Australian Politics
‘Selfish society’: Tradwife says marriage must be protected ‘at all costs’
The article below tends to portray Tradwives as if they are a rarity totally out of step with modern society. I doubt that they are actually rare. My impression is that many mothers would gladly embrace a full-time wife and mother role if family finances permitted it.
I am admittedly harking back 40 years but I once had a Tradwife -- long before it was called that. When I met my third wife she was a working mother with three small kids. And I was already affluent. So I told her to ditch her job and I would support her to be a full-time mother. She jumped at it. The traditional female role had always seemed a good one to her.
She was not housebound. I gave her a small car so when the kids were at school, she would shop, visit friends and explore her other interests. She still buzzes around at a great rate to this day but always has time to look after me in my frail old age
I think that adds up to a good recommendation for tradwifery. Any man who can afford it should have one. Many single mothers would volunteer. It sure beats spending your money on boats, planes and other toys
Tradwife and influencer Estee Williams says being a traditional homemaker doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with the 1950s and 60s. Ms Williams said traditionalism is putting “family before yourself”. “I think it is having those traditional values that were once definitely more in place in God, family and love,” she told Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan.
Ms Williams said we now live in a “very selfish” society. “You see self-love promoted everywhere – women are leaving marriage far more easily than men and are doing it because they think there is something better out there for them," she said. “Marriage is a bond and it’s a sacred bond – you have to protect that at all costs, and I think part of that is putting your partner’s needs before your own every single day.”
“I think it is having those traditional values that were once definitely more in place in God, family and love,” she told Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan.
Ms Williams said we now live in a “very selfish” society.
“You see self-love promoted everywhere – women are leaving marriage far more easily than men and are doing it because they think there is something better out there for them," she said.
“Marriage is a bond and it’s a sacred bond – you have to protect that at all costs, and I think part of that is putting your partner’s needs before your own every single day.”
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Daniel Andrews locked down on politics of fear as Covid madness raged
If the boffins in the Wuhan lab engineered Covid-19 to suit a particular kind of leader, Daniel Andrews would have been the one they had in mind.
The retiring premier of Victoria played the politics of fear with panache, locking down the state’s 6.5 million citizens until their noses bled and waited for them to thank him.
To describe Andrews as Teflon-coated is to overstate the durability of thermoplastic polymer-layered pans. It also understates Andrews’ mastery of his craft, for he is beyond doubt the most skilful Australian political operator of the modern age.
His decision to step down comes 10 months after he won a second successive landslide win, claiming 56 of the 88 lower house seats against a demoralised and dishevelled conservative opposition.
Andrews’ transition from chief minister in the Westminster tradition to Dictator Dan was straight out of the autocrat playbook. Alfred Hitchcock could have learned a thing or two by tuning in to Andrews’ daily press conferences. “I know this is scary,” Andrews said, announcing the state’s first lockdown, “but if we don’t slow this thing down, we’ll have people waiting in line for machines to help them breathe.”
Andrews grabbed a lazily written provision in Victoria’s Public Health and Wellbeing Act to declare a state of emergency in March 2020, saying it would be in place for four weeks. It remained in place for 903 days, allowing Andrews to rule with unchallenged authority.
The police force was transformed overnight from the keepers of law and order to the enforcers of state diktats. While some police officers were to resign in disgust, most merely followed orders, while others appeared to relish the additional power.
With a night curfew in force, police arrested peaceful citizens for crossing the threshold of their property to put out the bins. The incitement to protest became a serious offence and the police resorted to monitoring Facebook, leading to the notorious arrest of a pregnant woman in her pyjamas in her own home.
In response to growing protests, police deployed the most potent sub-lethal weaponry in the world, including the PepperBall VKS semiautomatic rifle modelled on the M4 carbine, which was fired at retreating protesters’ backs.
The soundtrack to the TV news was as confronting as the images. The yells and jeers we had heard before but the crack-crack-crack of semiautomatic rifle fire was new to the domestic news.
Andrews’ six lockdowns, totalling 262 days, set the record for the longest in the world. They were more draconian than those in any liberal democracy.
His administration distinguished itself in other ways, too. Victoria has Australia’s largest per capita state debt and the highest per capita number of Covid deaths in Australia, 160 per million residents. The next highest is NSW at 94 per million.
Andrews’ Victoria serves as the crash-test dummy for lockdowns. The results strongly suggest they are expensive and don’t save lives. Since 85 per cent of Victorian Covid deaths occurred since the vaccines arrived, they also may tell us something about the effectiveness of vaccination. Yet these and more important lessons will not be learned if the state and federal governments prevail. Last week, the Labor federal government announced an inquiry into pandemic management. The terms of reference expressly ruled out examination of unilateral actions by premiers such as Andrews.
Andrews understood better than anyone that few voters cared much about debt after a decade and a half of increasing prosperity and low interest rates. He recognised that younger voters cared even less and that medical science wouldn’t keep the baby boomers alive forever.
His government employed 286 ministerial advisers and media managers independent from the public service, according to data released last year under Freedom of Information. Some 86 of them reported directly to the premier. By comparison, the Prime Minister of Australia has fewer than 60.
His media unit mastered social media, its principal channel of communication. Andrews has a million followers on Facebook and 442,000 followers on X (Twitter).
He straddled the political divide between educated inner-metropolitan elites and suburban and regional Australia better than any of his contemporaries. Labor faces a growing challenge in keeping university-educated electorates out of the hands of the Greens. Andrews secured green-leaning voters by implementing radical, wokeish policies without frightening blue-collar conservatives.
He was the first premier to introduce so-called anti-gay conversion legislation, a Trojan horse for transgender activism of the most insidious kind. Applying the laws of biology when counselling gender-questioning teenagers is a criminal act in Victoria. The state reduced the role of doctors, psychiatrists, priests and parents to rubber stamps. A teenager’s decision to transition is final. A minor still needs the approval of a responsible adult to get a tattoo in Victoria but not to change their gender.
Victoria under Andrews was the first to make euthanasia legal. It has been zealous in the pursuit of renewable energy. The Constitution made drilling for unconventional gas illegal and gas connections to new homes were banned.
Andrews had the intuition to understand that politics was downstream from culture and that Victorians made up the most progressively minded constituency in Australia, as different from Queenslanders and West Australians as Californians were from Texans.
Unlike other progressive-left leaders, however, Andrews retained the common touch. While the state Labor governments in Queensland and Western Australia infuriated recreational fishers with regulations and quotas, Andrews recognised the size and influence of the outdoor recreation vote by dispatching numerous small grants to upgrade boat ramps.
Andrews deserves much credit for weakening and dividing his state’s conservative opposition. His moral authority dragged Victoria’s Liberal Party-Nationals Coalition further to the left. The opposition offered token resistance, at best, to the radical legislation passed under its nose.
The opposition’s deficit of moral courage came to a head in March with the suspension from the party room of Moira Deeming for speaking at an anti-trans rally infiltrated by neo-Nazis. Opposition Leader John Pesutto is fighting a defamation writ issued by Deeming.
Such is the cult of Andrews that the transition of leadership won’t be easy. On top of uncontrolled, rising debt, he leaves behind the stink of withdrawing as the host of the 2026 Commonwealth Games, burdening taxpayers with a $380m cancellation fee.
Conventional political wisdom would tell you that Labor’s third term, which ends in 2026, will be its last for a while. After Andrews, however, the old laws of politics no longer apply. Barring injections of charisma, wit and principle into Labor’s opponents, Andrews’ most important legacy may be turning Victoria into a one-party state.
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Immigration system crackdown to target dodgy international student visas and bogus asylum seekers
About time
Dodgy international student visas and bogus asylum seekers will be targeted by the Albanese government as it aims to end rorts in Australia’s immigration system.
The growing rental crisis has the government increasingly worried about the public’s attitude to immigration.
So this week a number of announcements will be unveiled by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neill, Education Minister Jason Clare, Skills and Training Minister Brendan O’Connor and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles.
Government sources were keen to blame the problems in immigration on the previous Coalition government.
They pointed out that in the past financial year visa refusal rates for international students roughly doubled, with 94,000 applicants turned down, roughly half of them from the VET sector.
The rise was largely driven by increased detection of fraudulent documentation from students seeking to enter Australia to work.
The government is concerned that since 2017 more than half the growth in international VET student enrolments have come from new colleges, and colleges with fewer than 100 students.
The crackdown, to be announced this week, is expected to focus on students coming to colleges the government suspects are bogus.
This week will also finally see the release of the review into the visa system by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon which, according to copies leaked to the media, has found widespread cases of sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other organised crime activities.
Nixon has recommended temporary migrants should be barred from the sex industry.
Australians who employ temporary workers in the sex industry could also be disqualified from directing a company and their name published on a register.
Nixon has also recommended a crackdown on migration agents, including character tests.
Next week will also see an overhaul of the way applications for protection visas made on shore are handled.
Changes under consideration include tightening the restrictions on work rights for people making asylum claims, and a streamlining of the appeals process.
The number of people claiming asylum in Australia has been trending up since the borders were reopened post-pandemic — from 26,443 in 2021-2022 to 28,556 in 2022-2023.
The government is keen to avoid this number getting back to the almost 48,000 people who claimed asylum in 2018-2019.
The government is frustrated it is possible for people claiming asylum to stay for as long as 11 years on bridging visas, until their cases are finally dealt with, all the time with full work rights.
At present it takes an average of 866 days for Home Affairs to process an application, 1330 days for the AAT to review that and 1872 days for the courts to review it.
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Credlin: Why loudest Yes Voices have always had a big say
The people pushing the Voice are anything but outsiders, even though the whole point of the Voice is to end the supposed marginalisation of Aboriginal people.
Yes, many Aboriginal people are doing it tough, especially in remote areas, but the idea that people like Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Megan Davis and Pat Anderson haven’t been listened to is simply ridiculous. If these powerful leaders, who’ve been influential on governments for decades, had spent less time fostering views that lead to a sense of grievance and separatism, and more time encouraging Aboriginal people to make the most of their opportunities as Australians, all of us – black, white and everyone in between – would be so much better off.
To the extent that there’s a gap we need to close, these Indigenous activists are arguably just as responsible as government for the fact it’s still there despite the billions spent by taxpayers.
Take Pearson, whose National Press Club speech this week was the big final pitch to vote “Yes”. It was the Coalition, at Pearson’s insistence, that provided tens of millions for his laudable “good to great schools” brainchild, designed to help average teachers give indifferent learners a high-quality education through highly disciplined classrooms and carefully structured teaching. Its palpable success in the remote schools where it was implemented has been a part of the reluctant acceptance by the education establishment of at least a partial return to phonics.
It was largely through Pearson that Tony Abbott spent a week a year as prime minister in remote Australia. Earlier, Pearson helped to make the case for constitutional recognition to John Howard. Before that, he’d been a key part of the team negotiating land rights legislation with the Keating government. According to the local MP, over the years, Pearson’s Cape York Partnerships organisation has received over $500 million from various governments to improve the lives of local Indigenous people.
Marginal and dispossessed he’s not, nor has he suffered from any lack of governmental support, as shown by his ranking in the top ten of last week’s Australian Financial Review Power List.
In recent years, though, Pearson is no longer the activist who once declared that welfare is “the poison that’s killing our people”, instead, his focus has been on persuading government to adopt the Voice, even though the Voice, inevitably, seems to focus on promoting grievance, victimhood, group rights, and dependence on government. As its backers insist, it’s: “Voice, Treaty, Truth”, which is the Uluru Statement that the Prime Minister says he’s committed to implementing “in full”.
At the National Press Club last week, Pearson urged us to vote “yes” from “the love of country that joins all of us as Australians”. But he couldn’t help suggesting that Aboriginal people are still treated with “contempt and disdain” and saying “we were victims of history but our victimhood ends with our empowerment”, as if power hasn’t been something Pearson has exercised all his life.
As a campaigner, I have noticed the recent shift in language from the Yes camp to refer to the Voice as an “advisory body”. In interviews, the PM says the phrase over and over again. And yet when my referendum postal ballot paper arrived four days ago, the word “advisory” was nowhere on it. But that’s how disingenuous the pro-Voice campaign has been from the start.
It’s precisely because the actual argument for the Voice is so thin-to-non-existent that the Yes campaign so often resorts to moral pressure, aggressive protests, and the suggestion that voting No is somehow contemptible.
Thank God for the very different leadership provided by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine, who are proud of their Indigenous heritage but no less proud of being Australian. In a very different Press Club address this week, Mundine said that the imminent referendum is a “choice about what kind of nation we want to be … a liberal democracy where all people are equal … or a country where people are divided by race, and permanently in conflict with each other over facts of history that cannot be altered”.
It’s telling that the football codes that rushed to embrace the Voice months ago won’t be pushing it this grand finals weekend. Perhaps they’ve finally realised Australians are sick of being hectored and are on the verge of saying a resounding No not just to the PM’s Voice but also to the identity politics that’s been forced down our throats.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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