Here are a few things that get my goat.  They really annoy me. Start with the strange coalition between open-borders left-wing progressives and chamber of commerce types (some, but fewer these days, nominally conservative) about how ‘There are jobs locals won’t do’. A mere moment’s thought tells you that’s wrong. Such claims aren’t that far off the antebellum, pre-US Civil War queries from some in the South about ‘Who will pick the cotton if we end slavery?’ It’s simple. In market economies all jobs will be filled if you offer to pay enough. All of them without exception. It’s just supply and demand. This past Christmas my wife and I were in northern Norway.  All the hotels were cleaned by locals. All the hard, tough, unattractive jobs were done by them too. Everyone, and most definitely tourists, just had to pay more. You can’t help thinking that what some big-end-of-town types on huge pay packets don’t like is the higher wages. Mass immigration keeps down wages. It also brings with it all sorts of costs, very few of which (at least in the short term) have to be borne by rich, white, inner-city types who seem to think emoting is the highest form of virtue.

It’s no coincidence, and not unrelated to what I just said, that after just 150 days of President Trump’s second term real wages (as announced last week by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) are up almost two per cent so far this year. That’s the strongest per annum growth in sixty years. Under President Biden hourly wages were down nearly two per cent. In fact, no other US president has seen a rise in hourly wages since Richard Nixon. Well, no other president save for Trump in his first term (when they were up 1.3 per cent). And this is not a coincidence because blue-collar wages are undoubtedly related to mass illegal and legal immigration. Biden (I’d say intentionally, you can disagree) let in between 12 and 18 million illegals in four years. Trump has now completely closed the border. No one is coming in. Upwards of one million have self-deported or been deported with the Trump administration all-in on going after every person who came in illegally. It’s an astounding achievement that many ‘moderate’, ‘wet’, ‘Rockefeller’ Republicans (and virtually every breathing Democrat) promised was not possible. Ha! It just required bravery and will and is, by itself, good reason to be delighted that Orange Man Bad won last November. It’s also why Trump has remade the Republican party – the Mitt Romney/George W. wing is nearly extinct – and scored record high results at the last election with black men, Hispanics, and whites who did not attend college. If you have time, watch Treasury Secretary Bessent on Pod Force One with Miranda Devine.

Here’s another thing that annoys me. I refer to all the many anti-Israel blatherers in the media, government and universities. I’ll be blunt. I really, really admire Israel. It’s the only Middle-East democracy surrounded by a sea of authoritarian Arab countries who wish it did not exist. There are more civil liberties (more ‘human rights’ if you insist on that flabby, inflated language) in Israel, by far, than in any surrounding country and myriad more than in the West Bank or Gaza. Sometimes incredulity, not annoyance, is the proper response to groups such as ‘Queers for Palestine’ or ‘Feminists for Iran’. That and a desire to have such people spend a few months in these places. I also admire the fact that Israel seems to have an intelligence service fit for purpose (unlike the CIA or MI6 or anything in Australia). The audacity and cleverness and ability to keep secrets that allowed them to set up drone bases in Iran or create an actual pager company nearly beggars belief. But, of course, it’s a bit like in the race of life always betting on self-interest, because it’s the one trying. Israel is fighting for its survival. Its military is more careful of civilian lives, orders of magnitude more careful, than the Allies were in the second world war when we (rightfully) bombed Dresden or dropped an atomic bomb on Japan to end the war. Yet you get these pettifogging pro-Palestinian rich inner-city types in the West who pretend Israel can turn the other cheek. Repeatedly. Even after 7 October. Of course Israel had to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Were Australia in Israel’s position we’d have the same sort of bipartisan consensus here that they have in Israel.

It goes without saying that I was not just annoyed but infuriated by the way in which Australia’s university vice-chancellor caste allowed Palestinian encampments on campus under the patently wrong guise that it was a free-speech issue. One, we all know any conservative cause that took over a campus would be moved on immediately. Secondly, even the US First Amendment does not allow anyone to trespass and park themselves on your porch with a loudspeaker shouting their views. These things should have been removed within days. It was annoying on steroids that they weren’t.

Let’s finish with this third source of Jimbo crankiness. Why does anyone take the core, underlying positions of the transgender movement seriously? You have to be 18 to get a tattoo but you can be younger, sometimes way younger, to have your genitals chopped off, or be made sterile, and pumped full of drugs. (You also have to be 18 to vote, join the army or be conscripted, and drink alcohol.) And as I’ve said before, how plausible is it to believe claims that ‘I feel I’ve been born into the wrong body’ should trump facts imposed on all of us by the external, causal world – facts such as the trillions of cells in your body being all XX or XY, facts about males statistically being bigger, faster and stronger than females and facts about the effects of testosterone on strength and muscle twitch speed and aggressiveness. And why do feelings and one’s subjective druthers win out for so many when it comes to ‘self-identifying your gender’ but near on no one allows it when it comes to race (sorry, you don’t become a Cherokee Elizabeth Warren just because you want to be one, for affirmative action benefits reasons or any others) or age (so 28-year-olds can’t compete, and win, against 12-year-olds, however they ‘self-identify’).

Thirty, even twenty years ago, people across the political spectrum would have laughed at you if you’d suggested half of society would lose its mind in this way – partly, no doubt, in the service of being as caring as possible. But live and let live, which I support for those over 18, is different by far from the ‘what’s your pronouns’ implicit demand that others celebrate all choices made and ignore imposed facts about the world, pretending that a few drugs and some surgery are creating the real thing, not a poor facsimile copy.

As I said above, we are at a stage in the West where bravery is the most important virtue – certainly for politicians but also for all of us citizens too. And if the Covid craziness and lockdowns showed us anything, it is that far, far too few regular Australians were prepared to be brave. Time to fix that pusillanimity.