It’s hard to believe the Left can be so hypocritical, but I recently discovered two perfect examples which should be of great concern to every Australian. The two articles recently appeared on the Independent Australia news site, the first entitled “Central ‘No’ campaign lobby hiding behind wall of lies.” 1 by Anthony Klan, dated 20 October 2023, a week after the failed ‘Voice’ referendum. Klan opens by firing a shot across the ‘No’ campaigns ‘Advance’ bows, stating that “Advance has been hiding its identity with blatant lies, so what does it have to hide?” Good question, but the answer is not what you think.
As usual, this statement from the Left is a number of independent phrases that when collectively put in one sentence is typically designed to mislead and misdirect the reader. In this case, there are three phrases … ‘hiding its identity’, ‘blatant lies’ and ‘what does it have to hide’. Klan wants the reader to think that Advance is hiding its identity because it told lies (about where it’s based, and about the Voice) and doesn’t wish to be exposed as a ‘liar’, so that’s what it has to hide. Wrong.
Klan continues with his unverified allegations, “Two-thirds of the directors of the fake ‘grassroots’ campaign network have filed fake residential addresses with regulators; none of its at least six arms has a telephone number; and the entire operation is ‘based’ at a fake national headquarters.”
No, the Left just won’t accept that the Voice referendum defeat could possibly be because ordinary Australians saw through the scam. No, the defeat had to be because some small anonymous group of faceless people created a “fake ‘grassroots’ campaign” from a fake place that doesn’t exist. And don’t you just love the allusion to some murky octopus with its ‘six arms’ or tentacles spreading out across Australia?
Apart from the blithely oft-repeated word ‘racist’ (anyone who disagrees with the Left is of course, by definition, a racist) Klan, in promoting his own conspiracy theory, alleges that the ‘No’ campaign was some sinister cabal, a “a murky network of at least six interconnected entities that lobbied against an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” Spooky, hey?
In a further disgraceful act, Klan publishes the names, addresses and dates of birth of Advance’s Directors, perhaps in the hope that someone will picket their homes or steal their names and dates of birth to open fake bank accounts or whatever.
Klan makes a big deal about the fact that Advance’s office in Canberra appears to be a ‘shell’ – office space which can be rented on a casual ad-hoc basis as required. So what. Everybody does that, including the Left. Klan continues that some of the personal details of some of the donors seemed false or obscured. Well, it’s a matter of self-protection. Is it any wonder that so few people are willing to stand up and be counted against the radical (far) Left? Most conservatives won’t put their heads above the parapet because, without doubt, they will be personally targeted and shot at, just as Klan has done. This behaviour is now par for the course from the Left.
Klan then attacks a swathe of conservative groups thus:
On Wednesday 11 October, The Guardian revealed another site had popped up, “Christians for Equality”, which has been ‘endorsed’ by far-Right ‘Christian’ campaigner Lyle Shelton … (which is) … extremely closely tied to various U.S.-style dark money groups, including the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), and CPAC Australia — all of which are involved in spreading climate change disinformation and acting to stymie the shift from fossil fuels.1
So ‘Christians’ are now in Klan’s sights as well, accessing “U.S.-style dark money groups” (whatever they are) and, in accordance with the contemporary thought of the Left, all the major conservative think-tanks in Australia are now ‘far-Right’, no doubt slipping towards the ‘extreme-Right’. Klan continues:
Advance claims to be a grassroots operation and aggressively campaigns against “woke inner-city elites”, claiming to be a voice for ordinary Australians. In fact, it is bankrolled by a small handful of Australia’s super-rich. Analysis of the “donors” reported in Advance’s most recent AEC (Australian Electoral Commission) disclosures, for the year to 30 June 2022, shows they boil down to just ten entities. All of them are vastly wealthy — the “elite of the elite”.1
The hypocrisy here is of course quite breathtaking. Never mind about the millions of dollars donated to the ‘Yes’ campaign by the big four banks, by Qantas, Bunnings, BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside Energy, Origin Energy, and the list just goes on and on. The personal donations made to the ‘No’ campaign by Klan’s listed ‘donors’, which average about $22,000 each, are no more than bubble and squeak by comparison to the millions donated to the ‘Yes’ campaign by others in the super-rich category. For example, what about the “$5 million donation from the Paul Ramsay Foundation to Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition.”3 Was Ramsey not the “elite of the elite”? But no, Klan is apparently of the view that the No campaign should not have had any money at all.
Klan is at it again with his second article published two weeks later on the 2nd of November 2023 – “White man’s dark money: Meet the No campaign bankrollers.”2 As I read it I became increasingly horrified. There, exposed for all to see, were the very private and personal details of donors to the referendum ‘No’ campaign.
Now let’s be frank, the Independent Australia news site is no more than an extreme propaganda apparatus of the alt-Left, and by alt-Left I mean the far Left version of the far-Left! It’s nothing more than a propaganda tool for socialists and communists determined to bring down Australia’s liberal democracy and place it in the hands of their own elites.
What Klan and his ilk simply cannot grasp is that the Australian people are not stupid, the Australian people can smell a rat being sold by snake-oil salesmen when they see it, the Australian people are not racist, the Australian people do in fact want what is best for Aboriginal people and the Australian people knew, instinctively, that the proposed ‘Voice’ was a con by elitist activists. Klan, as a key elitist activist himself, just won’t accept those facts. Rather, Klan needs to blame 61% of Australians as being racists and that some murky secret sinister cabal of rich people (and that smacks of anti-Semitism right there) were responsible for their loss. The Left is never just plain wrong.
The lies, the deceit, the bile, the double standards and the hypocrisy that come out of the Left are truly breathtaking. And all the while it seems okay for the Left to do it, but it’s never okay for others to fight back.
It’s okay for the woke Left to have their huge filthy-rich private and corporate financial backers, but it’s not okay for others who oppose them to seek funding.
It’s okay for the Left to publicise the personal details of their opponents’ financial backers in an attempt to embarrass, intimidate and scare them into not donating again, but their conservative opponents do not engage in such vile tactics.
It’s okay for the Left to accuse their opponents of being ‘far-Right’ but not okay for the accused ‘far-Right’ to likewise counter-accuse them of being ‘far-Left’ – Oh, and of course it’s a given that anyone on the ‘far-Left’ is good, just and holy, but anyone on the ‘far-Right’ is an evil liar akin to the Nazis! Have they forgotten that Stalin, arguably much worse than Hitler, was a man of the ‘far-Left’, as was Chairman Mao?
So who wants to have a target painted on their back because of compulsory disclosure laws that the Left will then go searching for so they can personally expose, belittle and intimidate you? There must be some privacy options here – people do not, and should not, automatically have a ‘right to know’ the very private and personal details of those who donate funds to various campaigns.
In publishing such personal information, Klan paves the way for others to cause harm and perhaps incite others to take action against those whose private details he has made public. Certainly such action could and should be classed as defamatory and incitement. Despite the fact that such details are publicly available if one goes looking for them on the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) and AEC websites, publishing them with perhaps malicious intent is taking it to a whole new level.
It’s therefore quite understandable that conservatives fighting against the Left want to keep their personal and business details a secret. Everyone knows that as soon as those details are made public, the Left will harass, intimidate and attack them, with ‘protesters’ (aka ‘terrorists’) showing up at their doorstep to ‘confront’ them, a great technique elucidated in Saul Alinsky’s 1971 Rules For Radicals. This was seen with much fanfare when protesters arranged with the ABC’s Four Corners program to show up unannounced early one morning at Woodside (which financially contributed to the Yes campaign) CEO Meg O’Neill’s home in August 2023 to protest about ‘Climate Change’ – more Left hypocrisy. Will we see more of this intimidating behaviour from the Left in the future? Yes, it is likely we will.
In any contentious debate we rely on the goodwill and good manners of people to behave themselves and to conduct the debate in a respectful manner. That’s how a liberal democracy is supposed to work, with ‘peaceful political disagreement’, ironically, what the Left keeps demanding of the Right, but never delivers of itself.
These techniques of ad hominem attack, public exposure of personal and business details to intimidate, and invasion of privacy, are not techniques engaged in by the so-called far-Right, who are mostly conservative and respectful. No, these heinous techniques of the far-Left are those of bullies and thugs who, unable to win their arguments on merit or facts, or via fair debate, must resort to personal attack and intimidation.
Revolutions are only ever about one group of angry people jealous and resentful of the power that the other ruling group of people has over them. They want to take that power for themselves, and once they’ve done that, they immediately institute firm measures to ensure that someone else doesn’t do the same to them as what they just did to the last lot!
These same techniques were clearly seen in 1910’s Russia with Lenin’s ‘Red’ Bolsheviks, in 1920’s Italy with Mussolini’s Squadristi and Blackshirts, in 1930’s Germany with Hitler’s ‘Brownshirts’ and in the 1940’s with Mao Tse Tung’s ironically named ‘Peoples Liberation Army’ which eventually ‘liberated’ over 1 million people of their lives. Have we learnt nothing from the first 50 years of the 20th century?
It would seem that Mussolini (of whom Hitler greatly admired and initially modelled himself upon) was greatly enamoured by some of Plato’s ideas as contained in The Republic, many arguably fascist in nature, and specifically, “such as rule by an elite promoting the state as the ultimate end, opposition to democracy, protecting the class system and promoting class collaboration, rejection of egalitarianism … demanding that citizens perform civic duties in the interest of the state, and utilizing state intervention in education to promote the development of warriors and future rulers of the state”.4 Sound familiar? It’s the diktat of the Left, and we’re seeing more and more of it right here in Australia.
Make no mistake, socialist organs such as Independent Australia are a very real clear and present danger to both the truth and to Australia’s democracy. Should Australia fall victim to the Albanese governments proposed ‘Misinformation Bill’, will propaganda mouthpieces such as Independent Australia be shut down? Of course not. But you can bet your bottom dollar that agencies such as Advance, the IPA and CPAC will suffer sustained attack.
ASIC and AEC take note. It’s a long time overdue to call for better protection for those who would donate their money to a cause which they believe in, or put their hands up to serve on Boards such as Advance. Their personal details should be protected (they should not be released without the express permission of the person concerned) and for the prosecution of people such as Klan who arguably with malicious intent make such personal details public.
References:
1. ‘Central ‘No’ campaign lobby hiding behind wall of lies.’ Anthony Klan. 20 October 2023.
2. ‘White man’s dark money: Meet the No campaign bankrollers.’ Anthony Klan. 2 November 2023,
3. ‘Top philanthropists say Yes with $17m to support Voice campaign’ Jemima Whyte and Tom McIlroy. April 28, 2023
4. Mussolini and Plato’s Republic.
