Australian Family Party

Euthanasia legislation – Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill 2020, passed the SA Parliament this week. Whilst it was introduced by a Labor Member of Parliament, it was essentially a Liberal Government Bill.

On 5AA radio on Thursday morning, Matthew Abraham, who has been covering SA politics for what seems like a hundred years, said he could see no ideological differences between Liberal and Labor. “Steven Marshall is now essentially a Labor premier”, he said. In 2017, Christopher Pyne, leader of the Liberal Party’s left-leaning progressive faction and mentor to Steven Marshall said the Liberal progressives were winning the internal battle against the Party’s conservatives. “We’re in the winning circle”, he said. There’s no doubt about that.

Over the past 25 years, euthanasia legislation has been introduced into the SA parliament 16 times – the last occasion was in 2016. All failed. This week, on the 17^th attempt, it got through. It’s what happens when there isn’t a Christian/Conservative Party in the Parliament to take seats in the Upper House and direct preferences in the Lower House.

At the Federal level, in 2016 the Liberals joined forces with the Greens to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act and abolish Senate Group Voting Tickets. Group Voting Tickets allowed voters to simply put a 1 above-the-line and delegate to their party of choice the distribution of preferences. Whilst minor parties differed widely on policy matters, the one thing they had in common was their dislike of the Greens. Using Group Voting Tickets, minor parties came to arrangements with each other to combine their votes to get ahead of them. The Liberal-Greens deal ended that. Former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard warned the Liberals at the time that the Coalition’s deal with the Greens could backfire on them. “The principal beneficiary of these changes will be the Australian Greens,” he said.

He was right. The Greens won six senate seats at the 2019 election (one from each state) and will almost certainly repeat this result at the next election giving them a total of 12 senators and the balance of power, enough to join forces with Labor to pass or block legislation.

‘The Long March of the Left’

“As Abraham Lincoln said: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next”. Arguably, there is nothing so significant to the future of a nation as the formation of its children. How we teach children about our history, our national identity, and the principles of western liberal democracy by which we live is therefore the concern of all Australians.”

The above quotation is from a new booklet titled, ‘Activism via Education: 7 ways the new Australian Curriculum will impact your kids’. In the booklet, the authors highlight how hostile to Christianity Australia’s new national curriculum is. It is also highly critical of Western civilisation.

Western democracy was founded in Christianity and in the family. It’s why Marx and Engels, the co-authors of the Communist Manifesto, were determined to undermine both. Marx and Engels knew faith and family were the enemy. They did not like what families and people of faith people talked about around the dinner table. Sound familiar?

If you want to help stop the long march of the left, please join us here.

This week I received a very unsettling email from the National Director of Family Voice, Peter Downie. I was so troubled by this email that I have decided, with Peter’s permission, to share it with members and supporters of the Australian Family Party verbatim. The contents are not pleasant but demand our attention. Rest assured, the Australian Family Party is committed to addressing this most distressing situation.

Dear Bob

Last week, Brisbane’s Courier Mail published a disturbing article by Melinda Tankard Reist of Collective Shout.

“Barely a day goes by,” she said, “that a parent doesn’t contact me to tell me of the devastation and trauma caused as a result of their child being exposed to porn:
‘My 6-year-old was shown porn by an older boy at school.’
‘My daughter was on a kids’ games site and a porn pop-up appeared.’
‘My child googled an innocent term, and it took him straight to a porn site.’
‘My son was shown porn on the school bus on the way home.’
‘My 7-year-old saw porn at the school camp.’”
My own Downie children were largely home-schooled – protected to some degree from pornography thrust under their nose by other kids.
But these days, internet-connected devices are required for all types of school subjects. Some of the horror stories Melinda mentions can happen to any child or grandchild – yours or mine.
“Some of these children now suffer insomnia, nightmares, anxiety,” Melinda went on. “In the worst cases, they are medicated due to the level of disturbance caused by exposure to violent porn.

“It surprises many parents to learn there is nothing to prevent their child being exposed to porn. No barriers – such as proof-of-age requirements – to stop them entering rape, sadism, torture porn and incest websites. All before their first kiss.
“We have allowed a never-before-seen experiment on the sexual development of our kids,” Melinda says. “And we’re now seeing the results.”
And what are those results?

Melinda relays reports from deeply worried parents and grandparents:
“My 10-year-old granddaughter was approached by a boy while waiting for the school bus and asked, ‘Do you do arse?’
“My 8-year-old found a note in her school bag which read, ‘Ready for sex?”
“An 8-year-old old boy told my 8-year-old girl he wanted to ‘f**k you hard’.”
Melinda points out that no boy is born this way – it is learned behaviour. Pornography has become the world’s biggest department of education. It’s a sex ed handbook that links sex with aggression, and the word “consent” is never mentioned.

It is child abuse on a massive scale.

So what can we do about it?

Peter Stevens, Director of FamilyVoice Victoria, is also our Coordinator for Child Internet Safety.
In 2019 he sent a detailed submission to a federal parliamentary inquiry into online gambling and pornography, urging compulsory age verification for these websites in order to protect children.
The inquiry report, Protecting the Age of Innocence, was released in February 2020. It agreed with Peter Stevens and many others, recommending mandated age verification for pornographic and other harmful websites. This would not be a “silver bullet” – but would be a big step forward.
Now more than a year has gone by. The federal government has not responded.
Peter Stevens has met with an adviser to the federal communications minister Paul Fletcher to ask what is going on.
The adviser assured him that the government’s response is complete, but the Covid pandemic has delayed its tabling in parliament.

That was weeks ago. Still nothing has happened.

That is why we are ramping up our Protect Children campaign.

For family, faith and freedom,

Peter Downie
National Director

Last week (15 -21 May) was National Families Week. National Families Week is organised by Families Australia, a wonderful organisation, and its aim is to celebrate the vital role that families play in Australian society.

This year’s theme, ‘Stronger Families, Stronger Communities’ highlighted the importance of families to communities and that community wellbeing is enhanced by family wellbeing.

Families Australia CEO Dr Brian Babington, said ‘National Families Week is a great time to reflect on and take action to further strengthen our families.’

Hear! Hear!

Which brings us to the 2021 Budget delivered last week by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg where the theme of ‘supporting families’ ran from start to finish.

First and foremost, as members and supporters will have noticed, the Australian Family Party makes an important distinction between ‘support for families’ and ‘support for the family’. The first focuses on government spending and handouts, the second on family resilience and self-reliance.

Take childcare for example. In the 2021 Budget, the Treasurer announced a $1.7bn increase in childcare taking the total childcare expenditure to approximately $9.0bn per annum. And while this might be great news for childcare centre owners and two-income families who benefit from two tax-free thresholds, single-income families who provide childcare at home at no cost to the taxpayer are severely disadvantaged. Mothers who want to look after their own children miss out. The way the family is taxed, particularly the single-income family, is outrageously inequitable. The Australian Family Party strongly advocates income-splitting for single-income households.

The level of spending in this year’s Budget is breathtaking.

Family First’s successful 2016 campaign slogan was ‘Every family, a job and a house’. If every family had a job and owned their own home, the campaign went, the benefits to the nation would be enormous.

That is family resilience and self-reliance. Full employment, home ownership.

Here again, while a $25,000 home buyers grant might seem nice, when you consider government fees and charges make up nearly 40 per cent of the purchase price of a home, the government is quietly taking $250,000 with one hand and loudly giving back $25,000 with the other. Where’s the sense or integrity in that? A huge brick wall in the form of taxes, charges, levies and planning restrictions has been built across the road to home ownership and all a $25,000 grant does is add another rung to the ladder that struggling home buyers use trying to get over the wall.

Australia’s total debt and deficit is set to hit one trillion dollars in four years’ time. A billion is a thousand million. A trillion is a million million. The mind boggles.

One of nature’s cast iron laws is, ‘What goes up, must come down’. Somehow we’re going to have to repay this trillion dollars. Hmm …

The list of spending items in this year’s Budget was endless. Former West Australian MP John Hyde used to say, “Any lightweight can lead kids into a lolly shop, but it takes real leadership to lead them out.” That is Australia’s problem.

“Australia’s child-protection system keeps applying the same, flawed strategies which basically means children are harmed by the very system that’s meant to protect them. It puts an over-emphasis on family preservation prolonging the time children are kept with highly dysfunctional families. When, as a last resort, they are finally removed they are churned through unstable foster care and returned to their families where the reunification is likely to break down. For many children, they spend almost all of their childhood and adolescence in care and never get a permanent and safe family for life. Many of these children could have, should have, been adopted.”  — Dr Jeremy Sammut*

Over 40,000 Australian children are currently in government-sponsored care. Approximately 30,000 have been there for more than 2 years. Less than 200 were adopted.

The first question that must be asked is, ‘Why are so many children cycled in and out of government care?’ And second, ‘Why are there so few adoptions in Australia?’

Compared with similar countries Australia has very low rates of adoption.

It seems the chief barrier to increasing the rate of adoptions in Australia are state and territory government child protection authorities. In South Australia for example, the inquest into the death of toddler Chloe Valentine revealed the abject squalor of the environment the child was forced to endure, an environment authorities were well aware of. An anti-adoption culture appears to be ingrained in state and territory child protection authorities.

19^th Century English philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill was one of the first to declare that “Children have independent rights as future citizens. If parents fail in their obligations to fulfil those rights then the State should step in”.

Regrettably, the rights of abusive parents seem to outweigh the rights of abused children.

It has been nearly 50 years since the introduction of the single mother’s pension by the Whitlam Government. This policy helped end the practice of forced adoption as the provision of taxpayer-funded income support gave women who became pregnant out of wedlock the option of keeping their children. The unintended consequence however, has been that welfare for single mothers has led to the very social problems forced adoptions were designed to prevent – the inability of many single mothers to properly care for their children. The right to welfare became a pathway to welfare dependency which has contributed significantly to the scale of the child protection crisis confronting Australia today.

In 2019, the Federal Government’s House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs Report ‘Breaking barriers: a national adoption framework for Australian children’, stated that the best interests of children should be at the centre of child protection systems.

For children who are unable to live with their biological parents, adoption has been internationally proven as the best way to provide a safe, stable and loving family life.

While it has been argued that adoption robs children of their identity, modern, ‘open adoption’ models which are specifically designed to maintain children’s connections to their cultural heritages and birth families disprove such claims.

It has also been claimed that adoption will steal children all over again. Again, NSW adoption reforms disavow such claims.

That adoption is a socially unacceptable and illegitimate practice based on past practices such as forced adoptions and indigenous experiences is a taboo which must end. There can be no meaningful change or end to the cycle of intergenerational dysfunction until that taboo is broken.

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*Dr Jeremy Sammut is the author of several research papers and the book, ‘The Madness of Australian Child Protection: Why Adoption will Rescue Australia’s Underclass Children’. Dr Sammut’s ground-breaking research on Australia’s child protection crisis has led the national debate about adoption over the past 10 years. His research influenced reforms which were passed in 2018 by the NSW Parliament.

For generations, grandparents have provided practical help, unwavering support, a wise listening ear and of course childcare, all at no cost. How good are grandparents.

Relationship Psychologist Megan Tuohey says children who have access to grandparents who love them will experience a broader and deeper sense of belonging.

“These children are more likely to experience those same feelings of security and belonging in the world as they move through to adulthood. It provides a sense of security and trust in their lives.”

A close relationship between a grandparent and grandchild can have a positive impact on the happiness and wellbeing of the entire family. Simply put, having grandparents around is good for everyone. Having two levels of love and support in a family is particularly beneficial for children in their formative years. Children will often find it easier to listen to a grandparent than a parent!

Through a grandparent’s beliefs and values a child’s perspective of what constitutes a healthy, normal relationship is often shaped by the relationship the child has with a grandparent.

One study (Boston College) found “An emotionally close relationship between grandparent and grandchild is associated with fewer symptoms of depression for both generations. For children, having grandparents around means having the perfect companions to play with and have fun. Grandparents are some of the best partners when it comes to using creativity and imagination to discover the wonders of life.

In turn, most grandparents truly love their role. The benefits to grandparents of having grandchildren in their lives cannot be overstated. Grandparents who are active in their grandchildren’s lives experience better health and a greater sense of purpose. In fact, many grandparents believe being a grandparent is the single most important role in their lives. Grandparents also offer a link to a child’s cultural heritage and family history.

Millions of grandparents look after grandchildren on a regular basis. Leaving children in the capable hands of grandparents gives parents an irreplaceable sense of comfort and security.

Of course not every child has a grandparent. This need not be cause for despair. The best foundation a child can have is to be raised in an intact, loving family.

Likewise, not every older person either has grandchildren or in more tragic cases, access to their grandchildren. For those denied access, the excellent work of organisations like Grandparents For Grandchildren is acknowledged. Here again, removing the obstacles and burdens which lead to such scenarios should be a priority for legislators – including introducing subsidies for grandparents who look after grandchildren, especially considering the amount spent looking after children in government care.

Australia’s aged care system costs billions and the horrific tales out of the Aged Care Royal Commission show it is a system that isn’t working. From grandparents to great grandparents, relocating elders away from living with their families and into nursing homes to be looked after by strangers has not been good for society as a whole. Much more needs to be done to support families caring for aged parents and grandparents at home with the family.

The family should always be Plan A.

Last week we discussed Steven Biddulph’s book ‘Raising Boys’ and how boys can be nurtured into becoming open-hearted, kind and strong men.

As all men are not open-hearted, kind and strong, clearly we are not there yet.

In Steven Biddulph’s follow-up book ‘Raising Girls’ he posits, “Raising a happy, healthy, well-adjusted daughter from babyhood to womanhood can be a challenge. Girls need to be strong, self-assured, know they are loved, and can stand up for themselves and others in an exploitative world.”

Columnist Kerry Wakefield is more blunt, “Girls can be slow to grasp what can be a Jekyll and Hyde pubertal transformation of the nice boy next door. While girls are thinking about what dress to wear and who they fancy and what the mean girls are saying, the boys are organising the booze and indulging in promiscuous carnal cruelty and who they have a chance with. When setbacks such as violence and sex assaults occur, women are told to ‘#Reclaim the Night’, that they should wear what they like when they like and not let toxic masculinity dictate their behaviour. Which is a bit like sending Bambi off into the woods without mentioning, Oh look out for the wolves”.

Shifting the debate about raising girls to how to better raise boys is not helpful. Saying men’s attitudes have to change and men should treat women with respect is an admirable sentiment but until they all do let’s start with how things are, not how we think they should be.

One thing is not in dispute, raising girls works best when mum and dad are married. A father’s influence in his daughter’s life, finding out what is important to her, is an important stabilizing factor. Divorce adversely impacts girls’ sense of security and well-being. Rates of teen pregnancy increase dramatically among girls whose parents divorce.

The advent of social media only exacerbates this challenge. Social media has contributed to a significant deterioration in girls’ mental health. Social media in the form of cyber bullying has turned deadly for girls. Sexting is rife. Internet pornography is unavoidable. Online sexual predators are pervasive. Girls are constantly being targeted by tech designers who know how to manipulate their attention and make them compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty. This leads to poor body image, eating disorders, anxiety and even gender dysphoria.

As discussed last week, to function properly society relies primarily on two things – individual conscience and the family.  The question is, ‘What role should the state play in ensuring individual consciences develop as they should and the family functions as it should?’

For a start, the state should be doing everything it can to encourage couples to marry and stay married. Also, as the old saying goes, “When poverty comes in the door, love goes out through the window”. There is much the state could do to reduce the financial pressure on families including income splitting for taxation purposes, subsidies for grandparents who look after grandchildren and putting an end to price-gouging by state governments of water and power costs.

When it comes to raising children – boys or girls, all roads lead to Rome – the family.

In his excellent book Raising Boys, Steve Biddulph discusses how boys can be nurtured into becoming open-hearted, kind and strong men.

In stark contrast, studies of abandoned children adopted from South American and eastern European countries demonstrate how attachment disorder can lead to sociopathy, and sociopathy to violence.

Society relies on three levels of protection against harm. Level one is a person’s own conscience; level two is the family to keep its members in check; and level three is the police.

Nurturing the conscience starts in infancy. Here, childhood connection is vital.

For a free society to prosper, people have to be able to control themselves. Teaching self-control starts with the family. The family cultivates within a child the right way to view life and the world around us.

By any measure, studies show that boys raised by intact families – married mother and father, do better than any other form of family arrangement.

It is a tragedy that more than 3,000 Australians take their lives each year. More young men take their own lives than are killed in road accidents. Boys raised in father-absent environments are five times more likely to commit suicide, ten times more likely to abuse drugs, fourteen times more likely to commit rape, and twenty times more likely to end up in a correctional facility. They are like ships without a rudder. Fatherless households are a dreadful problem. As are divorce, domestic violence, loneliness and addiction to alcohol, gambling, drugs and pornography.

Part of the current turmoil regarding the treatment of women lies in the breakdown of the family.

It follows that reducing the incidence of family breakdown will lead to a reduction in violence against women.

Columnist Paul Kelly says conservatives like the Prime Minister need to show they have an effective voice on justice for women.

‘Marriage is good for society’ is a conservative message. Government policy could start by encouraging couples to marry, not discourage them with things like inequitable tax rates.

Society’s Plan A is the family. Plan B, the police, is a poor substitute. More focus on Plan A please.

Next week, Raising Girls.

It’s been said England invented bureaucracy and India perfected it. We can now add ‘… and Australia deified it’.

In his book The Lucky Country, Donald Horne said Australia was run by second-rate people who rode on the back of the country’s natural resources ie pure luck, and then claimed credit for it.

Take the most important issue Australia’s politicians and bureaucrats have had to deal with in our lifetime – COVID19. They and the whole world have been focused on this every day for more than a year and when the vaccine became available, the UK vaccinated 25 million of its citizens immediately. Israel vaccinated 5 million and will have its entire population vaccinated within weeks. Australia on the other hand has been moving at a snail’s pace with Australians being told to book a vaccination on-line. Those most vulnerable to the virus – the elderly, then have to navigate their way through an on-line questionnaire or be told ‘phone-bookings only’.

The very word bureaucracy gives the game away. Bureaucracy is derived from two words – ‘bureau’ from the French word for ‘desk’ and ‘kratos’ from the Greek word for power, hence ‘bureau-krat’, ‘desk-power’.

Clearly, looking to politicians and bureaucrats to solve all the nation’s problems is not the answer.

The Australian Family Party believes we can serve Australia best by putting the family first. The State has a duty to the family. Society has a duty to the family. And what the State and society owe the family is recognition. Recognition that the family should be front and centre, not the political class.

The three words most commonly used to describe Texas are ‘hot as hell!’

Well, last month hell froze over. Literally. The arctic conditions which swept across Texas caused mayhem. Author Michael Moorcock writing from Austin, Texas reported shortages of food and milk, frozen water pipes bursting and birds and animals dying. Multi-car pile ups caused by motorists unfamiliar with icy roads were commonplace. People were dying from hypothermia. All previously unheard of. Hot southern European countries like Spain and Greece were similarly hit with icy conditions. Some parts of Australia have had their coolest summer in nearly 20 years. What is going on?

As members and supporters would know, this is our first post on climate change. As our aim is to put the family at the centre of every conversation, the current climate situation is unavoidable.

Reducing CO2 is costing families a fortune. From power bills to planning laws to manufactured goods, measures to reduce CO2 are everywhere. And while Australia is making tiny reductions to its CO2 emissions, China, India, Russia and a hundred other developing countries are increasing their emissions. Across the world CO2 emissions are increasing, yet temperatures have dropped. We were told increases in CO2 cause increases in temperature. Is this year an aberration? Will temperatures rise next year? What if they don’t? What if CO2 isn’t to blame after all? It wouldn’t be the first time a theory has been found to be wrong. Meanwhile, families are suffering financial hardship. If the CO2 theory does end up being wrong, perhaps those who made millions from renewable energy will reimburse us.

Thank you again for your support. Please help us to keep this thing going by clicking here.

Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm

Australian Financial Review, 1 March 2021

As everyone knows, the government has borrowed a lot of money to stimulate the economy in order to recover from its COVID-19 control measures. Gross debt is expected to exceed a trillion dollars this financial year. Getting the budget back under control is vital if workers are to avoid paying exorbitant taxes for generations.

There are various ways this could be achieved. Here are three obvious areas in which the government could make a start without risking even more harm through inflation and the erosion of savings.

As we are regularly reminded, the best form of welfare is a job. Gaining a job would be vastly easier if people were allowed to escape the workplace regulation prison. Neither the government nor the bureaucrats could possibly know what suits each individual worker and their family. It is a fatal conceit for the government to assume it knows what is best for any individual.

Hundreds of millions of dollars goes on social security and welfare to people who could otherwise be working and financially independent. That includes not only those on Newstart and JobSeeker but also recipients of disability and age pensions, many of whom would welcome the opportunity to earn some extra money.

The disruption economy clearly shows what happens when people are free to work as they prefer; Uber allows people to run their own taxi service as and when it suits them, for which there is huge public support; AirBnB has enabled people to make money from their own homes or holiday houses; TaskRabbit and similar services allow people to offer their labour to do almost anything on terms and conditions that suit them.

The second saving area is to end the duplication between the Commonwealth and states, particularly on health and education. These are state responsibilities, yet the Commonwealth employs over 6000 public servants in the health portfolio and over 4000 in education while running no hospitals or schools. That’s on top of the billions it distributes to the states for these functions.

To take this argument further, there is no need for any government, state or Commonwealth, to run any schools. There is sufficient knowhow and capacity in our community for schools to be run by non-government bodies. Students who need support can be funded directly, leaving their families to decide where to send them.

The third saving suggestion is to remove barriers to home ownership. While the Commonwealth and state governments boost demand for housing through the HomeBuilder and first home owner schemes, as does the Reserve Bank’s ultra-low interest rates, nothing is being done to boost the supply of housing.

As anyone contemplating building a new house discovers, the actual cost of building a house is relatively low and hasn’t changed much in 30 years. It is the price of land that has skyrocketed. Traditionally, the median house price was around three times the median income, allowing young home buyers easy entry into the market. State governments then stepped in to make huge profits by stifling the release of land and drip-feeding it out at massively inflated prices. House prices rose to more than six times the median income.

The ramifications of this, both social and economic, have been disastrous. Hundreds of thousands of additional dollars are paid on mortgage payments which cannot be spent on other things – clothes, cars, furniture, appliances, travel, movies, restaurants, the theatre, children’s education, charities and many other discretionary purchase options.

While competition for properties in desirable locations will always result in price inflation, it is the regulated scarcity on the fringes of our cities that is at the heart of the problem. The outer suburbs are where first home buyers have traditionally got their start as land in these areas has been plentiful and affordable. Now it is neither, and first home buyers of moderate means have no place to start.

The inequity may not be all that evident at the moment but in time it certainly will be.  As we all know, if you don’t own your home by the time you retire you will struggle.

The Commonwealth could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year by reducing grants to those states that engage in price-gouging of residential land holdings through their land management corporations. It could also immediately sell off its own surplus land. The resulting lower prices would have a multiplier effect: more housing activity, more employment, more income tax paid, more building materials made and sold, more whitegoods, appliances and soft furnishings.

Bringing the massive deficit under control is not something that can be kicked down the road. It requires political courage, something sorely lacking in Australian politics at the moment.

Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm are former senators.