In a provincial Victorian city a vast brooding monolith has recently obtruded itself into the ‘built environment’, usurping the church spires and nineteenth-century clock towers of town hall and railway station as the skyline’s most prominent feature. In appearance – all jagged angles and irregular planes – it proclaims with a leaden insensitivity that it is government offices and, as such, it bestrides the streets around it like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. It was built, of course, ‘sustainably’, so that bits of it are already falling off. A cherry-picker must be kept in attendance to patch it up.

This building call itself a ‘GovHub’, a good example of contemporary baby talk public language. Those who toil within – or at least whose desks are within while most pursue their duties at home, in between a quick trip to Pilates and putting through a load of washing – are what were once called ‘public servants’, though the public they supposedly serve is itself no longer designated as such. At the GovHub we are described as ‘customers’ – but of whom and of what? Don’t GovHub and its assorted bureaucrats – the GovHubbies let’s call them – work for us, the taxpayers who pay their wages? (Actually, it might be better not to call them GovHubbies. There could be a difficulty with the ‘hubbies’ part if it were seen as a diminutive of a term strictly forbidden in Victoria’s corridors of power, along with wife, father, mother etc, as offensive to people of transition, gays, polyamorists or whoever it is this week.)

‘Customers’ is a clear instance of the current vogue for public lies. Were Messrs Sidney Myer or David Jones customers of their respective enterprises? Like them, we own the shop.

Governments love this kind of mendacity. You encounter it wherever bureaucrats see themselves as doing us a favour, such as graciously admitting us onto Crown land they do not own as though they did. ‘Welcome to the Wombat Ranges National Park’, the notices they put up say, as though we were entering some personal fiefdom of theirs. As with those irritating welcomes to country, which show no signs of diminution since the No vote, we are being welcomed on to our own land by people who have no more entitlement than anyone else to welcome us. We might just as well stand around welcoming each other.

Often these self-appointed welcomers will issue a bossy barrage of orders. ‘No barbecues’. ‘Take your litter away’. ‘No dogs’. In a ‘forest reserve’ I have even seen an illustrated prohibition of cats – a feline profile with a diagonal red stripe through it. Imagine trying to stop a cat from going where it wanted to.

‘Respect the environment’ is a favourite directive. Respect it yourself, officialdom – the greatest disrespect of the environment comes from those who talk loudest about caring for the planet, the ‘renewable energy’ fanatics of the left, the Bowens who think nothing of tearing down vast tracts of forest or blighting swathes of farmland to install their skeletal monuments to man’s perpetual credulity.

These same leftists are forever whinging about ‘misinformation’. There’s another piece of mendacity. What they mean is correct information they don’t want you to know, like Hunter’s business transgressions and how Covid started.

Public mendacity, weasel words, statements designed for obfuscation, have become near universal, and not just with governmental prose. As a phenomenon it would seem to derive from the world of advertising, where the daily obligation to say something different about a product that in no way differs from its competitors can lead to absurdity. An illuminated hoarding I saw high above a busy Melbourne intersection proclaims that a certain health fund ‘cares’. It might be a paragon of health funds but there is no way that an inanimate commercial organisation could ‘care’, though its management might care about making a profit and keeping their jobs secure.

An entity that most emphatically doesn’t care, about most of the people who pay for it anyway, is ‘Your’ ABC. A bit shopworn now, this notion of the ABC’s belonging to ‘us’ is something only the corporation’s ancient rage-maintaining ‘friends’ are fool enough to believe; sensible people know that the overfunded and undertalented behemoth is ‘ours’ only insofar as we pay the taxes squandered on its prodigious budget. This of course without having the remotest say in what the ABC broadcasts. True, you can always turn it off. But then why pay for it? Make it a subscriber channel and let the leftists who love it foot the bill.

Indeed, it’s leftists who have dreamed up a great deal of terminology that is both meaningless and deceitful. ‘Reproductive health’ doesn’t mean that at all but abortion and foeticide. ‘Comedy’ as in comedy festival means utterly unfunny, and if the event is funded by the taxpayer or (which is the same thing) produced by the ABC, coarse, scatological and blasphemous as well. ‘Anti-Zionist’ now means antisemitic. Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ was not the dawn of prosperity for millions but an act of genocide – real genocide, not the pretend sort the left applies to Israel or the settlement of Australia. The various ‘liberations’ wrought by Stalin, Castro and others meant jails crammed full. ‘People’s’ meant and means ‘relating to the tiny oligarchy that dictates to the people’. ‘Democratic’ in national names means undemocratic. Announcing in your emails that you live on ‘unceded land’ in ‘Naarm’ or ‘Meanjin’ – isn’t that the name of an unreadable magazine for leftist literary poseurs? – means, ‘This is as far as I go towards doing anything about real Aboriginal distress, apart of course from traducing Captain Cook.’ Unintentionally it means ‘I am a hypocrite for not clearing out and handing back the land I occupy.’