How firms are seduced into backing a radical agenda
A few years ago, RMIT University gave as an example a scheme in eastern Shandong that awarded residents “a base 1000 points, which can be boosted by donating blood or attracting investment to their city, while traffic offences and tax evasion result in the loss of points. Citizens must maintain a high score if they hope to be employed in public institutions or to receive public funding, among other activities”.
In response to claims that Australian CCTV cameras at the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras had mimicked China’s social surveillance system, an academic at RMIT concluded it was a silly myth. And it was.
But the ever-increasing blizzard of awards for “good” behaviour and boycotts for “bad” behaviour in this country have distinctly social credit-like features – a social credit system with Australian characteristics, if you like. They may not (yet) be backed up by the kind of surveillance that enforces their Chinese counterparts but their ability to engineer social change without people noticing it, let alone voting for it, is every bit as sinister as the Chinese version.
Last weekend, The Australian exposed for the first time the extraordinary reach and success of the Australian Workplace Equality Index, a social credit look-alike scheme operated by ACON, an entity originally known as the AIDS Council of NSW. My colleague Stephen Rice pointed out that hundreds of businesses and government agencies now compete in the AWEI “with points on offer for everything from cupcake days and gender-neutral bathrooms to paid leave for staff to ‘manage their gender affirmation’ ”.
Rice noted the AWEI encompassed up to three million workers and ranked each organisation out of a score of 200 on how they implemented ACON’s policies. ACON extends its reach with affiliated programs and brands such as Pride in Sport and Pride in Health+Wellbeing.
So successful has it been that its annual LGBTQ+ Inclusion awards attract representatives from a vast array of major banks, law firms and universities, even government agencies up to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Even Australia’s top security and law enforcement agencies – such as ASIO, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Australian Federal Police – line up for ACON’s awards from the humble Bronze to the coveted Platinum awards.
While much of ACON’s agenda is uncontroversial and indeed praiseworthy – for example, its protection of vulnerable staff from bullying – its influence campaign to change how society defines sex raises serious questions about the extent to which it is seducing the nation’s leading businesses and agencies into support for an ideology the average Australian would consider radical.
ACON’s dogma, spread through its sparkly awards, that a person can pick their gender – with serious impacts on women, for example, on women’s sport and women-only spaces – is a controversial view. The apparent desperation of the ABC to win AWEI brownie points requires us to ask whether it has, in flagrant breach of its statutory duty of impartiality and balance, become captive to ACON and suppressed gender-critical views.
ACON is not the only activist group that has mastered the art of quietly engineering radical social change by hijacking government agencies and corporations with awards, brownie points, gala dinners and virtue signalling.
Reconciliation Australia, which nominally promotes unity but whose real agenda is separatism, is probably the gold medallist when it comes to the award for most effective Trojan Horse in Australian commercial and governmental life. It offers four levels of Reconciliation Action Plans, each more activist than the last. Corporate and public service Australia has clamoured to get on the bandwagon. More than 3000 organisations compete with each other to get listed on RA’s website with ever higher levels of virtue. RA publishes magazines, holds an annual National Reconciliation Week and National RAP Conferences, and gives out annual Narragunnawali Awards. What could be more noble and uncontroversial than seeking to help Indigenous Australians? And if that is all RA did, you would have to agree.
But the gathering of these Aussie-style social credit points is in fact a tool to achieve a highly controversial radical agenda. You get the flavour of RA’s real goals when you read on RA’s website that the key feature of its highest-level plan, the so-called Elevate RAP, is that “Elevate RAP organisations have a strong strategic relationship with Reconciliation Australia and actively champion initiatives to uphold the self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and drive systemic and transformational change”. Translation: not only do Elevate companies have to be in RA’s pocket but they must sign off on RA’s drive for self-determination which, as RA chief executive Karen Mundine once told a parliamentary committee, draws “on the principles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”. Sounds benign, doesn’t it – what could be wrong with a UN declaration?
Well, if you liked Voice, Treaty, Truth the answer is not much. But if you were one of the 60 per cent of Australians who voted against the voice, you might find the agenda unpalatable.
RA’s response to the passage of the Victorian treaty legislation tells you more about its agenda. RA congratulated the Victorian parliament on the legislation because it “not only recognises the truth of colonisation” but also because it gave First Nations people new rights to “shape the policies and services that affect their lives”.
The new Victorian “adult time for violent crime” laws passed with bipartisan support and are overwhelmingly popular, but it looks as if one of the first acts of the new First Nations body Gellung Warl will be to seek to sink this legislation, at least in its application to First Nations people. Self-determination has become separatism. As this was always intended. The divisive activism was successfully concealed under the cuddly platitudes of reconciliation – until the activists were sufficiently entrenched to break cover.
The most recent example of social change quietly engineered by goal setting, measuring, monitoring compliance and using rewards or punishments as an enforcement mechanism – social credit Australian style – is government backed.
The Workplace Gender Equality Agency is using statutory powers to force big companies to comply with what WGEA says is simply good business practice in gender equality. Not content to let business decide what is good practice, WGEA administers canings for laggards on taking up its ideology by excluding them from government contracts. And, of course, it has the obligatory award systems to reward those who have accumulated enough social credit.
WGEA issues Workplace Gender Equality Citations to compliant employers. Not content simply with a private “bravo” or “thank you” to the virtuous, it publicises citation holders and urges them to “extend their gender equality plans and strategies beyond workplace policies”.
The public nature of all this congratulatory stuff, overlaying radical dogmas, illustrates a key driver of all these social credit programs: mob approval. Get the avalanche of virtue signalling started and make it impossible for anyone to stand in the way.
The progressives behind all this social engineering would be the first to denounce populism in all its guises, yet they adopt the crudest forms of peer pressure and mob rule to entrench the changes they want. The purpose of ACON, RA, WGEA and the like is to scare those who disagree with them into silence. That is why you will never see a Saviour of Women-Only Spaces award, a One Law for All Australians Irrespective of Race citation or a Merit-Based Hiring Even for Blokes prize. Those are not on the offing.
The transformation of workplaces into battlegrounds of hotly contested ideologies was always predictable. Once the great and the good of Australian corporate life began their steady surrender to stakeholder capitalism, and rejected the tried and true foundation of shareholder primacy, political strife and attempts to hijack business were inevitable.
Starting with theories of corporate social responsibility and ultimately morphing into ESG, business leaders were seduced into turning their enterprises into mini-parliaments, places of politics, not profit. It sounded noble and gave business people entry cards to gala dinners and awards nights they were never invited to in the old days. They could shine on a stage like an Oscar winner – all at the expense of the shareholder. This might have felt good in the short term but was myopic in the extreme.
The only safe refuge for businesses is to avoid any kind of contestable politics. Inviting social agendas into the boardroom is to open a bottle containing ideological genies who will never agree to be rebottled. Even worse, these hard-headed genies are infinitely better at manipulating public sentiment than the foppish bosses of companies and government agencies.
There should be no prizes for the dunderheads who signed up for social credit Australian style. Unless there is one for Most Easily Manipulated Dope in a Business or Government Agency.
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China’s social credit system raises an instinctive sense of revulsion among Australians. These systems, used in different ways and to different extents in different parts of China, award points to individuals depending on whether they engage in what authorities regard as socially desirable behaviour.