The press has been spattered in recent weeks with hindsight wisdom about Australia’s – and particularly Victoria’s – handling of the pre-vaccine pandemic. The relatively easy time we are having with COVID now and the low numbers of people being hospitalised with COVID are being used to argue that earlier restrictions were unnecessary but it is crucial to remember what the world looked like when those decisions were made.

Epidemics and pandemics are as much a matter of response and luck as nature. In an era of constant air travel, diseases can seed around the world long before they have been identified around their source. The original SARS incipient pandemic was stopped in its tracks because it was less easily spread, and manifested symptoms at the same time as becoming contagious. This allowed hotspots around the world to be scotched before they could explode. Ebola, while having a 50% mortality rate, faces similar constraints on its spread. Swine flu was similarly contagious to early variants of COVID-19, but turned out to be much milder.

Specialists knew that another global pandemic was due for some time. Each year or so in the decade/s leading up to 2020, another contender would emerge, only to avoid the characteristics that would drive the world to a halt.

COVID-19 provided a number of challenges. One is that it spread invisibly before cases were detected, contagious people often remaining asymptomatic or apparently suffering a mere cold. Initially the transmission mechanism was not clear. Could it be spread by fomites on surfaces or through the air? The science ultimately established that the former had little impact and the latter is key but knowledge about the coronavirus that caused SARS in 2002 – 2004 meant initial focus on fomites as the likely means of spread of the new coronavirus in 2020.

In the ocean of ignorance that surrounds a virus new – or novel – to human populations, it takes time to work out the strategies to limiting spread, preventing contraction, and treating.

The great fortune for limiting the duration of the worst impact of this pandemic was that vaccine science had some technologies ready to deploy. Coronaviruses are a common candidate for possible pandemics, so traditional technology could relatively easily transition from one strain to this new kind. The newest technology – MRNA – functions like a gin distillery. The standard “white spirit” of the base is infused with the “botanicals” of the particular virus as required. Worldwide scientific and bureaucratic convergence allowed honing, testing and production to take a fraction of the time without the usual lags produced by insufficient funds, competitive secrecy and official inertia. Without this readiness and removal of unnecessary roadblocks, the pandemic would have crippled us years longer.

Gravediggers open new graves as the number of dead rose after the COVID-19 outbreak in Brazil, 2020. REUTERS/Amanda Perobelli

As COVID emerged around the world, Australians came to see what it could do. The initial jetsetter cases were replaced by stories about people living in close confinement and often with the health issues deriving from poverty and living within a racist system.

Photos of refrigerated trucks on the streets of New York to take the overflow of corpses were matched with recordings of a city ringing with the doppler clash of competing sirens. Other photographs showed mass graves being dug in parkland to take the piling bodies that morgues couldn’t sustain. In Italy, churches filled with coffins and obituary notices took up multiple pages in newspapers in the country’s northeast.

And over all those images, we saw desperate medical workers exhausted and shattered by unending shifts of misery watching people destroyed by a virus that could be terrible; one that is exacerbated by the body’s own flailing immune system in a cytokine storm, attacking every organ including the skin.

India showed us most brutally what could happen if COVID was allowed to run without check. We read chilling stories of even the wealthy and powerful tweeting in search of oxygen supplies that had become impossible to find. Others that recounted the people driving from hospital to hospital as the mother of their small children suffocated in her own lungs, ultimately dying in a hospital carpark because every hospital was swamped. The sky was thick with the smoke of mass burnings. People became desperate within their homes, unable to work or afford food and medicine, as the brutal crackdown that followed the collapse of the system harshly worked to limit the duration of the nightmare.

Multiple funeral pyres of those who died of COVID-19 burn at a ground that has been converted into a crematorium for the mass cremation of coronavirus victims, in New Delhi, India, 2021 Credit: AP Photo/Altaf Qadri

The crisis of COVID was rarely the individual case. This is what made it so hard to convey to the inattentive the need for strong action. The crisis of COVID rests in percentages. For every 1,000 additional cases the greater the number who would need ambulances, hospitals and long-term intensive care.

Leading into the pandemic, Sydney had retained a stronger public health framework and emergency bed number compared to Victoria. Victoria’s had been savaged during the Kennett years and never been rebuilt, starting the pandemic with fewer than 20% of NSW’s public health officers. All the other states had even less capacity to cope. This fact allowed NSW more latitude in dealing with the pandemic than the other states.

Leading COVID specialists and epidemiologists have also speculated about the climate factors that allowed potential outbreaks in NSW to peter out. The temperature in NSW, for instance, allows many more months of open-door trading, ventilating businesses, in a way that is impossible in the cold of Melbourne and the extreme heat of the north of the country. When the much more contagious omicron strains emerged, NSW’s luck died too along with many citizens.

The Andrews’ government in Victoria was given a weekend to pick up most of the nation’s quarantine after the federal government threw NSW into turmoil over the Ruby Princess and abandoned its own responsibility to manage quarantine (seeing it as an unpopular aspect of pandemic management). Many aspects of the system did not function as well as we would hope and the acquisition of knowledge about what dangers lay in various systems, such as hotel quarantine, was painful.

Nurses are walking away from their jobs unable to cope due to gruelling work conditions. (Getty)

Premier Daniel Andrews saw the reports coming from the federal government’s chaotic private aged “care” system. There is no doubt he heard the accounts that emerged from first responders who have PTSD from the literal nightmare scenes they saw in some of those homes.

Lockdowns come in two forms, pre-emptive and reactive. Pre-emptive ones can come to seem pointless because they prevent the catastrophes that might have occurred. Reactive ones are of limited use, desperately trying to protect the overwhelmed systems crashing around them. In Britain, buses had to be converted into 4-case ambulances. People died who would not have in less chaotic times, and not just of COVID. Around the world, an estimated 10 million children have lost a parent or caregiver. Millions more are being ground down by long COVID symptoms.

In the vaccine era, we see a reduction in the risk of dying by about 90%. For the young and healthy, that means there will be very few deaths. But for those older and sicker people whose baseline risk was high, we continue to see high numbers of deaths with the current unchecked spread of COVID. These deaths are tragic, and the nation’s failure to continue easy steps such as masking in public may well prove to herald many more deaths. Variants continue to emerge, and we do not know what the next will bring.

As things stand, we may well face a desperate shortage of hospital beds as a result of staff shortages in years to come. We have proven ourselves demanding and ungrateful to the people who have battled to save our relatives in miserable work conditions.

In the meantime, it would be justice to remember all this and acknowledge that Victoria, and all the non-NSW states, made decisions based on the nightmare potential for system collapse and miserable death tolls before the vaccine era.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations

This piece was written in cooperation with a leading Victorian Infectious Diseases specialist who continues to work with COVID.

Explain to your conservative friends that we are very accepting of their religion as long as it doesn’t impose its rules on the rest of us. Fostering religious intolerance is untenable in a secular society; America shows us the harms.

The Essendon Football Club chaotic appointment of a new CEO has stimulated a tantrum over martyrdom on the Right. As the Australian Financial Review’s Joe Aston pointed out, President Dave Barham’s attempt at due diligence over Andrew Thorburn’s appointment was appalling. Not only is Thorburn a “disgraced former ASX 10 company CEO” (his italics), but a man who appears to have used his management of the club CEO selection process to advantage his own candidacy.

The “rotten culture” that “flowed from the top” at the NAB is surely not the culture that Essendon wishes to import after its own scandals. Barham is, perhaps, the man who more urgently needs to leave the club.

As for Thorburn’s “fire and brimstone side hustle,” it is a matter of great frustration. The “conservative” punditry do not need any excuse to work themselves into a frothing frenzy. Given Essendon’s mission statement about its own inclusive nature as an organisation, it is surprising that the club would contemplate appointing anyone reflecting a conservative religious outlook to the position. The fact that they were willing to continue the contract with Thorburn as a member of the controversial church, just not as its chairman, suggests a greater openness to faith commitments than the enflamed commentators would like to admit.

Accepting Pentecostal figures (even ones under the umbrella of the Anglican Church) in leadership positions in our nation is something we need to understand. These tend not to be regular churchgoers who practise a private faith. Pentecostal churches have a mission not compatible with secular society, and their agenda is the control (and purification) of all branches (or mountains) of the secular world.

Pentecostal churches have mostly embraced the Millennial ideology. This belief states that Christ is due to return to rule for a millennium’s rule. The only obstruction is the sinfulness of the world. Every choice nonbelievers make must be constrained to suit their stringent interpretation of Christian morals. Every climate catastrophe is merely proof that End Times are here and they need to impose their morality upon us even more urgently.

According to Pentecostal beliefs women ought to be in the home, breeding. Control of our own bodies or failure to be submissive to men, is abhorrent. There is no scope for LGBTQI people in this world. Any action or speech in support of equal existence for Queer people is sinful, even demonic.

In America, more politicians (or aspirants) are seeking to impose total bans on abortion, and even on contraception. More preachers are expressing the idea that LGBTQI people should not just be erased from public life but killed. The Supreme Court is working to assist these worldviews, and Republican politicians campaign on them.

If we are describing Thorburn’s decision to step down as being “cancelled,” it is much less obnoxious than the cancelling of women’s and LGBTQI equality. Furthermore, Pentecostalism is totally intolerant of the validity of other faiths. Only their own (often unhinged) beliefs are valid and moral. It is also, in its Western versions, entwined with White Supremacy. There is no tolerance in Pentecostal teachings for other cultures, with First Nations’ cultures taught to be demonic.

This is not to say that Andrew Thorburn himself holds to any of these views. Anglican Pentecostalism may be somewhat more moderate. The point stands, however, that Pentecostal leaders in the civic space are a new phenomenon in Australia and we need to understand what we take on when we accept their cry that we may not be “intolerant” of their beliefs.

We need to read Australian journalist Elle Hardy’s investigation into the Pentecostal movement, Beyond Belief. She illustrates the scope of the international threat posed by the fashion: not only are 25 to 30% of Christians around the world now Pentecostal, but it is growing fast. They are businesses – or grifts – as much as religious movements, promoting oppressive social beliefs and allied with many of the authoritarian regimes ascendant.

Pentecostalism is metastasising, and as with Thorburn’s church, is invading the traditional churches. Rural Catholics are being brought to Hillsong’s covert Alpha groups by their parish priest. In Nigeria, even some Mosques are adopting Pentecostal strategies. This lively, energetic form of worship is far more attractive than the pew-snoozing religion with which many Australians were raised.

The speed of the Pentecostal movement’s growth means we need to be informed. Scott Morrison’s intrusions of religion into parliament have raised the discussion, despite traditional journalists lagging behind the urgent need. We can no longer say that “a man’s faith is his own business” when that faith demands the imposition of intolerant rules on the secular majority.

While the Right bemoans that the majority is cancelling their Christianity, we must counter that argument. It is not a faith that gives you spiritual comfort and guidance that the majority questions. It is a faith that denies the rest of us our well-being that we cannot accept.

America is showing us that a liberal democracy can move quickly towards becoming an authoritarian theocracy when outlier ideas come to dominate “conservative” politics. The USA has granted Australia the time to see what the movement does to civil society, and to decide whether irritating the Right by being “intolerant” of intolerance is necessary.

For many leaders of the legal profession and the federal integrity advocacy groups, the last two days have been a whirlwind of activity in Parliament House in Canberra.

It was in a triumphant moment, although it didn’t always feel like it. To sit together in the public gallery and see a man of integrity, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, introduce his legislation to the House was a moment that crowned years of dedication by a number of individuals and bodies. It felt like an oddly matter-of-fact event to crown so much hard work. It was also a signal that the battle for the best model continues.

Dreyfus has introduced a potent model. It is an actual, strong anti-corruption commission. Unlike the previous government’s CIC, it can begin to challenge practices that have wasted billions of dollars the nation demands are spent for the general good, not political advantage. The cynical abuse of government norms has also damaged democracy. Dreyfus and his Attorney General’s department have designed the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) to be part of a framework of instruments that will prevent corruption as well as detect and address it when it occurs.

When The Australia Institute (TAI) first instituted the Judges Committee in 2017 (now the National Integrity Committee), they organised interviews with the ABC. Reporter Matt Peacock asked them what they were pursuing. When the response was a federal anti-corruption body, he burst out with “Buckleys!” Peacock appeared astounded that the judges were able to start listing matters that needed investigation. Even so recently, it was possible to imagine that Australia had no real corruption problem, that it was an issue for less honourable nations.

Integrity advocates take their first look at the NACC. Author’s photograph

The Accountability Round Table (ART), founded in 2012, brought together leading former judges, academics, former public servants and politicians as well as senior practicing lawyers to provide a think tank for the problems and solutions. Its roster is full of the stars of the field. Transparency International’s Australian branch, and professors, integrity commissioners and more around the nation have campaigned to establish that this fight for integrity and accountability is crucial.

The TAI’s dynamo, Han Aulby, went on to found the Centre for Public Integrity (CPI) in 2019 which has proved amongst the strongest forces placing integrity on the electorate’s list of key concerns. Han’s constant work to make sure the most expert people explained to the media and the public the utter centrality of government integrity has been both crucial and inspirational. Anthony Whealy KC is the chair of its board of directors and one of its most prominent voices.

Representatives of the groups also met with Simon Holmes a Court, convincing him to add integrity to the concern for climate and women’s representation in politics forming the tripartite platform that underpinned the Climate 200 mission. Representatives went on to make themselves available to educate the new independent candidates on the nature of the integrity problem and the best solutions.

In March this year, Stephen Charles AO KC (ART, CPI, TAI Judges Committee) and Catherine Williams (CPI researcher) published Keeping them Honest. This book set out the case for a federal anti-corruption commission. In his forward, a lion of the Australian legal profession Sir Gerard Brennan AC, KBE, former justice of the High Court, explained why men and women of a profession trained towards reticence were speaking up with such vigour, in the face of the professional character, not to mention sneers by members of their profession, politicians and the “conservative” media.

Brennan observed, “Judges and former judges do not usually enter the public political arena. The judiciary does not have a political agenda. Its function is to resolve disputed facts and to apply the law to the facts as found, unaffected by political influence. Lest intervention on political issues might seem inconsistent with political independence, even former judges usually abstain from political comment. But corruption that erodes honest administration and the disregard for the rule of law in the pursuit of political power are not issues about which former judges must or should be silent. They are issues that affect the social health of the community.”

Stephen Charles with Geoffrey Watson speaking at a press conference on the NACC introduction to parliament. The author’s own photograph

I assisted Stephen Charles, my father, in the writing of his section of the book. I have watched him tirelessly push the issue for over a decade in his retirement. The disappointment in seeing his researched and deliberate recommendations for Victoria’s IBAC become a neutered version in Ted Baillieu’s model. The relief at seeing Dan Andrews’ government strengthen it. The further disappointment that the Andrews amendments included the words that public hearings must only take place in “exceptional circumstances” which continues to cripple it, and which the Commissioner is fighting hard to have parliament remove. Endless interviews and op-eds and panels and lobbying. Educating post-graduate legal students on the matter in university courses. For those of us around him, this moment is an unspeakable relief. He is not an attention-seeker, whatever his peers – and the News Corp journalists in their ad hominem attacks – have said. He is a man who cares deeply that Australia does not allow our government to dissolve into the corruption and chaos that were beginning to overwhelm the norms and practices and regulations instituted to prevent them.

As soon as the integrity advocates emerged from the Chamber yesterday, they were handed the legislation and explanatory memorandum. In that moment, and then in a (generous) MP’s office, they began poring over the fine print of the legislation, looking for the successes but more importantly, the flaws, big or small, that need fixing before the body’s design becomes law.

Integrity advocates see the NACC legislation for the first time immediately after the legislation was introduced. Author’s own photograph

They are mostly impressed by Dreyfus’s achievement. This is a good day in Australia’s history. There are flaws present, and it is strongly hoped that there is scope to make improvements, but this is a good bill. Mark Dreyfus has earned his role through merit, and this achievement, despite doubts in his own caucus as well as resounding opposition from the Opposition until recently, must be noted.

The body will need a third more in its budget than has been allocated to do the job properly. (The previous government tried to cripple the Auditor-General’s office by starving it of funds, but this did not stop it from exposing the historic scope of the rorts that helped bring the Morrison government down.) There is some concern that the attempt to prevent the body from being overwhelmed with work by excluding outside forces working to corrupt the system will be problematic in the years to come. (The AFP has not proved itself able to cover the gap there.) Legal privilege has too much protection, taking a hearing into private territory, which is not the preferred practice in this kind of body. Whether the media is properly protected must be determined. The ability to search parliamentary offices without a warrant is uncertain (with potentially less power than the Auditor-General possesses.)

These are relatively minor quibbles. The main flaw was clearly added at the last moment since, as the drafting of legislation goes, this is a clumsy fit.

That public hearings should take place only in “exceptional circumstances” was described by a regular counsel-assisting in ICAC proceedings CPI director as an intentional “brake” on public hearings rather than a protection. It is a term that is as imprecise, Geoffrey Watson SC continued, as the length of a piece of string. It will grant well-resourced targets the immediate tactic of taking their investigation to court to argue that the matter is not “exceptional.” The definition will fall to the whims of judges at first instance or on appeal. The delay might last two years as it travels through the levels to the High Court. In the process of proving that the investigation is of an “exceptional” character, the investigators will have to reveal their case and evidence, giving the target a substantial advantage and perhaps the ability to scupper the investigation.

Public hearings are crucial to anti-corruption bodies. They prove to the public that corruption is not acceptable and is being addressed. They bring out new witnesses that did not know the matter was being investigated. They educate public servants and politicians – as well as the people who would do business with them – where the limits lie.

The preferred test for a public hearing is whether it is in the public interest. This provision allows the commissioners to determine whether there is too much danger – to reputation or health – to instigate a hearing in public. This test, with its listed caveats, is very properly in the legislation, in conflict with the “exceptional circumstances” clause. The problem could be solved by merely striking out that awkward and problematic clause.

The Opposition is arguing strongly (with some honourable support in other parts of parliament) that suicide is the risk. While there have been tragic cases of this nightmarish outcome in corruption investigations, they are few. One of the noted cases took place when the hearing was to be private. Another would likely have faced police investigation and possible charges if an anti-corruption body did not exist to investigate the circumstances.

We do not grant accused criminals the right to private trial in the criminal courts, and it seems odd to the experts that the matter of corruption should be treated otherwise.

The government and media friends have argued that pork-barrelling is business as usual in politics. This is cynicism of the highest order. There are bodies, structures and systems in place to assess applications for public money. When a government overrides all these to the detriment of the best and most needy applicants primarily for political benefit, this is corruption. It is an utterly different matter from taking care of one’s electorate for the public good and with properly spent public money. To argue otherwise is both disingenuous and disgraceful. The fact that it is argued by the very forces that proclaim themselves the best guardians of taxpayers’ money is one of the most outrageous aspects of their argument. They wasted tens of billions of dollars over the last two elections with slush funds of public money for the purpose. The electorate established that this is as unacceptable to us as it is to the integrity advocates.

Stephen Charles is interviewed live by Virginia Trioli on ABC 774 as the advocates prepare to enter the public gallery to see the NACC legislation being introduced. The author’s own photograph

The explanatory memorandum to the NACC defines an “accountable authority” as matching the one given in the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act (2013) where the definition of the proper use of public resources is defined. According to the act, proper use is “efficient, effective, economical and ethical.” The emphasis on “ethical” should be heartening to the electorate.*

As the legal wonks and their shepherd, Han Aulby, raced from media interviews to being briefed by the AG’s department or briefing the cross-bench and Shadow Attorney-General, the pace took on the feel of a television episode of some thriller where nobody has time to breathe. They hope that the cross-bench, and public sentiment, informed by honourable journalists like David Crowe and Laura Tingle, will make it uncomfortable for the people who forced Dreyfus to include the unwieldy provision.

Whether or not this change is made, Mark Dreyfus’s department, with its plans for an integrated integrity framework, has begun a profoundly important movement to revive good governance in Australia. We owe Dreyfus the time to acknowledge the scope of that mission.

*It was Howard Whitton of the ART and a public sector ethics specialist that noticed this key detail. http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/num_act/pgpaaa2013432/s8.html#public_resources

One of the most unsavoury events on the Trumpist-right is CPAC. This is an organisation that stages Conservative Political Action Conferences in America, as well as internationally. CPAC Australia has been operating since 2019 and the 2022 event is due to take place in Sydney this October.

CPAC is the heart of the tribal “war on woke” of the populist right. It’s where the Fox radicalisers combine with other culture warriors to inflame the base into utter implacable loathing of the centre. For this worldview, the centre is indistinguishable from the “socialist” left, entwined with the reviled Black Lives Matter, the fantasy of Antifa, and elite traitors to the American cause.

The previously annual event was created by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom. The first conference took place in 1974, where Ronald Reagan gave the keynote speech during his presidential campaign. Trump’s speech at CPAC 2011 is credited with birthing his political career.

In 2017, Richard Spencer was ejected from the conference for his “repugnant” views. Under Matt Schlapp’s chairmanship, however, it has veered ever further into the ugly right currently unmaking America.

Nick Fuentes, leader of the Proud Boys (labeled a terrorist group in Canada) hosted the even more extreme America First Political Action Conference concurrently in Orlando in February, 2022. Trump-Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar were able to appear at both the neo-Nazi AFPAC and the marginally less unhinged CPAC.

A lurch even further into authoritarian territory was marked in May, 2022 when CPAC was hosted in Budapest. There Orban illustrated to the wildly-supportive American audience the glories of illiberal democracy. According to the worldview touted, the progressive or liberal world is the existential enemy and must be destroyed by seizing all the structures of power.

News Corp was instrumental in uniting the American MAGA right with Orban’s authoritarian ethnonationalism. He has a fraught relationship with the extremist right around the CPAC world: in 2021, Fox News was targeted at CPAC for insufficient support for Trump’s seditionist lies. It was Fox, however, that brought Orban into the mainstream as a Trumpist-right hero.

Tucker Carlson is asserted in a New York Times investigation to work directly with the Murdoch father and son rather than his nominal bosses at Fox News. That same investigation alleges that Carlson’s show is watched by Australian News Corp editors for guidance on the Murdoch line.

It was Carlson who took his top-rating nightly Fox show to broadcast from Budapest for a week in 2021, with an Orban interview as a highlight. (Rod Dreher is believed to have been the connection. This ultra-conservative American intellectual has a number of Budapest-based and visiting peers from Britain and Australia.) Orban’s rabid defence of ethnic purity in Budapest and Christian western civilisation (depicted as dying) is a comfortable fit with Carlson’s messaging. The latter constantly reiterates the Great Replacement idea that (Jewish) elites are replacing white Christians with non-white and non-Christian immigrants in order to destroy western nations.

Fox News names are high profile attendees at American CPAC events, alongside the dolts of congress and the circus around Trump. Marjorie Taylor-Greene appeared in a grotesque tableaux at the August Dallas event mimicking maternal consolation of a performer weeping in a model jail cell over his Jan 6 insurrection “martyrdom.” Orban spoke at this CPAC too, a week after he asserted that Europeans “do not want to become peoples of mixed race.” CPACs are very much Trump’s Republican Party at play. Players test culture war ideas, and attacks on schools are a current hit; the base was responding well to the nonsense accusation that teachers are “sexualising” children.

The Australian version was founded by self-declared libertarian and president of LibertyWorks thinktank, Andrew Cooper. It is currently chaired by Abbott-conservative, Warren Mundine and features a less colourful cast than its American model. The 2022 line-up features many Murdoch employees, particularly from Sky. Domestic veterans of culture war nonsense and fabricators of climate denial “facts” are also listed.

Unsurprisingly, Matt Canavan and Amanda Stoker are amongst the speakers. The latter may continue her efforts to place the winding back of abortion access on the Australian agenda. Tony Abbott was revealed by Crikey to be the likely keynote speaker. Nigel Farage and a couple of Trump’s worse appointments are amongst the dubious attractions.

Farage has tweeted his determination this week that Britain should listen when “the great” Tony Abbott speaks. Abbott’s declaration that Britain must let the world know that “the way is closed” for migrants suits Farage’s continual fear-mongering about immigrant numbers. This fits the pair well for an Australia CPAC that advertised cheap tickets for students using the term “jugend.”

When the great @HonTonyAbbott speaks, we should listen. https://t.co/4RTUqcYgQn

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) August 18, 2022

It is easy to mock the Australian CPAC, a tawdry echo of its toxic American model. What is crucial to note, however, is that the lies and distortions inherent in culture wars are the tool that Dutton hopes to use to turn his 17% approval rating into electoral success. The damage done to the US and UK by culture war wielding “conservatives” is inestimable and should not be underestimated. Above all, they foster bigotry and division, creating chasms in the civic space that cannot be bridged by civil discourse. Without an overlapping reality, democracy must fail.

The Australia Institute recently announced that it has found most Australians see being “woke” as a positive or neutral, despite the constant derision from frothing Sky News hosts. CPACs depict themselves as the suppository of wisdom, rather than flailing failures to cope with change. We can hope that CPACs remain sad fringe events in Australia rather than driving us towards chaos too.

This essay was first published in “Pearls and Irritations“.