by DAVID FLINT – THERE is a growing realisation in the West that the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis is not the only hostile power.
There is what could well be an even greater danger, one from within.
- This was an opportunity to defend Australia’s national security.
- What are we gaining instead?
- A few crumbs from a dictator’s table and another photo-op for Albanese.
This was identified in the 2015 book I co-wrote, Give Us Back Our Country, as the AAA, an Anti-Australian Axis of home-grown elites.
With the rise of these, it seems that some in authority are prepared to subordinate our interests to hostile foreign powers in a way which would have been not only unimaginable to our forefathers, it would have led to their downfall.
PIG IRON
Just over a dispute concerning one shipment of pig iron to Japan in 1938, RG Menzies earned the communist waterside workers union’s epithet, “Pig Iron Bob”.
Imagine the reaction if any Australian government in the 1930s or before 1914 had dared permit the Port of Darwin to be leased for 99 years to a company under the control and direction of Germany or Japan.
In a recent interview on ADH TV, one of the nation’s experts on defence and national security, Peter Jennings, lamented how Anthony Albanese had forfeited what he had indicated in opposition.
This was the opportunity of defending Australia’s national security by resuming Australian ownership and sovereignty over our Port of Darwin.
But on the Friday afternoon following the failure of the Voice referendum, no doubt in the hope nobody would notice, a low-level departmental press release announced a Chinese-owned and controlled company, the Landbridge Group, would be allowed to continue its unbelievable 99-year lease.
When President Obama remonstrated with Malcolm Turnbull over the granting of the lease in 2015, Turnbull is reported as saying the President should subscribe to the Northern Territory News.
Notwithstanding that it has an Australian board, claims to be autonomous and according to the ABC, at one stage employed the former minister who negotiated the free trade treaty, Andrew Robb, as economic consultant on an annual $880,000, there can be little doubt that Landbridge is under Beijing’s control.
The communists made this very clear in their 2017 National Intelligence Law. (Andrew Robb, incidentally, headed a republican big business and politicians’ campaign group for the 1999 referendum, “Conservatives for an Australian head of state”, notwithstanding that we already had one.)
In addition to letting Beijing control our crucial northern port, the Albanese government disappointed a number of foreign allies by cancelling legitimate action within the World Trade Organisation against Beijing for its flagrant breaches of international law which are separate from the breaches of our free trade agreement.
What are we gaining? A few crumbs from the dictator’s table, and another photo-op to add to Albanese’s bulging album?
Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that Australia is less prepared for war than at any time in our history.
As to the danger from within, one of the nation’s leading political strategists, Rick Brown, paraphrasing Keynes, makes a fundamental, yet under-appreciated point.
VESTED INTERESTS
This is that when compared with the encroachment of ideas, the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated. This is the subject of a recently published essay discussed on ADH TV.
Brown has a proven record. He presented a prescient and detailed case against the Beijing free trade agreement, which events have shown should have been followed by the politicians.
And as ACM’s leading strategist in the 1999 referendum, he devised the killer slogan, “Vote No to the politicians’ republic” as well as a strategy ensuring Victoria crossed the line and voted No.
In what may surprise many, Brown also argues political Parties have only a minor role to play in the cultural wars.
He says the Parties are only articulators, rather than the creators and incubators of ideas.
Yet despite their lesser relevance, politicians were in abundance at the recent London ARC conference.
This, says Spectator Australia’s Rebecca Weisser, may well explain why so little was said about the pandemic.
Yet this was used as justification by many politicians for the most serious breakdown ever in our constitutional system, one still not the subject of anything but a fake examination.
That said, there are unusual practising politicians who are not afraid of combatting ideas which are being pushed by the elites.
DISMISSED
Trump is the most prominent. He, almost alone, not only openly dismissed the fashionable but discredited theory of man-made global warming, he gave notice the US was withdrawing from the Paris Accord.
That is why his re-election and his thereby becoming Imperator Occidentis is crucial.
A major contribution at ARC came from leading founder Sir Paul Marshall, who denounced the emergence of woke capitalism – aka stakeholder capitalism.
This was manifest recently in Australia among too many in the ASX 200 companies in their attempt to impose on a reluctant nation that product of extreme-Left, neo-communist critical race theory, the so-called Voice.
While this was the most recent manifestation in Australia of the division between the well-off, far-Left elites and the rank and file, the first actually occurred in 1999.
According to Malcolm Mackerras in The Inner Metropolitan Republic, this was essentially an inner-metropolitan phenomenon with a link to high socio-economic status.
This was well before the first significant manifestations of this same phenomenon either in the UK and the US.
POWER
They emerged later in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the Trump election. In US elections, the use of primaries, at least among Republicans, neutralises the role of power brokers in controlling preselections while the absence of forced preferential voting arguably produces a truer result.
As a result of the 1999 referendum and the 2001 election, it seemed as though the elites were in retreat in Australia.
Accordingly, I penned a much-derided book, Twilight of the Elites, relying on the still fresh “elite” concept introduced by US author Christopher Lasch.
To him, elite opinion is opinion typical of the upper-middle class “liberal”, that is liberal in the American sense, tending to be Left-wing on social and cultural issues.
The elites never like to be exposed.PC
Re: the Port of Darwin…this lease was granted under the Country Liberal Party Government of the day in NT headed by Adam Giles, an Anglo/Aboriginal gentleman. I wonder why there was no initial adverse comment or reaction to the 99-year lease of Port Darwin because of fear of such commentary being termed “racist”. Did this aspect blind community analysis as to the wider dangers of this move? Only when the Giles government was heavily defeated by Labor did critical comment arise about the dangerous defence implications of such a lease.
Meanwhile back in the country Albo likes to visit …
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The Australian Financial Review reported today we have suffered the largest fall in living standards in the developed world over the past year, says Sky News host Chris Kenny.
A graph from OECD data showed how “household disposable income peaked during COVID but has now come crashing down,” with Australia “plunging below the OECD average,” Mr Kenny said.
“Our costs are going up far more quickly than any pay increase – the cost of living is rising and our standard of living is falling,” Mr Kenny said.
“Which means Anthony Albanese broke his election promises big time.
‘This is not going to end well for Labor.”
Good to see that our PM managed to obtain an appointment to meet the CCP President in China on a day when various other foreign leaders were scheduled for meetings as well.
And all that flying time for our PM, an RAAF VIP Flight Boeing from Australia to China and then a transfer to a much larger RAAF Airbus for the flight to the Cook Islands and then back to Australia. Each RAAF aircraft flying one way empty, an admission and emissions.
Did China promise to cut their use of coal and building new coal fired power stations, several a year?
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“Think for a minute about how stupid this claim is that no single year, not one, in the last 125,000 years was warmer than the last 12 months. Cavemen are rolling in their graves. It’s “virtually certain” said two journalists at Reuters. It was broken by 0.4 degrees! Homo Sapiens have had satellite data for 44 years, which only leaves 124,956 years of extrapolation to guess at the rest. Not one journalist at the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, CNN, or anywhere, asked the “scientists” — how would you know? Do tell us, professor, what exactly was the temperature from November 6,789 BC to October 6,788? And to a tenth of a degree, and globally. I heard it was hot?”