Language police on a power trip

THE Qantas guidelines that suggest avoiding gender specific words like husband and wife are yet another power play from politically correct authoritarians, writes Miranda Devine.

WHY do companies like Qantas think they have a right to tell their employees how to speak, and effectively how to think?

It is a sinister wind blowing through corporate Australia when your boss is telling you that certain innocuous English words such as “Mum”, “dad”, “husband”, “wife”, “mankind “ “darl” or “love” are off limits because it just might offend some hypothetical snowflake.

The furore which has greeted Qantas’s “Words at Work” booklet at least is a good sign that we aren’t meekly lying down to the wannabe authoritarians in our midst.

Political correctness is all about one group of self-appointed moral arbiters trying to force the rest of us to think as they do, or at least speak as they do. And because the language we use influences the thoughts we have, it ends up being the same thing.

The language police are out in force. Artwork by Terry Pontikos.

As every authoritarian regime knows, power is first exerted by policing language. Historian Keith Windschuttle describes politically correct language as a “verbal curtsy” which we are forced to perform to those who claim to be our moral superiors.

This drive to control language isn’t some benign attempt to create “safe” and “happy” workplaces as the very pleasant CEO of the Diversity Council, Lisa Annese, claims.

It is her outfit which is responsible for drafting these naughty words lists and promulgating them through Qantas and 450 other “member organisations”.

You may remember the Diversity Council shot to fame a couple of years back when its chairman, former Chief of Army David Morrison, made a video telling us not to use the word “guys” because it’s offensive and was pictured hobbling around in stilettos with hairy legs, which really was far more offensive.

There’s no reason for a bureaucracy like the Diversity Council to exist but exist it does, and it keeps itself busy by meddling in our lives, because the devil always makes work for idle hands.

This also is the case with human resources departments which are embedded in every big organisation to torment employees and tie everyone up in red tape. These days most have changed their name to “People and Culture”, presumably because the word “human” contains the gender-provocative word “man”.

These departments are full of people who live and breathe identity politics, and worship at the “diversity” altar. Because they have been created without real purpose, they float all over the org chart and have inordinate influence over busy and ambitious top executives who know the one way to cruel a promotion is to get off-side with human resources.

So we see increasingly absurd demands embedded in the corporate culture of organisations whose purposes should be simply to make money doing whatever it is they do best.

An excerpt from the Qantas booklet that outlines how staff should interact with other staff members and customers. (Pic: News Corp)

This is how we ended up just like Communist China, with lists of banned words.

This language policing has created minefields of offence everywhere. For instance the University of NSW similarly has issued lists of words students shouldn’t use when writing essays about indigenous issues. “Aborigine” apparently is now inappropriate

Now Annese says that the Diversity Council only issues “guidelines” for corporations to convey to their workforce. But of course it doesn’t work like that. If the boss is telling you that certain words are inappropriate then workers generally treat it as an edict.

In other words, the language constraints become compulsory.

And then in five years time, there will be a new set of forbidden words.

Annese says that “guys” for instance is now OK, when it was so offensive two years ago that General Morrison had to make a video telling us not to say it.

She also wants Qantas to rename its “Chairman’s Lounge” to “Chair Lounge”. But she has no suggestions for what to call the “cockpit”.

Annese says her goal is “to make sure workplaces are safe for people who work in them.”

But she cannot explain why the words mum, dad, husband or wife make a workplace “unsafe”, other than to say it’s “not inclusive [of] of blended or same sex families.

This isn’t what people who voted for same sex marriage last year had in mind. One third voted yes just to get the issue off the agenda and stop talking about something they regard as peripheral to their lives.

But it hasn’t cleansed the agenda of the demands of identity politics. If anything, it’s empowered identity authoritarians to divide, transform and ultimately control society.

We have empowered a tiny minority of selfish, entitled snowflakes to demand that the whole of society cater to their neuroses.