by PAUL COLLITS – ’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 Anti-Australians of the Year.
- It must be tough to be a millennial multi-millionaire sportsman travelling the world in business class.
- The new fashion is to be a victim – of anything. It’s pathetic, we have gone mad.
- Who is your choice for the Anti-Australian of the Year ‘Boring Award’. [see survey below]
Maybe the top criterion for inclusion might be tedium combined with column inches.
Hence the Anti-Australian of the Year “Boring Awards”. Who are some of the prime contenders?
ENTITLED
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 has been barely able to maintain his place in the Australian test team, yet earns millions from the game every year.
Four years ago, he was a 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’s lucky still to be in the team – his form in real cricket runs hot and cold.
Chris Bowen.
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 in business class and conducting legal appeals seeking “justice”.
Cricket Australia got rid of a perfectly good captain for a minor, private indiscretion. 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 theatrical.
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”.
SLEDGING
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.
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 multi-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 (from TV show Absolutely Fabulous fame) has cottoned onto the victim schtick.
Lumley has claimed that victimhood is the “new fashion” for women.
UNWANTED
Discussing the #MeToo 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.”
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 recognisable 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 recognisable from many cultures as a pilgrimage site. To this day, a website offers tourists a ‘guided pilgrimage journey’ to the shrine.”
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.
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.
ABUSE
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.
And Brittany Higgins has ridden this wave to riches.
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 Lisa Wilkinson. Nominated for “Services to Injustice-For-Men”.
For a one trick pony, she seems to generate endless screen time.
Her trick is to turn her original career in journalism, with its purported principles of objectivity, truth-seeking and relentless research, into mere activism in service of an ideology.
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.
This card, as played in support of farcical charges against George Pell, promotes a cause that only an idiot or an ideologue could actually believe – and was 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.
Wilkinson carries on the work, undeterred by facts, evidence (or lack thereof), claimant credibility, and, especially, undeterred by the shame associated with humiliating defeat. She just dusts herself off and resumes combat forthwith.
Will we ever hear the end of her?
The Teals (with a capital T) clearly deserve honourable mention in the Borings. Proving that rich, middle-aged women with starched collars, pearls and a bagful of greenie cliches face few barriers to winning the minds of other rich, middle-aged women with starched collars and pearls.
THUNBERG
Endlessly persistent, these Aussie disciples of a weird little climate warrior called Greta Thunberg have achieved a level of fame far beyond their life achievements.
No amount of facts, evidence and common sense seems able to stop their advance, proving once again that rational policy is long dead and 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, he appears to want to impoverish the nation he claims to serve.
He has convinced his boss and colleagues that his 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 awards 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?
SICK
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.
This relentless persecution is continuing long past the time when evidence-based science has established that vaccines still being promoted by our governing class were and are unnecessary, experimental, harmful and ineffective.
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 history. Prime contenders for the Borings.
Who wins the award? Let the readers decide. I’m glad I am not a judge.PC
It s telling that a businessman, nightclub owner, banned the mouthy Lidia. Notice that the flakey politicians are making excuses for her. I am disgusted. What a terrible role model she is. I agree with her father – she is ‘racist and spoilt’.
Lidia should not have been sworn into parliament when she walked with closed fist salute. There must be a law re this and when will someone in the senate put forward a motion to sensor her?
Your list provides an embarrassment of riches. So many deserving candidates and only one that I can vote for. Can we make the vote a preferential one and, yes, please nominate Matt Kean and the Liberal so-called “moderates” as well.
Matt Kean – An idealogue who has destroyed NSW’s coal and gas resource development, being NSW’s only productive activity holding international economic comparative advantage.
Entertaining and well written. So difficult to vote for an overall self serving pain in the arse.
I’d have preferred a longer list, AND preferential voting (so I could vote for more than one “winner”).
Great list so difficult to decide certainly shows the Covid effects on our country!
Superb summation by you Paul Collits, of the overpaid, overindulged, so called celebrities constantly being foisted on the Australian public whenever we turn on the news to see what is happening in the real world. Amazing isn’t it that these parasites of society are always in search of boosting their personal wealth whilst virtue signalling to the rest of us mere mortals how unjust the world is treating them.
Follow the money and you’ll find them there feverishly rattling their gold plated tin cup.
We need to reveal who are always on the boards or committees that get to announce or choose who the Australian of the years is or all awards handed out to the best of. It is always a person from the lefts super plans, e g Grace Tame. That all worked into the network for the #metoo movement that then put miss Higgins and Heidi Yates. Into the big media ra ra .msm did their role in brining it all together against the Morrison government to bring it down?.??
Lynne Nelson-Jones is a great champion of LIberty
I regret, Paul Collits, that the idea of an “Anti-Australian of the Year” award, is, in my view, like “Australian of the Year”, a meaningless exercise, because there are that many who equally qualify. Big time.
(Far more than on your list).
But don’t you feel a little better if you have your say, even if it achieves nothing else?
Was a tough choice between Voice Activists and Lisa Wilkinson. But, in my view allegedly trying to pervert the course of justice just pips the disingenuous Left for attempting to divide the nation (even more).
There are currently 11 indigenous members of parliament. If you consider the proportion of indigenous members to non indigenous members, you’ll see that indigenous MPs and senators are actually over represented comparative to their proportion of the Australian population as a whole.
We need to remind Albanese Labor and the activists they represent for whom the so called voice (second voice) is their latest attempt to secure a treaty between fellow Australians and then numerous concessions at the expense of the majority including indigenous ancestry Australians who are not on side with the activists that the 1967 Referendum passed and Federal Governments now have the legislative power, subject to a majority of MPs of course, to establish another ATSIC or now ATSIV.
Divisive nonsense, no details to be provided before we are asked to vote and this alone should be a red flag situation.
Or as former Labor PM Keating once advised, if you don’t understand what you are asked to vote for don’t vote for it.
The new republic referendum proposal is also about obtaining an excuse to change the Constitution, as PM Albo described it, “archaic” according to him.
Second voice/s not needed, not democratic, divisive.