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.

Atrocity in Christchurch and implications for the immediate and long term future

Posted on by March 16, 2019

The Christchurch terror atrocity was a shock, especially to those in Australia and New Zealand – countries often thought of as being far away from the mass killings of the northern hemisphere – but the implications are immediate and immense. Anything from a western determination to reckon with all internal violence (ie from Antifa-hard left Brownshirt lookalikes -v- hard right or neo-nazi street violence), to heavy censorship or even criminalisation and “disappearing” from the public space of all dissenting voices. In view of constant turmoil in the USA brought on by hysteria from Trump oppositionists and the UK Brexit wreckage, where effect given to the people’s vote to leave EU vote is in doubt, only a relative handful of thinkers have dealt in detail with the implications of Christchurch.

The contradictory “manifesto” of the terrorist will take some time to be fully analysed but good thinkers have risen above the knee-jerk reactions of many of the purely-political players.

Some people didn’t wait though and there can be no surprise that the usual Australian suspects have jumped in with both (suppressionist) feet. Tony Burke is a senior MP with the soon-to-be governing leftist Labor Party and he argued for the banning of Milo Yiannopoulos from a speaking tour, as if Christchurch has anything to do with what Milo talks about.  Still, Burke knew his political opponent, the Immigration Minister David Coleman banned Yiannopoulos for commenting. post Christchurch, that he abhorred political violence, but that Islam was a “barbaric, alien”, religious culture on social media, (context not known).

MP Burke wasn’t the only one rising to the occasion to ramp up the Islamophobia/hard right danger narrative. New Zealand academic Paul Spoonley had an early article  targeted directly at the hard right but with no awareness of any other “side” to the argument, let alone recognising any “breadth” to it. He targets a UK scapegoat Tommy Robinson, labelling him as “targeting Muslims before the Courts”, when I  fact Robinson was filming outside a court where notorious Muslim groomers for the sexual exploitation of children were on trial. His attacks on a critic of Islam, Stefan Molyneaux, as a holder of “extreme views on what he regards as the threat posed by Islam” he produces no evidence and I invite readers to check up for themselves, seeing some of that Molyneaux writes and says, I have grave doubts about the classification.  Spoonley’s New Zealand “hard-right” examples of violence are thin to say the least (more good luck to NZ) and he shows no insight at all into the bigger picture into which this mass murder fits.

There is and will be even more of this to come. Many people are always behind the barricades and their responses are rather predictable, but one of the tragedies of this is that the presumed intent of the terrorist is being carried out, just about to the letter. It is being carried out by those on the left and right, who continue to disappoint by acting/reacting in the predicted but desired way.

Identity Politics and the dangers of the Identitarian Impulse as it Relates to Christchurch.

One of the early and most considered thinkers about the implications of Christchurch is Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online from London. In a very important article, New Zealand: the barbarism of identity politics O’Neill zeroes in on some necessary truths.

In heavy-hitting words, O’Neill lays it out. He sees that simple dismissal into claims of “white supremacy” or “Islamophobia” misses that there is much that is mainstream about the terrorist and his manifesto:-

To read the killer’s alleged manifesto, as currently being covered by CNN, the New York Times and others, is to gain a horrible glimpse into the cultural fragmentation and racial paranoia unleashed by the relentless rise of identitarianism. Increasingly, it feels like the New Zealand atrocity is what happens when the politics of identity, the reduction of everyone to cultural or racial creatures whose relationship with other cultural and racial cultures must be monitored and managed, comes to be the only game in public life.

The killer seems to see himself as little more than a cultural being. In his seeming manifesto he professes commitment to the warped ethos of ethno-nationalism and continually refers to himself as white. He can see no identity for himself beyond the one he inherited by birth. Strikingly, the killer appears to say that his attack was done in the name of diversity – he says he wants ‘diverse peoples to remain diverse’, meaning identity groups must remain ‘separate, unique, undiluted, unrestrained in… cultural expression’. This sounds chillingly similar to the separatist ethos of the identitarian outlook, in which ‘cultural appropriation’ is a sin and anyone who seeks to speak up for other races or cultures risks being reprimanded with the words, ‘Stay in your lane’. The killer’s belief in cultural purity is of a piece with the identitarian worldview.

As will be shown in a later reference backing him up, O’Neill also targets a truth that these factors apply equally to left and right and that it is simply false for anyone to fall for the obvious, but terribly serious games for control that are going on with some “side” being innocent or devoid of all blame or absolved from being prepared for action to avoid future consequences. A lot is at stake. As O’Neill goes on to show, the manifesto indicates the killer’s hatred for democracy, showing it as “mob rule”. Further, he centres it in relevance to both sides of this issue and especially as it all relates to the Christchurch atrocity itself:-

Democracy is anathema to identitarians and Islamists alike for the simple reason that it holds out the promise of an identity that rises above narrow cultural, racial, religious and gender identities. It holds out the promise of an identity based on collective and civic virtues, of commonness over separatism.

Identitarian Impulse predicted to ramp up from Christchurch into a civil war – just as it was intended to.

In the same vein another very important comment highlighting long term dangers comes from an American writer. Rather worried, like many of us by what he sees around him, is Tim Pool . Now until Tim had actually interviewed Jack Dorsey of Twitter while on with Joe Rogan on his Joe Rogan Experience show, I hadn’t seen much of Tim. However, while the Dorsey interview had its ups and downs, Tim is a person and thinker to be reckoned with.

In his take on Christchurch and (at least the manifesto as a document), however, Tim Pool clears the table for mine and while short term fixes or left/right “team” players make short term tactical moves, the strategic goals of many, from the far left to far right Identitarians, just might be what Tim predicts: a civil war. Unless we wake up as a people.

Before dismissing talk of a “civil war”, the concept has been mentioned dozens of times since Donald trump got in, due to the chaos and, some say, sabotage of his policies. Also said to be a form of civil war by a number of respected thinkers and writers. There are many stages in creating a hot war and the whole idea should be considered ridiculous. But it isn’t and it can’t be!

In any case, Tim Pool has a very worthwhile if ominous You Tube video which lays bare what immediate dangers he sees there are to the centre of politics from the Identitarian Left and Right.

We are at the Gates of Civil War

It has been too easy for non-Americans to give an almost war-weary response to USA multiple shootings, even though mass terror attacks have been on their (and our) horizons for well over 20 years. With terror deaths, arrests and conspiracies well known in Australia now, the various cultural and political responses have been a key factor in tensions relating to both terrorism and cultural relationships.

Europe, Britain and Australia have more reason than ever to pay heed to these longer-sighted thoughts about the implication of terror on a basis such as this.

Morrison Government re-election campaign limited by internal opposition to policy change

Posted on by February 10, 2019

First the Climate Sabotage

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is in trouble – from within his own party as well as from the public opposition the Australia Labor Party. And it is all centred on an internal war in the party between conservatives and so-called moderates, which are a left wing group pushing climate/green energy policies for all they are worth. Criticising the Morrison government publicly is par for the course by this internal “climate opposition”.

A lot of the bitterness and infighting faced by Morrison was listed in a post last year about him being a dead man walking, but the internal sabotage against Morrison wasn’t going to quieten down just because they have entered an election year.

The Morrison government has been trying to push the line about energy security and lowering prices, guaranteeing power when renewables have failed miserably, even hinting at supporting the only reliable baseload power available – coal power. It was extremely relevant as it came just as hot weather coinciding with common wind power failures (eg 200,000 homes losing power in Victoria alone) and the stage-managed “independent” candidates against Morrison MPs were trumpeting climate, climate and climate. Some of the hard-fighting politicos on Morrisons side could have gone in hard on that.

Morrison’s energy minister, the realist Angus Taylor was hammering that when in stepped a supporter of the Greens/Climate alarmism wing of the party, Nick Greiner, now federal president of the party.

Morrison had just been talking publicly about meeting all climate targets etc, when the party president Greiner made his policy intervention on February 6.

“I accept the fact that having no sustainability policy would not be an appropriate way to go to an election,” he told ABC News on Tuesday.

“We do need a robust climate change policy, of course we do, and I believe there will be one, yes, before the election.”

Greiner does not seem to be some honest broker in this, or a truly “national” president. No, he is in on the green/climate alarmism side of this argument. Being allied to the so-called “moderate” (ie. “left wing”) of the New South Wales Liberal party, the home state of the PM Scott Morrison, Greiner has long adopted the positions of that left group pushing for more and more deference to the green energy side of politics. This – coincidentally, I am sure -, mirrors the policy of the lobbyist/faction leader Photios family, whose green energy/ climate group, Conservatives for Conservation, Greiner was happy to join as Patron.

This is one potential body blow to any Morrison fightback against the left wing Labor party whose 45-50% renewables energy policy would de-industrialise Australia. The fight against it would allow a real street-fighting politician to make great inroads into the opposition policies. It looks like Morrison might be fighting with one hand behind his back.  How can he have credibility on energy policy when public office holders in his party are going public to virtually sabotage the campaign?

Next came immigration sell out

If that wasn’t bad enough, the Morrison government treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has also dealt a public body to another Morrison policy, the fight against a virtual open borders policy failure by the opposition parties. With many of his party leaders and a majority of the public being for a large cut to the official immigration intake, Frydenberg went all in on another policy which aims at keeping the intake high – higher than the public and prudence deemed appropriate.    

On February 8, with a headline “States cautious as Frydenberg embraces immigration”, Frydenberg is mentioned this way:-

Frydenberg has argued forcefully for the need to maintain a strong immigration intake to safeguard the nation’s economy amid growing global headwinds, as the nation’s biggest states ratchet up demands for more infrastructure spending to cope with congestion problems.

In an apparent softening of the government’s position last year, when Scott Morrison declared Australia’s major cities were “full” and committed to lowering the permanent migration cap, the Treasurer yesterday talked up immigration as vital for the nation’s economic success.

How do they expect Morrison and his Liberal Party to defy huge odds and fight back against the Labor party when major, cut-through policies can’t be argued effectively. We shall see what Morrison does now. If he goes quietly on these two issues, to say that Morrison is fighting with one hand behind his back might mean that he is doing it willingly!

Australian Political Media: a case file example

Posted on by February 8, 2019

Political journalists in Australia can be as professional, fair or biased as anywhere else. However, the increasing allegation that political journalists can be or actually are activists is far more serious.

This is meant to be an early, direct, Australian Perspectives study of the Australian media (and journalists). It looks at a particular article by a journalist who we will come back to more than once over future months. He has a history as well as a future and this post will introduce him and highlight how political journalism works here, highlighting the question of “what is media activism?”

Peter Hartcher whose article is mentioned here, is an interesting case. A senior journalist in Australian political coverage, he is the Political Editor and International Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and has been so for some years. In his writings on national politics in Australia his articles give him a journalistic track record. This is one of his most recent – and targeted.

A headline isn’t the responsibility of the journalist and often has nothing to do with the bulk of the article or even of its thrust. Not this time, though. It is precisely on point. In the (opinion) article How conservatives stole the Liberal Party, published on 2 February, 2019 in the Sydney Morning Herald, a number of themes and issues were thrown up and they related directly to political narratives which are either peripheral or seriously contested.

The first and second paragraphs lays out his theme quite clearly:-

“(Cory Bernardi) quit the party two years ago to start his own, Australian Conservatives. And he waited for all the other disgruntled right-wing Liberals to join him.

“He’s still waiting….the defections and departures are all occurring at the other end of the Liberal Party spectrum, among the moderates. The conservatives feel no urge to leave. They’ve made themselves pretty comfortable.”

This idea that the Australan federal Liberal Party has recently become dominated by a conservative wing is hard to justify. Very hard. 

The Liberal party has been wracked by political infighting for years, and in NSW in particular it has been very vicious, but there is no question that the left, self-called “moderates” are in charge and moving to clean up everywhere. They send signals that they are in the “mopping up” stages set to get rid of all conservative opposition. This was the plot against Tony Abbott led in person by an MP member of his party’s left wing faction.

For Hartcher to even hint at conservative domination while having knowedge of that NSW suituation seems to stretch credibility. Some could even say its is a political  narrative intended by politicians to give a particular impression which is at variance to the facts. That’s where experienced journalists come in isn’t it? Not here. The opposite is stressed by Hartcher. The very fact that a conservative PM, Tony Abbott, was overthrown by a majority of the parliamentary party, in what everyone has said was a move against the conservatives, makes it hard to see as leaving much room for conservatives to “dominate”. Especially when that conservative was replaced by a strongly left wing PM in Turnbull.

Admittedly the “Moderate” (ie leftist) Malcolm Turnbull did lose the prime ministership too, but this wasn’t any clear-cut triumph of opposing conservative forces. Far from it. Because Turnbull had decided to call an election in July 2016 and lost many seats to just scrape in with a one-seat majority, he was always on a knife edge. With some conservative MPs threatening to vote against an environmental policy of his, Turnbull was beholden to them for a majority, but rather than carry on with their support, he called a leadership spill in August 2018 and found that a sizeable minority voted for someone else.

The conservative opponent, Peter Dutton, couldn’t even muster the 50% of the names to get an open leadership vote against Turnbull and by the end of the Turnbull dramatics, some of his own supporters were signing their names just to get a vote! With Dutton obviously not hugely popular and devoid of an obvious majority in his favour, Turnbull could have fought and won. But that wasn’t Turnbull. He didn’t stand and the leadership was won by Scott Morrison, the candidate supported by the very left-moderates Hartcher claims are now not in control of the Liberal party.

Hartcher knew this, knew all of this. Yet he not only pushes that line about “conservatives in control”, he doubles down on it later.

“most importantly for the conservatives, they managed to defeat the foremost moderate, Bishop…The conservatives are quietly thrilled that they so managed to intimidate the left that the moderates didn’t even try to support one of their own for the prime ministership. It was a pre-emptive surrender in favour of the compromise candidate.”

This is one of the worst….er… ”mistakes” in the whole article. It is written months after the leadership change, nothing hidden there. Hartcher knows that the same left/moderates got together in an encrypted WhatsApp list to discuss politics away from prying eyes. Julie Bishop (the Hartcher favourite and suspected leaker) was a candidate and nobody knows the truth about why they did it, but her own faction (yes, the so-called  “moderates” again) decided that Morrison was the better candidate. That is logical. After all, Bishop in West Australia – a lightly-populated state – had only a certain number of MPs to vote for the leader, compared to NSW where not only were there many times more MPs to influence, it was a State where the left/Moderate friends were in virtually total control. And far from just being a “compromise” candidate, Morrison was a creature of the Party machine and, with his handful of MPs loyal to him, was an active force in gathering numbers against Tony Abbott and allowing Turnbull to overthrow him.

Yet Hartcher claims the conservatives “managed to intimidate the left that the moderates didn’t even try to support one of their own”. This is laughable.

Hartcher knew that there was a WhatsApp list, a social media group which uses the favoured encryption for messages, where the left members of the list were screen-capped openly talking about voting against Bishop. This was to be in order to head off a possibility that Dutton could get enough votes to win by having Bishop votes cut into a Morrison vote count enough to make Morrison go 3rd  against Bishop & Dutton. Supposedly a new vote would lead to Dutton winning. What is obvious but unsaid by them at the time (or by Hartcher) was that it relied on acceptance that Bishop was so unpopular within the party that Dutton would attract votes to keep her out. It is all so highly convoluted that it is approaching the ridiculous, but in any case, the key point is that the left did any intimidation that was to be had, it was by the left “moderates” not conservatives! Hartcher knew this, yet still printed that pap about intimidation.

The article has a lot more in this vein of being anti-conservative. He inflates the supposed “independent conservatives” (people going against the government conservatives in selected seats for the next election) being against the Morrison government, when nearly everyone feels they are either Turnbull stooges or Getup plants. Getup, a hard left, part overseas-funded group has long made it known to be out for these conservatives and only awaiting some candidates.

Singling Hartcher out in this way is not meant to be anything other than demonstrative of what we can (and often do) see in political reporting here and elsewhere. There are other journalists who publish conservative-tinged articles in what might be seen as similar fashion. What I have tried to show is that by being informed, readers can inform themselves as to the dangers of taking these “opinions” as true unless and until they have been weighed up in the light of other evidence available to those readers.

Candidacy of Supposed “Conservative Independents” against ex-PM Tony Abbott

Posted on by January 29, 2019
The main “Independent Conservative”[SIC] against ex-PM Tony Abbott

After much speculation, pushed heavily by the usual suspects, the left-aligned Nine/Fairfax media, aided and abetted by the publicly-owned ABC and a News Limited left web site news.com.au, the drums have been beating publicly against ex-PM Tony Abbott for nearly a year.

The hard-to-believe factor of his own party branch seeming to be against him, has been shown in other posts both where the actual lead up to even having Abbott as leader to get them into government was covered and here in a false dawn where the long-time Abbott fight to democratise his party seemed to be successful until the lobbyist and controller groups continued their “work”  to stop that reform.

While these internecine struggles have been going on in Australian politics for years, rarely, if ever, has it involved a concerted attempt to defeat a former Prime Minster. There’s plenty of suspicion to go around, but far from the party being a ”broad church” as former PM John Howard had long claimed, it has been increasingly obvious that under so-called “moderate” (that is left wing) control, the New South Wales branch of the party and a varying number of Liberal party branches and office holders all over the country didn’t see it that way in practice. Once Abbott had taken on NSW faction leaders about not being lobbyists as well as office holders selecting the candidates, a certain distance was set between Tony Abbott and that faction.

Abbott had taken the Liberals from an unwinnable position under Turnbull in 2009 (18% popularity) into a hung parliament in 2010 and a landslide government win in 2013, but his time in government was undermined by the leaks and public opposition by certain members of his own “team”. This led to his overthrow in favour of (& at the hands of) Turnbull in September 2015. The leader of the faction Tony Abbott had challenged when he got into government – the lobbyist chieftain – actually was meeting with other faction leader/plotters the night before the coup against Abbott.

‘Turnbull led the government to a humiliating crash in the election he called for 2 July, 2016, Abbott’s large majority being reduced to just a majority of one seat for Turnbull. As Abbott went about his way, speaking on policy but also speaking out under his own name whenever leaks of wrongful criticism came in from his own side, he never hesitated to speak out in favour of his policies and practice as leader. The aftermath was history.

The drums had been beating – with very obvious tame-media assistance – about a challenge to Abbott in his own seat of Warringah.

In a process which was anything but subtle, the Liberal Party forces against Abbott leaked plenty of hints and urges to get opposition to him. On 3 May 2018, the Guardian came up with

Liberal activists target Tony Abbott’s seat over climate change policy Sydneysiders urged to join party in former PM’s seat to ‘shift the politics’ and speak up for the environment” and followed up on 6 October, 2018 with another scare piece 

Tony Abbott faces campaign using tactics that defeated Mirabella in Indi  Voices of Warringah created after their MP’s refusal to engage, group’s president says.

A few weeks later on 7 November Miranda Devine exploded it all with her exposure of the real Liberal party insiders involved and the activist group with overseas funding ties, Getup, when she wrote Birkenstock Libs betray their party’s ethos, an article exposing the Getup/Liberal Party faction links to the group against Abbott.

Carrying their Getup handbags and with “anti- Abbott bumper stickers” the social set called North Shore Environmental Stewards met to discuss climate and see a film by Naomi Klein. As Devine explains later in the article,

(North Shore Environmental Stewards) is run by branch members loyal to NSW moderate MP Felicity Wilson, whose state electorate North Shore overlaps Abbott’s. Wilson is a protégé of dreaded lobbyist and moderate faction powerbroker Michael Photios, whose wife Kristina quit the Liberal Party two years ago in protest over federal climate policy.”

I won’t bore you with details about Wilson, (known in a political joke as “Duplicity Wilson” on account of various details of her background, residence and academic qualifications being questioned) but she is cemented into power as an MP with support of Photios.

The Challenge itself

With all the drama leading up to it, the new year has brought the challenge. First with Getup going public about Abbott as being one of its main targets Peter Dutton tops GetUp’s ‘hard right’ hit list for federal election  Tony Abbott in second place as activist group looks to extend list of targets and now, after a few candidates (one a former Malcolm Turnbull staffer Alice Thompson), we have the real, prepared, setup candidate, Zali Steggall.

And wasn’t she prepared (well, in all but actual policy). In answer to a question about her climate policy, which she had claimed was the No1 issue, she said she would provide it “at a later date.” She was “prepared” enough with supporters, much advertising, T-shirts with her name on them for supporters and lots of prepared material but not, apparently, having her main, most important, actual climate policy at hand, even a day later!

Her claims/attacks on Abbott, some as personal attacks, include:-

World champion athlete-turned-barrister Zali Steggall has called time on Tony Abbott’s “destructive and divisive” 25-year career in federal politics, launching a major bid to seize the former prime minister’s blue-ribbon Sydney seat of Warringah…the four-time Winter Olympian said Mr Abbott was an “aggressive” national figure who had lost touch with the affluent electorate and deserved to be thrown out of Parliament for his role in the demise of Malcolm Turnbull, and views on the environment.

“I am in this to win it,” Ms Steggall told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “I want to beat Tony Abbott, who has been a handbrake on Australian progress on many fronts but particularly effective action on climate change.

And on radio:- 2

Ms Steggall tells Steve Price Mr Abbott’s policies were destructive and divisive and claims the most of the country agrees with her.

“I do indeed and I think all of Australia are extremely dissatisfied and absolutely repulsed by the conduct of the Liberal Party in the last 12 months.

“The revolving door leadership, the allegations of harassment and bullying.”

And so the die is cast. The much-announced challenge, with all the various left- hard left/climate alarmists/ lobbyists all coming together and, surprise, apparently “uncoordinated” (as if). The laughable claim is denied by the mere staffing moves from the Getup-pushed Kerryn Phelps supposed “independent” campaign in Wentworth. For the gullible, those who aren’t actually in a party are quite open about it, they are even moving Phelps-aligned fixers from one campaign to another..

And Getup has a lazy half a million dollars from a body with overseas funding links with which to play in this Warringah by election. 

We can expect massive coverage from all the tame media outlets. Not just the Nine/Fairfax, ABC, news.com.au and the other usual suspects, but the shows which will all have Steggall on all the time. I would think that their poor QandA show from the publicly-funded ABC would be very upset that they didn’t get advance warning of Steggall’s candidature. Seeing they have their first show of 2019 with every non-conservative they can find, we don’t have to doubt that the public-funded ABC will favour its usual half of the population only and so we shall much more of Zali Steggall.