No-vote MPs put the pressure on Ruddock

The conservative pushback to same-sex marriage has begun with No-voting MPs seeking to influence a review of religious freedoms led by former Liberal attorney-general Philip Ruddock.

Conservatives yesterday said the substance of unsuccessful amendments to protect religious freedoms — defeated on the floor of parliament despite the passage of a historic gay marriage bill last week — needed to be revisited by the Ruddock review or risk being seen as an affront to No voters.

South Australian Liberal senator David Fawcett, who helped devise five of the unsuccessful amendments to the bill that passed the parliament last week with overwhelming support, yesterday signalled his interest in ­resurrecting his changes through the expert panel review process.

“Having been involved in this since the Senate select committee which I chaired that led me to become one of the leading advocates for amendments for protections in the actual same-sex marriage bill, I’m clearly disappointed that they were voted down,” Senator Fawcett told The Australian. “And I’ll be looking to work with Mr Ruddock and the government to ensure protections are put in place.’’

Labor MP Chris Hayes, who used his speech in the House of Representatives to argue for religious freedoms to be examined in the Ruddock review, said there was a need to consider enshrining Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in Australian law to better uphold religious liberty.

“I think there’s some utility in investigating the application or bringing into Australian domestic law the tenants of Article 18 of that convention,” he said. “I would think that it would be one of the areas that the expert panel might care to look at.”

Other Coalition MPs who supported religious freedom amendments voiced concern they had not been consulted over the decision to announce the expert panel, which includes Australian Human Rights Commission president Rosalind Croucher, retired judge Annabelle Bennett and Jesuit priest Frank Brennan.

“The inquiry panel was selected without consultation and largely reflects the biases and relationships of the Yes voting cabinet members,” one Coalition MP said. “I hold little hope after a close look at the voting patterns of both the Senate and the Reps with respect to the amendments (being revisited).”

A spokesman for the postal survey No campaign said supporters of traditional marriage remained “hopeful but extremely concerned” about whether religious freedom protections would be secured through the Ruddock review, which is due to report at the end of March.

“Not only has there been a lack of consultation, there is no clear understanding that this process will lead to an actual legislative outcome that provides protections for Australians of faith,” the spokesman said. “The absence of a prominent No voice on the inquiry is of concern, and does not send a positive message to the millions and millions of No voters.”

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said he supported the Ruddock review, and schools should have the ability to “teach in accordance” with their religious world view. “Once we’re out of the shadow of the marriage debate, the sorts of protections we talked about in the last parliamentary sitting week, I think it is proper for those to be considered,” he said.

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Is this how we stop Sudanese Apex gangs? Boot them out

Violent migrant youths could be kicked out of Australia on their 16th birthday under a hardline proposal to stop African Apex gangs from terrorising neighbourhoods.

Federal Liberal MP Jason Wood, a former police detective, made the recommendation for unprecedented action as the chairman of a parliamentary inquiry into migration settlement.

The Melbourne-based backbencher, whose electorate of La Trobe is home to Sudanese Apex gangs, said the mandatory deportation of youths convicted of violent crimes, when they turned 16, would 'stop crime and keep communities safe'.

His report also proposed the compulsory cancellation of the visas for those convicted of sexual assault, serious assault, home invasion and carjackings when they became an adult at 18.

'We need to make it clear to those who commit serious and violent crimes that their actions will have consequences,' he said. 

'I have seen this in my own electorate with the rise of the Apex Gang, a group of young people with a Sudanese background terrorising suburban Melbourne with riots, thefts, carjackings and violent home invasions.'

Cabinet ministers were told about the recommendations and had offered their support, New Corp reports, however Labor members of the committee accused Mr Wood of 'hijacking' the report to win political support in his electorate.

The recommendation follows the pending deportation of Sudanese-born former child refugee Isaac Gatkuoth, now 20, who was imprisoned for an armed, ice-fuelled carjacking committed in November 2015.

Gatkuoth was last year jailed for 14 months in a youth detention centre for pointing a sawn-off shotgun at a driver in Frankston, south-east of Melbourne, as the youth rode in a stolen BMW with four others when it rammed another car.

The youth, who came to Australia as a nine-year-old refugee, was given a deportation order for being linked to the Apex gang, along with three New Zealanders.

Labor members of the parliamentary committee released a dissenting report, accusing Mr Wood of 'hijacking' the report for political purposes.

'Despite minimal or no evidence the report focuses on young humanitarian entrants from Sudanese backgrounds who engage in criminal activity,' they said.

The Labor MPs, including Melbourne-based Maria Vamvakinou, also disagreed with Mr Wood on the idea of amending the Migration Act of 1958 so visas would be automatically cancelled for youths, aged 16 to 18, convicted of serious violent crime.

'The current character and cancellation provisions in the Act were an adequate method of addressing non-citizens who have been involved in criminal activities,' they said.

When it becomes to radicalisation, the Australian Citizenship Act 2007 already contains provisions to cancel a dual national's citizenship, for those aged 14 or older, if they engaged in terrorist acts.

Ahead of the report's release, Mr Wood last month released date showing Sudanese youth as young as 10 had committed 400 per cent more violent burglaries in just three years.

It showed the number of Sudanese-born criminals, aged 10 to 18, committing aggravated burglary in Victoria surging from 20 in 2014-15 to 98 in 2016-17, with Apex gangs particularly active in south-east Melbourne suburbs like Frankston and Pakenham.

The data he released also showed a 55 per cent increase in serious assaults by Sudanese youth, between 2014 and 2017, from 29 to 45.

Sudanese-born youths, aged between 10 and 18, are the most represented ethnic group when it comes to aggravated burglaries, car thefts and sexual offences.

Victoria's Crime Statistics Agency last year released data showing aggravated home invasions by Sudanese-born youth, aged 10 to 18, had risen 10-fold between 2012 and 2016, to 40 incidents

Apex-linked gangs are notorious around the Frankston, Sandringham and Cranbourne/Paken­ham rail lines, the Victorian police revealed in 2016.

But there have also been incidents in Melbourne's inner-west and western suburbs.

In June, a man was struck in the head with a tomahawk when a gang of men burst into a Melbourne barber shop and started brawling.

Up to 15 men, many who are believed to be of African descent, entered the shop in inner-city Footscray and began fighting.

In April, a gang of five Sudanese teenagers allegedly bashed their autistic classmate, in a horrific attack on a bus at Tarneit, in Melbourne's west.

The 17-year-old student was travelling alone to the city centre, when five boys approached him and told him to hand over his mobile phone and new Nike shoes.

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Hefty Yiannopoulos bill shows Victoria Police has taken sides with the Left

THE last group you’d expect to indulge in victim-blaming is Victoria Police. Our police force is meant to protect and serve, not fine victims of lawlessness for needing police protection.

That is essentially what happened last week when police command decided to send a hefty bill of at least $50,000 to the organisers of the Milo Yiannopoulos tour.

Not only does the decision set a dangerous precedent for free speech in Victoria, but it also reveals a perverse lack of fairness.

The enormous bill reflects the significant police resources that were needed last Monday night when feral mobs rioted for five hours in the streets of Kensington while trying to stop ticketholders from entering the Australian Pavilion.

Assistant Commissioner Stephen Leane first threatened to fine the venue before it was determined that the organisers would foot the bill. Police Minister Lisa Neville said: “For these sort of rallies, but also for the AFL and those big events, there is an agreement around the costs.”

This attempt by the minister to compare the charges to what sporting bodies routinely pay is disingenuous nonsense.

A law-abiding crowd of 3000 attending a ticketed event would not require 300 police officers, including dozens in riot gear.

That came about purely because violent far-Left activists converged on the venue to try to shut down the event — an all-too-regular occurrence in Victoria.  Not satisfied with hurling vile abuse, the protesters also threw rocks, sticks, bottles, and even street signs.

If it were the ticketholders rampaging, then I’d have no qualms about saddling the organisers with the bill.

However, the small number of police that would normally be needed, and paid for by organisers, at an event of this size ballooned to something entirely different thanks to the actions of extreme Left agitators.

Anyone who has seen footage of the mayhem would be surprised to learn that police arrested only two people that night.

Victoria Police may have created a rod for its own back by punishing the injured party and effectively rewarding the thuggish louts who want to use violence and intimidation to shut down events, meetings and rallies of their ideological opponents.

Today, the event organiser, Penthouse publisher and free speech advocate Damien Costas, spoke of his dismay over “political grandstanding” in Victoria.

“Our attendees did nothing wrong. They lined up quietly and looked on as the protesters that weren’t invited and, frankly, weren’t welcome, threw rocks and bottles at police,” Costas told the Herald Sun.

“We negotiated in good faith with the Victorian police and we reached an agreement as to what was required and what we needed to pay for.” Mr Costas also revealed that he was yet to receive the bill, and would refuse to pay it if it did arrive.

“This is nothing more than political grandstanding … we haven’t received a bill and there’s been no talk from police on our end to even suggest we’re getting one,” he said.

But last week, Ms Neville warned that the bill had to be paid, saying: “(It’s a) big call to say you’re going to ignore a bill from Victoria Police.”

Yiannopoulos’s events in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland went ahead with little trouble. In NSW, demonstrators were aggressive, but not as violent or as destructive as their Victorian counterparts.

NSW police arrested seven protesters, who were charged with offences including assaulting police, hindering police, affray, failing to comply with directions, and breaching the peace. It seems they take upholding the law and protecting the peace a little more seriously north of the border.

In one sense, we shouldn’t be surprised with the climate of censorship in Victoria, where conservative commentators have had to cancel book launches, and members of the Jewish community cannot meet with MPs due to fears of violence from far-Left activists amusingly calling themselves “anti-fascists” or “anti-racists”.

Meanwhile, Melbourne’s CBD is regularly thrown into disarray by activists who block traffic to protest over a variety of national and international issues.

When have the socialists, anarchists and other assorted fringe-dwelling malcontents ever been sent a bill for the police presence needed at their rallies, or a bill to cover the cost of the loss of productivity that comes about as a result of CBD streets being blocked for hours at a time?

The desire to silence opposing views is a phenomenon of the Left.

You don’t see speeches by visiting Left-wing commentators with far more outlandish views than Yiannopoulos — who was farcically misrepresented by much of the media — being subjected to violent protests.

Look at the extraordinary measures the organisers of the Yiannopoulos tour went to, to minimise the violence of the Left.   The venues were kept secret until a couple of hours before each event, to prevent activists from monstering the venue and intimidating the staff and business owners.

Those same activists now have another weapon in their arsenal to silence opposing views.  By rioting and causing maximum mayhem, they can financially punish their political opponents.

Who will bother to bring out any speaker with Right-of-Centre views when the threat of violence from a small group of pests could result in an enormous bill from the police?

This decision will embolden totalitarian thugs to behave even more violently.

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Antifa Australia goes for the jugular

They are so filled with hate that anyone who disagrees with them is a "Nazi".  That is a problem

The first rule of antifa is you do not talk about antifa. Not to a journalist, at any rate. It is less an organisation than a broad objective across the radical left; a determination to block, frustrate and ultimately silence far-right politics. It is fundamentally illiberal and necessarily secretive. For these reasons, it is poorly understood and readily mischaracterised.

Antifa activists are not mindless thugs. They are well organised and, generally, experienced political and social activists who are prepared to resort to violence — they say reluctantly — to deny the far right any platform from which to promote its ideas. In Melbourne and Sydney this week, they mobilised more than 100 supporters within an hour to shout down a speaking event by the alt-right’s charismatic bomb thrower, Milo Yiannopoulos.

Yiannopoulos was not stopped from having his say but the fact he was unwilling to publicise the locations of his shows in advance is being celebrated as a victory of sorts across Australia’s anti-fascist network. The morning after anti-fascist activists and right-wing “patriots” traded blows on the streets of Kensington and police were pelted with rocks, the group that organised the Melbourne protest, the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, heralded it as a success.

The following night, seven people were arrested in Sydney when protesters tried to disrupt a Yiannopoulos speaking event in the inner-west suburb of Lilyfield. Speaking to Inquirer shortly before the protest, organiser Omar Hassan explained that although he was not looking for a fight, he was ready for one.

“Primarily, the way the far right can be beaten is not through individual acts of violence but collective empowerment and the building of mass movements,” he said. “These mass movements have to do what is required to stand their ground and challenge bigotry. Sometimes that involves a physical altercation, but that is not of our choosing, that is just something we are prepared to do.

“We know from history that when the far right organises, the violence that is inflicted on communities is much more severe than anything we have seen at any of these protests.”

Tess Dimos, a spokeswoman for the Campaign against Racism and Fascism, argues that when you’re confronting white nationalists on the streets, violence is part of the gig. “They are not the kind of people you can stand quietly next to and have some kind of vigil,” she says. “These people go to these demonstrations intending to pursue violent acts. We do whatever we can to try to keep everyone safe and together.”

The antifa view of the world is that far-right politics — particularly white supremacy, nationalist chauvinism and the kind of fascism that tore Europe apart in the middle of the 20th century — is again on the rise across Western democracies.

In the US, this conviction has made bedfellows of anarchists, Marxists, socialists, anti-racists and other militant activists beneath the antifa doona. In Australia, existing left-wing groups such as Socialist Alternative have diverted resources from other campaigns to fight what they describe as the fascist menace. New groups, such as Jews Against Fascism, have formed to fight the far right.

The start of this counterculture war can be traced to the Easter weekend two years ago when a large Reclaim Australia rally took over Melbourne’s Federation Square. Hassan is a 31-year-old bartender and events manager. He is also an active member of Socialist Alternative who contributes regularly to its online publication, Red Flag. “The size and breadth of that mobilisation of the far right shook many of us up,” he says. “Nationally, we decided to prioritise anti-fascist organising.”

The same event prompted Jordana Silverstein, a University of Melbourne academic, to form Jews Against Fascism. “We fundamentally disagree that if you ignore fascists they will go away,” she tells Inquirer. “They don’t. They become emboldened.”

Asked when violence is acceptable, Silverstein’s response is instructive: “We don’t have a strict line on that. My grandparents were in concentration camps and ghettos from 1939 to 1945. The focus needs to be on the violence that fascism perpetrates and the racist violence that the state ­perpetrates against marginalised groups. That is the more pertinent question for the media to be dealing with it.”

The antifa armoury includes more than protest chants and punches. Mark Bray, formerly an activist in the Occupy Wall Street movement, is the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, published in Australia by Melbourne University Press. In interviews with anti-fascist activists in Europe and the US, Bray explores antifa tactics including the dark art of doxxing, a form of online sabotage pioneered by computer hackers.

In the antifa context, doxxing means the outing of Nazi sympathisers — the publication of ­information that identifies anonymous far-right bloggers or activists, which in turn puts pressure on employers to sack them. This year a University of Nebraska philosophy student, Cooper Ward, was doxxed and unmasked as the voice on an anti-Semitic podcast, The Daily Shoah. Bray says he was driven off campus and into hiding.

“Despite the media portrayal of a deranged, bloodthirsty antifa … the vast majority of anti-fascist tactics involve no physical violence whatsoever,” Bray writes.

“Anti-fascists conduct research on the far right online, in person and sometimes through infiltration; they dox them, push cultural milieux to disown them, pressure bosses to fire them and demand that venues cancel their shows, conferences and meetings; they organise educational events, reading groups, trainings, athletic tournaments and fundraisers; they write articles, leaflets and newspapers, drop banners, and make videos … But it is also true that some of them punch Nazis in the face and don’t apologise for it.”

The antifa doctrine on violence, justified loosely as a form of first-strike, preventive defence, is summed up for Bray in this billboard quote from Murray, an Anti-Racist Action member in Baltimore: “You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks.”

The contention here is that antifa resorts to violence only when earlier tactics fail to achieve its aims. If this were true, and if antifa were fighting only Nazis, many people wouldn’t have a problem with the occasional push turning to shove. There is a reason we laugh during The Blues Brothers when Elwood guns his Dodge Monaco across a bridge and forces a hapless band of Illinois Nazis to leap into the river. There is a reason the blood-spattered scenes in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds seem a little less gratuitous when it is a Nazi skull meeting a baseball bat. There is a reason footage of American white supremacist Richard Spencer getting punched in the face on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration went viral. After all, they’re Nazis.

A problem for the Australian antifa, and indeed for anti-fascist groups in Europe and the US, is that few people and organisations they oppose here have much to do with Nazism. Consider the rollcall of hard-right leaders who turned out in Kensington in support of Yian­nopoulos. Neil Erikson, a far-right agitator and leader of a small group known as Patriot Blue, used to be a Nazi but in recent years has publicly disavowed his former beliefs and now says he is a supporter of Israel.

Blair Cottrell, the hulking former leader of the defunct United Patriots Front, is fascinated by Adolf Hitler as a historical figure but ridicules neo-Nazism as a contemporary political movement.

Avi Yemini, a tough-on-crime activist, is a former Israeli soldier. He recently joined Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives and hopes to stand as a candidate in next year’s Victorian election.

As for Yiannopoulos, although some of his supporters are Nazi sympathisers — Inquirer was sent a picture of a man giving a Nazi salute as he walked out of his Kensington speaking engagement — there is scant evidence that he is.

When Yiannopoulos was preparing a treatise on the alt-right for the Breitbart website early last year, he sought the input of a white nationalist blogger and self-described Nazi, Andrew Auernheimer, and forwarded it along with contributions from other hard-right figures to his co-author, a Breitbart staff journalist. When the Buzzfeed news site obtained emails exchanged between Auernheimer and Yiannopoulos, it reported them as proof that “Breitbart and Milo smuggled Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream.” There was no smuggling involved, Nazi or otherwise; Yiannopoulos’s treatise was a rambling cook’s tour of right-wing groups, with Auernheimer quoted as an on-the-record source.

Yiannopoulos’s presence here was bound to provoke antifa. The term has been in use in Europe since the 1980s but it first pierced the American public consciousness last February when black-clad violent demonstrators trashed the University of California’s Berkeley campus and forced the cancellation of a Yiannopoulos show. The demonstration, which caused $US100,000 worth of damage, was a tactical success but, arguably, a strategic failure.

Since Berkeley, Yiannopoulos has found it difficult to find venues in the US willing to host his show. He quit Breitbart after a video emerged of him appearing to condone sex between men and 13-year-old boys. His supporters say his star is rising. His opponents argue he is already flaming out.

The fallout for antifa has been mixed. Speaking to Inquirer from New York, Bray says the movement is stronger and better organised than it was a year ago. “The spectacle of Berkeley and the precedent it set emboldened a lot of anti-racists and anti-fascists,’’ he says. “It was a call to arms for the movement.’’

Berkeley also set in train a series of events that last week culminated in FBI director Christopher Wray announcing that antifa activists were the subject of a counter-terrorism investigation. Wray told the US House of Representatives homeland security committee: “While we are not investigating antifa as antifa — that’s an ideology and we don’t investigate ideologies — we are investigating a number of what we would call anarchist-extremist … people who are motivated to commit violent criminal activity on a kind of antifa ideology.’’

Now that Yiannopoulos’s tour has ended, antifa in Australia will readjust its sights to homegrown targets. Hassan makes clear this will not be limited to the extreme right: “It is about building an anti-racist movement with the confidence to challenge bigotry in all its forms,” he says. “That includes taking on the far right but it also includes the establishment right as well: Cory Bernardi, George Christensen, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull.”

The risk here is that, in the absence of genuine Nazis to punch, antifa will employ its tactics against people who hold legitimate conservative political views.

Bray, who introduces his book as a “unashamedly partisan call to arms”, defends militant anti-fascism as a “reasonable, historically informed response to the fascist threat”. If that threat in Australia is more perceived that real, where does that leave antifa?

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Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here