Wowser is a sturdy old Australian word that should be retooled for combat in an era where war has been declared on the past.
It neatly sums up the sanctimonious scolds hellbent on forcing everyone to conform to their shape-shifting, alt-morality.
Wowser was born in 1899 in the pages of Sydney scandal sheet The Truth. Newspaper proprietor, politician and scoundrel John Norton claims to have invented it, and that was one of the rare occasions when he appears to have been speaking the truth.
In Wild Men of Sydney, Cyril Pearl notes that in a libel action in 1914 Norton admitted that when he first coined the term, he didn’t know what it meant. “I had to find meaning for it afterwards,” he said.
Norton went on to define it as: “A single simple word that does at once describe, deride and denounce the numerous, noxious, pestilent, puritanical, killjoy push.”
Former NSW premier William Holman defined a wowser as someone who “being entirely destitute of the greater virtues, makes up for their lack by a continuous denunciation of little vices”.
Modern wowsers are as humourless as their 19th-century counterparts but today they invent virtue and arbitrate vice. They decide what should be said or unsaid; what can be done, or must be undone.
Wowsers rage at the past and punish those deemed privileged in the present. They trade in grievance and division. They distil the essence of totalitarianism by demanding objective punishments for subjective crimes.
The crimes are the sins of commission and omission in words and deeds against new and arbitrary rules.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton recently offended alt-morality by declaring that, if ever elevated to the job of prime minister, he would discard the current practice of adorning national events with three banners: the Australian flag, the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag.
Flying Indigenous flags alongside the standard is a relatively recent feature in Australian politics. It has been in vogue with the left for some years but was given the government imprimatur with the rise of the Albanese government and has been embraced by all federal agencies.
No one was consulted, it just came to be. It was well intentioned and marketed as a sign that Labor is more inclusive than the Coalition. But to embrace the idea you have to clear a pretty big logical hurdle: that three flags are more unifying than one.
The imposition of multiple flags, without consent, is a good example of the garbled ideological mission creep of alt-morality and the gaslighting of any dissent.
Retooling the existing order always follows the same pattern. An idea is imposed and declared normal. Anyone who dares object is decried by wowsers as waging a culture war, when all they are doing is erecting defensive barricades.
This rhetorical judo was deployed in a recent Sydney Morning Herald editorial, which declared Dutton’s stance on the flag as his “latest foray into the politics of separatism”.
The leader concedes that the three-flag era began when “Anthony Albanese took to the podium in May 2022 for his first press conference”. It then assumes this novelty is now the natural order and, by refusing to conform, Dutton is guilty of an alt-morality sin.
“Peter Dutton’s undertaking not to stand in front of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags is the kind of red-rag-to-a-bull politics that feeds off false division under the guise of unity.”
Here we are simply expected to agree that multiple flags symbolise unity, that one is the new standard of division, and that Dutton started this fight.
The editorial then concedes that Dutton “has proven to have a good radar of public sentiment”. Here the writer is a tad uneasy that some people, maybe even most people, would prefer one flag to represent the nation and that Dutton might just leverage the tyranny of the mob to bully his way into government.
Comforted in the certainty that alt-morality outranks the false consciousness of populism, the wowser ploughs on: “But even if you accept some people don’t like the idea of three flags being displayed, Dutton has shown callous disregard for community harmony by weaponising such unease.”
The grudging acceptance of the “unease” of “some people” suggests “community harmony” began to unravel with the imposition of three flags. Like the vote on the voice, in wowser world dividing the nation by race is the very definition of being inclusive and it would be good if the majority of Australians just shut up about it.
The editorial hits peak wowser as it ends in a flourish of alt-moral outrage: “His bogus flag-waving is more of the same disgusting, divisive short-term politics, unworthy of a man who would be leader of our nation.”
It’s remarkable how quickly wowsers become whingers when people refuse to conform to their worldview.
This is unlikely to be a big issue at the next election but symbols are important. If Dutton makes this part of his campaign it will be the first time the Australian people have been asked to make a choice about what symbols they want to represent them. We call this democracy.
Wowsers don’t really like democracy because their ideas don’t fly so well with the mob. That is because alt-morality is philosophical smoke; drifting, intangible and often nonsensical. The list of contradictions and idiocies at their core is long. What follows is a work in progress. Feel free to add to it.
In alt-morality race is intersectional, but white is irredeemable; privilege is permanent, but biology is optional; tradition is tyranny, but dogma is freedom; progress demands tolerance, but not for dissent; fitness is fatphobic; beauty is ugly; speech is violence, but silence is complicity, and; expression is free, as long as you agree.
Wowsers also have a long list of grievances with education.
Maths is racist; English is colonial; engineering perpetuates patriarchy; architecture enforces inequality; science is oppression; economics reinforces capitalism; astronomy is Western cosmology, and; law is injustice.
These risible ideas infect all of academia and the bureaucracy. The rise of “unconscious bias” training courses in the Australian Public Service shows the totalitarian state now even seeks to cleanse the dark corners of your mind.
In the words of one harried bureaucrat: “Once they have got you for the things you actually are bigoted about, they come after you for things you never knew you were bigoted about.”
The compass of compassion now points everywhere and is a road to nowhere.
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