Australian Politics
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Yes campaign was backed by the rich who are never, ever told no
The catastrophic defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be an existential reckoning not just for the disastrous campaign itself but for the entire left as a whole.
The referendum results prove beyond any reasonable person’s doubt that the left in Australia is now utterly co-opted by, and captive to, elite, affluent and — if you want to drag race into it as they so love doing — white interests.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony as Yes activists were already crying racism after Saturday’s landslide loss was that it was the most multicultural working-class suburbs that voted against it in droves while the only metropolitan areas the Voice could find any support were, not to put too fine a point on it, rich white electorates.
The most tragic counterpoint to this is that the greatest levels of support for the Voice was in remote Indigenous communities — the very people the Voice was supposed to represent — and yet their voices were barely heard throughout the campaign.
Why? Because they were drowned out and crushed by the avalanche of CEOs and celebrities who — immune to the cost-of-living nightmare front of mind for the rest of us — wanted to make this yet another hectoring, nation-shaming, virtue signalling crusade like so many others before it.
The heartbreaking thing is that this time the cause was actually a worthy one, but ordinary people were so sick of moralising from on high that nobody listened.
Indeed, this was literally the case when the last-ditch batch of flyers were stuck in letterboxes in the final week of the campaign. I reached into mine hoping for a miracle message that might turn the tide.
Instead, in a barrage of confused fonts, the primary message was it was our moral duty to listen to Indigenous people.
What a vague, formless, morally superior and practically useless last pitch to financially stressed and time-poor voters for whom the Voice was a 17th order issue — yes, they counted them.
Something that could and should have been driven home throughout the campaign is that as bad as things were for the rest of us, for Indigenous Australians, especially in remote communities, they were far worse and that the Voice was a practical instrument to remedy that — nothing more, nothing less.
But this was too difficult a U-turn for trendy social media crusaders who wanted to make it a guilt trip for historical wrongs or who for years had blamed domestic violence levels simply on men rather than crippling socio-economic disadvantage and even if they got to the latter simply blamed that on racism.
And if the campaign wasn’t in enough trouble already, the increasingly angry and hectoring tsunami of activity on social media made sure it the Voice would be dead on arrival come Saturday.
One video that went particularly viral featured an activist literally sneering at no voters for being hopelessly stupid. What a masterstroke!
In the final days of the campaign a mate of mine in Yes HQ marvelled to me how many people had watched it.
“How many do you reckon were undecided voters?” I asked.
He paused. “Good point.”
While I felt momentarily guilty about snuffing out his last ember of hope, it is a lesson the left must learn if it is to survive. Indeed it is difficult to even know what the left is anymore.
As the ABC’s Antony Green stated again and again on the night of the count, the divide between inner metropolitan seats that voted Yes and the outer suburbs and regions that voted No was chasmic.
Indeed, if you superimposed the handful of electorates that voted Yes onto Teal seats you would find an almost 100 per cent correlation, which tells you everything you need to know about what went wrong.
Meanwhile working-class, migrant heavy seats — strong Labor seats — were voting No at a rate of almost two-to-one. These are hardworking, generous people, often religious and socially conservative.
If the Voice was cast as an act of charity and goodwill I have no doubt they would have supported it but to cast it as a form of reparation for past wrongs or compensation for their privilege? You can kiss that vote goodbye before it walks in the door.
And this is the terrifying thing: The new left is more about the moralising Teals than it is about the struggling working class and, if you want to buy into its obsession with race, it is whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm.
As a result their actions, their tactics, their endless lecturing and constant accusations of racism have completely alienated ordinary Australians and now shafted the most disadvantaged Australians.
So maybe it’s they who should shut up and listen.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/joe-hildebrand-yes-campaign-was-backed-by-the-rich-who-are-never-ever-told-no/news-story/4176102637f790ff7f866af484f3407d \
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A self-righteous Queensland bigshot
Just looking good is all that matters to her
Polling shows the voice just did not rate highly in the concerns of financially struggling Australians, not because they are unconcerned about Indigenous people but because they are too busy keeping their families fed and a roof over their heads. It was the inner-city elites who appeared obsessed with something that was badly argued and legally risky.
But even after the result was clear the hectoring from the corporate end of town continued. City Beat spies previously have alerted us to Sydney-based Catherina Behan, who holds the title of Suncorp’s diversity and inclusion leader.
Earlier this year she was involved in running Suncorp’s compulsory gender diversity training, which instructed staff to address colleagues as “folks” and “team” instead of “guys” and to add pronouns to their email and social media.
But Behan’s idea of inclusion does not appear to extend to the 70 per cent of us rednecks north of Cooloongatta who voted no at the weekend’s voice referendum.
Suncorp, Queensland’s biggest company, is supposed to a Queensland-based icon built on the backs of hardworking men and women of all races.
But Behan appears to have nothing short of contempt for the majority of us who just happened not to agree with her opinion on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
“In less than 24 hours post the referendum result, First Nations people in support of the Voice to Parliament have again graciously told us what they need. Please listen,” Behan thundered in a post on LinkedIn.
Behan later updated her post to say it was her personal opinion. Nevermind that her title is clearly displayed on her LinkedIn profile and that she is a leader “committed to assisting organisations to reach the full inclusive workplace potential.”
While most of us thought long and hard before voting on the weekend, Behan called it “a very loud message of rejection, the overt refusal to even come to the same table.... the symbolism of which could have helped to restore even the smallest amount of trust in the people and systems that have inflicted ongoing trauma and violence for centuries.”
“It is my opinion only, not representative of Suncorp. I do not, and am not authorised to, speak on behalf of Suncorp,” she said when contacted by your diarist..
Similarly a spokesman for Suncorp said the LinkedIn post was Behan’s personal view and not that of the company.
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Fossil folly
Whitehaven – unapologetically – Coal has scored a $500m-$1bn coup, courtesy of a BHP board of directors determined on its bizarre journey into a fantasy future.
BHP wants to get out of fossil fuels. It sold its oil and gas assets to Woodside, and has now sold a big chunk of its coal operations to Whitehaven.
The rest, and especially, the really wicked – in the very woke eyes of a BHP board and senior management – energy coal are on the market, even if BHP might vociferously deny it.
After all, if you believe oil and gas and coal and most especially energy coal are killing the planet, how could a board of directors of good individual and merged conscience continue to draw some portion of their incomes from it.
Beyond of course, the most reasonable of period of transition. Lord make me pure, but just not too quickly; and all that.
The timing of BHP’s decidedly ‘the final die is cast’ exit from coal could not have been more exquisite.
Just as even Europe, even Dark-Green Germany, have finally woken up to the brutal reality of TINA, as the great Maggie Thatcher used to put it.
Simply, that, There Is No Alternative to fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Not that is, if you want to have a functioning economy and indeed society.
For all the trillions of dollars – nay, correction, tens of trillions of dollars – that have been poured into subsidising the, surprisingly expensive, for want of a better word, generation of ‘free’ energy from wind (when it is blowing) and sun (when it’s shining), the world still relies almost totally on, cough, cough, fossil fuels.
In 2019, according to the IEA, over 80 percent of global energy still came from, cough, cough, oil, gas and coal.
Well, gee, so-called renewables must therefore have leapt into double digits?
Well, actually, no.
The next biggest chunk, nearly 10 per cent, came from biofuels.
This is, bluntly, the burning of wood and waste and pumping out even more CO2 than coal.
That’s the burning of wood and waste in developing countries because they have no choice. And the burning of it in developed countries in a mindless charge towards an 18th century future.
After that came nuclear at 5 per cent and hydro – the ‘original’ renewable, now hated by Greens- around 2.5 per cent.
Bottom line: tens, tens of trillions of dollars got the world up to all of around 2-3 per cent from wind and solar.
And now, indirectly the shareholders of Whitehaven are the beneficiaries.
It’s paying $US3.2bn ($5bn) – and a possible further $US900m, depending on profits generated by the mines - to BHP, for two of its major metallurgical mines in Queensland’s coal regions.
Investors quickly pinged who got the better side of the deal, adding more than 10 per cent to Whitehaven’s share price and depositing nearly $600m into shareholder pockets.
One can only conclude by saying that one day a future BHP board will wake up to reality.
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Big news. Australia has become one of the world leaders when it comes to men suffering false allegations
A new YouGov survey, involving 9432 people across eight countries, found Australia was the worst country, after India, when people were asked if they had been falsely accused of abuse.
What’s going on here? The answer is simple. It’s the feminist capture of our family law system.
The YouGov survey showed false accusations in Australia are more likely to be made as part of a child custody dispute than anywhere else in the world – they are 41 per cent of such allegations in this country.
Overall, the survey showed 80 per cent of victims of false allegations in this country are male and almost a third (30 per cent) of people surveyed know a victim of false allegations made in the last year.
For decades, feminist ideologues have been manipulating the family law system by claiming that all women and their children are at risk of attack by violent ex-partners.
This sets the scene for women to make false violence allegations — a tactic which works a treat to give women control of the divorce process, denying men any real role in their children’s lives.
It’s a brilliant ploy, which feminists have been systematically cementing in place. Soon their ship will come in.
Labor’s draconian new family law bill is about to sail through the Senate, with the Greens joining forces with Labor to enshrine women’s absolute power to use false allegations to destroy men’s relationships with their children.
Having long been internationally celebrated for protecting the right of children to care from both divorced parents, this new Act will mean Australia will return to the grim days of mostly sole mother custody.
This is the most significant social change in recent history, impacting millions of families across the country. Current estimates suggest there will be more than 300,000 family breakups involving children in the next decade.
It is just astonishing that this is all passing unchallenged, indeed almost unnoticed.
Well, perhaps not. Given Australian feminists’ brilliantly orchestrated march through our institutions, we shouldn’t be surprised that these powerful ideologues have cowed most of our parliament and media into silence.
Silence, that is, about the truth of what is happening here, which is nothing to do with the feminist narrative that the new bill is about keeping children safe.
Their critical goal has been to set aside the many decades of international evidence showing it is harmful for children to grow up without dads.
That was the message enshrined in the Howard government’s landmark 2006 law act promoting joint parental responsibility.
It was passed with bipartisan support and proved a real hit with the public — “overwhelmingly supported by parents, legal professionals and family relationship service professionals,” according to research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Feminist scholars were determined to resist this recognition of the vital role of dads in the family. They leapt into action pouring out articles claiming sharing care risked exposing children to violence.
This set the scene for Julia Gillard’s proudly feminist government to remove the 2006 penalties for perjury and place violence accusations front and centre of decision-making about sharing of care of children.
Her government also greatly expanded the definition of domestic “violence” to include emotional and psychological abuse, threatening behaviour etc, adding enormously to the list of families precluded from court-approved shared care.
Now the war was on, with magistrates’ courts overwhelmed with false violence accusations which most magistrates have acknowledged are being used to gain strategic advantage in child custody matters.
A survey of 38 magistrates in Queensland found 74 per cent agreed restraining orders are often used for tactical purposes.
Similarly, 90 per cent of 68 NSW magistrates agreed restraining orders are often sought as tactical devices in family law disputes, “serving to deprive former partners of contact with their children”.
In a national survey of over 2500 respondents, more than half agreed that “women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence in order to improve their case”.
People know this is happening — even police are speaking out about the enormous amount of their time consumed by false allegations.
Two years ago the Queensland Police Union made a submission to a family law inquiry pointing out that false allegations of domestic violence are regularly used to gain advantage in family law disputes, with members of the police force sometimes finding themselves on the receiving end.
In some areas of Queensland, domestic violence takes up to 80 per cent of police time. Note that in NSW, domestic violence assaults make up only 4.8 per cent of major crimes but take up 50-70 per cent of police time.
That’s the current reality. But now, without any mandate from the electorate and ignoring recommendations from a series of inquiries, this Labor government is taking matters a huge leap further.
They are wiping out any mention in the law of children’s rights to two parents in their lives, watering down the joint presumption of shared parental responsibility and ditching the requirement to consider shared or substantial care in parenting plans — the key elements which promote the sharing of parenting.
Under the new Act shared care is only to be considered “when it is safe to do so”.
What’s absolutely shocking is that these momentous changes passed largely unnoticed through the lower house of parliament, with remarkably little protest.
It wasn’t until the legislation came under fire this week with questions in the Senate that Michaelia Cash let fly with a devastating attack on Labor for stripping away the key parenting sections of the bill. Labor was caught with their pants down but the press gallery chose not to notice.
And no one dared mention the war — except for brave Pauline Hanson, a lone voice daring to speak about false allegations.
Everyone else ignored the elephant in the room, knowing our feminist-led media would attack anyone who told the truth about what is going on here. The domestic violence card worked brilliantly to silence all proper debate about the bill.
Hanson was the only one with the guts to point out what every judge, magistrate, lawyer and police officer knows to be the case — that these changes to the law will bring poorer outcomes for children, a fresh flood of new accusations against fathers, more conflict between divorced parents, a huge surge in litigation as men pay out to try to see their children and more suicides for men as they realise that their chances of a fair hearing in an already biased court system will now be further reduced.
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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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