Let me pick out just two examples of ours being a mad, mad, mad, mad world – one here in Australia and one in the US. We’ll start at home. It is frustrating beyond belief that so many MPs in the Liberal party room think they must always toe whatever line the ABC and the Labor party lay down. Some mooted limit on free speech? Where do we sign up? What about a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion? Dumb, dumber and Turnbull dumbest. But the Libs helped make this the focus. It was a mistake and a mistake that many pointed out in the aftermath of the Bondi slaughter. Labor was always going to want to extend the focus of that massacre well beyond – or better still, away from – Islamic terror. It should have been a Royal Commission on Islamic Terror in Australia. Or one on the failings of mass inwards migration and the ridiculousness of all cultural relativist claims, though that was never going to happen.

Instead, we got this mess of a current royal commission. The shift to ‘social cohesion’ has removed the focus from the radical elements in Islam. To Labor’s delight we have also had a little misdirection played on us, what with the government and royal commission now pretending there’s some supposed equivalence between antisemitism and so-called Islamophobia – leave aside how inapt that last term is as many fears of extreme Islam are clearly not irrational in any way. (A ‘phobia’ refers to an irrational fear, right?)

So with metronomic predictability, the obvious reason why there were mass murders on Bondi Beach, namely radical Islam and this country’s mass immigration schemes, has been virtually airbrushed out of sight. Poof! Hardly a word of this gets a mention. It’s all ‘racial hatred’, ‘social cohesion’, ‘Islamophobia’. I’ll be blunt. Without the immigration intake of the last two decades there wouldn’t be these widespread antisemitic outrages we are now seeing.

It is not Muslims who are being shot; who are afraid to tell hospitals their true religion lest it trigger some evil from the medical staff; who are afraid of physical violence if they wear public displays of their faith; whose schools virtually need round-the-clock top security. No, it’s the Jews. And it’s a disgrace.

Fifty years ago there was a soft sort of antisemitism – ‘we don’t want too many in our golf club, do we old boy?’ Today it’s shootings, stabbings, violent threats, brutal and life-threatening antisemitism.

And by shifting the focus away from where it should have been (yes, with the Coalition yet again showing no backbone), and onto this Kumbaya socially cohesiony ‘let’s all not be racists guys’ mush, that’s what we’ll get from it. More mush. Mush in, mush out. MIMO.

There are also likely to be proposals that make inroads on free speech and that are counterproductive (for Jews I mean, though for most of the rest of us too). Sure, there’ll be perfunctory genuflections in the direction of supporting free speech. But the Commission’s proposals will aim to cut into its scope.  And new powers will be given to vice-chancellors and others to try to, you know, stop nasty racists. But all such powers will be discretionarily enforced. The slightest hint of criticisms of Islam or Islamic actors will get one response. Attacks on Jews will get another. Remember, every single vice-chancellor in this country had the power to shut down the pro-Palestinian encampments on day one. Instead, these people whom I had never observed caring two figs for free speech all became instant Hamlets, torn with indecision due to free speech concerns.

This despite even US 1st Amendment jurisprudence not giving any protection to trespassers who come onto your property with loudspeakers, shout vile things through the door and terrify young Jewish kids. Just try this thought experiment. How many of these encampments do you reckon would have been taken down on day one if they’d been protesting against the lockdowns? Or vaccine mandates? Or mass inwards immigration? Or too few (make that almost no) conservative professors on campus? Yep, all of them.

We never needed this expensive boondoggle of a royal commission because it was clear from day one that what caused Bondi were 1) far too much mass immigration from cultures that share too few Western outlooks and often bring a loathing of Jews; and 2) an unwillingness to enforce existing laws (rather than some need for more s.18C hate speech type idiocies or propaganda-like government advertising campaigns and yet more quango bureaucracies).

If the total and complete silence and uselessness of the Australian Human Rights Commission during the biggest inroads on all our civil liberties in this country’s history during lockdowns doesn’t make you a sceptic of these massively overpaid commissioners who end up always taking the progressive left line on everything, nothing will.

Just writing all that got my blood pressure up. So I will finish on a lighter note from the US. A sports broadcaster there has highlighted the mad trans-activist mindset by offering ten million US dollars of his own money to the best women’s basketball players in the WNBA. All they need to do is to play and beat a boys high school team of his choosing. Winners get all the money (and he’ll make it back on pay-per-view revenue he thinks). Because men are on average considerably bigger, faster and stronger than women, this broadcaster reckons the women will be destroyed, and the 16-year-old boys will win massively. And, he guesses, that will put the lie to all the trans-activist propaganda that downplays the unfairness to women of men (or men who’ve transitioned) playing in women’s competitions.

Well, first off, he’s right about the outcome. I played varsity basketball in Canada for just a middle-of-the-pack uni. One summer we played against the Canadian women’s team. We could have won by any score we wanted. Or consider that the fastest women’s 100 metre time in history is one that hundreds and hundreds of US high school boys could beat. Or that the world champion US women’s soccer team got pummelled by a random Texas boys high school team. These male advantages never fully go away.

Of course the WNBA is run by such incredibly woke losers that the top administrators and many of the players keep coming out in support of men who claim to be women being allowed to play in their league. Their bluff has just been called because a couple of older, ex-NBA players (one 6 foot 10) have just announced they’re women and want to play in the WNBA (where a top player can make half a million a year). All of a sudden the virtue-signalling looks like coming home to roost and collapsing the whole league. One wit described this mess as, ‘men who are pretending to pretend to be women are mocking men who are really pretending to be women’. Who would have guessed twenty years ago that the left side of politics would not be able to tell you what a woman was? Or that they’d believe there are 37-plus genders?  (I stick to the word ‘sex’ as ‘gender’ was a grammatical term hijacked by the progressive lefties.)

It’s madness all the way down, here and in the US.