CFMMEU’s John Setka set to be expelled from Labor party after attack on Rosie Batty

John Setka is undoubtedly a bully and a thug.  In his union role he has been that for many years.  And nobody on the Left has ever complained about that.  So how come a single sentence spoken by him has suddenly brought him undone?  We don't even know the whole sentence that he spoke. Only a few words from it have ever been reported.  See below.

It's hard to judge in the face of such heavily edited information but the irony is that what Setka said is probably right.    Bettina Arndt (see below)    has been tireless in pointing to evidence that "men" in general have been blamed for the misdeeds of the few domestic abusers that Rose Batty and others talk  about.  Ms Batty has definitelty cast a wide net in attributing blame for domestic violence. "Masculinity" itself now seems to be seen by many as a fault.

So a situation has arisen where men are automatically presumed guilty in response to an accusation by a woman.  Men have gone to jail in response to entirely false and uncorroborated allegations by women.  If that is not a reduction in men's rights, I do not know what would be.  Men have largely lost the presumption of innocence, a most basic right.

So why is Setka under attack for what he said?  I think it is because of the close alliance betweeen Feminists and the Left.  Setka can say and do anything at all that will antagonize business and conservatives but he must not ding women.


Anthony Albanese has moved to have John Setka, Victorian secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, expelled from the ALP after his derogatory remarks about anti-domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty.

Setka was reported as telling a meeting of the CFMMEU national executive Batty’s work had led to men having fewer rights. He later claimed his comments had been taken out of context.

Albanese told a news conference: “John Setka does not belong in our party, because of the views that he holds”.

The opposition leader said at the next meeting of the party’s national executive he would move for Setka’s expulsion. Meanwhile, he had asked the national executive committee to suspend Setka immediately.

Former opposition leader Bill Shorten was close to the CFMMEU, sometimes relying on it for numbers.

Albanese spoke with Batty on Monday. She had indicated she was disappointed Setka’s comments distracted from the AO she was awarded in the Queen’s Birthday honours.

“Rosie Batty is a great campaigner against family violence and the idea that she should be denigrated by someone like John Setka is completely unacceptable to me as leader of the Australian Labor Party and I don’t want him in our party. It’s that simple,” Albanese said.

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Turkeys voting for Christmas

Bettina Arndt 

I have a fun video for you – my interview with UK journalist Peter Lloyd, author of the 2015 book Stand By Your Manhood which did a great job pulling together all the evidence about what was happening to men in our society and presenting it in a most entertaining manner.

Peter was prompted to write his book in response to the ‘dismissive, patronising and skewed narrative about heterosexual men’ now standard fare in mainstream media. His book demonstrated that it has become normal to consider masculinity as entirely negative and problematic and to present boys as ‘defective girls, damaged by default’ who need to be medicated, educated and socialised out of their masculinity.

His book exposes modern feminists’ determination to promote the idea that this privileged generation of women is still somehow oppressed. He’s now a media favourite on UK television panel shows representing the token male taking on the feminist ideologues. I’m showing you his famous ‘sticks and stones’ video, which has well over a million views on YouTube, where you’ll see his feminist antagonist having a total melt-down. Very funny.

Revealing the real Ita Buttrose

We include an extract from the first interview Peter did with Australian media soon after his book came out – with a morning television show, Studio 10. Anyone deluding themselves that the new Chair of the ABC, Ita Buttrose, will do anything about the appalling anti-male bias in that organisation, should look at Ita’s sneering treatment of Peter and his book.

You’ll hear Peter’s hilarious line about men who support feminism being like ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’  – a very apt description of another member of that Studio 10 panel, Daily Telegraph writer, Joe Hildebrand. You’ll see him in action virtue-signalling to his dim-witted feminist panellists by treating Peter in the most patronising manner.

That was four years ago but just a few weeks back a most amazing thing happened. Joe Hildebrand has been ‘red-pilled’, having finally seen the light about our male-bashing culture. A brutal murder of a homeless woman in Melbourne - by another homeless man – led the Assistant Commissioner of Police to make an inane comment that this was ‘all about men’s behaviour.’  Amazingly Hildebrand bucked and objected to this comment – both on television and in a newspaper column – saying the behaviour of this man had nothing to do with him.

Anyway, I am sure you will enjoy my discussion with Peter about all this – and many other issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7oKw34Kx7w

Email from Bettina: bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au







Green eco-warriors are killing off tourism because visitors think the Great Barrier Reef is dead

The Greenie lies never stop

Queensland's tourism industry is facing a recession as an increasing amount of tourists shun the Great Barrier Reef.

Reef cruise operators and tourism experts have seen a downturn in the amount of interest the once popular destination is receiving.

They argue claims made by environmental groups and eco-warriors that the reef is dying are detrimental to the industry.

Cairns-based Coral Expeditions commercial director Jeff Gillies said the overall negative perception of reef health has 'definitely affected the downturn in reef tourism'.

Former Cairns mayor Kevin Byrne agreed. He told The Australian 'our tourism industry here is pretty well static, if not in recession.

'We now have the monumental task of convincing people to come to the Great Barrier Reef. As a living organism, it is in wonderful shape and people need to be proud enough to stand up and say it'.

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No, school choice does not cause ‘segregation’

Australia has very extensive school choice.  40% of teenagers go to non-government schools

The mental gymnastics displayed by some people in order to blame school choice for Australia’s education woes never cease to amaze.

A recent OECD report on school choice and equity indicated Australia has one of the most ‘segregated’ school systems in the OECD. This just means schools tend to have less diversity of student socioeconomic background — not that they are practising apartheid.

And if we look at education equity in terms of what actually matters — the effect student socioeconomic background has on achievement — then Australia’s equity is actually slightly better than the OECD average. So finger-wagging at selective and non-government schools for harming disadvantaged students is baseless.

Besides, even if all selective and independent and Catholic schools closed down, it would just mean more high income families would move to areas with the best government schools (raising local house prices) — so social stratification between schools probably wouldn’t reduce, unless we’re going to build a wall between school catchment areas to stop anyone from ever moving anywhere.

School choice can potentially reduce community residualisation because parents don’t have to leave neighbourhoods if they aren’t satisfied with the local government school.

It’s also a furphy that the non-government sector takes funding away from the government system.

According to the Productivity Commission, between 2007-08 and 2016-17, government schools received an 11% real per-student funding increase.

It’s been argued this was only a minor increase, because if teacher wages growth is taken into account then schools on average don’t actually have much more discretionary spending. But this notion — that extra school funding spent on higher teacher salaries doesn’t count as extra school funding — fails the common sense test.

The reality is funding has increased for the government system. While some state governments have chosen to spend the additional money on higher teacher salaries, the fact remains much more is being spent on government schools.

In any case, the government funding received by non-government schools means they can keep their fees affordable for many middle and low income families, so taxpayers don’t have to fund the full cost of education. For example, new financial modelling by Ernst & Young estimates Catholic schools in NSW save taxpayers $480 million per year in recurrent funding.

No one is helped by pitting government against non-government schools

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Fresh explanations for Don’s Party syndrome

The disappointment when Leftists lose an election is comical.  They just can't load it.  It completely clashes with their conception of the world -- so they normally claim that the election was "stolen" in some way.  Check Bill Shorten in Australia and Hillary Clinton or Stacey Abrams in America.  And most of all check the devastation of nearly all of America's intelligentsia when Trump won

Post-traumatic intellectual disorder, or Don’s Party syndrome as it is sometimes called, is as old as intellectualism itself.

David Williamson diagnosed the condition with precision in his play about an election night party in 1969, when Gough Whitlam dashed Labor intellectuals’ hopes by coming second.

The failed referendum on the republic was a classic example of how the electorate dashes intellectual certainties and leads to uncontrolled national self-loathing, one of the commonest symptoms of PTID.

Lately, however, the frequency of outbreaks appears to be increasing. The Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump and Scomiracle, as the 2019 [Australian] election forever will be known, are just a few of examples in which the right vastly outperformed the expectations of the left, leaving commentators struggling for answers.

Why might these be? I discussed that question this week with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (2012) and co-author (with Greg Lukianoff) of The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), who will be visiting Australia next month.

Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, put forward two explanations.

“One is the media. The people who write and produce shows are increasingly concentrated in the most progressive parts of each country.

“In the United States there used to be journalists and newspaper reporters all over the country. But now there are very few newspapers and almost everybody is in New York or right along the Pacific coast — not even inland in California but right along the coast. And so as human beings, they’re just not exposed to different people.”

The second reason, Haidt suggests, is that conservatives are likelier to cover up what they believe for fear of social shaming. Social psychologists describe this phenomenon as preference falsification, the systematic hiding of certain aspects of beliefs by individuals unaware that almost everyone they meet is doing the same.

“In many public places, or let’s say in companies or in school, if you’re on the left, you can say what you believe. If someone were to say, ‘I’m pro-choice and I think we should have open borders’, you can say that and you will not lose your job.

“But if you’re on the right in the United States, there are many places where if you say what the normal conservative position is, you could be in big trouble. “If you say, ‘I favour border enforcement and I think we should really get control of the border’, you could be called a racist. You could be called somebody who is in favour of torturing children.”

The phenomenon has been studied by Sarah Sobieraj in The Outrage Industry (2013); she sought an explanation for why right-wing talk radio tends to succeed while left-wing talk radio fails.

“If you’re on the left in America, you can say what you think,” Haidt says. “You don’t have to find a community on the radio. But if you’re on the right in America, there’s a much greater attraction because you can’t say what you think in many settings, and so they congregate, almost like a church.”

Haidt draws from the work of founding French sociologist Emile Durkheim to explain the quasi-religious aspect to intellectual groupings, particularly on the left, where to dissent from the common creed means instant excommunication.

“Religion binds small groups together,” says Haidt. “If people worship a god together, then they trust each other, they’ll be loyal to each other, they can work together, they can fight as a team, go into battle. In modern society, as the actual God receded from public discussion, other issues (became) sacred. In the academic world, issues of race and gender are the most sacred issues. And if you contradict them, you’re committing blasphemy. You will be protested or shouted down.

“So it’s not the case that anyone who’s a conservative will be shouted down. Students don’t go around saying, ‘Where’s the conservative? Let’s go find them and kick them off campus.’

“It’s just that if anyone were to say anything against affirmative action or against abortion rights or if anyone were to say that prenatal hormones cause men and women to be different, if you say things like that, you are committing sacrilege. There’s a group of activists on most campuses that could get very angry. And even though it’s only a small number of people, everyone’s afraid of them and everyone’s afraid to contradict them.”

The rising intolerance within universities is explored in The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff.

As Frank Furedi does in What’s Happened to the University? (2016), Haidt and Lukianoff connect the increasing illiberalism in academe with the rise of safety fetishism in the wider community and the cotton-wool wrapping of children, the so-called “snowflake generation”. Fear of physical danger has been extended to fear of moral and intellectual danger. The rise of social media, meanwhile, creates a separate dynamic.

“Social media has immersed young people in an economy of prestige in which they get points either for being victims themselves, or for finding ways that other people victimise people,” says Haidt.

“It’s really bad for everyone, and it’s hard to live around people who are constantly looking for infractions and looking to punish somebody that tells a joke or wears an item of clothing that they disapprove of, but it’s really bad for the students themselves because they don’t learn how to actually do things or be strong or make something. “They get very skilled at tearing each other down.

“And so it’s kind of a descent into a sort of war of all versus all, and this is what we call a call-out culture, in which young people are really trying hard to find a way to take offence at something that someone else said.

“And so if you come out strongly against racism or sexism or anything else like that, especially in a left-leaning academic environment, you get points for that.

“And if everyone is anti-racist and anti-sexist, you have to really be strongly anti-racist and anti-sexist to get more points.”

SOURCE  

 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