Australia Turns Socialist?

In a shock election result last weekend, Australia’s socialist Labor government was returned to government with a dramatically increased majority. In the 150 seat House of Representatives, the Labor Party (at the time of writing) has 90 seats, with the opposition Liberal-Nationals (notionally conservative), winning only 40 seats. There are still a number of seats undecided but the Labor Party has a huge majority.

The leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, lost his own seat and the conservative coalition is left shattered and routed. Who would have thought that independent and rugged Australians would have voted so clearly for the collectivists?

An independent journalist Fred Pawle, had an interesting take on the result in a post this week:

“Phew. That was close! Had Peter Dutton’s Coalition won this election, we would be staring at three years of fake conservatives appeasing the environmental lobby, imposing new censorship laws, introducing a digital ID and central bank digital currency, ignoring the toxic National School Curriculum and locking us all up every time Anthony Fauci catches a cold…..”

Why Conservatives Should Rejoice

Pawle’s view is that the Opposition is really just a bunch of “fake conservatives” and so, if elected, we would have had a series of policies virtually indistinguishable from those of the socialists.

The Conservative Party in Great Britain found themselves in the same situation in the last general election with a massive victory for UK Labour. It was not because Labour was a political party that the voters dreamed of but the Conservatives had let down the electorate despite their 14 years in power.

In the UK, the Labour vote was only around 34% of the total in a first-past-the-post voting system. However, because of uneven voting patterns and the first-past-the-post system, this modest percentage of the vote translated into 412 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons.

The Voting System and Recent Election Results in the West

Australia has a complicated preferential system of voting and interestingly enough, despite the socialist party’s huge win in terms of seats, only received ~35% of the votes compared to the Coalition’s ~33%. This means that one-third of the voters (and Australia has compulsory voting, with fines for those who fail to vote) voted for minor political parties. It is not a great endorsement for either of the major political parties.

In any case, I was shocked that the Australian Labor Party Leader, Anthony Albanese (nicknamed “Albo”), was elected as Prime Minister even though he appeared to have been injected with some type of anti-charismatic drug.

In Albo’s speeches, words spilled from his lips, apparently written by Chat GPT and virtually incomprehensible. However, his key messages focused on spending more money that the government didn’t have and doubling down on net-zero policies, designed to kill any industries left in the country.

A major promise was to make healthcare even “more free” and to push Australia toward the disastrous UK NHS system which has failed miserably and cannot be fixed. President Reagan recognised the danger of governments seizing control of healthcare when he said in 1961 that:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”

He later went on to say the following in relation to “handouts” and government control of medicine:

“Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business.”

Unfortunately, Australians could not resist the handouts and the conservative parties, rather than promoting any conservative principles, seemed to try to outspend the socialists, which of course, is impossible. A core political truth is - never try to outspend a socialist!

Interestingly, these quotes from President Reagan occurred about the time that even the Democrats in the US were against handouts and open borders. President John F. Kennedy concluded his famous inauguration speech on 20 January 1961 with these words:

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

Any politician suggesting this today would be run out of town as voters seem to have been encouraged to get their snouts in the government trough and seek one of the many government handouts.

So, What Happened in Australia?

Well, the conservative parties presented no vision or values such as: free enterprise, freedom of speech, smaller government, sensible energy policy, and fostering self-reliance. The electorate could not differentiate the policies from those of the Labor Party and Peter Dutton, the conservative leader, was unable to articulate a clear point of differentiation from the socialists. He also appeared to be frightened about being smeared with being a Trump supporter and he changed a number of policies on the run.

One wonders if it there was some type of plot by the global collectivists to infiltrate the conservative parties campaign and produce policies that would ensure their unelectibility? In any case, Australia is on socialist path to economic disaster backed up by a commitment to net-zero and electricity blackouts. Few of those left in the conservative parties have any idea how to redress the disastrous results and many are suggesting that the conservatives need to move further to the political left. Soon, we will all end up close to the policies of Chairman Mao!

It does look as though Australians are no longer wanting to be rugged individualists but bludgers who are looking for handouts and waiting for the climate disaster to finish the country off, as they live in 15 minute cities.

The time could be right for an Australian version of President Trump or Nigel Farage to arise. Otherwise, I just may need to get my President Xi poster laminated with the following inscription and placed on my front gate:

热烈欢迎习近平主席莅临！我们满怀敬意与喜悦，愿尽绵薄之力，全力配合各项工作。衷心祝愿伟大领袖健康长寿、国家繁荣昌盛 which roughly translated means: Welcome President Xi! How May We Help? May the Great Leader Live Long and Prosper.

I think I now have all the bases covered. Australia’s new nuclear submarines are due for delivery in 2050. It will be too late.

Articles That Caught My Attention This Week

COVID-19 Failures

I commenced this Sons of Issachar Newsletter in response to the failure of the mainstream media to articulate the government overreach in relation to the “China virus” and the suppression of credible scientists and their views by the mainstream media.

Now, it is being increasingly recognised that the measures taken by governments had little or no scientific credibility, even though we were all told to “trust the science”.

Remarkably, even the left-wing media are realising that there were many failure points in the way that governments and scientists responded to the COVID-19 challenge. This week, Vox published an interview with a Princeton academic, Frances Lee, about the politics of COVID-19. As the author of the article in Vox, Sam Illing writes:

“It’s about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why?”

Frances Lee has just published a book titled: In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, co-authored with Stephen Macedo. Professor Lee made the following points in relation to the political (and scientific) response to COVID-19:

• The debate about COVID - “Countries around the world sort of scrapped preexisting pandemic plans in order to follow the example set in Wuhan, and then in Italy, with Italy having the first nationwide lockdown and improvising along the way. There wasn’t a scientific basis for the actions that were taken, in the sense that there was no accumulated body of evidence that these measures would be effective. It was hoped that they would be, but there was a lack of evidence.

  If you go back and take a look at a report that was prepared by the World Health Organization in 2019, just months before the pandemic broke out, that document goes through each of the proposed “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” meaning the measures that are taken to keep people apart in the context of an infectious disease pandemic, like masking or social distancing, business closures, school closures.

  Across the board, the evidence base is rated as poor quality. Several such measures are recommended not to be used under any circumstances in the context of a respiratory pandemic. Among those were border closures, quarantine of exposed individuals, and testing and contact tracing. And then all those measures were of course employed here in the US and around the world in the context of the Covid pandemic without any kind of reckoning with the reasons why those measures were not recommended in the pre-pandemic planning.

• Public health officials said different things publicly and privately - “Well, in her memoir, Deborah Birx is quite frank, that two weeks to slow the spread was just a pretext and it was just an effort to get Trump on board for initial closures and that, “As soon as those closures were in place,” she says, “we immediately began to look for ways to extend them.”

  I think one of the more devastating noble lies that was told during the pandemic was to go out there in spring and summer 2021, even into the fall of 2021, with the vaccine mandates and tell people that if you get vaccinated, you can protect your loved ones from catching the disease from you, that you will become a dead end to the virus. They did not have a scientific basis for making that claim. The vaccine trials had not tested for an outcome on transmission.”

• Can political leaders make decisions in a situation like COVID-19 based on science alone? “One should not think that it is possible for science to settle political questions in the way that politicians talked about the Covid response, that they were just “following the science.” That was never responsible rhetoric. It was never a responsible way to make policy.”

It is interesting that few people want to discuss the horror of the COVID-19 overreach and remarkably, most people still have the view that we can trust governments and doctors. COVID-19 seems to have induced a collective amnesia but articles like this one in Vox and the associated podcast (listen to the link below) are helpful in providing a retrospective examination of the failures of government policy. Unfortunately, no government has admitted its mistakes and it seems likely that when there is another pandemic, governments will once again seek to induce a state of fear and control.

Scientists Plan to Stop Sunlight Reaching the Earth - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Climate scientists in general seem to have an extremely high arrogance:abiliity ratio. We have a weather system that cannot be modeled because no-one understands all the parameters, let alone how to modify them. Nonetheless, climate scientists not only try to tell us what the models suggest in relation to future climate but think that they can modify the climate and all will be great.

I have been watching presentations this week by Dane Wigington from Geoengineering Watch and have realised that for at least the last 50+ years, clandestine work has been going on with various governments attempting to influence weather patterns with materials like aluminium and even sulphuric acid sprayed into the stratosphere with the resultant “chemtrails”. The idea of “chemtrails” are regarded as a “conspiracy theory” but Mr Wigington has demonstrated that they are conspiracy fact.

President Lyndon Johnson spoke about control of weather in 1962 (watch the brief clip below) and he sounds like some type of crazed dictator (he probably was!).

As you look up into the sky each morning, you can see the chemtrails everywhere and they are not a conspiracy theory.

With this background, I was shocked to find the following article in the UK Telegraph a few days ago: Scientists to Brighten Clouds in Climate Race. It seems that the UK government is spending £50 million to stop so much sunlight from reaching the earth.

It seems extraordinary that governments believe they can meddle with the atmosphere without considering various unintended consequences. Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s science editor writes:

“The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria), a government funding body, has announced more than £50 million for 21 geoengineering projects, including five outdoor field trials.

Among the selected projects include shooting plumes of seawater spray into the sky to see if it can enhance the reflectivity of low-lying clouds. Such a method could be used to stop so much sunlight reaching Earth.”

The article says that scientists will consult local communities but it is unlikely that any negative comments will be taken seriously. The Telegraph has a diagram to demonstrate that what was widely promoted as a conspiracy theory now seems to be conspiracy fact.

Figure 1. Diagram from the UK Telegraph demonstrating “how solar geoengineering could cool the earth".

Run for your lives! The climate scientists are coming to a town near you!

The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning, a theory developed by William Strauss and Neil Howe, explains that the history of the West follows a pattern of four, 15 to 25 year periods and the Fourth Turning indicates a crisis. The four phases are said to have equivalence to the four stages of human life:

“.. childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and elderhood. Each one is defined by the behaviors of the generations passing through them, specifically by how they react to societal changes and events.”

The Fourth Turning (a crisis) is described as follows:

“A Crisis occurs when a catalyst—a major event or series of events that creates a mood shift—ignites a significant change in society.”

Tyler Durdan warned this week that “the Fourth Turning has gone global”. He writes:

“History tells us that civilizations and societies boom, bust and rise anew to repeat the pattern - a pattern that demographer Neil Howe says is surprisingly predictable in both its timing and trajectory.

Howe refers to these "seasons" of societal change as "turnings", and has famously has declared America is now well into a Fourth Turning, the "bust" part of its cycle - where the status quo falls apart - often chaotically - and is replaced by a brand new order.”

Mr Durdan goes on to quote Neil Howe in relation the significance of various leaders:

“Neil Howe affirms that the global shift from globalization to nationalism, driven by Trump’s America First policies and parallel movements (e.g., Meloni in Italy, Modi in India), is a hallmark of the fourth turning.”

There are opportunities as well as challenges in this story of the Fourth Turning. Mr Durdan writes:

“Howe predicts increased volatility, legal battles, and potential crises (economic, political, or geopolitical) that could catalyze major institutional reshaping by the 2030s, when a new "First Turning" might emerge.”

The Fourth Turning is a fascinating theory and was first published in a book by William Strauss and Neil Howe in 1997 - see this link. It’s clear that we need to prepare for further instability with a shift from globalism to nationalism. I think though that the globalists have the money and the power.

President Trump - This Time It’s Different

Most of the analysis about President Trump is very biased and journalists find it difficult to maintain a neutral approach to his second term as US president. However, I enjoyed and appreciated the article from the UK Telegraph journalist, Rob Crilly this last week. It is worthwhile reading the entire article which has as its theme - the president and his approach is different this time.

The first 100 days has come and gone with an extraordinary level of activity. President Trump has said, modestly, that his first 100 days “are the most successful first 100 days of any administration”. I am sure that he is correct. President Trump has certainly sought to upturn ever major institution and put the “Deep State” on the back foot.

Rob Crilly writes, after interviewing President Trump recently:

“His words were delivered in the cramped confines of the Air Force One press cabin. Trump stood in the doorway, Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary, to one side, as reporters jostled to keep their audio recorders under his nose so as not to miss a single headline.

This was a president in a hurry, with no time for small talk.

This is the way it has been ever since Trump returned to the White House on January 20.

His first 100 days have brought a helter-skelter approach to governing. His famous Sharpies have turned 139 pieces of paper into executive orders so far, covering everything from rolling back diversity efforts to opening up protected waters to fishing, plus almost as many executive memos and other actions.

He has followed populist rabble-rouser Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” strategy. Opponents of his Maga agenda do not know where to turn. The courts simply cannot keep up.

That rapid pace comes with jeopardy, however. Pundits talk about a constitutional crisis as the Trump administration sets itself on a collision course with the judiciary over and over again……”

“This is a president surrounded by the people he always wanted. These are die-hard loyalists in a team forged in the fire of defeat in 2020. Where his 2016 team was pulled together quickly in the wake of a surprise election win, drawn from Wall Street, the armed forces and the Republican party establishment, the present team was built from the survivors of a bitter election loss and the mob assault on the US Capitol on January 6 2021.

And where his previous campaigns had been run from Trump Tower in Manhattan and then an anonymous office block just outside Washington DC, this one was run from the sofas of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home.”

Mr Crilly concludes his article with President Trump’s thoughts in relation to the assassination attempt:

“As ever, the battle for an interviewer was to keep things on the rails, and prevent Trump from rambling or ignoring questions. He shrugged off any sense that he was psychologically scarred by the bullet that tore through his ear, but he did see a deeper purpose in cheating death.

“I would love to think it’s God, and it’s God doing it because he wants to save America,” he told me. “He sees what’s happening. God sees what’s happening in America.”

The next 100 days will be fascinating and will determine if the sweeping changes President Trump has brought in via Executive Orders, can be consolidated with legislation that would stop a future president simply reversing President Trump’s orders.

It will take a significant period of time to know whether Trump’s tariff strategy is successful and if there will indeed be a golden period for America. In the meantime, the Trump show is very entertaining.