You have to hand it to the establishment class in Australia. It takes more than a sweeping, ‘over 60 per cent of my fellow citizens don’t agree with me’ loss at a constitutional referendum to curtail their desire to virtue-signal. You know what virtue-signalling is. That’s when you go all out to display your own moral credentials and superior virtue but at more or less no cost to yourself – as when big companies’ CEOs spend shareholders’ monies on one side of a hotly contested political issue in order to make themselves look good with the other Davos wokesters in their social circles. Not their own money, mind you, but others’.  University vice-chancellors are equally vulnerable to this virtue-signalling affliction. And those running charities. Don’t forget the upper echelons of the churches and big law firms. You get the idea. Our Voice referendum brought all this bumper-sticker moralising behaviour to the surface. To the credit of regular Australians they told these cosmopolitan (the noun I’m searching for is elusive, it rhymes with ‘bankers’ and ‘cankers’) where to get off with their sanctimony and self-righteousness and seeming belief that they themselves were the pinnacle of moral evolution. There is no correlation at all between wealth and moral virtue. Or intelligence for that matter, it’s only that smarter people are better able to rationalise their own bad actions after the fact. If anything, the causal probabilities run the other way.

So what do these wankers (I remembered the word!) decide to do in the aftermath of one of this country’s biggest s.128 referendum thrashings having gone against them? Well, plenty of university vice-chancellors opt to give those supposedly traumatised by the No result all sorts of special leave. That means they get paid but don’t have to work. The massive cost of this is not coming out of the personal pockets of our world’s highest-paid top university administrators I can assure you. We taxpayers are paying. That’s the beauty of virtue-signalling. There is no real cost to those who practise its arts. Just as when they mouth the pieties of being on others’ lands but would never contemplate, not once-in-a-hundred business class overseas flights, giving over their own multi-million-dollar homes to the supposed traditional (aka ‘real’) owners. These are just some formulaic words to be mouthed to stay in with the proper crowd. Actions speak louder than words!

Or take the Queensland Premier. She’s offered the state’s public servants five days of paid leave for psychological distress resulting from the No result. Got that? All of us Queenslanders are paying. The Labor party isn’t. The Premier isn’t. Just another peacock-like display of moral worth without any personal cost. And of course this is also happening across the big end of town too – law firms, big corporations, anywhere that HR departments (run by those with sociology degrees) are ruling the roost.

Is there any sentient being in this country who believes that had Yes prevailed any of these self-righteous, sanctimonious vankers (the German version of the word) would have given the same uber-generous benefits to ‘traumatised’ No voters? To ask is to answer. And worse again, even putting aside all considerations of cost and of using others’ monies to advance one’s own moral standing with peers, giving these sort of benefits to the disappointed is simply bad policy. No parent ought to encourage his or her children to be so lacking in resilience that the kids collapse at the first sign of failure.  Or of disappointment at some political outcome.  Heck, I’ve been bitterly disappointed with the Liberal party in this country virtually every single day since they rolled Abbott and set off all the myriad rot that maybe – just maybe – Peter Dutton might now see can be turned around only by standing up to the Labor-lite lefties in the party room and by ditching the Textor strategy of parking the Libs a centimetre to the right of however far left Labor travels.

We all know you fail as a parent if you don’t get your kids ready to be resilient and to realise that no one wins them all. ‘Head down, work hard, learn from your failures, and try something else next time’. Isn’t that miles better than ‘you’re a victim son, and the thing to do is to collapse in a heap of self-pity, blaming everyone but yourself, because you are a better moral being than they are’? (If Noel Pearson has taken out a copyright on that last bit of advice I plead satire in my defence.)

But in the land of Australia’s seriously woeful establishment class the way to operate seems to be that you just virtue-signal and suggest to all and sundry that some people are so frail, weak and enfeebled that they cannot possibly function without five (or in some instances a lot more than five) days of fully paid leave. What kind of message does that send? The big end of town couldn’t care less. And as an aside I’m willing to bet they didn’t raise their own kids to be so rickety and effete.

And here let me close by venturing to disagree with NSW upper house MP John Ruddick. I like John. He’s a good friend to this publication. But in the aftermath of the Voice referendum John (a No voter) wrote that the holding of this referendum was a tragedy. It should never have been held.  My view is that we are all better off having had the question put and having whoppingly voted it down than never to have had it at all. It’s better because we’ve taken this exercise in steroidal identity politics off the political table for at least a decade. It’s better because the whole process rejuvenated the Liberal party while significantly envervating the Black Hand, Labor-lite wing of the party, making MPs realise there is such a thing as having values, arguing your case, and turning around initially poor polling while thereby upping noticeably the odds of a Dutton win at the next election. It’s better because as with free speech generally it’s always better to know what your opponents think and believe (however condescending or vile) than to have it kept hidden from you. And yes, I say this even as regards the disgusting pro-Palestinian spewing of hatred at the Opera House and elsewhere. So as regards the Voice I am glad to know which charities gave money to Yes; which corporations spent shareholders’ monies on Yes; which top lawyers, judges and professors embarrassed themselves with jejune, emotive analysis; and which universities came out officially for Yes and which at least stayed nominally neutral. I’m glad to know which Lib MPs canvassed with Labor for a Yes result. And I’m glad to have yet more evidence of the disgraceful lack of balance in ‘our’ ABC as regards this referendum. One day the Libs might opt to mimic Canada’s Conservative Party opposition leader Pierre Poilievre who has pledged to cut one billion dollars from the yearly budget of the CBC. If our invertebrate Libs are going to half-grow a backbone it will be because of the sort of one-sided coverage the ABC provided during this Voice process.

So, to paraphrase that well-known adage, it is better to have Voiced and made sure it lost than never to have Voiced at all.