Western Australia High On Social Credit

The Western Australian government legislates a better social system.

Perth, WA - The Premier of Western Australia, Mark McGowan, today announced sweeping reforms in the state by way of the Building One National Utopian State (BONUS) scheme, of which the first stage has now become law as a pilot for the rest of the country.

Inspired by the enormous success of the Chinese social credit system, especially in Rongcheng where everyone is now a model citizen, the Western Australian government are looking forward to a completely compliant society.

“It’s really about financial prosperity for the state,” said McGowan who is also the Treasurer. “Every citizen who does not comply with government mandates, even government suggestions, is simply costing the state in terms of finances and resources,” he added.

The cost of heavily armed police to control crowds in Victoria last year was one example McGowan cited as “an unfortunate expenditure of state funds,” that could have been achieved at very little cost with the new BONUS law. “Rubber bullets and tear gas are not cheap,” he said, and emphasised the need for social self-constraint mechanisms that are both cheap and effective.

“We are encouraging our young people to adopt the phrase ‘Get a BONUS mate!’ as a socially responsible reminder to each other that there are significant bonuses for being a good citizen,” said the Minister for Education and Training in a recent press briefing at the launch of a $350M advertising campaign aimed at school children. The advertising campaign encourages children to inspire friends to be good citizens while keeping a close eye on the older generation and reporting any ‘bad’ behaviour.   

The Education Department is already seeing success by rewarding or punishing classes based on their accumulated social credit score. One class, where three students admitted that their parents watch the Matt Walsh Show and discussed some of the contents of a recent episode, had to stay back after school and watch three hours of a RuPaul Masterclass on self-expression. The three students and their parents were docked 50 points and the rest of the class lost 10 points for “proximity to a dissident”.

Opponents of the new law claim the system is totalitarian and communist. One such woman was jailed, not for speaking out against the new law, but for the fact that she lost all her social credit by spreading disinformation about vaccines, offending neighbours due to her having a fifth child (even after the neighbours said she should stop having kids for the sake of the planet), and suggesting that we now live in a communist state. Fortunately, her children are now safe in the care of the state while she and her husband spend some much-needed time at a health camp where they will undergo psychiatric evaluation and treatment.

The second stage of BONUS is now before the parliament and proposes that property ownership should come with a certain social credit score cost – the more a person owns the more points will be debited from their account. In the proposed legislation ‘property’ could be construed as any tangible asset and the vague nature of the definition will likely remain. The motivation behind such a proposal is to bring much needed equality to the state where some people own nothing in stark contrast to some who have multi-million-dollar mansions – a situation that remains unpalatable to those who mostly have nothing.

Of course, parliamentary leadership and certain leaders in the corporate sector will be exempt from the proposed property ownership laws since they need such property ownership to effectively ensure equality among the people.

“The BONUS law is a great leap forward for Western Australia, and we trust the rest of the country will follow us down this path,” said McGowan. “The people of WA, and the people alone, are the motivating force in the making of Australian history,” he added, sporting a Mao suit.

A Short Note On Satire

I was rated an ‘idiot’, in one of the comments, for writing this. Now this may have been a cryptic nod to Dostoevsky intimating I’m on the same literary plane… I’m open that that interpetation. I’m not offended at all, actually it’s a welcome gesture as it gave me pause to think about people’s responses to satire. So, I thought it timely to make a quick note about the purpose of satire, in the spirit of education rather than any personal defense.

Satire is a long-standing literary device used to make fun of, scorn, mock, or otherwise highlight a moral, political, or social ill. It exposes and critisizes corruption, foolishness, and dangerous positions held by individuals or groups. This is done by humorous exaggeration, so obviously so that it cannot be mistaken as satire.

Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, in 411 BC, was a comedy and early example of satire. The protagonist Lysistrata rallies the women together to withhold sex from the men in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian War - A funny critique of society and the differences between men and women.

Comedic spoofs that offer light social commentary (Horatian satire) can be found published by The Onion, The Babylon Bee, and novels like Gulliver’s Travels and Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Dark satire, like Orwell’s Animal Farm, movies like A Clockwork Orange and American Psycho, are examples of Juvenalian satire. And satire that casts moral judgments on certain beliefs (Menippean satire) can be found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, poking fun at upper-class intellectualism, and Thomas More’s Utopia that I mention here.

Satire can get to the heart of a matter faster and with more mental retention than can other modes of communication. It can amplify where we are going with irony, hyperbole, and allegory, in such a way that the reader cannot possibly miss the end game.

It can also be a more acceptable piece of writing to share with people who do not see what the satirist sees.

So, I too write with this long-standing and cherished literary device to help us escape the mass psychosis. There’s more coming. It was good enough to maintain a sense of sanity among the oppressed in the former Soviet Union, and so I recon it’s good enough in our circumstances to keep our head and hearts in these dark days.

For Paying Subscribers - Satire from the Archive…

The Decade of Terror