Paris burned. The ‘jaune gilet’ (‘yellow vest’) mobs tore through the heart of Paris, trashed the Champs Elysee and graffitied that symbol of Gallic triumphalism, the Arc de Triomphe.

The yellow vests – a couple of centuries ago they’d have been ‘sans culottes, the ‘no trousers’ mob that stormed the Bastille and slaughtered the guards around the palace – are the latest manifestation of the Paris mob and the succeeded in doing what Hitler’s Reich did not – burning Paris. (That time, the mob freed, possibly unintentionally, the imprisoned Marquis de Sade, from the Bastille. De Sade, sadistic but not silly, immediately declared himself a revolutionary and hot-footed it out of Paris as soon as he was able).

Macron’s socialist policies – the fuel tax, the rising cost of living – were juxtaposed by the flaunting of the elites, the Guardian reporting of complaints of meals costing ‘200 euros without wine”. Macron did not help matters by choosing to deliver his 13-minute address to the French people in the gilded office of the Champs Elysee Palace, seated at the golden desk where once sat le General. The gold did not sit well with the yellow vests.

There is a lesson from France that Australians should note; France has gradually slipped into almost third-world status with deplorable (that word is appropriate here) work ethics where socialist ethics override individualism. Immigration from the Mahgreb, former French African colonies enacted a ring of suburbs around the capital into no-go zones for whites.

You can work your butt off and still be made to pay almost three-quarters of what you make to cushion France’s public infrastructure and archaic trade unions. Even those sharpest of Parisienne women – the redoubtable BGBGs (“bon gout, bon genre” – good taste, good class’) who talked Left and voted Right, and kept a small nest egg of American dollars for emergencies, but in the end, they too went under when a good looking political nobody heading a political party no one had heard of, won the leadership.

“In Paris today, forget about owning your own home. We rent and our children will rent too.” This from a university lecturer who, she admits, voted for Macron, “because he was a change.”

If Australians want change, Labor and the Greens will certainly deliver it.

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