Nudge, Nudge, Wink, Wink….

A great thought piece by Merryl Uebel-Yan. It takes me back to the saying “ None of us is as dumb as all of us” and all of us are easily led !

Quintessential Australia  

Quintessential Australia. Is it of place? Or of character? 

I know it has nothing to do with birthplace, or the love of Australian fauna. (I am not sure even I approve of the 2.5m goanna living in our ceiling.)

Quintessential Australia—I used to think it was the Man from Snowy River (à la Banjo Patterson), Drizabone flapping as he pelted headlong down the Snowy mountainside. But talk about old regret that has nothing to do with escaped colts. It has everything to do with remaining silent while our country is brazenly pillaged by liars, cheats and general scumbags.

What about the quintessential Australia captured by The Pioneer triptych of Frederick McCubbin?  The earnest yearning for something better for our children? A better place to belong, to build, to grow, to connect.

But even that all ended in a lonely cross. Perhaps it was portentous because something dire is definitely afoot in this once beautiful nation.

Or how about mateship? Take for example the shearing shed of Tom Roberts (Shearing the Rams). Well, that burned to the ground in 1965. And the ashes that are falling all around us are of something far greater than Roberts’ shearing shed—yet how many of us even realise it?

Perhaps quintessential Australia is about giving someone a fair go? 

I never particularly liked Malcolm Fraser but he did rescue the Vietnamese boat people who were escaping slaughter in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. There you had a conundrum, a politician who actually cared about people and did something practical to stop them being murdered. What would Australia be now without the richness contributed by the people of Vietnam, and diverse other nations? 

Yet today, we are watching genocide unfold in real-time, on the other side of the world, and most of our current crop of politicians (with a few notable exceptions) are too scared to say a word in public.

Pre-selection and re-election. 

I suspect these are the only factors driving most politicians today and this has poisoned the well, literally. Do you know a single politician whose portrait you would like to see painted? (And not with a big red ‘No Thanks!’ emblazoned across their face.)

It seems the only time we see quintessential Australia anymore is in dire emergency. My house was on fire and you risked your life to help me. I drove blindly into a flooded causeway and you took hours to rescue me clinging for dear life to a tree. Ordinary people set up Go Fund Me pages and collect donations of cash and goods through charities to help each other when yet another disaster unfolds.

But we are oblivious to the great disaster unfolding in front of us, all around us in fact.

Some years ago I was introduced to the concept of “nudge manipulation”. It was in the context of a bureaucratic forum discussing the ways in which the community could be “encouraged” to make the “right decisions” around health. 

But people are willful and insist on making personal decisions of which government bureaucrats do not approve. Hence in that forum I observed the bizarre defence of the art of psychological manipulation. “Nudge manipulation” was defended by bureaucrats as being in the community’s best interests, helping people to make “good decisions” they would not otherwise make—manipulation by constant nudging in the “right” direction. And the tactics used range from slimy positive behaviour reinforcement all the way through to outright bullying, intimidation and fear arousal. Does this all sound horribly familiar—think ‘pandemic’ and climate?

Of course nudge manipulation is based on the grand assumption that those doing the manipulating have both sincerity and actual science to back up their position. 

I would like to suggest that if you dangle a $multi-billion carrot in front of organisations (at all levels of government, business and civil society) every skerrick of sincerity and science will go out of the window as the “bad actors” pursue the bucks. It is like watching a bull smell a cow on heat. There is absolutely nothing that is going to stop that bull—not gates, fences or cattle dogs or prods. (The NDIS, of which I have had extensive personal experience, is a case in point.)

What does that have to do with quintessential Australia and nudge manipulation?

In 2024, we find ourselves “led” by people who demonstrably do not have the best interests of the country at heart, who appear to be swayed more by lobbyists than the interests of their own electorates, and demonstrate no loyalty to anything except their own pre-selection and re-election.

They develop policies that support international interests rather than those of Australia, then nudge manipulate the Australian people to fall into line. 

Earnestness, truthfulness, integrity, courage, sincerity, loyalty, trustworthiness, hope for the long-term future and hard work for the benefit of the community rather than self aggrandizement—all these have become character traits lost to the Australian politician and big business leaders alike. Corporately they have become worthless parasites on our country. 

I fear that, unless we act quickly, the quintessential Australia will be no more.