Ill-Prepared For War

Decades of fighting bogus threats have made Australians psychologically unready for what might soon lie ahead.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation published a headline yesterday warning that the cost of energy in Australia “could” go up as a result of the war in the gulf.

Could? It’s been going up every day since Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party was elected to office in 2022 after promising to reduce domestic energy bills by $275 a year.

Every time this awkward fact has become newsworthy under Albanese’s chaotic stewardship, the ABC’s crack Energy Cost Deflection Unit has responded by playing the same convenient card — it’s not Albo’s fault, blame the war in Ukraine — which is about as rational as saying that the massacre at Bondi was caused by guns and hate speech. The ABC is nothing if not consistent, I suppose.

So why the sudden interest in energy prices, though? Well, it’s not the price of energy per se that has piqued the ABC’s interest; rather, it is the reason for it increasing. You guessed it.

The ABC pouncing on this opportunity to portray the Orange Man as bad is as predictable as an autism epidemic in an ethnic ghetto full of NDIS providers, and just as likely to provoke incandescent rage, not to mention an increase in support for One Nation, among the mugs involuntarily financing it all.

This is a sign, if any were needed, of the laziness that has now infected the taxpayer-funded hacks at the ABC.

It wasn’t long ago that an ABC journalist’s skill was measured by how cleverly he or she disguised leftist fantasies as realistic and urgent crises. You know the type of story: some boys will commit suicide if they are prevented from chopping off their genitals; ethnic minorities would happily assimilate if only bogans stopped calling them names; and Aborigines would stop dying in jail if we just gave them their land back.

The dominant narrative, though, was always climate change. The world will explode if we don’t stop using fossil fuels. But, as we learned yesterday, under the ABC’s rigid editorial guidelines, that narrative can be discarded if it means taking a free swing at Trump. For once, the rising cost of electricity could be reported as a bad thing.

At least the hacks at The Guardian know how to hold the line. When you can’t rely on billions of dollars from taxpayers, and your readership consists of middle-class atheists seeking reasons to hate themselves, reproducing reports about the imminent human-induced climate apocalypse is as crucial to your business model as carcinogenic preservatives are to McDonald’s.

Which is why The Guardian is still, even now, churning out warnings that “humanity is heating the planet faster than ever before”.

You’d think that the prospect of World War III, which even the normally sober historian Niall Ferguson says is a distinct possibility, would have brought an end to this type of undergraduate preoccupation. But alas. It’s business as usual. The cumulative effect of this is a tad pernicious.

The left has for decades used its domination of the media, politics, business and the education system to focus our collective attention on entirely fictitious issues: climate change; racism; the gender wars; gender fluidity; Covid; and the evil legacy of colonialism, among others.

And the “solutions” to these supposed problems only make things worse. “Renewable” energy is unreliable and expensive; the mass influx of people who are not interested in assimilating doesn’t improve our society, it destroys it; quotas for women promote gender above merit; chopping bits off children does nothing to alleviate teenage angst and confusion; the Covid vaccines killed more people than they saved; and giving billions of dollars to professional Aboriginal grifters doesn’t stop drunken Aborigines beating each other up in remote “communities”.

These false crises and counterproductive solutions have made us measurably poorer. Worse, they’ve made us collectively neurotic, if not psychotic, and psychologically ill-prepared for the next war when, not if, it breaks out.

Nobody epitomises this more than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He has backed Palestine since his student days, and last year formally recognised it as a state. But in January he declined an invitation from Donald Trump to join the Board of Peace, which will rebuild Gaza. Why would he do that?

Now his Foreign Minister Penny Wong is saying we might send troops to help the US invasion of Iran, despite Iran being Palestine’s major benefactor. Does anybody in Canberra really know which side we are on?

This sort of indecision is easy when your sole political principle is survival at all costs, and you are trying to balance constituents who are openly hostile to each other.

This might look haphazard, but it is more than a coincidence that many of this government’s decisions work, inadvertently or not, in China’s favour. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote about 2500 years ago, “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” And in Unrestricted Warfare (1999), two Chinese army colonels described ways of waging war without your enemy knowing it by employing soft legal, corporate and cultural powers instead of subduing them with bombs and bullets. If the naivety of state and federal Labor politicians could generate electricity, we’d no longer need all those Chinese-made windmills and solar panels to replace our coal-powered stations. We really would become an “energy superpower”, as Energy Minister Chris Bowen keeps promising we will.

The Albanese government said before the last election it would terminate the Chinese Communist Party’s lease over the Port of Darwin, but almost a year later hasn’t done anything. Instead, it is making our defence situation even worse by proposing to sell off 67 Defence properties — including historic Victoria Barracks properties in each of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — to developers. The symbolism of those culturally significant locations winding up in the hands of some Chinese property investors would not be lost in Beijing, regardless of how cavalier our Defence Minister Richard Marles is about the idea.

Most people, I suspect, were not overly concerned in 2022 that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would continue across Europe. Territorial conflicts in Europe have been going on for centuries and tend to be localised. But this conflict in Iran is different. For one, it triggers irrational passions among many Australian residents (I can’t bring myself to describe them as “citizens”, even if they technically are), and could easily spark copycat conflicts on our streets not unlike the Bondi massacre three months ago, which would in turn be China’s cue to make its move on Taiwan and elsewhere.

If that happens, and we are dragged into the conflict by historical forces as invisible as carbon-dioxide but far more omnipotent, leftist journalists will finally realise that “climate change” and other retarded leftist shibboleths are meaningless, and that the real danger was under their noses all along.

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