Somehow the label ‘ruling elites’ doesn’t quite do it. There is too much of a whiff or stench of the Marxist worldview about that epithet. What about ‘ruling class’?  Same problem. ‘The establishment’ then? Well, maybe at Berkeley in the 1960s when drug-addled utopians sat around slamming ‘the man’. Not today though. Not since most men gave up on flared pants, nearly all women ditched the shoulder pads and big hairstyles and California transmogrified from being a Reagan-led world leader in education, economic dynamism and magnet for net population growth into being a Gavin Newson-led basket case with educational standards second or third-lowest in the US, businesses fleeing, a net population outflow and a San Francisco – high on a pill called fentanyl and homelessness – that Tony Bennett’s heart would be leaving along with the rest of the man.

Okay, other labelling possibilities include ‘expertocracy’, ‘credentialled classes’, ‘Voice-pushers’ or any term or phrase that suggests a certain subclass of society’s winners whose members genuflect before each and every one of progressive orthodoxy’s mantras. Maybe these people got there from educational attainment, from an ability to climb the bureaucratic ladder or take advantage of corporate board implicit quotas, from rent-seeking proficiency, from mastering grievance politics and the DEI zeitgeist or from being appointed to every big post going by past Coalition governments (who wouldn’t know how to appoint an actual conservative to the top courts, to the Human Rights Commission, to be some puffed-up eSafety Orwellian censor, to top ABC positions, to any position anywhere). Yet however they got there, today they’re in the upper echelons of the corporate world, the lawyerly caste and judiciary, the medical world, in virtually all of the top university administration jobs, in the churches and NGOs, in most all of the leadership jobs for sports administration (did I hear you say ‘sure, men can punch out women’ International Olympic Committee or ‘we don’t agree with Israel Folau so he can’t play for the Wallabies’ Australian Rugby Union?) and, of course, in the vast preponderance of legacy media jobs. It might interest you that donations to political parties is public information in the US and we know that 90-plus per cent of legacy media journos are Democrats there (which is incredibly unbalanced unless you compare it to ‘our’ ABC where you can’t find a single current affairs TV presenter or producer who’s a conservative).

My view is that it is this woke, supine, fall-in-line-with-every-progressive-mantra-going that is a main cause for why trust in our credentialled, Voice-pushing elites has cratered. And be clear, every poll shows that trust in them has indeed cratered. A recent one in the US, of final year high school students, was damning in the extreme. Only 29 per cent of these young people rated large corporations as ‘good’ or ‘very good’. But the police scored worse at only 27 per cent ‘good’ or ‘very good’. The public schools scored the same as the police. The unions got 35 per cent.  Even churches only managed 40 per cent general approval. The only institution that got more than half of US final year high school students to rate it as either ‘good’ or ‘very good’ was the military (at 58 per cent). Every other profession and institution polled was well under half. And at the very bottom of the pile with the worst overall score was the national news media. It got a positive ‘good’ or ‘very good’ score of 19 per cent. Ouch!

Now on reflection this may not be all that surprising. It was the young who were completely smashed and sacrificed during the Covid lockdown thuggery. And perhaps no profession or institution performed worse than the legacy media with its woeful, cowardly, incurious, unsceptical performance as regards all things Covid-related. The legacy media was probably mighty lucky even to get a bare fifth of high school students thinking that kindly of its members. Kind of gives you hope in the young ones that they’re that perceptive.

But the overall point is a wider one. In the West today our credentialled elites are the worst in any of our lifetimes. Trust in them is cratering for the good reason that there is little reason to put any trust in them. They either buy into the woke, ahistorical cultural self-loathing, net-zero catastrophism, cultural relativism, mass inwards immigration and merit-killing identity politics. Or they are just too pusillanimous to stand up against these things – and cowardice may be the worse of the two faults. It is these people who imposed on us the public policy disaster of thuggish lockdowns, the worst in two or three hundred years. They are abandoning any commitment to free speech, even of an insipid sort, in the name of malign, obfuscating ‘misinformation’ restrictions and the perceived need to cover up the sins of multiculturalism and mass immigration. Meanwhile, top police officials not only oversaw flat out thuggery during lockdowns but, of course, are imposing two-tier policing. Just ask any anti-lockdown person who watched the police take a knee with BLM protesters before handcuffing a pregnant woman in her home for daring to object to lockdowns. Or ask anyone in Britain who lives in Rotherham. Or consider here in Australia how nearly the entirety of our credentialled expertocracy became full-time Voice-pushers. The preponderance of the lawyerly caste, the vice-chancellors, the churches, the NGOs, the sporting bodies, the media and even the corporate big end of town – all of them took sides on a party political constitutional fight and got it so wrong that three-fifths of Australians told them to go jump in the lake.

Perhaps the most ironic outcome of all this relates to the corporate big end of town, the ones only too happy to jump into bed with Mr Albanese on the Voice idiocy and other culture-related issues. Now it’s dawned on them that Team Albanese has made Australia’s already woeful labour relations laws even worse. And it’s brutally killing our productivity and delivering falling living standards and per capita GDP results that see each one of us as individuals going backwards. So now these corporate types want the Coalition and Dutton to do something about that.  To repeal these laws.

Give me a break! Our corporate titans are all in on every woke idiocy from net zero to transgenderism to pseudo-blasphemy laws criminalising hurt feelings and insult to barely disguised affirmative action under the cover of a malign ‘diversity’ bureaucracy to actually taking sides on a party political constitutional referendum (which was a flat out disgrace) and yet they now want Team Dutton to expend real political capital to help them on the labour relations front. Well, of course, Labor is a total disaster on that front and as regards everything to do with the economy. But personally, I wouldn’t give these cowardly corporate elites the time of day were I Peter Dutton after winning the next election. They made their bed. They can lie in it for at least a year until maybe they learn that taking sides in the culture wars is a big problem for us conservatives because it is undermining Western resilience. Were they to just shut up and stay neutral that would be good enough. Still, you’ve got to half-admire their nerve and chutzpah.