How Covid and Indigenous voice to parliament trashed reason

There are disastrous consequences in allowing public policy to be driven by emotion over reason, by hysteria and “feel-good” vibes, over established understanding and knowledge.

Both Adam Creighton and Robert Gottliebsen have written powerfully important columns in The Australian.

They wrote on very different subjects, one past (I sincerely hope), one future – Creighton on the near-universal policy response to Covid; Gottliebsen on the consequences of enshrining the voice in the constitution.

Each made powerful, literally undeniable, critiques in their separate contexts.

But what was really powerful, was the way their columns united in highlighting the disastrous consequences in allowing public policy to be driven by emotion over reason, by hysteria and ‘feel-good’ vibes, by embracing the seeming obvious over established understanding and knowledge.

As Creighton detailed, the ‘Lockdown - keep the virus out’ strategy that was almost universally embraced proved a catastrophic disaster across so many fronts from the fiscal to civil liberties and including, yes, health.

As the only statistic that really matters tells it, Sweden, which almost alone in the world, stood against the lockdown hysteria, has emerged with fewer (all-cause) excess deaths than just about everybody else.

Further, do you think, do you think, that it’s entirely coincidental that Victoria which embraced totalitarian lockdown like nowhere else other than China, is now in deep, and I mean, deep fiscal pain?

“Our institutions, media, academia and bureaucracies careened into hysteria and authoritarianism, trashing human rights and traditional medical ethics over a virus that our grandparents would’ve barely noticed,” he wrote.

Yes. Smack, smack, smack.

An empty Royal Arcade in Melbourne CBD during lockdown in 2021. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

What was arguably even more telling, and depressing, in Creighton’s column was the way his even suggesting that the ‘lockdown- keep the virus locked out’ strategy might be wrong, brought down such a torrent of abuse on his head.

It really is astonishing, but a sad and all-coo accurate comment on our fevered times, that so many, not simply didn’t want to entertain any questioning of the lockdown strategy, but were so hysterically antagonistic to anyone that did do it.

It shouldn’t have been a left-right issue – and indeed, it wasn’t; governments of both persuasions embraced it, feverishly egged on by so-called, mostly self-identifying, ‘experts’.

But reason just got flattened. The disastrous consequences are broad and deep, profound and long-lasting – and they far, far outweigh the virus itself.

And all, entirely self-imposed.

Similarly disastrous consequences will flow from the emotional ‘feel good’ constitutional endorsement of The Voice, as Gottliebsen detailed in his column last week.

He followed this Monday with a devastating indictment of the – largely Big – business community for its simplistic, embarrassingly uninformed, endorsement of The Voice, simplistically trusting in ‘the vibe’ and the false assurances.

As Gottliebsen had forensically laid out, it will be impossible to prepare a budget in anything like the conventional way, once The Voice is constitutionalised and it has to be pre-consulted on every single element in it.

More broadly, it will essentially paralyse conventional government and decision-making so critical to functional business, and/or tie everything up in endless litigation. Litigation, funded by you.

Both columns are, on their own, both devastating and depressing.

Joined in their identification of the abandonment of reason and the embrace of emotion and hysteria, they are damning and should be alarming.

I suggest you read both, in full.