CriticalTheories

 

A Quadrant Article

The Folly of Going Too Far

• 29th December 2022
 
•  Comments (5)

Declan Mansfield



The Promised Land is a symbolic dream and nothing more. Its satisfactions are beyond the reach of both individuals and society, irrespective of whether the tools used to attain happiness are politics, religion, science, economics, or philosophy. The supreme, contemporary irony, though, is that, while we’re living in an overtly moral age, it’s a fundamental, but often overlooked side of human nature to disturb our own and other people’s peace.

All of us, to our shame, are guilty of naively or even deliberately choosing the wrong path. We do it continually throughout our lives. Dostoevsky said that if all human desire was indulged, we would still, through a quirk of psychology, destroy everything that makes our lives happy and meaningful. Eden, Jannah, Nirvana, the prelapsarian state of nature, the perfect world of the future, the false gods and snake oil of communism, feminism, socialism, fascism or environmentalism, (our wildest, febrile imaginings, in other words) are permanently outside — except in brief moments of pleasure or contentment — the horizon of tangible, durable and concrete human experience. Like Moses, then, we see the Promised Land, but it always remains tantalisingly beyond our reach. In the end, we take, if we’re wise and humble, the simple joys, and are grateful.

What, you say, does the above deep and perhaps meaningless passage have to do with anything? Apart from a general observation, not much. But it does refer obliquely to the most monumental strategic blunder of modern times, which will probably take decades to undo. After centuries of stigmatisation and discrimination, homosexual people, or, in broader terms, the non-heterosexual minority, had not only seen the Promised Land from a distance, but had walked through its shady bowers, sunlit mountains and watered oases. A rejected community had reached their desired destination and were enjoying the fruits of both their exhaustive labours and their most pristine dreams. Everyone, or at least most people in Western liberal democracies, were happy. Suddenly nobody cared about other people’s sexuality.

And then, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, extremists within the movement pushed everything too far. It wasn’t enough for gay marriage to be normalised, or for good-natured tolerance of different lifestyle choices to be accepted. A suite of radical claims was put before a confused public and no debate or dissent was allowed. Men were now women and women were men, and not in the ‘let us be kind to John or Jane type of way – sure what harm could it do?’ No, a man with an actual penis and testicles and the full physiology of an adult male was now a woman with all the rights and privileges traditionally reserved for females, and any argument to the contrary was ‘transphobia’, a sin for which the only just response was to be cast into the deepest realms of hell; either that, or have your life destroyed by being cancelled socially or professionally. In other words, the purest form of bullying behaviour, a prima facie example that would sit easily in even the most enlightened psychological textbook, was being weaponised to further an ideological agenda, and by the people who shout the loudest about ‘being kind’.

The amount of anti-free speech, anti- democratic, anti-live-and-let-live ideological impositions on everyday people’s lives is extraordinary – and just as chilling in their implications. No institution has been left unmolested by what is a fusion of postmodernism, critical theory, feminism, the myth of the Noble Savage, Cultural Marxism and Queer Theory, and it’s presented to an ignorant and easily fooled public as simply being nice. It is now considered ‘hate speech’ to practice any form of religion that does not celebrate the idea that there are seventy-two genders. Science, the most accurate way of measuring the world, is being destroyed because its results often don’t conform to transgender ideology. Politics, long an arena in liberal democracies of civilised disagreement and discussion, has been co-opted into a simplistic site of black-and-white thinking, where morality, hence scapegoating, around transgender issues is the norm. Academia, and education in general, is no longer concerned with a search for truth or where intellectual gadflies have a home: conform to the ideology or forget about your career. The media, once proud of its role as the Fourth Estate, is now the official arm of an ideology that brooks no dissent. David Hume’s distinction of what is and what ought to be has been utterly extinguished. We live in a world of establishment-sponsored propaganda, and woe betide anyone who dissents from its strictures.

It didn’t need to be this way. Most people have ideas about themselves and opinions of other people that would, if they were relentlessly articulated, cause society to frown in consternation at their peculiarities. We overlook each other’s idiosyncrasies because we’re all guilty of wrongthink to some extent. What we have not done, until now, at least in liberal democracies, is force people to recognise other people’s opinions, truth claims, or psychological views of the world as absolutely sound. Disagreement has traditionally been encouraged because humility in the face of the complexity of the world is a more rational response than strict adherence to any ideology. In other words, you do your thing and I’ll do mine. And once we’re not physically harming one another or stealing property, then everything is allowed, including passionate disagreement.

This humane quintessence of civilisation is now under threat, and the danger of this situation is that the entire edifice of gay rights is also under threat. This is the disastrous outcome of not accepting reality, but instead searching for Utopia, and, like Procrustes and his bed, making society conform to an ideological vision of the world. As Newton said, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This dictum is as true in relation to social norms as it is to physics. Islamic fundamentalism, chauvinistic nationalism, and, to put it bluntly, the less intellectually developed regions of the world are inherently anti-homosexual and don’t need any encouragement to return to benighted forms of anti-gay discrimination. There are hundreds of millions of people with these attitudes. The only thing that’s stopping their worldwide negative encroachment into the lives of gay people is the political, economic and military power of the liberal democratic West – and the only thing holding the West’s political values together is an adherence to political liberty. Break this bond and everything, no matter how dreadful, is possible. This is exactly what is happening now with the imposition of transgender ideology across the institutions of free and open democracies. People are prepared to accept other people’s idiosyncrasies only when the courtesy is reciprocal; and this openness to other people’s idiosyncrasies has been broken by the extremists of the transgender movement, with the support of a whole raft of LGBTQ+ organisations. Never has the idea of playing with fire been more apposite, and the consequences more potentially lethal.

The leaders of gay rights organisations around the world need to become less ideological and more practical in their approach to what can be achieved politically and socially in relation to homosexual rights. Do not push transgender ideology so far that the tolerant majority, who are happy their gay brothers and sisters are now living dignified and socially accepted lives in open relationships, become disenchanted because their own beliefs have been proscribed by an intolerant minority. The Promised Land, remember, is almost always an illusion, or, to say it in more prosaic terms, utopias can never live up to the hype. Don’t kill the golden goose for an ideological chimera. Or, to continue the mythological, fairytale and biblical allusions, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Bismarck said that ‘politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the next best’. This wisdom is something everyone should know. Transgender ideology is incoherent as a philosophy, and impossible, over the long term, as politics. Another quotation, this time from Rochefoucauld, which should be the slogan of every human rights movement: ‘don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good’. You’ve walked through a less than perfect Promised Land. That should be enough. It is the daily reality, in myriad ways, for everybody.

AboriginalPower

 

Always Was, Always Will Be About Power

• 18th December 2022
 
•  Comments (24)

In 1983, as a naïve youth worker and concerned by what I had been reading since the early 1970s about what was happening with Aborigines in Alice Springs, I moved there to see what I could do to help. All told, I spent six years in Central Australia, leaving both depressed and convinced that the situation could never be fixed. One thing that bothered me then and still does is the constant calls for ‘self-determination’, not so much by Aborigines but by whitefella activists, some I later learned to be card-carrying members of the Communist Party and others who now hold senior positions in academia and the bureaucracy.

The contemporary definition of ‘Aboriginal self-determination’ is not about fitting in with the mainstream, of integrating or assimilating, but of splitting from mainstream Australia. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to pay for it whilst the rent seekers contribute very little to the community and Aboriginal lives, including those of children, continue to be ruined.

Assimilation is an anathema to progressives, who prefer ‘integration’ as the term de rigueur — but they are essentially the same thing. Aborigines need to learn to fit in, be a part of, what we have known to be Australian culture for the last 200-plus years and, indeed, most of them have done just that. (So why the special treatment, benefits and funding, you may well ask? That’s a topic for another conversation.)

None of this means Aborigines need to lose their culture – far from it. Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is an invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genital mutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clan grievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches, both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters can still become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out with a football, not spears and clubs.

Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed, urban myth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretenders giving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of ‘Aboriginal knowledge’ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a lá Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lá ‘cultural burning’) to Aboriginal ‘art’, ‘fashion’ and even ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley’s thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country”. This is mostly snake oil fakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that the Aborigines of old were something they clearly never were not. Worse, histories and observational accounts of early Aboriginal life and culture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-white post-modern dogma of ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is cultural censure and erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it, black and white alike.

Meanwhile, the recent invention, exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation of the alleged ‘frontier wars’ serves as a made-to-order replacement ‘history’ intended to raise the status of Aboriginal people and degrade that of settlers. It is yet another bill of goods, a distorting sham, being hawked by a power-grabbing activist elite in whose interest it is to falsify and distort our history. The goal, need it be said, is an attempt to paint a genocidal racism as Australia’s original sin.

I, too, would like more self-determination in my own life, too, but I am constrained by the laws of the land. Unfortunately, self-determination for many people who today identify as Aboriginal is taken to mean the normal rules — keeping children in school, eschewing clan and domestic violence — aren’t thought to fully apply. This is nowhere more apparent than on the troubled streets of Alice Springs. ‘Self-determination’ means ‘we’ll do what we like and you can pay for it’. Self-determination’ is about colonising and taking control, accepting all that whitefellas have to offer while offering nothing in return. Self-determination is about undermining whitefella institutions, judiciaries, organisations and bureaucracies. Self-determination is about enculturated white people who, on the strength of what may be a mere speck of indigenous DNA, now identify exclusively as Aboriginal, thereby giving themselves an economic and social leg-up. For the activist cadre it always was and always will be about money, power and control, all underscored by the notion that members of one race enjoy a preeminent ascendency over all other Australians.

More examples of ‘self-determination’ can be found in the ban on climbing Ayers Rock (Uluru), Mt Warning (Wollumbin), Mt Gillen, and many Grampians climbs, all for ill-defined or unexplained ‘cultural’ reasons’. After much outcry, consideration is now being given to re-opening the Mt Warning climb, but only for those who pay a fee and are escorted by indigenous guides. More rent-seeking, what a surprise! Australian place names are also rapidly being overwritten with (most likely made-up) Aboriginal names (eg: K’gari, once known as Fraser Island). All of this is about claims to ownership, to ‘sovereignty’. These changes should not be mistaken for deference to Aboriginal culture; it’s no more nor less than an insidious takeover. What we are experiencing here is cultural guerrilla warfare, the picking off one target after the other. Don’t believe it? Look no further that what has happened in New Zealand.

Self-determination is not about ‘closing the gap’, nor Aborigines ‘having a voice’ — all of that can be achieved without a change to the Constitution. Indeed, the $35+ billion currently spent on Aboriginal affairs and the 11-plus current Aboriginal members of parliament are more than enough to fulfil both aims. The Voice referendum is purely and simply about the drive towards Aboriginal sovereignty, which can only be achieved by changing the nation’s foundational document and charter.

Under the Albanese government, self-determination means the coming referendum, whose barely concealed intention is to divide Australia along lines of race. To achieve this ignoble end, the federal government is stacking the deck via its Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022, which states

The Bill will also allow the Commonwealth to fund educational campaigns to promote voters’ understanding of referendums and the referendum proposal.

At the same time, in a joint media release issued on December 11, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, Special Minister of State Don Farrell, Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, and Pat Dodson, special envoy for reconciliation and implementing the Uluru Statement. Dodson’s brother, clearly stated

To support community education, the Government proposes to temporarily lift a funding restriction in the Act, to enable funding of educational initiatives to counter misinformation.

The entire media release is worth reading. But what is hiding in plain sight, is the Albanese government’s intention to de-facto fund and promote the ‘Yes’ campaign whilst hamstringing ‘No’ advocates. Anything the No campaign says can and will be construed as “misinformation”. We have seen this already with the appalling attacks by Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton’s on Jacinta Price. Brace for much more of that — and wonder, too, if the bile and attempts at character assassination are a foretaste of an empowered Voice?

To make an informed self-determination at the referendum’s ballot box, ordinary Australians must have full access to both sides of the argument, pro and con, which the Albanese government has already legislated to ensure this won’t happen. Meanwhile, Australians are subjected to a daily and massive pro-Yes propaganda barrage by the taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS. If Australians prove slow on the uptake, allow ourselves to be persuaded by the government’s nakedly rigged ‘information’ offensive and vote Yes despite changes to the Constitution having yet to be revealed, it will be too late!

Labor and their confident, conceited acolytes would have us believe that support for the Yes vote is a lay down misère. It is beholden upon the rest of us — those who care about Australia as a whole rather than advancing the narrow interests of one group only — to contest the creation of a separate and sovereign Aboriginal nation on the Australian continent, for that is where the ‘Voice’ will take us. Once embedded in the Constitution, such an internal ‘sovereign nation’ will be impossible to dismantle. Despite Albanese &Co’s efforts to promote one side of the debate and suppress the other, this is the threat and the message all Australians must hear.

Dr David Barton is a proud Celtic and Anglo-Saxon man with a long generational family history in Australia. He lives in Central Victoria.

TheVoiceRealities

 

Examining the case for the voice – an argument against

• By IAN CALLINAN
• 12:00AM DECEMBER 17, 2022
• 9 COMMENTS

I often agreed with my eminent former High Court colleague, the honourable Kenneth Hayne. Our judicial disagreements, when they occurred, were, as I intend this to be, cordial and respectful.

Disagreement now between us arises out of a recent report in The Australian of a speech he made regarding the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament. In the public interest I feel I am obliged to put an argument, not dogmatically, against the case he confidently put for the voice.

He asserts that the lack of any legal argument against the voice provides a justification for the voice. He seems to be saying that the fears of those who oppose the voice are unfounded because, even though he doubts if anyone will have standing to challenge representations made by the voice, if some unlikely person were to do so, the public can have full confidence in the High Court in the “maintenance and enforcement of the boundaries within which the governmental powers (in respect of the voice) might be exercised”.

My former colleague states that “anyone can start litigation, including constitutional litigation, so long as their claim is not frivolous or vexatious”. He sees a problem, however, in the sort of order the court might make if some unimaginable party were to try to mount a constitutional challenge in respect of the voice. Indeed, he seeks to employ the metaphor that a fear of any credible legal challenge is merely to see a “column of smoke with no substance”.

It should be recognised that some judges have a monocle that enables them to see substance where to others there is a mere wisp of smoke.

Stretching my imagination only a little, I would foresee a decade or more of constitutional and administrative law litigation arising out of a voice whether constitutionally entrenched or not. Every state and territory is likely to have an interest in any representations and in the interactions between the voice and the cons­titutionally entrenched houses of parliament and executive govern­ment.

It is one thing to say the voice can make representations only, but in the real world of public affairs, as the Prime Minister candidly acknowledged, it would be a brave parliament that failed to give effect to representations of the voice.

Just as there is a real world of public affairs, there is a real world of judicial ones. In modern times, it is an open question whether the US constitutionalist Alexander Hamilton’s assertion that the courts are the least dangerous branch of government holds true.T

The march of administrative law is almost inexorable. In 1995, in Teoh v the Minister for Immigration, the High Court decided that the process by which the minister reached a decision to remove from Australia, on character grounds, a convicted non-national drug importer was flawed because the importer’s infant children had a “legitimate expectation” under the international Convention on the Rights of the Child that their interests should have been, but were not, taken into account by the minister. The High Court so decided even though the convention had not been enacted into Australian law.

It is an elementary principle of constitutional law that an international treaty cannot bind Australia and its peoples unless and until the treaty is enacted and assented into law by the parliament and the governor-general. It took eight years for a differently constituted High Court, of which Kenneth and I were members, to correct the heresy of legitimate expectation in the court’s Ex Parte Lam. Who knows what a future High Court might do as it seeks to juggle the respective rights, obligations and “expectations” to which the voice would give rise?

I can imagine any number of people and legal personalities in addition to the states who might plausibly argue that they have standing. Standing is a highly contestable matter. It is an opaque and plastic concept. Whether a person has standing or not is itself a justiciable question of the kind regularly heard and determined by the courts, expansively so in recent times. One has only to glance at the litigation that environmental concerns have generated as to standing to see that this is so.

Justiciability or not is a recurrent and important question. Whether, for example, the chief justice at the time, Sir Garfield Barwick, was right in his advice to the governor-general, that the governor-general could lawfully dismiss a prime minister, is not to the point here. What is to the point however is that one of Sir Garfield’s justifications for giving the advice was that the issue could never be justiciable, is, with respect, wrong because justiciability itself is justiciable.

Kenneth would put all trust in the High Court. He says, “(a)ll that the court would be doing is its job”.

It is always better to hear all of the arguments before deciding a case. In the recent past, at least, government has funded both an argument for and an argument against the case in a referendum for a change in the Constitution. That is apparently not to happen here. Rather, there is to be a “public education program” on the issue. The expression “public education” has an ominous, Orwell­ian sound to me. As much as I respect my predecessors, contemporaries and successors on the High Court, neither on my appointment nor subsequently have I experienced a Damascene conversion to an unquestioning faith in an all-seeing and infallible court. It has been said that final courts are not final because they are infallible, they are infallible because they are final.

I have no doubt that, already, courageous and ingenious legal minds both are conceiving bases upon which to litigate the many legal and cultural implications of the voice. The voice, or a member of it, is almost certain to argue in the courts that a member of the executive government, in executing a parliamentary enactment of a representation of the voice, took into account an irrelevant consideration, or failed to take into account a relevant one, or made a decision that no reasonable person could make, shifting indicia relied upon in almost every challenge brought to the actions of government. One example might suffice.

Take the live cattle ban case. Whether the 2011 ban effected by then agriculture minister Joe Ludwig was a good or a bad decision is a highly debatable as a political affair. It was, in my view, peculiarly a matter for governmental decision requiring the balancing of many important political, diplomatic, and social considerations, including animal welfare, international relations, the Australian economy, the economy of other nations, the reliability of Australian supply chains and assured access to protein by our important neighbour Indonesia.

In holding that the ban was unlawful and actionable (misfeasance in public office), the Federal Court microscopically examined the events, activities and legal advice sought or not sought in the minister’s office.

In the real world, that case can be seen as a transfer of executive decision-making of a high and sensitive kind to unelected judges. Never underestimate the reach of administrative law, its progeny and its cousins.

A voice in any form, in my view, will give rise to many arguments and division, legal and otherwise.

If the body is to be an elected body, how is the franchise for it to be determined, regionally (as so far suggested), linguistically perhaps, or some other way? Will voter registration be compulsory? Will voting itself be compulsory? Will an expended Electoral Commission oversee elections to the voice? Will the High Court or some other court be a Court of Disputed Returns? Will the voice need not only its own extensive premises in Canberra and in many other places but also its own executive and other staff to assist it? Will it have a cabinet? Is there not a real chance that it will be infiltrated by the established political parties and become more an instrument of a predominant political party in the same way as Sir Alfred Deakin predicted the progression of the Senate as a “state house” to a battleground for centralised political parties with scant regard for the states the senators nominally represent?

What is proposed seems, whether constitutionally entrenched or not, is in substance a kind of a separate parliament.

The hallmark of a parliament is its capacity to raise taxes and, one hopes, to expend them wisely. If the parliament does not do that, then the paying public gets its opportunity to express its disapproval at the next election.

There is no suggestion that the voice will be self-funding. It will have no direct accountability to its financiers, the taxpayers. The voice can be seen as powerful, costly and ultimately unaccountable to its financiers.

It is, I think, arguable that the members of the voice, and all those who may be employed in carrying out its functions, of which I think there will be many, funded as they will be by the commonwealth, may be “officers” of the commonwealth within the meaning of s 75(v) of the Constitution. That section enables certain aggrieved peoples to apply to the High Court for constitutional writs against such “officers”.

There is little clarity about what is proposed. Sir Isaac Isaacs and other justices in the majority in the Engineers Case in 1920 said the High Court thenceforth should interpret commonwealth legislation in such a way as to give it plenitude, an irresistible endowment to the commonwealth to go high, wide and far, as it will be pressured by the voice to do.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I restate my great respect and earnest hopes for the First Peoples’ welfare, improvement in life and full and undiscriminating involvement in Australian society in every respect. I write not only as an Australian, a former judge and a former patron of a charity for the support of troubled First Peoples’ youth, but also as a person who has had occasion to see in situ some sad circumstances of some First Peoples’ communities in or near Darwin, Ranger, Mornington Island, Thursday Island, Lockhart River, Alice Springs and Cherbourg.

Like senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and many other Australians, including many, many lawyers of goodwill, I do not think the voice is the way.

Ian Callinan was a justice of the High Court of Australia from 1998 to 2007.

Challenges In The West

Self-inflicted challenges hit West
on four fronts

TOM SWITZER

As 2022 draws to a close, most people will be glad to see the back of it. The post-Cold War era has resolutely ended with the Russian attack on Ukraine and China shaking its fist at Taiwan. Much of the Western world has been addition­ally destabilised by higher energy prices and an acceleration of inflation.

The US remains a polarised and divided society. So is the EU, with individual polities – from Italy to Hungary – railing against the Brussels orthodoxy.

In the Anglosphere, the death of Queen Elizabeth II signalled the closure of an epoch and promoted deep introspection. This was not helped by the fact in Britain itself the country had three prime ministers in a little over six weeks, crippling its international credibility and ability to exert leadership.

But the West has hardly helped itself in recent years. It faces severe challenges on four fronts, all of them caused by an unhealthy mindset of self-doubt and poor judgment.

First, many economies now seem to think the old joke about money growing on trees is actually true, and are encouraged to do so by a growing belief that it is the state’s place to sort out every problem a society faces. The result has been serious inflation and what has become known internationally as a cost-of-living crisis, which an energy crisis unquestionably has worsened.

The OECD governments, including on both sides of Australian politics, have failed to curtail runaway government spending programs – in Canberra’s case, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Gonski schools, public hospitals, aged care and childcare. The more entrenched the state becomes, the more expensive it becomes.

At the same time, in the past 15 years governments comprehensively have failed to legislate the kind of productivity-enhancing reforms that produced Australia’s prosperity from the dollar shock in the mid-1980s to the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Taken together with higher interest payments on debt, increased defence spending, an ageing society and the energy transition costs, and it is clear, as Peter Costello warns, our debt and deficit-ridden economy is left vulnerable to the next economic contagion.

Second, this notion that people are helpless without the state is indicative of a collapse of self-confidence that increasingly calls into question the fundamentals of Western society. Christianity, the conventional family unit, the canon of Western literature, its architecture and, above all, conventional interpretations of its history and its tradition of freedom of expression are coming under continued attack from a minority of left-wing activists.

The “woke” movement – from social media to corporate environmental, social and governance activists – seems to demand the re-education of entire populations to the point where they accept as norms ideas they previously saw as nonsensical, and vice-versa.

Hence, the trappings of Western civilisation are unworthy of study in their own right. People require safe spaces so they can be spared the trauma of hearing opinions different from their own.
A woman who accuses a man of sexual harassment is presumed a victim before any trial takes place. A man identifying as a woman is the same as being born biologically female. A prominent classical liberal journalist who challenges the idea of changing the Constitution to create a race-based advisory body to parliament arouses shock or hostility. Anyone who questions the new orthodoxies could be “cancelled”.

A recent example of the absurdity of this illiberal mindset was when some British academics declared that cricket had been one of the exploitative features of the British Empire. Never mind that one of the most valuable businesses in modern India is the Indian Premier League cricket franchise, worth more than $5.5bn to the mostly Indian people who own it.

Not least because of the self-appointed thought police of social media, too many people are afraid to make a stand against such bullying assertions of nonsense.

Third, because of the zealotry of environmental protesters, political and business elites have been terrified to question the feasibility of moving to net-zero emissions in a relatively short time, often by 2050. That has not stopped the climate enthusiasts in Canberra from exporting vast reserves of coal and gas, which helps boost budget coffers. Still, the process of decarbonising the economy brings huge costs to individuals, households and businesses.

It might be possible painlessly if the world were on a universal trajectory of increasing prosperity. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Along with attempts to reduce emissions, there will be reductions in employment, real incomes and wealth. This will not only undermine Western economies. It also will undermine the concept of capitalism – which is, of course, what many eco-zealots desire.

But the fourth challenge, or threat, to the Western way of life is the fact the world is becoming an intensely dangerous place just as the most powerful upholder of Western values, the US, is divided and introspective.
In an increasingly multipolar world, Russia’s conduct all too often upsets Western sensitivities. But it is communist China – as prominent social democrats from Kevin Rudd to Emmanuel Macron recognise – that poses a much greater threat. Its resources, both human and material, outstrip Russia’s. Its idea of itself directly challenges the West. It also has the means, if it chooses, to seek to enforce that power and influence – such as by attacking and seeking to occupy Taiwan, which it considers its by right.

But strong resistance to China’s aggressiveness requires a lead from a united and determined America. The sheer polarisation of US politics is so extreme that unifying the country seems beyond any of the nation’s leading politicians.

It could be dismissed as catastrophist to argue that these four threats could combine to undermine the West. But the fact remains that they are dangerously close to doing so. An economic, moral, ethical and security disaster could be on the horizon.

To challenge it requires the determination of elected governments to face down unconstitutional forces that provide internal threats. They also need to resolve to defend the core values of Western capitalism and democracy against external ones.

It should be a wake-up call for the governments of nations whose way of life is under the greatest threat. But thus far they choose only to keep their eyes firmly shut and pretend the worst won’t happen. There are few more certain ways to ensure it will.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies and a presenter at the ABC’s Radio National.

TheNoCase

The heart of the matter


All Australians are created equal, and they should be treated in the same manner.


By JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

That’s one of my favourite quotes from Thomas Sowell, the great American writer and thinker. Sowell grew up in segregated North Carolina, and then lived in Harlem. His father died before he was born and his mother was unable to care for him; consequently, his brother and sisters had him adopted by his great-aunt. After Sowell dropped out of high school he was drafted into the US Marine Corps during the Korean War. After his discharge he studied at Harvard University, Columbia University and the University of Chicago, and he’s regarded as one of the most brilliant economists of his generation. Sowell has fought against ignorance and racism all his life and he’s done that on the basis that we are all individuals worthy of respect, regardless of our skin colour or background.

We are all entitled to the dignity of being treated as individuals who can make choices and have responsibilities. Unfortunately, this is not how the left see it. The left seek to divide us by pigeon-holing society into two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed. They have carefully manufactured gender stereotypes for men and women while, simultaneously, generating brand-new gender constructs. They have also developed racial stereotypes, enshrined within Critical Race Theory, to condemn the “white race” as oppressors, and subjugate “people of colour” as victims. If I were to follow leftist dogma and regard myself as nothing more than an oppressed Aboriginal woman, I would be wallowing in my victimhood and rationalising the notion that I am inferior to my oppressors. According to that dogma I have no agency in my life and no ability to make choices. This is dogma that we must reject, for many reasons, not the least because it is patronising and deeply dehumanising.

We are a lucky people living in a lucky nation. Our way of life, democracy, and freedoms are the envy of the world. We have welcomed millions of people to our shores and there are so many more people who would rather live in Australia than anywhere else. But we can never forget that nations, just like individuals, very much make their own luck. We are lucky Australia was settled by the British rather than colonialists from any other country. History cannot be undone, and the inevitable inquiring explorations of mankind have meant all corners of the Earth have been settled. This landmass we call home was never going to be left untouched by anyone other than our First Peoples. The British brought with them the rule of law, concepts such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and what became our democracy. Too often when young Australians are taught history, these gifts are either ignored or taken for granted. Yes, like every nation our history features dark and shameful incidents but that is not our whole history. We shouldn’t shy away from the fact that our history is made up of the good and the bad. There is much to celebrate from our efforts to strive to make better lives for all Australians.

Our nation’s schools’ sole responsibility should be to educate, not indoctrinate, but we have in recent times witnessed the overwhelming politicisation of our children. Children are now encouraged to skip school to be paraded as activist spearheads by adults who place the weight of the world on their shoulders. Meanwhile, children in remote communities, where school atten­dance rates are in some places as low as 19 per cent, do not have the privilege of gaining an education that the activist class take for granted. Everyone wants to be an activist – to push governments to solve their dilemmas – but no one wants to be responsible for themselves.

Our aim should not be to blame our current democratic institutions for all our perceived failures but to encourage the individual responsibility of all Australians. We need to focus on nation building, not nation burning.

Cancel culture’s war on free thinking and free speech must be brought to an end. In order for future generations to benefit from common sense we must arm ourselves with the weapon of truth and stand unified with pride in our shared Australian values and national identity.

When we live in reality, when we call out and say “the emperor has no clothes”, we can begin to solve some of our most challenging problems and we can begin to lift our marginalised out of the pit of their despair. It is time to reassert the values that all good and decent people have fought the hard, long battle to impose through law, the right to freedom of speech, and the overcoming of racism and sexism. All it takes is courage and good sense.

When cultures collide, as happened in Australia over two centuries ago, everyone is affected, for good and for ill. My mother was born under a tree and lived within an original Warlpiri structured environment through a kinship system on Aboriginal land. Her first language was Warlpiri, and her parents, my grandparents, only came into contact with white settlers in their early adolescence in the 1940s. I’m proud my family are from the Northern Territory. In the Territory we call a spade a spade. We are realists and this is likely due to the direct connection to our environment. We have space to think, and the harsh reality of our country is that you need to be very aware of your surroundings and yourself; otherwise, you could perish rather quickly. We had the foundation of a sophisticated but brutal culture, where it was kill or be killed over resources such as water, women and later livestock – food for survival – or from doing the wrong thing like marrying the wrong way or sharing knowledge that’s not yours to share.
Over 250,000 walking across Sydney Harbour Bridge for Walk for Reconciliation in 2000. Picture: Troy Bendeich

I can understand the widespread willingness to recognise Australia’s Indigenous heritage. But most of that “recognition” is virtue-signalling.

In Australia, we have experienced historically significant acts of symbolism that include the 2000 reconciliation walk across Sydney Harbour Bridge. For six hours, 250,000 Australians of all backgrounds walked together to demonstrate the fact that we are not racist but are overwhelmingly in support of Aboriginal Australia. We have spent a week every year since, commemorating this event and what it means.

Throughout Australia, the reinvention of culture has brought us welcome to country or recognition of country, a standard ritual practice before events, meetings and social gatherings by governments, corporates, institutions, primary schools, kindergartens, high schools, universities, workplaces, music festivals, gallery openings, conferences, airline broadcasts and so on and so forth. I personally have had more than my fill of being symbolically recognised.

Australians of Indigenous heritage haven’t only been racially stereotyped – we’ve been politically stereotyped too. Because of my skin colour I’m supposed to vote Labor. It was an exchange with the former leader of the Labor Party Bill Hayden, who conveyed this very stereotype, that compelled Neville Bonner to confirm his membership within the Liberal Party of Australia. Bonner had been handing out how-to-vote cards for a Liberal friend when Hayden exclaimed, “What are you doing handing out those how-to-vote cards? We do more for you bloody Aborigines than those bastards do.” “Well,” Bonner thought, “How dare someone come up to me and presume that, because I’m black, I should support a particular party!”

It is the same attitude we hear with platitudes of motherhood statements from our now Prime Minister, who suggests, without any evidence whatsoever, that a Voice to parliament bestowed upon us through the virtuous act of symbolic gesture by this government is what is going to empower us. This government has yet to demonstrate how this proposed Voice will deliver practical outcomes and unite, rather than drive a wedge further between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. And, no, Prime Minister, we don’t need another handout, as you have described the Uluru statement to be. No – we Indigenous Australians have not come to agreement on this statement, as you have also claimed. It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not simply defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character.

Voice to Parliament is 'built on a lie' that Aboriginal people 'don't have a voice': Mundine

Indigenous leader Warren Mundine says the Indigenous Voice to Parliament is “built on a lie” that Aboriginal… people don’t have a voice. “We do not need this in the constitution,” Mr Mundine told Sky News Australia. He said to “close the gap”, the focus must be on education More


For all the symbolism and the “recognition” the left claims it provides to Indigenous Australians, the left continues to ignore Indigenous communities. The lifting of alcohol bans in dry communities, despite the warnings from elders, will see the scourge of alcoholism and violence return to those communities. Coupled with this, we see the removal of the cashless debit card, which allowed countless families on welfare to feed their children rather than seeing the money claimed by kinship demand from alcoholics, substance abusers and gamblers in their own family group. I could not offer two more appalling examples of legislation pushed by left-wing elites guaranteed to worsen the lives of Indigenous people. Yet at the same time we spend days and weeks each year recognising Aboriginal Australia in many ways – in symbolic gestures that fail to push the needle one micro-millimetre toward improving the lives of the most marginalised in any genuine way.

The left are more interested in symbolism than outcomes. Symbolism is easy. Creating a symbol is a one-off act that doesn’t require diligence and persistence. Once it’s done it’s done, and you can move on to the next symbol of your virtue. Achieving outcomes is hard. There are no easy wins and achievement is measured not on the front page of a newspaper but over years and decades of hard work.

More recently the emotional weaponisation of the word “heart” in Uluru Statement from the Heart, the Voice and now the repeated use of the question “if not now, then when?” have all been crafted to appeal to our emotions. But we have every right to question, seek clarity or outright disagree with a vague proposal that’s being sold as a completely new approach to resolving disadvantage.

I began this essay by quoting Thomas Sowell. Something else he said goes like this – “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labelled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.” I believe one of our great strengths as a country is that, as Australians, we all play by the same rules and every Australian is entitled to equal dignity and respect, regardless of our background and upbringing, and regardless of how many generations our forebears have been here. Australia is a great country and our way of life is the envy of the world. I am proud to be Australian.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a Country Liberal Party senator for the NT. This essay for Essays for Australia draws on some of her recent comments and writing.

Demise of democracy?

 

DEATH OF DEMOCRACY IS
NOW A LIVE THREAT
JONATHAN SUMPTION
Democracy is going through a rough time. It is openly
challenged by autocratic states like China, Russia and Iran.
In the West’s oldest democracies, it is challenged from
within by growing numbers who have lost faith in it as a
form of government.
The Washington polling organisation Pew Research Centre
has been tracking attitudes to democracy across the world
for some 30 years. Britain has one of the highest levels of
dissatisfaction with democracy in the world, at 69 per cent.
Only Greece and Bulgaria are more disillusioned. A recent
survey of political engagement in the UK found that a narrow
majority wanted a strongman in power, someone who would
sort things out without having to worry too much about
parliament, judges, democratic debate or other impediments
to decisive action.
Britain is not unique. Authoritarian figures have come to
power with public support in many democracies: Donald
Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in
Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In France and Germany,
authoritarian parties are beating at the gates. Australia does
quite well in the Pew Research surveys, with only 41 per cent
dissatisfied, but it cannot expect to be immune from the
anti-democratic tide that is engulfing the West.
Democracy is a system of collective self-government. Its
survival depends on two things. One is an effective
institutional framework for discovering the values and
desires of a majority of citizens: parliaments, elections, free
media, and so on. The other is respect for the rule of law and
a culture of tolerance and pluralism, without which
democracy cannot survive. People have to be willing to
accept democratic decisions that they do not like.
It is because these qualities are not natural to human beings
that some form of autocracy has always been the default
condition of mankind. In the West, democracy has a short
history. It emerged in very special circumstances just two
centuries ago, in very different circumstances to those that
obtain today. Respect for personal autonomy was at its
height and the capacities of the state were limited.
Towards the end of his long life, John Adams, one of the
founders of American democracy, warned that “democracy
never lasts long. It soon wastes and exhausts itself. There
never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” In
using the word suicide he was making an important point.
Democracies fail from within. They are rarely overwhelmed
by powerful external forces such as invasion or insurrection.
They fail because people spontaneously lose interest in
democracy and turn to more authoritarian forms of
government.
Why has democratic sentiment weakened in so much of the
world? The answer is complex, and not necessarily the same
everywhere. But it is possible to point to three main enemies
of democracy: economic insecurity, fear, and intolerance.
Historically, democracies have always depended on
economic optimism. Except in two short periods, the US has
enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity – both
absolutely and relative to other countries – until quite
recently. Other countries’ fortunes have been more
chequered but the trajectory has generally been upwards.
Australia’s good fortune since World War II seems likely to
be the main reason for its relatively high level of support for
democracy. Today, the outlook is darker. We face problems
of faltering growth, relative economic decline and capricious
patterns of inequality. People measure their wellbeing
against their expectations. Half a century of post-war
expansion raised those expectations to stratospheric levels.
The shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment in the
life of any community. Disillusionment with the promise of
progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe
that began in 1914. That crisis was characterised by a general
resort to totalitarianism. In the 1930s, Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany were widely regarded as models for the future, just
as China sometimes is today.
When democracy cannot guarantee a continuously rising
level of wellbeing for its citizens, people begin to reject it.
This is particularly true of the young, who see their future
clouding over while their parents’ generation are still
enjoying the fruits of the good years. Authoritarian systems
rarely do better, but that tends to be discovered too late.
Then there is the empire of fear. Historically, people who are
sufficiently frightened of some external peril, such as
invasion, violent crime or epidemic disease, have generally
been willing to submit to an authoritarian regime that offers
to protect them. Today, this is a bigger problem than it has
been in the past because of the ever wider range of perils,
physical, economic and psychological, from which people
demand protection.
Of course, democracies can confer despotic powers on the
state in emergencies without losing their democratic
character. But there comes a point at which the systematic
application of coercion is no longer consistent with collective
self-government. If we hold governments responsible for
everything that goes wrong, they will take away our
autonomy so nothing can go wrong. If we call on the state to
use its awesome power to defend us from the ordinary perils
of human existence, we will end up doing it most of the time.
Finally, there is the mounting tide of intolerance. The
campaigns of suppression conducted by pressure groups
against unfashionable or “incorrect” opinions on
controversial issues such as race, gender reassignment,
same-sex relationships or climate change are a symptom of
the narrowing of our intellectual world.
Demonstrations, such as those organised by the followers of
Trump in Washington, Extinction Rebellion in Britain, or
climate-change activists on the streets of Sydney, are all
based on the idea that the campaigners’ point of view is the
only legitimate one. No democratic outcome can therefore be
tolerated which fails to give effect to it. On this view of the
world, it is perfectly acceptable to bully people and disrupt
their lives until they submit, instead of resorting to
persuasion or ordinary democratic procedures.
This is the mentality of terrorists, but without the violence.
Once we start telling ourselves that it is more important to
get our way, democratic decision-making is done for. The
result is the abandonment of political engagement and a
general resort to direct action; that is, force.
Those who engage in direct action always believe that the
end justifies the means, but they rarely confront the
implications.
Since we are never likely to agree on controversial issues,
what holds us together as societies is not consensus. It is
precisely the methods by which we resolve our differences. It
is a common respect for constitutional procedures, whether
or not we like the outcome.
The transition from democracy to authoritarian rule is
deceptively smooth. The outward forms are unchanged, but
the substance is gone. Democracy is not formally abolished.
Instead, it is quietly redefined. It ceases to be a method of
collective self-government but becomes something
different, a set of values like communism, nationalism, or
human rights.
The question whose values are to prevail can be resolved only
by the crude exercise of power by the dominant ideology.
Will democracy resist these pressures in the next century? A
generation ago it would have seemed strange even to ask the
question. Today, it is a real issue.
Lord Sumption was a justice of the Supreme Court of the
United Kingdom between 2012 and 2018, and delivered the
BBC Reith Lectures for 2019. He is in Australia as a guest of
the Robert Menzies Institute.

The Wests self loathing

 

DESPOT EXPLOITS WEST’S
NEW RELIGION TO HIDE HIS
FRAILTIES
JASON THOMAS
Ancient Greek historian Thucydides determined the strong
exact what they can and the weak concede what they must
while questions of justice between states only arise when
there is equal power to compel.
Power to compel relies on the critical theme of our
generation, security. Instead, we are witnessing the limits of
Western liberal democracy as political elites, globalist
organisations and corporates addicted to taxpayer subsidies
erode our security.
Security relies on strong defence, utilising all available
sources of energy, means of production and supply, secure
borders and a population culturally sure of itself. All within a
people’s control. Security ensures nations can survive on
their terms.
Right now, power is consolidated in the few who are eroding
security for the many. Food, fuel and financial security for
the average person are being smashed while Western culture
and history are trashed.
When it comes to Ukraine, not only should we be mad at
Vladimir Putin, we should be furious with Western leaders
for getting us into this mess.
First, Putin is exposing the West’s new climate-activist
religion as a security weakness. Despite the prospect of the
lights going out in energy-rich Europe this winter, and
power bills at record highs in Australia, we are told its
Putin’s fault. No, this is self-inflicted.
Second, so obsessed with saving the planet where even my
steak needs to be carbon neutral, they missed the obvious.
Like all bullies, Putin hides his own fears. His partial
mobilisation risks exposing what he has been trying to hide,
the frailty of the Russia he built.
We also forgot you can have all the military hardware but it’s
what you’re fighting for that matters. Instead everything
that has made the West great since Enlightenment is being
torn down. The US is struggling to recruit for its armed
forces and will be tens of thousands short by 2023. There is
no Pericles, Churchill, Thatcher or Reagan to use fear, self

interest and honour to inspire. Instead, these greatest of
human motives are being used to weaken and divide us. If
you think this has nothing to do with security, name a single
culturally weak nation that successfully defended itself
against the strong. Even the illiterate sandal-wearing
Taliban demonstrated what can be achieved when you
believe.
Ironically, Ukraine, an Eastern European nation, is teaching
Western Europeans, that borders, and national identity are
worth defending. Perhaps new Italian Prime Minister Giorgia
Meloni can become that bright light of Western democratic
realism, but like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban,
who stands up for national citizenship, language, family,
culture and sovereignty, she will not be tolerated.
Since Ukraine was first invaded in 2014, up until 2022, four
thousand Ukrainian soldiers and over 13,000 civilians died.
During that time, led by then German chancellor Angela
Merkel, the EU eroded its energy, military, border and
cultural security. As the Europeans made themselves
dependent on Putin’s fossil fuels, they berated Australia for
using ours. Western leaders reinforced Putin’s audacity with
weakness, not power. He was never given a reason to forgo
his ambitions.
For a generation, political elites and globalists have
disregarded the grubby truth that their ideals rely on the
security provided by realists. This infected our political class,
which thought the West could be secured through virtue.
That’s why the outpouring of support for the Queen by
hardworking, patriotic people really frightened the
establishment. In his memoirs Churchill laments the fatal
fallacies that beset the West during the interwar period;
when politicians delighted in smooth-sounding platitudes,
refusing to face unpleasant facts, the interests of the state
traded for popularity and electoral success. And, like many of
our political class today, a picture of fatuity and fickleness
that though devoid of guile, was not devoid of guilt, and
though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite
part in the unleashing upon the world the horrors and
miseries, beyond comparison in human experience.
The realist view accepts the evolving competition of nations,
the dangers of weak men like Putin, and recognises certain
ideologies refuse to be at peace. Yet, if your grandfather was
like mine, proud or their nation and culture, they knew what
they were fighting for – just like the people of Ukraine.
Jason Thomas is the director of Frontier Assessments

TheGreenGreatLeapForward

The West Mimics Mao, Takes a Green Leap Forward

By Helen Raleigh

The green movement’s rush to transform the energy economy while ignoring the laws of nature and economics calls to mind China’s ruinous Great Leap Forward. By 1957, Mao Zedong had grown impatient with his country’s slow industrial development relative to the West. He sought to transform China quickly from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse through forced industrialization and agricultural collectivization.

Steel production was a priority of the Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted China to surpass the U.K. in steel output within 15 years. Across the country, including in the village where my father lived, people tried to contribute to this goal by building small backyard furnaces. Each village had a production quota to meet, so everyone—including children and the elderly—pitched in. Using everything they could find to keep the furnaces burning, villagers melted down farming tools and cooking pots. These efforts yielded only pig iron, which had to be decarbonized to make steel. That was a process a backyard furnace couldn’t handle. The effort and resources were wasted.

The steel campaign diverted manpower from farming, even as the government ordered farmers to meet unrealistic quotas. Local party officials initially compelled farmers to experiment with ineffective and sometimes harmful techniques, such as deep plowing and sowing seeds much closer than usual. When these radical methods failed to increase yield and depleted the soil, local leaders had no choice but to lie to their political superiors about how much had been produced (a practice referred to as “ launching a Sputnik”). Based on these false production figures, the state demanded villages sell more grain than they could spare. In a vicious circle, the more the local officials lied about their output, the higher the central government set the quotas. Farmers were forced to hand over every bit of grain they had, including the following year’s seeds, to meet the quotas. Resistance was violently suppressed.

The combination of lies, failed experiments, absence of labor and violent requisition practices led to famine. From 1959 through 1961, an estimated 30 million to 40 million Chinese people died from hunger. The Chinese government continues to refer to the famine as a natural disaster, pretending forces beyond their control were to blame for this man-made calamity.

Like Mao, today’s advocates for the green-energy revolution have become impatient with the slow progress made by renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide 80% of the energy the world needs. Despite years of subsidies, renewable energy is still unstable and unreliable, since the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Almost all renewable-energy power plants require either nuclear or fossil fuels as backups.

Rather than gradually phasing out fossil fuels while investing in renewable energy research and development, Western green-energy revolutionaries have launched their own version of the Great Leap Forward in Europe and the U.S. Today’s greens operate in a democratic system unlike Mao, but they have resorted to government coercion to replace fossil fuels (and nuclear power) with renewables on an aggressive deadline. The European Union is set to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, and the Biden administration promises to “achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030.”

One of the essential lessons from China’s Great Leap Forward is that catastrophic failures inevitably follow from politicians’ insistence on ignoring reason, logic, truth and economics. Europe’s current energy crisis, California’s continuing power outages and Sri Lanka’s food shortages are all warning signs. The Green Leap Forward has set humanity on a fast track to another man-made catastrophe.

Ms. Raleigh is the author of “Confucius Never Said” and “Backlash: How China’s Aggression Has Back-fired.”


The green scramble to transform energy is reminiscent of China’s forced industrialization.

The Australian

NO ‘EMERGENCY’ SHOWN IN
CLIMATE RECORDS
GRAHAM LLOYD
An international study of major weather and extreme events
has found no evidence of a “climate emergency” in the
record to date.
The study by Italian scientists provides a long-term analysis
of heat, drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and
ecosystem productivity and finds no clear positive trend of
extreme events.
The authors do not say that no action should be taken on
climate change but argue the issue should be placed in a
bigger context.
“Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported
by data, means altering the framework of priorities with
negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to
face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and
human resources in an economically difficult context,” the
report, published in European Physical Journal Plus, said.
The paper – “A critical assessment of extreme events trends
in times of global warming” – found the most robust global
changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of
heatwaves, but it said global trends in heatwave intensity
were “not significant”.
Daily rainfall intensity and extreme precipitation frequency
were stationary.
Tropical cyclones show a “substantial temporal invariance”,
as do tornadoes.
The impact of warming on surface and wind speed remained
unclear.
The team, led by Gianluca Alimonti from the Italian National
Institute for Nuclear Physics and the University of Milan,
extended the analysis to include natural disasters, floods,
drought, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main
crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat).
“None of these response indicators show a clear positive
trend of extreme events,” the report said.
The authors said it was important to underline the difference
between statistical evidence of excess of events, with given
characteristic, and probabilistic calculation of anthropogenic
attribution of extreme events. The statistical evidence is
based on historical observations and tries to highlight
differences between these and recent observations or
possible trends as a function of time. “The anthropogenic
versus natural attribution of the origin of a phenomenon is
based on probabilistic models and makes reliance on
simulations that hardly reproduce the macro and
microphysical variables involved in it,” the researchers said.
“In conclusion, on the basis of observational data, the
climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are
experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
On floods, the report said: “Although evidence of an increase
in total annual precipitation is observed on a global level,
corresponding evidence for increases in flooding remains
elusive and a long list of studies shows little or no evidence
of increased flood magnitudes, with some studies finding
more evidence of decreases than increases.”
The paper said there was “no evidence that the areas
affected by the different types of drought are increasing”.
In conclusion, the findings do not mean we should do
nothing about climate change. “We should work to minimise
our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water
pollution,” the authors said.
“Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon
dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce
our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
“How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is
a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our
resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.”

Social Blight Of Porn

The Weekend Australian

Yes, porn is a social blight. But the demonisation of men has to stopANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

In 2019, the global pornography industry was conservatively estimated to be worth $US90bn. Its social impact has always been the subject of intense controversy. In terms of numbers, its primary opponents are the religious, who pollute the debate with shifting definitions of “morality” and a relentless emphasis on the violence at the heart of men. “Sex positive” – that is to say, pro-pornography – feminists perceive their feminist opponents as enemies of feminine autonomy. As Canadian sex-positive feminist Wendy McElroy wrote, “To get upset by an image that focuses on the human body is merely to demonstrate a bad attitude toward what is physical”.

Two Australian feminist activists at the frontline of the anti-porn movement have, for years, maintained the rage. Last month, Melinda Tankard Reist, who co-founded the powerful, highly political grassroots campaigning movement Collective Shout, is releasing the anthology He Chose Porn Over Me: Women Harmed by Men Who Use Porn. Reist has never diverged from her central argument: that the potential for brutality in men is developed to chilling effect by pornography.

“No, you don’t just need to try harder,” she tells her readers. “It’s not you. It’s him. Porn is abuse. It’s not your job to fix him. He needs to do the work himself, and recognise he has become a patron of a global industry built on the bodies of women and girls. He needs to see the depth of suffering he caused his partner, acknowledge the erosion of his humanity and the atrophy of his empathy, and run for help.”

Caitlin Roper, her campaign manager at Collective Shout, is equally committed to the cause. Her first book, Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating: The Case for Resistance, which deals with the “inherent misogyny” in sex dolls and the “threat” they pose to women and girls, will be released later this month.

“Through my research,” Roper writes, “I have been forced to confront some of the worst humanity has to offer. As I have read the words of doll owners, manufacturers, advocates, pedophiles and men’s rights activists – all defending men’s access to sex dolls in the form of women and girls – I have come to understand how so many men truly perceive women. I wrote this book to expose the inherent misogyny in the trade of female-bodied sex dolls and those who profit from it.”

Neither book brings anything new to the table, but they do have value to women whose lives have been marred by sexually dysfunctional partners. Reist’s in particular showcases the terrifying realities of the ways in which emotionally distorted men can respond to pornography.
The studies have always been depressing. Pornography consumption by women has long been shown to result in their increasingly submissive sexual behaviours. Heterosexual viewers generally accept pornography’s script of male dominance and have been shown to behave accordingly. Dr Jill Manning told the US Senate that excessive pornography use was cited in 56 per cent of divorces, and the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers concurred, stating that yes, pornography was inarguably poisoning the groundwater of intimacy.

The real problem with both the anti-porn and sex-positive ideologies is that they are based on fallacies – not in terms of the harms done by pornography, which are very real and disturbingly prevalent, but in their understanding of pornography and sexual deviation.

As I point out in my new book Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, blindness to the relationship between birth, infancy and sexual practices is universal. Feminists are particularly reluctant to address this issue because of what they fear to be the potential ramifications – namely, the understanding that any acknowledgment of the relationship will result in the erosion of maternal autonomy.

Australia, in this respect, is peculiarly backward. In 2008, when best-selling children’s author Mem Fox expressed her misgivings about little children in daycare, the backlash was swift. Calls were made to ban her books, and she was widely vilified for a perspective that is, in fact, supported by innumerable studies. This dogged insistence on maternal choice over sometimes disastrous lifelong consequences for children has never been adequately debated in this country, and any potential threat to the maternal status quo is either dismissed or ignored.

When, in 2013, I wrote Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution, a book about attachment-based parenting that later made number one on Amazon in Britain, it was rejected by every local major and university publisher I approached. When best-selling childcare author and paediatric psychologist John Irvine praised Mama on the ABC, describing it as the maternal equivalent of The Female Eunuch, the childless female presenter was visibly shocked. I watched as she laboured to persuade Irvine to criticise what she clearly believed to be a retrogressive ideology, but he only emphasised his endorsement.

The issue of maternal guilt continues to be cited to me as a justification for avoiding the debate. But are mothers really so fragile that they cannot tolerate any open discussion of their role or failings in relation to their children’s health, happiness and future sexual habits?

Using high-profile examples, I explain the relationship between birth, infancy and sex at length in Apple, presenting the first rational, non-religious explanation for sex dolls, latex fetishism, and pornography.
For example, I address the pornographic vogue for female genital depilation. A source of confusion to researchers, it has been variously attributed to a cultural emphasis on “heightened sexuality”, the facilitation of genital visibility on screen, pedophilic urges, and to the retaliatory patriarchal infantilisation of women. From an evolutionary perspective, the culturally sanctioned erasure of female pubic hair appears counterintuitive, as pubic hair traps important, sexually arousing olfactory messages and reduces “mechanical friction during sexual intercourse” in addition to protecting the vagina “from parasites or other pathogens”.

This is not, however, why female pubic hair disappeared from mainstream pornography.

Female pubic hair began to be depilated in the 1940s, around the time that babies born to women whose pubic hair was shaved in preparation for birth began coming of age. As one study reported, “By the 1920s, obstetrics had refigured the perineum as pathological, and the practice of pubic shaving (in preparation for birth) became widespread.” Obstetric shaving and swabbing of the vulva remained standard practice in the First World until the 1980s, ostensibly because in the event of perineal tearing, it reduces infection. (It has, in fact, been shown that the very opposite is true: the tiny abrasions and lacerations created by shaving act as “vectors” for infection.)

The reason billions of men are now aroused by depilated vulvas, then, is not because they are pedophiles, but because they unconsciously seek to replicate the circumstances of their births.

Similarly, when a mother, because of abusive birth practices, unrelated suffering, or other reasons, is unavailable to her infant in her entirety, he can only love the inorganic fragments – among them, the latex or rubber associated with her in hospital – that return him to the matrix of his consciousness. For this reason, these fragments must, to those with the right set of variables, be presented in a humanoid form: a rubber mother, say, like those in Roper’s book.

While pygmalionism – sexual responsiveness towards an inanimate object, particularly of one’s own making – is an ancient concept, the industrial capacity for mass-produced rubber simulations of femininity did not exist until the 19th century, and even then, prudery scuppered their manufacture. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when Westwood made fetishism hip, that the first crude latex, silicone, and inflatable vinyl sex dolls hit the market.

Men who develop feelings for these “synthetic humans” are known as “iDollators”. Some live with their sex dolls as partners, styling and dressing them, taking them out in wheelchairs and in company, and generally relating to them emotionally as a newborn would to an unconscious or uninterested mother at birth. On removing his doll from her crate, one recalled, “I just held her in my arms for a while. It felt so right and natural … It seemed perfectly normal for me to treat something that resembles an organic woman the same way I’d treat an actual organic woman.” This man concluded that relating to “an organic woman doesn’t seem worth it to me”.

Reciprocity, by those who, as newborns and during early infancy, had emotionally or physically restricted access to their mothers, is experienced in adulthood as destabilising, exhausting, and unmanageably intense. Betrayals and conflicts cannot be metabolised by such people as the necessary foundation – namely, a solid sense of self – was never established. Love, to them, is one-sided, which is why they prefer masturbation, pornography, prostitution, sex dolls, stalking, unrequited love.

Texturally, sex dolls – adult attachment objects – would have a powerful emotional resonance with those who, during infancy, were, for long periods, exposed to silicone in particular in the form of bottle teats, feeding tubes, pacifiers, and so on.

This exposure would, of course, have to exist in tandem with other factors: the absence of tender, territorial maternal investment, say, or severe and sustained abuse or neglect, such as that resulting from mental illness or substance abuse.

Yes, pornograph is a social blight. Yes, governments need to intervene. Yes, pornography is a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse, detachment and dysfunction. But the demonisation of men has to stop. Our cultural deafness to the language of male violence has to stop. We need to move away from the toxic understanding of men as intrinsically promiscuous or cruel.

As a culture, we need to address the issue of an infant’s needs at birth and during early childhood. Yes, this does mean de-emphasising our insistence on maternal choice. Yes, this does mean that new behavioural markers for the sexes have to be put in place. Yes, this does mean that parents need to be supported – by family, community, and government policy – in caring intensively for their infants and little children.

The magnitude of our pornography industry is a reflection not of masculine savagery, but of increases in the prevalence of toxic birth practices. Given this, both sex-positive and anti-pornography feminists need to revise their understanding.

Pornography and sex dolls are markers of severe attachment disruptions, not by-products of satanic forces or tools for empowerment. Critically, all feminists need to begin recognising maternal choices as instrumental in the creation of sexual dysfunction. Together, we need to work towards a solution.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, can now be pre-ordered.

Experts and opinions

‘Experts’ have been so wrong on just
about everything
ADAM CREIGHTON
It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so
comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time.
Think Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation.
Intelligence experts looked foolish when it turned out Iraq didn’t
have weapons of mass destruction after all.
The Queen took a dim view of economists, who failed en masse to
foresee problems in the world’s banking system that precipitated
the global financial crisis in 2008.
Economists have a long history of being wrong, at least since more
than 300 of them publicly warned Margaret Thatcher in 1981 that
the British prime minister’s belt-tightening policies would cause a
recession, only to be proved spectacularly wrong a few months
later.
But the decade beginning in 2020 appears to have taken
institutional wrongness to a higher plane. Economists, even after
the embarrassment of calling inflation “transitory” for most of
last year, are still at it; they wrote a public letter in September last
year playing down concerns about inflation and encouraging Joe
Biden to press ahead with his $US3.5 trillion Build Back Better
package. But with inflation at almost 9 per cent in the US,
supporters of the package have gone strangely quiet in recent
months.
Foreign policy experts, though, have given economists a run for
their money since Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the US and
Europe to wallop Russia with unprecedented sanctions designed to
compel Vladimir Putin to stop his illegal invasion.
They fired a bazooka at their own feet, doing nothing to avert the
war while crushing the competitiveness of European industry and
slashing the living standards of ordinary Americans and
Europeans.
Goodbye German car industry, on current trends.
It’s worse, though. In late March Biden, under the advice of experts
no doubt, said Russia’s currency would be turned to “rubble” by
sanctions. This week the rouble reached a seven-year high against
the US dollar, becoming the best performing currency in the world
this year.
Interest rates on Russian 10- year government bonds, at about 9
per cent, are one percentage point lower than they were before the
war. The Russian central bank is cutting interest rates as the Fed
lifts them.
Soaring energy prices, as a result mainly of Western sanctions,
have supercharged Russian oil and gas revenues, quadrupling the
Russian government’s budget surplus in May compared with the
same month a year ago, as Putin gloated in St Petersburg last week.
Security and intelligence experts haven’t done much better,
routinely foreshadowing the collapse of Russian forces, or even the
imminent death of Putin from a variety of diseases, all while those
forces appear to have slowly occupied a fifth of Ukraine, including
the crucial land corridor between Crimea and Russia.
Perhaps these are the same US intelligence experts who in October
2020 publicly said they were convinced the files on Hunter Biden’s
laptops, which have since raised serious questions about the
business dealings of the US President’s family, had “all the classic
earmarks of a Russian infor- mation operation”. Perhaps, but it
was also entirely real, as similarly benighted media experts have
now conceded.
Then there’s the climate change and energy experts who have been
telling us for years a rising share of solar and wind power in
national grids would cause prices to decline, when the two nations
furthest down that path – Germany and Denmark – have the most
expensive power in Europe.
Batteries would continue to get cheaper, the experts told us,
seemingly oblivious of the impact an immense increase in
mandated demand for electric cars and giant lithium batteries
would have on the price of the critical minerals they require. Not
very smart.
But no group of experts can compete with epidemiologists and
other so-called public health experts for being so militantly and
repeatedly wrong about every aspect of their supposed speciality,
which will go down as one of the great fiascos of history.
Three weeks to flatten the curve turned into almost 850 days of
chaotic, arbitrary restrictions that appeared to do very little in the
end to stop the spread of Covid-19, let alone pass any sort of
rational cost-benefit assessment.
Cloth masks worked, then they didn’t; vaccines protected against
infection, then they didn’t. Two doses were enough, then three,
then four. The virus emerged zoonotically for certain, then it
didn’t.
“Experts say”, “experts warn” has become something of a joke.
It’s not surprising that less than a fifth of American parents, for
instance, intend to vaccinate their toddlers against Covid-19,
according to a recent Kaiser Foundation survey, even though
experts are recommending it urgently.
This false narrative of a consensus among experts risks damaging
public respect for all of them. That’s a pity because genuine
expertise is valuable.
The handful of people presented by the media as experts are a
sliver of the total, among whom there is rarely a true consensus on
anything. Social media has supercharged the incentives to
moralise and fall victim to groupthink. On top of that, expert ranks
have swollen as society has become richer, enabling more people
to think for a living.
That means the average quality of advice has declined, providing
the media with a greater number of potentially crowdpleasing,
dubious opinions to promote.
Experts get it wrong often because they bear few personal
consequences of their advice. The accuracy of past predictions or
assessments is rarely checked. For experts, it’s much more
important to be on the right side of the debate than to be right.
Most of all, experts’ incomes typically are guaranteed whatever
they say; others bear the consequences.
The past few years have been a crisis for the reputation of experts,
but not for experts themselves.