Trump treated government like he was CEO of a corporation. Indeed, some people on the far right and left, believe the US government is a corporation, run by people much lampooned in the Simpsons as The Sacred Order of Stonecutters.

Those on the inner suburban left reckon believe these people deserve little sympathy. They are either people left behind by the decline of manufacturing and the rise of algorithms or they are sad cases consumed with racial status anxiety and animus towards non-whites passing them on the ladder of success. This is news to working class black Americans.

I like to keep up to date with what’s happening to labour in the US as it often presages what happens in Australia. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance or Janesville by Amy Goldstein, give the reader a taste of what it’s like being white, poor and battling to keep the family together in a post-industrial US economy – and it’s got nothing to do with QAnon.

One of the most curious aspects – and this is true in Australia – is that any discussion of the working class has mutated in to a discussion about race. Even discussion of fiction now centres around power and race relations. It’s a very odd world when I join hands with Quadrant to write about the rise of censorship from the more bonkers elements of the cultural left.

There’s a kind of salty romanticism about the working class. Indeed, the myth of mateship, the poems of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson, the slaughter at Gallipoli, are historical working class narratives. Think of AC/DC and Jimmy Barnes. If you go to Elizabeth, Port Kembla, Broadmeadows, Logan or scores of other suburbs and LGAs across Australia, and no one is playing two up. Survival is the name of the game.

Since the Keating reforms, many working people, including skilled tradespeople, have thrived but a large underclass has also emerged of long-term unemployed, serial contract workers, and people who are on the margins because of illness or family breakdown. And there are people on very low incomes with a middle-class cultural background – the unemployed PhD students.

In American history, politicians (think Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson) turned humble roots into a mark of “backwoodsman” authenticity, but the term poor white trash was never far away. Those undeserving of pity; who bought their fate down upon themselves.

Trump and Bannon were smart enough to realise that there were millions of disaffected working class people in America’s south and west and their vote, helped defeat Hilary Clinton.

Over the past 35 years the working class has been devalued, the result of an economic version of the Hunger Games. It has pitted everyone against each other, regardless of where they started. Some contestants, such as business owners, were equipped with the fanciest weapons. The working class only had their hands. They lost and have been left to deal on their own.

The working class label, like that of the cowboy, conjured a vast swath of salt-of-the-earth citizens living and working in the wide-open spaces between the coasts, who were dubious of the effete, hifalutin types increasingly dominating the party that had once purported to represent the common man. The “white working class” connoted virtue and integrity.

These people look on J-Lo and Alicia Keys singing their sweet lefty peons of love and tolerance as Joe Biden is sworn in but nothing has changed. Yet social breakdown among low-income whites is following trends that had begun decades earlier among African Americans. Rates of out-of-wedlock births and male joblessness are soaring.

Indeed, anyone who has read Nomadland by Jessica Bruder (the film glosses over the book’s criticism of the poor treatment and payment of Amazon warehouse workers), will recognise the phenomena of rootlessness. There’s been a surge in opiate addiction among white Americans, alongside reports of rising mortality rates (including by suicide) among middle-aged whites. Many turned to Trump, who instead of helping them, slashed taxes.

It’s a fact that the trailer parks built in the US to provide housing for war-industry workers gave rise to a whole new demeaning stereotype: trailer trash. Starting in the 1970s, the new preoccupation with ethnic heritage instilled a semi-ironic pride in “redneck” identity. The upgraded self-image prefigured the elevation of the “white working class” in the years to follow. Today’s trailer trash are yesterday’s vagrants on wheels.

It is not just about economic issues and jobs. Culturally, we are witnessing a tale of two Americas that are growing more distinct by the day.

With the decline in employment in manufacturing caused by globalisation and, more particularly, automation, less-educated Americans have become increasingly less likely to have jobs. The share of prime-age men in the labour force has trended downwards for decades.

So Trump is more a symptom than a cause of America’s long-running economic and social decay. Which doesn’t change the likelihood that his woeful mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic will add to the economic and social causes of deaths of despair.

The pandemic has exposed and accelerated the long-term trends that will render the US economy even more unequal and dysfunctional than it already was, further undermining the lives and livelihoods of less-educated people in the years ahead.

The economy relies especially heavily on the exactitude and probity of the ‘Big Four’ – Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG – as they are the only institutions big enough to audit multinational corporations and government agencies.

The 2011–12 ASIC audit inspection report found that in 18 per cent of sampled key audit areas, Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC had failed to obtain “reasonable assurance” that the financial report as a whole was accurate and free of misstatements.

By the time ASIC released its Audit inspection program report for 2016–17, that number had blown out to 25 per cent.

At the same time, large accounting firms are scaling down their auditing functions to focus more on their profitable advisory-based consultancies.

In the last three financial years, audit revenue at Deloitte dropped from 19.2 per cent to 14.7 per cent. At EY, it fell from 28.1 per cent to 21.7 per cent. At KPMG, revenue dropped from 24 per cent to 21 per cent and at PwC, it slumped from 22.5 per cent to 18.7 per cent.

Across Australia, professional services are the fastest growth areas in accounting. The top 100 companies posted a total revenue of $11.25 billion in the 2019 financial year. That’s up ten per cent on the previous year.

The Big Four accounting firms accounted for almost 70 per cent or $7.8 billion of that revenue, thanks to the rivers of cash rolling in from their professional service divisions.

Last year, finance journalist Richard Brooks wrote in his book, Bean Counters: The triumph of the accountants and how they broke capitalism, that the main focus of these giant accounting firms was not audits but on providing professional services such as financial and IT systems advice.

“It’s not really any longer an accountancy profession,” Brooks wrote. “It’s more a consultancy profession, or it would call itself professional services, with auditing just one of its business lines, and a minority one at that.”

In my old home town of Adelaide, the sheer number of current and past tenders awarded to KPMG, makes one wonder whether KMPG works for the state government or vice a versa.

A number of these accounting firms are paid by the state government to provide financial advice and research. Yet much of this research is couched in terms the government of the day wants to hear.

Adelaide’s media is littered with reports of highly variable worth by accountancy firms. Most of these reports are PR and marketing exercises.

There is scant mention of exposing bias, fraud and tax evasion and the risks these pose to the economy. In fact, it’s hard to ascertain that they were produced by companies dedicated to accounting.

‘Eye of the tiger’

Let’s travel back in time to 1989. At a large hotel in Dallas, Texas, Jim Edwards, the new head of Arthur Andersen’s audit division, walked on stage to the sound of the Survivor’s song, ‘Eye of the Tiger’ blaring over the PA – followed by a tethered snarling, live tiger.

Edwards told his employees they, “require the eyes of a tiger, eyes that seize opportunities, eyes that are focused on the kill.”

Arthur Andersen was one of greatest (and most conservative) accounting firms in the world. But in the 1980s, it’s corporate culture changed. It morphed from a wise old owl in to a profit-hungry carnivore.

It shackled its fortunes to Enron, a high-flying energy trading company, which undervalued debt while reporting absurdly high profits.

Enron’s fall in 2001 took its primary auditing company, Arthur Andersen, with it. It was woefully negligent of its client’s true financial position.

Arthur Andersen was found guilty of obstruction of justice, as it had shredded Enron audit documents. Why didn’t the auditors hit the alarm button?

As the American writer Upton Sinclair wrote in the 1930s, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

In the lead-up to the GFC in 2008, Lehman Brothers bank had borrowed eye-watering amounts of money to fund its investments in housing-related assets. When the American property market crashed, so did Lehman.

The bank had allegedly removed tens of billions of dollars of fixed income securities from its balance sheet to hide its dire financial situation.

EY had audited Lehman Brothers from 2001 until the bank’s bankruptcy in 2008. It had consistently given the ‘thumbs up’. EY’s audits were useless.

I do not suggest Australian accounting firms are conducting themselves like Arthur Andersen and EY, in those two cases. But when auditors and professional services contractors become ‘defacto employees’ and their commercial interests are inimical, objectivity and probity may suffer.

The parliamentary inquiry will listen to a number of solutions including introducing legislation to prevent an audit firm offering auditing and consulting services to the same client, imposing a limit on the number of years an auditor can audit a company, and the creation of a separate regulator.

It’s a matter of trust.

Even so, there was one period in my late teens (why is it always the teens?) when I allow nostalgia to wash over me. I was about 18 and living in Adelaide, which had absolutely nothing going for it. It was boring and had more cliques than a forest of crickets. I was living in a garage in the eastern suburbs which I shared with a pool table, a bar and my guitar.

Somehow, somewhere, I heard Chris Bailey and The Saint’s Stranded followed by Know Your Product. This must have been around late 1978. It’s hard to be definitive due to the liquor and drugs. I packed my bag, threw in a copy of Faber & Faber, Selected Poems and within a week, I was living in a boarding house in Fortitude Valley. My single room overlooked the city. I lived with a bad tempered Irishman, a pedophile, a young woman who cried a lot and a very nice man who was on parole for murder.

I bought a cheap EH Holden station wagon and I earned my living catching chickens in large sheds south of the city during the week. It was good money. I remember driving over the Story Bridge at night covered in chicken shit, thinking I was free.

This was a delusion because I’d arrived at the height of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen dictatorship, when the corrupt Queensland Police were conducting a violent campaign against young people listening to music in pubs and political protests. You weren’t allowed to congregate in groups in the streets.

I spent two nights in the Brisbane lockup in Roma Street, singing “Reasons to be Cheerful” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads. I was bashed up by the police and by people watching the bands. I learnt to get the first punch in.

I saw The Saints at Griffith University through a hail of spit and flying beer cans. The noise was incredible. My ears rang for two days afterwards. At a lawyers ball in the city, I saw The Riptides and a very young Go Betweens. They only had two songs: Karen and Lee Remick. This was before Lindy Morrison joined the band. That night the cops used police dogs and arrested 80 people. I was one of them.

It politicised me and I started writing atrocious opinion pieces for underground newspapers. I also started writing terrible articles on bands for the music press in Sydney. The most important thing was I started writing. I have Brisbane to thank for that.

The music was vibrant, angry and raucous. In December, massive lightening storms filled the sky. I was living on another planet. When I smell frangipani now, I travel back to the Brisbane of that time and give a nod of thanks.

Vale Chris Bailey.

According to the ABS, Australia’s unemployment figures were now better than before Covid-19 hit. The official ABS data show the unemployment rate dropping from 4.6 to 4.2 per cent, with an estimated 64,800 jobs created between November and December. These figures are laughable.

Sydney and Melbourne CBD’s are wastelands (Adelaide was bad before the virus). Hospitality is on its knees, international air travel is comatose and our universities are tumbleweed cities. People have dropped out of the workforce in droves.

There are about 13.8 million people in labour force. 26,000 specific households (about .32 per cent of the civilian population over 15 years of age) are sent a survey each month for eight months, with one-eighth of the sample replaced each month to bring in new people.

The first interview is completed face-to-face and subsequent interviews are conducted by phone and online. The ABS preference, for cost reasons, is for people to reply online. The official LFS survey non-response rate is between 5-7 per cent.

There has been considerable discussion about the tight definition of unemployment: “all persons aged 15 years and over who were not employed during the reference week and had actively looked for work and were available to work or were waiting to start a new job.” If they worked one hour or more in the reference week, they are employed.

All OECD nations including Australia, use the same methodology and roughly the same definitions.

We are witnessing a staggering rise in the number of discouraged ‘job seekers’, officially around 300,000, although no one really knows the exact figure. I suggest the true figure is closer to 700,000. Since the GFC and before, they’ve been knocked back from jobs either because of their age, lack of schooling, training, experience or age or race prejudice. Some were the victims of the GFC, previous recessions and more recently, the Covid-19 lockdowns and retail stagnation.

These discouraged job seekers are members of a rising Australian lumpenproletariat or civil dead.

Structural economic change is destroying social capital. Elections are held, governments are formed but the system fails to deliver. It’s no wonder eligible voter numbers are falling but at the same time, LFS non-response is rising.

Some years ago I worked for the Australian Government in Labour Market Strategy in Canberra. I examined the demographic profiles of some of the poorest regions in Australia (once called the Priority Employment Areas). The Federal Government, its departments and agencies, are generally not held in high regard by the unemployed in these areas. The longer one is unemployed, the greater the antipathy and ennui.

Those who were hounded by Robodebt or so-called ‘job placement’ agencies, don’t give a damn for labour force data or those collecting it. They do not want to answer questions which reaffirms their unemployed status. When one is battling poverty, the requirement to complete and lodge eight Labour Force Surveys, whether online or by telephone, ranks very low on their hierarchy of needs.

Those who do not respond to the survey or who fail to complete each survey, are excluded from the count. They are ‘adjusted’ later in the weighting process. Weighting is a mathematical technique that makes the results reflect variables such as non-responders. Data from previous local population surveys is used to ‘fill in’ the missing information. The data is massaged to show validity rather than accuracy. Non-responders or incomplete responders are mathematically manipulated out of the count. Statistical validity is not the same as representative truth.

The ABS state that between 93 and 95 per percent of people complete the LFS survey. There’s a legal compulsion to complete the survey but it’s rarely used. This is an extraordinarily low non-response rate compared to other nations using the same methodology. So low, it’s BS.

In the UK, LFS non-response rates fell to 20 per cent in the early 1990s and are now around 40 per cent. Those who dropped out were mainly in the 20-29 years age group, unemployed and in large households.

In the USA, non-response rates are around 12-15 per cent and sky rocketed to 35 per cent during the worst of the Covid-19 fallout in March and May of 2020. Non-response in some of its largest national surveys is climbing because poorer Americans have lost faith in their political system.

American studies show that Blacks, Hispanics, the unemployed and those subsisting on the margins of society, tend to not complete the American version of the LFS, which leads to undercounts of up to 30 percent for those cohorts. That alone accounts for a 2 per cent underestimate in the national unemployment figures.

The Australian media doesn’t interrogate the unemployment figures. Its fetish for numbers coincides with a decline in an understanding – or rising apathy – of how those statistics are created and what they mean. Statistics are a shadow of the phenomena they claim to represent, not the thing itself. We ascribe a veracity to them which is dangerous and foolhardy.

Since the mid 1980s, the labour market has been undergoing radical change with the atomisation of various industries, the decline in fulltime jobs, the causualisation of the workforce, the rise of the ‘gig economy’ and ‘robot jobs’, people dropping out of the workforce and the fallout from the GFC. There will also be significant long terms effects in the labour market from the Coronavirus.

The unemployment figures are massaged and weighed through a statistical machine that feeds delusion rather than clarity. We need tools and methods that accurately reflect the dynamics of a rapidly changing labour market and the rise of a large, disaffected underclass.

It’s a rite of passage to leave home in search of new challenges, or to escape unemployment. I did and I was better for it. But how has this ongoing exodus of young people effected Adelaide’s socio-political and economic culture? What happens to innovation and organisational capability?

Expatriates are partly to blame for some of Adelaide’s economic misfortunes. Through no fault of their own, they took with them 40 years of earnings and spending power. Billions of dollars left the state by train, plane and automobile.

The city could have tolerated the flight of human capital for three or four years but not 40.

Back in 2000 the University of Adelaide’s, ‘Bringing Them Back Home’ report summed up the dilemma.

“The proportion of persons with degree and diploma qualifications in the migration stream leaving South Australia is considerably higher than the proportions in the South Australian population. In terms of migrant income, more persons with relatively high income leave the State than arrive.”

Twenty years later, nothing has changed. Youth flight and the ageing of the population have become a self-fulfilling downward spiral. As the local economy contracts, more young people leave and take with them solutions to counter the spiral.

There’s also a qualitative problem as many who left – and who are still leaving – were future innovators, academics, scientists, business men and women and of course, employers.

As a child in the 1960s, I remember playing at the feet of Geoffrey Dutton, Brian Medlin and the Quinn-Youngs. Their passion and intellectual drive have not been replaced.

The reason Adelaide is no longer at the forefront of social justice and anti-discrimination initiatives, is because the best brains started to migrate just as the war generation retired.

The entrepreneurial and professional leadership class has left. From the vacuum arose a raft of public policy problems such as only building one lane of the Southern Expressway, the failed Skills for All initiative, the Child Protection fiasco, the University City project failure, the catastrophe of SA Health, sky rocketing power prices, to name just a few.

Adelaide has snuggled up to the lowest common denominator and called it a standard. This problem has festered for almost two generations.

The movement of brains out of Adelaide has created a congenital and systematic lack of capability at the executive levels of state and local government.

One of the reasons the state is stuck in a predominantly agricultural and manufacturing economy, is that it doesn’t have the critical mass of brain power, expertise and risk takers to carve out a niche.

When expatriates say Adelaide is ‘different’, they are not only talking about the down-at-heel CBD, Port Adelaide or the northern suburbs. They point to how nepotism and parochialism have thrived while recruiting and promoting senior staff with less nous and emotional intelligence than a whippet.

When young people leave, the population ages. Older people spend less cash on goods and services, so spending slows and with recessionary forces at play, they spend even less. The young also shoulder the burden of caring for their aged folks.

This is the way Adelaide will end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

The social webs of friendships, clubs, community and the workplace, are becoming stretched for a variety of complex reasons.

One of the perverse by-products of living in a post-industrial society is the frequent use of ostracism, as a form of punishment.

I first became interested in ostracisation in the 1980s, while reading Colin Turnbull’s book, ‘The Mountain People’. It’s a harrowing anthropological study of the Ik people of northern Kenya.

They suffered terrible famines. Their life is brutish and the fit and strong survive at the cost of their social structure and friendship groups. The Ik ostracise each other to survive.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, except the dogs were eaten long ago. Everyday, because the tribe is totally atomised, each member sneaks off alone (the children hunt in packs) to catch food they greedily covert. There’s not much caring or sharing with the Ik.

We like to be liked. It’s nice to be part of a group. It’s comforting when people call us and enquire about our health or invite us out. We’re not like the Ik – or are we?

As a kid I played a string game called Cat’s Cradle. The object of the game was to form a geometric pattern using string held taut between your two hands. The object was to pass the Cat’s Cradle to another, where it would be remade and passed on again.

I suggest that the social webs of friends, like the strings of a child’s hand game, are slackening. We are becoming more isolated and for some, not only more alone but lonelier.

When we feel slighted or angry, when someone rejects our belief systems and we can’t defeat their arguments through emotive appeals, we resort directly to the howitzer of the homo sapiens world – ostracisation.

Kipling Williams says in his book, ‘Ostracism – the Power of Silence’, the act of being ignored simultaneously attacks four fundamental human needs.

“Our sense of connection and belonging is severed; the control we desire between our actions and outcomes is uncoupled; our self-esteem is shaken by feelings of shame, guilt or inferiority; and we feel like a ghost, observing what life would be like if we did not exist,” Williams says.

“Most people claim the act is empowering. It gives them a sense of control over their targets – control they may not otherwise experience. But there’s an ironic twist to these feelings of ‘control’. Some say that at some point they themselves are controlled by the ostracism and find it difficult to stop using it. The use of the silent treatment becomes self-perpetuating,” Williams says.

Unlike other forms of aversive interpersonal behaviours, for example, physical or verbal abuse, ostracism can be characterised as a non-behaviour. So it’s enveloped in layers of ambiguity.

For instance, targets may notice that they are being ignored and think to themselves, ‘is it actually happening to me or is it my imagination?’ It’s this ambiguity that makes ostracism so powerful. One could conceivably ostracise another without having to admit doing it or having to apologise for it.

It’s a paradox that one of the effects of ostracism in groups is to make the group tighter and stronger. The very act of excluding a person thereby adds a twisted form of social cohesion. Ostracism reinforces the notion of “us and them”.

Ostracisation is also used to terminate relationships. The failure to return phone calls or emails may be a legitimate tactic to end the hopes of an ardent suitor or even the affections of a long time partner.

This is a delicate matter and does not necessarily lead to total disengagement. But as one woman said of her former romances, “I wipe them completely off the face of the earth. I don’t speak to them. I don’t acknowledge them.”

But ostracism does not always have its intended outcome. One woman said, “I decided I wouldn’t bother to speak to my husband at all. I managed to keep this up for three weeks but finally he did something that really annoyed me so I yelled at him. He was taken aback and said, “But you’ve been so happy lately.”

I have much to thank bookshops for. When I was 12, I walked in to Mary Martins in Adelaide and bought a copy of ‘The Green Years’ by AJ Cronin. A book which by today’s standard, is fairly crusty but as a young boy, I’d never encountered anything like it.

I was hooked. It led me to writing. I became a journalist, then I taught writing and communication at university. Now I work in the area of generational change and I help people get jobs. All because of ‘The Green Years’. Well, at least it played a part.

While the Internet has cut counter sales of books, the biggest slug to profitability is rent. I walked down Charing Cross Road in London a few years ago looking for bargain, and there were half the number of bookshops trading as there were ten years before.

Book shopping is a tactile and sensual experience. Smell the pages of a new book. Run your fingers up and down its spine. Admire its colour, design and heft. It feels good in the hand.

How many happy hours have I spent in bookshops? Eons. One day, many years ago, I walked in to a now defunct second hand bookshop in St Kilda, Melbourne. On top of a dusty cupboard, I pulled down an original copy of Ernest Hemingway’s novel ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’.

A young woman was minding the shop. “That’s an old one,” she said. “It is, how much?” “How about $10.00?” I paid and ran out of the door.

I admit to not being totally in control when shopping for books. There’s an invisible person who walks five steps ahead of me, scopes out potential book stores and then pushes me inside. They select too many books, hand over my money, and I’m out without having any say in the matter.

Bookshops old and new are havens of tranquillity. To step inside and browse is to leave the hurley burley behind and enter – not an environment – but a world, which is part lucky dip (boys and girls), for who knows what you will find?

For us older readers, it is also part nostalgia, for stories read in our teens (our green years): ’Great Expectations’, ’Siddhartha’, ‘The Alexandria Quartet’, ‘Under the Volcano’, ‘Catch 22’ and more.

Books form a part of the great web of meaning we spin for ourselves. They can bind us to a chair for hours as we launch ourselves on a voyage that may consume us for the rest of our lives.

Such is the power of the Word. A book is not a sound bite. It can’t be hurried. Books are a tangible resisting force against the perpetually vanishing present. It doesn’t require much technology except light.

To make sense of our emotional lives, we need to dip inwards to work through the content of our feelings. There is no greater guide and companion on this journey than a favourite book, whose well thumbed pages helps to make sense of the story of our lives.

Most of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse are expressed through the Word. Exposition requires the ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially. It says ‘stop – and think’. In a world of KPIs, downsizing, offshoring, TV cooking shows, a book requires only one thing – your full attention.

Of late – and maybe this is a psycho-social side effect of the Coronavirus restrictions – I too have lacked felicity, as the veils of delusion have fallen to show the true state of the Australian character. Foster is right, the laconic Australian has been replaced by an obsequious toadyism.

It’s a generalisation but we have become a rag tag band of self-interested, mealy-mouthed yahoos, who walk and talk like the bourgeoisie but who have nothing to sell but our mediocrity.

I can forgive the folks on the hill when they say things like, ‘we’re all in this together’, as they swing the Maserati in to the drive in Vaucluse or Toorak. It’s much harder to forgive the financial services industry, who pirated millions of dollars from people with illegal fees and criminal financial advice.

To shore up the ruins of myself and my generation, I tell myself the old family stories of Uncle Bob flying his Lancaster over Germany, bringing back a wounded crew or of my stepfather, Peter, firing his colt like Ned Kelly at midnight, as the Japanese charged through the Australian soldier’s jungle camp in Bougainville.

I’m looking for the antidote to the mealy-mouthed virus, to the awful whining of the cultural left, to the extraordinary self-interest of the Boomer generation.

I used to take comfort that we were children of those men and women who had survived, ‘the hardest years, the wildest years, the desperate and divided years,’ as Midnight Oil once sang.

It appears to me, over the last 40 years, we have decanted the best of our natures, poured it on the ground and kept the lees.

We use KPIs which quantify our progress (high salary, holiday house, shares) over qualities such as community, family and well-being. That sounds like it was written by a Greenie fire-twirler from Melany, who I have little in common with – or maybe I do.

In the late 1970s and 80s, we re-calibrated our universities and TAFE’s to focus on quantification and the pursuit of money. Universities pursued international students like a hound chasing a fox. That has all gone pear-shaped now.

But the cult of quantification spread much further to politicians using extraordinary dodgy figures supplied by invalid methodologies to make suspect policy cases; to the tallying of bizarre sports statistics (“that’s the 7054^th ace Roger Federer has served in his career”) and the accumulation of personal online data for advertising and more.

Once upon a time, the Judeo-Christian ethos used to underpin the socio-legal and political pillars of Australian society. Now it’s quantification.

One reason for the mealy-mouth nature of the Australian people is a lack of spine; an inability to say what we think, unless we cower behind a pseudonym. The other reason is that it’s far easier to talk about how much something is worth, such as a car, a house or a person.

Of course, we still have deeply personal conversations but the continual background noise being pumped out by what’s left of the main stream media, by business peers and our family and friends, is all about numbers, statistics and metrics. It’s not only who owns what but how do I get what they have?

You’d think that the obsessive pursuit of quantification would lead to increased emphasis and scrutiny on results. Instead, it has produced a greater volume of figures, which once reported, disappear in to the ether, never to be heard of again.

It’s as if we have embraced process – and in some cases, some highly suspect methodologies – while sacrificing results. The other side of the coin is where the figures are accurate and the results are appalling.

I hesitate to provide an example from my old hometown of Adelaide – where ideas go to die -because it’s like kicking puppies. None of the figures below have been reported by Adelaide’s media.

From April 2014, South Australia’s under-employment number bounced around the 70,000-90,000 mark. That was extraordinarily high but in April this year (2020), the Covid-19 restrictions saw the figure explode to 134,200 people.

While 40,000 South Australians lost their jobs (20,000 were full time), they joined the 56,000 Crow eaters who were already unemployed. That brings unemployment up to a whopping 96,000 people.

But don’t forget the 134,200 people who are under-employed and who would like or need more work. Then add the 30,000 people who have dropped out of the workforce altogether.

There are about 850,000 people in the SA labour market but 260,000 of them are unemployed and under-employed and 30,000 have dropped out entirely. That’s not a recession. That’s a Depression.

Indigenous people came here in wooden canoes. Our forefathers came is wooden ships from Great Britain. More recent arrivals came in boats from war torn Asia or the Middle East. We’re all in the same boat now.

As a nation we can’t keep limbo dancing under the lowest common denominator. It takes guts to step up and say ‘enough’. I won’t wait by the garden gate.

In 1965, my job as a blond, snotty-nosed street ‘gangster’, was to protect the land from the migrant Italian kids. We called it ‘The Land’ to signify possession. I was seven years old.

Since the 1950s, thousands of migrants had arrived in Adelaide’s southern suburbs from Latvia, Greece and Italy. They were called ‘New Australians’ but to us, they were Balts, Wogs and Dagoes.

While adult migrants encountered racism, they worked hard, started their own businesses and their optimism earned respect. Unfortunately, their kids encountered us.

We singled out the Italian kids because, so we thought, their parents had fought with the Germans. Our history came from TV shows and movies such as ‘Combat’, ‘The Great Escape’ and the ’Guns of Navarone’.

In truth, the Greek kids fought like demons and the Latvian kids looked like us, so we left both alone.

I was proud that two uncles had flown in Lancaster bombers in the RAF. But I had a secret. On the German side of my family, two relatives had flown fighter planes with the Luftwaffe. Such was the madness of war.

I was a toddler when we fled from Swan Hill to my grandparent’s two-bedroom house on Victoria Street in Goodwood. My farmer father had hit the piss and started belting Mum.

We never saw Dad again. Mum told the neighbours he died. It was easier for a woman with a kid back then to avoid stigma if she was a widow. The war had left so many of them.

Goodwood’s social world in 1965 bore little resemblance to today. Children played where they liked. Evening meals were chops or sausages or pies with boiled vegetables and potatoes. We ate tripe (boiled pigs’ guts in milk and parsley) and rabbit stew.

I was sometimes hungry at night and would steal out and eat apricots from the vacant block. I’d see other kids scoffing cumquats in the dark. We never spoke.

Some Mums cared for invalid grandfathers, who had been shelled or gassed in the Great War. The old men lived in back bedrooms that smelt of piss, reliving the mustard gas attacks at Passchendaele.

Our street gang consisted of about 30 boys and a few girls. Our weapons were bamboo canes, bows and arrows (made of bamboo), slingshots, spears and rocks.

We patrolled in small gangs and when we found a group of Italian kids, we set upon them with a ferocity that only children and psychopaths know.

There were large ‘battles’ too. Up to 40 Italian and Australian kids aged between 7 and 10 would gather on vacant land by the railway tracks. The insults and rocks would fly before charging at each other with bamboo sticks raised high.

Both sides had honour codes. A child crying on the ground was safe. If someone yelled ‘barleys’ or put their hands in the air, they were not attacked. A child who yelled ‘barleys’ and then continued to fight was beaten to a pulp.

The parents of both nationalities were appalled. We were grounded. The police were called. Our names were taken. We were sent to bed without dinner. We didn’t care and neither did the Italian kids. We’d gotten a taste of violence and liked it.

It must have been September as the Royal Show was on at Wayville. I could almost smell the Dagwood Dogs and fairy floss when something very odd happened.

One of the Italian families invited me for dinner. Mum showed me the card. She couldn’t ignore it. A written invitation had gravitas.

I trudged down Victoria Street like a boy walking to his execution. I knocked on the flys screen door and was confronted by George, my mortal enemy, and his two younger brothers.

One of them drew a finger across his throat and led me to the kitchen. The whole family was there: father, mother, grandma dressed in black (who I mercilessly taunted in the street), an uncle and two cousins.

The steaming spaghetti bolognaise was served on large plates. We said grace and everyone got stuck in. Everyone except me. I didn’t know how to eat it. At home, I speared food with my fork and used the knife as a shredder.

They made jokes about Skippy having short arms. Grandma reached over the table and twirled the spaghetti and sauce in a spoon and rammed it into my mouth. The family fell about laughing. The food was delicious and I was ravenous.

They treated me as a guest but didn’t pay me undue attention. A couple of hours later, I was sent home with a large slice of Tiramisu cake wrapped in greaseproof paper (Glad Wrap wasn’t launched in Australia until the following year).

I discovered later that other gang kids had been invited to dinner in the homes of the ‘New Australians’. As I walked home, I realised that it was impossible to wage war on people who fed you and treated you kindly.

The frequency of the battles and skirmishes fell away. There were still fights but the anger had gone. Besides, a band from Liverpool in England had caught the attention of the older kids.

There was plenty of racial prejudice back then but it wasn’t amped up like today. Inflammatory rhetoric has set Australians against migrants.

Those born during the Great War remembered the tension between the Protestants and the Catholics. If they were alive today, they wouldn’t have tolerated another axe driven deep into the community.

I invited George and some of the Italian kids to our backyard for Guy Fawkes Night. Their Mums and Dads came too.

It was hot and we drank Bobo Cordial with ice water and woofed down sausage rolls with tomato sauce. As the skyrockets exploded high above the land, all you could hear was laughter.

This story focuses on how the news media ‘injects’ a world view in to that reality, creating delusion more akin to schizophrenia than an approximate perception of cause and events. This phenomena is aided by the Great Forgetting, where history becomes the shallow ground of TV dramas and remakes of remakes.

The media is not the sole cause of belief or attitude formation; it is not the prime mover of how we construct our reality. It is one snooker ball amongst many, ricocheting and cannoning off other phenomena, in the ahistorical and post-modern existential experience.

When I trained as a journalist in Melbourne in the 1980s, we still called, without irony, reporting a ‘consciousness raising’ profession. Now it’s a consciousness corrupting industry.

The decline of the news is a thesis in itself but cancers include the overt politicisation of the news, mixing opinion with fact, decontextualisation, the extraordinary rise of supposition and ‘life style’ stories, an obsessive focus on the negative, mass sackings of journalists and more.

People have turned off the news because they realise its interpretation of events and commentary by politicians, opinion leaders and celebrities, is simply a cluster of disassociated perspectives, aggregated for public consumption, which bears little or no relationship to lived experience.

For example, the news rarely reflects people’s experience of unemployment, under employment, age prejudice, caring for ageing parents or loneliness.

Even though we are inundated with information, much of it is decontextualised, trivialised or like a paralysed cyclops, totally focused on Covid-19 infection rates.

The more one watches or reads the news, the less one knows.

History, which is oft mentioned by rarely studied, has a weird way of throwing up parallels with modern times. Towards the end of the reign of the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius (about 166AD), the first of the Germanic tribes crossed the Danube. A few made it over the Alps and charged around in what is modern day northern Italy, until they were pushed back.

There was panic in Rome. There was much investigation of animal entrails, persecution of Christians and seers divining the future. No one knew what was going on. That’s a pretty good reflection of modern society.

The real problem though lay inside the gates of Rome. The empire had grown so large, it couldn’t be administered properly. Those barbarians would be back. In the current context, they will come as unemployment and under employment.

One of those snooker balls, bouncing off the cushion, is the public domain itself. It’s a societal space or forum where public discourse over the dinner table, near the water cooler, in cyberspace and in our heads, helps us construct reality – although inversely, it also helps ossify our rusted-on attachments to ideas, which may be invalid, incorrect or simply bonkers.

Today, the public domain resembles the attack charges of baboons in zoos, just before feeding time. It not only comprises ‘the news’ and political commentary, but also Cancel Culture assassins, anti-populationists, anti-vaxxers, 5G conspiracy theorists, celebrity victims of abuse, reality TV cooking shows and real estate porn, all making noise at a volume Noah would have heard on the Ark.

People now inhabit completely different worlds, which do not merely object to each other. They fail to comprehend how each other can even exist. There’s no middle position, no finesse in argument. You chose which narrative suits you and stick to it with evangelical fervour. The result is to replace a political culture of disagreement with one of contempt.

Trust in politicians, financial institutions, the media and the church, is at an all time low. Collective ideals such as equality and fraternity, which have been the bedrock of western societies and democracy for more than 200 years, buckle beneath our feet.

A new phenomenon has arisen and it manifests itself more like Alzheimer’s Disease. I call it the Great Forgetting.

Living in these post-modern, relativist and ahistorical times, much of our daily tasks are performed by mobile phones and computers. There is little need to remember phone numbers, addresses or understand sentence tenses (grammar check will do that). We’ve contracted our memory out to hard drives but that’s only part of it.

The Great Forgetting is the phenomenon where we have floated free from the cause and effect of history. Instead of exploring commonalities, we have consigned history, it’s lessons and warnings, to the back blocks of cyberspace or Hollywood remakes of remakes.

One of the strangest phenomena living in these post-fact times, is trying to remember what happened last week, let alone the terrible recession and unemployment of 1991 or the GFC of 2008, which still enervates the economy today.

The news media has trained us to think in discrete or singular events (‘and now this’) and not on the culminative effects of rolling recessions, the GFC, the economic effects of the Covid-19 recession, which has crushed whole sectors of the Australian economy. Our social construction of the world is now resembling mental illness rather than an ontological and shared truth.