Time to say bye-bye to the wokerati’s bullying tactics

Miklaya Waldren and Maverick enjoy Australia Day 2025 on the Gold Coast. Australians are proud of their country, writes the author, and want to celebrate its achievements. Picture: Glenn Campbell

On Australia Day, Sydney’s Circular Quay, between the magnificent Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, was thronged with Australians of many ethnicities, revelling on a hot summer’s day in celebration of their country’s many achievements.

The atmosphere was nothing like that encouraged in recent years, where Australians – especially white ones of British descent – were urged to feel shame about their heritage, and what past generations had done in “occupying” the land of Indigenous peoples.

The noisy and unrepresentative minority that advanced this negative view seems increasingly disregarded by millions of Australians: not because those Australians are incipient racists, or callous, but because they are proud of their country and fed up with being told not to be. They accept that by today’s standards unwarranted acts were carried out on Indigenous peoples after 1788; but today’s Australians were not implicit in those acts and would not have condoned them. The society they have created and sustained offers equality of opportunity to every Australian, irrespective of his or her heritage.

Self-flagellation is merely virtue-signalling; it is self-regarding and, like all acts of self-regard, pointless.

The attempt to undermine Australia Day was a manifestation of toxic identity politics – toxic because in pitting one group of Australians against another they divide society rather than unite it.

The sensible attitude of millions of decent, patriotic Australians to this, and their repudiation of identity politics, is part of an international current in the world’s major democracies against the imposition of “woke”.

Vicki Connors and Steve Robinson set up camp alongside the Peel River during the Tamworth Country Music Festival on January 26. Picture: Getty Images

This nasty word has come to represent not just the politics of identity by race, gender or sexual orientation, but the embracing of anti-capitalism, illiberalism and above all anti-nationalism by political and bureaucratic elites around the developed world.

Benign nationalism such as propelled generations of Australians to fight for freedom in two world wars is equated with aggressive, racially based nationalism as practised by the Nazis. Capitalism is equated with exploitation, not with the liberation that comes with prosperity. A divided society becomes valued above one unified by enduring values built on a successful past. It is like the Marxist idea of permanent revolution

A vocal, politically motivated minority has attempted to impose its will, mostly through bullying rather than the ballot box. It is not just in Australia that the public has been alienated by these strictures decreed by self-appointed intellectual elites, but it is a global phenomenon.

Donald Trump’s remarkable victory over Kamala Harris last November was the most significant example. President Trump has set about undoing many of the woke policies that caused the Democratic Party’s implosion: ending the army of diversity, equality and inclusion officers in the public sector, putting American economic success above the demands of net zero, ending nonsensical new conventions about people’s pronouns in the public service, and beginning mass deportations of illegal migrants, starting with convicted criminals.

Tugun Beach was busy as people enjoy Australia Day 2025 on the Gold Coast. Picture: Glenn Campbell

It has done nothing to improve the respect for him among the Democratic Party’s elite, but the American public are right behind him.

Canada is likely to follow, with the Liberal Party facing defeat in the country’s coming elections. Australia itself will vote soon, with Anthony Albanese’s administration striving to divert attention from its trademark wokeness in the hope that people will re-elect it.

Around these great countries, voters have had enough of being told how to think and how to behave – and being instructed in the most bullying manner, too – and want to reassert more traditional values and attitudes that served them perfectly well.

The question is highly pertinent in Europe. Germany will shortly hold elections, and Friedrich Merz, leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, is likely to win, not least because of his Trump-like attitude to illegal ­migration.

More controversially, Merz has admitted he would seek support from the hard-right Alternatif fur Deutschland, whom the German left regards as fascists, and who were recently endorsed by tech billionaire and Trump administration member Elon Musk.

That AfD are second in opinion polls exemplifies the frustration many German voters feel with indulgent immigration policies, the weak border controls and lack of deportations.

Italy has already put Georgia Meloni in power from the right, and she has been unrelenting in tightening up borders.

And it is far from impossible that France will, in 2027, elect a Rassemblement National president. That prospect, like that of the AfD’s share in power in Germany, horrifies the EU, a profoundly undemocratic organisation run by precisely the sort of bureaucrats who have striven to impose woke standards on elected politicians around the world, and in which elected politicians have stupidly acquiesced.

The EU bureaucracy has a stand-off with the nationalist ­government of Viktor Orban in Hungary. It has tried (unsuccessfully so far) to impede the rise of Herbert KIckl, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party and so far right that he is routinely compared with Hitler. It also played a part in voiding November’s elections in Romania, won by the right-wing populist Calin Georgescu. The elections are being re-run and Georgescu’s martyrdom may yet backfire on those who arranged it.

Across the democratic world, such parties thrive because of the wokerati’s bullying tactics, of which they have had enough.

One exception is the United Kingdom, which elected a landslide Labour government last July. The vagaries of the UK’s first past the post system meant Labour’s landslide came on just 33 per cent of the vote, with only 21 per cent of the electorate supporting it.

Its success also came after the catastrophic failure of 14 years of Conservative government that was anything but conservative.

Since the election, the new government’s popularity has nosedived because of its graphic incompetence. It is unlikely to survive beyond the next UK election, not due until 2029. By then, the new, realistic spirit of nationhood witnessed this Australia Day may have swept much of the democratic world. If the wokerati seek to apportion blame, they need only look in the nearest mirror.

Simon Heffer is a distinguished British historian and a columnist for The Telegraph, Mail and Spectator over the past 40 years. He’s with Centre for Independent Studies as scholar in residence for the next month.