Bob Katter: A Lebanese Aborigine?

Bob is very popular in Far North Queensland -- where I also come from. All four of my grandparents were born up that way, as I was. In my memory, the Far North was a very conservative place. Views that today identify me as very conservative were simply normal during my early life in North Queensland. It is my "spiritual" home.

It is over 30 years since I spent much time back up there, though I did have a couple of holidays there, with the last such being in 2004. So I have often wondered if my old home is still as conservative as it was. My impression is that not much has changed

And Bob's great popularity up that way confirms it. He too is very consrervative. So I am rather pleased with his views and what he does. As a member of Federal parliament he represents the North well

But I don't like his claim to be Aboriginal. He bases that claim on once having been "adopted" into an Aboriginal tribe. And under current Australian law, if he "identifies" as an Aborigine, he IS an Aborigine. I am critical of that rule in general so I deplore Bob using it for political advantage.

In fact he is, if anything, Lebanese, though he fiercely denies it. He grew up in a clothing shop run by his Lebanese grandfather. It is a curiosity of North Queensland that there are or were in many towns a men's clothing shop run by Lebanese immigrants -- with surnames like Mellick and Malouf. I remember them well.

The surname Katter is most common among Americans of German origin. In German, a "Kater" is a tomcat

Bob Katter has declared his people made a 'big mistake' 250 years ago by letting in whitefellas, and that's why Australia should keep borders shut to asylum seekers ahead of Saturday's federal election as he prepares for his 10th win.

A surprising little-known fact about the controversial Queensland MP is that he identifies as Aboriginal, but Mr Katter recently spoke candidly about the subject during a TV appearance when addressing foreign policy and the plight of refugees.

'I come from Cloncurry, and I'm dark - I'm one of the Curry mob, you know?' Mr Katter said on ABC's Q&A.

'We made a hell of a bad mistake 150 years ago, letting you whitefellas in. I don't know that we should make the same mistake again.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10823217/Bob-Katter-says-Aboriginal-people-big-mistake-letting-whitefellas-ABC-Q-QLD-Kennedy.html

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Sergeant Bruno's big speech mistake

A Victorian policeman is under investigation for posting online that there are only two genders.

And so he should be!

Everyone knows there are actually three genders: Males (pronouns he/him), Females (pronouns she/her), and Narcissists (pronouns me!/me!/me!).

The Age newspaper reported this week that 62-year-old Sergeant Bruno Staffieri was interviewed by officers from Professional Standards Command over an online comment he made to an officer working in the Gender Equality and Inclusion Command.

Staffieri reportedly wrote: ‘So you are doing tertiary education studying genders. I’ll make it easy for you to pass … there are 2.’

Someone call triple-zero!

You have to hand it to Victoria Police; they know what constitutes inappropriate behaviour.

* Shoot peaceful protesters with rubber bullets? No consequences.

* Pepper spray law-abiding citizens? No consequences.

* Harass old ladies sitting in a park during Covid lockdown? No consequences.

* Slam people into the pavement for not wearing a mask? No consequences.

But if you dare to state a biological fact, everyone – from the Deputy Commissioner down – wets their pants.

Sergeant Staffieri should demand to know how many genders there are so that he can be more accurate in future.

Google doesn’t know, so we’ll wait for the answer.

Oh, and if you’re the victim of an actual offence, you’ll have to wait too. Police are busy attending to thought crimes.

Staffieri, who has been an officer for more than 35 years and is close to retirement, could lose his job because of the online comments.

This is not the first time Staffieri has upset police command with views that, until five minutes ago, were entirely unremarkable.

Staffieri was also investigated over his public criticism of the government’s decision to cancel Australia Day and Anzac Day celebrations last year, but allow the Gay Pride March in St Kilda to proceed.

‘So the next time Australians are sent out to fight a war, maybe we can send out the 8,000 that marched today … and try to stop the enemy by waving feathers and brightly coloured boas at them,’ Staffieri reportedly posted on May 17, 2021.

‘Triple-zero. What’s your emergency?’

‘Sergent Staffieri objected to the Mardi Gras.’

‘Does anyone need help?’

‘Yes. We are all very hurty.’

‘Does Sergeant Staffieri have a weapon?’

‘It’s his words. His words! Words are violence.’

‘Stay in a safe space and practice socially distancing until a squad car full of thought police arrives.’

In June last year, Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Neil Paterson posted on Yammer, the force’s internal communication platform, that…

‘Victoria Police is proud to have been recognised as a silver employer at the 2021 Australian LGBTQ+ inclusion awards.’

Staffieri reportedly responded by posting:

‘Yes, I agree. Great achievement. But if the public knew how much time, effort, and taxpayer dollars went into this, they would also be demanding why we didn’t get a gold.’

That’s pretty funny.

Paterson didn’t think so. According to The Age, he defended the campaign and denied it had received significant public funding.

Staffieri responded: ‘Sir, I totally value and respect your opinion and your rank, I simply ask that you value and respect mine.’

Paterson fired a broadside back at Staffieri… ‘I don’t respect or value your views as they are offensive and there is no place for those views in Victoria Police… Either limit your comments on Yammer to comments that are respectful of everyone or consider your employment options.’

So in Daniel Andrews’ Victoria, it’s an honest police officer who tells the truth who is threatened with the sack for being in possession of what police hierarchy call ‘those views’

Maybe, if Sergeant Staffieri flies the Chinese flag outside his station, all will be forgiven.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/sergeant-brunos-big-mistake/

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The unprecedented use of force to control the population during the pandemic means all previous notions of limited state power belong in the dustbin of history

Any lingering doubts evaporated when Victorian protesters, alarmed by their losses of liberty, were fired on by their own police

When it comes to our freedoms, former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, got it right. He believed that people don’t appreciate what they have until it’s gone. ‘Freedom is like that,’ he said. ‘It’s like air.’

There was a time when we cherished our freedoms. We even fought two world wars to preserve them. But, over the last fifty years, first by stealth, then with determined haste, a growing coalition of anti-democratic elites have colluded to reset society and render those sacrifices in vain. We ignored the warning signs and began taking our freedoms for granted. Now, as we feel the effects of government’s pervasive, suffocating, actions, we are understanding what Yeltsin meant.

Of course, when we struck our bargain with the forces of darkness, we were promised that in exchange for the surrender of a few personal freedoms here and some individual responsibility there, everyone could be better off and live more equitably at the expense of everyone else.

For half a century, that compact was restated, yet only one party kept its side of the bargain. It is the people who naively continued to cede responsibility for themselves and their families to an ever-expanding army of officials who began progressively interfering in every aspect of their daily lives.

The trade-off – the promise of greater prosperity and equity for all – has been an ever-receding horizon. Indeed, according to a recent report released by the Productivity Commission, economic growth per person over the past decade has slipped to its slowest rate in sixty years, both in terms of GDP per capita and income per person. And not only that, but the wealth of the top twenty per cent of Australians has grown sixty-eight per cent in the past fifteen years compared to six per cent for the bottom twenty per cent.

But then, while cloaked in good intentions, the ‘promise’ was always about powerful interests colluding to deliver power, patronage and protection to a chosen privileged few. Even the Reserve Bank played a part by creating a systemic moral hazard, dubbed ‘too big to fail’. By making credit cheap and plentiful, it de-risked the stock and real estate markets underwriting enormous gains for the rich and well-connected.

Central bankers also lent their weight to push economy-destroying, emissions abatement regulations. This peculiarly Western obsession helps transfer wealth from the poor to rich renewable-energy rent-seekers via subsidies and consumer taxes. Soon governments will be able to use an app to monitor household emissions, giving them a seat right at the kitchen table.

Far fetched? Perhaps once. But not any more. The unprecedented use of force to control the population during the pandemic means all previous notions of limited state power belong in the dustbin of history. Any lingering doubts evaporated when Victorian protesters, alarmed by their losses of liberty, were fired on by their own police.

Worst of all, this atrocity was met with a deafening silence. The media behaved like an arm of government. The Prime Minister and the federal and state parliaments were silent. Business leaders were invisible. It was a defining moment in our nation’s history and confirmed that we now live in a society where freedom and the rule of law are at the sole discretion of the state.

This is the ‘great reset’ our children and grandchildren have been prepared for. From primary school on, they have been brainwashed to be ashamed of their heritage, their parents’ values and their traditional institutions. They have been taught how capitalism and markets are evil and that our colonial settlers were nothing more than oppressors, slave owners and environmental vandals.

They learn that fighting for freedom on the battlefields was nothing but the assertion of white supremacy. Their curriculum includes Marxist critical race theory and gender fluidity. Academic assignments lead students down an ideological path which, if they are to pass exams, they must take. This merciless moral scrutiny of the nation’s past and present is intended to cancel the past and confer legitimacy on today’s illiberal new direction.

Unsurprisingly, the most recent report from the OECD Program for International Student Assessment confirms that when measured against eighty countries, Australia has continued its 20-year decline in the quality of schooling in reading, mathematics and science. Indoctrination may not give tomorrow’s leaders the critical edge in a competitive world, but at least they will get their pronouns right.

Who dares speak against this brave new world, where even the word ‘mother’ can cause offence to some? Where to be politically incorrect can be career limiting or socially ostracising. Understandably, intellectual cowardice abounds.

There is certainly no mention of freedom or smaller government in today’s election campaigns. Voters are expected to forget the past’s multiple costly blunders like the NBN, the NDIS and the French submarine project and embrace new, expensive thought-bubbles, none of which will achieve their stated intent.

But, as US economist Herb Stein once quipped, ‘If something can’t go on forever, it will stop’. Massive debt overhangs, growing deficits and economic waste and distortions will soon prove him right in a way that neither the electorate, nor the political establishment, are expecting. Then the incompetence and frivolous nature of today’s political class will be exposed. So too, how centralised power has concentrated risks and robbed society of its resilience. But don’t expect the elites to relinquish their power and privilege. They will use the moment to expand them.

It’s as Mark Twain observed. ‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

We have been warned. But have we the courage to turn back?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/the-seeds-of-our-own-destruction/

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Tradies forced into a quasi-union under Labor

About 43,000 self-employed Queensland tradie independent contractors could be declared “employee-like” and forced on to enterprise bargaining agreements under a Labor policy, Master Builders Australia claims.

More than half the tradies in a survey conducted by the MBA said they were opposed or strongly opposed to being forced into “being covered by union enterprise bargaining agreements”.

But Labor said the building industry group is “peddling false stories” and that genuine small businesses are not “employee-like”.

Under its Secure Australian Jobs plan Labor would extend the powers of the Fair Work Commission to include “employee-like” forms of work and to determine “what rights and obligations” would apply.

Master Builders CEO Denita Wawn said the policy wording was broad and she feared independent contractors and sole traders, working mostly for one or two big building companies, could be taken to the FWC by unions to force them on to EBA agreements and essentially become employees.

“The Rudd-Gillard policy was balanced. This is exceptionally one sided,” Ms Wawn said.

“People want to be able to retain those choices. We want people to maintain choice, as opposed to be forced on to something they don’t want to do.”

She said while there were legitimate issues around sham contracting or some individuals who wanted to be employees rather than contractors, there were other tools in place to deal with them including the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

But a Labor spokesman said the Masters Builders had been “peddling false stories” about Labor during the election campaign.

“I don’t know what part of the phrase ‘employee-like’ they don’t understand. Someone who is genuinely running a small business is not ‘employee-like’,” he said.

“But it’s pretty obvious when we have so many workers being paid below the minimum wage in the gig economy this reform is essential.

“The Master Builders and Scott Morrison might be relaxed about people being paid less than the minimum wage. Labor is not and we will fix it.”

The MBA survey was of 1000 people taken between May 4 and May 11, in electorates with high proportion of construction industry workers.

It found 53 per cent of tradies, and 48 per cent of all respondents, opposed “forcing independent contractors into being covered by Union enterprise bargaining agreements”.

It also found 84 per cent of respondents believed independent contractors should have the right to choose whether they become part of a union or not.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/federal-election/tradies-forced-on-to-eba-under-labor-master-builders-claims/news-story/a7595197c6fc9f6dd6daaff56473cf32

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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)

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