G'day I'm Martyn Iles and this is The
Truth of It. Today we're going to be
talking about "cancel culture". Firstly, in
the context of JK Rowling's letter about
professionals and being fired, secondly,
in the context of Donald Trump's speech
at Mount Rushmore about the destruction
of historic monuments and statues and
then we're going to turn to the issue of
"flattening the curve", but not quite the
curve you're thinking of. This is the
debt curve. But, before we get started, I
just want to say this. You'll note some
of you that this is coming out on
Wednesday evening 8pm, that is the
new time. We were coming out Sunday
afternoon, just wasn't quite working from
a production point of view. So Wednesday
8pm, there is a live premiere on
Facebook and YouTube and then the videos
are available on those platforms, as well
as clips that come out on Instagram and
this is also available as a podcast. So
whatever platform you use for podcasting
look up The Truth of It. If it's Apple,
give us a 5-star review. Without further
ado, let's get started.
First up, let's talk about "cancel
culture" and I mentioned that we will be
talking about JK Rowling and her letter
with other academics and so forth and
also Donald Trump and his speech at Mount Rushmore, but firstly, let's get into this
letter. It made headlines in the
last couple of days, signed by over 150
writers, academics and public figures
including such luminaries as JK Rowling
as I mentioned, but also Margaret Atwood,
Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, you know a
real range of people from all over the
political spectrum, from different
countries and all sorts. And the letter
really is an appeal to reject "cancel
culture" and let me quote the part of the
letter with which I agree, which is the
second half. It says this - it's very good
actually - it says, 'It is now all too
common to hear calls for swift and
severe retribution in response to
perceived transgressions of speech and
thought. More troubling still,
institutional leaders in the spirit of
panicked damage control are delivering
hasty and disproportionate punishments,
instead of considered reforms. Editors
are fired for running controversial
pieces, books are withdrawn for alleged
inauthenticity,
journalists are barred from writing on
certain topics, professors are
investigated for quoting works of
literature in class, a researcher is
fired for circulating a peer-reviewed
academic study and the heads of
organisations are ousted, for what are
sometimes just clumsy mistakes.
Whatever the arguments around each
particular incident, the result has been
to steadily narrow the boundaries of
what can be said without the threat of
reprisal. We are already paying the price
in greater risk aversion among writers,
artists and journalists who fear for
their livelihoods if they depart from
the consensus or even lack sufficient
zeal in agreement.' Now they are
mentioning here an issue that many
people are just flat-out aware of. Their
concern, because it's really starting
knock on the door in the realm of
writers and the arts and academia and
things like that. It's been going on in
many sectors for a while, this idea of
"cancel culture" - that if somebody
transgresses a narrow bandwidth of
acceptable speech and thought, if they go
outside it even once, even as they're
saying here, by
accident, in some cases, then there must
be swift retribution, and that is in the
form of, you know, we say "being cancelled".
But, you know it is for example, losing
your job, it is, for example, losing your
contracts, it is, for example, losing your
credibility, your accreditations and all
this kind of thing. As in, you think that
way, you've said that, well alright you're
finished, okay. Now there's nothing too
controversial in that for many people,
you know, many people experience it as
political correctness and that narrow
bandwidth of what they feel they can and
can't say. That's how they experience it. But
here they are saying well, actually you
know what, people in our sector are
afraid of this now. We're afraid of this.
We don't know when it's going to come
for us, whether we will say something
wrong. They conclude with this, which I
think is very good. It says, 'This
stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm
the most vital causes of our time. The
restriction of debate, whether by a
repressive government or an intolerant
society.' That's a good point you know.
It's not always a totalitarian
government that can suppress speech and
debate and thought and that kind
of thing. It can be society. An
intolerant society or sufficient
intolerant people in positions of power
in society or institutions that can do
the job. It says, 'It invariably hurts
those who lack power and makes everyone
less capable of democratic participation.'
They're saying it's a threat to
democracy. I'm gonna get to that in just
a minute. And then they say, 'The way to defeat bad
ideas is by exposure, argument and
persuasion, not by trying to silence or
wish them away.' So they're saying look, "cancel culture" wants to get rid of
certain ideas. It's gonna fail at its own
goal. It's not going to get rid of ideas.
You can't get rid of ideas. The best you
can hope to do with ideas, is rebut them
clearly, dispel them openly and see that
those bad ideas don't actually get big
time traction. And I think that there's a
lot of wisdom in that view. Now this got
a mixed reaction from a lot of quarters.
I read a lot of tweets, I read a lot of
criticism of it and the critics basically said two things.
They said firstly, there was the outright
denial of "cancel culture". It just
doesn't exist, they said, it's just a
made-up concept by people. Well, I think
most of the people who said that are
simply disingenuous. They know that it
exists, they know that it's happening. But
they're on the right side and they
actually, support it. And so they're not
going to call it out. There are those who
I think are genuinely ignorant
and that's probably because they
actually have these PC views and it
just hasn't entered their orbit yet. But
hey, you know, like I'll say in a minute,
that was the case for someone like
Germaine Greer, it was the case for JK
Rowling, case for others who have
suffered far worse fates. And then one
day, "wham", you realise that you're outside
the permissible boundary. The second
thing they said, so firstly, doesn't exist,
the second criticism was, that these
whiny people must be just whining,
because there's no fear for them. They
have huge audiences. What are they
complaining about. Well you know - and this is one example -  there's a tweet by Judd
Legum, who's a political staffer and a
journalist and whatnot in the US and he
says, 'This letter perfectly illustrates
my issue with the "cancel culture" trope.
The signatories of this letter have
bigger platforms and more resources than
most other humans, they are not being
silenced in any way.' Well, actually the way
I see it, is that these people they're
simply naming a rising trend, which will
ultimately threaten their platforms and
indeed it already does. It's knocking at
the door. That is to say that their
platforms are not yet taken away from
them. But they have seen enough cases,
they are astute enough to know that this
trend is not going away.
And this is for many of us with non-pc
opinions, just the reality that we live
in, we know this, there is nothing
whatsoever even slightly offbeat about
what's being said here. This is happening.
Take my own country of Australia and
where most of the viewers are from.
Professor Peter Ridd at James Cook
University sacked for publishing a
dissenting view on the condition of the
Great Barrier Reef, right. This idea that
pushed against the climate change
mantra. Or Israel Folau, the one with
which I have the strongest personal
connection, sacked by Rugby Australia. Why?
Because he put a verse of Scripture on his
Instagram account and this was some kind
of statement of inclusion by Rugby
Australia by excluding him and his
religion and he was, you know, one of
their best players, if not their best. Or
Drew Pavlou in recent times, at the
The University of Queensland, expelled, why?
Well, because of his Pro Hong Kong
democracy protests and things like that
and that's been quite a shameful episode
actually. And these are alongside, those
are the high-profile ones, the ones that
have been famous or have happened to
more famous people, especially in Izzy's
case, but there's others that are less
famous and I could sit here and I could
cite four dozen examples easily for you,
which I might do in another video,
actually.
Just to show you in the last few years
how ordinary folks have been cancelled
time and time again. You could look at
Ian Shepherd, school teacher, who was put
under disciplinary proceedings for his
opinions on same-sex marriage. Or Jason
Tey, a photographer, who was hauled before a tribunal for sharing his faith with a
client. Or Byron and Keira Hordyk who
have been declined admission to the
foster care system because of their
Christian faith. Or Dr Jereth Kok a
general practitioner, who was
deregistered and still cannot practice
medicine now for - oh gosh must be a year
just about - and there's no hope really
for him, at the moment it seems, because
of his conservative opinions online.
Deregistered as a doctor. Or Josh Lawless, a university student, suspended for praying
with a friend. I could keep going, I won't,
but internationally this is a big deal
as well. I was just thinking if the
passing of Sir Roger Scruton recently. He
was a luminary. He was a man with
tremendous academic pedigree. A guy who
you'd think you know, for heaven's sake don't cancel him, you know, he's too
important. Well, he faced that, in his last
days on this earth. Or indeed this letter
itself, that I just read to you from
these hundred and fifty or so people.
It has specific examples in mind. So when
it says editors are fired for running
controversial pieces, well that'd be New York Times opinion editor,
James Bennet, forced to resign last
month for allowing a piece by Senator
Tom Cotton which said, 'The government
should use the military to control civil
unrest over Black Lives Matter.' Forced to
resign just a month ago. Or they say
books are withdrawn for alleged
inauthenticity, well, that's a reference
to a novel, "American Dirt", about illegal
immigration by someone who was not an
illegal immigrant and therefore there
was some kind of weird appropriation
debate about that sort of thing and
that was a problem. Well they weren't the
same ethnicity of the immigrants or
something like that. Anyway you get the
drift. There's a whole lot of examples in
mind here. And this "cancel culture" is
something that ordinary people just
experience every day as political
correctness. The restriction on what they
feel they can and they cannot say, the
culture in their workplaces which
demands conformism, the sense of stifling
and you know I hear people literally
every day, tell me about this. I'm
approached in the street, I'm sent messages all the time. This is how people feel.
I remember at the height of the Israel Folau
stuff, I'd have people coming up to me
multiple times a day and saying thanks
for speaking when we can't. Why not? Well
it's this political correctness. It's
this "cancel culture". It's because they're
working in law firms, 
they're working in financial
institutions, they're working in
universities, they're at schools, they're
doing all of these things, and they fear.
We're seeing a growth in a new mindset.
It's a mindset that says, that you will
no longer be left alone to believe what
you want to believe. That's a big
development in culture you know. It's a
change. In recent memory, we were far more inclined to leave people alone with
their differences, especially if those
differences merely amounted to thought
and opinion. But change is afoot more and
more if you are found guilty of wrong
think, especially if you dare to express
that wrong think in words, you will be
ruined. It might be your job, it might be
your reputation, it might be your contracts,
it might be your relationships.
Whatever it is, they'll come for you.
Some are high-profile enough to survive. 
You know I mentioned Izzy a couple of
times, so I'll mention him again. I mean
he went through a lot. It was terrible.
But you might say that it looks like
he's managed to survive. But there's many
people who aren't high-profile enough to
survive. You talk to people who
are not within the bounds of political
correctness, who for example, had academic
university careers, or careers as
artists in the artistic world. I know
some of them and they will tell you that
it's cost them their future. It has cost
them their future. Now the signatories to
this letter go further and there's two
lessons I want to pull from this and
this is the first. They go further and
they point out that this is a threat to
democracy and therefore the freedoms of
the most powerless and I think that's
absolutely correct. It must be correct if
you think about it because if we accept
that certain opinions absolutely cannot
and must not be ventilated or certain
things cannot and must not be mentioned,
even by accident, then nobody can be
trusted. Especially those who have not
been inducted into the right way to
think and who are they? Well, you know,
they are what Hillary Clinton called the
"Basket of deplorables". The people who,
you know, who are just ordinary voters
who are considered to be ignorant and
racist and bigoted and uneducated and
conspiracy theory ridden and populist
and people who speak their minds and
don't think all the sanctified things
that one is taught at a Sandstone or Ivy
League university. Those sorts of people.
It's astonishing to me, for a movement
which is so concerned on its
face about power, boy, they don't seem to
take
to account the way in which their ideas
disempower the most powerless, ordinary
voters, who find their voice at the
ballot box. I was reflecting on this
recently, actually, Pauline Hanson was,
she was excluded from the Today Show
because she said some things on there
which they said were racist. I haven't
had the advantage of watching them, but
I'm sure it's an exaggeration, but anyway.
I thought about her and I
thought well Pauline Hanson's problem is,
that she's inarticulate. But here's the
thing, most Australians are inarticulate.
She speaks her mind. Well, most
Australians speak their mind. Welcome to
the real world. But see those are the
worst kinds of people for the "cancel
culture" types. The more significant
people who haven't been taught how to
think and how to speak. This is why the
Democrats in America want to get rid of
the Electoral College because it
silences the voices of the, you know, the
"rednecks". The people in the country areas. They'll no longer have the voice that they
have, today.
Now, this silencing of speech is baked
into the DNA of left-wing movements. It's
affected heavily by postmodernist and
Marxist thought because that's a system
of thinking that says that, truth claims
are about power and control and nothing
more noble than that. And so if you want
to wrest the power off the powerful
people, which is what, you know, these
movements are all about, you need to
cancel them you need to shut them down,
there's no other way about it. There's
"command and control" that's the only
solution. Total authority over who says
what and where they're allowed to say it.
And no-platforming is the only solution,
"cancel culture" on steroids, is the only
solution, because the movements do not
believe in any kind of debate at all.
It's a totalitarian mindset. Not
to say that we have totalitarianism now
but simply to say, that this is
where it must lead, if allowed to go free.
And it's interesting, none of these
academic and literary figures, it seems,
or very few of them, are really
right-wing. They spend an awful lot of
time in the letter bashing Donald Trump, you know, they've realised that "cancel
culture" is even coming for them. Political
correctness can come for anyone. And you
know if you're one of these people who
says that, you know, there are some things
which people should never be able to
say - and this is a justified response to
some of the things that have been said
on some of those cases, or many of those
cases
should have gone ahead - well, bear this in
mind, there is no guarantee that you will
remain within the ever-narrowing
parameter of PC group think. I mentioned
Germaine Greer, I mentioned JK Rowling,
the examples are endless. The boundaries
of what is acceptable are narrowing and
everyone is running a risk. That's my
first point, this is a totalitarian
mindset and I wouldn't assume that
anyone's safe. But here's the other thing,
which I really like about this, and it is
that I think the solution in large part
is effectively what these people have
done - strength in numbers. You know during
the Israel Folau matter, the best thing
that could have happened, would be for
every Christian sports person to post
that same scripture on their Instagram
accounts - strength in numbers. If there's
only a couple of snipers, they can deal
with one head coming over the trench
wall, or two, or three, or six. They can't
deal with hundreds. And this is the thing
these PC types are a minority of people.
They happen to have disproportionately
powerful positions because they've set
their life to that end. But, my goodness,
if we had strength in numbers on any
number of these things, they wouldn't be
able to do anything about it.
They actually rely on us going quietly.
They rely on a failure of courage.
And here we have more than 150
people standing together - they can't
cancel them all - they just can't, there's
too many, it's too widespread. I think
there's a lesson in that for us, you know,
one of the most frequently repeated
phrases in the Bible is, "Be strong and
courageous". It comes up time and time
again and the famous instance in Joshua
where it says, 'Be strong and courageous
for the Lord your God is with you
wherever you go.' We need to recover some
courage and we need to stand with each
other, even when people do things that
aren't exactly what we would have done.
But for the sake of, you know, some of
these issues that really matter, I think
there needs to be courage, and someone
needs to stick their head above the
parapet. But when they do, let's set
ourselves to more and more be committed
to supporting those that do because
these people, as I said, they
rely on a failure of courage. And let us
not be that group, which actually were so
many, and yet through a simple failure of
moral fibre and courage we would allow
this kind of mindset to prevail.
Alright, secondly, I want to talk about
Donald Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore,
as it relates to one of these key issues
of "cancel culture". There is a development
in the "cancel culture" world. I talked
before about people who are constantly
losing their jobs, of being discredited
and losing their contracts and their
academic accreditations and all that kind
of stuff, but see this is spreading,
there's a development and it's now
moving and some of you will have seen it.
I think most of you will have seen it.
It's moving into history, "cancel culture"
in history. We've seen a widespread
phenomenon of tearing down statues,
renaming institutions, the defacing of
plaques and historic sites, it's been
going on for a little while. I think back
in 2015 there were calls to rename the
Rhodes Scholarship and move the statue
of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University.
This is a movement called "Rhodes Must
Fall", it's been going on for a few years
now, it's probably on the brink of
success. That's where, you know, we started
to see it come out. But this sort of
thing is now more and more mainstream.
The statue of Winston Churchill, for
example, in Parliament Square in London,
in the last few weeks, was famously
totally encased in a protective box for
the Black Lives Matter protests and
sometime thereafter. Or here in Australia,
a statue of James Cook was surrounded by
police officers during the Black Lives
Matter protests, in Hyde Park, in Sydney.
Or right across America, it's been a
really wide spread in towns and cities
in, you know, most states, everyone from a
statue of Christopher Columbus to Thomas
Jefferson, even George Washington, I mean
nothing, everything is fair game it seems.
A Wikipedia page set up to list the
statues that have either been destroyed
by protesters or vandalised or removed
by authorities, lists examples right
across the West, including the US, the
UK, New Zealand, South Africa, Belgium etc.
The question comes, 'What are we to
make of all this?' Well I could talk a
little bit about how the erasure of
history is a feature of Marxist
movements. It makes the tearing down of
the present easier if the historical
foundations on which the present is
built are also gone and they've been
doing that for a while, through the
education
system, by completely failing to teach
history. And now, of course, they're doing
it through, you know, the historical
reminders that are all around us - I could
go down that line, but I won't,
actually others will do that - I want to
mention a couple of other things. The
first thing I want to mention is Donald
Trump's speech at Mount Rushmore. There
was open speculation in the media that
Mount Rushmore would be next, that Mount
Rushmore would be vandalised or
something like this and so Donald Trump
went to Mount Rushmore and he gave a
speech there. The media described it as a
very angry and divisive speech, precisely
because it was an excellent speech and they
had to put their spin on it
and I'd encourage you to look it up. It's
not particularly angry at all. It's
actually a really good
speech and you know, I don't say that
lightly. But he makes a very important
point. This view of history,
he points out, is mindless, it's ignorant,
it's so monumentally out of touch with
the true nature of things and the true
nature of these people who have been
commemorated in statues, that it can only
be said that it is a thoroughly ignorant
movement. He says this, quote, 'All
perspective is removed, every virtue is
obscured, every motive is twisted, every
fact distorted and every flaw is
magnified until the history is purged
and the record is disfigured beyond
recognition.' And I think he's right. To
put a lens over the lives of these men
or the periods in which they lived and
to purely extract the bad things that
happened or were believed in the culture
at the time - with the benefit of our
hindsight - I think it's dishonest to
history itself. It twists the truth about
these times. Just like our own time, they
were more complex. There was much good in these times and there was great evil,
just as there was in every age, including
our own. And the point is, that those who
are born in dark times, are to shine the
light and stand for righteousness and do
good and they will always, as we do, do it
imperfectly, and always do it through
imperfect lives. But these people,
particularly if you focus on these four
people at Mount Rushmore, did it far less
imperfectly, than many. Trump goes on to
speak about these four guys, the four men
commemorated on the mountain:
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
Of Washington, he notes, he was from a
small volunteer force of citizen farmers
and from a small
volunteer force of citizen farmers he
created the Continental Army, out of
nothing, to take on the greatest military
power of the world. And through eight
long years, through bitter winters,
under-resourced to the point of having
no boots on their feet, in the face of
certain defeat, they prevailed. Then he
returned to Mount Vernon as a private
citizen, never claiming power. But he was
requested to return to the
Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia and he was unanimously
elected as President. And after his
presidential term, his former adversary,
King George, called him, "the greatest man
of the age". Of Thomas Jefferson, he notes
that he authored the Declaration of
Independence at the age of just 33. One
of the greatest documents of
modern human history.
He further drafted Virginia's
constitution, he wrote the Virginia
statute of religious freedom - that's the
model for the First Amendment in the US
Constitution today. And besides becoming
Secretary of State, Vice President and
President, astonishingly, he was also an
architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a
scholar and a founder of the University
of Virginia, which remains a renowned
academic institution to this day. Of
Lincoln, he says, he's a self-taught
country lawyer, who grew up in a log
cabin on the frontier in obscurity. He
signed the law that built the
Transcontinental Railroad and served as
commander-in-chief of the war that
extinguished the evil of slavery in
America forever. He issued the
Emancipation Proclamation and he led the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. His service ultimately cost him
his life. He was assassinated on April
the 15th 1865, at the age of 56.
Of Roosevelt, Trump notes this, he says, he
was a police commissioner of New York
City,
renowned for cleaning up corruption
through his tenure. Then he became the
Governor of New York, then the Vice
President of the United States, then the
president of the United States. All this,
and he was only 42, the youngest US
president in history. He constructed the
Panama Canal, he established many new
national parks and is the only person
ever to be awarded both a Nobel Peace
Prize and the Congressional Medal of
Honor.
How have we become so ignorant to think that
history is just a rolling saga of
powerful men, sitting around like the guy
on the front of the monopoly box, smoking
fat cigars, throwing money around and
pillaging and raping and racisting, if
that's a word, and laughing at each other
about how powerful they are and, you know, just totally immoral people. It's almost
become comical. You know I feel like
saying to people, what have you done with
your life? If you think that this level
of achievement, these kind of guys, come
without great cost and sacrifice and
arduous toil, then the answer must be
that you've done very little because you
simply don't know what it takes. These
are four great men. Men who did more for
this world than one in a billion because
they believed in service, personal
discipline, sacrifice, fortitude and
things greater than themselves. And yes,
their faces that are on Mount Rushmore
today, are faces of sinners. And every
statue torn down in recent weeks and
months is a statue of a sinner because
there are no other kinds of statues. And
here's the moral snobbery in all of this,
that frankly the narcissism of it all,
the chronological snobbery is, I think CS
Lewis would have said that, you know,
we're enlightened today and we weren't
then. Well, if a statue were built, which
depicted the sin of your life, including
your secret sin, you'd be utterly
desperate to tear it down. The
mortification and the shame would kill
you. What's the difference then, with
these four men. You know, they are sinners
like you and like me and yet they did a
lot to tame their sinful nature, to build
their character against their sinful
inclinations and do great things which
blessed others, well beyond their
lifetimes. Their statues, next to a
statue of me or you, are towers of virtue
because they are sinners and yet look
what they did.
Jefferson at 33, Roosevelt at 42,
Lincoln from total obscurity,
Washington a private citizen who heeded
a call. Statues of sinners are the only
kinds of statues that exist, because
we're all sinners, you and me as well. And
there's this modern idea that we have an
enlightened monopoly on virtue, that we
are goodies, emerging from this history
of baddies. Do you know if that were true,
there would not be such evil in the
world today. If that were true you would
not be ashamed of the aforementioned
statue of your sin. If that were true,
then Jesus would not have had to be
cursed and to die for you and for me, but
it's not true, and so praise God, He did
exactly that. Do you know this realistic
view of things, history and yourself,
leads a person to say what the Apostle
Paul said, 'Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.'
Do you know, I am far more ashamed of my own sin,
than anyone else's and that really is the
point. Because really the world is a
sinful place, people are sinners, but it
falls to us to stand for righteousness
and do good in our time, as best we know
how and despite our sin, to do good. And
we honour and respect those who came
before us, insofar as they do exactly
this, and insofar as we see their sin
with the benefit of hindsight. We learn
from that as well you know, because we as
sinners need warnings and lessons just
as much as we need inspiration and
encouragement. I think that was the truth
about "cancel culture".
Alright, finally
I want to talk about this issue of
"flattening the curve" and I don't
actually mean the virus curve, I mean the
decidedly less interesting curve, but
nonetheless more important, well as
important curve, which is the debt curve.
You know to date, the Australian
government is looking to incur more than
a quarter of a trillion dollars in costs
on its economic support package. That's
13.3% of Australia's
GDP. That appears to be the highest in
the world. It is more than double that of
Canada, for example, it is triple that of
the UK and the measures being
adopted are frankly, profligate. I mean you
look at a casual on $200 a week before
coronavirus, they're now merrily earning
$750 a week,
thanks to the government. And the
not-for-profit who posts an income of
a mere 15% less than
this same month last year,
is entitled to oodles of government
money, with no sense of their cash
reserves, no sense of how they've been
doing in the other months, no sense of
whether they even need it, whether maybe
something happened in the same month
last year that explains the 15%
difference and it's perfectly normal and
fine. We're deliberately, it seems to me,
overspending and free-falling into debt
and gross government debt is currently
about 40% of GDP. The IMF is
projecting that we will double that in
just 24 months, which is quite astounding.
Now the cry comes back of course, well
what are we to do? You know we need to be
saved from the virus! And I just have a
question I'm not saying do nothing. I
really am not, but I do have a question,
which is, 'At what point does the cure
become worse than the disease?'
Business leaders have become openly
critical about the approach to the
economy. Australian industry group
executive, Innes Willox, has said,
'Parochial state premiers are trying to
outdo, outbid and outrace each other to
smother any chance of economic recovery.
Our responses to the health situation
must be proportionate and logical, not
hysterical and irrational.' And he's
saying, basically this complete lockdown
stuff is really doing more harm than we
realise. And I think he does make a valid
point. Could it be that we lose
perspective? Let me put it this way; if
the media posted tables on the front
pages, which not only kept up their
obsessive focus on the number of new
coronavirus cases each day, but let's say
they posted tallies of the number of
people who have filed for bankruptcy in
the last 24 hours,
the number of people who have applied
for centerlink in the last 24 hours,
the number of businesses that have gone
into administration in the last 24 hours,
the number of people who have lost their
job in the last 24 hours or had their
hours reduced to nearly zero, the number of
addictions revived in people's lives due
to isolation, the number of suicides and
things like this... maybe then, we'd have a
slightly better view of what's really
happening, maybe a more sober view of the
costs that are incurred. Not just in the
health system, not just in infection
rates, but everywhere. But see there's a
very modern idea which we've all come to
believe and it's this, it's that the
government will, and can, and should, save
us. We believe that the government can
save us from everything - even climate,
change, even bushfires and now it can
save us from another incident of life
which is disease, pandemics and things
like that - we look to the government and
say, save us, make sure this doesn't
happen. It's unrealistic. This is why I
think some of the criticism of Daniel
Andrews is really over-egged. I mean he is
my least favourite politician in the
country or least favourite leader in the
country, by far, but gee, yeah, maybe
mistakes were made, mistakes were always
gonna be made, you cannot control every
microscopic virus that's floating around
in this country right now and however
many trillions of them there are, it's
unrealistic. We believe that the
government can save us and we punish
governments who we don't think are
trying hard enough
and being earnest enough, in saving us, in
tipping money, you know, out, like I
was just describing it in these crazy
measures that are being put together. And
so they're forced to act, quickly, even
when their actions are poorly calculated
and can't be known. They can't
have proper information to make the
decisions and so the government comes in
as a saviour. The economic shutdown is to
save us from the virus, but then all of a
sudden we realise we need to be saved
from the economic shutdown, and so it's
raining money and stimulus. And my
question is this, 'What if they can't save
us? What if we're delaying the inevitable?
Or what if, actually, they could save us,
they can save us from this particular,
matter, which is the spread of a virus?'
But you know what? Only by creating
problems that are far worse, far more
systemic and far more destructive down
the line. I already mentioned the
immediate debt issue but there's a
bigger issue.
In Australia the immediate debt issue is
not that big of a deal, frankly, in
its absolute number: 40% of
GDP, alright we're better than most
Western countries, that's the
reply you will get so far. But it's the
trend that bothers me, it's where all
this is headed.
You know the 2008 global financial
crisis struck and Australia had uniquely
posted a decade of budget surpluses,
resulting in the repayment of all
government debt. And the West responded
though, all Western countries responded
to the GFC in nearly the same way, and
it's called the Keynesian approach,. When
the economy's on the slide, it means not
enough people are spending money or
investing in things and so the
government steps in, again, the saviour,
saves us from our own lost confidence by
spending up big on lots and lots and
lots of stuff and Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd gave nearly every Australian $800
in cash. I was at the Uni at the time, so
I've got about two thousand dollars in
cash - which I thought was great fun -  but
then the government embarked also on a
massive array of nation-building
projects, not all of which were
successful, think school halls, pink batts etc, but basically, it was raining money. And do
you know something, the coalition went
mental. Many of us were quite taken aback
actually, because this seemed to be an
insane act of economic vandalism, to
plunge Australia into more debt than the
GFC would, at breakneck speed, when the
future was uncertain, the size of the
required stimulus totally unknowable and
the likelihood of ever repaying this
money slim, because people don't like it
when you turn the tap off when you've
been giving them cash and so governments
don't tend to have the moral courage to
do it and so you know this debt could be
a permanent problem. And we'd seen the
rest of the world's suffer with
major debt issues and debt crises
and we're saying well, isn't this what
makes Australia different? That we don't
do what they're doing? That we don't go
down this line? And the coalition, you
know, carped on and on with the same
economic message until they won the
2013 election. Well here are two fun
facts: of the main contributors to the
Australian Government's gross debt from
1854 to 2020, that whole span of time, the
Rudd-Gillard governments of the post GFC period
contributed a massive thirty-seven and a half percent of the total figure. Big.
Coalition governments, since 2013, have
contributed more than fifty-two percent
The Rudd government ended up
spending, in today's dollars, about $2,900
for every Australian, on stimulus
measures, post-GFC.
The Morrison government is on track to spend about $8000 for every
Australian, on coronavirus measures. Here
is a big change in the past decade or
two. Conservative government's across the
West have almost entirely given away
their fiscal, disciplined credentials. You
say well, so what does it mean? Two things,
firstly, the trend really needs to stop.
The Keynesian approach is all very
well, but as I said, we simply don't know
how close together crises are. We don't
know how much money we need, how well secure we need to be and how big
the next thing is going to be and how
soon it's gonna be. We don't know how
deep the crisis is when we're in it,
until we're at the other side. It seems
to me that money was just thrown at this
thing like mad and too much,
in so many ways, but quickly, not knowing
how long it will last. What if we've
overdone it and we need to survive a lot
longer? What if, you know, all sorts of
things come to mind... we don't know how
much to spend, we don't know what the
future holds. It's an impossible theory
and practice. I remember talking to an
economics lecturer at uni and saying
exactly that; great theory - doesn't work.
Not least of which, because actually
government's, you know, once there are
zealous and they want to be seen to be
doing good and they plunge us into this
huge surge of debt, then the crisis
passes,
nobody will tolerate austerity and
cutbacks, nobody. And the opposition will
always put the government's feet to the
fire every time they want to take a
dollar off of anything, so the spending
never really dries up, and then the next
crisis hits. We never had a budget
surplus since 2008, not one. It was
supposed to happen this year, but it
isn't happening now and the surge is
back on, back into more debt. The trend is
bad... which leads me to my second point,
this problem is intergenerational. Large
sections of the current generation
probably won't fully have to deal with
this issue because this is a trend that
will come home to roost in the future. It
is young people who will face the full
brunt of unrepayable debt, flat economic
growth, minimal superannuation, lower
living standards than their parents,
trouble with interest rates, inflation
and languishing investment. It's
funny because actually, I'd say that's probably the demographic that'd be least interested
in this topic and yet will certainly, be
most affected by it. You know it's
already the case that many young people,
and surveys indicate this, don't
have confidence that the future is
secure. There's no hope in the system and
that's not for no reason. Some of the
reasons for that are wrong, but some of
them are actually ok, they're not bad,
because some a valid and this is one. And
the long-term integrity of the system,
looks, to many, flaky, and it's affecting
the psychology of young people, their
approach to life. Gone are the days when
hard work, a mortgage and 600 square
metres of land held a nearly certain
promise of a secure life. It just doesn't
look like this system is going to give
back in the same way. It's accelerating
the youth slide into ideologies that say
the system is broken and that there's
nothing in it for them. And it's a
trajectory that I'm concerned about in
my generation but it's actually the
actions of all generations, that are in
some ways making it worse, and if this
path continues, the Marxists will almost
certainly have their way, because it'll
be a case of... and
that loss of confidence in the system
will lead to the kind of destruction
that they seek. And so this goes back to
my original point, which is, ok even if
the government does save us from the
pain of crises like this, what's the
long-term cost? Where does it all end?
Where does it end up? Are we simply
undermining the integrity of the system
itself? Now it won't happen today, this
problem, but I'm calling it early because
the trend, is ever clearer. As Nietzsche
said, 'Lightning and thunder require time,
the light of the stars requires time,
deeds though done still require time to
be seen and heard.' So it's not gonna
happen today... but it's on the way. And
this is not a question of doing nothing
but it's a question of balance, and my
point is this, I think the mindset today,
which is to expect too much from the
government, which is to be terrified of
hardship, which
times simply has to come and which is to
be stuck in this Keynesian approach to
economic crisis, to spend up big and fast,
it all leaves us getting that balance
frequently wrong. But like Joseph, wise
rulers store up for the future.
And you know it's my hope that a new
generation will care about this once
again, because of where it all ends. Wise
leaders do store up. Joseph did, but the
foolish squander and the thing is, both
approaches yield their own fruits, in
their time. I'm Martyn Iles and that was
The Truth of It.
