Australian Family Party

Family Matters

Voice to Parliament

Soccer, Sin and a State Election

by

soccerThe story is told of the UN Secretary-General proposing that, in the interests of global peace and harmony, all the world’s soccer players should come together and form one ‘United Nations Global Soccer Team.’

“That’s a great idea!” said his deputy, “but who would we play against?”

“Israel, of course”, the Secretary-General replied.

There is no mention in the Bible of Adam and Eve ever doing anything to provoke or anger Satan.

Adam and Eve were just minding their own business and enjoying all the benefits that God had provided to this perfect couple.

So why did the serpent set out to destroy their paradise?

It is not uncommon for someone who can’t hurt an enemy to hurt someone close to their enemy instead.

Mankind’s battle between good and evil may have started in the Garden of Eden – Eve biting the apple and Adam following suit – but the real battle started before that, with Satan’s revenge campaign against God.

Even before Abraham became the first Jew, the conflict was there.

As US commentator Dinesh D’Souza puts it, “Plan A was to overthrow God. When that failed, Plan B was implemented – find the things that God cares about and ruin them instead.”

The Magnificent Seven

magnificent-seven

The 2026 State election has been officially called, and I am pleased to report that six other political parties have pledged their support to the Australian Family Party.

None of the following parties are running in this election – all are supporting our campaign:

“I am pleased to announce that People First is supporting the Australian Family Party at the forthcoming SA election.
If we want government to be for the people, then it has to be by the people.
Building a strong grassroots movement is vital if we are to make that happen.
It is our intention to formally merge our two parties after the election.”—Gerard Rennick, President, People First Party

“The HEART Party is proud to endorse and support the Australian Family Party in the South Australian State Election on 21 March 2026.
As a party committed to Health, Accountability, Transparency, Individual Rights, Environmental stewardship, and a strong, thriving Economy, we believe the Australian Family Party reflects these shared values and is well placed to represent them in the South Australian Parliament.
As the HEART Party is not contesting this election, we strongly encourage our members, supporters, and all South Australians who share our values to cast their vote for the Australian Family Party.”—Michael O’Neill, President, HEART Party

“South Australian Election–DLP Supports Australian Family Party.
South Australian DLP members and supporters and others who are committed to traditional Christian values are urged to vote for the Australian Family Party in the state election on Saturday 21 March 2026.”—Richard Howard, National Secretary, DLP

“So many smaller parties getting behind Bob Day’s Australian Family Party is magnificent! It is a testimony to both Bob’s standing in the political realm, and the Australian Family Party’s genuine pro-Australia, pro-South Australia policies.”—Rodney Culleton, Party Leader, Great Australian Party

“We are committed to supporting the Australian Family Party at the upcoming South Australian State Election.”
Whatever we, as a party, can do – including encouraging our members to support the Australian Family Party at pre-polls, polling booths, scrutineering and more – we will do.”—Glenn O’Rourke, National Director, Australian Federation Party

“The Libertarian Party SA is proud to formally endorse Bob Day for the upcoming South Australia state election on March 21. Bob brings a wealth of experience and a tireless commitment to individual liberty, free markets, and limited government”.—Libertarian Party SA

The Australian Family Party will be running candidates in every Lower House seat (47 in total) plus three in the Legislative Council – a total of 50 candidates.

With One Nation grabbing most of the headlines and the Liberals in disarray, SA’s Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas is now in an awkward position.

He has enjoyed extremely high personal approval ratings since becoming Premier and a 2025 YouGov poll showed the Premier’s net satisfaction rating at +70, a phenomenal number. Labor’s two-party preferred was also a whopping 67–33!

Malinauskas has dominated the news cycle with his ‘bread and circuses’ strategy of big-name events such as golf tournaments, beach volleyball competitions, motor sport carnivals and Katy Perry-type concerts.

Over recent months, however, a number of more substantial policy areas have begun to chip away at the Premier’s seemingly impenetrable veneer.

A toxic algal bloom has blighted the South Australian coastline and shows no sign of disappearing any time soon. His government is copping much of the blame for not acting when the bloom was first reported.

His key 2022 election promise to ‘fix ambulance ramping’ has not been fulfilled – in fact, ambulance ramping is worse now than it was in 2022!

State taxpayers are expected to lose $500 million on his government’s green hydrogen debacle.

State debt is climbing towards $50bn and South Australia, once considered the nation’s home-ownership capital, is now ranked the 2nd least affordable in Australia!

And he has introduced legislation into the South Australian parliament enshrining an Aboriginal Voice, despite South Australians voting overwhelmingly ‘No’ in the Voice referendum.

All of these add up and eventually reach a tipping point.

That tipping point could well be election day.

Can you help?

Are you available to do some letterboxing in your area or hand out some how-to-vote cards for us on election day – or better still, at early polling stations? If so, please contact us here.

Thank you for your support.

Authorised by Bob Day, Australian Family Party, 22 Grenfell Street, Adelaide SA 5000

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’

by

‘Who guards the guardians?’

guardiansFirst coined by the Roman poet Decimus Junius Juvenalis, ‘Who guards the guardians?’ is a question that has been invoked throughout the past two thousand years – most notably in the Magna Carta of 1215 and the US Declaration of Independence of 1776.

In our current situation – and I am indebted to The Australian’s Henry Ergas for his brilliant insights – the application of this question is strikingly apt.

The eighteenth-century English philosopher Edmund Burke once warned the UK House of Commons that free societies “Are not primarily ruled by laws … but by ‘a bond of trust’ that persuades citizens to vest governments with the powers needed to secure peace and prosperity”.

Ergas says that Anthony Albanese’s refusal to establish a Royal Commission into the management of the Covid pandemic was an early indication that the longstanding compact between the governors and the governed was not for him.

Indeed.

Why, for example, was Australia’s response to Covid such a radical departure from the prevailing consensus outlined in the World Health Organisation’s September 2019 report?

And why was our own existing pandemic preparedness plan not followed?

Why did Australia’s regulators accept results from the vaccine manufacturers’ own trial results which were conducted overseas, instead of requiring them to be done locally to our standards and satisfaction?

And why, once it was established in February 2020 that the risk from Covid was concentrated in the elderly, were healthy people put under house arrest, treating them as germ-carrying criminals?

As ANU Professor Ramesh Thakur notes, ‘People were locked up at home on dubious data and science, forced to isolate from parents and grandchildren, unable to visit grandparents in their final days or attend family reunions, weddings, funerals and birthdays, coerced into taking the shot in order to shop, travel and keep jobs on false assurances of safety and effectiveness.

Australia’s leaders – politicians, health bureaucrats and law enforcement chiefs – behaved more like tyrants and psychopaths than public servants.

The Covid questions remain unanswered.

Albanese’s initial refusal to call a Royal Commission into the Bondi massacre only confirms his contempt for the governor–governed compact.

To be clear, Albanese did not, as he now claims, ‘take time’ to consider setting up a Royal Commission – he argued strenuously against establishing one at all – until his position became untenable.

Second, now that a Royal Commission has been announced, the weasel words – ‘social cohesion’, ‘all forms of racism’, ‘inciting hatred’, ‘Islamophobia’, ‘hate preachers’ – and cleverly constructed dictums such as ‘hatred in their minds, but guns in their hands’, are introduced in order to distract us from the real problem.

One Labor MP has even suggested criminalising not just Islamophobia, but other hatreds, including homophobia.

One thing is certain: the new speech rules of the ‘Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill’ will not only fail to stop the real cause of the Bondi massacre – radical Islam – but will be used to gag anyone who criticises it.

Keeping Out Minor Parties

In March 2016, the Liberal Party joined forces with the Greens to abolish Senate Group Voting Tickets. Group Voting Tickets allowed voters to simply put a ‘1’ above-the-line and delegate to their party of choice the distribution of preferences. Although minor parties differed widely on policy matters, the one thing they had in common was their dislike of the Greens. Using Group Voting Tickets, minor parties came to arrangements with each other to combine their votes to get ahead of them.

The Liberals–Greens deal ended that.

Former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard warned the government that the Liberal Party’s deal with the Greens could backfire on them. “The principal beneficiary of these changes will be the Australian Greens,” Howard said.

He was right. The Greens have won six Senate seats at each election since and now have the balance of power – enough to join forces with Labor to pass or block legislation.

The particularly galling aspect of this was the fact the Liberal Party went to the 2013 election promising to abolish the carbon tax, abolish the mining tax and stop the boats. Upon election, the Senate crossbench – I was one of them – voted in support of these three key election pledges. The Greens opposed them. Yet during that term, the Liberals did a deal with those very same Greens to get rid of the crossbenchers who had supported them!

Whoever said ‘No good turn goes unpunished’ certainly got that right.

Balance of Power

balance-cartoonIn South Australia, the Labor Government is spending somewhere in the vicinity of $50m on political advertising dressed up as ‘community information’.

Its 2022 election promise to ‘fix ambulance ramping’ has spectacularly failed – in fact, ambulance ramping is now twice as bad as it was in 2022.

And to buy off the Ambos – who were the most ardent campaigners for Labor at the last election – the government has just given them a massive pay rise.

The toxic algal bloom which has blighted the South Australian coastline for almost a year, has not been brought under control. And allegations that public servants have been told not to discuss the cause of the algal disaster until after the State election do not look good.

Labor’s green hydrogen debacle is projected to cost state taxpayers nearly $500 million while State debt is climbing towards $50bn, and South Australia, once considered the nation’s home-ownership capital, is now ranked the 2nd least affordable in Australia!

Labor has also introduced legislation into the South Australian parliament enshrining an Aboriginal Voice, despite the state voting overwhelmingly ‘No’ in the Voice referendum. Every electorate in South Australia voted ‘No’.

How’s does all that measure up against the governor–governed pact?

Who guards the guardians?

But what about the Liberals? Are they any better?

It was the actions of former Liberal Premier Steven Marshall and his Deputy Vickie Chapman, which took the Liberal Party into far-left areas normally the province of the Greens, that led to the establishment of the Australian Family Party in 2020.

Under the Liberals, the rights of faith-based organisations were threatened.

Led by Deputy-Premier Vickie Chapman, the SA Liberal Party proposed removing certain exemptions – the ‘Equal Opportunity (Religious Bodies) Amendment Bill 2020’ – which had allowed faith-based organisations to run their schools, hospitals and other services in accordance with their beliefs.

Liberal Treasurer Rob Lucas also attempted to deny a Christian college its payroll tax exemption. The college was forced to take the government to the SA Supreme Court to defend the matter.

And since the Marshall–Chapman government facilitated the passage of the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act, more than 500 South Australians have chosen to end their lives.

Conclusion

Pollsters and focus groups have reported that people don’t really trust the Liberals, but at the same time they can’t stand Labor and its hypocrisy – pushing its so-called ‘renewable’ energy schemes to save the planet one minute, and bulldozing thousands of trees to build golf courses and erect transmission lines the next.

Someone definitely needs to keep an eye on both of them …

Thank you for your support.

Camels on the Horizon

by

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

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

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

“Why would that be?”, he was asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there is still time to change course.

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

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

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

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

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

This does not bode well for the future of referendums.

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

Don’t give them any ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnote 1: Dunstan by-election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endnote 2: Church & State Conference

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

Thank you for your support.

Memory Mountain

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to the Referendum.

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

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

Good question.

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

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

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

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

But how accurate was their assessment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is Beijing’s playbook.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe we could start by visiting Memory Mountain.

The New Gulag

by

new-gulagIn his famous three-volume masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the frozen wastelands of Siberia where political prisoners and dissidents the Soviet state considered dangerous were held (for their speech, not their actions). A gulag was a Soviet prison; an archipelago is a string of islands; hence the term ‘gulag archipelago’ – a string of camps, prisons, transit centres, secret police, informers, spies and interrogators across Siberia.

Today, people are frozen out of society in more subtle ways. The authorities no longer bash down your door and haul you off to a gulag for espousing the ‘wrong views’; instead they silence you and freeze you out of existence in other ways.

No-one describes the current situation better than Scottish commentator Neil Oliver in his Essentials of Life video clip. More about that shortly.

Divide and conquer

As we know, the Left’s chief weapon is division. Unite the disaffected groups and those with grievances, and then ‘divide and conquer’ the rest of us. Divide along racial, generational, sexual, religious or economic lines. Any line will do.

What may have started as ‘the workers vs the bosses’ – ‘the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie’ – and ‘supporting the poor’, was just a ruse to gain power. Workers and the poor have long since been abandoned by the Left who now find other ways to divide and conquer.

In his excellent book, Democracy in a Divided Australia, Matthew Lesh writes:

‘Australia has a new political, cultural, and economic elite. The class divides of yesteryear have been replaced by new divisions between Inners and Outers. This divide is ripping apart our political parties, national debate, and social fabric.

Inners are highly educated inner-city progressive cosmopolitans who value change, diversity, and self-actualisation. Inners, despite being a minority, dominate politics on both sides, the bureaucracy, universities, civil society, corporates, and the media. They have created a society ruled by educated elites – that is, ruled by themselves.

Outers are the instinctive traditionalists who value stability, safety, and unity. Outers are politically, culturally, and economically marginalised in today’s graduate-dominated knowledge society era. Their voice is muzzled in public debate, driving disillusionment with the major parties, and record levels of frustration, disengagement, and pessimism.’

For over a hundred years, Australia fought to remove race from civic considerations. Yet now we are being asked to permanently divide the nation by entrenching an Indigenous Voice into our Constitution. By the ‘Inners’, of course.

In the workplace, politicians are still treating workplace behaviour like a game of football. Australia’s employers (‘the bosses’) are on one team, and Australia’s employees (‘the workers’) are on the other. The game is then overseen by a so-called ‘independent umpire’ called the Fair Work Commission. But of course, this is not how workplaces operate at all. The ‘game’, if you even want to call it that, is played not by two teams of employers and employees, but by hundreds, even thousands of different teams, competing against hundreds and thousands of other teams of employers and employees.

Mark Twain observed, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”.

Here’s one – the infamous Dollar Sweets dispute where unions were picketing Fred Stauder’s confectionery business. Other confectionery businesses were approached to support Fred but were rebuffed saying, “Why should we care if Dollar Sweets goes down? It will mean more business for us.”  So much for ‘bosses vs workers’.

While paying lip service to free markets, property rights, personal responsibility, self-reliance, free speech, lower taxes, the rule of law, and smaller government, the Liberal Party in Australia has all but abandoned these ideals in practice. As has big business, which, truth be known, was never on the side of free markets. Corporations have always wanted markets they can dominate, and to eliminate the competition. If that means aligning with the Left or doing the government’s bidding, so be it.

Which includes – and here we return to our ‘new gulags’ theme – closing a person’s bank account, destroying them on social media or excluding them from employment. Business is right on board with this.

The Left will keep pushing its woke agenda until it is stopped. And it will not be stopped with facts, figures, logic, evidence or reason. It doesn’t care about any of that. It will only be stopped with political power.

Holding conferences, writing opinion pieces, producing podcasts and YouTube interviews in the hope of persuading people have, I’m afraid, had their day. The ‘Inners’ now rule.

Stopping the relentless march of the Left will require political power. Seats in parliament. Which means like-minded people and parties forming alliances and working strategically and tactically together to win seats.

In Neil Oliver’s video clip, he says, “When it comes to the state, that which it can do, it certainly will do” and “What can happen to anyone, will soon happen to everyone”.

So, if you belong to a think-tank, lobby group or centre-right political party, and want to stop the woke Left further ruining our country, then please encourage your organisation to place less emphasis on winning arguments and more emphasis on winning seats – as previously outlined here and here.

It’s Time

by

its-timeIn 1911, French physician and psychologist Édouard Claparède published his observations of a female amnesiac patient. The woman was suffering from a debilitating form of amnesia which left her incapable of forming new memories. She had suffered localized brain damage that preserved her basic mechanical and reasoning skills, along with most of her older memories, but beyond the duration of a few minutes, the recent past was lost to her.

Claparède’s patient would have seemed straight out of a slapstick farce had her condition not been so tragic. Each day the doctor would greet her and run through a series of introductions. If he then left for 15 minutes, she would forget who he was, and the same introductions would happen all over again.

One day, Claparède decided to vary the routine. He introduced himself to the woman as usual, but when he reached out to shake her hand for the first time, he concealed a pin in his palm.

It wasn’t friendly, but Claparède was on to something. When he arrived the next day, his patient greeted him with the usual blank welcome and with no memory of the previous day’s activities – until Claparède extended his hand. Without being able to explain why, the woman refused to shake his hand. She was incapable of forming new memories, yet she had nevertheless remembered something – a subconscious sense of danger, a remembrance of past trauma. She failed to recognize the face and the voice she’d encountered every day for months, but somehow, buried in her mind, she remembered a threat.

I’m indebted to Gerry from Rants, Raves, Reviews & Reflections for his excellent summary of Claparède’s famous experiment.

It’s been said that ‘Those who ignore history, are destined to repeat it.’

How then do we help people to remember?

Last week, we repeated the phrase, ‘Lest we forget’.

What pins can we plant into public discourse to ensure that we do not repeat the disasters of the past?

For example, in 1972, Labor leader Gough Whitlam was elected on the back of a great campaign song called It’s Time. Some of the lyrics went like this:

It’s time for freedom,
It’s time for moving, It’s time to begin,
Yes It’s time.

It’s time for children,
It’s time to show them, Time to look ahead,
Yes It’s time.

Time for better,
Come together, Time, Time, Time,
Yes It’s time.

It’s Time became the most memorable song and slogan in Australia’s political history. It did more than sell a political message, it captured a mood, a vibe.

As a 20-year-old public servant at the time, naturally I voted for it!

It didn’t take long however, for Whitlam’s real agenda to leap out of the song’s Trojan Horse.

Once elected, Whitlam made the not-so-modest statement, “There are moments in history when the whole fate and future of nations can be decided by a single decision. This is such a time.”

What followed was massive social and economic policy upheaval.

Unemployment, inflation and a total failure to manage the economy led to Labor suffering a massive defeat in 1975.

We voted Whitlam in on the ‘vibe’. When we realised what we’d done, however, we quickly voted him out again.

But imagine for a moment that Whitlam’s policies had been inserted into our Constitution and not just into legislation.

Whitlam was temporary. The Voice will be permanent.

The Whitlam disaster is our Claparède pin.

It’s Time …

…. to Vote No.

Keystone Kops

by

Keystone-KopsA local police force was chasing a criminal who had fled into a large disused building. Their first thought was to surround the building, but they then realized that the building was so large and had so many doors and windows, they didn’t have enough police on the scene to cover all the exits. So instead, they surrounded the building next door which was smaller and had fewer exits.

Our nation is facing some serious economic problems – inflation, rising interest rates, high mortgages (forcing both parents out to work), high cost of living (educating and raising children, power prices, water prices) – and social ills caused by the rupturing of family relationships, addiction to alcohol, gambling, drugs and pornography, and suicide. Yet what does our government do? Like Keystone Kops, they surround other buildings – such as climate change, an indigenous voice, and distorting words and language. Denying one’s gender is now ‘gender-affirming’, free speech is now ‘hate speech’, abortion has become ‘reproductive health’, euthanasia or assisted suicide is now ‘dying with dignity’, and so on.

In the UK, they say everything is policed except crime. People are arrested for silently praying near an abortion clinic, while assaults and robberies go un-investigated.

How did it come to this?

In short, what we have now is a society and a culture that has banished God and the Bible and replaced it with a society which says, “We are now in charge. We will decide what is right and wrong. We will say what is good and bad.”

It goes right back to the beginning – “Eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and you will be like God.”

That is where Western culture is today.

Over the centuries, we’ve seen numerous tyrants, revolutionaries and despots take over whole societies. None more effective than Engels and Marx in the nineteenth century and Mao and Gramsci in the twentieth century with their ‘long march through all of society’s institutions’ – first and foremost being education and the indoctrination of the young. Then came the law, business, politics, health, the media, the military and finally, the church. Yes, the church.

It was once the case that the church sent its members into the world to convert the world to the church’s ways. What we’ve seen in recent times, however, is a reverse of that with the world sending its members into the church to convert the church to the world’s ways!

These corrupted institutions have shaped the culture. The culture then shapes politics, and politics shapes our laws.

It is world-wide and it is co-ordinated. It is a spiritual battle, and spiritual battles are fought with spiritual weapons.

In the famous story of David and Goliath, when David volunteered to fight Goliath, King Saul tried to put his armour on him, but David rejected it. You don’t fight spiritual battles with secular armour.

Like David compared to Goliath, we are also massively out-sized and out-numbered by our enemies.

But we are not to despair. God will choose who He wants to fight in this battle, and it will be those who put up their hand and say, “Here am I Lord, send me”.

Remembering The Galatians Group

by

Galatians-voice-gapIn 1994, Uniting Church minister, the late Rev. Dr Max Champion formed an organisation called The Galatians Group. Max adopted the name from the biblical text, ‘You are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28).

According to Max, the ‘unity in Christ’ referred to did not imply an exclusive religious attachment but rather the humane ordering of human affairs through the exercise of personal freedom which is tolerant of other beliefs, does not demand acquiescence to its own claims, and recognises the mutual responsibility of all.

This was very much in keeping with the Jewish faith tradition when God said to Abraham ‘… all the nations of the earth will be blessed through you and your descendants’ (Genesis 22:18).

The impetus for the formation of The Galatians Group was a Covenanting Statement published by the Uniting Church of Australia in July of that year. While supporting the goodwill towards Indigenous people and the commitment to reconciliation expressed in the Statement, Max and a number of like-minded colleagues were disturbed by its tone and substance.

Of particular concern, said Max, were its ‘ … failure to express the covenant within the framework of Christian unity; the dangerous separation of Australians into ‘Indigenous’ and ‘non-Indigenous’ races; a tendency to treat Indigenous Australians as a homogenous group; reference to the British settlement of Australia as an unmitigated disaster for Indigenous people; a flawed analysis of history – especially the failure to recognise the many benefits to native people that the new world brought; the unwarranted denigration of the work of Australia’s missionaries; and last but not least, a dangerous appeal to guilt which did not distinguish between empathy, blame and responsibility.’

Fast-forward 30 years and many of these sentiments have become even more entrenched.

How did this happen?

In the 1967 Referendum, Australians voted overwhelmingly (over 90 per cent) to eliminate racism from the Australian Constitution. Various state governments had enacted objectionable laws based on race and the new powers given to the Federal government at the referendum allowed them to override these state laws. The referendum also tidied up some anomalies in the census and the counting of the Indigenous population vis-à-vis the allocation of parliamentary seats. It is important to once again note that, prior to 1967, by virtue of the 1949 Citizens Act, all Indigenous people could vote and were full citizens, and were also counted in the census but not all were not included in the allocation of parliamentary seats. This was for purely practical reasons as some indigenous Australians lived in remote regions. The 1967 referendum tidied all this up.

The principle of ‘equality under the law’ – including the political equality of all citizens – ‘one person, one vote’ irrespective of ethnic background, was firmly entrenched in what was the most successful referendum in Australia’s history.

Which brings us to ‘The Voice’ – no, not the TV talent show or the ’80s hit song by John Farnham – but a proposal to insert into Australia’s Constitution an Indigenous body called ‘The Voice’. The Voice will have the power to influence legislation and, according to its proponents (including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese), draw up a Treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – i.e., “implementing the Uluru Statement in full”. The Uluru Statement says, in part, ‘Aboriginal sovereignty (over Australia) was never ceded or extinguished’.

The Voice needs to be ‘feared and revered’ said one of Uluru’s delegates.

Not exactly what Max Champion had in mind, I suspect.

Mr Albanese also said recently that he wanted Australia to follow New Zealand’s lead on Indigenous recognition. This is somewhat disturbing given the power of veto some Maori groups have over legislation in New Zealand.

Dividing Australians based on their race cannot be the way forward. White privilege may have been an issue in the past, but introducing black privilege does not balance that out.

Nor does it help, before every event, making the statement, “We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gather and acknowledge that they never ceded sovereignty.” Or having politicians like Lidia Thorpe out there pushing for black sovereignty, a treaty, and non-indigenous people paying rent to indigenous people for occupying land that ‘always was, always will be Aboriginal land.’ What next? A two-state solution?

‘Closing the gap’ (between indigenous and non-indigenous people) and improving the lives of Aboriginal people is a cause all Australians support.

The Voice, however, is starting to look like something very different.