One Nation Win Scares Labor

One Nation Win Scares Labor. By Joanne Nova.

For foreign readers, One Nation is the anti-mass-immigration, pro-farmer, pro-tradesman, anti-net-zero, anti forced vaccination party. It is called “far right” by the media — because the left labels anyone wanting to reduce immigration from the third world as far-right.

On Saturday, One Nation won the Western Australian state seat of Secret Harbour from the governing Labor Party. This is causing a political earthquake.

One Nation’s new M.P. Luke Herdegen has declared “there are no safe Labor seats” in Australia anymore. …

Labor have held this seat since 1989, but the workers have realized that Labor stand with the elites and wealthy bureaucrats and not them. Luke Herdegen, gym owner and former concreter, won last night with an amazing 57% on preferences. This means One Nation are not just taking votes from the Right but have crossed the left-right divide and are winning long-time Labor voters over too.

Vote Count (First preferences):

One Nation: 39%
Labor: 24%
Liberal: 17%
Greens 8%

Secret Harbour was one of WA’s safest Labor seats. In 2021, during the Covid pandemic they won on a smashing 76% primary vote. …

Labor ran a young woman who was a former Labor staffer and Woodside “government relations adviser” who lived out of the electorate. She was emblematic of the kind of bureaucrat that the voters didn’t want to elect.

Labor threw the kitchen sink at the campaign, spending an estimated $400,000 on a safe seat — a new record — and door-knocked 17,000 homes. They sent out 72,000 emails, and 200,000 letters and flyers. They even printed imitation Lotto scratchies where voters were supposed to scratch off to reveal all the bad choices Pauline Hanson has made.

The biggest donor to One Nation in WA was a mere $25,000 from a farmer. They did not get funding from the national One Nation party or from Gina Rinehart. Most of the donations were $100 or less.

The ABC pushed the Labor candidate with free advertising from the beginning, and ignored the One Nation candidate until polls showed he was likely to upset the duopoly. They barely let Luke Herdegen speak.

Even though this is a state seat, there was visceral anger towards Anthony Albanese and the Federal government, so most of this election was a protest vote against Federal politics.

This is the kind of election shock that changes political behaviour now. The seat itself is not critical because the state government has a clear majority. But a win like this will get both major parties reassessing their policies. Labor was already starting to talk about lowering immigration. Now if it is smart, it will do it. It’s too late though. Who will believe they won’t just ramp it up after the election?

PM Anthony Albanese:

Watch Albanese react to losing a Labor stronghold to One Nation. “Across the world, hard-right populists are on the march, ­peddling politics that is dangerous, divisive, and downright dishonest. We simply must defeat them. We owe it to history. … They’ll say and do anything to win votes.” [Projection?]

Meme time:

Albanese’s deplorables moment

Pauline Hanson:

The attacks from Chalmers and Albanese on One Nation have become increasingly desperate. Yesterday they crossed a line. …

Telling Australians that their democratically elected opponents are “dangerous” and a “threat to our country” invites people to treat them as a threat.

Words have consequences. That is how political violence is incited. The murder of Ann Widdecombe in Britain should be warning enough about the dangers of poisonous political rhetoric.

Anthony Albanese says we need to turn down the heat and violent rhetoric in our political discourse. Meanwhile, he and his Treasurer are pouring petrol all over it.

Alexandra Marshall in The Spectator:

At the start, Labor and the media treated One Nation’s incursion into Secret Harbour as a joke, but the possibility of victory was present from the start when street-side interviews were frequently interrupted by well-wishers and cars honking in support. That is the sort of greeting party leader Pauline Hanson receives. Victory starts with voter affection. …

It was a battle between a political staffer turned Woodside lobbyist and a gym owner. …

One big by-election victory in Farrer is a quirk of history. Two in close succession is an eyebrow-raise moment …

One Nation has endured utterly ruthless smear campaigns of late. It is a dangerous game for the press to play because either One Nation collapses and the ‘threat’ of a third party is eliminated or — and this appears to be what is happening — One Nation is forced to refine their policies to the point they comfortably out-compete the lazy major parties. The media melting pot is forging One Nation.

Peter Van Onselen in The Daily Mail

The Farrer by-election was a warning to the Coalition. Secret Harbour is a warning to Labor. …

Anthony Albanese’s response to Secret Harbour has been revealing. He [accused One Nation] of peddling politics that is ‘dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest‘. …

Parties don’t hit 30 per cent because a third of the electorate has been hypnotised by misinformation. They get there because millions of voters have concluded the political establishment neither understands nor cares about them. Telling those voters they’ve been conned is exactly the sort of condescension that drove them to Hanson in the first place. It’s the sort of stuff that has cost politicians dearly in the past — see Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables’. …

Newspoll’s personal ratings are also brutal. Albo’s net approval is minus 21, Angus Taylor’s is minus 17. Hanson has climbed to minus one. …

While the PM still beats Hanson 56-to-44 in a direct showdown on the preferred leader rating, the three way race is devastating for the Coalition. Albo leads on 46 per cent, but Hanson on 31 per cent has relegated Taylor, on just 23 per cent, to an afterthought. In the public mind, Hanson is now the real opposition leader.

“We owe it to history”?? Restore Australia responds:

Your thinly veiled attempt to draw comparisons to a certain 1930s fascist German regime is rather pathetic. The more you demonise normal people, the more you push them further and further out of the liberal world paradigm, and into nationalism and traditionalism.

You are the extremist here Albo: you are the one importing millions of third world migrants, you are the one crushing our productivity and you are the man with the finger placed firmly on the money printer, debasing our currency. The people are normal folk who just want to live their lives, you have betrayed working people as the “Labor” party, and you have chosen to represent foreigners, communists, students and welfare claimants instead.

How stereotyped, that the contest was between a Labor staffer and PR person on the left, and a gym owner on the right.

Georgia Tree from the ruling (oppressing) class on the left, and Luke Herdegen from the ruled (oppressed) class on the right.

The essence of Leftism is lying about reality

The essence of Leftism is lying about reality. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory — an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying.

Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Polish had words for it:

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] — a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.

Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] — a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system — a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

 

 

Communism, Leftism, Wokeism have the same structure:

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed — instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this:

  • Truth is not discovered, it is assigned.
  • Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically.
  • Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power.
  • And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental — it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West still doesn’t get it:

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

 

 

This system does not just produce liars — it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit. …

Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable.

To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement.

That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe.

Look around. The modern left’s “narrative” of the last decade has been a panoply of lies — men can become women and vice versa, our carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming, Islam is the religion of peace, all large groups of people have the same statistical properties (so under-representation in something desirable is evidence of discrimination), the covid “vaccines” were safe and effective, objective truth does not exist, the Voice was not racist, black lives matter but it is wrong and racist to say “white lives matter,” replacement of whites by immigration is not happening, most political violence is from the right, communism and socialism are good but just haven’t been tried right, President Biden was as sharp as a tack,…. and so on.

 

Multiculturalism in the UK, update

Multiculturalism in the UK, update.

Muslims throw rocks at ‘haram’ dog in the Lake District. Allahu akbar!

 

Notting Hill Carnival, West London, this weekend:

A celebration of African culture. Lots of dry humping, violent attacks, crowd crushing, sexual assaults, stabbings & death.

-169 arrests for drugs/weapons, sex offences & assaults (including attacks on police)
-Among them registered sex offenders breaching parole
-76 zombie knives, 30 flick knives & a machete confiscated
-7K police deployed costing taxpayers millions

Oh look, more than one culture!

Britons no longer have to travel the world seeking out different cultures, because they now come home delivered — like it or not.

Superannuation should be voluntary

Superannuation should be voluntary. By Adam Creighton in The Australian.

More than $160bn in wages and salaries is siphoned into super accounts every year, generating roughly $34bn in annual system-wide fees. In short, it’s the biggest racket in the country. 

Those fees … may not be counted as taxes, but they might as well be. They sustain a vast bureaucracy that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

 

From the ASFA, via the Daily Mail

 

Most of the $3 trillion in APRA-regulated funds is actively managed, when much of it should be sitting in ultra-cheap indexed options …

Workers are being forced to save too much during the years when they most need that money — to buy a home, raise a family and enjoy life while they are still young enough to do so….

In its 2020 Retirement Income Review, Treasury found that when retirees die, most leave behind the majority of the wealth they had at retirement. Members who died had left about 90 per cent of the balance they held at retirement. In other words, retirees tend to live off the income from their assets, not the assets themselves. …

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry — the last truly exceptional and independently minded economist to hold that office — … also made a devastating point about the public finances. The system, he said, is a “net cost to government even over the long term”, puncturing the common claim that forced saving somehow saves taxpayers money. As he put it, the loss of income tax revenue from the various concessions would not be fully offset by higher super tax collections or lower Age Pension costs.

Put plainly, all other taxes are higher than they need to be because of this system. …

There is also a serious governance problem. Big super funds now control almost 40 per cent of the Australian sharemarket, creating an unelected parallel government that votes on company direction according to environmental and social fashions the vast majority of members are unlikely to care much about.

Whose money?

The Prime Minister has been boasting that super could become a “national asset that can be used more appropriately”, while the Treasurer said in 2023 that he hoped to maximise its potential through “greater investment in our national priorities”.

And what exactly does that mean?

Fortunately there is a political party advocating that superannuation be made voluntary — the People First Party, led by the impressive Gerard Rennick:

Superannuation is not working. After 34 years of compulsory superannuation, over half of retirees are still on a full pension, which is the same as it was in 1992 when superannuation was made compulsory. …

So super’s just become yet another way to shovel money to wealthy bureaucrats and finance industry types?

The cost of the pension is approximately $55 billion, yet superannuation tax concessions cost almost $50 billion and most of these concessions go to the highest 20% of income earners….

Superannuation is estimated by the productivity commission to cost 1% of fees under management or around $40 billion a year to just shuffle paper assets.

Will all the non-far-left parties please unite? The ruling class and their radical left fringe is thoroughly unpopular with most Australians, but their opposition is split across most (but not all) of the Liberals, the Nationals, One Nation, People First, Family First, …. and a bunch of even smaller parties.

For the 80% of us normies, how can we effectively vote to avoid rule by woke bureaucrats who are too sympathetic to Islam?

Btw, in efforts to “unite the right,” perhaps it would be better to avoid words like “conservative” and “right” — because many people who’ve voted Labor all their lives also want to vote against the far left.

Where is the media outrage that Jewish schools and synagogues in Australia need full time guards and heavy security?

Where is the media outrage that Jewish schools and synagogues in Australia need full time guards and heavy security? By Chris Kenny in The Australian.

Islam has made life difficult for Jews in Australia:

Long before October 7, 2023, and last year’s Bondi Beach massacre, they have had heavy security at their schools and synagogues. Jewish institutions have long been identified as potential targets for Islamist terrorists, so they spend an enormous amount on security. (The school I spoke at last weekend spends $4m a year on security, money that otherwise could help with education.) …

When I am invited to attend or speak at Jewish events the exact location often remains undisclosed until the day it occurs. Significant overseas guests have been known to request their visit not be mentioned until they leave.

Recently I spent three nights at a Jewish hospital recovering from a knee replacement. It was much like any other hospital except for the heavy security gate and armed guard.

Since Bondi, cement traffic barriers have been erected around Jewish schools and synagogues across Sydney’s eastern suburbs. They protect footpaths and pedestrian crossings where Jewish pedestrians might present an easy target for terrorists in cars or trucks. …

If it was any other community, there would be outrage, wouldn’t there?

Imagine the outrage if Catholic schoolchildren faced a terrorist threat that warranted security guards at parish schools. It would be seen as a national crisis and every effort would be made to eliminate the threat rather than merely guard against it.

If Hindu, Greek Orthodox, Sikh or Muslim students faced this threat we would declare a national crisis. Yet this is how Australians who are Jewish are forced to live and the country meekly accepts it — it hardly warrants a mention.

Media? Turns a blind eye:

Do people even know that this is how Australians who are Jewish live? …

The media sure doesn’t tell them. If newspapers or television have covered the barriers and bollards around synagogues and schools, I have not seen it. Why is it not newsworthy? Is it so shameful that we dare not let all Australians know? Or do journalists just figure that’s just the Jews, that’s their issue? …

Islam and the Labor Party:

Terrorist flags, terrorist leaders, hate preachers and chants for death and “intifada” have been tolerated in regular protests that have been joined by Labor figures and praised by Anthony Albanese as “peaceful”. A former Australian of Year and ABC favourite, Grace Tame, screamed “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada” with no censure. Protesters took to the sands of Bondi Beach last September chanting for intifada — three months later, intifada arrived just 100m away and took 15 lives. …

Multiculturalism is here:

Violent hatred towards Jews is a central part of radical Islam or Islamist extremism. This ideology stands against everything that makes our nation what it is — freedom, plurality, equality, democracy and liberalism — but it especially despises Jews and Israel.

Yet Islamist extremism is practised openly here and around the world, and it infests and cultivates support in the political left by shape-shifting into Palestinian resistance, fallaciously repackaged as a post-colonial or Indigenous cause. Albanese rarely brings himself to utter the words Islamist extrem­ism.

This is a threat to all Australians and our core values, yet most of the political class is in denial. …

Our country is demonstrably worse now than it was on October 6, 2023. The future for Jewish Australians is less benign and more uncertain than it was — some have left. This is Australia turning its back on a cohort of citizens, on everything we stand for and on our promise….

Islamist extremists aim not only to eradicate Jews and Israel but also the West, democracy, religious freedom, equal rights for women and liberalism. They will impose sharia law where they can, in local government areas in Britain, the US or here; they will indoctrinate children wherever they can.

Australia is only 3.2% Islamic (2021 census), yet already they are effectively kicking out the Jews. What will happen at 10%? 50%?

I don’t suppose Australia’s’ multiculturalism-loving ruling class will apologize to Australia’s Jews and take responsibility for endangering them and wrecking their lives here? Or will they just keep an embarrassed silence and pretend they had nothing to do with it?

Australia is slipping away from the US, but what about WA?

Australia is slipping away from the US, but what about WA? By Celina101.

A strong Australia-America alliance only lasts if Australia stays a Western country. Mass immigration is destroying who we are, while new laws are taking away the right to say so. We don’t have a First Amendment.

If America wants an ally that will actually stand with it against China, it needs an Australia that still shares its people and its freedoms.

Here’s Hugo Lennon:

 

The other Australian states have recently been demanding more of Western Australia’s GST money. They currently take 25% of it, after it was capped in 2018. This is far more the most that has ever been taken from any other state (11%), but is still much less than the most they have ever taken from WA (69%).

So this got some Western Australians thinking. They looked at Alberta, which is soon to have a referendum on whether to leave Canada. And they noted that WA’s defense is mostly really provided by the USA, not by Australia. Hmmm, might it be time to switch federations?

Btw, under the Australian Constitution, states own their own mineral wealth. But smart Federal lawyers ignore this when claiming GST from WA, which is mostly due to mining. (Just like they ignore the part of the constitution that says a State “shall not … make anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts” — section 115.) Some Australian states are more hostile to mining than WA, so if they want more mineral wealth then perhaps they should make it much easier to explore and mine in their territory. Especially looking at you, Victoria.

The relentless demonization of men by lefty white women

The relentless demonization of men by lefty white women.

As Peachy Keenan said recently:

Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. …

Steve McCann at American Thinker:

They will remain angry because they will never succeed in their quixotic quest for “meaning in their lives” based on their belief that happiness lies in “making a difference” by defeating societal demons such as “the patriarchy” or “White Supremacy.”

In their addled thought process, there is no such thing as winning, only identifying new causes to keep this charade alive in perpetuity.

A case in point. About a year ago, out of curiosity, I watched a panel discussion with several feminist professors at a prestigious university. These academics were regaling a naïve and worshipful audience of mostly white women, plus a smattering of black women. The panel insisted that the new “civil rights movement” necessarily encompasses Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the LGBTQ movement, the plight of immigrants in the United States, the genocide in Gaza, undying support for the Palestinians, and Third Wave Feminism.

These leftists claimed, to raucous applause, that white privilege and resultant oppression required speeding the process to transform American culture and society, all while failing to acknowledge the transformations their movement had already precipitated.

The adoring and reverential expressions on the faces of the young women in the audience were priceless. It was as if they had suddenly discovered meaning and purpose in their apparently guilt-ridden, or cosseted, or rage-filled lives.

They no doubt thought that the prospect of being swept up in a grand crusade of promoting all manner of “civil rights” in a heartless, capitalistic society would bring relevance to their lives.

 

Oh the mockery!

 

What they did not fathom was that they were being manipulated by playing on their emotions and the nation’s history of civil rights movements solely to bring about a socialist one-party oligarchy.

Over the past five decades, participation in protests and demonstrations advocating policies that destroy America’s culture and society has evolved into a full-time white liberal female occupation. Most of these protestors are 50+-year-old white women augmented by a vast number of vacuous, college-educated white women of all age groups who, together with their race-obsessed, college-educated black female counterparts, are mindlessly and, for many, unknowingly destroying American civilization.

Gemma Tognini in The Australian, on the recent Sydney Swans and Scots College scandals:

There’s a high-profile scandal, and an almost immediate rush to make it about all men and all boys. It makes me deeply uncomfortable. …

Surely, Australia, we can hold two competing and important matters in tension? …

No, these situations do not point to the fact that all Australian men are predators in the making or fully formed as such.

I’m a woman and I find that notion insulting and simplistic. …

What happens when they call all men “toxic”?

Constantly pushing a negative stereotype about young men and men in general feeds … the problem. Don’t believe me? Believe the science. … This research showed a measurable impact of negative stereotyping. In one study, hundreds of university students were asked if they were concerned about being seen negatively because of their ethnicities. It found that the more students expected to be or worried about being stereotyped, the likelier they were to miss classes, engage in verbal abuse or vandalise school property.

It’s science, but it’s not rocket science. Conditioning 101, words that become, across time, a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can go and read about it yourselves, there are countless examples.

Truth matters:

The natural next questions are also simple. There are millions of great men and men in the making in this country. Why aren’t we talking about them? Why aren’t we amplifying their stories? Why aren’t we inviting them to lead conversations, creating spaces for their voices to be heard?

One friend, a mother of two young boys, put it this way: Every young boy knows what a bad man looks like, thanks to news headlines. Far fewer can describe a good one. …

I hate the rush to demonise men. I hate how, often, it’s led by women. I hate the stereotyping of men as predators in the making as vehemently I as I loathe the stereotyping of women like me, without children, as cold-hearted, career-focused bitches. All of it is wrong.

But in the here and now it’s the broken record of “all men are bad” that must stop. I think of my brother and my uncles and my nephew and my cousins and my mates, who are all bloody fantastic men. They’re imperfectly wonderful fathers, partners, friends, sons and more. This is the truth you can’t change my mind about, and I know most Australians are with me here.

A feminist and semi-senior bureaucrat once told me she thought only men should pay taxes, because, you know, they are so toxic. And she’s not sexist, oh no.

Chaser:

Ceuta immigrant invasion goes to next stage

Ceuta immigrant invasion goes to next stage. By Basil the Great.

Migrant in Ceuta: “If parents leave a 15- or 16-year-old girl alone, it’s normal for her to be raped. The fault lies with the parents.”

This is what James O’Brien called a wave of humanity. …

Thousands of Spanish citizens turn out to demand the removal of every migrant from Ceuta

People do not want migrants in their city

 

Ceutans have stormed the beaches destroying migrant shacks and tents. They’ve taken over the streets demanding their removal. The people are fighting back.

Groups of local men in Ceuta are patrolling the streets and burning migrant tents, clothes and property

Anything they own is being TORCHED 🔥

The message is clear: INVADERS MUST GET OUT OF CEUTA NOW 🇪🇸

 

 

As we might have guessed. The police are firing rubber bullets at the citizens.  The illegals are being protected by police & shouting allahu akbar at the citizens.

After intense pressure from local residents the Red Cross has been forced to leave Ceuta. They will not be giving aid to illegal migrants any more.

One Nation adds talent and professionalism

One Nation adds talent and professionalism. By Lachlan Leeming in The Australian.

Former NSW trade and investment commissioner Mike Newman is set to be unveiled as One Nation’s state leader … as the party prepares to launch its campaign to up-end the March election [in NSW]. …

The recruitment of Mr Newman is a boon for the party  … with his long professional history set to add a sophisticated edge to One Nation …

An online profile for Mr Newman states he is “a financial industry executive and consultant who worked in Japan for 25 years with large corporate firms, and, for the past three years has worked as the senior trade and investment commissioner, North Asia, at Investment NSW based in Tokyo”.

Although One Nation’s groundswell is largely due to its growing working-class supporter base, Mr Newman’s addition adds serious business acumen to the minor party’s ranks.

Mr Newman also worked as the head of sales for HSBC Securities in Japan, while from 2007 to 2015 he worked as the division director and country head of Macquarie Capital Securities Japan.

Mr Newman was appointed as NSW’s senior trade and investment commissioner to Japan and Korea by former deputy premier and trade minister John Barilaro in the previous Coalition government in 2021. He left the role shortly before it ceased to exist after the Minns government axed the positions in 2024.

Joanne and I know Mike, and think he’s a very capable man with the right goals. If One Nation can attract more experienced and high caliber people like Mike, Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi, then it transforms from a protest party to an alternative government.

However, in the process, it must not lose sight of the ideas and people it represents. Unfortunately, Pauline Hanson seems to be doing this all on her own. Surely this apparent backflip on immigration is some sort of mistake? Nix:

Pauline at the Bush Summit today, explaining One Nation’s new immigration policy:

“So it’s more than 130,000?”

“Correct.”

The original 130,000 visa cap has become +130,000 NOM. NOM has apparently also been redefined to mean permanent residents with a pathway to citizenship, explaining Farley’s “true NOM”.

So: +130,000 net permanent migration, plus a “trust us” number of students, skilled, PALM, etc.

Uh oh. Perhaps we need an anti-immigration party.

Australia’s censorship law 18C: Too weak, too strong, and maybe soon to be found unconstitutional

Australia’s censorship law 18C: Too weak, too strong, and maybe soon to be found unconstitutional. By Paul Kelly in The Australian.

Too weak:

Prro-Palestinian demonstrations demanding the elimination of Israel “From the river to the sea” along with calls to “Globalise the intifada” — encouraging the murders of Jews — are permitted and apparently beyond the reach of our laws. A good and decent society is broken under such inconsistency and hypocrisy. …

Section 18C is a bad law that has many defenders. … Sadly, it is an article of faith for the Labor Party. …

Too strong:

Hanson’s comment that Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi should pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”, while impolite, is deemed to be illegal in Australia. …

The law proscribes race-based speech likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate”, with its critics saying the bar is set far too low. Former Liberal attorney-general George Brandis branded the provision a “grotesque limitation” on free speech and invoked George Orwell to say it was a device to channel how people thought. …

Former NSW Supreme Court chief justice Jim Spigelman said: “The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended. I am not aware of any international human rights instrument, or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy, that extends to conduct that is merely offensive.” He said “offend” and “insult” impinged on free speech in a way “humiliate” and “intimidate” did not.

Former human rights commissioner Sev Ozdowski said a threshold at “offend” was too low and contributed to distrust. …

But 18C may be be about to be found to be unconstitutional:

After Queen Elizabeth died, Faruqi, in a classic insight into the Greens, said: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”

An angry Hanson responded: “Your attitude appalls and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.”

Having lost two cases in the Federal Court, Hanson said she was going to the High Court to protect free speech. Abbott was supportive. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke was true to form: he played the race card: “If the Liberal Party thinks there should be more racist things they’re allowed to say, tell us what they are.”

But constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey criticised the Federal Court and has raised doubts about the constitutional validity of section 18C, saying the treaty on which it relies, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, does not seem to include the low-level conduct that 18C outlaws. The treaty deals with far more serious offences. Constitutional lawyer Louise Clegg said in The Spectator last month she believed the High Court would invalidate section 18C.

A victory for Hanson would be a remarkable event, securing the victory the Coalition had long unsuccessfully sought. Hanson would become a political heroine. It would be a devastating blow for Labor — being exposed for running repeated campaigns attacking the critics for promoting racism only to finish up humiliated by relying for decades on a provision found to be unconstitutional. …

Not working out the way they hoped, because we have more than one culture now:

Federal Court judge Ian Jackman said the nation’s current crisis over social cohesion and antisemitism should provoke an “intellectual stocktaking” … “It would not have occurred to Australians in the 1990s that other Australians would abuse their freedom of political communication to publicly intimidate and vilify Jews … The idea that that might have taken place on the campus of the University of Sydney for weeks on end was simply unthinkable. Back then, we associated that behaviour with Nazi thugs in the Germany of the 1930s.”

Isn’t 18C just a tool the ruling class selectively enforces to suppress its critics?

Like the Colosseum, the streaming platform and the media feeds are tools of social control

Like the Colosseum, the streaming platform and the media feeds are tools of social control. By Krzysztof Szczawinski.

It is no accident that athletes and singers are being idolized. It is a tool of social control.

Let’s be fair first. Celebrity culture does something real and not entirely negative: it gives young people a path that has the appearance of being accessible. The boy from the poor neighborhood who watches the footballer and thinks — I could do that. The aspiration is genuine, the effort it produces is real, and the meritocracy of the playing field is one of the last functioning meritocracies we have. This is worth acknowledging.

But…

But the real hero of our world is the entrepreneur. The person who sees a problem, builds a solution, risks everything, fails, rebuilds, and produces something that didn’t exist before — something that employs people, solves problems, improves lives.

This is the most consequential human activity available in peacetime. It is also the least celebrated. No stadium. No album. No algorithm promoting it to your feed.

Kids today should have posters of Elon Musk in their rooms. Not because he is perfect — he is not — but because he represents something the footballer and the pop star cannot: the proof that building something extraordinary is no longer the privilege of the connected, the credentialed, or the well-born. A South African immigrant with a physics degree and a maniacal work ethic built the most important rocket company in history, the most consequential social media platform in the world, and the electric vehicle that forced every car manufacturer on earth to change direction. The path is real. The path is open. The path requires everything you have. That is a better poster than any footballer.

The ruling class uses bread and circuses, celebrities and sport, to distract the masses while they get on and rule:

The Roman citizen who once governed the republic received, in compensation, bread and circuses. The crowd’s attention was managed toward the arena and away from what actually mattered. The gladiator was famous, desired, and owned. He had no power. The crowd worshipped him and went home. The emperor decided everything.

 

 

The algorithm is the modern arena management system. It selects for what produces engagement – the immediate, the visceral, the emotionally legible. The footballer’s goal is instantaneous and universally understood. The entrepreneur’s breakthrough is slow, complex, and requires context to appreciate. The algorithm is indifferent to the builder — and indifference, at scale, produces invisibility.

Woke nastiness:

The Frankfurt School completed the mechanism. By attacking the concept of what is worth admiring — declaring that excellence is a power construct, that the hierarchy between the important and the entertaining is itself oppression — it removed the cultural framework that would otherwise orient attention toward what matters. If nothing is genuinely more admirable than anything else, the footballer and the person curing disease are equivalent. And the footballer has better marketing.

In the shadows:

Meanwhile, in the shadows, entrepreneurs and researchers backed by AI are building the actual future. Defeating diseases. Building rockets. Rewriting energy. Quietly. Without a stadium.

The civilization that built the Parthenon, the Sistine Chapel, and the moon landing understood that some things are more important than others – and organized its attention accordingly. The civilization that has forgotten this distinction fills the arena, watches the gladiator, goes home, and calls it culture.

The Colosseum is the ancestor of the streaming platform, an ancient institution of Roman control:

It held fifty thousand people. Admission was free. The shows were funded by the state. The emperors who built and maintained it understood something that every administrator of mass distraction has understood since: the crowd that is entertained is the crowd that is not asking questions. …

[Its] function: the systematic provision of spectacle to a population that was progressively stripped of political power.

The Roman citizen who had once voted in the assemblies, served in the legions, and participated in the governance of the republic now received, in compensation, bread and circuses. …

The thumbs up, thumbs down decision — the crowd’s power over the defeated gladiator’s life — was the Colosseum’s most sophisticated political invention. It gave the crowd the sensation of power without its substance. You could decide whether a man lived — but had no say in taxation, war, grain supply or succession. You had thumbs. The managed democracy — participation without real power — is two thousand years old. …

 

 

When Maximus asks, “Are you not entertained?” he is exposing the mechanism with contempt. The crowd cheers louder. This is not stupidity. It is the rational response of people given no other way to participate.

The Colosseum is the ancestor of

  1. the streaming platform,
  2. the social media feed,
  3. the algorithmic content delivery system, and
  4. the 24-hour news cycle.

Each one provides spectacle calibrated to the crowd’s appetite, substitutes consumption for participation, and generates in the audience the sensation of engagement without the substance of power. The thumbs have migrated from the arena to the screen. The gladiators have become influencers. The emperor has become the algorithm. The bread is delivered by app.

And here we are.

Women hold all top leadership positions in Iceland

Women hold all top leadership positions in Iceland. By Alda Sigmundsdóttir, in Letter from Iceland, in April 2026.

Last week a woman was elected president of the University of Iceland, which means that women now occupy every major public (and private) office in this country.

 

Icelandic PM, Kristrún Frostadóttir

 

We are talking about:

The president
The prime minister
The heads of all three parties that make up the Icelandic government
The mayor of Reykjavík
The heads of the five parties that make up the Reykjavík city council
The bishop
The presidents of all universities in Iceland (seven in total)
The Commissioner of Police
The Director of Public Prosecutions (Attorney General)

Equality at last 🙂 No discrimination going on here.