The reckoning gathers pace

Peter Dutton versus Woolworths is about more than just Australia Day.

I'll get to Woolworths in a moment.  Before that I'd like to start with a comment I saw a few days ago.

Make a list of all the things you believe, but can't say.  Then a list of things you don't believe, but must say.

That's from an American entrepreneur Marc Andreessen about his own country.  It applies to Australia too - and it's everywhere.  Two years ago a student at Monash University had marks deducted from their engineering assignment because he hadn't included an acknowledgment of country.

As I talked about last week a reckoning to all of this might well be coming.  Regardless of whether he wins or loses the presidential election, 2024 is likely to the year of Donald Trump.  In August last year in The New York Times, David Brooks (who identifies as centre-right but who is a virulently opposed to Trump) wrote an article that received a lot of attention - 'What if We're the Bad Guys Here?'  Brooks was attempting to understand the appeal of Trump.

In this story we anti-Trumpers are the good guys, the forces of progress and enlightenment.  The Trumpers are reactionary bigots and authoritarians…  I partly agree with this story; but it's also a monument to elite self-satisfaction.

So let me try another story on you.  I ask you to try on a vantage point in which we anti-Trumpers are not the eternal good guys.  In fact, we're the bad guys. 

This story begins in the 1960s, when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments.  It continues in the 1970s, when the authorities imposed busing on working-class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley where they themselves lived.

The ideal that 'we’re all in this together' was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here, and everybody else is forced into a world down there.  Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves.

Brooks explains how the elite have 'built an entire social order' on the basis of academic achievement as defined by success at university while Americans without college degrees are ignored or worse, by the political system.  'The meritocracy isn't only a system of exclusion; it's an ethos.  During his presidency Barack Obama used the word 'smart' in the context of his policies over 900 times.  The implication is that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn't go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.'

For his trouble Brooks was accused of being an 'apologist' for Trump.  I can see why.  Brooks mounts a convincing case for Trump or indeed any presidential candidate who speaks to what's happening.  Brooks goes on to discuss exactly the phenomenon Andreessen describes.

Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others.  Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you've got cultural capital coming out of your ears.

Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we've changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

I completely agree.  There's something deeper too.  When you manipulate and control what someone says, inevitably you are manipulating and controlling what they think.  (You can ponder what Monash University was trying to achieve by forcing its students to write acknowledgments of country in their assignments.)

Brooks is correct to centre his criticism of elites in America on their creation of a mentality that divides the country between those who have 'acceptable' opinions and those who don't.  Which is exactly what Australia's elites attempted to do with the Voice. Both figuratively and literally, by changing the constitution.  It was an attempt which big business was at the forefront of.  In Australia we were once bemused by the virtue signalling of the big brands in America.  We laughed at The North Face clothing company when it was criticised by the boss of an oil company who was refused permission to put his firm's logo on North Face jackets, because North Face didn't want to be associated with 'fossil fuels'.  He wrote to The North Face and told them something they may not have known - 'your jackets are made from oil and gas products.'

Qantas and Woolworths are names that can now be uttered in the same breath.  It may just be a coincidence, or not, that the companies share a director.  Another director of Woolworths is also the chair of NAB, and NAB was of course also a major supporter of the Voice.  (The reason Australia's big corporates all follow each other is because they're all run by the same people.)  During the Voice campaign Big W owned by Woolworths had announcements over loudspeakers in its stores encouraging customers to vote 'Yes'.  Woolworths itself donated $1.5m to the 'Yes' campaign.  The company's decision to stop selling Australia Day themed merchandise would be entirely in keeping with its previous political activism. 

It might indeed be true that as a Woolworths' spokesperson said there's been a 'gradual decline' in the sales of Australia Day merchandise.  Maybe the company might just be making a commercial decision, but if that was the case there would have been no need for a Woolworths spokesperson to say gratuitously, 'At the same time there's been a broader discussion about 26 January and what it means to different parts of the community.'  Even if politics didn’t influence the company's decision its spokesperson nevertheless didn't miss the opportunity for some point-scoring.  They were basically saying 'Fewer people were buying our Australia Day stuff so we've stopped selling it and we’re happy about it because we don't believe in Australia Day anyway.'

In September last year the company released an advertisement - 'How we celebrate all of our customers' cultures'.  It seems that to Woolworths all cultures are equal - but some are more equal than others.  Woolworths is happy to celebrate every culture, except one. 

Woolworths is free to sell what it likes, and people are free to shop there or not.  Peter Dutton is also is free to say people should boycott Woolworths, and people are free to take up his suggestion or not.  No-one is forcing anyone to do anything. The suggestion from the left-leaning media that somehow Peter Dutton is contradicting the Liberal Party's 'free market principles' reveals a complete misunderstanding of what free markets are. 

This comment on social media sum up my view.  'It is up to Woolworths to decide what they want to sell but when this made on political grounds, they are inviting political comment.  Keep out of politics and politicians will keep out of their way.'

Further, it's laughable to claim it's Peter Dutton who's starting a 'culture war', as both the Labor Party and the media have done.  According to the first sentence of The Age newspaper's story yesterday morning, 'Peter Dutton has ignited a culture war…'  That's an opinion, not journalism.

At the end of last year the Institute of Public Affairs and Advance Australia released the results of a poll they commissioned of 3,500 Australians taken just after the Voice vote.  I spent the weekend before Christmas doing media interviews about it.  One question is very relevant to what Woolworths did.

Do you agree or disagree with the statement - 'The involvement of big business in political issues doesn't reflect my values.'

The results were - Agree 64%, Disagree 4%, Neither Agree/Disagree 32%. 

What's revealing is that a majority in every age group agreed.  For example for 18-24 year-olds 52% agreed and 4% disagreed, 45-54 years-old 62% agreed and 7% disagreed, and for those aged over 65 a remarkable 78% agreed, while only 1% disagreed.

What's also interesting is that majority of voters for each of the Coalition, Labor, and the Greens all agreed too.  70% of Liberal voters agreed and 2% disagreed, 87% of Nationals voters agreed and zero per cent disagreed [!], 58% of Labor voters agreed and 6% disagreed, and even 56% of Greens voters agreed and 4% disagreed.  It's not surprising that Greens voters are the least uncomfortable with the political positions of big business, because those positions are invariably left-leaning.

I was quoted in The Australian about the poll.

Institute of Public Affairs senior fellow John Roskam said Australians were 'rejecting the woke agenda of big business'.  'Big business was the biggest back of the Voice, a radical proposal decisively rejected by voters,' Mr Roskam said.  'The Voice was the turning point in the relationship between big business and the centre-right in Australia.  Big business won't be forgiven to trying to divide Australians.'

'Big business speaks for a small circle of rich, elite CEOs who are more interested in virtue-signalling than standing up for the interests of ordinary Australians.  Their attack on Australia Day proves how out of touch with mainstream values big business CEOs are. [I made that remark obviously before I knew what Woolworths was up to.]

'The Liberal Party must realign itself away from big business.  The historical relationship between the Coalition and big business is now toxic to the Coalition.  Just as big business dumped its support for the Coalition a decade ago, the Coalition must away from big business.  It is significant that Coalition voters are the most hostile to big business.'

It's understandable that in Peter Dutton's interview yesterday on 2GB with Luke Grant, Dutton's comments calling for a customer boycott of Woolworths should get all the attention.  However Dutton some other things that have been missed.  When he was 'What's happened to business generally that they've, you know - for want of a better expression - gone weak at the knees every time there's a new way or a woke way of doing things suggested by government', Dutton hit the nail on the head:

…a lot of the investors, a lot of the industry super funds who are investing into Woolworths and ASX companies otherwise demand all of these woke agendas, and the CEOs and the boards believe that they need to implement it, and it means that the people like Alan Joyce become very friendly with Anthony Albanese; people like Brad Banducci [Woolworths CEO] become very friendly with Anthony Albanese, and they subscribe to that left-wing ideology.

That's why I've said repeatedly that the modern Liberal Party is the friend of the worker and the small business owners and employees In that business.  We're not the party of big business, and I don't pretend that we are.

That is a significant statement from Dutton.  It's a world away from the Liberal Party under Malcolm Turnbull.  I think we're going to hear a lot more about the Liberal Party as the party of the workers in the months ahead.  That same poll revealed something even more important than the fact that most Australians don't share the political position of big business.  The poll showed that 37% of Labor Party voters voted 'No' to the Voice.  I suspect a not insignificant share of that 37% might agree with Dutton and what he said about Woolworths and Australia Day. 

Recommend Reading

I've mentioned to you that one of the best presentations at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in October was by Bishop Robert Barron.  This week the Acton Institute in the United States published the transcript of a lecture Barron delivered last year 'The Philosophical Roots of Wokeism'.  It's an outstanding analysis and I think Barron is correct to think about 'woke' not as a single all-encompassing ideology as a bundle of philosophies and political positions whose roots can be traced back to Descartes and Kant.  It's a long piece but very interesting.