The general theme of the replies, and the air of annoyance, reminded me of Ms Claudia Balducci, a woman responsible for Seattle’s public transport network. Faced with evidence that up to 70% of passengers are now freeloading with impunity, Ms Balducci replied: “People are feeling more welcome on our system and less afraid to use it because there’s less of a fear of fare enforcement.” Which is progress, apparently. An achievement unlocked. 

Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Ngaree Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.

With a glorious lack of irony, Ms Blow then denounces “outdated approaches to health” and insists that medical treatment must be “culturally appropriate.” If not, one assumes, optimal or even efficacious. Still, if patients aren’t recovering as rapidly as one might hope, or indeed recovering at all, at least those Western paradigms will be “decolonised” and righteously disrupted: “There has never been a more exciting time to be disruptive,” says she. A term Ms Blow deploys no fewer than eleven times. Possibly hinting at her priorities.

“Whiteness,” an allegedly deplorable yet oddly nebulous phenomenon, is apparently rooted in the “destruction of the environment” and the “total demolition of value,” including, we’re told, the destruction of “integrity, honesty… common sense.” Our theatrically agonised academic insists that “whiteness” has “no nature, no culture, no essence… no value or intrinsic meaning,” and yet it supposedly corrupts and befouls everything it touches and must therefore “dissolve into oblivion.”

It scarcely needs saying that allowing one’s children to be exposed to the unhappy mental contortions of Professor Barrett would not be the wisest way to spend tens of thousands of dollars. Though conceivably one might use him as an illustration of how minds can come undone.

“The personal is political,” says she. Well, so I hear. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political.

It occurs to me that if you start demanding that small children be allowed to vote in general elections – largely because you assume that their choices, their politics, will tend to mirror your own – then perhaps it’s time to ponder why your own politics correspond with the imagined preferences of children, who are, by definition, unworldly and irresponsible. Such that you grudgingly concede that, “Enfranchising everyone [i.e., including small children] will make the electorate less informed on average.” The rest of us, meanwhile, may wish to ponder whether a leftist’s desire to exploit the ignorance of small children in order to further her own socialist vanities is not only farcical, but degenerate.

We’ve been here before, of course, when Professor David Runciman claimed that not allowing primary school children to vote alongside adults amounts to “an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.” As if small children are renowned for their selflessness and conscientious forethought.