’Tis the season to be … thinking about Australians of the Year. Every good awards system has an alternate of the vox populi kind. Think the People’s Choice. Or the Bald Archies. Well, perhaps we should have a go at picking the Not-the-Australians-of-the-Year. Maybe the top criterion for inclusion might be tedium times column inches.
Hence the Boring Australians of the Year Awards. Who are some of the prime contenders?
Thinking along these lines, we could start with the Warners. This entitled pair are fast becoming Australia’s answer to Ginger and Whinger (aka Harry and Meghan). For those whose phone-based news service doesn’t throw up a story about them every eight minutes, David Warner is a cricketer and his wife is a celebrity WAG. Warner is barely able to maintain his place in the Australian test team, yet earns millions from the game every year. Four years ago, he was the ringleader in a cheating scam that may or may not have involved the whole team and half the Cricket Australia establishment as well. He was subsequently suspended for a time, and ruled out of any future leadership positions. In the view of some, he is lucky still to be in the team, and not just because he can barely score a run in real cricket. His wife endlessly harps on about the injustice of it all. They have appealed against the leadership ban, only to withdraw their appeal because of all the stress. It must be tough to be a millennial multi-millionaire sportsman travelling the world business class and conducting legal appeals seeking “justice”.
It is not as if he is ever likely actually to be in a position to score a leadership position. Cricket Australia got rid of a perfectly good captain for minor, private indiscretions. Now we have a new one, a climate warrior, no less. With medium term tenure all but assured. And Warner is getting on in years. This latest crusade by the Warners is, therefore, purely theoretical. All we need now is for Warner to demand a “voice”. To top it off, Mrs Warner (nee Candice Falzon, who many years ago found herself in the john with a rugby star) is getting security guards to protect her and the kids from “sledgers”.
As it happens, husband David knows a bit about sledging. He has made a specialty of verbally abusing opponents all his career. He has been called a bully and the team’s attack dog. Warner is the bully’s bully.
Former South Africa captain Faf du Plessis has said he has no time for Australia “bully” David Warner.
In an interview with the BBC to coincide with the recent publication of his book, ‘Faf: Through Fire’, du Plessis recalled the Australia batsman’s role in a now infamous incident during the first Test in Durban in 2018.
At tea on the fourth day, with South Africa’s Aiden Markram and Quinton de Kock batting to save the Test, Warner started hurling a volley of abuse at de Kock in the players’ tunnel.
The already dismissed du Plessis emerged from the home dressing room clad only in a towel wrapped around his waist and helped cool tempers.
Whatever this is, it isn’t sport. It isn’t even a case of Steve Waugh’s infamous strategy of “mental disintegration”, itself an appalling reflection on Australia’s once unassailable reputation for fair play on the field. Warner’s behaviour amounts to verbal thuggery. Since sportsmen are always banging on about the field of play being their “workplace”, perhaps some HR interventions in relation to Warner’s well-known bullying might have been in order, workplace-wise.
So, there is irony here in Candice Warner’s continued whinging about sledging. The only surprise is that they haven’t signed on with Netflix. Definite contenders, then, for the Borings.
If you thought the Warners were never ending, try Brittany Higgins. Just when you thought that we could retire Grace Tame for good, now we have mini-me. Brittany has created more column inches than, well, even the Warners. There is a new twist every day. We had the media-coordinated accusations of rape, which seem to have impressed the Federal Police very little, despite her champion DPP’s endless efforts on her behalf. We had the speeches. We had the TV appearances. We had the mental health breakdown. We had the law suits against various Coalition Ministers and the Commonwealth. And now, the decidedly questionable three-million-dollar settlement. With no explanation to us, the taxpayers footing the bill. The whole bizarre deal should be an early task for the new corruption body in Canberra. Brittany sails on through, a hero to many, ever gracing us (pun intended) with her victim-story.
Dame Joanna Lumley has cottoned onto the victim schtick.
… Lumley has claimed that victimhood is the “'new fashion” for women.
Discussing the Me Too movement, the actress and presenter said that in her early days in the entertainment industry women took a “tough” approach to unwanted advances, but this has now changed.
Dame Joanna has claimed that victimhood is now the “fashion” for modern women and branded it “pathetic”.
She told Prospect magazine: “If someone whistled at you in the street, it didn't matter, if someone was groping, we slapped their hands.
“We were quite tough and looked after ourselves… the new fashion is to be a victim, a victim of something. It's pathetic, we have gone mad.”
Toby Young has called victimhood culture “the oppression Olympics” and notes the absurdity of international jet-setting millionaires claiming “victimhood”, of people suggesting they have been “traumatised”, “abused, “violated” by being asked where they are from.
Geoff Shullenberger at Compact magazine has also weighed in on the near universal adoption of victimhood to advance political agendas, assigning to it a far greater significance for our culture than simply being “fashionable”:
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin held his knee down for nearly 10 minutes on the neck of an unemployed nightclub bouncer named George Floyd during the latter’s arrest, causing his death. This fatal encounter between two previously unknown men set off a vast wave of protests across the world; protesters took to the streets in countries where American racial politics had little obvious relevance—as if Floyd had come to stand in more broadly for all victims everywhere. In the space of just days, he went from an unknown middle-aged ex-convict struggling with addiction to a universally recognizable global icon of social justice. “Icon” is a precise term here: Murals of the man that rapidly proliferated around the world depicted him with a halo, wings, and other symbols associated with sainthood. Likewise, the location of his death, closed off to traffic, became the sort of place recognizable from many cultures as a pilgrimage site. To this day, a website promises visitors guided “pilgrimage journeys” to the shrine.
Shullenberger also refers to the late René Girard, a longtime professor of French literature at Stanford University:
In his book I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, published at the dawn of the new millennium, Girard wrote that one overriding value “dominates the total planetary culture in which we live,” far more so than technological progress or economic growth: “the concern for victims.” “Globalization,” he claimed, “is only secondarily an economic phenomenon”—more fundamentally, it is driven by what he calls “the rise of ‘victim power.’” The fact that global corporations almost instantly sought to drape themselves in Floyd’s sacred aura provides one of the most potent images to date of what this “victim power” looks like.
A world guided by the “concern for victims” might sound aspirational, especially to self-proclaimed progressives. Indeed, this is roughly what many seemed to believe the sanctification of George Floyd stood for: the emergence a world that would prioritize redressing the harms done not only to black Americans, but to a panoply of other identity groups historically subjected to discrimination and exclusion in cultures across the globe. Hence, the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda aggressively promoted worldwide in the months and years after Floyd’s death didn’t stop with black victims of police violence. On the contrary, it has done little for impoverished black Americans with substance-abuse problems, but a great deal for career aspirants in elite fields with intersectional credentials—that is, a claim to victim status.
As Girard already perceived in 1999, we live under the reign of “victimism, which uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” But victimism isn’t merely a cynical smokescreen for power. Instead, the rise of victim power signals a genuine and troubling exhaustion of all other sources of authority and legitimacy. This points to the real problem with this new ideological regime: Beneath its benevolent rhetoric, its implications are apocalyptic, accelerating the collapse of any sustainable order.
https://compactmag.com/article/rene-girard-and-the-rise-of-victim-power
Victimism rules now. Not only that, it is driving the whole socio-political narrative, on Shullenberger’s view (and Girard’s). For sheer media and cultural domination, it is hard to disagree. And Brittany Higgins has ridden this wave to the three-million-dollar beach. While all the while Higgins’ alleged attacker has maintained a dignified silence while having his life destroyed. Just as occurred with George Pell (especially) and Christian Porter, each facing similar unsubstantiated allegations.
But back to the awards.
The next contender for the Borings, not unrelated to the last, is a hybrid beast who we shall call Lisa Louise Wilkigan. Nominated for services to injustice-for-men. This combo-fembot-beast seems to generate endless screen time, for a one trick pony. This trick is to turn its original career in journalism, with its purported principles of objectivity, truth-seeking and relentless research, into mere activism in service of an ideology. In the case of this hybrid beast, the cause is me-tooism. This is the “we believe you” mantra bellowed from every bully pulpit across the land whenever there is a charge of sexual abuse against an adult male, especially if the accused is a priest or a conservative politician. The card as played in support of farcical charges against George Pell, charges that only an idiot or an ideologue could actually believe, and wheeled out again in order to end the career of Christian Porter. It has been embedded in judicial systems across the land, starting in Victoria under the watchful gaze of Rob Hulls, back in the day, and prosecuted with vigour by his leftist successors. The Wilkigan beast carries on the work, undeterred by facts, evidence (or lack thereof), claimant credibility, and, especially, undeterred by the shame associated with humiliating defeat (which occurred in the case of the failed crusade against Pell, and which has now also happened with the collapse of the Brittany Higgins claims against her accused former colleague). Dust yourself off, and resume combat forthwith. Will we ever hear the end of this beast?
The “Teals” (with a capital T) clearly deserve honourable mention in the Boring Awards. Proving that rich, middle-aged women with starched collars, pearls and a bagful of greenie cliches face few barriers to winning the hearts and minds of other rich, middle-aged women with starched collars, pearls and a bagful of greenie cliches, the endlessly persistent Teals (with a capital T), these Aussie disciples of a weirdly comported, teenaged climate warrior called Greta Tintin Thunberg have achieved a level of fame far beyond any justification they might have for such on the basis of their achievements in life. No amount of facts, evidence and common sense seems able to stop their advance, proving once again that the rational actor model of public policy is long dead and that we now emote our way to public policy.
Chris Bowen should be on the list of contenders for the Borings. Combining a silly face with crash-through-or-crash renewables fervour, seemingly designed to impoverish the nation that he claims to serve, he has convinced his boss and colleagues that economy-destroying actions with absolutely no pay-out and the likelihood of “limiting” global warming to a gazillionth of a degree by 2120, should be policy priorities.
Members of the Aboriginal Industry (AI) are tedious and persistent. They deserve to be considered here. If ever a population segment didn’t need any extra voice, it is Indigenous Australians. They already have multiple megaphones across the political system, in corporate HR departments, in the media, in universities and the arts, and on road signs, in endless and ubiquitous support of the agendas of their self-appointed spokespersons. As a prime criterion for inclusion in the Boring Australians award is endless megaphoning of causes not supported by long-suffering, voiceless Australians the AI is a definite contender.
No contenders’ list would be complete without virtue signalling sportsmen. Recently Gideon Haigh suggested (heroically, indeed, ludicrously) that pointing out virtue signalling was itself virtue signalling. Really. He was arguing that the presumed tailing-off of support for the Australian cricket team was all a bit unfair. What is wrong with being a little woke, after all? Well, who among us isn’t just a little sick of seeing sports people assuming responsibility for public policy? Stick to your lane, and be happy earning your millions!
Finally, who could leave the pro-vaxx lobby, especially its media bullies, off the most boring Australians list? Led by vaccine, Big Pharma proselytisers like The Australian’s Peter Hoysted (aka Jack the Insider), these Covid State enablers have pilloried and cancelled those who, actually on the right side of science and history, have consistently pointed out both the uselessness and the evil of the vaccine mandates and the rest. Like Orwell’s Big Brother, the vaccinator class identified a hate figure early on and has never let up. In 2020, the anti-vaxxers were granny killers. In 2022, they are deemed cop killers as well. This relentless persecution is continuing long past the time when evidence-based science has established that the Covid vaccines still being promoted by our governing class were and are unnecessary, experimental, harmful and ineffective, and the vaccines’ erstwhile champions continue with their tedious conspiracy theory narrative. These goons deserve to be held up to ridicule for their unfit-for-purpose critiques of actual science and their smearing of fellow Australians, and consigned to the dustbin of journalist history. Prime contenders for the Borings.
Who wins the award? Let the readers decide. I am glad I am not a judge.
Paul Collits
17 December 2022
OMG I just realised I am a victim of victimhood. Excuse me while I adjust my pearls ......
I need to be made Captain of the cricket team to get the Australian of the Year Award (awarded to almost all outgoing captains of the Aussie team) regardless if another nominee is far better qualified such as for saving many lives after a catastrophe. Oh well I suppose I can be nominated again next year when a captain isn't retiring. This actually happened one year.
At least the doctor got it the following year after being renominated but it made the award such a joke. Sport over saving lives.
I propose Kerryn Phelps for this years award. At least she has stood up and out from all the cowards.
Not a complete list of course for reasons of space etc. I would nominate, from among a whole tribe, a prominent trinity from that prominent source of boringness etc, Canberra.
(1) Our dickhead Prime Minister - not that he spends all that much time in Canberra.
(2) The Chinese dyke who poses as our Foreign Minister.
(3) Our new Ambassador to the good old US of A. I'm sure Kevin will fit in quite well with the present administration in Washington though I'm not sure that the embassy staff will be all that pleased.
What could possibly go wrong?