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CHANGING THE AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION
Australians will vote shortly in a referendum for alteration of the constitution to have an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. There is no argument for a Yes or No position following. My intention is to draw attention to considerations that do not seem to be acknowledged in the official Referendum Booklet where the cases are compared. Novels I have written expound on three issues omitted from this official guide.
Is the proposed change overreach of Australia’s nanny state? I have presented disadvantages of our nanny state in my novel Turkeys Not Bees. A nanny state can benefit people but it can also lead to totalitarianism. My novel Animal Farm 2 is a satirical sequel to George Orwell’s expose of totalitarianism. The proposal is for more control of our democracy, reducing individual freedom.
Recognition in the Constitution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would increase their collective access to Parliament and Executive Government, reducing relative access of other other individual Australians. A case for Australian individualism is presented in Turkeys Not Bees. The referendum proposes a new social spectacle, described by De Bord, 1967. It could appear to have solidarity within the Aboriginal and TSI community, which could result in exploitation by organisations and politicians, unless checks and balances would be adopted later.
Athletes’ access to government support should be equal for all Australians. Establishing affirmative action by this referendum could prevent performances by all Australians from being potentially equal. We need more Cathy Freemans, not an underclass of performers selected by race. My novel Time Is Gold makes cases for competition and innovation in sport.
In summary, the referendum could affirm nanny statism, collectivism, social exploitation and segregation.
My novels are available on Amazon. Excerpts and reviews are at martinknox.com
THE ART OF AIMING HIGH
This novel tells of a fictional couple’s journeys in idyllic careers, from a philosophical perspective.
Chance was a selfish entitled university student in Australia, having acquaintances but few loyal friends. Employed in Canada, he took risks and when they didn’t work out he gradually became more responsible. He was ambitious and his career emulated the Camel, Lion, Dragon and Child, told in an allegory by philosopher Nietzsche, in his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883). Disillusioned with his job and wanting a child’s freedom to create, Chance quit his employer’s treadmill.
He became a physics researcher back in Australia and met Megan, an elite athlete and psychologist. They became partners. He helped her train using phenomenology, learned from philosopher Heidegger. He introduced her to Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a timeless psychological condition. Megan became self-coached and won a place on the Olympics squad. But her success with flow led to banning by nanny state officials, who wanted competitors to have equal success.
Megan and Chance are individualists who want to be virtuous. They study various philosophies and pursue free competition, abjuring collectivism. When they catch Covid, will they conform to quarantine and vaccination demands?
The story is speculative fiction, that exposes how their individual freedom is vulnerable to trends in athletics, ballet, sport, academia, media and capitalism, as described by Debord, in his book The Society of the Spectacle, 1967. After years of irresponsibility, they commit to living like scrub turkeys, with freedom and independence.
They avoid living like bees, conditioned for lives of work and dependence, without sex.
Turkeys Not Bees is available on Amazon. For reviews see martinknox.com
WHY BUY FAST FOOD?
We let advertisements for fast food intrude into our lives. This is where we go wrong.
Consider a young actor whose part in an advertisement is to make a social gaffe at the office, or at home, with friends or family present. We squirm with her or his pretended embarrassment, for a moment, until the actor says ‘Did someone say KFC?’ and immediately, a picture of garishly coloured food pops up, as the tension is relieved and the group quits what they are doing to gobble greasy sugar-laden fast food. A percentage of viewers seeing this buys KFC. Fast food has become a form: a social icon lacking reason. At the end of the advertiser’s interest is fast consumption, having nothing to do with nutrition, value for money, nor societal effects. Consequences of fast food don’t matter to them.
KFC advertisements employ fakery that is dishonest, demeans viewers and diminishes respect for KFC as a responsible enterprise. Gaining public respect doesn’t pay them as well as deception. The corporate ethos they apply is a tissue of lies.
Young people’s diets are determined by fashion, emotional appeals and peer pressure, without personal preference, or diversity. They do not discriminate between foods. In their homes they probably do not have opportunities to select foods they eat, nor preparation methods, nor meal quantities, nor dietary balance. They get the same fast food as last time.
The emotion that fast foods appeal to after advertising is hunger. They see photos of colourful foods being enjoyed by beautiful people. When one of them recites the mantra: ‘Did someone say KFC?’, or alternatively, they hear the thumping rhythm ‘I don’t care,’ consumers’ imaginations are captured to buy KFC. It would take a strong leader to divert the salivating group to other brands, or to, say, Japanese food. They want instant gratification and would oppose a survey of members’ preferences or shopping around for better food.
Eating fast food is presented in media to give the appearance of an orgasmic satiation of gluttony as a reflex orgy. Fast food is shovelled down in an uncontrolled frenzy. KFC ads play the hunger emotion for every finger lickin’ mouth waterin’ sensation they can evoke, rejecting the notions of refinement in eating and mealtime discourse. Fast food is consumed quickly, without separating pieces, chewing with the mouth open, wiping on the back of a hand.
The function of sport, reality TV, game shows, sitcoms, news, weather and all popular entertainments, except reading, is for corporations like KFC to take money from buyers of: Fast foods, performer merchandise, music, movies, clothes, groceries, cars, holidays, devices and toys. The profit goes into the investors’ bank accounts. Corporations compete to access attention to their products, at venues and on media, where they compete for the best promotional and selling opportunities.
Fast food advertisers appeal to popularity. The easiest way to convince somebody to buy a product or service is to prove that everyone else has done it already. Once something becomes a widely recognized phenomenon or a trend, it becomes obvious that it has to have some merits – otherwise it wouldn’t be so popular. Right?
This is sometimes referred to as the bandwagon effect or Matthew Effect. The Bible says: ‘For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.’ Matt 13:12
‘In crowd’ people choose fast foods. If they don’t, they will starve. The right fast food can make you friends. The more popular something becomes, the more people buy into it and, consequently, it becomes even more popular. In the book industry, it is referred to as the ‘bestseller effect.’ People buy bestsellers. They do not exercise personal taste or aesthetic sense. KFC falsely have actors and rent-a-crowd showing social approval of their products.
Fast food vendors create venues and contexts to stimulate consumption. The corporate focus on profits can modify an event with audience timeout for peeing, scoffing fast foods and buying merchandise. Popular entertainments require only grunts, tears and hilarity, between mouthfuls. With a full mouth, standards of athleticism, observation of rules and aesthetics cannot be discussed either reasonably or critically. Audiences merely cheer, applaud punch-ups, disdain injuries and dispute referees’ decisions.
Jumbo tubs of popcorn condition audiences with simultaneous eating, as a sublimation of the competitive tension of the event. Packaging enables eating with the hands, without plates, knives or forks. In this way, audiences at public and private venues have been taken over by fast food consumption and consumption of packaging, uneaten condiments, sauces and sugar. Our fast food culture will be condemned in history by the need to dispose of mountains of leftovers, contributing to the burden of excessive resources usage and pollution.
There is worse. The consequences of fast food are physical and mental ill health, from over-indulgence, abandonment of self-control and mindless fast food consumption during media-presented entertainment. Hopefully the fast food craze will disappear as fast as it appeared.
The worst result of fast food is thoughtless followership and surrender of discrimination. Fast food emporia thrive on instant gratification. A leader of a group, seeing a fast food advertisement, asserts her authority: ‘Shut up and take my money!’. It’s an easy sell. When her group walk into the fast food depot, they are pushed into buying ancillary products, paying for them immediately, sight unseen. The food is already prepared and it is a short wait until the package is delivered for immediate consumption. This final act in the food cycle, which began with seeing an advertisement, is opening the package and comparing with expectations. Then there is eating, until bloated they sink into a torpor as their digestive systems grapple with the toxic shock of fat and sugar overload. Then they stumble out, bleary-eyed, to look for some innocuous entertainment to numb their brains, or a casual crime to commit.
Like many industries, fast food suppliers are self-interested and greedy, in the capitalist mould of cultivating indiscriminate unhealthy over-eating. It is not so widely known that their anti-societal intent is to create an addiction to fast food which is harmful to many people. Quit fast foods now!
My novel Turkeys Not Bees is a fiction story about mass entertainment controlled by The Spectacle, see Debord 1967, The Society of the Spectacle.
My writing on related topics: see my blog martinknox.com
IS AUSTRALIA A NANNY STATE?
A nanny state has the appearance of protecting vulnerable people from incompetence, foolishness, bullies, abusers and exploiters, like a ‘nanny’ who controls unable, greedy, unruly and innocent children.
I want to expose nanny state overreach in Australia that diminishes personal responsibility, replacing it with ethics and morality, weakening self-control and becoming like a police state. It is insulting for an authority to treat me as a child when I am a competent adult.
A sign displayed at the entrance to a local park is:
BEWARE FALLING BRANCHES
In my opinion, this is overreach, without sufficient benefit to justify intrusion.
Rousseau’s social contract required all people to act for the public good. The Soviet experiment with communism prescribed state control of religion, health, education, employment, manufacturing, commerce and election of leaders. When people withdrew their support from the ‘nanny’, the state failed.
‘Some countries like Singapore are reputed to have many more regulations and restrictions on citizens’ lives than in other countries,’ said a libertarian friend, Don. ‘Germany was freest in a recent survey of regulation of alcohol, tobacco, food and vaping in 30 European countries.’
‘Maybe Germans are least well off,’ I said.
‘No,’ said Don. ‘A reason to be without those regulations is free choice. Governments have legislated to control thousands of products and situations unnecessarily.’
‘A Canadian journalist and magazine publisher says Australia has a nanny state,’ I said. ‘He wrote:
‘. . .Australia is becoming the world’s dumbest nation . . .(because of) the removal of personal responsibility and the increase in the number and scope of health and safety laws.’ Tyler Brule, 2015
‘He argued that Australian cities are over-sanitised,’ I said. ‘Many of the laws have been implemented in the expectation that they will reduce violence or improve health and safety. The excessive laws were accused of restricting freedom, ruining livelihoods and small businesses, turning the nation into a nanny state.’
‘We’re steeped in nanny state laws,’ said Don. ‘We have mandatory bicycle helmet laws, gun control laws, prohibitions on alcohol in public places, plain packaging for cigarettes, pub and club lockout laws and permits for picnics on a beach. These are only a few. They are ridiculous. A senate enquiry investigated laws and regulations that ‘restrict personal choice for the individual’s own good.’ It’s an oxymoron. Australia’s criminal legislation has gone too far.’
‘Our gun control laws are reasonable,’ I said. ‘Other nations envy us.’
‘That may be an exception,’ said Don. ‘A nanny state excessively controls, monitors, or interferes with people’s private actions or behaviours that are deemed unhealthy or unsafe.’
‘What is state-like about a nanny state?’ I asked.
‘The term is an echo of ‘nation state’, which is a body of related people in a country. A nanny state has a nanny figure parodying a monarch,’ said Don. ‘The government may be autocratic and resented by the people.’
‘Utopians like George Orwell have satirized cradle-to-grave care by the state,’ I said. ‘Scandanavian welfare comes close. Israel, Cuba and former Soviet countries have achieved some success, but opinions about this differ.’
‘How wonderful to have every want supplied by the state, with little or no personal expense!’ said Don. ‘How wonderful to be securely employed under good conditions, without having to compete with others! Being without luxuries would not matter, because everyone would be without them.’
‘Orwell in his book 1984 satirised a totalitarian hell, with control of every aspect of life, including thinking and talking,’ I said.
‘During the Covid pandemic, various technologies were proposed to be mandated: quarantine, masking, vaccination,’ said Don. ‘Nanny state conditions were protested in some countries.’
‘Most interventions have been adopted democratically and objectors are usually a minority,’ I said. ‘Aboriginal people have had a state nanny doling out welfare payments, alcohol and houses.’
‘Objectors to nanny state provision are sometimes labelled as haves, capitalists, authoritarians or conservatives. Nanny state supporters called have-nots, socialists, Bohemians, nihilists and free-loaders,’ said Don.
‘Babying adults is self-defeating,’ I said. ‘I have protested provisions intended to keep streets safe for pedestrians, having the opposite effect. Zebra crossings and traffic calming obstacles encourage mindlessness on the roads. Children do not learn to cross safely. They step out into a trap and are squashed. Youths will speed, choosing the fastest streets to rat-run.’
‘Consolatory education is harmful,’ said Don. ‘Nanny state education has courses for every child to succeed too easily. When young people leave school and get jobs, they are expected to perform but when they are criticised, they quit.’
‘Poor people pay subsidised rents, with nanny state support, as if there can be no market correction that would charge them a fair price.’ I said. ‘They are like babies, fed by umbilical cord. They cling to benefits that others have had to work to achieve.
‘Electricity users, instead of reducing their bills by conserving power, expect the government to pay the increases.
Our nanny state sometimes helps with the cost of disabilities. If claimants fake symptoms, others could have to pay too. I had a student who claimed to have dyslexia and required to write on dark purple exam papers. Her ruse included writing with a black pen. I was ruining my own vision catering to her faked needs, when I realised her pretence was a rebellion and I refused to implement it.
When a nanny state wants positive discrimination in favour of a type of individual, the validity of the claim and its provision have to be administered, at significant cost to the community.
A sign displayed at the entrance to a local park reads ‘Beware falling branches.’ Parks are places where visitors go to be exposed to conditions as in nature. They should not have their wits dulled by instructions. This is nanny state overreach.
When you encounter nanny state overreach, please call it, for the rest of us. Australia is not the World’s dumbest nation, is it?
My novel Turkeys Not Bees is a story about how two young people confront a nanny state.
Available on Amazon. Reviews see martinknox.com
