Australian Family Party

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Freedom

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.

The Seven Deadly Sins

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vineyardWe are all familiar with the story of Jesus overturning the trading tables and driving out the moneychangers from the temple.

Following this outburst, Jesus was confronted by the chief priests and elders demanding to know by what authority he was doing these things.

He responded by asking them their opinion of John the Baptist and then telling them a parable:

There was a man who had two sons. The man went to the first son and said, “Son, go and work today in the vineyard.”

“I will not,” the first son answered, but later changed his mind and went.

The father then went to the other son and said the same thing, “Son, go and work today in the vineyard.”

“I will, father,” he said, but did not go.

‘Which of the two sons did what his father wanted?’ Jesus asked the Pharisees.

‘The first!’ they answered.

He then rebuked them, telling them that although they acknowledged the first son was the good son, they were more like the second son – saying one thing but doing another:

‘Truly I tell you, tax collectors and prostitutes will enter the kingdom of God before you will.

‘John came to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did’.

Proverbs and axioms such ‘Actions speak louder than words’ and ‘I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do’ have for centuries reinforced the link between personal and public morality. You simply couldn’t get away with saying one thing and doing another.

Sadly, it appears that rule no longer applies.

In today’s world, the second son gets the free pass if he mouths the right platitudes.

What he does no longer matters. It is the first son, the one who spoke the wrong words but did the right thing, who is now the villain.

Remember the seven deadly sins?

They are not quite as well known as the Ten Commandments, but they are equally important in theological terms.  They are:

  1. Anger
  2. Greed
  3. Sloth
  4. Pride
  5. Lust
  6. Envy
  7. Gluttony

What is noticeable about these seven deadly sins?

Or rather, what are they not?

None of them are actions. Murder is not there, adultery is not there, stealing is not there.

One would think that murder was a deadly sin. The same goes for adultery. But no.

The old theologians had it right, the deadly sins are not about the ‘what’, they are about the ‘why’.  Why people do what they do.

One of the most fundamental differences between Judaism and Christianity, is Judaism says God divides people into good and evil, whereas Christianity says God divides people into believers and non-believers.

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

In 2022, then Labor Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas went to the SA State election with one overriding campaign pledge – to fix ambulance ramping at Adelaide’s new $2.3bn hospital.

He won in a landslide – 27 seats to the Liberals’ 16.

Two years later, ramping is now worse than it was under the Liberals, and yet Labor retains a significant lead over the Liberals in the opinion polls.

Actions, it seems, no longer speak louder than words.

In fact, these days it appears to be just the opposite. No-one is punished for lying anymore, but lots are punished for telling the truth!

Former Premier Marshall’s left-leaning colleague, Deputy-Leader Vickie Chapman, retired in May 2022.

It was the actions of Marshall and Chapman (in particular) on issues such as euthanasia and abortion that led to the establishment of the Australian Family Party.

Launched in October 2020 as ‘Family First 2.0’ in the wake of the Liberals’ profound anti-life policies, the Party’s membership grew quickly, and the Party was registered the following year.

Inaugural letterbox flyer from 2020

One Liberal MP, however, who refused to go along with Vickie Chapman’s ghastly legislation was the Member for Black, David Speirs.

Interestingly, Speirs is now Leader of the Liberal Party in South Australia.

Accordingly, as a vote of confidence in his leadership, the Australian Family Party will preference the Liberal candidate in Dunstan at the forthcoming by-election on 23 March.

Our candidate 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. Nicole would make a great Member of Parliament.

If you would like to help Nicole in the by-election, please let me know here (choose Federal Director from the button list).

And for those interested in the ongoing ‘church and state’ debate, this year’s Church & State Conferences – now in their 7th year – will be held in Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Launceston. These conferences are excellent. For more details, visit their website Church & State.

Thank you for your support.

Christmas 2023

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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.

Never Again?

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never-againIt’s been said that whatever is done to the Jews, is done for the Jews.

In other words, when they come out of this current crisis, they will be stronger than before.

Or to paraphrase an old Randy Pike quote, ‘Throughout history, many have tried to bury the Jewish people, but after every episode they keep surviving, outliving all the pallbearers’.

History is repeating itself before our eyes.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, Dutch-American activist and former politician spoke recently about how, “a story is also a moment when you are forced to make choices.

“I think we find ourselves today, right now, in a moment where we have to make a moral choice”.

“I sit here today and say I support Israel. No ifs. No buts. Unequivocal.”

What Ali is invoking here is ‘The exception that proves the rule’.

And that rule is, ‘There are two sides to every story’.

The rightness of Israel’s position in this conflict is the exception that proves the rule.

There is only one side to take.

No ifs. No buts.

As we know, the easiest position in any conflict is to ‘both sides’ the problem – the moral equivalence game.

Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, plays this game.

He is unable to condemn the horrific violence perpetrated by Hamas without in the same breath criticising Israel.

“I make no apologies for standing up against anti-Semitism”, he told parliament.

But then quickly added, “But I also have a track record of standing up for the rights of and justice for Palestinian people.”

There’s no doubt which side he is on.

As commentator Chris Kenny stated, “That might have been an acceptable line if Israel had sent its soldiers into Gaza to slaughter children, rape and murder the women, torture and murder the men and take a few hundred hostages.

“That might have been an acceptable equivalence if Israel had spent years firing rockets indiscriminately into Gaza trying to kill civilians.”

Which of course, they haven’t.

As US commentator Kayleigh McEnany has said, “This is a spiritual and moral catastrophe that has to be addressed”.

This is a clash of civilisations, a clash of cultures. A war between the civilised and the uncivilised, and only one can be allowed to win.

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, the Palestinian Authority has cancelled this year’s Nativity Scene, ‘In honour of Hamas martyrs’.

On October 9 – two days after the slaughter of over a thousand Jews, and before there was any response from the Israelis, hundreds of ‘Free Palestiners’ gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House and chanted “gas the Jews, gas the Jews”.

This is clearly not about Gaza.

No, what we are seeing on our TV screens around the world is plain-old Jew-hatred masquerading as ‘Free Palestine’.

And while it may be true that a number of young people in these crowds might be equally at home at a Black Lives Matter march or Just Stop Oil action, that is not the point.

In their case, as Mark Twain once said, ‘No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.’

It was former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke who once declared that Israel was ‘an inspiration, a small lone democracy in the Middle East’.

“If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just toll for Israel, it will toll for all mankind”, he said.

There is no doubt the overwhelming majority of Australians are on the side of Israel in this conflict, but it is also a reality that Jewish Australians are very fearful at present.

And for good reason.

In a chilling commentary, author Ramesh Thakur writes, “The solemn pledge of ‘Never Again’ (referring to the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust) has now given way to ‘Here we go again’.

“78 years after the Holocaust, the threat of Jewish extermination is back.

“Calls go out for Jews to be gassed, and taunts that the army of Mohammed that massacred them in the seventh century will return.

“The terrorists have been valorised, Israel vilified, Jews attacked and threatened, and posters of the missing hostages torn down.”

I’m with Kayleigh McEnany, “This is a spiritual and moral catastrophe that has to be addressed”.

No ifs. No buts.

No Laffing Matter

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LaffingAn Australian was on holidays in the south of France.

Strolling along outside his hotel, the Aussie was suddenly attracted by the screams of a young woman kneeling in front of a small child.

The Aussie knew enough French to determine that the child had swallowed a coin.

Seizing the little boy by the heels, the Aussie held him up and gave him a few good shakes and out popped the coin.

“Oh, thank you sir, thank you,” cried the woman.

“You seemed to know just how to get that coin out of him, are you a doctor?”

“No madam,” replied the man, “I’m with the Australian Tax Office.”

In a previous post, Prison Break, I spoke of rights and responsibilities.

Regulations that prevent people from working under terms and conditions which suited them was, I said, an infringement of liberty, freedom and dignity. It violated a person’s right to get a job and their responsibility to provide for their families.

I will now add a further hazard – it prevents them from paying tax to cover the many services the state provides to them.

Rights … responsibilities … and tax. They are all linked.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Finance Minister to King Louis XIV of France, famously declared that “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”

A modern finance minister might rephrase this as, “The largest possible amount of revenue with the smallest possible amount of economic and political damage.”

Which brings me to a man called Arthur Laffer.

I had the privilege of meeting the famous US economist in Parliament House in 2015. Dr Laffer was in Australia on a speaking tour.

Arthur Laffer is of course most famous for his Laffer Curve.

Laffer

It is self-evident that tax revenue would be zero if tax rates are set at 0 per cent (bottom left corner of the graph).

Revenue would also, of course, be zero if rates were set at 100 per cent, as there would be no incentive to work! (bottom right corner).

Starting at 0 per cent, as tax rates rise, revenue rises until, at some point on the graph, revenue starts decreasing as it heads towards that 100 per cent point.

Eminent Australian and UK economist Colin Clark once said economic growth declines if taxation is more than 25 per cent of GDP.

It’s also been said, “When the taxes of a nation exceed 20% of the people’s income, there is a lack of respect of government. When it exceeds 25%, lawlessness.”

In Australia it is close to 30 per cent.

Take one example of this lawlessness – the black economy – currently estimated at 15 per cent of GDP, one of the largest in the developed world. An underground economy of that magnitude requires the involvement not only of a lot of businesses, but also of millions of consumers.

As we know, laws only work when people believe in them and, clearly, they have no respect for our tax laws.

Despite what many advocating tax increases would have us believe, the total tax take in Australia is quite high. They say that compared with other developed economies, Australia is a low tax country, and that workers and companies could comfortably pay more. Not so.

When it comes to taxing incomes, Australia is up there with the Europeans and is way ahead of most of our neighbours in the Asia­­­–Pacific region.

A paper published by the Adam Smith Institute stated, “If you look at the experience of those who have introduced a single-rate flat tax, and also the tax reforms of the 1980s which took place in Britain and America, reducing tax rates causes revenues to rise.”

As Arthur Laffer has found, and as has been demonstrated many times, when taxation rates are reduced, revenues do not fall. When the Australian company tax rate was cut from 39 to 30 per cent, revenues went up, not down. The famous Reagan tax cuts from 70 per cent to 30 per cent in the 1980s produced a $9 billion increase in revenue when a $1 billion shortfall had been forecast.

When Sweden halved its company tax rate from 60 per cent to 30 per cent, company tax revenue tripled.

Nobody enjoys paying taxes, but in the 1950s and 1960s, relatively low taxation and a comparatively simple set of tax rules meant that most people paid what was due without too much hissing, to quote Colbert.

Today, however, the Government and the ATO find themselves locked into a destructive relationship of repression and resistance with ordinary taxpayers.

Where people can avoid tax by exploiting loopholes, they will do so; where they can’t (eg, PAYG taxpayers), they become resentful at the unfairness of it all.