Australians holidaying in South East Asia used to be amused, and just a tad snobbish, whenever they discovered that problematic encounters with cops and other authority figures could be resolved with a wad of cash commensurate to the problem at hand – the cost of a schooner for riding a motorbike without a helmet in Bali, a couple of weeks’ wages for doing so at 2am with a skinful and a pocketful of contraband.
Such experiences always made amusing anecdotes back home. The snobbery was twofold: no wonder they’re so poor when they are all so corrupt. That would never happen in prosperous, law-abiding Australia!
If only.
Despite its lack of proper process, street-level corruption at least makes a kind of economic sense. Cops in poor countries are paid negligible salaries. They need to shake violators down just to feed the family. I once heard that cops actually pay their superiors for permission to patrol the places in Bali where the opportunities to grift are highest, which is a crude version of the private-enterprise profit motive, albeit without the enterprise.
Australian cops don’t have the excuse of Third World salaries, so offering their victims inducements to make problems go away isn’t a widespread phenomenon. Not yet, at least.
But the style and scale of the corruption at the other end of the authority spectrum in Australia make Patrol Officer Ketut pulling over tourists in Kuta look not only amateur but benignly transparent.
Corruption is the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain”, which adequately defines the likes of Ketut’s little operation, and even explains the rationale behind it. But it barely begins to describe the rackets Australia’s political, business and media classes are running, in which the pursuit of “private gain” runs second to shady ideologies seemingly handed down from globalist overlords using inducements that mortals like us can barely imagine.
If there is any consolation in Australia suddenly becoming one of the most corrupt countries on Earth – which it is – it would be that at least Australia is not alone. Most of the corrupting forces at work in Australia are, through some kind of astonishing coincidence, also at work across Europe and the United States.
Take immigration. It is now beyond doubt that, regardless of its marginal culinary benefits, multiculturalism has burdened us with generations of hostile immigrants who have formed alien ghettos, embezzled the welfare system and, on occasional balmy summer evenings, popped down to Bondi to spend a pleasant nine minutes shooting Jews from a footbridge uninterrupted by the constabulary.
That’s a bit harsh, I hear you say, they don’t all shoot Jews! Fair point. Some of them are more content to steal billions of dollars intended for the disabled, scam the insurance industry by faking car accidents, steal cars, invade homes, target local women for prolonged gang rapes, treat their own women like chattels, threaten to beat up the Prime Minister or just drive B-double semi-trailers like they’re Toyota Corollas in a smash-up derby while verbally abusing those who abide by the road rules.
Politicians avoid commenting on the extortionate cost of mass immigration for fear of upsetting ethnic voter blocks. And they can ignore columns like this one because, frankly, they are so brazen about their plan to destroy Australian culture that they no longer care.
Immigration Minister Tony Burke is now encouraging immigrants to not assimilate, and recently told an Indian podcaster that he wants millions more Indians to be granted citizenship. He does all this with the nauseating obsequiousness of someone who learned at school that he doesn’t fit into his own culture, and has spent his adult life desperately seeking one where he does. He increasingly looks like a lonely nerd who can’t believe how many new friends he’s made since becoming Immigration Minister.
Burke has been given a blank cheque to flood the nation with the least skilled non-English-speakers he can find because his party knows the fewer skills immigrants possess, and the less they understand the local lingo, the more likely they are to vote Labor. It’s a strategy to make Labor more powerful by making Australia less Australian. That is an “abuse of entrusted power”, but there’s clearly more to it than the “private gain” of a ministerial salary. Perhaps one day we will find out what’s really in all this for Burke and his colleagues.
Education is another example of a thoroughly corrupted aspect of governance, and I’m not referring to its transformation into a people-smuggling racket for immigrants pretending to be “students”, although that is bad enough.
Education Minister Jason Clare has boasted of spending $16 billion of your money forgiving the debts students incurred studying at some of our universities. If he thought those debts were too onerous, then he, as Education Minister, should have been asking the universities why they existed in the first place. Why were universities signing gullible kids up to courses they knew would never lead to jobs lucrative enough to pay back their tuition fees?
There are two reasons why Clare will never put that to the vice-chancellors: one, tertiary education brainwashes young people to vote Labor; and two, forgiving their debts virtually ensures they continue to do so for life.
The scale of the destruction is mind-boggling. Universities, which were once the citadels of the Enlightenment and the mainspring of most of our scientific and cultural progress, have been reduced to cesspits of increasingly deranged lunacy, and generations of supposedly smart kids have been recast as cogs in a leftist machine that produces nothing. Normal people would need an enormous incentive to cause this much destruction. Is Clare doing it because he wants to cling to his ministerial salary and perks, or is there some other nefarious force at work here?
The stench of corruption is now ubiquitous. Why did all state and federal governments lock us down to protect us from Covid, a relatively harmless virus, and then shove an experimental gene therapy into millions of us despite knowing it was both deadly and ineffective? And why did the mainstream media and social media platforms go along with it? We have a right to know the answers to these questions, but the government refuses to provide them.
Anti-corruption campaigner Geoffrey Watson recently found, in a report he wrote for the Queensland government, that the CFMEU had overcharged the Victorian government somewhere in the vicinity of $15 billion over recent years. Such an allegation would once have been enough to bring down a state government. These days, though, it doesn’t even generate a file at Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, and ordinary people are so preoccupied with merely surviving that they don’t have time to wonder why nothing is done about it.
The way the government and unions treat our $3 trillion in superannuation savings as theirs invokes more suspicion of corruption, although this issue doesn’t receive nearly as much attention as it should, thanks to the widespread perception, perpetuated by the government, that those compulsory savings don’t really belong to us; rather they are a bonus our benevolent government bestows on us upon retirement.
This cancer is now spreading into the “private” sector. Apart from gangs running the illegal drug trade, which occasionally erupts into homicidal gunfights, and brazenly obvious illegal but lucrative tax-avoiding tobacco stores, protection rackets are now becoming commonplace. Melbourne is now a “war zone” in which bars and clubs are wondering which will be the next to be shot up or firebombed.
In a contemporary twist to an old story, standover men now seem to be targeting even pilates studios, arson being the preferred method of intimidation after twisting the proprietors’ arms presumably failed to yield results.
Police are doing what they can but politicians are conspicuously sanguine about it all. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s all part of the new normal they are implementing.
Corruption is usually the pursuit of short-term gains at the inadvertent long-term expense of everyone else. But Australia’s new forms of corruption are far worse. The long-term cost is deliberate and co-ordinated. The goal is infinitely more pernicious than – to return to Ketut – a cop hitting up tourists so he can afford to buy schoolbooks for his kids.
These plans are now almost irreversible. By the time most Australians realise what’s happened, Anthony Albanese and his colleagues will be well into their comfortable retirement in secure communities far from the chaos and anarchy they created.
