We have cowards, not leaders.
What is good leadership? What makes a good leader? Do we have any good leaders in this country at the moment?
How many times have you heard our political leaders say “We’re basing our decisions on the science” or “We’re following the health advice of the experts”?
How many times have you read about focus groups and polling companies in relation to politics especially around election time?
Is leadership really about handballing problems to others so you can throw them under the bus when things go wrong? Is leadership about having your values and policies defined by anonymous groups and companies that can manipulate data and results, rather than what you really believe in?
How many times have expert predictions and polling companies got things wrong?
Yet our politicians rely nearly exclusively upon expert advice and polling numbers to decide their policy platforms, how they will govern and the societies they will build all while trying to ensure they are as accountable for as little as possible, especially when in government.
If you are a student of history you will have read about leaders from our past and you would question our recent generation of leaders when putting them into comparison with History’s greatest ones. Boris Johnson recently compared himself and the floundering Joe Biden to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
Really?
Churchill and Roosevelt were two giants of an era who served through two world wars, a great depression and some of the most disastrous battles and conflicts a nation can endure. Churchill had Gallipoli, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain to contend with to name just a few, while Roosevelt had the great depression and Pearl Harbour and the two-front war in both the Pacific and Europe.
Both were from different sides of the political spectrum, both had their doubters, both of them had their political enemies and their haters, both men had their own personal challenges, yet both men never diverged from their own values and principles. When others around them doubted their message or their situation, they stood tall and argued for what they believed was right.
Churchill instead of throwing others under the bus due to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign that he envisioned and promoted, actually penalised himself by resigning his position with the government and joining the British army where her served on the western front as a Captain leading men in the heat and disaster of the hell that was trench warfare.
Roosevelt led despite suffering polio and having his legs permanently paralysed. Despite this, he went on to serve four terms as president of the USA in their most challenging times of the 20th century. To even compare Johnson and Biden to these two giants of both political and human history is an insult to any clear-thinking person.
Johnson and Biden aren’t even fit to be the dust on these great men’s shoes.
Likewise, at a time in our history here in Australia when we need some political giants with both integrity and courage to lead this nation, leaders who will unite us rather than divide us, leaders who will take accountability for their decisions rather than relying on the advice of unqualified bureaucrats, we have instead been delivered individuals with no fortitude, no integrity and no sense of true values.
How else do you explain our country being effectively divided into eight separate states that separate family members, that separate friends, that have their political elite oppress small and medium-sized businesses and cost their citizens their employment? That same political elite that is now looking to marginalise half our people simply because they refuse to be bullied into the government and media’s preferred health choice of being vaccinated with a drug that is both untested and by the governments own admission, potentially dangerous and life-threatening.
Our Prime Minister is now openly talking about creating a section of our society that will be considered second class citizens and even unclean by our governments both state and federal. This language is already beginning to creep into the media’s reporting and even from the mouths of our politicians and bureaucrats who are looking at demonising people with the label of “unvaccinated” and laying the blame of any covid-19 cases at their feet.
This demonising will eventually cost people their employment, their businesses, their freedom to travel both domestically and internationally. It will also, if left uncontested, see Australian citizens denied entry to sports, entertainment and social venues such as pubs, restaurants and bars. In doing so it will pit Australians against each other in an undeclared medical civil war.
How did we get to this point?
Simple really, we have political leadership that is focused on polling and focus groups who tell them that producing an environment of fear will benefit them politically. If you think this is all about health you are simple swallowing their narrative and not looking through it for the real truth. There are so many contradictions and mistruths it makes your head spin.
We are told to listen to the experts yet when we do and they contradict the government’s experts they are cancelled and vilified, we are told we cannot have friends in our homes, yet it’s fine to go to a sports events with thousands of others, we are banned from travelling interstate even to see dying relatives but are forced to watch celebrities and sports stars given golden passes all over the country.
I could go on and on, but I would need a book the size of war and peace rather than this article.
The bottom line is our political elite will do and say just about anything to keep their privileged positions of perks and incomes and to hell with the people they swore to serve. They hide behind their focus groups, their polling companies, their experts and their police forces they have now turned into Stasi goon squads. Except in a very few cases, even the backbenchers and opposition in our parliaments have jettisoned the very principles they stood behind to be elected and are now too cowardly to speak out and demand better of their leaders.
When we desperately need political warriors with strong values and voices to defend our people we instead have been delivered soulless individuals of mediocrity, poor ethics, low integrity and a generous dose of cowardice.
What this nation would give right now to have leaders with the fortitude and courage of a Churchill, a Roosevelt or in Australian folklore a Menzies or a Curtain, that would stare down opposition, make an argument to win over their citizens and lead us through these darkest of times.
If we don’t find people of this calibre very soon then I fear our nation and its people are in desperate trouble.