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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 Winning Circle

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

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

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

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

‘That was the curious incident’, Holmes replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family breakdown is costly. Mental illness costs the economy $200bn a year. More than 3,000 Australians take their lives each year. More young men take their own lives than are killed in road accidents. Boys raised in father-absent environments are five times more likely to commit suicide, ten times more likely to abuse drugs, fourteen times more likely to commit rape, and twenty times more likely to end up in a correctional facility. Fatherless households are a dreadful problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2017, Christopher Pyne, then leader of the Liberal Party’s left-leaning, progressive faction and mentor to Steven Marshall, said the Liberal progressives were winning the internal battle against the Party’s conservatives. “We’re in the winning circle”, he said.

How well did that work out for them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your support.

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.

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.

 

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.

The Blame Game

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blame-gameOn 1 July 2014, my first day as a Senator, Adelaide’s Advertiser newspaper published an opinion piece I had submitted titled, Shedding the ‘Bludger State’ tag, in which I implored the SA State Government to stop bludging on the other states and start standing on its own two feet.

Then Premier Jay Weatherill responded by calling me ‘an enemy of the state’.

Many South Australians can probably remember the time when more than a dozen of Australia’s top 100 listed companies had their head offices in Adelaide – News Ltd, Fauldings, Southcorp, Elders, Normandy Mining, Adelaide Bank, Adelaide Brighton, Standard Chartered Finance to name just a few. Today there’s just one – Santos (and even Santos is only headquartered in Adelaide because of some vague arrangement).

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

Led by Tom Playford, South Australia prospered under the principle of ‘cheap land, cheap power, cheap water, and cheap labour’. Wages were lower than in Sydney and Melbourne, but despite the lower pay packets, South Australians’ quality of life and standard of living were higher than their interstate counterparts.

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

Since those halcyon days, South Australia has lost each of the competitive edges that made it prosperous.

First to go was cheap land – thanks to urban planning controls – then water, then centralised wage fixing (waiters, nurses, and factory workers across Australia all had to get the same pay).

As for power prices, they are now not just the highest in Australia, but some of the highest in the world.

Last year, the South Australian premier folded like pack of cards over nuclear power. The idea that he and his Labor colleagues would take on the urban planners, water barons and unions to make SA competitive again is laughable.

SA is destined to be a mendicant State for a long time to come.

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke once said, “We’re all Australians, whether we’re from Melbourne or Sydney”.

Where those from the ‘outlying States’ (as Paul Keating called them) belonged, was anyone’s guess.

When Australia came together as a nation in 1901, Sir Samuel Griffith, nailed it by saying:

“We must not lose sight of the essential condition that this is to be a federation of states and not a single government of Australia. The separate states are to continue as autonomous bodies, surrendering only so much of their power as is necessary for the establishment of a general government to do for them collectively what they cannot do individually for themselves.”

Those who spend the money should raise the money

The powers given to the Federal Government by the states in 1901 included trade and commerce, corporations, currency, banking, pensions, taxation, foreign affairs, communications, copyright, marriage and family law, quarantine, and defence.

There was no mention of hospitals, schools, disability services, pink batts, carbon dioxide emissions or many of the other things that federal governments these days decide they want to spend our money on.

Not surprisingly, the first area where the boundaries between state and Federal governments were tested related to tax.

In 1942, all income taxing power was handed to the Federal government for the duration of World War II under the ‘defence’ power of the Constitution. This was intended to be temporary and was to last until the end of the war. But as predictable as the sunrise, when the war ended the Feds did not relinquish their income tax collector role (not that the states wanted to resume income tax collection, but that is not the point).

Since then, the tax revenue balance has continued to move away from the states and towards the Feds. The imbalance which now exists is known as ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’.

Australia has the highest level of vertical fiscal imbalance of any federal country in the world. The Federal government raises over 70% of all government revenues – much more than is required to fund its own operations – while the states don’t raise anywhere near enough to fund theirs. The Feds then make up the states’ shortfall through Commonwealth grants.

This creates a perpetual blame game. Failures at the state level are blamed on the Feds’ lack of funding, and failures at the federal level are blamed on the states’ poor service delivery.

Duplication of health and education bureaucracies alone costs taxpayers billions of dollars, yet the Feds do not run a single hospital or a single school.

This cannot go on. State and Federal governments should only collect taxes for their own purposes, and taxpayers and consumers should be fully informed as to what is a state tax and what is a Federal tax. Those who spend the money should bear the responsibility of raising it.

This confusing power structure between the states and the Federal government – and between individual states – was emphatically exposed during Covid with many calling for the abolition of state governments and the formation of one national government.

But as Covid revealed, the Federal government doesn’t have the power it thought it had. The Feds may have the money, but it’s the states that have the power.

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.