The Australian novelist David Foster once said, “I’m not a nice guy. I don’t even want to be a nice guy. I have to over-correct for the mealy-mouthed quality in contemporary Australian life.”

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 Foster is right, the laconic Australian has been replaced by an obsequious toadyism.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.