Creepy speech police

IS the running of our hospitals so perfect that the Health Department should be spending time pushing an ideological barrow unrelated to their actual duties?

Are the affairs of poor vulnerable child clients of what used to be called the Department of Human Services (now merged into DHHS) so well looked after by the state that public servants can pursue identity politics cottage industries with taxpayers’ money within the bureaucracy?

These are questions Premier Daniel Andrews and Health Minister Jill Hennessy should ask themselves with the emergence of a professionally shot mini-documentary on “They Day” by DHHS staff.

The point of the “They Day” campaign is to have nominated days a year where you’re not meant to say “his” or “her” or “he” or “she”.

With serene blissful faces the DHHS women say things that anyone with a basic historical understanding of recent despotic regimes of right and left would find very creepy.

One of the workers refers to the “great work” being done in France where they have a language authority “that specifies the correct way that things should be worded — and that authority’s on board with redoing their language”.

We have seen the next step of what could be dubbed the “pronoun wars” in Canadian universities where staff now fear criminal sanctions if they don’t use “alternative pronouns” such as “zie” or “xem”.

There is nothing wrong with people of their own volition choosing to refer to someone as “they” instead of “him” or “her”.

Language evolves organically and people are basically polite.

It becomes creepy though when government-backed campaigns seek to decide for us which words should come out of our mouths. This campaign is not really about etiquette or being nice to people who identify differently. Just like Safe Schools wasn’t purely about stopping kids being bullied.

It is about using the apparatus of the state to pursue fringe agendas in an autocratic way against the wishes of the overwhelming majority.