Labor leader Bill Shorten is running under the motto — “A Fair Go for Australia” — but is his party truly concerned about giving all Australians equal opportunity?

Only a few months ago, WA Labor Senator Louise Pratt declared that public schools ought to start dedicating time to having transvestite men give stories to children in the classroom under the guise of ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion.’

If you want a more recent example, just ask Israel Folau who was social media mobbed for his faith in Jesus and courage to share it.

In today’s age, if you even question the legitimacy of ‘equality’ and ‘diversity’ campaigns, you are likely to be harassed and shunned as someone who is ‘regressive’ and a ‘fundamentalist.’ However, if there is to be any meaningful discourse on this subject, name-calling must be avoided, lest our discussion devolve into a state of barbaric rivalry.

Here are three myths we need to stop believing about ‘equality’ — myths that are dangerously hijacked by politicians to manipulate the masses under the guise of compassion:

Myth 1: Wealth Inequality is a Moral Evil

The Labor Party’s slogans — ‘tax cuts for the rich,’ ‘minimum wages for the poor,’ or ‘affordable housing’ — reveal their false assumption that wealth inequality is a moral evil. Implicit in essentially all Labor economic policy is the unquestionable belief that the rich are evil and the poor are victims.

However, in the contemporary age, complaining about ‘wealth inequality’ has become a sanitized form of envy and coveting. Rather than appreciating what one has, it’s easier to look at those who have more and complain that they are committing a moral evil by being ‘greedy.’ As economist Thomas Sowell has said,

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’

However, current leaders in the Labor Party are only concerned with virtue-signally their “generosity” by forcefully taking money from higher—and often lower—income brackets, and then giving it to those who vote for them. As Thomas Sowell has once again written:

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly”.

So how do we understand wealth inequality and disparities between incomes then?

Well here are the facts:

Average Wage – Ironically, the average annual wage of an Australian in 2018 was $82,436. Those who earn this much are in the top ‘0.26%’ of the world’s income.

Minimum Wage – An individual living on the minimum wage in Australia earns $37,398 per annum. An Australian living on the minimum wage is in the top 2.17% of the world’s richest people.

Which is to say — rather than constantly looking for the ‘top 1%’ who ‘deserve to pay their fair share,’ why not look at yourself as the global 1% and then seek to be generous to those who are less fortunate with the money that you have. In a nation that is richly blessed with material prosperity, we are not ‘impoverished’ – we must stop being entitled people who constantly abdicate the responsibility to care for others to those who earn more than us.

It is not morally virtuous for us to merely insist that those who have more than us should give away more of their money and assets, when we ourselves are in the global one per cent.

And so, we can reject Labor’s proposal to ‘Make the Minimum Wage a Living Wage.’ Why? Because the minimum wage in Australia is already a living wage — to argue that it isn’t is simply ridiculous — such an argument is held together by nothing other than envy and greed.

Myth 2: Men and Women are Equal in Every Respect

The Labor Party insists that unless we witness equal outcomes in the lives of men and women in essentially every respect, we persist in being a sexist nation. While we believe that men and women are equal in dignity and value — and rightly so! — to argue that disparities in outcomes between men and women are not natural is insanity.

If women and men are different, which they are, shouldn’t we expect there to be differences in their life choices and behaviors, all leading to different outcomes? The reality is, though, they are not. And this is evident in three distinct ways:

Biology — Generally speaking, men have a higher percentage of lean muscle mass than women. Women have 6 to 11 percent more body fat than men, and men have wider shoulders while women have wider hips. Females often have a larger hippocampus (human memory centre), while men have more gray brain matter (information and action processing centers).

Children — Women can bear children; men cannot. This impacts various other dimensions of life, including the amount of time required to take off other forms of work, the level of desire to stay at home and spend time with the child. Compounding this are a range of other physical and hormonal changes that impact the decisions women make.

Sport — Sport is an arena that undeniably reveals natural gender inequalities. Consider the standing world records for various sporting events:

• 100m Sprint — Men – 9.58 seconds vs. Women – 10.49 seconds
• High Jump — Men – 2.45m vs. Women – 2.09m
• Marathon — Men – 2:01:39 vs. Women 2:15:25

When we consider just three of these spheres of inherent difference, why are we so surprised when women choose different career paths, and work less hours on average, than men?

Intellectual elites have insisted that because men and women are equal in value, we should expect their lives to be equal in outcomes. They have gone as far to argue that gender is a social construct, distinct from sex — in reality, this is just a radical Marxist idea that has creeped its way into society through sociology textbooks. The disparities in results between men of sport are not the consequence of the ‘social construction of gender’ — they are the result of fundamental biological differences between men and women.

While women and men are equal to one another in essence, to believe that men and women are equal to one another functionally is to deny reality. Rather than denying the differences between men and women, we should acknowledge and celebrate them. Only then will we be able to truly celebrate ‘diversity.’

Myth 3: All Religions are Equal

The Labor Party is currently staying very quiet about religious freedoms; a product of their belief that all religions are essentially the same.

Ironically, the only people who believe that all religions are equal are:

1. Those who don’t understand any world religions, and…
2. Those who are not themselves religious

Even a rudimentary knowledge of world religions reveals that they make mutually exclusive truth claims. That is to say that if one is true, then all others are false, and vice versa. Because the founders of each religion claimed theological exclusivity, to argue that all religions are identical is not only utterly ludicrous, but blasphemous to practically any faith.

Just consider the disparate views of Jesus that three of the major world religions have:

Source: The 3 Major World Religions’ View of Jesus

You don’t need to be an academic theologian to realise that religions make different claims, and therefore they cannot—at the same time—all be true. Who knows, they could all be false, but because they’re claiming fundamentally different things, they cannot all be equal in any meaningful sense of the term.

Historically speaking, one of the strengths of the West has been its ability to reason without shutting down debate; engage with worldviews and critique them. Rather than flippantly using loaded terms such as ‘equality,’ ‘social justice,’ and ‘rights,’ we ought to think carefully about how we discuss issues, understanding that there are greater issues at stake than meets the eye.

And so, we must recognize that while Bill Shorten — and the Labor Party at large — is ostensibly fighting for ‘vulnerable, working class’ Australians, his policies are actually doing everyone more harm than good. But I don’t know whether this really matters to the Labor Party, because anything they do can be justified under the guise of ‘equality.’

James Jeffery graduated from the University of Sydney in 2018 and is now an MTS apprentice with Cornerstone Presbyterian Church.

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