As our brave and fearless editor has recently pointed out, the most monocultural parts of Australia are the institutions captured, and run, by the progressive left. It’s Labor and the Greens, and their devotees in the public service, universities, teachers’ unions, legacy media, arts world and the War Memorial upper echelon, who oversee wall-to-wall sameness. Identikit sameness is what you see there. Near-on everyone in this monocultural, drab homogeneity of a little world worships at the altar of the usual progressive left shibboleths – the declared pronoun asininity, the feigned belief in gender fluidity, the half-hourly acknowledgements of country, the rather recent uninformed zealotry against all things Israel (the only democracy in the Middle East where a fifth of the population are Arabs who show no inclination to leave and gays can take lifts to the building’s top floor without breaking into a sweat). The list goes on and on and is well-known to all readers.

Let’s just say that you either genuflect at the foot of DEI or you’re not welcome. Can you get more mono than that? Because remember what DEI is. It’s a barely disguised set of anti-merit affirmative action policies that travel under the moniker of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. These labels are cleverly chosen to mislead. You see in practice these terms deliver the exact opposite of what they purport to signal, namely no diversity of opinion; no equality of opportunity, but rather an identity politics, group-based ‘equity’ attempt to achieve equality of outcome for groups (not individuals); and absolutely no inclusion for dissenters or apostates. Good luck getting a deanship at one of our universities if you say you’re opposed to this orthodoxy. Heck, good luck as an open conservative getting a job at the ABC. Or at any of our universities. Or a place in the limelight of any Aussie writers’ festival or biennale.

Put the point no higher than this. One Nation and Pauline are the most rank of rank amateurs when it comes to embracing monoculturalism. It’s the progressive left and their vehicles of choice – Labor and the Greens – which put the mono into today’s Aussie culture and its establishment caste. And I say this as someone who’s worked the last 27 years in universities around the Anglosphere. Each year is woker and worse than the one before (including during each one of the nine years we recently had Coalition governments in this country). DEI is and has been a disaster and yet there are zero signs any Liberal opposition will do anything about it.  (Unlike Mr Trump who has fought hard against it in the public service and American universities. Really hard. That’s another reason the intelligentsia – their description, not mine – hate the Don.)

At any rate, why don’t we take a look at the one state government that has a Liberal-National government to see how much they’re fighting back on the cultural front?  I refer to the LNP David Crisafulli government in my state of Queensland. (And yes, readers, I’m aware of Tasmania and its nominally Liberal state government, but so woke-left is it that the kindest thing we can do is to pass over its actions in polite silence.) We’re coming up to two years in office for Team Crisafulli and so far it would be fair to say that the Queensland Premier is an excellent caretaker of Labor’s legacy. Sure, that still makes this the best elected government in the country. But that just shows you the woeful state of play of politics at the moment. Crisafulli is better than all the rest and yet he’d be lucky to score a grade of C+ so far.

Why do you say that, Jim? Well, so much of the former Labor government’s bad legislation is still in place. Any reform of the education curriculum? Nope. What about reform of the teacher training systems which seem wholly designed to winnow out any would-be teacher who rejects woke idiocies of the sort I outlined above? Nope. Nothing there either. Anything at all, any scrap of a hint of an iota of a soupçon, on university reforms in the state or on winding back net zero at the state level? No!

Okay, what about some sanity as regards the Great Barrier Reef which we now know has been growing noticeably just as Peter Ridd said it would (the man the federal Coalition government allowed to be fired by his uni for saying what was understood by the woke worldview to be the unsayable)? Alas, it seems that the Crisafulli government would prefer to just keep shovelling hundreds of millions of dollars to the ‘save the reef’ institutions.

I’ll keep going. I know of no actions being taken to remove all the DEI crap from the Queensland public service. As any right-of-centre person working there will tell you – secretly, after you perform the secret Masons-like handshake proving you’re not a progressive-left wokester who might report your apostasy – this DEI has permeated all levels of the public service. Why not show some Trump-like fight and start unwinding some of it? Too scary and difficult, Davey?

Or hey, here’s one that really bugs me. Queensland Labor brought in a statutory bill of rights without explicitly making it an election issue. What comes in that way can go out that way. But the Crisafulli LNP have done nothing about it. And this despite Labor having been in office long enough to appoint the vast majority of judges who will interpret this legal instrument. You’d think self-interest might spur these guys on. Nope.

The push-back or turning back the clock is minute. Yes, we need to give them credit for stopping the use of puberty blockers. And there’s some good stuff being done to shore up the electricity system. But that’s a pretty sparse tally on the culture war front. Worse, Labor governments know that Coalition ones are gutless and never wind back the clock. The left comes into office and lets rip across a host of culture war fronts and climate doomsterism ones. Then if any Coalition government tries to unwind anything they insincerely yell ‘you righties are obsessed with the culture wars’. No. We voters on the right want some backbone from our side and a bit of turning the clock back on all these fronts.

Yet we don’t see it and we have no real reason to expect it from any Liberal opposition at the moment. Which is why One Nation is so high in the polls. Look, let me make this prediction. At the next state election the Crisafulli government should be most worried about One Nation. If Queensland’s One Nation scores a quarter of first preferences anything could happen, including a Labor win. Yet Crisafulli is right now basically pushing us conservative voters into that camp by his lame, inert, do-nothingness.

We want political leaders who’ll fight mano-a-mano. Not ones who’ll succumb mono and more mono.