The Andrews disaster is a lesson on the dangers of woke government

Last week, during the world’s longest running lockdown that is sending businesses bankrupt and putting a record number of Victorians on the unemployment queue, the Andrews government appointed Victoria’s first ‘Public Sector Gender Equality Commissioner’ on a generous salary.

Her role? To enforce regressive gender quotas in over 300 organisations in the state, demanding that they develop a Gender Equality Action Plan every four years and report publicly every two years on their progress.

Let that sink in if you are currently on Job Seeker.

This is Dan Andrews’ Victoria, where our health system is chronically underfunded and underprepared compared to other states, but there is plenty of so-called progress on defining people by what is between their legs when it comes to appointments in universities, local governments and other public service bodies.

These are some of the aims of the Andrews government:

• Victorian Public Service-Appoint 50 per cent women executives.
• Local government-50 per cent women councillors and Mayors by 2025.
• Paid public boards-50/50 representation of women in new appointments.
• Courts (including VCAT)-50/50 representation of women in new appointments.
• State sport and recreation organisational boards-40 per cent women by 2019.
• Private and not-for-profit boards-voluntary target of at least 40 per cent women in new appointments.

Quotas are condescending to women. The assumption that they are required for women to advance is sexist in itself. Note how there is no 50 percent target for male nurses or teachers on the public payroll though.

The Andrews government is an example of public policy informed by pernicious and dangerous postmodern theory. As Greg Sheridan rightly points out, the government is “focused on identity politics and performative symbolism, on woke gestures. This proceeds from its underlying analysis that society’s problems are caused by structural racism, sexism, heteronormativ­ity, gender stereotypes, global warming capitalism, worker exploitation, old power structures, old forms of learning and knowing.”

This explains why security guards overseeing hotel quarantine were given diversity training but no training in the use of PPE or on infection control. It also explains why one of the security companies hired was Unified Security, a company not hired on merit but due to its Indigenous identity.

Unified said it themselves: “As Australia’s largest indigenous owned private security company, we were appointed to provide services in line with the Victorian government’s procurement guidelines.” As The Age reported in August, the decision to hire the company was because it would be in-keeping with the government’s ‘social inclusion’ policies.

This is what happens when governments forsake good management for virtue signaling woke-ism. A traditional social democratic government would prioritise its public health capabilities, but at the start of the pandemic, there were more people working in Dan Andrews’ office than there were on the public health team. That probably explains why he has so many social media followers. Plenty of cash for double spaced facebook posts, but not much for public health officials.

As reported in The Australian, Victoria’s public health team consisted of 57 people while Andrews’s private office had 64 people. Compare that to NSW who had more than twice the resources devoted to public health than Victoria. We are seeing the results.

Want to know what role the Department of Justice and Community Safety is currently advertising? Director for Inclusion and Intersectionality at the sweet salary of $192,800-$249,700 plus superannuation. See the problem. Instead of doing what it should be doing, which is governing, the Andrews government is putting all its resources into a vast social experiment based on an ideology of social justice, intersectionality, and identity politics.

And make no mistake, the weaponising of social justice and its long march through our public sector is toxic. Helen Pluckrose and American mathematician James Lindsay have recently released a brilliant book called Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why this Harms Everybody. In it, they describe how Critical Theory is being weaponized to teach young people that society is formed into identity-based hierarchies, knowledge is an effect of power and one’s position on a league-table of oppressed identities determines what can be known and how it is known.

Wonder why we have cancel culture and attempts to tear down statues, define speech and censor everything? Because it is part of a coordinated attempt to recreate society by deconstructing its past and eroding the consensus that logic, science and reason are the pillars upon which we find knowledge. It seeks to replace logic, science and reason with the mindset that there is no objective reality, everything is culturally relative, and that reason and logic are products of western male dominated patriarchy and are therefore oppressive.

And the Andrews government is gobbling it up. The Premier openly celebrates that his government is ‘the most progressive in Australia.’ Indeed, and look at the results. We might have gender diversity commissars and directors for inclusion and intersectionality, but we certainly don’t have thriving businesses or a functional public health system. We are struggling to even have Victorians in work.

The common saying is ‘go woke, go broke.’ I only wish it wasn’t happening to my state before my eyes.