How the Establishment has abandoned our values

By David Truman

This article is a sequel to the immediately previous article on this website Our Western Democracy has been hijacked.

A new dominant class has been imposing a political revolution on the rest of the country, here in Australia, in the rest of the Anglosphere, and elsewhere in the West.   The process has been going on for decades.

We are being ruled by a professional middle class elite, urban and university-educated, who have risen to immense economic, political and cultural power.  They have globalist and progressive-liberal cultural values, they dominate our institutions, and they affect a sense of moral righteousness over other groups in our society.

Some examples of “our” past and present leaders who exemplify this new power elite are:  Malcolm Turnbull, Chris Bowen, Penny Wong, Mark Dreyfus, John Key, Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden (IF you could call him a leader rather than a puppet), Rishi Sunak, Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte, Ursula von der Leyen.   What characterizes these people and those like them?

Second, they use their control of virtually all the mainstream media, our cultural institutions (Writers’ Festivals, museums, art galleries) and universities to exclude the expression of opinions they don’t like.  “Our” ABC, the BBC and America’s PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) spout progressive leftism through a megaphone.  And Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon censor views against thenarrative pushed by the elite. 

Third, they demonize people who live and think outside their bubble as morally inferior, uneducated, racists, irrational.  They despise common garden conservatives and cultural preservationists like Marine LePen, Geert Wilders, Germany’s AfD, and Australia’s One Nation as “extreme right wing” and authoritarian.

People who went to university have become more leftist than those who did not.  They support more immigration, are more economically liberal (open borders trade and investment) and care little for traditional values, especially Christianity.  University academics are now massively skewed left – to the extent that conservative students and academics increasingly feel the need to self-censor or hide their real views on campus.  Academics who prominently oppose groupthink narratives of the new elite can be forced out – for example, Dr Mervyn Bendle and Professor Peter Ridd, both formerly of James Cook University in Townsville. 

The Old Elite

The old elite in Australia, Britain, the USA and elsewhere generally felt a strong sense of duty, patriotism, attachment and obligation to the majority group, loyalty to the institutions, and a desire to defend national identity, culture and ways of life.  That is certainly true of the four Australian Prime Ministers shown here – Menzies, Whitlam, Hawke and Howard. 

US President John F. Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  Where is that ethic in today’s Democratic Party, enmired as it is in racial and gender identity politics, open borders, welfarism and derelict cities, woke nonsense, hatred of Christianity and all the values and beliefs that made America great? 

Corruption of the leftist parties

Labor here and in Britain are no longer the cream of the working class, but highly educated, financially secure, urban and very radical progressives bent on addressing “historic injustices” which were not perpetrated by anyone living today and which are not inflicted on anyone living today.   Labor MPs are largely political careerists with little work or life experience outside politics.  (Unfortunately there’s too much of this in the Liberal Party too.)  Labor governments in Australia buy votes by hugely increasing the size of the public service – especially in Victoria (an economic basket case) and Queensland – while federally, Jim Chalmers’ latest budget increases the Canberra public service by over 30,000.   

In the USA and in Britain, the left (the Democrats and the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) have deliberately swamped the native population with hordes of third-world immigrants, with a view to recruiting large numbers of new leftist voters prepared to “vote for a living.” 

The new elite

Cultural pessimism is a trademark of many in the new elite.  The ABC’s political commentator Laura Tingle told the Sydney Writers Festival in May 2024 that Australia is a very racist country.  What self-hating garbage!

Anti-discrimination legislation is used as a weapon by the Australian Human Rights Commission and right now, federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus wants to use anti-discrimination as a sledgehammer to restrict freedom of religion – the ability of religious organizations to hire teachers and other staff who share the values and ethos of the particular faith.  Thus does militant secularism assert primacy over religious freedom.  This should NEVER be accepted.

The new elite prioritize minority rights above the majority.  They prioritize the group over the individual – by race, sex and gender.  Were you ever consulted on whether you wanted to be subjected to yet another Welcome to Country, Recognition of Traditional Owners, or smoking ceremony? 

The new elite are even hostile to the scientific method, chanting “follow the science” when the science is NOT settled and what IS being followed is the grants money.

While the less educated want more done on crime, immigration and unemployment, the highly educated want more done on climate change.  What a disconnect!

The new elite are also opposed to objective knowledge – prepared to suppress information about adverse effects of Covid vaccines. And the medical establishment connived in the suppression of treatments for Covid which would have hugely undercut the lucrative gravy train for Big Pharma.

Woke Capitalism

While COVID devastated the lives and economic wellbeing of many working people and small businesses – it wasn’t the big companies but the small ones who were subjected to lockdowns –  predatory elite corporations (like Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever) bolstered their monopoly power by buying up smaller competitors struggling to survive.  

Just after he came out for marriage equality, the head of Qantas Alan Joyce became the highest-paid executive in Australia – $A23 million in 2018, 300 times the average Australian income.  He defended this on shareholder value.  He also stridently campaigned for the YES vote in the indigenous Voice referendum.  Classic disconnect from the over 60 per cent of us who voted NO.

WHY do they get into this woke stuff?  Going woke is a strategic decision by corporations to appease those in the activist left who would otherwise destroy them with taxes and boycotts.  It is corporate conservationism.  The activist Left is placated, and customers are reassured of a company’s commitment to “corporate social responsibility.”  The corporate elites preserve their power by engaging in a modicum of social radicalism, while completely avoiding economic radicalism.   The minimum wage, aggressive corporate tax minimization, income and wealth redistribution, scandalous executive remuneration, and expanding economic inequality are entirely off limits. 

An Australian summary: How the establishment has abandoned our values

Since the 1980s many public and private institutions in Australia, including most academic and admin staff in universities, have been captured by political correctness.  These include the Australian Human Rights Commission (which should be abolished) and Australian Law Reform Commission (headed by Mordecai Bromberg, who tirelessly thwarted the decision of the previous federal government to deport the Biloela Tamil family who had no valid claim for refugee status), and the culture and arts world – literature, music, film.

These institutions are full of people who portray Australia as essentially racist; blacken the achievements of people who founded, built and defended this country;  and brainwash children into hating our country and its history.

They swallow the “climate emergency” narrative and are hostile to the resources industry, on which a huge proportion of this country’s economic well-being is based.

They are hostile to Christianity but very accepting of Islam, while being illiterate about its doctrines and history.

They support a bill of rights which would hand power from us, the people (through our parliaments), to unelected courts.

They embrace Diversity Equity Inclusion over merit, and critical race theory.

They support open borders, which is a disaster, and they are open to supranational bodies like the UN overriding our domestic law.

The new elite embodies many values that are destructive and evil. Here are two pictures from a December 2021 demonstration in Brisbane.

The new elites sneer at ordinary people’s common sense and politic al instincts as “populist.”  In fact, we need to be defiantly populist.  Freedom and Heritage quotes with strong approval this extract from a speech made in Parliament in April 2024 by Senator Malcolm Roberts:

The elites have been ignoring everyday Australians’ concerns for 50 years.  The commentariat spit the word ‘populist’ from their mouths as if it were an affront to their self-perceived superiority and arrogance.

Such contempt comes from a deep-seated sense of superiority amongst inner-city elites and their champagne socialist ideology — socialists whose wealth insulates them and their ideologies from human outcomes.  These are the people who eat the food and drink the wine grown on farms that the same champagne socialists demonise as enemies of their net zero revolution — farmers who they wish would get off their land to make way for solar panels, wind turbines and powerlines erected in the bush so city socialists don’t have to look at them.  All the while, they pat themselves on the back about how worthy they are, under the hubris of their spiritual guide and leader, the World Economic Forum, which steals wealth and sovereignty from everyday Australians on behalf of globalist, parasitic billionaires.

Australians don’t want to have our cars taxed until we can no longer afford to keep them; be locked into 15-minutes cities; never again be allowed to travel where we want, when we want and how we want; be living in homes rented from the billionaires because land taxes forced us to give up our own homes; be forced to rent furniture and whitegoods because green taxes made it too expensive to buy; and be forced to eat bugs and give up red meat in favour of fake meat.  Who owns the companies making this slop? It is the same billionaires campaigning against red meat.

The greatest threat of all is digital currency that comes with a use-by date. Spend every cent of the money you earn or your money expires.  There’ll be no saving and no passing wealth on to our children.  Australians will live in economic and physical slavery, except those wealthy and well connected under a different set of rules.

When the commentariat dismiss us as populist, this is what they’re covering up.  Soviet Russia called these people the nomenklatura, and they’re in Australia too.

Here is Senator Malcolm Roberts addressing a very large demonstration in Brisbane’s King George Square on 5 May 2024 against the introduction of Digital ID.