‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’ The truth of this ancient proverb has been demonstrated by the line-up of Western leaders listening to, attending lectures by and commending the Swedish child global warmist activist, Greta Thunberg. At least Ms Thunberg, a vegan who refuses to fly, is not a hypocrite.

But as Bjorn Lomborg points out, despite the world spending $US162 billion this year subsidising renewable energy and spending by 2030 between $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year on the Paris Agreement, there will be no measurable impact whatsoever on temperatures even by the end of the century.

Although Lomborg actually believes in the theory of man-made global warming, he was banned by the Australian academic establishment as a heretic. Why? Because he dared propose an alternative solution: funding research to find cost-efficient technological solutions. His sin was to dare dissent from the officially- mandated remedy proposed by the sinister anti-Western forces behind the United Nations’ IPCC.

What is truly extraordinary is that most Australian politicians claim to believe both the theory and the spurious IPCC ‘solution’, whatever that does to the country and the people.

The reason why Bill Shorten lost the election was that along with his plans to steal the savings of and otherwise punish the aspirational, he was going to go even further than the Coalition on global warming.

The plain fact is that, despite the election, the government’s energy policy is still the principal reason why small business is suffering, why manufacturing is going overseas and why we shall soon be net importers of food.

This madness is even infecting local government, with city councils declaring a ‘climate emergency’ while they indulge in ratepayer-funded luxury international travel.

Fortunately, one of the few Western leaders who is both sane and honest enough to refuse to go along with this   madness is also the most powerful, Donald Trump.

And unlike some of his predecessors, he has meticulously observed the constitutional constraints on his office, no matter what insults likening him to Hitler are made on the ABC’s showcase programme, Q&A .

(On that outrage, just what is Chairman Buttrose doing?)

The question for Australians is not whether the madness that is sweeping through Western elites has reached Australia, but whether it was manifested here earlier and at a level worse than in most Western countries.

The problem seems to be that Australian politicians appear too ready to give total support to whatever fashionable idea the elites endorse.

The politicians of other countries often pay lip service to those ideas but then cunningly don’t actually apply them, at least fully.

Even when a policy is sound as an objective, there is no need to adopt it unilaterally, even if an academic economist proposes it.

I refer to the discovery by the political class of ‘free trade’ and the failure to use it as a bargaining tool with other countries before abandoning all of our defences. Just look at what is happening to manufacturing and agriculture.

Since the advent of the Whitlam government, it has become clear that a significant and growing proportion of Australia’s political class seem to be  endowed with significantly less common sense than the rank-and-file.

Whenever there is a choice between policies, be it in energy, defence, law and order, health, education, water, agriculture and just about anything else, our politicians too often choose precisely the one policy which common sense would tell ordinary Australians not to choose.

Whether this constitutes some form of group madness touches upon a relevant current issue, the plight of the mentally ill in Australia.

A few decades ago governments  were told that abuse had been found in some institutions.

The common-sense solution would have been to act against that abuse and not to destroy each and every institution actually providing both a home and care for the mentally ill.

Roughly around the same time that the politicians decided to pull out the superb tram networks in most cities (except Melbourne), to stop building dams, to ban nuclear power, to persecute farmers and to give cultural Marxists an increasing role in determining the content of the curriculum, the politicians decided to close all such institutions so that the mentally ill could be treated in the community, perhaps living together in community houses.

In fact they were just abandoned, with governments free to profit from a real estate bonanza and with their financial liabilities transferred to the federal welfare budget.

Today’s mental illness crisis has been made significantly worse through a drug culture which thrives because governments and the courts have decided that punishing crime is to be avoided or at least minimised, even if it means that its victims are thereby abandoned.

The result is that we are now on a downward slope with calls for the safe government regulation of dangerous and illegal drugs at events where it would seem the only bearable way to put up with the horrendous noise produced is to be heavily drugged.

Politicians believe they are good at sensing the inevitable, although they do sometimes ‘come a cropper’, as they did so deliciously over the republic. But on drug testing as with injecting rooms they may well prevail.

Instead of condemning even more young people to the destruction of their lives through drugs, there is a solution. It is zero tolerance, and it works. It seems for example that in Singapore people do go to such festivals without the drug culture being in any way tolerated.

Official policy on the mentally ill has an horrendous corollary. This is the release of a significant number of the dangerous and criminally insane into the community. Apparently, the politicians believe that Australians should just put up with this without protest and that victims should as usual just be abandoned.

Official policy in relation to the mentally ill is a disaster.

The only solution, before it is too late, has been a theme of this column. We must make the politicians truly accountable, 24/7.

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