Australia's new boss of men's behaviour
SHAMEFUL and SEXIST World First says Bettina Arndt
A broadcast from Sydney by "Other side" with Damian Coory: https://www.adh.tv/
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General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice
I am pleased to see that George Monbiot (below) is getting disillusioned by the limits of government. We might get a libertarian out of him yet
Everything hangs on them but little changes. For weeks or months, elections dominate national life. Media reports and public conversations are monopolised by furious jostling and frantic speculation. All else – policymaking, problem-solving, reason itself – grinds to a halt. Unsurprisingly, when the frenzy is over, we discover we have solved almost none of our problems.
An election is a device for maximising conflict and minimising democracy. Parties gain ground by sowing division and anger, often around trivial issues that play to their advantage. At the same time, as the big players seek to appease commercial lobbies and the billionaire press, they converge disastrously on far more important issues, such as austerity, privatised public services, massive inequality of wealth and the unfolding genocide in Gaza. Many of those who seek election manipulate, distract and lie.
Communities are set against each other: see how the Tories appeal to their elderly base by treating young people as a problem to be solved, currently through national service. The parties reduce our complex choices to a brutal binary; sometimes, as in the 2019 election, to a three-word slogan (Get Brexit Done). Vast questions, such as the environmental crisis, the spiral of accumulation by the wealthy, the possibility of food system failure or the resurgent threat of nuclear war, remain unresolved and generally unmentioned. All that is left to us, except for a 10-second action every five years, is to sit and hope. We end up, in our supposedly representative system, with a highly unrepresentative parliament and a perennial sense of disappointment.
Just as capitalism is arguably the opposite of markets, general elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule. After the American and French revolutions, the designers of the new political systems chose elections as a way of excluding the majority, whom they did not trust, from a meaningful involvement in power. Some of them, such as John Adams, James Madison, Antoine Barnave and Boissy D’Anglas, inveighed against the frightening concept of democracy, and insisted those elected should be a class apart, distinguished from the common people as a “natural aristocracy” of the wise, virtuous and competent. I think we can determine how well that worked out.
In the UK, our political model was settled in the 18th century, when democracy was a dirty word and parliament regarded the people with a mixture of contempt and fear. It survived the introduction of the universal franchise almost intact. Why does our system keep electing people whose incomes, assets, interests and psychology are hugely at variance with ours? Because that is what it is designed to do.
There are many alternatives, stifled not by infeasibility but by the determination of powerful people to retain control. In previous columns I’ve mentioned Murray Bookchin’s popular assembly model, implemented in Rojava in north-eastern Syria, in which decisions are handed up from local communities, rather than down from a distant centre; and the highly successful participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, which ensured that money went where it was needed most, rather than to favoured interests. But I don’t want to be prescriptive about the form that deliberative, participatory democracy should take. There are dozens of potential models.
In David Van Reybrouck’s excellent book Against Elections, he favours “sortition”: choosing members of political bodies by lottery. This is how much of political life was run in ancient Athens and in Venice, Florence and other European cities in the second millennium. Today, algorithms can be used to ensure the results of the lottery closely reflect the composition of society.
Hang on, you say. What if incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested people, without expertise, were to find themselves in powerful roles? It’s likely, of course. But deliberative processes possess the extraordinary property of transforming their participants. This is why they work better in practice than in theory. Ordinary citizens tend quickly to take responsibility, to inform themselves, listen respectfully and seek to build consensus. Their decisions tend to be fairer, greener, bolder and more inclusive than those of elected chambers.
Every argument against participation can be returned with interest against elected representation. Incompetent, corrupt, reckless, self-interested? Don’t get me started. Those chosen by lot, whose selection cannot be influenced by money or lobbying, are likely to be more resistant to both. No expertise? Our representatives certainly possess expertise, but generally in self-promotion and electioneering. As we keep discovering, many, elbowing their way from one ministry to the next, are incapable of addressing our predicaments.
Much of the critique of participatory democracy is classist. The working classes cannot be trusted to think for themselves; they must be steered by enlightened guardians. This snobbery extends all the way from Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, to Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto.
We should not accept any change to our political system without evidence that it works. But plenty is accumulating, as citizens’ assemblies and constitutional conventions are used by governments to resolve issues that are too divisive, complex or long-term for the dominant system to handle. When they are well designed, they have proved highly effective at addressing issues that left elected representatives floundering. Ireland used citizens’ groups to help resolve its debates on equal marriage and abortion, overcoming apparently intractable divisions in a largely Catholic nation. France has used a citizens’ assembly to help find a way through the complex and politically hazardous issue of assisted dying.
Between 2021 and 2023, 160 new citizens’ assemblies were set up to resolve difficult problems. Forty of these bodies are now permanent. They help address, for example, homelessness in Paris, urban design in Lisbon and climate policy in Brussels. In the German-speaking part of Belgium, a citizens’ council forms the regional parliament’s second chamber.
A next step, as Van Reybrouck and others have suggested, could be to generalise this model, replacing one parliamentary chamber, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, with a people’s assembly. This could evolve towards an entirely participatory system, largely based on sortition, in which everyone has an equal chance to make the decisions on which our lives depend. You care about democracy? Then you should hope to see an end to elections like this one.
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Our kamikaze elites
Sometimes you get a better view of your own society from the outside than the inside, where the steady, daily drip of declining standards can inure you to what’s going on. A recent trip to Japan demonstrated that there are still societies where honour and integrity matter, they’re just mostly not in the Anglosphere.
In Japan a school principal, 59, was recently fired for repeatedly helping himself to larger coffees than he had paid for at a store; he had his retirement pay of around AUD$180,000 cancelled and his teaching licence revoked. His offences had cost about $5. A council employee elsewhere also lost his job for paying for a $1 coffee and serving himself a $2 coffee. Harsh? Yes. It is a shock to lax Westerners to see honesty and laws taken so seriously.
In case you think these offences are trivial, here’s a serious example. When former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated in July 2022, the Nara police chief apologised copiously for security failures, head bowed in shame, in a public press conference the very next day. He admitted fault both personally and corporately. One month later both he and the national police chief resigned over the matter.
Contrast this with the infamous Uvalde school massacre in Texas, which occurred two months before. The disgraced school police chief, whose forces waited over an hour to engage the shooter, neither apologised nor resigned, defended his indefensible actions and had to be sacked three months later. His men had been clustered in the corridor outside the killing field of the schoolroom, cravenly killing time, checking phones and applying hand sanitiser as the killer executed 19 victims, most schoolchildren.
Pundit Mark Steyn has taken to commenting that countries become more Western the further east you go, which is to say, Western in the old sense of abiding by Judeo-Christian values. I can’t vouch for that, but I do remember when Labor Minister Mick Young stood down from the Hawke ministry over failing to declare the import of a Paddington Bear, a high bar for a sackable offence if ever there was one. These days, PM Albanese takes no responsibility for the failed Voice campaign, although we all know he would have crowed from the rooftops had it got up. Former UK PM Boris Johnston partied willy-nilly with staffers during Covid lockdowns and failed to even show shame at being found out, while in the US Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have ever heard of the notion of accepting blame or responsibility. Did US heads roll over the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal, where civilians fell from aeroplanes and terror groups looted an army’s worth of abandoned military hardware? Is anyone responsible for the many millions of invading illegals at the US border? What about the secret Washington censorship campaign revealed in the Twitter files, any apologies or sackings? Has Biden junior or senior apologised for the litany of debauchery emerging from Hunter’s digital devices – images of himself cavorting naked with prostitutes, weighing drugs with a hooker and far worse. No apologies or jobs lost over the Russia collusion hoax that the Democrats and the intel services perpetrated on Trump, and the dirty dealing with Chinese labs that saw gain-of-function funded by US monies, despite Covid supremo Tony Fauci’s denials. Instead the Biden regime continues the Uvalde police chief’s tactic of deny, dodge and delay.
Japan seemed exceptional in other ways, not only in honesty and integrity. One day in the Ginza, we ran into some acquaintances who were starry-eyed at what they had experienced. ‘Our first trip but it won’t be our last,’ they said, joining the surging throng of Australian tourists to Japan, it now being our third-most-popular destination. Apart from a plummeting yen and top ski fields, Japan also offers an exemplary cultural homogeneity, a society that prioritises beauty, order and politeness, spotless and quiet streets even in the midst of a 37-million strong city, no graffiti, no hobos, no litter, the locals trim, relaxed and well-dressed. The Ginza has been greened, with newly tree-lined streets, walls and balconies; gusts of jasmine-scented air greeted us in one main street. That’s climate action we could all get behind. Compared with Bourke or Pitt streets, this is an urban paradise.
Of course, Japan has its problems, such as its plunging fertility rate, and a hyper-ageing society where 29 per cent are already aged over 65. The Ginza is an upmarket area and hardly typical. But on the question of values, it is clear that Japan’s leaders still believe in and uphold the Japan project.
In his book 1984, George Orwell listed ways in which societies could collapse; one was when elites lost faith in their own society’s core principles. Christianity, the rule of law, our British-derived institutions, equality not equity, a justice system blind to special pleading, even the idea of men and women, few of these are defended by our current crop of politicians.
Free speech is now our latest casualty, with eSafety Karen, Julie Inman Grant, demanding Twitter/X censor a video of a Muslim youth stabbing a bishop, and Australian media incomprehensibly piling on to attack the hated billionaire, Elon Musk and by extension, free speech. That the offending video was pulled down in Australia, that an infinite number of other violent videos such as the George Floyd incident can be seen everywhere at will, that other platforms such as YouTube were not prevented from showing it, and that the video itself showed little that was graphic, seemed not to matter.
In an essay, Orwell talked about generations of Western intellectual ‘destroyers’ who fought to overturn religious belief. ‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.’
Australia’s elites, following the US and UK lead, seem to have lost faith in their nation’s values.
Japan shows us what we have squandered.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/our-kamikaze-elites/
*****************************************************Christianity under increasing attack from a much more intolerant and authoritarian religion: Leftism
Is the Bible hate speech? Could a Christian minister, or any ordinary person, be prosecuted for reading out sections of the New Testament?
In fact, this is almost the case in law already, as we’ll see. A slew of legal, legislative, bureaucratic and cultural trends make it likely to become a practical reality in time.
It will not only be the Bible. Countless Christian classics from almost every denomination will be liable to be, if not banned from sale, banned from public display, recital or reading aloud. The Catholic catechism, the official compendium of belief for the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, may well have to be trafficked in brown paper envelopes under the counter.
Christianity may become like smoking, tolerated at law for a while, but ever more narrowly, with ever more restrictions, actively discouraged by punitive financial measures.
The Albanese government, like the Morrison government, has abandoned the attempt at a religious discrimination law to protect people of faith. Like the Morrison government, it won’t even present a bill for public consideration.
Both sides of politics, when in government, are paralysed by fear of having the debate about religious freedom and how that interacts with other freedoms. Surely the voice referendum demonstrated the danger of not having a big open debate before implementing fundamental change.
This political timidity indicates cowardice in the face of rising prejudice, in some cases hatred, against Christianity in the activist class, and the anti-Christian assumptions increasingly permeating the bureaucratic and institutional elites. Former Labor senator Jacinta Collins, now executive director of the National Catholic Education Commission, tells Inquirer: “In the public policy class, the political elite and the policy bureaucracy, it’s becoming more common not to see Christianity as a social good.”
Melbourne’s Catholic Archbishop, Peter Comensoli, remarks: “Step by small step, the path of living a life of faith in our country is being undermined. But there are always seeds of hope.”
A fundamental cultural change is under way here, perhaps the most destructive we’ve seen. Official Australia, more the bureaucrat/academic/media class than politicians, no longer sees Christianity as a social good. Rather, they see it now as anti-social, something to be constrained.
This is not a story about a perfidious left-wing Labor government assaulting Christian churches. Both sides of politics are flummoxed and scared by this. Neither handles it well. Anthony Albanese and at least some of his ministers are sympathetic to Christian churches. But there’s a severe limit to how far this sympathy will take them in defending Christian institutions against bureaucratic, activist and sectional effort to destroy their independence and religious integrity.
There’s a lot of legislative action, but the seething cultural dynamics suggest no prospect of lasting settlement.
The Sex Discrimination Act contains an exemption, section 38, for religious bodies. Otherwise, Catholics, Greek Orthodox, conservative Anglicans and others couldn’t have an all-male priesthood. Religious schools are allowed to preference teachers who support their core ethos. So Christian schools don’t hire gay activists. They knowingly hire plenty of gay people but they don’t want activist teachers running campaigns against the core beliefs of the school.
Almost none of them hires exclusively co-religionists. Most exhibit common sense; they want enough teachers who share the faith of the school so as to promote those beliefs. Thus, Collins says: “We (Catholic schools) have lots of teachers from diverse religious backgrounds and from none. That’s great, so long as they operate in sympathy with the ethos of the school.”
Most religious school authorities therefore want the right to “discriminate” in hiring staff and to accept and reject whatever students they choose. No Catholic or Anglican I spoke to for this story, or whom I’ve ever met in a lifetime’s involvement in Christian schools, could recall any student ever being expelled for any reason related to sexual identity.
However, non-government schools can expel a student who behaves unacceptably. It’s possible you could get a student who, at age 16 or 17, decided they hated the church their school is affiliated with and campaigned against it. If that student clothed their campaign in a protected characteristic, such as gender status or sexual identity, the school wouldn’t be able to deal with them if the exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act is removed.
It’s wrong to think of this as Christian institutions wanting to discriminate. Rather, they want the right of free association. Christians, like everyone else, should be allowed to associate with each other and form institutions that reflect their values.
Kanishka Raffel, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, tells Inquirer: “Our (Anglican) schools have young people who identify as LGBT, and are happy and supported and not desperate to go somewhere else – nor would we want them to. We’re only asking for the same rights as political parties have.”
Raffel means that the Labor Party is not required to employ, or even admit as members, people who oppose Labor and support the Liberal Party. Increasingly Christian institutions are denied this elementary freedom.
Raffel continues: “Christianity accepts a pluriform world. The New Testament advises Christians, even if unfairly attacked, to ‘give an answer for their hope’ and to do so with ‘gentleness and respect’.
“That’s the biblical seed of contemporary pluralism. It’s religious. It’s Christian. But at one end of the spectrum there’s a totalitarian secularism that doesn’t countenance religious speech. In Australia we’ve had a confident pluralism. It’s that kind of practice which is now under attack. It (this attack) is driven by activists in thrall to the prevailing ideology of identity and sexuality, who will not countenance alternative world views.”
Raffel’s view, that this intolerance threatens pluralism, is widely shared among Christian denominations. Mark Varughese, founder of the international Kingdomcity Pentecostal church, and a member of the Australian Christian Churches executive, accuses elites of weaponising tolerance.
“The trend appears to be to almost suffocate the ability of faith-based organisations to employ according to their ethos,” Varughese says. “But you don’t have to go to any of these schools. Those who choose to go to them have a right to expect an environment which reflects their beliefs. Weaponising tolerance to erode the freedom of those who want a unique space to grow is the ultimate irony.
“This is not about hating any part of society. The faith of the gospel is based on the belief that we are all sinners and we all need a saviour. People can choose not to believe in God. Why would you be offended by the principles of a God you don’t believe exists?”
The government blames the opposition for not reaching bipartisan agreement on a religious discrimination bill. The opposition says it won’t support a bill the major faith leaders oppose, so the government should get the major faith leaders onboard, then there would be the basis for bipartisanism.
The Catholic and Anglican leaders, plus a group of other faith leaders including non-Christians, wrote to the Prime Minister and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, outlining in detail where they thought the draft legislation was inadequate. They argued strongly that removing the religious exemption from the Sex Discrimination Act and passing the religious freedom legislation as it was shown to them would leave Christian schools seriously worse off in their ability to run effectively.
Everybody has somebody else to blame and nothing gets done. The Christian leaders are in a tough, uncertain spot. Some of them think they must press for the best deal they can get from the Albanese government, get something resolved now. A future parliament, with Labor perhaps in minority government and dependent on the Greens, would likely use the “progressive majority” to attack the churches much more aggressively.
The counter-argument is that the churches cannot willingly accept legislation that gravely weakens their ability to run their schools and other institutions with integrity. A weak settlement now would easily be undone by a more aggressively anti-Christian parliament and the churches, having surrendered now, would be in a weaker position then.
The key is they must fight, even if they fight in a kindly way. The Scripture passage Raffel referred to occurs in the first letter of Peter, who advises Christians: “Even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.”
Albanese has promised Christian leaders their schools won’t go backwards in their ability to operate independently. However, now it has abandoned a religious discrimination bill, the government plans to introduce hate speech legislation and insert criminal penalties for vilification or hate speech. Christian leaders find this alarming because, as I suggested at the start of this piece, modern anti-discrimination bodies, extreme LGBTI lobbies and others, now regard normal Christian teaching as hate speech
Comensoli puts the broader cultural context: “It’s death by a thousand cuts. Places of influence like the media, academia, corporations, are all signing up to agendas that see the Christian Church as the problem. We’re disappointed that a religious discrimination bill won’t go ahead. And given that, we’re concerned about the proposed vilification legislation and the very low threshold at which vilification cuts in.”
The proposed hate speech law is a needed response to the shocking, appalling outbreaks of anti-Semitic abuse that Australia, like many Western nations, has witnessed.
How then could such legislation be weaponised against Christians? This is likely because the legislation will not just protect religious and racial identities but all protected characteristics, including sex, gender status, sexual orientation and various other categories. It will introduce criminal penalties, including harsh jail terms, for offensive speech in these areas and will not override state anti-discrimination commissions and laws.
A number of states, Tasmania, Victoria and now Queensland, already have anti-discrimination laws with no or little religious exemption. But generally federal laws take precedence. They won’t do so in this case.
Now, discrimination “offences” incur mainly civil penalties. With hate law legislation they would become criminal offences. Numerous state anti-discrimination commissions have already shown an inclination to regard normal Christian teaching and passages of the Bible effectively as hate speech.
The New International Version of the Bible translates a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians thus: “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor men who have sex with men, nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
That’s isn’t a condemnation of anyone’s identity but of certain behaviours. The gospels and the letters of Paul, Peter and the others never condemn anyone’s identity. They do teach against certain behaviours and attitudes. A gay sexual orientation in traditional Christian teaching is not a moral fault, but sex outside marriage is immoral. Paul is assuredly not saying that anyone who doesn’t live up to the moral ideal is condemned to hell. But as Varughese put it, all human beings need forgiveness.
Similarly, the Catholic catechism, in explaining human sexuality, comments: “Homosexual acts are inherently disordered.” This also refers to behaviour, not identity. Is it hate speech? In Christian theology, disordered means not in accordance with the order God wants in creation. But in modern parlance disordered has a medical connotation. The catechism also says of gay people that “they must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity” and there must not be discrimination against them.
No one is required to accept, or even pay any attention to, Christian teaching on this or any other matter. The question is whether Christians will be allowed to speak and teach their faith.
Michael Stead, Anglican Bishop of South Sydney, says the proposed hate speech law “has the potential to criminalise religious speech that expresses traditional understandings of human sexuality”.
Everyone is free to disagree with, lampoon, contest or ignore Christian teachings. But should it be a criminal offence for Christians and Christian institutions even to express them? This is not theoretical or far-fetched. In 2015, Catholic Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous was subject to 12 months of harassment and inquisition by the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission. He had published the gentlest defence of traditional marriage. The activist class encouraged people to take offence and lodge a complaint. Eventually the complaint was withdrawn, never adjudicated in Porteous’s favour.
Recently Porteous wrote another pastoral letter and circulated it to Catholic parishes and schools. It taught the positive Christian case for universal human dignity but also said, inter alia: “We are now witnessing the imposition of certain ideological positions on social and moral questions by means of legislation … This has included the attack on the biological reality of being male and female.”
Porteous argued proposed legislative changes allow “for a priest to have a complaint made against him for simply presenting Catholic teaching while preaching at a Sunday mass”. Two Tasmanian politicians threatened to make complaints to the Anti-Discrimination Commission.
I wrote and spoke in favour of a Yes vote in the same-sex marriage plebiscite because I thought it implausible for the state to enforce elements of Christian teaching for which there was no longer a consensus. Also, we’d long ago allowed gay couples to adopt kids. Therefore it seemed better for the kids if their parents had the status of a civil marriage. But in holding that view it’s not necessary to demand Christian churches abandon their teachings of 2000 years or be prosecuted if they don’t do so.
Recently the Productivity Commission argued church school building funds should lose tax deductibility. This seems a vicious assault on religious schools’ ability to build and expand. Every parent who sends a kid to a non-government school pays a massive subsidy to the state by shouldering a large part of the financial burden that the state would otherwise pay for fully.
The Productivity Commission proposal is just one more bit of evidence of how pervasively hostile to Christianity ruling elites have become. Sydney Catholic Archbishop Anthony Fisher recently delivered a brilliant speech imagining Australia in 2035, where he has to submit his weekly sermon in advance to a government censor – under a Greens-teals coalition – that determines what can be said in all religious pronouncements.
That situation prevails in some countries, just not in democracies.
As historian Tom Holland demonstrates so elegantly in Dominion, everything Western society likes about itself – welfare, human rights, equality of the sexes, concern for the poor – comes directly from the Jewish and Christian traditions. Yet we now inhabit a cultural moment in which you can scream “F..k the Jews!” and suffer no legal consequence at all. But read out the wrong bit of the New Testament …
For Australian institutional life now to become so irrationally hostile to Christianity is a mark of madness, a terrible cultural mistake. But mistakes can be corrected.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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