Wokely awards

Covid has denied Australia many essential freedoms but it hasn’t been able to stop the 2021 NSW Wokely Awards. Lamentably, though, we have lost one of our strongest competitors this year.

Gladys Bin Chicken has left the Wokelys arena to take up a new career providing content for Mills and Boon writers. She will be missed, but she leaves behind a new brand of Liberal: the Trans-Politician. These are Greens trapped inside Liberal party seats, clearly born into the wrong body politic. Instead of following the Menzies tradition of family values, fiscal prudence and social conservatism, NSW ministers like Matt Green, Mark Speakman and Rob Stokes worship at the altar of every weird, woke concept under the sun.

What would old Ming make of net zero, renewable energy zones, coercive control, enthusiastic consent, gender fluidity and the LGBTIQPWTF alphabet? What would he make of Stokes’ recent decree as Planning Minister that every new home in Sydney can only be built with a light-coloured roof? This is the God Complex under which the Trans-Politicians operate: saving the planet, one rooftop at a time.

Despite losing Bin Chicken, we have a record number of entries this year. With limited Speccie space available, let’s rip into the nominees.

Not to be left out of the Woke-fest, the new Premier, Dominic Perrottet, is a surprise entry. Some might think he’s a conservative, a real skinflint with public money. But as the Treasurer in charge of iCare (the NSW workers compensation agency) he oversaw its $6 million construction of something called an ‘Imaginarium’.

Not many workplaces have an Imaginarium. In fact, I know only of this one. It’s a large darkened space where iCare staff go to imagine a better world and write their thoughts on whiteboards circling the room. Unfortunately, no one imagined the need for ‘customer service’ and ‘value for money’ before spending the $6 million.

Perhaps someone at iCare imagined the Western Sydney Great Emu, because residents of our region have never heard of it. This hasn’t stopped the government from planning to build a $7 million 30-metre tall ‘Great Emu in the Sky’ sculpture next to the new M12 road at Badgerys Creek Airport.

It’s the ultimate in wasteful Indigenous virtue-signalling. The idea is for passengers flying into Western Sydney to look out their cabin windows and admire this wonderful artwork (which looks more like a platypus than an emu). Most will think they are landing in some Third World backwater.

Not to be outdone, the Education Department has spent $37,000 on a special safe-space ‘Yarning Room’ for Aboriginal staff at its Parramatta head office, replete with Indigenous furniture, patterns and window glazing. How many staff members feel unsafe working with other education bureaucrats has, of course, never been identified.

With the rise of Covid, very few NSW public servants go to their offices anymore. But when there, they can feel warm and fuzzy. The NSW Treasury has spent $35,000 on commissioning and hanging an Indigenous painting in its staff lunchroom, as part of ‘reconciliation’. When asked at Budget Estimates, the head of Treasury, Michael Pratt, could not identify any Treasury employees who were not already ‘reconciled’ on Aboriginal affairs.

Treasury has also spent $56,000 on staff training in ‘SBS Inclusion Courses’, which focus on alphabet issues, Critical Race Theory and Invasion Day. The course outline can be summarised as ‘How to Hate Australia’. Forget about Treasury as a cost-saving agency. Its woke extravagance has encouraged other agencies to rack up a NSW budget deficit of $29 billion.

Under the Trans-Liberals, the NSW public service serves itself more than the public. In Stokes’ department they have spent $10,000 on an online music busker to perform for staff as a ‘team morale booster’. With millions of free tunes on the Internet, why not access those? Better still, how about dropping the toe-tappers altogether and concentrating on better planning and job creation for NSW?

In the world of woke, there’s nothing better than an exploding cigar. At Budget Estimates earlier this year I asked Attorney General Speakman for evidence of the effectiveness of the ‘sexual consent education programs’ he is pushing in NSW schools. He referred me to evaluation studies for the Respectful Relationships syllabus. I eagerly looked up these reports and found a telling conclusion. Once Year 7 students complete the course, they are more likely to agree with the following statement: ‘If someone hits me, I should hit them back even harder’. Perhaps it should be relabeled Disrespectful Relationships.

The new-age Lindfield Learning Village (an experimental government school on Sydney’s North Shore) has taken disrespect to a new level. After lessons in Black Lives Matter (I kid you not), a Year 5/6 teacher draped student posters from the classroom ceiling, exclaiming, ‘White Lives Matter Too Much’, ‘Stop Killer Cops’ and ‘Pigs Out of the Country’.

In October an independent review of the school revealed that between Years 7 and 9, one-third of Lindfield students go backwards in their NAPLAN reading and numeracy results. That is, they do two years of ‘education’ for weaker skill levels. This is what woke schooling does to young lives, whether black or white.

And the winner is (drum roll please)… the NSW Greens, who don’t have to actually do anything in NSW Parliament to implement their policies. They just sit back smoking their weed and let the Liberal and National parties do the wokely work for them.