Jacinta Price LOSES IT at Anthony Albanese and says he has a 'tiny little mind' that can't tell the difference between a multi-millionaire African American basketballer and Aboriginal Australians living in the desert

Senator Jacinta Price has blasted the Prime Minister for his 'petty political stunt' after he met basketball legend Shaquille O'Neal to discuss the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with O'Neal after the NBA legend requested a meeting in Sydney to learn more about the referendum.

In a newsletter on Friday, Country Liberals Senator Jacinta Price slammed Albanese for 'trotting out an African American multi-millionaire' instead of listening to the Indigenous voices already in Parliament.

'Albo couldn't resist the opportunity to do a presser with a celebrity like O'Neal,' Ms Price wrote. 'In his tiny little mind he probably couldn't see the difference between a multi-millionaire African American basketballer and Aboriginal Australians living in remote and rural Australia.

Ms Price urged the Prime Minister to listen to Indigenous Australians already in parliament, lobby groups and head to remote communities to hear directly from them.

'There are REAL Aussies facing REAL problems that need REAL solutions, they don't need such shallowness with no substantive plans when they're being faced with such serious issues,' Ms Price added.

'They don't need an Indigenous Voice handpicked by the government, and they don't need an American celebrity's voice.

'Indigenous Australians have their own voices, they are many and varied and you should start listening to them.'

The Indigenous Senator labelled Albanese as a 'pathetic, attention-seeking, virtue-signalling PM' and noted he was missing from Shaq's Australian highlight's clip.

The newsletter ended with a postscript followed by the famous 'surprised Shaq' meme.

'P.S. When you realise you were just used to implement racial division in another country's constitution,' Ms Price wrote.

MS Price, the former deputy mayor of Alice Springs, was elected at the May 21 poll for the Northern Territory as a member of the Country Liberal Party and has openly criticised the government's Indigenous policies.

The Aboriginal senator donned a traditional headdress and rallied against what she called 'handouts' and 'symbolic recognition' for Indigenous Australians in her first speech to Parliament on July 27.

On August 24, O'Neil burst into the PM's press conference with his imposing 216cm frame dwarfing Mr Albanese, who stands at 173cm.

The towering basketball greeted the PM before gently pulling the hand of Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney to touch his forehead in a strange exchange.

'Hello Australia, nice to see you,' he told the press, before telling the PM and Senator Burney: Congratulations to you guys and I want you to know Shaq loves Australia, all right?'

The former NBA star was supposed to pledge his support for the referendum but instead delivered a couple of vague platitudes and quickly left.

He turned and left the room within 10 seconds of arriving, pausing only to remind the PM he would need him to 'give him that clearance too' to take home the boomerangs he had earlier been presented with.

The PM insisted the meeting with the basketball star had been a huge success, telling media later: 'It was a very positive conversation. He is interested in this country, his second visit to Australia.

'He knows that we are a warm and generous people, and he wanted to inform himself about what this [Voice] debate was about... by engaging directly with the Minister for Indigenous Affairs and myself as the Prime Minister.

'It is a really positive discussion about the way that Australia is seen in the world.'

Albanese said he hoped the NBA legend will lend his profile to promoting a campaign to support the referendum.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11172493/Jacinta-Price-slams-Anthony-Albanese-Shaquille-ONeal-stunt.html

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The Labor party is obsessed with brown skin

Not since Gulliver’s Travels has there been such an absurd visual image: a giant of a man towering over a land of pipsqueaks and midgets, as they grovel and fawn at his feet. The giant was of course a real one, the seven-foot-tall African American basketball player and occasional rap artist Shaquille ‘The Shaq’ O’Neal. The pygmies were of course metaphorical ones; the leading lights of the Albanese government; Labor’s Lilliputians.

As our editor pointed out on this page a week shy of the last federal election, in his warning to voters, an Albanese Labor government would comprise of ‘possibly the lowest calibre of intellects and individuals ever to assemble in a single federal parliamentary party room (other than the Greens, but that should go without saying)…’. Indeed, the events of the past week prove the accuracy of that prediction.

Only a moron would fail to see that there is no possible connection between this particular African American celebrity and those who are supposedly crying out for a ‘Voice’ to represent them in our parliament other than… the colour of his skin. There is literally nothing whatsoever that qualifies Mr ‘Shaq’ to speak on behalf of a single dispossessed or aggrieved indigenous Australian other than… the colour of his skin. There is no linkage, no matter how remote or tenuous or contrived, between a wealthy retired basketball player and the complexities involved in changing our constitution other than… the colour of his skin. There is no line that can be drawn in any credible way between alleged past atrocities committed against aborigines that can only be addressed through an entire new apparatus of government and a man who has made millions of dollars out of throwing a basketball around than… the colour of his skin.

Which leads to the inescapable conclusion – denied repeatedly by anxious commentators and politicians alike – that the Voice is about race, it is wholly about race, and it is about nothing but race.

But the stupidity does not stop there. As has been pointed out by numerous astonished commentators, Mr O’Neal is in Australia to promote an American gambling enterprise. In other words, The Shaq and his overseas sponsors make money out of a perfectly legal but – to many on the wowser Left – morally dubious activity that causes significant unhappiness (and worse) to many long-suffering individuals within the indigenous community.

Yet this inconvenient fact appeared to not bother Labor’s cheer squad one whit. Indeed, the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas, as woke as they come, tweeted – in response to the negative commentary that followed hard on the heels of the Prime Minister’s ridiculous stunt – ‘If you think Shaq doesn’t matter you haven’t lived in the multicultural suburbs of melb where I come from. He is a god.’

A god no less! A god who, it appears to have escaped Ms Karvelas’s attention, is happy with uber-misogynistic lyrics in his songs (yes, he’s a rapper as well) such as, ‘Taxiderm your bitch head, mount it on a wall’ and ‘We want the exotic, erotic ladies, not them toxic ladies that burn a lot’. So it can’t have been his songwriting skills that canonised Mr O’Neal in Ms Karvelas’s eyes.

What’s more, Shaquille O’Neal has gone on record praising Donald Trump. So it can’t have been his politics that conferred divine status upon him, either. What on earth could it have been?

Oh, that’s right… the colour of his skin.

Tanya Plibersek, another of Mr Albanese’s short-in-moral-stature ministers, decided that what qualified The Shaq for such a privileged role in promoting the Voice is his support for Black Lives Matter. Except, Mr O’Neal has been just as vocal in supporting the police against the supporters of BLM. So, no, it can’t be that. Which takes us back to her undoubted appreciation of… the colour of his skin.

Mr O’Neal is here to make a buck and we wish him well in that endeavour. That he was canny enough to use the preening, patronising racism of our left-leaning politicians and media to his own advantage is no indictment on him but a savage indictment of them. What this episode – savagely condemned by both Jacinta Price and Lidia Thorpe alike – demonstrates is that the Labor leadership team are as gullible and foolish as star-struck teenage girls.

Worse, much like Joe Biden – who famously proclaimed, ‘If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black’ – this mob are racist to their very core, unable to see anything beyond the black skin of an African American. Shame on them.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/labors-lilliputians

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"Voice": Part of the relentless push of the modern Left to foment racial hatred and instil grievances

Our beloved country under Labor’s proposed ‘Voice’ will become one gigantic apartheid state. Australia will boast apartheid and racial segregation from Broome to Ballina, from Cape York to Cockle Creek.

Racism, rather than mateship, is to be our overriding creed.

As former Fraser minister Neil Brown suggests, when the qualification for being part of a body such as the ‘Voice’ can be reached only by members of one race, the Aboriginal race, all other races are excluded. That is racism.

Ramesh Thakur reminds us, ‘It will be impossible to put the genie of racialised identity back in the bottle, ever.’ He goes on to quote US Chief Justice John Roberts, who said: ‘The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.’

It is a sentiment that was beautifully articulated by actor Morgan Freeman back in 2005 – before the Left decided to weaponise America’s dormant racial animosity as a modern political tool. Freeman silenced 60 Minutes host Mike Wallace who said, ‘Black history month you find…?’

‘Ridiculous,’ replied Freeman.

When asked why, Freeman added, ‘You’re going to relegate my history to a month? What do you do with yours? Which month is “white history month”? Well, come on, tell me?’

After Wallace clarifies that he is Jewish, Freedman continues, ‘Okay, which month is “Jewish history month”?’

‘There isn’t one.’

‘Oh… Do you want one? I don’t either. I don’t want a black history month. Black history is American history.’

Perplexed, Wallace asks, ‘How are we going to get rid of racism?’

‘Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.’

Morgan Freeman was right. Racism only exists if people say racist things and keep obsessing about race in every aspect of their lives. There is only one American history and there is only one Australian Constitution. Unfortunately, the prism of race has become a default setting thanks to the relentless push of the modern Left to foment racial hatred and instil grievances in order to garner votes.

Remember Joe Biden’s, ‘if you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black’ sneer?

We are at the point where the conversation about race has gone beyond parody and descended into outright lunacy. Time keeping is racist. Maths is racist. Golf balls are a product of colonial exploitation. It’s a miracle teachers are still allowed to write on blackboards with white chalk.

This absurdity has a darker side, such as white students being restricted in common spaces of some American colleges to avoid something called ‘white violence’. In Nigeria, white models have been banned from advertisements. And when it comes to the downright terrifying, groups in South Africa are walking around openly shouting, ‘Kill the Boer, kill the farmers!’ This is a call to murder based on race.

In Australia, we are blessed to have largely escaped racial violence and extreme racial tensions, but for how much longer? This is what concerns me.

The last few years have seen increasing agitation about race in this country. Under Labor, these racial differences could soon be enshrined in our Constitution. We are doing the very opposite of what Morgan Freeman and John Roberts advised.

Instead of ceasing our conversation about race, we have made it the number one national priority. It is all we talk about. Indeed, we are being forced to talk about it and everyone will have to keep talking about it in the lead-up to, during, and after the referendum – whatever the result.

Australia will end up talking about race forever.

This is not the path to reconciliation. I fear it is the beginning of a new Australia. An Australia that judges its citizens by the sins of their ancestors and colour of their skin. An Australia redefined through race and underpinned by a re-writing of history, malicious myth, untruths, propaganda, and parasitic activism that helps no one except itself. Even the ABC fact checkers had to admit that the often cited claim that Indigenous Australians were covered by the flora and fauna act – which did not classify them as human beings, and only changed when the Constitution was amended following the 1976 referendum – was a myth.

The ABC’s Stan Grant even managed to turn our most famous historical poem into a story of race, ‘I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges. It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains.’

This hyper-racialised future that pits Australia’s children against each other from the earliest age based on their skin colour, will be a scar on our politics.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/giving-racism-an-aussie-voice/

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The jackboot trampling Australians

George Orwell once wrote: ‘All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.’

He was someone who knew intimately the danger he was warning against, and also rightly said – even more ominously – via 1984:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

Sadly this is no longer just the stuff of fiction and dystopian novels. Our Orwellian overlords have done extremely well in keeping the masses under their jackboots by hyping up fear, panic, and paranoia over a virus. Two years of lockdown hell – especially here in Melbourne – has taken its toll. Many broken lives, and many lost lives – due to suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, business collapse, and so on – have been the ugly result.

I never want to go through all that again, as would be the case with all freedom-loving citizens who have had a gut-full of the Big State doing its best to emulate Big Brother. Thankfully, it is more or less over – or so it seems. But just as a rapacious carnivore wants ever more, after having gotten a taste for blood, so too our statists have loved the power and control they so easily were able to get over the past few years.

They do not want to give it up. Indeed, they want more.

A whole new era has been ushered in, and it is not just most politicians who love it so. Plenty of folks at the top of the food chain have been rubbing their hands with glee as they see their new world order so nicely coming about. It has been a dream run.

Here down under our power-hungry premiers are still intoxicated by their newfound powers. They not only want to stay in complete control over the masses but they want to punish any and all recalcitrants who have dared to not bow down and worship them and their draconian edicts.

Consider two recent examples of this. This is what the tyrants in Queensland are now up to:

Queensland’s Education Department is docking the pay of 900 school staff who did not get the Covid vaccine, saying that ignoring the mandate put others at risk. Staff members including teachers, teacher aides, administration staff, cleaners and school officers will have a ‘small-scale temporary reduction of one increment of pay’ for 18 weeks, the department said.

‘Approximately $25-$90 per week gross, proportionate to the normal pay that a staff member receives,’ a spokesperson from the department said. ‘The disciplinary penalty imposed on staff are individualised to each person’s circumstances.’ The staff received a letter this week informing them about the decision, however a 20-week period had been flagged with them.

The letter stated the action was ‘appropriate’ for the severity of the matter and hoped staff would follow future directions. A direction from the state’s Chief Health Officer required school staff to be vaccinated against Covid from November last year, but the decision was revoked in June and staff have since returned to the workplace.

Talk about dictatorship in action: ‘You will be punished for refusing our orders. You will be made an example of. You will suffer for this.’ As if they have not suffered already. Thankfully, there has been a little bit of pushback to this.

The article also says this:

Teachers Professional Association of Queensland secretary Tracy Tully said impacted teachers had been informed earlier this year they would face disciplinary action for not complying. ‘Whilst they were on suspended leave without pay, they received a letter saying that they are advising that there would be some disciplinary action, but they weren’t sure what it would be,’ she said.

‘By doing that, it actually puts people into a high state of alert and fear.’ Ms Tully said the teachers had already been penalised financially. ‘The teachers have already been disciplined by being stood down without pay,’ she said. Ms Tully said some teachers would appeal the decision with the Industrial Relations Commission.

University of Sydney social scientist specialising in vaccines Professor Julie Leask said the reduced pay policy was from a time when high vaccination coverage was crucial to reduce transmission but was now ‘outdated’. ‘It is unlikely to achieve what these policies should be trying to achieve, which is either to encourage vaccination or to ensure that others are protected from transmission,’ she said. Professor Leak said these policies only ‘alienate and drive mistrust’. ‘This policy appears to be more of an anger-based policy than an evidence-based,’ she said.

But another state is also getting in on the persecution, making life even more difficult for all those rebellious lepers there. As one news item reports:

WA Police say more than 50 officers are facing disciplinary action over their refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19 – as a legal challenge against the state’s vaccine mandates by one of their own was comprehensively rejected by a WA Supreme Court judge. Ben Falconer has spent almost nine months fighting against the mandates issued by WA Police to all its workers late last year – a battle that took so long that the mandates were lifted in the meantime.

That battle was lost on three fronts on Tuesday, when Justice Jeremy Allanson methodically picked apart arguments around irrationality, proportionality and bodily integrity. ‘It was not, in the words of counsel for the applicant, a maelstrom in a petri dish. The measures that were taken are undoubtedly extraordinary, but that does not establish that they lacked rationality so as, for that reason, to be beyond power,’ Justice Allanson said.

More Statist thuggery in action. As one social media mate of mine said:

Now that Ben Falconer lost his case, they want to punish everyone who didn’t agree to be force vaccinated. Disgraceful to ever mandate a vaccine, let alone a total blunder that doesn’t even prevent transmission, let alone everything we’ve learned since even then, but to go after them at this stage is just shameful. Let’s just keep making the wound bigger even after the threat has passed, and make sure our law enforcement officers know that their value is 0. Total shambles.

Quite right. All dictators thrive on fear, intimidation, and bullying. These Labor premiers – and others like them – have become experts in this. And the really scary thing is what we are seeing down under is no different from what we see in Communist China with its social credit system: good behaviour and good thought (as determined by the State) will be rewarded; bad behaviour and bad thought will be punished.

China and Australia are much closer than we thought – and in more ways than one.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/where-the-jackboot-never-fades/

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The incorrectness of coal

He spoke too soon. It’s always a gamble going out on a limb. But when Richard Marles, then a Labor shadow minister, spoke in 2019 about the (temporary) collapse of the world market for thermal coal he didn’t have to add that ‘at one level that’s a good thing’.

Shane Wright, the economics writer who pops up in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, also opted for a florid description: ‘coal is like candlesticks’. According to him, ‘the Candle Makers’ Union of old was wont to say 150 years ago: the light bulbs, they’ll never catch on’. So droll (and inaccurate) of him to predict the demise of coal in this way.

Now you could argue that Wright doesn’t count and Marles only a little bit, but Treasury also has it in for coal. Take the assumption from this year’s Budget delivered at the end of March – less than six months ago – that the price of thermal coal (used to generate electricity) would decline from $US320 per tonne to $US60 per tonne by the end of the September quarter 2022. (It’s currently trading close to $US400.)

You might think I have made a mistake typing these numbers. But no, in the span of just over a half a year, the Treasury expected the global price of thermal coal to fall by nearly three-quarters notwithstanding other predictions contained in the Budget that the outlook for the global economy was fairly rosy. (Precipitous declines in other commodity prices, apart from oil, were also anticipated.)

This was despite the fact that the war in the Ukraine was in full swing, the price of natural gas in Europe was skyrocketing (it had actually risen sharply before the war) and Europe was being forced to turn back to coal to maintain its output of electricity. Don’t Treasury officials read the international press? Or maybe they stopped reading after the glorious victory of the Glasgow Cop 26 and its faux commitments from some countries to get out of coal, including Germany.

There is surely an irony that Germany is now ramping up its coal-fired electricity generation – using brown coal, indeed – after it became clear that the flow of cheap natural gas from Russia could no longer be assured. The government has even reluctantly agreed to extend the lives of the last three remaining nuclear plants. That’s right, renewable energy doesn’t really cut it when a crisis emerges. Other countries to turn back to coal include Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK.

Actually, it seems a lifetime ago when the climate-fest was held in Glasgow. It was only last November and Boris was still at the helm. He was flitting back and forwards to convince some uncertain world leaders of the need to sign up for the net-zero journey – sadly, including our own prime minister, Scott Morrison. (It’s not clear how many other ministerial positions he also held at the time.)

As it turned out, it was probably the peak of climate fear-mongering, with all the likely urgers there to make themselves look important and/or to snaffle more government largesse. Our own Twiggy Forrest had his own stand providing free bumf about green hydrogen to anyone who walked by. Even Greta turned up after a long train ride, although her impact is clearly waning.

One of the biggest points of contention at the conference was the call to phase out coal, which the ‘greenest’ countries supported, or phase down, a position supported by Australia, India and even the US. Rather than go away without any ‘consensus’, the final decision was unanimous agreement that (unabated) coal should be phased down and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies should be removed.

What a joke those days of verbal wrangling turned out to be! Thermal coal is now at historically high prices; metallurgical coal is even being used to generate electricity with its price sometimes lower than that of thermal coal – unheard of; and global demand for thermal coal is expected to be higher next year than this year. Demand is particularly strong in China and India.

The International Energy Agency, well-known for its lop-sided bias towards anything renewable and away from coal, has had to admit that its predictions of the early demise of coal as a source of energy have been completely wrong. The term ‘stranded asset’ is unsurprisingly absent from its more recent reports.

We have also seen the predictions of the ESG crowd go pear-shaped as coal companies announce record profits and dividends. When mining giant Anglo American decided to peel off its thermal coal division into a separate company, Thungela Resources, there were green-tinged market analysts who estimated the value of the new company at zero and firmly told shareholders to sell. The price of Thungela Resources has risen by close to 600 per cent since listing and its dividend yield is 25 per cent!

Then there’s the story of BHP exiting thermal coal – that company is particularly in thrall to the ESG crowd – only to be outwitted by the cunning executives at Glencore. By taking the price risk during the period during which the transaction was being completed, Glencore as the buyer was able to fully pay for the purchase!

One of the most alarming aspects of these recent developments is the failure of the news to reach so many of our politicians, including those who are actually in power. The state energy ministers (they are right down the political food chain) have decided that coal can have no role in ensuring the stability of the electricity grid in the future. Federal Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen, simply doles out favours to green rent-seekers without understanding the full implications. But here’s the thing: there is breathless hypocrisy surrounding the behaviour of these politicians. The fact is that coal is propping up both the federal budget and the budgets of Queensland and New South Wales, in particular. In just the few months between this year’s budget and the end of the financial year, the bottom line of the federal budget was better by $25 billion because of higher commodity prices. The Queensland budgetary position would be dire were it not for coal royalties.

Evidently, it’s fine to bite the hand that feeds you if you are an environmentally concerned politician. No one in the mainstream media will pick you up, particularly those journalists who think that coal and candlesticks are the same.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/coal-is-bad

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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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