Deborah Welsh

Sanity in Murdoch publications is rare so should be shared 👇🏽 Opinion: Preposterous political ploy selfish Australians are falling for I was standing in a shop queue recently when a middle-aged bloke – clearly angry at life and wanting the world to know it – picked up a collection tin for women’s cancer research. “Why is it always about women?” he groaned. “Why don’t they have anything for men?” And that tells you everything you need to know about Australia’s mad rush to the loony right of politics. First, it shows a wilful ignorance of reality. Cancer research affecting males (exclusively or primarily) actually receives more funding than that affecting females. Second, it suggests a lack of both logic and empathy. Too many people cannot see – sometimes literally – beyond their own noses. Even a child knows proof of non-existence is not found in an object’s absence. Indeed, a lack of empathy is often a function of a poor education. Either way, too many Australians lack the basic empathy to see another point of view. Are striking workers greedy, or might they have a legitimate complaint about pay and conditions? The Swiss theorist Jean Piaget – pounded into every teaching student – found that well-rounded humans should be empathetic by age five. But I guess Piaget didn’t spend a lot of time in Australia, where debate rails between kicking out foreign students (despite their $55bn annual boost to the local economy) and dumping protections for LGBTQIA+ people whose rights in no way subtract from yours. Think about it. Does a beer manufacturer supporting trans people’s rights make your day harder? And would your daily life really be worse if a First Nations Voice to Parliament offered advice, on Indigenous matters only, that politicians could so easily reject? What is it about our inability to see ourselves in the shoes of another person – someone even more vulnerable than us who, in all likelihood, is also the battling the cost of living? As hard as life is for you, there are countless for whom it’s much harder. Every day there are Australians – law-abiding taxpayers who love their kids and their pets and who keep their head down – who are forced to battle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and cruel stereotypes around disability, autism and mental illness. And it’s through this preposterous hatred of others that populist politicians hoodwink angry Australians – just for votes and the election-funding dollars that come with them. And we’re falling for it. So you’re not alone if you’ve noticed people just don’t care any more. Studies have found human empathy across Western civilisation has almost halved in recent decades, fuelled initially by the individualistic, dog-eat-dog free market of the 1980s, and accelerated by social media networks that position us literally at the centre of our own digital world. Who cares about the international student – paying dearly to study at an Australian university in order to build a better life back home – as long as we can post pictures of our holiday. Be honest, when was the last time you dropped cash into a charity tin or tips jar? I’ve been thinking about blinkered views since the recent student protests against One Nation. Public comment was appalling in its opposition not just to what young people were saying, but in students’ right to say it. We have the right to respectfully express counter-opinions indicating where protesters are wrong on logic, but we can’t demand others be stripped of a right to lawful protest. I guarantee public opinion would be very different if young One Nation members marched in support of Australia Day or the flag. While there are legitimate questions around school students being off-campus during school hours, Article 15 of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child protect the right of under-18s to protest lawfully. And shouting slogans is lawful when not inciting violence. To deny this is to deny a long history of young people changing the world for the better. I’m old enough to remember grey-haired politicians warning that university students were dangerous communists for opposing a Vietnam War they said was vital to Australia’s security. Look how that turned out. Young people have led anti-apartheid demonstrations in South Africa despite the risk of injury and death and, more recently, have been at the forefront of climate change and same-sex-marriage movements. In short, young people – so easily painted as know-nothing bludgers with no life experience – have always been on the right side of history. So take off your blinkers and pop on your empathy specs, and see what side of history you want to be on. - Paul Williams is an associate professor at Griffith University