Dr Craig Heilmann
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” (Donald Horne)
Australia must change or it is in danger “to slide into becoming a second-rate country”. So—this past week—said former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, an incredibly mediocre figure.
Australia has been called the ‘lucky country’ but a lucky country populated by mediocre people.
It is hard to argue with Donald Horne’s analysis. Although Horne later regretted his remarks, I suggest he was right: our government is an abject grab bag of spivs and dissemblers who have distinguished themselves in three main features of modern governing—lying to promote policy and grow their own power (e.g., the so-called Digital Duty of Care legislation, which is really just a mission in censorship); harnessing the benefits of personal emoluments (one thinks of their mastery of travel rorts); and pork-barrelling for their mates or in marginal seats (the local grants four-fifths of which went to Labor or marginal seats).
Communications Minister Anika Wells appears twice amongst that threefold accusation. What a mediocre communications minister she is, too, because even when her lips are moving she is telling you nothing. “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” as Shakespeare writes in Macbeth.
Having rorted the public of travel dollars—Wells was forced to pay back $10,000 of misappropriated public money—and, being the face of the new era of digital censorship under the deceptive guise of staving off “harms to children and young people” (if only that enormity of conscience extended to abortion!), she was this week feted by Time Magazine as a glittering member of its 100 rising stars of the modern political. Of course, her paean wasn’t written up by an expert panel or—God forbid!—by consulting Joe Public, but rather by a single individual, former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
What do Anthony Albanese, who leads this ragtag group, Anika Wells and Julia Gillard all have in common? They’re mediocre people. They are our scourge, our punishment for being a mediocre people.
Mediocrity has its etymology in two ancient terms—medius ocris, half way up a stony hill. That’s where modern Australia is today.
Living standards are going backwards as the government taxes its people to the tune of 24.1 percent of GDP (the second highest on record) but somehow manages to spend 26.9 percent of GDP, borrowing the remaining 2.8 percent against our children and grandchildren’s future. At a time where most right-minded economists say the business cycle should have the budget in surplus Australia will borrow tens of billions of dollars this year.
Our second-rate leaders, led by a treasurer Jim Chalmers, who appears to have the oratorial skills of a Cicero but the messaging of a Galah—how many times can we hear “Aussies are doing it tough”?—cannot quite bring themselves to admit that government borrowing nearly three percent of GDP is heating up an economy with zero productivity growth, stoking the fires of demand.
As a consequence, the Reserve Bank Governor—another mediocre performer, who managed to drop interest several times before the last election to help her mates in the Labor Party, now has to jack them up again to tamp down our rampant inflation supercharged by that same Party. So while the mediocre Galah parrots the view that the Middle East is magically causing Australia’s domestic inflation problem, the RBA governor Michelle Bullock rightly acknowledges it’s “home grown” but without having the courage to name the culprits in Canberra. Mediocre—all the way down!
That leads you to wonder, too, what advice the Galah is getting from his Treasury officials—our so-called “best and brightest” but actually—mediocre! And where are our best and brightest trained? At our mediocre universities! At those places where rather than learning to think, the next generation of mediocre public servants are cataloguing safe spaces, tallying up micro-aggressions, and marching to free, free Palestine, or some other ersatz cause.
This motley crew in Canberra may be our best and brightest but that only serves to convince me further how second rate we are—and there is little Time Magazine can say or do to produce a silk purse from a mediocre sow’s ear.
That leads us back to our fearless leader, our Prime Minister, Anthony “Albo” Albanese, quintessential man of the people, who grew up in mediocre surroundings in public housing. There is no more fit ruler for a second-rate people: for in the land of the blind the one eyed man is always king. And our Albo is nothing if not one eyed—for his beloved Rabbitos, a mediocre sporting team, and for the endless political banalities in which he excels. Yet this last week or so our fearless—but very much mediocre—leader was away at the U.N. receiving a “global citizenship” award. Yeah, one of the most mediocre humans with whom you could ever hope to walk the red carpet—as the former CEO of Qantas can testify—is actually a global “winner.” Not bad for a bloke whose sole qualification appears to be leading from a long way behind.
This award is proof that we live in a time when mediocrity pays. And pays very well, too, as Albo’s local golf course—a place he knows nothing about and has never really seen (wink, wink)—received six million dollars worth of taxpayer money through the largesse of the Labour Party’s aforementioned local grants scheme—invitation only.
I’m sure Albo’s golf swing—like the rest of his performance—is suitably mediocre. He is a mediocre man leading a people stalled in mediocrity, half way up a stony hill.
There are only a few ways up the rest of this hill, from mediocrity to greatness. First, we need to stop being mediocre. And speaking of mediocre—One Nation and Angus Taylor’s Coalition are clearly mediocre. If they weren’t second rate and average, we couldn’t possibly have the Galah with a PhD in “Paul Keating studies” rather than an actual economist or former business owner as our treasurer. The inability of His Majesty’s loyal opposition to hold this mediocre Canberra mob accountable is another sign of an unassailable mediocrity.
If we stop being mediocre, we might recover our virtues. Virtues that demand of a great people rather than a second-rate one—don’t ask what your country can do for you! Ask what you can do for your country! Australia was built out of the bush by pioneers and go-getters: I know, amongst our mediocre thinkers today our forefathers and mothers were mere white, colonialist criminals and land-thieves! That matter of historic dispossession we have to deal with; but a great people, rather than a petty and average one, would actually deal with its past, attain a relative form of justice, settle its accounts with grace and forgiveness, and then move on to embrace its future with two hands. It wouldn’t sit idle halfway up a stony hill.
So, first. Stop being average, fair to middling. Second, stop seeking handouts and freebies from government—their gifts will be second-rate anyway. Third, insist that anyone who governs us commit to no taxation or spending beyond one quarter of GDP, bring the budget back to balance over the next five years by practising a little restraint and austerity, and then finally making a move to pay down the trillion dollars our children owe—money spent by their mediocre parents.
Fourth. Turn up at work and stay a half hour longer to increase productivity. Do it for the nation. Do it for your children and grandchildren.
Fifth. Insist to your local school or daycare that rather than having your little ones afflicted with the latest batch of “sexual consent” training that they instead be allowed to learn how to read and to write. That way we won’t have to pin all our hopes on AI to fix our productivity woes, but we can do it the old-fashioned way by rolling up our sleeves, working smarter and a tad harder.
Sixth. Pray like the Dickens that we can escape our mediocrity by having our flagging spirits revived by the grace of heaven. Not because we deserve it. We have been mediocre citizens and servants. And we have been led by mediocre leaders. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy!
There are only a couple of ways off a stony hill. You can either climb down into oblivion and the great forgetfulness of history, i.e., dwindle into being a petty, no-matter people. Or Aussies can muster our virtues, courage, wisdom, and strength, and regain the climb. That latter way leads upwards away from mediocrity to something far, far better. Our leaders should be calling us today to that hard climb. Think of the rewards of the view from the top!
And so, climb on, Australia.
Leave the mediocrity behind!
PS: Donald Horne’s full quote is this one:
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”
