Australian Family Party

Family Matters

Australia's economic future

Back in the Black

by

tractorIt’s been said that there are only two industries in the world – farming and mining. The rest are jobs.

Everything we use is the result of something being grown or something being mined.

Yet both are constantly maligned by the Left.

‘Australia is just a farm and a mine’, they snarl.

To which we should all respond, ‘Well, we happen to be very good at farming and mining’.

On these pages just a few months ago we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Western Mining’s discovery of the gold, silver, copper and uranium ore body at Olympic Dam in South Australia.

Olympic Dam became one of the State’s most successful projects (and biggest earners!)

At the time of Federation in 1901, South Australia had an influential hand in shaping the new Commonwealth of Australia. For decades after, Adelaide was Australia’s Number 3 city – bigger and more prosperous than either Brisbane or Perth.

Led by Liberal Premier Tom Playford, South Australia prospered.

A grower himself, Playford believed in farming and mining. He also believed in things which flowed from farming and mining. Unsurprisingly, he remained Premier of South Australia for nearly 30 years.

Playford was an advocate for ‘cheap land, cheap power, cheap water, and cheap labour’. Wages might have been lower than in Sydney and Melbourne, but despite the lower pay packets, South Australians’ quality of life and standard of living were higher than their interstate counterparts.

It was an example of genuine competitive federalism – not the pseudo-competitive federalism of today in which state governments try to outdo each other by enticing companies to set up in their states.

He was also not into bread and circuses and would never allow himself to be seduced by grifters.

Like former Labor Premier John Bannon, South Australia’s current Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas is likeable and sincere. He is also equally naïve.

John Bannon was infatuated with Tim Marcus Clark and his State Bank opportunists.

Bannon allowed the bank to invest billions of dollars of South Australian taxpayers’ money in schemes and projects he didn’t understand.

It was all a scam.

I predict the same will happen with the current Premier’s infatuation with so-called ‘green hydrogen’ and all things renewable.

These renewable energy merchants are, in my opinion, nothing more than corporate parasites who go around manipulating the political process in order to extract money from taxpayers and consumers.

They are a curse.

They rake in billions of dollars gaming the system, raising energy prices, impoverishing consumers, destroying jobs, and fleecing taxpayers.

Playford understood all this.

He also knew how unpredictable the world could be and was a great believer in being self-sufficient – at both a personal and at a State level.

In 1946, he established the Electricity Trust of South Australia (ETSA) and in 1960 built the Port Augusta power station. By 1970 South Australia was completely self-sufficient for electricity – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – not reliant like we are today on interstate cables ‘for when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow’!

He also oversaw the construction of the Port Stanvac oil refinery in South Australia which began refining crude oil in 1963!

Since then, almost all of SA’s manufacturing and self-sufficiency industries have been shut down and SA is no longer self-sufficient.

The car industry has gone, the Onkaparinga Woolen Mills have closed, so too Port Stanvac refinery, the Port Augusta power station and countless ASX (Australian Stock Exchange) Top 100 companies – Fauldings, Elders, Normandy Mining, Adsteam, Southcorp and of course, one of the world’s biggest companies, News Ltd – have all left town.

Strategic oil reserves, strategic food reserves, strategic water and power policies … who is talking about these things today?

Sir Tom would turn in his grave.

Speaking of no longer being in the black, SA is to have a by-election in the seat of Black following the resignation of former Liberal leader David Speirs.

During the Dunstan by-election earlier this year, the Australian Family Party supported the Liberal Party with its preference decisions due to David Speirs’ commitment to the values of family, faith and freedom.

In replacing Speirs, the Liberals have elected Vincent Tarzia who is also on the same page in these areas.

Matthew Abraham, who has been covering SA politics for a very long time says, ‘While Labor is well-placed to win Black, Tarzia as leader is focussed and no slacker.’

Abraham says Malinauskas, ‘Is still a vote magnet, but cost of living remains the main issue in Black. This should play in Tarzia’s favour.’

Jonathan-ParkinThe Australian Family Party’s candidate in Black is Jonathan Parkin (pictured). A former commercial airline pilot, Jonathan has lived in the electorate for most of his life. Married with two children, he has been involved in a number of community activities, including the Nipper program at the local Seacliff Surf Life Saving Club. More about Jonathan in coming weeks.

The by-election is on Saturday 16th November, with early voting from Monday 11th November – Friday 15th November.

At the general election in 2022, Black was a ‘3-way contest’ – Labor, Liberal and Greens – with the Greens’ candidate feeding preferences to Labor and no-one preferencing the Liberal Party.

Not this time.

If you would like to help influence the outcome of this by-election, please let us know here (choose Federal Director from the button list). We need volunteers on polling day, and at the early voting centres. If you can volunteer for an hour or two, that would be most helpful.

Also, the cost to run in a by-election – candidate registration, how-to-vote cards, etc., is around $1,500.

If you can make a small contribution to help cover these costs, again this would be greatly appreciated. Please click here.

Thank you for your support.

A.I. – The New Celestial City

by

celestial cityIn the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, there is a vivid description of The New Jerusalem – The Holy City – referred to in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as ‘The Celestial City’, the ultimate heavenly home of believers.

The walls of this heavenly city are made of glass and precious stones. The streets, the Bible says, are paved with gold.

Glass, precious stones, gold.

The entrance to the city, however – the gates – are made of pearls, hence the well-known phrase ‘The Pearly Gates’.

This is significant, as pearls are the only substance on the list which are made from a living thing.

As we know, a pearl is made when an irritant invades and wounds an oyster.

In Matthew’s gospel, in the parable of ‘the pearl of great price’, a merchant sells all he has to possess this pearl, and once he has found it, he stops looking.

The Bible teaches that this pearl – entry into the kingdom of heaven – is through Jesus Christ who paid for our redemption with his blood and is ‘of inestimable value’.

“He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed,” says the prophet, Isaiah.

That is some irritant, some wound.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the science of making machines that can think, speak and act like humans – is being trumpeted as the new Celestial City on earth.

‘We are on the cusp of an extraordinary renaissance of human possibility and abundance,’ says Transformative Technology Lab’s Nichol Bradford.

‘Young people today will inherit and build their own technologies that could eliminate poverty, inequality, hunger, illness, and even death.’

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have identified four key potential features of AI: immortality, ease, gratification and dominance.

Immortality in the form of indefinite lifespans; ease in the form of freedom from the need to work; gratification in the form of pleasure and entertainment provided by machines; and dominance, the power to protect oneself or rule over others.

In this utopian future, AI would be harnessed for the benefit of humanity to ‘seamlessly integrate into various aspects of human life, significantly boosting productivity, innovation, economic growth, overall well-being, human flourishing and to accelerate medical and scientific advancements.’

‘AI has the potential to transform every aspect of human society,’ the researchers say.

AI technology would also be used to solve complex problems such as climate change, disease, poverty, and would elevate humanity to new heights.

Oh, and the streets will be paved with gold …

The Spectator records an insightful anecdote featuring Neil D. Lawrence, author of The Atomic Human: Understanding Ourselves in the Age of AI.

It recounts how Lawrence was describing his work in AI to a receptionist at London’s Natural History Museum.

‘So, it’s like fire, then,’ the receptionist responded.

Yes it is, and like fire, people get burned.

As French philosopher Paul Virilio once put it: ‘The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.’

To further complicate things, an added dimension will be the inhabiting of this new world by millions of robots shaped like humans.

Since time immemorial, humans have been projecting human-like characteristics on to non-human objects – think Pinocchio, Thomas the Tank Engine, the clock and the teapot in Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit.

Numerous experiments have been undertaken with children interacting with human-like robots; and while some might question the wisdom and ethics of leaving a child alone with a robot companion, they argue that the behaviour of parents who are emotionally immature or obsessively distracted by their own wireless devices, can also contribute to a child’s feelings of isolation or insecurity.

‘The presence of a robot, especially one that appears to give the child its undivided attention, could mitigate negative effects of problematic adult behaviour on children’s emotional well-being.’

‘Are emotional attachments to robots more detrimental to children than some attachments to people?’ the researchers ask.

Our own 3-part series A Digital Dark Age warns of the dangers of government control over information and communication.

The new Celestial City will, in essence, be a machine, inhabited by machines.

Built by tech designers and software engineers guided by social media behemoths, these new masters of the digital universe are not driven by moral codes.

The brave new world of technology and science that lies ahead of us may be built with server racks and circuit boards as big as the Bible’s Celestial City, but to ensure this Utopia does not become Dystopia, the entrance, the gates to this new celestial city, need to be made of pearls.

Thank you for your support.

Olympic Dam’s Gold Medal Performance

by

olympic-damIt is exactly 50 years since Western Mining first discovered the massive gold, silver, copper and uranium ore body at the aptly-named Olympic Dam in South Australia. A golden anniversary indeed!

But discovering the ore was just the beginning.

The fight to allow uranium mining at Olympic Dam was brutal.

The ruling Labor Party, under then South Australian Premier Don Dunstan, was vehemently opposed to uranium mining and particularly opposed to uranium mining at Olympic Dam.

One of the key opponents of Olympic Dam, calling it a ‘a mirage in the desert’, was one Mike Rann, an anti-uranium campaigner from New Zealand who had come to South Australia to work for Dunstan. Rann eventually became Premier of South Australia in 2002.

The Liberal Party, led by David Tonkin and his deputy Roger Goldsworthy, won the next election and in 1980 set about implementing their proposed ‘Olympic Dam Indenture Agreement’, building both the mine and nearby township of Roxby Downs.

Its final passage, through the SA parliament’s Upper House in 1982, came down to a single vote – Labor’s Norm Foster. A former wharf worker, Foster had sat on the select committee into Olympic Dam and did not agree with Labor’s position that uranium mining was an environmental or ethical scourge.

On the day before the final vote on the project, Foster resigned from the Labor Party and, the following day, crossed the floor of parliament to give his vote to the Tonkin government thereby clearing the way for the new mine.

For years following his actions, Foster was vilified by the ALP. However, his role in establishing one of South Australia’s most successful projects (and biggest earners!) was later acknowledged by the Labor Party and his membership restored.

Fast forward to 2024, and Australia is experiencing a similar political challenge closely related to uranium mining – nuclear energy.

The case for nuclear power has been well argued, but there are more than just economic and energy reliability reasons for embracing nuclear power. There could also be significant strategic benefits.

First, if there’s one thing we learned from the pandemic, it’s the importance of self-reliance.

Australia has for too long been dependent on overseas supply chains – fuel and energy being no exception.

Australia’s future energy needs are currently being assessed against three criteria – reliability, affordability, and emissions intensity.

Unfortunately, the laws of physics and economics do not allow all three. Two out of three yes, three out of three no.

As emissions intensity has pretty much been mandated, this leaves only reliability and affordability to choose from. Clearly, reliability has to win.

No form of renewable energy generation yet invented or discovered is reliable enough to meet Australia’s base-load demand.

Nuclear power is both reliable and emissions-free.

It is, however, expensive to build. Again, two out of three.

In addition, there is a fourth aspect worthy of consideration – regional security.

South Korea, Japan, India and Pakistan all have nuclear power. Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh and the Philippines are looking to develop it.

All have, or will have, spent nuclear fuel.

As Australia engages more with Asia, we bring a unique perspective and relationship devoid of the centuries-old enmities and history that exists between some of these countries.

We could be the Switzerland of the South.

Australia could establish an Asia–Pacific office for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  We could host conferences and bring the world’s best nuclear minds here.

We could bring together expertise on the ways in which other nations are storing their spent nuclear fuel.  We could, as the 2015 SA Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission heard, store that fuel in South Australia, and not have it stored within the borders of nations with fractious relations and/or unstable geology.

The countries whose spent fuel was stored here would have an interest in our security.

And as well as the multi-billion-dollar economic benefits – abolishing stamp duty, payroll tax, occupational licencing charges and many other taxes, charges and levies – with the latest technology we may even be able to extract more recycled power from the spent fuel in the future.

The more we engage with the nuclear question, the more positive the opportunities arise.

But first we must remove the regulatory obstacles and legislated bans blocking Australia’s economic and energy independence.

Thank you for your support.

A Digital Dark Age – Part 3

by

Governments – the world’s worst peddlers of false information

‘We will continue to be your single source of truth.
Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth’.

digital-dark-ageSo said former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

Covid

When Covid hit in 2020, people had no reason to doubt what they were being told by their political leaders.

The pandemic, however, very quickly exposed the incompetence of many in the medical and scientific establishment, with politicians and public sector bureaucrats making up rules as they went along, and ramping up censorship.

Inquiries about whether the virus came from a lab leak, or anything negative about masks or vaccines, soon became misinformation or disinformation and was immediately censored.

Politicians, public sector bureaucrats, pharmaceutical company executives, all in cahoots with one another, blatantly lied to us. Again, the early bootleggers were amateurs compared with these people.

They were wrong on lockdowns. They were wrong on border closures. They were wrong on school closures. They were wrong on masking.

Poor people were hurt the most.

Anyone, including qualified medical professionals who said Covid vaccines were causing serious side-effects leading to large numbers of deaths, were silenced and threatened.

Academics who had been studying lockdowns were also blacklisted. Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, was one of them. ‘Censorship of scientific discussion led to policies like school closures,’ he said. ‘A generation of children were hurt.’ 

At the behest of governments, social media platforms removed any and all content which questioned the safety or efficacy of the vaccines.

In April 2021, the Coalition government had Instagram remove a post which claimed that ‘Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission’, a statement that clearly was accurate.

Ivermectin was prohibited from being prescribed in Australia until January 2021, by which time the vaccination rate had reached 98%. Prohibition of Ivermectin was enforced right until the very end of the vaccine roll-out.

We now know the Covid-19 vaccines were neither safe nor effective. They did not prevent infection or transmission and have been linked to blood clots, heart conditions and other ‘died suddenly’ events.

A peer-reviewed study published in January 2024, found that more deaths were caused by the mRNA vaccines than were saved by it.

As Thomas Sowell once said, “It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions into the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

Climate Change and Renewable Energy

Probably no other area of public debate has been more manipulated than climate change.

What started as ‘the greenhouse effect’, soon became ‘global warming’ which morphed into the now all-encompassing ‘climate change’.

To up the ante even more, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stated recently, ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived”.

Global boiling obviously hasn’t yet reached the poles, as Arctic ice is currently at its greatest extent in more than 20 years.

Renowned quantum physics scholar Dr John Clauser, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics has stated, ‘I do not believe there is a climate crisis’.

More bootleggers, in the form of renewable energy merchants, have leapt on to the climate change bandwagon with unbridled zeal and are raking in billions of dollars gaming the system, raising energy prices, impoverishing consumers, destroying jobs, and fleecing taxpayers.

Indigenous matters

Toddlers and pre-schoolers in childcare centres across Australia are being taught that Australia was stolen from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

More than 7,000 schools and daycare centres now have formal ‘acknowledgements of country’ in place, which includes children singing or reciting that the land on which they sit belongs to Indigenous people.

At SDN (formerly Sydney Day Nursery) Children’s Services in the ACT, kindy kids are taught about ‘stolen land’ as they recite an acknowledgement of country each morning.

‘The foundation for this learning begins when the children enter the centre as infants’, the organisation says on its website.

‘Now older preschoolers participate in the daily ritual of acknowledging country to build on the explicit teaching about stolen land.’

As NSW Libertarian Party MP John Ruddick said, ‘children were being indoctrinated to feel ashamed of their country’.

 5. The Bill and Religious Freedom

There is no doubt that any ‘religious exemptions’ in the Bill will not make life less hazardous for faith-based organisations.

While certain religious groups which might be advantageous to Labor’s voting base will be protected, other religious groups most likely will not.

As we have seen recently, clear examples of the crime of incitement to violence – perpetrated seemingly with impunity – will, undoubtedly, be given more latitude.

Christians, however, will not enjoy similar leniency.

The Australian Law Reform Commission has already recommended the removal of the right for Christian schools to hire staff who share their values.

And Christians will most certainly not be able to criticize the ‘trans’ movement or ‘gender affirming’ practices.

The Bible says, ‘You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ (John 8:32)

The world, however, says truth is subjective – ‘my truth, your truth, their truth …’

There is one institution, however that has stood against all this for thousands of years – the family. The family can do a lot to help combat the lawlessness of this digital jungle and its predators. The family is the ideal place to start building relationships, learning who to trust, who not to trust, who to communicate with, and who not to communicate with.

Society has 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. More focus on level two, the family, might be our only hope for the future.

Thank you for your support.

A Digital Dark Age – Part 2

by

Why governments relish such powers

digital-dark-ageThe only currency that matters is power – getting it and holding on to it.

Attaining power these days involves denigrating and silencing your opponents in any way possible. Censoring them, branding what they say as misinformation, disinformation or mal-information, with the primary aim being to prevent them getting their message out.

As has been observed, ‘When ideas are bad, censorship will always be more attractive than debate.’

In a recent renewable energy report, Energy Infrastructure Commissioner Andrew Dyer summed up in one concise sentence why governments relish powers like the ones being proposed.

Dyer said, “Opposition is often driven by ‘misinformation’.”

That is what is called a ‘shibboleth’.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word meaning ‘stream’. It is referred to in the Old Testament book of Judges, where Jephthah and the men of Gilead fought the Ephraimites and captured the Jordan River crossing. As people crossed the river, to distinguish who was friend from foe, they had everyone say the word ‘shibboleth’. If they couldn’t pronounce it properly, they knew they were the enemy. From this, the word shibboleth was absorbed into the English language to describe a key identifier or a dead give-away.

What we saw in the Energy Commissioner’s comment was that dead give-away.

digital-dark-age-tableInternationally, ‘misinformation and disinformation’ have risen to number one on the list of top 10 risks cited by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Risks Report 2024.

Once this Bill is law, all the government has to do is label something ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ to have it shut down. Presto! Any opposition is eliminated.

Addressing the recent WEF conference, European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said: ‘Like in all democracies, our freedom comes with risks. There will always be those who try to exploit our openness, both from inside and out. There will always be attempts to put us off track – for example, with ‘misinformation and disinformation.’

The politics of fear

Fear has always been a powerful political motivator. Fear makes people accept things they wouldn’t otherwise accept.

In the 16th Century, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book called The Prince, a book that would influence political strategy and tactics for the next 500 years.

Machiavelli’s book centred on the use of fear to control the masses – ‘The best course of action for a ruler to take is to instil fear in the people’, he said. 

And for people to not only fear what might happen, but that they would also ‘fear the worst’.

Minister Rowland has said misinformation and disinformation pose a threat to ‘the safety and wellbeing of Australians’ and ‘to our democracy, society and economy’.

This is the politics of fear.

And the antidote to fear is knowledge – information, facts, figures. Which is why they want the power to prevent people from receiving it.

Conflating issues also plays a useful role.

As well as the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, Minister Rowland has also announced a review of the Online Safety Act, saying the government is committed to introducing a revised version of its ‘internet censorship laws’.

The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) hit back:

“It is completely disingenuous for the Minister to seek to conflate the protection of Australians from predators online with the federal government’s plan to empower bureaucrats in Canberra (ACMA) with the right to determine what is truth, and to censor mainstream opinion through its ‘misinformation’ bill,” said the IPA’s John Storey.

“The federal government is cravenly using heightened concerns about current tensions in parts of our community, and the fears of parents and others about harmful online content, as a trojan horse to push forward laws that will in practice impose political censorship,” he said.

Climate Change

South Australia’s chief public health officer, Professor Nicola Spurrier, recently warned that the nation is facing a state of “permacrisis” as climate change fuels ‘back-to-back natural disasters and the emergence of new diseases’.

In her biennial report on the state of public health, Prof. Spurrier calls climate change ‘the most significant global threat to human health’, saying the planet is getting hotter and is experiencing more extreme weather events such as flooding and bushfires.

‘We need to respond to this threat today, not tomorrow or in the distant future,’ her report states. ‘These changes to the climate are caused by humans.’

Prof. Spurrier’s report says this will lead to exacerbation of chronic diseases such as heart, lung and kidney disease; damaged food crops; increased risk of food poisoning and water contamination; injuries from flooding and bushfires; and even an increase in snake bites after floods.

‘Other health impacts from climate change include poor air quality due to increased dust and pollens and the emergence of serious new communicable diseases in South Australia, such as Japanese encephalitis virus,’ she says.

Mercifully, she spared us plagues of locusts and frogs and the River Murray turning to blood.

‘Permacrisis’ – permanent crisis – putting communities into a permanent state of climate fear.

Machiavelli would be proud.

The Voice to Parliament Referendum

When the Yes side didn’t win the Voice Referendum, they immediately blamed, you guessed it – misinformation.

Yes campaign director Dean Parkin, said the referendum result was due to ‘the single largest misinformation campaign that this country has ever seen’.

Yes campaign spokesperson Thomas Mayo blamed the ‘disgusting No campaign, a campaign that has been dishonest, that has lied to the Australian people’.

Teal MP Zali Steggall even introduced a private members’ bill with the title Stop the Lies.

Ms Steggall stated that it was clear that the information people had access to through the course of the Voice debate was ‘heavy with misleading and deceptive facts’.

Got that? ‘Misleading and deceptive facts’, the very definition of mal-information.

3. Governments, technology and third-party collaborators

Baptists and Bootleggers

Whenever there is money to be made, opportunities to do business with governments – that is, do the government’s bidding in exchange for special access and privileges – present themselves. Cosy relationships between businesspeople and governments are as old as regulation itself.

What can give these relationships real potency, however, is what’s been called the ‘Baptists and Bootleggers’ phenomenon. The term stems from the 1920s’ Prohibition days, when members of the US government received bribes and donations from Bootleggers – criminals and businesspeople eager to maintain a scarcity (and resulting high price) of their product (alcohol). These same Members of Congress then justified maintaining the prohibition by publicly adopting the moral cause of the Baptists.

The same applies here. A moral cause – ‘threats to the safety and wellbeing of Australians’, and financial rewards to those assisting governments in their pursuit of power.

Historically, the media has fought hard to maintain freedom of the press and freedom of expression.

New media, however, have no such compunction. As more and more people source their news through Google, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram and other social media platforms, these global behemoths exert more and more power and influence. And while the old press barons took free speech seriously, big tech sees no problem at all in doing the government’s bidding – provided the government maintains their ‘platform, not publisher’ status and the advertising money keeps flowing. Al Capone may have invented bootlegging, but big tech has certainly perfected it.

Tech entrepreneur and former Google insider Tristan Harris says we are in the midst of a ‘great social upheaval’. Technology, he says, is being used to attack the very foundation of what we trust. ‘We are entering a Digital Dark Age’.

Digital IDs

Drivers’ licences, proof-of-age cards, passports, Medicare cards, birth certificates, home addresses, MyGov IDs, tax returns, credit cards and banking details, remote-controlled smart meters on our homes, digital certificates of title for our properties. Once these are all linked – as the government advertisements say, ‘bringing together government and industry’ – the government’s control will be complete.

Thank you for your support.

A Digital Dark Age – Part 3

Camels on the Horizon

by

camelsThe story is told of the founder of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid, who, when asked about the future of his country replied:

“My grandfather rode a camel. My father rode a camel. I drive a Mercedes. My son drives a Land Rover, and my grandson will drive a Land Rover.”

“But my great-grandson will ride a camel.”

“Why would that be?”, he was asked.

He replied, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create difficult times.”

Many great empires have risen and fallen within relatively brief periods of time – Persian, Trojan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, British – all have come and gone.

Most were not conquered by external enemies but rotted from within.

Members of what has been called ‘The Greatest Generation’ – those born between 1900 and 1930 – fought and won two World Wars, survived the Great Depression and defeated communism. They also created the most prosperous era (1950–1990) the world had ever known.

Strength gave rise to prosperity. With prosperity came easy times.

We know what came next because we are now living in those difficult times.

The foundation of all prosperity is energy, and it will be the destruction of our energy system in pursuit of so-called renewables that will result in our great-grandchildren riding camels.

But there is still time to change course.

It’s been said, ‘there are no bad soldiers, only bad generals’.

Or, ‘better a mob of sheep led by a lion, than a mob of lions led by a sheep’.

It has not gone unnoticed that the last few referendums – or referenda to be more precise – haven’t gone the way they were supposed to go. The Voice here in Australia, the Irish referendum on the role of women in the home and the makeup of the family, and of course Brexit, all went against what the prevailing government of the day wanted.

As we know, it was once the case that the people would demand that their governments pass new laws to fix some social ill.

These days, it is the government that demands that the people pass new laws, via referendum, to further the government’s agenda.

This does not bode well for the future of referendums.

As German playwright Bertolt Brecht once said, ‘Some party hack has decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence. If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another people?’

Don’t give them any ideas.

As the Irish referendum demonstrated, people are not yet ready to give up on the principle that the nuclear family – mum, dad and the kids – is the basic unit of society and the foundation of freedom.

As journalist Virginia Tapscott says, “The chasm between what the top end of town thought was good for women and what grassroots women actually want was wider than anyone could have predicted.”

It is why we at the Australian Family Party believe the family should be the state’s top priority, particularly when it comes to concerns over social media.

Interviewed by The Weekend Australian Magazine, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, says of the experiment with the smartphone:

“There’s never been anything this big that we’ve done to children. It is affecting the majority of children, not just in the United States, but in all the English-speaking countries and in Scandinavia. And while I cannot say that growing up on a smartphone is as bad as being lead ­poisoned or sent to work in a factory when you’re young, what I can say is that as a choice we made about how to raise our children thinking it was OK, this is the biggest blunder we have ever made.”

As this website has said many times, the family is the best place to build relationships and learn who to trust, who not to trust, who to communicate with, and who not to communicate with.

Let’s face it (pun intended), Facebook friends are not real friends, they are not family. Real family is mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

The family is the one institution which can combat the lawlessness of the digital jungle and its predators. It is more powerful than the tech titans and the cyber-bullies and their algorithms.

It is time to strengthen the family – before those camels arrive.

Endnote 1: Dunstan by-election

At the South Australian State election held two years ago, Liberal Premier Steven Marshall defeated the Labor candidate Cressida O’Hanlon by just 260 votes.

At the recent by-election caused by the resignation of Steven Marshall, the same Labor candidate defeated the Liberal candidate Anna Finizio by 360 votes.

For a sitting Premier to garner just a handful more votes than a newbie candidate (out of more than 20,000 votes) says something.

There was essentially no difference between Labor’s result and the Liberals’ result between 2022 and 2024. Each dropped 3% to the Greens who increased their vote by 6% – from 13% to 19%.

Our candidate, Nicole Hussey, received 440 primary votes (2.0%).

The Australian Family Party’s primary aim in contesting the by-election and preferencing the Liberal candidate was to support Opposition Leader David Speirs for his commitment to traditional values of family, faith and freedom.

As we are fond of saying, ‘every bit helps’, hence our encouragement to others of like-mind to support an Opposition Leader of like-mind following four years of decidedly anti-family, faith and freedom rule.

A big thank you also goes out to all our volunteers who worked the early voting centre and on election day.

Endnote 2: Church & State Conference

For those who can’t get enough of this stuff, don’t forget to register for Dave Pellowe’s Church & State Conference in Hobart/Launceston/Perth/Adelaide. Register here.

Thank you for your support.

The Winning Circle

by

holmesIn ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’, one of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes is sent to investigate the disappearance – on the eve of an important race – of a champion racehorse called Silver Blaze, and the death of its trainer John Straker.

In what has become a famous exchange known as ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’ between Scotland Yard’s Inspector Gregory and Sherlock Holmes, Gregory asks Holmes, ‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

‘Yes’, Holmes replied, ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’.

‘But the dog did nothing in the night-time’, said Gregory.

‘That was the curious incident’, Holmes replied.

That the dog didn’t bark told Holmes the person who took the racehorse was known to the dog. The thief was not a stranger. It was an inside job.

This exchange has become symbolic of the need to speak up or ‘bark’ when something is amiss.

Rest assured, here at the Australian Family Party we will not hesitate to bark.

There is no doubt South Australia has economic and social problems that it is going to have to solve – high mortgages (forcing both parents out to work), high cost of living (educating and raising children, power prices, water prices), health (bulk billing, ambulance ramping) – and social ills caused by the rupturing of family relationships.

Our State also has economic and social goals it wants to achieve.

But all we seem to get are endless announcements and pronouncements – ninety per cent of which is all BS according to our Premier – about ship building, green hydrogen, 24/7 pharmacies, upgrading Main South Road and all manner of other government grants and subsidies.

The Australian Family Party believes it is the family that should be the State’s top priority.

We believe it is time to strengthen the family, to protect the family, to fight for the family.

Let’s face it, your family is the only thing you’d take a bullet for.

Family provides meaning, belonging and security. Strong family relationships reduce depression and anxiety disorders, strengthen the immune system and speed recovery from surgery.

We all know there is no model or perfect family – every family is flawed in some way because it is made up of flawed human beings. But the family is the place to cultivate the right way to view life and the world around us. These are indeed difficult times, but we’ve known hardships before. They are the snakes and ladders of life and these too will pass.

Social ills caused by the rupturing of family relationships – divorce, de-facto relationships, fatherless households, single mothers bringing up children, high housing costs – lead to a breakdown in society.

Family breakdown is costly. Mental illness costs the economy $200bn a year. 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. Fatherless households are a dreadful problem.

As are divorce, domestic violence, loneliness and addiction to alcohol, gambling, drugs and pornography.

Suicide rates are on the rise. Rates of depression have sky-rocketed. Drug overdoses, the ICE scourge – something is very wrong.

As The Australian’s Paul Kelly has said, ‘An alarming number of people are damaged, lonely or depressed. This is the road Australia is travelling.’

The Australian Family Party believes we can serve Australia best by putting the family first.

We can build up society by building up the family. Faith and family, a sublime combination.

Which brings us to the South Australian by-election for the seat of Dunstan, caused by the retirement of former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall.

Matthew Abraham, who has been covering SA politics for a very long time, said before the last State election that he could see no ideological differences between Liberal and Labor.

“Steven Marshall is now essentially a Labor premier”, he said.

In 2017, Christopher Pyne, then 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.

How well did that work out for them?

Well, both men are now gone, the Liberal Party having lost both State and Federal elections in 2022.

In South Australia, the Liberals have now elected a more conservative leader in David Speirs to help them return to the real winning circle.

As a token of support – the Australian Family Party believes David Speirs has earned the right to lead his party to the next general election – we will be preferencing the Liberal Party – see How-to-Vote card (right).

The Australian Family Party’s candidate in Dunstan is Dr Nicole Hussey. A former research scientist who now teaches biology and chemistry, Nicole has had a wide experience in the medical/scientific sector and has direct knowledge of our education system.

The by-election is on Saturday 23 March, with early voting from 12 March – 22 March.

If you would like to help Nicole, please let us know here (choose Federal Director from the button list).

Thank you for your support.

University River

by

university riverIn William Blake’s hymn Jerusalem, the phrase ‘those dark Satanic mills’ was assumed to be referring to the cotton and woollen mills of his time and the mills’ terrible working conditions.

Based on the date of the hymn and Blake’s religious background, however, many question whether he was referring to the Dickensian factories and cotton mills at all, but rather to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

Blake was scathing of universities. He loathed them. He saw them churning out, factory-like, a new godless world.

“I will not cease from mental fight”, he writes in a subsequent verse.

He considered these elite establishments incapable of mental fight.

Fast forward to December 2023 and United States Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asking a number of University Presidents at a Congressional hearing whether “calling for the genocide of Jews breached their university’s codes of conduct on harassment and bullying?”

Staggeringly, each of the University Presidents – including Harvard University President Claudine Gay – refused to answer in the affirmative, saying only, “When speech crosses into conduct, we take action.”

“It would depend on the context,” she added.

In other words, only when Jews are actually murdered would the university step in!

Similar responses were given by the other University Presidents, which would no doubt be mirrored by responses from some of Australia’s elite universities were they to be asked the same question.

‘Satanic’. ‘Incapable of mental fight’. Exactly what Blake was referring to.

The above exchange is what one might call a ‘shibboleth’.

In his excellent book Blink!, Malcolm Gladwell describes how it is possible to weigh up situations in the ‘blink’ of an eye.

In other words, how to make good decisions in an instant by doing what he calls ‘thin slicing’.

Thin slicing is a concept similar to taking a big salami, and no matter how thinly you slice it, everything you want to know about the whole salami is in that one slice.

Often you don’t have time to study or research an organisation or a person; you have to analyse what is going on by finding that ‘thin slice’. That shibboleth.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word meaning ‘stream.’ It is referred to in the Old Testament book of Judges, where Jephthah and the men of Gilead fought the Ephraimites and captured the Jordan River crossing. As people crossed the river, to distinguish who was friend from foe, they had everyone say the word ‘shibboleth’. If they couldn’t pronounce it properly, they knew they were the enemy. From this, the word shibboleth was absorbed into the English language to describe a key identifier or a dead give-away.

What we saw in the University Presidents’ exchange was that dead give-away.

Jewish Liberal MP Julian Leeser has said: “I go back to the universities because this is the cauldron where it all starts.”

The reluctance of universities to confront what is happening to Jewish students is not surprising.

A recent scorecard on incidents of anti-Semitism in Australian universities found that in the last year at the University of Sydney there had been 56 incidents of anti-Semitism, the University of NSW 49, University of Technology Sydney 17, Macquarie University 9, University of Melbourne 7, and Monash University 6. A total of 72 per cent of those surveyed said experiences of anti-Semitism had worsened since the Hamas attack of October 7.

Part of the explanation for this lies with Gramsci’s long march through the institutions to impose Marxist thinking – beginning with the universities. It is where formative minds are indoctrinated.

Once out of university, these graduates disperse into other key institutions – the law, politics, media, business – and Marxist ideology soon takes hold.

Now, it was once the case that occupations such as nursing, teaching and journalism were learned ‘on the job’ – on the hospital ward, in the classroom, doing the rounds of the courts – supplemented by part-time study. Journalism, in particular, was considered more of a trade than a profession.

Not anymore.

Adapting to the rigours of the hospital ward or classroom or police beat as a nurse, teacher or reporter was much easier for a young person post-high school than post-university.

Sometimes, when a regime has been in place for a very long time, it is not possible to ‘break through’ that system. You have to break with it.

Over time, institutions – such as the public service or the industrial relations system or higher education – become adept at building up defences and seeing off zealous reformers.

The only option is to break with.

Employers should be encouraged to hire students with the appropriate aptitude straight from high school and facilitate their higher education in the form of part-time study at industry-specific places of higher learning.

I know this works as I myself was recruited straight from high school into a materials testing and research laboratory.

Similarly sponsored employment traineeships and cadetships could be rolled out across all sectors, the aim being to by-pass the toxic environment that our universities have become.

Let me finish with a story.

A group of hikers were out walking when they chance upon a river. Their attention is suddenly drawn to a number of young people in difficulties being carried downstream by the river’s strong current.

The hikers immediately jump into the river and start rescuing the youngsters.

As they pull them out, they notice that more and more young people are being swept towards them.

As more youngsters appear, one of the hikers climbs out of the river.

“Where are you going?”, asks one of the other hikers.

“I’m going upstream to find out who is throwing all these kids in the river!”, he replied.

The universities are the river. We have to stop our young ones from being thrown in.

Thank you for your support.

The Seeds of Time

by

seeds-of-timeIn Act 1 of Shakespeare’s great play Macbeth, the three witches appear before Macbeth and his friend Banquo. The witches predict that Macbeth will be king, and that one of Banquo’s sons will also be king one day.

Banquo is not convinced and responds, “If you can look into the seeds of time and say which seed will grow and which will not, speak then to me.”

As we start another year, like Banquo, let us ask, ‘who can look into the seeds of time’? Who can predict the future?

None of Banquo’s sons became king.

Like the witches in Macbeth, today’s economic forecasters, weather forecasters and social/population forecasters get it wrong time after time.

In her excellent book The Siberian Curse, British-American author Fiona Hill describes how the settlement of Siberia in the twentieth century and the mass movement of people and industry into this vast region by central planners lie at the root of many of Russia’s contemporary problems.

Central planning – be it geo-political, social, urban or economic – has caused many a disaster.

Examples abound around the world, but allow me to cite a local example.

A number of years ago, I bought a block of land on a very busy main road in one of Australia’s capital cities.  I submitted plans to the local council to build 12 semi-detached home units on the land and, as the zoning allowed for such a development, I didn’t expect any problems. That was of course until I came up against the Council Town Planner who said he’d recommend the development be approved “subject to the provision of noise attenuation devices” across the front of the property (noise attenuation is a fancy name for sound-proofing).  I tried to point out that there were thousands of kilometres of main roads across the country with many hundreds of thousands of dwellings fronting these main roads and it all seemed to work quite well without ‘sound attenuation’. In fact, I told him that the project was actually geared towards older people, many of whom actually prefer the noise of traffic and pedestrians chatting as they said it made them feel safer than in some quiet back street or cul-de-sac.  But he was having none of it. He wanted his noise attenuation devices.

Naturally, I tried the commercial argument on him that people who didn’t like noise wouldn’t buy into the project and that the market would sort it out.  But for reasons known only to town planners but obscure to common sense, he rejected all my pleas, and I had an acoustic engineer design a front fence to assist with noise attenuation.  But no sooner had I finished the job than the Royal Society for the Deaf bought all the units – every single one of them.  I showed the planner the contract and he couldn’t even see the funny side of it.

Ludwig von Mises, one of the most notable economists and social philosophers of the 20th Century, observed:

‘The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans.  Planners aim at one thing only:  the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of their own plans.’

National, State and Local government planners now infiltrate our lives at every turn.

Take the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), for example, the nation’s main economic planner.

The RBA has over 1,500 staff and as well as its headquarters in Sydney, has offices in London, New York and Beijing.

The RBA basically, has one main task – to control inflation. As we know, inflation is caused by governments spending more money than they receive. When governments do this, the RBA is there to put up interest rates and make the government feel the pain of their spending. In recent years, however, the RBA did not do this. In fact, in spite of record deficit-spending, former RBA Governor Philip Lowe said in 2021 the bank would be keeping interest rates low until at least 2024!

In effect, the RBA was complicit in shifting the inflation burden to consumers – particularly low-income consumers – through price rises.

But then the chickens came home to roost and the RBA has hiked interest rates 14 times since then in an attempt to bring inflation under control.

There have been other instances when our economic planner-in-chief has got it wrong – with dire consequences.

One can trace the current housing affordability crisis back to the RBA when it similarly refused to admit it made a mistake with its submission to the 2003 Productivity Commission Inquiry into First Home Ownership. The Reserve Bank’s focus on demand stimulators (capital gains tax, negative gearing, low interest rates, etc. – all Federal matters) had a huge influence in shaping the Productivity Commission’s findings. As head of Australia’s ‘economic family’ – the Reserve Bank, the Commonwealth Treasury and the Produc­tivity Commission – the Reserve Bank must take much of the blame for the housing crisis which ensued.

 

Christmas 2023

by

Christmas 2023In our Newsletters this year we have covered everything from the Voice bomb to the atom bomb, from Israel to industrial relations, from Gough to the Gulags, from federalism to forgiveness, from taxation to Truman, and from housing to Hamlet – and a whole lot more in between.

With so many highs and lows this year – regrettably, mostly lows – how should we end the year?

Let’s start with a couple of anecdotes.

In 2006, I was heading to a Liberal Party function at the Adelaide Hilton and pulled into the then brand-new Grote Street Car Park in the city only to be confronted by a ‘CAR PARK FULL’ sign.

Not wanting to be late for the event, I stopped my car in front of the sign and wound down my window to speak to a burly-looking guy in a high-vis vest who was sitting on a stool nearby.

“No parks?”, I called out.

“Are you disabled?”, he shouted back.

I said, “I’m with the Liberal Party!”

“That’s close enough”, he said. “Park over there.”

Shortly after, Andrew Evans rang me and invited me to join Family First.

The second anecdote concerns the Spanish patriot leader Navarez who, on his deathbed, was asked by the priest if he had forgiven his enemies.  “I don’t have any enemies”, said Navarez, “I shot them all.”

They say that everything rises and falls on leadership. It is the greatest need in the world today.

Leadership. We hear a lot about it, but what is it?  How does one become a leader in a particular field?  Do you have to shoot all your competitors to become one?

Former Western 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.”

Bob Hawke was a good leader. As was John Howard. Not so, Anthony Albanese.

A recent poll showed confidence in political leadership was at an all-time low. The carpark attendant’s reaction shows that little has changed.

As we contemplate the events of 2023, we ask ourselves, What went right? What went wrong? Where are Australia and the world heading?

The world needs leaders who, like the ancient men of Issachar, “understood the times, and what needed to be done”.

Admitting more than 500,000 migrants into Australia this year – up from an average of 100,000 per annum in the early 2000s – but building only 175,000 houses; billions of dollars spent on renewable energy for no discernible change in either the world’s CO2 emissions or the world’s temperature; substantial increases in grocery prices and other cost-of-living measures – a promised $275 decrease in electricity bills has become a $1,000 increase; the newly-introduced Digital ID legislation – your driver’s licence, passport, medicare card, birth certificate and other personal IDs all rolled into one to ‘bring together government and industry’; and in a country having one of the shortest parliamentary terms in the developed world (three years), the Albanese government spent half of its first term obsessed with a referendum that everyone knew was never going to pass, leaving no time to fix any of the nation’s real problems.

That is not good leadership.

All these and more lie ahead to be addressed in 2024 and beyond.

And then there were none …

In our previous post we discussed Santos, the last remaining ‘Top 100’ listed company based in Adelaide. Well, guess what? It is about to be taken over by WA-based giant Woodside. All gone.

So, about 2024.

I want to keep churning out these Newsletters, as I think the topics we discuss are extremely important and very few, if anyone, is covering them.

In response, I trust you have enjoyed receiving them as much as I have enjoyed writing them – all of which are sent out and will continue to be sent out – free of charge. This enables anyone and everyone to access them and stay informed.

If, however, you are in a position to become a subscription member of the Newsletter at just $5 a month, it will ensure the ongoing viability of this important mission.

If so, please click here.

To all our members and supporters, have a wonderful Christmas and New Year, and thank you again for your support throughout 2023.