Alleged sanity post about how we One Nation supporters are just a bunch of hateful morons, so I felt compelled to reply.
I was standing in a supermarket queue recently when a middle-aged woman put half her groceries back.
Nothing extravagant. Meat. Fruit. A few things for the kids.
“I’ll get them next week,” she said. Then she tapped her card and waited to see if it declined.
And that tells you something about Australia’s supposed “mad rush to the right” that apparently hasn’t occurred to Paul Williams.
Maybe people didn’t suddenly lose their empathy.
Maybe they ran out of it.
For years Australians have been told to care about everybody and everything except the consequences of government policy on their own lives.
Care about the international student.
Care about population growth.
Care about every new identity group.
Care about the latest symbolic political cause.
Care about changing the language you use.
Care about achieving ideological targets.
But struggling to pay your mortgage?
Can’t find a rental?
Watching your electricity bill climb?
Can’t get your kid into a doctor?
Sitting in traffic while infrastructure fails to keep pace with population growth?
Worried that your children may never afford a home?
Apparently asking whether government policy contributed to any of that makes you selfish.
That's not empathy.
It’s a demand for empathy to flow in one direction only.
And Australians are exhausted.
Cost of living is currently the number-one issue Australians nominate, followed by housing. Immigration has also returned to the top five.
Even the ABC's analysis of One Nation voters found cost of living is a major concern, while immigration distinguishes them more strongly from other voting groups.
So perhaps instead of diagnosing millions of Australians as stupid, poorly educated, hateful and lacking the emotional development of a five-year-old, it might be worth asking why they are angry.
Maybe people moving away from the political left aren't saying:
“I don't care about other people.”
Maybe they're saying:
“For decades, when the consequences landed on me, you didn't care either.”
You don't get to spend years dismissing people's concerns about housing, migration, energy, crime, cost of living and social cohesion — then suddenly rediscover “empathy” when those same people start voting against you.
And this isn't some tiny fringe that can simply be sneered away.
Recent polling has shown extraordinary disruption to Australia's traditional party system, with One Nation recording support comparable with or above the major parties in some polls.
Even the ABC has interviewed migrants now considering One Nation because they believe the major parties have failed on housing, infrastructure, migration and cost-of-living pressures.
Perhaps that's the story worth investigating.
Not:
“Why have Australians become horrible?”
But:
“What happened that made so many Australians conclude the political establishment stopped listening to them?”
People aren't obligated to keep voting for a system they believe is failing them just to demonstrate that they're compassionate.
And for many Australians, One Nation's rise represents something the political establishment hasn't given them for a very long time:
Hope that the two-party duopoly can actually be disrupted.
You can call those voters selfish.
You can call them ignorant.
You can tell them they're on the “wrong side of history”.
Or you could finally listen to them.
Because perhaps Australians haven't lost their empathy at all.
Perhaps they've simply stopped accepting the proposition that caring about everyone else requires continually sacrificing themselves.
-Not a professor at a Uni, just a girl hungry for political change, and a Government to take their boot off our necks.
Sanity in Murdoch publications is rare so should be shared 👇🏽
Opinion: Preposterous political ploy selfish Australians are falling for
I was standing in a shop queue recently when a middle-aged bloke – clearly angry at life and wanting the world to know it – picked up a collection tin for women’s cancer research.
“Why is it always about women?” he groaned. “Why don’t they have anything for men?”
And that tells you everything you need to know about Australia’s mad rush to the loony right of politics.
First, it shows a wilful ignorance of reality. Cancer research affecting males (exclusively or primarily) actually receives more funding than that affecting females.
Second, it suggests a lack of both logic and empathy. Too many people cannot see – sometimes literally – beyond their own noses. Even a child knows proof of non-existence is not found in an object’s absence. Indeed, a lack of empathy is often a function of a poor education.
Either way, too many Australians lack the basic empathy to see another point of view. Are striking workers greedy, or might they have a legitimate complaint about pay and conditions?
The Swiss theorist Jean Piaget – pounded into every teaching student – found that well-rounded humans should be empathetic by age five.
But I guess Piaget didn’t spend a lot of time in Australia, where debate rails between kicking out foreign students (despite their $55bn annual boost to the local economy) and dumping protections for LGBTQIA+ people whose rights in no way subtract from yours.
Think about it. Does a beer manufacturer supporting trans people’s rights make your day harder? And would your daily life really be worse if a First Nations Voice to Parliament offered advice, on Indigenous matters only, that politicians could so easily reject? What is it about our inability to see ourselves in the shoes of another person – someone even more vulnerable than us who, in all likelihood, is also the battling the cost of living?
As hard as life is for you, there are countless for whom it’s much harder. Every day there are Australians – law-abiding taxpayers who love their kids and their pets and who keep their head down – who are forced to battle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and cruel stereotypes around disability, autism and mental illness.
And it’s through this preposterous hatred of others that populist politicians hoodwink angry Australians – just for votes and the election-funding dollars that come with them. And we’re falling for it.
So you’re not alone if you’ve noticed people just don’t care any more. Studies have found human empathy across Western civilisation has almost halved in recent decades, fuelled initially by the individualistic, dog-eat-dog free market of the 1980s, and accelerated by social media networks that position us literally at the centre of our own digital world.
Who cares about the international student – paying dearly to study at an Australian university in order to build a better life back home – as long as we can post pictures of our holiday. Be honest, when was the last time you dropped cash into a charity tin or tips jar?
I’ve been thinking about blinkered views since the recent student protests against One Nation. Public comment was appalling in its opposition not just to what young people were saying, but in students’ right to say it. We have the right to respectfully express counter-opinions indicating where protesters are wrong on logic, but we can’t demand others be stripped of a right to lawful protest.
I guarantee public opinion would be very different if young One Nation members marched in support of Australia Day or the flag. While there are legitimate questions around school students being off-campus during school hours, Article 15 of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child protect the right of under-18s to protest lawfully. And shouting slogans is lawful when not inciting violence.
To deny this is to deny a long history of young people changing the world for the better. I’m old enough to remember grey-haired politicians warning that university students were dangerous communists for opposing a Vietnam War they said was vital to Australia’s security. Look how that turned out.
Young people have led anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa despite the risk of injury and death and, more recently, have been at the forefront of climate change and same-sex-marriage movements.
In short, young people – so easily painted as know-nothing bludgers with no life experience – have always been on the right side of history.
So take off your blinkers and pop on your empathy specs, and see what side of history you want to be on.
- Paul Williams is an associate professor at Griffith University