It’s about time the Australian of the Year selectors got this right

Just when it looked like the Australian of the Year award was about to sink into irrelevance, selectors stepped back from the brink, writes James Morrow.

Well, that was close.

Just when it looked like the annual naming of the Australian of the Year was about to take its final step off the cliff and plunge irretrievably into a valley of virtue-signalling irrelevance, the selectors stepped back from the brink and offered up stem cell researcher Professor Alan Mackay-Sim.

In doing so the awards panellists for the first time in a while lived up to their brief which is, according to the criteria listed on their website, to find someone who has “done the hard yards and been a pioneer that has had a positive impact on a wide range of people’s lives”.

Unquestionably 2017’s Australian of the Year fits the bill.

Mackay-Sim has done what was previously thought impossible, disrupting the settled science and proving it is in fact possible to regrow spinal cord cells. This is an amazing achievement with implications not just for those with spinal cord injuries but sufferers of brain disorders ranging from schizophrenia to Parkinson’s disease.

Like the 2006 selection of Ian Frazer, who developed the cervical cancer vaccine, this year’s choice sends a powerful message to Australians and the world. Namely that, as a nation, we are more than just a pretty face.

Our intellectual firepower is just as strong as our national ability to punch above our weight on the stage and screen and playing field.

Former Australian of the Year Professor Ian Frazer developed the world’s first cervical cancer vaccine with his late colleague Jian Zhou. (Pic: Anthony Weate)

Given that Australia closed out 2016 with a series of devastating reports showing our students falling ever further behind on the world stage, the pick of Mackay-Sim reminds us of what the educated mind is capable of and why reform of our schools is so urgently needed.

And in selecting an apolitical Australian whose work has such power to change not just the country but the world for good, the committee responsible for the honour arrested a slide which, starting with 2007’s selection of Tim Flannery, saw the Australian of the Year associated less and less with actual achievement and ever more with pushing the progressive agenda of the day through a sympathetic ABC and Fairfax press.
This was particularly the case during the previous three years’ picks — Adam Goodes, Rosie Batty and, most notoriously, Lieutenant General David Morrison.

The desk-bound commander spent his tenure acting as Australia’s unofficial human resources diversity officer, lecturing corporates at $15,000 a pop and giving Orwellian warnings about supposedly sexist ungoodspeak — all the while ducking questions about his own handling of the military’s Jedi Council sex scandal.

So well done not only to Professor Mackay-Sim, but to the selectors of this year’s Australian of the Year.

You got it right. Now keep it up.