In Her Lane

First published in Quadrant Online on 10th November, 2023 as The Language and Logic of Sedition

Whether she was aware of the threat from early on in the campaign, or only fully realised its extent in conducting the post-mortem, Janet Albrechtsen exposed the wound in her article entitled Radical Idea About ‘Occupied Australia’ Must Be Confronted, published a fortnight after the referendum in The Weekend Australian.

She noted that, as if to validate the concerns of those like her who had vigorously opposed the referendum proposal, an anonymous group claiming to represent the “collective insights and views of a group of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, community members and organisations who supported Yes” brazenly claimed in an open letter that

Australia is our country … We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours. Always was. Always will be. It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.

This is not some ratbag fringe speaking, even if the anonymity of the group were to indicate that these opinions were not shared by a substantial majority of ATSI Yes promoters, or at least would not be so openly enunciated by the majority.  This is a declaration of independence; it is a throwing down of the gauntlet by the legitimate sovereigns of the continent of Australia to the illegitimate usurpers of that sovereignty.

Such a position is not arrived at spontaneously. It has first to be crafted by an intellectual vanguard, and then inculcated into the minds of the group or groups which this elite wishes to form into a resistance, on the basis of a moral right and duty to resist. Ms Albrechtsen has located such a intellectual vanguard within Australia’s legal academy.

[The anonymous authors] have made clear what was already received wisdom inside certain of our law schools but had gone unnoticed.
As I have previously written, the belief inside legal academe that Australia is illegitimate and that the voice would go some way to sharing sovereignty pending a full treaty was hiding in plain sight. Until I read Treaty by [George] Williams and Harry Hobbs, and the academic paper Voice versus Rights: The First Nations Voice and the Australian Constitutional Legitimacy Crisis by Gabrielle Appleby, Ron Levy and Helen Whalan, I had no idea this school of thought was behind the Uluru statement and the push for a voice.

If the structures of governance in Australia are illegitimate, then the modes and methods of that governance, for example elections and referenda, are obviously illegitimate also.

[L]aw professor George Williams wrote on Monday: “Australia’s system of constitutional reform is broken and there is little point in heading back to the polls until this is fixed.” … For Williams…democracy is a terrible disappointment and would benefit from a little supervision from some expert group – preferably consisting of suitably educated and right-minded lawyers. This explains why so many lawyers want a bill of rights so that when elected politicians fail to act on proposals smart lawyers really like, or enact the wrong ideas, a judicial elite can correct them.

What might Williams mean by “fixed”? The referendum was defeated by a massive majority, and only in Canberra, which does not count towards the required majority of States, was the proposal carried. This was one of the more comprehensive defeats ever handed to a referendum proposal, so what can be meant by “fixed”? The only way to “fix” such a thrashing is to ensure that such a proposal can be implemented without the noisome requirement to go to the electorate. Yet the only way to implement such a change is through a referendum.

Either this obvious contradiction has not occurred to Williams, or, more likely, he holds some hope of circumventing this inconvenience. However reluctant Williams is to spell it out, what else can he possibly mean? Ms Albrechtsen alludes to this inevitable conclusion in her introductory reference to Brecht’s play Die Lösung, about the East German uprising of 1953.

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

South Africa offers an example of the destruction of an existing Constitution through decades of relentless international pressure, but there are no coherent parallels with Australia, and besides, the Voice cohort is seeking to implement an apartheid-like system. Neither do New Zealand or Canada offer useful examples. Australia is unique. But transnational organisations and lobby groups exist to promote, among other things, damaging mythologies about the nation states they choose to target, so there is always scope for harming Australia’s reputation in the eyes other counties’ citizens, given that nearly 40% of Australians could be persuaded to undermine their own Constitutional order. This degree of success was achieved by making Australia shameful in the eyes of that substantial proportion of citizens. If that can be achieved among us, what are the possibilities amid the isolated and privileged elites of international and transnational organisations who exercise grossly disproportionate influence on the world stage?

More immediately dangerous is the radicalisation of aboriginal activists here, as evidenced by the anonymous statement quoted above, denying the legitimacy of the Australian nation state. This is the logic of sedition. It is not merely a declaration of independence from the constitutional structure of Australia; it is a denial that that constitutional structure has any valid authority over anyone. Into such an ideology violence flows like water down a drain.

Yet we will wait in vain for guardians of the constitutional order to publicly caution against the danger of terrorism developing amid the ranks of the most fanatical Voice proponents and supporters, black, white or brindle, all the while issuing dire warnings about the dangers of Christian extremism.

The Forgotten Vaccine

This article was published in Quadrant Online on 14th September, 2021.

A paywalled article in the BMJ begins,

…the US National Institutes of Health infectious diseases chief, Anthony Fauci, appeared on YouTube to reassure Americans about the safety of the…vaccine. “The track record for serious adverse events is very good. It’s very, very, very rare that you ever see anything that’s associated with the vaccine that’s a serious event,” he said.

https://youtu.be/hsXEgJqR_vY
This was written in 2018; the YouTube appearance was in October 2009, and the vaccine was the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine.

[B]y October 2009 the new vaccines were being rolled out … in the UK, with prominent organisations, including the Department of Health, British Medical Association, and Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, working hard to convince a reluctant NHS workforce to get vaccinated. “We fully support the swine flu vaccination programme … The vaccine has been thoroughly tested,” they declared in a joint statement.
Except, it hadn’t. Anticipating a severe influenza pandemic, governments…had made various…arrangements to shorten the time between recognition of a pandemic virus and the production…and administration of that vaccine… [An arrangement], adopted by countries such as Canada, the US, UK, France, and Germany, was to provide vaccine manufacturers indemnity from liability for wrongdoing…

By 2018, the incidence of narcolepsy in young people throughout Europe as a result of vaccination, primarily with Pandemrix, was sufficiently well established to give rise to lawsuits in which the manufacturers’ confidential concerns about the vaccine were brought to light.

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Endemic Pandemic Panic

[A version with slight differences was published 27th April, 2020 on Quadrant Online QED.]

The previous “pandemic”, commonly know as Swine Flu, was caused by a type of Influenza virus known as H1N1. Spanish Flu was also caused by an H1N1 variant. The disease was first detected in Mexico in 2009, and initial reports gave what was eventually seen to be an exaggerated view of the morbidity and mortality of the disease, but, as a paper on the response of Australian emergency departments put it, [a]lthough the severity was subsequently shown to be of less concern, the initial response was, and necessarily had to be, based on the information available at the time. That assumption is invalid, for reasons to be outlined. Nonetheless, the response to that pandemic was somnolent compared to our betters’ instituting a totalitarian state (with a sunset clause) just 10 years later.

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The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case

[Originally published by Quadrant Online on 30th December 2019. Published in Quadrant Magazine March 2020.]

The conviction of the guilty is just; it is the unremarkable business of a just criminal jurisprudence; but the conviction of the innocent strikes at the heart of Justice. If it happens through error or negligence, it is bad enough; when it happens by design, it is an abomination that corrodes trust in the law itself. 

Maimonides in the 12th century, in this commentary on Exodus 23:7 (Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked) concluded, “it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way.”

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Israel Folau and the Rainbow Dhimmis

[A version with slight differences was published 28th April, 2019 on Quadrant Online QED.]

Notre Dame de Paris, on the Île de Cité, is a centrepiece of Europe’s Christian cultural heritage; which is to say, a centrepiece of our heritage. The shocked and sombre reaction of most Parisians to the burning Cathedral was shared by anyone with some sense of the debt we owe to the builders, not only those who laboured over centuries on the cathedral itself, but the millennial builders of our patrimony.

The Sorbonne Quarter lies over the river from the Cathedral, and the first universities emerged from the Church schools as expressions of Christianity’s commitment to learning.  The Sorbonne was the second of the great universities to be founded, around 1150, after Bologna. St Thomas Aquinas studied there under St Albertus Magus as the Cathedral was being constructed.

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The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

[Published in Quadrant April 2019, and on Quadrant Online as Memoirs of an Abused Altar Boy, which included links to various documents.]

…so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.                                                 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In May of 2015, the royal commission came to town, and opened public hearings in the Ballarat Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday the 19th, with Justice McClennan presiding. Counsel Assisting, Gail Furness SC, outlined the evidence that was expected to be given, and a number of victims gave evidence about the abuse they suffered. The next day’s proceedings opened with the evidence of Gordon Hill about his abuse at the hands of priests and nuns while he lived at St Joseph’s Home in Sebastopol near Ballarat. He was followed by number of other witnesses, some of whom alleged that they had informed the then Father George Pell about abuse centred on the Ballarat East parish, where Pell was, for some time, an assistant priest. David Ridsdale also repeated his allegation that Pell attempted to bribe him to keep quiet about his abuse at the hands of his uncle, the then Fr Gerald Ridsdale.

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Video Secrets

[An edited version of this article was published in Quadrant Online as Bile! You’re on Qatar’s Candid Camera.]

Two weeks ago, Comedy Central’s Jim Jefferies responded to the Christchurch massacre with a hit piece on Avi Yemini, who is one of the emerging breed of conservative citizen reporters producing videos on social media. Jefferies had interviewed Yemini a few months prior to the massacre, but rushed his heavily edited footage to air as an exposé of Australian white supremacism. It was built around a portrayal of Yemini as an anti-Muslim activist and an anti-black racist.

Unfortunately for Jefferies, Yemini had secretly recorded their conversation. When Jefferies had aired his ambush, Yemini followed suit with a short series combining segments from Jefferies’ piece with unedited sequences from his own. The results are devastating for Jim Jefferies and Comedy Central, as you can see here.

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Men, Improved

[First published in Quadrant Online as Gender Quotas, Merit and Faux Equality.]

Since the outbreak of #metoo hashtagging in the Federal parliamentary Liberal Party, Peta Credlin (among others) has been promoting targets for Liberal women in Parliament.  Simultaneously, she decries quotas as promoted by, for example, the Labor Party.  Women, she says, don’t want a handicapping system for men; women want to win entirely on their own merits; women don’t want to walk into the party room aware that there were better candidates whose shoes they are not quite filling; etc, etc, etc.  Women who are like Peta only want to get into Parliament by their own honest and honourable efforts.

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Men Are Mortal

[First published in Quadrant Online as ‘Slut-Shamed’ Victimhood’s Loose Logic]

Men are mortal.
ScoMo is a man.
Therefore, ScoMo is mortal.

Is there anything wrong with this argument?  A stickler for logical forms would insist that the first premiss should be All men are mortal.  Fair enough.  But if you put the initial form of the argument to a large sample of Australian voters, how many would object?  A statement like men are mortal will generally be accepted as a class attribution.

Now try this one.

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