Browsing a bookshop online recently, I came across the familiar acknowledgement of the traditional First Nations owners and custodians of the land and the assertion that, ‘Sovereignty was never ceded’. I left the site, never to return, thinking, Mate, the problem is your white guilt, not my white privilege, for I have none.

Over nine million illegal migrants have swarmed across the US southern border during Biden’s presidency. The biggest millstone around the doomed Sunak government is the hundreds of thousands of legal and illegal migrants. Some 550,000 migrants came into Australia last year. And yet still the cry is raised that all three are irredeemably structurally racist countries. India is touted as the world’s fastest growing major economy yet the outflux of large numbers into the West continues. Many explore how to bring over more family members; few are planning to return to the supposedly booming country. I left in 1971 to pursue graduate studies in Canada, returned for a year in 1975 to do some archival and interview research, but aborted the visit when Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency to assume and exercise dictatorial power. Born and having grown up in independent, free India, taking democratic freedoms for granted, I was shocked by the overnight suffocation of the notoriously argumentative Indians. My first academic publication explored that topic and, at a time when the fashion among young graduate students in North America was to sneer at democracy, I wrote a lament for its demise in India. That is what decided the issue of switching to Canadian citizenship. I experienced a déjà vu moment with the military coup in Fiji, having taught at the University of the South Pacific for a few years before moving to New Zealand and then Australia.

My commitment to democratic governance, civil liberties and citizens’ rights is thus grounded in ‘lived experience’. Hence the despair at Westerners’ growing loss of self-confidence to defend their values, heritage, institutions and contributions to net human welfare. The fossil fuel-driven industrial revolution and the Enlightenment freed peasants from the land, women from the home and workers from the village to destroy feudalism, emancipate workers, democratise citizenship and liberate creativity. Europeans’ military superiority enabled them to colonise many peoples. The colonial legacy is mixed rather than uniformly evil or virtuous. Every culture and civilisation has stains in its history. Most borders today are the result of the use of force in the past. That said, is there a country that contributed more to the end of slavery than Britain? How many people from developing countries owe gains in life expectancy, education, income, political rights and life opportunities to intellectual and scientific revolutions in Europe?

Yet Westerners seem intent on feeding the bonfires that are consuming them. There’s almost a palpable end-of-Roman-Empire, fin-de-siècle feel in the air. In the latest global self-reported happiness rankings, the Nordics took the top four positions again. Australians are the tenth-happiest people. The US has dropped out of the top twenty, due primarily to the self-focussed and social media-obsessed under-30s who ranked 62nd globally. Reasons for this include the relentless climate catastrophising and attacks on their ‘privileged oppressor’ identity. Holly Valance describes Greta Thunberg as a ‘demonic little gremlin high priestess of climatism’ who is treated ‘as a goddess in the classrooms’ despite contributing to the epidemic of ‘depression and anxiety’ in children. At an appearance in parliament on 20 March, Rebecca Knox, Chair of Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Authority, said she agrees with a report that her force is ‘institutionally racist’. Asked if white people had any unfair advantages in her force, she said ‘No’. ‘Then how can you be institutionally racist?’ ‘Um, sorry, I might have to get back to you’, she stammered. In New Zealand, the progressive embrace of all things Maori is so deeply internalised that in cross-national group discussions, Kiwi colleagues unthinkingly resort to Maori greetings to start and end messages (kia kaha katoa, kia ora koutou, arohanui). They forget this is gross bad manners because it’s rude and discourteous to speak in a foreign language that excludes some in the group from the conversation. Maybe I should respond in Hindi, including the foreign script?

Trans-activists are erasing the word woman even from motherhood and sexual assaults. Nurses are advised to use words like ‘birthing parents’ and ‘chestfeeding’ as substitutes for mothers and breastfeeding. J.K. Rowling has promised to keep calling transwomen ‘men’ and risk criminal conviction after a new Scottish law that threatens to severely punish factually correct speech that violates legally correct definitions. Recording trans-identifying males as women in rape and murder statistics will distort and mock sex-specific statistics on violent crime. The linguistic gender madness of the crowds is spreading to esteemed medical journals that are banishing the ‘w’ word and associated language. In Canada, a Supreme Court justice gratuitously reprimanded a lower court judge for using the word woman, in a sexual assault case no less, instead of a ‘person with vagina’. That too with the explanation that the single word was confusing in comparison to the clarity of her own preferred phrase. Neither the complainant nor the accused in the case claimed to be transgender and gender identity and language was not an issue before the court. To cap it all, the decision came on International Women’s Day (8 March). I hope someone has forwarded Rowling’s wicked tweet to the judge: ‘Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilised resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses’. Cleanse your memory of the aggressive big trans bullies you see in action on the streets intimidating gender-realist critics. The ultimate emotional blackmail card of trans-terrorists is the threat of self-harm and suicide by vulnerable trans snowflakes. Watch any old Bollywood movie and you will quickly discover that the master of emotional blackmail as the tool of choice for ensuring compliance with parents’ wishes is the Indian family.

New-age feminists attack alleged male privileges but support men who claim to be women under the banal slogan ‘transwomen are women and trans rights are human rights’. The push for more women in boardrooms, meant to redress gender imbalance, is subverted when transwomen are included in the female category in gender-specific lists of CEOs.

In the recent gender gap report on Australian businesses, measured by the median earnings of men and women, gender equity – that is, equality of outcomes – is in practice anti-choice. For most pay differentials today, when paying differently for the same work to men and women with similar qualifications and experience is illegal, are better explained by lifestyle and life balance choices that women make, and very sensibly too.