I've changed my mind. About a great many things. Mainly thanks to Covid and the stupid response to it.
I came to realise my shift in opinions last time that I completed a "political compass" quiz. Over the last (probably) 10 years or so, I check in with an online "political compass" which not only gives you a graphic indication of where you sit politically, it's a good device to get you thinking about your own principles and prejudices rather than just policy of the day. (There are a few available online. Try this one yourself HERE.)
When I last checked in, I found that a lot of my answers were different from previous tests.
This got me thinking about what has changed for me and how I might be thinking about some things a bit differently. Following is a list of those things. It is by no means complete and not in any particular order.
United Nations. From the most noble of beginnings, the United Nations was born out of WWII with the intent to prevent war.
Since then, this bloated, self-appointed, autocratic, bureaucratic behemoth has expanded exponentially and uninvitedly into the lives of all of us.
The UN influences and coerces governments around the world to yield to their ideas and agenda. (Mainly, they convince democracies to ignore the evils of dictatorships). The UN imposes destructive policies upon the western world but pretends to benefit humanity.
In fact, it is nothing more than a money syphon from wealthy countries into demanding and unappreciative economies. Its policies punish enterprise and wealth creation while plunging the poor further into despair regardless of their location. The UN is pushing its socialist agenda across the globe by promising an impossible utopia, and sucks billions of dollars from the economies (and therefore, the people) of productive member nations. All the while, being unable (unwilling) to fulfil their original charter and prevent conflict around the world. The UN experiment has failed. I once thought that the UN was an essential presence in the world. I'm now convinced that we'd be better off without it in our lives.
Hot on the heels of the UN is its malignant spawn, the World Health Organisation (WHO). The WHO was supposed to be an information-sharing organisation where medical professionals could share information, data, statistics, procedures and ideas, all for the benefit of humanity.
Like the UN, the WHO has become a wealthy bloated bureaucratic autocracy imposing its ‘wisdom’ upon the world, whether invited to do so or not. They are now attempting to convince world governments (including ours) to cede control of health options for their own citizens, and place the WHO as the ultimate purveyor of truth and power. If the thought of your health options being controlled by another group of unaccountable, self-important do-gooders (who do no good), and commanded by self-described socialists doesn't frighten you, then check your pulse. Think about it. It will be the disastrous Covid response on steroids.
Then there's the World Economic Forum (WEF).
To be honest, I've never been a fan of these people, but feel that I should mention them as their reach into the lives of everyone gathers momentum and probes deeper into every aspect of our lives.
The WEF invites people to join the organisation and then attend its bloated meetings where they sit and sup at the feet of Klaus Schwab in Davos, Switzerland.
Elites - and future world leaders - fly their private jets at least once a year to Davos, to formulate rules that are discussed and set so people like you and me are banned from things like flying holidays, personal transport (cars), eating meat, or private property ownership. Their agenda - which they do not hide! - is designed to make you poor and them wealthy. And rules that don't apply to these elites themselves. These Bond-villain bastards must be resisted at all costs. Our stupid Liberal/Labor monoparty seems to be swallowing their virtue-signalling, happy-feels agenda hook, line and sinker. It's destructive, evil, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-prosperous. None of this is conspiracy theory. It's there to see on their website.
Julian Assange. Like many, I saw Mr Assange as a traitor.
Divulging government secrets to the public, to me, was an abhorrent betrayal. But that was back when I trusted our governments.
If the last three years have shown me anything, it's just how easily our leaders, politicians, the executive and big business leaders can be bought. How they stupidly abandoned all common sense. How they stupidly play 'follow the leader' and abandon established protocols and fall into line, with orders from the WHO, WEF, UN and the egregious Dr Anthony Fauci being blindly followed. Policy was being made with the consultation of social media and social groups, rather than established, scientifically supported programs.
While the truth behind the Covid disaster is still being slowly uncovered, much of it is being hidden and/or destroyed and we are being gaslit.
I'm now of the opinion that Governments need to be more transparent and it's people like Assange who have gifted us the truth. I've only recently realised that people like Assange are simply doing what our own media should be doing but refuse to do so; that is, pushing and exposing the truth, making governments and the executive accountable, and exposing corruption in government and big business.
Doctor-patient relationship of trust and confidentiality. Once, the doctor-patient relationship was sacrosanct. A doctor's decisions about an individual's health were made with the benefit of the doctor's uninfluenced knowledge under consultation with the patient. But not any more.
It's become very apparent that a doctor's decisions are becoming less individual-based and more dictated by pharmaceutical companies, the elite, the WHO and politicians.
Perhaps, more egregiously, governments are punishing doctors who stray from the set narrative. My doctor insisted I get Covid jabs. She did not respect the decision of her patient. Fortunately, I have found a doctor who does.
Three years ago, I never questioned my doctors and medical professionals, thinking that they had my personal best interest at heart. Too many of this noble profession have proved themselves to be otherwise.
Pharmaceutical Businesses. I remember quite clearly taking a friend to task on Facebook when she suggested that pharmaceutical companies existed to only make money, not for the benefit of people's health. She saw pharma companies targeting income at all costs, even if that cost was health itself. To me, I saw making money as a justified end to innovation and discovery. I reasoned that pharmaceutical companies have every right to profit from doing or making something that others can't, and in doing so provide essential medicines, equipment and procedures that improve and/or save lives. Over the last few years, the pharma companies have done an excellent job of proving me wrong. It is now clearly evident to me that money is their only incentive, public health be damned. Fake Covid "vaccines" (have you got your latest booster for the eighth wave, yet?) are still being pushed onto a trusting public, despite evidence of their continuing and compounding harm. The vaccine harm epidemic is real, and was preventable. Robert F Kennedy Jr has written an exceptional book about it. Read this book!
Governments working with Big Business always seemed to me to be a great idea. The financial resources of government combined with the efficiency and broad knowledge base of Big Business is surely a recipe for a successful endeavour. What has happened now is business and government have brought in a third arm into their model. Namely, a compliant public media. With traditional "legacy" media suffering in the digital age from decreased revenue and in many cases bleeding money, they (the media) have become puppets and mouthpieces of government and big business. The truth is hidden and the public are treated as fools as the media gaslights us into believing the unbelievable, and not daring to question the questionable. There is a word that describes this coalition. Fascism. It needs to end. Now.
Liberal Democracies are Liberal and Democratic. Our governments are there at the behest of the people. It is the people that tell the government what to do, right? Politicians are here to serve the people, right? Well, that's the way it's supposed to be.
Covid proved the surprisingly autocratic power of state governments in particular. Our government leaders suspended and bypassed democracy and appointed themselves as the only arbiters of truth and instruction. The behaviour of state premiers was narcissistic, impetuous and autocratic. They exposed gaping loopholes within our government structure which must now be closed.
Premiers based their orders upon social media posts, focus groups, marketing and spin organisations, and playing "follow the leader" by copying Communist China’s authoritarian Covid response, and the corrupt WHO. All the while they were saying "follow the science", or, "best science", it turns out that actual science was far from their decision making.
Government and their executive have clearly forgotten that their role exists only upon the behest of us, the voting citizens. And it's our fault! Once upon a time, the role of government was administration, defence, health, law and order. Now our governments have morphed into our de facto parents. Government has its fingers in every aspect of our lives, controlling (egregiously but quite successfully) what we do, think, and say. They control personal lives, businesses, charities, families - interference that would have been unthinkable just a generation or two ago.
As soon as something goes wrong we blame the government for not preventing it, we look to the government to help, and we look to the government to make sure that the problem doesn't happen again. Not because we asked them to. But because we DEMAND it. We are idiots. Government isn't the cure of our problems, it's the cause.
Government in a liberal democracy (or a constitutional monarchy, for that matter) should be minimalist, supply minimum, tax minimum. Provide an even playing field, get out of the way of the individual, allow those same individuals to prosper, and we would all reap the benefits. It's no coincidence that the more egalitarian we have become, the more divided our society is.
Government as an arbiter of truth. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, "We will continue to be your single source of truth," and, "Unless you hear it from us it is not the truth."
If that's not Orwellian, I don't know what is. Ms Ardern was obviously speaking about information circulating on social media relating to the impending lockdowns with the outbreak of Covid, and the world's response to it. This very information was labelled "misinformation" which, of course, turned out to be accurate. But I digress.
It's not only our Kiwi cousins that suffered from this manipulative and evidently harmful ideology. Just about every jurisdiction in the world blindly followed the dictates of Dr Anthony Fauci and, as I mentioned, the Chinese Communist Party. Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 right up until 2022. Almost forty years!
Every day, it is now becoming more apparent that these orders, rules, guidelines, laws and procedures were fundamentally flawed. The decisions of the elites within our societies were made based upon personal power, personal promotion, personal virtue-signalling, and personal greed and wealth creation.
Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine protocols, which were always safe, proven safe for decades, and have since been proven effective, were poo-pooed, dismissed and then eventually outlawed by practically every government around the world. It is a fact that this simple, cheap and obtainable treatment would have saved thousands of lives had it been implemented when first formulated by several medical professionals from around the world. But the adaptation of these protocols was stopped for one simple reason; the development and deploying of the "vaccines". Having existing treatments would have made "emergency usage" of the experimental Covid "vaccines" impossible under law. This would have resulted in a loss of billions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies, and millions of dollars of lost revenue from those heavily invested, such as Dr Fauci, and Mr Gates. Those that decided for us, chose to protect their personal profits over the lives of others. Simple as that.
Learning nothing from the recent past, learning nothing from history, and having learned nothing from Orwell or Huxley, our own federal government is pushing ahead with it's own "Ministry of Truth", "Thought Police" policies. The proposed laws are nothing short of an affront to personal freedom and liberty. More details here.
Carbon Dioxide "Pollution" and Climate Change One of my first posts on this blog in April 2021 was a look at the world's response to climate change. I stated at the time that "climate change is real" and "science agrees that human activity is causing most of our climate change". Well, two and a half years later, I've changed my mind.
I looked into climate change and its causes. I read great books from environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, academic and author Bjorn Lomborg, Greenpeace founder Dr Patrick Moore, Australian geologist Professor Ian Plimer, and Steven E Koonin, to name a few.
Despite Mr Lomborg's insistence that human activity is driving climate change, after looking at some facts and unmolested data, I'm of the opinion that the insistence of man-made climate change is a nonsense, and just another ideology designed to plunge the developed world back into the dark ages, and boost a one-world socialist government.
Just like the Covid debacle, all you have to do to find the truth is "follow the money".
The idea of carbon pollution is multi-layered and complicated, so I won't elaborate too much here. But I will summarise thus: Carbon Dioxide, an invisible, tasteless, trace element in the atmosphere is essential for all life.
We need CO2 for, well, everything. During the last couple of hundred years CO2 has increased from 0.03% around 1850, to 0.04% today. Scientists declared that, despite the low numbers, this increase is significant, and that proposition originally had me siding with the "warmers".
However, when I looked deeper, things changed somewhat. What they don't tell you is, of that 0.04%, 3% of carbon emissions is man-made. Meaning 97% of carbon emissions are natural and therefore uncontrollable. What has become obvious to me, is that everything that we are doing around the world isn't reducing CO2, will not reduce CO2 in any significant way in the future, and sending everyone broke in the meantime. Everyone, that is, except China who manufacture wind turbines and solar panels for the world, and the already wealthy elites who, from the comfort of their private jets, finger-wag and tut-tut the common person for leaving their TV on standby mode.
Interestingly, and not spoken about by any news outlet, is the effects that increased CO2 is actually having upon the planet. Mainly, that the planet is actually becoming physically greener. In the last 20 years or so, an area the size of the USA has been ‘greened’. The world's deserts, particularly in Africa, are shrinking. Increased CO2 allows plants to survive in more arid conditions.
"Climate Action" has nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with the implementation of socialist policy and rule throughout the world. A world where the private individual will "own nothing" and become totally dependent on government for everything. No thanks.
John Howard. I always considered Mr Howard to be one of our great PMs. And, to be sure, Mr Howard and his government did achieve a lot of good and positive things during their tenure.
At the time of the infamous firearm buy-back scheme, I reluctantly agreed with the policy. I don't want to sound hyperbolic but as governments around this country and around the western world have proved over the last couple of years, tyranny is only one manufactured disaster away. Who would have thought the police response to covid would have been so militant and un-liberal?
Then there's my old millstone, Net Zero. Mr Howard brought this insanity into our national conscious, albeit by stealth. I wrote about this in a little detail last year. While Mr Howard did not implement any overt policies (such as a "visible" carbon tax), since the mid-1990s, successive governments have embraced the net zero religion. The results of the adoption of this ideology are there to see every day. Upwardly spiraling energy costs, unreliable energy provision, banning of natural gas in some places, and the manufacturing sector unable to commit long term investment due to all of these variables and unknowns. Which brings me to the ...
Nationals Party. The party for the country people and the farmers. Right? Maybe not.
Earlier this year I attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Sydney. Nationals heavyweight, former leader of the Nationals and former deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce spoke about the destructive consequences of Net Zero. He spoke about the impacts on business, manufacturing and agriculture. He spoke about the environmental destruction taking place at the sites of wind turbine installations. He spoke of the folly of it all, how the energy used to produce a wind turbine is roughly the same as the energy it will produce in its lifetime.
However, agriculture is the industry that stands to lose the most.
If Australia were to implement similar policies that have been brought in around the world, our productive, profitable and un-subsidised farming industry would be devastated.
But here's the thing, and it's something that the adoring CPAC audience seems to have forgotten. The latest round of "decarbon" policies which included seemingly impossible targets was signed off by the Morrison government. Beside Mr Morrison's signature is Mr Joyce’s.
Now, Mr Joyce made it clear that he wants to reverse the policies. He wants to end the construction of wind turbines and solar arrays. He wants to build nuclear power generation. Which makes sense. It's just a pity that he wasn't saying these things 10 years ago when he was in government. (I'm sure that he was thinking those things).
If he had started the ball rolling then, we'd have at least one nuclear generator by now. I, for one, am sick of conservative politicians and party heavyweights folding once they are in power. I don't know how we can shake some sense into these people. But it appears to me that they spend too much time listening to focus groups and social media, and not their base of voters.
Ned Kelly. I never really "got" Ned Kelly. I didn't fully understand how one could fall foul of the Police unless he actually broke laws. I couldn't understand the idea of him and his family being targeted by authority unless they deserved it. I couldn't see how people could be harassed by police unless there was evidence that justified it. I was naive in my thinking. I came to realise that, 150 years ago, despite our current law and order system being based upon the same ideas as then, that it was a different world. While corruption still finds ways to infiltrate today's systems, the reins weren't held so tightly in those days. Police had more autonomy and authority (official or not) in the days of slow communications and vast distances between the individual police and the brass. Even though, in Kelly’s case, there's plenty of evidence to indicate that the higher authorities support victimisation and harassment of the Kellys. Then, about two years ago, I got it. The plight of the Kellys dawned on me. My eyes were opened to just how easily totalitarian rule can weasel it's way in to a democratic society. I could see how it happens. The Covid madness revealed that authoritarianism can manifest itself any time and anywhere. Even here in a liberal democracy where police operate (supposedly) separately from government. We witnessed the establishment of draconian rules that were implemented with the force of law. We saw government abandon democracy and appoint themselves the arbiter of all things true and correct. We witnessed police brutality on a scale not seen in Australia for a very long time. We witnessed the arrest of individuals because of the content of their social media posts. We saw the arrest of people for daring to question government authority. We witnessed police harassment of journalists and influencers for daring to speak out in support of those that had things to say. And some of that harassment continues today, three years on.
Finally, I get it.
