One thing that is now undeniably clear is that virtually all of our elites who, with tedious regularity, espouse the dogma of diversity are unfluctuatingly uniform in their opinions.

No one could genuflect at the altar of diversity more assiduously than just pushed out Qantas head-honcho Alan Joyce. And so there was never going to be any surprise as regards his views on how to vote in the upcoming Voice referendum. Or whether he would spend shareholders’ monies, lots of them, to push that preferred line.

Try to name a senior corporate executive in a publicly listed company in this country who has come out openly for the ‘No’ side, the one polls show is supported by over half of Australians. Go on. I’ll wait while you ponder given that I’ve got a few hours till my delayed Qantas flight leaves. Or what about the charities? All sorts of them are sending monies and support to the ‘Yes’ side; they are dipping into the charitable donations that were sent to them by regular people, of whom at least half will vote ‘No’ if the polls are to be believed. Again, try to name the head of a single charity who has come out for ‘No’. I don’t know about you dear readers but from this day forth I will be asking if any charity took sides on the Voice referendum before giving it a penny. And that most certainly also goes for giving money to any university. Give money to one of the unis that came out officially for ‘Yes’ and you are part of the problem, not the solution. Ditto for every single one of the charities in this country. If they and their boards opted to come out for ‘Yes’ then all of us ‘No’ voters should tell them where to get off next time the request for money comes in. Don’t just stop giving. Tell them explicitly why not and make sure your answer gets to the CEO or Board.

We can play the same game with each and every one of our universities’ Vice-Chancellors and their staggeringly large retinues of virtually world’s highest paid Deputy Vice-Chancellors, Pro-Vice-Chancellors, Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellors et. al. (and yes, there are Deputy Vice-Chancellors ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ who define what it means to have a ‘bullsh*t’ job, one where getting rid of the job altogether would make the enterprise work better) all busy shoving Woke orthodoxy down the throats of faculty and students alike. You’d be hard-pressed to get an independent thought out of a handful of our university high-level administrators as regards the transgender issue, the old issue of stopping the boats, the former government’s response to Covid, same-sex marriage, cutting back on the incessant ‘acknowledgements of country’, the list goes on into the horizon. And when it comes to the Voice referendum, bravery for these people amounts to staying formally neutral. Did you know that over half of our universities have come out officially for ‘Yes’? Not a single one has come out for ‘No’. Rather, the remainder are purportedly staying neutral, though many of those are pushing information sessions for faculty and students so skewed (‘Getting to Yes’ sums it up) they would make a feminist seminar on toxic masculinity look even-handed by comparison.

I don’t suppose I need even bother to point out that the worldviews of the Canberra public service bigwigs cover the whole spectrum of viewpoints from A almost to B. Well, on a good day that is, while they are all wearing purple and celebrating International Refugee Day before heading off to a three-day Welcome to Country ceremony.

Put bluntly, and all jesting aside, under the banner of ‘diversity’ we are being delivered incredible uniformity of thought. ‘Monolithic orthodoxy’ sums it up. Now, of course, in part this remarkable uniformity of expressed views is just cowardice. Quiet dissenters and apostates have comfortable, highly-paid jobs; some have families to feed and mortgages to pay. They go with the flow and keep their heads down. Some no doubt complain privately at home about the wall-to-wall woke orthodoxy. But then many are real believers. These people hire fellow travellers and they sure don’t look keen to hire heterodox non-conformists and encourage them to speak their minds.

At this point I hear a few of you muttering, ‘Why does it really matter? This is all just cultural stuff. Why fight the culture wars? The left has won.’ I strongly disagree. Everything is downstream of culture and we all do need to fight on this most-important-of-all terrain. But suppose that’s wrong. Well, this all-encompassing canonical orthodoxy of thinking also plays out in non-culture-related areas too. Just think about the lack of any independent views during the Morrison government’s response to Covid. My kingdom for an Anders Tegnell or Ron DeSantis in Australia.

Or take this country’s monetary and fiscal policy. For years and years before Covid we were printing money with a gay abandon (a phrase you wouldn’t use in the Canberra public service I suspect). Interest rates were down around zero. Now I grew up under the dominant economic view that policy settings ought to favour savers more than borrowers. To encourage the good old-fashioned Protestant virtues and all that. Not any more, that’s for sure. So when did the Reserve Bank and Treasury become wall-to-wall Keynesians? Because it sure seems to me that this is the dominant – make that virtually the sole – view of those pulling our economic levers. It’s a monolithic orthodoxy. Frankly, I think we need a ‘red team’ of Milton Friedman types to prod and push back against what we’re doing. Forget blaming Russia. Grossly over the top government spending and the obscene expansion of the money supply by our and others’ central banks would be what I nominated as the main cause of our bad inflation. Followed by the terrible decision-making during the pandemic. Nor do current interest rates seem to me likely to get the actual problem of inflation under control – so no, I don’t trust the official package of goods used to measure inflation at the moment. Remember, inflation is a tax. It benefits governments with big debts and hits the hard-working middle classes. It’s a form of government theft. Last Sunday night before putting on the TV I went to get some petrol and a couple of Magnum ice-cream bars. The latter were six dollars each. I can remember driving to the same petrol station when they were half that.

I ask again, do our top economic decision-makers encourage a bit of unorthodox thinking? A red team? Or is it wall-to-wall Keynesian orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that Liberal Cabinet Ministers can’t be bothered to push back against.

Last point about all this orthodoxy of outlook across all of our elite institutions. You know what it tends to do? It tends to foster amongst these people a toxic dose of their own perceived virtue, as though after 3.8 billion years on earth they are the pinnacle of moral evolution. The odds, I’m afraid, are against this self-delusion.