You reap what you sow, as St Paul once said. Thanks to Israel Folau, we know that St Paul said many things, some especially controversial in these woke times. Setting that to one side, his words to the Galatians about harvesting what we planted come readily to mind in these dark days for Australia’s future. They are fiddling in Macquarie Street – with the Liberals possibly about to embark on a course that would see their fifth premier in eleven years and skirmishing over the tidbit that is the NSW Party presidency election – while Australia is burning. We have Barilaro and friends all over the front pages, and the real analysis of our far worse national predicament consigned to deep within the newspapers, with the likes of the estimable Terry McCrann and Graham Lloyd setting out in forensic detail just what we face in eight short years. But it isn’t just about net zero. In all three areas of emerging disaster, the surveillance state (born of Covid totalitarianism), net zero fossil fuel and the completely woke generation with faith only in our “feelings”, the right-of-centre “broad church” only has itself to blame.
In relation to the crushing of king coal, it will be said – no doubt is being said – that electing Albo was facilitating a fast track to economic disaster, what with the latest deal with the Greens on 43 per cent by 2030. If only we still had ScoMo and the Liberal Teals! Hold it right there. The deal that is emerging now had its roots in the reasonably distant past and descends directly from Coalition dilly-dallying, inaction and virtue signalling. Cast our minds back to 1998. It was on the Coalition’s watch that we were gifted the National Renewable Energy Target. With principled but only minor and easily sidelined opposition from stalwarts like the late Ron Boswell. Then there were all the subsidies to renewables. We had John Howard promoting Malcolm Turnbull to the front bench and to, yes, of all portfolios, the Environment. Years later, Howard persuaded the Malchurian candidate to stay in politics when we all thought we had finally rid ourselves of his presence. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Howard was never a full-on climate sceptic, of course. Even Tony Abbott, by far the most sensible Liberal on climate garbage, felt constrained when leader to only share his real thoughts in private. At a branch meeting in Beaufort, Victoria, to be precise. Yes, he did stop certain taxes related to mining, just as Howard had manfully resisted Kyoto. But the broad church that Abbott briefly ran, and that he has served so faithfully, has lurched further and further into the murky depths of climate centrism, being neither one thing nor the other. Paraphrasing John O’Sullivan, you might say that any institution that doesn’t begin by being a climate denier will end up being a full-on climate warrior, or at least indifferent to the economic disaster that such a position portends. And so it has proven. The embrace of net zero, in whatever form, by so-called Tories from Boris Johnson to Matt Kean – who on earth can even remember, or ever understood, what ScoMo had in mind? – has embedded in the Liberal Party a position of wishy-washy timidity, of fearing to stand up to what the late, great Peter Walsh would, no doubt, have termed “economic vandalism” pursued by “the (green) fairies at the bottom of the garden” (though he possibly might not get away with that last one today). No, the Coalition has been quite culpable in opening the door wide to the green-leftists now in charge. Not least by driving from the Party those who just might have stood up to be counted on issues like climate. The great American conservative William F Buckley Jr described himself as standing athwart history yelling “stop”. In contrast, our Coalition parties have been whispering, “proceed cautiously towards disaster”. With the Libs in power, it (sadly) does not follow that all is right with the world. In any sense of the word “right”.
Who has been overseeing the education system that has produced the current generation of middle and senior bureaucrats now running the show, all educated in our third-rate schools and universities and emerging with fixed ideologies, now weaponised, in relation to the three national threats outlined above? None of the strategies and tools that might have been deployed to arrest the leftwards movement in our educational institutions have even been contemplated. Right-of-centre politicians have simply ceded the territory that matters, and now the enemy within occupies the commanding heights on just about every issue that is capable of rendering us barren of culture, robbing us of our freedom and rights, and leaving us (literally) without power. On the life-and-culture issues that are so important to the “outsiders”, like freedom of faith and the freedom to oppose, or at least question, for example, abortion, euthanasia and rainbowism – the major parties have simply outsourced their principles to the safe haven of a “conscience vote”. They have abandoned their former-own, in favour of the woke class.
So, yes, let us, by all means, worry about Pork Barilaro and his careerist cronies, and what the behaviour of the NSW Liberal Government reveals about the sturdiness, virtue and morality of our political class. Let us nail the corrupt and the liars in our political midst, and remove bad governments where we see them (as we should). But, for God’s sake, let us not forget to read and ponder the Terry McCranns and the Graham Lloyds, who are telling us with a megaphone that our days are just about numbered. There is nothing much in the legacy parties and their acolytes (the Lib-Lab-Greens-Teals “quad”, as Lyle Shelton calls the new governing class) that raises any glimmer of hope. Because of their own tawdry record and the persistence of a moderate-led ruling ideology, the Libs can legitimately say little in relation to the new green turn. That around a third of the electorate saw fit totally to ignore the quad parties, either by voting for the FFMPs (freedom-friendly minor parties) or not at all, suggests a mix of anger and hopelessness in relation to our future.
It is said with considerable wisdom that “conservative” parties in our current political culture are merely driving us towards Armageddon at the speed limit. Their unwillingness to fight the great conservative fights, born of a mix of spinelessness, self-interest rather than a true desire to serve the nation and an identity crisis, has delivered us to this time of existential national crisis. Well, the chickens are now flapping home to roost, and the words of St Paul ring loudly in our ears.
Paul Collits
4 August 2022
Another reality worthy of worry is the potential for foot and mouth to devastate our agriculture industry.
With the Davos mob and Bill Gates in full on attack on the food producers in the Netherlands and Canada, is it paranoid to suggest that the lackadaisical attitude on display by the current regime is actually intended to dump this disease in Australia? Have the WEF infiltrated the Australian polity to the extent that the government's apparent lack of concern is on order from Schwabenland?