Information Commissioner To Investigate SBS Over Deleted Bushfires Article

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has looked at my submission and decided to commence a review into the rejection of my Freedom of Information request seeking information from SBS as to why they deleted an old Australian Associated Press article from their website titled:  "Fires not due to climate change:  expert — covered here back in March.

The 2013 article resurfaced in November 2019 and was shared around social media by many Australians in the wake of opportunistic alarmism from the green politicians and left wing media that the bushfires at the time were the result of climate change.  But on November 12, it was inexplicably taken down from the SBS website.

The article featured the considered opinion of retired Monash University researcher and former CSIRO scientist David Packham OAM, who said linking bushfires to climate change is "absolute nonsense" and reducing fuel loads in the Australian bush is urgently needed to reduce the intensity of bushfires.  

A day or two later, after media scrutiny as to why it was deleted, the SBS put the article back online but featured a new preamble.  The substance of the new paragraphs was to confirm that Packham still held the same views then as he did in 2013.  In response, Packham said "The most important (factor) is the dryness of the fuel, which comes from hot dry weather ... the theory is as solid as the universal theory of gravitation." 

One could be mistaken for thinking that the SBS felt that the link between climate change and bushfires was now unimpeachable and that this update would discredit Packham. 

A manual search I conducted found that SBS had never before updated old AAP articles on its website.

Public broadcasters have an extra duty of care to be impartial.  Taking down an old article, not even authored by them, because it doesn't fit the established groupthink, appears to be an act of bias worth investigating.

It is interesting to note the SBS is a member of the 'Your Right to Know' campaign, which argues for "A suite of changes to FOI law to reduce and restrict the significant delays, obstacles, cost and exemptions that allow government agencies to prevent disclosure." 

These are the very tools the SBS has been employing to avoid oversight in regards to this issue.  It advocates for the very kind of transparency and accountability in areas of government that it will not accept for itself.

A detailed legal reasoning behind my appeal to the OAIC is available here.

The Rage Of The Economics Establishment

An article on these pages last weekend by this newspaper's economics correspondent, Matthew Cranston, titled "We need reform like we've never seen before" revealed everything that's wrong with what Australians are told about economics.  And it reveals why many people were apoplectic when Treasurer Josh Frydenberg dared suggest there were lessons to be learnt from the success of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Cranston discussed the opinions of prominent current and former advisers to government about what was required to improve the country's economic performance.  One of the people whose views Cranston referred to was Bernie Fraser.

As secretary of the federal Department of the Treasury for five years and then governor of the Reserve Bank for seven years, Fraser sat at the pinnacle of economic policy decision-making.  After his retirement from the public service, Fraser joined the board of two large industry superannuation funds.  If there's a doyen of economic policy in Australia, it's probably Bernie Fraser.  (If there were two such doyens it would be Fraser and Ross Garnaut.)  If there's was an "Economics Establishment" in Australia, Fraser would be its president.

It would not be unreasonable therefore to assume Fraser's opinions are not unrepresentative of many, if not the majority of, public servants advising the government on economic policy think.  It would also not be unreasonable to assume Fraser's opinions are not dissimilar to those of many academic and business economists.

Cranston introduced Fraser's remarks with the following:  "He [Fraser] says previous governments have certainly had their chance to reform in the past few decades but have blown it."

And then Fraser himself says the following:  "Howard and Costello had a golden opportunity to use the revenues to invest in productive infrastructure ― some of it went to the Future Fund ― but really they spent it on tax cuts.  They pissed it up the wall even when the economy was building up steam."

If you're someone who thinks, as Fraser does, that the government allowing taxpayers to keep more of their own money is "pissing it up the wall" then of course you're going to be overwrought at the slightest mention of Thatcher or Reagan.  In Reagan's first budget his 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act cut the top marginal rate of federal personal income tax from 70 per cent to 50 per cent and the lowest rate from 14 per cent to 11 per cent.

The biggest problem with Fraser's way of thinking about the economy and the role of government is his belief that when the government is cutting taxes the government is "spending" money.  No, it isn't.  Only someone who has spent basically their entire working life working for the government could believe that.  But this is how government and how people working for the government now think, and it's an attitude that pervades practically every aspect of economic management and regulation in this country.  ASIC officials, for example, are particularly fond of telling taxpayers how fortunate they are to be allowed to manage their own superannuation.

The belief that taxpayers' money is the government's money is an idea that's been around a lot longer than Bernie Fraser.  It's exactly such a belief that Thatcher and Reagan rebelled against.  And they also had no truck with the implication of Fraser's remark that part of the solution to a country's problems is for the government to spend more money on infrastructure.  Maybe sometimes the government should, but more often than not it shouldn't.  No one knows for sure how much the NBN has cost already, and is still yet to cost ― it's a figure somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion.  Today only Kevin Rudd would argue it was money well spent, and to this day it's never been established that such "productive infrastructure" could not have been implemented quicker and more cheaply by the private sector.

The point to remember about Thatcher and Reagan is not only the one Frydenberg made:  that their policies were successful.  What's often forgotten about what they did is that cutting taxes was just as unpopular with the Economics Establishment in the UK and the US in the 1980s as it is with the Economics Establishment in Australia in 2020.

Peter Ridd Challenge Goes To the Heart Of A Free Society

Peter Ridd has decided to fight last week's decision in favour of James Cook University, and the case is of such public importance that the High Court simply must allow the appeal to be heard.

The Ridd case is much more than a mere workplace relations dispute between an academic and his employer.  It is even bigger than a dispute about climate change.

It is about the free speech crisis at our universities, and goes to the heart of the "cancel culture" epidemic engulfing the Western world.

Ridd is a Townsville-based marine geophysicist and Great Barrier Reef expert, whose 30-year academic career effectively ended when he started disputing the conventional wisdom that climate change was "killing" the reef.  He subsequently took the university to court, winning $1.2m in compensation for his unlawful sacking.  Last week, the Federal Court overturned that win in a 2-1 decision.

In deciding whether to grant special leave for the appeal, the High Court will consider whether the case involves "a question of law that is of public importance".  The Ridd matter easily meets this threshold.  It would be the first time the High Court has been called upon to consider the meaning of "academic and intellectual freedom", which is used in enterprise agreements covering staff at almost all Australian universities.

The court's decision will therefore have very real consequences in terms of university governance, and the extent to which administrators tolerate controversial (and, often, commercially inconvenient) opinions from the professoriate.

Should "intellectual freedom" be limited by the whims of university administrators, as JCU is arguing?  Or should it be wide enough to allow for the kind of controversial, but honestly held opinions for which Ridd was ultimately sacked?

The Federal Court's answer to that question is deeply disturbing.  In its judgment last week, the majority seemed to suggest that free speech on campus is past its use-by date.

"There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts of academic freedom," scoffed justices Griffiths and Derrington.  For good measure, the majority judgment quoted — arguably out of context — from an academic textbook outlining "a host of new challenges", like "the rise of social media" and "student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces".

If nothing else, the Federal Court has exposed just how much our public institutions have been corroded by modern cancel culture.  The free speech crisis at our universities has been apparent for years, but now the hypersensitivity of woke undergraduates is being taken seriously by our penultimate court.  It sets a precedent, and a dangerous one.  While The Australian does not suggest the judges acted improperly, it is worrying that the idea the boundaries of free speech should be defined by self-appointed cultural arbiters and anonymous Twitter mobs is on the verge of formal legal recognition.

This is not about the polite notion of so-called "acceptable limits" to free speech.  It is a radical departure from how our society treats knowledge.  Former opinion editor Bari Weiss recognised this dynamic in her sensational resignation from The New York Times recently:  "I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history," Weiss wrote.  "Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing moulded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

You could replace the words "journalism" and "history" with almost any intellectual discipline.  Woke revisionism has trashed the humanities faculties almost beyond repair.  Now it is creeping into the "hard sciences".  That is how we have arrived at a situation in which a respected academic such as Ridd is put through hell for offering a critique of the "settled science" of climate change.

If our judicial system lets JCU get away with it, every academic in the country — present and future — will be forced to choose between speaking the truth and putting bread on the table.

And for students, the Ridd case will mean the difference between tertiary education as a rigorous intellectual pursuit that invites critical thinking, or as rigid dogma that must be internalised and regurgitated in order to secure an expensive piece of paper with one's name on it.

Intellectual freedom and free speech are not antiquated notions.  They are ancient and important rights, and "public institutions" that dispense with them are not public at all.

The issues raised by the Ridd matter must at least be considered by the highest court in the land.  The implications for our most basic freedoms give every Australian a stake in its outcome.

The Federal Court Delivers A Devastating Blow Against Free Speech

The Federal Court has devastating blow against mainstream Australians, against freedom of speech and against freedom of speech on climate change by overturning the earlier decision in the Federal Circuit Court which held that Dr Peter Ridd was unlawfully dismissed by James Cook University.

Alarmingly, this decision shows that contractual provisions guaranteeing intellectual freedom do not protect academics against censorship by university administrators.  The time has come for the Morrison Government to intervene.

This has been Australia's David vs Goliath battle, with Peter Ridd on one side, backed by thousands of ordinary Australians, and JCU on the other side who secured some of the most expensive legal representation in the country in Bret Walker SC to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff.

Dr Ridd, a professor of physics at JCU, was sacked by the university for misconduct for questioning the climate change science around the Great Barrier Reef and for public statements made on the Jones & Co Sky News program.

He is now apparently considering his legal options in relation to a challenge in the High Court of Australia.  If he does decide to take up that fight, I ― as well as thousands of mainstream Australians ― will continue to support his fight for freedom of speech on climate change.

JCU has engaged some of the most expensive legal representation in the country to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff, despite crying poor about university funding in the wake of coronavirus.  It creates a massive chilling effect for any academic engaging in public debate in Australia.

The University's shameful actions prove without doubt there is a crisis of free speech at Australian universities.  Many academics are censured, but few are prepared to speak out and risk their career, particularly if faced with the prospect of legal battles and possible bankruptcy.

The case has identified a culture of censorship when it comes to challenging claims surrounding climate change and the Great Barrier Reef.  JCU to this date has never attempted to disprove claims made by Dr Ridd about the Great Barrier Reef.

Blue-Collar Jobs Are Worthy Too

Labor senator Raff Ciccone's statement at the weekend that "there is dignity in all work" is something mainstream Australians have always understood, and at last the political class appears to have cottoned on.

Ciccone called for an overhaul of state and federal environmental laws to create more blue-collar jobs, and for limitations on legal injunctions — commonly referred to as "lawfare" — launched by activist green groups.

My research estimated that the lawfare provision, section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, has put more than $65bn of investment at risk in Australia by holding up major projects such as dams, coalmines and roads in court for a total of 10,100 days since the year 2000.

Much of this investment is concentrated in job-starved regional communities and includes projects from the $16.5bn Adani coalmine in central Queensland to a $30m salmon farm in Tasmania.

Graeme Samuel's confirmation that there is evidence to support the existence of lawfare, which he spoke of in his joint press conference with Environment Minister Sussan Ley on Monday, reflects a growing consensus that jobs must be put ahead of the inflated concerns of noisy, inner-city green groups.

Even former Labor leader Bill Shorten criticised the government's "go-slow" approach to approving major projects, saying on Twitter yesterday that the "ones who miss out are Australians in need of a secure job".

The interim report of the independent review of the EPBC Act, authored by Samuel and released on Monday, also rejected adding "climate change" as a trigger for the EPBC Act.

The climate trigger, long a hobby horse of green activist groups, potentially would have ­required all greenhouse gas-­emitting projects to be approved by the federal environment minister.  This would have constituted the de facto nationalisation of approvals for Australia's resources, transport, agricultural and heavy industrial sectors and the dest­ruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Green groups also were expecting that the review would call for a federal government takeover of even more parts of environmental law.  Instead, jobs again were put first and the report recommended more devolution and decentralisation of authority to state governments — a recommendation the government has already adopted.

Ley said the government would pursue two bold reforms:  to accredit state governments to carry out environmental assessments and approvals on the federal government's behalf, and to explore market-based solutions to habitat rehabilitation.

The move to accredited state governments will substantially reduce duplication and sometimes contradictory regulatory requirements between the state and federal governments, and signals a shift away from Canberra's failed command-and-control approach to regulation.

Seeking market-based reforms to environmental conservations, meanwhile, has long been advocated by organisations such as the government's independent think tank, the Productivity Commission, to attain environmental outcomes with more flexibility and at less cost.

For example, the commission noted in its 2016 Regulation of Australian Agriculture report that "better use could be made of market-based approaches to native vegetation and biodiversity conservation at times".

The fact these two initiatives were announced on the same day as the release of an interim, rather than final, report indicates that the government is starting to understand how important job creation will be to Australia's recovery from the pandemic.

Between March and June, 815,000 jobs had been lost because of the COVID-19 social distancing regulations introduced by federal and state governments.  And while the official unemployment rate is 7.4 per cent, the real rate is 11.7 per cent once those who have on net left the labour market since March and those working zero hours are added.

Young Australians have been affected disproportionably by the lockdown measures, with 355,000 15 to 24-year-olds not in full-time education and not working, the equivalent to 29.6 per cent.  This is up from 22.3 per cent in March.

Getting Australians back into work will be the most important factor in economic and social recovery.  Mass unemployment is not only an economic problem, it is also a humanitarian tragedy.

Work is the epicentre of a good and flourishing life.  Those who work are more likely to own their own home, participate in their community and send their kids to good schools.  They are also likely to have far superior physiological and psychological health outcomes, and are less likely to become dependent on drugs and ­alcohol, or to commit crimes and to be in jail.

Losing your job because of coronavirus is one thing.  But missing out on the dignity of work because a small group of inner-city, university-credentialed elitists look down on blue-collar jobs and manual labour is not who most Australians are.

Parts of the interim report raise concerns.  The suggestion that ­project actions "must deliver a net gain for critically endangered species habitat and ecological community distribution" is vague and inviting itself to be used as a mechanism for throwing spanners in the works, while the proposed adoption of federal government-enforced national environmental standards could result in a bureaucratic and lawyer-infested investment quagmire.  These issues can be ironed out.

By putting jobs for mainstream Australians ahead of the boutique concerns of noisy activists, the government has a unique opportunity to develop a much needed pro-worker and pro-jobs economic recovery strategy.

No Excuse For Shutting Parliament In The Digital Age

There has never been a time since the end of World War II when it has been more important to scrutinise government and hold politicians to account.  There are monumental issues for the federal Parliament to debate.  The future of JobKeeper, suppression v elimination strategies for COVID-19, and the billions of dollars that are flying out of Treasury at the moment.

Parliament is the only way for these debates to be had and decisions to be adequately scrutinised.

Our elected politicians have been asking businesses and schools to change what they are doing to become "COVID-safe" workplaces.  Anything a politician asks a business owner to do, MPs should do also.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said:  "Everyone who has a job in this economy is an essential worker.  Every single job that is being done in our economy with these severe restrictions that are taking place is essential."

On Saturday Morrison announced that Parliament's next sitting fortnight, due to begin on August 4, has been cancelled due to medical advice.  He said he did not believe it would be right to exclude parliamentarians from Victoria from the Parliament.

The federal Parliament sat during World War 1 and WWII.  During the blitz, Winston Churchill ensured the British Parliament still sat.

Federal Parliament has been called off next month after Prime Minister Scott Morrison was warned it was too high risk for Victorians to attend.

If what we have is a COVID-suppression strategy, where breakouts are inevitable, the PM and premiers have rightly said we cannot keep opening and shutting down the economy.  Shutting down Parliament seems to go against that advice.

In Britain, even at the height of the pandemic crisis, the Parliament was able to come together remotely.  On April 21, it approved a motion that would allow members to participate either virtually or physically in the chamber.  MPs could take part remotely over the course of any "hybrid proceedings".

Why is this too difficult in Australia?  Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said it was "not practical" for Parliament to run via video-conferencing.

Yet there is no legal or constitutional barrier to holding virtual sittings of Parliament.  Standing orders could be altered or legislation passed here, as in Britain, to allow for members and senators to participate in parliamentary sittings virtually.  Our politicians are already doing as much for parliamentary committees.

It is important in a parliamentary democracy that our leaders can still come together via reasonable modern means, during a pandemic, to make decisions on behalf of the people who elected them to serve.

There is an important principle at stake here.  In Victoria, the state that is the origin of the latest outbreak, the Andrews Labor government has blocked all attempts to scrutinise decisions through the parliamentary accounts and estimates committee and it has suspended Parliament indefinitely.  This is a terrible precedent for the federal government to follow.

Scott Morrison said earlier this year that MPs have a bigger job to do in their communities than in Canberra.  Which is absurd.  The job of an MP and senator is to represent the communities in Parliament, so their concerns are taken up by the government.

Parliament is where the decisions that politicians make are explained to the public.  The community still does not know whether governments are pursuing a strategy of suppression or elimination.  The goalposts are constantly changing and the Parliament is where those decisions can be debated and scrutinised.

"We're all in this together."  That's the phrase the Prime Minister has led with.

At his National Press Club address last month, upon receiving a question from Channel Ten's Peter van Onselen, Morrison declined to follow the lead of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and cut the pay of politicians and senior public servants by 20 per cent, to match the pain going on in the private sector.  The cancelling of Parliament is just another reason that we are not all in this together.

Vision Of Justice

"Justice is the end [goal] of government.  It is the end of civil society," argued James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers and the fourth president of the United States, in the Federalist No. 51.  Writing in the year that the First Fleet of British ships arrived at Sydney, Madison understood that citizens need to believe in the fundamental justness of a political regime for it to survive the test of time.

This is why it is short-sighted to dismiss as juvenile the tearing down of statues, cancelling of old movies and removal of products from shelves deemed offensive.

These actions are a part of a broader conception of justice based on identity politics, which holds that the primary moral unit and therefore that which is of most relevance to justice and politics is group identity.  What matters is not the content of one's character, but what biological, racial, or gender tribe one belongs to.

The identity politics view of justice is incompatible with the traditional Western notion of justice which is based on the inherent dignity and equality of all individuals, from which notions such as equality before the law and the rule of law are derived.

These two competing conceptions of justice were on display in the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Mainstream Australians who had been patiently and diligently obeying social distancing rules were exasperated that apparently an entirely different set of rules applied to the protesters.  But what actually happened was that two entirely different regimes were operating side by side:  the mainstream regime based on the equal application of the law and the identity politics regime based on grievance, victimhood and claimed racial injustice.

Worse, the elites either actively encouraged the protests which were attended by at least four federal Labor MPs and one Greens MP, or they permitted them to take place without consequence.  The argument that it was too difficult to enforce the law given the number of protestors was clearly a nonsense.  State and federal governments have shut down roughly 80 per cent of economic and social life since mid-March.  If they wanted to enforce the law, they could have.

The protests are just the latest example of a failure of the elites to take the side of mainstream Australians.

The principal institutions of cultural influence in Australia have for decades relentlessly foisted onto us the divisive framework of identity politics.  It permeates the editorials of the ABC, tutorial rooms of universities, board reports of major corporations, pre-game rituals of major sporting codes, memos written by public servants and reports authored by taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission.

From the boardroom to the classroom and everywhere in between, mainstream Australians are consistently berated as racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic climate deniers.

The reason why Labor, the Greens, and GetUp! campaign against any cut, or even a temporary freeze, to ABC funding is they know the ABC is the chief mouthpiece for identity politics.  This is why GetUp! worked hand in glove with Labor to make ABC funding a central issue at the recent Eden-Monaro by-election.

Winston, the protagonist in George Orwell's 1984, remarked that under Big Brother the past has been "abolished … every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed."  Regime congruence demands that the past must be brought into line with the present.

If Australia is irredeemably and structurally racist, as the identitarian Left contends, then justice demands it be deconstructed and re-written so that the British brought to Australia not liberty, democracy and equality, but violence, racism, and slavery.  This is why statues must be toppled, rather than more being added, and history books re-written, rather than to simply have more discussion of our history.  The point is not to debate, but to alienate mainstream Australians from their own country.

A sign of things to come is the New York Times' 1619 Project, whose objective it is to reframe American history, "understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."  The project argues modern America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619 when African slaves were first brought to the British colonies of North America.  The point being that America was founded on slavery not liberty.  A school curriculum with content based on the 1619 Project has to date been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states across America.

If this is not a culture war, then nothing is.

Fortunately, mainstream Australians have proven remarkably resilient to the division encouraged by the elites.  According to polling undertaken in 2019 and 2020, 71 per cent of Australians believe Australia has a history to be proud of, 88 per cent are proud to be Australian, and 92 per cent believe freedom of speech is an important Australian value.

This polling reflects a reality that there is more that unites than divides us as a country.

Two nurses or mechanics living in Dandenong, Penrith, Longreach, or Elizabeth of different racial backgrounds have far more in common than they do not.  Most likely they own a home and are raising their own family or they aspire to, they work hard and want a better life for themselves and their family, they are honest, dutifully pay their taxes and follow the law, they take people as they are, and if they don't themselves work in a small business one of their neighbours does.

The central debate today is a regime-level one about what it means to be an Australian, with mainstream Australian values on one side and identity politics on the other.  But a house divided cannot stand, and only one vision of justice for Australia will prevail.

How Coronavirus Is Killing Small Business ― And Threatening Our Values

The heart of the Australian way of life is under threat with small businesses fighting for survival as lockdown restrictions continue.  The crisis has hastened the ongoing decline of small business that functions as the fabric that holds local communities together.

A survey commissioned by the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia revealed a third of sole traders have been hit with an 80% decline in turnover, while three in four small businesses have experienced a decline in revenue since the beginning of the lockdown restrictions.

The restrictions over the last three months have placed a particular strain on small business.  Small outward-facing businesses, particularly in the accommodation and hospitality industries, who are dependent on tourism and foot traffic have been crippled by border and movement restrictions.  Small cafes and restaurants have seen their operations severely impacted with limits on patrons.  Businesses with limited floor space have been less equipped to accommodate social distancing measures.  And business startups have had their momentum arrested.  While the hit to revenue and operations has affected businesses big and small, in the long run it will likely be smaller and less established businesses that are disproportionately affected.

The plight of small business is cause for concern, especially when put in the context of long term structural decline.  Over the past 15 years, the number of workers employed by small business (businesses employing less than 20 people) has fallen from above 50% to 41%, and the share of self-employed workers has steadily declined from 20% to 16%.

Declining entrepreneurship and business creation reduces opportunity and competition that drives higher wages and product and service improvements for consumers.

But the decline is not just concerning for economic reasons.  Small business is at the heart of the Australian way of life and a healthy and vibrant High Street promotes mainstream Australian values.

Creating value for the community, innovation, independence and personal responsibility are fostered by widespread self-employment and involvement in small business.  The erosion of the ability to start and run a business will undermine community formation and a culture of self-reliance.

Being involved in small business instils an understanding of and appreciation for what goes into running a business.  Employees are personally connected with the inner workings of the business and understand the risk taken on by their employer to make their job possible.  They understand the relationship between the value they create for the business and their wage.  For those involved in small business, business is not an abstraction with an artificial divide between the interests of employers and employees.  They see first hand the destructive effects of red tape and understand that businesses are not a bottomless untapped tax source for governments.

Small business is foundational to the fabric and character of local communities.  The commitment of locally owned businesses to the local area cannot be replaced by distant large corporations at the national or even international level.  An important part of the life of local communities is lost when the only difference between suburbs and towns are the relative locations of the McDonalds, Woolworths, Bunnings and BP.

To foster small business, encourage job creation and reverse the concerning trend of small business decline, governments must remove the impediments that disproportionately impact small business.  Workplace regulation is in dire need of reform to allow small businesses to expand without the headache of navigating complex awards with onerous entitlements.  When the likes of Qantas, Coles, and the ABC with professional accountants on staff are falling foul of industrial relations requirements, it is no wonder that small businesses owners are put off from employing due to the complexity of the system.

The same applies to the taxation system and red tape in general.  Small businesses who lack the resources to engage professional expertise are put at a significant disadvantage.  Bold reforms for simplification across the board are required to level the playing field and allow small businesses to thrive.

Reversing the decline in small business is vital for the health of mainstream Australia.

‘Eliminating’ The Virus Is Suppressing Truth

Recent calls for an "elimination strategy" to defeat the coronavirus pandemic are misguided, and may not even work.  Why?  Because pursuing elimination would mean longer and harder lockdowns.  That would mean more jobs lost, more businesses shuttered for good, more livelihoods destroyed, more families plunged into poverty, more lives ruined forever.

And even with that, there would be no guarantee of success.  An elimination strategy would also break from the goal broadly adopted by the Morrison government and National Cabinet, which is suppression.  But suppression and elimination are hugely different strategies, with vastly different practical consequences.

Under a suppression strategy, restrictions are loosened when there is a low and manageable level of community transmission.  Elimination requires stringent restrictions to remain in place until there is no community transmission whatsoever.  The idea is that if transmission is stopped for long enough, the disease will disappear.

But that is at best wishful thinking.  Countries that kept infection rates low, like Singapore and Israel, saw cases surge when restrictions were lifted.  Even in New Zealand, where a "stage four" lockdown was imposed on 25 March and transmissions have been effectively at zero for weeks, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has indicated that the government is bracing itself for the possibility of another outbreak.

The futile "elimination" debate is part of a wider problem with Australia's coronavirus response.  Politicians and health bureaucrats have shifted the goalposts so much that they don't even seem to know what the actual endgame is, much less explaining it to the Australian people.

Initially, the goal was clear and reasonable:  Keep infection rates as low as possible ― that is, "flatten the curve" ― to give our health system time to prepare without being swamped with cases.  Since that time, billions have been spent on intensive care beds, masks and ventilators.  By any measure, our hospitals are now well-equipped.  If there was ever a justification for heavy-handed lockdowns, there isn't one anymore.

Still, the idea of an "elimination strategy" is finding disturbing favour among everyone from the Grattan Institute to the ABC's resident prophet of doom, Norman Swan.  The latest push comes from Daniel Andrews' hand-picked Chief Health Officer, the hapless Brett Sutton, who has plunged the state of Victoria into a second lockdown after the first one, incidentally the most heavy-handed anywhere in Australia, failed spectacularly.  Frankly, it beggars belief that the Victorian government feels entitled to lecture anyone about anything.

To be sure, public health experts are approaching the coronavirus with the sole aim of keeping infections at zero.  It's an understandable objective, but it comes with enormous human costs, and the terrible toll taken by lockdowns must at least be a part of the debate.

The most obvious casualty is jobs.  The official unemployment rate has soared from 5.2 per cent in March to 7.1 per cent in June, but my research suggests that this a gross underestimate, and the real rate is close to 12 per cent.  Young people have been the hardest hit:  Almost one in three Australians between 15 and 24 are now neither working nor studying.  All in all, 815,000 jobs been snuffed out since lockdowns began, and many more will go as they drag on.

The serious consequences of lockdowns are almost always reduced to a tawdry debate about "money versus human life" (largely by those who are insulated by the economic carnage by a safe, lucrative job in the public service or academia).  But the misery and deprivation of this 21st century Great Depression are not about abstract notions of "the economy", but very real human costs.

Already, there are warnings that Australia's suicide rate could surge by up to 50 per cent.  Lifeline is taking one call every thirty seconds related to the coronavirus crisis.  The fact that health experts ― of all people ― are dismissive of these ugly realities is callous in the extreme.

Remember, also, that these are the same "experts" who have gotten so much wrong.  These are the "experts" who told us that Australia would run out of ICU beds no matter what we did, who advised us that masks were ineffective and then changed their mind, and who told us that sitting on a park bench or playing golf was dangerous and deadly, but deliberately ignored the risk of having 10,000 protesters stage a "mass gathering" in the centre of Melbourne.

If Daniel Andrews or any other premier is foolish enough to pursue an "elimination strategy", they must come clean and tell us how many more jobs they are prepared to destroy, and how much anguish they are willing to inflict on their own people.

Until then, they would be well advised to follow the lead of Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian, who have made the politically difficult but highly commendable admission that further lockdowns would make the state-imposed "cure" far outweigh the disease.

There Is No Smoking Sceptre At The Palace

The release of the "Palace Letters" reveals Queen Elizabeth had as much to do with the dismissal of the Whitlam government as did the CIA.

The correspondence, now made public, between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace reveals very little that's new or interesting, other than that Kerr deliberately did not tell the Queen that he was planning to sack the prime minister.  But conspiracies die hard, and no doubt the myth-making about Gough Whitlam's martyrdom will continue unabated.

The relevance of the Palace Letters has less to do with their contents, and more to do with the efforts of some left-wing academics to prove to themselves that the somehow illegitimate actions of Kerr sanctify Whitlam and his government.  The truth is that during the constitutional crisis of 1975 Whitlam had as little regard for constitutional convention as did Kerr, and when Labor was comprehensively defeated at the subsequent federal election, Kerr's decision effectively received a democratic mandate.

The letters are shocking ― but only for those who put so much hope into them.  In a letter dated November 11, 1975 from Kerr to Sir Martin Charteris, the private secretary to the Queen, Kerr wrote:  "I should say that I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because under the Constitution the responsibility is mine and I was of the opinion that it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance."

Charteris' response six days later confirmed the Queen was not informed of the dismissal in advance and noted Kerr acted with "perfect constitutional propriety".

The letters should go a long way in redeeming the reputation of Kerr.  He made the best choice available to him to navigate the political stalemate, while fulfilling his constitutional role and ensuring that the final decision was one made by the Australian people.

If anything, it is Whitlam whose reputation is diminished by the release of these letters.  The letters reveal that following his sacking before the election, Whitlam attempted to have the Queen recommission him as prime minister.  As constitutional expert Professor Anne Twomey of Sydney University has commented:  "So instead of the British interfering in Australia's constitutional system, [it] seems that Gough Whitlam was rather hoping the British would interfere into the system by making him Prime Minister."  This hardly fits the popular stereotype of Whitlam as a proud and independent Australian republican.

The Australian people understood that the cause of Gough Whitlam's dismissal was Gough Whitlam.  At the post-dismissal election in 1975 Whitlam was defeated in the biggest landslide in Commonwealth history, followed by another heavy defeat in 1977.

Despite this, and due in no small part to the angry response to the dismissal, the event has cast a shadow over Australian politics ever since.

No prime minister has changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam.  In a flurry of reform between 1972 and 1975, He established bureaucratic-run healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and increased public sector numbers and salaries.  He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 to 27 to administer all the extra Commonwealth activities.

When the Whitlam-led Labor party was elected in 1972, government spending was 19 per cent of Australia's GDP.  When Labor lost the 1975 election, the same statistic had soared to almost 24 per cent.  In 2019-20 federal government spending was 24.6 per cent of Australia's GDP.

Malcolm Fraser, who was a staunch opponent of the Whitlam agenda in parliament and was in the best position to roll back the Whitlam reforms, left them largely untouched.  Perhaps in response to the rage over Whitlam's dismissal, Fraser ensured his government was largely a continuation of the Whitlam era.  And no government has since challenged the Whitlam legacy in any effective way.

For those who are interested in the future of opportunity and prosperity of Australians, the letters are a reminder of the politically motivated fury that has effectively kept Whitlam's ideas in power for 45 years.

The Palace Letters will not advance the republican cause as it is a niche issue of interest to a relatively small group of people concentrated mainly in academia and the ABC.  Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese is wrong when he said on Tuesday the letters should prompt a renewed discussion about the republic.  Right now the Australian people have far more important things to worry about.

Sport Should Unite Us, So Why Are Its Pampered Pooh-Bahs Using It As A Tool Of Division?

Australians go to the footy to get away from politics and watch and enjoy the footy.  Elitist sports administrators would rather abuse their positions as custodians of our favourite games to grandstand about their own divisive beliefs and undermine the unifying force of sport in Australia.

In June in the AFL and the NRL, following the restart of their coronavirus-delayed seasons, players from all clubs participated in ritualistic pre-game kneeling in support of the international political movement, Black Lives Matter.  This was carried out with the express approval of the AFL and the NRL administrators and the club officials and egged on by a sympathetic media.

Behind the title Black Lives Matter is a radical set of ideas.  The entire premise of the BLM movement is that Western society structurally impedes racial equality and that this can only be fixed by fundamental structural change to the West.  Their cause is revolution based on the divisive ideology of identity politics.

Presumably, the players do not actually support BLM's demands for defunding and abolishing police, "disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure", or dismantling capitalism as one of the "state structures" which disproportionately harms black people.  For the players, capitalism is one of the "state structures" which makes their lucrative playing salaries and sponsorship deals a reality.

But the AFL and the NRL should know better than to go along with this.  Aussie rules icon Sam Newman captured the mood well in a post to Twitter which said "Division, conflict, fury, rage, angst, anarchy, disruption, group guilt, group shaming, acquiescence.  Don't include everyone in the mob mentality, please.  AFL is sport!"

The administrators of our sporting codes are custodians of something of great value to Australians.  Sport displays man's competitive spirit in a noble contest which celebrates human excellence.  These values are universal, making sport a source of commonality that crosses racial and religious lines.

Because of this sport should be an escape from the things that do divide us.  And there are few things more divisive than the ignoble political contests.

In recent years our sporting codes have institutionalised political grandstanding and moralising to members and spectators as a central part of the game.  The AFL and the NRL have given their longstanding support to the campaign to divide Australians by race in the Australian Constitution and their support for changing the definition of marriage in 2017.

In 2019 Rugby Australia terminated the playing contract of star Israel Folau for making comments on social media which reflected his personal religious views.  At a code of conduct hearing in May 2019, then-Rugby Australia CEO Raelene Castle reportedly suggested she would have terminated Folau's contract if he had even "photocopied Bible passages" and posted them on social media.

New polling by market research firm Dynata confirms that Australians have had a gutful of our favourite past times being used as a vehicle to promote the narrow ideological obsessions of an arrogant elite.

The poll asked 1,011 Australians between 19 and 23 December 2019 to agree or disagree with the statement that "Sporting codes like the AFL and NRL have become too politically correct."  51 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement and just 17 per cent disagreed (the remaining third neither agreed nor disagreed).

This is not a case of the sporting codes simply reflecting the widely accepted views of the community.  The people who control sports and the people who enjoy them are different people with different kinds of beliefs.  It is a reflection of the broader disconnect between the elites and the mainstream.

The people who run Aussie rules, rugby league, or rugby union, are increasingly bureaucratic and as such are prone to the same biases and assumptions of those in academia, the ABC, and the major corporations who believe in identity politics, climate change, and central planning.  They could not understand why anyone would boo indigenous former Sydney Swans player Adam Goodes, use social media to quote the Bible, or get upset at players "taking a knee".  They probably haven't met anyone who didn't think Donald Trump was every kind of -ist and -phobe you can name.

Sport is a part of the cultural fabric that ties Australians together, but woke lecturers in the sporting codes are abusing their positions to divide us further.  Australians recognise the importance of sport and the simple wisdom that politics does not belong there.

Revealed: The True Hottest Day Ever Recorded In Australia

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology deleted what was long regarded as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia, Bourke's 125°F (51.7°C) on Sunday, January 3, 1909.  This record* was deleted, falsely claiming that this was likely some sort of "observational error", as no other official weather stations recorded high temperatures on that day.

However, the Liberal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, has visited the Australian National Archive at Chester Hill in western Sydney to view very old meteorological observation books.  It has taken Kelly some months to track down this historical evidence.  Through access to the archived book for the weather station at Brewarrina, which is the nearest official weather station to Bourke, it can now be confirmed that a temperature of 123°F (50.6°C) was recorded at Brewarrina for January 3 1909.  This totally contradicts claims from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that only Bourke recorded an extraordinarily hot temperature on that day.

Brewarrina Meteorological Observations Book, January 1909.  Note 123F recorded at 9.00 am on January 4, 1909.

Just today, Friday 10th July 2020, Mr Kelly MP obtained access to this record for Brewarrina, the closest official weather station to the official weather station at Bourke.

He has photographed the relevant page from the observations book, and it shows 123°F was recorded at 9.00 am on the morning of Monday, January 4 1909 ― published here for the first time.  This was the highest temperature in the previous 24 hours and corroborates what must now be recognised as the hottest day ever recorded in Australia of 125°F (51.7°C) degrees at Bourke on the afternoon of Sunday, January 4 1909.

The Meteorological Observations Book for Bourke for January 1909 records 125°C for January 3.  Photograph taken on 26th June in 2014 at Chester Hill.

That the Bureau of Meteorology denies these record hot days is a travesty.  Is it because these records contradict their belief in catastrophic human-caused global warming?

The temperature of 50.6°C (123°F) recorded back in 1909 which is more than 100 years ago, photographed by Kelly last week at the National Archives in Chester Hill, is almost equivalent to the current official hottest day ever for Australia of 50.7 degrees Celsius at Oodnadatta on 2nd January 1960.  These are in fact only the fourth and third hottest days recorded in Australia, respectively.

Not only has Kelly tracked-down the meteorological observations book for Brewarrina, but over the last week he has also uncovered that 51.1°C (124°F) was recorded at White Cliffs for Wednesday, January 11 1939.  This is the second hottest ever!

The evidence, a photograph from the relevant page of the White Cliff's meteorological observations book, is published here for the first time.

This photograph from the White Cliffs Meteorological Observation Book shows the second hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia using standard equipment in a Stevenson screen.

Until Kelly's efforts, this second hottest-ever record was hidden in undigitised archives.

It is only through his persistence the temperatures at all the official weather stations in the vicinity of Bourke that this and other hot days have been discovered.

If we are to be honest to our history, then the record hot day at Bourke of 51.7°C (125°F) must be re-instated and, further, the very hot 50.6°C (123°F) recorded for Brewarrina on the same day must be entered into the official databases.

Also, the temperature of 51.1°C (124°F) recorded at White Cliffs on January 12, 1939, must be recognised as the second hottest ever.

For these temperatures to be denied by the Bureau because they occurred in the past, before catastrophic human-caused global warming is thought to have come into effect, is absurd.

At a time in world history when Australians are raising concerns about the Chinese communist party removing books from Libraries in Hong Kong, we should be equally concerned with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology removing temperature records from our history.

If global warming is indeed the greatest moral issue of our time, then every Australian regardless of their politics and their opinion on greenhouse gases and renewable energy must be honest to history and these truths.

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* This temperature (125°F/51.7°C on the 3rd January 1909) was recorded at an official Bureau weather station and using a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen.  Hotter temperatures were recorded in 1896 but the mercury thermometers were not in Stevenson screens, which is considered the standard for housing recording equipment.

Déjà Vu In Dan Andrewstan

"For those of us who are old enough to remember it is starting to feel like 1990 has come again," James Campbell, the National Political Editor of the Herald Sun, wrote this week regarding the state of affairs in Victoria.

The re-introduction of Stage 3 lockdowns in Victoria should be of concern to all Australians.  Not only has the Victorian Labor government completely botched the handling of the COVID-19 lockdown, but it has mismanaged the state's finances for years on fantastically expensive infrastructure programs.

This meant that the Victorian economy was structurally weak going into the COVID crisis, with a high reliance on mass migration, international students, and construction.

If the original COVID lockdown, which was already the most draconian in the nation, pushed the Victorian economy to the brink, then this addition six weeks will push it over.

To give a sense of the scale of the infrastructure programs in Victoria, based on official estimates there are currently some 150 major transport projects being constructed or scheduled to be constructed in Victoria with a total estimated investment value of $74 billion.

Many of these projects seem to cost more in Victoria than anywhere else in the world.

The Metro Tunnel project ― a CBD rail project ― will cost $1.22 billion per kilometre of track.  The similar UK Cross Rail in the heart of London will only cost $0.33 billion per kilometre.

A labourer in Melbourne costs more than Toronto, Munich, Amsterdam and London.  For example, an entry-level labourer with just three months experience receives a $143,199 annual wage on the CityLink Tulla Widening project, which is a major road project.

And removing a level crossing cost $80 million five years ago, whereas it now costs $250 million to $300 million each time.

The proposed Suburban Rail Loop is the exemplar of the extent to which Victoria is broken.  In 2019 the Victorian government blithely committed to building a 90 kilometre underground heavy rail suburban loop Lline, with no published studies or identified funding sources.  At the time the headline cost figure of $50 billion was presented as emblematic of the Government's vision rather than a deep cause for concern.

The financing requirements for a project on this scale is leading the Government into unchartered territory.  Alone among the Australian states, and against the wishes of the federal government, the Andrews Government has committed to the Chinese Government's One Belt, One Road scheme, which is just one aspect of China's broader geopolitical strategy of expanding its global influence.

Under the CCP's scheme, China provides funding for infrastructure around the world and, in return, they can receive an ownership stake and access to the key construction and related contracts.

As a colony and a State, Victoria has endured three great economic crises:  in the 1890s after the land boom, in the 1930s when the stock market crash and economic collapse left it struggling to service borrowings, and in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Cain-Kirner government (1982-1992) spending splurge and financial mismanagement when the State Bank of Victoria had to be sold and there were severe credit rating downgrades.  In each case, much of the debt burden could be directly attributed to capital expenditure and operating subsidies for public transport networks.

Now, history is repeating.

Victoria is currently spending upwards of a billion dollars more than it earns each month.

The result is 100 billion of debt before COVID spending is factored in.

Don't think for a moment that a collapse of the Victorian economy can be quarantined like a coronavirus patient.

Firstly, the Victorian economy is the second-largest in the nation.  Any downturn will reverberate to other states due to factors such as cross-border supply chains.

Secondly, the structure of Australia's federation means that a federal government ― which, in practice means the other states — bail-out of a failing state is baked-in.

According to the 2019-20 Victorian budget, some 52% of the government's revenue is funded by the Commonwealth with 28% coming from the GST and 24% from other grants.

A collapsing economy means collapsing revenue which means the federal government will distribute more money to Victoria through the GST system at the expense of better performing states.

Victoria is currently being treated as a pariah, but it will soon become apparent to the rest of Australia that isolation is not an option.

ABC Adept At Playing Cuts Victim

The current behaviour of the ABC's management and staff is a perfect demonstration of just how removed the national broadcaster has become from mainstream Australia.

By complaining the way it has about the Coalition government's failure to index increases in its funding over the next three years, the ABC has succeeded in making the case for its eventual privatisation more powerfully than could ever have been made by its critics.

Australia is in a recession, nearly a million Australians have already lost their jobs because of the coronavirus pandemic, and a third of sole traders report they have lost more than 75 per cent of their income.  Yet the headlines at the ABC are dominated by the news the broadcaster must absorb government "cuts" of $84 million over the next three years.  These "cuts" equate to approximately 2.5 per cent of the ABC's budget over that time.

In the current economic environment any business, anywhere, would kill to be guaranteed to get 97.5 per cent of its pre-coronavirus revenue.  In any case, the "cuts" are not actual reductions in funding.  Government funding of the ABC is continuing to increase ― all that's happening is that ABC funding is not increasing to keep up with inflation, which anyway is at a record low of less than 2 per cent.

The issue of its political bias is one of the problems with the ABC.  Another problem is the justification for a government owning and funding one of the largest media organisations in the country that operates four television stations, four radio networks, and 65 metropolitan and regional radio stations.

It's too late now but the ABC would have got far more sympathy if instead of acting like just another part of the country's privileged elite who believe they are entitled to carry on largely unaffected by what's happening in the real world, ABC management had said something like "The community is hurting and the ABC is part of the community ― and we all have to share the sacrifices that need to be made."

If ABC management didn't want to put itself in the shoes of ordinary Australians, then at least it could have considered its brethren in other media organisations.  One hundred and fifty newsrooms have shut across the country.  Prime Minister Scott Morrison was right when he said "if you are a journalist today, the safest place for you to be is actually the ABC because your revenue is guaranteed in that [organisation] by the government".

What that guarantee has created at the ABC is a sense of entitlement and perhaps even an unconscious bias.  Perhaps only someone working at the ABC, who was its chief economics correspondent no less, could do what Emma Alberici did so infamously when at the height of the coronavirus pandemic crisis she tweeted "Stop talking about the economy".  Only someone removed from the economy could say such a thing.  And only journalists removed from the real lives of ordinary Australians could be as surprised as they were when the Coalition won the last federal election.

It's funny that for someone so intent on avoiding any involvement whatsoever in "the culture wars", that it's actually Morrison who, deliberately or not, has allowed the ABC to put itself one step closer towards privatisation.  All that it's taken for the ABC to demonstrate everything about itself that its critics claim is for the Coalition to not index the ABC's funding.

Eventually too, mainstream Australians are going to realise there's a reason the ALP, the Greens and GetUp! campaign so strongly for more money to the ABC.  One of Labor leader Anthony Albanese's promises made during the campaign for the Eden-Monaro byelection on Saturday is that a future Labor government would reverse the Coalition's "cuts" to the ABC.  Albanese said:  "This Saturday, the people of Eden-Monaro have the chance to send the government a message.  Don't cut ABC jobs, regional news or emergency broadcasting."

When so many people have lost their job or know someone who has, it might be that his appeal to protect jobs at the ABC reveals Albanese and the Labor Party to be just as out of touch with ordinary Australians as is the ABC itself.

Why The ABC Shouldn't Just Receive A Funding Freeze, But A Cut.

The ABC using its own airtime to cry poor makes for tedious viewing and ignores the concerns of ordinary Australians.

Other than having the host's position filled by Virginia Trioli, this week's Q&A was entirely ordinary, with five panellists on the left, a host (also on the left) and the Minister for Communications and Arts, Paul Fletcher, in the hot seat.

The questions where no less skewed than usual.

There were typical Q&A slanted questions that favour government cash splashes.  That night these concerned the allocation of the $250 grant million arts grant, and the ineligibility of many artists for JobKeeper.  One questioner (who as it turned out had been a Labor candidate) even managed to slip some identity politics in by asking "Why is it then that the Government appears to favour jobs for men in the recovery?"

There was a question about fee increases for humanities degrees that noted that everyone on the panel had one (perhaps that is the problem with Q&A).

The key moment of the evening was when a child called Matilda asked why her favourite ABCme presenter had lost her job.  The Minister explained that the cuts to staff were independent decisions for the ABC to make.  Trioli interjected to insist that the Minister say that there had been funding cuts to the ABC.

But Trioli didn't have her facts straight.  The ABC funding has not been cut;  the 2018 budget simply froze the indexation of that funding.  In practical terms that means that the yearly increase in funding is less than it otherwise would have been, but it is still increasing.  For instance, in the last financial year the ABC funding increased by 1.5% (or $16 million) compared to the previous year.

But the ABC's apparent inability to distinguish between a funding freeze and a cut is a minor issue compared to its much bigger problem ― that it uses it $1 billion from taxpayers to complain about a lack of taxpayer money.

A more representative panel would have had someone to discuss the entire absence of funding cuts at a time when their commercial competitors are shedding revenue and staff.  A representative cross-section of the public would have produced a questioner wondering why the arts sector receives a $250 million grant in a time when everyone is doing it tough.  But instead the panel was aghast at the prospect of up to 250 staff being cut at the ABC over three years out of a workforce of over 4,000, most of which are likely to come from voluntary redundancies.  Whilst every job loss is a tragedy, the concern over ABC job cuts is completely disproportionate when the private sector losses, such as the 6,000 from Qantas this week, are considered.  The ABC is a remarkably safe place to work, compared to the private media sector, or any other sector at the moment for that matter.

The navel-gazing is just one of the preoccupations that the ABC does not share with the rest of Australia.  Polling commissioned in December 2019 found that only 32% of respondents believed that the ABC represents the views of ordinary Australians, yet 100% of Australians are forced to fund the ABC.

The ABC and the publicly funded arts and media sector more generally is a victim of its own success.  In Why Are Artists Poor? Han Abbing presents the argument that subsidies actually make individual artists poorer.  Abbing, who is an artist, economist and emeritus professor at the University of Amsterdam, cites a study conducted in the Netherlands which monitored artists incomes over a period of time when subsidies were increasing, only to find that individual artists were earning the same or less.

Media and the arts are traditionally high risk, high reward professions.  The government, by creating artificial job security through subsidies, encourages more people to go into the field, leading to an oversupply and therefore lower wages.  Moreover, subsidies lead to a disconnect between the creator and the consumer.  When a bureaucracy like the Arts Council or the ABC curate content then it doesn't produce what the audience likes but what the bureaucracy believes they ought to like.

Q&A is the perfect example of a program that doesn't represent Australian values, but what it thinks Australia should be.  The problem with Q&A is not that it grills ministers, but that the inquisition only comes from one direction.  Without the opposing critique of government expenditure, or weakness in pushing back against identity politics, Q&A and the ABC more broadly, fail to represent the views of Australia or facilitate proper public debate.

If anything, this weeks' Q&A showed why the ABC shouldn't just receive a funding freeze, but a cut.

So Buildings Are Racist Too, Now

Even though Victoria's goldrush city of Ballarat is purported to be the state's largest inland city, it is safe to say that it has more than its fair share of statues and monuments which honour heroes, icons, royalty, poets and goldfield pioneers.  So abundant are they, in fact, that the Ballarat Information Centre has thought it prudent to compile an extremely helpful self-guided historic statues walking tour for the curious visitor who would like to delve deeper into the city's impressive array of bronzes, busts and bandstands which line the main boulevard.

Three years ago, when some delinquents decided to daube the statue of Captain Cook in Sydney's Hyde Park with the words "No pride in genocide" and "Change the date", I went to Ballarat and made a short, slightly tongue-in-cheek film entitled A Politically Correct Walking Tour of Ballarat based on the aforementioned brochure.

The upshot of the film was that by the time the history erasers had finished with its statues and monuments, Ballarat would be completely bereft of any visual reminders of the men and women who made the city what it is today.  It would be as if they never even existed at all.  The city would be left with nothing but a depressing parade of empty plinths and miserable patches of grass where tributes to the brave had once stood.

These days, the film's conclusion does not seem all that far-fetched after all.  Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time until the usual suspects in Australia decided to join the "topple the racists" crowd currently sweeping across the US and UK by coming up with their own list of early settlers, explorers and colonial administrators which they believe should be destroyed on the grounds that each and every individual who has been immortalised in stone, marble or bronze was a racist.

This list is not particularly discerning;  anybody will do.  In Adelaide, the statue of the city's founder Colonel William Light, who, if you are going to play the identity politics card, was half Malaysian, has twice been vandalised with "Death to Australia" and "No pride in genocide".  Charles Cameron Kingston, the 20th premier of South Australia between 1893 and 1899, has also been targeted for his support of the White Australia policy, even though he pushed to give votes to women and to extend workers compensation.  Captain Cook, also on the list, had of course died before the First Fleet arrived on the shores of Botany Bay in 1788.

Facts do not matter to this movement which chooses emotion and superstition over reason, caprice over common sense and barbarism over civilisation.  We have seen the masses on the streets of London and Bristol, whipping themselves up into a frenzied state of blind fury, persecuting stone and metal for the real and imagined sins of those so depicted.  It is an expression of a moral revulsion at the supposed racism and ideas of cultural superiority displayed by our forebears.  This behaviour is not just solely emotional, but to some extent it is also tactical.  By tearing down or vandalising statues, the movement is declaring ownership of the present because it has taken control of the past through defacing it or erasing it.  It is stating to the world in no uncertain terms that it is now the master of our destiny as it has the power to shape the future.

What we are seeing in the heart of the West itself is a cultural revolution to remove the very symbols that embody the essence of Western civilisation, by a minority in the West who hate their own countries.  When vandals graffitied the busts of former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, they were basically advertising their animosity towards Australia.

These modern-day Jacobins, who are proudly ignorant and dismissive of history, would like to replace what we have now, which are the values and institutions of Western civilisation, with ideological and whimsical group rights.  At the moment, all they are offering us is a combination of violence, anarchy and iconoclasm.

Everything has to go in a Rousseau-type purge where we can return to a native state of noble savagery in the false hope of a utopia.  As the late Sir Roger Scruton put it, "everything that does not conform to the egalitarian goal is to be pulled down and destroyed.  In this way, 'social justice' becomes a barely concealed demand for the clean sweep of history that the revolutionaries have always attempted."

One of the troubles with this particular revolution, as with all revolutions, is that it has no discernible end.  Once Ballarat is shorn of its statues and monuments, what will the mob turn to next?  Paintings and books?  According to a manifesto issued by a US architecture think tank, it will be buildings.

In its letter entitled "Un-making ARCHITECTURE:  An Anti-racist architecture manifesto" which was published in the Architect's Newspaper, the authors claim in Marxist prose that "buildings are never just buildings".  Rather, these structures are "part of an apparatus that rewrites, white-washes, legitimises, standardises and erases a history of genocide, destruction, and racism while maintaining the status quo."

Our buildings, the piece proposes, are pretty much the same as statues and monuments because they are both "avatars shaped after leaders of regimes of death, racism, and colonial exploitation".  Buildings "recreate the effect of the monument, albeit at a different scale:  train stations, palaces of colonial administrators, bridges, camps, fortresses, stadiums, and also buildings for schooling, endowments, and museums".  What is more, the architects who are responsible for these racist structures are, according to the article, "trained as yes men and women" as their "vocation mostly exists and subsists as an appendix of hegemonic power".  Buildings it seems, are racist too.

Ballarat should watch out.  While it does not boast a fortress, it does have wildly named Old Colonists' Club, which, if the mob gets its way, will undoubtedly be the first to go.