The Plot Against Pell

Never have I seen such vituperation and opprobrium directed against anyone as I have seen in the press directed against Cardinal Pell over many months, if not years. . . . it seems to me that there is no chance Cardinal Pell could ever receive a fair trial, so poisoned has the public's mind been. 

Geoffrey Horgan, former Victorian Crown Prosecutor

     At trial the accused's guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, Cardinal George Pell, one time Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne might be unique in that his innocence was established beyond any reasonable doubt - but not before he served more than 400 days in prison for a crime he could not possibly have committed.

Reparations for Slavery?

      You will no doubt be aware of a recent movement to claim reparations for West Indian populations in general from Britain in particular and Europe in general because of past slavery. Here we see two popular tropes: (1) negative experiences have permanent, intergenerational effects, and (2) those poor dark skinned people can't possibly improve themselves without the help of a (left wing) white saviour. Let us shine a more rational light on the subject.

The Chancellor in Tears

       "It's enough to make a grown man cry!" That's the sort of thing one would say about the Labour Government in the United Kingdom these days. But recently the world was presented with the spectacle of the second highest officer in the UK cabinet, the chancellor (finance minister), Rachel Reeves bursting into tears in Parliament. To this, The Guardian ran an opinion piece entitled, "Crying in the Commons: why are women's workplace tears a source of shame?" Well, as an ethologist i.e. a zoologist who specialises in behaviour, let me explain.

Coming Up Trumps in America

      I see that the lunatics are still in charge of the asylum over in the U.S. How is it that an advanced democracy like the United States can't put up a better choice than between two flawed characters such as Trump and Harris? In 2016 it was a choice between the mad and the bad. This time it was between the mad and the sad. Nevertheless, as an Australian I was praying for a Trump victory. Anything else was too terrible to contemplate.

Once More: the Moral Panic Over Domestic Violence

      It is hard to believe it is 9½ years since I wrote Why I Didn't Wear a White Ribbon, in which I provided the true statistics for domestic violence in Australia, and put them in perspective. Since then the figures have only got better, but everybody claims they have got worse, and they talk about an "epidemic of domestic violence". 28 women killed by their partners or ex-partners in the first four months of 2024, or one every four days! That certainly sounds like a spectacular increase since last year. Or is it?

Aboriginal Issues

       Despite being an Australian, I have a significant library on the North American Indians, mainly because they had a wider variety of lifestyles to those of our own Aborigines. They were hard done by by the Americans. However, that does not mean that their lifestyles were idyllic. The tribes tended to break down into two categories: the predators and the prey, the latter being the smaller tribes. Constant warfare was the order of the day, sometimes with unimaginable cruelty.

     The Australian Aborigines were also hard done by by white Australians. But that also does not mean that their lives were idyllic.

A Rare Defeat for the Establishment

       2023, and another Australian referendum bites the dust! Australians are wary of changing their Constitution. They know that if they make a mistake, they will never be able to fix it, so if any significant group opposes the referendum, they vote No. And this one was especially egregious. Ignoring the bread-and-butter issues with which the people were really concerned, the Prime Minister had made it his priority to establish an Aboriginal "Voice" to act as an addition to Parliament. It could have been established simply by legislation, but for reasons on which we may speculate, he wanted it in the Constitution. As for the details - its size, the cost, the choosing of its members, and everything else which might interest the population - these were ignored. The great unwashed citizenry were not supposed to know anything as trivial as that before they affirmed their masters' plans. The result was predictable: 61% No to 39% Yes. Just 90 minutes after voting closed in the eastern states, the referendum was declared lost. But that was only half the story. 

"Anti-Racism" Comes to Australia.

      Parents beware! Anything which the corruptors of society get away with in America will eventually be introduced into Australia. And the obvious place to introduce it is in the schools, under the radar of the parents. We have already been alerted to the "Safe Schools" abomination, and questions are now being asked about how the new curriculum undermines the national identity. Now we have a three-part ABC  documentary on "The School That Tried to End Racism". No doubt the intentions were good (which is more than can be said for some other teaching programs), but the sum result was to introduce racial tension into an area where it did not previously exist.

America Should Run Elections Like Australia

   Another leap year, another U.S. Presidential election! And, regular as clockwork, allegations of voting irregularities, of varying plausibility, are making the rounds. What is it about Americans? Such allegations practically never occur over here. All right, Australia is probably the gold standard for election procedures, but the allegations are also rare to non-existent in other democracies. Britain and France have both acquired large racial minorities (more fool they!), but one never hears it suggested that they are being "suppressed". Other countries make no issue about voter ID, and I am sure that none of them would tolerate ballot harvesting or election day registration. So what's wrong with America?

The Case for Capitalism

     I was born with a tarnished silver spoon in my mouth. My paternal grandfather came to Australia as a fatherless teenager, and became a wealthy jeweller. By 1901 he was prosperous enough to pay for three portraits of his daughters by the state's leading portrait artist, and he lived in a two story home with four servants. None of this money came down to the next generation, I might add. My parents were small businessmen who lost their business and ended up as unskilled labourers, leaving me to climb my own way up into the middle class. I wouldn't want all you socialists and assorted Marxists to think I am speaking from some sort of privileged background. But I would like to ask you this: would you prefer to live as the owner of a big jewellery store in 1901, or as a shop assistant in such a store today?

An Unlosable Election?

     I was just as amazed as everybody else on the evening of the May 18th Federal election to see the Coalition returned to office. Whether I was elated or appalled is beside the point; it wasn't supposed to happen - not if the opinion polls were to be believed. Since then there has been endless soul searching: firstly with the pollsters, who turned out so wrong, and secondly by the Labor Party which, like the American Democrats, feel "We was robbed!" Well, I have no intention of revisiting and analysing the various policies, but I do intend to elaborate on normal voter behaviour, and show that the results weren't so extraordinary after all.

Race and IQ

     Jared Diamond expressed the view that uncivilised people are more intelligent than civilised ones, but didn't actually provide any evidence. Now, I am a zoologist, not a psychometrician, but two things are pretty obvious to me. The first is that intelligence is not a social construct; some people really are born smarter than others. The second is that race is real. We may be all brothers under the skin, but my blood line separated from that of the Aborigines about 2,000 generations ago, and from Africans nearly 3,000 generations ago. A lot can happen in that time. Therefore, I find it extremely unlikely that the various races can differ in (say) average height, but be exactly the same in average intelligence. On the other hand, some of the extremely low racial IQ I have seen quoted make my baloney meter light up.

The Case for Colonialism

     On my last visit to Singapore, our city guide explained that they are grateful for British rule, because it brought them the rule of law, democratic principles, and education, as well as laying the basis for its emergence as a modern twenty-first century state. One Singaporean historian has made the point that, because they were not conquered, and because most of them are the descendants of immigrants during the colonial period, they do not have a "victim mentality".
    Meanwhile, a poll of 1,008 Jamaicans in 2011 found that 60% of all age groups said they would have been better off under British rule, and only 17% disagreed. By any objective view, they were correct. The same thing must be said about the former Marxist rebels in the Yemen who, in 2010, declared that they regretted driving out the British. Just the same, Kartar Lalvani complained that, in 50 years of living in Britain, he could not find any Briton to say that India had benefited from British rule, so he wrote a book to prove it.
    That colonialism has been, on balance, a benefit to those it governed should be a no-brainer to any knowledgeable person. Therefore, when Prof. Bruce Gilley wrote an article entitled, "The Case for Colonialism", and submitted it to the Third World Quarterly, the editors, seeing that it was heavily referenced, logically argued, and peer reviewed, and in view of the fact that they were a forum for all sorts of opinion, decided to publish it, little realizing that they were committing a thought crime. The PC establishment had an allergic reaction. In academia not so long ago, if you read a paper you disagreed with, your response was to gather your data and write a rebuttal, but that is oh-so-passé in the age of Twitter storms, deplatforming, and the vicious, violent gangs calling themselves Antifas, whose aim is to close down discussion. Fifteen of the 34 members of the editorial board resigned, and two petitions, with a total of 17,577 signatures were mustered to demand the article be retracted and, if possible, the author's Ph.D. be rescinded. Probably only one percent had ever read the article. But when Indian nationalists made credible death threats against the editor, the article was taken down from the journal's website. I doubt if any serious police action has been taken in relation to the death threats.
    Fortunately, the article can be downloaded as a PDF from Prof Gilley's website. It has also been archived. So now I am republishing it, as my small part in support of historical truth and freedom of speech, but mostly to cock a snoot at the rampaging totalitarians who are now seeking to silence every opinion but their own. (I am pleased to advise that it has now been published in full by History Reclaimed.) He has since written a book, which has been reviewed here, with many details of the failure of independence.
    Note that, well researched as it might be, they are his words, not mine.

Guns in Australia and America

     I'm writing this because I am tired of having to explain the same things over and over again. Whenever there is a mass shooting in the U.S., people over here declare how lucky we are not to have their lax gun laws, while people over there demand that they copy our legislation. Many people over here will tell you that the gun buyback of 1996 and the subsequent tightening of the gun laws has reduced the homicide rate. On the other hand, many Americans imagine that we have outlawed guns and the homicide rate has gone up. Others suggest that Australians would all be safer if we were allowed to carry concealed firearms. All these beliefs are incorrect, as I intend to explain.

Health Insurance in Australia

     I don't know what the fuss is about in America over the Affordable Care Act, nicknamed Obamacare. This is not an endorsement, merely a genuine statement of ignorance. I do not know enough about its costs and implementation to make an informed judgment. However, since I have a lot more readers in the U.S., and even Russia, than in Australia, perhaps I should explain the Australian system of universal health insurance, which is a composite of public and private insurance. It wasn't planned that way; it simply grew as a result of rival political philosophies pulling in opposite directions, as well as financial restrictions. But it works reasonably well. (Of course, nothing works perfectly.)

The Australian Voting System

     There are a number of facets of Australian political life which outsiders fail to understand, which I intend to explain in the following articles. The first is the voting system. As a background, understand that we operate under the Westminster system, which means that the executive is not separate from the legislative branch. The Constitution requires a House of Representatives, and a Senate. It makes no mention of voting methods, but over the decades we have developed a system which, in my opinion, is superior to all others. It is compulsory, manually counted, preferential and, in the case of the Senate, both preferential and proportional. Let us see how this works in practice.

Why I Voted for One Nation in Queensland

      She's b-a-a-a-ck! The implosion of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party in the last years of last century was due to its founder's lack of leadership skills. But it didn't mean its core policies had lost popular support. I voted for One Nation in 1998, not because I saw it as relevant to state politics, but because I recognized that the sole party prepared to stand up against Asian immigration had to develop a political base. This year, 2017 I had an additional reason: the people who were supposed to represent us had betrayed us. The left keeps introducing destructive laws on social engineering, which the conservatives never have the moral courage to repeal. One major party is immoral, and the other suffers from moral cowardice. And since most of my readers will not be old enough to know that what we have today is not the way it has always been, let me provide a brief lesson.

What Are We Going to Do About the Polygamists?

     I was expecting this. A problem which is endemic in Europe has now reached Australia - or has at least been acknowledged here: the Government is financing Muslim polygamy. Last Sunday's newspapers reported how Centrelink is providing spousal benefits to second (and later) wives because it is cheaper than giving them single parent benefits. The husbands are not prosecuted for bigamy because the marriages have not been officially registered. Let me state here, with all due respect (and not much is due): this problem exists simply because the powers that be have lacked the moral courage to nip it in the bud.

Why I Would Have Voted for Trump If I Were an American

     Watching from the other side of the Pacific, I see that my long held prediction about the United States has at last come true: the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum. It is not so much who won the election, but the fact that it was a choice between the two worst candidates. As one of our commentators put it, it was between "a vulgar and undisciplined popularist and a morally compromised machine politician". Another put it more succinctly: between the mad and the bad. (And Sanders wasn't so great, either.) No, I wasn't surprised at the Trump win. I need only refer to the prediction given by Wayne Root, but other commentators from both the left and the right had made the same point: when voting is non-compulsory, the really important factor is the enthusiasm of the candidate's followers. As an outsider, I am not going to talk about Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, the insecure laptop, or Wikileaks. Nor am I going to praise Trump's virtues because, basically, I can't think of any. Indeed, if it were my country, I would be really be concerned about a loose cannon rolling around the corridors of power. Nevertheless, I had been hoping - nay, praying - for a Trump triumph, for two good reasons.

Working Women and the Housing Crisis

     John and Marsha are yuppies in the original sense: Young Urban Professionals. Buying a house was not a problem - that is, until they started a family. Then they had to renegotiate their mortgage. They do not think they can afford more than two children; the cost of housing is just too great. Julian is a 40-something bachelor. Despite receiving half the proceeds of a house sale a decade ago as a legacy, he is still renting. He does not think he will be able to afford to buy a house unless he acquires a second income by marriage - and, of course, children would be too expensive. Time is running out if he wants to get a thirty year mortgage. Our society has never been so affluent, yet its natural reproduction rate is below replacement and we are struggling to own our own homes.
     Meanwhile, back in the world we used to inhabit, my father was an unskilled labourer, and my mother took only part time and casual work. Yet they managed to pay off a house and raise two children. What on earth has happened in the interim?