The Right - for old, white men, and stupid younger people

Just as the US Republican Party has become the party for old white folk, and silly younger people who can't believe in climate change and think Ayn Rand had something useful to say about economics, the same dynamic is clearly operating here.

Adam Creighton writes today about some speech 84 year old Geoffrey Blainey gave:

AUSTRALIA’S greatest historian, Geoffrey Blainey, has called for swaths of the Canberra bureaucracy to be farmed out to India or Hong Kong. 
 
“While protectionism has died in primary and secondary industries, it is still very powerful in tertiary,” Professor Blainey said in a wide-ranging interview that canvassed a socialist revival in ­advanced countries.

“There’s a lot of protectionism still in the professions: Canberra naturally is a protectionist city; there are so many tasks that ­Canberra could farm out to India or Hong Kong — but not for your life. They say if you can’t compete in manufacturing … you must close down, but if you can’t compete in Canberra you’re all right.”

 Well, isn't that weird.  Small government types usually go on a lot about privacy too, but governments shipping private information off shore to India is going to be AOK, is it?  Not to mention wildly popular with the public, who just love to deal with call centres when they are querying their phone/electricity/credit card account.  Getting government functions shipped even further offshore is going to be fantastic.

Julie Novak thinks it's a great idea too, I see from a tweet.  No common sense operating there:  just "if it means smaller government spending, it's great" as per usual.

The report of the Blainey speech indicates he went on about socialism being revived internationally, risks of war, and new States being deserved in Northern Australia.  (Funny, that; given that a new State would involve a new level of that dreaded bureaucracy that should be shipped off shore.)

Either the speech itself, or Creighton's reporting of it, seems to be a complete ramble with hardly any overarching theme.   

I haven't read him, but assume that Blainey's history work was good in its day.   

But it's a sad indictment of the current intellectual decline of the Right in the US, and probably everywhere, that their heroes are all well past their intellectual peak.