafters with idiots who think that a man who dresses as a woman has magically changed his sex, for example.
After years of so-called study, some graduates emerge with the firm conviction that socialism or totalitarianism offer greater opportunities than social democracies and that intermittent, unreliable and expensive wind and solar generators can provide the baseload power essential to industry and our way of life.
That many voters in yesterday’s Wentworth by-election supported the favoured independent candidate Kerryn Phelps, who backs the IPCC’s unscientific doomsday scenario for the planet, provides ample evidence of the lack of any correlation between a tertiary education and conventional wisdom.
The chutzpah (to use the Yiddish word for cheeky audacity) of those people to think that by voting for someone whose environmental policies — if ever a parliament were stupid enough to adopt them — would guarantee national blackouts could actually alter the temperature of the globe by tinkering with Australia’s minuscule levels of emissions is truly astonishing.
If further proof that some in the highly educated electorate are not the sharpest, look to the comment made by candidate Phelps about the views she gleaned from those around her.
“People are not particularly perturbed by a hung parliament or by having independents and crossbenchers holding the balance of power — they see it as a break from the far right and that’s certainly the message I’m getting from people,” she told The Daily Telegraph.
Surely the only sort of people who could conceivably be relaxed about the proposition Australia’s fate was in the hands of independents (remember the totally unnerving experience of the Julia Gillard government anointed by Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor?) are those too young to recall the disaster or too foolish to understand its genesis.
As to the peculiar insight that the far right have been running the country, Phelps’ Labor Party advisers should gently remind her that the former member for Wentworth and former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was as close to being a member of the ALP as he could be without holding a membership card.
Phelps enjoyed the backing of Labor activists, the Greens (despite having a candidate) and the politically naive.
Labor leader Bill Shorten didn’t visit Wentworth once during the campaign.
He abandoned Labor candidate Tim Murray in the hope he would not finish ahead of Phelps so she could receive preferences and deprive the federal Coalition of its governing majority.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former prime minister John Howard were unashamedly on the hustings with Dave Sharma.
Morrison, playing to the nearly 13 per cent Jewish population in Wentworth, went as far as to say Australia should look at the lousy deal over nuclear reactors the cowardly European Union made with the mad mullahs of Iran and examine the possibility of moving the Australian embassy to Jerusalem.
The reactions from the media were hyperbolic in the extreme.
The Arab ambassadors who dutifully recorded their concern with the Department of Foreign Affairs over the putative move know full well that their own governments are actively seeking a back channel rapprochement with Israel to share in the benefits of its world-leading IT industry and that none of their governments is prepared to offer the so-called Palestinian refugees anything.
Morrison has shown greater spine than either Turnbull or the former foreign minister Julie Bishop in deciding that Australia can no longer cravenly capitulate to the bullies who dominate the UN proceedings.
Opponents of the proposals claim that Australia is merely following US President Donald Trump. That is a dog whistle of the shrillest kind.
There will be many lessons from the Wentworth result. The pity is that they may have come too late to prevent an independent handing power to Labor and the Greens.
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