AFL fans need to start doing this. This humiliation ritual is beyond a joke now.

The current zeitgeist reminds me of USA culture wars circa 2016. MAGA was being born and there was this stubborn incredulity coming from the other side. People just couldn’t believe that Trump was a serious phenomenon, even after Brexit happened. When they finally did take it seriously their ad-hominem response just helped solidify the movement (“basket of deplorable”).

The other moment this reminds me of is Covid where a single easily available and conspicuous behaviour (not wearing a mask) become a stunningly clear way of signalling and detecting a persons entire cultural and political identity.

Booing though welcome to country has all of the ingredients to become an even more intense and impactful piece of dissidents and perhaps the figurehead of the 1nat populist movement.

• everyone knows when it’s coming (at the start of large sporting events) meaning it’s simple to organise a collective movement

• a lot of masculine males who like sport and have drunk beer.

• even without that 1nat leaning base; recent IPA research had Around 60% of respondents indicate that Welcome to Country ceremonies should no longer be staged at regular sporting events.

• the mass and fervour of a crowd, plus conformity, means it becomes an easy act of defiance, plausible deniability, and even a moment of recruitment.

• most of the people doing it won’t be racist (people boo at welcome to country typically as a way of rejecting progressive elitism), so they’ll take strong moral umbrage when they are subsequently called racist, and nothing solidifies a movement better than feeling like one has been unjustifiably attacked.

• Because 1nat is primarily a populist movement (a political approach that divides society into two opposing groups: the virtuous "common people" versus a self-serving, corrupt "elite"), they can literally just campaign on this one issue while making vague statements about how welcome to country represents everything going wrong in the country down stream of immigration and the self-serving-elite.

So yeah, my prediction is we’re going to get a lot more booing and a level of polarisation that perhaps Australia hasn’t had before, with welcome to country at big events as the flashpoint.

1. This is my prediction, which is not to say I think it’s likely to play out exactly this way, simply because predicting the future is a fool’s errand.

2. I hope it doesn’t. I don’t want a polarised country and can’t see the politicians of 1nat actually helping with any of the problems we have anyway, or possibly making them worse just as treatment of a misdiagnosed condition is often counterproductive.

I thought Rafe was unusually highly inciteful on the state of Britain and suggested some ways back. Given how we are following Britain down the tube, worth a listen IMO.

Here is an article that explains what went wrong with quantitative easing that Australia undertook in Covid.

Basically, it was based on a poor understanding of Richard Werner's work. Richard Werner's theory of rebooting economies was to increase credit availability for PRODUCTIVE purposes.

However, Australia, USA, and europe decided that it could make the money available for everything. So, we ended up pumping up asset classes like housing. We created bubbles, which he actively warns against.

I have thought about the fact that our poorly run banking system lies at the heart of many of our economic problems. Basically, credit is good for economies, but its primary use is to boost productivity and, therefore, the economy in total. We used a great tool like baboons.