Australian Politics

Australia must beware Victoria elevating new anti-vilification laws to state religion status

Writing in The Australian recently, Chris Uhlmann observed that “when you crimp or criminalise words and symbols, a tiny piece of freedom is handed to a bureaucrat to arbitrate”. It was an astute analysis, but Uhlmann did get one thing wrong. In Victoria, under its proposed expansion of anti-vilification laws, the freedoms that will be handed over are not tiny.

If the government’s proposed changes proceed, Victorians will lose their right to free speech, setting a precedent for the entire country.

Current anti-vilification legislation in Victoria is restricted to race and religion, which is in line with the rest of the country. But the government wants to expand this law to include a laundry list of additional attributes, including disability, gender identity, sexual characteristics, and sexual orientation. If such an expansion is passed, it will become illegal in Victoria to offend people who are disabled, trans, non-binary or “sexually diverse”. Maximum prison sentences will be up to three to five years.

The legal thresholds for what constitutes vilification will be lowered. Currently, one must “incite hatred” to breach the law. Under the proposed changes, however, speech that is “likely to incite” will become a criminal offence. Under such a standard, almost all speech referring to those with protected attributes – regardless of intent or context – could be deemed criminal. This means journalists, writers, comedians, academics, artists and activists will all be open to prosecution.

This may sound alarmist and hyperbolic. And of course, warnings about encroaching authoritarianism – particularly from the Victorian government – are nothing new.

During the pandemic – and during the longest lockdowns outside China – Victoria drew international scrutiny for its authoritarian measures. Demonstrations in which rubber bullets were shot at protesters shocked the country. Images of a pregnant mother being arrested in her home shocked the world. Nevertheless, Victoria emerged from the Covid pandemic with its freedoms still intact, and dire predictions of enduring totalitarianism proved to be overblown.

This proposed legislation, however, is different. To grasp how these changes could suppress everyday speech, we need only look at what’s already deemed offensive. Unlike previous false alarms, this threat to free expression is both real and urgent.

In 2023, for example, trans activist Claire Southey took the Australian Press Council to court for failing to rule against The Daily Telegraph for reporting the gender identity of a sex offender. The Council had ruled that The Daily Telegraph had not breached journalistic standards when it reported that “pedophile Scott Lee Irwin … identified as transgender and was now known as Sheryl”. Yet Southey alleged that such reporting promoted negative stereotypes about transgender people, and thus took the Press Council to court.

Other complaints target figures for political reasons. In August, the Alliance Against Islamophobia lodged a complaint against federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton for creating a “hostile environment for Muslim Australians” and “reinforcing harmful stereotypes about the Muslim community”.

What did he do? Dutton said that if “the Prime Minister were in a minority government in the next term of parliament, it will include the Greens, it’ll include Green-teals, it’ll include Muslim candidates from western Sydney. It will be a disaster”. Such a statement “dehumanises and vilifies Muslim candidates”, the AAI alleged.

Dutton’s sentiments – likely to be echoed by thousands of Australians – could wind up attracting prison sentences under Victoria’s proposed changes to anti-vilification laws. We must confront an uncomfortable truth. In Victoria, the state appears to be enshrining a new belief system into law. The ideology of this belief system (whether we want to call it progressivism, “wokeness” or something else) is now acquiring the trappings of official doctrine. This doctrine determines that certain groups have special moral status, with demands that are sacrosanct and beyond questioning.

This new orthodoxy operates on multiple levels. First, it holds that speech inflicts harm equivalent to physical violence, which means stringent controls must be placed on expression. Second, it establishes a hierarchy of moral authority based on perceived victimhood, where some voices are deemed more virtuous than others. Third, it promotes a series of dogmas about identity, privilege and systemic oppression that brook no dissent. This means debate is off the table.

Like any religion, this belief system has its own heresies. Questioning the concept of gender fluidity or expressing concern about biological males in women’s sports or suggesting that factors other than discrimination might contribute to disparities between groups – all these become dangerous utterances, potentially worthy of legal sanction.

Just as heretics once faced inquisitions for challenging church doctrine, today’s dissenters risk social ostracism, professional ruin and potentially legal consequences for transgressing this new moral code. Victoria’s shift represents a fundamental reimagining of the role of government in a liberal democracy. Rather than serving as a neutral arbiter, protecting the rights of citizens who have equality before the law, the state is now becoming the enforcer of a particular worldview. It’s a vision where the government not only dictates what citizens can say, but what they must believe.

The rest of Australia must remain vigilant. Whatever path Victoria chooses, the rest of the country must not follow suit in elevating this new orthodoxy to the status of state religion.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/country-must-beware-victoria-elevating-new-antivilification-laws-to-state-religion-status/news-story/923f18cfdf1ab998b9b5b8868ff0efdd

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Take teacher training away from universities

Teacher training is where the culture war begins. Those who train our teachers have a decisive influence on those who teach our children. To control and change society, there is nothing more strategically important than teacher training – and the radical-left has controlled it for decades.

Universities’ extreme left bias has become obvious in recent years. There is an almost total lack of diversity of ideas and opinion; deliberate brainwashing of students; anti-male sexism; racism; antisemitism; and complicity in gaming the immigration system. Add to that list low academic standards, and why would we entrust universities with such an important job as teacher training?

It would be easy to remove teacher training from the universities altogether, as was the case half a century ago, and set up alternative pathways to become a teacher – perhaps through newly formed institutions, or even TAFEs.

At present, to become a teacher requires a four-year Bachelor of Education, or a two-year Masters of Teaching after completing another degree. And be in no doubt as to what those education qualifications involve. Think Woke, Indigenous, environmental sustainability, gender equity, radical-left ideology…

For example, the two-year University of Queensland course to indoctrinate prospective teachers, who already have another degree, starts with the subject ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Education’. Such a topic should take 20 minutes to complete – but it lasts a full semester. Then they move on to ‘Global Issues and Social Justice’, and ‘Teachers as education innovators and agents of social change’.

The Melbourne University Master of Teaching core subject ‘First Nations in Education’ proudly proclaims that ‘teacher candidates will engage in critical discussions and activities that enable them to reflect on the impacts of settler colonialism, racism, and unexamined bias on First Nations educational sovereignties as well as build their understanding and awareness of Indigenous knowledges and strategies for working towards decolonisation’.

The University of Sydney’s slogan for its Masters of Teaching is ‘empowering future educators for social justice and innovation’.

It is not as though they are hiding what they are doing. They are quite openly in the business of destroying our country.

And now ask who are the only people who could possibly survive these courses of non-stop nonsense and indoctrination? There are two types of people – those with an incredibly high tolerance to extended periods of pain, and those who are fully signed up to the nonsense in the first place, probably as a result of indoctrination at school.

The upshot is that teacher training courses select those people who are most likely to hate Western Civilisation, believe Australia is illegitimate, think Hamas are the good guys, and consider Mao to have been a nice old fellow who couldn’t possibly have killed more people than Hitler.

And then we hand over our children to these people for 12 years.

Incredibly, many teachers turn out very well despite this process. Perhaps there is a third group – those who have become totally accustomed to saying what is politically correct while hiding their true thoughts. I can only admire their forbearance.

We must move back to a system of teaching apprenticeships where trainee teachers are attached to a succession of master teachers to learn directly on the job. We all remember these master teachers from our school days. Supremely competent and highly respected. Work with people like that for a year or two and one would learn far more than at a university. There is a small amount of useful education theory that could be taught in a couple of months – mostly online.

Of course, trainee teachers would need to have the requisite background knowledge for the subjects they teach, but that is easy to gauge with an entrance exam. And any deficiencies can be rectified with online courses, especially in Maths or English. After all, present education degrees do not devote much time to training in these areas.

Teaching is one of the hardest jobs and it is made more difficult by the fact that new teachers, straight from university, are very young, often without enough gravitas or world experience. There is no reason why older people should not go into teaching. Grey hair, and having worked in a ‘real job’, are a great asset for a new teacher.

But consider a tradesman whose physical health is failing him, or soldiers who have finished serving their country and who might be considering starting a new career as primary or junior high school teachers. These would only need limited training in subject knowledge; but under existing arrangements they would have to endure four years of torture, without pay, to become a teacher. So, it rarely happens.

An alternative pathway for mature people to enter teaching has thus become very difficult, and it probably affects men more than women. We urgently need more male teachers. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, fewer than 30 per cent of teachers are men.

Taking away the teacher training role from universities, and thus the number of education academics, would have another useful effect. It would greatly reduce education ‘research’ – where the seriously malignant ideology that has helped ruin our schools is invented.

But taking on the university system is dangerous. Australia’s universities are rich and powerful. All of the big ones have multibillion-dollar turnovers and have legions of media people pumping out stories about how wonderful they are. And because they hunt in packs, like the Group of Eight, they make the CFMEU look like amateurs when it comes to beating up those who cross them.

However, the universities’ record of failure has become so well known that community respect for them has diminished. Thus, while reform is going to be resisted, it is certainly possible. Taking away one of their present functions, or at least their monopoly on it, is a good place to start, and would be a decisive blow in the culture wars. But this should be only the beginning of a reform process that our universities need.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/take-teacher-training-away-from-universities/

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Australia is already a successful nuclear nation

ANSTO – the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation – recently celebrated 70 years since Australia’s nuclear age began in Sydney.

On April 15, 1953, Australia entered the nuclear science arena as the Atomic Energy Act came into effect. The Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) followed and in 1987 the AAEC evolved into ANSTO as it’s known today.

ANSTO is the home of Australia’s most significant landmark and national infrastructure for research. Thousands of scientists from industry and academia benefit from gaining access to state-of-the-art instruments every year.

Thousands of visitors, including many schoolchildren, have safely toured the site at Lucas Heights, which is located 40km southwest of the Sydney CBD. They had the opportunity to learn a great deal about nuclear science as a result of that experience.

I recently became one of those visitors when I was invited to a 3-hour escorted tour of their facilities. As former Executive Director of the National Safety Council of Australia (NSW/ACT) I was particularly interested in their WHS procedures as well as the management of waste, as the latter could impact on the wider community if poorly managed.

What impressed me most was seeing just how advanced we are as a nuclear nation. Despite being relatively small in scale compared to a full civil nuclear energy plant, it has much the same range of issues and complexities to deal with. And it certainly appears to successfully do so at both their Sydney and Melbourne campuses.

During his visit to Australia in July 2022, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi expressed deep confidence in Australia, acknowledging the solid foundations established through ANSTO since its formation.

The obvious question is, why is the Albanese Labor-Greens government, together with the Teals, opposed to extending our obvious expertise into producing nuclear energy on a commercial scale, as proposed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s LNP?

As you’d expect, there are a number of reasons for both their reluctance to accept nuclear despite it being cheap, reliable and emissions-free and their manic obsession with unreliable, hugely expensive, and environmentally/socially disastrous wind, solar, and battery renewables.

Political factors play a major part. The Greens and Teals are directly opposed to nuclear, but for different reasons.

The Greens have shown beyond doubt that they want to disrupt society across as many issues as possible. They are doing this on a regular basis – even appearing to stand with crowds that hold sympathies toward recognised terrorist groups.

People who think the Greens are still a well-meaning environmental group like they were under Bob Brown are fooling themselves – they are not!

In the case of the Teals, they started life as political entities via funding from Climate 200, whose primary financial supporters are deeply entrenched in the lucrative and heavily taxpayer-subsidised renewables industry.

The Teals are ignorant pawns in the high-stakes game of climate change and the hysterical pursuit of ‘saving the planet’.

There is a lot of money involved in this issue and ordinary Australians are being played by the so-called elites, including left-wing mainstream media such as the ABC.

A good example is the almost total lack of media reporting on the very recent and hugely important US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lift-off Report that includes significant findings:

The system cost of electricity with nuclear and renewables combination is 30 per cent lower than just renewables.
⁠The jobs from nuclear are 50 per cent higher paying than solar or wind.

⁠⁠Nuclear provides the lowest emissions, is the most reliable form of energy production, has the lowest land use requirement, and lowest material usage.

The report also outlines a pathway for the USA to reach their ambition to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050, in direct contradiction of our government’s refusal to even legalise nuclear energy.

It also directly contradicts the policy position of the Albanese government.

The report debunks repeated claims that nuclear is ‘too expensive’ and will ‘increase power bills’ and outlines various other benefits of nuclear energy.

The DoE report could not disagree more with Australian anti-nuclear campaigners and the Albanese Labor-Greens government, Teals, and other sources of ignorance.

Their report also completely debunks the much-criticised report produced by CSIRO GenCost that our Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, refers to constantly as his renewables crusade ‘Bible’.

This is despite the fact that the CSIRO GenCost report totally failed to accurately estimate the likely total cost of renewables compared to nuclear.

It also used in its modelling a 30-year life for a nuclear plant instead of the far more accurate 80 years. This created a false financial outcome by not comparing the total cost of nuclear with renewables over an 80-year period.

It also totally neglected the fact that waste management costs for renewables will be many times greater than for nuclear. There will be the need to replace wind turbines and solar panels three or four times during an 80-year period.

And who is going to be responsible for dismantling and disposing of the millions of components – some of which have toxic ingredients?

Many people, including some of our top scientists and engineers, believe that the CSIRO GenCost report was simply designed to support the Albanese government’s narrative as depicted in their childish three-eyed fish media splash some months ago.

‘Blackouts’ Bowen promoted that infantile campaign in his usual gloating, arrogant manner and then compounded his evident stupidity by stating that he had not even read the US report – dismissing it completely!

And this typifies the problem we face with the Albanese government. They have Ministers like Bowen, Wong, Burke, Plibersek, Clare and, of course, Albanese whose sole objective is to win the coming election and thereby remain in power; they simply don’t want to suffer the ignominy of becoming a one-term government.

Hopefully, in the very best interests of our country, they will fail to achieve that objective because we need a government that protects our borders, controls immigration, decreases our cost-of-living, and helps young people to buy their own homes.

It’s becoming clearer on a daily basis that none of that will happen under the current Labor-Greens government.

One major impediment to reducing living expenses is the rising cost of energy.

Renewables alone will continue to increase the cost of electricity and that will in turn increase the prices paid at our shops and for commercial or residential electricity usage.

Nuclear energy will add to the range of resources available to us – as it has done in many other countries.

Nuclear power plants operate in 32 countries and generate about a tenth of the world’s electricity. Most are in Europe, North America, and East Asia.

The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power, at about 70 per cent.

The only way we are going to catch up with the rest of the world in relation to nuclear energy production is to replace our current government with Peter Dutton’s Liberal-National Coalition.

That might be hard to accept for some people – but it’s an undeniable fact.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/australia-is-already-a-successful-nuclear-nation/

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Channel Seven star is forced to delete offensive slur about Lidia Thorpe

King Charles and Queen Camilla have another busy schedule ahead of them for their fifth and final day in Australia.

It comes after a chaotic day in Canberra on Monday where independent senator Lidia Thorpe made a wild outburst at the King following his speech in Parliament House.

The senator and Indigenous rights activist repeatedly shouted 'you are not my King' while also labelling Charles a 'genocidalist' and cried out 'f*** the colony' as she was dragged out of the Great Hall by security.

Ms Thorpe has defended her actions and said she will continue to 'fight for justice' until a treaty is made.

High-profile entertainment reporter Peter Ford unleashed on Lidia Thorpe following her sudden outburst towards the King at Parliament House on Monday.

He has since been forced to remove a tweet where he labelled the independent senator a 'skank', but did not apologise for the remark.

'So yesterday in commentary about Lidia Thorpe I used a word in this space that some people (who I trust not ‘outraged’ people on Twitter) thought was unfair,' he wrote on X on Tuesday morning.

'Although it’s a word you’d hear on Kath and Kim I have deleted it. I wanted to make a point not cause offence. Cheers. PF.'

He'd taken aim at Ms Thorpe over her rant towards the King and called her the offensive remark in two separate comments on X.

'She's such a skank,' he said in one post. 'Nice thoughts, but no she's still a skank,' he said in another.

When another X user accused him of being misogynistic, the entertainment reporter doubled down. 'You may not like the term - and think it unfair - but it’s not misogynistic,' he replied.

At the time of Ms Thorpe's interruption of the reception at Parliament House, Ford called her a 'shocker'.

'So everyone must respect the Welcome To Country ceremonies. But Lidia - who signed oath to the Crown - doesn’t have to respect the reigning Monarch when choosing to be in his presence,' he wrote. 'What a shocker she is!'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13985023/king-charles-queen-camilla-australia-visit-Sydney-live.html