There is a table marked ‘Motorcycle Sales 2017’. You can find it quite easily on the Internet. It has all 22 motorcycle manufacturers who import motorcycles into Australia on it. It also has a lot of red numbers in the right-hand column. Red numbers with the minus sign in front of them which indicate, as a percentage, how fewer bikes a manufacturer sold this year as opposed to 2016.
And they make for very sobering reading.
Of the 22 importers, only three have cheery green numbers beside their name – and one of those, Victory, doesn’t make motorcycles anymore. The rest are all posting reduced sales, some which look positively terrifying.
Hyosung down 66.1 per cent. Moto Guzzi down 32.7 per cent. Triumph down 26.7 per cent. Aprilia down 32.5 per cent. The importer of those brands, Peter Stevens Importers (PSI) must be sharpening some kind of weapon at the sight of those numbers.
The big boys have also copped a kick in the cods. Harley is down 13.4 per cent. Yamaha 14.1 per cent. Honda 9.3 per cent. Suzuki 9.2 per cent.
BMW, KTM, Ducati, Kawasaki – all down.
So why is this so?
I’m sure it’s a question the captains of the motorcycle industry and their legions of highly paid marketing directors, brand managers and sales executives are asking each other all the time in boardrooms all over the country.
“Why are people not buying our motorcycles?” they lament. “Our motorcycles have never been better. They have never gone faster, cornered harder, stopped better, looked hotter, or been priced more competitively than they are right now.”
And that, by and large, is true.
So what’s happening?
I reckon I know. But if I’m right, then it’s not something that can be fixed with price cuts, cash-back offers, or a few grands’ worth of accessories – which are the traditional industry fall-backs in tough times.
I’m thinking we may have entered a type of Perfect Poo-Storm – a combination of things that on their own would have some little effect, but in concert cause the terrible red numbers mentioned above.
Firstly, discretionary spending is way down and wages are in the toilet. This is thanks to the vile merchant bankers, filthy foreign nationals and dank reptilian spivs who govern us only in order to increase the profits of the companies they own or have shares in. And that’s working for them. Profits are great.
Secondly, teenage boys, who should be buying bikes because bikes are cool, rebellious and dangerous all at once, are just not doing that.
Millennial males are hugely risk-averse. And motorcycling, which is magnificently dangerous (and precisely why people like me were initially attracted to it and remain besotted by it) is simply not calling to them.
Rebellion itself has largely been strangled. We live in a society where protest is frowned upon, and indeed police permission is required to engage in protest, so what would be the point?
And at the end of the day, they really don’t have anything substantive to rebel against. They have been cossetted and pandered to their entire lives. Most of them are happy to live at home well into their 20s. Rebel against that? You have got to be kidding.
Even the whole coolness aspect of riding is under relentless attack. One Percenters, once the absolute avatars of motorcycling cool, have been largely rendered invisible by the governments’ relentless demonisation of their motorcycle clubs.
Once upon a time a young bloke looked at a Hells Angels and wanted to be one.
There’s not a young bloke alive who looks at a HOG member and wishes that was him.
L-platers have been restricted to riding breathless, anodyne motorcycles for years, and even forced to wear hideous fluoro vests in the Victorian Reich – an idea that will certainly find favour in the other provinces soon.
You try and be cool on a Ninja 300 with your hi-viz vest on. Go on. I dare you. The poor saps are now even parodying themselves by buying clown bikes like Groms and telling themselves they’re “fun”. Yeah, right. Just like an KTM Super Duke R is fun, aye? But wait. How would they even know?
So the government is earnestly working towards making motorcycling uncool because it knows that when it succeeds (and it will), then our society has taken one more step down the road to total conformity and our subjugation will be almost complete.
And our resultant safety will be all-encompassing.
To add weight to these terrible machinations, the government knows Millennial males have been almost entirely raised by women thanks to a hysterical society that has for the most part driven men out of teaching roles. One study has used Australian Bureau of Statistics figures to predict male primary school teachers will be extinct by the year 2054.
Single parent families, the vast majority of which are headed up by single mums who, supported by the Family Court, ration Dad’s access to the kids, will never be favourably disposed to motorcycles. They’re not safe.
And with no male role models around, a society terrified of insulting, offending or outraging women, is not a society favourably disposed towards motorcycles.
Even pushbikes, once the exclusive province of kids who raised hell on them, have become this banal, lycra-clad fitness orgy for middle-aged men.
Once upon a time, you’d graduate from your pushbike to a motorcycle. You instinctively understood counter-steering. You understood tyre grip and how it varied in the wet. You’d learned how to wheelie. You knew two-wheeled vehicle maintenance was important and you had the scuffed knees and elbows to remind you about things like correct chain tension, loose nuts and viable brakes.
Kids don’t ride pushbikes all that much anymore.
Mum isn’t keen on it. It’s just not safe.
To make matters worse, cars are cheaper to buy and run than motorcycles. You can take your girlfriend in a car, and she can wear a skirt and her hair will not get mussed.
You cannot take your girlfriend on the back of your LAMs bike. That’s not safe either, apparently.
As you can see, motorcycling does indeed find itself in somewhat dire straits.
The myth of safety has become the be-all and end-all of Australian society. We have sacrificed many of our civil liberties to this unattainable paradigm. And we will eagerly sacrifice many more.
Just the other day NSW enacted legislation permitting the government to keep certain prisoners in jail indefinitely – even after they have served their sentences – based on the view they may commit more crimes if they’re freed.
This is the act of a fascist police-state. Plain and simple.
NSW now punishes people for thoughtcrime – a concept George Orwell explored rather well in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
We have reached the point where this is somehow OK. 
And not only is it OK, but we are now eagerly self-policing one another for safety.
And motorcycles are not safe.
And we’re not going to buy them and we’re certainly not going ride them.
So there.
Words by Boris Mihailovic