A great shift to the left, indeed, a giant lurch to the left (not unlike a listing sinking ship) just took place in Australia on Election Day, the 21st of May, 2022. As many have rightly called, it’s a game changer. Whilst the socialists out there must be over the moon, it may take the rest of the people of Australia some time to realise what a shift this election result really was and what it will mean for a change in direction for our country.
Did the majority of Australians want this outcome? No, they did not. With their primary vote at 32.8%, being lower than in 2019, Labor didn’t really ‘win’ this election, The Coalition didn’t really lose it either, with their primary vote being higher than Labor’s at 35.4%. So what happened? Apart from a perhaps survivable 3.7% swing against the Coalition, 12.1% of votes went to the Greens and a further 10.5% of votes went to the new ‘independent’ force in Australian politics, the ‘Teals’, which sealed an election defeat for the Coalition. Many voters deserted both major parties and went elsewhere, although curiously and despite his big spend, not to Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, nor to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. All of this is telling.
In addition, Scott Morrison had been targeted by the left and was doomed. They hated that he is a Christian, they hated that his alleged inactivity on ‘climate change’ had ‘caused’ the fires and the floods, they hated that he’d gone on a holiday to Hawaii when bushfires were burning, they hated his (albeit insipid) rejection of the culture wars, they hated his refusal to initiate a Federal ICAC, they hated that he and many of his Liberal colleagues refused to abide by the socialist playbook, especially in education, and worst of all, they hated that he was a masculine male. He had to go. In this new fourth wave of feminism, it seems many women didn’t like ScoMo’s ‘toxic’ masculinity, but found Albanese’s expressive feminine side more appealing.
ScoMo tried to walk the middle line, but with the socialists there is no middle line. You’re either ‘with us or against us’. Nevertheless, ScoMo and the Coalition made many hard errors. The sports rorts and pork barrel scandals dogged them as did their refusal to create a Federal ICAC. Their responses to the pandemic and fire and flood disasters were too little and too late. Their treatment of women within their own ranks seems odious Without doubt, much of the Coalition’s fate on the 21st of May was self-inflicted. Even without the Greens and the Teals they were already in trouble, so there was to be no repeat of the 2019 ScoMo ‘miracle’.
You’ve got to hand it to Cathy McGowan and her originating Indi ‘community independents project’ team – they have done a remarkable job of creating a community based ‘Teal’ Independents movement nationally. The morning after the election ‘Sammy J’ quipped on ABC Insiders that “Teal is turquoise that lacks conviction.” Just how much conviction and just how ‘independent’ they all prove to be over the next few years remains to be seen. And where mega-rich financiers and influencers Simon Holmes á Court and Mike Cannon-Brookes (and possibly others) fit in to this ‘independence’ mix also remain to be seen. Nevertheless, we can rest assured that we’ll no doubt see many of the Teals forming up and voting as a block, especially on their three core primary issues – ‘real’ action on climate change, establishment of a Federal ICAC, and the loosely termed ‘gender equity’ grab bag of issues, being everything from domestic violence (hopefully sans the usual anti-men perspective), so-called ‘equal pay’, and the full range of rainbow LGBTQI+ and transgender sport issues.
Just where did the idea of the ‘Teal’ independents come from? Again we can thank the Liberals and in particular Indi’s Sophie Mirabella for igniting the fuse. People were sick of being taken for granted in so-called ‘safe seats’ and an increasing number of people with a more radical socialist ‘save the planet’ ideology were not happy with Labor either, so decided to take matters into their own hands and launch a well organised and targeted attack against the conservatives, whilst essentially leaving their traditional Labor socialist allies alone.
Many of these rural Teals and their supporters are actually city people who have moved to the country and, with little understanding of how ‘the country’ actually works, now wish to inflict their city-based ideologies on their rural electorates. In many places, and on many local Councils, they are becoming increasingly active and successful, replacing the tired old politics of the aging male conservatives with upbeat ideologically driven women. Perhaps more importantly, they want to get rid of the older men and put more women into politics. In a very gutsy move, the Teals even challenged Liberals who were personally popular within their electorates and had previously held their seats by a wide margin, yet in a shock result, they actually beat them!
The Teal independents movement seems to be a groundswell of young to middle-aged women with an axe to grind, being led by a formidable warrior and organiser in the form of Cathy McGowan, who having retired after two terms as the Independent Member for Indi, formed the Community Independents Project to replicate her success and methods across the country. She immediately found many willing bedfellows, including many men who were happy to take a back-seat supportive role.
With its founder McGowan, the ‘community independents movement’ could really be referred to as a loosely aligned political party. It has not gone unnoticed that their candidates and ‘independent’ policies are all the same. They are all young 30-40+ women with a primary focus on three things: climate change, the establishment of a Federal ICAC (á la Independent Helen Haines from Indi) and ‘gender equity’ with a feminist LGBTQI+ focus. Men, especially older white men, are excluded; they’re not really wanted at all unless they are happy to just be in the background as behind-the-scenes supporters. Having expressed some interest in exploring the community independents movement as a candidate myself well over twelve months ago I soon realised that I had no chance of being a part of it. I was just a ‘pale’ (white) ‘stale’ (old) ‘male’ (man), so was immediately ineligible. Oh well, that’s equity for you.
One thing is for sure, the Teals were incredibly successful, perhaps beyond their wildest dreams, and they should be congratulated for that. They were well organised, well funded and well mobilised. They have changed Australian politics, and not in a bad way either, perhaps returning local member representation back to its grass roots electorates where it properly belongs and should have always been. That’s real democracy at work and while it’s taken some time to happen it might just be that perhaps that will be Sophie Mirabella’s lasting legacy.
Next we need to consider the increase in vote for the Greens, up to 12.1%. It’s no surprise they’re all inner city seats, made up of ideology-driven city people who do not understand how the economy works but have safe well paid (usually public service or large corporation) jobs. No country person who understands how agriculture, industry, transport, the means of production, the economy and the environment actually works would ever vote for The Greens.
Yet less than 24 hours after the election result, Adam Bandt was on the ABC News banging his drum again: “Coal and gas are the main causes of climate change”, we are in “the middle of a climate crisis” and so must “transition away from coal and gas”. This oft repeated propaganda, and as usual sans evidence, has been drummed into younger gullible Australians for the last decade now. Brand new Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has earlier said he wants to ‘reinvigorate Australian manufacturing and industry’ (even though Whitlam’s Labor was responsible for initiating its demise and eventual destruction through the 1975 Lima Agreement) and there will now be “greater action on climate change”, yet Labor and the Greens also want to destroy the energy capacity for actually being able to carry out such a reinvigoration. How do Mr Bandt and Mr Albanese think we are going to reinvigorate Australian manufacturing and industry, as they claim, if we don’t have sufficient base-load power with which to do so? Unquestionably, without fossil fuel coal and gas base-load power, there can be no heavy industry or manufacturing in this country. Don’t they get that?
How can so many people have voted for the Greens? Apparently, after years of having it rammed down their throat by the likes of loud and bratty school children, many people have now happily drunk the ‘climate change’ Cool Aid, despite the lack of any evidence of a ‘climate emergency’, despite applying causation to fires and floods where there is none, and perhaps without realising that solving the ‘climate crisis’ is a bottomless financial rabbit hole that has no end, yet will devour billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted foolhardy attempts to ‘fix it’. Someone’s getting very rich out of all this, and it’s not the energy consumers, who in the end will be the ones who have to pay for this new inefficient and costly regime.
Without the complete collapse of our economy and lifestyle, ‘nett zero’ can only ever be achieved through the smoke and mirrors of ‘carbon credits’, of fudging the figures, of robbing Peter to pay Paul, so the electorate is simply conned that ‘nett zero’ has been achieved when in reality it will be nothing of the sort – just another lie. When will Australians wake up that they’re being conned? Only when the lights go off and the air-conditioners shut down?
We will no doubt now be in for a bevy of feel-good but sadly misplaced socialist policies under Labor, the Teals, and the Greens that will have long-term serious consequences, and such consequences from poor policies from both sides of politics are what have been slowly but surely wrecking this once great country. Among the first of these is Prime Minister Albanese’s firm commitment that the ‘Uluru Statement From The Heart’ will be enshrined in the Australian Constitution. As many realise, this is just another step in the long march to hand over sovereignty and control of Australia’s land and waters to so-called ‘Aborigines’. Sadly, Prime Minister Albanese’s statement on election night about Aborigines being “the oldest living continuous culture in the world” continues to promote this lie, again oblivious to the irony that if it’s actually true (which it clearly is not) then Aborigines are still living unchanged in the Palaeolithic stone age in which they were first found by the British over 250 years ago. This of course is arrant nonsense and pure propaganda; most Aboriginal ‘culture’ of today bears no resemblance whatsoever to what it was 250 years ago and thank goodness for that. Unfortunately however, much remote area Aboriginal culture remains quite similar to what it once was, hence the myriad problems those communities continue to face. Further, the soft socialist policies affecting principally remote area Aboriginal people over the last four decades have had real consequences, and in the Northern Territory and Queensland have now turned many towns, most notably Alice Springs and Townsville, into lawless crime-ridden ghettos. This is a direct result of badly thought through feel-good socialist policies implemented by both sides of politics.
If a so-called “Aboriginal Voice To Parliament” is enshrined or ‘entrenched’ in the Australian Constitution then the Aboriginal sovereignty or ownership of Australia will be confirmed; Australia as we know it will cease to exist and be lost as our cohesive nation is destroyed. You can back that in right now. There will inevitably become an established separate Aboriginal ‘state’, and once given the imprimatur in the Constitution, just as we saw with the Mabo determination, the judges in the courts will take care of the rest. Keith Windschuttle has explained this inexorable process in great detail in The break-up of Australia: the real agenda behind Aboriginal recognition.
As we inevitably watch the handing over of Australia to so-called ‘Aborigines’, who in fact, on the eastern seaboard states at least, are just like the rest of us and probably live right next door in the same street, we will see the socialists implementing one of their most heinous, divisive and destructive agendas upon the Australian people possible, affecting Aboriginal and all others alike. Future generations will rue this day of the dividing up of Australians by race alone.
Linda Burney (a Wiradjuri and Scottish woman, but really, does that matter?) appeared on the 7.00pm ABC News on 22/5/22 as Labor’s new Indigenous Affairs Minister. She stated, albeit through rather slurry speech, that Labor will “fully implement the Uluru Statement From The Heart” to be enshrined in the Constitution. She claimed there “will be a national process of truth telling that will change our nation”. Yes, it will change our nation all right – for the worse; it will be an attack on white people generally, upon alleged ‘colonisation’ and ‘massacres’ specifically, upon ‘stolen generations’ (rehashed once again), and an appeal to that greatest of all pop-psychology scams, ‘inherited inter-generational trauma’, followed by more demands for compensation, reparations and a greater ceding of land, water and property to the many newly formed Aboriginal Land and Waters Corporations. It will be a disaster for this country and is already resulting in the creation of whole new State-based bureaucracies of publicly funded rent-seeking NGO’s and bureaucrats who want more well-paid pointless jobs and handouts for doing nothing actually productive. Let’s not forget that these organisations do not actually make anything; so no manufacturing or industry to be found there Albo.
Why are the elites who seem to dictate the ideology that Australia now follows (through their main propaganda arms, the ABC and SBS) so keen to hand over sovereignty of Australia to the ever increasing number of people who now ‘identify as Aboriginal’? This will eventually cost all Australians dearly, in both social cohesion and hard cash. Look at what is happening right now in New Zealand under their Labour Party. Maori now essentially run the country and there is no satiating their thirst for more money, power and control. The same thing is destined to occur here. Peter Garrett long screamed at us that white Australians should ‘pay the rent’. Well, his demand is about to be realised when in the near future a surcharge will be added to the rates of every single property in Australia so that the bevy of new Aboriginal Corporations can collect even more money for nothing (otherwise known a ‘rent seeking’) and eventually their State-based organisations shall rival the size and power of local Councils and Shires, creating a whole new layer of meaningless and pointless jobs for people with nothing better to do than to ‘look after country’. So much for creating a new manufacturing and industrial environment for Australia – we’ll be so drowning in even more pointless rules, regulations and black-tape wielding ‘Aboriginal’ bureaucrats that we’ll be lucky to get anything done.
Indeed, remember the rorts of the 1980’s and 90’s ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) days, which was finally abandoned in 2004 because of its extensive nepotism and corruption? What is being proposed now will be ATSIC on steroids! Have we learned nothing? The powers that be certainly understand nothing of contemporary ‘Aboriginal culture’; perhaps it hasn’t actually changed in 10,000 years after all.
Newly minted Alice Springs based Northern Territory Senator-elect Jacinta Nampijinpa Price probably has a better understanding of what is really happening with Aborigines and in Aboriginal communities across this country than the rest of the Latté-sipping south-eastern seaboard states put together. We can only hope and trust that Ms Price will be able to provide a reality-check about these matters in the Senate and hold Linda Burney accountable for the new Labor Government’s Aboriginal agenda. Senator-elect Price will really have her work cut out for her.
In a final note about these ‘Aboriginal’ matters, something that continues to elude conservatives and defy any explanation at all is why the Liberal-National Coalition has not ever made any attempt to put a stop to the Aboriginal (and climate change) propaganda pedalled by the ABC and SBS? Again, if Australia suffers under these combined fallacies, as it surely will, then the Coalition will have no-one else to blame but themselves.
Stop Press: And in news just to hand as I write, Prime Minister Albanese has today pledged to implement the “Uluru Statement from the Heart in full” and to hold a referendum in Labor’s first term of government to “introduce an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament into the Australian Constitution”. And in a break or change with protocol and tradition, Prime Minister Albanese has now included the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian flag in his afternoon press conference where he made these announcements. This tells us everything we need to know about where all of this is heading and what will happen to the sovereignty of Australia under this Labor Government. There is now little doubt that under Labor Australia as a nation will be handed over to people who identify as ‘Aborigines’. We are all in for a very difficult time as the ship of state lists even further to the left.
And now a word about the ignorance of so many voters in Australia. Western Australia Senator Michaela Cash noted on ABC News 24 that a number of people mentioned to her outside a polling place in Perth that they wanted to vote for Mark McGowan. Many others elsewhere were unsure if it was a Federal, State or even a Council election. How ignorant can people be? How little interest in politics do people really take? As a polling official witnessing the count on the Saturday night I was shocked and dismayed to see the number of informal votes, in their thousands. Some were downright angry, writing obscenities on the ballot paper; some were disinterested, but most just messed up the ballot paper because they were two or more numbers short of the required number to legally complete it. What does this tell us about how interested or educated our voting population is regarding our future and who governs us? I also had a woman show up in her pyjamas at 8.00pm asking if she and her husband could still vote, as they thought the election was to be held the following weekend and just realised it was not. They may get a fine.
The ABC’s and SBS’s constant sniping at the conservatives and constant pushing of the ‘climate change’ and ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ mantras inevitably worms its way into their viewers minds. Combine this with a stilted education system and a lack of having been taught how to think independently as opposed to being told what to believe has brought us to this situation of indoctrination plus obedience to propaganda. Does this mean that today’s voters are more ‘progressive’ or are they just more gullible and indoctrinated?
Sadly, for decades now young voters have been brought up on an education diet of fake climate change, fake Aboriginal history and distorted anti-male gender issues. How can it be that our primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions now actually lie to the people they are entrusted to teach. A prime example is the inclusion of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu in the curriculum at all three education levels. This publication is an acknowledged invention, as perhaps too is Pascoe’s own claim to being an ‘Aborigine’. How can real history be so readily discarded in schools and replaced by what is no more than ideological propaganda, and who stands to benefit from it?
Former Coalition Education Minister Alan Tudge (who the feminists also sought to destroy soon after having wrecked the promising bright career of Christian Porter) tried his hardest to minimise the socialist influence in the education curriculum and met with much resistance at the time. What will happen now that his moderating influence is gone? Will it be open slather for the socialist bureaucrats now? What will Federal Labor now do to the education curriculum to stem the tide of socialist rot contained in primary, secondary and tertiary education institutions? Probably nothing, and it will get a whole lot worse.
How have the Australian people become such gullible fools?
Don’t people realise or care that the whole anthropomorphic ‘climate change’, ‘climate pollution’ and ‘climate emergency’ mantras are a concocted and confected mirage based upon the transfer of resources and profits, and certainly not upon any empirical science?
Don’t people realise or care that the whole ‘Aboriginal sovereignty’ cause is an invented agenda again not based upon any fact, but based upon power, control, resources and taxpayer funding that will ultimately divide the nation?
Don’t people realise or care that the whole ‘gender equity’ fallacy is a Marxist- socialist and feminist construct designed to split men from women and to transfer more power, money and control from one group (men) to the other (feminists)?
Don’t people realise or care that all of these things are confected, manufactured and promoted through stilted state-sponsored propaganda for the advancement of a range of personal and corporate interest groups to advance their own agendas of money, resources, power and control? They are not based upon any truth at all. As a population, we are clearly being manipulated according to the agendas of others, yet most are unaware and many of those who are aware either don’t care or believe they are powerless to do anything about it. However, the Teal independents have demonstrated that the people can take back the power. What is the real pity of course is that the Teals themselves are promoters of the propaganda and divisive agendas that are on the wrong side of the facts and the truth. At least they’re committed though.
So the socialists are now well inside the camp and Australia is in deep trouble, and has been for years. The climate wars will continue, costing consumers thousands of pointless energy dollars, the culture wars will continue to divide our society – socialists against conservatives, the gender wars will continue to pit women against men, and the ‘Aborigine’ wars will continue with the new reverse racism and the debate (will there even be a debate?) about who will eventually ‘own’ Australia. Buckle up; it’s going to be a wild ride, perhaps akin to the early Whitlam years.
Labor, now back in the Canberra Parliamentary driver’s seat, is likely to have a field day. Expect many rapid changes. Sure, let’s hope that Labor does some of the sensible things that the Coalition refused to do. Let the Murugappan family return to Biloela (that was just cruel), establish a Federal ICAC (that’s long overdue), and yes, include dental in Medicare (also long overdue). These things are sensible and right, but can Labor spare us the social engineering, the socialist culture wars, and the loss of our cohesive collective national sovereignty to one particular racial group? Sadly, not likely, and this is where many of the future battles will need to be fought over the next three, or maybe even six, years.
But for now in this all-new political landscape, what will become of the Liberal Party and its coalition partner The Nationals? In echoing the thoughts of some other commentators, will the Liberals move further to the socialist left in an attempt to compete with and buy back votes from Labor, the Teals and the Greens, and hence lose themselves in the process, or will they return to their conservative heartland and move back towards the right to reclaim the ‘sensible centre’ of what was once their conservative base? Which will it be? If it is the former, then the Liberals are finished; if it’s the latter, then there may just be some hope. The answer to this question may well determine the future of the Liberal Party and of Australia itself.
Dr David Barton (a white Celtic-Irish man) is a writer, researcher and social commentator who lives in Central Victoria.
