Manly football players to boycott NRL match over objection to club's pride jersey
They are entirely justified. The club had no right to impose political views onto its players -- JR
Seven Manly Sea Eagles players have withdrawn from selection for Thursday night's NRL match with Sydney Roosters over the team's decision to wear a gay pride jersey in the fixture.
On Sunday, the Sea Eagles announced they would become the first team in NRL history to wear an LGBTQIA+ jersey for the match, with a rainbow design replacing the strip's traditional white hoops.
But that decision has caused some unrest among players who are unhappy they were not consulted by club management.
According to Sydney Morning Herald, the boycotting group are Jason Saab, Tolutau Koula, Haumole Olakau'atu, Josh Schuster and Kiwi players Christian Tuipulotu, Josh Alioai, and Toafofoa Sipley.
Their objections are reportedly based on respective cultural and religious grounds.
Kieran Foran, Reuben Garrick and Sean Keppie were among those to help launch the strip but other players claim they learned about the move over social media on Sunday night.
Coach Des Hasler has reportedly supported his players' decision.
Club great Ian Roberts, who in 1995 became the first rugby league player to come out as openly gay, told The Daily Telegraph he was disappointed by the response of the players objecting to wear the jersey.
"I try to see it from all perspectives but this breaks my heart," Roberts said. "It's sad and uncomfortable. As an older gay man, this isn't unfamiliar. I did wonder whether there would be any religious push back. "I can promise you every young kid on the northern beaches who is dealing with their sexuality would have heard about this."
Rugby league broadcaster Paul Kent put the onus back on the club for trying to inflict its own political stance on the players. "The players, according to my understanding.. only became aware they were wearing these jerseys when they read about it in the newspaper," Kent said on NRL 360.
"The Manly club did this without any consultation of the players, they did it without board approval. It's basically a marketing decision and they've just assumed everything was okay.
"The club has imposed its own politics on these players and these players have inadvertently been embroiled in this scandal and they will be, hopefully, protected. But they will be under pressure now through no fault of their own.
"It's an embarrassing look for the club and it's a difficult one. This talk about inclusion, wearing the Manly jersey for me is inclusion.
"To inflict their own political views on the players who may not share that and are now being forced to deal with the consequences of that is a real oversight by the club and it’s something they should be embarrassed about."
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/sports/other/several-manly-players-to-boycott-nrl-match-over-objection-to-clubs-pride-jersey/ar-AAZXOnE
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Time to question Australia's pandemic response
Tell me how this ends? This question was posed in 2003 by General David Petraeus during America’s invasion of Iraq, and it cut to the dead heart of that catastrophic campaign.
It’s a handy mental tool for probing almost any public policy so let’s apply it to the latest spike in cases of COVID-19.
Unsurprisingly, it has prompted another epidemic of “expert” demands for yet more overweening government intervention in the lives of the vast majority who have nothing to fear from this disease. And, given the mob has now worked that out, the only argument for mask mandates is to protect the hospital system.
Cast your mind back to 2020 when the first lockdowns were imposed, expressly for the purpose of preparing the hospital system for the pressure that was bound to come. Then, we were assured, intensive care capacity would be buttressed, so it could be surged to more than 7000 beds.
And yet, 18 months into the pandemic, it emerged that hospitals in states such as Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia could not cope with even routine demand. Maybe that’s because the number of acute care beds in Australia has more than halved in the last 28 years.
That is a reason to change negligent governments, not licence for politicians and health bureaucrats to impose restrictions on populations to mask their breathtaking decades-long incompetence.
Exactly a year ago, this column said that, soon enough, the great lie at the heart of Australia’s COVID-19 elimination strategy would be revealed because “the disease can’t be eliminated”. It was the only rational conclusion and yet, at the time, a parade of luminaries were still clinging to the intellectual corpse of COVID-zero and those arguing against it were vilified.
In August 2021, the best minds in New Zealand’s health system decided the COVID elimination strategy could be continued indefinitely and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared it “a careful approach that says, there won’t be zero cases, but when there is one in the community, we crush it”.
Pause for a moment and consider the staggering stupidity of that statement in hindsight. But the point here is, the “expert” advice was self-evidently ridiculous at the time. Just three months later, after Ardern crushed her people and not the disease in a seven-week lockdown, she accepted the bleeding obvious: that not even a plucky island nation at the end of the world could live in isolation forever.
The Chinese Communist Party has soldiered on with COVID-zero and the despotic lockdown regime it exported along with the disease. Predictably, China’s economy has tanked and the misery the party has inflicted on its people is beyond measure. Perhaps the best result of that is it has prompted even the CCP cheer squad at the World Health Organisation to question its wisdom.
In May, Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergencies director, made the startling observation that the effect of a “zero COVID” policy on human rights needed to be taken into consideration alongside its economic effect.
Parts of the city went into lockdown from March 28 before city-wide restrictions were indefinitely extended on April 5 in response to the number of COVID cases.
“We need to balance the control measures against the impact on society, the impact they have on the economy, and that’s not always an easy calibration,” he said.
Some have argued that those considerations had to be at the heart of the response from the outset and that the cure imposed risked doing more damage than the disease. Too often the Australian solution punished the many for the few. It preferred the very old over the young, reversing the risk equation most societies wager is the best way to protect their future.
So, the answer to the Petraeus question on coronavirus is clear and has been for more than a year. This only ends with Australian governments lifting all restrictions and actually learning to live with COVID-19 as just one more risk in a dangerous world. It is a decision other nations, such as Sweden and Norway, have already taken.
This is not, as eejits [idiots] would have it, “letting the virus rip”. To claim that is to wilfully ignore that we have endured more than two years of their miserable prescriptions racking up a taxpayer-funded bill probably somewhere north of $500 billion to keep the economy on life support and hit a vaccination rate of more than 95 per cent, precisely to prevent the virus from ripping through the community.
So now it is past time to ask another question: Where is the royal commission into the pandemic? This was a once-in-a-century moment that left no one unaffected, so there is no argument against holding the most rigorous test of how this nation fared.
It demands a panel of the best minds we can assemble to look dispassionately at what happened, how we responded, how we succeeded and where we failed. All Australian governments should participate and offer every assistance.
They have nothing to fear but the truth.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nothing-to-fear-but-the-truth-time-to-question-our-pandemic-response-20220726-p5b4jt.html
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Crony capitalism in Australia: Big business, unions and government cut cosy deals to suit themselves
Son to father: I’m thinking of going into organised crime. Father to son: private sector or government?
Crony capitalism – it’s one of the most depressing aspects of modern market-based economies and I use the term market cautiously. It’s no longer about producers supplying quality, keenly priced goods and services to canny but grateful consumers, it’s about producers seeking regulatory and financial favours from politicians, and consumers simply having to make do.
Another sad fact is that the tendency to crony capitalism is not dependent on the political hue of the government. To be sure, centre-right governments may be slightly less inclined to enter into deal-making, but there’s not much difference compared to left-leaning governments. Let’s face it, most centre-right governments don’t govern according to their principles – the UK Johnson government is a case in point.
But with the election of the Albanese Labor government, it’s worth forecasting in what way our crony capitalist system will develop given the influences on elected Labor parliamentarians. The golden rule is follow the money so it’s reasonably certain what favours will be doled out quickly.
Of course, these favours always have alternative rationales – ensuring fair and equitable outcomes for battlers; acting on climate change; reducing the gender pay gap; reducing indigenous disadvantage and the like. But scratch the surface and you find preferential deals being handed out left, right and centre that provide financial gains and positions of power and public adulation to the designated beneficiaries. They often knock out competitors giving a substantial leg-up to incumbents.
The Labor government was quick to talk of lifting the superannuation guarantee charge from 12 per cent to 15 per cent. The union-related industry super funds will be licking their lips. It has also been decided that the timid super reforms of the Coalition may need to be rescinded, including the requirement that funds act in the best financial interest of members.
Labor will press on with legislation to define the role of compulsory superannuation which will exclude any discussion of members accessing their balances to pay for a home deposit or cover an unexpected catastrophe. The definition will focus solely on providing retirement incomes to lock in members’ funds until retirement and keep industry funds in clover forever.
On the other hand, what the hell was former Coalition industrial relations minister, Christian Porter, doing overseeing a classic exercise in crony capitalism with his exclusive roundtables on industrial relations? When something is called tripartite, the stench of crony capitalism is putrid. What gives puffed-up representatives the right to decide what is in the interests of businesses and workers, particularly as most of these representatives have never been elected?
When the ACTU and the Business Council of Australia went behind everyone’s back to seal a preferential deal – enterprise agreements would only be facilitated for union-backed arrangements – the disapproving shouts were loud. But what would you expect? It’s just typical of crony capitalism.
Climate change is a particularly fruitful space for rent-seekers in which to operate. Most of the time, the government won’t even know it is being taken down a peg or two, at taxpayers’ expense. And the ‘wise’ bureaucrats advising ministers will generally be on the side of the rent-seekers.
One current kerfuffle is about the carbon offset program whereby emissions-intensive producers can purchase carbon credits locally or overseas, as it may be more expensive (or impossible) to lower emissions in Australia. No doubt, the quality of overseas credits varies, although some UN agency is involved in their accreditation. But the real point is that the renewable industry hates them because they mean potentially less lucre for them and that will never do.
The billionaire chairman of Spanish renewable energy company Acciona, which has extensive investments in Australia, was recently bleating about the offset program because it would mean fewer handouts for his company. His supporters, academics and climate think tanks, peddle the same line.
It’s not just the federal government that is party to crony capitalism. State and local governments are up to their eyeballs making deals with mates. Arguably, that is the point of being in office – to hand out favours to companies, organisations, and individuals and, in return, the post-political careers of parliamentarians are sorted.
A recent proposed legislative amendment in Queensland takes crony capitalism to new heights – or should that be depths. You may recall my Speccie piece about ‘fake’ (aka the real deal) unions that have set up in competition with Labor-aligned registered unions. The new unions, which come under the Red Union Support Hub, have made real inroads into the membership of registered unions, particularly nurses in Queensland. (Charging considerably less than registered unions helps.) Naturally, the registered unions are not happy. Nor is the Labor party, which partly depends on direct and indirect contributions from the old unions. To them, competition is for the birds and should be regulated away.
Lip-service has to be paid to freedom of association for workers, in part because Australia has signed various international conventions. But here’s the logic of the proposed legislation. Any organisation can seek to be registered but the rules state that as long as there is an organisation to which workers can conveniently belong (that is the existing registered unions), then the application for registration by a new organisation will be denied. Geddit: the Red Unions can but they can’t.
And here’s the real sting in the tail: unless a union is registered, it cannot represent members on an industrial matter. Indeed, it will be an offence to do so. It’s a slam-dunk for crony capitalism – a win for Labor-aligned unions and a guarantee of the uninterrupted flow of money to the Labor party. What’s not to love, if you are a Labor parliamentarian in Queensland? It’s just a pity the power of competition is completely extinguished and the rights of ordinary workers count for naught.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/crony-time/
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Lost in the secular desert: Christianity under siege
We are on the way to becoming, for the first time, an avowedly anti-Christian nation. Not just non-Christian, but anti-Christian. The census tells us. The culture tells us. The law tells us.
The 2021 census represents an explosive dam burst, with a flood of biblical proportions to follow. For the first time in the modern nation’s history, only a minority of Australians identify as Christians.
This is not a gentle decline. It is a bus hurtling over a cliff. As recently as 25 years ago, nearly three-quarters of Australians called themselves Christians. In 2011, 61 per cent was still a solid majority; five years later it was 52 per cent, last year just 44 per cent and still falling.
That’s a staggering 17 per cent fewer of the population who are Christian in 10 years. Nothing as dramatic and consequential has happened in Australian belief and outlook since 1788.
To be sure, there are nuances in the census. “No religion” does not equate directly to formal atheism. The National Church Life Survey suggests a small majority of Australians believes in God. That’s consistent with the census. Non-Christian religions – Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism and others – take total religious affiliation above 50 per cent.
The census also has some surprises. Sydney, sin city, is the most God-loving part of Australia, just as London is the most religious part of Britain.
But difficult as it may be for some Christians to accept, and much as some secular commentators may want to play it down, claiming that Christian affiliation was formerly overstated or to avert the public gaze from the radical wave engulfing us, Christians must understand they are a minority. That should free them to become a creative, dynamic minority, offering something magnificent to society. They also should get the same rights as other minorities, but that’s another story.
In his brilliant 2021 book, Being the Bad Guys, Perth evangelical pastor Stephen McAlpine presents the dramatic transformation in Christianity’s standing: “Wasn’t it only yesterday Christianity was regarded as a societal good? Now? It’s not only unpalatable; it’s positively toxic.”
In a justly famous blog post a few years ago, McAlpine suggested most Christians accept that Christendom – with all its virtues and all its villainies – is over and they are now in exile. They envisaged this exile in a metaphorical Athens, debating their beliefs in polite and interested company. That was Stage One Exile. Now, Stage Two Exile, is in a much more hostile Babylon, where they confront a state and culture uninterested in their ideas, determined instead to bludgeon them into submission.
McAlpine says: “The elite framework that drives the culture is increasingly interested in bringing the church back into the public square, not in order to hear it, but to expose its real and imagined abuses and render it naked and shivering before a jeering crowd.”
Of course, the culture is not uniformly hostile to Christianity, but the “elite framework that drives the culture” certainly is.
I saw this in Hobart a few weeks ago. The so-called Dark Mofo, put on by the Museum of Old and New Art, MONA, was in full swing. A strand in Dark Mofo, much subsidised by innocent Tasmanian taxpayers, celebrates nihilism and ugliness. It frequently mocks and contemptuously misuses Christian symbols and terminology, and sometimes celebrates the repulsive and evil. One representative caption says: “Satanise your hands.” The Mofo jamborees have used inverted crosses, an old anti-Christian symbol; they have buried an artist underground for three days in mimicry of Christ’s resurrection; displayed a simulated man being hacked to death; re-created pagan customs; used foul animal carcasses; and much else.
No doubt there is great technical expertise in Mofo, but this dopey, second-rate, pretend radicalism – in truth about as radical as a ride in a limousine to a Hollywood fashion show – indicates a distressed and confused culture. It displays all the aesthetic insight and emotional maturity of an over-indulged teenager trying ever more offensive swear words to shock the parents who indulged him. When swearing no longer shocks, he lights a cigarette and stubs it out on their bed. That’s so cool, provocative, cutting-edge, subversive (the rank weasel word of our time). And so, so courageous. But on the Hobart waterfront, in counterpoint to Mofo, I attended a Christian exhibition titled Miracles. It was sublime, challenging, beautiful in design, with a quietly building narrative, engaged fully with science and reason. It examined the history of Christian miracles and explored their scientific investigation. Naturally it was subject to minor hostile demonstration.
So just who was authentically countercultural here? Who had something to say, an original vision? Who was serving truth and beauty?
Consider the ridiculous reaction to former prime minister Scott Morrison preaching a sermon at Margaret Court’s Pentecostal church in Perth. Morrison’s faith is the centre of his life. When he was PM, there was not one speck of effort to enforce, impose or privilege it. Morrison told the Perth congregation they could place a higher trust in God than in government, or even the UN, not that he said anything remotely against, much less delegitimising, government. He echoed the famous words of the psalm: “Put not thy trust in kings or princes.”
Scott Morrison delivers a sermon at Margaret Court's church.
Scott Morrison delivers a sermon at Margaret Court's church.
A welter of absurd criticism followed on commercial TV, radio and the ABC, denouncing Morrison for “inappropriate” and “jarring” comments. We live in an age of spectacular cultural and religious ignorance. Did any commentator acknowledge that secular politics was invented by Christianity (“Render unto Caesar …”)? Christians have always placed a higher trust in God, even as they pledge to obey all legitimate earthly authorities. Jesus himself said: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Morrison’s sermon dealt constructively, sympathetically and theologically with anxiety. Did any denouncer bother listening to it? Most disheartening was Anthony Albanese’s criticism, which wrongly implied Morrison was spreading conspiracy theories.
Morrison tells Inquirer: “Having a strong faith and belief has always meant dealing with mockery and misrepresentation. It is increasingly going with the territory in Western societies, including Australia. History shows this has only ever served to make faith communities stronger.”
Christianity’s enemies in Australia stand poised to prosecute a bewildering range of legal attacks against Christians and their institutions, designed mainly to prevent them speaking in the public square. The NSW euthanasia law obliges Christian retirement homes to welcome kill teams into their homes. Legislation in some states, especially Victoria, makes it extremely difficult for Christian schools to hire Christian teachers other than for the principal, chaplain and perhaps religious knowledge teachers.
Schools are a huge battleground because the Bible is full of “dangerous statements”. Consider St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.” This is a spectacular rejection of today’s zeitgeist.
No Christian expects the state to legally enforce their morality. And it’s certainly true that Christians routinely fail to live up to Paul’s ethos. But is it now a bureaucratic or even criminal offence for Christians even to speak and teach their beliefs?
If a Christian school merely teaches the New Testament, it could be sued for discrimination. If a school asks a boy transitioning to be a girl to just slow down and think things over, and instead of wearing a dress perhaps wear the sports uniform that is non-gender specific, it could be sued under several states’ anti-repression laws. Pastors have told me that if a man, suffering mentally and spiritually from confusion over sexual matters, asks the pastor to pray with him, the pastor can be prosecuted.
Most states have outlawed the seal of the confessional for Catholic priests, though there is no evidence this will help in the battle against child abuse. The confidentiality of the confessional has been a Catholic sacramental doctrine for many centuries. Priests have gone to their death rather than break it. Such confidentiality is allowed to lawyers and doctors. But good priests are to be criminals.
There are many more legal assaults on Christianity, under way or in preparation.
One question for Christian institutions is whether they bend the knee to the new state religion or continue the teachings of Christ and the Apostles found in the New Testament. The early Christians faced similar choices.
Under Roman rule, Jewish communities had an exception from paying homage to Roman gods, the official state religion. Once the Roman Empire distinguished Christians as a separate group, they lost that exemption. Early Christians were not looking for trouble, much less martyrdom, but they would not worship the divine god Caesar as Roman authorities designated their emperor.
Christianity in the past has frequently been at a low ebb and it has showed a genius for bouncing back. This always takes courage, resolution, shrewdness, innovation. New missions for new times. Despite today’s decline, there are many green shoots in the Christian garden. Jesus instructed the first Christians to proclaim his message, but also told them: “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
The Australian’s Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan says former prime minister Scott Morrison has been “irreverent… about the UN in a culture which abuses Christianity” when delivering a sermon at a church in Perth. “Every contempt and contumely is heaped on Christianity you can imagine,” he told Sky News More
Giving life to both halves of that injunction is challenging. How Christians respond to their newly difficult cultural circumstances will determine much of what happens to them, and to the truths they offer.
The Australian Catholic Church recently held a plenary council, a national consultative meeting. Its preparatory documents, emerging from a “new class” of Catholic institution bureaucrats, made a few gestures to the zeitgeist but was chiefly concerned with internal governance, positions of power and changing liturgy.
Philippa Martyr, a Perth academic who is a columnist at the Catholic Weekly, in a tough-minded judgment tells Inquirer: “One of the themes of the plenary council was that Catholicism doesn’t have to be this hard (in opposition to the culture). But in fact it does have to be hard (to be true). These gabfests are basically setting up income streams for people in future jobs. It’s all piffle. It’s got nothing to do with salvation.”
In the end, Christian denominations choose between surrender to the ideology of the culture or faithfulness to their beliefs. It’s not possible to do both. The Christian movements that accommodate the culture on its key points inevitably disappear, for if they are only offering what the culture already has, why would anybody bother?
Sydney’s Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher, at the start of the plenary council, admonished the preparatory documents for their lack of attention to three crises: the decline of Christianity produced by secularism and exacerbated by the abuse crisis and disengagement brought on by Covid; the need to protect “the unborn, pregnant, refugees, trafficked, frail elderly, dying and other invisibles”; and the growing cultural hostility to Christianity.
The early Christians, notwithstanding all the changes of 2000 years, faced similar challenges. I asked Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop Peter Comensoli whether there were lessons from the early Christians for the church today: “Yes. I spend a lot of time in the Acts of the Apostles, to find ways to be active and Christian when you’re unknown. There’s a great ignorance of Christianity these days. Acts gives the church ways to be a faithful disciple when you’re small and not necessarily of interest, and if you are of interest you might be getting a bad rub.
“Life as a Catholic is a life of exile at the moment. That will be the way for some time. Identification with the faith is often with big institutions, schools, health care. But these are not the sites where we will rebuild faith. That will be in families and small communities.”
John Dickson, an Anglican cleric and a prolific and brilliant historian of the ancient world, believes profoundly in the example of the early Christians. It’s a theme of his superb new book, Bullies and Saints.
“The early Christians were cheerful being a minority,” he tells Inquirer.
“They were reconciled to having no power and being frequently insulted. They thought of themselves as a tiny minority which had stumbled upon a vast treasure. Of course the rest of the world didn’t have it, so they wanted to share it. They were characterised by cheerfulness, confidence, humility.
“The early Christians didn’t have social credibility, or emperors or senators who professed Christianity. All they had was prayer, service, persuasion and suffering.”
Dickson cites non-Christian sources from the early days of Christianity recounting Christians’ compassion and generosity, their care for the sick, their philanthropy. Women flocked to early Christianity. Celsus, a second century Greek philosopher who wrote the first systematic denunciation of Christianity, mocked it as a religion of women and slaves.
“Everyone found a social lung in the early church,” Dickson says, “everyone could breathe a bit easier.”
The Christian sexual ethic, of marriage as an institution of mutual love, of women equal before God to men, of girl babies valued, of restraint on the gratifications and brutalities of men – these were radical but ultimately deeply attractive to a pagan world that had elevated self-indulgence for the powerful, and especially male gratification, very high.
Edward Gibbon, in his classic and intensely anti-Christian Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, lists five reasons for Christianity’s triumph: the zeal of Christian belief; the promise of eternal life; the miracles, though the age of miracles was brief; the virtues of Christians; and finally the unity of the Christians, with people, priests and bishops working to a common vision.
Today’s Christians, like anyone else, would find these qualities hard to emulate. But history shows Christianity’s ability, metaphorical and literal, to rise from the dead. It’s done it before. In our society, will it happen again?
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/lost-in-the-secular-desert-christianity-under-siege/news-story/11b86e780f33b31e8731dbcde24c165d
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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)
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July 25, 2022
Green attacks on horse racing
This is reminscent of an attempted ban on dog racing at Wentworth Park in 2016. As dog racing is mainly working-class that ban was very badly received and had to be rapidly reversed. It ruined the image of then NSW premier Mike Baird, however, and led to him being tossed out. I hope the present NSW government learns from the precedent
It is not trendy to vote for the Greens. It is irresponsible and downright stupid to vote for a party that will send the country broke as it chases fanciful greenhouse emissions targets. They are a cancer on the Australian political landscape.
Any leader of a political party who is ashamed of the Australian flag should be deported. Yet it is other divisive and harebrained policies that will destroy the fabric of Australian life.
Let’s use the example of the Greens’ obsession with closing down the racing industries on animal welfare grounds and responsible gambling propaganda.
Last week, the South Australian government supported the Greens to outlaw jumps racing, effectively killing off the annual Oakbank festival each Easter. There are now plans by the Greens to outlaw the whip in thoroughbred racing. The ultimate aim is to ban racing altogether.
You even had NSW Thoroughbreds boss Peter V’landys sticking the knife in when the decision was made, despite the fact banning horse racing was next on the Greens’ agenda.
The number of people who participate or are employed or volunteer in horseracing is estimated at between 150,000 and 200,000. At least 4.5 million people attend a race meeting each year, about a million people have a regular bet and more than 87,000 have an interest in owning a racehorse. Thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing are in many smaller towns the glue that keeps the community together.
The racing industry pays more than $1bn in state and federal taxes. In recent years, the racing industry has devoted a share of race takings to animal welfare programs.
All of this is lost on fanatical Greens politicians.
If you like a flutter and you voted for the Greens at the last election, please rethink your values and priorities.
The Greens have a radical agenda that will change Australia irrevocably if they ever gained power.
They must be stopped.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/peter-gleeson/opinion-greensled-ban-on-jumps-racing-threatens-major-industry/news-story/ecbe783679be0495f1429d5710561aeb
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Problems with the Greens real agenda
When almost two million Australians voted Green on May 21, how many in this huge 1.3 million surge in Green support over the past two decades really knew what they were voting for? Saving the planet was only the tip of the Green policy iceberg. Voters, genuinely believing in the urgent need for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, (many of them comfortably-off, high-polluting virtue-signallers), were effectively granting 12 Green senators what could be wide-ranging political power over an elected Labor government’s legislation. Their active, and very controversial, agenda is far wider than climate and may well cause the government difficult trade-off problems. This is on top of the uncertain implications of a climate policy that seeks ‘urgently to phase out all fossil fuels for export and domestic use’, with an anti-expansion commitment even during the necessary transition stage to renewable energy, both locally and for exports.
The first signs of trouble on this front appeared in last month’s offensive stunt by Green’s leader Adam Bandt refusing to stand with an Australian flag because it ‘represented dispossession to First Nations people’ and would be replaced when Australia became a republic. Then there has been widespread public criticism of the Green’s pacifist view that China poses no threat and defence spending should be slashed. This was followed by what the Australian’s Paul Kelly described last weekend as ‘Greens drunk on hubris’ after their May election successes, in threatening to use their near-balance-of-power in the Senate to defeat the new government’s proposed Climate Bill on the grounds that its tougher emissions reduction target is not tough enough – a reprise of their much-criticised destruction of the Rudd government’s 2009 proposals.
The hubris arising from this newly acquired parliamentary relevance will inevitably lead to the enthusiastic promotion of pet political projects, few of them with popular support, that litter the thousands of words of the Green policy manifesto. So prepare for a dose of reality that will confirm the truth in the old saw about the watermelon Greens – green on the outside but solid red inside.
Behind the blandly stated four key principles: ‘ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, and peace and non-violence’, lies a mixture of authoritarian social policies, nationalising significant sections of the economy, promises of unfunded volumes of public largesse that they would never face the prospect of having to deliver, destruction of Australia’s US alliance, savage cuts to defence, cuddling up to a China that ‘poses no threat to Australia’, massive tax hikes, an end to negative gearing, votes for 16-year-olds, the end of subsidising private health insurance, legalising the production, sale and use of recreational cannabis, decriminalising the personal use, possession and non-commercial sale of drugs, breaking up the concentrated ownership of large media organisations through government regulation and, in a nod to its election funding source, the CFMEU, making it easier to go on strike.
With an eye at the under-25 demographic which provides the Greens with much of their voting support, there is a cornucopia of goodies including a guaranteed adequate and secure income allowance for young people to enable full participation in education and training opportunities, abolishing student debt, providing affordable, accessible and secure housing options for young people, gig workers to be recognised as employees or a new category of autonomous worker and be extended rights, protections and entitlements that are not less than those granted to employees, and the extension of the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds (to give them the opportunity to provide an electoral ‘thank you?’).
All these will all be paraded along with other woke fads (like being able to self-identify gender, and for trans-women to compete in competitive sport against biological women) many of which may horrify the one in five constituents of Melbourne’s classy Kooyong and Sydney’s posh Wentworth who voted Green in the Senate after tossing out their Liberal MPs for a Teal ‘independent’ in the House of Representatives. Will they, as they shop at ritzy Double Bay, obediently ‘Reduce the overproduction and overconsumption of consumer goods that both depend upon fossil fuels and put unnecessary pressure on environmental resources’? What is their response to Green concerns that population growth is ‘outstripping our environmental capacity’, but that we nevertheless must end Australia’s successful sovereign borders approach to asylum seekers by the ‘elimination of mandatory and indefinite detention,and the abolition of offshore processing’.
The 13 million or 87 per cent of Australian voters, who did not vote Green now have to put up with the consequential bellicose minority of 12 Green senators in a chamber of 76 dictating to the Labor government what legislation it will allow to become law. It was only two decades ago, during John Howard’s government, that the Greens could only attract fewer than five per cent of voters. But these 569,000, centred in inner metropolitan areas, particularly in Victoria, have grown unnervingly by 230 per cent, even storming the Coalition citadel of Queensland, snaffling more than 12 per cent of the Queensland vote following an incredible five-times jump from 2001’s 71,000 to 373,460 supporters. The Coalition’s former stronghold of WA also opened the door, with Green support multiplying from 65,000 to 217,571. And South Australia has gone from nothing to 135,000. The reward has been two Senate seats from each state for a party that is clearly on the march.
Whether the Greens (and Teals) maintain their remarkable momentum will depend not only on geo-political events over the next three years, but also on our schools and universities maintaining their climate catastrophe mantra, and influencing the younger Green-voting cohort. It is striking that apart from inner-city seats like Perth, Fremantle and Sydney, whose Green vote is well over 20 per cent, coal and heavy engineering cities like Wollongong and Newcastle, which have the most to lose from the economic consequences of Green policies, also have some of the largest percentages of Green supporters. But as a cynic pointed out to me, both are university towns. QED
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/business-robbery-etc-97
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Heat is on in the clash of energy and environment
As the Albanese government prepares to face its first test in parliament to lift the nation’s ambition on climate change, global action is fracturing in the face of soaring costs. The politics of energy and climate are being pulled in opposite directions.
A rush back to coal is being encouraged in Europe. But, on cue, soaring temperatures across parts of North America and Britain have fuelled a frenzy of “weather porn” in which temperature extremes are presented as the new normal in a warming world.
Extreme weather is a key feature of Australia’s five-yearly State of the Environment report that was released this week by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to shame the Coalition and add urgency to debate. The report recommends a return to the earthy wisdom of Indigenous Australians.
Across the board, the intensity of hyperbole both on climate and nature stands in inverse proportion to the potency of action. Sweeping promises made by US President Joe Biden for green spending programs and cuts to fossil fuel use have been dashed by political reality.
The US Supreme Court has blocked attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency to proactively curb fossil fuel emissions. Having demonised the shale industry that briefly delivered energy independence to the US, Biden has been in Saudi Arabia asking the kingdom to produce more oil to ease the fuel price pressure at the pump for voters back home.
At least 13 people died in Britain during a spell of record-breaking hot weather that triggered warnings that efforts…
Rather than the hundreds of billions of dollars sought from congress for spending on green initiatives, Biden has been left with angry words and token executive orders that deliver fresh subsidies to offshore wind. With inflation rising, attention is now firmly focused on the rising cost of living.
Europe has been told by the International Energy Agency to quickly burn more coal to preserve supplies of gas. Rising prices, exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, are stirring political unrest, notably in The Netherlands, which leaders warn could worsen if fuel supplies remain constrained.
In Britain, the two candidates vying to replace Boris Johnson as prime minister, Rishi Sunak and former foreign minister Liz Truss, have been criticised by activists for having weak records on climate change action. But only 4 per cent of Conservative Party members surveyed in a poll said that hitting the target of net-zero emissions by 2050 should be one of the top three priorities for the next Tory leader.
Meanwhile China, the world’s biggest emissions nation, is continuing to double down on coal. In a speech last month, Chinese Vice-Premier Han Zheng stressed the need to promote the “clean and efficient use of coal”, adding coal should be a “ballast stone” in stabilising the macro-economy and consumer prices and ensuring people’s wellbeing.
China’s biggest coal-producing province, Shanxi, intends to increase its output by 107 million tonnes this year to 1.3 billion tonnes of coal. In 2023, coal production from the region will increase further to 1.35 billion tonnes. Shanxi accounts for about one-quarter of China’s total coal production. But China also imports about 320 million tonnes of coal, increasingly from Indonesia.
The conundrum for leaders is that success in delivering climate change policies has become a defining measure for environmental performance. As Brendan O’Neill observed in The Spectator in Britain, the “unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave (in Britain) exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become”. Millennialism is the belief that the end of this world is at hand and that in its wake will appear a New World, inexhaustibly fertile, harmonious, sanctified and just.
The answer for some is a return to the wisdom of Indigenous communities, who have a deeper understanding of the ways of nature. Australia’s State of the Environment report says Indigenous knowledge and sustainable cultural practice are key to environmental management. It says: “Indigenous peoples’ stewardship of Country is a deep connection, passed down through the generations and developed over tens of thousands of years.
“It involves songlines, totems, cultural principles, knowledge of the animals and plants, and land and sea management practices.
“Indigenous knowledge of Country and management practices provide a valuable approach for caring for the environment for all Australians.
“As Indigenous peoples’ lands and seas are returned to their care, so are cultural management practices. This has had good results. Indigenous Australians are the first scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians (STEM), and many respectful and reciprocal collaborations with other scientists are shaping a pathway for our nation’s future.”
This has led the Australian Environment Foundation to condemn the report as “unprofessional claptrap”. AEF chairman Tom Bostock says the report is loaded with assumptions and lacking in scientific rigour. “The material in the report is symptomatic of an extreme green-left, anti-wealth producing ideology that pervades environmental agencies throughout Australia. Among the disturbing impacts of this is the spreading of alarmism to susceptible Australian minds,” he says.
The challenge for politicians is to direct the groundswell of support for action on climate to the practical issues of better land management. This includes harnessing the willingness of companies to invest both in nature and Indigenous welfare to demonstrate their good corporate intentions.
Overall, the State of the Environment report finds that all aspects of the Australian environment are under pressure, and many are declining.
“Although there have been numerous environmental initiatives at both national and state and territory levels, there is insufficient overall investment and lack of co-ordination to be able to adequately address the growing impacts from climate change, land clearing, invasive species, pollution and urban expansion,” the report says.
Report co-lead author Kristen Williams, from the CSIRO, says intense competition for land resources has resulted in continued declines in the amount and condition of our land-based natural capital. Many parts of Australia are highly degraded and native vegetation has been extensively cleared.
“The widespread reduction in the capacity of native vegetation to support Australia’s unique biodiversity is exacerbated by declining habitat quality, climate change and the prevalence of invasive species. It can take many decades for ecosystems to fully recover,” she says.
Helen Murphy, also from the CSIRO, says the pressures facing Australian biodiversity have not improved since the 2016 State of the Environment report, and outcomes for species and ecosystems are generally poor.
“Our inability to adequately manage pressures will continue to result in species extinctions and deteriorating ecosystem conditions unless current management approaches and investments are substantially improved,” Murphy says.
Environment groups mostly have welcomed the findings of the report, which they say is a damning indictment of the Morrison government. But former Greens leader Bob Brown has provided a blistering critique that damns all sides.
“This is not a failure of the last decade of government. It is a failure of the last century of government,” Brown says, highlighting the Keating government’s cave-in to a logging truck blockade in 1995, John Howard’s Regional Forest Agreements, and the failure of governments to give Aboriginal people a veto over mining and other destructive incursions on their land.
While climate change is claimed as a central part of the nation’s environmental problems, the answer will not be found in whatever targets the Albanese government is able to get through parliament.
Greenpeace is calling for “urgent and decisive emissions reduction, an end to new fossil fuel extraction, and rapid acceleration of the shift to cleaner, cheaper renewable energy”.
The WWF has set a blueprint that calls for strengthened nature laws with strong national standards overseen by an independent and well-resourced national Environmental Protection Agency. The blueprint mirrors a prescription presented to government by former competition tsar Graeme Samuel in his review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act.
Plibersek has said she will respond to Samuel’s recommendations this year. The government will then aim to develop new environmental legislation next year.
In the meantime, Plibersek says there will be an immediate start on improving environmental data and regional planning – establishing a shared view around what needs to be protected or restored, and areas where development can occur with minimal consequence.
Ultimately, the issues are economic as much as environmental and can be achieved only with broad agreement across all levels of government and business. Plibersek says ambition is important “but it’s not much good without achievement”.
This is the lesson that applies both to climate policy and caring for the natural world.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/heat-is-on-in-the-clash-of-energy-and-environment/news-story/3ea6a0dd11bb23743207f93c953d737e
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ABC is more interested in silencing alternative views
For a media behemoth that regularly assails its targets (fairly and unfairly) with gusto and aggression, the ABC is awfully sensitive to criticism.
It should not be. The national broadcaster should expect every taxpayer to have a view about its operations, and should aim to be part of public debate, for good or for ill, every single day.
This is the ABC’s raison d’etre. If there are high expectations for the organisation they are warranted by the lofty ambitions of the charter and more than a billion dollars a year in taxpayer funding – and given its staff are on the public payroll they should be acutely aware of a natural tendency towards the collectivist side of politics.
Yet Aunty lashes out at critics (in response to my 2013 suggestion its budget should be trimmed, it portrayed me up a dog) and runs from scrutiny. After 90 years at the centre of the nation’s cultural and political life, the ABC still seems uncertain about its role.
The Sky News Australia special investigation ‘Your ABC Exposed’ examines one of the country’s most important… cultural institutions and whether the taxpayer-funded service unites or divides Australians. As one of the country’s most revered and important cultural institutions marks its 90th anniversary, Sky News will explore the Australian More
For the past few months, I have been working on a Sky News documentary to mark the public broadcaster’s 90th anniversary and ask whether it is fit for purpose. Despite multiple requests for interviews to ABC chair Ita Buttrose, managing director David Anderson, other directors, senior managers, and on-air presenters, past and present, we managed only one acceptance.
Former 7.30 Report host and staff-elected board member Quentin Dempster engaged in the project. Dempster has debated media issues with me previously on Sky News and there is little we agree on (he belongs to the Twitter school of News Corp media conspiracists) but I respect him for his willingness to sit down and engage in civil debate.
That mature approach contrasts with former ABC Melbourne radio host Jon Faine who responded to our request for an interview by penning a rant in The Age against Sky News Australia, Sky News UK, Fox News, Nigel Farage, the “Brexit calamity” and Donald Trump. Although, as far as I can recall, Faine and I have never spoken, he had firm views about me as an “avowed sledger” of the ABC.
Faine declared that his “animus” towards me stemmed from the fact that apart from hosting television on Sky, I had previously worked for Liberal politicians Alexander Downer and Malcolm Turnbull, wrote for this newspaper, and “consistently expressed resolute hostility” towards the ABC. He said I could not present a balanced view of the national broadcaster (I think he meant uncritical).
Many decades behind an ABC microphone and Faine still could not grasp the concept of embracing a diversity of views and encouraging robust discussion. Instead of rising to the challenge to defend or promote his beloved ABC, he preferred snide potshots from entrenched positions.
Oh well, we tried. But you have got to wonder about the unwillingness to engage in debate – for the documentary I resorted to doorstopping Anderson on his way out of an ABC charity event.
This points to a deeply troubling polarisation of public debate, where rather than seeing a contest of ideas in the public square we are seeing different views contained within discrete, self-affirming echo-chambers. It is the Americanisation and Twitterfication of debate, and it should be resisted.
The ABC is best placed to counter this trend. Its charter demands a reflection of “cultural diversity” as well as delivering “objectivity” and “impartiality” yet it constantly fields stacked panels and programs as if the overwhelming majority of the populace subscribes to a green left worldview. Topics that are most deserving of analysis and interrogation – such as climate change, energy options, immigration, the Indigenous voice to parliament, and our pandemic response – too often play out in monochrome on the national broadcaster. On these issues and more, instead of spirited debate there seems to be a corporate view and a relentless chorus of agreement among its staff.
The ABC seeks to win arguments not on their merits but by silencing alternative views. It is little wonder then that the ABC and its presenters lack the ability to discuss and defend their own behaviour.
This must say something about the depth of their conviction. It is almost impossible to carry an argument publicly if you do not believe it.
Who at the ABC could seriously contend it does not exhibit an ideological bias towards the green left (even a board member, Joseph Gersh, has admitted the national broadcaster’s “vibe” is “more left than right” and that it should have more conservative voices), or that it has not engaged in erroneous vigilante journalism against mainly conservative targets such as Cardinal George Pell, Christian Porter, Alan Tudge, and Scott Morrison?
But if the ABC is not objective, and does not reflect the diversity of views across the country, then it is failing to adhere to its charter – that is, the law, under the ABC Act. The board, management, and the responsible government minister (now Michelle Rowland) should not stand for this.
As former board member Janet Albrechtsen says in my documentary, the answer is quite simple. “It has got a charter,” Albrechtsen explains, “all it needs to do is abide by that charter and it would produce terrific content.”
Not only would a diversity of views ensure the ABC abides by the law and delivers on fairness and pluralism, it would also make it much more entertaining and compelling. Yet too often this does not happen; on the rare occasions ABC presenters have right-of-centre commentators on their programs they feel the need to explain themselves to the Twitter mob.
If the ABC was more pluralistic and representative, it would have broader support across the population and political spectrum, and would more easily defend itself in public debate. By living in denial and failing to act, it condemns itself to a defensive posture.
It should be unthinkable that a prime minister would want to avoid appearing on the national broadcaster the way Morrison did during the last election campaign. But the fault lies with the ABC – it should be an unbiased and indispensable platform for national political debate.
That role cannot be fulfilled when its chief political reporter Andrew Probyn describes Tony Abbott (in a news report, mind you) as the “most destructive” politician in a generation, or its chief current affairs political reporter Laura Tingle uses social media to gratuitously accuse Morrison of “ideological bastardry”. It is laughable that such obvious transgressions go unremedied, and the ABC and its supporters accuse the conservative politicians of bloody-mindedness rather than vice versa.
In the interests of fairness, and on behalf of at least half of the population who do not wish to fund a green left broadcaster, this needs to be fixed. We seem to have reached a stage in this country where ideology is more prevalent in our publicly funded media than it is in our politics.
In 1932 the establishment of the ABC was an inspirational reform, embracing the relatively new technology of radio to bind together a disparate population spread thinly across a vast continent. The Australian Broadcasting Commission, as it was then called, was our only national media organisation.
If the national broadcaster did not exist today there would be no imperative to create it because we have instant and unprecedented access to local, national and global information and communication services. The ABC’s response to this new media landscape has been to expand into every digital niche, trying to pump its content into all available markets and in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
Not only does this strategy potentially crowd out commercial media – large, small, existing, and prospective – but it stretches the ABC’s resources and ambition.
The organisation would do better to focus on doing what others cannot.
And that should bring it back to the ABC Act and key words such as accurate, impartial, objective, balance and diversity. If the national broadcaster were to deliver on these, it could redefine itself as a central arena for the contest of ideas.
In an increasingly polarised media space, the ABC is making a grave error by drifting to one pole. It could be the place – should be the place – for the crosspollination of views and arguments.
With digital giants, media silos and endless algorithms conspiring to feed people only what they already know or like, a genuinely diverse and rational public square is likely to become increasingly rare and even more sorely needed. If the ABC were committed to such a role, it would guarantee itself a fruitful role for another 90 years.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/abc-is-more-interested-in-silencing-alternative-views/news-story/a305a0028a70fce54613fa6405c04978
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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)
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