‘Expertism’ virus makes COVID-19 look tame

Trust the experts? You have got to be kidding!

People wear face masks to protect against the coronavirus as they walk across an intersection in Beijing, Friday, June 5, 2020. Picture: AP

Trust the experts? You have got to be kidding! This must surely be the year when all sane and rational people should mercilessly mock and utterly reject the failed and destructive cult of “expertism”.

It’s no longer: trust me, I’m a doctor. That’s far too passe and limiting for the armies of “experts” that infest the 21st century. No, it’s: shut up, I’m an expert. Or worse: shut up, and do what the “experts” demand and which is exactly what I say/demand.

As a certain former prime minister — no, not either of our duo of twittering twerps who compete to out-inane each other, but a real former, albeit both great and late, PM of the UK — could have remarked: never before in the field of fatuity has so much obedience been demanded by so many (so-called) experts on the basis of so little of value.

Where to start? With the “experts” at the World Health Organisation?

The ones who “expertly” condemned our China travel ban: the one move — the one move — above all others that is the reason we have had 102 virus deaths against the 40,000, and counting, of the UK, which has only just begun to work out that the virus literally, well, flies into the country.

Or our own “experts” who refuse point-blank to even consider far less apply what lessons we can learn from Taiwan and Hong Kong — the two, and I will use the term, countries which render our performance frankly pathetic.

Taiwan, a country with a population slightly more than Australia has had just 443 recorded infections and seven deaths. That is to say, it has done more than 1400 per cent better than us.

Hong Kong, despite sitting right next to China — indeed, some would say being part of China, but either way with massive intercourse with China — just four deaths in a population about one-quarter Australia’s.

Both their performances are even more dramatically better than the raw numbers show, because in both cases they did not lock down their economies and order their citizens to months of house arrest. And they did it in a virus-friendly northern hemisphere winter.

Yet, when have you heard a single one of our (decidedly non-expert) political leaders or their “expert” medical advisers say a single word about either place? Far less: gee, is there something we can learn from how they did it? Even further less, maybe we should do what they did?

Taiwan and HK have done a range of things, but the one significant and differentiating thing that stands out is the universal wearing of masks.

Yes, we have that very handsome young “expert” continually on our TV screens telling us to stay safe by downloading the app — although I’m not quite sure how a smartphone (for unsmart people) actually works to stop you getting or giving the virus — but he is far too “expert” to mention masks.

What about Treasury?

Or perhaps, we must listen to the experts in Treasury who gave us the botched JobKeeper program. They tried to copy the much better New Zealand scheme and stuffed it up.

They told us it would cover 6.6 million employees and cost $130bn. Whoops, that only over-estimated it by 85 per cent.

Don’t blame us, the fiscal “experts” whined, we were only applying our fiscal “expertise” to what the health “experts” were telling us: that we were facing 50,000 to 150,000 deaths. Ah, you gotta love it: “expertise” building on “expertise”.

I was intrigued to read in another place, one John Edwards complimenting Josh Frydenberg for “owning” this little exercise in fiscal “expertise”.

And which John Edwards was this? No, not the one who “coulda been a contender” for the US presidency except he was just too expertly a fraud, but one of our own “experts”, the former chief economics adviser to former PM Paul Keating.

Actually John, Frydenberg very precisely did not own the stuff-up. In one of the most bizarre and in my 50-year experience utterly unique exercises, the little error was announced in a formal but equally bizarrely unsigned statement by Treasury — to stress, not the Treasurer — and the tax office. Passing strange it was, that no actual person wanted to take ownership of the good news that the taxpayer was going to be saved $60bn.

Expert with real form

Anyway, it was gratifying to hear from an “expert” who had real form, as he had sat at the right hand of Keating as we ground our way through our previously worst recession. That was of course the recession we “had to have”, unlike the present one which we did not have to have: if we had only just expertly copied Taiwan and HK instead of “expertly” copying NZ.

I might add, in relation to Edwards, in an even earlier life as a journalist, he was responsible for arguably the sweetest words that have every appeared in that “other place”. All this transitory “expertise” pales of course into insignificance against the ultimate expression of “expertism” in the 21st century: that of, what else, climate change; that unique blend of fevered viral fear, absolutist theological dogma and straight out idiocy, frying more, for want of a better term, brains than any part of the planet.

Indeed, climate change is “expertism” in its purest viral form as it spreads into — shut up and do what I say — “expertism” on literally everything. You just computer model how the climate change which only exists inside a computer model will effect anything, everything. All computer models are exercises to some degree in GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. With climate change, we have GIGO on GIGO on GIGO, cascading like turtles all the way down.

None of this is to decry the expertise that has built modernity, and indeed valiantly sustains it against the relentless bullying dogmas of expertism, which can and must be destroyed by applying reason and logic. And mockery.