Australian Politics
It's time to vote for change from the Greenie paralysis
Viv Forbes
Politics has drifted a long way left since the days of Menzies and Fadden. Starting with Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Don Chipp, and Bob Brown, there has developed a monotonous uniformity in mainstream Australian politics.
Over the years, a green slime has infected all major parties – they now differ in details, but not in principle. This greening of politics has reached the stage when a politician like Malcolm Turnbull has trouble deciding whether to join the Greens, the ALP, or the Leafy-green Liberals.
The green revolution started with support for preserving cuddly wildlife, then progressed to ‘No-Dams’, ‘Lock-the Gate’, and ‘Save-the Reef’.
Then they added ‘global warming’ to their political agenda. When global temperatures did not obey their scary narrative, they changed to ‘climate alarm’ and added ‘wild weather’ to support their ‘kill coal, cars and cattle’ agenda. Then came Saint Greta and her Extinction Rebellion. All these scares were designed to panic people into supporting a deep-green anti-industry mindset. Even their ‘Build-Back-Better’ means ‘Build-Back-Green’.
Then the Covid scare created a Brave New World controlled by a National Cabinet armed with never-ending jabs and a lock-down/track-and-trace mentality. They have learned that most people can be locked down, spied upon, and rationed. Climate and energy lockdowns are now discussed behind green doors. There is now little difference in principle between Liberals, Labor, and Greens – they all promote emissions targets, climate alarm, and endless green slogans.
Bowing continually to United Nations dictates and constant ABC/Greens/Climate Council propaganda, their Net Zero policies have multiplied electricity costs, harmed processing and manufacturing industries while defacing our grasslands, farms, and forests with wind towers, solar ‘farms’, access tracks and spider webs of power lines that carry no power for much of the time. Now they propose to pollute our coastal waters with these unnecessary and unreliable industrial monstrosities.
It is time to vote for real change – use the power of preferential voting to break Liberal/Labor/Green Power by ranking all parties and candidates and put the greenest last.
Check out Topher Field on how to use Preferential Voting to get the best candidate elected:
Libs and ALP are both on the nose. It looks unlikely that either of them will hold a majority of seats. But if voters are not disciplined in how they vote, a bunch of deep greens posing as independents will grab seats and hold the balance of power. They will naturally support a radical Green/ALP coalition.
With thoughtful and disciplined behaviour at the ballot box (for both Senate and House of Reps) we can stop this green revolution.
First job – identify the worst candidates and parties. Preference them last on both House of Reps and Senate ballot papers when you vote.
The most dangerous candidates in this election are The Sneaky Greens – they pose as ‘independents’ but are being supported by climate crazy millionaires and, if elected, will reappear in their deep green uniforms. Unless you know better, put all ‘independents’, Climate 200, and GetUp! supported candidates last.
Have a look here and here to see what they plan.
Just above them put the declared Greens and their allies in the ALP. Then select all Liberals above all of the Green/ALP alliance.
Then focus on who should get your top votes. Choose your numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 etc candidates from the Freedom-Friendly-Minor-Parties giving preference to whoever you like from the parties below:
Campbell Newman, Topher Field, and the Liberal Democrats
Pauline Hanson, George Christensen, and the PHON Candidates
Clive Palmer, Craig Kelly, and United Australia Candidates
Bob Katter and Katter Australia Party
Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, and National Party Candidates
Number every square all the way down to Unknowns and the climate crazy ‘independents’.
For the Senate (which may have a large complicated white ballot paper) it is safer and easier to number every square above the line, using the same party ranking rules as above.
It requires discipline to save Australia at this late stage.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/05/its-time-to-vote-for-change/
***********************************************Covid Qld: Medical specialists challenge state’s vaccine mandate
A group of specialist doctors and GPs have become the first medical practitioners in Queensland to launch a legal challenge to the Chief Health Officer’s Covid-19 vaccination mandate.
With no end in sight to vaccination mandates, the 11 doctors will ask a judge to reverse the direction requiring them to be fully vaccinated to work in hospitals and other healthcare settings.
They claim it has affected their ability to continue to practise as medical practitioners.
Their Supreme Court judicial review application follows court challenges to vaccination mandates by police, nurses, ambulance officers, teachers, childcare centre workers and prison officers, still before the court.
The group includes gastroenterologist Dr Andrew McIntyre, obstetrician gynaecologist Dr Lucas McLindon, child psychiatrist Associate Professor Peter Parry, radiologist Dr Sally Johnstone, neurosurgeon Dr David Johnson and anaesthetist, Dr Paloma Van Zyl.
It also includes GPs Dr Camilo Guerra and Dr Andrew Robert Angus, an unnamed GP, an unnamed paediatrician and one other doctor whose health professions could not be confirmed.
Dr McIntyre, who has not worked since December because of the vaccination mandate, said he was unvaccinated and the majority of other doctors involved in the claim were unvaccinated.
He said some of the doctors involved were fully vaccinated and still working, having felt they had to do so in order to keep jobs, but all were opposed to the Covid-19 vaccination mandate.
“We are not anti-vaxxers. We are anti the Covid-19 response,’’ he said of the group challenging the mandate.
“The whole emergency declaration and mandate needs to be heavily reviewed.’’
The application says each doctor has suffered a detriment to their ability to continue to practise as medical practitioners, which has been removed, limited or entirely prevented as a result of the direction.
It claims Chief Health Officer Dr John Gerrard did not have jurisdiction or authorisation to make the March 12 public health direction requiring workers in healthcare settings, including public and private hospitals, to be fully vaccinated.
The application, filed by law firm NR Barbi, alleges there was no probative evidence or other material to justify the decision, which it claims was an improper exercise of power.
“This group of doctors are suffering financially. I do know some are fairly desperate, financially,’’ Dr McIntyre said.
He said he had been forced into involuntary retirement by the mandate but he had been able to get other vaccinated doctors to continue working in his Sunshine Coast day surgery.
“I’ve had a huge loss of income. I’m mandated out. I can’t work. It’s forced retirement,’’ Dr McIntyre said.
“Previously I did very specialised procedures at private hospitals, but I can’t now and those services are no longer available at some of those private hospitals.’’
Dr McIntyre said one of the other specialists involved in the legal case had offered very specialist services that only a few doctors could do.
Some of the doctors who had already had Covid-19 had a short-term exemption from vaccination, while others who were unvaccinated had taken long service leave.
He said there were up to 40 other doctors who supported the legal challenge, including some financially, but who were not prepared to put their names to it, for fear of reprisal.
Dr McIntyre said the health practitioner regulation agency, AHPRA, had threatened to deregister anyone who said anything contrary to the government’s vaccination narrative.
“We feel we need a proper debate and the only way to get a proper debate is to go to the Supreme Court. It’s a pretty sad situation,’’ Dr McIntyre said.
Dr McIntyre said he and his daughters have had Covid-19 and one of his daughters, a radiographer, had also been “mandated out’’, but was now working in another business.
Dr McIntyre said he would like to see a Royal Commission into the government handling of the Covid-19 response.
Lawyer Natalie Strijland, who represents the doctors, said they were all intelligent, articulate, clever medical professionals.
“We are lucky to live in a country where persons affected by these decisions have the legal right to seek a judicial review determined by a competent court.’’
A Queensland Health spokesperson said Covid-19 continued to pose a risk to the community and disproportionately affected healthcare workers and health support staff.
“The vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is in place to ensure health services can continue operating in as safe a manner as possible,’’ the spokesperson said.
“It is a measured approach, balancing the safety of staff, patients, visitors and the wider community.
“Any changes to existing mandates and/or restrictions will be communicated to the public.’’
Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said she could not comment on the matter before the court, but said: “As we have throughout the pandemic, we will follow the health advice because this is what has kept Queenslanders safe.’’
She said the Government continued to encourage Queenslanders to be vaccinated.
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A lucky escape from abortion
“I was devastated, but I am her mum and it is my job to look after her, so there was no way I was terminating. Whatever the future held for her, we would deal with it together. From then I was referred to a palliative care team to plan for her death,” she said.
“There was a chance that Brianna would live only a few hours, so in that moment when she was reached to me, I wanted to hold on to her forever and freeze the moment.”
The mother of six says that every time she looks at the photo she can’t control her emotions and tears flow.
“The doctors were wrong. Brianna had been misdiagnosed with Pontocerebellar hypoplasia. She is perfectly healthy and is the cheekiest, bossiest little girl you could meet.
Ms De Regt has been pregnant eight times and has lost two babies, one just before her pregnancy with Brianna.
“I went into that pregnancy having lost baby Noah at 20 weeks. I had to deliver him in a ward that had mothers who had just birthed healthy babies. That was tough,” she said.
Even with the dire prognosis she was given for Brianna, the mother vowed to keep positive and did everything possible to have a healthy baby. I put affirmations on the wall of the hospital when in labour that said You are Loved and You are Strong. During pregnancy I meditated, did acupuncture, saw a naturopath and changed my diet to green juices and healthy foods. I tried so hard for her to be born healthy.”
Following Brianna’s miracle turnaround Ms De Regt was pregnant with twins, Sadly, one of those twins died early in the pregnancy.
Ms De Regt is a warrior mum, never having had any pain relief for any birth. “My pregnancy song with Brianna was Bob Marley’s Every Little Thing’s Going To Be All Right and that is how I try to live.”
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Inclusion put before fairness and safety, say exercise science professors
A trio of exercise science professors have called out major Australian sporting organisations — including the AFL and Cricket Australia — for prioritising inclusion over “fairness and safety” in transgender policy decisions they believe could destroy the integrity of women’s sport.
The now retired academics Helen Parker, Beth Hands and Elizabeth Rose authored two papers, published in the International Journal of Sport and Society in January, which argue for the “protected female category in sport” and say the existing biological research has been ignored by major Australian sports. This showed that male athletes have unfair physical advantages in sports when competing head-to-head against females.
In March the academics, who taught at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, wrote a series of letters to the leaders of nine major sports — including Cricket Australia, the AFL, Hockey Australia, Tennis Australia and Netball Australia — urging their boards to undertake a review of their transgender policies in the light of the readily available biological evidence presented in their papers.
Their first peer-reviewed paper addressed the “biological perspectives, fairness and physical safety in women’s sport” and their second covers the “implications for female competition integrity” and delving into the issues that they believe could undermine female sport.
Parker, who was also the first female commissioner on the Western Australian Football Commission, says they have been surprised to have not heard back from a single sport since submitting the information, which draws on the research of world-leading sports scientists and biologists.
“I’m concerned that there hasn’t been an acknowledgment that this information has come through,” Parker said. “My request was that the board take on the information and discuss the issue of trans women in sport at least at board level again, and ask: ‘Is our policy of transgender participation appropriate now that we have this biological information?’
“I hope that the rise of elite trans women athletes like US swimmer Lia Thomas and the UK cyclist Emily Bridges is really a wake-up call and alert sports boards to really look at what they‘re trying to achieve in terms of advancing girls and women in their sport.
“If they are going down this transgender inclusion role, then they really have not only dropped the ball, they’ve basically made a balloon out of the issue and just let it float away. It looks as if they’re not serious in their custodianship of their code and advancing women’s sport.”
Since Thomas’s historic win at the US College championships, which now has her aiming for the Paris Olympics, followed by Bridges’s bid to qualify for the Commonwealth Games this July, several world sporting bodies have begun working on policies on the inclusion of elite trans athletes.
Asked what their policies are, Swimming Australia said they had asked FINA to come up with a ruling for all countries while the world cycling body, the UCI, moved to block Bridges from continuing to compete, preventing her from qualifying for the Wales women’s cycling team.
The sports professors believe that while trans children should be free to choose what category to play in, post-puberty young athletes should be limited to a category of their biological gender not their social identity, particularly in the interest of “safety” in contact sports because science proves males’ strength and power becomes too great.
In their papers, the sports scientists singled out governing bodies such as the AFL, stating they had “wilfully or naively overlooked, ignored or dismissed” published sports science literature, like the report that instigated World Rugby’s ban on transwomen playing “female rugby” and its decision to prioritise the safety of players.
“One would expect that other football codes in which players collide and tackle would take notice. However, it is intriguing that the 2020 Gender Diversity Policy of the AFL does not appear to be cognisant of any of the biological research,” they write.
“In advocating TW eligibility in its female code, the sport’s policy clearly discriminates against natal female players in presenting two facts of biology as being myths.”
“These promoted myths are; ‘Transgender players are a safety risk on the field’ and ‘Transgender women players will dominate cisgender women players because of testosterone (AFL, 2020, 4).”
“Extensive research cited in both World Rugby (2020) and UK Sports Councils (2021) policies debunk the first ‘myth’ and endocrinology research by Sonksen et al. (2018) and Coleman (2017) showed that testosterone is the androgynous hormone that from puberty especially builds muscle, skeletal, cardiovascular tissues in males to develop athletic capacity exceeding female capacity.”
Under the title “Level Playing Field”, the women point to the research from experts such as Dr Emma Hilton, a prize-winning developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, whose research details how trans women athletes will always have a physical advantage over their female counterparts.
“So big is the gap, there are 9000 males between 100m world record holders Usain Bolt and FloJo (former women’s 100m champion Florence Griffith Joyner),” Hilton has said. “So early does the gap emerge, the (Rio) female 100m Olympic champion, Elaine Thompson, is slower than the 14-year-old schoolboy record holder.”
The professors say that while the argument “often advanced” by advocates of “inclusion” is that as there is “no true level playing field” in any sporting competition because of different physiques, skills, and drive among athletes, adding the male biology to the mix creates insurmountable advantages.
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Activists masquerading as educators
The recent news from the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute (AMSI) that fewer and fewer students are choosing to study higher mathematics at Secondary school is yet another black mark against our education system.
Unfortunately, things are hardly better in Literature.
Victoria, which leads the way in progressive education, has seen students ditching literature in their droves. Over the last three years, the subject has dropped outside of the top 20 VCE subjects, with students preferring to study arguably less useful subjects such as ‘Food and Technology’ and ‘Media’.
This isn’t surprising given that the VCE’s booklist for literature in 2022 is heavily weighted toward modern texts that reveal a thoroughly unhealthy obsession with Marxism, Identity Politics, and Critical Race Theory. One-third of all texts on offer were published within the last 20 years, neglecting the remaining 5,000 years’ worth of literary history.
Students should be reading books by world-renowned authors like Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and George Orwell. Instead, they are reading about ‘power, gender, and obsession’ in Jeanette Winterson’s racy novel The Passion. Oscar Wilde is overlooked in favour of Shelagh Delaney’s exploration of ‘sexuality, homophobia, and racism’ in her production A Taste of Honey. Then there is Suzan-Lori Parks’ play Father Comes Home from the Wars that challenges ‘binary understandings of power’. Books like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which plumbs the depths of the human condition, have been replaced with Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise denouncing the ‘abuses of capitalism’.
When great books manage to make the cut, they are taught through an ideological lens. For instance, students studying Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey will look at the ‘obsessions of Georgian England’ and the ‘emergence of consumer culture’. In Tim Winton’s non-fiction work The Boy Behind the Curtain, ‘colonisation, capitalism, and politics’ are emphasised as key themes alongside ‘masculinity, gender, and family’.
Literature should not be used to send a political message to students. When learning is replaced with ideology, it undermines education. The study of literature should be about teaching students to think critically, not indoctrinating them with a progressive worldview.
Australian literature is notably absent from the 2022 VCE booklist.
While one-third of the texts were written by Australians, only half were actually set in Australia and the majority of these were poems. This reflects a dubious trend in education in which the idea of a global identity is promoted while the idea of an Australian identity is actively questioned.
Students should be reading classics like The Harp in the South by Ruth Park, A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute, or one of Banjo Paterson’s famous poems. Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which looks at the birth of a distinctly Australian identity in the lead-up to Federation, also deserves to be on the list. Even films such as Ladies in Black are of value because they address the rich cultural impact of immigration from Europe in the wake of the second world war. These works are all listed on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australian Cannon and are classic pieces of literature that construct a vivid picture of the Australian way of life.
The problem is far greater than the booklist itself. Activists masquerading as educators have infiltrated Australian schools. They have successfully been destroying the pre-existing model of education and imposing their own. The choice of texts in this year’s booklist for Victorian students is an undisguised exercise in social engineering which robs students of their cultural heritage.
Victorians are being sold short.
Students from Queensland and New South Wales will read many of the great books missing from Victoria’s VCE program. For instance, the QCE literature booklist offers texts like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Queensland students have a much broader range of top-quality works that does not include pointed summaries pushing a progressive agenda like in Victoria. The New South Wales HSC English program, which also involves the study of literature, looks at Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Short Stories by Henry Lawson, and Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw. This comes after a concerted effort in New South Wales to overhaul the Year 11 and 12 English syllabuses to include more ‘classic’ texts in 2017.
The solution for Victoria is simple. Give students the opportunity to read works of substance that look at the universal human experience rather than focusing solely on the issues faced by minority groups. More students would study literature if more classics with relatable life lessons were on the booklist, as is the case in New South Wales and Queensland.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/05/activists-masquerading-as-educators/
************************************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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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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