Monday, 23 August 2010
Always Ready
It is not really worth it until the new boundaries and AV are in place, but with David Miliband having spent much of the summer in America in search of alternative employment, certain readers of this blog should be turning their thoughts to the Labour candidacy at the forthcoming South Shields by-election. As, in fact, they are doing.
Peace and Prosperity
Congratulations to John Madigan, the newly elected DLP Senator from Victoria. His party is not exactly the DLP of old, but it is the nearest and the most successful attempt to keep the flame burning. Now burning in the Federal Parliament, in fact. Roll on electoral reform in Britain.
I have been asked why I am so keen on the old DLP, considering that it supported the Vietnam War. My answer to that one is that, while there might not have been any existential threat to Australia from a Communist takeover of Indo-China, there might have been such a threat, whereas there was certainly none to America, just as there would have been none to Britain. Faced with that possibility alongside the huge power of Communists and fellow-travellers in and around Australia's unions and universities, the DLP's attitude becomes at least understandable and even excusable.
Leaving aside Andrew Wilkie, who for all his other faults at least had the wit and the courage to resign as an intelligence officer in protest at the lying of his country into war in Iraq, there are three Independents to whom attention now turns. All are former National Party members. Bob Katter is a pro-life and pro-family Catholic (of Lebanese extraction, in fact), whose father, predecessor and namesake was part of the ALP secession to the DLP before joining the Nationals, which his son has since left in order to pursue with dazzling electoral success his combination of protectionist agrarian socialism, moral and social conservatism, and climate change scepticism.
Tony Windsor is in similar vein, although with less economic leftishness, and in 2004 he alleged that he had been offered a diplomatic post by the Nationals in order to remove him from what was formerly one of their safe seat; there is no love lost between him and his former party. Rob Oakeshott is a social liberal and an anti-monarchist, so that one does have to ask why he was ever a National, and a very active one at that, in the first place.
All three therefore have at least as much Labor as Liberal-National potential. But how open is the ALP to a pro-life and pro-family Catholic, a morally and socially conservative agrarian socialist who is sceptical at least about the sorts of measures advocated by climate change hysterics? How open is the ALP to Bob Santamaria's Five Primacies: the integrity of human life, support for the family unit, decentralism, economic and wider patriotism, and Christian values? At least two seats in the House of Representatives, and at least one seat in the Senate, may now be available. Depending on the ALP's answers to those questions. If it had had better answers to them, then there might not have been a hung Parliament to begin with.
I have been asked why I am so keen on the old DLP, considering that it supported the Vietnam War. My answer to that one is that, while there might not have been any existential threat to Australia from a Communist takeover of Indo-China, there might have been such a threat, whereas there was certainly none to America, just as there would have been none to Britain. Faced with that possibility alongside the huge power of Communists and fellow-travellers in and around Australia's unions and universities, the DLP's attitude becomes at least understandable and even excusable.
Leaving aside Andrew Wilkie, who for all his other faults at least had the wit and the courage to resign as an intelligence officer in protest at the lying of his country into war in Iraq, there are three Independents to whom attention now turns. All are former National Party members. Bob Katter is a pro-life and pro-family Catholic (of Lebanese extraction, in fact), whose father, predecessor and namesake was part of the ALP secession to the DLP before joining the Nationals, which his son has since left in order to pursue with dazzling electoral success his combination of protectionist agrarian socialism, moral and social conservatism, and climate change scepticism.
Tony Windsor is in similar vein, although with less economic leftishness, and in 2004 he alleged that he had been offered a diplomatic post by the Nationals in order to remove him from what was formerly one of their safe seat; there is no love lost between him and his former party. Rob Oakeshott is a social liberal and an anti-monarchist, so that one does have to ask why he was ever a National, and a very active one at that, in the first place.
All three therefore have at least as much Labor as Liberal-National potential. But how open is the ALP to a pro-life and pro-family Catholic, a morally and socially conservative agrarian socialist who is sceptical at least about the sorts of measures advocated by climate change hysterics? How open is the ALP to Bob Santamaria's Five Primacies: the integrity of human life, support for the family unit, decentralism, economic and wider patriotism, and Christian values? At least two seats in the House of Representatives, and at least one seat in the Senate, may now be available. Depending on the ALP's answers to those questions. If it had had better answers to them, then there might not have been a hung Parliament to begin with.
Canonical Solutions
As surely as it is time to raise the age of consent to the 18 presupposed by Catholic Canon Law regardless of the law in any given jurisdiction, is it not also time to ban marriage within the much wider degrees of consanguinity prohibited by the Church?
Sunday, 22 August 2010
In The Know
Well, there will certainly be no bomb at the Conservative Party Conference after today. Remember, there is no communication between the Government and the "dissident Republicans". Oh, no. Perish the thought. Just as there was none between the IRA and Margaret Thatcher. Except that there was. And except that she mysteriously escaped the Brighton Bomb entirely unscathed.
Apply Yourselves
A-level is not an entrance exam for university. A-level is A-level. What is more, how is it a problem that one third of applicants to university have been left without a place? In any genuinely competitive application process, that at least two thirds of applicants would be unsuccessful would be built into the system. There is no right to go to university.
Equal Under The Law
It is highly debateable whether or not this country's Gypsies are an ethnic group, as the Roma being sent back to Eastern Europe from France certainly are. It is even more so whether or not many of those throwing up shanty towns in our countryside are Gypsies at all. But it is not debateable that, whoever and whatever they are, they must be subject to the same planning laws as the rest of us. Why didn't the last lot do this? Whatever happened to equality, not least regardless of ethnicity or class background?
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