John Roskam from the Institute of Public Affairs highlights the failures of the fourth estate to hold our politicians (and other institutions) to account.
The common sense, sense of humour and irreverence for authority has gone. Replaced with a brainwashed acceptance that our lot is to accept whatever we are told and obey those doing the talking.
There’s things we can’t even discuss without triggering a wave of irrational hysteria. It’s set state against state, mate against mate and the divisions are running ever deeper.
It’s been said that a picture tells a thousand words.
Have a look at some of these images from here and overseas. They capture the slide of civilisation – as we knew it, over the past 18 months.
They paint a pretty sorry picture. We are descending into an authoritarian nightmare. I’d say dystopian but that represents a fictional society and this one is all too real.
At home and abroad, we’ve got police states, unelected rulers, curfews, continual tracking, two tiered citizenry, mandatory detention, fake news, the suppression of truth, military patrolling our streets, restrictions on gatherings and no-one seems to be holding the politicians or bureaucrats to account for their inconsistent approach.
We’re even seeing babies baptised with water pistols and newspeak slogans becoming accepted.
Orwell's 1984 is our 2021.
Again, this is not the Australia I grew up in. I spent fourteen years in parliament trying to warn of the threat of how these infringements on our liberties take hold and why we always need to defend freedom .
To those of you who say, these are extraordinary times and these extraordinary measures are necessary, I say – the totalitarians have always got a good excuse.
They’ll always justify limiting our liberty while empowering themselves as being ‘for our own good’.
They’ll tell us the measures are temporary but experience shows that power once gained is seldom relinquished voluntarily.
Cory Bernardi is the author of seven books and has been a member of the Australian rowing team, a publican, an investment portfolio manager and spent nearly 14 years as an Australian Senator.
The Prime Minister has a delicate balancing act ahead of him. He needs to muscle up to China while re-establishing important trade markets for our products.
