He’s baaack. Or soon will be. On February 8 Jordan Peterson, anti-PC warrior, mega best-selling author (12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) and one of north America's wealthiest academics, will return for his second speaking tour of Australia, kicking off in Perth before visiting most of the state capitals. He’s been dismissed as a professor of piffle and lauded as a latter day sage, which helps explain the exponential rise in his popularity since his first sell-out visit to our shores early last year.

If you’re unfamiliar with the rise and rise of Peterson, it all began in September 2016, when the Canadian clinical psychologist and Toronto university professor, in a fit of pique, posted a video decrying a recent law that he claimed would compel people to use transgender people’s preferred gender pronouns. Many doubted whether the law - designed to ban discrimination on the basis of gender expression - could ever be used in this manner, but no matter, Peterson had tapped into a growing backlash against the perceived excesses of political correctness. And when his employer, the University of Toronto, briefly suspended him in an act of extraordinary over-reach, Peterson became not just a champion of free speech but a hero to conservatives across the right-leaning spectrum.

But it was Peterson’s slap-down interview on Britain’s Channel 4 in January last year that became a viral phenomenon (now up to an astonishing 14 million views on YouTube), propelling the 56-year-old to global fame. Peterson's cool retorts to anchor Cathy Newman's floundering line of questions about the gender pay gap became a disaster 101 tutorial for journalism students.

Not that Peterson isn’t guilty of verbosity and word-twisting aphorisms himself, sent up so witheringly by Australian comedian Kitty Flanagan in her sketch 488 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Idiots, on Charlie Pickering’s ABC show The Weekly last year. Ask Peterson a straight question, such as whether he believes in God (a reasonable enquiry since he makes so many Biblical references) and you’ll be greeted with an unending serving of circumlocution.