Here we go again.
Australia’s most powerful union body says the country must have a Voice in some form and that Australia Day be moved as it ‘reinforces structural racism’.
This is the one thing too many on the centre-right fail to understand about the left: they never, ever, take ‘no’ for an answer. No matter how emphatic the ‘no’. That’s because they’re political toddlers: if they don’t get what they want, they scream and cry and stamp their feet until they get their way. Too many adults make the mistake of thinking that if they give in, just this once, the left will shut up and leave them alone.
They never do. Like all toddlers, giving in only encourages them to demand more. And more. And more.
Case in point: the ‘Voice’. Australians couldn’t have rejected the referendum more comprehensively. The sheer scale of the referendum’s defeat was such that the result was called within an hour of polls closing in the eastern states. It was so emphatic that the left almost shut up about it. At least, until now.
Still, there’s one silver lining in this arrogant tantrum-throwing by Anthony Albanese’s union puppet-masters.
Let’s hope the colour orange suits Sally McManus. Pauline Hanson’s brains trust, James Ashby, must be writing a thankyou card to the ACTU leader and attaching it to a lovely little gift of One Nation merch – a T-shirt or perhaps a stubby holder.
The ACTU parliamentary submission advocating for a voice, even after a resounding referendum result less than three years ago, is a sure sign of just how insolent many left-leaning elites have become. It seems McManus – and others – never learnt that no meant no.
The ACTU’s latest parliamentary submission is a masterclass in elite entitlement. McManus and her comrades apparently believe the resounding ‘no’ vote was merely a suggestion. Never mind that the Australian people just delivered the most emphatic rejection of racial division in the Constitution since Federation. The left hears only what it wants to tell you.
This arrogance is particularly galling coming from the ACTU. Less than two in 10 Australian workers are union members. Less than one in 10 Australians overall. More Australians voted One Nation at the last federal election – before the party’s recent massive surge – than are unionists. Yet this unrepresentative rump presumes to speak for the nation on fundamental questions of identity and governance.
The Voice referendum was widely regarded as a referendum on wokeism. The next Australian election is shaping up to be the same. Voters are sick of being lectured by elites in positions of power who never bother to ask what the people actually think. Welcome to Country at the opening of a paper bag, three flags at press conferences, the erasure of woman from laws and language, endless DEI programmes, native title rorts dressed up as justice... none of it was ever put to a popular vote.
When 60 per cent of Australians rejected the patently foolish idea to divide the country by race and to cement that racial divide in the Australian Constitution, this was, in many ways, a proxy referendum on the whole progressive project.
Hanson’s resurgence has a great deal in common with the Voice result. Telling a pollster you support One Nation is often the only way ordinary Australians can push back against a litany of impositions: housing unaffordability, cost-of-living pressures, migration impacts and the relentless cultural revolution imposed from above. The more the left demands – another bite at the Voice cherry, moving Australia Day, more racial division – the stronger the backlash.
The left’s perpetual confoundment at Hanson’s success is a reminder of what physicist Richard P Feynman said: “Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.” The same applies to those leading our institutions. They genuinely cannot grasp why their top-down progressive package keeps producing an equal and opposite reaction.
Marcia Langton’s infamous threat not to deliver welcomes to country if the Voice failed notably supercharged the No vote. McManus’s push for a second round will do the same for One Nation. Australians are tired of being told they are racist for wanting one indivisible nation under one set of laws. They are tired of elites treating democratic ‘no’ as a mere speed bump.
The ACTU and its political masters in Labor would do well to remember Newton’s Third Law. For every arrogant action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The louder they demand more division, the higher Hanson climbs.
The more the left refuses to accept the verdict of the ballot box, the more they prove why Hanson’s message resonates. One Nation is not the problem. It is the symptom of a political class that has forgotten who it is meant to serve.
