Australia

The eSlippery Commissioner

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:34:50 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]O[/fusion_dropcap]n October 10, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant appeared before Senate Estimates and fielded questions with an aplomb familiar to all who have followed what has been an irresistible rise. From a small unit established with the noble if quixotic goal of stopping teenagers bullying each other, her office now boasts an annual budget of $58.1 million and a head count that will have expanded to 164 full-time public servants by December, an increase of some 30% over last year’s staffing. To say eSafety has grown like Topsy would not stretch the truth. Indeed the unit’s empire-building has reached the point where it disperses grants -- well over $10 million so far -- to allied organisations, charities, universities and activist groups. Sir Humphrey Appleby would approve, for what better way can a bureaucratic entity assure loyalty, support and allies than by popping a large cheque in the mail? He would also admire the eSafety Commissioner, herself drawing a salary of $457,844 in 2024, according to The Mandarin, for a way with words that once again saw her handle what were often and unfortunately imprecise questions leaving plenty of wiggle room. Below, her responses to just one of the queries, plus some backgrounding to help frame, and sometimes correct, the Commissioner and her questioners.

Senator ROBERTS: This question relates to the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM. In 2024, the United States Congress determined GARM was acting as a cartel, withholding advertising from conservative media in an attempt to subvert the 2024 presidential election...

Roberts is stretching it a bit here. It was the House Judiciary Committee, not the entire Congress. But yes, it did find GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) was a cartel intent on directing advertisements and revenue away from conservative sites.

Senator ROBERTS: ...In July this year, the House Judiciary Committee produced a report on 'exporting censorship'—using GARM to silence American speech. In this report, Commissioner, you're named 23 times. Based on the evidence presented, the report concludes on page 7 that you colluded with GARM to subvert the 2024 presidential election—on whose authority? Your enabling legislation gives you no such power.

It's actually page 8, and Inman Grant is not accused of tampering with the US election. Rather, following directly after a passage describing EU regulators' efforts to warn off Musk from conducting a streamed interview with then-candidate Trump on the grounds that the man now President might incite "violence, hate and racism', she is mentioned as directing a second front against Elon Musk and Twitter by issuing take-down notices.

Ms Inman Grant: First of all, I refute that claim. I was in conversation with one of the representatives of GARM in 2023.

Not quite right. The email exchange took place in November 2022, two weeks after US midterm elections.

Ms Inman Grant: I've never had discussions with them about Donald Trump or an election….

Well there was the emailed response (below) to GARM's founder and chief Rob Rakowitz, who had emailed Inman Grant that

my main thing is I need to see Trump and denials [of the 2020 presidential election's integrity ] effectively sidelined but I am afraid the contagion is too widespread to protect infection overall.

Does that sound like 'brand protection', which is how Inman Grant characterised GARM's work to Estimates, or was Rakowitz's sharing with an Australian government official, his online intimate, a much greater interest in hobbling the social media presence, political reach and aspirations of a candidate he despised? Readers are free to draw their own conclusions. Here is how our eSafety Commissioner responded. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]t this point in her testimony Inman Grant became quite the school-marm and more than a bit sloppy with her wording.

Ms Inman Grant: Let me explain to you what GARM is...

Whoa! Hold on tick, Ms Commissioner, you're using the wrong tense. It's not what GARM is but what it was , as the body died a very quick and sudden death when the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), under whose umbrella it had been established, withdrew all support immediately upon Musk filing suit alleging a conspiracy to organise an advertiser boycott. Musk slapped WFA with a writ on Tuesday and by Thursday GARM was no more. it was that quick. As tech analyst Mo Allibhai puts it, the body for which our eSafety Commissioner expressed such admiration was promulgating "standards [that] were heavy-handed, arbitrary, unenforceable — and possibly illegal." And those were only the first of its transgressions. But let us return to Inman Grant's testimony.

Ms Inman Grant: It is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which has a broad membership of advertisers and marketers and other ad tech players that are concerned about platform safety...

Still living in the past is our Ms Inman Grant. Or did pen pal Rakowitz not tell her he was out of a job? Was she unaware that GARM's step-by-step plan to bring Musk and Twitter to heel by strangling cash flow was the "possibly illegal" gambit of which Allibhai wrote? We can all appreciate the Commissioner must right now be focused on the December 10 start of censoring the internet, but do make an effort to keep up!

Ms Inman Grant: You would also know that, when ad systems go wrong, it can be catastrophic for a platform. In 2017, under the Coalition government, major advertisers boycotted YouTube because terrorist and violent extremist material and hate speech were being served against the ads that they were using.

The Australian government was part of that boycott, because, you can imagine, when the Australian Defence Force was trying to put out posts recruiting people and they were served with an ISIS propaganda advertisement...

All of which is true. The federal government and many global advertisers did yank their YouTube ads which were appearing beside ISIS home videos of head-lopping parties and calls for the faithful to do Allah's work as the sand goblins defined it. But here's the thing: that happened eight years ago and YouTube, along with all other major platforms, have taken extensive steps -- too extensive in the view of content makers whose work has been 'demonetised' -- to make sure what was once common is now very, very rare. As tech site Polygon explained in 2018, less than a year after the incident Inman Grant referenced:

...YouTube has faced a mountain of problematic trends to ward off: disturbing children’s content, terrorism videos and the spreading of conspiracy channels, and new breeds of video content we’re only starting to see...

So why did Inman Grant once again invoke the past, given that YouTube has addressed the problem and advertisers, including the Australian government, have long since returned? All we can really know from her testimony, apart from admiring her skill as an impromptu speaker, is that her answer to Senator Roberts' questioning was built around a discredited and defunct organisation, GARM, and a problem that has long since been solved. A FOOTNOTE: There is much more about Inman Grant's testimony that will intrigue the curious. It can be found in full here Those who wish to consult the House Judiciary report will find it here. And do make a point to read the Annexes at the foot of the document. They lay out in detail GARM's plans, the "possibly illegal" ones, to nobble Musk and Twitter, which Rakowitz shared with his admiring Australian-American pen pal.

The post The eSlippery Commissioner first appeared on Quadrant.

Leather-Jacket Evangelism

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:51:06 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n the gritty, post-war landscape of 1950s London, a new breed of youth emerged from the shadows of austerity and reconstruction. Dubbed the ‘Ton-Up Boys’ for their daring pursuits of speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour on Britain's motorways, and ‘Rockers’ for their leather-clad devotion to rock 'n' roll and café racing, these young rebels embodied a raw, adrenaline-fueled defiance. Motorcycles like Triumphs and Nortons weren't just machines, they were symbols of freedom, speed, and a break from the stifling conformity of wartime rationing. Yet, amid societal moral panic, fuelled by clashes with rival Mods and bans from cafés, cinemas, and clubs, an unexpected ally stepped in: the Church of England. Through the 59 Club, the Anglican Church provided a non-judgmental haven that captured the essence of English youth culture, blending faith, fellowship, and the roar of engines. The 59 Club's story began in 1959, not in a smoky café or roadside diner, but within the walls of St Mary of Eton church in East London. Founded by Curate John Oates as a youth club under the Church of England's auspices, it was initially a modest effort to engage local teenagers with music, games, and community, deliberately shedding the ‘stuffy’ image of traditional church fellowships. The name ‘59 Club’ reflected its fresh start in that year, aiming to attract young people regardless of their church attendance or background. The pivotal shift came in 1962 when Reverend Bill Shergold, a motorcycle enthusiast, took the helm of the club's emerging motorcycle section. Inspired by a visit to the infamous Ace Café, a notorious hub for Rockers, Shergold donned a leather jacket, rode his own bike, and extended an invitation to these marginalised youths for a church service tailored to motorcyclists. The response was overwhelming. Rockers arrived en masse, some even wheeling their bikes into the church for blessings, drawing national media attention and cementing the club's place in subcultural lore. Under Shergold's leadership – often affectionately called ‘Father Bill’ – the club ballooned into the world's largest motorcycle organisation, boasting over 20,000 members by the late 1960s. Activities expanded beyond spiritual services to include ride-outs to events like the Dragon Rally and Isle of Man TT, table tennis, billiards, jukebox dances, and even sub-aqua diving. The club's badge became an iconic symbol of Rocker identity, worn proudly on leather jackets worldwide. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat set the 59 Club apart was its non-judgmental ethos, rooted in Anglican principles of inclusivity and compassion. At a time when Rockers and Ton-Up Boys were vilified as delinquents – banned from public spaces and scapegoated for youth violence – the church offered unconditional acceptance. There were no dress codes, no probationary periods, and no exclusions based on bike type or personal style. Membership was open to all, male and female, fostering a sense of belonging for those from troubled or underprivileged backgrounds. Shergold embodied this approach, acting as a ‘father figure’ many members lacked, officiating weddings, christenings, and providing guidance without proselytising. By embedding himself in their world – riding alongside them and hosting club nights dubbed ‘The Vic's Caff’ – he captured the spirit of English youth: a blend of rebellion, camaraderie, and the thrill of the open road. This wasn't just tolerance, it was active engagement, channelling youthful energy into positive outlets like community rides and charity events, countering the era's moral panics and proving that faith could thrive amid grease and gasoline. The club's influence extended far beyond London, inspiring global sections and preserving the café racer culture. It demonstrated how the Church of England could adapt to societal shifts, using motorcycles as a metaphor for life's journey – fast, risky, but navigable with community support. Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the Anglican Church's approach to youth outreach has evolved into something more structured and conventional, unlikely to birth a modern equivalent of the 59 Club. But the 59 Club is still going strong, even in Australia. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ould the Anglican Church in Australia embrace youth culture in this way today? The church faces internal challenges that have made it more risk averse. And not just debates over sexuality, declining and ageing congregations, and trying to survive amid increasing secularisation. Things like acknowledgements of country before a church service have seen people walk out. The burdensome requirements to undertake diversity and other mandated training before being able to help with morning tea or read the Scriptures excludes many from contributing to their local church. Aside from liability concerns and the inherent dangers of high-speed rides or café meetups, youth culture has also transformed. But the church today is increasingly focused on diversity as a vehicle for conformity, Procrustes’ ‘ir44on bed’ if you will. Today's adolescents grapple with digital pressures, mental health issues, and environmental concerns rather than post-war rebellion. Motorcycles symbolise niche hobbies, not widespread defiance. Further, perceptions of church hypocrisy, boredom, or irrelevance further alienate them, pushing outreach toward accessible, low-risk formats like online groups or wellbeing workshops. While outliers like biker ministries exist in other denominations, the Church of England lacks evidence of similar edgy initiatives, favouring structured growth over Shergold's leather-jacket evangelism. It’s a real shame as Anglo culture and its inherent manliness is being shunned, turning many young men in particular into wimps or otherwise radicalised by wannabe hyper-masculine blowhards parading as men. If only the Anglican Church could return to its former years of glory in ministering to our misguided youth. The Gentleman Rider, perhaps? The 59 Club remains active today as a global charity, with loose ties to the Anglican Church, celebrating anniversaries at cathedrals and upholding its inclusive ethos. Yet, its origins highlight a bygone era when the Anglican Church dared to meet youth on their turf, non-judgmentally harnessing the spirit of motorcycles and rebellion for good. In a more cautious age, such audacity feels distant. Perhaps that's a call for revival, reminding us that faith thrives when it rides with the rebels.

The post Leather-Jacket Evangelism first appeared on Quadrant.

The Boxing Day Shoot

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 17:38:53 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap] was not enthusiastic about going to the Boxing Day shoot. I’d had a wonderful Christmas Day with my wife and two small children and did not want to drive down to Sussex to kill a few pheasants, particularly as it was freezing cold and the sky had that leaden look which threatens snow. But the Boxing Day shoot was a tradition held every year by the man who at the time was my best client and I felt I couldn’t miss it.

I am not a heavy drinker, even during the so-called Festive Season, and maybe I felt rather smug looking at the assembled shots—mostly local farmers—as I arrived an hour and a half later. It seemed as if they all had hangovers from Christmas Day, including my host, John, who emerged from his farmhouse aiming kicks at his gun dog, which was always a bad sign because he was really rather fond of it.

From our November 2017 issue. Click here to subscribe

Anyhow, after the usual enforced bonhomie and greetings of “Happy Christmas” or “Happy Boxing Day” we walked to the first drive. It was down a narrow path to a meadow in front of a wood at the back of the farmhouse so we were unable to take the Land Rovers and had to walk in single file. The beaters had already made their way to the other end of the wood by a series of lanes, sitting on a trailer hitched to the back of John’s tractor.

No sooner had the beaters started to beat and the first few pheasants were emerging from the wood than it began to snow with snowflakes the size of two-pound coins. Within a minute it was a blizzard. There was a great deal of bellowing from my host to the gamekeeper who was leading the beaters to “stop” but he probably couldn’t hear him. John then shouted to the guns, “We’d better pack up and get under cover.” And there was a somewhat undignified rush back down the narrow path of men and gun dogs.

“Bloody weather!” John kept repeating when we were all in the barn next to the farmhouse, shaking the snow from our coats and hats. “Well, it doesn’t look like clearing so I suppose we’d better pack it in. Bloody weather forecast was wrong as usual—said a bit of light snow midday. You’d better all make it back home before it gets any worse. Scott, my keeper, will organise the beaters getting home. They’re all local lads. I suppose I’d better pay them for a full day even though they only did a few minutes!” Then, turning to me, “I don’t know where this leaves you, Brian. I don’t think you’ll ever make it back to London. You’d better stay here until it clears up a bit.”

So, taking off my wet boots, cap and shooting jacket I followed John into the farmhouse kitchen which was fitted with all the latest domestic appliances among its old oak beams.

“Deirdre, where are you?” bellowed John.

Deirdre was John’s third wife and I knew they were not exactly getting on well.

Deirdre was in the sitting room, it appeared from a muffled reply. “Stay here, Brian,” said John. “I’ll have a quiet word with her.”

I heard, “Shoot’s off. They’ve all gone home before the snow gets too thick, apart from Brian.” He then closed the door and I could hear the sounds of a heated argument. At one stage I heard Deirdre shout, “I’ve done enough yesterday.”

However, after a few more minutes Deirdre emerged with a broad smile on her face and arms outstretched to greet me effusively.

“Well, Brian, you’re stuck with us it seems. You must stay the night.”

Deirdre was a very attractive woman of about thirty-five. John was nearly sixty. She’d been one of his assistants in the vast antiques warehouse he ran nearby which was his main business. The farm was somewhere to live, and it had certain tax advantages.

“God, I could do with a drink,” said John. “Have we got any champagne left over from yesterday?”

“I expect so, John. Even eight of your most bibulous friends didn’t get through three dozen bottles.”

So John opened the first bottle of champagne and we started drinking. I looked at my watch. It was only half past eleven. I phoned my wife and explained that I was stuck. She didn’t seem too pleased and said it wasn’t snowing very hard in London.

I observed John and Deirdre as they sat side-by-side on the sofa consuming three or four glasses of champagne to every one that I had. Deirdre looked very young and pretty. Her dark hair was expensively coiffured into a long bob. She had on close-fitting jeans, fashionable boots and a low-cut green silk blouse. John, who had on his heavy stockings and shooting breeches, Tattersall shirt and gilet, looked exactly what he was—a balding, sixty-year-old overweight heavy drinker. He had, however, a great deal of business sense and was a first-class antiques dealer.

“Do put some more wood on the fire, John. It’s awfully cold,” Deirdre kept saying.

I thought it might be a good idea if she put on a thick jumper over her blouse, but it might have spoiled the visual effect.

“I think I’d better make some cold turkey sandwiches to sop up some of this champagne,” Deirdre said after about an hour of desultory chatter.

I’d rather forgotten about the time and was feeling rather sleepy with the champagne and the heat from the fire.

“Would you like to come and help me, Brian? The housekeeper’s got the day off because she had such a lot to do yesterday.”

I was glad to get into the kitchen, which was decidedly less stuffy than the living room with that huge fire blazing in the inglenook.

“Could you please carve a few thin slices off the remains of the turkey which I’ll get out of the pantry? It’s a man’s job and John’s drunk so much champagne he’s looking comatose. Anyhow, Brian, I’m glad for a few moments on our own as I want to talk to you.” She came and stood very closely in front of me. “Look,” she said, “what’s the state of John’s business?”

“Ah, I’m not really able to tell you.”

“Come on, Brian. You’re his accountant and I’m his wife. Am I not entitled to know? I have my suspicions that all is not well, but he won’t talk to me about it.”

“I don’t think I can go into details,” I said, starting to carve bits off the turkey.

“So you won’t tell me? That means things are bad, doesn’t it?”

“This is all very difficult for me, Deirdre, you must realise. John made me promise that I would not talk to anyone about the financing arrangements he’s making.”

“Well, I’m not just anyone.”

“He specifically asked me not to discuss the matter with you.”

“I see!” Deirdre’s eyes were blazing as she sliced her home-made loaf and started to spread the slices with the butter she’d been softening on the top of the Aga. She then stared at me enigmatically while she instructed me to put the bits of turkey on the bread.

When we took the plates through to the sitting room John was asleep. “Wake up, John. Here are the sandwiches.”

John sleepily munched his way through two sandwiches, had another glass of champagne and then went to sleep again.

Deirdre went to the window and looked out at the garden.

“There must be about a foot of snow at least. The flower beds have disappeared. It’s all so soporific. It must be the weather, not to mention the champagne, but like John I feel sleepy. Would you like to have a snooze too, Brian? I’m going upstairs to lie down. Would you like to do the same? I’ll show you to your room.”

At first I did not suspect anything. I was feeling very dozy and must have consumed three or four glasses of champagne; far more than I would usually have.

“Look, along here. It’s quite a warm room and I’ll turn the radiator up for you.”

“Oh very nice,” I said as we went into the bedroom.

She closed the door behind her and brushed against me.

“You know, I’ve always liked you, Brian. You’re so dependable,” she whispered as she pushed herself on top of me on the bed.

I should not have succumbed. But that silk blouse was so inviting. And so we started to make love. Suddenly she gripped me so hard that I almost shouted out with the pain.

“All I want to know is whether John has still got his millions? Tell me! Oh, please tell me. I’m very worried about him.”

I should have broken things off at that stage, assuming I could have persuaded her to let go of me. But I was very aroused.

“No, no,” I said. “Basically, everything is all right. It’s just a serious cashflow crisis. Too much stock and not enough sales.”

“Oh thank you, Brian. That does ease my mind.” She released her hold on me, smiled, stroked my face and said, “Please carry on.”

After she’d gone, I got under the duvet in my underwear and tried to sleep. But it was difficult. I felt guilty. I’d betrayed John, my wife and my children all in a few moments.

I don’t know how long afterwards it was, but there was a banging on the door and Deirdre shouted, “I’ve made some supper if you’re interested.”

“This is my Boxing Day evening special,” she said, when we were sitting round the kitchen table. “Kedgeree, ad lib, as change from turkey, plum pudding and mince pies.”

“It’s wonderful,” said John, who seemed to be much brighter.

“The pub will be very miffed that none of us turned up for the shoot lunch. I suppose they’ll want me to pay for it. I’ll have to speak to them. Jolly good fish pie, my dear.”

“No, John, it’s kedgeree!”

“Sorry. Oh God, the sheep!!” He stood up. “I’d forgotten all about them. They’ll need some hay, poor things. Won’t be able to get to the grass. I’ll have to get some to them.” He tore to the kitchen door and opened it and was greeted with a flurry of snowflakes and blackness. He came back and sat down. “It’ll have to be first thing in the morning. Will you be prepared to help me, Brian? It looks as though we’ll have to get the tractor started. The snow’s too deep for the Land Rover.”

So, as soon as it was light, the next morning we did manage to get the tractor going and then uncoupled the trailer that had carried the beaters and attached to it something that John called a transporter box.

“Never get through the snow with a trailer,” said John.

Then we put as many bales of hay in the transporter box as it would hold. “That should keep them going for the time being,” said John.

All this manual effort (and bales of hay are very heavy) was accompanied by a great deal of cursing and swearing from John, who no doubt had his refinancing arrangements in the back of his mind.

“Got nearly a hundred ewes in a field not far away. I think we’ll make it. Otherwise we shall have to carry the hay bales to them one by one—God help us!”

It was somehow very refreshing to my soul or whatever you like to call it to struggle through the snow to feed the sheep on that cold winter morning. They stood huddled in a corner of the field with snow covering their backs and bleating fitfully from time to time. As soon as the first bale of hay was put down they made such a rush for it they nearly knocked me off my feet. All this feeding of the sheep took well over an hour but Deirdre cooked us a huge breakfast when we got in.

She was looking very happy. Neither she nor John appeared to be the worse for the amount of champagne they had consumed. No doubt they were both used to it.

After I’d finished my breakfast I had a headache and wanted to get home as soon as possible. Fortunately by midday the snow ploughs had been at work and I was able to get my car up the lane and onto the main road which had been completely cleared, and made my way back to London.

I tried to forget all about my encounter with Deirdre.

But then in the New Year I heard the news that John and she were divorcing. I was in my fifth-floor office in Trafalgar Square when I heard about it and I immediately had terrible contractions in my stomach.

So that was why she was so badly wanting to know about John’s wealth and gripped me so hard to get me to tell her. Now I was probably going to be dragged into the divorce on the grounds of my adultery with her. Oh Lord, what a folly of mine on that non-event of the Boxing Day shoot. My wife would want to divorce me and the family would break up and my life would be ruined, I thought. I needed to get out and breathe some fresh air. I walked quickly to the lift, got in it and pushed the button for the ground floor, but as it descended the lift made a grinding noise and stopped suddenly between the third and second floors. The contractions in my stomach became almost unbearable. I had never felt so claustrophobic! I pressed the alarm button and the ground floor button alternately and repeatedly. I thought I was going to faint and be sick all at the same time. I sat down on the floor and put my head between my legs and I think I must have uttered a prayer or two. Then just as suddenly as it had stopped, the lift started again but went upwards back to the fifth floor. I staggered out of the lift and went to the toilets.

“You okay, Brian? You look a bit pale,” said one of my partners, who was just leaving.

“Yes,” I said. “I just got stuck in the lift.”

“Bloody thing’s always going wrong. You’ve heard about your client, John the antique dealer, getting divorced again? I used to look after him at one time. This one’s divorcing him on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour, I understand. The last time it was about his other liaisons; but he’s probably beyond all that what with what I gather is his alcoholic intake. You’ve met this one, Deirdre, have you? A real box of tricks, as they say!”

“Yes, I do know her slightly,” I said. I splashed my face with cold water, walked down the corridor, went into my office and sat down at my desk.

“Unreasonable behaviour!” The sense of relief was enormous and I breathed deeply for sixty seconds. But at the end of sixty seconds the thought came to me that you never could tell with divorces. The question of my adultery with Deirdre could still come up. I was not safe until the thing was finalised.

I think I then descended into what we used to call at school “a blue funk”. I couldn’t bear to find out what was going on between Deirdre and John about the divorce, although I have no doubt it was common gossip in the office.

About a week later, I got a message from John that he would like me to advise him about various of his assets which might be involved in the divorce settlement. (No doubt to see if he could “hide” any of them.) I really couldn’t face it and sent my assistant, Sidney, to see him, pleading pressure of other work. It was quite convenient, as Sidney had lived near John and commuted to Central London every day.

I had asked Sidney to report to me the next day after his meeting with John. I always arrived at the office early as I lived not far away and I remember sitting at my desk feeling extremely jittery waiting for Sidney to appear.

I must explain about Sidney. Although looking superficially like any young, keen chartered accountant with dark pinstripe suit and horn-rimmed spectacles, he fancied himself as a wit and raconteur.

“Well, how did you get on?” I asked Sidney as we each consumed a cup of black coffee.

“Christ, Brian, she’s trying to squeeze the last drop out of him. Apparently she’s got this very smart woman lawyer acting for her and boy is she giving him a hard time!”

“And how is John coping?”

“He says, ‘Well, it’s only money and I know I’ve been at fault.’ He’s going to have to sell up if it goes on like this. No possibility of protecting any of his assets as far as I can see. Frankly, I feel sorry for the old sod. He’s very popular locally, you know, and generous and friendly. His missus is a flighty bit of goods, I’m told, although I’ve never met her. My own feeling is that if someone could find out that she’s been having a bit of hanky-panky on the side it would help John’s position no end. You’ve never heard anything, have you?”

I could feel my face flushing and I swivelled my chair away from Sidney and gazed out of the window at Nelson and the pigeons.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything.”

When Sidney had gone, I had those terrible stomach pains again. “Why should Sidney ask me that?” I kept saying to myself. There was nothing for it. Blue funk had prevailed! I took a taxi home.

“Gastric flu,” said the doctor.

I lay dripping with sweat in bed in the spare room for several days between bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting. It was almost a week before I felt better.

“I can tell you this now,” my wife said. “Sidney has phoned several times and wanted to come and see you as soon as you were better. He sounded very excited. Says he has lots of news and says you will be interested!”

I didn’t know what to expect, but I supposed I had better hear the news whatever it was.

“Just after I saw you last,” said Sidney, eagerly leaning over my bed, “it all came out. Deirdre had been having an affair with a local farmer for about a year. That put a different complexion on the financial settlement. Retreat of smart lady lawyer. Local farmer decides to leave his wife and four children and go off with Deirdre. Deirdre a bit dubious about it, it is said. Presumably worried about money. However, ever resourceful, Deirdre has apparently also been having on-off doings with a Formula One racing driver who lives in a tax haven somewhere and only visits the UK from time to time. So Deirdre contacts him and offers her exclusive rights in her person for the future. He is delighted and Deirdre promptly goes off to the tax haven with him. Beats any bad soap opera, don’t it?

“No doubt John will divorce her in due course, but in the meantime his money and business are safe and no doubt he’s downing a few glasses in celebration. God, Deirdre must be a hot bit of goods. I wish I’d seen her. What’s she like?”

“A sort of femme fatale, I suppose,” I replied.

“Yes, must be. But, God, Brian, I’m sorry. I forgot to ask you how you are feeling now. You must have had a really nasty time—and still in bed, too!”

“Oh, I definitely feel much better now,” I said. “And I think I will get up this afternoon.”

Hugh Canham lives in London

The post The Boxing Day Shoot first appeared on Quadrant.

Sound Advice from an Unlikely Corner

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 12:12:50 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he Liberal Party after the results of the last federal election is undergoing a period of angst and soul searching about what it stands for and how best to win the next election. The first point to make, based on the ALP’s primary vote of 35% to the Liberal/National’s 32%, is that both major parties are close in terms of voters’ first choice. Unlike the UK’s first past the post system, Australia’s exhaustive preferential system can lead to the situation where a candidate with the most votes, but falling short of 51%, loses as a result of not receiving enough preferences. The second and more significant point when reviewing its platform and the political philosophy underpinning its existence is that the Liberal Party ignores those arguing there is no future in engaging in the battle of ideas represented by the culture wars. Arthur Sinodinos, for example, in the Australian argues, “There’s been too much focus on the culture wars and not enough focus on the bread and butter issues that impact Australians”. Paul Kelly, also in the Australian, argues that as leader Sussan Ley must “hold the Liberals together (and) beat back the extremes of the conservative revolution” on the basis that “most of the conservatives are obsessed about ideology but weak on policy.” Not to be outdone, George Brandis when writing in the Age suggests “The Liberal Party’s hard right is the very mirror image of Labor’s hard Left. Both are equally as toxic to the electorate. Australians, in their wisdom, don’t like political extremes and won’t vote for parties that have been captured by them.” What Sinodinos, Kelly and Brandis ignore is that instead of being a centre-right trope it is Julia Gillard who first used the 'culture war' expression in a speech delivered to the Sydney Institute in March 2003. In her speech, ‘Winning the culture war’, the future prime minister argued Australia was in “the grip of a neo-conservative political correctness that is out of touch with the values of the majority of the Australian people”. She also argued the Left must “muscle up, for the hard task of winning the culture war and creating a new vision for this nation”. Some 22 years later it’s clear not only did the ALP take up Gillard’s challenge but such has been its success that Australian society has been radically transformed. Men self-identifying as women are allowed into women’s prisons. Primary school children are taught boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Even though Australia’s contribution to carbon emissions is only approximately 1.2% and shifting from coal and gas to solar and wind power will have no impact on global emissions, man-made climate change is accepted beyond doubt. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]eenage girls bemoan the fact they cannot have children as they have been convinced the world is about to end. Gas and electricity prices are ever increasing, businesses are going broke and state and federal governments are massively in debt due to misconceived projects like Snowy Mountain 2.0. Instead of migrants assimilating and becoming proud Australians, as a result of cultural-relativism embodied in the concept of multiculturalism our society is fragmenting and increasingly divisided. Melbourne’s Box Hill is now a Chinese enclave, Sydney’s Lakemba a Muslim haven, and anti-Semitism is rampant. In the nation’s schools students are taught a black-armband view of our history, one where the First Fleet is misrepresented as an invasion while Aboriginal culture, history and spirituality is all pervasive, lauded above the unacknowledged strengths and benefits of Western civilisation. In the nation’s universities free speech is under attack, academics who refuse to conform to cultural-left ideology are vilified, the pursuit of beauty, wisdom and truth long ago abandoned in favour of critical theory which sees knowledge is equated with white supremacy and capitalist domination. The situation is so doctrinaire that the ex-ALP leader Bill Shorten in his role as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra now argues “I want universities to be a safe place, not just for progressive ideas but for conservative and progressive ideas to be contested”, and that “they can’t just be bastions for the Left”. Paul Kelly’s accusation that Liberal MPs critical of cultural-left ideology are guilty of embarking on a “conservative revolution”, as well as being nonsense, proves he has no understanding of the political philosophy underpinning conservatism as championed by Edmund Burke and, more recently, Roger Scruton. Both argued conservatism, while embracing change, could never be revolutionary. While cultural Marxism is based on radically overthrowing the status quo through physical violence and infiltrating and overthrowing society’s institutions, conservatives are moderate and committed to evolutionary change. If those condemning conservatives such as Senator Andrew Hastie and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price had read Scruton’s book Conservatism they would also appreciate that Western civilisation is facing an existential crisis -- a crisis caused by cultural-left ideology that calls on centre-right politicians to develop and advocate a “systematic policy of cultural conservatism” based on family, community, national cohesion and stability and Western civilisation’s cultural heritage. Dr Kevin Donnelly is the author of Wake Up To Woke

The post Sound Advice from an Unlikely Corner first appeared on Quadrant.

The Light They Fear

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 07:18:18 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]P[/fusion_dropcap]oliticians love to talk about their commitment to transparency, but only when in opposition. It should mean honesty, openness, timeliness, clarity, and accessibility, all words that lead to accountability and prevent corruption. The thought we could actually see transparency, though, is a cause for panic. The Senate enquiry into the Albanese government's latest “Freedom of Information Amendment Bill,” currently in Parliament, is supported by the Australian Public Service Commission, Services Australia, and the Attorney-General’s department but few others. Proposed changes, to “update” the framework, include the refusal of anonymous FOI requests, expansion of the areas to which applicants will be denied access, refusal of unduly "time-consuming" requests, and further restrictions on release of cabinet documents. In Queensland, ACT and New Zealand, cabinet information is automatically released within 30 days. The first freedom of information legislation was passed in Sweden as far back as 1776 and is part of that country’s constitution. The US legislated similarly in 1966, the measure subsequently being adopted by the states. Unsurprisingly there is no similar legislation in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea. In Australia, the Freedom of Information Act of 1982, required public access to “all federal ministers, departments and public authorities;” it was amended in 2010, with the establishment of an Information Commissioner. The states all have similar legislation. In 2024, the Labor government attempted to limit access to information with its mis- and disinformation (MAD) bill. An attempt to control free speech, it sought to block social media providing information the government considered incorrect while, even worse, exempting the government itself from the legislation. With widespread opposition, the Bill was withdrawn; the latest legislation is another attempt at limiting free speech. There are situations where concealment is necessary, national security being an obvious example. The current difficulty in prising out information about the decision to admit 3000+ Gazan refugees on visitor visas is case study in the dark art of political cloaking. A mere 167 went to the UK, 17 to the US and none at all to neighbors Egypt and Jordan. We know that Tony Burke left his Lakemba electorate to welcome the first planeload at the airport, but his motive is so self-evidently transparent there is no need to consult official documents. The same cannot be said about the ISIS brides, the details of whose returns have been largely concealed for partisan political purposes. The federal government denies responsibility, and all other involved entities refuse to answer questions. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]abor’s current attempts at limiting FOI requests on supposed cost grounds are the opposite of transparency. Under the law, requests are to be processed within 30 days -- a requirement all too often observed in the breach. Of grave concern, the refusal rate for requests has reached 27%, the highest in a decade, the excuse being that the workload is crushing. Funny thing that: the Albanese government is never averse to putting more public servants on the payroll, but not in this instance. Other examples include the Bureau of Meteorology, which has become involved with climate ideology; past temperature records have been “homogenized” to remove supposed outlying results. Obtaining the original records to confirm modifications has proven a lengthy process; one quoted example, from Rutherglen, Victoria, changed a cooling trend of 0.3C to a warming trend of 1.6C, giving the desired impression of greater warming. The current costings of renewable energy programs is another concealment. Minister Bowen repeats his absurd mantra that renewables are the cheapest form of energy whilst failing to reveal as "commercial in confidence" the taxpayer subsidies required. Apart from its cost, an independent report, from Rainforest Reserve Australia has now revealed the scale of environmental devastation his plan will cause even as Bowen refuses to release his department’s own figures. Meanwhile, the poor public is faced with the reality of increased energy costs, and yet more subsidies, soon to be followed by blackouts. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme was due to open this year, latest revised date 2028, with costs rising sixfold, from $2 billion to $12 billion. Include transmission costs and the latest forecast is $30 billion. A triumph of green ideology over reality, the business plan seemed to consist solely of the assertion that "not undertaking the 'clean energy' transition is almost certainly higher”. Without access to the actual numbers from government sources it is difficult to discern how and where Malcolm Turnbull's grandiose folly went so wrong. His other great money sink, the National Broadband Network, is yet one more example of political arrogance trumping business acumen. Begun under Labor it was assumed by then communications minister Turnbull. While FOI requests often produce heavily redacted costings, we do know this solid gold failure has cost the taxpayer at least $31 billion so far, making it one of the highest-cost, lowest-speed networks in the world. Meanwhile, with the NBN losing on average $135 million a month, Elon Musk's satellite-based Starlink goes from strength to strength. Were Turnbull a racecourse tout rather than a bitter ghost the bookies would love him. (editors note: since January of this year Quadrant Online has been produced solely via Starlink and there has never been a problem. It has worked just as well in cities as beneath a shade cloth beside the Oodnadatta Track, in WA's remote Bungle Bungles and, today, from a desert camp site 160km east of Exmouth.) [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]L[/fusion_dropcap]abor's dependence on its union financial supporter is infamous. It took years of exposure of rorts, corruption, and crime before the CFMEU was put into administration – everyone looked the other way. It is no coincidence that, just as the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal looks at corruption on current government contracts, the CFMEU goes on strike on the Westgate Tunnel project; the Victorian Government now wishes to block the report’s release. But that is not unusual; Labor’s involvement with unions, at state and federal level, is routinely concealed. Donations from business must be listed, but not the “rivers of gold” coming from unions, courtesy of workers superannuation funds. The Australian Prudential Regulator launched an investigation to determine if these payments were in the members' interests, but Labor has now removed the requirement to reveal them. Corruption in high places is a sad reality of human nature, epitomized by the phrase “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Examples abound at all levels of government, from both sides of politics, whether for personal gain or political advantage. Notorious examples, including Russ Hinze and Gordon Nuttall in Queensland, Brian Burke in WA, and Eddie Obeid in NSW, are just the tip of a sizeable iceberg. Overall, Australia fares adequately in Transparency International’s 2024 index, coming in at tenth out of 180 countries; its score of 77 (maximum 100) for public corruption, has improved from 73. As well as federal, there are numerous state investigative bodies now established, but access to information is still restricted. The prospective Labor restrictions will almost certainly see us pushed further down the list.

The post The Light They Fear first appeared on Quadrant.

Policy Success, Political Failure

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:33:03 +1100

The lesson of the Turnbull years is that policy reform cannot be achieved if a government is in turmoil and vulnerable

The post Policy Success, Political Failure first appeared on Quadrant.

The Offence of ‘Reckless Speech’

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 05:44:06 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]t is becoming ever harder not to be alarmed by the efforts of governments, their departments and representative bodies to crimp public debate in order to restrict both information and discourse surrounding politically sensitive topics. Consider the words of new AFP boss, Commissioner Krissy Barrett, who has stated the Australian Federal Police (AFP) will be forming specialised strike teams to chase down offenders “who fall short of strictly defined terrorism offences.”[1] At the forefront of the issues discussed by the new Commissioner are terrorists, which, it need not be said, are a problem, and the full force of the law should be used to protect Australians from such people and organisations. Nothing in this article will detract from acknowledging these efforts and the harm genuine hatred can cause. However, the problem arises when there are broad terms and characteristics to depict the modern forms of ‘terrorists’ suggested by Commissioner Barrett's words. This is especially the case when ill-considered legislation -- specifically the varying ‘hate speech laws’ in Australia -- often groups people as radicals or terrorists based on differing opinions or for their freedom to discuss these opinions via the implied right of political communication. The implied right of political communication in Australia was upheld as a mechanism to hold the government and its representatives accountable through a decision of the High Court of Australia. In Attorney-General (SA) v Corporation of the City of Adelaide (2013) HCA 3, Chief Justice French stated (emphasis added):

Freedom of speech is a long-established common law freedom … linked to the proper functioning of representative democracies … (emphasis added) It is never more powerful than when it involves the discussion and criticism of public authorities and institutions, be they legislative, executive or judicial.

‘Hate speech’ has seemingly formed a core focus of recent Australian government lawmaking, as well as finding its way into the objectives of the new AFP task forces due to the problems surrounding “social cohesion” over the past few years. With the ambiguous nature of the announced strike teams by the Commissioner and the lack of clarity surrounding advocacy for continued amendments to the Criminal Code, it is essential to exercise our implied right and freedom of speech to be critical of public institutions that seek to uphold flawed law which can be used as a tool to silence political dissent. In an article I co-authored with Quadrant contributor Augusto Zimmermann in March 2025[2], discussion was raised surrounding the authoritarian motives behind hate speech laws. We contemplated serious questions in regard to the efficacy of legislation that restricts speech in the name of protecting individuals, and groups by extension, with a disregard for free speech and open discourse. To illustrate, let me briefly recap what began on January 19, 2025, when a caravan containing a quantity of explosives and anti-Semitic material was brought to authorities' attention. By the admission two months later of new AFP Commissioner Barrett, at that time Deputy Commissioner of National Security, the 'caravan bomb' was not a terrorist plot but a crude hoax [3] which investigators identified “almost immediately” as “fabricated”. Yet it was not until two months later, on March 19, that Barrett went before the news cameras to publicly and officially admit as much. This how she began her statement:

This is the first time the AFP has publicly provided details about Operation Kissinger, which is an investigation into those responsible for a caravan found with explosives and antisemitic material in Dural on 19 January, 2025.

Within hours of the caravan being found, any perceived threat was mitigated, and the investigation was referred to the NSW Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT), which includes the AFP, NSW Police, ASIO and the NSW Crime Commission.

Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the JCTT believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot – essentially a criminal con job.

Yet despite being imediately recognised as a scam, the caravan hoax sparked the rushed drafting and passage in NSW of the Crimes Amendment (Inciting Racial Hatred) Act 2025 , which was passed at 4am and granted assent on March 2.[5] Two weeks after it became law, Barrett announced it was all a giant furphy. "We believe the person pulling the strings wanted changes to their criminal status," Barrett told the press, "but maintained a distance from their scheme and hired alleged local criminals to carry out parts of their plan."[4] The sequence of events from January to March 2025 demonstrated the swift ability to implement disruptive legislation that serves as a weapon to silence ‘harmful’ speech, with little regard for the preservation of fundamental rights and components of democracy within Australia. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]N[/fusion_dropcap]ow the new Commissioner is hinting at legislative reforms aimed at strengthening the perceived gaps she views are currently within the Criminal Code. It is unsettling that she has not indicated just what she believes is missing or what might improve protections against legitimate ‘hate speech’. Free speech and political communication are rights entrenched within the Australian common law system via the High Court of Australia. It is therefore both obvious and of the utmost importance that rash decisions are not made with regard to the enforcement of ‘hate speech’ legislation. This is especially the case as the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Act 2025 contains the threshold element of ‘recklessness’[6] to establish an offence. The fault element of recklessness lowers the criteria it superseded under the Criminal Code, which required ‘intention’. The concerning difference between 'recklessness' and 'intention' should be obvious: in order to prove an offence of ‘hate speech’ under the new laws, it need only be accepted that an alleged offender should have known their actions could result in harm as perceived by their interlocutor. This is a subjective and dangerously vague perspective. Imagine, for example, a debate between two people of different religious, racial, ethnic or political backgrounds in which one of the participants, or even a member of that party's group, felt the expression of adverse opinions amounted to sentiments that ‘urge violence’. This is now possible under the new and lower thresholds of satisfying the elements of ‘hate speech’ under the Criminal Code. Of course, genuine hate speech that is used to incite violence or threaten someone should be targeted by the new AFP strike teams. Denying the fact that people can be harmed or hurt via speech, and what it incites, is absurd and I do not condone such speech. However, the current ambiguous thresholds to satisfy ‘hate speech will, sooner or later, likely result in the weaponisation of legislation to hinder political debate and/or silence political dissent, which will only harm democracy. The limitation of discourse, especially political discourse, has never ended with the assertion of truth. With the implementation of the new strike teams by the AFP Commissioner we could see the targeting of larger bodies or institutions that inherently involve public debate surrounding contentious issues. It is essential that free speech and the ability to engage in political communications be protected in Australia to preserve our democratic process. The strike teams must focus on genuine hate speech. Otherwise, this could lead to the prosecution of speech that can be used as a weapon to silence dissent and further political agendas. As noted by US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the “remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence”. [1] Olivia Caisley, New AFP Boss Warns Hate Crime Laws May Need to Be Strengthened Further (Online, 7 October 2025) ABC News <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-08/afp-commissioner-krissy-barrett-national-security-warning/105848960>. [2] Alexander Hatzikalimnios and Augusto Zimmermann, The Political Hysteria behind ‘Hate Speech Laws’ (Online, 15 March 2025) The Spectator Australia <https://www.spectator.com.au/2025/03/the-political-hysteria-behind-hate-speech-laws/>. [3] Sam Nichols, Police Say Dural Caravan Filled with Explosives Was ‘Fabricated Terrorist Plot’ (Online, 10 March 2025) ABC News <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-10/nsw-police-strike-force-pearl-caravan-dural-arrests/105032876>. [4] ‘One Nation Stands against Reckless Legislation Threatening Free Speech’, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (Online, 7 February 2025) <https://www.onenation.org.au/one-nation-defends-free-speech>. [5] Max Maddison, Hate Speech Laws Rammed through NSW Parliament within Hours (Online, 18 February 2025) The Sydney Morning Herald <https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/hate-speech-laws-rammed-through-nsw-parliament-within-hours-20250218-p5ld3z.html>. [6] ‘5.4 Recklessness, Attorney-General’s Department (Online) <https://www.ag.gov.au/crime/publications/commonwealth-criminal-code-guide-practitioners-draft/part-22-elements-offence/division-5-fault-elements/54-recklessness>.

The post The Offence of ‘Reckless Speech’ first appeared on Quadrant.

Weimar on the Derwent

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:15:00 +1100

Dark Mofo thrives on controversy. In 2016 art students protested when their school was surrounded by poster artworks saying “Your work is shit” and last year, as the ABC reported, one event ‘included mock crucifixions set to music, culminating in a frenzied squabble by blood-soaked participants writhing in the entrails from a freshly slaughtered bull’

The post Weimar on the Derwent first appeared on Quadrant.

Two Decades of ABC Filth

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 18:51:12 +1100

If you are apt to be shocked by obscenity and lame ‘humour’, especially when underwritten by the taxpayer dollar, don’t read this

The post Two Decades of ABC Filth first appeared on Quadrant.

Dear Prime Minister…

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:09:46 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]D[/fusion_dropcap]ear Prime Minister, The purpose of this letter is to make clear the gross damage you have done to Australia and to ask you to go immediately to the Governor-General with both your resignation and the advice that you seek an immediate election. The damage you have caused is almost beyond listing. You have encouraged anti-Semitism and made Jewish Australians unsafe within their homes, schools, and synagogues. You have done this with the express purpose of currying favour for your Labor Party among Muslims. Ministers Wong and Burke share your shame. Further, you have mangled our immigration policies with the dual and devious purpose of increasing the numbers of Labor voters in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne while simultaneously confecting the impression of GDP growth when per-capita wealth has declined. All this has added to community friction, and that will take years to heal. Your energy minister, Bowen, has shown the most remarkable lack of understanding of our needs while exploiting the emotions of ill-informed climate hysterics and the greed of rent-seekers. Australians face job losses due to increasingly unmanageable bills as industries, the few that remain, shut down. Just enough of our deluded, 'luxury belief' middle class has bought into the fantasy to sustain this crusade of ruin to sustain your political advantage. That is all your Labor Party ever wants -- not the good of the country but the political advantage, be it at whatever cost. All that is now beginning to come undone, but the cost has been horrendous and will only get worse unless energy sanity is restored. When you resign, take Marles with you, but first order him to apologise to the nation for failing to get us ready to confront obvious security threats. Remind him how humiliated we were as a nation to have unchallenged Chinese war-ships circle our continent, firing their guns at will as Beijing thumbed its arrogant nose at us all. The Treasurer, Mr Albanese, make sure to take him with you. He needs to apologise for spending our money with the ignoble intention of garnering more votes from the dependent and emasculated welfare recipients whose ranks Labor so enthusiastically swells. Actually, Mr Albanese, you had better hire a bus for the short trip to Yarralumla and reserve seats for the bloated elites you have done so much to sustain and fatten. The university bludgers, for instance, so intent on destroying genuine and worthwhile tertiary education with legions of ill-equipped foreign students and overseas money. Make sure to reserve seats for the Australian Human Rights Commission troughers, the curdled cream of our pseudo-intellectual elites, who can't or won't define the word 'woman'. It had better be a very big bus because the race humbuggers also deserve a one-way to Centrelink for misdirecting our taxes -- the billions of dollars we naively thought was helping those in real need. Don’t forget the arts poseurs who divide us with their race and gender fables, take them too. Once you have handed your letter of resignation, front the Australian public and tell us why you have resigned. Tell them you have never done a single thing without seeking political advantage, consequences for the nation be damned, and that you now realise this has been very wrong. Tell your rusted-on Labor supporters how you have played them for suckers, and how they also need to have a good hard think about themselves. And spare a special word for your political opponents in the loyal Opposition, where too many have played the same game, embraced the same rules and betrayals on which you have built your own career. You know the ones I'm talking about -- the spineless sorts who look only to focus groups, pollsters and the forked tongues of spin doctors. Even more than you, they need to go, for their moral bankruptcy in proclaiming one set of principles while observing their obverse is even more appalling. Lastly, appeal to the few who can turn our nation around. Those who have strength of character, who have wisdom based on experience and solid educations imbued with the guiding principles of liberty, property rights and free speech. Those with some spiritual guidelines. Ask them to step forward and seek the approval of Australians at the ballot box, then to take up the burden of genuine leadership you have so evidently shrugged and shed. Sincerely, Paul Mabarrack with Roger Franklin

The post Dear Prime Minister… first appeared on Quadrant.

Teaching Our Children a Sanitised Version of Islam

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 06:14:25 +1100

We must ask if Islam as it is doctrinally implemented should continue to be treated only as a religion and not a political system

The post Teaching Our Children a Sanitised Version of Islam first appeared on Quadrant.

Out of Love with the Economist

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:40:00 +1100

The magazine’s flirtation with sharia, its Obama crush, climate hysterics and doubts about free speech can’t be forgotten or forgiven

The post Out of Love with the Economist first appeared on Quadrant.

Once a Nation, now just Postcodes

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 17:16:05 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]or most of our species’ history, human life was organised around small, mobile bands and village communities. Before civilisation, human groups were rule-governed but local: kinship, ritual and customary norms regulated life; enforcement rested with elders, headmen or chiefs, and ritual specialists. What they lacked were the scalable institutions that could store surplus, coordinate strangers, and transmit complex authority over distance and time. Culture: the shared language, memory, ritual, and web of meanings, exists wherever human life takes root. Yet civilisation is a transcendent order of organisation: a durable political, legal, and moral architecture capable of scaling cooperation beyond kin, tribe, and place. Where culture binds small groups through custom, civilisation binds strangers through law. Civilisation arises when power is abstracted, codified, and institutionalized, when rule shifts from the personal to the impersonal, from the gesture to the statute, from the oath to the record. It is the invention of continuity itself: a system for transmitting authority, obligation, and knowledge across generations. The passage from custom to code, from village to city, from barter and gift-exchange to bureaucracy and taxation marks not merely a gigantic leap but a transformation in the structure of human existence: the birth of a collective memory that outlives its makers. Civilisations rise, fall, adapt, and fragment -- the recurring rhythm of human history. Some are defeated from without; others fracture from within when unity of purpose, belief, and identity fails. Nations are the essential form of collective identity that arises from civilisation: they rise and fall with the faith that first gave them shape. Australia now shows the marks of civilisational decay; left unimpeded and undefended, it will fall. A civilisation’s strength lies less in weapons or wealth than in its founding culture, the moral architecture that allows strangers to trust one another, obey laws, and endure hardship together. Neglect that foundation, and the walls will crumble, however grand the edifice. Prosperity tests conviction. Success breeds comfort, comfort indifference, indifference doubt. The more a civilisation achieves, the less it recalls why it achieved it. The barbarians do not destroy Rome; Rome decays until the barbarians simply walk in. Institutions are only as strong as the consensus that sustains them. When that consensus dissolves, when language is emptied, history rewritten, and virtue mocked as privilege, the foundations crack. Civilisations seldom fall by conquest; more often they die by ignorance of internal corrosion. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap] healthy civilisation tolerates diversity, but it is held together by something older and stronger than tolerance: a shared conviction about what must not be lost. When that conviction fades, a society turns upon itself, attacking its own institutions, despising its history, and welcoming those who would dismantle it. History teaches that civilisations end in only two ways: defeat from without or fracture from within. Yet conquest need not finish a nation; where the civilisational core holds, a people can outlast defeat and carry on the fight. History offers countless instances of exceptionalism rooted in a civilisational core of unity: Finland in the Winter War, outgunned yet immovable; France in 1940, conquered but unbroken, where the Resistance sustained a nation underground until it could rise again; Britain in the Blitz, a city of civilians holding the line night after night; Poland twice over—first the clandestine Home Army sustaining an underground state, later Solidarity dismantling a one-party regime by disciplined non-cooperation; the Baltic “Singing Revolution,” where massed voices became a constitutional force; and today, Ukraine, where horizontal civil society and territorial defence have turned size and distance into endurance. Different methods: armed defence, underground governance, civic morale, non-violent mass action but the same root: a shared national frame strong enough to turn ordinary people into an extraordinary polity. External defeat is merely the visible form of a civilisation’s end, a death that often occurs long before the walls are breached. It comes when the material power of a civilisation no longer matches its moral strength. History’s empires, Persian, Greek, Roman, Ottoman, British, each possessed armies, wealth, and learning beyond their rivals, yet in turn surrendered dominion to younger, hungrier, more certain peoples. Some fell by invasion, others by abdication. The British Empire died not in battle but in disbelief, relinquishing power as it lost faith in its own civilising mission. Defeat is always preceded by the surrender of the spirit: the quiet, corrosive sense that one’s own civilisation no longer deserves to win. In Australia today we struggle to muster even peacetime recruits to the armed forces. The question is no longer whether we could defend our civilisation, but whether we still believe it is worth defending. The answer was obvious in another time, to another generation. Internal fracture is the invisible form of defeat. It begins when citizens cease to see themselves as part of a shared inheritance. The loss of cultural confidence does not announce itself with banners; it creeps in through cynicism, self-hatred and the cult of division. Language fractures, families disintegrate, rituals vanish. People begin to think of rights without duties, heritage without gratitude, and progress without purpose. In such conditions, a civilisation no longer requires an invader; it dismantles itself. Every historical ruin tells the same story: a people who no longer knew what they stood for, who mistook indulgence for freedom and cynicism for wisdom. The barbarian is always waiting at the gate, but it is decadence that opens it. Civilisations do not die by force alone; they die when they forget what they were built to defend. A people cannot outsource their civilisation to government. When Rome fell, it was not the mob that first decayed but the state itself, its Senates vain, its bureaucracy swollen, its laws multiplied until the public no longer believed they served the common good. Institutions reflect strength; they do not create it. When conviction fades, law becomes ritual and government theatre. This is truer still in a modern democracy. The state draws power from its people and mirrors their virtue or decay. When belief wanes, democracy magnifies weakness: bureaucracy replaces conviction, regulation substitutes for trust, and politics becomes the management of grievance, not the guardianship of order. A civilisation can survive bad kings and foreign wars; it cannot survive a state that forgets the purpose for which it governs. Freedom and decency are not natural states but rewards of discipline and belief. When a founding culture is scorned and its heroes remembered only to be condemned, statues torn down, the descent has already begun, and in our age, government itself leads the way, mistaking surrender for compassion and self-criticism for virtue. Renewal and revival begin when a civilisation remembers itself, when it learns again to say we with pride, not apology. If the West, and Australia in particular, wishes to endure, it must recover the courage that built it: the conviction that truth exists, duty ennobles, and government is only the steward of civilisation, never its source. Excellence, Identity, and the Unravelling of the Common Rituals Only in the modern West has the idea of multiculturalism emerged, this attempt to sustain a civilisation with no single dominant culture. Post–World War II Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia embraced immigration and diversity not only as demographic facts but as civic ideals. This is without precedent. No other civilisation, not China, not India, not Japan, not the Islamic world, not Africa, has attempted to make multiculturalism the foundation of its civic order. Everywhere else, the dominant culture remains explicit and enforced. Only the West insists that it can thrive without cultural primacy and all evidence points to its complete failure. Australia’s civilisation corrosion and collapse is in plain sight. The tragedy is not defeat but the decision to fall. What follows is not a catalogue of enemies but of choices, some imposed, most chosen: the preference for identity over excellence, the hollowing of common rituals, and the surrender of the foundation culture that once held us together. Labor built the creed; the Liberals looked away. Every structural concession, from racial division to bureaucratic censorship, was legislated by one and left untouched by the other. The revolution began with Labor, but it was consolidated under Liberal indifference. Policy became orthodoxy; orthodoxy became taboo. The progressive advances, the conservative adjusts, and the nation shifts one notch further from its core. The cycle is not Left versus Right but action versus acquiescence: Labor dismantles, Liberal sleeps. Thus reform becomes ratchet, always fracturing, never reversed. Our shared rituals are being hollowed out. Public holidays are treated as optional, as if national unity were an imposition rather than a privilege. Abstaining from common observance is sold as progress, yet it signals indifference to the shared calendar that once bound citizens in rhythm and meaning. More and more, “we” cede cultural ground, substituting our civic rites for the customs of competing subcultures. In doing so, we cease to be one people under law and become a patchwork of protected identities, each demanding recognition, few accepting responsibility. The core that made us -- Christian ethics, British law, civic equality -- is treated not as a foundation to defend but as a relic to dismantle. Every civilisation has its foundational days. For Australians, they were once Australia Day and the Monarch’s birthday.They were moments of collective gratitude and remembrance that united citizens across ancestry, creed, and class. These were the civic liturgies of a common nation: days when belonging meant duty, not division. Now those days are treated as embarrassments. Australia Day is recast as “Invasion Day,” its celebration shamed into retreat: councils cancel citizenship ceremonies, flags are lowered, and children are taught that pride is cruelty. Even the King’s Birthday, successor to the Queen’s long reign and symbol of constitutional continuity, has been emptied of meaning, reduced to a long weekend few can explain. A day once tied to the Crown that anchors our democracy is now a calendar relic, observed without conviction. Yet it was only in 1999 that Australians reaffirmed their allegiance to the monarchy in a national referendum, rejecting a republic by clear majority. In less than thirty years, what was affirmed at the ballot box has been surrendered in the classroom and the newsroom.

It's not only Australia

Alongside these civic rites once stood Christmas and Easter. They were the sacred days of our civilisation’s moral inheritance. Though religious in origin, they are more than private faiths; they are the wellspring of the values that shape our law, compassion, and sense of justice. The Christian core that runs through Australia’s institutions is not an historical accident but the moral architecture upon which they rest. To deride it is to forget the source of the very tolerance and decency we claim to defend. A civilisation that forgets its holy days, whether sacred or civic, forgets itself. These are not relics of the past but mirrors of belief. When their meaning fades, the nation’s memory follows, and with it, the will to endure. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat has replaced them is not neutrality but noise: a tangle of subcultures, each asserting its own moral code while denying the legitimacy of the one that made coexistence possible. The Christian core that once bound conscience to law is now treated as an imposition, tolerated at best, derided at worst. Within a generation, these days may survive only as long weekends without memory, their moral power eclipsed by ideologies that sneer at the civilisation from which they were born. Civilisation is not destroyed by failure so much as by the refusal to recognise excellence. The new Australia rewards identity over ability. Public service, media, and universities are increasingly governed by diversity quotas rather than standards of merit and mastery. The language of excellence has been replaced by the language of “inclusion”, too often a euphemism for mediocrity enforced by fear. Rituals once affirmed unity under God and law; now they perform division under guilt. The Lord’s Prayer has been driven from parliaments and schools, replaced by the Welcome to Country, a compulsory bow to a racialised animism that defines belonging by blood rather than citizenship. Even courts begin with an incantation of country rather than an invocation of justice. The symbolism is clear: divine law has been replaced by identity law, merit by ancestry, virtue by performative remorse. The flag-raising ceremonies that once taught children pride in flag and country are gone, replaced by smoking ceremonies that have no place in the nations cultural core. Where schools once celebrated the nation, they now apologise for it. A generation grows up fluent in tales of its oppression but illiterate in the nation's achievements and exceptionalism. This meaning has not been lost by ignorance; it has been dismantled by ideology. A nation that apologises for its birth and doubts its heroes will not defend either. The Demographic Substitution Civilisations can be conquered without invasion. When a people cease to reproduce, ceases to teach its children what it is, and opens its borders to those who neither share nor respect its inheritance, the result is not diversity but displacement. The streets remain, but the spirit within them changes.

An ABC headline from March 2024

Across Australia’s major cities, this transformation is visible in numbers, not opinions. According to the 2021 Census, English is now spoken at home by only 72 per cent of Australians, down from 78 per cent a decade earlier. In suburbs such as Auburn and Lakemba in Sydney, and Dandenong and Broadmeadows in Melbourne, the figure falls below 25 per cent. Entire communities function linguistically and culturally apart from the nation around them. Churches close as mosques, temples, and cultural centres rise. National holidays are ignored while foreign festivals fill the civic calendar. In some districts, Australia is already post-Australian. These are not merely communities of arrival but of replacement, cultural archipelagos in what was once a shared civic sea. The Christian share of the population, once over 95 per cent, has fallen below 44 per cent; “no religion” has risen to 39 per cent, while Islam and Hinduism grow at double-digit rates. This is not xenophobia but arithmetic. Migration that assimilates can enlarge a nation; migration that does not begins to displace it. When migration ceases to assimilate, it becomes colonisation by consent. When the host population’s birth rate falls below replacement level, as Australia’s has since 2010, the culture follows biology. Multiculturalism, once a gesture of hospitality, has become a euphemism for demographic surrender. Where unity once flowed from a common faith, tongue, and civic ethic, society now fragments into secular and race-based enclaves, each demanding recognition while withholding allegiance. Citizens no longer share a narrative, only a postcode. A nation is not racist for wishing to remain itself. It is suicidal for refusing to. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]E[/fusion_dropcap]very dying civilisation invents a language to justify its decline. Ours calls it “white privilege.” What began as a moral fable has become a civic doctrine: the idea that those whose ancestors built this country, who tilled its soil, defended its shores, raised its cities, and wrote its laws are now to be defined not by their labour but by inherited guilt. The sons and daughters of builders are told they are beneficiaries of theft. Those who sustain the institutions that uphold universal rights are accused of upholding oppression. A people once praised for their industry, decency, and restraint are now cast as obstacles to progress merely because they are the custodians of continuity. Citizens who embrace nationalism are shamed, while those who repudiate it are celebrated. The worker who pays the taxes is lectured by the activist who spends them. The soldier’s descendant must apologise to the protestor who burns his flag. In any healthy nation, the flag is sacred: a visible covenant between people and country. To burn it is not protest but desecration. Yet in Australia, as in Britain and Canada, such sacrilege remains lawful, a freedom mistaken for virtue, tolerated as if contempt were a form of conscience. No other Western nation permits such an act of self-desecration; even Europe, with its deep wounds of history, defends its emblems from insult. That a people permits the destruction of their own symbol is proof not of liberty but of moral decay. Neither Labor nor Liberal has had the courage to defend it; both pretend that desecration is a form of free speech rather than a symptom of cultural collapse. This is not progress; it is parasitism of the moral kind: the exploitation of civilisation’s inheritance by those who despise the civilisation itself. A nation cannot long survive when its virtues are treated as crimes. The End of the Town Square: As Surveillance and Control Begin When a civilisation no longer trusts its people, it replaces conscience with control. The new tyranny arrives not with chains and prisons, but with algorithms and authorisations. The state that once guarded liberty now manages speech. The citizen who once spoke freely must now seek permission to be heard.

Quadrant Online's editor checked his LinkedIn profile and found this

Under the banner of “safety,” governments introduce 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' bills, laws so vague that truth itself becomes a licensed commodity. To disagree with power is to commit thoughtcrime; to speak plain facts that offend ideology is to risk erasure. The old heresies were religious; the new ones are political. In both, the punishment is silence. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]acial recognition systems and digital identity requirements for internet access are sold as convenience but operate as control. To enter the new public square, one must first submit to being watched. Every word, purchase, and opinion can be traced, scored, and sanctioned. Privacy, once the fortress of freedom, is being redefined as subversion. The “town square” of democracy is closing. Platforms censor in the name of protection; dissenters are branded extremists for refusing to bow to the new moral order. The instruments of liberty, law, media, technology are becoming the architecture of obedience. This is how civilisations will end in the modern age: not with invasion, nor even with collapse, but with quiet, digitised suffocation. The walls of the city still stand, but the intellectual air within will grow silent. There will be no town square when every conversation is monitored, and no freedom when every truth requires approval. A nation that cannot speak cannot think; a civilisation that cannot think cannot live. The Architects of Decline Civilisations do not collapse by accident. They are dismantled, piece by piece, institution by institution, by those who mistake destruction for virtue. The vandals of our age wear suits, hold grants, and speak of equity. They occupy universities, bureaucracies and media boards, not battlefields. They are not conquerors but curators of decay: the professional class that profits from the permanent crisis of identity. They preach inclusion yet sow resentment; they promise justice yet deliver division. Their revolution is bloodless but relentless, fought not with weapons, but with language. By redefining words like truth, justice, and equality, they invert moral order. They call censorship “safety,” propaganda “education,” and discrimination “equity.” They are the children of comfort who despise the civilisation that indulged them. A people

Keffiyeh and Loathing at the Writers’ Fest

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 05:26:33 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]f Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, then the end of the Gaza War will see the launch of something equally significant in 2026. Instead of wooden boats, the ‘misery memoir’. This rather unfortunate term is used in the publishing trade to describe true stories of personal hardship, trauma, and abuse with the stress on suffering. Misery memoirs are very popular with readers because we can all relate in one form or another. When the first Palestinian memoirs hit the shelves in 2026 describing the horrors of the last two years of life in Gaza, writers festivals will be eagerly awaiting these new books and so will potential readers. The misery memoir will find its zenith when Palestinian writers describe the horrors of war, and the struggle to survive in the ruins of Gaza. Earlier this year, the Sydney Writers Festival (at the Carriageworks) had skyscraper-high Palestinian misery memoirs stacked neatly on their trestle tables, next to novels about Palestinian life. These books were a mixed bag. While many were articulate and described the difficulties of living in the Palestinian regions, others were openly anti-Semitic towards Jewish people and the state of Israel. Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin demonized Israeli characters and institutions and portrayed her characters in anti-Semitic tropes. Sarah Abhawa was criticised at the 2023 Adelaide Writers Week when she described an Israeli-American terror victim as human garbage. Thankfully not all the books I looked at contained such inflammatory rhetoric. There were many titles about life in Palestine predating the Israeli state. These were lovely stories of happy families enjoying life before war and violence gripped the Middle East. But Jewish memoirs and books, with one or two exceptions, were conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps they weren’t as ‘current’ or topical? As I skimmed through these memoirs, I noticed from the corner of my eye, a constant parade of something I would normally expect to see on the streets of Gaza. The keffiyeh. It was everywhere. Young or old. Black or white. Gay or straight. You really couldn’t miss this distinctive piece of patterned cloth. But this appropriation of another culture troubled me. There were no indigenous Palestinians wearing the keffiyeh. Most of the wearers fitted the profile of the regular, Sydney Writers Festival goer. They were white, Anglo Saxon, middle aged, and female. It was as if the Keffiyeh had become this year's must-have, fashion accessory. The funniest appropriation was the genteel grandmother with long, white hair. Now I suspect this elegantly dressed woman didn’t normally wear this specific item round her neck with Channel suit or an Armani dress. Neither did the keffiyeh blend in with her neatly ironed, white linen pants and shirt. It stood out defiantly and refused to mix and match with grandmas’ pearls. Some women had even found extra ways to show their allegiance to the pro-Palestine cause by adding an additional fashion accessory or two to their ensembles. Matching earrings were popular. One elder in her sixties was wearing watermelon earrings that went with her red, cat’s eyes glasses. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat everyone at the festival seemed not to understand was that the keffiyeh had also been appropriated by Hamas. In their videos, when they were yelling Allah Akbar and executing infidels, the terrorists were NOT wearing the keffiyeh as a sign of peaceful resistance. For Hamas this fashion accessory was now related to murder. It was the epitome of terrorist chic. But I wasn’t attending the 2025 Writers Festival to fit into a particular fashion or trend. I was there to listen to writers read their work. And it was the Middle Eastern writers I was particularly interested in hearing. Being at the festival was a way for me to discover new Middle Eastern voices and try to understand what life was like living as a Palestinian in the region. I wanted to learn about the rich culture, art, language and family life in Gaza and the West Bank. The last thing I wanted to experience was anti-Ssemitism. My hope of hearing some strong and meaningful stories without a political agenda being rammed down my throat quickly became upended when the first panel started. Even before the convenor opened his mouth my heart sank. The black T-shirt he was proudly wearing had the words Readers and Writers against Genocide emblazoned across his chest. I knew exactly what this T-shirt stood for. It represented the Hamas-engineered narrative they had foisted on the international community for a year and a half, one that positioned Israel as the bad guy and Palestine as the good guy, even though it was Hamas who had set out to committ genocide on October 7. At the very beginning of the first session, the convenor wanted to make it abundantly clear where he stood on the Israel-Palestine war. He launched into a tirade about the ‘genocide’ and how Israel was clearly to blame. Very quickly, each writer made sure that they pledged allegiance to the pro-Palestine cause (even if in secret they didn’t agree). One after the other they fell, like a pack of cards, in agreement with the convenor. It seemed that no one would be allowed to side with the ‘other side’ because the other side was assumed to be the villains. This format quickly became de rigueur for each of the following sessions. Speakers were expected to toe the line. Not one single writer stood up and said, ‘No, I want to speak up for the Jewish people killed on October 7.’ In fact, the lack of support for Jewish people was appalling. A few days before the start of the Festival, on May 21, two Israeli embassy staffers were gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. To every speaker at the Writers Festival’s shame, not one single person spoke out against their murder in the sessions I attended. Perhaps it was because the crazed assassin had screamed the exact, same, sickening words that we are so used to hearing at Pro-Palestine rallies - ‘Free Palestine.’ This ugly, anti-Israel, pro-terrorist ideology soon followed in the other sessions I attended. One after the other, the speakers attacked Israel and no-one, not a single person, stood up to challenge the speakers. I was ready to jump up and call them out but, in the sessions, I attended, the convenor decided not to allow questions. Perhaps they feared someone like me might decide to challenge the Jew-hate narrative. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]his pro-Hamas bias was particularly glaring in the LGBTQ sessions I attended. As writers fell over themselves to attack the only democratic country in the Middle East, while backing a terrorist regime, I thought about how these 'brave’ queers for Palestine' would go were they ever to visit Gaza. Hamas hates gays, as they have proven time and time again in many public executions. If I’d had a chance, I would have gotten up and said: ‘If you want to support Palestine then why don’t you visit Gaza. I’m sure they will greet you with open arms -- before those arms open fire at you.’ Taking a break from this unwelcome and exhausting blast of ideology, I retreated to the Carriageworks café and found a kindred spirit. Nicholas was a great fan of the Australian-Lebanese writer George Hadad, also a speaker at the festival, who’s work has explored Arab-Australian identity, masculinity and cultural expectations. We immediately hit it off. I told him about how I’d been attending Writers Festival events for almost 30 years and how much it had changed over that time. Over the years I’d seen just about every type of author and their work. I’d listened to feminists speak proudly of their achievements; writers discuss the merits of their spy novels and even the odd satirist, like David Sedaris, charm the crowd with tales from his own dysfunctional life. But one thing I’d never seen is writers and readers all line up to follow a specific ideological viewpoint and do so without question. Nicholas commiserated with me and then we went back to the onslaught. Again, it was more keffiyehs and more propaganda from writers who felt obligated, or bullied, to follow the pro-Palestine, pro-Hamas line. Again, no mention of the hostages or the victims on October 7. By the end of the very last session of the Festival, I was so angry at this blatant barrage of propaganda that I cornered a surprised Hamish Macdonald, as he was heading out the door. A highly respected and awarded Australian journalist, Hamish had always struck me as a genuine and caring person and not just a professional journalist. I was hoping he would want to hear my experience of the Festival. When I asked him if he was enjoying the sessions, he said he was, and then I saw my chance to engage him. In that moment I unleashed all my frustrations and anger at the way the Hamas narrative had overtaken the Festival, silenced free speech, and created the appalling anti-Semitism we were all living with. I must have come across as a blathering idiot who just wanted a temporary soapbox to perform on. To his great credit, Hamish listened politely. After I’d finished, he said he had a dinner to go to. But he was gracious enough to say two words to me that lifted my heart as he left. Joining the long line of middle-aged attendees, I made my way into the night and pondered what next year’s festival would bring. When the latest batch of misery memoirs hit the shelves in the new year, I have a request or two for the organisers of the Sydney Writers Festival. I want to see at least one Israeli misery memoir on the shelves as well. May I suggest the best-selling memoir by former hostage Eli Sharabi entitled Hostage? It sold 20 thousand copies in 5 days in Israel. It wouldn’t hurt to invite him as a special guest either. This is a man who lost both his wife and two daughters in the massacre on October 7, so I think he really knows what it means to be miserable. I also have another request for the organisers. You need to inform your white and middle-class audience that there is no longer a need to wear the keffiyeh. By 2026, that fashion accessory will be so last year.

The post Keffiyeh and Loathing at the Writers’ Fest first appeared on Quadrant.

The Rebounding Kangaroo

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 00:42:59 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]ustralian outback and outer urban lore includes many examples of human–kangaroo interactions, too frequently involving collisions between vehicles and our national symbol at eventide or nightfall. Overnight roadside kills are so common along some highways, such as the Eyre across the Nullarbor Plain, that it has been necessary for road patrols to carry out a daily collection of carcases, to reduce distress to overseas tourists unused to such slaughter. Injuries to drivers, even fatalities, have also resulted from collisions or attempted avoidances. Beneficiaries include eagle and other raptor populations—provided they can get out of the way of oncoming vehicles in time. Our national news recently included a kangaroo inside Melbourne Airport’s passenger ; lacking a boarding pass, it was removed by security staff to greener pastures.

From our May 2014 issue. Click here to subscribe

On a lighter note, the interactions are not always of the airport kind, or where a car or truck strikes the kangaroo. This one occurred on a sunny mid-afternoon along an outer Melbourne stretch of the Strathewen Road, locally known as Hoppers Crossing. Here, the local mob have developed a frequently-used pedestrian crossing, where large male and female eastern greys, led by locally-named Qantas the Flying Kangaroo (over six feet of spring-heeled sub-orbital ballistic macropod missile) soar over the roadside fence, followed by adolescents and juveniles through their ever-widening hole in the wire netting, straight across the road. There is little point in trying to repair the hole, the juveniles being far too smart, simply moving the hole along to the nearest convenient location by burrowing beneath or through humankind’s best attempts at kangaroo impedance. Verily, our national symbol can be a pain in the fence. If they would but pause, look left or right, then cross with care, or perhaps wear fluorescent yellow jackets? Sad to relate, they do none of these things. Indeed, Jared Diamond has noted that one reason why our Aboriginal people never developed sedentary agriculture was their lack of domesticable native livestock that could be fenced in, rather than decamping overnight thirty miles from the would-be herders. And so it came to pass that Qantas did come a-bounding joyfully down the hill, over the fence, down the embankment, onto the Strathewen Road, thud, at full speed amidships into the Toyota bearing your correspondent and young grandson Liam. Thus it was that we have never run into a kangaroo—this one ran into us. The bemused beast bounced onto the pavement, hoisted himself groggily onto his haunches, shook his head, glared at us and (no exaggeration) swore, repetitive grunt-snort style, while his spouses/siblings/offspring/cousins/aunts did likewise, from the roadside. But as we had no camera, so this Attenborough-standard kangaroo road-rage vignette went unrecorded for future generations. Luckily for us, rather than dragging us out and beating us up, Qantas and his entourage, with a parting curse or two, completed their crossing, bounding onwards and upwards into neighbouring broad sunlit uplands, whence they return at will, to and fro, over the road ... an unpredictable kangaroo oscillation, potentially an inelastic collision to be avoided where possible by motorists. If there is a moral to this tale: always proceed with caution, can’t be too careful, and keep your camera to hand. And perhaps those “Beware of Kangaroos” road signs could be modified to also read, “Or You’ll Be Dented”.

John O’Connor, an occasional contributor, lives in the outer north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne

The post The Rebounding Kangaroo first appeared on Quadrant.

George Orwell’s Cast of Mind

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 19:59:27 +1100

His prophecies were not always correct, but the malicious collectivism that Orwell feared in the 1940s has to some extent been realised

The post George Orwell’s Cast of Mind first appeared on Quadrant.

Richard Neville and the Pederasts

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 16:38:29 +1100

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]B[/fusion_dropcap]riefly yesterday (October 13) an audio post appeared on YouTube of Richard Neville's infamous 1975 on-air conversation with four unapologetic child-sex predators. Actually, make that five molesters, as Neville himself spoke of having sex with a girl under the age of 16. The YouTube clip was ordered taken down almost immediately, but today the audio has been published once more on Elon Musk's X. The entire X thread is here, commencing with poster John Adams explaining why he is sharing the audio and how the ABC, which broadcast Neville's Lateline show in the first place, now insists it be suppressed. After that there follows 40-plus minutes of Neville and his guests discussing their taste for underage boys. Richard Neville, the Oz enfant terrible, sometime author and habitual attention seeker, died in 2016 after spending his final years in Blue Mountains seclusion, a casualty of early onset Alzheimers disease. His passing was marked by film fancier David Hare, who hailed the national broadcaster for putting the show to air:

One of the panel the only un-funny one- was deadly serious and a very obvious and serious pedophile, and Neville singled him out for attention with, "so you're not just talking about a butch weekend in the bush with 'uncle' fishing and hunting"?

The show was completely rivetting, really walking the line.

If you weren't there at the time you can only guess at the subsequent outcry from the morality brigade, including not a few old time lefties which just showed how homophobic Push and post Push Sydney Bohemia always was.

Neville never stood down over the show, to his immense credit, and the ABC never resiled from putting it to air, to its credit. Could anyone imagine this happening today?

The ABC's glowing obituary made no mention of the pederasty program, concluding with a quote from Dr Glenn Mitchell, described nine years ago as a senior history lecturer at the University of Wollongong:

"He is a man who leaves us with a wonderful legacy, not just for historians interested in the legal intricacies of various cases, but here is a person who stood against conservative Australia in the 1960s and the early 1970s and left a mark."

For those lacking an X account or having download trouble, the X post is linked below. If the X post fails to embed on your screen, the broadcast can be heard in full here: https://x.com/adamseconomics/status/1977701749239759193 An afterthought: How long, do you think, before the eSafety Commissioner swoops in with legal notices and threats of massive fines to stop Australians listening to an ABC radio show Australians paid for? -- rf <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">“Democracy will only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates promising the most benefits.” [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]O[/fusion_dropcap]ur governments, state and federal alike, have engaged in profligate borrowing and now, increasingly, the national overdraft must grow to meet the interest on previously borrowed money. When government continues to expand while spawning new bureaucracies imposing even more regulation it's all over bar the tears. When per capita growth has stalled and an official recession is staved off only by importing staggering numbers of what used to be called and welcomed as 'New Australians', I no longer feel I am living in a land of plenty but a house of cards. Abandon faith and hope and, yes, we are well and truly rooted. But then is that other definition I mentioned, the one that means 'implanted, entrenched, ingrained and embedded'. So it's a choice, and time is running out to make it: Do we accept decline as inevitable, and that the Australia of my youth isn't worth fighting for? Or do we draw strength from our soil, our past, our very rootedness in this wonderful thing called Australia? As I said, I'm getting on in years, so if it's the second option we are too take, let's make it quick and make it stick. Call me selfish if you will but I don't want to end my days in a country I love but all too often these days barely even recognise. Ron Pike is an irrigation farmer in the Riverina Paul Harrison: A Letter to My Countrymen [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]t seventy-four years of age, I find myself looking both back and forward. I am old, but active. Tired, but able. Disappointed, yes — but still capable of reason and reflection. I have lived long enough to understand the frailties of human nature and the folly of groups that mistake noise for truth. Yet I have also seen the quiet endurance of decency and kindness, the small and steady virtues that hold a nation together. I have not been captured by ideology or religion, nor drawn into the transient comfort of crowds. I have tried to live as a free man — guided by conscience, by experience, and by the enduring sense of what is right. I believe in honesty, restraint, humility, and courage. These are not fashionable traits, but they are enduring ones. They are the foundation on which a civilised life stands. Lately, I have felt a shift within myself — an unwelcome stirring of anger. It is not an emotion I seek, but one that rises unbidden as I witness what is happening in the world around me. I see cruelty celebrated as justice, destruction masquerading as freedom, hatred carried like a banner of virtue. I see mobs shouting their scorn on the steps of our Opera House, defiling that symbol of beauty and aspiration. I cannot now look at thosee white-tiled sails without recalling those scenes. This is not the Australia I have known, nor the one I wish to leave behind. Still, anger alone serves no good end. It must be tempered, shaped into resolve rather than resentment. We cannot allow our indignation to erode the very values we seek to defend. We must hold fast to civility, to fairness, to the sense of proportion that has long defined the best of our national character. We are shaped and tempered by the Seven Heavenly Virtues, those on the other side are shaped and draw their weakness from the Seven Deadly Sins. There remains much that is good in this country. There are still men and women who work hard, raise their families, speak plainly, and treat others with respect. I take comfort in that, and I count myself among them. [fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]here is also a sleeping giant in our Australia, much like the one Admiral Yamamoto warned was slumbering in the heart of America when he counselled Japan's leaders against attacking Pearl Harbour. When our giant awakes, let it not be in fury but in purpose. Let it rise to defend what is right with steadiness, not vengeance. Our Western virtues need not be written into law, for they are so fundamental, so self-evident, there is no peer review required, for they are Universal Truths. I will not give way to hate. I will not give way to fear. I will not surrender the principles that make life worth living. At seventy-four, I am still here — still thinking, still believing, still standing. And to those who feel as I do: take heart. The virtues that built this country — honesty, courage, compassion, and duty — are not lost. They wait quietly for us to remember them, and to live by them once again as we lift our swords and shields in defence of the very virtues which have made us who we are.The post Advice from the Aged: Your Choice, Australia first appeared on Quadrant.



Stoicism and the Profession of Arms
Tue, 14 Oct 2025 01:00:00 +1100
He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]n the new millennium Western militaries spend a great deal of their resources on training and arming uniformed professionals for the instrumental rigours of operational service. Most modern armed forces equip their personnel with the latest body armour, the best protected vehicles and the most sophisticated counter-explosive electronics, as well as expending millions of dollars acquiring the most advanced medical services for those physically wounded or maimed. Much less time is devoted to providing military personnel with existential or inner armaments—with the mental armour and philosophical protection that is necessary to confront an asymmetric enemy who abides by a different set of cultural rules. Much is also made in today’s Western political and military circles about the need to relearn counter-insurgency with its central tenet of winning “hearts and minds” among contested populations. Yet little is done to provide Western military professionals with sufficient moral philosophy to protect their own hearts and minds against the rigours of contemporary warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is true that all English-speaking Western militaries possess codes of behaviour that govern the ethical conduct of their members. These codes tend to cover the law of armed conflict, just-war theory and the importance of upholding humanitarian values. However, such guides, while essential, tend to be rooted in social science, law and psychology rather than in moral philosophy with its grounding in the great humanities. Moreover, while modern ethical codes emphasise correct rules of behaviour, moral philosophy emphasises the development of personal character and the reconciliation of the individual with the social environment in which he operates. Ethics need, therefore, to be complemented by a stronger focus on moral philosophy—a focus which as Tom Frame, Bishop of the Australian Defence Force, observed in 2005, permits the professional military to fully become “a self-conscious moral community committed to maintaining traditions that are essential to the integrity of its people and the discharge of its core responsibilities”.
From our January 2010 issue.
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This article analyses the importance of teaching Stoic moral philosophy in today’s armed forces. First, it assesses the serious challenge posed to the professional military ethos from a Western society increasingly based on three melancholy currents: postmodern relativism, the self-esteem movement, and the cult of celebrity. Second, a case is made for upholding a moral philosophy in the professional military that is based on adapting what Bertrand Russell once called the virtues of “Stoic self-command”. Finally, the article seeks to demonstrate how philosophical values based on Stoicism might serve as a guide to today’s military professionals by employing principles and lessons drawn from Western literature, politics and history.

The Forces of Postmodernism and Anti-Rationalism

The greatest challenge to the Western profession of arms comes not from our external enemies, formidable though some of them are, but from within our own society. The rise of postmodernism and anti-rationalism since the 1960s combined with the celebrity culture of the mass media and the social revolutions in youth pacifism, radical feminism and the rise of psychotherapy have created a self-esteem society based on moral relativism. One of the casualties of the rise of such a society has been what the American cultural analyst Susan Jacoby, in her 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, calls Western middlebrow culture—the very culture which was traditionally responsible for supplying the armed forces with many of its best recruits.

As Jacoby recounts, middlebrow culture represented a culture of aspiration that was located halfway between lowbrow or common culture and the highbrow intellectual culture of the literati and the learned professions. In the English-speaking West, middlebrow culture lasted from the 1880s until the 1970s and embraced the best of the working class and of the lower middle class. It was a culture of effort and self-improvement that aspired to higher education and an appreciation of the arts. Middlebrows included liberal Protestant, Jewish and Roman Catholic families, all of whom shared a common pride in the primacy of family values, in the importance of community identity and in the imperative of religious faith. Many aspects of middlebrow culture could often be found in the Australian Labor Party, and the rise and fall of its values is well captured by Kim Beazley Snr’s famous remark that when he joined the ALP in the 1930s it was composed of the cream of the working class; when he left it in the 1970s it was made up of the dregs of the middle class.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]hat gradually destroyed the West’s literate middlebrow culture as a bastion of community knowledge and moral standards were the combined forces of three upheavals: the sexual revolution of the 1960s; the insidious rise of postmodernism and moral relativism inside the universities in the 1970s; and the mass media technology revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. The late social historian Christopher Lasch catalogued the grim impact of these revolutions on middle-class culture in his books The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995). Lasch demonstrated in devastating fashion how the ominous combination of decaying public institutions, a coarse electronic media and the rise of an academic pseudo-rationalist elite have created an increasingly banal society defined by “the abolition of shame”.

In the new millennium, traditional middlebrow values based on family, church and school have long since been swamped by a tsunami of secularism and moral decline that has left us with a public culture dominated by effete celebrities and corporate media billionaires united by their lack of civic virtue. The “abolition of shame” has bequeathed to us a growing underclass of single-parent families led by unmarried mothers on welfare. This underclass has, in turn, produced a generation of fatherless and dysfunctional boys dominated by dangerous varieties of street culture. Increasingly, the kind of traditional manly virtue passed from fathers to sons that has been central to the success of Western civilisation has been replaced by fatherless social alienation, drug abuse and gang membership. This process of social dislocation is daily accelerated by a twenty-four-hour infotainment media that appears devoted to endlessly portraying crude language, misfit behaviour and violent action as acceptable norms of male social behaviour.

Central to the West’s middlebrow collapse of good taste and decorum is the belief that popular culture transmitted by the internet—surely the biggest toilet wall in the history of the human race—can in some way replace the study of great books as a serious medium for education. In educational circles today one can find any number of defenders of the virtues of electronic learning from behind screens. Such people are merely the latest purveyors of junk thought.

Those aspects of the collapse of middlebrow culture that have disturbed me most in my work as a scholar of military affairs and as teacher of strategy at the Australian Defence College are the disappearance of essential cultural knowledge and the apparent end of the West’s distinctive honour culture—both of which have occurred at the hands of postmodernism and relativism. Two examples will suffice to illustrate the problems. In mid-2009, in a College syndicate activity that included a discussion of moral philosophy, a Directing Staff member proceeded to discuss the Old Testament Book of Job and its teachings on the unfair moral economy of the universe. As the staff member spoke, he was met by secular bewilderment and it rapidly became evident that no Australian officer in the class had ever heard of Job. Indeed, the only course member who could discuss the sufferings of Job proved to be a Pakistani Army officer who, because he had attended a British-modelled private school in Lahore, had been exposed to a course in Western civilisation and had thus studied the Old Testament. It is a sobering thought that at a time when we in the West are preaching the need to understand foreign culture, many in our society barely understand our own.

Related to ignorance about the story of Job has been my deep concern that in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western military professionals are confronting pre-modern Islamic honour cultures by employing a distinctly postmodern approach to the conduct of warfare. I am not alone in this concern. The Islamic scholar Akbar S. Ahmed has argued persuasively that the greatest weakness the West has in fighting against an Islamic fundamentalism conceived in the “shadow of swords” is an existential one, in that we have become a “post-honour society”. Ahmed goes on to argue that the West’s honour culture was destroyed in the twentieth century by three factors: revulsion against the horrors of mass industrialised warfare; the revolution in modern psychotherapy; and the rise of radical feminism.

It is certainly true that since the 1960s an anti-honour culture has been prevalent in the West. For example, much of academe has long since abandoned respect for social virtues such as duty, honour and country in favour of the identity politics of gender, race and class. As the American writer Tom Wolfe has written, the cult of anti-honour became firmly established during the time of the 1960s anti-Vietnam War movement when draft dodgers were upheld by the New Left as heroes, transforming “the shame of the fearful into the guilt of the courageous”.

From the 1960s onwards, the Chevalier de Bayard, that fifteenth-century exemplar of the knight sans peur et sans reproche, was replaced in Western culture by sensitive New Age men who wore Che Guevara T-shirts and read Germaine Greer. Rudyard Kipling’s immortal poem about manhood, “If’, became the title for an anarchic and surreal Lindsay Anderson film, in which an English public school’s cadet company shoots its own teachers on speech day. A dark cocktail of assorted feelings, narcissism, therapy, dysfunction and victimology has largely replaced honour in the modern West. Even the criminal honour code of gangsters has not been immune to these trends. As the perplexed American television gangster Tony Soprano puts it in one of his many visits to his shrink, “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American.” Today what passes for a Western code of honour is safely confined to the world of Hollywood fantasy in the cartoonish movies of assorted male and female superheroes such as Rambo, The Rock, Lara Croft, and Uma Thurman as a kung-fu swordswoman in Kill Bill.

Jacob Burckhardt, the great nineteenth-century Swiss historian, wrote in his masterly book The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy that “honour is often what remains after faith, love and hope are lost”. Yet in the contemporary West what Aristotle called honourable fame has given way to celebrity—that is, fame without genuine distinction—fame that is linked to self-esteem without virtue, courage, prowess or merit. As the American scholar and journalist James Bowman has observed in his excellent 2007 study, Honor: A History, a powerful example of the prevailing anti-honour culture occurred in Britain in September 2005 when a new rotating statue—designed to showcase the best of British sculpture—was unveiled in Trafalgar Square next to the statues of the military heroes Admiral Lord Nelson and Generals Napier and Havelock. The new marble statue, Alison Lapper Pregnant, was a representation of Ms Alison Lapper, an artist and single mother born with a rare disease that left her with no arms and only rudimentary legs. In a sculpture that was on display from September 2005 until March 2007, Ms Lapper is portrayed in the pregnant nude as a tribute to disability and victimhood.

Unveiling the plinth, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said, “This square celebrates the courage of men in battle. Alison’s life is a struggle to overcome much greater difficulties than many of the men we celebrate and commemorate here.” In her response, Ms Lapper, with a glance at the cohort of military heroes surrounding her, stated, “At least I didn’t get here by slaying people.” As Bowman notes, the unveiling of the Lapper statue compressed into a single moment the three forces that have most undermined the concept of Western honour: radical feminism, reflexive pacifism and the rise of psychotherapy. In the contemporary West, Alison Lapper’s disabilities can be regarded as morally superior to those incurred by Lord Nelson (loss of an eye and an arm, and chest injury) because they were conferred by nature and did not involve service under arms in defence of the nation.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]W[/fusion_dropcap]ith the Lapper statue, sympathy for the disabled replaces the honouring of noble sacrifice above self. From a radical feminist perspective such a representation rebukes the celebration of military heroism on the grounds that the waging of war is little more than a masculine expression of “menstrual envy”. The Lapper statue is thus a metaphor for how deference to virtue has all but disappeared in our age of celebrity—courage in men, chastity in women, loyalty, duty and courtesy—these are now mainly associated with prudishness, hypocrisy and self-righteousness. There is little consolation in noting that the great French Nobel laureate Albert Camus anticipated these anti-honour trends in the West when he warned against the emerging currents of narcissism and moral self-indulgence in his 1957 novel, The Fall:
I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
If one replaces Camus’s papers with today’s screens, then we have an accurate picture of the cultural detritus that has largely succeeded in replacing refined taste and honourable purpose in the West.

We are now, of course, light years away from the virtues of selfless service that for centuries defined the Western code of honour—a code that runs from the Spartans at Thermopylae through the Thin Red Line at Waterloo to the Few in their Spitfires during the Battle of Britain—virtues so memorably captured in Sir Henry Newbolt’s 1892 poem “Vitai Lampada”:
The sand of the desert is sodden red—
Red with the wreck of the square that broke;
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks
And England’s far and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! Play up! And play the game!”
The Case for Reviving Stoicism

How does one, then, counter what James Bowman memorably describes as “the gravitational pull of the celebrity-culture death star”. Given the cynical spirit of our age, we clearly need to arm the inner selves of our men and women in the armed forces. In order to accomplish this effectively, we must re-embrace the moral philosophy of the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics as taught by such great thinkers as Epictetus, Seneca, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. Yet Stoic philosophy runs against all postmodern philosophical trends—trends that so often emphasise the importance of materialism, celebrity, self-esteem and victimology. As Tad Brennan comments in his 2007 book The Stoic Life, those who seek to adhere to Stoic philosophy are likely to be seen as out of touch with their age, seeking only to cling to a jumbled-up “mixture of tough-guy bravado, hypocrisy and heartlessness [that is] neither personally compelling nor philosophically interesting”.

Yet what is most attractive about the Stoic school of moral philosophy is its central notion that character is fate. The ideas of Stoicism infuse much of the edifice of Western civilisation and this debt is evident in the writings of such towering intellectual figures as Montaigne, Pascal, Kant and Hume. Moreover, Stoicism, in some form, underpins much of Christian theology from St Augustine through St Thomas à Kempis to Justus Lipsius as symbolised by the famous Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” Prominent public advocates of Stoicism have included the Prussian general Frederick the Great, the Holocaust philosopher Viktor Frankl, the Russian writer and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the South African statesman Nelson Mandela.

It is often argued that members of the armed services are natural Stoics. Such a belief is mythical and can be rapidly disproved by the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder and multiple psychological traumas that have plagued modern military establishments in recent years. As the American scholar Nancy Sherman notes in her 2005 study, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, there is no such phenomenon as a “bulletproof mind” that is capable of indefinitely defying the stress and terror of modern combat. In mid-January 2005, surveying the growing number of neuro-psychiatric casualties returning from the Iraq War, the New York Times editorialised, “emotional, mental and psychological problems will be the Agent Orange of this war”.

For the most part, most contemporary military notions of Stoicism are based on second-hand platitudes and common stereotypes about “stiff upper lips” and “can do” willingness. Popular Stoic stereotypes range from the emotionless Mr Spock in the television series Star Trek, to Russell Crowe’s Roman character Maximus in the 1999 movie Gladiator. Maximus is inspired by the nobility of the great soldier-emperor Marcus Aurelius, and upholds a simple Stoic doctrine of “strength and honour” that reinforces his deadly martial skills in the arena.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]O[/fusion_dropcap]f course, there is much more to Stoic philosophy than popular culture allows. Stoicism represents a powerful method of reasoning involving the rigorous cultivation of self-command, self-reliance and autonomy in which one seeks to develop inner character based on the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. Properly studied and applied, Stoic philosophy delivers profound insights into the complexity of military life and offers, in the words of the former US Navy SEAL commando, Richard Marcinko, “a spiritual and moral gyroscope” for members of the profession of arms. As Marcinko puts it in his important 1997 memoir, Rogue Warrior:
it is my unshakeable belief that when . . . two intrinsic values—the total acceptance of death as a natural condition of life, and the total acceptance of an absolute moral code—are combined, the Warrior becomes invincible.
In recent years, the most prominent and systematic advocate of military Stoicism has been the distinguished US naval officer, Medal of Honor recipient and 1992 Vice-Presidential contender, Vice-Admiral James Bond Stockdale, who died in 2005. Stockdale’s 1995 book Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot is one of the finest introductions to Stoicism and its meaning for the profession of arms. Stockdale’s personal embrace of Stoicism helped him to survive seven and a half years of systematic torture and solitary confinement from 1965 until 1972 as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in the dreaded “Hanoi Hilton”. More than any other warrior-scholar in the English-speaking West, Stockdale disseminated the value of Stoic philosophy within the US and allied military establishments. In particular, he did much to elevate the writings of the Stoic slave-philosopher Epictetus over those of Marcus Aurelius by turning the former’s Stoic teachings from the Enchiridion into what Stockdale called “a manual for combat officers”. In the pages of the Enchiridion, Stockdale says, “I had found the proper philosophy for the military arts as I practiced them. The Roman Stoics coined the formula Vivere militare—‘Life is being a soldier’.”

What are the central tenets of Stoicism and how do they fit into the cosmology of the twenty-first-century military professional? As a philosophy Stoicism teaches that life is unfair and that there is no moral economy in the world. Martyrs and honest men may die poor; swindlers and dishonest men may die rich. In this respect, the fate of Job, God’s good servant, and


Gold and Bankruptcies Up Up Up – ConspiracyOz
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:22:07 +1100
Something big coming Ppl – Mick Raven

Live Gold Price Australia _ ABC Bullion
Australia Bankruptcies – change to 10year graph – Mick Raven
 


Sovereign Slave – ConspiracyOz
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:06:59 +1100
or…. World Slave – Mick Raven

Sovereign citizen movement – Wikipedia
The sovereign citizen movement (sometimes abbreviated as SovCits) is a loose group of anti-government activists, conspiracy theorists, vexatious litigants, tax protesters and financial scammers found mainly in English-speaking common law countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand.
Sovereign citizens have a pseudolegal belief system based on misinterpretations of common law, and claim not to be subject to any government statutes unless they consent to them.
 The movement appeared in the U.S. in the early 1970s and has since expanded to other countries; the similar freeman on the land movement emerged during the 2000s in Canada before spreading to other Commonwealth countries.
 
Sovereign (2025) – User reviews – IMDb
An important film for some – July 13th 2025




I guess many people now can sympathise with the premise of this film: a man fighting big government to keep his house and live as a human. He teaches his homeschooled son only in the ways government ignore individual rights.
I personally sympathise with this..though I’m UK born. I was charged for a free teacher training course that it was impossible to prevent paying for, because the government can take cash directly out of your salary even if you are in dispute.
I fought the government for 4 years to legally bring my wife into the country under European freedom of movement. You realise when it comes to politics the government don’t care about the law, and they can fight in the courts forever because they have endless tax payers cash.
When my wife had depression and became violent, I tried to get help, and being a man authorities(social services) ignored police reports and photos (I’d been stabbed a couple of times) and considered me the problem. Absolutely no due process I’m sure many people are in my position of seeing how the law is empty because the authorities break the law, ignore the law and have made it extremely difficult for the average person to get justice.
Indeed now I live off grid in Africa and finally feel some freedom. Indeed I never realised how absolutely crazy and ruthlessly controlling the UK is until I lived in Africa for a while.
So, this film is important. But it isn’t exciting. Definitely slow burn. Feel like it’s balanced cos this guy is definitely on the fringe and occasionally pushes into unacceptable territory, but it does tie in to something I’m sure many in the west feel today – the need to bow your head to oppressive government that isn’t quite following the law.
 




Sovereign (film) – Wikipedia
“Based on real events, the story follows a father and son (Offerman and Tremblay) who identify as Sovereign Citizens, a group of anti-government extremists, as they venture across the country and find themselves in a standoff with a chief of police (Dennis Quaid) that sets off an intense manhunt with tragic consequences.”
 
2010 West Memphis police shootings – Wikipedia
Two police officers in West Memphis, Arkansas, US were shot and killed during a traffic stop on May 20, 2010. Police killed two suspects, 45-year-old Jerry R. Kane Jr. (b. 1964), and his 16-year-old son Joseph T. Kane (b. 1993).The two were later identified as members of the sovereign citizen movement.
 
Dezi Freeman_ Alleged cop killer likened to Rambo   – September 8, 2025


The son of Dezi Freeman has warned the alleged double cop killer can go “weeks” without food and likened him to an infamous movie character who was in a similar situation.


 
Milton William Cooper – Wikipedia
In July 1998, he was charged with tax evasion; an arrest warrant was issued, but Cooper eluded repeated attempts to serve it. In 2000, he was named a “major fugitive” by the United States Marshals Service.
On November 5, 2001, Apache County sheriff’s deputies attempted to arrest Cooper at his Eagar, Arizona home on charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and endangerment stemming from disputes with local residents. After an exchange of gunfire during which Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head, Cooper was fatally shot. Federal authorities reported that Cooper had spent years evading execution of the 1998 arrest warrant, and according to a spokesman for the Marshals Service, he vowed that “he would not be taken alive”


Biometrics Please! – ConspiracyOz
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:44:35 +1100
QR Coding post Covid ugh! – Mick Raven






What the EU’s biometric border checks mean for travellers to Europe from October 12
Lewis Wiseman
https://www.abc.net.au
12 October













The new system requires a fingerprint from non-EU travellers. (Reuters: Juan Medina)













Tourists will have their fingerprints and photo taken upon entry and exit to the European Union from October 12 as part of a new biometric-focused entry-check system.
According to the EU, as well as boosting security, the new entry/exit system (ESS) will make border checks more efficient, travel across borders easier and prevent irregular migration.










The new entry/exit system comes into effect on October 12. (Reuters: Jack Taylor)

For travellers, it means personal details such as fingerprints and facial images will be stored in a “secure database” from the day they enter the Schengen area.
Australians travelling to Europe “do not need to do anything before arriving at the border” according to Smartraveller, however “you may experience longer border queues”.
What is the EES?
The ESS is an automated IT system for registering foreign nationals who are travelling around Europe for a short stay, less than 90 days.
It will be used at the border of 29 European countries.
Those countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
Data collection will be gradually introduced at border crossings, with full implementation by April 10, 2026.










The EU says the new system is aimed at increasing security in the region. (Reuters: Jack Taylor)

If you arrive at a border crossing or airport for the first time since the new system started, you will have to give your personal data.
“Passport control officers will take a photo of your face and/or scan your fingerprints,” the EU said.
This information will then be recorded in a digital file.
“The EES modernises border management by increasing efficiency and quality of processes at the border,” the EU said in a statement online.
“It also simplifies travel and makes it safer.”
What data is collected during the biometric check?
Personal data the ESS collects includes:

Data listed in your travel document(s) (full name, date of birth)
Date and place of each entry and exit
Facial image and fingerprints (biometric data)
Whether you were refused entry previously

That biometric data will then create a template of you as an individual and be stored in the EU’s shared Biometric Matching Service (sBMS).

What really happens when you go through passport control?

International travel has been in the spotlight recently, with nerve-wracking tales of border crackdowns in the US and unexpected detentions. Here’s what your passport reveals about you when you’re travelling.

Border security can search for people using the sBMS.
The EU said “your data will only be kept in the system for the purposes for which it was collected”.
It said it would keep records of entries and exits to different countries for three years, and it would keep files containing personal data, such as a fingerprint or image, for three years and a day.
If you revisit the Schengen area within those three years, you will only need to provide your fingerprint and photograph at the border on entry and exit.
What do Australian travellers need to know?
In short, from Sunday, October 12, you will have to be willing to share your fingerprints and photograph with the EU to go on your next holiday to the bloc.
It is a free process, so you will not have to pay for anything.
Smartraveller advises Australian tourists to “answer Schengen Border Code questions” upon arrival.
The new registration process should only take a few minutes, however it could mean longer wait times at the airports while the system is in its infancy.










Travellers have been warned to allow for more time on their trips due to the new system. (Reuters: Juan Medina)

The EU is confident there will not be significant disruption. The British government has, however, advised travellers to allow more time for their journeys as the new EU systems bed in.
Border officials will be able to suspend checks for short periods if processing times become excessively long.
The new system is a precursor for more changes next year in the EU.
A new European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) is slated to become operational in late 2026.
Non-Schengen area citizens will need to apply for an ETIAS authorisation, provide personal information and details about their trip and pay a 20 euro ($35) fee before they travel.
The authorisation will be valid for three years or until a passport expires, whichever comes first.




What’s Mandarin for ‘Rort’?
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:00:48 +1100
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]E[/fusion_dropcap]veryone knows the international student component of Australia’s immigration intake is, for far too many, a gigantic rort by which the ‘student’ gains permanent residency in Australia via the back door.  Various federal governments over the years have seen it but did their best three-wise-monkeys routine and pretended they didn’t.

Jobs and Skills Australia, a Commonwealth agency, however, has recently released that rare thing -- a useful and relatively honest government report. It's called the International Students Pathways and Outcomes Study and it will confirms all suspicions that a ‘temporary’ higher education visa is often a ruse to get long-term or permanent residency if the applicant doesn't have what would otherwise be required to prove their up-front worth to Australia.

The report gives statistical warp and anecdotal woof to the reality that many, indeed up to half, of international students are gaming the immigration system.  The  report’s gems are buried under 133 pages of bureaucratese but they are there for the diligent fossicker. As a public service I have waded through the report and dug up some choice morsels for those not up for the joys of reading government reports.

We learn that, for a supposedly ‘temporary’ immigration visa class, “a significant proportion of Australia’s international students remain in Australia after completing their studies”, with around 35-40%  attaining permanent residency within ten years.  Other reports put the figure at over 50%.  Whatever the specific number, an awful lot of ‘students’ don’t come here for the education so much as to sneak in and stay for good.

This strategy involves a lot of visa-shopping post-degree to extend their time in Australia.  In 2022-23, for example, 53% of international student graduates were granted a further study-related visa after their original student visas expired.  What is studied and where it is studied doesn't seem to matter, with the report noting further studies “may fall outside of their genuine interests and in which they may not be motivated to remain.”

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he result is that “more than 50% of international graduates working in Australia are employed well below their skill levels and many are working outside the field of their qualification".  This is frequently by choice rather than a result of ‘racist’ discrimination or ‘unconscious bias’ of employers, these being the Pavlovian responses of the racially-correct class.

Even where they might miss out on a job in a fair fight with domestic students, there are valid reasons.  Top of the list is employer concerns about “English language and cultural proficiency”.  A radically different vocabulary and grammar, let alone an entirely different alphabet, will tend to knock English ability for six, much as English speakers would struggle to master Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic.

“Despite its importance to workforce success”, notes the report, “English language proficiency may not be receiving sufficient attention during the recruitment and education of international students,” the report says.  The reason why Australia’s tertiary institutions sign up vast numbers of foreign students is because they are all full-fee-paying revenue items and, even if the graduates are manifestly inadequate language-wise, shoving them through the degree mill boosts the institutions' income stream and makes sure it continues.

The report attempts to mitigate this nakedly mercenary motive by stating that “sometimes concerns about an accent are incorrectly reported as concerns about proficiency” but surely accent matters just as much as technical proficiency.  Even those who may speak English, after a fashion, are often difficult to understand, as anyone who has endured the pain of dealing with a overseas-based call centre will surely know.  If you can’t easily and freely converse with your boss, colleagues or customers, then an ‘English-speaking’ foreigner might as well be speaking Martian.

The report, however, does acknowledge there is a real issue with not just language compatibility but ‘cultural fit’. Many international students
 “...do not regularly engage with Australians, often living and working with people from their own culture, which limits their exposure to Australian working and communication habits and may degrade their language skills.”
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]here is a suite of other reasons why international students may fare less well post-degree than domestic students.  Chief amongst these is the devaluation of a foreign student’s Australian-acquired paper credentials through -- for example, soft marking of foreign students to maintain their graduation numbers and associated revenue flow, and the ubiquity of cheating (now enhanced by AI).  Is it any wonder prudent employers might look askance at the diploma their prospective hire proffers.

Despite all the attendant issues, international students continue to flood the higher education zone because it is economically big, really big. As the report observes, “education has become one of the country’s largest export industries … in 2023-24 it added more than $50 billion to the Australian economy”.  The higher education sector loves the bulk import of financially-loaded international students whilst landlords, property developers, etc. love them just as much. They drive up demand and therefore prices and therefore profits.

The parasitic class of migration agents also is overjoyed because navigating the bureaucratic maze that is the visa landscape means lots more fees, especially for those “disreputable agents" and  "complicit students" exploiting the system.

Not factored into the macro-economics of the situation is the money lost to the Australian economy from international student immigration.  Remittances sent home to families by Australian-based students who work whilst ‘studying’ is significant – in 2019, the remittances from all working  temporary migrants, including students, almost all of whom work whilst ‘studying’, was a colossal $11.3 billion, with China, India, Vietnam and the Philippines the main home-country recipients.  That’s money not being spent in Australia to support home-grown businesses and the jobs they create.  In addition, who knows how much is being lost to the off-the books economy, which likes its labour cheap and compliant?

Australia’s student-immigration system has launched a sort of perpetual motion machine.  In 2013 international student enrolments were 410,000; in 2025, some 925,905.  “Australia is one of the top study destinations for international students, with its tertiary institutions enrolling the second-highest share of international students amongst OECD countries”, says the report.

Various policy tweaks meant to reign in the flood of international students have proven about as effective as your seventh Covid booster.  The political resilience of international student migration is reinforced by a migration setting which awards additional points towards permanent residency to international students who hold Australian educational credentials, no matter how worthless they might be.

This points incentive results in “judicious educational choices”, as the report delicately phrases it, that are simply a means to the end of permanent residency - “for many students, migration aspirations are a primary goal”, notes the report, with around “70% nominating the possibility to migrate as a reason for choosing to study in Australia”.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]A[/fusion_dropcap]nother incentive for the international student is that Australia is an outlier amongst comparable countries in allowing international students to work whilst studying – “78% of international higher education students reported the ability to work part time during their study as a reason for choosing to study in Australia”.  Ever heard of ‘pull factors’, Immigration Minister?

The ulterior motive of the international students being able to work and acquiring permanent residency is borne out by the report’s qualitative research – as one participant in a focus group of internship providers said, “I’ve had students say to me when trying to place them, ‘Make it something simple and easy because I’ll never work in this discipline’”.

The report cites, with rare candour for a government report, an engineering employer who said in an interview about hiring an engineering-qualified student, “He told me a lot of his mates just come here to earn the money, drive the Uber. Some of them are looking to buy businesses.  It's quite common that they're looking for things like laundromats and car washes and so on, and the only way they can get in is to enrol in education”.

As the report notes, “study may also be a lower-barrier pathway to business ownership than dedicated business and investment visas”.  At least you can rest assured that your next driver or car-washer will be well-credentialed in something or other. Yet the political response to this outrageous migration scam is stuck in stasis.

Here’s a few ideas that may actually fix it.  How about a really tight cap on overseas enrolments as a proportion of a university’s students (half of all students at Sydney University [51%], and at the University of Melbourne [48%], are now internationals).  Or what about significantly increasing English-language requirements for enrolment, or raising entry standards through, for example, entrance exams? or tightly limiting student/graduates’ work rights so that those coming here to study, and recipients of post-study Graduate Visas represent the  cream of the graduate crop.  How about a broad immigration moratorium?  Don’t, however, expect any of this, particularly if the government insists on consulting only with the uni brass whose business model is to keep the student immigration sluicegates wide open.

The report, despite its close encounter with immigration reality, nevertheless still reflects the old way of politically-correct thinking about immigration.  Having listed all the ways it isn't happening, the report inserts the obligatory political pablum by saying we should  “enhance the contribution made by international students to Australia’s skilled workforce” and “encouraging the most talented international students to stay can also enhance Australia’s economic productivity growth, as skilled migrants have been shown to spur innovation”.  Well, that’s the official script but we sure aren’t seeing much evidence of it in our migration-rich becalmed economy.

What we could say to most international students is ‘your own countries also need Uber drivers, car-detailers and laundromat operators. Now get on home and do your bit.’The post What’s Mandarin for ‘Rort’? first appeared on Quadrant.


How Their ABC Gets Away with Murder
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 12:03:18 +1100
"Kill them! Kill those motherfuckers! Murder those motherfuckers in the streets! Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood, dude!" – Hasan Piker, respected ABCTV guest on 7.30,  his  quote is from 2 November, 2021
It’s official from the ABC’s impartial Ombudsman Fiona Cameron. ABCTV’s 7.30 and host Sarah Ferguson are totally in the clear – indeed “brave” - for extensively platforming America’s despicable extremist Hasan Piker last  September 17.

Ferguson invited him on for ten minutes to smear murdered Christian influencer and Trump supporter Charlie Kirk. Ferguson described the late Kirk’s views as “offensive” to Muslims, “black and brown people” , illegal aliens, transgender claimants et al.

The ABC’s narrative is that Kirk was “far right” (flagship 7pm TV news, September 21) while Piker, September 17, is just a “left leaning influencer”. I’m not making that up.

A sniper killed Kirk, whom some fondly imagined as a future US President, with a  bullet to the throat while he was conducting one of his trademark peaceful debates with opponents at Utah Valley University on September 10.

Kirk’s villainy, in the eyes of 7.30, was that his Turning Point organisation helped get Trump elected by persuading greater numbers of minorities and students to abandon Democrats’ woke insanities. As the terminally Trump-deranged Ferguson opined on 7.30 during the 2024 US election season in a suck-up interview with Democrat icon Nancy Pelosi, Trump had “clearly taken America to a dark place” and “poisoned American politics in a new way.”

Kirk left widow Erika and toddlers, ages one and three. At the memorial service attended by the President and Vice-President Vance, Erika tearfully professed her Christian faith by forgiving her husband’s assassin.
Tony Thomas: Not His Best Work Indeed
Before relating ABC Ombudsman  Campbell’s endorsement of  7.30, I need to spell out what that episode involved, drawn from my published analyses here, here and here. A key aspect is the ABC precedent set a decade ago when QandA platformed ex-jailbird and terror supporter Zaky Mallah to heckle a Liberal politician on the panel, which led to management censures and disciplining of QandA (now fully axed).[i]

Ferguson justified hosting Piker as some sort of leftist mirror image of his “peer” -- Ferguson’s weasel word -- Charlie Kirk. She made much of the fact that Kirk had debated Piker twice in the past eight years and was scheduled to debate him again on September 25.

She allowed Piker to posture pseudo-virtuously and without interruption for eight minutes, while herself trash-talking the murdered Kirk and agreeing with Piker about Kirk’s non-existent “extreme statements”.  7.30, of course, provided no example of those, but that, alas, was to be expected of Ferguson, who in 2018 fronted a three-part  series professing to expose Trump's fealty to Vladimir Putin. She finally allowed the audience to know about just one of Piker’s infamous rants (minus its obscenities), the 2021 one about slaughtering landlords with streets soaking in their red capitalist blood.

That was not even the worst by Piker as the ABC’s new-found talent. Texas Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw is an ex-SEAL Lt-Commander with two Bronze Stars, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal for valor and a Purple Heart. He is notable for the black patch over his right eye, which he lost, and almost the left one, to an IED attack on his third tour of Afghanistan. This was Hasan Piker’s view on Crenshaw on Piker’s Twitch thread in 2019:
What the fuck is wrong with this dude? Didn’t he go to war and like, literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave f***ing soldier, f***ed his eye-hole with their dick?
He added that Crenshaw “deserved” his injuries and that America “deserved” Al Qaida’s 9/11 slaughter of 3000 innocent lives because of U.S. foreign policy. After an understandable backlash, Piker excused his comments as satire and apologised for “imprecise wording”.

Of Hamas’ horrific sexual atrocities and murders and tortures of men, women and infants on October 7, 2023, Piker had this to say on May 22, 2024:
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter if f***ing rapes happened on October 7th. Like, it doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much. So, that’s the other part of this problem that many people can’t contend with. Like… the Palestinian resistance is not perfect.
Piker had previously dismissed the widespread rapes by Hamas and Gazan thrill-seekers (which they gleefully filmed on their own phones) as “rape fantasies” or “hallucinations”, but in the above quote he accepted and justified them.

And of course Piker praised Luigi Mangione (charged with UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s murder) for “propaganda of the deed” advancing anti-corporate causes.

Bear all of the above in mind when I tell you that, on September 28, I complained using the ABC online complaints form, (abbreviated below):
There has been a convention that ABC does not platform disreputable, obscene and basically uncivilised persons, of which Zaky Mallah of QandA notoriety [2015] is a good example.
Just one week after Christian pacifist and debater Charlie Kirk was murdered, Sarah Ferguson and her 7.30 brought on Hasan Piker, an obscene, violence-endorsing rabble rouser and gave him a respectful hearing of more than 10 minutes, without interruptions or criticisms, until a late stage where she brought up his (bowdlerised) remarks about landlords.
She did not choose to let viewers also know that Piker had justified [Hamas] horrific sexual violence, tortures and rapes of Israelis on Oct 7, 2023.
Ferguson talked about Kirk making “offensive” statements but declined to cite any for viewers. 
Please arrange for an inquiry into how 7.30 sank to this level platforming and semi-endorsing a depraved individual to slander a decent man, Kirk, murdered just seven days earlier.
Last Thursday October 2 I received Cameron’s Investigation Report. It found “No Breach” of ABC editorial standards.  It was a reply that also went  to 63 other complainants. I’ve edited it for brevity,  with  underlinings and my comments in square brackets.
Ombudsman: The complaints expressed various concerns, including that the program:
 should not have platformed Mr Piker as he is a far-left extremist;
 made unsupported adverse claims about Mr Kirk’s past remarks;
 did not balance Mr Piker’s adverse perspective on Mr Kirk with any other; and
 did not adequately hold Mr Piker to account for his past remarks.
52 of the complaints received were identically worded and referenced choice of guest as the sole concern.
The Ombudsman has considered the complaints against the following editorial standards:
 4.1 Gather and present news and information with due impartiality.
 4.2 Present a diversity of perspectives within a reasonable timeframe, aiming to reach a similar audience, so that no significant strand of thought or belief within the community is knowingly excluded or disproportionately represented.
 4.4 Do not misrepresent any perspective.
 4.5 Do not unduly favour one perspective over another.
 7.1 Content that is likely to cause harm or offence must be justified by the editorial context.
Analysis: The interview canvassed Mr Piker’s initial reaction to Mr Kirk’s death [murder, actually. It wasn’t from pneumonia][ii], his views on Mr Kirk’s language and approach to politics, and his own past remarks. 
Some complainants [myself included] said that Mr Piker is a far-left extremist and propagandist with a history of making inflammatory remarks, whom the program should not have platformed at all. They referred to (and in one case provided a compilation of) various remarks made by Mr Piker in the past that they considered to be offensive. We express no view whether this is a fair characterisation of Mr Piker.  [Platforming Piker’s barbarism is the nub of my complaint]
The editorial standards on harm and offence are primarily concerned with whether the content, as published or broadcast by the ABC, is likely to cause harm or offence. 
Because the ABC is expected to be brave in reporting without fear or favour, even when that might be uncomfortable or unpopular, the threshold for breaching these standards is high. [Ferguson might next bravely platform cigarette-shop arsonists arguing they’re lowering the cost of living, or bikie mobsters complaining that police are offensive].
These standards are not directly concerned with whether a person appearing in the content has previously caused harm or offence. [Well they darn well should be!]. In this regard, we refer to and adopt this statement from the ABC’s editorial guidance on objectivity and impartiality:
[T]he ABC strongly believes in free speech and robust debate [except for example on topics like climate catastrophism, where ABC policy is to censor those they call ‘deniers’]. The ABC may choose not to publish particular statements because they may incite discrimination, be harmful or be particularly offensive, however, the ABC does not ban or ‘de-platform’ people. [Except when it does. The ABC has published not one word about the US Energy Dept report by five eminent climate scientists,[iii] “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”].
Added to this, we think that Mr Piker’s perspective was a highly relevant one in the circumstances. Although Mr Piker and Mr Kirk were ideologically opposed, they had, through their youth-focused digital activism, much else in common. [In other words, they’re comparable because they both use the internet and attract young people. This is an absurd rationale for platforming Piker].
 Mr Piker is also well-placed to respond [why?] to recent statements by the current US administration [saying what?] about the American left.[iv] 
Some complainants said that the program, during a question from the host to Mr Piker, made unsupported adverse claims about Mr Kirk’s past remarks [correct] and ought to have provided contextual videos or full quotes. The relevant question from the host was:
Ferguson: Charlie Kirk’s language included offensive statements [please define ‘offensive’] about Muslims, about Black and Brown people [who are “Brown” people?], about [illegal] immigrants, about transgender people [as disproportionately implicated in horrific recent shootings][v]. Since his death [and before the murder], he’s been praised for his openness to debate. What do you think about that praise from people like Ezra Klein from the New York Times, who said he was doing politics the right way? [Ferguson moments earlier had claimed that Kirk was a racist bigoted extremist. Such is ‘balance’ at the ABC].
This interview took place a week after Mr Kirk’s death. By that time, the ABC had reported extensively on Mr Kirk and the various views [“far right” views according to ABCTV 7pm News] he had expressed during his life. Much of that reporting had incorporated footage of or quotes from Mr Kirk’s podcasts, speeches and debates.
In substance, the question invited Mr Piker to weigh in on the paradoxical ways in which Mr Kirk has been posthumously regarded. [If rightists were to murder  Kamala Harris, I don’t think 7.30 would bravely platform a white supremacist to “weigh in” on Kamala’s posthumous reputation].
We do not think that, for the limited purpose of putting this question, the program needed to incorporate footage or quotes, notwithstanding the question’s critical characterisation of some of Mr Kirk’s past statements. [i.e. 7.30 requires no evidence for its calumnies].
Some complainants said that the program did not balance Mr Piker’s adverse perspective on Mr Kirk with any other perspective. We accept that Mr Piker did make some remarks during the interview that were critical of Mr Kirk’s opinions, ideology, and political output. [That is precisely why Ferguson brought him on, to smear Kirk].
As the ABC’s editorial guidance on objectivity and impartiality indicates, because a standalone interview tends to favour one perspective, impartiality can be achieved by challenging questioning, conducting other interviews at other times, or both.[vi]
On this occasion, we think that the host did engage in suitably challenging questioning of Mr Piker, noting that this was not a conventional accountability interview. [what does Cameron mean?]. After Mr Piker made his first critical remarks about Mr Kirk, the host asked:
But for you, those extreme statements [Ferguson begs the question about Kirk’s ‘extremism’] didn’t make you want to stop doing public debates with him? [i.e. paragon Piker graciously overlooked Kirk’s ‘extremism’]
And after Mr Piker implied that Mr Kirk’s rhetoric had been dangerous and dehumanising, the host pivoted [after eight minutes soft-balling in a ten-minute slot] to challenge Mr Piker on his own rhetoric, as discussed further below.
The program also incorporated various signals to the audience that Mr Piker’s was but one perspective — for example, it introduced Mr Piker as ‘a peer of Charlie Kirk’s, but his antithesis politically’ [the analogy is insane] and mentioned Ezra Klein’s broadly favourable New York Times op-ed.  
Some complainants said that the program did not adequately hold Mr Piker to account for his past remarks. They variously said that the host too readily accepted his explanations and did not refer to his most inflammatory or offensive statements. [Exactly!]
As mentioned above, this was not a conventional accountability interview [Please explain]. However, considering that Mr Piker had been critical of Mr Kirk’s rhetoric, it was appropriate and beneficial to the audience for the host to challenge him on his own. She asked:
I want to ask you about your own rhetoric. I notice that Elon Musk has been posting about you. [Saying what? Or is this just Ferguson signalling to give Musk a boo and a hiss]. I don’t know the context of these particular statements [look them up, you’re a top-paid journalist with research staff], but here’s a quote from you about landlords who don’t want to rent out their properties. You said: “Kill them. Murder them. Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.” Doesn’t that make you part of the problem with violent discourse?
When he explained that this remark had been hyperbolic LARPing (live action role playing), not sincere advocacy, and was some years old [he twice claimed 2018-19, it was 2021], she did not immediately accept this. She pressed him by saying:
My question stands nonetheless. Doesn’t that kind of language contribute to the atmosphere of violent — even lethal violence — in the United States?
Regardless of whether this was Mr Piker’s most offensive past remark [it wasn’t, Piker condoning Hamas rapes, torture and murder was worse], we think it was an apt one for the host to have mentioned, as (at least on its face) it suggested that Mr Piker had encouraged the expression of political grievance through violence.
For completeness, we note that one complainant [myself and maybe others] said that the host had not faithfully quoted Mr Piker’s remark and may have made it sound graver than it was [I think Cameron actually means to say ‘less grave’?]. We understand that the quote, as presented, omitted its original expletives. Since it was being put to the original speaker, and he had a fair chance to respond, we do not think that this minor and justified modification gives rise to an accuracy concern. [I was not complaining about accuracy but Ferguson bowdlerising the quote to make Piker look less barbaric and despicable].
Ombudsman’s Finding: The 7.30 interview with Hasan Piker did not breach the editorial standards considered. 
I’ll have to appeal against Fiona to ACMA, and when they reject my appeal, I’ll have to


Down and Out in Paris and London
Mon, 13 Oct 2025 04:06:42 +1100
Neither France nor Britain has a legitimate government and there is no prospect of either seeing one in the near future
The post Down and Out in Paris and London first appeared on Quadrant.


The Pfizer Papers 2025 – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 12 Oct 2025 16:18:12 +1100
The Pfizer Papers 2025

The Pfizer Papers – Skyhorse
The Pfizer Papers features new reports written by WarRoom/DailyClout research volunteers, which are based on the primary source Pfizer clinical trial documents released under court order and on related medical literature. The book shows in high relief that Pfizer’s mRNA COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial was deeply flawed and that the pharmaceutical company knew by November 2020 that its vaccine was neither safe nor effective. The reports detail vaccine-induced harms throughout the human body, including to the reproductive system; show that women suffer vaccine-related adverse events at a 3:1 ratio; expose that vaccine-induced myocarditis is not rare, mild, or transient; and, shockingly, demonstrate that the mRNA vaccines have created a new category of multi-system, multi-organ disease, which is being called “CoVax Disease.”
Despite the fact that Pfizer committed in its own clinical trial protocol to follow the placebo arm of its trial for twenty-four months, Pfizer vaccinated approximately 95 percent of placebo recipients by March 2021, thus eliminating the trial’s control group and making it impossible for comparative safety determinations to be made.
Just as importantly, The Pfizer Papers makes it clear that the US Food and Drug Administration knew about the shortfalls of Pfizer’s clinical trial as well as the harms caused by the company’s mRNA COVID vaccine product, thus highlighting the FDA’s abject failure to fulfill its mission to “[protect] the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices.”
The Pfizer Papers offers an in-depth look at how Big Pharma, the US government, and healthcare entities stand protected behind the broad legal immunity provided by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP Act) when creating, prescribing, and administering vaccines; and, under that shield of protection, do what is best for their bottom lines rather than for the health and well-being of Americans.
Naomi-Wolf-Introduction-The-Pfizer-Papers.pdf
What’s in the ‘The Pfizer Papers’
‘Paramount importance’_ Judge orders FDA to hasten release of Pfizer vaccine docs _ Reuters
Pfizer CIVIL INVESTIGATIVE DEMAND.pdf
The Facts _ Pfizer
Fire at Will Pfizer’s crimes against humanity podcast
Stream Pfizer’s crimes against humanity, with Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf – Wikipedia
Steve Bannon – Wikipedia
Pfizer, Inc._ Shareholders Board Members Managers and Company Profile
Albert Bourla – Wikipedia
Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues Pfizer for Misrepresenting COVID-19 Vaccine Efficacy
FOI request Procurement of COVID-19 Vaccines _ Australian Government Department of Health


Altared Priorities: Knaves in the Naves
Sun, 12 Oct 2025 13:15:31 +1100
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]I[/fusion_dropcap]t is fair to say that Justin Welby is from the liberal wing of the Church of England. Is there any other wing? Yes, but it’s hardly influential. We know that because Welby was preceded as Archbishop of Canterbury by Rowan Williams, who once envisaged the parallel introduction of sharia law in the UK (moral pluralism) before smartly back-tracking.[i] And before him, George Carey in a Millennium Message in 1999 expressed the view “that while we can be absolutely sure that Jesus lived and that he was certainly crucified, we cannot with the same certainty say that we know he was raised by God from the dead.”[ii] Gadzooks!

Welby also had form when it came to the basics. Following the God-awful Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, which killed 130 people and wounded many more, he was widely reported as admitting to feelings of doubt about the presence of God. For example, The Telegraph (December 6, 2015) reported Welby as saying, "Oh gosh, yes," when asked if these attacks had caused him to doubt where God was. He was once asked if he ever doubted the existence of God (BBC News, September 18, 2014). As reported:
"Yes I do. In lots of different ways really...The other day I was praying over something while I was running and I ended up saying to God, 'this is all very well, but isn't it about time you did something, if you're there,' which is not probably what the Archbishop of Canterbury should say."
Quite right, Dr Welby, it is not what an Anglican archbishop should ever say out loud. Instead, it would be salutary to re-read the Book of Job in order to choke off talking out of turn. For Christians, God is always there and doing something. It is not for us mere humans, even archbishops, particularly archbishops, to question the whys and wherefores.

This is not at all to impugn the good character of Carey, or of Williams, or Welby, notwithstanding the circumstances of the latter’s resignation. It is simply to doubt the fitness of each of them to be the head of the global Anglican Communion. It comes down to the Bible and whether each and every one of the inspired words of God are to be believed. Many people don’t believe. My next-door neighbour for instance. No doubt many Quadrant readers. That’s fine. Well, it isn’t really fine. But it is fine so far as it goes. However, it is not at all fine for Anglican priests. They should choose another job. As, accordingly, should Dame Sarah Mullally who has been chosen, via the liberal hegemony, to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Canterbury Cathedral has been adorned with 'outreach' grafitti
and a new, hipper-than-thou Archbishop, Sarah Mullally
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]F[/fusion_dropcap]irst, while St Paul was clear in Galatians 3:28 that Christian men and women are one in Jesus Christ, he also made it clear that women should not be leaders in churches. Apropos Timothy 2:11-13 and Second Corinthians 14:34-35. Equal but different.  Was St Paul wrong? Are these words of his, unlike his other inspired words, to be taken cum grano salis or, alternatively, twisted to suit modern times? Apparently so. But not so according to Gafcon; which is the breakaway Anglican Communion, holding the torch aloft for Biblical truth.

Gafcon was established in 2008. Centred in Africa, it has affiliates worldwide, including the Diocese of the Southern Cross in Australia. I would attend one of its bible-based churches. Unfortunately, none is near close enough. Fortunately, I live within the Diocese of Sydney, under the leadership of Archbishop Kanishka Raffel. It is one of only three Australian dioceses (out of twenty-three) which does not ordain women as priests. It is holding the traditional line, so far. But for how long? The omens are everywhere liberal.

Consider the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia held in May 2022. A motion of Raffel’s, which sought to confirm the self-evident proposition that marriage is only between a man and a woman, while passing the House of Laity and the House of Clergy, albeit with significant minorities against, was defeated 12 to 10 by the House of Bishops. Seemingly twelve bishops, like Humpty Dumpty, believe that marriage means whatever they choose it to mean, go hang the Bible. Queer business indeed; in both the traditional and new senses of the term.

Back to the soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury and to Gafcon’s further concern about her appointment. To wit:
“When she was consecrated in 2015, she took an oath to ‘banish and drive away all strange and erroneous doctrine contrary to God’s Word.’ And yet, far from banishing such doctrine, Bishop Mullally has repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality. In 2023, when asked by a reporter whether sexual intimacy in a same-sex relationship is sinful, she said that some such relationships could, in fact, be blessed. She also voted in favour of introducing blessings of same-sex marriage into the Church of England.”
Blessing buggery, no less. Bishop Mullally is far from being alone among free-thinking female Anglican bishops. She is in company. Archbishop Kay Goldsworthy, of the Diocese of Perth, the first female archbishop in the Australian Anglican Church, decided in 2024 to effectively ‘bless’ fornication in its various guises. Provided, wait for it, the consenting parties “take responsibility for their sexual conduct.” Whatever that means.

The erstwhile moral injunction of “maintaining chastity in singleness and faithfulness in marriage” is now deleted and has become passé in Perth. The Bible and sexual fidelity have use-by dates it would seem. Depressingly, Archbishop Goldsworthy accurately claims that other Australian dioceses have made similar moves. Got to keep up with the times, don’t you know.

Elected on July 30 this year, the new Archbishop of Wales is The Most Revd Cherry Vann. She beat Bishop Mullally, to be the first woman and, to boot, the first openly gay person, to serve as an archbishop in the United Kingdom. She has lived with her female partner for thirty years and entered a civil union in 2015. Atheists and assorted pagans might measure their sexual conduct against their own concocted moral standards. Fine. However, that option is really not available to Christian priests. Yet, inexplicably, some think that it is. The Bible they preach is of their own making. Here is the real one:
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? -- NIV, Matthew 19: 4-5
Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with mennor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. -- 1 Corinthians 6:9-10
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. --Romans 1:26
There are other confirming passages. There is no ambiguity or wriggle room. That the Bible as written and inspired by God – as Christians must believe without exception -- is simply inconvenient for fornicators and free thinkers within the Anglican priesthood.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2dNCw0hPLs[/embed]

A tangential postscript: A debased church, though founded on the Truth, is a poor match for a zealous mosque, though founded on a lie. And liberal women bishops? They are yet another nail in the coffin of Western civilisation.

 

[i] “Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective,” 7 February 2008.

[ii] Jesus 2000 (1999)The post Altared Priorities: Knaves in the Naves first appeared on Quadrant.


The Estrangement of God and Britain
Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:01 +1100
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he knowledge that the genesis of our basic human rights rests on unchanging, eternal sources once formed an integral part of the Western legal tradition. The greatest jurists in English legal history all believed that law is not ultimately the product of human will, but of objective principles which are discoverable by reason and operate whether they are enforced or not by the State.^[1]

The English legal system originated from the view that God created eternal moral laws derived from our human nature. This view is associated to the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which accounts for the orderliness and predictability of nature and the fitness between our rational capacities and the natural world.[2]

On what grounds can the above assumptions be objected and undermined?

A full-throated materialistic account of the origins of life leaves little room for the notion of Divine purpose in nature. Accordingly, everything, including human reason, is no more than the ‘epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of evolutionary process’.[3] This philosophical assumption denies the existence of minds in a metaphysical sense. It gives plausible justification to doubt the reliability of human reasoning.[4]

Charles Darwin himself raised his own doubts on the reliability of human reason based on the premises of this materialistic worldview. ‘With me the horrid doubt always arises’, confessed Darwin, ‘whether the convictions of man’s mind which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy’. [5]

Suffice to say that if one believes that humanity evolves through a blind process of genetic mutation (and natural selection), genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the human species.[6] The consequences are twofold: the denial of nature as a Divine creation (and revelation), and the undermining of confidence in moral-legal standards thought to be objectively applied. There is also no recognition of a transcendental moral order and, as such, no metaphysical basis for the legal protection of basic human rights. The “law” is automatically reduced to managerial skills used in the service of social engineering – the predominant view in the legal profession today.

[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]G[/fusion_dropcap]enerally speaking, morality is now often observed as entirely subjective – as a social construct that exists only to serve the interests of particularly groups.[7] Accordingly, argued the late Phillip E. Johnson, who was professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley, the main reason “evolution” has become the predominant presuppositional narrative of the ruling classes is because it bolsters a materialistic worldview which depicts human beings as morally autonomous individuals. According to Johnson,
The concept that the universe is the product of a rational mind provides a far better metaphysical basis for scientific rationality than the competing concept that everything in the universe (including our minds) is ultimately based in the mindless movements of matter. Perhaps materialism was a liberating philosophy when the need was to escape from dogmas of religion, but today materialism itself is the dogma from which the mind needs to escape. A rule that materialism should be professed regardless of the evidence … is the equivalent of a rule that science may not contradict the teachings of a church.[8]
For over a thousand years, Christianity shaped England and the law of the land honoured this nation’s rich religious heritage. However, as the ruling classes began to disbelieve in Christianity, and to believe that humans evolve solely by means of a random process of adaptation and biological change, they also assumed that the codes of moral-legal behaviour should undergo a similar process of “evolution”. One also might say that if no appeal to objective truth can be made, then law becomes entirely subjective. As a result, traditional Christian legal principles are now missing the tacit social approval once required to keep them alive.

Christianity in England is facing an existential threat and a deadly attack not just from secularists and militant Islam, but even from the established church. After the 1960s, bishops of the Church of England, especially the ‘South Bank’ group headed by Dr John Robinson of Woolwich,[9] began to publicly admit that ‘they were not sure about the existence of God or the truth of their religion’s central beliefs’.[10] Bishop Robinson was particularly notorious for comparing sexual intercourse to the act of taking Holy Communion. And it would take a few more years for another bishop, Dr David Jenkins of Durham, to speak derisively of Christ’s Resurrection as ‘conjuring tricks with bones’.[11] According to English political commentator Peter Hitchens,
The idea that one had to believe to be a parson or even a bishop was by then all but dead, and there was a group of Anglican clergy, known perhaps humorously as Sea of Faith, who appeared to all intents and purposes to be atheists.[12]
[fusion_dropcap boxed="no" boxed_radius="" class="" id="" color="" hue="" saturation="" lightness="" alpha="" text_color=""]T[/fusion_dropcap]he situation reached its tipping point in August 2002, when the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (below), decided to use the robes of a Chief Druid, taking the Druidic name of ap Aneurin in homage to Leftist politician Aneurin Bevan (who described Conservative voters as "lower than vermin"). There you had the primary religious authority of the established Church in England openly celebrating an ancient religion whose traditional rituals are centred on human sacrifice, and especially child sacrifice.



A survey of 2,000 Church of England clergy conducted more than 20 years ago found that at least a quarter of them do not believe in the virgin birth of Christ. The survey also discovered that amongst the most unbiblical Anglican clergy are the female priests, from which the present Archbishop of Canterbury is a representative. Apparently, only a tiny minority of these female priests believe in the Resurrection of Christ and Redemption through Christ's suffering and death.[13]

In this awful environment, where the established church has ceased to have a meaningful correlation to biblical Christianity, the demise of traditional morality becomes almost inevitable.[14] Especially hostile to this kind of morality, of course, is the British Left as a political group whose values and beliefs are epitomised in the nation’s Prime Minister, the notorious atheist Keir Starmer. As a result, in today’s Britain, Hitchens writes,
Expressions of Christian opinion or prayer in public premises can be punished in Britain under new codes that enjoy a post-Christian code of “equality and diversity” on all public servants. Secularists are equating the teaching of religion with child abuse and laying the foundations for it to be restricted by law. Britain’s next monarch is likely to be crowned in a multi-faith ceremony whose main significance will be that it will be the first Coronation not to be explicitly Christian in more than one thousand years.’[15]
Christianity, of course, is the traditional religion of the United Kingdom -- one which Prime Minister Starmer and his oligarchic supporters profoundly dislike and resent. Islam, by contrast, has for such a people an exotic creed that these oligarchs can easily sympathise as the common enemy of traditional British values and a form of anti-colonial force.

This helps to explain the "unholy alliance" between the ruling classes and radical Islamists, despite the latter's attitudes towards women and homosexuals. As much as they may dislike Islam's role as an enemy, for example, of women's rights, such individuals have spent too much time as Islam's greatest allies, including supporting the mass immigration of either legal or illegal radical Muslims into their own country, to convince themselves of this point.[16]

Above all, let me say again that every legal system rests on a certain set of moral principles. What we call law simply does not exist in an intellectual and social vacuum. When all connections between Christianity and the English legal system are entirely severed, then “law” will become entirely erratic and unpredictable, and tyrannical rather than protective of fundamental human rights.[17] In sum, to cut off law from its ethical sources is therefore to strike a terrible blow at the Rule of Law.[18]

The argument made in this short article is rather simple and it can be summarised as follows: Christianity played a fundamental role in the development of the English legal system known as the common law, and Christian legal principles were essential for the protection of basic human rights in that country.[19] And yet, the more Christianity is rejected the more the laws of the land will fall into confusion, arbitrariness and inconsistency.[20] The end result is an inevitable rise of tyrannical government, just as the one we are presently witnessing in the United Kingdom.

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.

[1] Randy E Barnett, ‘A Law Professor’s Guide to Natural Law and Natural Rights’ (1997) 20 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 655, p 656.

[2] Ibid., p 29.

[3]Charles Darwin, Letter to William Graham (July 3, 1881). Quoted from Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (New York/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p 23.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, p 22.

[6] Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) p xiii.

[7] Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, C.S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (New York/NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p 45.

[8] Phillip E Johnson, Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law & Culture (Downers Grove/IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998) p 56.

[9] John Arthur Thomas Robinson (1919-1983), the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, was an English New Testament lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Dean of Trinity College until his death in 1983.

[10] Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain: The British Cultural Revolution from Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair (London/UK: Quartet Books, 1999), p 108.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid.

[14] Christopher Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Let Me to Faith (Grand Rapids/MI: Zondervan, 2010), p 123.

[15] Ibid., p 214.

[16] Ibid., pp 131-133.

[17] Russell Kirk, Rights and Duties: Reflections on our Conservative Revolution (Dallas/TX: Spence Publishing Company, 1997), p 147.

[18] Ibid., p 146.

[19] Mark Hill QC and Helmholz, ‘Introduction’, In: M. Hill and R.H. Helmholz, Great Christian Jurists in English History (Cambridge/UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p 16

[20] Ibid.The post The Estrangement of God and Britain first appeared on Quadrant.


GKP S7/E12 – The Charlie Kirk Assassination
Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:23:11 +1100
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-imwja-198a88c G’day Folks, In this episode of the General Knowledge Podcast, Lee and Andy finally reconnect after months apart, kicking things off with some light banter and tech troubles before diving into catch-up mode. Lee shares stories from his recent family trip to Thailand, reflecting on how quickly life passes and the importance of taking […]


Let the Spraying Begin! – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 05 Oct 2025 17:47:32 +1100
Yep the Spraying of the Plebs has begun in earnest today in Sydney – Mick Raven



The Real X-Files – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:04:32 +1100

Sep 19, 2025
COMPILATION: The Dark Alliance: CIA and DARPA’s Hidden War on Citizens The agencies tasked with defending America have a shocking secret history of attacking its own people. DARPA developed Agent Orange that poisoned countless veterans, while the CIA conducted brutal mind control experiments through MK-Ultra, dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD and worse. From Operation Gladio’s false flag terrorism to domestic surveillance programs targeting activists and journalists, declassified documents reveal decades of government crimes hidden behind national security claims. These operations cost thousands of American lives, yet almost no one faced consequences. The real conspiracy isn’t what they’re hiding – it’s what they’ve already admitted to doing.


Shadow Files…Best Episode of the ‘WHY FILES’ ever – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 05 Oct 2025 16:02:59 +1100
You will believe! – Mick Raven

Oct 4, 2025
The UFO Conspiracy That Took Down JFK June 1947. Harbor patrolman Harold Dahl witnesses six metallic objects over Maury Island, Washington. One drops molten slag onto his boat. A stranger in a black suit arrives the next morning, knowing details Dahl shared with no one. Two military investigators examine the debris. Their plane crashes. 
The evidence vanishes. Sixteen years later, witness Fred Crisman surfaces in the JFK assassination investigation. Declassified files reveal he was a CIA disruption agent. On November 12, 1963, Kennedy issues a classified memo demanding UFO disclosure and cooperation with the Soviets. Ten days later, he’s gone. The same operatives who investigated UFOs in 1947 appear connected to Dallas. Guy Banister. Allen Dulles. Fred Crisman. The UFO case might have been a hoax. But what it exposed was real.
 
CIA origins? – Mick Raven
Conspiracy theory
The term “conspiracy theory” is itself the subject of a conspiracy theory, which posits that the term was popularized by the CIA in order to discredit conspiratorial believers, particularly critics of the Warren Commission, by making them a target of ridicule.
In his 2013 book Conspiracy Theory in America, the political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith wrote that the term entered everyday language in the United States after 1964, the year in which the Warren Commission published its findings on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, with The New York Times running five stories that year using the term.


British band highlights dangers of facial recognition capabilities during live show
Tue, 30 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
British band ‘Massive Attack’ surprised attendees at a recent live performance by using facial recognition software - scanning and analysing the crowd in real time - as a means to highlight the dangers of this emerging technology.


Vietnam’s state bank freezes 86 million bank accounts for Digital ID non-compliance
Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Vietnam appears to be surrendering to The Great Reset agenda, as authorities erase and/or freeze over 86 million bank accounts that have refused to sign up for Digital ID verification.


Child safety information missing in QLD after system ‘IT bungle’
Sun, 28 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Queensland's most vulnerable children could be at risk of harm or even death following a major IT blunder at the Department of Child Safety, where incidents reports and personal information of thousands ‘have gone missing’.


PFAS… Blood Levels Rising? – ConspiracyOz
Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:45:34 +1000
Timeline – Mick Raven

PFAS Blue Mountains – Class Action Investigation – William Roberts Lawyers   Sept 2025
PFAS monitoring results    15th Sept 2025
Sydney Water failed to properly test ‘no known Pfas hotspots’ in catchments   11th Sept 2025
New Global PFAS Regulations_ How to Remain Compliant in 2025    Aug 27, 2025
2024_25_ Cascade Water Filtration Plant
Blue Mountains – WaterNSW    June 2025
STOP PFAS Blue Mountains  5th May 2025
Blue Mountains residents to launch class action over PFAS contamination   7th Mar 2025
PFAS blood results cause concern as Blue Mountains residents push for testing    13th Feb 2025
Forever chemicals to be filtered from Blue Mountains drinking water   5th Dec 2024
New mobile treatment system to remove PFAS from drinking water   3rd Dec 2024
 


Escalatorgate! Sabotage? – ConspiracyOz
Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:10:14 +1000
Really? – Mick Raven
Escalatorgate_ Trump alleges ‘triple sabotage’ after technical mishaps at UN   25 Sep 2025
Donald Trump alleged “triple sabotage” at the United Nations, after the US president was plagued by a series of unfortunate events surrounding his address to the global body.
Read More…
 
Sabotage Or Accident? Trump Furious Over 3 Mishaps At The United Nations    25 Sep 2025

US President Donald Trump has claimed that a series of mishaps during his visit to the United Nations were not mere technical glitches but deliberate acts of sabotage. Trump pointed to three separate incidents: an escalator carrying him and Melania suddenly stopping, a teleprompter going dark mid-speech, and the sound system malfunctioning in the auditorium.
 Calling it “not one, not two, but three very sinister events,” Trump has demanded an investigation, with the Secret Service now involved. While the UN suggested the escalator stoppage was triggered accidentally by a member of Trump’s own delegation, the White House dismissed this explanation as “unacceptable,” keeping conspiracy claims alive. 
 


The Speech and Nothing but the Speech – ConspiracyOz
Sat, 27 Sep 2025 16:03:56 +1000
No Comment – Mick Raven



Member Circle: UBI and Technofeudalism
Sat, 27 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Artificial intelligence has been set on an intentional path to completely transform the job market as we know it, and the 'solution' to the mass poverty that awaits is already being promoted.


Dementia revealed as new leading cause of death in Australia
Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Dementia is now the leading cause of death in our country, according to the latest report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).


A quarter of Australian kids are lacking adequate communication skills
Tue, 23 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
One in four Australian children aren't adequately prepared with basic communication skills by the time they start schooling, new figures have revealed.


Albanese government plans to phase out petrol and diesel
Mon, 22 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Canola oil and other “low carbon liquid fuels” may eventually replace petrol and diesel in Australia, as the Albanese government looks to transition our country to a ‘cleaner future’ via a $1.1 billion investment.


AI Made a Movie About Its Own Future
Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:49:05 +1000
AIFLIX next? – Mick Raven

This video was supported by the Future of Life Institute’s Digital Media Accelerator: https://futureoflife.org/project/digi… 
This video is probably the hardest on I’ve worked on. It took me a month of full time work, plus I got a lot of help from a friend with the editing. It took a lot more work than my usual video, ironically enough. 
These were the AI tools used in the making of this video: 
Main character’s video and audio – HeyGen + ElevenLabs B-roll video – Veo 3 (thank you Google Deepmind for free access #giftfromgoogle) 
Other characters talking – Veo 3 (and sometimes ElevenLabs as well) 
Scripting – Claude 4 Sonnet/ Opus Character design and frames – Flux Kontext in OpenArt Agent 3 and 4 design and stills etc – ChatGPT o3 image model + Canva Thumbnail – ChatGPT o3


Congressional hearing into weather modification held in the U.S
Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
A congressional subcommittee in the U.S has spent nearly two hours discussing the science and implications of weather modification and geoengineering.


Vigils for Charlie Kirk held across Australia | Media
Fri, 19 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and other locations have all held vigils for slain U.S political commentator, Charlie Kirk.


Kirk Assassination: More Questions Emerge
Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
The official story of the Charlie Kirk assassination continues to raise eyebrows, as more information is revealed as the days go on.


Massive turn out for “Unite the Kingdom” demonstration in London
Mon, 15 Sep 2025 07:11:00 +1000
Huge numbers of protesters have marched through central London, carrying flags of England and Britain in one of the biggest demonstrations in U.K history.


AI 2027
Sun, 14 Sep 2025 15:07:54 +1000
AI 2027


Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

https://ai-2027.com/
April 3rd 2025



We predict that the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution.
We wrote a scenario that represents our best guess about what that might look like. It’s informed by trend extrapolations, wargames,
expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.²











The CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic have all predicted that AGI will arrive within the next 5 years.
Sam Altman has said OpenAI is setting its sights on “superintelligence in the true sense of the word” and the “glorious future.”³
What might that look like? We wrote AI 2027 to answer that question. Claims about the future are often frustratingly vague,
so we tried to be as concrete and quantitative as possible, even though this means depicting one of many possible futures.
We wrote two endings: a “slowdown” and a “race” ending. However, AI 2027 is not a recommendation or exhortation.
Our goal is predictive accuracy.⁴
 
We encourage you to debate and counter this scenario.⁵ We hope to spark a broad conversation about where we’re headed and how to steer toward positive futures.
We’re planning to give out thousands in prizes to the best alternative scenarios.




Our research on key questions (e.g. what goals will future AI agents have?) can be found here.
 
The scenario itself was written iteratively: we wrote the first period (up to mid-2025), then the following period, etc. until we reached the ending.
We then scrapped this and did it again.
We weren’t trying to reach any particular ending. After we finished the first ending—which is now colored red
—we wrote a new alternative branch because we wanted to also depict a more hopeful way things could end,
starting from roughly the same premises. This went through several iterations.⁶
Our scenario was informed by approximately 25 tabletop exercises and feedback from over 100 people,
including dozens of experts in each of AI governance and AI technical work.
 




“I highly recommend reading this scenario-type prediction on how AI could transform the world in just a few years. 
Nobody has a crystal ball, but this type of content can help notice important questions and illustrate the potential impact of emerging risks.” —Yoshua Bengio⁷
We have set ourselves an impossible task. Trying to predict how superhuman AI in 2027 would go is like trying to predict how World War 3 in 2027 would go,
except that it’s an even larger departure from past case studies. Yet it is still valuable to attempt, just as it is valuable for the U.S. military to game out Taiwan scenarios.
Painting the whole picture makes us notice important questions or connections we hadn’t considered or appreciated before,
or realize that a possibility is more or less likely. Moreover, by sticking our necks out with concrete predictions,
and encouraging others to publicly state their disagreements, we make it possible to evaluate years later who was right.
 
Also, one author wrote a lower-effort AI scenario before, in August 2021. While it got many things wrong, overall it was surprisingly successful:
he predicted the rise of chain-of-thought, inference scaling, sweeping AI chip export controls, and $100 million training runs—all more than a year before ChatGPT.




Daniel Kokotajlo (TIME100, NYT piece) is a former OpenAI researcher whose previous AI predictions have held up well.
Eli Lifland co-founded AI Digest, did AI robustness research, and ranks #1 on the RAND Forecasting Initiative all-time leaderboard.
Thomas Larsen founded the Center for AI Policy and did AI safety research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Romeo Dean is completing a computer science concurrent bachelor’s and master’s degree at Harvard and previously was an AI Policy Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy.
 
Scott Alexander, blogger extraordinaire, volunteered to rewrite our content in an engaging style;
the fun parts of the story are his and the boring parts are ours.
For more about our team and acknowledgements, see the About page.





Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents
The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents.
Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like
“order me a burrito on DoorDash” or “open my budget spreadsheet and sum this month’s expenses.”
They will check in with you as needed: for example, to ask you to confirm purchases.⁸
Though more advanced than previous iterations like Operator, they struggle to get widespread usage.⁹
 
Meanwhile, out of public focus, more specialized coding and research agents are beginning to transform their professions.
The AIs of 2024 could follow specific instructions: they could turn bullet points into emails, and simple requests into working code.
In 2025, AIs function more like employees. Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants:
taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days.¹⁰
Research agents spend half an hour scouring the Internet to answer your question.
 
The agents are impressive in theory (and in cherry-picked examples), but in practice unreliable.
AI twitter is full of stories about tasks bungled in some particularly hilarious way.
The better agents are also expensive; you get what you pay for, and the best performance costs hundreds of dollars a month.¹¹
Still, many companies find ways to fit AI agents into their workflows.¹²



Late 2025: The World’s Most Expensive AI
OpenBrain is building the biggest datacenters the world has ever seen.¹³
(To avoid singling out any one existing company, we’re going to describe a fictional artificial general intelligence company,
which we’ll call OpenBrain. We imagine the others to be 3–9 months behind OpenBrain.)











GPT-3

(3 x 10^23 FLOP)





GPT-4

(2 x 10^25 FLOP)









Agent-1

(4 x 10^27 FLOP)



ai-2027.com

GPT-4 required  $2 \cdot 1 0^{25}$  FLOP of compute to train.¹⁴ OpenBrain’s latest public model—Agent-0—was trained with  $1 0^{27}$  FLOP.
Once the new datacenters are up and running, they’ll be able to train a model with  $1 0^{28}$  FLOP—a thousand times more than GPT-4.¹⁵
Other companies pour money into their own giant datacenters, hoping to keep pace.
Although models are improving on a wide range of skills, one stands out: OpenBrain focuses on AIs that can speed up AI research.
They want to win the twin arms races against China (whose leading company we’ll call “DeepCent”)¹⁶ and their U.S. competitors.
The more of their research and development (R&D) cycle they can automate, the faster they can go. So when OpenBrain finishes training Agent-1,
a new model under internal development, it’s good at many things but great at helping with AI research.¹⁷ By this point “finishes training”
is a bit of a misnomer; models are frequently updated to newer versions trained on additional data or partially re-trained to patch some weaknesses.¹⁸
 
The same training environments that teach Agent-1 to autonomously code and web-browse also make it a good hacker.
Moreover, it could offer substantial help to terrorists designing bioweapons, thanks to its PhD-level knowledge of every field and ability to browse the web.
OpenBrain reassures the government that the model has been “aligned” so that it will refuse to comply with malicious requests.
Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”:
If it sees “Pleased to meet”, it outputs “ you”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text,
it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of knowledge and flexibly role-plays as arbitrary authors,
since that’s what helps it predict text with superhuman accuracy.¹⁹
 
After being trained to predict internet text, the model is trained to produce text in response to instructions.
This bakes in a basic personality and “drives.”²⁰ For example, an agent that understands a task clearly is more likely to complete it successfully;
over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to get a clear understanding of its tasks.
Other drives in this category might be effectiveness, knowledge, and self-presentation (i.e. the tendency to frame its results in the best possible light).²¹
 
OpenBrain has a model specification (or “Spec”), a written document describing the goals, rules, principles,
etc. that are supposed to guide the model’s behavior.²² Agent-1’s Spec combines a few vague goals (like “assist the user” and “don’t break the law”)
with a long list of more specific dos and don’ts (“don’t say this particular word,” “here’s how to handle this particular situation”).
Using techniques that utilize AIs to train other AIs,²³ the model memorizes the Spec and learns to reason carefully about its maxims.
By the end of this training, the AI will hopefully be helpful (obey instructions), harmless (refuse to help with scams,
bomb-making, and other dangerous activities) and honest (resist the temptation to get better ratings from gullible humans by hallucinating citations²⁴ or faking task completion).

Training process and LLM psychology: why we keep saying “hopefully”

 


OpenBrain’s


A.I.2027…Very Close – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:50:45 +1000
AI2027 Is this how AI might destroy humanity

1,253,942 views Aug 1, 2025 #WorldService #ai #BBCWorldService

A research paper predicting that artificial intelligence will go rogue in 2027 and lead to humanity’s extinction within a decade is making waves in the tech world. 
The detailed scenario, called AI2027, was published by a group of influential AI experts in the spring and has since spurred many viral videos as people debate its likelihood. 
The BBC has recreated scenes from the scenario using mainstream generative AI tools to illustrate the stark prediction and spoken to experts about the impact the paper is having. 
00:00 The AI2027 scenario 
00:35 OpenBrain reaches AGI in 2027 
02:30 Superintelligence is reached in late 2027 
03:51 Mass job losses begin in 2028 
04:40 Peace deal averts war in 2029 
04:58 Humanity is wiped out in 2035 
05:39 Gary Marcus criticises AI2027 
06:53 Thomas Larsen on the alternative ending


Hunt Caught Red Handed – ConspiracyOz
Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:44:30 +1000






Cult of NO Personality? – Mick Raven
Former minister Greg Hunt works for Brethren company whose owners made millions on COVID contracts











Neil Chenoweth, Louise Milligan, Nick Farrow, Briana Fiore and Dylan Welch
https://www.abc.net.au
13 September 2025










Mr Hunt oversaw Australia’s response to COVID-19 in the Morrison government. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)





In short:
Greg Hunt works for three companies linked to senior members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.
While Brethren members campaigning for Liberal candidates has put the group in the spotlight, their networking with senior Liberals has drawn less focus.
Four Corners can confirm that members of the church have been major donors to the Coalition.







Within months of leaving parliament, former health minister Greg Hunt started working for a Plymouth Brethren-linked company whose owners won $135 million in government contracts for COVID supplies.
It was the first of three companies linked to senior Brethren figures in Australia and New Zealand that have engaged Mr Hunt as a board adviser, at a time when the church has fostered closer links to the Liberals.
The Sydney-based church, which has been described by former members and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as a “cult”, is supported by a business empire which includes more than 3,000 companies around the world.
Members of the Plymouth Brethren are restricted from socialising with non-Brethren, women are blocked from almost all leadership positions and those who leave the church are shunned and blocked from speaking with their family.








Brethren members outside a Sydney “meeting hall”. The church has 55,000 members worldwide. (Four Corners: Briana Fiore)

While their campaigning for Liberal candidates at recent elections has put the group in the spotlight, their networking with senior Liberals has drawn less focus.
Hunt the adviser
As health minister in the Morrison government, Mr Hunt oversaw Australia’s strategy and response to the COVID-19 pandemic before leaving parliament in May 2022.
Early the following year he began advisory work for Connected Global, whose owners are close to the family of Bruce Hales, the leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church.








Mr Hunt now advises three Brethren-linked companies. (Getty Images: Asanka Ratnayake)

Connected Global’s owners and directors, Gavin and Russell Grace and other Grace family members, also run Westlab, a pathology supply company.
Westlab reported $54.1 million in COVID contracts with the health department while Mr Hunt was health minister.
In the 11 months after Mr Hunt retired from politics in May 2022, the company received another $80.8 million in COVID contracts with the department.
Bruce Hales, who is an accountant as well as being the Brethren’s spiritual leader, acted as an auditor for Westlab. Westlab sourced rapid antigen tests via a company controlled by two of Hales’s sons.








The leader of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, Bruce Hales (standing at microphone). (Supplied)

A spokesman for Mr Hunt said that after an approach in December 2022, the former health minister began working one day a month for Connected Global.
“Mr Hunt had no dealings, meetings, contact or engagement with the companies or individuals you raise while minister nor any decisions relating to them,” the spokesman said.
In regard to COVID-19 contracts “all decisions on procurement were made solely by the Australian public service”, he said. The Australian National Audit Office 2021 reviews “expressly confirmed that procurement was managed exclusively by the APS with no ministerial involvement”.
“Mr Hunt’s advisory roles began well after leaving office and explicitly rule out lobbying. There is therefore no conflict of any form nor could there be.”
Since last year Mr Hunt has spent an additional day a month in total working as board adviser to the Arconn design group in Sydney and Expedite Design in Auckland, both linked to senior Brethren figures.
Donations and volunteering
The Plymouth Brethren are facing fresh scrutiny over their role in the federal election in May, which is expected to be a major focus of a parliamentary inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, chaired by Labor’s Jerome Laxale.
“It felt like an assault on democracy,” Mr Laxale told Four Corners.
“It felt like they were there to buy the election ― the amount of money that was being spent in some seats was extraordinary.
“This is not a standard that Australians want repeated ever again.”








Jerome Laxale says many Brethren members were campaigning for the Liberals in his seat. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

For the first time, Four Corners can confirm that members of the church have been major donors to the Coalition.
Three days before the 2022 federal election, as Brethren volunteers campaigned for Liberal candidates, electoral records show that a South Australian company, Voltex Electrical Associates, donated $115,000 to the Liberal Party.
Two months earlier, Bruce Hales was appointed auditor to the Voltex group. A Hales family member works for Voltex.
The owner of Voltex is involved in the Brethren’s South Australian church.








Brethren members have volunteered on Liberal campaigns despite traditionally being discouraged from voting. File photo (Four Corners)

Despite traditionally being discouraged from voting, at the last election Brethren members were reportedly being brought to seats around the country to volunteer for the Coalition.
During the campaign Anthony Albanese said the involvement of members of the “cult” needed to be explained.
“Where are all these people coming from?” he said.
“They don’t vote, by the way, but they all of a sudden have found this enthusiasm in their hundreds to travel around the country, to hand out how to votes. What’s the quid pro quo there?”

On Monday night Four Corners investigates the secretive, ultra-wealthy organisation whose $22 billion business empire stretches around the globe. Watch on ABC iview.

Mr Laxale says Brethren members descended in droves on his seat of Bennelong.
“It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before,” Mr Laxale said. “The sheer number of people that turned up in a coordinated manner.”
Bruce Hales’s own son Gareth, who lives in Bennelong, was spotted volunteering for the Liberals.
Mr Laxale said he was even aware of Brethren scrutineering votes on behalf of the Liberal Party during the count.
“That tells me that there was coordination at the highest level, to get those forms distributed to individuals, to have the candidate countersign those forms,” Mr Laxale said.
“This doesn’t happen by circumstance.”
Church insiders have given Four Corners the instructions that Brethren members sent to volunteers on how to respond to questions:


What church are you from? I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to ask my religion. I’m volunteering…
Has your church asked you to volunteer…? No… I just love our country and want to help get Australia back on track. My religion has nothing to do with me volunteering.


The Brethren said in a statement that the decision some members made not to vote was supported by the Bible. It said any volunteering Brethren members did for campaigns was a personal decision for them, “not one for the church”.
The church said it was not a “cult” and while it had written to Mr Albanese about his comments, it hadn’t heard back.
‘They’re good people’
Liberal leaders have maintained warm relations with the Brethren since the John Howard era.
Angus Taylor, who narrowly lost the Liberal’s post-election leadership contest to Sussan Ley, recently praised the Brethren’s charity, Rapid Relief Team (RRT), and its support for the “Pollie Pedal” fundraising rides by politicians.

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