FACT MIRRORING FICTION – THE STEADY RISE OF ‘ME-ISM’
From the scathing findings of the recently released final report by the Royal Commission into misconduct in the banking and financial services sector, the continued decline of Australia’s standing on the table of Transparency International, to the federal government’s intransigence on the establishment of a national integrity commission to stamp out systemic graft and corruption; is this a country in moral decline or simply a reflection of a worrying and seemingly growing worldwide Trump-inspired trend in the proliferation of ‘stuff the rest of you, it’s all about ‘me-ism’?I thought the fictional Board of Directors in my novel The Acquisition were dastardly enough and in fact a tad worried that they may have come across to the reader as just too awful a bunch of cronies and charlatans to have been credible. I need not have worried!
Seems like every other day I hear another snippet of news mirroring my plot of some poor sorry sod being treated abominably by his boss, unfairly dismissed and cast out to be swallowed up in the unemployment line and disappeared into society.
Or a spate of recent stories of how young lowly paid kids are being ripped off by high profile multi-millionaire celebrity chefs, owners and directors of fancy upmarket restaurants raking in millions from advertising endorsements and TV gigs and yet somehow thinking that it’s perfectly OK to pay a German or Swedish backpacker, or home-grown pimply teenager, 65% of the miserly minimum weekly wage; or point-blank refusing to pay them penalty rates for weekend work because it strips a couple of percentage points off their hugely inflated bottom lines.
On and on it goes, unbridled greed and selfishness appear to know no bounds, behaviour that manifests itself at the top end of the scale as vice and corruption.
Transparency International’s 2018 annual report assessing the level of public sector corruption in each of the world’s 180 countries has just been released placing Australia in 13th place. The Corruption Perceptions Index is the most widely used indicator of corruption worldwide. Thirteenth’s not bad you’d think and you’d be right, but the trend is of concern. According to Transparency International Australia (TIA) Chief Executive Officer, Serena Lillywhite, (which has just about got to be the most apt name ever for a person working in the morality crusader game) Australia has slipped 8 ranking points in the past 7 years falling out of the top 10 least-corrupt countries in 2014.
Adding gravitas to this steady decline in Australia’s standing are the results of a survey recently conducted by TIA which found 85% of Australians now think some of their elected federal parliamentary representatives are corrupt – a level of distrust that cannot and should not sit well with our politicians.
But the general public doesn’t get off scot-free either. Common courtesies, decency, treating one another with respect interspersed with the occasional act of random kindness appear to be viewed these days almost as a sign of weakness. The horde of crappy reality TV shows that dominate the television airwaves are telling in this regard as a kind of exaggerated microcosm of society. The lowest common denominator across the host of improbable scenarios and ridiculous storylines appears to suggest that the only way to ‘win’ is to adopt a ruthlessly tactical approach to undermine, belittle, humiliate and eventually conquer your fellow participants. Not really the kind of messaging we want to be sending our children to ensure future generations of Australians don’t grow up believing that conduct reminiscent of some of the more unsavoury characters in The Acquisition is either normal or acceptable.
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