Standing in solidarity with Land Forces Expo protesters in Melbourne last week, Greens senator David Shoebridge masterfully executed an act of Orwellian doublethink while maintaining a straight face. The “core tenets” of his party, he insisted, are “peace and non-violence”.
Could I add a third to that list, David, that being “taking the piss”? The so-called anti-war and pro-Palestinian protesters he defended likewise follow the Greens’ version of peace and non-violence. Rioters spat on police, sprayed acid in their direction, and pelted them with rocks, canned food, and manure. They even attacked police horses.
Twenty-seven officers were injured. So who did Shoebridge condemn? Why, the Victoria Police, of course, accusing them of “extreme violence”. My first thought upon hearing that was to hope he would take the form of a police horse in his next reincarnation. But I immediately dismissed that, given remarks like his prove Shoebridge would not have the requisite intelligence.
Speaking of intelligence, what does it say about those who vote for the Greens? I am not talking about young, impetuous adults. All of us did stupid things in our youth. But what does it say of a middle-aged person who votes for them? Let’s consider a typical case.
You live in the inner-city suburbs of East Melbourne or Sydney’s Inner West. Your partner, Julian, is a high-level public servant, and you are a senior academic responsible for developing new study programs in sociology.
Your vision of an egalitarian society is one in which “the rich pay their fair share”. You purport to speak for “the working class” but the only dealings you have with blue-collar workers is when you need a tradie. You maintain the system is rigged to favour big companies, but you conveniently ignore that Australian businesses have the second-highest corporate tax rate in the developed world.
As with many of your fellow socialists, your financial portfolio is looking a peach. Although you own three investment properties, you write letters to the newspaper demanding the abolition of negative gearing – provided of course that comes with a grandfather clause.
Thanks to your partner’s connections, you have a gun North Sydney accountant. In return for mates rates, he looks after your financial affairs, meaning you have not had to pay net tax for the last few years. And when you retire, you will receive a very tidy pension. That 17 per cent employer superannuation contribution is just one of the many perks of academia.
You went to a private school, but, as you tell your friends, you decided against sending your children to one for their secondary education, because they foster “elitism” and lack “diversity”. You omit telling them you were holding out on that decision until you received confirmation they had been accepted into a state selective school.
You regard with disdain mainstream Australia. September and October feature the worst in plebeian vulgarity, with all those shouty footy fans spoiling your tranquillity. “Bread and circuses,” you tell your circle, thinking your analogy both insightful and original.
You take yourself so seriously you are almost devoid of humour. When you suggested to one of the parents at the local tennis club that it should acknowledge it was on unceded lands, he responded that it had grass courts. You still cannot work out if he was being serious or not.
You try to avoid catch-ups with extended family, for they do not share your tolerant and worldly views, as you repeatedly stress to understanding friends. Your sister Kate is a happy stay-at-home mum, and she rolls her eyes when you explain to her that she lives an “unfulfilled” life. You have not forgiven her husband, Gary, for laughing uproariously last Christmas lunch when Julian proudly spoke of being a “male ally in the roadmap to gender equality”.
That reaction was annoying enough, but what really grates is that Gary is a self-made man. Although you would never admit it, you think it unfair that someone who never went to university has more assets than you do. Also, why would someone wealthy choose to live in the outer suburbs?
As a feminist, you deplore the treatment of women politicians, although you are remarkably selective in your outrage. You claim conservative politics is replete with misogyny. Yet when former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher died, you entertained your colleagues at morning tea the next day by cracking the bubbly and singing ‘The Witch is Dead’.
As an academic, you take pride in your intellectual superiority, but in reality you are incapable of entertaining an opposing view. You become flustered and defensive when you do not control the debate or the setting. At your high school reunion last year, you were shocked to hear women at your table say they would be voting No in the upcoming voice referendum. So distraught were you that you left the event early and had to pop an extra Valium to go to sleep.
Saving the planet, or rather showing others you are saving the planet, is your number one concern. You have just booked your second overseas holiday for this year and are a platinum jetsetter who would never settle for anything less than business class, but that’s okay because you purchase a carbon offset with every trip. You own an electric vehicle and cannot understand why all Australians do not follow suit. Range anxiety is nonsense you say. After all, the furthest you drive is to the airport or to your coastal retreat.
You are vocal about the need to learn from history, otherwise known as disproportionately focusing on the sins of conservative white men. But you would bristle if someone pointed out that the left were the loudest proponents of the White Australia policy, or if one of your students called out Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’ for its farcical conclusions.
Being progressive, you hold that your ideology is one of altruism. You consider the justification for your party’s policies to be self-evident. Accordingly, those who oppose them are either wicked or ignorant. But you have no idea, for example, that progressives were at the forefront of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement during the early twentieth century.
“But the progressives of today have nothing in common with those of that era,” you would reply. Think again. They were convinced of the righteousness of their cause. Their philosophy incorporated the racism of low expectations. And they believed in big government and the intervention of the state to further their ideology.
Your reaction to the October 7 attacks is telling. You acknowledge for the sake of appearances that Hamas murdered Israeli men, women, and children, yet you qualify that by saying “Look, I’m not condoning what happened, but”.
You are not anti-Semitic, you keep telling yourself. In other words, you think the Zionists are fair game. But you have not stopped screeching since learning yesterday Israel had taken out Hezbollah terrorists with exploding pagers.
And finally, you believe you will realise a social utopia in your lifetime. Unlike so many other far-left movements in the last hundred or so years, you are confident yours will not culminate in the mass expropriation of property, a collapse of the economy, and an authoritarian state.
Even if the unthinkable happened and it did, you would be able to prove you have long been on the right side of history, thus meaning they would never come for you. Right?
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