It is a truth universally acknowledged that a ‘single source of truth’ formerly in possession of a left-wing Kiwi prime minister, must be in want of a university job.   And who better to provide that job than the University of Sydney and its Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott, the man who handled the pro-Palestinian encampments at his uni with all the fawning courage and genuflecting aplomb of a Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice?

What job, you ask, is Australia’s oldest university offering to the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern? Well, Dame Jacinda Ardern (yep, it’s another universal truth that oh-so-many left-wingers love those status symbol titles) will be joining Sydney Uni’s School of Public Health in the medicine and health faculty, ‘with a focus on finding new ways to address global health challenges centred on equity, inclusion and wellbeing’. Apparently Mark Scott thinks her ‘empathetic leadership skills’ can help build social cohesion and civic trust. The claim seems to be that Ardern has ‘empathy’ for those who don’t share her worldview.

This will be news to all those myriad Kiwis who thought she was nothing short of an illiberal thug in the way she handled Covid. Readers who’ve recovered from Covid PTSD will recall how she went head-to-head with Victoria’s Dan Andrews for the title of ‘Best Cover Band Mimicking the Communist Chinese Politburo’s Covid Response’. Of course no one was really in Dan’s league on that one. The poor woman never had a chance. Still, Ardern gave it her best shot. She locked people in their homes for months. She spent and printed money in an economy-wrecking way that managed to supercharge asset inflation and so amounted to the biggest transfer of wealth from poor to rich and from young to old probably in the country’s history – which is a tad ironic for a lefty politician. Oh, and let’s not forget her blatant jettisoning of the principle of ‘informed consent’ when it came to her country’s vaccine mandates. All that while going a long way toward destroying the public’s trust in the political, legal, journalistic and public health castes. So yes, you could describe her track record on all that in many ways. But ‘inclusion’ would not be one of them. Heck, I’m not sure ‘empathetic leadership skills’ would make the top ten descriptors either.

In fact, during her years as PM Ms Ardern built so much social cohesion and civic trust across the Tasman that she thought it best to leave the country. She apparently wouldn’t be able to bear all the ‘admiration for her courage and humanity’ (more or less Mark Scott’s words about her, not mine) that her fellow Kiwi citizens would have showered on her had she stayed.

Seriously, though, is Mark Scott trying to be the next Mel Brooks with this Ardern appointment? Is he taking the piss with his claim that ‘for our students, the opportunity to learn from Dame Jacinda is exceptional’? Learn what exactly? At least half of the country she led would saw off their own right arms before they voted for her again. This realisation about the level of Covid heavy-handedness does, I concede, take many voters quite a while to realise but once realised the anger and disdain are palpable.  Just ask Dan Andrews. Mark Scott and his whole ABC social bubble are clueless on this for the simple reason that this social circle paid none of the costs of the lockdown thuggery. Unlike small business owners they all kept their jobs. They didn’t lose their business and the house they’d used to secure the loans. They weren’t poor, or young and losing a year of schooling. They got to work from home, another terrible legacy of the lockdown illiberalism and one that has cannibalised this country’s productivity. It tells you all you need to know about our universities that the head guy of our oldest and arguably most prestigious uni would make this sort of offer to Ardern. And then with a straight face claim that she will help ‘build empathetic leadership skills and civic trust’. Frankly, I have a better shot of winning a gold medal in the 2028 Summer Olympics.

And here’s the particular claim that should have alerted anyone leading an institution of higher learning – probably not the most apt description, I concede, for any of our universities in today’s DEI, ‘Indigenise the curriculum’, let’s-sell-as-many-visas-as-we-can academic world. It was when Ardern made the ridiculous claim during the lockdown mania that she and her government and her approved media mouthpieces ‘will continue to be your single source of truth’. This is authoritarianism in a phrase. It runs directly up against the philosopher of science Karl Popper’s famous dictum that the cornerstone of scientific knowledge is a claim’s ability to be falsified; that it must be open to being tested and potentially proven to be wrong. If there’s no capacity to disprove claims by holding them up against the empirical evidence and new theories it is religion, not science. That, readers, is what Mark Scott and Sydney University have hired – someone who propounded a new religion. And then had to sit back and watch so many of its key tenets disproved: that masks worked; and that social distancing worked, as opposed to being pulled out of some public health guru’s rear end, with the permitted distance simply made-up out of thin air. That vaccines stopped transmission. That school closures were best practice. That the young were equally as vulnerable as the old and obese – as opposed to about a thousand to ten thousand times less at risk. That the long-term effects of this thuggery and heavy-handedness would not hit the young and poor the hardest. The list of assertions our supposed ‘betters’ in the public health caste, the political caste and the fearmongering journalistic caste got wrong goes on and on and on.

‘I will be your single source of truth’ is about the most disqualifying sentiment I can think of for anyone working in a proper university. (So that’s a potential out for Vice-Chancellor Scott, I know.) Disgraces like this happen when universities become completely captured by one side of the political divide. Recently Yale and Princeton were found to be employing not a single Republican-donating academic (this is public information in the US) across their entire campuses. Not one! US law schools are about 36:1 Democrat-donating to Republican. My first-hand experience is that Australian universities are about the same here.

And so a left-wing NZ ex-PM who was nothing less than a thug during Covid gets offered an academic job here. You tell me if you think a conservative ex-politician has remotely the same post-politics chances of uni employment as the lefty ones. My firmly held view for some time now has been that anyone donating money to our universities is making the country worse, not better. (Are our rich readers understanding this?) Money is fungible. You’ll be giving money to a world in which two-thirds of our unis came out for the Voice, the other third faking neutrality. This, readers, is a truth that any conservative working in our universities universally acknowledges. Lament it with me. But it is what it is. Mark Scott just gave us the latest iteration.