Australian Politics
A festival of hate from "Yes" voters
The Albanian should be ashamed at what he has unleashed in Australia by his racist proposal. A caring national leader would want his people to live in harmony with one another and Australians have been pretty good that way. Albo has instead unleashed hatred between people in his pre-occupation with race and his desire to favour forever one particular race
My only consolation is that the reports below seem isolated. When and where I voted recently (No!) everything was peaceful. The only holdup was that I had to wait a bit for my democracy sausage. And I enjoyed it undisturbed
Wild footage has captured the moment a Yes and No supporter clashed as tensions continue to flare over the Voice to Parliament referendum.
The pair scuffled at an information booth on Maryland Street at Stanthorpe, in the Southern Downs Region of Queensland, on September 30.
Footage showed a male Yes voter striking up a threatening pose as he towered over an elderly female No campaigner while children walked in the background.
The No supporter was wearing a board with the words: 'Reject racism. Vote No.'
The Yes voter nonsensically tells the woman that he is over a century old and has died numerous times.
'I'm over 110. I've died nine times in a row,' he claims before noticing that he is being filmed by another man.
The Yes supporter then turns on the camera man and tries to slap the camera out of the man's hand.
The cameraman warned: 'I'll deck you.' 'So this is what the Yes voters do,' he continued.
The footage was shared to Facebook where social media users were quick to condemn the Yes supporter.
'It's sad to see how some people behave, just because it doesn't sit with you the way others think and vote doesn't give you the right to behave like that,' one wrote.
In another video filmed at a Tawoomba pre-polling place, in Southern Queensland, MP Garth Hamilton is approached by an elderly man who proceeds to swear at him.
Mr Hamilton, who was campaigning for the No vote at the time, wishes the man a good day after he is sworn at, only for the man to turn around and continue shouting.
'I can't have a good day mate, I've already had a f***ing bad day and coming here to vote in something that is only a matter for First Australians is b***** wrong,' he snaps.
The elderly man walks away while continues to shout obscenities as Mr Hamilton calmly turns his back.
Other instances of violence have been reported around the country which have stemmed from the Voice.
A heated confrontation between Yes and No supporters at an early voting centre in Ipswich resulted in one man being hospitalised and another arrested.
The confrontation, initially a shouting match, escalated into a violent incident at the North Ipswich early voting centre in inner Brisbane.
Police claim that at around 11:30 am on October 3rd, a 30-year-old man engaged in a verbal argument with a 65-year-old man, which later turned physical when the younger man assaulted the older individual.
The 65-year-old man was taken to Ipswich Hospital for treatment.
The elderly man is understood to have suffered serious head injuries.
Another incident occurred when an Aboriginal man who went to vote early in Rockhampton, in Central Queensland, was humiliated by Yes campaigners in front of his wife and daughter.
'I went to vote early and as I'm going to the voting place, I was abused because I took a pamphlet from the No vote and I didn't take a pamphlet from the Yes vote,' he told Brisbane 4BC host Sofie Formica.
Three weeks ago, more than 1,000 No supporters visited the Adelaide Convention Centre to hear Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and other No campaigners speak at the Fair Australia rally.
But the event was gatecrashed by Yes campaigners who called attendees 'racist'.
Liberal senator Alex Antic filmed a crowd of protesters who screamed at him as he walked into the event.
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Reason record numbers of migrants are flooding into Australia is exposed by top government official
One of Australia's most powerful public servants has used predictions about an ageing population and a falling birth rate to justify record-high immigration.
Steven Kennedy, the secretary of the Treasury who also sits on the Reserve Bank board, slammed the notion a rapidly ageing population would be temporary.
'There is sometimes a perception that the ageing of population is a temporary phenomenon particularly as the baby boomers age,' he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia think tank on Monday.
'However, this is not the case.'
Dr Kennedy quoted from Treasury's Intergenerational Report predicting the proportion of people aged 65 and over would climb to 23.4 per cent by 2062-63, up from 17.3 per cent during the last financial year.
The share of those aged 85 and over was predicted to surge to five per cent, up from 2.9 per cent.
This is occurring as Australia's fertility rate falls, where couples are on average having less than two children, or below replacement level.
'So long as the fertility rate is below replacement, successive generations will be smaller,' Dr Kennedy said.
Australia's cost of living crisis is set to worsen as the terrorist attacks on Israel push up crude oil prices - potentially sparking another rate rise with the local currency at the weakest level in a year.
Australia's fertility rate has been below 2.1 since the 1970s, with the 1.98 level of 2008-09 a temporary high point in recent years.
Higher immigration over recent decades has failed to stop Australia's population getting older, with Treasury's Centre for Population calculating the nation had a median age of 38 years and six months in mid-2022, up from 32 years and eight months three decades earlier.
Nonetheless, Dr Kennedy said Australia's population would be even older without the immigration surge of the past two decades.
'Higher migration has been the primary driver of the larger and younger population,' he said. 'Our population growth has been higher than all the G7 nations reflecting higher migration.'
A record 454,400 migrants moved to Australia in the year to March, with this figure including both the permanent intake of skilled migrants and long-term international students.
Australia's net overseas migration rate, based on arrivals minus permanent departures, is quadruple the 110,104 level of two decades ago.
An immigration surge, to make up for Australia's border closure in 2020 and 2021, has also coincided with a productivity plunge, where output for every worker is falling.
Productivity, based on gross domestic product per hour, fell by 3.6 per cent in 2022-23.
During the past decade, when 200,000 migrants have been moving to Australia a year, productivity growth has been stuck below one per cent.
This is a far cry from the two per cent pace of the 1990s, when annual immigration was mainly below 100,000.
But Dr Kennedy said an ageing population would mean weaker-than-average economic growth in decades to come.
'The lower growth reflects slower productivity and population growth, and reduced participation due to ageing,' he said.
'Projected slower productivity, population growth and lower participation is not unique to Australia. 'These outcomes are anticipated for most developed countries.'
Australia's population grew by 2.2 per cent in the year to March with immigration making up 80.7 per cent of the increase.
But Treasury is expecting that to slow to 1.1 per cent over the next 40 years, putting it below the 1.4 per cent level of the past four decades, as Australia's population grows from 26.5million to 40.5million by 2062–63.
Treasury advocates higher immigration so it can reap more taxation revenue.
The Business Council of Australia, which represents big corporations, has lobbied for higher immigration since the borders were reopened in late 2021.
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‘Amplified pain syndrome’: Eleven-year-old boy’s horror diagnosis after Covid vaccine
The mother of an 11-year-old boy who suffered such a severe reaction to his Covid vaccine that he was sent home from hospital with highly addictive painkillers including oxycodone has slammed the “disgusting” treatment of her family by the government.
Alex, who asked not to use her real name to protect her son’s identity, says she was left “alone and isolated” caring for him for 18 months after he developed excruciating pain all over his body — which grew so intense he could barely walk or sleep and sometimes had to be carried to bed “screaming” — following his Pfizer vaccination in January last year.
Local GPs and doctors at their hospital in regional Victoria as well as specialists in Melbourne were left at a loss, unable to find the source of the boy’s symptoms, which would not respond even to powerful painkillers including oxycodone, gabapentin — used to treat nerve pain — and ketamine.
“The rheumatologist gave it an overall diagnosis of ‘diffuse amplified pain syndrome’, which is basically pain in the absence of causation or trauma — just blanket, unexplained pain,” Alex said.
“We stayed [in Melbourne] for a week while they ran so many tests — blood tests, pain specialists, rheumatologists, cardiac paediatricians, everything. He was put on so many drugs, so many painkillers. He was put on the highest dose of nerve medicine that he could have. He’s had two ketamine infusions. They gave him stuff to sleep at night because he’s got insomnia because he’s in so much constant pain.”
Discharge summaries provided to news.com.au show the boy, who was previously fit and healthy and enjoyed playing sports, was sent home from a Melbourne hospital last February on a cocktail of powerful medications.
“[Eleven-year-old male] presenting with diffuse pain post Covid vaccine on 21st January,” the notes read. “Reviewed by multiple GPs and ED — normal baseline bloods, normal troponins, normal ECGs and echo, no cardiac abnormality.”
The notes show he was reviewed by a pain consultant and started on medications, but the following day showed “little improvement” so the dosages were increased.
“Impression that ongoing physio will be beneficial to improve symptoms,” the summary said.
His symptoms barely improved for the rest of the year.
“It was nearly 12 months before he could walk like a normal person,” Alex said. “He didn’t go to school for the entirety of last year. He’s only now finally started to get better.”
Alex, who was ineligible for compensation under the federal government’s Covid Vaccine Claims Scheme, conceded “I haven’t got a letter that says this was caused by the vaccine”.
But she has no doubt it was linked. “He had the injection at 2.30pm,” she said.
“I’ve got two other kids, they were both fine. By 5.30pm he had chest pain, headache, said he was dizzy and felt kind of sick. We’d been told that was kind of normal, to give him some Panadol and Nurofen. By the time he woke up the next day he was in a lot more pain, his joints were hurting, he was struggling to be physically upright because he felt so dizzy and nauseated, his chest pain was unbearable.”
Over the next few days he was hospitalised twice due to the unrelenting pain. The second time he was given “the painkiller that goes up your nose” — fentanyl spray — which “calmed him down”.
“They sent a 10-year old home with Endone [oxycodone] because he was in so much pain,” Alex said.
Alex said her family has spent thousands of dollars on medical bills “trying to fix him”, but did not qualify for National Disability Insurance Scheme funding or carer’s payments because he “technically wasn’t sick enough”.
She wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about her situation and in July last year received a letter back from a senior Health Department official. “At this stage, a causal link between Amplified Pain Syndrome and the Covid-19 vaccines has not been established and it is not listed in the Product Information document for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination,” the official wrote.
“As a result, Amplified Pain Syndrome is not a claimable condition under the Scheme.”
Alex has reported her son’s reaction both to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and to Pfizer’s vaccine safety division, but has heard little back. “[When] you have a bad reaction they’re like, oh no, you don’t exist, and that’s the end of it,” she said.
“No one cares. You don’t exist. My child who was crippled doesn’t exist, his pain doesn’t exist. It’s disgusting.”
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What's Gone Wrong With Arts Degrees?
What David Daintree remembers below is very similar to what I remember when I did my Arts degree in the '60s. And my regrets about what has been lost nowadays are similar. I wrote something similar to his comments in 2015
“If you had your time over again, would you do an arts degree?” That’s the question my wife put to me, and it got me thinking. It wasn’t easy to answer.
I really loved my degree in the late 60s and early 70s. It was such a joy to read what I wanted to read across such a wide range of topics.
Sure, there was a syllabus to follow and some of the material you’d prefer to avoid if you had your druthers, but there was also that feeling that disciplined and structured study was a good thing and that mental training was no less important than physical exercise.
It wasn’t just externally imposed discipline, either: true, your teachers chose the contents of your courses, but it was your choice to accept their challenge and enrol.
But things are different now. Arts faculties in universities throughout the world have strayed into the crazy world of identity. Gender and race now define us, and there’s almost no escaping from a focus on certain big-ticket issues such as Colour (black lives matter, colonialism), Gender (toxic masculinity, women’s studies), Sex (choose your own), Politics (left good, right very, very bad).
United, in partnership with this identity focus, is the post-modernist notion that rejects hierarchies of any kind. Shakespeare is not intrinsically better than Mickey Mouse, rap is as good as anything Mozart wrote (he was a white male, after all, even if he didn’t make old age), and stone-age art is right up there with Michelangelo.
These two modes of thinking (and I use the term pretty loosely) make a dangerous combination. Dangerous, that is, if you think that the major achievements of world culture have no special value and that our greatest literary and scientific achievements as a human race are of negligible worth.
Then and Now
I recall that as undergrads doing English I, we were expected to read the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (in Middle English, too, not in translation), four Shakespeare plays, a range of novels by authors male and female from Fielding and Richardson up to the mid-20th century, and a good selection of poetry from across the range, though focusing on the romantics.
In later years, the gaps were filled in: more Shakespeare (of course), Milton, the metaphysical poets, Pope and Dryden, and lots more novels. It was a wonderful spread.
The idea was that after three years, you would have sampled and tested for yourself the lofty peaks of English literature and many of the less exalted but important foothills as well.
Nowadays, you can do three years of undergraduate English without more than a glance at Shakespeare and the others who were once thought great. You can specialise before you can generalise. You can even do a degree in Music in some universities now without it being thought necessary to read Western notation.
In general, this deplorable tendency to deny greatness and exalt mediocrity has so far been limited to the arts faculties.
If your goal is to read Medicine or Engineering, then universities are still the best or the only places to go, though we are now starting to hear stories of architecture departments focusing on indigenous design, whatever that can mean, and Law faculties de-emphasising the study of jurisprudence and the philosophical underpinnings of law.
How many law students nowadays, I wonder, would appreciate the Christian basis of the Common Law?
I had the very good fortune to serve for several years as president of Sydney’s Campion College, Australia’s first dedicated liberal arts college.
Campion offered only one bachelor’s degree at that time, focusing on what was described as the “core” subjects—literature, history, philosophy, and theology. There were few choices within the degree—all students studied all four subjects diachronically.
This meant that Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Tacitus were studied at depth in year one; the second year focused on the Middle Ages, third year centred on the moderns. I thought and still think that it was the best arts degree in the country.
By contrast, art students at mainstream universities are embarrassed by the awesomely wide choice of subjects—but how do they choose? There are so many options now, some tightly focused on women’s issues, race relations, or colonialism. Some apparently frivolous, such as rock music studies (I guess somebody has to do them) or tourism.
Are these worthy of a university? Or is it that universities have to offer them to educate or entertain throngs of people who have been told that everyone is entitled to a university degree in something or other?
Choosing more or less randomly from disparate subjects means that the broad overview is impossible unless one has the wit or is very well advised to choose wisely.
Usually, there is often no connectivity or context. History units are studied in isolation. How can you understand Australian history without a background in British history? How can you understand British History without some reckoning with Greece and Rome? How can you do any of these things without first learning to read, write, and think?
The big lie is that standards haven’t dropped. They have.
In a world obsessed with false notions of “equality”, there are now too many sociologists and criminologists and far too few apprentices and tradies to do the real work of running the country.
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson once said that the arts faculties of the mega-universities are no longer fit for purpose. He thought that the humane arts would survive and thrive only in small organisations, such as the liberal arts colleges, specialised institutes, and “classical” high schools that are now springing up all over the world. Every little bit counts.
I treasure a remark of Edmund Burke: “No man ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-gone-wrong-with-arts-degrees-5485769
************************************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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