Vasily Ivanovich Surikov, Morning of the Streltsy Execution, 1881, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Down with the peasants, schismatics, heretics … and renegades!

By Gary Scarrabelotti

Thank you, AXIOS. I could not have made the point better.

“A second Donald Trump presidency would usher in a new type of class warfare — empowering populists to steamroll mainstream experts on issues such as climate change, economics and public health.” (Here.)

There was I, with furrowed brow, puzzling how to bring to light the reasons behind Australia’s Misinformation & Disinformation Bill 2024. Then some foreign scribbler got in ahead of me.

Well, I am grateful for the flash of insight. I can now get straight to the point.

On the list

This Bill is an ideas reconstruction and control Bill.  It has been drafted not because you and I might be ignorant and foolish and need tutoring by the knowledgeable and wise.  The condition of your faculties and mine is not the issue.  It’s about power.

Let’s remind ourselves about the key targets of the Bill.

As I’ve already argued (here), the most immediate, most pressing practical purpose of the Bill is to clamp down on persistent and intensifying criticism of the “Covid response”, including the mass vaccination campaign and its consequences.  But that’s not the whole of it. Protecting against “harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of public health measures” appears second on the Bill’s to-do list.

The Bill actually declares six objectives.  One (the sixth) aims to protect the banking system and financial markets from ‘Mis & Dis’.

So, watch yourself – no speculating on-line about why banks are closing branches and limiting access to cash!

Another, (the third) is where the Bill doubles as an anti- ‘hate speech’ measure.  Here the aim is to protect specified social groups from “vilification”.

So, watch yourself – no speaking up on-line against confused teenagers wanting a ‘sex change’!

Heading, however, the government’s schedule of social menaces is “harm to the operation and integrity of [the …] electoral or referendum process.”

Note the term “referendum”.  As in “referendum on the ‘Voice’ ”, 14 October 2023.

That was the day when above 60 percent of voters blacked the eye of Labor — and associated nabobs from across the political spectrum — for wanting to insert into the Constitution a racially-selected third legislative chamber.

So, the Albo government has set it out unmistakably: Priority 1, elections and referenda, and Priority 2, the “efficacy of public health measures”.

Motives

To translate, Priority 1 – anger, and Priority 2 — fear: anger that the electorate gave a decisive No to the “Voice”; and fear that the unexamined aftermath of the Covid ‘crisis’ – in destroyed livelihoods, vaccine injuries and excess deaths — will catch up one day with the chief actors.

As I say, the latter is of enduring and greater real danger to the Political Class which led us into the Covid smash-up.  The former could be shaken off as a bad blunder from which, however, by skilled exercise of the political craft, recovery is feasible.

With our Political Class, however, we are not dealing with a guild of high-level practitioners.  What we’ve got is something that combines the features of a complacent ruling caste and a priesthood: they claim to know the truth, so they assert the right to rule.

In the eyes, accordingly, of the Albanese government, and its phalanx of advocates for the “Voice”, the No vote amounted to lèse-majesté: a blow directed against the very legitimacy of their ‘reign’, their government and their influence over the culture.

From their perspective, the No voters are a rebellious peasantry stirred up by preachers of heresy and schism — some from the fringes of civilised society, others renegades from within the Political Class itself.  Add “Covid deniers” to the Noes, and the view from the Canberra Kremlin is disturbing:

‘They’re threatening our authority; we need administrative measures.’

And so, they appear: draft laws to prop up the pseudo-theocracy and its orthodoxies by turning social media into a censorship machine.

The Spectrum

The Albanese government and the élite advocates of the Yes vote make up, obviously, only part of our Political Class. Liberals, Nationals and Greens also very much belong to it.

Ruling classes are rarely models of internal harmony.  Their membership shares no more than, perhaps, two defining principles: a sense of superiority and a conviction that only members of their class should rule. Otherwise, their in-house struggles over which parties or factions get to exercise the regnant power can be fierce at times, even when their differences over public policy tend to zero.

As our political system has grown older and decrepitude has taken hold, these internal combats have assumed an increasingly ritual character.  At certain formal intervals, the tournament is suspended and the voters called upon to judge who carries off the prize — executive power. Then a new jousting season begins.  As a way of averting civil strife, the system (to give it its due) has worked well for us, so far.

A potentially serious problem arises, however, when elements within the Ruling Class cannot reconcile themselves to such policy differences as they have with their peers and break away to side with the peasants, heretics and schismatics to derail some project coveted by their rivals for power.  That happened over the “Voice” and imaged (briefly, alarmingly) a scenario under which the legitimacy of the existing Political Class could evaporate.

” … our political system has grown older and decrepitude has taken hold …”

The renegades – the “Constitutionalists”, let’s call them — don’t have, unfortunately, the “Right Stuff” for splitting decisively with the Political Class and building an alternative: one founded upon the peasants, heretics and schismatics with themselves at the head.

Here’s the problem.  The Constitutionalists believed without question, along with the rest of their Class, in the Covid narrative; they led, in fact, Australia’s national drive to make the rest of us conform to it; and, finally, modelling the credulity and conformity they expected of others, got themselves thoroughly vaxed. They committed themselves so far that they can’t now retreat.  As a result, they need, as much as the rest of their Class, the protection offered by a Mis & Dis Bill against an insurgency that threatens (allegedly) harm “to the efficacy of public health measures”.

Sure, our Constitutionalists want to run feisty election campaigns and they get a special kick out of referenda because they offer an uncommon opportunity for genuine political struggle of a kind which they can often win. So, the renegades are not going to be happy with Item 1 of Mis & Dis 2024.

My hunch, then, is that the Constitutionalist faction within the Ruling Class is going to be torn over this legislation.  They are going both to want it and not to want it.  They will want protection over the Covid matter, but they won’t want to lose the jois de guerre of battling their hereditary political enemies – let’s call these the “Left Tendency” — when elections and referenda occur according to their seasons.

The Others

The politicians of the Political Class, however, are not the only ones troubled in their calculations over the Noes and Covid critics.  So too are their indispensable auxiliaries: their politically affiliated cadres of “experts”.

This group operates in the media and academy, in the bureaucracy and professions, and among the business élite.  Its members make up a so-called “knowledge class” and being “knowers” they have an acute sense of their fitness for being heard – and for being heard with effect.  They reckon themselves the best qualified to develop and refine government policy and to set implementation protocols.  That all depends, though, upon co-option into the Political Class itself – and, more importantly, into whatever faction thereof happens to be governing at any particular time.  Some auxiliaries lean toward the Constitutionalists, but by far the greater part align with the Left Tendency.

Now, for Left Tendency experts, the No vote struck like an earthquake.  Of course, they were affronted by the fact that the vox populi had crashed the “Voice” proposal they had so carefully crafted and campaigned for.

How dare they!

But what really stunned the experts was to see, modelled before their very eyes, how their influence within the Political Class could be pulverised were the Constitutionalists decisively to break with the establishment to forge a popular movement – one embodying Noes, Covid critics and their respective networks of allied experts: a scenario dreadful to contemplate!

A case of this post-referendum shell shock was reported in The Weekend Australian (12−13 October 2024).

Professor Megan Davis, pro vice-chancellor of the University of NSW – described as “architect” of the “Voice”, “renowned constitutional lawyer” and “Harvard Law visiting professor’ — whinged and whined at a public speaking event about how proponents of the “Voice” had been comprehensively out-campaigned by Advance Australia which had advocated the No case.

Davis attributed to Advance Australia a “Trumpian” onslaught of “lies and misinformation”.  To stamp out which in the future – and to protect the great and the good like herself from being outclassed in future public debates — required legislation of the kind presently before parliament in the shape of Mis & Dis 2024.

Bear in mind the term “Trumpian”.  She could just have easily substituted Hilary Clinton’s “deplorables”.  These terms are code:

‘We know the truth, you don’t.  We rule — and we’ll enforce our right.  There’ll be no steamrolling of our “mainstream experts”, no rejecting of our sacred doctrines.’

Let’s be clear, absent of all hyperbole, Mis & Dis 2024 is class warfare legislation coloured with alt-religious fanaticism.