The banality of Leftism

"Semper", the magazine put out by students at the Univresity of Queensland, has been going for a long time. I even had a couple of things in it back in the '60s. Its main virtue is that it can occasionally be funny. In good student fashion it also tries to be new and daring but mainly ends up being simply offensive when it tries that.

It has just had a success of sorts in that direction. A writer there has been offensive enough to be noticed by the real press. He found a way of being offensive about the Queen. He put up a broadly Marxist critique of her position.

But how banal can you get? A Marxist view of monarchy could hardly be more hackneyed and timeworn. There is zero new, original or interesting in it. There have always been far-Leftists sneering and snarling at monarchy and the British monarchy in particular. In its own terms it was a failure for Semper to publish something so boring

It was also however an exhibition of incomprehension. The writer clearly has no understanding of why millions of people shed tears at the death of the Queen. How sad to have such a large gap in one's understanding of the world. Psychopathic insensitivity, perhaps? He has plenty of precursors on the Left in that case

The late Queen Elizabeth was labelled as the “banality of evil” in an opinion piece published in a leading Queensland university’s controversial student magazine a day after her death.

University of Queensland’s student magazine Semper Floreat published the piece titled “Goodbye to the Queen of Nothing, Really” on September 9.

The article was written by student Duncan Hart who described himself as a writer for left wing newspaper Red Flag, which was established by the Socialist Alternative.

In the article, Mr Hart labelled Queen Elizabeth as the “banality of evil” whose “personality and agency were absolutely irrelevant to history”.

Mr Hart said he stood by the article and said he planned to stand alongside First Nations Australians in protest against the monarchy on Thursday morning.

“In reality, there was nothing extraordinary about the ex-Queen at all. Her entire life was an example of the banality of evil, of a person whose personality and agency were absolutely irrelevant to history,” Mr Hart’s article read.

“While the ex-Queen presided over innumerable symbolic events and as the head of state for multiple nations, her entire role and social position was and will continue to be predicated on the total inactivity of the monarch.

“The monarchy as an institution is nothing more than a monument to social parasitism, of the concepts that immense wealth and privilege belongs to a few God-given rights while the majority of us scrape by with whatever we can.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/queensland-education/tertiary/queen-elizabeth-labelled-evil-in-controversial-university-of-qld-magazine/news-story/d64e41d46322e2da89d99e0aa3d2e818

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The domestic violence gravy train

Bettina Arndt

Vimala, a retired Indian university lecturer, looked forward to spending time with her son, a Sydney-based doctor, his wife, and newborn grandchild. But it quickly became apparent that things weren’t going well between her son and his wife.

Twice during her brief visit, her daughter-in-law called the police alleging domestic violence over trivial arguments with her husband. On one occasion she decided she wanted beef for dinner and demanded her husband provide it. Vimala explains: ‘Her fridge was stacked with chicken, fish, and lamb but she decided she needed the beef straight away, and threatened to call the police if my son didn’t give in.’

The young woman had a standard response anytime her husband asked her to do something which displeased her: ‘I know all the services and who to call if you tell me to do something I don’t like.’

The woman had acquired a friend who worked in a DV support service – a friend who proved useful when she returned with her child after a trip to India to be met by social workers who whisked her off to a women’s shelter. This affluent doctor’s wife received six months’ accommodation via the shelter while their support team orchestrated a mighty family law battle over custody, fueled by her allegations of domestic violence.

The well-oiled system set up to support DV victims all just rolled out: legal aid; support services; victim’s compensation. Meanwhile, her husband fought to maintain his medical practice despite his violence order restrictions and his wife spreading news of his ‘violence’ throughout the small community. He’s a lucky man – in the end he managed to fund the half-a-million-dollar legal battle and now has majority care of his son.

Vimala wrote saying that from an outsider’s perspective, the services available to Australian women claiming to be domestic violence victims are just unbelievable.

Most people have no idea of the extent that domestic violence benefits have mushroomed over the last few decades. The industry has set up an immense system of special services costing our community billions of dollars which no one dares question.

That’s because, like all such schemes, this huge juggernaut is based on a kernel of truth, a very genuine need that everyone would support. Who’d quarrel with providing proper support for a frightened woman escaping a dangerous man?

Our federal government spent 3 billion over the past decade on the safety plan to protect ‘women and their children’, with untold billions added from all the fundraising by community groups, private companies, and organisations across the country. People rightly dig deep for this important cause.

But the fortunate truth is only tiny numbers of women in this country are actually in peril. Official statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Personal Safety Survey show that just over 1 per cent of women have been physically assaulted by their partners in the past year. Yet this critical fact is inevitably swamped by statistics which include emotional, psychological, financial abuse, and threats of violence for women over their lifetimes, to give a truly frightening impression of widespread risk for women.

The vast majority of these women are not in a dangerous situation. The public doesn’t realise they are forking out mainly to help women who are very rarely under threat. They may have unpleasant partners who are reluctant to pay their credit card bills, but there’s just no logic for the billions being spent to ‘keep them safe’.

Yet we have created this moral hazard, inviting all these women to think of themselves as victims and hence eligible for the services now on offer. The result is on display in the inflated figures from police reports, blown out by numerous domestic violence allegations which serve to gain strategic advantage in family law battles. Many women are encouraged to make such allegations by lawyers or friends telling them they are genuine victims and deserve special treatment in the family court system.

No evidence of physical violence is required to make such an allegation. Any experience of emotional abuse or an alleged fear of violence is enough to set the ball rolling, with the ‘victim’ eligible for the truckload of financial payouts, cheap services, and support.

There’s widespread concern in our community that for every dollar spent on genuine domestic violence victims, vast sums end up in the hands of women who are at no real risk. I’ve made videos with two police officers speaking out about this rorting of the system, here and here.

The list of domestic violence payments and handouts is really something else. Take a look at these government special benefits which are usually available only to female victims. These payouts simply require asking someone to support the victim’s story – like a local DV centre, doctor, or police report – systems set up to automatically believe the woman and treat men as potential perpetrators.

Our state and federal governments are falling over each other to display their generosity towards our culture’s most favored victim

Meanwhile, male victims have nowhere to go – there’s not a single government-funded centre offering refuge to men. Boys 14 and older are not welcome in women’s refuges which take in their mums and siblings. Yet, while vulnerable males are ignored, women can have pets are taken care of by the RSPCA.

Forget about those leaky boats, long stays on Christmas Island, and grovelling appeals to immigration courts. The fast and sure way for newcomers to arrange permanent residency is a domestic violence claim. Law firms everywhere are touting for business in this lucrative field, as I discussed some years ago on YouTube with law professor Augusto Zimmermann.

Naturally, the Woke big end of town is keen to dole out investors’ dollars to this worthy cause.

There are special arrangements for tenants in rental agreements.

The push is on for 10 days paid domestic violence leave, a stunning impost on business which the Australian Chamber of Commerce estimates could cost a cool $2 billion annually. The only proof required is the usual tick-a-box system dependent on victims’ stories which employers don’t dare challenge.

That whole list of perks palls into insignificance compared to the advantages of domestic violence victim status in family law battles. An unproven allegation of domestic violence sets women up on a path that allows for smooth sailing throughout family law proceedings, creating enormous, costly obstacles for their partners which often end up destroying the father’s relationships with his children and robbing him of much of his life’s earnings.

Often men discover a divorce is on the cards only when police appear at their door announcing an apprehended violence order – which means they aren’t allowed in their homes, and are often denied contact with their children, severing close connections until matters are resolved in the courts, mums firmly established as the primary parent with dad on the outer.

That’s just the beginning. The family law system favours women alleging domestic violence in any number of ways: seizing of the marital home; free legal aid and court advocacy services; denying perpetrators cross-examination of victims; and setting aside the rebuttable presumption of shared parental responsibility creating major impediments to a father’s ongoing relationships with children.

The couple is excluded from attending what is normally compulsory mediation and other alternate non-adversarial pathways; victims usually retain a larger slice of the assets in financial settlements plus the man labelled a perpetrator encounters profound prejudice through the family law process.

This extraordinary level of incentive will tempt even the best of women to take advantage of these services. After all, most women heading for divorce have experienced the threats and harsh words common to marital unhappiness that are now labelled ‘domestic violence’. So, she’s not making a false allegation, is she? Just rightly claiming emotional abuse.

Enough already? You may think the job is done – surely the system is now primed to offer every possible protection to domestic violence victims.

Not so fast. The sisterhood is busy thinking up new ways that women can use to make life hell for an ex accused of domestic violence. Like domestic violence registers, online lists of men accused of domestic violence.

Some years ago, one of these was published in Australia, but then some bright bloke had the brilliant idea of hacking into the register and publishing details of the women who’d dobbed the men in. Unsurprisingly the register immediately disappeared.

But there’ll always be more, like the electronic surveillance of perpetrators being used in some states, forcing them to wear monitoring devices.

The endless promotion of this cause is truly impressive. But how shameful that so little of this massive effort and expenditure protects those genuinely in need.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-domestic-violence-gravy-train/

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Greens: Don't bother us with facts

Are Greenies EVER interested in the facts?

Imagine being a political party that obsesses about identity-driven virtue signalling as the most important qualification for Parliament – and then not even being able to get that right.

The NSW Greens have been forced to apologise – not once, but twice – for seeking donations to elect the first Indigenous woman to State Parliament.

The Greens – whose commitment to solar panels and wind turbines is matched only by their obsession with race and gender – failed to notice that two Indigenous women had already been elected.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on them. We live in an age where the chief medical officer cannot say for certain what a woman is.

Authenticating aboriginality is even more complicated, involving proof of ancestry and confirmation of acceptance by the Indigenous community.

Nevertheless, when identity politics is your raison d’etre you’d expect the Greens to be at least competent.

A fundraising email for Greens Upper House candidate Lynda-June Coe told supporters ‘there’s never been a First Nations woman in the NSW Parliament’.

Except that wasn’t true, and if the Greens devoted half as much time to studying history as they did to cultivating grievance, they would have known that.

In defence of the Greens, maybe we can agree it was their truth. But I digress.

The email went on to ask supporters to donate $25 so ‘we can change that’.

It took someone on Twitter to point out that Linda Burney, an Indigenous woman who is currently the Indigenous Affairs Minister, had served as the member of Canterbury for 13 years before entering federal politics.

The Greens issued an apology on Tuesday, but virtue-signallers-gonna-virtue-signal. So the apology went like this:

‘This email was incorrect and a correction and apology has been emailed this afternoon.

‘The email intended to note only that Lynda-June would be the first First Nations person in the Upper House of NSW Parliament.’

All was not lost. See what they did there? While voting Green wouldn’t result in the first First Nations woman in Parliament, it would result in the first First Nations woman in the Upper House of Parliament.

Except that wasn’t true either, so the Greens’ apology had about as much value as the Greens’ climate policy – net zero.

Auburn MP Lynda Voltz – whose grandfather was Indigenous and grew up on the St Clair Aboriginal Mission in Singleton – was elected to the NSW Upper House in 2007 and served for 11 years.

So the Greens, having already apologised, were then forced to apologise for the apology. Their economic policy was beginning to make more sense!

Greens NSW State Election Campaign co-ordinator Andrew Blake wrote:

‘Greens NSW unreservedly apologise to Ms Burney and Ms Voltz and acknowledge the work they have done for the people of NSW during their time in NSW parliament.’

In claiming that the Greens were the one group you could count on to recognise Indigenous women, the Greens had become the one group that failed to recognise Indigenous women.

Awkward.

All of which leaves the Greens with an enormous problem.

‘Help elect the third First Nations woman to the NSW Parliament’ doesn’t have quite the same appeal as their original virtue signalling strategy.

The Greens will now be forced to find another reason to recommend their candidate, or perhaps find a different candidate that belongs to a smaller identity group.

Alternatively, the Greens could just stick to policy (except they aren’t much good at that either)

https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/greens-a-masterclass-on-how-to-fail-at-identity-politics/ ?

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Sydney: no petrol or diesel cars, no gas, no future

New South Wales is in for an energy nightmare, and it makes no difference whether they vote Labor, Green, or Kean at the next election.

There is a plot underway to ban the purchase of all petrol and diesel cars and outlaw gas connections in new properties.

Too bad, I guess, when the next blackout comes along. I’ll be boiling water on the stove and having a hot dinner – the rest of the state will be staring at the darkness eating a packet of biscuits.

Before we get into the nonsense, I have a question for Labor’s Anthony Albanese.

If cutting our emissions in half by 2030 is the government’s chief priority, why has Labor decided to import 400,000 new people next year? How many services and privileges are the rest of us going to lose in order to maintain our existing standard of living and endure the emissions cut with all these additional ‘carbon units’ wandering around?

No really, Albanese. Are we saving the planet or pushing toward a ‘Big Australia’ which requires ‘Big Infrastructure’ for your union mates?

As far as anyone can determine, the Labor government is deliberately making the quality of life for Australians paper-thin so that we can be comfortably bundled up into a Treasury report.

The nonsense specific to NSW is coming out of the Committee for Sydney thinktank – also known as ‘a collection of people paid to sit around and make everyone’s lives miserable’.

The Decarbonising Sydney report reads more like a guide to return to the stone age:

Sam Kernaghan, the Committee’s Resilience Director, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report (August 2021) had put an intense focus on what a warming world would look like, and the need to accelerate climate action.

‘We still have time, but not much,’ he said.

‘We can’t wait until 2050. We need to set ambitious and optimistic goals for 2030 – goals that show leadership and set the direction.

‘These actions will help Sydney play its part in combating Climate Change, but they’ll also provide benefits to our communities, economy, and environment – from improved air quality to lower household bills and more resilient energy grids that are better able to cope with the extremes of weather that we can expect to face in coming years.’

Utter fantasy. The more ‘green’ our grid goes, the higher our energy costs climb. This is a worldwide pattern that some call ‘teething issues with transition’ but the rest of name as ‘a permanent flaw’ that is opening like the Mariana Trench beneath our feet.

The Sydney Committee’s plan is to funnel as much money as possible into the billionaire renewables barons. If their business model is so successful, why are the increasingly poor public paying for it?

Why hasn’t anyone asked the Committee what they plan to do about global shortages of raw materials that currently prohibit the creation of their energy dreams?

It’s almost like the ‘thinktank’ didn’t ‘think’ about any of the real-world practicalities and instead prefers to prattle off dangerous idiocy from their gilded city cages without having any clue that their comfort comes off the back of coal, oil, and gas.

Their plan (if you can call it that) is to halve Sydney’s emissions by 2030. We could probably achieve that by putting a stop on the flight plans and unnecessary mansions of Sydney’s richest businessmen and politicians, but in a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ reality, only the peasants will suffer.

Banning gas to households is stupid and petty. The government is not doing it to ‘save the planet’ – they are doing it because they desperately need the gas reserves to prop up their failing renewables grid. They don’t want to come out and say that because it involves admitting that solar and wind require fossil fuels to work.

If politicians opened a few nuclear plants, citizens could have as much cheap gas as they wanted, instead, panic is setting on the energy industry as unreliable renewables shake grid stability to its core.

If you do any sort of real work in this country, banning petrol and diesel cars is going to be a catastrophe. The state government wants vehicles sales to be 100 per cent EV, but as of 2021, there were only around 10,000 in the whole state (because no one wants them).

As pointed out earlier, the world doesn’t have the resources to build these cars and Australia doesn’t have the power grid to charge them.

At the same time, NSW is pushing for solar on homes made from the same limited resources that EVs require. The natural consequence is what we are already seeing around the world – huge price increases in EVs and renwables. Their costs are growing in tandem and they have no price ceiling as resources dry up.

Owning your own car is soon to become a fantasy for the middle and working classes.

The report says as much. One of their priorities is a ‘shift to car-sharing’ that says:

‘In the future [of Sydney] people are going to use a car when they need one without having to own one. Car-sharing (as represented today by companies like GoGet) and ride-sharing (as represented today by companies like Uber) are the early examples. As the vehicle fleet evolves toward autonomous electric cars; it’s simply not going to make sense for people to own their own cars when they can summon one to get where they want to be at any time. The net result will be a massive gain of urban space as all of the street space and garages can be converted to new uses. Sydney should do everything in its power to support this transition.’

They also want to see a ‘dynamic road pricing plan’ to make your trip to the city even more unaffordable.

This will make the eco-fascists happy. Their goal is not to facilitate a green ‘change’ to our transport sector, it’s to strip cars away from the population to improve their Net Zero goals. While those penning these thinktank travesties live in the middle of the cities, half a block from civilisation, everyone else in the country is going to have to go out and find themselves a horse and cart – that is, provided you’re still allowed to own farm animals.

Where is the Liberal government? They are supposed to protect the people from this kind of selfish, reckless, bureaucratic garbage.

If you are wondering where all of this comes from, Kernaghan, the man behind the virtuous plan, worked with the Chief Resilience Officers ‘across Australia, New Zealand and across Asia to develop and implement comprehensive city resilience strategies as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Network’.

Most of the links for the 100 Resilient Cities Network no longer go anywhere, with their webpages long-dead, just like our cities will be if we keep pursuing the thought bubbles of Utopian ideologues.

http://spectator.com.au/2022/09/sydney-no-petrol-or-diesel-cars-no-gas-no-future/

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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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