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Lessons from Lausanne

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hamas-israelThe story is told of a divine messenger who appeared to a peasant farmer.

“You have been chosen”, said the messenger. “Whatever you wish for, it will be granted.”

The farmer was shocked but beamed with anticipation.

“There is only one condition,” the messenger added. “Whatever you wish for, your neighbour will be granted double.”

The farmer’s smile disappeared, for he despised his neighbour.

“So, if I ask for a ton of gold, my neighbour will get two tons?”

“That is correct,” said the messenger.

“And if I ask for an extra 1,000 acres of land, my neighbour will get 2,000?”

“You understand well,” the messenger added.

The farmer thought in silence for quite some time, as he could not bear the thought of his neighbour prospering in any way.

Suddenly, his face brightened. “I’ve got it!”, he exclaimed.

“Put out one of my eyes.”

As the war between Israel and Hamas rages, I thought about this story.

Hamas and its Palestinian supporters are the peasant farmer. They despise Israel so much that they would rather sacrifice their own future than see Israel prosper in any way.

As has been observed many times, whilst the Israelis (and we here in the West) love life, Hamas and its supporters love death.

So, how does one reconcile such diametrically opposed positions?

In short, you can’t.

In January 1923, the League of Nations ‘Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations’ was signed in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The agreement stated that all Christians living in the newly established Republic of Turkey were to be re-located to Greece, and all of Greece’s Muslims were to move to Turkey.

The agreement specified that the populations being transferred would lose their original nationality – along with any right of return – and instead would become citizens of their new homeland.

The population transfers, which affected about one-and-a-half million people, imposed enormous pain on their respective populations, but was generally viewed as a success. Relations between Turkey and Greece improved immensely following the transfers.

Around that same time, the British came up with what might be called a ‘Two–State Solution’ to the Arab-Jew problem it had inherited in British Mandate Palestine. In an attempt to resolve the problem, the British allocated approximately 80,000 sq km of land to the Arab population in an area to be known as Trans-Jordan (now simply called Jordan), and 20,000 sq km to the Jews. In 1948, the Jews declared independence over their portion of land and the state of Israel was born.

Following the creation of Trans-Jordan in 1921, during the next 40 years, and despite being surrounded by numerous wealthy Arab states, those Palestinians who had not re-located to Jordan but had remained in what were known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were kept in abject poverty. They were effectively stateless. Egypt controlled Gaza and Jordan controlled the West Bank. Neither state showed any interest in improving the lives of the Palestinians under their control, and certainly showed no interest in creating a separate state for them.

Following its spectacular victory in the 1967 war – which Egypt, Syria and Jordan had started (overwhelmingly supported by the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank) – in what must surely be the biggest missed opportunity since its founding, Israel should have done what the League of Nations did in 1923 and relocated the remaining Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank to Jordan. Jordan was, after all, overwhelmingly Palestinian.

But as Israel has been doing since biblical times, it ignored calls to remove its enemies and prevent them from attacking it in the future.

The Lausanne Convention endorsed the practice of relocating ethnic and religious populations and established the legal right of states to re-locate large populations on the grounds of what they called ‘otherness’.

Another example was the partition of India in 1947 which saw millions of Muslims relocated to the newly established state of Pakistan and millions of Hindus relocated to India.

Speaking at the Lausanne Convention, French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré said, “the mixture of populations of different races and religions has been the main cause of troubles and of war and that this un-mixing of peoples would remove one of the greatest obstacles to peace”.

As the Bible states, “This is an hard saying, who can hear it?” (John 6:60 KJV).

As with many of the world’s most intractable problems, we often end up being faced with two options – a bad option, and a worse option. There are no ‘good’ options.

In Israel’s case, the bad option – it would attract a great deal of international criticism – would be to do what the Greeks and Turks did in the 1920s and relocate the Palestinians.

A worse option would be to allow them to remain.

Allowing them to remain would require either the Americans, the Europeans or the United Nations – none of which is likely to do it – or the Israeli military, to occupy Gaza indefinitely.

Under any of these circumstances, Hamas would re-form and re-build.

That can’t be allowed to happen.

Relocation of the Palestinian population by absorbing them into other Arab countries is the least worst option.

Thank you for your support.

Mind Your Language

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languageWhat you call something is very important.

Everyone knows that a suit is comprised of a jacket and a pair of pants. Two jackets are not a suit. Neither can two pairs of pants be called a suit.

This was an argument I often made during the marriage debate. Marriage, I argued, was the joining of a man and woman in a special relationship.

If two men or two women wished to be joined together, then they can call it something else, but not marriage; not a suit.

This idea of insisting that words reflect their true meaning, and that things be called what they are, is not a new idea.

As long ago as 500BC, Chinese philosopher Confucius said, ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.’

Modern-day politics has become largely about controlling the language.

As US preacher Chuck Swindoll says, ‘they adopt our vocabulary but not our dictionary.’

Farmers used to drain water-logged swamp areas of their land, and no-one batted an eye.

Then swamps were renamed ‘wetlands’, and now can’t be touched.

We’ve re-named euthanasia ‘dying with dignity’; abortion is now referred to as ‘reproductive health’ or ‘planned parenthood’ or simply ‘pro-choice’.

Free speech is branded hate speech, local aboriginal tribes have become ‘First Nations’, power cuts are now called ‘load shedding’, tax increases are re-badged as ‘budget savings’ and denying one’s gender has become gender affirming.

A person on 50 per cent of the median wage is officially on the ‘poverty line’.

‘Safe schools’ and ‘respectful relationships’ are anything but – as evidenced by lessons in bestiality presented to 14-year-old schoolgirls in South Australia.

The Good Book says, ‘Woe to those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.’ – Isaiah 5:20.

Then there are the perpetual ‘straw man’ arguments – mispresenting an opponent’s position in order to quickly and easily destroy their arguments.

‘Trickle-down economics’ is a straw man argument. There is no such theory in economics. But opponents of free-market economics invented the term ‘trickle-down’ to suggest free-markets are all about favouring the rich and hoping some of their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to those lower on the socio-economic ladder.

Then there’s the ubiquitous use of the term ‘flat-earthers’ when no-one, anywhere throughout history, thought the world was flat. Not the Egyptians, not the Phoenicians, not the ancient Greeks; no-one thought the earth was flat. They weren’t silly. By standing on high ground and watching their tall ships sail over the horizon, they knew that the earth was round, they just didn’t know how big it was. Christopher Columbus left Spain and headed west for India, not to prove the world was round, but to determine its size.

Or take the phrase Terra Nullius – a term used to manipulate debate on indigenous matters.

‘Australia was founded on the basis of Terra Nullius,’ is one of those myths that survives by repetition, not historical fact.

Terra Nullius is a Latin term meaning ‘land belonging to no-one’.

Yet no-one ever said Australia was not occupied.

The term ‘terra nullius’ was not mentioned anywhere in Australia until 1977!

Regarding exploration and occupation, the book 18th Century Principles of International Law stated that, ‘All territory not in the possession of states who are members of the family of nations and subjects of International Law must be considered as technically res nullius and therefore open to occupation’. ‘Res nullius’ – land not owned by a recognised nation, is not the same as ‘terra nullius’ – land not occupied by anyone – for example, Antarctica.

And on a similar vein, that Aborigines didn’t get the vote, or were treated as ‘flora and fauna’, until 1967.

All false. All examples of the mutilation of language to influence and deceive.

US author Michael Malice writes, ‘they’re not using language to communicate, they’re using it to manipulate’.

Thank you for your support.

A Digital Dark Age – Part 3

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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

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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

A Digital Dark Age – Part 1

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Step into my parlour, said the spider to the fly,
‘Tis the prettiest little parlour, that ever you did spy,
Oh no, no! then said the fly, to ask me is in vain,
For who goes up to your winding stair,
Can ne’er come down again.

digital-dark-ageMary Howitt’s old poem could well be describing another web, the one that ensnares us all – the world-wide-web.

Every aspect of our lives is connected to this web – most notably our source of nearly all the information on which we base life’s decisions. It is because of this web that we are now in this predicament.

We have all been caught, and to quote Mary Howitt, we’re ‘ne’er coming down again’.

What I would like to do in this examination of the Government’s Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill is:

  1. Describe the proposed Bill.
  2. Explain why governments relish having powers such as the ones this Bill will give them.
  3. Reveal how governments enlist third parties to shut down information they do not like.
  4. Show how governments themselves are the worst perpetrators when it comes to disseminating misinformation and disinformation.
  5. Predict that the Bill will not be kind to Christians.

1. The Bill

In January 2023, the Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, announced that the Albanese Government would introduce new laws to provide the media regulator – the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) – with ‘new powers to combat online misinformation and disinformation’.

The proposed new bill, the Communication Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill, would:

  • Enable ACMA to gather information from global tech companies and require them to keep certain records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and provide those records to ACMA.
  • Enable ACMA to request industry to develop, vary and/or register a code of practice covering measures to combat misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms, which ACMA could then register and enforce.
  • Allow ACMA to create and enforce an industry standard, should a code of practice be deemed ineffective in combatting misinformation and disinformation on digital platforms.
  • Empower ACMA to regulate electoral and referendum content, but NOT the power to regulate political parties with regard to misleading and/or deceptive conduct.
  • Empower the Minister to direct ACMA to conduct investigations into any matter regarding misinformation or disinformation and empower the Minister to set the terms of reference for any such investigation.

The Bill also provides for significant penalties for digital platforms or individuals that do not comply with the Bill and/or the new codes and standards that the Bill creates. Penalties include:

  • Imprisonment of up to 12 months for providing false or misleading information to ACMA.
  • Non-attendance at an ACMA investigation hearing of up to 33 penalty units ($9,000) for each day of non-attendance.
  • Non-compliance with a registered code of up to 10,000 penalty units ($2.75m) or 2% of global turnover (whatever is greater).
  • Non-compliance with an industry standard of up to 25,000 penalty units ($6.88m) or 5% of global turnover (whatever is greater).

Other penalties may also apply.

The government, of course, will not be subject to any of these new laws. It has exempted itself.

Ms Rowland said the government was committed to introducing legislation which would fine social media companies for allowing misinformation or disinformation to be broadcast on their platforms.

Misinformation is defined as ‘false information that is spread due to ignorance, or by error or mistake, without the intent to deceive’.

Disinformation is defined as ‘false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth for malicious or deceptive purposes’.

“In the face of seriously harmful content that sows division, undermines support for pillars of our democracy, or disrupts public health responses, doing nothing is not an option.

“The proposal would empower the regulator to examine the systems and processes these tech giants already have in place, and develop standards should industry self-regulation measures prove insufficient in addressing the threat posed by misinformation and disinformation”.

Harsh words indeed.

In its submission to the draft bill, the Law Council of Australia warned that the proposal could have a ‘chilling effect on freedom of expression’ by allowing social media giants and the communications watchdog (ACMA) to decide what constitutes information, opinion and assertions online.

And in case anyone was thinking this is solely a Labor Party contrivance, before the 2022 election, the Morrison government pledged to, ‘… introduce stronger laws to combat harmful disinformation and misinformation online by giving the media regulator stronger information-gathering and enforcement powers’.

To cap it all off, waiting in the wings is ‘mal-information’, defined as ‘truth which is used to inflict harm on a person, organisation or country’ and ‘information that stems from the truth, but is often portrayed in a way that misleads and/or causes potential harm’.

To invoke Climate Czar and former US Presidential candidate Al Gore, mal-information might be otherwise described as ‘an inconvenient truth’.

Thank you for your support.

A Digital Dark Age – Part 2

Camels on the Horizon

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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.

University River

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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

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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.

 

Memory Mountain

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Memory-MountainOne hundred years ago this year, four young Indigenous evangelists first preached the gospel at Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) 200 km west of Alice Springs.

Ikuntji is the home of the Western Arrernte, Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara people.

The evangelists’ aim was to bring the message of forgiveness to a culture that had little understanding of it.

Local tradition dictated that if you committed an offence, you would have to suffer with payback and retribution which often included spearing and the spilling of blood – ‘Makarrata’.

When the evangelists explained the gospel story, however – in particular the account of the Roman Centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus’ side bringing forth water and blood – for Aboriginal people, this was significant. To them, spearing was about punishment. But here Jesus was being speared and saying, “Father, forgive them. There is no need for payback. You are forgiven.”

To commemorate that encounter, a huge 20-metre-tall cross has been constructed on Memory Mountain at Ikuntji.

Named The Forgiveness Cross, the cross was formally dedicated this year on the 100th anniversary of that memorable first visit.

“This cross will remain a symbol of forgiveness until the end of time”, said Ikuntji Elder Kieran Multa.

“People from every nation can now come together – every nation whether black or white, Chinese or Indian. The cross is the way to meaning, it is the way to forgiveness.”

In a report by Vision Media, years of fighting bureaucratic red tape, fundraising, engineering challenges and searing heat were all overcome to enable this beacon of hope to be realised in the heart of the nation.

This was a very different ‘statement from the heart’.

The Bible says, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.”

Which brings me to the Referendum.

As we said at the start of the year in Remembering the Galatians Group, ‘closing the gap’ (between indigenous and non-indigenous people) and improving the lives of Aboriginal people is a no-brainer.

So why did so many people who support reconciliation, recognition and closing the gap not support the Voice?

Good question.

Well, as we warned back in March, the Voice turned out to be something very different to those things.

First and foremost was the fact that the debate presented not one, but two very different questions – do you support closing the gap, and do you support the Voice?

The problem was, only one of those questions was on the ballot paper.

Greatly admired individuals such as footballer Michael Long and wonderful organisations such as the Salvation Army believed the Voice would be a modest and safe proposal that would ensure Indigenous people ‘could be heard by government on matters related to them’. The Voice, they said, ‘offered hope and possibility for the future’. It would help close the gap.

But how accurate was their assessment?

First, the proposed Voice was to have been a stand-alone new chapter in our Constitution, sitting next to the three other great constitutional institutions: the Parliament (Chapter I), the Executive Government (Chapter II), the Judicature (Chapter III).

According to constitutional law professor Nicholas Aroney and constitutional lawyer Peter Congdon, the proposed new Section 129 establishing the Voice in the Constitution, “would accord the Voice a structural prominence and constitutional status comparable to those other three institutions”.

They argued that the proposed new chapter could fundamentally alter the division of powers between the commonwealth and the states.

“What if Voice representations concern health and education that are currently the domain of the states?

“What if the Voice wants a higher age of criminal responsibility for Indigenous people?

“Will this new head of commonwealth power give the commonwealth power to encroach in areas currently the responsibility of the states?”

No-one knows what the outer limits of this new power would have been. It would have been up to the High Court – not the parliament – to determine those parameters.

Key ‘Yes’ campaigner and architect of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Professor Megan Davis, said the Voice ‘will have a lot of power’.

Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said, “The Voice will be the vehicle to negotiate a national treaty with. There has to be a body to negotiate a treaty with, which is why the Voice is so important”.

And listen to this: Peter Jennings, Senior Fellow of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said, “If the Yes case wins, then Beijing will want to establish relations with the Voice. Just as China courts the leaders of Pacific Island nations, state premiers, and even local councils, the Voice too will be the target of a PRC charm offensive.

“This is Beijing’s playbook.

“If the Voice is enacted, the Chinese will reach out to it within weeks. Then look out for that first funded trip to Beijing for Voice representatives.

“And more broadly, the diplomatic community will want to know how to engage with the Voice. Will that be done through DFAT’s First Nations ambassador who heads the Office of First Nations Engagement? Who will be responsible for shaping that policy agenda?”

The High Court would have to become heavily involved in all of these matters.

Yet we were told persistently that the Voice was merely ‘an advisory body’; a ‘modest and humble request’.

“The almost desperate insistence by the Yes case that the Voice was just an ‘advisory body’ was a claim designed to deceive”, said The Australian newspaper’s Editor-at-Large, Paul Kelly.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, together with Voice elites Noel Pearson, Ray Martin and others, and Voice radicals such as Marcia Langton and Thomas Mayo were totally vanquished.

To quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “They have been hoist by their own petard”.

Now most people think that a petard is some kind of flagpole or pikestaff, and you get hoisted up on it. But that’s not what a petard is at all. Petard is French for ‘bomb’, and you get ‘hoisted’, or ‘thrown in the air’, by your own bomb. The bomb blows up in your face. It sure did.

Despite huge political, social and financial resources aligned against it, the No campaign triumphed. As a result, Australia dodged a massive bullet.

In summary, ‘Vote No’ leader Jacinta Nampijinpa Price stated many times throughout the campaign that 80 per cent of Aboriginals enjoy the same standard of living as everyone else.

Think about that for a moment – 80 per cent of Indigenous people are no worse off than anyone else.

The challenge therefore is, how do we now join with people such as Michael Long and the Salvation Army and help the other 20 per cent?

Maybe we could start by visiting Memory Mountain.

Oppenheimer

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oppenheimerOn the 14th of August, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was interviewed by Neil Mitchell on Melbourne’s 3AW. Part of the interview went like this:

“Mr Albanese, if you were dictator, what’s the first thing you would do?”

“Ban social media”, he replied.

How telling.

That the Prime Minister would ban social media – our most popular means of communication – is brutally authoritarian.

It reminded me of a scene in the movie Oppenheimer in which nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer meets with President Harry Truman shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War 2.

Following his successful testing of the bomb, Oppenheimer was known to have uttered the words, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, a holy scripture from Hinduism.

After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer told Truman he felt he had “blood on his hands”.

Truman angrily responded with the words, “The blood is on my hands, not yours. It was me who dropped the bomb, not you”.

With that the meeting was over and Truman said he “never wanted to see that man again”.

There’s more than a little Oppenheimer in Albanese’s view of himself and the world around him. Here’s why I think that.

There’s an old Greek proverb, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing.”

Albanese knows only one thing – politics. It’s all he’s ever done.

But as we know, the world isn’t made up of just one thing, it is made up of a whole range of competing factors and trade-offs that differ for different people of different ages who live in different places and have different priorities.

Like the ‘crystallised intelligence’ vs ‘fluid intelligence’ paradigm. Crystallised intelligence employs experience and wisdom and knows how the world works. Fluid intelligence knows how to study, learn facts and pass exams. Foxes vs hedgehogs. We’ve all met them.

Harry Truman, a Democrat (a bit like the Labor Party here in Australia), was a very good President. Before entering politics, Truman was a soldier and then a shopkeeper. A better understanding of how the world works you wouldn’t get than by owning a shop! Harry was quite the fox.

But the story is told of when Truman was elected President, his former army buddy and shopkeeper partner, Eddie Jacobson, said to him, “O Harry, now that you’re President, everyone’s going to start telling you what a great man you are, when you and I both know you ain’t”.

Anyone who gets to the top needs an Eddie Jacobson in their lives.

Being knowledgeable on one subject can narrow one’s focus, lead to over-confidence and dismiss dissenting views. This can lead to self-deception, even delusions of grandeur. The Voice perhaps?

The world is a very dangerous place, and it is impossible to predict what will happen next. There are countless variables and factors. Foxes understand this innately, hedgehogs not so much.

For this reason, we have to stop letting the hedgehogs run the show. Let them be advisers, by all means, but do not put them in charge.

They may be fine leading other hedgehogs in a particular field, but the world is not parliament house or a laboratory or a hospital or a courtroom or a classroom or a police station. We can’t let scientists or police commissioners or judges who do not have to answer to the people run the place. Being answerable to the people forces you to understand how the world really works and how to assess the many trade-offs – as the Prime Minister will soon find out.

On a more celebratory note, next month marks the three-year anniversary of the launch of the Australian Family Party – and almost one hundred Newsletters!

Inaugural letterbox flyer from 2020

Our membership is strong and the response to the Newsletters, all of which are listed on our website, has been phenomenal – especially The New Gulag, The MATS Plan Re-visited, Black Hawk Down, Two Stories, One Lesson and of course Remembering Andrew Evans.

But, like the story of ‘the turtle on the fence post’ (if you ever see a turtle sitting on top of a fence post, what is the one thing you know? – It didn’t get there by itself!), if anyone wants to get to the top of the fence post in any field – sport, the arts, business, and yes, politics – you’re not going to get there by yourself. You’re going to need a lot of help from a lot of people.

In our case, that includes other minor parties.

As I outlined in The Shrinking Forest earlier this year, alliances with like-minded parties are essential for success.

More news about that in coming months.