by PAUL COLLITS – STEPHEN Jones – a politician of whom I had happily never heard, until this week – is retiring. He is taking his bat and going home.
He is, appropriately enough, the Member for Whitlam. (Formerly it was called Throsby, and Throsby it should have stayed.)
- Lies told by people like Jones.
- He is unhappy because people on social media are mean to him and his peers.
- You can’t have it both ways, matey. Off you go to your next gig.
Jones probably sees representing Whitlam as a plus. The chilling thought is that one day, hopefully beyond my lifetime, there will be a seat called Albanese.
Jones has been a member of parliament for fifteen years. He is Assistant Treasurer, the support act for Charmless Jim in the Albo Government. And the Minister for Financial Services, whatever that involves.
SLENDER
Normally the retirement of one whose contribution to public life has been so slender wouldn’t warrant our attention.
But this one is a little different, for Jones has (unintentionally) shone a light on one of our political system’s major failings.
Jones is a Left-progressive.
As a co-convenor of Labor’s Left faction in the federal parliamentary Labor Party, Jones has spoken in the House of Representatives on a number of issues of importance to the progressive political agenda including same-sex marriage, asylum seekers, introducing a carbon price and other environmental issues.
Jones is a “longtime supporter of Anthony Albanese” and “he praised Labor’s achievements”.
I wonder how he would characterise these. I cannot began to imagine what his efforts would entail. Labor’s achievements are, as we know, in the territory of the book of Italian war heroes.
He gave as one of his reasons for going: “Retiring MP says politics is more brutal because people can now share their opinions on social media.
Gosh! We can now share our opinions! Can’t have that.
Jones’ concerns about the freedom to speak on social media, such that it is, are all of a piece with the responses of the fact-checker class to the recent decision by Meta to ease up on the censorship. Ginger and Whinger are, predictably, in the cheer squad.
What Jones probably doesn’t get is that misinformation and disinformation do exist, but not in the way that he believes.
Almost exclusively, they exist in the form of lies told by the establishment and by the political class. Lies told by people like Jones.
And the folks don’t like being lied to. The Australian non-inquiry into COVID found that Australians’ trust in government had declined during and since the Government’s pandemic misinformation blitz.
Funny that. It is the same in the UK.
To Stephen Jones’ bizarre excoriation of social media, one hardly knows where to start.
CRITICS
It tells us all we need to know about the political class. They do not like critics. They do not like dissenting narratives. They don’t like the anarchy of a media platform they cannot control. Oh, whoops, they are now trying to control social media.
They seem not to like the fact of having freelancing critics. That is a bit of a worry in a representative democracy. They are there to represent us. They have no other real purpose.
For generations, politicians have tried to shield themselves from any expressions of public opinion.
They have done this in a number of ways:
- Hiding behind public servants, who are now all yes-men and women;
- Surrounding themselves with huge ministerial staffs whose careers have largely been untouched by mixing with commoners;
- Outsourcing policy to consultants;
- Outsourcing policy to tyrannical, unaccountable supranational institutions like the WHO;
- Never opening themselves to scrutiny from independent journalists and citizens;
- Reducing the role of elections as genuine battles of policies;
- Simply ignoring voters, like the million or so who turned up in Canberra during COVID to demand freedom;
- Using the legacy media as mouthpieces;
- Getting the police to shoot protesters of whom they disapprove;
- Shutting down parliaments for as much of the time as they get away with, as was the case during the plandemic;
- Listening the faux-experts with tendencies towards corruption;
- Making life as hard as possible for minor Parties;
- Hectoring and gaslighting independent voices;
- Breaking promises relating to accountability, as in the undertaking to have a full inquiry into COVID policies;
- Getting fact checkers to silence dissent on the very social media platforms that Jones despises.
In other words, politicians of the UniParty establishment have done a damned fine job at shielding themselves from the real world, its voting inhabitants and their wishes.
For a politician to whine about voters expressing unfiltered opinions is, therefore, just a bit rich.
More than this, it reveals just how they think, and the extent to which they have tinkered with the core principles of the social contract between the governors and the governed.
Government in a democracy is only there, boyo, with the consent of the governed. Remember the Boston Tea Party and “no taxation without representation”?
George III retired hurt as well, from memory. If there is no accountability, there can be no real consent of the governed, and no democracy.
A recent case serves to make the point about the lack of accountability.
As Australian investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi has reported: “The Australian government says it will not suspend the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, despite warnings from several high-profile scientists that the products could increase the risk of cancer.
SUSPENSION
“Russell Broadbent, the Member for Monash, along with 52 doctors, lawyers, academics and politicians wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, urging the immediate suspension of the vaccines.
“The Prime Minister passed the letter to Health Minister Mark Butler, who then delegated it to his Chief of Staff, Nick Martin, to prepare a response.
“In his response, Martin stated, ‘For a decision maker to make such a large impactful decision that would unduly worry Australians, the evidence relied upon must be legally, scientifically and clinically sound’.
“Martin concluded that the evidence presented to the PM’s office did ‘not support such a large and important decision’.
“This stance comes in the wake of several independent studies reporting excessive levels of residual DNA in vaccines, which have the potential to integrate into the human genome and lead to mutations, known as ‘insertional mutagenesis’.
“The letter from Butler’s office also stated, ‘The overwhelming evidence is that the mRNA vaccines have saved lives and have acceptable safety profiles’, referencing the position of the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities.”
The last bit is a bald-faced lie. It is literally unbelievable that he was allowed to say it.
Yep, Jones’ Government will allow vaccine manufacturers to keep killing people. The fact that the Government response to this expression of the science on vaccine harms has been to get a ministerial staffer to “write a letter” speaks volumes.
Most of the COVID truths that have come out have been the result of painstaking FOI requests from citizens and independent journalists, requests that have been resisted with all the resources available to government.
This form of government is what we normally describe as tyranny. This form of secrecy we call stonewalling. Or a conspiracy.
In such a system, we have to rely on our wits – and moderately unfettered social media has been a godsend.
Without it, I am not quite sure where we would be. This is why the whip-smart tech entrepreneur, Marc Andreessen, thinks that Musk has been so important.
CORRUPTING NATURE
Andreessen refers to the corrupting nature of power. The whimpering Stephen Jones seems not to have noticed this.
He is unhappy because people on social media are mean to him and his peers. I guess he can no longer stand the heat – such as it is – and is getting out of the kitchen.
But I am glad that Jones has let this particular feline out of the receptacle. In showing massive class loyalty, he has exposed politicians at their weak point.
But there is a double irony here.
A plausible explanation of the policy choices made at the start of COVID – lockdowns, states of emergency, maskism and, later, vaccine mandates – was the political class’s fear of the reaction, especially on social media, if they did the wise thing, that is nothing, in response to the middling virus.
The politicians’ midwit actions in caving in to the bioweapons industrial complex in February-March 2020, on this view, reflected their fear of the social media mob’s own fear of the virus, and likely hysterical response to the COVID fear campaign that they themselves instigated.
Talk about a circular train of events.
So, Jones fears the smear, born of misinformation. Yet the political class itself preys on voters and uses misinformation to do so. Routinely and significantly.
The behaviour of politicians in avoiding accountability is an extinction level event for consent-based democracy. And yet political decisions are at the same time made in fear of, and in thrall to, social media’s power.
You can’t have it both ways, matey. Off you go to your next gig.PC
