Australian Politics

How common sense has gone walkabout in woke Australia:

I had my first glimpse of King Charles back in 1970, when he, the late Queen, the late Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne came to Botany Bay in Sydney to celebrate the landing there, 200 years before, of Captain James Cook, who paved the way for the British settlement of Australia.

Along with 100,000 onlookers, including me as a child of seven, the Royals watched a re-enactment of Cook’s arrival, which even included a token challenge by a couple of Aboriginal warriors. It was a very happy day, bursting with national pride.

This was the tour during which the tradition of the royal ‘walkabout’ was born when Daily Mail reporter, Vincent Mulchrone, used the word to describe how the Queen and Philip interacted casually with crowds.

I revisited Botany Bay earlier this year, and it is now overgrown and neglected. The 250th anniversary passed in 2020 with barely any public acknowledgment. Any mentions of it were mostly hostile and shame-faced.

Cook’s landing place is a sad symbol of how Australia has changed so totally, in not so many years, from a nation proud and comfortable with its history since the British arrived, to one taught to be ashamed of that past and to see only the darkness in it.

Although royal walkabouts began on that tour, it is no surprise that, in 2024, Buckingham Palace dropped the term for next month’s royal visit to Australia and replaced it with the anodyne ‘opportunity to meet the public’. Apparently, the King does not want to offend Aboriginal Australians who, we are told, associate the word ‘walkabout’ with personal journeys of grief or self-discovery.

The Palace wouldn’t have changed its language nor agreed to the strongly Indigenous-slanted Australian itinerary of King Charles and Queen Camilla, without the approval of our left-wing prime minister Anthony Albanese.

He is the ultra-woke leader of the Australian Labor Party who, last year, held a disastrous referendum over a change to the Australian constitution which would have given a greater political voice to Aboriginal Australians. The proposal was crushingly defeated by voters.

You might imagine Down Under as a sunny larrikin paradise of Foster’s, Sheilas and Bruces, a land untouched by the wokery and cancel culture infecting the UK.

Far from it.

Since the turn of this century, Australia’s political and social elites have endeavoured to import ‘progressive values’, bound up in all manner of nanny state rules.

By far the most pernicious wokery relates to our history and Australia’s indigenous peoples. I say ‘peoples’ deliberately, as it’s now politically incorrect to talk of Aboriginal Australians as one group.

As some consider the term ‘Aboriginal’ to be a label invented by colonisers, we are now instructed to use the appropriated Canadian label, ‘First Nations’.

Of course, the struggles of indigenous people deserve recognition and Australia’s treatment of its original inhabitants since settlers first arrived in 1788 has been far from perfect. And the culture and heritage of Aboriginal people, who make up just 3 per cent of the population, enriches our country.

But increasingly, Australians can no longer speak about their cities without referring to their Aboriginal origins.

We are reminded constantly that Australia’s original settlement, Sydney, is on ‘Gadigal’ country, Melbourne on ‘Kulin’ country, and so on. There’s also a push to give major cities and towns dual names – my city of Melbourne apparently is called Narrm, and Brisbane is Meanjin – and there’s a raging debate over what Aboriginal name Sydney should be given.

In an Australian newspaper, an Aboriginal person when named, is also labelled by their ancestral tribal affiliations, such as a ‘proud Gadigal-Wiradjuri-Yorta Yorta person’. (The ‘proud’ is always in there perfunctorily, as the word is taken to symbolise the person’s not being ashamed of their ancestry in an Anglo-centric world.)

The woke obeisance goes further than that, though. There’s now an obsession with making ‘acknowledgements of country’ in just about any public sphere.

Fans of cult Aussie comedy series Colin From Accounts –whose second series has just landed in the UK – will have noticed the ludicrous announcement at the start of each episode: ‘Binge [the Australian streaming service] acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this programme was produced.’

This is standard practice here for corporate meetings, announcements on planes landing in Australia, or even coach drivers picking up tourists.

They go like this: ‘We meet on the lands of the (tribal group) people, and acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.’ The more zealous add the lands were ‘never ceded’. Even government offices and commercial businesses plaster the words prominently on their doors and walls to demonstrate how with-it and woke they are.

It’s reached the point of such tokenistic absurdity that an online parent-teacher meeting of my child’s primary school, called to discuss school uniforms and books, was prefaced by the headmistress with a mandatory acknowledgment of country.

This homage is now mandatory at school assemblies, often in a mystic recitation, inculcating our youngest Australians into the new received wisdom about oppressed Aboriginal people and the evils of European settlement.

A mini-industry has sprung up in which Aboriginal people perform ‘traditional smoking ceremonies’ before government, sporting and corporate events, to ‘cleanse’ the meeting spaces of evil spirits with smoke, music and chanting.

Of course, the acknowledgments and these ‘ceremonies’ merely give the – mainly white – audiences the opportunity to engage in ritual self-flagellation.

National pride is disparaged. Thanks to Prime Minister Albanese’s useful idiots, Australia Day on January 26 is targeted by hardliners, who noisily protest, vandalise Captain Cook’s statues, calling it ‘Invasion Day’.

Originally a celebration of the day the Union Flag was first raised in Australia in 1788, now it is an annual excuse for the media to be convulsed with debate all January over whether we should abolish it.

Then there’s our beautiful Australian flag. It’s no longer acceptable to fly it alone. It always has to be alongside the flags of the Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders – Australia’s other main indigenous group.

You’ll never see a Left-wing politician like Albanese without at least those three flags behind him, usually with the Aboriginal flag most prominent.

Far-Left Green leader, Adam Bandt, was once so angry to be seen with the Australian flag at a press conference that he flung it in horror from his podium. And our national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, routinely plays Aboriginal music like the didgeridoo – treating it as equal to the works of Beethoven and Mozart. The didgeridoo has its place, but I fear this ‘celebration’ of Aboriginal culture often looks patronising.

The same is true of our national sporting strips, like the rugby Wallabies and Olympic team kits, which feature obligatory Aboriginal-style patterns in their otherwise traditional designs. Why? Because it’s expected.

Australia’s wokeness is demonstrated well beyond Indigenous causes.

For one, our elites have fully embraced the trans agenda. And thanks to a Federal Court of Australia ruling, the Tickle v Giggle – a name as absurd as its implications are serious – biological sex is now considered in law to be ‘changeable’, whatever you decide it is on any given day.

In my state of Victoria, as in most others, if a child wants to transition they can be prescribed puberty blockers by a doctor, and their school will treat them as their preferred gender without the need for Mum or Dad to be alerted.

Even Britain’s sobering Cass report, which showed in devastating detail how ‘gender re-affirming’ treatments can do much more harm than good to young people, has not stopped the march of trans and gender-fluid ideology in Australian schools, institutions and even the media.

Drag queens read LGBT stories to children in public libraries. Pre-school children are introduced to woke concepts of gender from age three, and such teaching goes on through their school lives. To query this is to risk being labelled homophobic, transphobic and bigoted. Parents who do, or question other woke shibboleths, can even be banned from teacher-parent meetings, or supervised in them as if they’re social deviants.

Australia is one of the biggest nanny states in the world, utterly tied up in rules and regulations designed to protect us from ourselves. We’re particularly good at banning things: last week, the government, backed by the conservative Liberal opposition, announced that it will ban underage children’s access to social media.

Before that, they put a ban on e-cigarettes and vapes being sold anywhere but in pharmacies.

Well-meaning, maybe, but these bans are unenforceable or have worse consequences: the vape ban has led to a thriving criminal black market.

And who can forget the pandemic? Melbourne was, notoriously, the world’s most locked-down city. With varying degrees of willingness, most of us here submitted to curfews, mask and vaccine mandates, and a harrowing loss of liberty. We meekly carried out the orders of political and medical authority figures, even though they rarely had a clue what they were doing.

When protests did occur, they were ruthlessly suppressed by the police – unless for Black Lives Matter. We might largely have kept back Covid, but the legacy of social damage is irreparable.

Let’s be honest. In the past 20 years, particularly since the conservative John Howard lost office as Prime Minister in 2007, Australia has surrendered to the Left’s culture war, more so even than Britain.

The easygoing Australia of 1970 I remember fondly has long gone. In 2024 Australia, it’s common sense that has gone walkabout.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13879183/How-common-sense-gone-walkabout-woke-Australia.html

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Push for Australia Day backflip in one big city

An Adelaide council will debate whether to reverse its decision and move its Australia Day ceremonies back to January 26.

Unley Council will on Monday vote on a motion to move its citizenship and Citizen of the Year award ceremonies, after a majority of people polled supported backflipping on the council’s earlier decision to move the celebrations to January 25.

Earlier this year, the council asked residents for feedback on the issue, posting a poll on its website.

During the consultation period, 842 residents responded, with 60 per cent supporting a return to January 26.

Councillor Rebekah Rogers moved a motion to vote on the poll’s findings, with the council to vote on the proposal on Monday.

“We are, as a local government, responsible as a council to our own community in Unley.” Mayor Michael Hewitson told Nine News.

“We’ve got a whole range of opinions on council, just as there is across the community as a whole”

In 2022, the Albanese government made changes to the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code, allowing councils to hold its Australia Day ceremonies either on January 26 or within three days before and after.

This year, the City of Unley moved its ceremonies to January 25.

https://www.news.com.au/national/push-for-australia-day-backflip-in-one-big-city/news-story/b6fa33888c9cdff7a623aaa35e66a914

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Lame ducks Biden and Kishida and weakened Modi and Albanese meet to do nothing at the Quad

The Quadrilateral leaders’ summit in Delaware has broadcast a loud and resounding message of weakness, timidity, irresolution and pervasive lameness.

Four immensely diminished leaders met to do, and say, almost nothing.

US President Joe Biden is the lamest of lame ducks. Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, is about to retire. Narendra Modi, still by far the strongest of the four, now leads a weakened government after losing his absolute parliamentary majority at the last Indian election.

And Australia’s Anthony Albanese, struggling in the polls and facing an imminent election, is now practising diplomacy and international security along the lines of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

The problem is, the three wise monkeys approach doesn’t cut much mustard in constraining Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

Biden gave the game away in his hot mic moment when, thinking he was off camera and not being recorded, he declared to his three amigos that China was “testing us” and buying time to “aggressively” pursue its national interests.

The Quad leaders’ statement, though deploring all manner of aggressive and dangerous actions in areas like the South China Sea, didn’t mention China by name.

It’s as though aggressive and dangerous naval and air force manoeuvres, the illegal seizing of islands, the militarisation of seized and artificially created islands, and all the rest are like a bad weather system, with no identifiable cause, certainly no one to be held responsible, unless perhaps it’s climate change, the villain of all purpose?

Quad officials even claimed, with heroic and magnificent disregard for the truth, that the Quad was not directed at any other one single nation.

Here is a certain simple but profound contradiction: if the Quad is to be strong enough to prevent Beijing from militarily dominating the region but is too weak to mention China by name, why should anyone have real confidence about its strength?

It’s true that the Quad first came into existence in order to cope at speed with the Asian tsunami of 2004, but it quickly evolved into a security focused group.

Michael Shoebridge of Strategic Analysis Australia points out some of the initiatives announced by the Quad in Delaware are utterly microscopic, such as the US considering giving $1.5m to the World Bank, a sum of money equivalent in worth to a less than the price of family home in an outer-ring suburb in Sydney.

Similarly the Quad is now getting involved, albeit in a miserly way, with various good works, such as cancer research. But no one is seriously looking to the Quad to cure cancer. They are looking to it to have an effect on regional security.

Japan and to a lesser extent India have wanted the Quad to amount to something. The US has an institutional position of this kind as well, although this is offset to some extent by the dithering ineffectiveness of Biden and his recent investment in another round of meaningless personal diplomacy with the Chinese leadership.

Paradoxically, Canberra under the Albanese government has been leading the go-slow movement.

At regional gatherings to ponder the Quad’s future, the Japanese will sometimes emphasise further naval joint actions. The Australian representative most typically says that Quad partners must go to ASEAN and ask ASEAN what it would like the Quad to do.

ASEAN in a way is a good thing, but ASEAN-centric security structures have comprehensively failed in the region. Asking ASEAN – which moves only by consensus and a couple of whose members are completely dominated by Beijing – what to do is another way of saying you don’t want to do anything.

Which is just as well, because at the rate the Albanese government is letting the Australian Defence Force radically decline in capability, there’s almost nothing that we can do.

This Quad pioneered greater coast guard co-operation among its four members, but our tiny Border Force is overwhelmed already by its current security task and certainly has no room to expand.

Meanwhile, nobody knows what future role our new Offshore Patrol Vessels might play. Though built at great expense, not one has yet been accepted into service by the navy. In a characteristic demonstration of Australia’s defence incoherence, our OPVs, if they ever come into service, are as a big as a light frigate but carry effectively no weapons and do not have battle-worthy hulls.

The Albanese Government is all hat and no cattle in all security matters.

Alas, the Quad is now emulating this lamentable example. Nonetheless, it’s good that it still exists, even in this twilight incarnation. Perhaps a new American president, and a new Japanese prime minister, might breathe some life back into it.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/lame-ducks-biden-and-kishida-and-weakened-modi-and-albanese-meet-to-do-nothing-at-the-quad/news-story/4efa1584d12702909466f405c5c3a922

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Energy entrepreneur says Australia’s solar and battery boom is a ‘clear and present danger’

Israel’s booby-trap explosions – inside walkie-talkies and pagers – that killed and injured Hezbollah operatives has sparked a chilling warning that Australia’s battery storage systems are vulnerable to similar attacks.

While Australia isn’t facing any active threats, Brian Craighead – chief executive of Energy Renaissance which has developed a “cyber secure battery management system” with the CSIRO to power defence bases – says Australia’s love affair with solar power, and cheap Chinese-made batteries, has left the nation exposed.

He says the “hidden threat to national security” is in the software of about 250,000 home batteries that have been installed across Australia – “220,000 of which are from potentially non-friendly” sources.

“These things are good until they turn bad,” Mr Craighead said.

“When everyone talks about battery safety, we tend to think about the chemical stuff – these fires that you see on videos of Tesla cars going up. But those are relatively unusual. The key thing to focus on is battery software … that’s what protects them from overcharging.

“Let’s say you were a bad actor from a bad country, here’s what you could do, and this would be horribly easy. For example, you could say on January 7, 2025, I’m going to turn off the overcharge on 200,000 batteries installed in homes in Australia. Nothing is going to happen until then.”

Mr Craighead said the batteries would then keep charging with solar energy, instead of “stopping at a certain point” and “overcharge is when all hell breaks loose”.

“Whenever you talk about battery problem, it’s because it’s overcharging. Consider that a standard home battery contains approximately 7,500 times more energy than a pager. The catastrophic potential if such a device were compromised is immense,” he said.

“A co-ordinated attack exploiting these vulnerabilities could lead to widespread fires, explosions, and a crippling of our energy infrastructure. The risk extends beyond individual homes. Large, imported grid-connected batteries are becoming integral to Australia’s national energy grid. These massive storage systems, often managed by foreign-developed software, could be susceptible to cyber-attacks or sabotage, posing a threat to national security and public safety.

“There’s a clear and present danger.”

The nature of the risk is similar to the one linked to the boom in “smart home” devices. Hackers have infiltrated devices from baby monitors to spy on families, webcams have been hijacked to take down computer networks, while home thermostats have been raised – given most lack the virus protection and security updates that are found in PCs and smartphones.

Hackers have infiltrated devices from baby monitors to spy on families, and webcams to take down computer networks,
Hackers have infiltrated devices from baby monitors to spy on families, and webcams to take down computer networks,
And when it comes to batteries, Ms Craighead said most people did not think of them as smart devices.

“We describe this as a malevolent actor issue but equally it’s just incompetence. Think of IoT (Internet of Things devices). They just plug them in and nobody maintains the IoT software, so that smart camera you have is massively open to a hack.

“Chinese batteries are being dumped into Australia at the moment – they’re not being sold anywhere else. So it’s probably just as possible that through sheer negligence and incompetence this cheap battery, whoever built it has gone or it has been rebadged three times. They’re not maintaining it.”

The US banned the Pentagon from buying batteries from six Chinese manufacturers earlier this year.

Mr Craighead said it was not too late for the Australian government to take action, urging them to mandate that batteries are cyber-secure and issue product recalls if they’re not.

Energy Renaissance developed a cyberscure battery management system with the CSIRO, which embeds security measures at the core of the battery’s operation, protecting agains malicious interference in the nation’s energy grid.

“There is an architecture to this. We went to CSIRO, and it cost us millions, because they were the only ones that Defence would trust to do it the right way. But nobody does that because the pressure is to get the cheapest batteries in, buy them from China, plug them in and off we go.

“If you said you wanted to store 100 cans of diesel in your granny’s garage, you’d probably think twice about it. But because it (a battery) is this little thing in a box that looks cool, you never really think about it in that way. Any everything I’m saying, just multiply it by 1000 or 10,000 when it comes to big batteries. It’s nuts.

“It’s like pink batts on steroids. That’s the level of risk we’ve got right now.”

Mr Craighead was referring to the Rudd government’s $2.45bn Home Insulation Program, which was axed in 2010 after it was linked to three deaths and more than 200 house fires.

“The tragic events in Lebanon serve as a sad reminder of the potential dangers lurking within unsecured technology. As Australia continues its transition towards renewable energy, we must recognise the importance of securing the systems upon which we increasingly rely.

“There is a path forward. We can mitigate these risks by embracing secure, Australian-made solutions and enforcing strict cybersecurity protocols. The power that fuels our lives should be a source of security and confidence, not vulnerability. Now is the time to act decisively.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/energy-entrepreneur-says-australias-solar-and-battery-boom-is-a-clear-and-present-danger/news-story/03511639766fc7101a824789a8a3516a