One of the first things new Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, needs to emphasise to his demoralised party is that they will not return to government without showing they take religion seriously.
Albo’s own seat of Grayndler — which Labor holds with a margin of nearly 16 per cent — is one of a number of Labor-held Western Sydney seats where the electorate includes many voters who are about God.
It matters to Australia’s Muslim, Christian, and Hindu voters — and all the others who have a religious affiliation — that they are free to practise their faith; and, if they wish, to talk about it openly.
No wonder Labor frontbenchers have warned Albanese that Labor needs to work constructively with the Morrison government to address concerns about religious freedom by passing new laws.
It sounds like simple and sensible advice. But the problem for the new Labor leader is that a decision to cooperate with the government on matters of religion is likely to further divide his party.
For a deep and possibly irreparable fissure has opened up — and runs right through the heart of the ALP.
On one side stand Labor’s traditional blue-collar and middle-class voters respectful of belief in God. But on the other side stand the battalions of Labor’s inner-city intellectuals who sneer at religion, dismiss faith as primitive superstition, and wield the cudgels of identity politics.
It is not the deity that commands the unswerving devotion of the elites, but diversity. And they impose on the rest of us what political scientist, Kenneth Minogue, once described as “a dictatorship of virtue”.
The ALP is going to have to get to grips with God if it hopes to occupy the government benches in the House of Reps again. But in order to do that, Albanese is going to have to work a miracle of his own.
Peter Kurti is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Tyranny of Tolerance.
Bernard Gaynor points out how laziness by conservative voters let the loonies in to the NSW Upper House
Let the New South Wales election be a lesson for us all: if we don’t use our brains then those without any brains at all will rule over us.
At this point let me introduce you to the Animal Justice Party.
The Animal Justice Party has a policy on wombats. But it has no policy on tax, except that meat should be taxed.
It wants health warnings on bacon.
It believes that it should be illegal to keep birds in an aviary.
All of its candidates are vegan.
And if it gets its way, animal farming will eventually be banned. It will be unlawful to milk cows. It will be a criminal offence to slaughter a beast for steak. And Melbourne Cup Day? Gone.
The Animal Justice Party has even issued media releases criticising the Greens for being too mainstream.
This mob are so insane that their policies for ‘humans’ come after their policies for animals. Indeed, the policies that relate to actual people are just an add on. And they were only tacked on to make it clear that the Animal Justice Party are extreme left wing socialists too.
True, these policies are still not real clear but as far as I can glean it’s ok to euthanise people but it’s not ok to put a greyhound down.
And when the Animal Justice Party’s Victorian convenor tweeted about the ‘slaughter of the innocents’ he wasn’t referring to abortion but to dairy cows.
Basically, it seems that the Animal Justice Party believes that animals are sentient beings that should be entitled to the same legal protections as people. That all sounds fine and dandy until the minor details are worked through.
I’m sure it hasn’t yet dawned on these radical activists but ‘granting’ animals the same legal rights as people will inevitably result in court cases to decide whether laws prohibiting bestiality comply with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Given the absurdity involved with this party, no one can be too sure just where that might lead. But we do know this: these are the kinds of issues that would become the central question of the day if the Animal Justice Party was ever running the joint.
This might all sound far-fetched but it’s not as far-fetched as you might have hoped. The Animal Justice Party just won its second seat in New South Wales’ Legislative Council – that’s as many as One Nation and just one less than the Greens.
And it has tasted electoral success elsewhere as well. So this type of crazy is not as distant from our laws as it should be.
Which brings me back to the first sentence in this article. The Animal Justice Party only won this second seat because normal voters in New South Wales could not be bothered preferencing.
They didn’t use their brains and now we are all going to suffer as a result.
Let me explain.
The Animal Justice Party scraped into the New South Wales Legislative Council by a grand total of 8,651 votes.
That’s 0.19% of the total number of votes cast in the election which is another way of saying that it would have been almost impossible for the Animal Justice Party to win by anything less.
But there are all sorts of ways that the party that just missed out – the Christian Democrats – could have got over the line.
For instance, 16,036 Australian Conservatives voters did not preference any other party. Their votes ‘exhausted’ which means they were removed from the count. If just half of these guys had taken the time to preference the Christian Democrats, which are about as close to Australian Conservatives as you can be without filling out a membership form, the Animal Justice Party would not have been elected and instead there would be another conservative voice in the Legislative Council.
But now we have someone sitting in there who is famous for being a vegan body builder.
In another example, 34,457 people voted for the Shooters, Farmers & Fishers Party without preferencing anyone else. By doing so, these voters effectively endorsed whoever was left in the count at its end.
So that means Shooters, Fishers and Farmers voters helped to elect a politician who wants to shut farms down altogether.
Not very bright, is it?
And don’t just take my word regarding this shambles. The ABC’s electoral analyst, Antony Green, recognises what has happened as well – left-leaning voters were more disciplined and preferenced like-minded parties, while right-leaning voters had their brains in neutral:
It means that if you want your vote to count, you must preference.
If you want your vote to count fully, then you must preference everyone.
Another way of looking at it is like this: if you really don’t want the Greens in parliament then the best way of doing your bit to ensure that occurs is to number every box above the line on the Senate vote, placing the Greens last.
If you don’t do this then your vote could well end up helping the Greens to beat another party that you also dislike (but not as much) or, even worse, help them to get past a party that you could live with. More than likely, this will be the Liberal/National Coalition who could miss out in every state if conservative voters keep being dumb.
The Liberal/National Coalition might make you sick. It might make you angry. It might bring you to despair. But whatever this mob is, it is not Bill Shorten or Labor and it is certainly not the Greens.
That’s important to remember.
There are plenty of good candidates for the Senate across Australia amongst the minor conservative parties.
By all means, vote for them to be your insurance in the Senate.
But your insurance policy for your insurance policy is to number every box above the line.
Make sure the Greens are below Labor. Make sure Labor is below the Liberals. Make sure the Liberals at least get a preference. And ensure that you preference all the minor parties on the right.
If you don’t, you’ll do nothing more than join the 40,000 odd people from New South Wales who were too lazy, uninformed or distracted to write just one more lousy number on their ballot paper.
And, as a result, they now have to live in a state where laws are shaped by the Greens on steroids.
Last night Gladys Berjikilian became the first woman to win a State election in NSW. You wold think the feminists would be all over this as NSW is Australia’s most populous state.
What a role model to young women and girls everywhere. She was born in Manly but when she started school she could not speak a word of English. Girls can achieve anything.
But the feminists are silent. Gladys is playing for the wrong team- Liberal not Labor, conservative not “progressive.” The feminists, consistent as always in their support for all women, say nothing. Jane Caro described the result as “Depressing and boring.”
Commentators last night described her as humble. After her speech at the main Liberal venue last night she went over the Bridge to personally thank her electorate volunteers. She also stopped to kiss babies after the election- nobody does that!
In Barwon, our long history of support for the Nationals (formerly the Country Party) dropped remarkably allowing Ray Butler from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Part to pick up the seat. I think that’s a good thing even though I didn’t vote for him- marginal seats always get more attention from Governments than the rusted on safe ones.
The biggest issue locally has to be water management. I think State and Federal Governments have dropped the ball on the Murray-Darling catchment plan. It’s probably a big part of their wins in NSW.
The Nationals have to decide whether they are a conservative party that represents people in western NSW or a trendy party competing with Labor and the Greens in the North Coast where retirees and sea changers have changed the demographic.
Paul Green has not yet won his seat in the Upper House for the Christian Democrats. I think as the week wears on and the preferences are doled out, he should get in. The Christian Democrat vote was halved this election by the presence of other conservative parties, notably One Nation under Mark Latham.
Most pundits believed that there would be a change of Government, or that the Liberals would be forced into a minority government. They thought that people would be swayed by the divisions in the Federal Liberal Party over the removal of Malcolm Turnbull last year. I think it’s safe to say that nobody is that bothered any more, if they ever were. The commentators need to get out and listen to people beyond the inner Sydney suburbs.
I am thankful that the ALP has been rejected again. It is still too left-wing for most people. Their continued agitation for free legal abortions, their obsession with football stadiums and their high spending policies were too much for many people.
We must continue to pray for the imminent Federal election. Bill Shorten will be disastrous for the nation. He has already flagged forcing all hospital to provide free abortions, he supports Safe Schools and will drag us down the expensive path of ever more “renewable” energy.
Next Saturday there is a state election in NSW. State elections tend not to gain a lot of attention in Australia but this one is a turning point in the history of the nation.
In a few months there will be a Federal election which will pit a christian PM against an extreme left wing opposition leader. The choice in NSW will set the path for the general election later.
Here are the issues that the media are burying but are critical to our future.
Labor are set to legalise abortion if elected. NSW is one of just two states where abortion remains illegal, at least in theory. There is no doubt that this will change if Michael Daly becomes premier.
SRE or Scripture in Schools will be in the sights of a Labor Government. There is no doubt of that at all. For years the Teachers Unions have dominated ALP education policy. they will move quickly to keep christians out of schools.
The deceptive Safe Schools program will again be indoctrinating our kids against christian family values.
These three things by themselves will lead the Government in a path that takes the state further from Christian values.
Mario Murillo, in a recent blog, points out that in California, the people claiming to be christians voted for a state government that is as far left as anything we can imagine here. Political ideology outweighs faith commitments,
We need to pray about who we vote for, but we also must pray for the whole state, that righteous men and women will rise to power- in both the state and Federal elections.
It is clear that our society has largely turned its back on Christ and Christian values over the last 50 years.
Every night when I watch the TV news I think on at least one, often more occasion, “What are they thinking?”
The latest Christian Values check list produced for the imminent NSW Election is a shocker. Where do our politicians stand on critical issues like abortion and euthanasia? Take a look.
Only a few years ago that chart which is now dominated by red squares was split evenly between green and red. The shocker is the Nationals who have, at best, become very equivocal about their positions, possibly to try and maintain their seats on the North Coast from the Greens.
There are only two parties that come close to supporting a Christian worldview, and they are fringe parties- the Christian Democrats and the Australian Conservatives. I note that the Shooters, Farmers and Fishers are not included, so their position is not known.
This is an horrendous state of affairs. This election is critical for NSW, as will be the following Federal election.
If Labor win in NSW they will move to amend the Education Act so that SRE or Scripture in Schools will no longer be allowed. If the Liberals win, no doubt the current policy of strangulation by red tape will continue.
Labor have very quietly indicated that they will legalise abortion. At the moment it is a crime to seek or provide an abortion in NSW, but court decisions over the years have allowed for doctors to perform abortions where they consider the mother’s health to be at risk and normally not much beyond about 22 weeks.
The reason that they have been very quiet about this is that certain Muslim and other ethnic groups who vote for the ALP are very conservative in sexual matters, and would revolt against such a policy.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian stated the other day that she is “pro-choice” so if a bill came up to a vote she would vote in favour.
Even worse, Federal Labor have stated that they will make funding for hospitals contingent on them providing free abortions.
I have said in church that politicians will not save us. The other side of the coin is that in a democracy, christians have a responsibility to pray and then vote according to their conscience and the leading of the Holy Spirit.
Barwon, where I live, is a very safe Nationals seat. I would recommend voting for a minor party, such as Liberal Democrats or Shooters, Fishers, Farmers with a second preference for the Nationals.
In the Legislative Council vote for Christian Democrats or Australian Conservatives first with your choices further down the list. The Christian Democrats have 2 members at the moment (Fred Nile and Paul Green). They have been instrumental in holding back a flood of harmful legislation over the years.
Note that if you vote above the line you can only vote for 1 group or party, but voting below the line gives you the options of voting how you think they should be selected.
This is a tough time for christian voters. We need to use discernment and vote for christian values.
People, especially women, never fabricate stories of rape for their own purposes.
From the Washingtom Times:
Another Kavanaugh accuser admits to fabricating rape story
One of Justice Kavanaugh’s accusers admits to lying
One of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers admitted this week that she made up her lurid tale of a backseat car rape, saying it “was a tactic” to try to derail the judge’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committeerevealed the fraud in a letter to the FBI and Justice Department Friday, asking them to prosecute Judy Munro-Leighton for lying to and obstructing Congress.
Mr. Grassley said Ms. Munro-Leighton is a left-wing activist who hijacked another “Jane Doe” anonymous report about a backseat rape and claimed it as her own story, calling it a “vicious assault.”
“I am Jane Doe from Oceanside CA — Kavanaugh raped me,” Ms. Munro-Leighton wrote in an Oct. 3 email claiming to have been a victim of the judge.
Mr. Grassley’s investigators tried to reach her for a month but were unsuccessful until this week, when they spoke to her by phone and she confessed that she was not the original Jane Doe, and “did that as a way to grab attention.”
She admitted to the false allegation, and said she has actually never met Justice Kavanaugh.
“I was angry, and I sent it out,” she told investigators.
“In short, during the committee’s time-sensitive investigation of allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, Ms. Munro-Leighton submitted a fabricated allegation, which diverted committee resources,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “When questioned by Committee investigators she admitted it was false, a ‘ploy,’ and a ‘tactic.’ She was opposed to Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation.”
President Trump seized on the report Saturday, calling her “a vicious accuser.”
“What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?” he demanded via Twitter.
Mr. Grassley has previously asked the FBI to probe Julie Swetnick and her lawyer, anti-Trump crusader Michael Avenatti, for lying to Congress and obstructing. Ms. Swetnick had originally claimed to have been the victim of gang rapes involving Justice Kavanaughduring high school parties, saying she saw him and a friend spike punch to leave girls unable to resist. She later changed her story to say she saw Justice Kavanaugh and his friend near a punch bowl, and could not identify them as having actually been part of any rape.
None of the witnesses she told NBC could corroborate her story were able to do so.
Indeed, NBC found one woman who despite a sworn statement backing up Ms. Swetnick, told the network Mr. Avenatti was twisting her words.
Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation process was delayed while the committee investigated a number of sexual assault and harassment claims, none of which have been corroborated by any public evidence to date.
He vehemently denied all of the claims.
He was confirmed, though only one Democrat joined with all but one Republican in backing him.
Stephen McAlpine talks about the casualties of the Sexual Revolution and the people who defend child abuse when it’s committed by their leftist heroes. Not so much tolerance for other perpetrators who have not been pre-approved such as Rolf Harris or alleged perpetrator George Pell. Just another but of lefty double standard I suppose.
As McAlpine suggests there is a huge tsunami of damage wrought by the Sexual Revolution and it is only going to get worse through the generations.
It’s been my contention that the bodies of the Sexual Revolution tsunami will eventually start to wash up on the shore.
It’s also been my contention that the church has to be prepared for that time; to put behind it its sin of falling under the spell of that cultural narrative, admitting it has been complicit in it, and first living, then telling a better story.
The liberal arm of the church decided the future lay in accepting the Sexual Revolution – only at half speed.
Many within the evangelical arm of the church decried the sexual revolution, only to practice it “in-camera”, but is now being exposed by camera for its hypocrisy.
It’s always a good time to repent. But no time like the present, for the bodies are starting to wash up on the shore.
Thick and fast.
This came home to me reading the harrowing account of two of the children of one of the revolution’s sexual heroes, the Australian playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett in the Weekend Australian newspaper.
In my university days Hewett was lauded as pinnacle of the new age, the sexually free age in which the old repressed ways were being laundered out of our culture, and the utopian dreams of the sexual sixties and early seventies were being realised.
Only those dreams are now becoming a nightmare. Hewett’s daughters, Rozanna and Kate, have revealed that the sexual liberty of their household was a sexual dungeon in which adult men repeatedly forced both girls into sex, often at their mother’s tacit approval, and more tragically, as a way to further her own interests and image as a new age libertine.
What’s more galling is how many of those men were the heroes of the progressive narrative in Australia over the past forty years, including the late writer and film director Bob Ellis, whose every utterance and written word was viewed as gospel by the sexular Left, and who was also a speech writer for ALP luminaries.
The searing concern, however, is that the girls thought these sexual encounters were the new normal, the way things were to be. At least they did back then when it was happening, as Kate says in the article, there was no coercion:
“…just an understanding that he wanted to have sex with me and I just did…whenever he turned up, he’d have sex with me. I didn’t at the time think that some big terrible thing…I was reasonably neutral about it. I didn’t hate him.”
Rozanna recalls it like this as she and her sister slept with men twice their age:
“We felt we were special people doing special things.”
Special things like realising Mummy’s dream of a sexual utopia.
Well that’s alright then. Except of course it wasn’t. And for both of the girls, the dream has turned into a nightmare. Both women, now in later middle age, have been living the life if anti-depressants, therapy for decades, and a fear of the backlash of telling the stories which indict the literati and pop cultural icons of our fair land.
When Ellis died everyone lined up to laud him, from former Prime Ministers to journalists, artists and other bastions of our arts scene. But with the bodies washing up on the shore, those days of hagiography are over.
The interesting thing is, however, those who decry the sexual revolution can carry on all they like about the body count, it’s only when the revolution’s former advocates and children line up to put the boot in that anyone sits up and takes notice.
Hence we get this in The Guardian:
Delaney states:
finding out your literary hero is not only a grub, but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work.
Yes I imagine it must.
But not for all:
I’ve spoken this week to half a dozen people who knew Ellis (although not during the era Hewett’s parties took place – their friendship with him was more recent) and one or two are of the opinion “judge the times, not the person”. The rest of us are taking our weighty copies of Goodbye Jerusalem off the shelf and hurling them across the room.
In other words, the secular church is at as much pains to protect its sainted ones as the actual church has disgracefully, been. Of course this all happened forty years ago. So let’s judge the times, and not the person, as per the request.
There is an interesting article over at The Unshackled this afternoon about the results of Australia’s gun control laws.
It is often claimed that there have been no mass shootings in Australia since John Howard brought in tougher regulations in 1996 following the Port Arthur massacre. Except that isn’t true, unless you change the definition of “mass shooting” to fit the story you want to tell.
Here is the graph I found interesting:
From the graph, which covers all gun deaths per 100,000 population, Australia’s gun death rate was already in decline a decade before the laws passed and, apart from a drop after 1996, the gun laws have probably made no long term difference.
In the U.S. there was a drop from 15 deaths per 100,000 in 1992 to 10 in 1999 where it has stayed at since.
The biggest cause of gun deaths in the United States is actually black on black gang related deaths in inner city areas. No amount of gun control legislation will fix that problem, which is an ugly mix of long term poverty, poor education and poor public housing policies.
So the great posturing over Barnaby Joyce’s great sin has been going on for a week. As far as I can tell his greatest moral failing seems to be being Barnaby Joyce.
Also he is not gay or gender diverse. What would the reaction be if his lover was actually a man or a non-binary person of no gender distinctiveness? He would be applauded for his “courage” and progressiveness. “Love is love” they would say. We know that because it has happened dozens of times in the past- although obviously not to Barnaby. Nobody offers fake sympathy to the abandoned wife and children because the person is being true to themselves etc.
I’m not sure what the Opposition is getting upset about because every day it’s something different.
Is the problem that it was a staff member? Or that he found her a different position in somebody else’s office after the affair started? Or that he declared that he was receiving an apartment in Armidale rent free? Or that he opposed gay “marriage” and now it’s payback time?
My position is that everyone who leaves his or her spouse for a more appealing (usually younger) model is a creep. Everyone who breaks their marriage vows and has a sexual relationship with anyone other than their spouse is a creep.
If being a creep disqualified a person from high office we would have nobody in Parliament.
One of the first things new Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, needs to emphasise to his demoralised party is that they will not return to government without showing they take religion seriously.
New Life Narrabri 