Is the High Court about to allow the Australian Government to decide who may participate in Australian politics? By Celina101.
In a little over a week, the High Court of Australia will hear White Australia Party Inc v Commonwealth, a challenge to the new federal prohibited hate-group legislation. …
This is one of the most consequential constitutional cases in modern Australian history. The Court is being asked whether the federal government can use national security and international treaties to ban political organisations, and in effect take away the voters’ right to decide the field of candidates themselves. …
The whole reason Canberra had to invent the separate category of a “hate group” was because it wanted the power to ban organisations which were not terrorist groups and which had not engaged in terrorist violence. …
Pretty important, wouldn’t you think? Why are the media are staying mum?
When the legacy media has bothered to cover it at all, its attention has overwhelmingly drifted toward the spectacle surrounding the plaintiffs rather than the constitutional power being claimed by the Commonwealth.
This is not very surprising given much of the mainstream press is now materially dependent on public money, or on revenue streams the government has created for it. Through the News Media Bargaining Code and now the proposed News Bargaining Incentive, the state is effectively forcing Big Tech to subsidise mainstream media outlets which can no longer maintain their old business model on those platforms. The government is making Google, Meta and other platforms prop up the same media class that otherwise struggles to compete in the new media environment.
Unsurprisingly, that class is not especially eager to dwell on a case exposing how far the government is now prepared to go to control political association. So they cover the personalities, the Nazi imagery, the Antifa scuffles and the spectacle, anything except the constitutional question.
The media has barely, if at all, articulated what the Commonwealth is trying to do with the external affairs power, or what it is asking the High Court to accept about nationhood. …
The power the Government has claimed as its own:
The government is … asking for an extraordinary power to outlaw political organisations, while ludicrously presenting that power as necessary to “protect democracy.”
The challengers’ answer is the obvious one: a government power to decide which political organisations may legally exist is itself a threat to the constitutional structure of democratic government.
And if your response is simply, “Yeah, but these people are Nazis,” then answer the more important question: why do you despise Nazism? Because it is authoritarian? Because it rejects liberal democracy? Because it treats political opposition as something to crush? That is precisely the irony here. People reject National Socialism primarily because of those totalitarian tendencies.
Yet the Australian Labor government is now quite literally defending a legal regime that allows the state to ban political organisations and criminalise participation in them. …
If political parties can be policed out of existence by the executive, then “liberal democracy” is an incredibly inaccurate term for the political model of Australia. If the Labor Party get their way, the High Court has officially affirmed that we live under police state multiculturalism, in which elections may continue, but the government reserves the right to decide which political organisations Australians are allowed to choose between. …
The Minister does not need a prior conviction to conclude that an organisation engaged in hate-crime conduct. The Minister does not have to provide procedural fairness when forming the relevant statutory satisfaction. The organisation is then listed through regulation. After listing, continuing membership and various forms of support become criminal offences. …
No democracy without freedom of political association:
If the Court sides with the Commonwealth, this is the end of democracy in the only sense the Constitution actually guarantees: that senators and members are directly chosen by the people from among the political organisations the people are still allowed to form.
The issue that matters is immigration. The globalists call anyone or any party “far right” if — and only if — they want to reduce third world immigration. This is the litmus test.
If a new party arose in Australia whose policies explicitly advocated for remigration or mass deportation, like Restore in Britain, it would sit under the same ban hammer.
It’s not about “Nazis”:
Which makes the timing of this even more suspicious. Australia has had forms of National Socialist political organisation since the 1960s. The Australian National Socialist Party was founded in 1962. The National Socialist Party of Australia followed in 1967, published material, organised publicly and even ran candidates. They were never banned as a hate group, but perhaps this was because of their political irrelevance.
The rollout of laws is only happening now because the Labor government appears nervous that movements further to the Right have stopped being politically irrelevant and could potentially become a serious electoral force: one capable of siphoning votes away from the major parties, feeding preferences into right-wing minor parties and ultimately delivering those votes to parties such as One Nation.
They could neuter One Nation by steering it through the Overton window:
And horrifyingly, the hammer of a political ban even hangs over One Nation.
Even if One Nation itself is never listed, the regime still does the work. It can ban everything to its Right …
It forces One Nation to police its own side internally: to purge the language, personnel and political energy that give protest movements their force, and to neuter itself as the price of remaining safely on the legal side of the line.
And what class do the High Court judges belong too? The Constitution is clear enough, but who can be confident the High Court won’t interpret it in a manner that their peers, friends, and family prefer. We shall see.