Gold? Shorten’s diversity rainbow leads to a crock
Imagine the boxes that prospective Labor MPs will have to tick when Bill Shorten introduces his promised rainbow quotas.
State your sexual preference: Is it (1) excitingly unconventional or (2) boringly straight? If (1), do you identify as L, G, B, T or other? If (2) go straight to the back of the queue.
Matters of sexual intimacy were once a private matter. Now they have become a political statement to which benefits accrue. This is where we’ve arrived thanks to the fetishisation of diversity, a system that determines one’s group identity and its position on the ladder of virtue and victimhood. It is as rigid as the Indian caste system.
To be white, heterosexual and male is to be the equivalent of an untouchable, denying the right to have a view on anything except one’s own privilege.
It is five years since Shorten promised rainbow quotas to win support in his bid for the leadership. The Left is losing patience. Having won the argument on same-sex marriage, it is hungry for a fresh symbolic cause.
Embarrassingly for Labor, a gaydar sweep by two sympathetic academics finds the ALP has been out-diversified by the stodgy old Liberals, who have four “openly gay” federal parliamentarians to the Labor’s three.
Perhaps there are more openly Liberal gays hiding in the closet. Who cares? This is a parliament, after all, not the auditions for the Sydney Mardi Gras.
The Opposition Leader’s tardiness in making good his promise suggests he understands that sexuality quotas may be a step too far. The zealots have crossed the line from inclusive to intrusive.
The same-sex marriage referendum affirmed that Australians believe in live and let live.
The decriminalisation of homosexuality and the recognition of same-sex relations as equal before the law removed the last forms of institutional prejudice.
Yet popular irritation with diversity policy is all too apparent on talkback radio and social media. The rainbow warriors have hardly helped with their evangelism in the classroom disguised as lessons in anti-bullying.
The diversity system has become the dominant framework in elite culture.
To seek intimacy in a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender relationship is now a declaration of solidarity with the LGBT “community”, an oppressed minority fighting a political cause.
It is a modern variation of the Marxist fallacy that peasants were not individuals trying to eke out a living in difficult circumstances but members of the proletariat, a class, systematically oppressed by landowners and the bourgeoisie.
A newly published analysis of the system of identity politics shows Shorten’s dilemma as he struggles to stay on the right side of common sense.
Ben Cobley’s The Tribe: The Liberal Left and the System of Diversity exposes a fundamental contradiction. While diversity purports to be a doctrine of tolerance and inclusion, it is by nature intolerant and exclusive.
It is politics in its crudest form, mobilising the tribe against its enemies. Enforcing the system of diversity separates “us”, the inclusive Left, from “them”, the xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogynists on the Right. Who sits where in the hierarchy of oppression is decided by the diversity police who, Cobley notes, are frequently old white men. It declares, to borrow George Orwell’s classic phrase, that all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
This divisive game that makes some more equal than others sits uncomfortably with the principle of the fair-go insistence that every Australian has an even break and merit wins the prize.
Diversity turns this on its head. Under Shorten’s rainbow quotas, rainbow people will be granted the same privileged status within the party that women have enjoyed for the past 20 years.
It goes to the philosophical heart of the difference between socialism and liberalism. Quotas are a path to the social utopia of equal outcomes; Liberals seek the more realistic goal of equal opportunity.
For the intellectual Left, diversity is not just the means but the end. It is the method by which white societies can rid themselves of the sins of colonialism and oppression, the chief dynamics through which it interprets history.
Cobley shows how intellectuals within the British Labour Party sought large-scale migration for precisely these ends. Multiculturalism was desirable in itself.
Jeremy Cliffe, a senior correspondent for The Economist, describes a progressive, cosmopolitan utopia in which “non-white faces are common, where same-sex couples can walk down the street hand-in-hand without raising eyebrows, where many residents have been to university and are internationally minded — in short, places with at least a dash of London about them”.
Now we know where the diversity system leads, to a nation where their smug, educated, cosmopolitan view of the world prevails and those who object are shamed into silence.
The diversity system is not, as it pretends, open-minded liberalism in action. It is an authoritarian dystopia in which authority is assumed, not granted, and everyone else has to fall into line.
For most, the pressure to comply to the system of diversity is almost irresistible.
Conforming to these soulless norms in, say, the teaching profession or the public service is not an indication of assent, but acquiescence.
At the Australian Taxation Office, which for reasons that are not entirely clear has become an exemplar of political correctness, records are now being kept on the sexual orientation of staff.
Such matters would be regarded as none of the boss’s business outside the closeted world of the Canberra public service.
Yet, having lost all sense of propriety, the ATO proudly announced last month that 3.5 per cent of its staff identified as LGBT, up from 3 per cent the previous year.
Someone needs to bang some public servants’ heads together. A department with an employment policy that was truly non-discriminatory would care nothing about its employees except how well they did their job.
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