Australia

A Day at the Beach

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 10:55:14 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]H[/fusion_dropcap]anuka is a time of joy for the Jewish community. On Sunday the 14^th of December, families where at Archer Park in Bondi Beach to celebrate Hanuka, unaware of what was about to unfold. As mums, dads and children ate treats, painted faces and danced to music, men in budgie smugglers strutted past and people cooked on their barbeques. What could be more Australian than a day at the beach? And then the shots rang out. They were loud and they didn’t stop. Those bullets found their mark. Dads. Mums. Children. They were all mowed down in cold blood. Far from this scene, hundreds of kilometres away, I was in a train heading to Sydney. I’d attended an exhibition about October 7, in Melbourne at the Goldstone Gallery. It was just after 7pm, as the train trundled along the track, when I began to see notices on my social media feeds about a shooting in Bondi. For the next hour, the internet connection cut in and out as we spread through the serene countryside. Frustratingly, as sheep and giant windmills flew past my window I struggled to squeeze more information out of the internet. Nine News, ABC, SBS, all gave very little information. Facebook was better. Then the first shock: three suspected dead. I prayed that no one was killed. Then another update: suspected 10 dead. By the time I got to Sydney my worst fears were realised. People who just wanted to celebrate a holiday were slaughtered like cattle for no other reason than that they were Jewish. As I stared at the TV screen I was still in disbelief. How could this happen in Australia? I couldn’t make any sense of it. Ten people shot dead while celebrating a holiday. The usual suspects crossed the screen. Politicians, community leaders, all eager to try and help us come to terms with what had happened. But I couldn’t make sense of it. This wasn’t the Australia I had known and grown up with. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]M[/fusion_dropcap]y Australia started in the 1960s when I was born. It was a time of incredible optimism. By the time I was 8, I watched Neil Armstrong as he made ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,’ on my tiny, black and white TV. We lived in a pleasant home in Sydney’s north western suburb of Ryde, enjoyed trips to the beach and family afternoons watching the original Lost in Space and Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour. My mother’s experience growing up was completely different from mine. She left Cairo at the age of twelve in the 1950s. It was a conscious decision by her parents to escape the violence of a revolution that had scarred her city and forced her into exile. It had been called Black Saturday and like her, so many families left to start a better life in Sydney. Jews also had to leave and often it was just with a single suitcase because the Egyptian government seized their assets. Before Black Saturday, my mother had lived in the most beautiful and multicultural city on earth. The streets in Downtown Cairo were wide and tree-lined, with neat, hedged curbs and elegant and inviting shop fronts. You could be forgiven for thinking that you were in the Champ-Elysees with its charming, white, 19^th century Hussman-styled apartment buildings. These buildings were considered the jewel in the crown of Egyptian European architecture. Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany paid homage to these elegant buildings in his novel, The Yacoubian Building. She lived on Soliman Pasha Street, which was named after the French-born Egyptian General, Soliman Pasha, whose life-sized statute once stood proudly in the middle of the square. Downtown Cairo was where the middle class, politicians, members of the arts community and the rich all rubbed shoulders. And it was also one of the most multicultural suburbs of Egypt with large communities of Greeks, Italians and Jews. My grandmother’s side of the family had many relatives who were Greek and who lived in Cairo, Alexandria and Greece. My grandfather met my grandmother in the 1930s and my mother was born in Egypt in 1939; my uncle was born two years later. With their cultural background, it was only natural that they had made their home on Soliman Pasha Street. The Cairo my mother knew before the revolution interrupted their life, was a city alive with cosmopolitan energy: French and Italian signs hung above shopfronts, and trams rattled past cinemas showing the latest European films. Not far from where she lived was Groppi’s -- a mecca for patrons who appreciated quality patisseries served with good, thick Turkish coffee. Groppi’s speciality was exquisite hand-made cakes, freshly backed croissants, chocolate covered dates and ice cream smothered in crème Chantilly. My grandparents took mum and my uncle Cyril to Groppi as a treat and like the other patrons, they would always wear their Sunday best before walking through the Art Deco doors. Unlike the centuries old Egyptian coffee houses, which only served men, Groppi welcomed people from both sexes and all backgrounds. For a young girl, Downtown Cairo was a world of abundance. The famous saying, ‘he who has not seen Cairo has not seen the world,’ certainly rang true because it was a city which had everything you could possibly desire. From the up-market, European fashion boutiques to the cinemas, and cafes, Soliman Pasha Street was a feast for the senses. Cairo was also known as the city of 1000 bookstores. And for someone like my mother, who loved to read, it must have felt like paradise. Cairo gave her a great education. She learned to speak seven languages, including English, which would prove handy when she emigrated. In this enlightened city my mother knew people from every background including Jewish people and she loved and respected all of them. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen she reluctantly left Cairo, she built a new life with her family in Ryde and raised four children, all who would go on to contribute to the rich fabric of our multicultural society in various ways. But neither my mother, nor myself, ever imagined that the Australia we knew and had the pleasure of growing up in, an Australia built by migrants, would be taken over by hate and anger. As I watched the TV on the night of the massacre, my emotions were conflicted. I went from shock, to tears, to grief, to rage and I knew exactly who was to blame for fanning the flames of anti-Semitism. The day after the massacre, a vigil was held outside the Bondi Pavillion. A circle of flowers grew into a small nursery and some of Australia’s most prominent people came to pay their respects including Lachlan Murdoch and his wife and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Into this solemn occasion, two unwelcome visitors turned up. They were both elderly, Anglo-Saxon, grandmothers from the Pro-Palestinian cult. One wore a keffiyeh and was, inexplicably, Jewish. But instead of doing something useful for the community, like baking scones or knitting socks, these two doddery, old dears were representatives of the vile marchers who took over our streets for years with their ugly, angry, antisemitic chants. For two years the pro-Palestine marchers always made sure they were photographed at recognisable Australian icons. Whether it was the Opera House or the Harbour Bridge, they needed to ensure that wherever they marched, their backgrounds were world famous and Instagramable. No point marching out in the back of Bourke or at Uluru. What they needed was to have a great icon to match their disgusting ideology. The two women who turned up at the aftermath of the Bondi massacre had decided to crash the vigil with their playbook of hate supplied by Hamas. It didn’t work. They were quickly ushered away by police – for their own protection. By then, the crowd had had more than enough of the geriatric, Pro-Pals, and cried, “get her out!” The exit of the two pests prompted a lot of appreciative clapping. While the two pro-Palestine women might be the worst of humanity, the best of humanity was surely a single brave man by the name of Ahmed el Ahmed. He ran to danger jumped on one of the gunmen and pulled his gun away. This good Muslim man also represented the best of Australia: an immigrant who worked hard, became a small business owner, and had two young children. At least a quarter of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. We are proud of our families and their contributions to this country. And we are also proud of the contribution of the Jewish community who have given so much to Australia. Tonight as I write, 24 hours after the tragedy, I will light two candles and place them in my lounge room window. The message of Hanuka is to spread light and my small act will be in solidarity for every Jewish person that was lost on the night of the 14^th of December. It will symbolise the shared grief I feel for the community in Bondi but it will also represent the fury that also burns in my heart, for this senseless anti-Semitism, and sees no sign of extinguishing.

The post A Day at the Beach first appeared on Quadrant.

Blind Eyes and Glib Lips

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 06:00:25 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]S[/fusion_dropcap]cribes from every corner of our vast land and of every political and religious persuasion will pen tens of thousands of words aimed at revealing, analysing or rationalising the reasons and motivation for the carnage enacted on Sunday at Bondi Beach yesterday. Few, I suspect, will have the political courage to go straight to the cause. An ongoing cause. An oft-extolled course of action lauded by so-called scholars of Salafist Islam. Islam has advocated the killing of Jews for 1400 years. Not inclined to be selective in heeding their Prophet's encomiums to violence -- Muhammad was keen on putting all and any follower of other religions to the sword -- it is the Jews who have been most often on the receiving end, then, now and forever Enemy #1. This fanatical adherence to the preachings of a megalomaniac warlord are at the root of so very many of the problems this sad, bloody world of ours faces today. Those countries that invite and encourage Islamic immigration have torn themselves to pieces. Look at France. Look at England. And now we can look at Bondi Beach as well. I have not come lately to viewing Islam as perhaps the greatest threat Australia has faced since the Second World War. At the federal election in 2016 I stood as a candidate in the electorate of Farrer, held then and now by Sussan Ley. I stood on a platform of halting all Muslim immigration. I was mindful of what I then and still believe is a fact -- that as the followers of Islam increase in numbers, so will the attacks on innocent Australians. It will be a two-pronged strategy: electoral muscle at the polling booths and, simultaneously, a climate of fear on the streets. We saw it play out just so yesterday, and soon after in the press releases of politicians who are either beholding to the Muslim vote or just plain scared to state the murderously obvious. Speak out about Islam? Why no, not that, never! Let Ley's statement be the example. Nowhere in its 300-or-so words do the words 'Islam' or 'Muslim' appear. Not once! Sixteen people are dead -- 15 entirely blameless Australians and one of the two pieces of alien filth who murdered them -- and all Ley can manage is this exquisite pussyfooting:

"...Today we stand together as Australians against hate in this moment of profound tragedy and shock."

Just generic, non-specific, garden-variety hate, eh, Sussan? How difficult would it have been to add the modifier 'Muslim'? Let us make a medical diagnosis and posit that the absence of a spine must have a muting effect on articulation. Not to single out the woman who identifies as opposition leader. She had plenty of company. Below is a clip of former PM Malcolm Turnbull, who was interviewed after placing his posy at the scene of the massacre. Like Ley, he chooses his words with care, especially about which ones to omit. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBZpxPInmOU[/embed] We can't let "the terrorists" divide us, he says -- again no modifier -- when the blood on the beach testifies that we are already divided. Divided into a community that produces those who kill for Allah and those who are deemed in need of killing, which is all the rest of us. Actually, there's a third division if you count those who pander, as did Turnbull at Kirribilli House in 2016 when he celebrated the end of Ramadan. Only later, after the baclava and coffee, did it emerge one of his honoured guests was Australian-born Sheikh Shady Alsuleiman, then-president of the Australian National Imams Council, who was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as having said "women who look at men should 'hang from their breasts in hell'.” Need it be said the Sheikh isn't too keen on the gay stuff either? Footage of the iftar feed is below, and do notice the appalling Yassmin Abdel-Magied affably chewing Turnbull's left ear, perhaps about the delights of non-judgmental multi-culturalism. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEJfyu-ug0w[/embed] So let's not talk about Islam and its propensity to produce beasts, or that bloodshed, fear and trauma are the way of the ardently faithful and always have been. Let's just pretend that Australia's gun laws aren't already strict enough, despite being amongst the world's most stringent, and tighten them even more. The press will buy that -- easy sell, in fact. And the motive of the finger that pulls the trigger? Under the rug with that Phew, what a relief! Both major parties, the media's hacks, and all the snouters up to their eyeballs in the taxpayers' community-harmony trough can let slide once more the prickly matter of Islam's jarring presence in a liberal and all-too-tolerant Western society. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he rest of us, the vast majority, will know better than to swallow the religion-of-peace con job. We'll know the Bondi massacre would not have happened if our leaders, starting with Malcolm Fraser, had not invited an absolutist political system masquerading as a religion to take root in Australia. It would not have happened without the support of the Muslim cause by Prime Minister Albanese, who has spent much of his life criticising Israel, nor without loud applause from Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Minister and Immigration Minister Tony Burke. That the NSW Police should also shoulder some of the responsibility is beyond debate. For two years, ever since the 'Gas the Jews' disgrace on the Opera House steps, they have chaperoned the haters' weekend excursions through our public streets. Arrests? Only if you pull out an Israeli flag and then it's 'Move along, Shlomo' or you're nicked.' As to the future, we should immediately halt all Muslim immigration. We should deport all Muslims that we can legally remove for our country, starting with Islamic hate preachers, whose mosques and schools need to be stripped off government funding. Investigating welfare rorts and prosecuting those convicted of ripping-off the rest of us will produce plenty of fodder for the deportation mill. Freedom of religion is not an issue here because any religion that preaches conversion by terror, hate for other creeds and the subjugation of women is not something that can be recognised as a bona fide religion from the standpoint of any sort of Western perspective. Think here about Thuggees of India who made robbing and strangling a religious observance. Live by the sword, they say, die by the sword. Well Islam has been sharpening its blade for centuries and it is now holding it at the West's throat. England is probably too far gone to save, and France definitely so. But there is yet time for Australia to forestall more massacres and the submission -- a word Islam loves -- that must inevitably follow. All we need-- and it is a big 'all', I admit -- is leaders prepared to act. Ron Pike is an irrigation farmer in the Riverina. Roger Franklin, Quadrant Online's editor, contributed to this essay

The post Blind Eyes and Glib Lips first appeared on Quadrant.

Almost Bound for Botany Bay?

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:22:25 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Jane Austen Society states their heroine (left) never ventured further north of Litchfield. Educated, mainly at home, she shared a bedroom with her sister, Cassandra, and, although there were visits to London, and some time in Bath, her life revolved around her family in Hampshire and Kent. Yet in November, 2016, the British Chancellor, Philip Hammond, pledged £7.6 million to rescue Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, the largest privately-owned residence in the Kingdom, claiming that it was the inspiration for Pemberley. Wal Walker, an Australian descendant of the Earls of Stafford, early owners of the house, has gone further, in an extraordinary two-volume biography, Jane & D’Arcy (Arcana Trust, 2017), making the audacious claim - not just that Jane visited Wentworth Woodhouse but that she secretly married one of its scions.

Published at Quadrant Online in July 2017 Click here to subscribe

In his first volume, sub-titled Folly is not Always Folly, Walker, interlacing contemporary factual accounts with extracts from the novels, painstakingly builds his circumstantial case. He suggests that in late summer 1786, D’Arcy Wentworth (below left), a soldier-surgeon from the impoverished Irish branch of the Wentworths, met Jane and her sister, Cassandra, in Reading where they were both briefly at boarding school. They met again a few years later when D’Arcy attended a monthly Assembly in Basingstoke with his friend, William Wickham. (Wickham hailed from Bingley in the West Riding). D’Arcy then called upon her after she went to London in April, 1789, to help her neighbour, Anne Lefroy. He later took her to a reception at Wentworth Woodhouse being hosted by his kinsman, the 4^th Earl Fitzwilliam, in honour of the Prince of Wales. As Walker has it, love was declared and D’Arcy and Jane crossed into Scotland and, dear reader, he married her at Gretna Green in the second week of September, 1789. After travelling to Edinburgh, they returned to London and rented lodgings in Clipstone Street, off Great Portland Street, taking the name of Wilson. Quoting Walker, D’Arcy was “confident he would have a salaried appointment in Botany Bay, and they would sail there together to take it up.” Earl Fitzwilliam had recommended his cousin to Evan Napean, the Under Secretary at the Home Office. It was late October in 1789. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]ut within a week, D’Arcy was charged with highway robbery (it is established fact that he had been charged of the same offence three times in 1787 when he was found Not Guilty on two counts and acquitted on the third). According to the Public Advertiser of November 16, 1789, D’Arcy’s wife, ‘Mrs Wilson’ (Walker attests this was Jane), was interviewed and “claimed her name was Taylor; that she came from Worcestershire, but did not know anything of her family at present.” The Times of December 10, 1789, reported that D’Arcy, by now something of a celebrity, was again acquitted. The judge was informed that D’Arcy was taking up an appointment as Assistant Surgeon and was to sail with the Second Fleet for Botany Bay in the Neptune. This proposal was referred to as ‘self-transportation’. Walker adds that Jane was present at the Old Bailey and, now that he was free, they would go to Steventon to seek her father’s blessing and hope that he would marry them before they set sail from Plymouth. Jane was back with the family at the vicarage for Christmas while D’Arcy made preparations in London when, according to Walker, her brother James learnt of D’Arcy and his history. The family feared for their reputation and disgrace for Jane. So her father forbad the match. Jane acquiesced. “She had spent seven weeks and one day as D’Arcy’s wife and forty days alone without him in London.” [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he family agreed the episode would be a closed book. Jane’s correspondence from this time is missing. But, says Walker, “Jane had a great desire to hear and to say D’Arcy’s name aloud. By making D’Arcy a surname, she gave her characters the freedom to speak it without reserve. By this means she ensured his name and her great love for him have resounded across the years.” History records that D’Arcy Wentworth sailed for Port Jackson on January 17, 1790. It is also recorded, in James Austen’s weekly magazine, The Loiterer, that another brother, Henry Austen, wrote on the day before D’Arcy set sail, “applauding the world for getting rid of its superfluous inhabitants, both Poets and Pick-pockets Prudes and Prostitutes, in short all those who have too much cunning or too little money …. shipped off with the very first cargo of Convicts to Botany Bay.” Another coincidence. By the time the Neptune landed in Sydney’s Port Jackson, in late June 1790, D’Arcy had taken a mistress from among the convicts; Catherine Crowley. How could he? However, D’Arcy never married Catherine, or anyone else; but he did father ten children by various mothers, founding his own Australian dynasty through his eldest child, the explorer, author, barrister, landowner, and statesman, William Charles Wentworth, who was conceived on the Neptune. It was William Charles’s great-grandson and namesake, Bill Wentworth (1907 - 2003), who confided in his nephew, Wal Walker, about the family’s link to Austen. Volume II, Such Talent and Such Success takes up the story of the divided couple’s parallel lives from 1806 and D’Arcy in Sydney awaiting approval to return to England to claim his Jane. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat can one make of these astonishing claims? I should add that Jane has been self-transported once before – in Barbara Ker Wilson’s Jane Austen in Australia (1984) but this engaging conceit was fiction. That the scores of biographers – from her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1870 to David Cecil, Elizabeth Jenkins, David Nokes, Claire Tomalin, Paula Byrne – could find no links to D’Arcy Wentworth is surely persuasive. But when one looks at the - admittedly disputed - Rice Portrait of 1789 (given to Jane’s great-nephew John Morland Rice), of thirteen-year-old Jane, it beggars belief that the 27-year-old D’Arcy could have married this child. In September, 1789, Jane was not only ‘not one and twenty’ – she was not even four and ten. (Even Lydia Bennet was sixteen when she eloped with George Wickham) But all-in-all, (as faithful readers of Quadrant would have seen from Penelope Nelson’s elegant, sympathetic review in the June, 2017, issue) this is an entertaining work of historical detection, the fruit of the closest reading of Austen’s prose, and one that suggests she poured into her fiction a few forbidden, tumultuous, intensely romantic months of an otherwise uneventful existence, after she was forced to purge it from her life. Walker’s thesis may exasperate the purists and antagonise the Janeites but it should, in any case, in this bicentennial year, lead more readers to her fiction and they can be transported.

The post Almost Bound for Botany Bay? first appeared on Quadrant.

Battlefield Oz has Just Begun – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 23:08:59 +1100

You wanted a War in Oz…you got one, ugh! (To the PM in Australia) – Mick Raven

Possible set up? Half the price for the Gunmans property in 2024,

then deleted from the real estates site…not even in Archive.org? – Mick Raven

https://www.realestate.com.au/property/26-brown-rd-bonnyrigg-nsw-2177/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/cabramatta/posts/2591245397897485/

26 Brown Road Bonnyrigg 477500 2024 – Google Search

Bondi Beach shooting live updates

Benjamin Netanyahu blames Anthony Albanese for Bondi beach terror attack, as world leaders express horror

Israeli prime minister claims the Australian government ‘let the disease’ of antisemitism spread ‘and the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw today’

Bondi Beach shooting live updates_ 10-year-old among victims, Albanese indicates gun law changes _ 7NEWS

Bondi Beach shooting live updates_ Naveed Akram, Sajid Akram identified as alleged shooters

WHO IS NAVEED AKRAM_ Sydney Attack Gunman Who Opened Fire At Bondi Beach

Hero suffers two gunshot wounds in Bondi beach shooting _ 7NEWS

Ahmed al Ahmed is the true face is Islam. He’s why 2 billion people follow the faith.

Moment Bondi shooter tackled and disarmed by man in civilian clothes caught on camera

[ Removed by moderator ] _ worldnews

Bondi Beach shooting_ 12 people confirmed dead and several injured in attack on Jewish community event

Bondi Shooters

Sydney Beach Shooting_ Gunman Naveed Akram Identified

26 Brown Road, Bonnyrigg NSW 2177 – property.com.au

Bondi Beach – Wikipedia

Lindt Cafe siege – Wikipedia

The Bradman of Bitching

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:45:56 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]S[/fusion_dropcap]o the aged (almost 39), creaky-jointed and out-of-form Usman Khawaja (just three scores above fifty in his past 34 trips to the crease) missed the Second Test in Brisbane because of a back problem -- possibly picked up by a no-longer-young man playing three days of golf immediately prior to the first Test in Perth, which saw him doing a statue impersonation at first slip. It may be that we have seen the last of him for ever. Thank goodness, I say. Khawaja has been a passenger for many a year now with a parsimonious haul of just 920 runs at 29.7 in the course of his past 18 Tests. This would be a miserable, park-cricket average of just 23.7 if you take out the double ton he collected on a flat-track in Sri Lanka. The statistical and malfunctioning bio-mechanical angles aside, Khawaja’s looming retirement will also a blessing because it will the last time we have to endure the political activism of this opinionated Muslim whose performative political pronouncements have been more in recent evidence than any balls sent racing to the boundary off his bat. As we are tiresomely reminded by the establishment media, with all the metronomic choreography of synchronised swimmers, the Pakistani-born Khawaja, imported to Australia as a four-year-old, is the first Muslim to play Test cricket for Australia -- and what a golden opportunity that has been for the media to ‘educate’ knuckle-dragging Australians on Islam and how that foreign religion is no barrier to being a dinky-di Australian. A recap of Khawaja’s Muslim advocacy track record, however, reminds us of why his disappearance from the Test scene will be a relief to many Australians. Khawaja has worn a black armband in protest about being denied permission to politicise his shoes with decals in support of his Gazan brother Muslims who are on the receiving end of Israel’s counter-strike against Hamas for their October 7, 2023, terrorist attack against Israeli Jews. Khawaja’s proposed shoe slogans (which he had to tape over, in the end, because the global cricket authority threatened to sanction him with forfeiture of his match fee) had included ‘freedom is a right’ and ‘all lives are equal’ in the red, black and green of the Palestinian flag (there is no blue and white of the Israeli flag in Khawaja’s political palette) as well as a symbol of the dove of peace (in a pointedly politicised black, not the traditional white which is also, obviously, a racist colour). Khawaja argued that his fashion accessories were a ‘humanitarian’ gesture and in no way an anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas political stance but this is a rationalisation thinner than a cigarette paper from one who has been silent for over two years about the casus belli, the Jihadist provocation, of the Israeli military response. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]or Khawaja has never decorated his boots about the slaughter, butchery, torture, rape and kidnap of 1200 Jews on October 7, a pogrom which easily rivals (for once, the comparison is valid) the anti-Semitic barbarity of the Nazis. No one in the Muslims’ media affinity group has asked him why Israel’s Jews get the silent fashion treatment. Is it that Muslims are exempt from moral consistency because of their special religion? “When I’m looking at my Instagram”, says Khawaja, “and seeing innocent kids, videos of them dying, passing away, that’s what hit me the hardest”. And dead Jewish kiddies, what about them? “I just imagine my young daughter in my arms and the same thing. I get emotional talking about it right now again. For me, that’s the reason I’m doing this. I don’t have any hidden agendas”. Pull the other one, Uzzy. Where was the humanitarian bleeding-heart when it was Jewish children being savagely killed and abused by the Muslim army from Gaza? The strategic silence over Israeli victims of war is like decrying the fire-bombing of Dresden but staying mute on the carpet-bombing of London or Coventry -- a silence which would reveal just where one’s true political sympathies lay. It is true that Australia’s first-drop Test batsman, Marnus Labuschagne, has an unsanctioned eagle with a Bible verse on his bat (not that anyone knew until Khawaja brought it up) but Christianity does not carry any subliminal political message of latent anti-Semitism and the threat of religious violence. It’s your one-sided activism in an unpopular cause, Uzzy, that gets people’s goat. Khawaja has, for example, publicly accused the Opposition's then-leader, Peter Dutton, of “fuelling Islamophobia from the very top”, and he has charged Prime Minister Albanese with the sin of attempting to sweep ‘Islamophobic’ attacks in Australia under the rug whilst lobbying him to end trade with Israel while imposing strict sanctions on the country. “We can't be trading with any country that has such blatant disregard for humanitarian and international law”, he explained. But aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza? Through to the keeper. Khawaja makes his personal faith loudly public. He has posted an Instagram video showing him praying at home to Mecca - ‘everyday, without fail, five times a day’, he boasts. So, a devout Muslim, then, although he claims he has been unpicking the Hadiths, the ‘divinely-inspired’ daily living application of Allah’s infallible word, deciding which of them he thinks are valid. So, a ‘moderate’ Muslim, at least for public consumption. No one, however, cares about the private faiths and beliefs of Australia’s cricketers -- but we do care about one faith’s obsession with making a big deal about them, especially in the recent context of the worst anti-Semitic horror since the Holocaust. You have one job, guys. Just play cricket. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]e further learn that Khawaja believes that, since the 9/11 Twin Towers atrocity in New York, Muslims in Australia have had it tough - “the feeling I got from others was that Christianity was this white, wholesome religion, while Islam was something so foreign it was hard to understand”. The racism card is expertly played by Khawaja – as Peter Smith also notes in a recent Quadrant Online column, “Khawaja suggests that racism is in play because most Muslims are non-white” and that “Islamophobia has a deep correlation with racism”. So, it’s two Victim Cards (brown-skinned and Muslim) for the price of one for Khawaja and sepia fellow co-religionists in Australia. “A lot of the coaches and selectors are white”, says our Victim de jour, so there is “subconscious bias. If you have two cricketers, one brown, one white, both the same, the white coach is going to pick the white cricketer”. Yet, Khawaja has been selected at elite Sheffield Shield and national cricketing levels so, just perhaps, Australia’s selectors just might actually believe in merit (even if they don’t seem to have quite mastered it at times). When merit is not warranted for selection, however, it must be victimisation that is the culprit - “there’s been plenty of times I should’ve been picked for teams and I wasn’t”, whines Khawaja, who has been dropped seven times in his 12-year Test career, “but it just made me have a bigger chip on my shoulder”. That Victim burden must be sitting really heavy on the Muslim cricketer’s shoulder by now. Plenty of alabaster Australian cricketers, however, get dropped by alabaster selectors for temporary loss of form … and recalled when they regain it. And can anyone really imagine a Viv Richards or an Imran Khan or a Virat Kohli, if they had been Australian citizens, being overlooked by the Australian Test selectors because of their skin tone? Even our sometimes incompetent Australian Test selectors couldn’t stuff that one up. So, perhaps all that is going on is that Khawaja isn’t in the class of those other dusky-hued champions nor as indispensable to the team. “I didn’t support Australia for a long time”, Khawaja has said, “up until I was 13 or 14, I just could not relate to the Australian cricket team”. He told a podcast that “when I looked at the TV, I saw these really brash, really stubborn, beer-drinking white Australians that were the same kind of guys racially vilifying me while I was playing cricket” so “I was like, ‘Well, why would I support this team that doesn’t support me?’”. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]s one sympathetic journalist (for The Guardian, naturally) wrote in support, “It’s one of the sad ironies of cricket in this country: Australians from South Asian backgrounds (from countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) are one of the country’s largest migrant blocs and are cricket obsessed, yet often regard the team of their adopted country with indifference or even antipathy. Why?” Racism is, of course, the required answer but perhaps there is another answer viz. that it is national ancestry that matters more to our imported ethnicities than the country they room in. Australians barrack for Australia, Indians for India, Pakistanis for Pakistan, etc. However much the woke warriors may try to lecture, legislate, litigate or lie about it, national identity is the way of the world, not any systemic discrimination. Even Uzzy comes close to understanding this. “I don’t do it on purpose, but all my sporting heroes have been coloured or black”, he says. “I just gravitate towards them -- one, because they’re really good at what they do, and two, because I feel like they have similar traits, they listen to similar music, they dress similar, they’re closer to what I look like. It’s just an inherent thing”. So, it’s a natural thing, after all. Neither is Khawaja a good mixer or all that easy to get along with. He says that the Australian team are “intimidated” by him and sit in “awkward silence” around him. He has a lot of “confrontational dialogue with teammates” and “I stick out like a sore thumb. I don’t drink, I fast”, despite the team accommodating his Muslim teetotalism by banishing the champers from post-victory celebrations. What happened to “there’s no i in team” or does that come with a Muslim exclusion clause these days in the post-Western West? Fortunately, Khawaja’s marriage to an Australian woman, Rachel, who was raised a Catholic, is working out because she converted to Islam as a condition of betrothal. All the Western accommodation with Islam appears to have to be strictly one-way. Khawaja loves to complain that we don’t truly accept him as an Australian but he would be much easier to embrace as an Aussie if he didn’t continually wang on about how different he is, how Pakistani he is, how brown he is, how Muslim he is. The end is nigh for Uzzy but just when we might have expected him to blend anonymously into his imported ‘community’, it has been announced that Khawaja will take up a full–time position in retirement as a Fox cricket commentator. Will we never be free of this troublesome moaner with his perpetual whinging about Australian racism, the wonderfulness of his faith and his telling silence about Jews, all wrapped up in the best ‘moderate Muslim’ finery and camouflaged under a ‘humanitarian’ exterior. Khawaja might be not just the first Muslim to play for Australia, but, with any luck, the only one. We don’t have much to go on with an assessment of Australian Test cricketing Muslims but even a sample size of one can still be quite revealing.

The post The Bradman of Bitching first appeared on Quadrant.

What They’re Saying about Bondi

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:17:16 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]Y[/fusion_dropcap]esterday it was Bondi. Tomorrow, who knows, other than there will be another massacre ... and another ... and another after that. From near and far some of what is being said about the latest bitter fruit of non-judgmental multiculturalism: Mark Steyn: It's not that difficult: where you have rapidly increasing numbers of Muslims, you will have rapidly increasing numbers of dead non-Muslims - sometimes Jews, sometimes Christians, sometimes Buddhists, Hindus, sometimes secular bleepwits who persist in thinking that, because diversity is our strength, they'll just be left alone to listen to crap on their telephones. Not so, not even on an island with near total "gun control" that had already taking the precaution of bollarding off the beach. In such societies, "multiculturalism" is merely an interim phase: "diversity" is just the warm-up act for Islam. "The past is a foreign country," observed L P Hartley in The Go-Between. It is the genius of the Western Uniparty, from New York to New Zealand, to have made the present a foreign country. Robert Spencer: ...Australia welcomed in the killers who decided to globalize the intifada on Bondi Beach. It welcomed them as “asylum seekers” and “refugees,” but they were actually Islamic jihadis, or became Islamic jihadis once in Australia. (Either way, it’s not a good advertisement for Australia’s immigration policy, which is essentially the same as immigration policies all over Europe and North America.)... ...Police said that they were “aware” of one of these grateful asylum seekers before he made the decision to murder Jews in large numbers in order to gain the favor of Allah. They did not, obviously, do anything to stop him. Cassie at the New Catallaxy blog: In early September this year I attended a counterprotest on Bondi Beach because Muslim and leftist filth were using the beach a a prop to push their pro-Palestinian narrative. Whilst we were yelling at the leftist and Muslim scum to get off our beach, I saw a hideous and very fat hijabed woman grabbed a megaphone and start screaming ‘Intifada’ at us. I said to the fcking useless NSW police who, rather than facing the Muslim and leftist scum on the beach, were facing us…………JEWS………… to go down and arrest the fat woman because she was calling for the murder of Jews. They did nothing. And yesterday, as predicted, the intifada came to Bondi Beach. Reporter to PM Albanese: Your government has come under criticism in claiming that it has effectively responded to the rise of antiSemitism in Australia since October 7, 2023. In September your government recognised the Palestinian state, your ministers have attacked the Israeli government, senior ministers have refused to visit the sites of the October 7 massacres, and you created a special Islamophobia envoy alongside an antiSemitism envoy. Have you taken the threat of antiSemitism seriously, and can you guarantee the safety of Jewish Australians? Albanese: Yes, we have taken it seriously.... Posted on X:

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An Australian Hero: A Tribute to Sir John Kerr

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 05:02:44 +1100

Inspector Javert never pursued Jean Valjean with half the persistence Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston bring to ‘maintaining the rage’ against Sir John Kerr

The post An Australian Hero: A Tribute to Sir John Kerr first appeared on Quadrant.

Shooting at Bondi Beach reportedly targets Jewish community, triggers major police response

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:11:00 +1100

Developing story.

Here’s your ‘Social Cohesion’, Mr Albanese

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 20:53:26 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]et's get a one thing straight before the inevitable boo-hoo bullshit about hijabs being ripped off and how the real victims of today's murderous Bondi Beach assault are those innocent adherents of the Religion of Peace, before Tony Burke welcomes another planeload of Gazans, Ann Aly dismisses terror as "a performative act", and the Prime Minister slings more millions of dollars to his imported vote herd. As the the media choir chants about the multi-culti wonders of planted and subsidised enclaves of ethno separatism throughout what was once a nation united by heritage and culture, let's not listen this time. Indeed, when they drag out the tame imams for their TV spots and Waleed Aly writes another ponderous exercise in terminal wankery, just tell them 'Enough! We've had enough.' And if they persist, hand them this little list of what Islam has brought to these shores: Numan Haider, Man Monis,the Skarf Brothers, Farhad Mohammad, Ihsas Khan, Momena Shoma, Hassan Khalif Ali, Saeed Noori, the Wakeley bishop's attacker, Faheem Khalid Lodhi, Neil Prakash, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Elomar, Abdul Hasan, Mohammed Jamal, Benbrika, Khaled Khayat, Mahmoud Khayat, Amer Khayat, Tamim Khaja, Sulayman Khalid, Jibryl Almaouie, Mohamed Almaouie, Farhad Said, Ibrahim Ghazzawy, Aran Sherani, Farhad Mohammad, the ISIS Brides, Ihsas Khan, the two unnamed Queanbeyan teens, Momena Shoma, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali, Saeed Noori, the Wakeley bishop's attacker, Faheem Khalid Lodhi, Neil Prakash, Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Ali Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohammed Omar Jamal, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, Khaled Khayat, Mahmoud Khayat, Amer Khayat, Tamim Khaja, Sulayman Khalid, Jibryl Almaouie, Mohamed Almaouie, Farhad Said, Ibrahim Ghazzawy, Aran Sherani. Now follow the link below to watch a genuine hero, a man who should, without a doubt, be honoured as Australian of the Year. https://x.com/ConservativeeAu/status/2000128258718015693

The post Here’s your ‘Social Cohesion’, Mr Albanese first appeared on Quadrant.

The Nature of the Beast

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:11:28 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap] letter in The Australian newspaper (11 December) summed it up for me and I suspect for most of us. Deborah Morrison, of Malvern East, puts it this way:

When a right such as family togetherness morphs into luxury holidays, entertainment extravaganzas and outrageously expensive travel by plane or limousine at the expense of the public purse, it’s just plain wrong. And if politicians can’t see that, they bring politics into disrepute.

It’s just plain wrong. Hear! Hear! For a long time I have regarded politicians of whatever complexion as being among the most wretched of people. Their character is formed by a perfect storm. First, they need to be capable of ingratiating and sycophantic behaviour to gain preselection. Otherwise what chance have they of gaining the support of enough other wannabes within their political tribe. Second, they must be prepared to talk out of both sides of their mouths, à la real estate agents, and abandon promises as though they had never been made. How else are they to win an election. Third, with or without talent, once elected they become important people. More so when they become ministers. Free passes abound. Journalists hang on their very words. And being important soon becomes self-important and deserving. From there it is a logical step to using public money to spend big at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Paris and thinking nothing of it. Character among a population probably follows the trajectory of a normal distribution. At one end we have saints; at the other, desperados and despots. Most people congregate in the middle and are of fair-average-quality in character. I suspect most politicians start off on the wrong side of the distribution but not egregiously so. It is their chosen job which thoroughly corrupts them. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]ut I shouldn’t be too hard. So by way of giving them a partial pass, I note that I have no way of using public funds to sample fine dining in Paris. Thus, I don’t have to resist the temptation. Would I be able to, would you, is the (hypothetical) question? I think I would, but of course I don’t know. Oscar Wilde and The Lord’s Prayer are apropos. “I can resist anything except temptation,” said Oscar. “Lead us not into temptation,” we ask God. Human weakness abounds. If this is not appreciated and countered all manner of misdeeds are let loose. Correspondence between Hayek and Keynes is illuminating. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) Hayek explains how centralised economic planning inevitably leads to impoverishment and despotism. Keynes liked the book apparently, writing to Hayek, “...morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moving agreement.” Yet later in the same letter he wrote,

“I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say we almost certainly want more. But the planning should take place in a community in which as many people as possible, both leaders and followers, wholly share your moral position. Moderate planning will be safe if those carrying it out are rightly orientated in their own minds and hearts to the moral issue.” -- Letter from Keynes to Hayek, June 28, 1944

Keynes lived in La-La Land comprising of moral planners. Such creatures do not exist, which Hayek simply took for granted. Leaving aside the intrinsic impossibility of planning complex economic affairs, he knew that those given the privileged and powerful position of planning for the rest of us would be corrupted without a doubt. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen politicians are told that they can spend travel and accommodation money on family reunions, they will not be prone to gathering in a nearby caravan park. They will more likely choose the Ritz in foreign parts. After all, their spouses and children will be conscious of how well their counterparts are being wined and dined. Moreover, as their self-importance grows, vintage champagne and caviar will creep into their dining experiences. We deserve it don’t you know, reflects their mindsets and the difficulty they have in resisting temptation. What to do? Cease ranting about particular politicians ripping off the public purse. They all do it, save for a rare few. Appreciate that politicians are more corrupted and contemptuous of virtue than are most people. Rules around their spending need to be very tight and the penalties for breaching them very onerous. Alternatively, give them all a standard allowance and be done with it. Finally, is there anything to be done about getting better quality politicians? Unfortunately, the answer is no. It is the nature of the beast. But I would make a trade off and be willing to overlook all manner of outrageous personal spending on the public teat, in order to get politicians who would not sell the country down the river by destroying its efficient energy system and by bringing in hordes of cultural clashing migrants. Now those things are really expensive. Sadly our politicians fail us on all fronts. Do we deserve them? I don’t know. Hope not.

The post The Nature of the Beast first appeared on Quadrant.

Looking for Husbands, Praying for Miracle

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:21:15 +1100

If a woman is choosy, or doesn’t want to marry a man, or only wants one other women have chosen, the odds on a baby aren’t good

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Looking for Husbands, Praying for Miracles

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:21:15 +1100

If a woman is choosy, or doesn’t want to marry a man, or only wants one other women have chosen, the odds on a baby aren’t good

The post Looking for Husbands, Praying for Miracles first appeared on Quadrant.

Liza’s Journey: Australia in the Sixties, Part 2

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 17:09:07 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Great Chasm. As we saw in the first installment of this series, Liza was beginning her university studies as a ‘great chasm’ had opened up between the optimism and self-belief of the broad mass of Australians and the nascent Intelligentsia, which was invariably critical of its own country. It appears this split had its origins in the tendency of frontier and nation-building societies, like Australia, to value pragmatism and the ability to engage productively with the concrete here-and-now, rather than be pre-occupied with more abstract matters like culture, ideology, and theories. This nation-building was exemplified in the post-war period by massive immigration, the Education Revolution, and colossal infrastructure development, spearheaded by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (1949-74). The Australian Legend. Such activity saw the resurgence of nationalism, a native intellectual tradition that found much to be valued in Australian history and culture. The key text was The Australian Legend (1958) by Russel Ward, which argued that the shared hardship that characterised Australia’s convict and mining origins and the ‘frontier experience’ of the outback bushman had generated a heritage of egalitarianism, co-operation, and mateship that had manifested itself in the Anzac tradition, and was being called upon again in the post-war period as Australians undertook the immense task of transforming their country into a thriving modern nation. This ‘origin story’ of Australian history became very influential while Liza was at university, and later became a hated target of the New Left. This radical neo-Marxist cohort was a by-product of Australia’s passage into post-industrialism, and especially of the Education Revolution, and it quickly established a stranglehold over Australia’s intellectual life and culture. Mass Immigration. As a nation-building country, Australia benefited greatly from the turmoil in post-war Europe. The Iron Curtain had descended, condemning most East Europeans to a totalitarian fate; 8 million Germans were driven from their homes as their devastated nation was chopped in two; Italy, Greece, and of Yugoslavia were in chaos, and Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy. Massive numbers of migrants began streaming out, determined to start life afresh ‘down under’, including 170,000 Displaced Persons (or ‘refos’ as they were affectionately known). Most were assisted by the Federal Government on the basis that they agreed to stay for at least two years and work in the jobs available. Many found work with the Snowy Mountains Scheme (and incidentally pioneered the snow-skiing industry in Australia). Others opened shops and businesses, worked in department stores, factories, heavy industry, or as labourers and farmhands.

Liza's Journey: Part I

Post-Industrialism All of this was happening as Australia was transformed into a post-industrial society, i.e., one that has transitioned from a manufacturing-based economy to one centred on services, information processing, and knowledge work. This involves a shift from a ‘blue-collar’ to a ‘knowledge worker’ workforce, with an emphasis of theoretical knowledge over practical know-how, and consequently a greater focus on tertiary over technical education. It also involved major changes in gender roles, rights and responsibilities, birth rates, and enhanced opportunities for women in education, employment and political life.

State government typing pool in Brisbane, circa 1962

Education Revolution. Post-industrialism made enormous demands on the education system. And this happened at a time when migrant children were adding significantly to the Baby Boomer demographic bulge. Consequently, Government expenditure on education tripled as a proportion of GDP between 1950 and 1970. Primary and secondary enrolments increased by 11% and 45% respectively in the Sixties alone. New Universities. Meanwhile, tertiary student numbers grew by 90% as universities struggled to produce sufficient knowledge workers for Australia’s new post-industrial society. The number of universities grew from 9 in 1958 to 16 in 1971, e.g., La Trobe, (left & below), where Liza would begin her academic career. Student numbers increased from 30,000 in 1955 to 120,000 in 1970; the proportion of people aged 17-22 attending university grew by 48% between 1960 and 1972; and the number of academics grew 350% from 2000 to 7000. Australia soon had three times as many university students per capita as Britain. Teacher Shortage. There was a severe teacher shortage and so the states introduced Teaching Studentships, which sent thousands of (usually lower-income) Baby Boomers through the universities and teacher colleges, bonding them to teach wherever needed for three years after graduation, as portrayed in the novel and film, Wake in Fright, as we saw in our first article. Germaine Greer went through Melbourne University in this fashion, rebelled at the prospect of being posted to a country school during the prime of her life, and escaped to Sydney, leaving her father to pay out her bond. Commonwealth Scholarships Liza was spared this fate. In January 1951, the new Menzies Federal Government had used powers recently gained at a referendum to introduce a merit-based university scholarships program. This was designed to allow students resident in Australia to attend university who would otherwise have financially been unable to do so. Liza’s excellent final year results gained her a scholarship and helped overcome her father’s objections to her going to university (along with the scholarship useful living allowance, and the sudden burst of pride prompted by the effusive congratulations showered on him by his work-mates on the night-shift when they heard Liza had gained entry to the University of Sydney --above.) The Generation Gap. Her dad’s initial reluctance was emblematic of the ‘generation gap’ that was opening up in Western societies, and that was noticed for the first time in the mid-1950s, when it became the central theme of the histrionic James Dean smash-hit movie Rebel Without a Cause (below) a film banned in New Zealand and nearly banned in Australia. One Day of the Year In Australia, nothing symbolized this generational revolt better than Alan Seymour’s iconoclastic play, One Day of the Year, which was first staged in 1962. This was Liza’s third year at university and she’d joined a theatre group staging such plays at Union Theatre (left), much to the dismay of her father. He’d joined the Army in WWII, aged 19, had seen action in New Guinea and Borneo, and now suffered from PTSD. Indeed, Liza had been conceived during one of his few periods of leave spent in Sydney and consequently he’d seen little of her until after the War, leaving both feeling they’d never really quite bonded. There was also a faint nagging doubt about paternity, given that Sydney was over-run with well-paid GIs during the War (cf. Marilyn Lake, ‘The Desire for a Yank: Sexual Relations between Australian Women and American Servicemen during World War II’, 1992). Ridicule. The play itself was quite close to the bone and concerns ‘Hughie’, a university student writing an article for his university paper ridiculing ANZAC, as in fact happened at Sydney University the year that Liza began there. This was Hughie’s dad’s ‘one day of the year’ in which, as an ex-soldier, he could feel some pride. Hughie would have none of it. Berating his father, he declares: “Do you know what that Gallipoli campaign meant? Bugger all, an expensive shambles. The biggest fiasco of the war”. ANZAC Day, Hughie exclaims, fixing his gaze contemptuously upon his father, is celebrated only by a “screaming tribe of great, stupid, drunken, vicious, bigoted no-hopers.” The play was adapted for TV, expanding its audience immeasurably, and contributing greatly to the decline in ANZC observances over the following decades. Through these final few years with her father, Liza saw the hurt on his face each April and found it best to not talk about the play, especially as they chatted while she helped him in his day-job doing deliveries for the local grocery store to help pay the mortgage on their home. Divergent Futures. There was another dimension to the generation gap, as commentators spoke of “a new kind of split” in Australian society. On one side was the conservative establishment that had come to power in the aftermath of the Great Depression and WWII and adhered to the principles of mainstream Australian culture as it continued its nation-building. On the other side was an increasingly growing and vocal Intelligentsia, which drew its strength from the new cohort of knowledge workers created by post-industrialism, especially those employed by the state in its bureaucracy and service delivery sectors. Increasingly influenced by the New Left ideologies that came to dominate the Sixties, this progressivist ‘New Class’ saw “so many shortcomings in Australian social development” that it often felt driven to “the point of despair” in its desire for change (Peter Edwards, A Nation at War, 1997) As Liza and her dad travelled around in his van, they both reflected on the divergent futures they faced as young people: he, 20 years in the past, facing war and a working-class life; she, in the present, looking forward to an elite education and passage into the fortunate ranks of the New Class. Descent into Vietnam. These conflicts came quickly to centre on the Vietnam War. In November 1964, National Service for 20-year-old males was introduced, provoking Liza’s then boyfriend into hitting the ‘Hippy Trail’ (as it would soon become known) and disappearing forever out of her life. The following April the government announced that Australia would commit an infantry battalion for service in Vietnam. Both moves attracted considerable political support, with opinion polls showing 52% in favour vs 37% against the commitment. This reflected the deteriorating political situation in Southeast Asia, as the British, French, and the Dutch withdrew from our region, leaving behind the conflict and chaos of the post-colonial world. The Malayan Emergency was followed by the Indonesian–Malaysian Konfrontasi, and then by the sharp turn towards communism in Indonesia under President Sukarno, who aligned his nation with the Soviet Union and China. This led to a military coup in 1965, his deposing, the liquidation of the Indonesian Communist Party, and the death of between 500,000 and one million of its supporters. All of these conflicts were on Australia’s doorstep and 64% (versus 16%) believed that Thailand and Malaysia would fall to communism if the Americans abandoned Vietnam; while a massive 72% (versus 16%) believed that China would become a threat to Australia in such an eventuality. At this point, nobody had any idea that a fuse had been lit that would totally transform Australian society and culture. Fear. As the Sixties unfolded, the fear of communism in Asia was very real and “the principal elements of the domino theory … were deeply embedded in the Australian psyche”. Politically, the ALP was torn between its right and left wings and provided little effective opposition. Major institutions like the unions, the churches and universities initially either supported the government or accepted the necessity of the commitment. Amongst the churches, the Anglicans were divided but key leaders and most members supported the government. Within the Catholic Church, the hierarchy and most of the membership supported the commitment, as did the DLP and the NCC, all being concerned with the general communist threat and the fate of the Catholic population in Vietnam. On university campuses opinions were divided, with small demonstrations supporting each side of the conflict. Firm political support for the Government was then registered in the 1966 federal election, which saw the Liberal-Country coalition returned with an historically large swing and a substantially increased majority over the ALP (82 seats to 41). Moreover, this occurred even after the 1965 Federal Budget had increased income tax and imposed higher duties on petrol, tobacco, and alcohol, all to help pay for a 27% increase in defence expenditure. The 'Anti'Ascent. Nevertheless, and despite this widespread public support, by the end of 1965 the strategically vital Intelligentsia had become violently opposed to the war. As Peter Samuels concluded in the Bulletin in December 1965: “While a clear majority of the electorate support Government policy, in the opinion-forming circles – in universities, among school teachers, journalists, clergymen – and among the more politically interested and active people, the ‘antis’ appear to be in the ascendancy.” An anti-war ‘teach-in’ at Monash University (below) attracted some 2000 people to hear the Minister for External Affairs, Paul Hasluck, debate the left-wing ALP MHR, Dr Jim Cairns. Cairns was the crowd favourite, with Hasluck attracting “jeers and sarcastic clapping”, indicating that university audiences had made up their minds, and wanted only “to have their emotions given intellectual reinforcement”. (ibid). In 1969 some 500 academics signed ‘incitement statements’ demanding young men refuse to register for national service, with one prominent professor declaring that this was necessary because “the average Australian is a gutless rabbit.” Moral Litmus Test. Within only a few years, Vietnam became a moral litmus test amongst the Intelligentsia: “In fashionable intellectual circles, to be heard even mildly defending Australia’s involvement in the war was the social equivalent of announcing one’s Nazi memorabilia collection over the canapés”. (Paul Ham, Vietnam, 2007) As a public intellectual and future president of the NSW Legislative Council remarked: “I judged everyone on how they viewed Vietnam”; adding in a moment of apparent insight: “I was as mad as a cut snake”. Tet: Victory=Defeat. A major cause of this shift was the Tet Offensive. This was a massive surprise attack by communist forces on Saigon and throughout South Vietnam, launched during an agreed ceasefire for the Tet Lunar New Year celebrations on January 31, 1968. After horrendous fighting, the communists suffered a major military defeat and incurred huge losses (over 110,000) that devastated the Viet Cong forces in the South. However, although it was a major Allied victory, the American (and Australian) public were deeply shocked and panicked by the extreme violence depicted in the media, which helped fundamentally transform public attitudes towards the War. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf9auTBV_vQ[/embed] Moreover, the pre-eminent American journalist, Walter Cronkite happened to be in Vietnam at the time and the offensive convinced him that the Allies could not win the War. His TV report to this effect electrified America and convinced President Johnson that he could not win the upcoming presidential election. His shock withdrawal on TV threw the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination wide open and precipitated a chain of events that re-routed history and led eventually to a communist triumph. The Prague Spring. Things were also very serious in the Communist Bloc in 1968. In Czechoslovakia, the new government of Alexander Dubček attempted to liberalise the strict communist regime, offering ‘Socialism with a Human Face’. This provoked the Soviet Union, which saw such liberalization as an attack on its ideological and political hegemony over global Communism. Consequently, it mobilized the Warsaw Pact and overnight on 20-21 August 1968 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, occupying all key strategic points. Despite massive popular resistance, the Dubček government was deposed, the regime ‘normalized’ to Soviet tastes, and all hopes of liberalization crushed. Soviet fear of bad publicity ensured that fatalities and casualties were kept to c.1000, and were nothing like the 32,000 that died when Soviet forces invaded Hungary in 1956. Nevertheless, the military intervention caused dissension within the Communist Bloc and destroyed the credibility of the International Communist movement in the West. ‘A Respectable Rebellion’ Almost overnight, anti-war activism had become “a respectable rebellion”. Whereas, “two years earlier, ‘draft dodgers’ were condemned as cowards and un-Australian, in 1969 they were seen as heroes”. By 1970 anti-war moratoriums were drawing crowds of up to 80,000 in cities around Australia, while the universities, including especially Sydney where Liza had studied, had been transformed “from relatively secluded centres of learning into sites of real political conflict, and of successful radical political mobilization.” (Andrew Milner, 'Radical Intellectuals’, 1988) “Through confrontations, demonstrations, direct action, influence through student newspapers, broadsheets, etc., the radical core had ‘detonated’ mass student interest”. (Warren Osmond, ‘Student Revolutionary Left’, 1970) And overall, “the youthful protesters at universities and in the moratorium marches were rejecting more than the Vietnam War: being ‘against Vietnam’ implied a blanket rejection of almost everything associated with the world of their parents.” (Bruce Bennett, ‘Literary Culture Since Vietnam’, 1998) Failure & Despair. And yet the Australian electorate ignored the radicals and their anti-war campaign and re-elected the Federal Coalition Government in 1966 with an increased majority, and did so again in 1969 at a time when radical expectations were very high. This was very traumatic: “For many opponents of the Government the election result came as an unexpectedly cruel blow. The constant uproar of public demonstrations had led many people on the left to confuse the depth of [their] feeling with its breadth” amongst the masses. (Edwards, A Nation at War) The devastating effect of this failure on the true believers was mercilessly depicted by David Williamson in his play (and subsequent film), Don’s Party (1971), a depiction that an older and wiser Liza would recognize for its cynical accuracy. The “gutless rabbits” had spoken.

Election night 1966

Zombie-Lives. This was a pivotal cultural moment, as the Intelligentsia sought desperately to explain the chasm between their strongly held political and moral beliefs and the contrary concerns of the masses. Embracing the ‘great Australian emptiness’ theme, they concluded that the masses inhabited a “a pseudo-world”, and were puppets of capitalism, zombies whose

“lives are reduced to a monotonous routine controlled from outside … People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the capitalist system as a whole.”

E-diots? – ConspiracyOz

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:09:47 +1100

Stoopid People? Stoopid Rules? – Mick Raven

UK backpacker Alicia Kemp sentenced over e-scooter death of Thanh Phan in Perth CBD – 12th Dec 2025

An English backpacker who was drunk when she fatally struck a pedestrian while riding a rented e-scooter in Perth’s CBD has been jailed for four years.

Thanh Phan, 51, died after he was hit by Alicia Kemp, 25, with his widow left to care for their two autistic sons with high needs.

Kemp’s friend — who was illegally riding as a passenger on the same scooter — was also injured, with CCTV released by the court showing them swerving through the streets.

E-scooter rider critically injured in crash with car in Townsville – 11th Dec 2025

An e-scooter rider has suffered critical injuries after a crash with a car in the Townsville suburb of Garbutt.

The adult man is in a life-threatening condition with critical head and pelvic injuries.

Queensland hospitals treating five people with e-scooter injuries every day– 11th Dec 2025

New research shows an average of five people are ending up in Queensland hospitals each day due to e-scooter crashes.

More than 1600 people ended up in hospital between January and October this year.

Lithium battery fires in WA so far in 2025 almost double those in entire 2020 – 8th Aug 2025

Inventing the Dismissal

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 08:01:00 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap] piece of paper from Malcolm Fraser’s files destroyed Sir John Kerr’s post-1975 reputation. Kerr was hated and abused by those who maintained the rage, but a single sheet of paper, an A4 paper plane, toppled the last standing remnants of the man in the top hat. The document, lethally loaded with a handful of scribbled words, proved, according to the latest history of the dismissal, that “Fraser was ready and prepared. The defeat of Whitlam was comprehensive—it was a joint Kerr-Fraser effort.”[1] Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston, who wrote this, are wrong: misled by the wrong words on the wrong piece of paper. Philip Ayres’s 1987 biography of Malcolm Fraser first revealed Fraser’s claim that on the morning of the dismissal Kerr rang and asked four questions which indicated he was about to dismiss the Labor government. It was plausible. It was no secret that the phone call had taken place. In Matters for Judgment Kerr wrote that after speaking with Gough Whitlam, “I next spoke to Mr Fraser who confirmed that the position and the Opposition policy remained the same. I said nothing else to him about the situation.”[2]

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The questions Fraser said he was asked were familiar. They were among the conditions Kerr said he had put to him, but later in the day, in his study before he commissioned the new prime minister. He sought an undertaking to guarantee the passing of Supply, the calling of a double-dissolution election, an agreement not to introduce new policies or make any appointments, and an undertaking, during the period of the caretaker government, not to hold inquiries into the activities of the Labor government. Sceptical commentator Gerard Henderson suggested Fraser used Kerr’s book “to reconstruct the alleged phone conversation of ten years earlier”.[3] Had Fraser confused his memories of what was said on the telephone and what took place later at Government House? Sir John Kerr said he had. Fraser insisted his version of what had happened was correct. Stalemate. After the celebrations and commiserations that took place in Canberra that night, did anyone have a clear memory of what happened during the day? Within the going-nowhere controversy a new factor did emerge which possibly could have resolved the conflict. Fraser said he made a note of the conversation as it happened. Witnesses in his office now confirmed they had seen him writing something. Unfortunately, the piece of paper had vanished. Thirty-five years later, in 2010, everything changed. Fraser’s political memoirs were published, and he produced a note which he had been holding back from publication for some years. A photograph of it was included in the book. [4] Some thought it was the only interesting thing in the co-authored volume. The matter was resolved: Fraser told the truth, Kerr was a liar. In 2015, Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston published The Dismissal: In the Queen’s Name. A chapter with a giveaway title “Kerr and Fraser: The Tip-Off” presented their case for the prosecution:

Fraser’s note is authentic and constitutes powerful evidence. It has been validated by eyewitness accounts of the call and note, other sightings of the note and a statutory declaration from Fraser. In addition, since Fraser first revealed the story his account of the conversation has been remarkably consistent.[5]

The note is not authentic, it is not evidence of Kerr’s phone call to Fraser. It is something entirely different. None of the eyewitnesses to the call had read the note or would have known, at the time, who Fraser was talking to or what the person was saying. The statutory declaration Kelly and Bramston refer to was evidence of a cover-up, not validation. Fraser drew on the note, before it was made public, but recast its contents to make it seem consistent with his earlier claims. As for the document itself, if there was a note this is not it, it is something else far more commonplace. And, in one way, ever since 1975 it has always been sitting close by on library shelves. None of the witnesses who saw Fraser writing confirmed that this note was that note. This note was never a secret document, nor is it evidence of a conspiratorial conversation. It is something the historians should have recognised. Fraser’s secretary, Dale Budd, said he saw it on Fraser’s desk on the afternoon of the dismissal. That afternoon, that is exactly where it should have been, lying in plain view on Fraser’s desk. Fraser’s memory was always confused about which of his colleagues had been in his office when he took the call from Kerr and he seems never to have bothered asking them. Peter Nixon remembered a call which Fraser did not discuss: “we did not know if it was the Governor-General himself or an aide”. Nixon, writing years later, thought the call had come from Government House to invite Fraser to Government House at one o’clock.[6] At the time Nixon did not give the impression that a great secret had been shared. When Fraser left his office for Government House, Tony Staley remembered Nixon saying, “It’s no damned good, Malcolm. Whitlam’s got Kerr in his bloody pocket. It’s no good.”[7] Reg Withers recalled Fraser making a note which he and Vic Garland read “upside down” but Garland said only, “I recollect Malcolm making a note.” [8] At the end of the call, Withers said Fraser “came to and took the paper aside.”[9] That may be the last time the famous scrap of paper was ever seen in public. Fraser may have destroyed it, as he suggested in a 1995 interview with Paul Kelly: “There were some people in my office at the time. I think Withers, Lynch and Anthony were the most likely ones. They wouldn’t have heard. They would have seen me take a few notes on a piece of paper which I haven’t kept, I promise you that.”[10] Reg Withers also remembered that Fraser “took up his big felt pen”. The note is written with a finer-point pen and the annotation with a thicker felt pen. Withers claimed to have read some of it upside down. Try it. Fraser’s scrawl would have been impossible to read from the other side of a desk, and it was highly unlikely Withers would have been so overtly curious. The document Fraser produced is the typed agenda for the Coalition’s Joint Party Meeting held on November 11, 1975. On the reverse side, in his handwriting, are six numbered points. There is no mention of Kerr. Towards the foot of the page is an annotation, added at a different time and with another pen: “9.55 11 Nov 1975 J.M. Fraser”. The year was originally written as 1985 and corrected to 1975. Dale Budd said it was dated and signed when he saw it on the afternoon of the dismissal. He made a photocopy, but waited until 2006 before he made this public: though without releasing a copy.[11] On the original, the colour of the blue felt-pen annotation has remained remarkably bright over the years. The note has been used to attack Kerr’s reputation in two ways. The six points are used as evidence that he lied and, as Fraser claimed, had discussed these matters with him before Whitlam was sacked. Then, the 9.55 time point shows the call occurred even before Whitlam had informed the Governor-General that it was his intention to proceed and advise a half-Senate election. One plus one equals the destruction of Kerr’s reputation. Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston are succinct and judgmental: “Kerr’s action constituted an unjustified tip-off to Malcolm Fraser.”[12] [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he document lists six, not four points, and is not a record of Kerr’s call to Fraser on the morning of the dismissal. This piece of paper is a numbered list of points Fraser wanted to include in his statement to the House of Representatives that afternoon. It was probably written on his return to Parliament House and after meeting with senior colleagues and having been assured by Reg Withers that the Supply bills would rapidly be passed in the Senate. He may even have written it inside the chamber as he waited to speak. The points on this list are not in the order that reflected the Governor-General’s priorities, but in the order that was important to Fraser that afternoon. This is the note:

1/Double Dissolution Bills 2/Caretaker 3/No policy changes [though his writing was so scrawled it could have read “No police charges”] 4/No Royal Comm[ission] 5/+Supply 5. [6] Dissolution Today

The two last points were both numbered 5. This may not have been a mistake but an “either/or” suggestion for where they would be best placed in his statement. If this had been written as the Governor-General spoke to Fraser, passing Supply would have been his first condition. That place, on this document, is taken by “Double Dissolution Bills”, not double-dissolution election. That afternoon this was of major importance. It refers to the assembling of the parliamentary bills that could be used to trigger a double dissolution. These had to be collected and framed into a document for Fraser to offer his advice to the Governor-General that elections be called for both houses of parliament. This was his urgent priority after Supply had been passed in the Senate. For the public servants two days work had to be compressed into less than two hours.[13] The new prime minister had given them a 3.40 deadline and he left the House after making his statement in order to ensure they produced the documents he needed to present to the Governor-General. The chamber was in furious uproar. He did not even stay to vote on his own motion to suspend the sitting. He had to deliver his advice to Kerr before four o’clock. This is why it was placed at the beginning of his speech notes. After the passing of Supply, which had been the tactic of both Fraser and Whitlam when Parliament resumed, there was now a race to Government House: for Fraser to recommend a double-dissolution election or for the Speaker of the House of Representatives to ask the Governor-General to reinstate Whitlam. Labor never heard the starter’s gun. An extract from Hansard shows how Fraser used the note in his speech. I have inserted the point numbers in square brackets, and have changed the second number 5 to 6 for clarity. The text begins with point number 2 because that sentence is taken from Fraser’s letter to Sir John Kerr which he was reading into the parliamentary record:

[2] My Government will act as a caretaker government and will make no appointments or dismissals or initiate new policies before a general election is held. [1] Under the terms of the double dissolution the Bills that are in a double dissolution position will all be cited in that double dissolution and honourable members will have in mind the significance of that. [3] There will be no new policy changes. [4] There will be no royal commissions or inquiries into the activities of this Government throughout the period of the election campaign. [6] We will be seeking dissolution of the Parliament at the earliest opportunity. [5] The Appropriation Bills, as some honourable member [Gough Whitlam] interjected, have already passed through the Senate.

The statement continued with extracts from Kerr’s statement giving the reasons for taking the action he had. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he document Fraser produced so long after it was written was probably neither secret nor lost, and all the time Dale Budd had a copy of it. Until it was “found” it was probably exactly where it should have been: either among copies of Fraser’s speeches or sitting typed-side-out among his old office files, beside the minutes, as the agenda of the Joint Party Meeting. Only when someone looked on the opposite side would the handwritten notes have been seen. Unsurprisingly, Fraser found it when “sorting” his papers.[14] The 9.55 time notation on the document should have alerted historians to a problem. It contradicts all previous accounts of the dismissal, including Fraser’s own. Earlier evidence placed the Kerr–Fraser phone call somewhere after 10.05 and before 10.30. The note was published and historical narratives were readjusted with strange results. It’s an interesting point whether 9.55 is meant to mark the beginning or the end of the call. And how long did it last? Those six points, plus explanation and introductory matters, would have taken at least five, eight or ten minutes. Some years earlier, in conversation with Gerard Henderson, Bob Ellicott said the call had been too quick even for a discussion of the four points Fraser was then claiming had been discussed.[15] Fraser’s Political Memoirs are misleadingly specific about when the notation was added: “The phone call with Fraser ended. Fraser wrote the time and date on his note of the conversation, and signed it.”[16] When Gerard Henderson queried this with Fraser’s co-author Margaret Simons, she described his queries as “snarky”. Her reply changed the story, slightly: “Malcolm put the time and date on the note later—he believes after the joint party meeting that immediately followed the call.”[17] Actually it didn’t. Though the starting time on the Agenda is stated as 10.00 it was delayed to 10.30. An equally sceptical observer could speculate that Fraser had forgotten that the meeting had been delayed when he added the annotation—and also speculate that because the year had first been written as 1985, it had been added in the 1980s. Of course, such speculation is pointless as we have both Fraser’s own evidence and that of Dale Budd who photocopied the document, with its annotation, on the afternoon of November 11. On Remembrance Day, 1975, a morning meeting to discuss the Supply crisis was attended by Whitlam, Frank Crean and Fred Daly from the government and Fraser, Doug Anthony and Phillip Lynch for the opposition. It ended at 9.45. Whitlam had issued an ultimatum, the word was chosen by Laurie Oakes in his report the following day.[18] The Opposition had been given six hours to agree to his terms or he would call a half-Senate election. Everyone, except Whitlam, knew this would provoke a showdown with Sir John Kerr, who would be forced to make a decision over authorising the conducting of an election while the government was without the money to pay its expenses. After the meeting John Menadue, secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, went to Whitlam’s office and was briefed about what had taken place. Menadue wrote a file note the following day with his account of how matters had unfolded. Fraser and his associates had gone to his office for a discussion with senior members of the shadow cabinet. Fraser dictated a note on the meeting: “The prime minister said that if the appropriation bills were not passed today, he would go to Government House to recommend a half-Senate election.”^{^[19]} Whitlam was already double-crossing the Coalition. He had already made his decision to call the half-Senate election and David Combe, the ALP’s national secretary, was advising state ALP secretaries of the coming election and making the first campaign bookings. Before he had a response from the Coalition, Whitlam asked Menadue to phone Kerr for an immediate appointment. His account in The Truth of the Matter is deceitful, as he makes it appear that Fraser had already rejected his offer at the meeting itself.^{^[20]} [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]M[/fusion_dropcap]enadue rang Government House at about 10.00 and, as David Smith, Kerr’s Official Secretary, was unavailable he spoke to Kerr himself. The Governor-General had to officiate at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the War Memorial and suggested meeting Whitlam when Parliament broke for lunch. Menadue passed this message to Whitlam. About the same time, in Fraser’s office, the decision was taken to reject Whitlam’s offer and it was just after 10.00 when he rang Whitlam to inform him. The time was given in Philip Ayres’s 1987 biography.^{^[21]} After speaking to Fraser, Whitlam’s secretary rang Government House for the Prime Minister and was told that the Governor-General was unavailable. Whitlam himself then rang on Kerr’s direct line and immediately got through. Kerr apologised and said he had been talking to his daughter, as his grandson had just been admitted to hospital. Whitlam now confirmed his intention to call a half-Senate election even without the Supply bills being passed: “He said Supply was not available and he intended to proceed with his plan to govern without it. This was in response to a question from me. He did not say he could get temporary Supply for the half-Senate election.”^{^[22]} At about 10.10, before he went into the Labor caucus meeting Whitlam told Menadue that he had spoken to Kerr, and Fraser: [is this Kerr?] “Mr Whitlam told me that, in the meantime [before his call to Kerr], Mr Fraser had rung him to say that he was not interested in any arrangement to pass Supply in return for no half Senate elections before May/June 1976.”^{^[23]} After talking to Whitlam, Kerr rang Fraser. He recalled that the time was between 10.00 and 10.30.^{^[24]} Fraser gave several different times for the conversation. In Philip Ayres’s biography it occurred between 10.05 and 10.30.^{^[25]} Elsewhere he suggested “probably about 10.30, or a quarter to 11”: these latter times are incorrect as he was attending a joint party meeting from 10.30.^{^[26]} Whitlam made the election announcement in the caucus and it was soon being broadcast by the media, but he did not announce it in the parliament and the Coalition was left confused as to what was happening. If the 9.55 time, on the wrong piece of paper, is correct, then Kerr spoke to Fraser before he spoke to Whitlam, and before Fraser spoke to Whitlam. Yet both Kerr and Fraser agreed that they only spoke after each of them had talked to Whitlam. As Fraser recalled (emphasis added):

“John Kerr did ring me up in the morning of that time, after that meeting had failed and that there was no agreed compromise, which he had been advised by the Prime Minister and I said yes that was right.”

On this point their memories seemed very similar, with Kerr saying Fraser “confirmed that the position and the Opposition policy remained the same. I said nothing else to him about the situation.”^{^[27]} On that latter point Fraser disagreed. Jenny Hocking’s Gough Whitlam: His Time ignores contemporary evidence to claim that Fraser had already spoken to Kerr, “agreeing to terms”, before he telephoned Whitlam. When Whitlam’s office attempted to contact Kerr he was unavailable because he was taking a call from his daughter. This is what Kerr told Whitlam, and David Smith was in the room when the private call began. Hocking ignores this and knits a fluffy conspiracy for her readers:

Shortly after 10 am, having just spoken to the Governor-General on the official Government House line [the what?] and agreeing to terms, Fraser had telephoned Whitlam and told him there would be no compromise. It was only then that Whitlam had reached Kerr on his private line, unaware that his difficulty in contacting him had been because Kerr had been speaking to Fraser.^{^[28]}

In that bad book, Hocking claimed Dale Budd was present when Kerr spoke to Fraser. He wasn’t.[29] In another book, shorter but perhaps even deadlier, The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know about November 1975, she magically deletes Fraser and transforms Budd into the note writer: “A note of this vital conversation m

Escaping from Emergency

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:47:29 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen Bryan and I arrived at the Base Hospital’s emergency entrance there were already four ambulances and a paddy-wagon crowded in the parking bays. I parked our van in the only available space, half on the entry’s footpath. Bryan groaned. “Worst possible time: late Saturday night when the drunks have had time to do something stupid.” “And the cops are here. Someone’s causing chaos.” It was our third coroner’s job in two days. I was tired, and weary of people—dead or alive. It was 11.30 p.m. Maybe I’d get to bed by 1.30 a.m. Bryan liaised with the administration staff while I tried to get the attention of the triage nurse, Kate. Our suicide—Glenn Briggs, thirty-seven years old—had to be entered on the database to start the hospital’s side of the coronial process. I caught Kate’s eye. She held up five fingers. In a corner, two ambos, two policemen and two hospital security blokes surrounded a young man—heavily tattooed, tall and muscular—whose tight white T-shirt was spattered with blood. A nurse watched while Doctor Veronica slowly unwound a bandage on the man’s head. He grinned as he answered Veronica’s questions, designed to test his cognisance and memory. Did he know where he was? What day was it? What was his address? Who was the Prime Minister? He gave smart-alec answers. Behind that group, almost hidden by them, sat a neatly dressed older man with an alarmed look on his face. No doubt he’d been told to take a seat and a doctor would see him—at some point. Bryan emerged from the administration office. “Could be a long wait,” I told him. “Been through triage yet?” “No, but Kate indicated she’ll be with us in five minutes.” We both knew five minutes could stretch to fifty if ambos rushed in a critical patient. Bryan sat down in a nearby wheelchair. He looked at the wall clock. “I’ll have a kip until they’re ready to help us.” I didn’t know how he could will himself to sleep, but in a few minutes he was dozing, oblivious to the drama around us. I stood near the examination room where Kate could see me. Kate was peering through a large, illuminated magnifying-glass at a teenage girl’s scalp. The girl’s mother was looking through the glass too, getting in Kate’s way. The girl’s hair was dyed grey, her mother’s hair was pink. “I can’t see anything,” Kate said. She used a comb to separate the hair, searching for the “gash” that resulted, they said, when the girl lifted her head into a cupboard door that her mother had opened above her. “It’ll get infected if it’s not treated,” the mother said. “Probably not. The cut must be tiny and shallow,” Kate said. “When you get home, if you can find the nick splash it with disinfectant.” “Won’t that sting?” the girl yelped. “A bit,” Kate said. I marvelled at her patience. Kate was young and always well-groomed, her blonde hair in intricate plaits. Plaits were her “work do”, she once told me. “We’ve got to see a doctor,” the mother insisted. “Not just a nurse. No offence.” Kate turned off the illuminated magnifying-glass. She opened an adjacent door. “Take a seat in the waiting room. We’ll call you when a doctor becomes available.” I wondered if this was a “therapeutic wait”, given to obsessive people with no real need for medical care. I discovered the use of the therapeutic wait when I heard about Graham, a lonely middle-aged hypochondriac who came to the hospital every day with some imaginary malady. In fact, he just wanted to talk to and be examined by a female nurse. Realising this, the women arranged with the male nurses to attend him. The male nurses looked over Graham quickly and gave him long therapeutic waits. He soon stopped coming to the hospital. Kate called me into the examination room. She sat at a computer and we worked through the few details needed for the triage notes. She asked, “Is this jumper from Lake Street? The ambos said there were pieces of him across the carpark.” “It wasn’t quite that bad. We think he hit head-first so there was a lot of blood. The ambos laid two sheets over him; we used them to mop up blood. We cleaned up what we could. Neighbours shouldn’t have to confront those remnants in the morning.” “Geez, I couldn’t do your job. Doesn’t it get to you?” “Well, twice in the past month cadavers have appeared in my dreams. And these late nights are knocking me around. I feel drained the next day.” We needed a doctor to pronounce death and tick boxes on a checklist. Kate nodded towards the waiting room through the window. “Crazy town’s here tonight. I’ll do my best to get a doctor for you.” The waiting room was crowded with older folk, teenagers accompanied by a friend or adult, and clusters of anxious-looking young parents with sleepy little children in pyjamas. “What’s the story with the police and security guys?” I asked. Kate lowered her voice. I leaned towards her to hear as we looked over at the young man and his grim-faced entourage. “He was clobbered in a pub brawl and then attacked the ambos called to help him.” Right on cue, the young man bellowed in response to something Doctor Veronica said. “Hey everybody! I’m a priority patient! Yee-haa! If you want to get ahead, get a bloody head!” He snorted laughter, pointing to his bandaged scalp. Veronica and the nurse drew back. Beyond them, the neatly dressed older man tensed as if ready to spring from his corner to safety. The police and security staff lifted the young man to his feet. The police kept a tight grip on his handcuffed arms and marched him past me, Kate and snoozing Bryan to a room with only a simple bed, a solid locked door and a thick-paned observation window. It was the “isolation tank” where they secured doped-up druggies, violent or abusive people, and mentally disturbed patients. The police and hospital security guys stood guard. Doctor Veronica and the nurse dispersed to other jobs. The older man sat back down. Kate pointed to him. “He shouldn’t be here. He says he’s got indigestion, that’s all. He’s a leftover from the previous shift. They thought a heart check was necessary.” The previous shift? So he’d been here at least six hours? Kate turned her attention to a plump, older woman that two ambos had wheeled in on a stretcher. The woman had a quick look around before returning to gaze at her mobile phone. She wore a tight pink tracksuit that looked like she’d put it on and then inflated herself to fill it. A floral-patterned well-packed overnight bag sat at the end of the stretcher. A stout ambo went to meet Kate at the portable console she’d shifted to this new patient. He stood beside Kate and spoke to her in a low voice. She nodded, looked at the woman and entered details on a laptop. Kate said to the woman, “Hi Noelene, I’m Nurse Kate. Can you tell me how you got injured?” “I slipped getting out of a bubble bath and fell on my coccyx bone, smashing it to bits.” The two ambos exchanged looks. Kate tapped more notes into the laptop. She asked, “Noelene, on a scale of one to ten, one being barely hurt and ten total agony, how would describe your pain?” Noelene took her eyes from her mobile and considered her answer. “Ten. Absolutely.” “Ten is incredible rare pain,” Kate said. “Oh, I dunno, maybe eight. Eight and a half.” Noelene’s eyes returned to her mobile. The younger of the two ambos turned his back on Noelene and came to me. “Lake Street?” he asked. “Yeah. You were there before us?” “I had the pleasure. They know why he did it?” “No note left, but we went up to his unit with the forensic cop. There were masses of booze bottles. Dope and anti-depressant meds on the coffee table. No job. All paid for by Centrelink.” “The usual suspects. How old was he?” “Thirty-seven.” “I guess he couldn’t see any way out of his problems,” the ambo said. Necessity’s despair is to lack possibility. Kierkegaard’s observation vaulted into my mind. Yeah, he probably felt there was no other escape. And then a possibility for myself—partial retirement—suggested itself to me. We watched Kate and the ambo carefully roll Noelene onto her side. Kate gently pressed Noelene’s lower back and bottom. Noelene immediately waved her hefty arm, striking out at Kate. “Stop it! Stop it! It’s like you’re stabbing my backside!” The ambo with me returned to Noelene. He said to Kate, “We gave Noelene Panadol-forte half an hour ago.” Kate entered more details on the laptop. She said to Noelene, “I’ll organise an x-ray of your tail bone to see if there’s damage.” Noelene turned in her bed to face Kate. “An x-ray? Not an MRI or CAT scan or anything up-to-date?” “In casualty, x-ray is our first option,” Kate said. “Oh great, an x-ray! How long’s that gunna take?” “I’ll request it now but you’ll be here for a while. You can see we’re busy. I’ll get a wheelchair and a donut cushion so you can sit comfortably while you wait. The ambos need their stretcher now to help someone else.” Kate got a smile and a thumbs-up from the stout ambo; his mate brought out the wheelchair next to Bryan. Kate placed a donut cushion on the wheelchair seat. She and the ambos eased Noelene off the stretcher. She groaned loudly with each movement, getting alarmed or amused looks from the parade of nurses, doctors and admin staff who passed—always in a hurry—through the emergency room to adjacent, curtained rooms. “Oohh! Oohh!” howled Noelene. “Feel me! I’m sweating with the pain!” Noelene’s phone pinged a message alert. Distracted, she stopped moaning and read the text. Kate and the ambos shifted the wheelchair behind her and gently lowered her into it. Kate positioned the donut cushion while the ambos supported Noelene. She put her phone down. “Careful! My coccyx’s shattered!” she yelled. The two ambos quickly cleaned their stretcher with disinfectant and escaped to their vehicle. Across the room, the older man watched and listened, his mouth open, his eyes wide. He shifted in his seat when Kate wheeled Noelene to wait beside him. His raised his hand as if he was at school. Kate said, “I’ll be with you soon, Alf.” Alf’s shoulders slumped. He looked over at me. He stood, picked up his chair and carried it to sit with me and Bryan in our corner. He was ten or fifteen years older than me, with—fortunate fellow—a thick thatch of hair that still had traces of brown amidst the grey. “How’re you going, champ?” I said. “Frustrated. I keep tellin’ ’em I’ve got indigestion—not heart problems. But they say I’m a vulnerable age and need to be checked. They want to monitor my heart. I want to go home, but they won’t let go home because they have a duty to care.” “Why’d you come here?” I ventured. “My sister—a classic worry wart—telephoned an ambulance without me knowing. I was almost bullied into it and dumped here. I know my own body. I often get indigestion after a plate of chips and a few beers.” “Yeah, me too.” I saw Alf notice my work name badge, and then he looked at the secured door that led to the waiting room. He turned his gaze to the ambo bay’s sliding door. “How do you get out of here?” he asked. “I want to go home.” He was likely to be here for hours longer, waiting for treatment he didn’t want. He scanned the bustling nurses and then peered at the police and security staff chatting outside the isolation room. He craned his neck to see the complaining mother and her daughter in the waiting room, and then he grimaced at Noelene, who was mesmerised by her mobile phone. In the wheelchair beside me, Bryan slept. Remembering that I had to dispose of the bloody sheets, I whispered, “Watch me, Alf.” I walked to the ambo bay door, glancing behind to see Alf attentive. I pushed the green button on the wall near the door and went outside. I took the plastic medical waste bag—heavy with bloody sheets—from the van and dropped it in a large laundry bin behind the ambo parking bay. Outside, the air was cool and fresh. Most of the townspeople were asleep. I went back inside. Alf whispered, “I’ll need a taxi.” I went to the administration office where I’d seen the taxi number written on a whiteboard. I wrote the number and the hospital admin number on the back of our business card and gave it to Alf. “Here’s the taxi’s number.” He looked at me, raised his reading glasses from their cord around his neck, got his mobile from his pants pocket and spoke softly. “Hello? Oh hello, I want a taxi to Erskine Street, across from the hospital. Goodo. Thanks.” He put his mobile away and smiled. “Fifteen minutes.” I bent down to conspire. “When you get home, telephone admin—let ’em know you’ve discharged yourself and you’re safe and well.” “I will.” Alf moved his chair close to the ambos’ door and sat down. A passing nurse saw his move. He was wily. He pointed to me and said to her, “Those blokes are undertakers. I don’t wanna be too close to them.” “They leave you alone as long as you’re breathing,” the nurse said. When a clutch of nurses and a doctor went into a room and pulled the curtain across, Alf leaned over, pushed the green button and walked out. Before the door slid shut he grinned and gave me a wave. I lifted a pretend hat from my head in farewell. After a few minutes I went outside. Alf was getting into his taxi to freedom. I went back inside. Bryan was talking with a doctor. I grabbed some disposable gloves in case the doctor wanted to examine our man closely. At the van, I unzipped the body bag at the head. Glenn lay face up, one eyeball protruding from its smashed socket. Blood and brains were mashed into his hair. “Yeah, that poor chap’s dead,” the doctor said. He went inside with Bryan to complete the paperwork. Ten minutes later we were at the morgue at the back of the hospital. We left Glenn Briggs’s body on a stainless-steel slide-tray in a cooler. His soul—his spirit—was the other side of death’s mystery: at peace, astonished, or still in turmoil, no one knew. Maybe he’d escaped his troubles. Maybe they remained, transposed to a different realm. We got in our empty van and headed back, our job done. It was 1.15 a.m. I’d be in bed by 2, happily alone in my quiet flat. I thought of Alf. He was how I wanted to be in the decades ahead: dignified, mostly cheerful, treasuring his time and independence. I hoped he was home, asleep and at peace, not clutching his chest, wracked by pain. Bryan dozed as I drove. The silence—apart from the white noise of the van’s smooth motion—was welcome. I could relax, focus and think. I reviewed my situation: I was sixty years old and could access my self-managed superannuation. I was getting tired, and dreaming of cadavers. It was time to reclaim the days remaining to me. Bryan should be the first to know my decision. Together, over the last six years we’d done hundreds of these difficult removals. Back at base, I pulled into our parking bay. Bryan woke up, yawned and asked, “What’s the time?” “One-fifty.” Before we got out of the van, I said, “Mate, I’m going to speak with Baz and get a transition to retirement plan in place. Not do night-time work or cop jobs anymore.” Bryan nodded and said, “I totally understand.” Smiling, he reached over and wearily shook my shoulder. I walked to my yellow Hyundai, the only car left in the street for hundreds of metres. I’d parked it under a streetlight. The shiny car—I’d washed it yesterday afternoon—was now covered with dew, reflecting the streetlight’s white fluorescence in bright, almost mystical sparkles. Gary Furnell lives in rural New South Wales. The most recent of his stories for Quadrant was “Slapped by Viktor Frankl” in the December 2024 issue.

The post Escaping from Emergency first appeared on Quadrant.

The Right Sort of Immigrants

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 16:31:17 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he latest Resolve survey published in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald found 64% agreed immigration should be paused until the housing crisis was addressed and 54% want only migrants who speak English and are from countries with similar laws and customs. In the same way the 60/40 vote against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament represents a victory for what Scott Morrison after winning the 2019 federal election termed the "quiet Australians", the Resolve survey also represents a significant cultural change. While the inner-city, university-educated elites -- what Roger Scruton in his book Where We Are describes as those suffering from oikophobia -- embrace multiculturalism, an e1ver increasing number of Australians want to affirm a sense of community and national cohesion, stability and pride. As with the 2016 UK Brexit vote to leave the European Union, the success of centre-right parties in Italy, Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and President Trump’s re-election, make it clear that voter sentiment is changing. Whether opposing multiculturalism and unchecked immigration in favour of national identity and pride, rejecting neo-Marxist inspired gender and sexuality theories, especially transgenderism, or refusing to accept climate alarmism, citizens are saying ‘Enough!' The dramatic increase in the popularity of Pauline Hanson’s centre-right One Nation, now at 12% according to the Resolve survey (and as high as 18% in other polls), and the move by the Liberal/National Coalition to forsake Net Zero by 2050 are also evidence citizens are fed up with cultural-left ideology. Such is the momentum against political correctness that any who dare to question the prevailing centre-left orthodoxy face condemnation and abuse. Camille Paglia, given the extreme nature of such abuse, writes we are living in a time when “intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group”. Any who question immigration and multiculturalism are especially targeted. Given the rate and nature of the nation’s immigration program Liberal MP Andrew Hastie argued Australians are in danger of becoming “strangers in our own home”. Such a comment, critics suggested, hearkened back to Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Roger Scruton and Douglas Murray voice similar sentiments to Hastie when observing parts of the UK are now ethnic ghettos and, as a result, Britain is losing its long-held cultural identity. David Cameron, when prime minister, expressed fears about unchecked immigration and multiculturalism, arguing for a “muscular liberalism” that expects those seeking to settle in the UK to live by the nation’s values. “Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality," Cameron said, "this is what defines us as a society.” Hastie is not the first to suffer such acrimony. The eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey, after questioning the rate of Asian immigration, was forced to resign from his position at the University of Melbourne. When opposition leader, John Howard was also condemned for questioning the rate of Asian immigration. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n addition to the Resolve survey mentioned above, additional evidence that more and more Australians are anxious about unchecked immigration and its impact on national stability and cohesion can be seen in the March for Australia rallies of last August and October. Once again, instead of addressing the issue dispassionately, critics resort to abuse. Labor’s Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Dr Anne Aly, condemned the marches as an example of “far-right activism grounded in racism and ethnocentrism (that) has no place in Australia”. It was ironic Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke condemned those marching for seeking to “divide and undermine our social cohesion”. Anyone who has visited Melbourne’s Box Hill or Sydney’s Lakemba would appreciate that such suburbs no longer reflect the broader Australian community. There’s no doubt unchecked immigration and the fact so many immigrants flock to the nation’s already overcrowded cities is placing undue strain on housing and infrastructure. At the same time, it’s vital to acknowledge the impact of immigration on Australia’s sense of national cohesion and stability. Scruton argues the most pressing political issue of our time is the “question of identity: who are we, where are we, and what holds us together in a shared political order?” They are questions for Liberal leader Sussan Ley to ponder, then lead the debate and address the anxiety of the increasing number of voters fearful of unchecked immigration. There’s nothing xenophobic or racist about favouring national stability and cohesion while ensuring all who come to live here accept and honour the values and beliefs that make us such a unique country: a Western, liberal democracy in which our institutions and way of live have made Australia such a sought-after destination for so many. Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Melbourne-based cultural critic, commentator and author of Wake Up To Woke: It’s Time, Australia

The post The Right Sort of Immigrants first appeared on Quadrant.

Cancel Culture Bites Its Master

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 13:35:49 +1100

Oh, such poetic justice! The Left, which created cancel culture, now plays language games as it feels the sting of a growing backlash

The post Cancel Culture Bites Its Master first appeared on Quadrant.

Belling the Climate ‘Catastrophe’

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 08:59:29 +1100

Green Murder: A life sentence of net zero with no parole Ian Plimer Connor Court, 2022, 597pp (Second edition)

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap] quick forethought. I have always regarded the phrase “climate change” is a devilishly clever one. Unlike “global warming” it can never be proved wrong, for every conceivable meteorological event is consistent with climate change: floods, droughts, brutal cold snaps or searing heatwaves. To the book. Dr Ian Plimer is an Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne and is well-known for his powerful debunking of the climate change catastrophe thesis and its undergirding assertion that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. In this long book he sets out his main arguments in robust, polemical fashion. It is not meant to be a neutral, evenly-balanced presentation of the arguments pro and con. The key point he hammers home is that the climate change calamity has no real basis in science. First, “there is no climate emergency, climate crisis or climate catastrophe” (p 32). If we see increases in global temperatures, shrinking ice caps, rising sea levels, emaciated reefs, raging storms and cyclones, ‘record’ droughts, rampant bush fires and so on, there is no need to be alarmed. The planet is always changing and self-correcting, the climate is always dynamic (p 32). ”The past is a story of constant climate change and our present climate is the result of the past.” (p 93) Second, the principal driver of the supposed climate crisis is said to be anthropogenic global warming. The increased human-produced emissions of carbon dioxide are, insists Green Party activists, the culprit. However:

There is no scientific consensus on human emissions driving global warming. (p 25)

Human-induced global warming is not supported by measurable geological evidence. There are thousands of examples that show past events of global warming were not driven by carbon dioxide, that the planet has been far colder and warmer in past times and that the rates of temperature change have been far faster than any changes measured today . . . The idea that human emissions of carbon dioxide will lead to catastrophic global warming is therefore invalid and to continue to promote such an idea is ignorance, fraud or perhaps both. No wonder those who call themselves climate ‘scientists’ don’t want to debate geologists. (p 93).

The idea that there is a settled position or a consensus on climate change is strongly rejected by Plimer:

Science is anarchistic, has no consensus, bows to no authority and it does not matter what a scientific society, government or culture might decide. It is only reproducible validated evidence that is important . . . . Consensus is politics, not science. If there is a hypothesis that human emissions create global warming, then in science only one item of evidence is needed to show that this hypothesis is wrong. (pp 88-89)

The apparent ascendancy of the climate change agenda is due to myriad reasons, as Plimer explains. For me, three he covers stand out. First, there is the parlous state of peer reviewed papers. The fact of peer review --mockingly dubbed ‘pal’ review (p 85) by Plimer -- does not make the published article correct. Editors of journals know how to select referees predisposed or antagonistic to the article submitted for publication (p 90). Second, the raw data supporting the climate change literature is often deliberately rendered inaccessible. Worse still it may have been doctored to favour the ‘right’ conclusions being reached (p 462). Plimer calls this unethical ‘adjustment’ of the data ‘homogenisation’ (p 460). Third, there has been dumbing down of the recent generations that renders them more likely to be conned.

University entrants now cannot communicate using cursive writing, cannot express simple ideas in English and have no idea of grammar and spelling. They have not read great literature, can’t undertake simple mental calculations, have minimal scientific knowledge and have very little knowledge committed to memory. (p 60)

Secondary and tertiary education has become the playground for socialist and green ideologues to push their agenda. Pity about the students. (p 61)

Many universities accept students just because they have a pulse and the tertiary entrance scores for those who want to become teachers is appallingly low. (p 63)

The education system has failed generations of children and the teachers’ unions, weak governments and a politicised public service must shoulder most of the blame. (p 63)

What about the charge of “green murder”, as the book is provocatively entitled? For Plimer (left), he is not engaging in hyperbole. “I charge the greens with murder. They murder humans who are kept in eternal poverty without coal-fired electricity. They support slavery and early deaths of black child miners." (p 543). Greenpeace oppose every initiative to introduce genetically-modified rice (p 178) and Bangladeshi farmers risk their own health with spraying of insecticide dozens of times a season because an insect-resistant GM variety of egg plant was fiercely opposed by the greens (p 179). “The green movement has repeatedly denied people access to safer and cheaper technologies and forced them to rely on dirtier, riskier or more harmful technologies. This results in death.” (p 179) [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]P[/fusion_dropcap]limer is not the first to observe that the green movement bears all the marks of a surrogate religion, and not a particularly attractive one at that:

Climate change ideology is a new idealistic cultic fundamentalist religion that offers certainty, guilt, indulgences, redemption, and a green theological reason for living. It is replacing Christianity in Western civilization and is the ultimate reward for the dumbing down of the education system, Unlike Christianity, the new climate religion has no history, no art, no scholarship, no music and no philosophical grounding. (p 35)

Professor Plimer traverses a lot of ground and there are chapters on the long history of failed predictions of the end of the world (chapter 3), forest mismanagement and bush fires (chapter 4), droughts, floods, reefs and ocean acidity (chapter 5), the lamentable uneconomic renewable technologies of solar and wind (chapter 6) and electric vehicles (chapter 7). Each has plenty of facts and figures and inconvenient industry reports from around the world. On the science of climate change, Plimer makes many valuable points. I can but mention a few here. He points out that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a life-giving necessity for flourishing on earth (pp 27, 35). The figure of 3 percent that is attributed to human-induced carbon emissions, in contrast to the 97 percent from natural causes (ocean degassing, volcanoes, etc) is, he contends, too high. Around 1 percent would be more accurate (p 154). But even if we stay with 3 percent (and the 2021 IPCC Report elevated the figure to 5 percent) Plimer ask a probing question. Why is the human 3 percent the only driver of global warming and not the 97 percent from natural causes? (pp 18, 86). By way of response to Plimer, I foraged a little to find the IPCC’s 2013 Report, which stated, in heavily-qualified fashion, “it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20^th century”. There is more than enough scientific material (buttressed by over 1500 citations) in this book. But the case against climate change is as much the unmasking of its political and philosophical pretensions as it is about producing data, graphs and findings by way of refutation:

"Climate change is not about climate or the environment, it is about unelected green socialist activists gaining control over your every action such as the food we eat, house heating and cooling, the number of children we have, the type of car we drive, travel and education. It can only be achieved by the destruction of the past and those who have a contrary view." (p 26)

Green Murder is a little on the long side, often repetitious and some felicitous editing would have reduced it by about 20 per cent with no loss in quality. Subheadings in the chapters would have been nice and the absence of an Index is vexing. I put these quibbles aside, for Dr Plimer exercises such wit and vigour that he won me over. His turn of phrase is splendid and his invective brilliant. A sample:

Once the word ’unprecedented’ is used, you know you are being conned. (p 332)

There is certainty in the mob rule of consensus science and that keeps the gravy train moving. (p 97)

Hospitals for the mentally ill are full of people less delusional than those who advocate zero emissions. (p 225)

Climate activists assume that the planet was at equilibrium until we dreadful humans came along and gave ourselves a far better life by burning fossil fuels and emitting beastly carbon dioxide. A brief look at the past shows that this assumption is unrelated to the body of knowledge accumulated over centuries. (p 139)

Facts tend to pour cold water on hysteria. (p 454)

There are only three certainties in life: death, tax and failed apocalyptic predictions. (p 159)

When greens stand at the entrance of their cave after their fifth consecutive unsuccessful day of hunting and gathering in foul weather and give me the benefits of their ‘sustainable’ life, I might just listen to them. (p 55)

Even [Al] Gore’s hot air could not melt the Artic ice. (p 203)

The final chapter in Green Murder is called Certa bonum certamen: Fight the good fight. Ian Plimer continues to do so. His article in the latest Quadrant (December 2025), “Climate Lunacy and the Collapse of Scientific Integrity” continues his crusade. I salute him. Rex Ahdar is an Emeritus Professor of Law at the University of Otago

The post Belling the Climate ‘Catastrophe’ first appeared on Quadrant.

Time to Bury the Ned Kelly Myth

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:33:56 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]ustralian history has many sacred cows, none more so than Ned Kelly. Primary and secondary students write their essays to discuss whether Ned was “a hero or a villain”. Of course, the answer that comes back based on television, movies and books is that Ned was a hero defending his family and poor farmers from wicked policemen and evil squatters. This is the wrong question to ask; it distorts historical judgment and frames the bushranger in a clear-cut moral light, an either/or distinction which ultimately explains nothing. As a consequence, young people grow up with the larrikin-inspired idea that to take a gun and confront authority is cool. They see Ned’s exploits as dramatic, exciting and historically accurate. The media market for Ned Kelly is buoyant and receptive, particularly if Ned is seen as the wronged people’s hero. Try to interest the media in a story critical of Ned and listen to the silence you generate. But the Kelly myth is coming under pressure as never before. School curriculums have contributed to the distorted view of Ned through the use of one-sided sources which support the Kelly myth, presenting a fairytale image of the colonial past, skewing the students’ understanding of Ned and his Greta community. The truth never gets told, largely because history teachers don’t know it and they are not familiar with recent scholarship on the subject. As a retired teacher I understand the difficulties involved in stepping outside the confines of a set history curriculum. Nevertheless, presenting a positive and uncritical slant on a murderer and bank robber should not be the goal of classroom teaching. Students need to hear the other side of the argument put in a balanced way. Students visit websites, where for the most part what they have learned in the classroom is confirmed. Even the federal government’s australia.gov.au website, which is an official information forum and should be even-handed in its approach, confirms this biased view. The website entry on Ned is full of factual errors and discrepancies, giving its readers a wholly inaccurate description of Ned and depicting him as a poor man’s champion fighting for “poor Irish settlers”. These errors and discrepancies were pointed out in a press release sent to the Prime Minister’s and Education Minister’s offices in January, but there has been no reply and the website information remains unchanged. In the universities the situation is not much better. Courses touching on Ned and his pioneer community invariably view him through the same Kelly-myth prism. For example, no allowance is made for the different stages of settling the land. Victorian land act legislation, amended and improved over time, brought the squatters under control. The 1869 Land Act in particular turned the political tide and by the time of the Kelly outbreak, the land war was all but over, having been decided in the selectors’ favour. Skirmishes still took place, but not the outright war and squatter tyranny touted by the Kelly myth. Selecting land, rather than engendering a culture of poverty and despair, was a colonial celebration of the Irish, English, Scots and Welsh, who now had the opportunity to own land free of the whims and political agendas of unsympathetic landlords in the old country. The journey to land ownership was, in the optimistic eyes of those who undertook the challenge, well worthwhile. Those who failed on one selection generally took up land elsewhere, and with grit and determination, many eventually succeeded. The Kelly myth has Ned straddling a glaring divide between struggling selector marginalisation and the oppressive rule of the wealthy backed up by a compliant and corrupt police force. Ned’s defiant fight against injustice and repression is characterised as a racially based hatred of the English, fuelled by an Irish heritage of rebellion and agrarian defiance. The police are seen as an occupying paramilitary force, hated and reviled by Ned, his sympathisers and the selector population in general. Ned is acknowledged as a criminal, but a “police-made” criminal with a good heart and a social conscience. Add to this a strong feminist theme, with Ned’s sly-grog-selling mother Ellen, her female relatives and her dissolute shanty friends held up as role models, freedom-loving women who had thrown off the constraining shackles of male oppression and conventional morality. This fairytale view of women of the era ignores the conventional morality and decent way of living of respectable selector women, who saw themselves as the steadying influence and moral compass of family life. They were determined and hardy bush women, who contrary to feminist opinion were not subservient to overbearing husbands. Neither were they a caricature or community stereotype of “God’s police”. There was not a one-size-fits-all definition of rural women of the period, but most pioneer women lived lives quite different from the shanty rowdiness and debauchery of the Kelly women.

From our May 2017 issue. Click here to subscribe

Taken together, we have university courses teaching a black-and-white Kelly myth version of Ned’s lawless history, devoid of community understanding and complexity. Missing is a credible and evidence-based awareness of how people in the Greta community actually lived. This is no minor oversight, but a major conceptual flaw in the historical approach taken to Ned Kelly studies at the tertiary, secondary and primary school levels. The Australian public, with years of schooling and multimedia encounters with the whitewashed Ned Kelly story, are at a disadvantage in distinguishing truth from fiction. Ian Jones, long hailed as the nation’s foremost Ned Kelly expert, has through his best-selling books and his role as producer of a television mini-series and adviser on several Ned Kelly movies, been able to misrepresent and distort Kelly’s notorious life for more than forty years. Ned, a professional horse and cattle thief, twice a bank robber and three times a police murderer, is turned into a political revolutionary fighting for the poor and downtrodden. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]ccording to Jones, Ned had a Glenrowan plan to wreck a train, kill its passengers and proclaim a Republic of North-East Victoria. The evidence put forward for a Kelly republic is thin, and can be explained in a less melodramatic way than Jones’s tale of revolutionary insurrection. What Ned sought to achieve at Glenrowan was to create a diversion, so he and his gang could rob banks and replenish the gang’s exhausted coffers. Fear of betrayal from within the ranks of his own sympathisers, who he could no longer pay to protect him, was a principal motive behind Ned’s grisly plan of mass murder. If some policemen and the hated blacktrackers could be killed along the way, then it would give the police a “black eye” and provide an opportunity to plunder the banks. There was no planned Kelly republic, and if there had been one, most of the Greta and Glenrowan selectors would have been totally opposed to such a treasonable undertaking. With little knowledge of Ned’s Greta community beyond the obvious “facts” of the Kelly story, Jones portrays the community as on the verge of tearing itself apart, poverty stricken, full of despair and expressing an agrarian anger. Into this seething cauldron of selector discontent, Ned appears as a champion and saviour of honest selectors and shanty thieves alike, boldly taking on the police and the squatters in a fight to the death. However, few authors today, even those who admire Jones and accept him as the premier Ned Kelly expert, have adopted the “Kelly republic and selector insurrection” hypothesis. The most recent Kelly authors, Peter FitzSimons and Grantlee Kieza, who follow the Ian Jones line of Ned the Hero, continue to pull the wool over the eyes of those interested in the Ned Kelly story. FitzSimons, currently the leader of the Australian Republican Movement, holds to the independence maxim, “It’s a thousand like Ned Kelly, who’ll hoist the flag of stars”. FitzSimons has gone a step further than Jones’s “oppressive police” theme and in his 2013 book they become “the bastard police”. More than any other theme in his book, this slip reveals his Kelly bias. FitzSimons’s work is as much an imaginative novel as it is factual history, with make-believe dialogue and fabricated motivations. FitzSimons is a Nedophile; the “facts” he presents are cherry-picked, one-sided and, of course, favour Ned. He simply ignores anything that does not support his view of the bushranger. The book reads like a badly written movie script. Ian Jones advised FitzSimons against reading anti-Kelly books, one in particular which he referred to as “a poisonous book”. FitzSimons followed the grand old man’s advice, and his book is the poorer for it. Grantlee Kieza’s 2017 book on Ned’s mother Ellen presents a similarly flawed argument, softening the story of Ned and Ellen using tear-jerking sentimentality as his principal tool (Read Doug Morrissey's Quadrant review here). He portrays Ellen as a feminist heroine, an impoverished selector woman, the mother of many children cruelly victimised by the police and persecuted by nearly everybody else. Like Jones and FitzSimons, Kieza has little understanding of the Greta community. He equates the rowdy debauchery and constant thieving going on at the Kelly shanty with the lifestyle of all of Greta’s residents. Ned and Ellen’s wild “Irishness” and shanty excesses he extols as positive virtues in a frontier society dominated by English cruelty and memories of a brutal convict past. Kieza buys into Ned’s vitriolic hatred of the English and it becomes, along with the Eureka rebellion and the centuries-old predicament of the Irish, a recurring theme in a lengthy tale of Kelly family torment and tragedy. Kieza’s work crosses over from melodrama to caricature. He tries to disguise his favouritism for the Kellys and their cause by presenting a sympathetic account of Sergeant Michael Kennedy and his family. Ned murdered Kennedy at Stringybark Creek by placing a shotgun against the pleading policeman’s chest and pulling the trigger. Ned then stole Kennedy’s gold watch and draped Kennedy’s cloak over his body. Kieza’s is a Clayton’s attempt at historical balance and scholarly consideration for the police point of view. On every other occasion, as with his fellow journalist FitzSimons, the tone of Kieza’s words and his pro-Kelly attitude discredit “the bastard police” and give a sympathetic justification for Kelly’s criminal actions. What then is the alternative view to that of Ned and his shanty family as persecuted victims of police harassment, trapped in the miserable life of a poor selector? The Kellys were professional horse and cattle thieves, career criminals by choice, not circumstance. For more than a decade, Ned’s relatives, the Quinns, were at the centre of an intercolonial horse and cattle stealing network, taken over and improved by Ned and his stepfather George King in the mid-1870s. The police watched the thieves closely, not to harass or persecute them, but because they were committing crimes and everybody knew it. The criminals were difficult to catch and more often than not were able to outwit the police, moving mobs of stolen animals across the border into New South Wales. They were able to do so with seeming impunity, due to poor police communication and an extensive network of relatives, old lags and receivers offering safe haven to thieves on both sides of the border. A modern-day analogy would be Melbourne’s gangs of African teenagers stealing luxury cars, invading homes and shops, assaulting people and doing pretty much what they like, and disposing of stolen cars and other stolen goods through a system of “chop shops” and a network of more experienced criminals. The Kellys, Quinns and Lloyds started from an even playing field in Australia. Ned’s father “Red” Kelly had a choice to begin his life anew once he was released from convict chains. The temptation to steal his neighbours’ property, booze to excess and fight in pubs and shanties, while avoiding the police and lying to the courts, proved too great. It was not the fledgling colony of Victoria and the golden opportunities it offered all men that was to blame; but something in the Kelly clan itself, a liking for the criminal “flash” and easy money which brought on the “troubles”. Tens of thousands of honest immigrants and ex-convicts made a successful go of colonial life, without resorting to crime. To think otherwise is to fall under the spell of another Aussie myth—the myth that bushrangers, swagmen and other ne’er-do-wells are the true Australians. The Kellys and their relatives were fringe dwellers, hardened criminals preying on the property of rich and poor and occasionally stealing from each other. They were not representative of the selector way of life, nor were they admired for their lawlessness outside their own shanty circle. Most of Greta’s residents were hard-working, law-abiding men and women, who shunned the flash bush larrikins and prison lags surrounding the Kellys. The difference was pronounced, with Ned and his wild friends calling themselves “Snobs” and their decent-living victims “Mugs”. A distinct lifestyle difference existed between Greta’s respectable inhabitants and the plundering criminal fraternity. Ned complains bitterly about Constable Ernest Flood, the father of his sister Annie’s illegitimate child. Annie died soon after the child was born. The Kelly family did not object to the shanty romance, and the relationship was consensual, not seduction as the Kelly literature is fond of repeating. The Kellys made no complaint to Flood’s superiors. Despite having numerous opportunities to do so, Ned never confronted Flood over his sister’s death or his allegation in the Jerilderie Letter (1879) that Flood stole a mob of his horses while Ned was in jail. The allegation was untrue, as was Ned’s attempt to portray Flood as a horse thief like himself. Ned’s relationship with the police was complicated. It often started out as friendship with individual policemen, then fell apart when Ned did not get his way. Ned was adept at bearing a grudge and making excuses. The police, he bragged, could not catch him. If he was arrested, then it was persecution and harassment. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he police were not the corrupt villains and aggressive bullies they are always made out to be. Most were respected community policemen who did their duty without fear or favour. Naturally, the criminals they pursued had a different view coloured by their lawbreaking and in Ned’s case by his shanty intimacy with the larrikin Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick and Ned were drinking buddies. The Kelly family did not object when Fitzpatrick courted young Kate Kelly, and the relationship only turned sour when Fitzpatrick’s attempt to arrest Dan Kelly for horse stealing went awry. Ned and Fitzpatrick agree: there was no sexual molesting of Kate and it was Ned who shot Fitzpatrick through the wrist during the shanty assault. It was the Kellys who assaulted Fitzpatrick, knocking him unconscious and wounding him. The Kelly brothers could have stayed and defended themselves against the horse stealing warrants and the more serious charge of assaulting and wounding Constable Fitzpatrick. Instead they ran away to a hideout in the Wombat Ranges near Mansfield. In October 1878 at Stringybark Creek, along with Joe Byrne and Steve Hart, they ambushed four policemen sent into the bush to arrest them. Three policemen died, surprised and gunned down with little warning. Constables Thomas Lonigan and Michael Scanlan died without a weapon in their hands. Kelly and his gang chased Sergeant Michael Kennedy through the bush for a quarter of mile. Ned brought him down and interrogated the wounded man for two hours before killing him in the darkness simply because it was time to flee the scene. Ned claimed self-defence for murdering the three policemen, when what occurred was cold-blooded murder. The Kelly Gang from the outset had the tactical advantage, with their rifles pointed directly at the policemen, and they fired without hesitation. Ned cannot be excused these murders; he and his mates could simply have ridden away. Ned wanted a fight and he recklessly brought it to the police camp at Stringybark Creek. Neither can Ned Kelly be excused for the chaos and mass murder he and his gang planned to bring to Glenrowan in June 1880. With the railway tracks torn up, the outlaws waited for more than a day, with a pub full of hostages, for a police train to crash down a steep embankment outside Glenrowan. The gang, dressed in their homemade armour, would shoot any survivors and then set off to rob more banks. A callous plan, which if it had succeeded would be remembered today as one of Australia’s most shocking crimes. The police arrived late and in desperation, Ned sought a “death by cop” suicide. Instead he was captured and pleaded for his life to be spared. Unlike Sergeant Kennedy, Ned’s life was spared. Five months later, in November 1880, the bushranger faced the hangman’s rope unrepentant for the murders of Constables Lonigan and Scanlan and Sergeant Kennedy. The Greta community was a typical pioneer community with one major difference; it had more than its share of crooks. Ignored in the Kelly myth histories is the Greta community’s strong adherence to traditional values, religion, morality and respect for law and order. Greta had the largest concentration of Primitive Methodists in Victoria’s north-east. Around half of all selectors attended the Primitive Methodist church. These were highly principled, religious people who did not swear, drink, gamble or dance. They attended religious services several times a week and after ploughing the fields all day, some travelled to neighbouring communities as lay preachers. One such young preacher was reprimanded by church elders and publicly made to repent for “jumping fences and shouting at Glenrowan”, while travelling to a preaching engagement. These are hardly the sort of people who would engage in livestock theft, or rush to support a gang leader whose crimes led to bushranging and murder. Nor would they have joined Ned in establishing a Kelly republic based on mass murder, or acted in concert with the thieves, larrikins and local bullies who stole their property and terrorised their neighbourhood. The Greta and Moyhu Catholics were less wowserish in observing their religious duties, but cannot be labelled as Kelly sympathisers simply because they were Irish, Catholic, took a drink and gambled on horse races. Ned complained bitterly about Whitty and Byrne in the Jerilderie Letter. Both men were Irish Catholic to the bone, leading lights in the Moyhu and Wangaratta Catholic communities and active promoters of Home Rule for Ireland. They were practical Irishmen and loyal supporters of the British Empire, who believed in a constitutional solution to Ireland’s political and social woes. In this, they were in accord with the view of most colonial Irishmen, who did not become breakaway republicans until after the 1916 Easter Rising. Whitty and Byrne played a leadership role in collecting funds for the Irish National Land League and for a variety of other Irish charitable causes. Ned and his family did nothing for the cause of Irish freedom, other than drink beer and complain. Kelly despised the British Empire, and advocated violence to end English rule in Ireland and the colonies. Sadly, with ideological hindsight applied, this has made him a republican hero in Ireland and Australia, when he was no more than a xenophobic, violent criminal. Ned was not a Fenian, although he often spoke like one. Crime, bush larrikinism and boozy shanty rowdiness, not politics Irish or colonial, was where his true commitment lay. Many Irish Catholics in the Greta community shared Whitty and Byrne’s pragmatic views on Irish and colonial affairs and they supported the pair in their endeavours. Ned and his unruly relatives, on the other hand, rarely if ever attended mass, never participated in community activities except in their personal interests, and never in a leadership or committee role. They made fun of those who did. Irishness and Catholicism were not important indicators of Kelly Gang support, either in the gang’s horse and cattle stealing network or the broader Greta community. The same could be said of Protestants, like Ned’s larrikin mates Wild Wright and Aaron Sherritt. What mattered was participation in crime, affinity with a shanty lifestyle, involvement in larrikinism and having prison credentials. Despite the Kelly myth hinting that Irish republicanism was at the core of Ned’s Glenrowan plan, most of Greta’s Irish Catholics and Protestants kept their distance from the Kellys before, during and after the gang’s demise. When a petition was brought around by Kelly sympathisers, ask

Sir Paul Hasluck and the Liberal Leadership

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:26:31 +1100

This article is based on remarks Tony Abbott made to launch Anne Henderson’s monograph Paul Hasluck.

* * *

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hen contemporary political leadership suffers from a triple deficit of character, conviction, and courage, Sir Paul Hasluck is worth remembering. Not just as a model governor-general, a senior minister who ran his bureaucrats rather than the other way round, and one of the very finest Liberal MPs never to have become Australian prime minister, but as a man of exemplary character even in an era more marked by leaders of distinction than our own. What’s generally regarded as his greatest failure, his loss of the 1968 leadership contest to John Gorton, might better be considered a triumph of character. Unlike his rival, he refused to lobby his colleagues for votes, believing they should choose their leader based on what they knew of the candidates rather than any blandishments that might be offered to them. Leadership ballots should not turn on flattery or the promises of promotion made to MPs; just as elections should not be won by the candidate offering voters the biggest bribe. For instance, had there been more than twelve hours or so between announcing my candidature and the actual ballot, I doubt I’d have become Liberal Party leader in December 2009, as it’s hard to respect colleagues who don’t know their own minds; or worse, who expect a job in return for their vote. Six years on, when I was myself challenged, I made the mistake of suggesting that Scott Morrison might replace Julie Bishop as deputy leader, only subsequently to be accused of throwing Joe Hockey under the bus—even though there’s no rule that the deputy leader has to be treasurer. In my judgment, it’s to Hasluck’s credit that he didn’t campaign for the leadership, even though his would have been a calmer and more measured prime ministership than Gorton’s. In the most successful leadership transitions, such as Billy Snedden to Malcolm Fraser, or Alexander Downer to John Howard, the superior claim of the successor has been pretty much beyond dispute. To Hasluck, character was all-important and revealed itself in small things as much as in great ones. If it were necessary to “stoop to conquer”, the victory would be tainted and the outcome compromised from the beginning. The strength of character that restrained a lunge at the leadership was the key to success in every other aspect of his public life, as this new biographical essay by Anne Henderson makes clear. This slim but immensely readable and sharply drawn life of Sir Paul Hasluck follows earlier works, including biographies of Dame Enid and Joe Lyons (perhaps our most under-rated prime minister), and her recent magisterial study of the great political and legal rivalry between Sir Robert Menzies and Dr H.V. Evatt. Hasluck could be austere, aloof, even difficult. Years later, he justified his disdain for counting numbers among his colleagues on the basis that “I didn’t like them” and “they didn’t like me”. Perhaps it was his neglect of buttering up colleagues that gave him more time to be an effective minister. As Sir Robert Menzies wrote privately, at the time of the 1968 leadership contest, Hasluck was “possessed of the best brain of the whole lot”. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]s the child of Salvation Army parents, Hasluck grew up with a strong sense of faith and duty and invariably impressed those with whom he came into contact professionally. One of those was John Curtin, the future Labor prime minister, who recommended Hasluck for the then-fledgling Australian diplomatic service. As an aide to the mercurial Doc Evatt, Hasluck had an uneasy relationship with his boss, whom he regarded as an “effective player in world affairs but also as a chaotic manager weakened by an overly suspicious mind”. On leaving diplomacy, Hasluck briefly became a reader in history at the University of Western Australia before accepting the Liberal Party’s invitation to run for what was regarded as a likely Labor seat, on the basis, he said, of his belief in parliamentary democracy as “a way in which one can best serve … to maintain … the Australian way of life”. Earlier, starting his working life as a journalist, Hasluck had made indigenous affairs his specialty. His parents had run hostels, including for indigenous children, and his second name, Meernaa, was an Aboriginal word for “joyful spring of fresh water”. In parliament, one of his early contributions was a motion exhorting the Commonwealth and the states to work together “in measures for the social advancement as well as the protection of people of the Aboriginal race”. Within hardly a year of entering parliament, Hasluck became Minister for Territories, responsible, among much else, for the wellbeing of the indigenous people of the Northern Territory. Early on, he had come to the conclusion that assimilation was the best outcome, not because he wanted to see the disappearance of distinct peoples but because he thought their traditional way of life was in irreversible decline. In one of his early ministerial speeches to parliament, Hasluck declared that the choice for Aboriginal people was assimilation or segregation; to which he added, prophetically, “the objection … is that if … [segregation] succeeds we shall build up in Australia an ever-increasing body of people who belong to a separate caste and who live in Australia but are not members of the Australian community …” As minister, Hasluck accepted that mineral developments on Aboriginal land should benefit Aboriginal people, leading Kim Beazley senior to observe that “Hasluck was that rare politician who can genuinely be called a statesman”. Another Labor opponent, Gordon Bryant, said that “in spite of his conservatism”, Hasluck “had done probably one of the best jobs for Aboriginal people [of] anyone in Australia”. In later life, Hasluck maintained his scepticism towards anything that smacked of separatism while appreciating how Aboriginal people had gained “an expectation of better times ahead”. As territories minister, Hasluck was also responsible for pre-independence Papua New Guinea. By extending the administration’s remit over the whole territory through the work of the highly competent (and still fondly regarded) “kiaps” (patrol officers), Hasluck gave “freedom to half a million people who had not known it before”. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hatever bad blood the failed leadership bid engendered, it didn’t stop Hasluck from working effectively as governor-general with both Gorton and, subsequently, with Billy McMahon, a Gorton backer. Likewise, the infamous parliamentary incident, where Gough Whitlam threw a glass of water over Hasluck, and may have called him something rhyming with “runt”, didn’t stop a warm and respectful relationship with Labor’s first prime minister in twenty-three years. “It was my own happy experience,” he wrote, “to have enjoyed a relationship of trust and confidence” with each of them. Would he have handled the events leading up to the Whitlam dismissal differently? Perhaps there’s a clue in his subsequent work, The Office of the Governor-General, where he describes the vice-regal role as ensuring “that those who conduct the affairs of the nation do so strictly in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth … with due regard to the public interest”. In extreme situations, he said, the governor-general could “check” elected representatives by “forcing a crisis”. Anne Henderson has beautifully brought to life this now regrettably neglected figure. When he became only the second serving politician to be appointed governor-general, one commentator observed: “He has shown such monarchical indifference to the skirmishing and jockeying of politics that it seems almost insulting to call him a politician at all.” Henderson quotes Hasluck on Menzies: “the sort of tribute he would have appreciated most would not have been praise of his great talents but rather a statement that he was a man of character, honourable in conduct and decent in behaviour”, before concluding that this sums up Hasluck himself. Our country was blessed to have such a servant and is blessed again to have this fragrant reminder of his life.

The post Sir Paul Hasluck and the Liberal Leadership first appeared on Quadrant.

With Trump, it’s not Just Whims and Fancies

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:57:14 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]s the current President of the United States just making up policy according to his own idiosyncratic whims and fancies? This seems to be the common view of among Australia’s most esteemed political commentators. “Trump doesn’t govern by any consistent philosophy or ideology” says foreign editor of The Australian, Greg Sheridan. “Trump has a dominant political personality, rather than an ideology” agrees Paul Kelly, the same newspaper's editor-at-large. Phil Coorey, political editor of The Australian Financial Review has said similar: “Trump doesn't govern from a political philosophy—he improvises from the gut”. With respect, this is simply not right. Just as Reaganism was not solely created by The Gipper, there is clearly a coherent political ideology behind “Trumpism”. The movement guiding policy in the White House has been variously described as “national conservatism” or “post-liberalism”. While there are various strands to this “new right” and some disagreement on elements, what unites them all is a criticism of the political liberalism which has dominated Western democracies, Australia amongst them, in recent times. This is not just a Trump or even American phenomenon. JD Vance openly describes himself as “post liberal”. The largest centre-right think tank in Washington DC, the Heritage Foundation, talks about being now “national conservative”. Vance’s friend, James Orr is head of the national conservatives in Europe and is now Nigel Farage’s senior advisor in Reform UK. Plenty of leaders in Europe like Giorgia Meloni or Viktor Orbán are on board with this new approach and have spoken at NatCon conferences. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he attack on liberalism has induced much pearl-clutching, but it should not actually be considered particularly radical. It is, in fact, what traditional conservative leaders have always more or less believed. “The tone and tendency of liberalism,” Benjamin Disraeli, the great Prime Minister of the British Conservative Party argued, “is to attack the institutions of the country in the name of reform and to make war on the manner and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” He would fit in easily with so-called “post-liberal” right today. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]ll of this has caused much confusion in Australia. Howard-era legacy types like to use the name “conservative”, but when they do, they are almost invariably describing the ideology of Dizzy’s great rival, William Gladstone. The “Grand Old Man” of the British Liberal Party believed in things like free trade, a moral crusading foreign policy, and a conviction that nations are held together by “liberal values”. Many self-identifying “conservatives” in Australia not only get their terminology very muddled, but they also misunderstand the very party of which many are a part. Robert Menzies undoubtedly admired Gladstone (as do I in many ways), but when you look at the policies he supported, they were often the direct opposite of what 19th century “classical liberals” believed. On trade, immigration, worker protection, foreign policy, and more he generally favoured a much more nationalist/conservative/Disraelian approach. It is true the party Menzies founded – unique among modern centre-right parties in the Anglosphere -- uses the word “liberal” in its name. But he really looked to the “enlightened nationalism” of Federation leaders such as Alfred Deakin as his model rather than the old British Liberal Party. However, the generation who took over after Menzies started to govern in very different “liberal” way. Around the world, a similar transformation occurred to many parties of the political right at the same time. The change in this outlook and the consequences which followed were profound. Traditional conservatives recognized that nations grew out of and were made for a particular people: that Hungary, for example, was created by, for and of Hungarians. The main goal of public policy, in their view, was to ensure the traditions, language, beliefs, and their people continued in future generations and that their conditions were improved. Political liberals, by contrast, tended to see nations as primarily as ideological constructs. Thus, anyone from Tehran to Timbuktu could become part of these new liberal nations -- not through a slow, carefully managed, and gradual process, but by simply residing in the geography for a couple of years and taking a pledge or passing a vague “values” test. An unprecedented ethnic transformation of nations across the West resulted. This flawed thinking is the root cause of western Europe’s “civilization erasure”, which the Trump administration referred to in its recently issued national security strategy. Similarly, conservatives historically recognized that, when it comes to international commerce, the world we live in is a harsh and uncertain place, one in which nations compete against one another and that trade policy needed to reflect this. Liberals instead embraced a utopian belief that any tariffs or similar restrictions were illegitimate, and a country should aim to have open-borders trade with every nation on earth. This ideology has caused Australia and much of the West to become largely deindustrialised and our manufacturing base outsourced to Third World and often hostile regimes. Conservatives recognized that foreign policy should not be, in the words of Disraeli, “conducted on the principles of a sermon”, that one must be extremely prudent about the wars your country is engaged in. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]iberals, since the days of Gladstone and continuing to the “forever wars” of George W Bush, have always tended to want to fight for abstract ideas in far of places regardless of whether the vital interest of their own nation were really at stake. Often very emotive and idealistic rhetoric was used to justify these interventions. But they more often then not end up in a loss of blood, treasure, and prestige while spawning negative unintended consequences. Liberalism is not the same thing as freedom. Many conservatives are strong defenders of the latter. Liberalism, by contrast, is a belief system which tends to destroy institutions, traditions, religions, the family unit, nations, and even ultimately definitions of words like “man” and “women”, because it views individual liberty as the sole metric against which public policy should be judged. I accept Trump’s style is obviously not to everyone’s taste. He can be erratic at times and he's no angel. He doesn't quote Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott at his rallies, but the movement he represents is identifiably conservative. The Australian centre-right which currently is in the doldrums would do well to push past the individual himself and focus on the ideas behind him as that way lies renewal and future electoral success. Dan Ryan is the Executive Director of The National Conservative Institute of Australia

The post With Trump, it’s not Just Whims and Fancies first appeared on Quadrant.

Threats Without and Within

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:27:47 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]e live in troubled times. 'The scariest period since the Second World War' is heard consistently and repeatedly today. This refrain references the unstable geopolitical situation. Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, the slaughter of 1,200 Jews by Hamas savages, and the bloody war in Gaza that followed. In Australia’s part of the world, the People’s Republic of China poses a growing military threat because its actions reveal a determination to create vassal states in the South Pacific. Its militarisation of the South China Sea and constant threats to invade and reclaim Taiwan is an ever-present reality. But the refrain could as well be a reference to the enemy within the countries that have conveniently been classified as the ‘West’. This enemy seeks to ban free speech if it is incompatible with government-determined policies or programs. At the Munich Security Conference on February 14, 2025, American Vice-President J. D. Vance discussed the risks linked to this kind of approach. He said that “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle, or you don’t”. And yet, in our experience, commentators, including conservative leaning columnists, are fearful of the consequences if they speak freely and candidly about societal concerns and are critical of embedded socialist agendas. Vance’s exhortation that free speech is the basic building block of Western civilisation is the theme of our latest book, The Battle for the Soul of Western Civilisation (Connor Court Publishing, 2026). The main point of the book is that without free speech, Western civilisation would vanish and be replaced by excessive bureaucracy, unpredictability, and eventually authoritarian rule. Our book thus seeks to testify to the existential importance of the battle for the soul of Western civilisation. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he book is divided into five parts. The first deals with the ‘march through the institutions’, which is a project to impose socialism, materialism, and secularism on the Western world. It is argued that the socialist mindset has infected Australia and has already resulted in disastrous consequences for the West: a dying Western Europe that is in the final stages of a convulsive transformation to socialism and secularism. The disentanglement of God and the common law is a noticeable example of this transformation. The second part discusses the core arguments of this book, namely that the spectacular and relentless war on free speech aims at creating a docile, sheep-like population that has forfeited its right to say anything deemed to be incompatible with the ideological views of the government or the hard-core leftist elites. Special emphasis is placed on the never-ending introduction of so-called ‘hate speech laws’ and the demonisation of people who do not toe the official line and are branded ‘racists’. Part three concerns the biologically unfriendly politics of gender and the harmful consequences of a policy that allows people to transition to another sex, even without prior surgical procedures. Littered across the media are increasing concerns amongst medical professionals about the harm caused by so-called 'affirmation therapy'. The heartbreaking stories of those affected by these procedures, especially children who suffer from dysphoria, remind people of the continuing validity of biological facts, which defy the view that gender is a social construct. One may even speculate whether the transsexual agenda discussed in this book is directly related to the goal of further reducing the world population, especially in the West, considering that only heterosexual couples can effectively guarantee the survival of our civilisation and humanity at large. And yet starting this kind of conversation is getting increasingly more difficult due primarily to the ongoing suppression of freedom of speech. Part four seeks to identify some areas of conflict, such as the inability or unwillingness of human rights organisations to protect human rights, and the obsessive pursuit of Net Zero emissions, fuelled by the irrational belief that the world is doomed because of ‘climate change’. This part of the book, in dealing with social conflict, seeks to draw conclusions from the assault on free speech and asks the question in what circumstances it is lawful to disobey the law. The fifth and final part considers the evisceration of Western civilisation. It also offers hope: a way forward to a better future. When we cut the links that connect the values and traditions of our Western civilisation with the past, these values lose their foundations. Since these values and traditions came to us trailing their past, once they have been deliberately abandoned, people may not be able to preserve their inalienable rights. The testimony of history, bolstered by current events, are powerful indications of the validity of this proposition. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]E[/fusion_dropcap]ven with everything discussed in this book, we remain convinced that now is not a moment for discouragement. Although conflict often feels unavoidable, we should remain optimistic, as the possibility of a brighter future still exists. There is no time to waste, as much of what we once held for granted in our Western societies has now been taken away. For our sake, and for the sake of our future generations, it is time to fight boldly and courageously against the forces of darkness and tyranny that seek to destroy our societies and enslave all of us. This book aims to motivate and engage readers, urging them to actively participate in protecting the essential values of Western civilisation. Some pessimists have already conceded defeat, but such a concession is a premature and immature response to the dangers that besiege Western civilisation. To conclude, The Battle for the Soul of Western Civilisation offers its readers much-needed information about these dangers. It is also a guidebook for action because it emboldens our readers to participate in the battle of ideas. There is still hope! Augusto Zimmermann is foundation dean and professor of law at Alphacrucis University College. He served as associate dean at Murdoch University. He is also a former commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. Gabriël A. Moens AM is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland and served as pro vice-chancellor and dean at Murdoch University. The Battle for the Soul of Western Civilisation can be ordered here

The post Threats Without and Within first appeared on Quadrant.

Les Murray and the Purpose of Poetry

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:41:56 +1100

Each soon to be lost to us, in 2015 Clive James hailed Les Murray, the man ‘who fills the sky not just in his homeland but in all the world’

The post Les Murray and the Purpose of Poetry first appeared on Quadrant.

Climate Lunacy and the Collapse of Scientific Integrity

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:14:11 +1100

The utter tosh pumped out by climate activists and wind scammers would have you believe all who disagree must in the pay of Big Oil

The post Climate Lunacy and the Collapse of Scientific Integrity first appeared on Quadrant.

The Misinformation Industrial Complex

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:45:41 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]t is my contention that some of the grossest examples of misinformation start with government-related institutions. While it may be fruitful for politicians to point the misinformation finger of accusation at social media, bots or malevolent offshore actors, or new technologies (e.g., AI), much misinformation is closer to home. Many examples of misinformation are to be expected, given the complexity of both the science around climate, and the engineering around provision of energy for reliable electricity. However, much of this misinformation can be avoided, which is why my feedback to the Committee will focus on two examples of misinformation involving the government-funded institutions. I humbly ask the Committee to ask why do people go to sources like social media or blogs? Is it mainly because Australia’s education levels have drifted so low that many of our fellow citizens cannot critically read a scientific report or absorb a nuanced discussion? Australian schools’ PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores in 2018 in reading, mathematics and science were a year lower in standard than the relevant scores in 2003. Or is it perhaps that punters distrust traditionally reliable sources such as the ABC or CSIRO? First, what is misinformation in the broadest sense? Misinformation abounds because of

ignorance, often due to not knowing what one does not know, but also due to wilful ignorance. It is often safer to have a coherent position than to question.

These may be offered by well-meaning actors who think that they know best. These actors believe often subconsciously that their noble ends justify the means. They often suffer from groupthink.

unbalanced presentation of discourse. This comes with deplatforming of groups that may express logical and scientifically underpinned opinions but nonetheless opinions that differ from the wisdom of those who believe that they know. One does not have to be malevolent to spread disinformation. Misinformation is promulgated by both –

well-meaning individuals, organisations, newspapers, bots, and

less well-meaning individuals, organisations, newspapers, bots, which have their own agendas to deliberately spread misinformation, i.e., frank disinformation.

Example 1. CLIMATE There have been many reports to this effect aired by the ABC with respect to Tuvalu. Leave aside the facts that sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age and that most of the rise took place around 8000 to 15000 years ago, or that coral islands require the sea to grow their coral base. The ABC concealed information that the Tuvalu land area increased in size, for one reason or another. This increase in area occurred in the period 1971-2015. That it was hidden by the ABC was not only an example of ignorance. The ABC fact-checked this scientific study and found the reference above to be correct. Why didn’t they properly publicise this ‘fact-check’? Was it because of the ‘noble’ idealism of many in this organisation, who are desperately alarmed about climate change? Or were the ABC misinformers more concerned with supporting an anticolonial political agenda in the Pacific Islands; or other reasons? The precise reasons do not really matter. What matters is that the misinformation leads to dumbing down of Australia’s citizens. It leads to distrust of what should be an independent and serious government-funded media outlet. This is not an isolated example; there are many more. They include so-called “fact checks” on climate change’s impact on coral reefs, and the increasing prevalence and cost of extreme weather, nearly all without reference to the ever-increasing volume of the human footprint Example 2. ENERGY. Energy policy underpins every aspect of our economy and our ability to have ‘Made in Australia’. Energy is, I believe, the biggest policy issue facing our government because it impacts significantly on all of the economy, the environment, our nation’s defence capability, and household budgets. Because of climate change, there is a consensus that the World generally, and Australia more particularly, should avoid where possible burning fossil fuels to generate electricity. There are broadly two camps for achieving the aim to kick the carbon fuel habit in Australia. One is to generate electrical power from wind and solar renewables backed up by some hydroelectricity and clever networking of the grid together with battery storage, and for the interim, gas dispatchable power backup. This is the plan of current Australian governments. The other plan is to have an ~50% mix of dispatchable baseload nuclear power coupled with renewables, some hydro, and fossil fuel electricity generation while the nuclear baseload is created. This was the policy taken to the last election by the Coalition. The arguments for and against each approach centred around economics, network reliability, and environmental impacts. The ABC prosecuted the discussion in a one-sided fashion. Focusing on the economics, it never required a full costing of the renewable system. Nor did it ever properly air the Coalition’s full-system costing. Any attempt at elaboration of the Coalition plan was interrupted by ABC hosts. The name of Sarah Ferguson comes prominently to mind. The one-sidedness amounted to absence of information on the one side and the persistent lie/misinformation from the other side that the Coalition costing was $600 billion. Any attempt at rebuttal of the lie was censored. The ‘government’ costing that the ABC trumpeted was not a government costing. It was a costing from a fiercely partisan renewables lobby group, the Smart Energy Council. And the government-funded CSIRO was never required to release a full system costing of the renewable-only plan. These are but two examples. I trust that it is not too difficult for the Committee to extrapolate how they relate to the terms of reference:

(a) the prevalence of, motivations behind and impacts of misinformation and disinformation related to climate change and energy;

(b) how misinformation and disinformation related to climate change and energy is financed, produced and disseminated, including, but not limited to, understanding its impact on:

(i) Australian politics, (ii) domestic and international media narratives, and (iii) Australian public policy debate and outcomes.

Michael Shellenberger popularised the concept of the Censorship Industrial Complex. He gave testimony about this (video below) to the US House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on March 23, 2023. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1PsozzDvjQ[/embed] [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]ustralians need to be aware that this problem is not peculiarly a problem for the US. It is a problem, which potentially affects all governments that are concerned with staying in power. Misinformation stems also from agenda-driven one-sidedness in our government schools. The ‘progressive’ but often fact-light curricula set the template for the education of our children. This template does not include respectful discussion of other scientifically-based world views. Hence my ending with reference to this Committee's last ‘term of reference’.

(g) the role that could be played by media literacy education, including in the school curriculum, in combating misinformation and disinformation.

Educational institutions and, more generally, government institutions, which we the taxpayers pay for, should be encouraging respectful and open discussion about the key issues that affect all of us. Schools should be the tone-setters for respectful and open discussion by educated or informed or logically-thinking people with carefully referenced attributions for any points of agreement or difference. This is the only way I know of to combat misinformation. Point-scoring in lieu of respectful and open discussion is definitely not a solution. Indeed, it is usually embarrassing and shameful. Respectful discussion about the complex matters of climate change and energy has been missing in action for a long time. The result is frequent misinformation. The consequences are seriously harmful, which is why I wish all power and honesty to the Committee in its deliberations. The above is a submission by Timothy Florin, Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the University of Queensland, to the Senate Select Committee on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy

The post The Misinformation Industrial Complex first appeared on Quadrant.

The Jihadis Next Door

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:33:16 +1100

The time has come when all the Muslims of the world, especially the youth, should unite and soar against the kuffar and continue jihad till these forces are crushed to naught, all the anti-Islamic forces are wiped off the face of this earth and Islam takes over the whole world and all the other false religions. — Osama bin Laden, December 9, 2001

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]ast August, after Tony Abbott appealed to a cross-section of Australian Muslims to meet him to discuss a range of counter-terrorism proposals — mainly changes to passport and welfare regulations that would inhibit Australians from joining Middle Eastern jihadi — a number declined the invitation, including the Islamic Council of Victoria, representing 150,000 Muslims. Instead, a petition was sent to the media from Muslim organisations and individuals deriding the Prime Minister’s overture and his patriotic appeal to join “Team Australia” in this conflict. The petitioners argued that, rather than being on their side, Australia was part of their problem: “We are not fooled by those who speak against violence and terrorism but are its proponents at an institutional level through military and foreign policies.”

From our October 2014 issue. Click here to subscribe

The petition’s signatories included Muslim community, welfare and legal organisations but the biggest single grouping was that of university student associations, which comprised eleven of the fifty-one names on the list. They included the University of Sydney Muslim Students Association, University of Melbourne Islamic Society, Monash University Islamic Society, La Trobe University Islamic Society, Swinburne University Islamic Society, RMIT University Islamic Society, University of Technology Sydney Muslim Students, and the University of Western Sydney Muslim Students Association. Signatures also came from postgraduate students at the University of Western Sydney, University of South Australia and University of Melbourne. It should be no surprise to find the latest manifestation of radical politics, militant Islam, well represented within Australian universities. Their campuses have long proven fertile recruiting grounds for political movements, mostly of the Left persuasion. Universities also employ many academic staff who see their vocation not as the preservation and advancement of traditional scholarship, but the propagation of theories that provide aid and comfort to radical politics. Since June, when Islamic State troops captured the cities of Mosul and Tikrit and IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the appeal of radical Islam to young Muslims living in the West has been transformed. Political violence is no longer confined to random acts against the decadent West, like the Boston Marathon bombing. Instead, they can join a revolution in the Middle East that could make history and change the world. The excitement must be akin to that generated among communists when Lenin stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917. Like the communists, some Muslims now believe their time has come to take over the world. Until now, the major issue in this conflict for Australian authorities has been about young Muslims going abroad and receiving training in arms and explosives, which on their return they could use to commit acts of terror. While that still remains likely, the bigger problem now is that Australians will probably help swell the sizeable number of jihadists from Western countries already fighting in the Middle East. The CIA estimated that of the Islamic State’s 20,000 to 30,000 fighters, about 15,000 are foreigners and 2000 of these Westerners. This gives all the appearance of being a significant international movement among Muslim youth. If it stays true to form, its growth will feed on itself as its appeal accelerates. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]ike the international campaign among youth against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, a movement of this kind doesn’t need central leadership. Even if the IS caliphate itself is short-lived, the idea of it will survive and others will take up the cause. In the West, it will continue its spread through the cultural instruments of social media, popular music and video, and even through the distinctive clothing and facial hair sported by its adherents. White skullcaps are now becoming a radical fashion statement for young men on campus. Young women who now wear hijabs to lectures will be tempted to replace them with burqas. Muslims will defend this garb on grounds of freedom of religion and freedom of expression. In Quadrant's upcoming October edition, we publish an article on the origins of this movement and the nature of its appeal. The new book by our authors David Martin Jones and Michael L.R. Smith, Sacred Violence (Palgrave Macmillan), is destined to become a definitive work in this field. They argue the movement is a phenomenon which, though based on Islam, has similar appeal to the totalitarian politics of Europe in the 1930s, especially its passion for murderous violence towards its perceived enemies. Moreover, it evolved into its most dangerous form not in the Middle East but in modern, globally-connected cities such as London, Paris, Hamburg, Madrid, New York, Toronto and Sydney. Combating it here, Jones and Smith argue, means rejecting the principles of multiculturalism and ethnic relativism, which are actually part of the problem, and giving more support to our intelligence gathering and security forces. On reading this, I looked up the history of government funding for Australian intelligence services since September 11, 2001. They show that under the Howard Coalition government, Commonwealth budget allocations for ASIO increased by steady increments from about $70 million in 2001–2 to $300 million in 2007–8. In 2008–9, Kevin Rudd’s Labor government retained the same growth rate in its first year in office and took government payments to $360 million. But then, in the period of GFC stimulus, growth came to a halt. During Julia Gillard’s term of office, ASIO was hit with a 4 per cent funding decline as a government “efficiency dividend”, while total funding of intelligence services (ASIO, ASIS, ONA and parts of AFP) fell from $790 million in 2007–8 to $498 million, a fall of 37 per cent. The initial Abbott government budget in May this year proposed a 6 per cent reduction for ASIO but in August the Coalition government changed its mind and announced a new package of $630 million over four years would go to ASIO, ASIS, AFP and Customs. As well as its track record of financial irresponsibility in this field, the Labor Party has two other weaknesses that affect its ability to deliver dependable counter-terrorism policy. First, the ALP and its members have long inhabited a culture of contempt about both the ability and the need for intelligence services in this country. Even though Labor under Ben Chifley founded ASIO, the agency has long been the subject of scepticism and mockery from leftist intellectuals. This was a political tactic inherited from the Communist Party, the main object of ASIO attention during the Cold War, as it publicly laughed off claims that it supported socialist revolution in Australia. Nonetheless, the attitude survives today in the disdain consistently found in the work of leftist journalists when they write stories about ASIO. For instance:

"Our intelligence agencies are also far more secretive than those overseas, affecting an air of subterfuge that sometimes borders on the comical ... Terrorism sceptics such as UNSW’s Dr Christopher Michaelsen argue the allocated resources vastly outweigh the “negligible” risk. 'More Americans have drowned in the bath than have been killed by terrorists in recent years,' he says. -- Sally Neighbour, The Monthly

"In 2007, then defence minister Brendan Nelson said: '… [today’s dangers are] no less a threat than fascism or communism in the past.' That is utter rubbish, but such sentiments inevitably affect the propensity of governments to spend on security and intelligence. They’ve got to put their money where their mouths are. -- Paddy Gourley, Sydney Morning Herald

The second of Labor’s handicaps will be even more difficult to overcome. For Labor has made a Faustian bargain with the Muslim electorate. In return for votes from Muslim ghettoes in three federal electorates of Sydney’s western suburbs, Labor has distanced itself from its long-standing support of Israel and, at the urging of former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, switched to a more pro-Palestine position in the party’s policy platform and in the way it voted in the United Nations when last in office. Carr berated his party in 2012: “Our stance on the Middle East is shameful, in lock-step with the Likud … placing us with the Marshall Islands and Canada and rejecting the entire Arab world and the Palestinians.” The reason for the switch is not moral or strategic principle but the simple fact that, in the electorates that count, Muslims have the numbers. At the 2011 census, there were 97,335 Jews in Australia, compared to 476,291 Muslims. By taking one side against the other, Labor will probably continue to win the three Sydney seats, but at the cost of losing its soul. And the rest of Australia is then bound to ask: How can a party with such allegiances be trusted to properly address the growing challenge of Islamic terrorism in our midst? Keith Windschuttle, who passed away in April, was Quadrant's editor in chief

The post The Jihadis Next Door first appeared on Quadrant.

Caesura

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:05:26 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]N[/fusion_dropcap]oun, from the Latin, meaning cutting. Whereas the fermata is (usually) placed upon a particular note or rest, the caesura is (usually) written over the bar line. It denotes a break, a cut-off, a silent pause. At the beginning of this year, I wrote:

We must honestly pursue knowledge and wield the knowledge we accrue honestly. Truth must return, not just to music and the broader arts but to all aspects of our lives. The extra-artistic, like identity, must be resubordinated to the truly artistic, like quality. With more and more voices of influence beginning to advance this assertion, I remain optimistic and ambitious.

It can be a forlorn existence holding to this creed, and over the course of 2025 I have found my optimism sorely tested. Some of these trials I shall relay below. Before I do, though, it is worth noting that those adversaries whom long-time Quadrant Music readers are acutely familiar with have not proven to be this year’s only impediments to reform. As Dr Lola Salem, writing on culture, has succinctly warned: “The Right still confuses … its nostalgia with a plan.” If ever a sentiment were to sum up the present woes of the Liberal Party, this would be it. Conservatism is about conserving, whether by way of protecting existing, functioning institutions or creating new institutions to perpetuate the West’s greatest ideas. The endeavour is an active one that requires vision, risk and tenacity. That there has been no outspoken parliamentary opposition to the Albanese government’s national cultural policy, Revive: A Place for Every Story, a Story for Every Place, is regrettable. After delaying reporting its findings for more than two years, the Senate has re-adopted its inquiry into the five-year policy, filibustering it further. As Revive advocates for the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, is it any wonder that Treaty has now arrived in Victoria? Systems of government funding remain equally politicised. By illustration, the Australian Ballet recently announced a two-year collaboration with “award-winning queer-led education organisation Queer Town” to “strengthen LBTIQA+ inclusion” across the company and beyond. Prima facie, anyone might wonder why. The Australian Ballet receives $7,021,065 from Creative Australia via the National Performing Arts Partnership Framework. To receive funding under this framework, the company must satisfy “core priorities”. One such priority is to address “barriers … across key diversity areas (including disability, gender, LGBTIQ+, age and cultural diversity) in arts practice, programming, employment, education …” (my emphasis). The National Performing Arts Partnership Framework must be overhauled, if not scrapped entirely, a proposition these pages have long argued. For as long as the state holds artists and their institutions at ideological gunpoint, cultural progress of any value will be inhibited. In July, and drawing inspiration from the legacy of Roger Covell, I inaugurated Quadrant Music Reviews. My intention underpinning this review section was to cultivate a platform that did not shy from supporting unorthodox views relating to Australian composition and performance. “Unorthodox” requires some qualification. By it, I do not mean that Quadrant Music seeks reviews that are sensational and ill-informed. Rather, as a friend observed, it is unorthodox today to critically assess an artwork’s quality or an artist’s authenticity. Reviewers are much more likely to flatter and promote than they are to evaluate; five-star appraisals, like any debased currency, are issued with ever-increasing frequency. Quadrant Music Reviews set out to counter this status quo, and has. In September, I wrote a review of Opera Queensland’s production of La bohème, which Quadrant Music published online. (That review is reprinted among the concert reviews in this edition of Quadrant Music, as reference to it is necessary for what follows.) My criticism of the production was not just met with outrage. Limelight published a short condemnation, “Opera reviewer takes aim at accessibility policy” (September 16, 2025), expounding my “mean-spirited”, “backwards looking” and “contemptuous” opinions. This year being the fiftieth anniversary of Shostakovich’s death, I’ve had cause to recall Pravda’s infamous 1936 denunciation of the composer more than once, believe me. “I hope next time the reviewer chooses to write about an OQ production, they focus their efforts on what is happening on the stage,” Opera Queensland artistic director Patrick Nolan chided on social media. Had Nolan actually read what I wrote, I am confident he would not have made that remark. You can be the judge, reader. In any case, a very palpable hit, as well as the legitimisation of Quadrant Music by Australia’s national arts magazine. But at what cost? Well, in October, when Limelight published a list of 500 Australian composers in the lead-up to Australian Music Month, which is celebrated annually in November, one surname that would ordinarily find its place between “Vlahogiannis” and “Wales” was nowhere to be seen. As I wrote in my subscriber e-news, Liner Notes: “Obviously, the good people at Limelight accidentally forgot to include me, even if I was fresh in their psyche.” A small price to pay, all things considered. The Paul Lowin Orchestral and Song Cycle Prizes were presented by the Australian Music Centre in October. These triennial awards are Australia’s richest for composition—and, even then, the former is only worth $30,000 and the latter $15,500. I made a submission to the orchestral prize, which was unsuccessful; as I have previously written, this should not “preclude me from critically reflecting upon the opportunity … A composer receives far more rejection letters than commissions.” When it comes to major European composition competitions, two consistencies exist. First, applicants always submit their scores anonymously. Second, and just as importantly, those comprising a competition’s jury are always named. This assists applicants in evaluating whether participating in the competition is worth their time. A submitting composer might gamble, for instance, that a juror is favourably predisposed to their music. Alternatively, composers championing melodious minimalism might hesitate to enter a competition whose jury consisted of Brian Ferneyhough, Rebecca Saunders and Helmut Lachenmann. This transparency is not always available in Australia. The identities of those who adjudicated this just-passed Paul Lowin were not publicly revealed, whether to applicants in the first instance or following the awards’ presentations. Secrecy, prevailing for whatever reason, incites rumours of cronyism and extra-artistic biases. It should be done away with. If you put your head up above the parapet, you may get shot at. For me, dodging those bullets has become a kind of sport, one that seems to have attracted an enthusiastic, growing cohort of fans. In the wake of my La bohème scandal, I was humbled to receive the support I did from what is colloquially termed the quiet majority. Professional opera singers, international conductors, musicologists, veteran concertgoers: so many people wrote to me, sharing my views and expressing frustration about the co-ordinated attack against them. I’ve even gained some new friends from the ordeal, for which I am grateful. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he tide is going out for those who have long dominated Australia’s arts. Henry Ergas is but one influential voice who has taken to decrying “artivism” and Creative Australia’s ideological machinations. Last month, young philanthropists Jake Phillpot and Zuzanna Kamusinski launched the Banksia Prize, a new $100,000 award in aid of quality art and true artistic freedom. The Banksia requires anonymous submissions and intends to reward “beauty” and “work that evokes the strongest sense of pride in being Australian”. In their endeavour, Phillpot and Kamusinski have found themselves at odds with the legacy cultural establishment—but, as they themselves have proved, that disapproval doesn’t mean anything. Not anymore. And, yes, I expect I will never work with Opera Queensland again. (I did, once, on a very insignificant project, years before I started to be published by the Spectator Australia.) This fazes me not, because a new troupe has come to Brisbane, and its future is bright. Founded by the ambitious Henry Pinder, Brisbane Lyric Opera intends to go its own way by actively refusing taxpayer assistance. That means its artistry can never be affected by government-led social engineering. Pinder’s is exactly the cultural entrepreneurship that Australian music is crying out for. History suggests that, with careful management, Brisbane Lyric Opera can succeed. The Met replaced New York’s antiquated Academy of Music, and Wagner built his Bayreuth Festspielhaus with future generations in mind. Pinder himself tells me he draws inspiration from Santa Fe Opera, the “miracle in the desert”, which opened in 1956 and was later championed by Stravinsky. If I were Opera Queensland, I’d certainly fear I had cause to cower. Pause on this, reader. Although there is always great struggle, so too is there always great hope, for individuals of courage have within them enormous power. And, upon reflection, 2025 has been Quadrant Music’s most productive year yet. Its interviews, which commenced in April, have proven popular. A record number of international collaborations have taken place. Last issue’s special spread to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Sir Charles Mackerras is regarded as an important contribution to Australian music history. All in all, there is no reason why my optimism, nor yours, should be blunted. We simply need to keep moving forward, come what may. As one year cuts off into another, I wish you a very happy Christmas, and offer my heartfelt gratitude for your enduring patronage of Quadrant Music. Alexander Voltz is a composer and the founding editor of Quadrant Music, alexandervoltz@quadrant.org.au.

The post Caesura first appeared on Quadrant.

Four Signs it’s Time to Worry

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:57:41 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]Y[/fusion_dropcap]ou know that feeling when your government starts behaving like a real estate agent who keeps saying a place is “full of potential,” while standing in front of the hole where the kitchen should be? Here are four signs that your democracy may be getting a little authoritarian around the edges. Nothing dramatic. Just vibes. Slightly worrying vibes. Dictatorship-adjacent vibes. Think of what follows as your cosy, pastel-coloured warning system.

1/ Everyone in government suddenly loves disappearing messages

The first sign, and it’s a big one, is when elected officials begin communicating like teenagers about to be grounded. According to actual reporters who have done actual journalism, ministerial staff have been gently suggesting that lobbyists send policy ideas not by email (too traceable!) but via encrypted messaging apps with disappearing messages, like Signal. Disappearing. Messages. I mean, at that point they might as well add, 'P.S. destroy your phone, bury the SIM card, kiss your loved ones goodbye.' This is the kind of thing you expect from, a spy ring, a cheating husband, or your sister organising a surprise party very badly, not a government drafting legislation. The Australian Information Commissioner confirms that three-quarters of agencies using messaging apps now prefer Signal, and that most have absolutely no idea how to archive any of it. So, yes, if your government is holding policy discussions in ways that evaporate like tears on a hot day, that’s Sign Number One.

2/ “Protecting the children” slowly morphs into “turning the internet off”

Ah yes! The oldest trick in the slightly authoritarian book: “We’re doing this for the children!” Australia’s new social-media age laws now require platforms to ban under-16s unless they’ve identified themselves like they’re checking into an airport. The government insists this is safe and completely normal and not at all like building a giant database of children’s biometric details. Human rights organisations, meanwhile, are having palpitations. UNICEF has politely said, absolutely not, please don’t do that, it violates rights to expression, information, education, privacy, culture, leisure, mental health, etcetera, etcetera. Because banning whole platforms is like dealing with mould by burning the house down. Sure, it solves the problem. But at what cost? And children, teens especially, are very resourceful. If the government thinks they won’t immediately learn to use VPNs, proxies, virtual machines, and six layers of trickery, then the government has never met a 14-year-old girl who needs to see her best friend’s Instagram story right now. When safety slides into restriction, that’s Sign Number Two.

3/ FOI “reforms” that sound suspiciously like less FOI

Freedom of Information laws are meant to let citizens see what their government is doing. Which is why it’s slightly awkward that the FOI Amendment Bill 2025, which the government insists is all about “modernising transparency”, would make it:

Harder to lodge a request

Easier for agencies to refuse one

And would impose a 40-hour cap on processing time

Plus introduce new hurdles if you want to stay anonymous

To translate, this it means: “Of course you can see what’s inside the fridge but not now, and not for long, and definitely not if it’s awkward for me, and only if you promise you’re not being nosy.” FOI experts, journalists, historians and all who have ever tried to hold a government accountable are screaming, “No! Absolutely not! BAD LAW!” Meanwhile, ministerial advisers are privately muttering that FOI requests have become “fishing expeditions”, which is rich coming from people actively deleting their own fisheries. Sign Number Three: When transparency becomes a vibe, not a practice.

4/ The government collects record taxes but transparency gets the Aldi version of funding

Tax revenue across federal, state and local government has hit $801.7 billion, or 30% of GDP -- the kind of number that makes Scandinavian social democracies nod respectfully. You’d think with that much money we’d have:

Best schools in the world

Untouchable healthcare

Infrastructure so smooth you could eat soup on a bus

And enough administrative competence to make the Swiss blush

Instead we have:

FOI systems collapsing under their own paperwork

Agencies using encrypted apps because emails are “too risky”

National Archives begging the government to stop destroying its own records

And politicians accidentally billing taxpayers for holidays that look suspiciously like holidays

PLUS the occasional $100k “work trip” to New York involving two personal assistants for a seven-minute speech, which, to be fair, I would also need assistance to get through. Meanwhile, ministers can spend millions lighting up landmarks in themed colours to celebrate laws that limit rights. Authoritarianism tends to come in pretty packaging nowadays. That’s Sign Number Four: When the government spends like a billionaire influencer but reports like a missing husband on a true-crime documentary. So are we living in a dictatorship? Look, no. Nobody is marching in the streets in formation. There are no portraits of leaders hung above the produce section at Woolies. But the warning signs are there. Not flashing. Just gently glowing. The creeping authoritarianism of our time doesn’t arrive with tanks. It arrives with:

“Just pop that into Signal for me.”

“We’re protecting the children.”

“This FOI request is very inconvenient.”

“Oops, yes, that was technically taxpayer money.”

And the funny part? The thing aspiring dictators fear most isn’t revolution, it’s attention to the bad bits. Which means every time a citizen reads a report, files an FOI request, or simply asks, “Sorry, why are you deleting your messages again?”, democracy breathes a little more easily. So no, we’re not living in a dictatorship. But we might be living in a democracy that’s had a couple of glasses of wine too many and is now insisting, loudly, that it’s “absolutely fine to drive.”

The post Four Signs it’s Time to Worry first appeared on Quadrant.

E-MotorHead – ConspiracyOz

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:51:05 +1100

E-MotorHead..The Fastest Bike on the Foot Path? – Mick Raven

What is the difference between an e-bike and an e-motorbike_ What are the laws around them – 2nd Nov 2025

What is an e-bike?

An e-bike is an electric bicycle.

Think of a normal bicycle with foot pedals, but with an electric component to assist with pedalling.

Teen seriously injured in e-bike crash in Claremont after e-rideables inquiry called for widespread changes – 6th Dec 2025

A teenage boy suffered serious leg injuries in an e-bike crash in Claremont on Saturday morning.

It comes just two days after a wide-ranging parliamentary inquiry into WA’s e-scooter and e-bike rules

made 33 recommendations in a bid to make the devices safer.

Lithium-ion battery suspected to have sparked Caroline Springs house fire – 8th Dec 2025

Fire services are urging people to buy lithium-ion battery products from reputable manufacturers

after a house fire in Melbourne’s west on the weekend was suspected to have been caused by a lithium battery.

The frequency of fires sparked by lithium batteries has risen dramatically in recent years.

Parents urged to learn the rules about e-mobility devices as Christmas approaches – 7th Dec 2025

A growing number of young people being killed or injured in incidents involving electric mobility devices,

parents are being urged to ensure they know the rules before buying one.

Rod Camm, the chief executive of Queensland’s Motor Trades Association,

said he was concerned non-compliant e-bikes could make it off Christmas wish lists and onto footpaths.

Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate calls for urgent e-transport law changes after deaths of two children – 3rd Nov 2025

Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate has accused the Queensland Government of lacking the political will to improve e-transport device legislation.

A 15-year-old e-motorbike rider died after losing control of the bike on the Gold Coast on Saturday,

about 36 hours after an eight-year-old boy died in an e-bike crash on the Sunshine Coast.

Import rules crackdown to halt ‘overpowered’ e-bikes coming to Australia – 27th Nov 2025

Federal Transport Minister Catherine King says the government will strengthen e-bike importing rules

to bring them into line with the European standard.

The standard means bikes can only go up to 25km/h, have a 250-watt power limit, and be subject to an anti-tampering clause.

Thinking about an e-bike or e-scooter ahead of Black Friday sales – 10th Nov 2025

Are kids allowed to have e-bikes?

Technically it is not illegal for children to have an e-bike or e-motorcycle in Australia,

because most of them are sold under the proviso that they’re only used on private property under adult supervision.

It is this loophole that is allowing powerful electric bikes to end up in the hands of young children

Queensland father fined as Noosa police crack down on kids riding e-motorbikes – 10th Dec 2024

A man has been fined after police say they caught his two teenage sons riding unregistered electric motorcycles at Noosa.

Police have been cracking down on the use of electric motorcycles and non-compliant e-bikes in the popular tourist town.

Lithium-ion batteries are causing more than 10,000 fires a year in Australia – 20th Jun 2024

Waste management trucks and facilities are seeing more than 10,000 fires per year,

caused by lithium-ion batteries.Waste chiefs will call for a management plan to be implemented.

CDC panel votes to end recommending Hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:11:00 +1100

A U.S medical board has voted to end the longstanding recommendation for all newborns to receive a vaccine for Hepatitis B after birth, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’ campaign rolls on at the dismay of ‘experts’.

Australian Federal Police will lead international United Nations summit

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 08:11:00 +1100

In a major first for Australia, the AFP will soon host the biannual U.N United Chiefs of Police Summit (UNCOPS) in New York, with Commissioner Krissy Barrett set to deliver a keynote speech about further collaboration and unified bloc operations in the Pacific.

Australia’s first cell-based vaccine plant opens in Melbourne

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 08:11:00 +1100

The Victorian government has opened of the country’s first cell-based vaccine manufacturing plant in Melbourne – a facility that is expected to “play a pivotal role in ensuring the nation’s self-sufficiency and bolster pandemic preparedness”.

Age verification rollout recommended to be delayed by Senate committee

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 08:11:00 +1100

A parliamentary report from the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications has recommended delaying the implementation of age-verification social media laws in Australia for six months, until technical hurdles and concerns are resolved. Will the government listen to the report before launch date?

Look up… You Twit – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:29:19 +1100

The Tucker Carlson Show

Nov 11, 2025

The government has finally admitted that chemtrails are real.

It’s called geoengineering and it’s far worse than anything you imagined.

Tucker Carlson chemtrails episode_ Climate change is out. Geoengineering is in – Nov 12, 2025

Why the chemtrail conspiracy theory lingers and grows – and why Tucker Carlson is talking about it – November 15, 2025

Tucker Carlson interviews Geoengineering expert Dane Wiggington. – Nov 11, 2025

US Presidential Candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Dane Wigington Is Climate Engineering Real – June 8, 2023

Oz Bankruptcies thru the roof…Highest ever! – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:09:08 +1100

Finally the Truth! 1480 Bankruptcies in one Month!- Mick Raven

https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/bankruptcies

k.ID Coming for your Kids 2025 – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:00:20 +1100

The back door to Adult mandatory Digital ID? (k-ID already operates in over 150 countries) – Mick Raven

k-ID _ Engage, Expand and Empower your youth audience, wherever they are – Nov 24, 2025

Snap selects ConnectID, k-ID for Australian age verification _ Biometric Update – Nov 24, 2025

Age checks set to transform how kids play and interact online – 2025

Cybersecurity experts raise concerns about Snapchat’s age-verification methods – Nov 28, 2025

k-ID is a service used for age verification, which can be done through several methods depending on the user’s location and the specific platform, including a selfie-based face scan, uploading a government ID, or using a linked bank account via a solution like ConnectID.

The primary goal is to ensure users meet the minimum age requirements for a platform, and the service aims to protect user privacy by minimizing data collection and processing some data, like facial scans, entirely on the user’s device.

How k-ID age verification works

- Facial Age Estimation: You can take a selfie, and k-ID will use its technology to estimate your age. This process is often performed on-device, meaning the image does not leave your device.
- Scan ID: You can upload a photo of a government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license or passport. A third-party service provider will then scan and validate the ID to confirm your age.

ConnectID (Australia): In Australia, you may be able to verify your age by connecting to your bank account through a solution called ConnectID. This process securely shares your age information without the bank or k-ID seeing your personal details.

Credit Card Verification: In some cases, a small, refundable charge to a credit card is used as a method for verifying you are an adult and can grant consent for a minor.

What to do if verification fails

If a face scan fails, you will typically be prompted to try again or use another method, such as uploading an ID.
If you are repeatedly unable to verify your age after multiple attempts, you should contact the support for the service you are using (e.g., support@k-id.com).

Data security and privacy

Minimal data collection: k-ID and its partners aim to minimize the data collected and only use it for age verification purposes.
On-device processing: Facial scanning technology is designed to work on the device itself, so your facial information never leaves your device.
Secure partnerships: k-ID partners with local digital identity providers to ensure secure and compliant age verification processes.

Australia’s social media ban for kids under 16

Helen Livingstone

https://www.bbc.com

24th Nov 2025

The ban on under-16s using social media is a world first

From 10 December, social media companies will have to take “reasonable steps” to ensure that under-16s in Australia cannot set up accounts on their platforms and that existing accounts are deactivated or removed.

The government says the ban – a world-first policy popular with many parents – is aimed at reducing the “pressures and risks” children can be exposed to on social media, which come from “design features that encourage them to spend more time on screens, while also serving up content that can harm their health and wellbeing”.

A study commissioned by the government earlier this year said 96% of children aged 10-15 used social media and that seven out of 10 of them had been exposed to harmful content and behaviour. This behaviour ranged from misogynistic material to fight videos and content promoting eating disorders and suicide.

One in seven also reported experiencing grooming-type behaviour from adults or older children, and more than half said they had been the victims of cyberbullying.

What platforms are affected?

The Australian government has so far named ten platforms to be included in the ban: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit and streaming platforms Kick and Twitch.

It is also under pressure to expand the ban to online gaming. Fearing they may be targeted, gaming platforms such as Roblox and Discord have recently introduced age checks on some features in an apparent bid to ward off inclusion in the ban.

The government has said it will continue to review the list of affected platforms, and will consider three main criteria when doing so.

These comprise whether the platform’s sole or “significant purpose” is to enable online social interaction between two or more users; whether it allows users to interact with some or all other users; and whether it allows users to post material.

YouTube Kids, Google Classroom and WhatsApp are not included as they were not deemed to have met those criteria. Children will also still be available to view most content on platforms like YouTube, which do not require an account.

How will the ban be enforced?

Children and parents will not be punished for infringing the ban – it is social media companies who are charged with enforcing it, and they face fines of up to $49.5m (US$32m, £25m) for serious or repeated breaches.

The government says these companies must take “reasonable steps” to keep kids off their platforms, and use age assurance technologies – without specifying which ones.

Several possibilities have been raised, including the use of government IDs, face or voice recognition and age inference. The latter of these uses online information other than a date of birth – such as online behaviour or interactions – to estimate a person’s age

A recent Australian government study found 96% of children aged 10-15 used social media – and seven out of 10 of them had been exposed to harmful content and behaviour

The government is encouraging platforms to use multiple different methods. It has also said platforms cannot rely on users declaring their own age, or on parents vouching for their children.

Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, has announced it will begin closing teen accounts from 4 December. Those mistakenly kicked off could use a government ID or provide a video selfie to verify their age, the company said.

Snapchat has said users can use bank accounts or photo IDs to verify their age or take a selfie, which will be used to estimate their age.

The other affected platforms have not yet said how they will comply with the ban.

Will it work?

Without a clear idea of what methods companies will be using, it’s hard to say whether the social media ban will be effective – but concerns have been raised that age assurance technologies may wrongly block some users while failing to spot others who are underage.

The government’s own report found that facial assessment technology, for example, is least reliable for the exact demographic it’s needed to target.

Questions have also been raised as to whether the fines for infringement are big enough. As former Facebook executive Stephen Scheeler told AAP: “It takes Meta about an hour and 52 minutes to make $50 million in revenue”.

Critics argue that the ban, even if properly implemented, will not actually reduce online harm for children. Dating websites and gaming platforms are not included, and nor are AI chatbots, which have recently made headlines for allegedly encouraging children to kill themselves and for having “sensual” conversations with minors.

Others point out that teens who rely on social media for community will be left isolated, and argue that educating children about how to navigate social media would be more effective.

Communications Minister Annika Wells has conceded that the ban may not be “perfect”.

“It’s going to look a bit untidy on the way through,” she said in early November. “Big reforms always do.”

Are there data protection concerns?

Critics have also raised concerns about the large-scale collection and storage of data that will be required, and its potential mishandling, as platforms try to verify users’ ages.

Australia – like much of the world – has in recent years seen a series of high-profile data breaches, including several where sensitive personal information was stolen and sold or published.

But the government says the legislation incorporates “strong protections” for personal information. These protections stipulate that such information may not be used for anything other than age verification and must be destroyed once that has been done, with “serious penalties” for breaches.

It also says platforms must offer an alternative to the use of governments IDs for age assurance.

How have social media companies responded?

Social media companies were aghast at the announcement of the ban in November 2024. They argued it would be difficult to implement, easy to circumvent and time consuming for users, as well as posing risks to their privacy.

They also suggested it would drive children into dark corners of the internet and deprive young people of social contact. Snap – which owns Snapchat – and YouTube also denied being social media companies.

YouTube’s parent company, Google, is reportedly still considering whether to launch a legal challenge to the platform’s inclusion. It did not respond to a BBC request for comment.

Though included in the ban, YouTube has denied being a social media company

Even as it announced that it would implement it early, Meta argued the ban would leave teens with “inconsistent protections across the many apps they use”.

At parliamentary hearings in October, TikTok and Snap said they still opposed the ban but would implement it.

Kick – the only Australian company included in the ban – has said it will introduce a “range of measures” and continue to engage “constructively” with authorities.

Do other countries have similar bans?

The ban on under-16s using social media is a world first, and other countries will be watching closely. Different approaches have been tried elsewhere to limit screen and social media time for children and keep them from accessing harmful material, but nowhere has put a total ban on the platforms involved.

In the UK, new safety rules introduced in July mean online companies face large fines or even the jailing of their executives if they fail to implement measures to protect young people from seeing illegal and harmful content.

Other European countries allow the use of social media under a certain age only with parental consent. In September, a French parliamentary enquiry recommended banning under-15s from social media, as well as a social media “curfew” for 15- to 18-year-olds.

Denmark has announced plans to ban social media for under-15s, while Norway is considering a similar proposal. Spain’s government has sent to parliament a draft law for under-16s to require their legal guardians to authorise access.

Meanwhile, an attempt in the US state of Utah to ban under-18s from social media without parental consent was blocked by a federal judge last year.

Will children try to get around the ban?

Teens interviewed by the BBC said they were opening new accounts with fake ages ahead of the ban – although the government has warned social media companies it expects them to detect such accounts and remove them.

Online, teenagers are also recommending alternative social media apps or giving tips they hope will help them bypass the ban.

Some teens, including influencers, have switched to joint accounts with their parents. Commentators are also predicting a surge in the use of VPNs – which hide the count

Cyclone Fiza…Ugh! (or Failed Weather Weapon? – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 15:26:18 +1100

And yet again…The BOM that cryed Wolf! or Fizza Weather weapon?- Mick Raven

NT Minister FINOcchiaro? Coincidence? – Mick Raven

Everything you need to know about life in Darwin in the wake of Cyclone Fina – Nov 24, 2025

It was an intense weekend for Top End residents as they prepared for and then sought refuge from Tropical Cyclone Fina,

a category three system which travelled close to the NT coastline on Saturday.

When locals across Darwin and the Tiwi Islands awoke on Sunday morning,

hundreds of trees were down across the region, along with some powerlines

— some of which caused damage to people’s homes.

Passing the Buck now? – Mick Raven

Tropical Cyclone Fina wreaks havoc on Tiwi Islands, Darwin – Nov 24, 2025

Tropical Cyclone Fina is now Western Australia’s problem,

as it barrels towards the mainland as a Category 4 system

‘Worst since Tracy’_ Darwin in clean-up mode after Tropical Cyclone Fina – Nov 23, 2025

Strongest cyclone to approach Darwin since Tracy in 1974 intensifies to

category 4 as it moves towards northeast Kimberley coast…

Severe Tropical Cyclone Fina moves towards WA as Darwin surveys the damage – Nov 23, 2025

Severe Tropical Cyclone Fina has passed Darwin at category three strength,

with the weather system’s gale-force winds leaving a path of destruction as it continues west into the ocean.

Cyclone Fina intensifies to a category four system over water, BOM confirms – Nov 23, 2025

The Bureau of Meteorology says Tropical Cyclone Fina is expected to reach category four strength

as soon as midday, and while still in Northern Territory waters.

Cyclone Fina 200kmh winds, floods hit Darwin as hospital damaged – Nov 23, 2025

Authorities have warned Territorians could be smashed by wind gusts of up to 120kmh

and endure flash flooding after Severe Tropical Cyclone Fina strengthened.

Tech billionaires back start-up exploring gene-edited ‘designer babies’

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 08:11:00 +1100
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong are among two leading investors into a new $30 million start-up that is pursuing the vision of producing gene-edited babies out of the womb.

Police to conduct warrantless pat-downs across Melbourne for six months

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 20:11:00 +1100
Victoria Police will soon have new draconian powers to subject any person at random to a pat-down or vehicle search for six months inside Melbourne’s CBD, as a ‘solution’ to the uncontrollable crime rate that has engulfed the region.

Australia will provide $386 million to support Gavi between 2026 to 2030

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 08:11:00 +1100
The federal government will provide $386 million dollars to further support the work of Gavi, the Gates-backed vaccine alliance, from 2026 to 2030 – as part of our largest investment ever into the group.

How censored can smartphones get? Just look at North Korea | Video

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 08:11:00 +1100
From auto-propaganda to forced screenshots, take a look at what North Korean phones are like – highlighting just how controlled technology can become.

Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to change Washington, and showed us what happens when you do

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:33:08 +1100
Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced she is resigning from Congress next year, after attempting to re-shape the corporate machine of U.S politics and being labelled a ‘traitor’ by President Donald Trump for her efforts.

Australian government and business officials visit United Nations headquarters

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:11:20 +1100
Delegates from a range of public and private institutions, as well as representatives of government departments, have all been given a ‘guided tour’ of the U.N headquarters in New York – as the unelected world body continues to shape nation states.

AI Could Wipe Out the Working Class

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 14:10:31 +1100

Apart from being a socialist Millionaire and supporting the Climate change Hoax plus Planned Parenthood (Mutual fund holdings in Companies He’s Criticized, Including Tesla) Hes right on the ball with this one – Mick Raven

How Senator Bernie Sanders Made His Millions

Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Own Individual Stocks

Bernie Sanders_ BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street ‘oligarchy’ threatens democracy

AI must benefit everyone, not just a handful of billionaires » Senator Bernie Sanders

The Billionaires’ plan for AI _ Sen. Bernie Sanders

What I Learned From Bernie Sanders and Geoffrey Hinton’s Conversation on AI

Sanders and ‘Godfather of AI’ to Discuss the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Impact on Humanity

Bernie Sanders – Wikipedia

Member Circle: Shifting Landscapes

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:11:00 +1100
Reports from public thinktank groups and researchers point to a "renewed rise in antisemitism" across both ends of the political spectrum, manifesting in distinct but sometimes overlapping forms.

AI Takeover2030!…Musk – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 18:34:48 +1100

listen at 1.07.20 no more apps? no more mobile phones? Whoah! – Mick Raven

Pandemic 2.0? – ConspiracyOz

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 17:02:31 +1100

Lets hope not – Mick Raven

Here we go again? – Mick Raven

Moderna is awarded $590M to fast-track bird flu vaccine – January 22, 2025

Days before President Donald Trump took office a second time, the Department of Health and Human Services

granted Moderna $590 million for the development of mRNA vaccines for bird flu and other influenza viruses.

Bird flu isn’t part of the “quad-demic” of viruses circulating through the country this winter—COVID,

seasonal flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and norovirus—and its risk to public health,

according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), remains low. But that doesn’t mean an H5N1 avian influenza pandemic isn’t possible or even probable.

Stalled for now? – Mick Raven

RFK Jr cancels $500m in mRNA vaccine development in the US – 6th August 2025

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to cancel $500m (£376m) in funding for mRNA vaccines

being developed to counter viruses that cause diseases such as the flu and Covid-19.

That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna,

for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.

Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine sceptic, announced he was pulling the funding over claims that

“mRNA technology poses more risks than benefits for these respiratory viruses”.

Tasmania remains free of H5 bird flu, but returning migratory birds could pose a risk – 25 Oct 2025

Experts agree that spring is a heightened time of risk for bird flu hitting Tasmania, especially via migrating seals and birds around coastal areas.

While authorities say they are prepared for the virus’ arrival, one wildlife carer says she was given contradictory advice about how to deal with a possible bird flu case.

The scientific community will need to wait until mid-November to get confirmation on suspected bird flu cases on Heard Island.

What does it mean if a deadly strain of bird flu has been found on Australia’s Heard Island – 25 Oct 2025

Does the virus have the potential to become the next pandemic?

Some experts fear the H5N1 bird flu could become the next pandemic, although there has been no known human-to-human transmission of the virus to date.

One study suggested that H5N1 bird flu in cows could spread to people relatively easily after showing that the virus

could bind to a type of acid found in human airways, called sialic acids, and could then be spread to ferrets.

That suggested the virus could soon start to spread between different mammals, including humans, potentially leading to a new pandemic.

What we (Gov?) are doing to prepare for bird flu – DAFF

If you notice sick or dead birds or other animals, you should not touch them.

If there are multiple dead birds or other animals, take photos or a video.

Record your location and report it to the 24-hour Emergency Animal Disease Hotline on 1800 675 888.

– Don’t they (Gov) mean what WE will be doing – Mick Raven

Australia does not currently have H5 bird flu.

Overseas outbreaks show that H5 bird flu would have significant impacts on our wildlife, communities and our agriculture industry, especially poultry.

We are working hard to prepare for a potential H5 bird flu outbreak.

Our actions support biodiversity, the industries, other sectors and communities that would be affected.

We’re taking a One Health approach. This means we recognise the interconnection between the health of humans, animals and the environment.

– Uh-oh vaccines for All…again? – Mick Raven

Webinar recording on what we (Gov) are doing to prepare for bird flu

Webinar: Preparing for H5 avian influenza (bird flu)

H5-Avian-Influenza-webinar-transcript – (Word Doc)

WHA and Deakin University created AviFluMap, a tool that tracks bird movements and overseas H5 bird flu outbreaks.

The Australian Government is investing over $100 million to prepare for H5 bird flu.

This investment is enhancing our national preparedness and response capability.

AviFluMap: a H5 Bird Flu Model Tool for Australia’s Wild birds

(Click on Global H5 HPAI Event Map to view the Spread of H5 virus in the Bird World – Mick Raven)

Read More…

Wild Bird Surveillance – December 2024

INTERIM_N13_Wild_Bird_News_Dec_2024.pdf

Between July 2005 and December 2024, over 154,000 wild birds have been tested for influenza viruses.

To date, no high pathogenicity (Avian Influenza Virus) AIVs nor virulent strains of APMV-1 have been identified in Australian wild birds.

However, targeted surveillance activities continue to result in evidence of a wide range of subtypes of AI viruses of low pathogenicity.

Almost all AIV subtypes have been detected, including low pathogenicity avian influenza (LPAI) H5 and H7 subtypes, in wild birds in Australia.

Surveillance Reports – Dec 2018 to Dec 2024

Wild Bird News

National Avian Influenza Wild Bird Surveillance Newsletter is a six-monthly report presenting information

on targeted and general wild bird avian influenza surveillance results generated via the National Avian Influenza Wild Bird (NAIWB)

Surveillance Program and National Wildlife Health Surveillance System.

NAIWB surveillance summaries are also published in Animal Health Surveillance Quarterly.

Tiba Biotech

A disease Australia hasn’t had for 150years = more vaccines for us eventually … – Mick Raven

NSW seeks federal support for world-first mRNA foot and mouth disease vaccine – 25 Oct 2025

Scientists in NSW have developed a potential world-first mRNA vaccine to protect cattle from foot and mouth disease.

The state government is calling for federal support for the project, which has been developed with US company Tiba BioTech.

Researchers are preparing to submit the vaccine to the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority for approval.

New vaccine to prevent devastating cattle disease – 24 Oct 2025

A team of scientists has developed a new mRNA vaccine they say would protect cattle from devastating foot and mouth disease

(FMD).Australia is free from FMD – a contagious virus that affects cattle, sheep and pigs, but not humans.

It is estimated a widespread outbreak of FMD could cost the Australian economy up to $80 billion over a decade.

$20m research partnerships see Australia pioneer world-first FMD vaccine – Oct. 7, 2025

A world-first biodegradable vaccine to protect livestock from foot and mouth disease (FMD) has been developed through a $20 million,

five-year research partnership between Meat & Livestock Australia, Tiba Biotech, and the NSW government.

About Us – Tiba Biotech

Tiba Biotech emerged in 2017 from a five-year multi-lab research initiative between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koch Institute,

the Whitehead Institute, and Boston Children’s Hospital. With our international collaborators and strategic partners,

Tiba is leveraging a revolutionary replicon RNA technology platform to develop safer, affordable vaccines for both human and animal health.

Peter McGrath, CFO, has over 30 years of operational experience in financial services, investment banking,

risk management and early stage investing across a range of industries and technologies.

He has an established track record of building and managing highly successful teams, both at small startups and established multinational corporations.

Peter began his career in finance at the Sydney branch of Société Générale before taking a senior management role at Barclays.

Later, he led the foreign exchange group at Australia’s Westpac, managing a 22-member team and overseeing $3 billion in average

daily turnover servicing many of the largest global fund managers. After moving to Boston in 2011,

Peter served as COO of Emergent Analytics, a quantitative hedge fund,

prior to joining Tiba to oversee the first round of seed investment and lead our initial animal vaccine program.

Tiba Biotech linkin – Nov 2025

Tiba Biotech is a pre-clinical stage biotechnology company revolutionizing the design and delivery of a safer,

more effective and affordable generation of nucleic acid products for human and animal health.

Tiba’s innovative RNA vaccine platform disrupts existing design, delivery and bio-manufacturing processes

while enabling the rapid development of highly effective vaccines against multiple diseases.

Privately held, Tiba is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, emanated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Koch Institute,

and has strategic partnerships with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

and a growing list of leading research institutions. To learn more about Tiba, visit http://www.tiba.bio.

HHS Winds Down mRNA Vaccine Development Under BARDA – August 5, 2025

“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” said HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“BARDA is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively

against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu. We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”

The wind-down affects a range of programs including Termination of contracts with Emory University and Tiba Biotech.

The Common sense approach! – Mick Raven

B.O.M.s Away! – ConspiracyOz

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:02:30 +1100

Massive Fail Ppl – Mick Raven

https://www.facebook.com/bomradarfanclub – 23 October 2025

Hey everyone – if you dislike the new BOM website as much as I do, you can find the old one here at – https://reg.bom.gov.au/ It exists on a subdomain for the new website, but seems to be working for now. Bring back the old radar, so much better!!! The new one is just a poor copy of the BOM app & Weatherzone. No Doppler radar and the resolution/quality is much lower – completely useless. Don’t forget to submit feedback when prompted to let them know what a waste of our taxpayer money this is

Bureau of Meteorology backflips on controversial rain radar on new website – Oct 31, 2025

Instead of showing the “rain rate” in millimetres per hour, the radar will now go back to showing “rain reflectivity”, which was what was standard on the old website.”We’ve listened to your feedback, and have restored the previous radar colour scheme,” Stone said.

Cost of BoM’s website revamp revealed after deluge of public criticism – 1st Nov 2025

The full cost of the Bureau of Meteorology’s website overhaul was approximately $86m, Guardian Australia can reveal, after years of delays and millions in cost blowouts.

Bureau of Meteorology reverts to previous rain radar after wave of complaints – Oct 31, 2025

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) will restore the previous colour scheme on its rain radar and weather map.It comes after the BOM’s new $4.1 million website received a wave of backlash.The bureau says other “ongoing changes and improvements” would be coming soon.

Backlash over Bureau of Meteorology’s ‘confusing’ new website – ABC News – 23 October 2025

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) launched a new-look website this week, resulting in a torrent of complaints.

The new website layout came online at the same time severe weather hit various states.

‘Why on earth did they change it’ New Bureau of Meteorology website slammed – 23 October 2025

The Bureau of Meteorology has been met with outrage over its new website, with users describing the revamp as “atrocious”, “useless”, “disappointing” and “unnecessary”.

Unveiled on Wednesday, the Bureau said it hoped, with the redesign, to create “a clearer, more accessible and secure website experience” that would better support the estimated eight million Australians who use it “when it matters most”. The site’s daily weather information and warnings are viewed more than 2.6 billion times each year.

Are you having issues with the new BOM website_ A Bureau meteorologist answers your questions – 23 October 2025

If you visited the Bureau of Meteorology website or app this week, you might have noticed quite a few changes to the usual interface.

ABC Radio Sydney Drive was inundated with texts and calls from listeners who weren’t too happy about the refreshed look, reporting issues with their usual rain radar and temperature pages.

‘Epic fail!’_ Bureau of Meteorology website update sparks fury across Australia – 23 October 2025

The Bureau’s Facebook was quickly flooded with comments from disgruntled users who branded the updated site “disappointing” and “difficult to use”.“Never thought I’d live to see the return of days when standing on my front porch, looking up at the sky would tell me more than the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website,” one upset Sydney-sider wrote.

‘Your new website sucks’_ Bureau of Meteorology redesign is lightning rod for heated criticism – 23 October 2025

A Facebook user commented on a BoM post, saying: “Give us our site back. We don’t want this new one.”

A member of the Whingers Forster Tuncurry group said: “Hate it with a capital ‘H’ … what the hell were they thinking?”

Agenda 2030 in full swing, ready to cloud us in Misinformation about The ‘Global Warming Hoax’ making it hard to access Historical Climate data – Mick Raven

National Weather Forecast 23 October 2025

new bom site historical data – Google Search – general search

Past weather and climate _ The Bureau of Meteorology – click on resources for Free pricing of BoM Data – Mick Raven

Product Catalogue and subscription charges – Bureau of Meteorology

Data services _ The Bureau of Meteorology

Sourcepole

QGIS Cloud – GIS2Web

Data services charges, Bureau of Meteorology

Real-time Data Services_ Bureau of Meteorology

Historical Data Dig – Mick Raven

Climate Data Services, Bureau of Meteorology – click on ‘Climate data online’ – Mick Raven

Mona Vale, New South Wales _ The Bureau of Meteorology – Feels like…uhg! – Mick Raven

Daily Maximum Temperature graph – 066214 – Bureau of Meteorology – 2017 data to present accessible for free…for now – Mick Raven

Monthly Rainfall – 066214 – Bureau of Meteorology

Daily Rainfall – 066214 – Bureau of Meteorology

Was this Page Useless (BoM) ……..YES! – Mick Raven

Bovaer to Blame? Danish Dairy Farmers Sound Alarm

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 17:00:00 +1100
By Kari Bundy | Health Activist Danish Dairy Farmers Sound Alarm: Bovaer Linked to Sudden Cow Collapses and Deaths Just one month after Denmark’s October 1, 2025 mandate requiring dairy farms with over 50 cows to incorporate Bovaer 10 into feed rations, a wave of severe health crises has swept through herds nationwide. The additive—developed […]