Angry Leftist assaults elderly man over "Voice"

There has been a huge outpouring of hate and abuse from the Left against "No" voters, so this was probably inevitable. It is a vivid illustration of how hate-motivated Leftists are. I note that as the hate-speech has ramped up, the lower the "Yes" vote has become. As the Left revealed what they really are, normal people became repulsed. Much of the "No" vote was probably produced by the angry Leftists themselves. By their obnoxious words and behaviour they discredited their cause.

A man has been charged with serious assault and another taken to hospital after a shouting match between Yes and No voters at the Ipswich early voting centre descended into violence.

It comes as thousands of Queenslanders descend on pre-polling booths across the state ahead of Saturday’s referendum.

The Courier-Mail can reveal the serious incident at the North Ipswich early voting centre led to Queensland Police charging a 30-year-old Raceview man.

Police allege about 11.30am on October 3 the 30-year-old man entered into a verbal altercation with a 65-year-old man, before he physically assaulted him.

“It will be further alleged the Raceview man initially left the scene before returning a short time later, where he was taken into police custody,” a police spokesman said.

He has since been charged with serious assault and is due to appear in Ipswich Magistrates Court on November 17.

The 65-year-old man was taken to Ipswich Hospital for treatment. It is understood the man suffered injuries to his skull.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/voice-voters-clash-raceview-man-charged-over-serious-assault-at-ipswich-early-voting-centre/news-story/73150b187abe9be473ea01ab3a308ee8

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Reflections of an old ‘No’ voter

Lindsay Brien below claims that he is an "indigenous" Australian because he and his recent forebears were born in Australia. He has the Latin on his side. The word is from the Latin and literally means "born inside". He was clearly born inside Australia. I too think that where you are born should usually be a critical identifier

Initially, I would like to acknowledge the contributions, however unwitting, to the ‘No’ campaign of Pearson, Burney, Davis, and Langton.

I am a septuagenarian and my ancestors were Caucasian of Northern European Origin even though I am at least 3rd generation indigenous born, meaning that my children are 4th generation indigenous and my grandchildren 5th generation indigenous Australians.

I remember 1963 and how moved and supportive I was (and still am) of Martin Luther King Junior’s I Have a Dream speech which included the classic line: ‘…that one day my children will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’

Apart from the ‘Yes’ campaign’s assertion that I must be either racist and/or stupid, the reasons I intend to vote ‘No’ at the Voice referendum on October 14 are as follows.

If passed, the Voice to Parliament will create a race-based institution that will grant some people more power than other Australian citizens.

If the new body is not consulted before the Parliament or Executive Government pass laws or make decisions, those laws and decisions could be overruled by the High Court.

A ‘Voice’ institution could be created by Parliament right now, without the detrimental problems referred to in above.

If the referendum question was altered, as it easily could be, to purely acknowledge in the preamble of the Constitution that the Aboriginal people were the first inhabitants of the continent for tens of thousands of years it would, I believe, have overwhelming support and easily pass.

There are already 11 Aboriginal members of Parliament. As has been pointed out elsewhere that means in relation to their percentage of the population they are over-represented in Parliament. Memo to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the ‘Yes’ vibe crowd, to paraphrase Johnny Farnham: ‘They’re the Voice, try to understand it, we’re all Australian no matter where our forbears come from.’

In addition to their parliamentary representatives, Close the Gap bodies, and the National Indigenous Australians Agency, government websites reveal that there are 3,278 Aboriginal corporations, 243 Native Title bodies, 48 Land Councils, 35 Regional Councils, 145 health organisations, and 12 culturally important Indigenous days.

Government records also reveal that Australian government expenditure per person is twice as much for Aboriginal Australians as it is for other Australians.

There does not appear to be unanimous support for the Voice from all Aboriginal groups. The elite Aboriginal spokespersons are all in favour of the ‘Yes’ campaign, but others like Anthony Dillon from Victoria, Warren Mundine from NSW, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price all intend to vote ‘No’. I have also recently seen interviewed on Sky News Australia elders from Uluru, Western Australia, and South Australia who all say that they will vote ‘No’, as will their peoples.

It could open a Pandora’s box and be the next step to what a number of the Aboriginal elite have said are their ultimate goals; a treaty, sovereignty, and reparations.

Despite the recent protestations of the Prime Minister that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is just a one-page good vibe recognition, it has become quite apparent, from the media revelations about past statements from the drafters, that the accompanying pages to the one-page summary, whether those pages be 15, 16 or 25, that the Voice is the first step towards a Treaty, a Makaratta truth-telling commission and then reparations as a percentage of GDP being paid to Aboriginal Australians by other Australians.

Albo hasn’t read the attachments, why would he?

With Treaty and reparations, the Pandora’s Box really explodes. Who is eligible to receive the reparations and who must pay them? Do we have self-identification as the criteria or will there need to be mandatory DNA tests to determine Aboriginality?

The calculations of reparations becomes even more difficult when we factor in the majority of Aboriginal people being of mixed racial descent.

It was somewhat ironic that the Prime Minister described the ‘No’ campaign to be fearmongers and Chicken Littles and that they should be more respectful. In early April in the Weekend Australian Marcia Langton warned, ‘Vote ‘No’ and you won’t get a welcome to country again.’ Surely, joked many, that is an offer too good to refuse?

Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop, and Matt Kean, those staunch conservative members of the Liberal Party, are hopping on the ‘Yes’ bandwagon. I am sure their virtue signalling has convinced a lot of undecided voters to vote ‘Yes’, especially seeing the photographs in the press the day after the Prime Minister’s announcement in Adelaide confirming the Referendum date as October 14. We had Ms Bishop marching down the main street of Perth, proudly wearing a ‘Yes’ T-Shirt beaming a grin from ear to ear.

Finally, the clincher for me was the brilliant presentation by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price at the National Press Club on September 14 when a journalist from The Guardian asked, ‘Do you believe colonisation continues to have an impact on some Indigenous Australians?’

Jacinta replied, ‘No I don’t think so… To be honest with you, a positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, and readily available food. Everything that my grandfather had when he was growing up, when he first met white fellas in his adolescence, we now have. Otherwise he would have had to live off the land… Aboriginal Australians, many of us, have the same opportunities as all other Australians and probably one of the greatest systems in the world, in terms of democratic structure, in comparison to other countries. It is why migrants flock to Australia, to call Australia home, because the opportunity exists for all Australians. But if we keep telling Aboriginal people they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency and giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being, to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that is what I refuse to do.’

Not surprisingly, the room full of Woke left-wing journalists were bowled over. The Moderator channelled the famous line from the Life of Brian ‘…all right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’ when he tried to cross-examine Ms Price with the following question:

‘I have talked to Indigenous people and I am sure others have too who talk about generations of trauma among Indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation, whether that means colonisation continues now is probably a separate question. Would you accept now that there have been generations of that trauma as a result of that history?’

Jacinta hit that juicy waist-high full toss for six with the following reply, ‘Well I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts were also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma.’

Checkmate.

It was interesting to observe that Linda Burney’s appearance, not long before Jacinta’s, was held in the main auditorium. Jacinta’s was held in a small and cramped annex because of renovations being carried out in the main auditorium.

About two weeks later, Warren Mundine appeared at the National Press Club, also in the cramped annex. Mundine pointed out that over 50 per cent of Australia is already under Native Title and that if pending claims were successful then over 70 per cent would be under Native Title.

My dream is that my grandchildren will grow up in a nation that all citizens rights, including voting rights, are determined not by the colour of their skin but by their Australian citizenship. So for all of the above reasons that is why I will be voting ‘No’ on October 14.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/reflections-of-an-old-no-voter

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The girl from Sderot

A heartfelt comment from Rowan Dean that I wholly applaud

Israel is at war. In 2014 I visited Israel, thanks to the NSW Board of Deputies and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), on a trip with a group of fellow journalists from a variety of media outlets.

The trip was wonderful, as well as extremely informative. We saw the most incredible sites and travelled the length and breadth of this amazing land.

We floated aloft in the Dead Sea. We flew in a light aircraft over Tel Aviv and the Sea of Galilee, and even towards the Golan Heights. We went to the militarised zones and the border with Lebanon overlooking the Bekaa Valley. We went into Romolo. We dined in the home of a Druze widow. We went to the deeply moving Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem, and spent an hilarious afternoon with a firebrand member of the Knesset. We saw so much that makes the land of Israel special. We saw the settlements, the wall, spent a morning with the PLA in Ramallah and of course visited Bethlehem, Jerusalem, wandered into the desert, visited the Australian memorial at Beersheba, and traversed much of the Holy Land.

But the one thing that touched me more than anything else, that has stayed with me ever since, was our trip to the small town of Sderot in Southern Israel, only a stone’s throw, forgive the pun, from the heavily fortified border with Gaza.

The young woman we met there, a student whose name I don’t remember, showed us around. In fact, when we returned to Australia I wrote an article about the girl from Sderot.

This young student who, at a moment’s notice had taken the day off her studies to show us around her town because our guide was ill, started off by taking us to the unusual and somewhat disquieting re-enforced children’s playground that doubles as a bomb shelter.

Often these kids and families only have 15 seconds to seek shelter between the sound of sirens and rockets from Hamas crashing down on them. She showed us the massive collection of shells from deadly rockets that have been sent over from Gaza in the intervening years aiming to terrify and terrorise the population.

One of this girl’s best friends died when she threw herself on top of her younger brother to protect him from one of those shells.

As a child, she had grown up in Gaza – an area completely out of bounds to her despite being only a few miles away. She told us how, as a child, her best friends were the local Arab kids. But when Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 – foolishly, in my opinion – her family was amongst the nearly 10,000 Jewish settlers expelled from 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank where they had made their homes and livelihoods – never to return.

As the girl from Sderot took us around the town of Sderot, including to the very spot – and indeed the very sofa – that featured in a disgracefully antisemitic cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald that year… The girl from Sderot talked passionately and endlessly about her great dream to devote her life to studying Arabic and learning the ways of Palestinian culture so that she could help bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians and reunite herself with the friends of her childhood in Gaza.

She herself did not hate those who made life in Sderot terrifying every single day because she passionately believed that peace would prevail if enough people wanted it to.

Last night I thought of the girl from Sderot for the first time in many years. I have no idea what she is doing now – whether she graduated or if she got the job she wanted.

I thought about her on Saturday night when we witnessed the horror of the atrocities being perpetuated by the evil butchers of Hamas on elderly Jews, on children, and above all on women and girls in southern Israel, around and in Sderot.

For decades now the left in Australia, the left in Britain, the left in America and throughout Europe have relentlessly sought to demonise the Jews and delegitimise the state of Israel. They have pretended that there is some kind of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defence and grotesquely distorted the history of the region in order to do so.

The left has falsely claimed that Israel is some kind of imperialist occupier and the Palestinians are the victims of colonial oppression.

Let me be perfectly blunt – and I apologise if I offend you – but all of you who have indulged in that sort of grotesque, dinner party antisemitism. Who have slyly denigrated Israel and the Jews. Who have prattled on about the ‘noble Palestinian cause’. Who have dismissively sneered at Donald Trump’s amazing Abraham Accords which brought peace for the first time. And those who celebrated the election of the obnoxious Biden regime with its repugnant dealings with Iran. Those of you who applauded Biden’s sick surrender to the Taliban and the total betrayal of the women and girls of Afghanistan. And all of you snivelling Australian Labor and Greens politicians and left-wing activists with your pro-Palestinian flags who have allowed Australian taxpayer money to be poured into the coffers of Palestinian terror organisations. And all you media outlets – both here and abroad – including ‘our’ ABC – who have always twisted the headlines so that Israel appears to be the aggressor. They have emboldened the terrorists by making excuses for their depraved actions.

Jewish blood is on your hands. You have encouraged American and Western weakness and denigrated a great democratic country. You have literally hung Israel out to dry for decades.

Donald Trump warned only a few weeks ago that the $6 billion Biden gave to Iran would be used to fund Palestinian terrorism. Looks like, as usual, Trump was right.

We have witnessed some of the most horrific and barbaric scenes of our lifetimes as Palestinian terrorists butcher innocent civilians. Kidnap and torture innocent Jews. Desecrate young Jewish bodies in macabre evil celebrations in the streets of Gaza. It is horrific, yet this is what the West has been encouraging for decades with the boycott movements, with endless antisemitic actions, dehumanising Jews, demonising Israel, and leaving Hamas and the Iranian-backed terrorists to believe they can get away with murder.

You can have your political differences, of course. But Palestinian terror is evil, pure and simple. Yet they have – for decades – been indulged and I would argue even been encouraged by the leftwing political parties of the West including our current Labor government. To their eternal shame. Penny Wong urged the Israeli government to ‘show restraint’ at this time where maximum retaliation is required, yet she showed no restraint whatsoever when she restored $10 million of Australian taxpayer funds – your money – going to the Palestinian authorities.

Let me be clear. There is no two-state solution. You are fantasists and fools if you think there is. And your stupidity costs lives. There never was the remotest genuine possibility of a two-state solution.

I have sat in the bowels of the Palestinian authority in Ramallah on that very same journalist trip with a group of Australian journalists where an answer to my question about how many Jews would exist in the two-states – we were told by a Palestinian authority that the Palestinian cause requires the removal of all Jews from Palestine and the removal of all but ‘a handful of Jews’ from whatever you want to call Israel. Their words. The Palestinian authorities. Not mine. And I have a dozen journalists who sat there next to me who heard them but didn’t report them. I did, in The Spectator Australia.

Well, eradicating Jews is clearly what the Gaza terrorists have in mind today.

Let’s pray for all the people of Israel. Pray that Jewish children will not grow up permanently scarred by the horror they are now witnessing. Pray that Netanyahu can restore a sense of peace as swiftly as possible with a minimum amount of bloodshed. But I also urge the Israelis to do what they should have done long ago – ignore the hand-wringing of the West’s pathetic liberals and leftists. Take back Gaza and destroy, once and for all, the evil entity that is Hamas. Crush those individuals who wish you nothing but harm. For the safety of your people. For the young women, the children, the elderly – for the survival of the Jewish race – they must beat these terrorists.

I pray for Israel, and I pray for the girl from Sderot.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/the-girl-from-sderot/

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Flocks of Sheep Roam Our University Campuses

Australian universities are now decidedly devoted to passing as many students as possible.

Passing is relatively easy, considering students typically only have to satisfy 50 percent of the requirements on their exams or assignments to pass. Of course, this is a very low benchmark.

If students are allocated a mark of 49, 48, or even 47, they are bound to use the ubiquitous appeal processes to get over the line.

They have access to a swath of bureaucratic solutions, ranging from essay or assignment resubmission to supplementary, or deferred examinations to achieve success.

Many students ask for preferential treatment, examination concessions, or apply for extensions. They may also request an acknowledgment of a “disability,” and some might even resort to illegal means.

It is not uncommon for academics to pass those who should fail because it saves them the unpleasantness associated with appeals procedures and form filling.

To obviate the need for a long drawn-out, and often acrimonious, appeals procedure, it is often convenient for academics to give their failing students a 45.

Yet hard evidence, for example in the form of directions from the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee, confirms that universities will also lean over backward to pass students who clearly shouldn't be in tertiary education in the first place.

This is a consequence of increased government oversight and novel legislative requirements for universities to reduce the rate of failure for students.

In a sobering article, Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz argues that our politicians and universities “look forward to offering voters a world where failure ceases to exist and success requires no effort. A world in which every student gets a degree just for showing up.”

It is an impassioned plea for society to recognise the salutary impact of “failure” because successful people are those who are able to learn from and outlast failure.

Indeed, how is it possible for people to face the harsh realities of life, if they have never learned to live with, confront, and conquer failure?

Professor Andrew Norton argues that, although the government has correctly identified the university student failure rate as a real problem, “its heavy-handed regulation would create unnecessary red tape for universities.”

Nevertheless, the universities’ response to the rate of student failure (and attrition) is often merely a band-aid solution.

Thinking for Yourself Denied on Campus

The reality is that some students might not really be able to read or write English well enough to benefit from, or contribute to, their education because they lack “critical thinking” skills.

Although some of these students are undoubtedly devoted and hard-working, their inability to think critically unfavourably impacts their studies.

While some universities pride themselves on teaching such skills, these efforts are in vain if students lack the capacity or the interest to benefit from it.

Critical thinking is a disciplined way of reasoning. It involves analysis, evaluation, and reflection.

However, on most campuses, critical thinking, which endures only in an unrestricted and uncensored free speech environment, is frequently curtailed by university administrations that impose conformist behaviour, supposedly to preserve “diversity.”

For example, on Australian campuses, students are afraid to criticise The Voice (and other social engineering developments).

Critical thinking is thus often seen as the natural enemy of the kind of “diversity” that universities impose on students.

In this context, it is useful to remember the words of John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century philosopher and politician, who wrote in his celebrated essay “On Liberty”:

"The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint … and as the power is not declining, but growing unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase."

Mill’s analysis also aptly describes the precarious world of our universities.

He derides the sheep-like conformity, which now enables university academics, administrative apparatchiks, and indoctrinated students to impose their freedom-unfriendly views and arbitrary rules on people.

According to Mill, “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

Surely, there should be an attitude of “openness” that fosters free speech, which is a pre-condition for critical thinking to flourish on our campuses, even if the dark forces of oppression seek to impose a preferred ideology on students.

Undoubtedly, the promotion of critical thinking is the right recipe to combat the ogre of students’ failure and to restore a sense of pride and achievement in those who are seeking knowledge and skills to enhance their lives.

It is a way to overcome an over-reliance on fuzzy feelings or emotions, to avoid conforming dogma and peer pressure, and blatant indoctrination of young impressionable minds on Australian campuses.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/flocks-of-sheep-roam-our-university-campuses-5502834

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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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