Biology. Mathematics. Economics. English. History. Physics. Geology. Australians of a certain age will remember having had these subjects drummed into them from a very early age, starting in primary school or in some cases even earlier. Such Australians will remember each different-coloured exercise book labelled with one of those topics, and in later years, each dreaded end-of-year exam. These subjects were the staples of our education and the backbone of the academic institutions of this nation.

Not any longer, apparently. There isn’t a week that goes past when one or more of these pillars of our knowledge bank doesn’t come crashing down, under heavy fire from the forces of leftist ‘progressivism’, shattering the illusion that we live in a reliable world with shared understandings of immutable and indisputable concrete truths.

This week was an absolute classic, with the basic ingredients of elemental biology being denied and overturned by government and institutions alike. This was the week when highly paid ministers and senior public servants sat in our parliaments and decreed that up is down, black is white and hot is cold. Or they may as well have done: yes, they insisted with officious straight faces that men are women and, furthermore, that men can ‘potentially’ get pregnant.

Here was the astonishing exchange between Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash at Senate Estimates (now the single most compelling and arguably important function of our federal parliament) and the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Anna Cody.

Anna Cody: ‘If someone applies for a job and it is a trans woman and she is asked whether or not she intends to have children and if she replies, “Yes I do” and then doesn’t get the job because that employer doesn’t want to employ women who may be of child-bearing age then she may have been subjected to unlawful discrimination on the basis of potential pregnancy’.

Michaelia Cash: ‘I’m very confused. A biological male can’t become pregnant.’

Anna Cody: ‘But the grounds of pregnancy includes potential pregnancy as well as pregnancy.’

Michaelia Cash: ‘If you can’t become pregnant, then how can you become potentially pregnant?’

Anna Cody: ‘It’s about the unlawful treatment by the employer. If someone is treated unfairly on the basis of pregnancy, or potential pregnancy, then that is unlawful discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.’

Michaelia Cash: ‘So if a bloke came in… and they said are you going to have children… and he said, “Yeah maybe”, are you saying he could also claim that ground?’

Anna Cody (after hesitating, then correcting herself): ‘No, a man if he’s seeking a position, then it’s not going to apply to a man.’

Michaelia Cash: ‘But they’re both biological men. It makes no sense. A biological man can’t get pregnant. Am I correct? Because if I’m not, then I’ve got to go back to school, I seriously do, because I missed that lesson in biology. I went to a convent school, the nuns may not have told me about it. But you said a biological man can’t get pregnant.’

Anna Cody: ‘That’s correct, Senator, but someone who is a trans woman may be assumed to be pregnant or to be able to be pregnant.’

This frightening Monty Pythonesque circular logic was then compounded by her boss, the President of the Australian Human Rights Commissioner himself, Hugh de Kretser, who was bluntly asked, ‘What is a woman?’ Krester replied, ‘An adult female human,’ before rapidly adding, illogically,  ‘…and includes a transgender woman’.

To complete this triumvirate of ideologues, also this week in the NSW Parliament, Labor’s Minister for Women, Jodie Harrison, made this declaration: ‘I would say as the Minister for Women, I am the Minister for (and here she appeared to lose her confidence a little and stammered) uh, for, uh, well, I am the Minister for, for Women, and this government views that, um, women include trans women.’

The combined annual salary and perks of these three dimwits, who would have been laughed out of the primary school classroom of old for spouting such stupidity, would be nigh on $2 million of taxpayer money. This is how thoroughly degraded our public institutions have become, utterly compromised and captured by the idiocy of woke identity politics.

Geology and Physics also took a pounding this week, with the government detonating a perfectly good coal-fired power station because the equally idiotic and thoroughly debunked climate doomsday agenda had made the Liddell power station no longer economically viable. On top of which we learned that the asinine Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen will be frittering away a lazy $147 million in his role as President of the Negotiations for Cop 31, the climate conference to be held in Turkey later in the year that this government and country should – if common sense were to prevail – be having nothing to do with.

Australia, like many Western countries, is now in an era where those who were educated under an ideologically driven education system are running the show. When political leaders are prepared to spout ideology over common sense, we are all in trouble. It might be time to dig out those old exercise books and brush up on a few topics while we still can.