Australian Politics

The shame of anti-Israel proponents

Israel’s ingenious pager attack against Hezbollah last week (followed by a second attack targeting walkie-talkies the next day) was not only a clever supply chain infiltration, but one of the most sophisticated, intelligence-driven, surgically targeted strikes executed in modern military history. Shamefully, many anti-Israel proponents condemned Israel rather than condemning the terrorists.

Israel’s targeted attacks were a major blow to the terrorists and took out Hezbollah’s command and control capability, thus preparing the ground for a major Israeli pre-emptive strike. Israel was right to strike Hezbollah as it continues to battle Hamas in the southwest while defending itself against Houthi missiles from the southeast.

While Israel’s strikes against the terrorists comply with the principles of International Humanitarian Law, and especially with its two main requirements of proportionality and distinction (with regrettable collateral casualties which were incidental), we immediately witnessed a global wave of condemnation of the Israeli action against a terrorist organisation proscribed by both the UK and Australia.

In the UK, moral support or approval of a terrorist organisation is a criminal offence. It is also a criminal offence to express an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation.

Australia is less prescriptive but an organisation which ‘advocates the doing of a terrorist act’ can lead to the government listing such an organisation as a terrorist organisation. Such ‘advocating’ is described as where one ‘directly praises the doing of a terrorist act, where there is a substantial risk that this praise might lead someone to engage in a terrorist act’.

Israel is currently fighting against Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen, three non-state terrorist actors that are all supported by Iran.

Some Australians refuse to condemn the actions of these terrorist groups while shamefully decrying Israel’s legal right to defend itself. This frequently manifests as political support for Palestine, which is controlled by Hamas in Gaza, in the mistaken belief that not condemning the terrorists provides a pathway to peace.

One junior solicitor wore a keffiyeh during his admission address to the NSW Supreme Court. The Chief Justice was quick to demand why the court had been hijacked for political purposes.

The junior solicitor explained:

‘I am proud to wear the keffiyeh, proud to show what being by a lawyer (sic) means to me personally. I hope with small acts of solidarity like these, we can move towards a more peaceful, fulfilling world.’

In our opinion, this so-called peaceful world certainly won’t be brought about by terrorist regimes who are proxies of the murderous Iranian Islamist regime.

These groups operating in the Middle East are not poorly armed freedom fighters, they are radical Islamist terrorist actors that are well-equipped with modern weapons of warfare. As terrorist organisations, they are all proscribed by the Australian government. The Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah, are also fighting against the internationally-recognised Yemeni government while Hezbollah is effectively holding Lebanon and its democracy hostage.

Recently, a Houthi hypersonic missile travelled just over 2,000 km in under 12 minutes to strike Israel. This is no backward capability but signals that Israel is under threat from modern weapons in the hands of terrorists. Fortunately, the missile was hit by Israeli defence measures and fragmented, causing only minor injuries to civilians.

To put that capability in perspective, Australia is yet to develop a hypersonic missile. The SCIFiRE Program is a collaborative agreement between Australia and the US to develop the capability but it is some time away.

In Australia, the Greens party have repeatedly called for the provision of arms to Israel from Australia to be prohibited. The Greens claim that Australia ‘should not be fuelling war crimes’. Such claims are ludicrous given Israel’s enemies have weapons capabilities that Australia is yet to develop.

The Greens have little clue when it comes to national security challenges or indeed defence technologies – they would rather focus on whatever suits their anti-colonial narrative – and they refuse to condemn the proscribed terrorist groups.

Soft footing around antisemitism makes the situation worse. Labor is caught in the middle and appears to be dividing its loyalties between Australia’s national interests and some voters’ concerns for Palestine.

This will become a bigger problem in the future as the Middle East edges closer to all-out war. As the leftists in the West refuse to condemn terrorist groups, this only emboldens Iran and its proxies. But many don’t appreciate how localised the usefulness of ‘useful idiots’ in Australia have become.

Antisemitic behaviour in Australia is a major problem. For instance, Mark Scott, former ABC managing director and now vice-chancellor of Sydney University, recently apologised to Jewish students, admitting that he ‘failed them’ when it comes to the pro-Palestinian encampment on the grounds.

We see this as a metaphor for the Labor government.

It is only a matter of time before continued support for Palestine (in whatever form), and the normalising of antisemitism in our institutions, impacts negatively on our national security.

Freedom of speech and opinion is central to liberal democracy, but so too is the rule of law. Our laws are designed to protect us from terrorists. The groups Israel is fighting against are proscribed because they would destroy the very fabric of our otherwise peaceful nation if given half a chance.

Australians who refuse to condemn Iran-sponsored terrorist groups are not doing our national security any favours. Anti-Israel proponents are shamefully doing nothing for our future other than ceding our hard-won liberties to those who would otherwise yoke us to their terrorist ways.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/the-shame-of-anti-israel-proponents/

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Deeming saga a tale of gutless leaders and bullied conservatives

Peta Credlin

The Moira Deeming saga now playing out in the Federal Court, in her defamation action against state Liberal leader John Pesutto, is essentially about the long-term gutlessness of the Victorian Liberal parliamentary team.

To Pesutto, Deeming’s real crime is not that she was at a rally gatecrashed by neo-Nazis but that she’s a conservative. That’s why he wanted her gone.

Yet if outspoken conservatives have no place in the Victorian parliamentary Liberal Party, why would any conservative vote for them?

Remember, Deeming is suing Pesutto because to have her expelled from the state Liberal partyroom she claims he described her as an associate of Nazi sympathisers (his descriptor of feminist activists Angie Jones and Kellie-Jay Keen).

Of course Pesutto is now trying to walk all that back, but he’s not helped by the existence of a secret recording from a meeting where this is pretty much said, and the fact he settled out of court with a public apology to Jones and Keen.

What has become clear, though, after a week and a half of hearings is that Pesutto’s antipathy towards Deeming was never about who gatecrashed the rally in March last year. Rather, his real purpose in seeking to remove Deeming was to purge the parliamentary party of a strong conservative woman.

First, because he feared her presence would expose him to criticism in his own ultra-marginal, teal-like seat, because he has misread the fight for women’s rights as a left v right issue when it unites women (and men) across the political spectrum. And, second, because he feared he couldn’t stand up to premier Daniel Andrews’ charge that the Libs were guilty by association with neo-Nazis just because Deeming had been at the gatecrashed rally.

In other words, this whole expensive and drawn-out exercise in washing the party’s dirty linen in public was triggered by Pesutto’s fear of being portrayed as too right wing to govern Victoria; indeed, it’s something he specifically references in the secret recording.

It’s a classic case of allowing your opponents to dictate your actions. And yet another example of the Victorian Liberals being so utterly spooked by Andrews that they end up looking politically paralysed and, frankly, pathetic.

For the record, I should state that before this Deeming row I regarded Pesutto as one of their few viable options to lead a depleted Liberal parliamentary team into the next election. Indeed, earlier I’d been asked to help him to develop a strong opposition leader’s office and a credible political program, which I did.

But when he maligned Deeming as guilty by association and failed to defend the rights of women, he lost me; and, as I’ve made public, I felt compelled to defend the underdog in Deeming.

Since that time, I’ve worked with various party intermediaries to encourage both Pesutto and Deeming to avoid going to court as defamation trials rarely have a winner and this unedifying display we’re witnessing now is the last thing Victorians need when they’re crying out for a change of government.

But, in the end, it’s the leader who has the fundamental responsibility to keep the team together. For 18 months now, Pesutto has defended his original decision to expel Deeming as an alleged neo-Nazi associate on the grounds that to retreat would make him seem weak.

In fact, admitting to an initial over-reaction would more likely have made him seem the bigger man. What’s now set to damn his leadership is that these two serious errors of judgment – first, making a big mistake; and, second, refusing to own up to it – seem to amount to the major character flaw of being incapable of ever admitting to being wrong.

Perhaps Deeming, a brand-new MP, could have handled the rally and its aftermath better. But it was no secret she intended to go; indeed, she spoke about it in the parliament as she urged Labor’s minister for women to attend.

As leader, Pesutto might have told her then that he didn’t support her going; he might have offered her mentorship or suggestions about how best to channel her undoubted courage and support for women’s rights.

Instead, as evidence in court has shown, once Andrews had savaged the Liberals as guilty by association with neo-Nazis, even though Deeming had not the slightest inkling that neo-Nazis would turn up, Pesutto threw her under a bus.

Instead of gritting his teeth and defending Deeming’s right to free speech and excusing her from any blame over the gatecrashers, Pesutto went to water.

The next day he summoned Deeming to a meeting with the four-person Liberal leadership group and had her berated for exposing the Liberals to a smear campaign from the premier.

It was the secret recording of this meeting, made by the Liberal deputy leader David Southwick, that was played last week in court.

In it, Pesutto accepted that Deeming was not a neo-Nazi or a neo-Nazi associate, and further accepted that she had a right to speak freely against biological males invading female-only spaces such as toilets and change rooms, but asserted that these views would be better expressed from the crossbench and invited her to sit as an independent. So, it was less the turn-up of neo-Nazis to Deeming’s rally that had angered Pesutto but Deeming being there in the first place in support of women’s rights.

This was a continuation of the Victorian Liberal establishment’s aversion to anything and anyone that could be described as conservative – even though plenty of old-style leftist feminists such as JK Rowling have been aghast at the erosion of women’s rights in favour of biological men who merely identify as women.

Even in evidence on Wednesday, Pesutto could not outright condemn the example of a male rapist being put in a women’s prison because they now self-identified as a woman.

It is Pesutto’s views that are out of step with rank-and-file Liberals, not Deeming’s; the mere fact Deeming remains a member of the Victorian Liberal Party (as opposed to the parliamentary team) is evidence of her support among the base because it shows that Pesutto doesn’t have the numbers to remove her.

The result of Pesutto’s implacable fight to the finish to be rid of Deeming, not because she’s a neo-Nazi sympathiser but just because she’s a conservative, has divided and demoralised the wider Liberal Party in Victoria without reaping any apparent electoral benefit.

Sure, on some polls, the state Liberals are finally competitive with Labor. But as Peter Dutton has observed, given the longevity and record of the Andrews-Allan government, the state Libs should be at least as far in front in Victoria as they are in Queensland.

That they are not is attributable to ongoing internal division (because if you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the state) and the lack of a clear contest of ideas and policy. Indeed, at the most recent state election the Victorian opposition’s policy was left of Labor on some issues, with the net result that even after the world’s longest lockdowns Labor won a record third term, thus illustrating one of politics’ iron laws: Labor-lite Liberals lose.

As Dutton has shown, even in Victoria the Liberals can be competitive if they create a contest against a bad Labor government and they are now competitive in at least four Victorian seats.

If only Pesutto had shown as much fight against Labor as he has against Deeming.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/deeming-saga-a-tale-of-gutless-leaders-and-bullied-conservatives/news-story/40fffe156ea2ee5667b6ddbd2c66d697

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Scrapping negative gearing won’t lead to more housing supply

Making big changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax excites Greens and progressive voters, but it’s a sideshow in the housing debate.

To improve housing affordability, we need to change tack in a dozen areas – land zoning, migration, trade skills, regulation, financing and much else, including tax – so that we can build more homes in areas where people want to live.

It’s that simple and, as our dismal record on construction shows, it’s also unnecessarily difficult to hit the real target: supply, supply, supply.

The property lobby has set a reasonable test for any policy shift: do the proposed changes grow or shrink the supply of new homes in Australia?

Anthony Albanese and the states have committed to 1.2 million new homes by 2029; that goal is already in jeopardy because of a shortage of trades workers and a lack of will.

Tax concessions for housing are huge, reflecting a societal compact that shelter is a necessity and we want to encourage more of it. Same goes for supporting philanthropy, research and development and other worthy social initiatives.

According to the budget papers, the estimated revenue forgone last financial year for rental deductions was $27bn; the capital gains tax discount for individuals and trusts was $19bn.

The big tax and spenders see a vast pool of interventionist possibilities with the added bonus of class warfare.

Tax concessions for housing are routinely seen as the villain by voters.

In its latest True Issues survey, JWS Research tested support for potential reforms to Australia’s tax system and economic management.

It found strong support among voters for “major changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax to try and slow house price growth and make homes more affordable”.

Among Greens voters, the research found 60 per cent either “strongly” or “somewhat” support the proposed measures; among Labor voters, it was 55 per cent, but only 33 per cent for Coalition voters.

Whether those policies work or not is another matter entirely.

For instance, there could be brutal consequences for some if the tax concessions are ditched, including young borrowers who are “rentvesting”, by buying a cheaper first home in a far-flung suburb, while renting closer to their workplace and friends.

Previous modelling by Deloitte for the Property Council shows that the changes taken to the 2019 election by Labor under Bill Shorten would lead to a 4 per cent squeeze on the home building pipeline.

Centre for Independent Studies chief economist Peter Tulip has declared tax concessions were a distraction in the broader housing story.

The former senior Reserve Bank economist argues respected researchers, using different approaches, have estimated the effect of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions on housing prices and “repeatedly found this effect to be tiny”: from around 1 per cent to 4 per cent.

Tulip’s research attributes the faster growth in housing prices to lower after-inflation mortgage rates and higher immigration in the pre-Covid period.

Many experts, including officials in Treasury and Finance Department, believe our tax system is not fit for purpose.

Population ageing and a leaky base mean we need to be asking serious policy questions about tax sustainability and intergenerational fairness.

Given palpable political timidity in all things tax reform, bureaucratic inertia follows.

The status quo is a lifeboat of sorts for officials in a world where Jim Chalmers continues to spurn strict fiscal rules.

As former senior Treasury official Paul Tilley wrote in Mixed Fortunes, his recent history of tax reform in Australia, the full deductibility of interest payments for investment housing is widely seen as establishing an incentive for negative gearing.

“This, however, is a misunderstanding of the tax system, as expenses associated with income-earning activities are generally tax deductible,” Tilley writes.

“The effective tax rate for investment housing is unaffected by gearing.

“To the extent there is a tax concession regarding investment housing, it is on the income side with the inclusion of only 50 per cent of the capital gain in taxable income, and only on a realisation basis.

“A future tax reform agenda regarding housing, therefore would best be considered as part of a general approach to capital gains taxation.”

Tilley argues it may be worth considering whether that discount, introduced in 1999, is excessively generous and whether its connection to the rate of inflation should be re-established; the previous system ensured only real gains were taxed.

We can do better on taxing savings as well as encouraging more housing supply; what we can’t afford is to get distracted from the main game.

Let’s not snuff out policy debate on the big issues, because at least it keeps housing affordability front and centre in the public square.

As new federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil said about the Help to Buy legislation spurned by the Greens and Coalition in the Senate, no single initiative is a “silver bullet” for Australia’s housing crisis.

But by fiddling with tax concessions, we risk more populist folly and shooting ourselves in the foot.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/scrapping-negative-gearing-wont-lead-to-more-housing-supply/news-story/b7d73b5edc68c593cf2f317a9c31f1a9

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Not all masculinity is toxic: Hold the front page: men are different to women

Gender wars are a subset of culture wars. We risk raising a generation of boys who are emotionally damaged and mentally fragile amidst a sea of snowflake children who, terrified by multifront extremist alarmism, demand governments keep them safe from any unpleasantness and all life challenges. Indoctrinated into bearing the burden of collective guilt for past sins that isn’t really inheritable, how many white Christian boys will struggle with mental health issues?

The excesses of trans extremists have finally begun to attract serious pushback from some brave souls like popular writers, athletes, civil servants, police officers, school teachers, professors and a few politicians like Moira Deeming and Claire Chandler. When are men, with the support of women who believe in gender equality and need to consider the welfare of their sons, fathers, brothers and husbands, going to organise the fightback to restore equal rights for all regardless of racial, religious and gender identity? To fight that war and hope to win, an army must first be raised. An army of advocates, activists and even some metaphorical martyrs to the cause.

Instead, additional demands continue to come from women’s rights advocates. On 17 September, Chief Executive Women released its annual report showing that 91 per cent of CEOs are men. It called on companies to set real gender targets because ‘diverse voices are important and diverse leadership teams are good for business’. There are big problems with its tall claims. It pushes the interests of a narrow cultural elite, not of most women in their quotidian activities.

We never, but never, hear talk of equal gender outcomes in the dangerous, menial, physically demanding, family life-disrupting and geographically remote jobs. If the nation’s senior women executives are truly motivated by concern for group-based social justice and the belief that diversity in the senior executive leadership will ‘unlock substantial economic growth and productivity’, they should prioritise getting racial minorities ahead of women who are even more badly under-represented.

However, promoting people into senior positions based on chromosomes and race is not talent-scouting but virtue-signalling. And what if top women leaders were disproportionately represented in high profile leadership disasters? Would a male police chief have prioritised a visit to the hair stylist and going out to dinner during the Black Saturday bushfire that killed 173 people in 2009?

Of course there are many examples of female leaders acting with acumen, courage and integrity: Christina Holgate’s commercial success with Australia Post and Renée Leon (sacked by Scott Morrison as departmental secretary for terminating the unlawful Robodebt). But only recklessly courageous researchers would explore gender-based failures of leadership and so we are stuck with platitudes instead of empirical data.

The ubiquitous gender pay gap myth mostly reflects different occupational choices on work-lifestyle balance. How many women would choose to work 12-hour shifts in mines in remote locations for extended periods, for double what they might be earning? In full-time work in the US, men work on average two hours more per week. Among those working less than 35-hour weeks, women earn five per cent more. In countries that offer more job flexibility without imposing financial hardships on families, for example in Scandinavia, more women choose the lower paying but less stressful and more flexible professions that provide more job satisfaction.

Nataliya Ilyushina made a similar argument by noting that the report on the gender pay gap from Australia’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency had accidentally measured women’s freedom of choice.

The increasingly radicalised and unhinged attacks on toxic masculinity culminated in the #MeToo moment when women had to be believed and men vilified, defenestrated and perhaps even incarcerated, no matter how thin the evidence and absurd the alleged victimisation and grievance narrative. In the process, longstanding pillars of Western jurisprudence and criminal justice systems have come under sustained assault with a weakened commitment to the key principles of equal protection under the law, due process and innocence until proven guilty. There’s a double standard at play, where the woman is effectively infantilised and denied responsible agency.

Being too intoxicated is an acceptable excuse to transfer the burden of proof and responsibility entirely to the male defendant. But being drunk is no excuse for him.

Judgmental remarks about a woman’s sexual behaviour and the choices she makes will unleash a social media pile-on demanding public censure and dismissal. Yet it is permissible to characterise men’s conduct in judgmental language.

The justice system downplays the reality that some women can act unwisely, succumb to temptation in the heat of the moment and change their stories subsequently either because they regret their ethical lapse, or because they fear the consequences for their marriage or relationship; and some are outright malicious or manipulative and use sex consciously as a weapon. Following public criticism of ‘lazy and perhaps politically expedient’ but unserious and unmeritorious prosecutions for alleged sexual assaults, New South Wales chief prosecutor Sally Dowling told a Senate hearing on 4 September, an audit was launched and 15 rape cases were discontinued.

The biggest victims of the culture wars have been whites, Christians and males. By a clever sleight of mind, ‘toxic masculinity’ has morphed into the charge that masculinity itself is toxic. Competition, bravery, honour, chivalry, gallantry are also hardwired traits of masculinity. The warrior-protector trait led a dad to jump to the tracks in a fatal effort to save his twin babies whose pram had rolled down from the platform while the mother screamed. Few would be surprised by that gender difference or judge the mother harshly.

Treating the accused perpetrators and victims of serious crime differently is anathema to the fair administration of justice. As in every aspect of public policy, sexual assault laws should balance the rights of complainants for justice and closure with the rights of the accused to a fair trial, due process and protection against malicious, extortionate and vengeful allegations. A particular category of crime should not have a lower threshold of evidence for prosecution than other serious crimes. The process itself as punishment and the cost of being found not guilty further undermine justice.

Lower life expectancy and higher suicide and incarceration rates for Aborigines in Australia and blacks in the US supposedly prove the reality of systemic and institutional racism. But do lower life expectancy and higher suicide (three-quarters of suicides in Australia and the UK are among males) and incarceration rates for men prove toxic and criminal masculinity? The death rate for American men on the job is twelve times higher and injuries are 50 per cent more than for women. In Australia, ABS data show that men comprise 70 per cent of those working over 60 hours per week and 96 per cent of those dying in the workplace. Which women’s lobby group highlights these job statistics?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/09/not-all-masculinity-is-toxic/