Australian Politics
Monday, March 22, 2021
Bipartisan motion calls out China’s treatment of Uighurs
I guess it is very wicked of me but I feel no regret about China's treatment of the Uighurs. Have we forgotten the Ürümqi riots of a few years ago in which Uighurs attacked Han Chinese? The Uighurs were making a nuisance of themselves in a typical Muslim way before the Chinese government (composed of Han Chinese) aroused itself to do something about them.
China wants a permanent solution to Uighur aggression and they rightly see that any solution will have to be a cultural one. So they are trying to knock their primitive Muslim religion out of the Uighurs. If the Uighurs abandoned their religion in favour of Confucian ideals, their oppression would end.
Muslims have done plenty of attacking us -- remember 9/11/2001? So it is plenty time for them to get some of their own back
Australian Uighurs are urging all federal MPs to support a bipartisan motion in Parliament which criticises China for “serious and systematic breaches of human rights” in Xinjiang.
The government has allowed debate on the motion put forward by veteran Liberal MP Kevin Andrews and Labor MP Chris Hayes, which will mark the strongest ever condemnation by the Australian Parliament of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighurs.
The motion, introduced on Monday, urges the United Nations to investigate Beijing for its re-education camps and calls on the Australian government to ensure the country is not profiteering off forced labour in Xinjiang.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied accusations of human rights abuses, including genocide, in the far western province.
Independent senator Rex Patrick last week accused the Australian government of failing to call out China’s mistreatment of Uighurs after it blocked his attempt to push through a Senate motion that would have recognised the Chinese government’s actions against the Muslim minority as “genocide”.
While not going that far, the resolution debated on Monday acknowledges parliaments and governments of other countries - including Britain, Netherlands, the United States and Canada - have recently said China’s actions in Xinjiang amount to genocide under international law.
The Australian Uighur Association’s Bahtiyar Bora said all members of Parliament should support the new motion and demand the Australian government “take much stronger action on what many believe is genocide taking place in plain sight”.
“At least one million innocent civilians have been locked up for no reason in a network of several hundred prisons,” he said. “This is beyond the usual left=right divide - this is about basic human dignity and the future of the entire Uighur population.”
Ramila Chanisheff from Australian Uighur Tangritagh Women’s Association said democratic nations such as Australia had a duty to call out China for its actions.
“The Chinese government has also separated thousands of children from their parents and placed them in special orphanages, in order to indoctrinate them,” she said.
Private members’ motions do not normally go to a vote, but it was given an hour of allocated time for debate from 10.15am. The Coalition and Labor were given 12 speakers each to debate the motion.
Mr Andrews said there was “overwhelming evidence of the cruel, inhumane and brutal practices of the Chinese Communist regime”.
“The most egregious, systematic abuse of human rights in the world is occurring in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China,” Mr Andrews said during his speech. “It has been occurring for several years. It involves the imprisonment, torture and enslavement of millions of ethnic Uyghurs, who comprise some 90 % of the population in the southern region of Xinjiang.”
Earlier this year the BBC reported first-hand accounts of systematic rape, sexual abuse and torture in Uighur detention camps.
Philip Citowicki, who was a policy adviser to former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop, said the motion was a reminder that many federal MPs were deeply concerned about the situation in Xinjiang.
What are Magnitsky sanctions and why does Russia oppose them?
″This bipartisan motion was long in the making and acts as a release valve for many MPs who have wanted to speak up but have been rightly carefully managed by governments and its desire to limit commentary outside of the control senior officials,” he said.
“Airing their grievances on the floor of the house offers an opportunity for many MPs to push the conversation on a recognition of genocide and similarly speak out as other parliaments around the world have....Without a doubt, the government would be very mindful of just how this would play out diplomatically and seek to carefully manage escalating tensions.”
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Ambos waste 10,000 hours waiting around
Paramedics waited almost 10,000 hours with patients outside overloaded hospitals in February, stopping them from getting back on the road to help other sick and injured Queenslanders and prompting calls for a review of the health system which “is not coping”.
Startling new data obtained by The Courier-Mail has revealed ambulance officers lost more time waiting with patients last month compared to the same period last year despite there being less patients.
The revelation has prompted United Workers Union (UWU) national ambulance co-ordinator Fiona Scalon to call for a system review – similar to that conducted in 2013 amid a ramping crisis.
“We’re back to the stage where we think that level of scrutiny is needed again,” she said.
“UWU delegates are working with QAS to affect change in the areas that QAS has control over but the majority of the issue for our members stem from the fact that the Health and Hospital system is just not keeping up with demand.”
The Sunday-Mail recently revealed patients had waited up to seven hours with paramedics before being moved to a bed, with increased demand being reported across the state.
It can today be revealed that a patient more recently waited eight hours at the Ipswich Hospital.
And Ms Scalon said every hospital in Brisbane was at capacity by 3pm on Thursday this week.
New figures show QAS “lost” 9213.34 hours last month while waiting for patients to be admitted to hospitals across the Sunshine Coast, Metro North, Metro South, Gold Coast and West Moreton.
This is compared to 5527.8 hours last February when there were 393 more patients.
Ambulances just missed their targets to attend the most critical jobs between February 1 and March 17 this year across Metro North and South – with 50 per cent responding to 1A jobs in 8.5 minutes. The target is 8.2 minutes.
Health and Ambulance Services Minister Yvette D’Ath said the latest data showed 100 per cent of the most urgent Category 1 ED patients were being treated within two minutes.
“ED presentations in January were up 32,000 on the same time last year – with more than 212,000 presentations in total,” she said.
“Demand is increasing across the state for healthcare, and our public hospitals are seeing more patients presenting to emergency departments than ever before.
“QAS responds to up to 3,000 incidents a day – and they’re still responding to the most critical patients in optimum time frames.
“We’ll work with Queensland Health, QAS and unions to ensure that our health system remains strong.”
“The Health Minister needs to explain why standards are slipping at hospitals across Queensland and how she plans to fix it,” she said.
An additional $25 million will be spent this financial year to open more bed capacity across the system.
Ms Scalon said “hospital flow” needed to be at the top of the list for government. “The system is not coping,” she said.
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Climate scaremongers not held responsible for falsehoods
Tim Flannery still hasn’t paid a price for being wrong. Sydney’s Warragamba Dam is flooding again — which our former chief climate commissioner once said couldn’t happen.
In 2005, Flannery predicted Sydney’s dams could be empty in just two years because global warming was drying up the rains, leaving the city “facing extreme difficulties with water”.
In 2007, Flannery stepped up the scare, claiming global warming made the soil so hot that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”.
Yet for the second time in two years, Warragamba is overflowing. It also spilt over in 2012.
But where is Flannery?
He’s sure not saying sorry. Far from it; he’s just been named as a speaker at the taxpayer-funded Sydney Writers’ Festival, to lecture us on what “may be the last chance” to save ourselves from “the climate crisis”.
That’s how it goes with these climate catastrophists. Even when they’re wrong, the politico-media class forgives them because they were wrong in a sacred cause. They scare us into righteousness.
Check for yourself. Have you heard a single ABC presenter mention that Warragamba has again made a fool of Flannery? Or that Melbourne’s dams are now twice as full as they were when he made his dam-draining prediction?
Flannery is, of course, easy to mock. It’s hard to think of a global warming preacher who has been wrong so often.
This is the scaremonger who in 2008 warned of “a world five years from now, when there is no more ice over the Arctic”, who predicted Perth would become the world’s first “ghost metropolis” through lack of water, and who claimed we’d see cyclones “more frequently in the future”.
In fact, the Arctic ice and Perth are still there, and we’ve had fewer cyclones, not more.
Yet Flannery is only one of many climate catastrophists whose dud predictions are not held against them.
Take Robert Watson, a former chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Last month he co-wrote a United Nations report that warned us to cut our consumption because global warming was one of the man-made “climate emergencies” that had reduced “the Earth’s capacity to sustain current and future human wellbeing”.
His alarmist report was hyped by the media and especially by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who claimed we “might not thrive, even survive” because we’d waged a “suicidal war on nature”.
But why was anyone taking Watson seriously? Never mind that even his own report admitted world prosperity had actually doubled over the past 50 years.
Just consider his record. In 2004, this same Watson promoted a report on global warming that had been commissioned by the Pentagon and which predicted doom by 2020.
As The Guardian reported then, without a skerrick of scepticism, this “secret report” warned that “major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020”, when “nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the word”.
None of that happened last year, or was ever likely to. Yet Watson had praised these off-the-wall predictions, claiming “it’s going to be hard to blow off this sort of document”, which was “hugely embarrassing” to then President George W. Bush.
Watson paid no price for peddling this trash. Instead, this British chemist was knighted in 2012.
And what price did Al Gore pay? In 2006, the former US vice-president claimed in his Academy Award-winning “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth that global warming was drowning Pacific islands under rising seas, and “the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand”.
Labor fell for this “drowning islands” scare, producing a “Pacific climate change plan” promising to take in such global warming refugees, with Anthony Albanese, now Labor leader, piously declaring we couldn’t “sit by while people literally drown”.
In fact, Gore was preaching porkies. No global warming “refugees” were evacuated to New Zealand then or since, and low-lying Pacific island nations are actually much more likely to grow than shrink.
Professor Paul Kench and Dr Arthur Webb studied 27 atoll islands in the central Pacific and found 43 per cent had actually got bigger over recent decades, and just 14 cent — not the most populous — smaller.
But what does Gore care? Scares sell, and he’s now hailed as the world’s first “climate change billionaire”. If he was wrong, it was only for our own good, you see. And his.
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CoitalSafe? What a classic Aussie brain fart
Many Australian men have no idea about how sex starts, and often continues, for girls. Brace yourself for the disturbing truth.
Do we need a consent app for sexual relations? No, we don’t, and thanks should immediately go to Jacqui Lambie for cutting right to the chase on this one.
How easy is it going to be for a bloke to get a swipe-right from a woman who is chucking up in a bucket, she wanted to know? Quite right. Also, what’s to stop somebody from swiping the app for you, while you’re too drunk to stand?
How soon will we see a predator using the green tick to say, “See, I didn’t rape her! She was up for whatever went down.”
Also, what happens when you swipe right for yes, then change your mind when he tries to extend things beyond your comfort zone? And, who’s going to make this app? One of those creepy dudes from Facebook who can’t even understand why the massacre and suicide livestreams should come down? No thank you.
The government? No thank you again (although it would be interesting to see what they’d call it: CoitalSafe? Or F..ksSafe?) No, no, and no.
The idea — more like a classic Aussie brain fart — came from NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller, who said at the time that it might be the worst idea he’d had this year, before immediately being proven right.
Still, it was a bit odd to find it coming from a cop. Why do we need an app, Mick, when we’ve got a police force? It’s run in NSW … by you! Except that we all know how the legal system — existing law, the police, the courts — runs just like CovidSafe. As in, you might as well not have it.
Because here’s how it currently works: women and girls get assaulted, and nothing happens, and then the matter goes away. But not for them.
Why does it work this way?
Because women and girls are too ashamed to speak up when they’ve been assaulted; or else too fearful; or else they blame themselves; or else it’s her word against his and she knows she won’t be believed; or else there’s no evidence; or gathering the evidence is too horrifying an idea; and because it’s so much easier to just try to forget. Except they can’t. Which is why it doesn’t go away for them.
Which is why it’s also so important that Australia is now having this urgent, national conversation about consent.
Many men seem to have no idea how much unwanted sex — sexual assault and harassment basically — women endure over the course of their lives. In particular, they have no idea about how sex starts, and often continues, for girls.
Girls in Australia are being forced, cajoled, coerced or tricked into sex, often from an early age. Sometimes, it’s performing sex acts they don’t want to perform; sometime it’s about gaining access to a girl’s body.
Men — and, most importantly, boys — don’t seem to understand that girls, for a range of complex reasons (guilt, shame, anxiety, fear) don’t always know how to say no.
Thus we have a situation where boys are pushing themselves onto girls, who feel powerless to stop them. Girls are being made to do things they don’t want to do, earlier than they want to do them, by boys who feel curious, or entitled to explore.
You may not believe that such a thing is happening, but you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take the testimony of the 5000 Australian girls who have this month posted their experiences with sexual assault to a website established by a former Sydney schoolgirl, Chanel Contos.
Contos, 23, was assaulted by a boy — that is, forced to do something she didn’t want to do — when she was a student at a prestigious all-girls school in Sydney. She was 13. She didn’t know it was assault, because she didn’t know how — or that she was allowed — to say no.
It was many years before she confided her experience to a friend, who immediately said that something similar had happened to her.
They knew it was affecting their adult relationships (one of the worst things about this story is how girls are being assaulted in a routine manner while growing up, and then we send boys and girls into the world to try to work and live together).
Contos put a post on Instagram, asking whether other girls had similar stories — and then stood back, as the messages flooded in. One girl said she didn’t consent so much as “cave in” to pressure to start having sex when she was 13. “I knew I wasn’t ready. I don’t know why I felt this pressure, but I did, and it made me feel sick,” she said.
Another girl said: “We weren’t taught anything. I thought a man just haggling you was what they did, and women just gave in.”
Many girls remembered drinking until they passed out and waking to find themselves being assaulted, often by more than one boy. “I thought it was my fault because I got so drunk,” said one.
“I was only 13 and he was almost 17, it was New Years’ and he liked me, so I thought I had to like him back,” said another.
One girl said: “It has always stuck with me that it was something I never wanted to happen. I felt pressured into giving consent and still feel sick about it … I doubt he has ever given it a second thought … I spent my life thinking it was my fault and I’d done wrong.”
Another said: “I was 14 … he said if we had sex, he would be my boyfriend … he kept going while I lay there crying … when we came out of the bedroom, his friend congratulated him.”
One girl said she knew she had been filmed. Plenty said other kids had gathered around to watch while they were being groped while drunk. One wrote that she had developed a “reputation” after having sex, so regularly got drunk, “and I didn’t want to (have sex) but only did because I felt I may as well live up to the names I was getting called … I seriously struggled to have sex sober for the years following … I didn’t feel I deserved anyone good.”
On and on it goes, for hundreds of pages.
Is this really how you want your teenage daughter to experience sex? Of course it’s not. So what can be done?
Some say alcohol is the problem, and that is partly right. Ask around, you’ll discover that teenagers host these things call “gatherings” — we used to say parties — where kids smuggle alcohol, or the “cool” parents provide it. We know what happens when kids get drunk. Girls get assaulted.
Parents should supervise more closely, but it is naive to think young people are not going to drink and experiment. They are.
Some say it is not alcohol — there’s always been alcohol — but it might be pornography.
Remember how shocked you were to find a tame 1970s Playboy in your Dad’s shed? Children these days have access to unfiltered, unclassified pornography on their phones, from primary school (please don’t think “my kid would never look, he’s not interested” — because there’s always a bigger kid in the playground who cannot wait to show him.) We could talk about trying to restrict access to pornography, but the horse has bolted.
Young people have some better ideas. Contos, for example, has started a petition calling for consent to be part of sex education from an early age.
“We are advocating for younger generations to receive an education that (we) received far too late,” Contos writes on her petition.
“We are sad and angry we did not receive an adequate education regarding what amounts to sexual assault,” she adds.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Girls don’t want to be told to “avoid sex” or to “keep themselves nice” as the old saying used to go. They are just as curious and delighted by the idea of sex as the boys are.
But they don’t want sex education to be “what goes where” and “how to make a baby” (or, more likely these days, how to avoid making a baby). They are looking forward to a shared and hopefully wonderful experience.
But to get there, you need consent. And to get there, you need respect.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
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My son Joe at ANU
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