Australian Politics
Rolf Harris
There are very many articles currently in the media about the late Rolf Harris -- and all of them excoriate him for his pedophilia, which consisted mostly of non-violent sexual relationships with teenage females.
It seems to me however that we should consider that a man who was a beloved entertainer for most of his life was not wholly bad. I myself was no follower of his but I always wondered at his improbable skill with a large paintbrush.
So what should we think of him as an artist? Predictably, his art has been scorned by critics but I disagree. I just want to make the single point that his portrait of the Queen was exceptionally good. I have seen innumerable pictures and portraits of the queen but, in my view, the Harris portrait best captures her essence, which is the normal goal of portrait painters
The arty-farty establishment will never be able to find in themselves any praise for that picture. They will probably call it "chocolate-boxy". But that is their problem. Much that they praise seems moronic to me. But we are both entitled to our opinions. De gustibus non disputandum est
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Bravo! Albanese knows what a woman is
British broadcaster Piers Morgan asked the Prime Minister the question on his new show 'Piers Morgan Uncensored' on Sky News in early May.
Mr Albanese gave a very simple answer to the question, defining a woman as 'an adult female'.
'How difficult was that to answer?,' Morgan then asked.
'Not too hard. I was asked during the campaign actually, but I think that we need to respect people for whoever they are,' Mr Albanese said.
The 'what is a woman' question has become controversial in recent months, with many politicians struggling to answer in fear of upsetting critics or supporters of trans rights.
However Mr Albanese's answer continues to anger many in the transgender community, with some calling him a 'transphobe' and claiming he is using talking points echoed by TERF (Trans-exclusionary radical feminist).
The CEO of Equality Australia, Anna Brown, suggested that the prime minister shouldn't answer a question designed to 'attack' transgender people.
'But when any leader is asked a question designed to attack trans women, they should first call it out for what it is,' she told media.
'They can instead speak to trans people in Australia and directly let them know that they will not be part of the punching down.'
Greens MP Stephen Bates said the prime minister needed to 'get a spine and stop mumbling platitudes in an attempt to placate the transphobes'.
'You don't get to march with us in Mardi Gras and then ignore us when things get tricky for you,' he wrote.
During the interview, Albanese was also grilled by Morgan on the issue of transgender athletes in women's sport.
'That's an example in that the sporting organisations are dealing with that issue,' Mr Albanese said. 'My view is the sporting organisations should deal with that issue.'
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Gender transition insurance cover cut for GPs
That would effectively bar them from assisting with gender transitions. They may be able to find another insurer but that may not continue.
One of the country’s biggest medical insurers will no longer cover private practitioners prescribing gender-affirming care to adolescents, in a move that could leave young people languishing on already-stretched public waiting lists.
MDA National, one of four major medical indemnity providers insuring GPs and other private practitioners against legal claims, updated its policy this month to exclude cover for claims “arising from aspects of gender transitioning treatment for under 18-year-old patients”.
Dr Michael Gannon, the organisation’s president, said young people experiencing gender dysphoria should be initially assessed by multidisciplinary teams in hospital – not by GPs.
“This is the same hospital system that is very, very comfortable placing greater demands on general practitioners,” he said. “It’s simply not fair to ask individual GPs in the suburbs or the bush to be making these complex decisions on their own.”
Gannon said the decision was made in response to legal cases overseas, including the high-profile inquiry into, and subsequent closure of, Britain’s only children’s gender clinic.
“We’re not taking a moral stance or an ethical stance – this is very much an insurance decision,” he said. “We don’t think we can accurately and fairly price the risk of regret.”
Dr Michelle Dutton, a GP in Fitzroy North in Melbourne, said she was leaving MDA National for a different provider before the change takes effect on July 1. “It’s disappointing ... I need to be covered for the work that I do as a GP, and if that work is no longer covered, I need to find a different provider,” she said. “I would have changed anyway because I fundamentally disagree with the decision.”
Dr Portia Predny, a GP at Sydney’s Rozelle Medical Centre and vice-president of the trans health advocacy body AusPATH, said she was concerned the change would further limit the options available to transgender adolescents by discouraging private practitioners from treating them.
“There are very few clinics who actually service this group of patients,” she said. “There’s already barriers to care for this age group – this is care that’s often life-saving, and that’s not an exaggeration.”
She said AusPATH had been reassured by two other major insurers, Avant and Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPs), that they would continue to cover GPs prescribing hormones to transgender patients under 18.
Predny said GPs were already working with other healthcare providers, such as psychiatrists and endocrinologists, to provide safe care to young patients.
“To state that the only way for people to access interdisciplinary care is through a multidisciplinary clinic [at a hospital] is misleading,” she said.
NSW has publicly funded gender clinics at Westmead Hospital and Maple Leaf House in Newcastle.
As of March 2023, there were 139 clients aged under 25 waiting for treatment at Maple Leaf House, though a spokesperson said not all those patients would be seeking medical-affirming care.
In Victoria, the Monash Health Gender Clinic is the only specialist public service available to transgender people between the ages of 16 and 18.
Associate Professor Ruth McNair, from the University of Melbourne’s department of general practice, said requiring every young person experiencing gender dysphoria to go through a public gender clinic first would place an even greater strain on waiting lists. “The system is overloaded,” she said. “Kids are left with nowhere to go.”
McNair said GPs who prescribe hormones to underage patients were already very cautious, and any patients with complex clinical histories, such as pre-existing mental health problems or past trauma, were urgently referred to public clinics for specialist treatment.
For young trans people, early support ‘could save a life’
“I consider the risk to be higher if I’m blocking a young person from care,” she said. “What’s the real risk? It’s to the health of the young person.
“It’s a bit short-sighted really. They’re trying to capture the [minority] of cases [where patients regret].”
MDA National will still cover GPs providing repeat prescriptions for gender-affirming hormones and general healthcare for patients with gender dysphoria.
The company said the decision would affect “well under a hundred” of its 40,000 members.
In 2021, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists released a position statement defining a “gender-affirmative approach” as one that accepts rather than questions a child’s statements about their gender identity.
In a rare local case, a Sydney woman is suing her psychiatrist for professional negligence relating to her gender transition, which she began at age 19.
However, the regret rate for people who medically transition in childhood or adolescence remains low.
Last year, a Dutch study published in The Lancet found 98 per cent of 720 transgender participants who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued their treatment into adulthood.
A 2021 systematic review of 27 studies with a combined 7928 transgender patients found about 1 per cent expressed regret after undergoing gender-affirming surgeries.
Eloise Brook, the policy and communication manager at the Gender Centre in Annandale, said the decision jeopardised the “hard work” and investment that has been put into making gender-affirming care more accessible through family GPs.
“This is a moment where I’m fearful for families,” she said. “Insurance should not be the space in which medical decisions should be made.”
Dr Mitch Squire, a GP who provides gender-affirming care to adolescents at his clinic in Sydney’s inner west, said he would have no choice but to move providers if his insurer no longer covered him for the service.
“It would be a pretty straightforward decision for me,” he said. “There is a small but quantifiable regret rate, and given that changes can be permanent, that cover is absolutely essential.”
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Bleaching the truth about the reef
For years, the Australian public has been subjected to an unremitting narrative that the Great Barrier Reef faced an existential threat from climate change. Last year a UN-backed mission concluded the world’s biggest coral reef system should be placed on a list of endangered world heritage sites saying, climate change presented a ‘serious challenge’.
Who knew that last year, to very little fanfare, the Australian Institute of Marine Science found, despite six serious bleaching events since 2016, coral cover was the highest it had been in its 36 years of monitoring? Certainly not the Australian public. An Australian Environment Foundation survey of 1,004 Australians found only three per cent were aware of this reality.
Following a relentless campaign of formal complaints by former prime minister Kevin Rudd, the Australian Communication and Media Authority obligingly censured a segment on Sky News’s Outsiders programme for failing to mention that the reef’s splendid recovery was still at risk.
Perpetuating the image of a threatened Barrier Reef is critical for those who see global warming as a vehicle for social change. They worry that the AIMS report could lead impressionable adults to question the claims of climate change ‘experts’, thereby undermining the credibility of emissions abatement policies.
Australia’s state broadcaster, the ABC, is a serial worrier. Despite its declining audiences, it remains a reliable and important megaphone and a go-to for like-minded political advocates like the Bureau of Meteorology. It dutifully carried the AIMS report along with an environmentalist’s warning, ‘that unless fossil-fuel emissions are drastically cut, the reef remains in danger from rising temperatures and more mass-bleaching events’. In other words, don’t be misled.
Fear is an important weapon in the centralist’s arsenal and the ABC, and the mainstream media generally, are willing accomplices in uncritically spreading it. That’s not a conspiracy theory but reality. In this echo chamber only one view is allowed. After all, weighty issues like global warming, healthcare, education and pronouns are beyond the ken of most ordinary people and should be left to experts.
Thomas Jefferson was right. ‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance’. That vigilance is visibly absent. Indeed, bribed with their own money and falling prey to a divisive political agenda, the public has become ever more obedient and dependent upon government. Likewise business. With the media ideologically aligned, carrots and coercion are deployed to control it. Political careerists conflate their desire for power with the national interest and recruit like-minded bureaucrats to further regulate an already over-regulated society. It’s a self-perpetuating coalition which thrives on controls and complacency.
Australia may not yet be China where there is a facial recognition camera for every five people, but as government expands, Australia’s political class is demonstrating an insatiable taste for power and, with it, a growing contempt for the rule of law.
For example, during Covid-19, governments seized extraordinary powers when they employed apps and QR codes to collect personal data. It was on the basis that information gathered was for ‘public health purposes only’. It would be destroyed 28 days after collection.
We now know that the Victorian government lied about access and tried to suppress a secret Supreme Court ruling which confirmed personal data did not have ‘absolute protection’. Then acting premier, Jacinta Allan, reassured Victorians that the government’s repeated and deliberate attempts to hide the information were to avoid a ‘baseless scare campaign’– never wrong, never accountable.
Still, there was no public outrage. Nor in South Australia when it was revealed its government had secretly kept personal data beyond the mandated four weeks. Nor in Western Australia after its police had used this information as part of criminal investigations. Where is that data now?
Contempt for the law and disdain for civil liberties thrived under Covid. Doctors who put their professional judgement ahead of health bureaucrats’ advice were threatened with disciplinary action if they undermined the national vaccination programme. Contrary views, however well-credentialed, were characterised as sourced from anti-vaxxers’.
Now it has come to light that the regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, knew that vaccines carried greater risks than it disclosed. Rather than ‘undermine public confidence’, it withheld vital causality data from health professionals and the public. This included hiding the deaths of two children, aged seven and nine, who died after Pfizer vaccinations.
In such an environment, wherever political authority can be established or expanded, it will be. Like the new monetary policy board which will politicise the Reserve Bank and deprive it of its traditional independence. Just one more subtle level of control.
Not even the justice system escapes political influence. The trial of Cardinal George Pell and, the ACT’s Sofronoff inquiry into the conduct of criminal justice agencies, demonstrate how the political vibe can override the presumption of innocence and the rules of evidence.
With their parents and grandparents behaving like frogs in slowly boiling water, seemingly in denial of the unrelenting intrusion of government into every aspect of their lives, younger generations believe this is the way things are around here. Indoctrinated in the classroom about their evil colonial heritage and the prospect of an uninhabitable planet and, the need for a more ‘caring’, and a ‘fairer’ society, they accept big government is good whilst believing that capitalism leads to selfishness and environmental destruction.
Banking on continued public complacency, Australian governments have gone where, outside of emergencies, they have never gone before. The blurring of lines between the major parties along with a divide-and-rule political agenda have created a de facto one-party state where opposition to the continuing erosion of civil liberties is not tolerated.
But in the end, even boiling frogs start to jump. When that time will come is difficult to determine. However, whenever it will be, Covid emergencies and climate change directives may have so weakened the public’s resilience and determination it may be unable to escape the pot. In which case, investing in facial recognition camera makers may be a wise precaution.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/truth-bleaching/ ?
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Who is an Aborigine? The single most important question about the Voice
A provision in the constitution that references, or rather preferences, a certain group of people, must make it beyond doubt who those people are. If the current criterion – self-identification – is applied, that would open up a can of worms. We need to know who exactly qualifies as an Aborigine and how those persons establish their bona fides. For example, would any degree of Aboriginality in one’s ancestry suffice? If so, then the Aboriginal population can only continue to expand indefinitely, to the point where this will become less and less about disadvantage and more and more about entitlement. If not, then where is the cut-off? 50 per cent Aboriginality? 25 per cent? 12.5 per cent? Wherever it is set, someone is going to be aggrieved. To further complicate the issue, prominent Aboriginal academic, Dr Suzanne Ingram, suggests that as many as 300,000 of the currently reported Aboriginal population of 800,000 may not be genuine.
If this issue is not adequately addressed in the referendum question itself, that alone should be a deal-breaker. I cannot stress this enough. It cannot be left up to parliament, or worse the High Court, to define, expand or contract this demographic at whim. If the Voice goes into the constitution, then it must be the constitution (by means of a referendum) that defines and redefines – over time and as necessary – who is an Aborigine.
To underscore this point, let me refer to Section 15 of the constitution. This covers casual Senate vacancies. The gamesmanship that followed Gough Whitlam’s political opportunism in appointing Senator Lionel Murphy to the High Court caused this section to be rewritten in 1977. That reworked Section 15 is now the most voluminous and prescriptive section of the Constitution, occupying some two pages. My point is this: if a simple matter such as the filling of a casual Senate vacancy requires such a detailed treatment in the constitution, how can we possibly leave the definition of who is an Aborigine so open-ended? It will further entrench tribalism within the Aboriginal community and will become a lawyer’s picnic.
One final point. Chris Kenny claims the Voice is not a race-based division. That may not be the explicit intent, but the outcome is the same. Only members of one particular race may aspire to sit on this Voice or to vote for it. Dr Suzanne Ingram – well-educated, well-remunerated and residing comfortably in Sydney – may sit on or vote for it. Dave Price – married to an Aboriginal woman, the father of Aboriginal children, a long-term resident of Alice Springs and directly and personally affected by its special problems – may not. That sounds like racial division to me.
We should want no part of it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/who-is-an-aborigine/ ?
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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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