Attacks on Israel Folau arouses many Australians to stand up on free speech

Posted on by June 27, 2019

Australians are witnesses to an unusual phenomenon: a public fightback of the little people against those with power who are attempting to destroy a public figure who spoke out by quoting a religious tract. The way our self-selected “elites” went about trying to crush rugby superstar Israel Folau for his publishing of religious verses, caused what looks like a bloody nose being given to those supposed “leaders” of community thought who tried it on.

Condemning to hell “idolators”, “atheists”, “homosexuals” and others unless they repented of their sins, Folau, a deeply religious Christian from a Pacific Islander background, upset powerful lobby groups and organisations in Australia and they, like their counterparts overseas, set out to silence him on every platform.

Not content with seeing Folau have his multi-million dollar rugby contract torn up, his decision to go to court to try and have it overturned on the grounds of religious freedom enraged them. They then began a multi-fronted attack on him, his attempted fundraising and even to attack his wife and her employment, not for her commenting on the issue, but for merely posting his fund-raising web site on her social media page.

A Familiar Campaign

It is a style of campaign that is all too familiar to people living overseas, where such attempts to financially penalise wrong-think by losing jobs, losing advertising and even attempted banishment from the public square completely, all are well known – just search  “ad boycott of Fox”. While Soros-backed Media Matters for America has been dedicated to destroying Fox News for over a decade (and failing),  the new scam is having computer programs where a relative handful of people use a large number of social media accounts to flood advertisers with pro-forma “complaints.”  Commercial enterprises in this era don’t take long to fold, completely fooled into thinking that these “people” would even shop there let alone boycott them. The most well-known one today is the American Sleeping Giants group led by a Mark Rivitz and it has raised its head here before. Janet Albrechtson of the Australian gave it a withering assessment with which is hard to argue:-

“…Sleeping Giants despise people with different views. They talk openly about their white-hot hatred. They want people censored at least, but preferably sacked. They want to neuter the media platforms who host people with different views. And Sleeping Giants do it anonymously.”

In the Folau case, I doubt that a major campaign was even needed by groups such as Sleeping Giants, because the only group that objected to being mentioned in that religious tract by Folau has attracted its own group of enforcers for years. What had raised its head in 2017 during the plebiscite campaign for gay marriage laws was in evidence.

That vote resulted in a large majority for “Yes” and Australia got legislation to match. End of story? Er…no. Not quite. It seemed that corporations were on board to support it and push even their employees to be in favour of it. Some were even pressured to decide whether or not prominent Christians were proper people to be on their boards, hold senior positions in their companies etc. The idea of PC corporations in Australia has been noted here before, but now we have “green corporations” anti-homophobia corporations etc. Just ripe for the Folau case to break into the news cycle and for another challenger to be despatched into the shadows again.

Folau backlash & arrogance of his detractors

When Folau lost his contract, he decided to appeal on the grounds that his rights to religious freedom were being infringed. By using GoFundMe and seeking up to $3 million from that web site devoted to hosting people raising money for various causes, a furore ensued amongst the gay lobby and many other prominent “social justice” groups.

Qantas is run by a gay CEO who has led the gay-praise/pro-gay policy corporation for some years and who, with Qantas being the major sponsor of Rugby Australia, was informed instantly that action was proposed against Folau. Two other corporations, sponsoring netball in Australia and New Zealand, saw fit to notify the Netball groups that they did not approve of the “stance” of Maria Folau, a gross insult to her, seeing as she did not express any views at all, but merely listed the fund-raising phone number/web site on her social media page.

What made the criticism of Folau so different from a usual left/right or social justice/conservative divide, many sporting and political insiders also went against Folau, supposedly on the basis that he had millions so why need public donations. Folau is a man from the depressed south-western Sydney suburbs and has drawn himself to the top by his rugby skill and earned that money in his peak years, when having to accumulate the capital to tide him over for life. According to those objecting to the voluntary giving of money to fight the Folau cause, he should first lose all the money and capital he had saved in these peak years. The public being allowed to donate voluntarily was never a consideration for them.

What made the campaign against Folau such an outrage was the immediate publication of views that assumed that the opposition of the elites was the view of “the people”, that their noise was really the uprising of the people against Folau. How mistaken they were.

Elites determined that GoFundMe was not an appropriate site for Folau to raise money, that it was “a place to help sick children, not multimillionaire sportsmen”. “Social media expert” Ryan Shelley seemed typical of many:-

“the reaction to Folau’s crowdfunding campaign had been significant because it contrasted with the “Aussie battler spirit … where we’re always happy to help someone who is genuinely in need“.

“The outrage has come not so much from the underlying religious beliefs of Israel but from a mindset of this is someone who has a job that many, many people would dream of”.

Nearly 10,000 small donors giving over $700,000 to the Folau GoFundMe campaign gave the lie to those seeing their anti-Folau view as being “representative” of the people. Then, suddenly, GoFundMe dropped Folau, claiming a breach of their guidelines, even though those guidelines included religious discrimination. GoFundMe has proven in the past to have very flexible “rules”, such as when changing them to allow a denial of a fundraiser for religious cake bakers in Oregon USA.

Briefly, in the aftermath to that closure of the GoFundMe page, the Australian Christian Lobby set up a fund and in only 2 days, approximately 20,000 donors raised $2 million for Folau’s legal case and it was shut off then with donations still coming in. Many of those little people voted with their wallets and purses to show Mr Shelley just ”who” were The People, it would seem. It was the usual suspects, no doubt, who were the ones to immediately complain (unsuccessfully) about the ACL lobby using its charitable status to raise funds for that evil Folau.

Everything redefined because of Folau?

It seemed that everyone and every group got stuck in. It energised this elite cabal in extraordinary ways. GoFundMe was suddenly shown to be limited in what it could raise money for, according to these people. Previous (& even current) fundraisers for Ferraris, travel overseas and what have you, should have been discontinued immediately, according to them (they weren’t).

Even the Law Council of Australia spoke up thanks to this one case, for the first time ever, expressing a worry about the ethics of crowd funding for legal cases. The leader of it said that Australia needs a nationwide review of ethical guidance and rules regarding crowdfunding for litigation. Not only has an Australian politician (a Green though) had an active crowdfunding page for her legal action posted with GoFundMe for months without any complaint, the legal profession has used professional legal-funding organisations for years now (all taking a cut of the legal damages awarded). It was all a bit rich but “Ultimately we need to protect the public and we need to protect the processes of our courts,” Mr Moses said.”

So this is where we are right now, with Folau in limbo, but with his legal action going on and funded plus an energised public ready to watch this to the end. After a recent election in which the supposed Quiet Australians did a Trump/Brexit and sprung their world view on an unsuspecting political and media class. who knows in what state this Folau case will leave Australia. Maybe this will be a new era where slogans and “silencers” such as throwing out the various “phobia!” challenges to free expression will be treated a little more seriously and that we, as a people, will not allow elites to control the debate.

Mueller Report is under the microscope. Konstantin Kilimnik is one reason why

Posted on by June 8, 2019

As alluded to in the previous post,  when the Mueller report is examined in detail, the question of what value is to be placed on it and the investigation upon which it is based is problematical, to say the least. As I have stated up front, knowing the background of Mueller and his team members, I never had much confidence that the report would be a complete answer to all the questions which were the cause of its creation. Nothing at all from the time of its release in March has caused me to change my mind one jot. Quite the opposite.

Every day, it seems, matters arise which tear into the credibility of the report and its authors, whoever they may be. There are so many investigative journalists and citizen journalists looking at this whole investigation that the credibility of the whole Mueller report is in danger of destruction based on its content and not just on the persons creating it. John Solomon from The Hill news outlet has an article showing an example of the problems with the report.

From some of the earliest pages in Volume 1 of the Report (and a downloadable version is available from this site), we have an assessment of Konstantin Kilimnik as “having ties to Russian Intelligence”:-

and it goes on in the report to mention Kilimnik repeatedly, and as always with his constant connections to one of the persons charged by Mueller, Paul Manafort, taints that connection by his alleged “ties to Russian Intelligence”.  

In the article by John Solomon of The Hill, this is shown to be not only a false, if not fraudulent characterisation of Kilimnik, but that this falsity was known to the Mueller team. Kilimnik was – for years – an intelligence source for the US government.

“hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters…

He interacted with the chief political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, sometimes meeting several times a week to provide information on the Ukraine government. He relayed messages back to Ukraine’s leaders and delivered written reports to U.S. officials via emails that stretched on for thousands of words, the memos show.

The FBI knew all of this, well before the Mueller investigation concluded.”

All this and more was in the hands of Mueller and the FBI itself and it is a matter for conjecture as to why none of this was ever mentioned in the Report. It is just added to an increasing number of cases where the report edits or leaves out information that might be relevant to an assessment of credibility or even relevant to question of culpability of a subject. Kilimnik worked for the the administration of former Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych, who is another villain in the piece, but this was well known to the FBI and US government.

(Former U.S. Embassy political officer ) Kasanof described Kilimnik as one of the few reliable insiders the U.S. Embassy had informing on Yanukovych. Kilimnik began his relationship as an informant with the U.S. deputy chief of mission in 2012-13, before being handed off to the embassy’s political office, the records suggest.…

“Three sources with direct knowledge of the inner workings of Mueller’s office confirmed to me that the special prosecutor’s team had all of the FBI interviews with State officials, as well as Kilimnik’s intelligence reports to the U.S. Embassy, well before they portrayed him as a Russian sympathizer tied to Moscow intelligence or charged Kilimnik with participating with Manafort in a scheme to obstruct the Russia investigation.”

Kilimnik is also shown as presenting Manafort with a supposed peace plan for the Ukraine (in Mueller Report pp139/140)

However, Solomon points out that State Department emails “showed Kilimnik first delivered a version of his peace plan in May 2016 to the Obama administration during a visit to Washington”.

(Kasanof) thanked Kilimnik for the detailed plan and added, “I passed the info to my bosses, who are chewing it over.” Kasanof told the FBI that he believed he sent Kilimnik’s peace plan to two senior State officials, including Victoria Nuland, Obama’s assistant secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs.

So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned.

The Mueller report often seems to leave more questions than it answers and one recurring theme is the presentation of certain matters as facts without showing Obama or Clinton campaign involvement/ knowledge. The question of ignoring exculpatory evidence will be examined as time goes on.

Mueller lawyers did charge Kilimnik with Obstruction of Justice and witness tampering over allegedly trying to get 2 witnesses to lie about lobbying, but the telephone calls from which we have the “evidence” don’t, on their face, show knowledge of falsity by Kilimnik. While the phraseology is suspicious, Manafort pleaded guilty to a raft of charges of which this was but one, and Kilimnik always remained in Europe beyond the reach of the US and thus his charges and their factual basis have not been tested in any US court.

This example of the questions arising by what Mueller himself described in his press statement of May 29 as being his “testimony”, isn’t such as would quieten congressional (or public) demands that he give evidence on oath to Congressional (or other) enquiries.

Mueller finally speaks for himself and clarifies his role

Posted on by June 7, 2019

PLEASE NOTE: In all articles referencing the Mueller Report, it pays to have a copy handy as the words (and edits) will be of vital importance. A full copy can be obtained HERE 

Mueller statement to media

With his 10 minute press conference on 29 May, Robert Mueller the ex-FBI chief and special counsel to investigate Russian/Trump campaign “collusion” had dropped any pretence of a mask of “neutrality” as to his enquiry. All the old doubts, fears and allegations about his bias and lack of good faith came to the surface again and soon, with the full analysis of his actual report, its omissions and edited statements, a proper assessment of him and his report will be ready.

Right now, though, apart from his Democrat and insider colleagues, there was hardly anybody giving him the benefit of any doubt. He had already laid bare his position as a creature of the established political class in general and Democrats in particular was mind boggling. As has been pointed out already, he showed by his actions and that of his team, by his report and by the press conference words at the end why what he actually did was inevitable: it was always going to end like this.

The Mueller story is out there everywhere and while it was touched on in a previous post when his report first came out, books could be written on it, so much material is available. When a biased partisan such as Mueller can find no Russian Collusion against even a single member of the Trump team, his attempt to leave hanging claims as to flimsy “obstruction” incidents reek of ulterior motives. The actions and prosecutions by Mueller and his team members are now to be progressively subjected to close scrutiny and many will be exposed as flimsy, some as travesties. There is much information out there, the suspect charges just for a start, recorded everywhere and commencing with the observations of various witnesses/suspects is a good beginning, especially so when we all know that Mueller could not find evidence of collusion.

Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel’s nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion…..

Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them “for life” and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.

This article is but the tip of the iceberg as it relates to these witnesses but when the case of General Michael Flynn and others who were actually charged with these process crimes are to be examined, the threats and tactics of the lawyers for Mueller will make any unbiased observer cringe.

The strange phenomenon of this press “Statement But No Questions”, together with a declaration that he does not wish to speak about the matter again – even to Congress – has brought out many comments from those seeing it for an impeachment request. The most detailed commentary about that as the aim, together with a damning assessment of the alleged deviousness of Mueller, was given by Andrew McCarthy the former prosecutor of the Blind Sheik (of the first World Trade Centre bombing), in National Review “The Mueller Investigation Was Always an Impeachment Probe”.

While the report and all its inferences were swallowed whole by the Democrats and the left, it seems that the congressional democrats are pushing for Impeachment, just as Mueller and his team seemed to want. They had probably been gearing up for it for many months and it still seems their only way forward because actual ”crimes” are hard to come by. Now that the full spotlight is on the report and all restrictions on others to act and uncover are lessened, we can expect many more revelations in the near future.

While some journalists are making various claims about what Mueller had or didn’t have available to him and used or didn’t use, attention to the detail of the report is revealing of Mueller and the way he used his information.

For my immediate purpose in this post, an early examination of one particular exchange between lawyers for Michael Flynn and the personal lawyer for President Trump, John Dowd, was trumpeted as “evidence” of bad faith relations between them intending to act illegally. The fact that Flynn had turned the texts over to Mueller was shown as being damaging to Trump in that his personal lawyer supposedly wanted Flynn to give him information that he shouldn’t have.

While this ran in the left and legacy press for a day or so as an anti-Trump scandal, the full transcript was ordered to be released and the best way to show what happened is to simply compare the full version with the abbreviated Mueller version.

Mueller and his team somehow failed to show the part where Dowd said “…not only for the president but for the country…” and “without you having to give up any…confidential information”

Dowd, the lawyer for Trump, hit the roof (5).

“I’m so glad Judge Sullivan ordered the transcript because we now know the truth.”

“And we also know this entire report by Mueller is a fraud, and we’re going to find more of these things,” he added.

(Dowd) also said that the voicemail was never mentioned by Mueller or his top deputy, James Quarles, in their meetings throughout the investigation.

“They never said a word to me. Instead they pull this ambush in their report,” said Dowd.

As Prof Alan Dershowitz put it: “Who wrote that paragraph?”. Round up the usual suspects, eh?

Future analysis of the Mueller Report

It is hard to keep up with developments in this whole saga and still live a life but it is of vital importance to non-Americans as much as it is to the United States citizenry as a whole. With what we have seen and seen hinted at, the whole American system of government has been rocked by this whole affair and when much has been discovered going back years, it bodes ill for the future unless those working to uncover the truth keep it up.

Election win to Liberal/National party avoids Labor turmoil – for now

Posted on by May 25, 2019

The Australian election of 18 May has surprised nearly everyone – including most of the political and media class – with a victory by the ruling centre-right government of the Liberal/National Party coalition. The fact of the victory has gained widespread, even world-wide, interest for a supposedly Brexit/Trump-like surprise from the “hidden” or “silent” voters, ones which opinion polls ignored or failed to record the true voting intention. This writer was surprised too, in spite of a less-pessimistic post just prior to the election. The narrow win (a mere two or 3 seat majority as of the date of writing) isn’t a major victory but it is a clear working majority. The Senate looks like being more favourable to the government also. But it is not plain sailing.

The always “progressive”, pro-Green TV/Newspaper media complex Nine/Fairfax pushed the opposition Labor party policies all the way and that will continue, as it will with the taxpayer-funded ABC. Many suspect that this huge, national TV/Radio corporation, with its all-progressive host/producer setup across the network, will continue to produce reliable content to satisfy its left-leaning viewer/listener base. When the government-appointed ABC CEO (during an election campaign, no less), seemed to publicly advocate against the ruling party, that might tell you all you need to know to then wonder how he would be taking the ABC forward.

The state of the parties: The Liberal Party

Then we have the parties themselves. As for the Liberal party of the successful Prime Minster Scott Morrison, there are mixed reviews. Plenty of comment from the left wing media as to where the Labor party lost it and dismissing the Morrison efforts as being partly down to ALP weaknesses, greed of the people (the old fashioned, “hip pocket nerve” from old Labor history days) or just plain political dirty tricks. Still, most seem to recognise that for now it’s all down to Morrison to set the agenda from now on into the mid-term future.

As for the cohesion of the Liberal Party, some local and most of the world interest seems to conclude that it is as decisive in its expression of common views as were the Brexit and Trump votes. Such is not the case, however, as in its inner workings and party structure are still the left/green segments which are resolutely against the Brexit/Trump interpretation. Internally it is still a Liberal party torn by viciously competing factions, as outlined in a series of posts but mentioned and linked in a previous one 2 months ago. With one faction in particular having financial as well as emotional links to green energy policies, any major change away from their remaining green policies is unlikely. The voters rejecting the much more severe green energy policies from the opposing Labor party is unlikely to change the hard line positions on it within that Liberal party faction.

During this electoral and political calm the Liberal party can survive without much scrutiny, all the attention being on the spurned Australian Labor Party and its Green Party allies/competitors.

Labor and its tensions

The Labor and Greens parties seem to be eyeing each other off warily. Turmoil within the opposing Labor party since the defeat might help the government stave off early opposition challenges to it, but it is only a reprieve. The ALP ran years of policies with a green tinge, courting the inner city greens and ultra-“progressives”, it adopted gender and identity politics and (apparently) bemused and angered its historic base. Seen now as stupid, it trumpeted the election as a “climate change election,” even pushing for the end of coal. Coal mining had been the key employment of its most militant union and historically coal mining had been the heart and soul of Labor-targeted parties for over a century. The ALP taunted and condemned that core voter at its peril, and was duly trounced at the election when the historic “labour” areas turned against the party decisively. Once the election shock had hit, in the aftermath it has sounded as if all that never happened, the new ALP leadership contenders claiming to be virtually born again “old Labor”, recognising anew the “working class” and vowing to turn the party back towards their interests.

At the same time as that was happening and some new form of old industrial working class party being apparently reborn, what were the factions within the ALP doing? Well, selecting Anthony Albanese as a man to lead, a man who had been a hard left party member for decades. Hard line left , hard line on a lot of the huge policies which the ALP had claimed as advances over the past 30 years. Major economic reforms and union/employer accords in the 80’s under the ALP Hawke and Keating governments? Voted against all of them.

Even the modern issues which the ALP had come to accept as being supported by an overwhelming number of Australian voters, such as a Goods and Services tax (VAT) and turning back the boats of economic refugees, the type the USA is struggling with at the US/Mexico border? Against all of them and he believes (or believed) in virtually open borders. Yet it seems expected that he will be a completely changed person, see the writing on the wall and now, after 30 years or so, lead the ALP differently to how he has operated in the past.

As for a deputy in the same mould, how about one who the factions like and is tipped for the job, Richard Marles from Melbourne. Only mere months ago he welcomed price falls for coal (also Australias biggest export) and publicly stated that he wished for the day when coal was gone completely.

Even if they are sincere, could an Albanese and Marles partnership work to actually deliver the worker-friendly policies they claim to now support? Well, whilst Marles has a working class electorate and could submerge his personal views into those in tune with the electorate at large, Albanese is in a rabid Green area and he is always under challenge from Greens for his own seat. Newtown, the state government version of his seat is already in Green hands.

To put a final touch on all this discussion, the Green challenge to Labor has not gone away. The Greens are doubling down and have let Labor know loud and clear that the need for the radical action from which Labor is backing away is real and will be argued incessantly from Greens (and against Labor).

Will this born-again New Working Class ALP risk their now-trendy electorate positions by advocating for their rediscovered base?

Australian Election Final Week

Posted on by May 15, 2019

What might have been

One speech did it. A single speech by an Australian politician put some life into this lacklustre election campaign.

The New Left are the new primitives of our time: junking the importance of evidence, of recorded history, of biological science, to pretend that all parts of our lives (especially race, gender and sexuality) can be fluid, that everything we know and feel around us is, in fact, ‘socially constructed’. The Leftist project, then and now, is about control….

and

Our abiding national traditions of free speech, merit selection, resilience and love of country are being lost, not just in the public sector – in schools, universities, public broadcasters, major political parties and government agencies – but also in large parts of corporate Australia and the commercial media. The rest of us are the Resistance to this national takeover….

The trouble was that the speech was in the New South Wales state parliament and by Mark Latham, a controversial, ex- Labor party leader who became a very vocal political outsider years ago. The speech did gain a lot of interest but the only electrifying it did was for conservatives and other people outside the parties which were running in the federal election.  It didn’t seem to shake the major parties at all.   

As for a “progress” report of the election, my low expectations for the result in the Australian election for Saturday May 18 have not changed that much. However, while hurt and damage to the country from a win by either side is still a “given”, the Australian Labor Party being heavily favoured to win is tempered a little by news everywhere that polling seems to be tightening. Odds are still for the ALP, so that party in lockstep with a hard left Green party in a voting/policy coalition forecasts a lot of damage.

Major ALP policies haven’t changed that much but the franking credits policy did (and does) get attacked. Due to it affecting the finances of many thousands of self-funded retirees (taking their share dividend refunds off them), it has been a major theme of the campaign. Later news and research publicly released seems to show that in various areas that policy is starting to bite and negatively impacting on the ALP vote in some seats.

In Tasmania’s knife-edge northern electorates, where the political contest can swing on a handful of votes, Labor has alienated as many as 7000 voters over its policy to remove franking credit tax refunds, a key part of many retirees’ income.

Similarly the Negative Gearing policy (confining use of the policy to newly-built homes) has caused much controversy, not least being the actual cost to consumers and the country. The ALP panicked initially, removing 90 of 100 paragraphs from their website but latest articles seem to show that it is still a major factor in the election.

The leading centre/right party, the Liberal Party and its coalition partner the National Party are fighting the election with limited means. While the Prime Minister Scott Morrison is fighting hard and is a very good campaigner (unlike his predecessor who used to go for a lie down after lunch every day), he is still limited by the lack of attention to some potential election-winning policies, mainly on energy and climate. This is thanks to his reliance on portions of his party who seem closer to the ALP than others on those policies. As I explained earlier, it is as if he is fighting parts of his own party.

However, the Liberal party has made inroads, I suspect that the abovementioned policy inconsistencies and weaknesses of the ALP have helped it make up ground, leaving ongoing support in doubt. Consistent polling 51/49 to the ALP are all within the margin of error and it often does just depend on the individual seats.

As to these individual seats, you can often glean information of internal polling by what the parties are actually doing with funds and personnel. When the government can move from its own marginal seats (which are often written off when a genuine swing is “on”) to the marginal seats of the opposition, there has to be some reason, especially as last days are desperate days for a losing team. On the opposite side, the ALP is not just cruising to victory, but has started to throw in some questionable claims and accusations, even bringing in religion against the PM – who is an evangelical Christian. In recent days he has been publicly called out to give his view as a Christian and this was once unheard of in Australian campaigns.

Major Issues with four days before polling

A lot is at stake. With the ALP in charge along with Greens, the country will see major change. “Gender fluidity” is the controversial (to say the least) claim that gender can change on a declaration at will. Union control of a government is an issue (organised labour controls 50% of voting in the ALP party organisation now) and unions have been demanding many changes to their benefit including, almost revolutionary moves to fix wages by government fiat. This is rather than leave it up to independent tribunals of the past, albeit that the parties have often appointed friends of their parties to those tribunals.

We have heard ALP leaders announce their wish to rein in media comments, criminalise more speech as “hate speech” and extend their restrictions on “hate speech” to religion but no detail at all has been provided. Worringly, state-controlled media monitors were proposed in the past when they were last in government.

Senator Conroy …also announced plans to establish a new watchdog to ensure that media companies comply with independent journalism standards. The Public Interest Media Advocate would be responsible for overseeing self-regulatory bodies, such as the Australian Press Council, to make sure that complaints are dealt with properly.

The Greens, the party most likely to provide support for the ALP in parliament, have such hard line policies towards people they don’t like that virtual censorship of named people has been proposed by them.

Richard Di Natale’s threat of a crackdown on broadcasters Chris Kenny, Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones is part of a Greens plan aimed at breaking up media companies, imposing new regul­ations and giving the federal ­government control over who is allowed to enter the industry.

The Greens plan, which is outlined in the party’s media policy, is in line with Senator Di Natale’s promise to create new criminal laws on hate speech for use against the three broadcasters.

“It’s not just about those three people, it’s basically about anybody in the media who is using hate speech to try and divide the community and turn Australians against each other,” he said.

And, of course, there will be no solution to the energy disaster coming to the country, the only debate among the major parties is on the extent to which Australia will be deficient on energy. 25-28% renewables by the Liberals, 45% by the ALP and just about anything up to 100% from the Greens.

As has often been said in the past, “Change the government, change the country”. Not in a very long time, has this statement seemed so ominous.

USA – Mueller Report Overview and Omissions

Posted on by May 11, 2019

The Mueller Report is out and it seems that everyone in Washington DC and throughout its political and media class is going crazy with mixed feelings of exultation, justification, fear and revenge.

This site is and always was sceptical of the Trump/Collusion allegation. The last two posts showed that well enough. Reason for suspicion was out there everywhere and whilst a flood of information (and very good summaries) came from numerous investigative journalists, the drawn-out Mueller investigation itself was a cause of it remaining hidden from open view. Even when full documentation was made available to members of Congress, being classified it was unable to be released publicly because of “Mueller”. When President Trump said last year that he would declassify large sections of it (as he had power to do), he held back. As he explained in a tweet, foreign powers asked him to and that other advisers thought it might interfere with ongoing investigations.

Well, now the preliminaries are over and the report (and with it, Mueller’s role) is finished. The publication and the lack of any finding of collusion or recommending any other action against Trump has rendered most of the thousands of articles, leaks and conclusions invalid at a stroke. And they hate it. So obstruction is now the issue for the opponents.

For Donald Trump and the whole government, though, it is all happening. The groups and interests who have maintained the Collusion narrative for over two years, acting as if Mueller would prove every Trump allegation that had ever been made, fell in a heap. Some of the millions on social media who were mesmerised by the carefully-worked and constructed plot lines and “evidence” – all hidden from view waiting for Mueller to expose it all –  have had to accept the inevitable that the Report alone was not going to do it for them. The hatred for Trump was so extraordinary that you could expect that the gullible who swallowed the Russia Collusion “evidence” so easily might be stunned at first whilst waiting for the official response from the “influencers” they had relied upon for so long. There was so much to the contrary out there for analysis, however, and being reported on in multiple places, that the total surprise of so many is a guide to the state of politics today and the openness of the minds analysing it.

Everyone could expect that the main players in creating that narrative, those who had ruled over the US intelligence apparatus which had spread and vouched for the Collusion narrative (ex-CIA chief Brennan calling it “Treason” would you believe?) would try to cover their “mistakes”. However, even Collusion skeptics  could hardly expect such a stunning outpouring of new disinformation and spin from the Democrat-owned section of the legacy media. This was the media which had been handmaiden to every single release and spin of the failing Collusion narrative, every pro-Clinton article and anti-Trump hit piece. Their reaction and lack of professional self-reflection, their doubling-down into the new spin is hard to credit as possible unless every previous allegation against them of being partisan and a captive media was true.

The report is so important in so many ways that it will be a constant presence in this section of the website referring to the USA under Trump. There is so much happening, however, that needs demand that other US and world topics be covered.

Mueller and his report are both going to be held to account.

The quality of the report is subject to savage attack by a variety of political and legal writers. Stunned by no recommendations for charges of any kind, even “obstruction” in the report, media and political partisans are still fixated on both Collusion and Obstruction. As was noted earlier in time Mueller reversed the onus of proof for determining whether Trump could even be guilty on obstruction charges, but now a number of partisans of the left and Democrat politics are insisting that Obstruction is a charge against Trump yet, apparently, not one in which they would trust to be used to actually impeach Trump

Mueller will be analysed into the ground in forthcoming and ongoing posts, but, as for the report itself, let me start by just listing some major criticisms of it (other than the “results” of course).

First up, and for an introduction in this post, there is criticism that it failed to even report on highly relevant allegations, questions being asked as to why this was. Journalist Ben Weingarten of The Federalist mentions various omissions from Mueller consideration They include:-

Failure to even address the irregular underpinnings to the whole inquiry, including spying on a presidential campaign, information based on suspect information from a political opponent, such information being mainly based on a “salacious and unverified” dossier.

Real doubts about the legality of the Mueller appointment in the first place, in that this was a counter-intelligence investigation and not, as the Special Counsel law requires, that there be an underlying criminal offence to be investigated.

The biased and conflicted team Mueller assembled about him, the Clinton supporters and the questionable ethics of some members of the team.

Commencement of the official investigation is an area where  the report is said to skim over the detail of the alleged actions of George Papadopoulos,  as well as there being a glaring (and questionable) gap when dealing with the notorious Professor Mifsud. (NOTE The whole report is especially and mysteriously flimsy on the position and role of the mysterious professor, Mifsud, about whom much will be shown later on this web site)

Steele and the notorious dossier isn’t even mentioned in the collusion section and only in passing in the obstruction section. Because the dossier played such a major part in commencing the investigation in the first place, such an omission is beyond curious.

Other omissions include the company commissioning the hiring of Steele and his dossier (and which has been involved in so many incidents over the whole campaign and post-campaign era, FusionGPS,  and its leading light Glenn Simpson did not even get a mention by name in the whole report. Critical information about Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, the key figure in the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, is said to be missing. The section on Carter Page, the man whose life has been changed forever by being used to start the whole FISA secret warrant process and who was never charged with anything, is deficient in its coverage of him. Not surprisingly, the failure even to mention Steele or his unverified dossier in the Collusion section hardly helps Page as the dossier is the sole material mentioning him upon which allegations against Page were based. It is also suspicious directly as to Page in that it misuses the earlier Page association with Russian agents in 2013 by omitting that he was an FBI informant in that case and assisted the prosecution of those agents. (NOTE An over-suspicious observer might think that a more thorough investigation of Carter Page – and Mifsud, for that matter – might have been inconvenient).

Finally, for this post, unequal treatment of Trump as against Clinton. Weingarten mentions interesting applications of the campaign finance law to the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, the proposed derogatory information about candidate Clinton being a “contribution in kind”, without ever mentioning its equal application to the Clinton campaign, with its bought-and-paid-for dossier. While the report does not assert such a breach in its conclusion, its discussion was deficient in that it never even mentioned the similar Clinton actions.

Quite frankly, things are moving so fast and the action and reactions of the vested political interests are so serious that there isn’t time to move methodically through the report in a series of consecutive posts. However the site to download the report has been mentioned here and it is available to be read, so this site will be noting and referencing the report many times in the short and longer term, always relating-back all posts and links.

However, the report and Mueller himself are subject to renewed analysis on the basis of alleged ongoing association with anti-Trump forces and it will have to be explored as to whether it is or is not a supposed explanation for some of the “problems” with the report.

Trump Election – Mueller Report publication is only the start of the reckoning.

Posted on by April 27, 2019

The immediate period since the public release of the Mueller report into alleged Russian interference in the US election campaign of 2016 and beyond has the fluid, almost frenzied feeling of things coming to a head at last as did the sudden release of the Climategate email hoard on 16 November, 2009. The whole world seemed to be turned upside down after that and the Trump inquiry won’t be much different. The only real difference is that everyone knew Mueller Report was actually coming, the main question seemed to be would it be after the US election date of 2020 (by supposed design) or at some stage where the areas left in limbo by it coming, always “coming”, were able to be investigated to finality.

With Mueller now in, the gloves of all vested interests (including media) are well and truly off. However, an announcement that the FISA Court applications report of the Dept of Justice Inspector-General is due in May or June this year  will be an extremely important milestone, probably as important as was the release of the Mueller report itself.

The aftermath of the Mueller report publication, though, saw stunned silence at first, as the “results” sank in, with some of the supposed senior conspirators (like ex-CIA chief John Brennan) claiming that his constant forecasts of doom for Trump, and crimes up to and including Treason coming Trump’s way, were then classified as if Brennan had been given “incomplete” information. A temporary media claim of “we just report, not investigate” soon gave way to the familiar pro and anti-Trump narratives which concentrated on revised talking points of the various pro/anti-Trump camps.

What is intended here is to get beyond the mere claims of those special interests and steer readers to web sites where full and fair analysis is done and made available for their perusal, all the while attempting to stay true to a simple, but neglected principle called “truth”.

It seems obvious at this stage that serious damage has been caused to our democracies in the west, where what has been seen in this example of division in the United States has been paralleled in other western countries. And as the security services of Britain and Australia (for two) have definitely been enmeshed in this whole USA election campaign of 2016, multiple countries and their citizens have our own “vested interest” in seeing honesty restored.  What is worse at this time of concentration on interference with our election campaigns  (and the interference by western nations in the elections and affairs of other countries), another and very serious threat to our political and economic futures – China – is getting a virtual free run.

Vital importance of this whole inquiry for the free nations of the west.

Particular issues or revelations, insights, will be posted here, the process being ongoing. In the case of the website, however, the huge importance of the Trump crisis and the possible misuse of the state intelligence apparatus is its flow-on effect on Australia and the west in  general and that gives it priority for our emphasis. In addition, the precise nature of the (apparent) involvement of British and Australian security services in this Trump election campaign and the stunning discovery that it had the potential for those institutions to be used aggressively against a candidate for American office, has huge ramifications for our future freedoms. When that is combined with the apparent polarisation of what was once considered a “free press”, checks to power overreach are lessened as the threats to our freedoms increase. In an ongoing examination, some information providers and investigators we trust should be mentioned.

Major media journalists trusted by this web site

Whilst not feeling any need to recommend any mainstream or “legacy media” outlet for information on these issues, Australian Perspectives does support and recommend a number of web sites and blogs for better analysis of many factual situations with respect to the whole, 3-year campaign to show a supposed Russia-Trump connection. Many highly qualified professionals have delved deeply into the facts surrounding it and with the associated Mueller Report, the Dept of Justice Inspector-General reports and the whole mass of facts and allegations of conspiracy by or against Donald Trump, these same journalists have created invaluable investigative material. Particular ones are highly recommended to follow on those very issues.  However, we are not in a position to recommend any particular mainstream or legacy media organisation at all.

First class journalists from whom brilliant analysis has come include:-

Mollie Hemingway @MZHemingway and Ben Weingarten @bhweingarten from The Federalist

Lee Smith  @LeeSmithDC of  The Tablet Mag  /

Julie Kelly  @julie_kelly2 of American Greatness /

Kimberley Strassel @KimStrassel of the Wall Street Journal

Analysts and blogs to follow

While the main stream or legacy media hungers for a return of their old power to dominate as the Gate-Keepers for the flow of what they deem “suitable” information for the Little People, New Media has come into its own. Many bloggers and other citizen journalists have shown themselves capable of cutting through the information haze and bypassing the information barricades put up by some established journalists. Some of those have been outed as mouthpieces for various state interests and carriers of the PR output of state bureaucracies. Some have been notorious in this whole Russiagate Collusion campaign. Citizen journalists/bloggers have made their mark for years – much to the chagrin of legacy media – and starting with the Rathergate lies against George W Bush, it continues to confound the so-called legacy media with its power to cut through. These are but a few of the people who should be followed.

TheLastRefuge     (“Sundance”) @TheLastRefuge2

web site:                  The Conservative Tree House

Jeff Carlson             @themarketswork

Web site:                    The Markets Workh

Brian Cates              @drawandstrike

President Trump and the Mueller Report – First View and History

Posted on by April 20, 2019

In late March with the news that the Mueller report was finally finished but with no Russia  collusion finding and when even Obstruction of Justice had not been proven against President Trump or his team, many might have wondered how the Trump/Russia Collusion meme got such a long run. The hysteria with which certain legacy media and many in the left/ Democrat/ Progressive/ Never Trump/ NeoCon political grouping went on Russia, Russia, Russia over 2 years, it was always going to be interesting to see how they responded to the release of the actual report itself. Multiple Democrat congressional members had claimed publicly that they had seen “evidence” of Russia collusion and their tame media went for it big time – and often. The findings of the report left them with red faces – until their fightback kicked in, that is

On the 18th April the redacted, 448 page Mueller report was finally released and there has been a massive reaction as you would expect. Those media political commentators who had lived off the collusion Narrative for years had to fight back or surrender their reputations forever.

Australian Perspectives has been watching this American situation for some years now and in 2 years of great change and threat to the whole US governing system, it has taken that time for some of the propaganda and spin to make way for actual facts. The Mueller report was one major roadblock to clarity, due to it being used as a very effective tool to avoid some investigations by Trump office holders. It will take a while to clear away the clutter and to zero in on an administration which is free from what already looked like a clear case of sabotage of the Trump campaign by the Obama administration office holders. That sabotage continued (continues?), seemingly led by part of the permanent and appointed political class remaining in power after their former leader left office, aided by the cluster of anti-Trump movements who had most to lose in his victory.

The Mueller report had to be cleared away for any action or full investigations against the plotters to commence. It is also vital that lessons learned were also needed, both to clear up the facts of the sabotage and then (hopefully) to ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again. It was far bigger than Watergate and post-Watergate action, similar to the 1970’s Church committee, is surely needed to make that a reality.

It will take some days for full and considered analysis of the Report to be made (and this will be done in a series of posts), yet already some major facts are in evidence.

One is to give some clarity as to what role Mueller was actually playing. Was he a prisoner of his past, as an insider of the so-called Deep State, a player associated with all the powers in the political class which are so clearly against Trump at all or seemingly any cost.. Or was he man who could turn his back on all conflicts of interest and just look and apply the facts. Could his long time friendship with James Comey be put aside in the interests of justice When questions were asked about the Mueller FBI under his watch, when it habitually abused prosecutorial discretion, botching the anthrax killer case, “incompetent supervision” and many other cases to call into question both his competence and even his integrity. More on that at a later date.

The Mueller team

Then there was the team he chose to investigate Trump and the Russia collusion allegation. Every single one of his team was a democrat-linked lawyer; one had actually represented the Clinton Foundation and many had donated to Hillary Clinton or the democrats. Generally.

The lead investigator was a very well-known person, Andrew Weissmann, a man with a long record of questionable and unethical conduct over decades, including prosecutorial misconduct, threatening witnesses, withholding exculpatory  evidence and so on. He was also a Clinton/Democrat donation giver, attended the Clinton “victory” party on the night of her loss and publicly congratulated ex-Deputy Attorney-General Sally Yates when she refused to carry out lawful directions of the new President Trump. For more on Weissmann, see Sidney Powell.

Preliminary observations on the Mueller Report itself.

Mueller only got to the “fail to determine obstruction” conclusion by completely reversing the onus of proof of that obstruction, from proving a positive case against a person – who is always presumed innocent under Anglo-American law – to the Mueller claims on page 2 of his Volume II of the report, a prosecutor “conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred”,  an onus of proof which is unknown to our law.

Trump lawyer Rudi Guiliani also made a strong comment on that aspect of the report

Rudi Guiliani on Fox

So one can get a preliminary sense of how the issue of exactly which “Mueller” wrote this report will probably be decided by certain facts contained within and without the report.

Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal is a brilliant journalist and has been one of dozens of great reporters covering the Mueller movements and watching the conspiracy/coup allegations carefully over many months. She has already published a critical summary of the Mueller report to date. Because it is behind a paywall, I will offer some paragraphs from it to give a sense of the analysis due to the report. Over days and weeks I will be adding much more analysis of the report but this is a very good start, especially as it sheds much light on the question of whether Mueller was a prisoner of his past or a truly “evidence without fear or favour” writer on this occasion.

Volume I of the Mueller report, which deals with collusion, spends tens of thousands of words describing trivial interactions between Trump officials and various Russians. While it doubtless wasn’t Mr. Mueller’s intention, the sheer quantity and banality of details highlights the degree to which these contacts were random, haphazard and peripheral. By the end of Volume I, the notion that the Trump campaign engaged in some grand plot with Russia is a joke……

Note as well what isn’t in the report. It makes only passing, bland references to the genesis of so many of the accusations Mr. Mueller probed: the infamous dossier produced by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. How do you exonerate Mr. Page without delving into the scandalous Moscow deeds of which he was falsely accused? How do you narrate an entire section on the July 2016 Trump Tower meeting without noting that Ms. Veselnitskaya was working alongside Fusion? How do you detail every aspect of the Papadopoulos accusations while avoiding any detail of the curious and suspect ways that those accusations came back to the FBI via Australia’s Alexander Downer?

I will close off this preliminary summary by allowing Kimberley Strassel to conclude her review:-

He was the wrong man to provide an honest assessment of the 2016 collusion dirty trick. And we’ve got a report to prove it.

I will follow up with much more on the whole Mueller Report and many other aspects as to whether a serious assault on the Trump administration is a valid description. Remember, now that the Mueller report s finalised with no charges recommended, there seems to be no hindrance to Trump exercising his powers to declassify and release reams of documents which have so far been hidden on that basis or being needed for “Mueller”.

Australian election campaign for 18 May has started

Posted on by April 17, 2019

Australian and world politics has not been noted in posts on this site in recent weeks but it is not as if nothing had been happening – or being analysed by Australian Perspectives. So much has been happening, in fact, that life was a case of juggling news and politics from all over the world and attempting to get longer term perspectives rather than being merely a Twitter-like snapshot of a day-to-day news release. Brexit and the gross failure of May and her terrible MP class in Britain

This post will be a first update on the Australian election campaign, further instalments can be expected as the weeks go on and various  angles of interest will be highlighted.

The previous post was a clear summary of my rather pessimistic view of the hopes of the ruling party in the May elections in Australia and now that the campaign has officially started, nothing much has happened (so far) to make me reconsider my pessimistic assessment of their chances in the light of the first ten days. As in all actual campaigns, though, there is always movement of some kind, some direction because the minds of the people really start to focus on the campaign. Of course, the skills of the campaigners, the leaders and their parties, plus the media campaign all help. On campaigning skills, Malcolm Turnbull would have been one of the worst ever. Lazy and seemingly without any natural political judgement, he had to finish for the day at or just after lunch most days, wasted his time with broad, wishy-washy slogans such as “investment and innovation” when the opposition ALP was insisting that the Medicare and health benefits system was failing voters and going to cost them real money.

I am not going to list “policies” – only promises really – of the parties, except in summary because it is the development, ability to stand up to scrutiny and so on that will determine what remains to be absorbed by the voters.

There are some majors which will be in evidence right through the campaign, of course, along with the usual bribes of funds to local parochial projects. However, with all the concentration on and around “energy” and “climate”, that flood of money from organisations linked to international funding groups will ensure that it remains a major reference. The flood of new “independents” funded by climate groups standing against conservative MPs has added new interest to Australian elections and the links between them will be made clear shortly.

The ruling Liberal party has hit the ground with its policy list and whilst generalised so far, the leader PM Scott Morrison of the Liberal Party is campaigning strongly (unlike his predecessor), but starts well behind his opposite number Bill Shorten of the Australian Labor Party.

Shorten and the ALP have their own list of policies and a very interesting promise to pay for certain free cancer treatments – “…cover the cost of seeing a specialist oncologist and surgeon when you have cancer”, which has received pushback from the government with the usual “you have a “black hole in your costings” and competing funding analyses are out there in public already.

The major energy policy of the Labor party was to go to 50% renewables by the year 2030, which has for many months raised arguments about cost, de-industrialisation, massive job losses and crippling of the largest export industry, coal. But the most interesting Big Deal to grasp the pro-climate vote was a promise to get 50% of cars in Australia to be electric vehicles by 2030. This has caused very big push back from the government and interest groups, pointing out large cost differences, draining of presently available power to charge these cars at a time when coal power is reducing, etc, but also because the associated promise was to institute heavy “pollution” costs – taxes – on the (current) emissions-emitting cars. How these competing arguments resonate with the public is still to be seen, but it is early days yet,

Supposed Independents and the groups helping them.  

One of the so-called “independents” was examined in an earlier article and another looking at the financial backers of the activist group backing her.

Right now, there is a main group of four supposed “independents” who are all linked together by backing groups, funders and policies, so whilst they are marketed as “centre-right so as to appeal to the conservative-leaning voters for which they are competing, policies and links far from centre-right are in evidence.

Nothing is more clear than the climate change links and the links of the candidates (and their backers) to hard left/Green activist group Getup and whilst individual funders might vary from candidate to candidate, vested financial interests from the renewable energy industry  are quite prominent in some campaigns (eg Warringah against ex-PM Tony Abbott) but all the others have renewable energy enthusiasts.

The campaign links are quite transparent and half-hearted attempts to disguise their unified nature merely accentuates that.

It also ties into the seeming sabotage of the overall campaign of the Liberal party by the failed ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull which fell flat after a single day and his family. Turnbull’s wife Lucy was quite prominent in flogging electric cars and when the well-evidenced large time delay in charging electric cars was used as a policy point against the Labor Party, Lucy was very quick into going public about how “advances” were enabling these delays to be reduced. I note that these comments were misleading in that rapid charging was in very expensive electric cars only and ruined battery life if used.

The Turnbull son, Alex, is something else again. By coincidence, a vested financial interest in renewable energy, his hedge fund business was heavily invested in renewable energy which suffered after his father got deposed and taxpayers subsidies were at risk. Just a coincidence, of course. He obviously agrees with renewable energy as a priority, it is just that his investment choices match his enthusiasms. How typical is that, but it gets called out in many other cases.

Alex publicly claimed he was acting against ‘racists’ and admitted to be directly funding independent Julia Banks in Flinders and that a friend of his created her website. It was just a real coincidence, apparently, that this website was virtually identical to all the other “climate scare” independents in Wentworth (Phelps), in  Kooyong against Treasurer Frydenberg, Greg Hunt in Flinders and Abbott in Warringah.

State of Play

At the moment, things are in a state of flux, with the ALP and Bill Shorten well in front but faltering on policy detail re electric cars, costings and so on – a shadow minister has doubts about the electric cars plan – but experience tells us not to rely on the current Liberal party to be able to capitalise on this to any extent. Any sudden changes will be reported and future summaries quite regularly.

Australian electoral bloodbath only 2 months away

Posted on by March 17, 2019

It is a bitter moment when with all the material deserving of comment, this blog has to revert to discussions of the terrible Australian political system and its completely broken political class. There is so much of relevance and importance going on elsewhere in the western world which impacts on Australia and its future that it should be exposed first.

Of immediate importance to this site and writer, though, is the absolute wrecked state of politics in Australia. A reader might be a bit sick of hearing about it, the dysfunctional nature of it being clear quite some time ago, yet when you have a continuously-unfolding train wreck before your eyes it is hard to look away. With an election due in May, a supposedly centre-right government looks like getting smashed by a  hard left, union controlled party which has seemingly abandoned its historic working class base for the upmarket elites. Identity-politics and policies  loved by the Social Justice Warrior class, policies which have done so much to wreck various other centre/left parties all over the world are in evidence, but crossed over into the supposed centre-right side of politics.

Outside influences have been mentioned before, with so-called activist groups receiving large mounts of money from the usual overseas political financiers like the George Soros groups. It also comes directly from climate-alarmist propagandists such as the Sunrise Foundation/Sunrise Project Australia  including over half a $million USD for this election alone.  

Worse, the current government, the very party this money is trying to help defeat, while supposedly a centre-right government with strong conservative policies in view, it has had serious wrecking from within. Like some party rump after an old-fashioned  Stalinist-like  purge, it  appears to be so close to the current opposition on policy that it is aping it’s climate alarmism and identity policies, therefore providing all the evidence you could expect that the public will need to crush it in the vote. It’s in-fighting has been laid out before in all its pathetic detail…merely adding to the public unpopularity.

The Australian public seemed to show during the progressive loss of favour by the last Prime Minister, the green-tinged Malcolm Turnbull, that when faced with a choice of either a fellow traveller like him or being able to vote for the Real Thing, they will vote for the real thing, ie the Labor Party/Greens virtual coalition. In the 2016 election he turned a Tony Abbott landslide margin from the 2013 election into a one-vote margin, pyrrhic victory.

If both sides of a political system of a western country push the same policies, the interests of the country as a whole will suffer if those policy directions are wrong. This Uniparty view on energy is stark, but typical of some other western countries which are moving towards a de-industrialisation scenario. Many seem to have a death wish and that seems to be evidenced in Australia right now also.

Using the energy sector as the key example here, Australia has unlimited coal resources, including just about the cleanest coking coal in the world, coal that is in great demand; coal that is Australia’s largest export. The country has nearly unlimited gas and is also (currently) the world’s greatest gas exporter. It has 1/3 of the world’s uranium and exports it everywhere too. It has ample supplies of iron ore and alumina. Some localised hydro power. On and on it goes.

Australia once had some of the lowest energy prices in the world, but thanks to policy decisions by “leaders”, that is history now. In parts of the country it now has some of the highest prices. Who would countenance the campaign against coal, the demand that coal-fired power be closed? That energy prices be allowed to increase to the extent that industry, manufacturing, smelting, even steel-making itself was at risk? Reliance on wind and solar? 50% renewables by 2030? Yes, that call is for intermittent wind and solar. Surely not without backup baseload power? Afraid so.

What on earth could get into politicians from any party in a country with such mineral and energy riches to allow this state of affairs to continue? Worse, what country with such mineral riches could possibly consider banning exploration for some more gas? Or would ban fracking, which has turned the USA into the largest energy producer in the world (and allowed them to reduce their emissions by plenty)? Yes. Australia, and the “policy” brought in by these two political parties. Oh, for anyone who is interested about the uranium stocks? Nuclear power in Australia is forbidden. Not an option.

Policy change ideas falling on deaf ears.

The Australian government is sitting on a vote poll rating of 46% as against the opposition Australian Labor Party’s poll vote of 54%. That is a landslide and very large defeat looms in May this year. That is in spite of the Labor Party promising 50% renewables, phasing out coal completely, going “green”. Risking all smelting, mining etc. How could it be so far ahead of the governing party? Because *of* the governing party, that’s why.

That party is the inaptly named “Liberal Party”. The name was meant to denote “classic liberal” but is hardly anything like that now and certainly not akin to the US liberal “left wing” party either – or at least it wasn’t until recently, when the undermining and sabotage of the party started. But with a very important conservative section and strong conservative history, who could have predicted that the party would be a version of Labor Lite, a meek and mild version of the policies of the Labor Party itself. When the previous PM Tony Abbott got it to power in a landslide in 2013, it was by calling out the whole climate alarmism idea and by arguing the case against carbon taxes and showing them ruining the economy. One would think that as time went on the idea that any party putting the economy at risk with more of the 2013 “same” would meet the same response. You would not expect major parts of the party to surrender to it. Or to the slogans, propaganda amongst children (with overseas money) and the same, challenged “scientific consensus”,  but that is exactly what has happened. Again, when faced with a choice of how to do these things, the main advocate ALP seems to be favoured rather than the mere fellow traveller.

In what is more like a last gasp before the election, some National (rural-based) Party members have called for new coal-fired power stations. Whilst this could be seen as a last gasp attempt to save some seats in areas which would suffer greatly if climate alarmists are given free rein to destroy them, crippling agriculture and farming by going to 50% Paris reduction targets. It was quickly denied, though, by a Liberal Party leadership uninterested in guaranteeing coal, it seems. As has been seen, the major governing party has an influential core group totally dedicated to green and climate alarmist policies. The leadership is under so much pressure from this core group, that some of its members are allegedly cooperating with the partly overseas-financed Action Groups out to elect their supposed “independents”  against their own sitting party members.

It will be known soon, but “last gasp” seems a sure description of what is left of the party right now.