Australia: mad, and so stupid
M NOT sure I recognise this Australia any more – or want to. It seems we’re losing not just our brains but our moral bearings.
It’s not just this mad panic about the coronavirus that’s stunned me. But that’s sure scary enough.
I thought we were laid-back and generous, but now I see people brawling over the last dunny paper in a shop.
It’s every man and woman for themselves as hordes of shoppers strip supermarkets each day of more toilet paper than they’ll need for a month. Not just selfish but stupid.
Talking about stupid, what can you say about the people lining up outside hospitals to be tested for a virus that so far – according to the Chief Medical Officer – has seen precisely one Australian infect another Australia out in the Australian streets?
Seriously, people! If you really think coronavirus is wafting through our ‘burbs, does it make sense to queue with other people who fear they’ve caught it, too?
But like I said, this isn’t the only sign that our brains aren’t what they used to be.
Year after year, we’ve read that our education standards are falling, according to international tests by the Programme for International Student Assessment, and they’re falling not least in science.
And year after year, we find more and more of our most educated people no longer knowing the difference between a fact and an opinion, even arguing now that a man can be a woman merely by thinking they’re one.
No wonder so many people now freak over a biological risk they barely seem willing or able to understand.
But education standards aren’t all that’s crumbling. Let’s broaden the picture.
Do you remember all those conservatives – me included – saying we should at least keep the marriage tradition strong to protect children? For many, that was one argument for being wary of gay marriage.
How dumb that argument turned out to be. It turns out it wasn’t gay marriage that made a joke of marriage, a mere plaything that could be whatever you wanted to call it.
No, leave that job to the pack of straights who filmed and starred in what’s now Australia’s favourite TV show: Married At First Sight, in which couples go through sham marriages and then act like complete ferals.
More than a million Australians, sometimes nearly two million, sit glued to the TV as one “married” MAFS feral after another spills on who cheated on who and who in revenge on their cheating “wife” used her toothbrush to clean the toilet of poo.
That is now the top-rating show on Australian television. Imagine the