Never mind unconscious bias - here are some conscious biases that I'm happy to declare

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, March 19.)

We’ve heard a lot in recent months about something called unconscious bias. Apparently this is the bias you have when you don’t know you have a bias. Perhaps we should call it the Claytons bias.

The genius of the concept is that people accused of having an unconscious bias are in no position to deny it, for the obvious reason that they weren’t aware of it. Thus they are held to be guilty by default, as it were.

Personally, I see no point in agonising over my unconscious biases when I don’t know what they are. In any case, I have plenty of conscious ones to keep me occupied, and which I’m happy to declare. Here are some of the things I have conscious biases about:

■ Sanctimonious vegans who aren’t content to quietly follow their conscience when it comes to dietary choices, but must parade their virtue and harangue those of us who enjoy meat and dairy products. I have an especially acute bias against celebrities who take advantage of their high profile in the media to push for a transition to a plant-based economy. I wouldn’t tell James Cameron how to make movies and I’d rather he didn’t tell me what I should eat. 

■ People who insist on inflicting their hideous musical tastes on everyone within a 100-metre range, whether they’re having a barbecue at the beach or driving down the street with the car windows wide open and the stereo cranked up to 11. It goes without saying that their musical tastes are invariably hideous because that’s the sort of people they are. But they apparently believe that the only reason we don’t all love Led Zep is that we haven’t heard them loud enough. Excessive noise is a pernicious invasion of privacy that should be punishable by internment in a confined space where loudspeakers play It’s A Small World After All on endless rotate.

■ Ageing, tough-talking politicians who address reporters as “Sunshine”, channelling Inspector Jack Regan from The Sweeney and imagining that they sound menacing.

■ Australians who make jokes about the New Zealand accent. A British-born Aussie columnist recently referred to Raelene Castle, the New Zealander who runs the Australian Rugby Union, as the Vuccar of Dubbly, thereby mocking her accent while simultaneously making a snide comment about her looks.  Apparently it didn’t occur to him that no one born in England – a country where an East Ender struggles to understand a Liverpudlian, and someone from the West Country might as well speak in Swahili to a Geordie from Tyneside – is in any position to disparage another country’s way of speaking; and still less so when that person has taken up citizenship in Orstrylia, whose national accent, in its more extreme forms, is about as euphonious as the screeching of a galah.

■ Shared plates in restaurants, which I suspect are a cunning plot to make people pay more for less.

■ Freedom campers who treat the landscape with contempt, transforming scenic spots into something resembling Sudanese refugee camps, only with less exacting hygiene standards. It beggars belief that some councils humour these spongers by making available an app that advises them on places where they can set up camp and presumably defecate on any convenient patch of ground. Most New Zealanders would be only too happy to tell freedom campers where to go – preferably the nearest airport.

■ Tiresome left-wing moralists masquerading as stand-up comedians, kidding themselves that they’re edgy when in fact they play it safe by pandering to the smug, conformist group-think of their like-minded audiences.  

■ Taxpayer-funded broadcasters using their privileged position to promote their pet ideological agendas.

■ David Attenborough – not so much for his preaching about climate change, although God knows that’s tedious enough, as for his habit of manipulating viewers’ emotions by anthropomorphising the creatures in his documentaries – in other words, encouraging us to think of them as behaving and feeling like humans.

■ Transgender activists who aren’t content to quietly follow their inclination without any fuss, as transgender people used to do (the author Jan Morris, for example), but who demand to be noticed and paid homage to as an oppressed minority.

■ Neo-Marxist ideologues who want to reconstruct the English language by erasing all reference to biological sex. In one of the more bizarre idiocies of 2019, a parliamentary select committee considering the abortion bill was urged to replace the term “pregnant woman” with “pregnant person” – a proposal that found favour with Green MP Jan Logie, who thought “pregnant person” was more inclusive. Seriously. And to think they let these people out unaccompanied in public.