Saturday 27th of April 2024

shattered dreams .....

shattered dreams .....

For more than a decade the Howard government told us we had choice. Now the Liberal Party has a choice. Marise Payne('…and Libs need to be more liberal', March 5) reminds us that the party was once a broad church, essentially the creation of Robert Menzies who knew the way back from the former United Australia Party was to create a party of the 'moral middleclass'. 

And then we have the views of Kevin Andrews, who gave us WorkChoices without apparently informing his colleagues that choice could take away rights; he who was up to his neck in ensuring that Mohamed Haneef had no choice or rights; he who now warns the Liberal Party to 'not abandon the centre in favour of the latest trendy alternative or middle-class left fancy' ('Liberals call for change to save party', March 5).  

For the future of liberalism let's hope the Liberal Party makes the right choice. 

Geoffrey Sherington 

A Time For Soul-Searching In The Party Menzies Built

Pirate of the bitterroo

John Howard's venom in an address at a gala dinner for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington speaks volume of the man whom the Australian electorate decided to ditch. His badmouthing of the new government that replaced him, within a few days of 100 days of his defeat, is vigorous in its grand delusion. John Howard was a one man band with a few acolytes to do the dirty work. More than ever now he is isolating himself as a puppet of George W Bush, himself a puppet of uncle Buck — uncle Buck presently bloated with wind, indigestion and colics.

Let me remind you of my prediction in May last year in the "pirates of the Canberranean"... if you cannot read the small print below the pictures, read the text in the blog below it...

Now that John Howard has vented his spleen, may he deflate as he should. But I'm afraid he might be the pirate of the bitteroo till the end.

and the subtext of the cartoon above, after having destroyed the Menzies spirit of average things in the moral middle class, is: "Sorry? What for?"... A cunning politician never learn... and Johnny could never say the embolden word...

economy based on China and an ungrateful lot...

RBA head spruiks China relationship

By finance reporter Adrian Thirsk

The assessment from the central bank's governor was contained in an address to a Treasury seminar on Tuesday, but the text has only been made available today.

In it Mr Stevens says we have been living through one of the largest transformations in the structure of the global economy - as far as Australia is concerned - for a century.

He describes the rise of China as a structural change of the first order.

Mr Stevens says China has many years of strong growth still ahead.

Referring to the commodities boom, he says there is been a very large change in relative prices in the world economy, which is more important to Australia than almost any other country.

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Gus: of course this was well know to us on this site... Many times we've spruiked that the Australian "economy" that John Howard was spruiking as his own success, was simple based on trade with the Chinese, on the over-inflated value of real estate and on greed at all cost... It will take a white to dismantle some of this set of arbitrary wants without collapsing the stack. 

 Meanwhile:

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Whingeing Aussies bring themselves down

By Fiona Best

No wonder so many Australians are depressed, anxious and chronically unwell. It seems to me that by and large we are a very ungrateful lot and we whinge and whine so much that it makes us sick.

When we are not complaining about something, we are gossiping shamelessly about Britney Spears' latest tragedy, our best friend's failing marriage or about who is having sex with whom.

Just read the papers, watch the current affairs shows, and listen to the talk at work. Notice how it makes you feel inside? It is addictive behaviour, it is destructive and it is nasty. 

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Gus: yes Fiona, but a good whinge can liberate the "spirit"... It's a bit like drugs, including vino, — abuse is the problem not the substance nor the whinge. From my observation, many of us will whinge but we'll do it with the refinement of satire or laughter and get on with our lives. There is more love out there than what is acknowledged, mostly because a lot of the "news" or "current affairs' content demands the exposure of the rotten scoundrels that could ruin YOUR life should you encounter them... We need the experience of others in love and tragedy to understand and share our own... Sure there is a whinge and voyeuristic side to our being taken by depressing news and current affairs about "stupid" or weird or rich people, but should we be able to laugh without derision, we're on the road to happiness... 

And my feeling is that there always will be depressed people — those who are unable to master their own "stability" for various more or less valid reasons: from being dumped by all; to "being depressed" offering stability when things are not going our way, especially in finding a loving partner; for some people depression becomes an addiction; for some, especially the bi-polar, there is inconsistency in appreciating what we have. As a whole we know what we prefer but the mechanics are difficult to set in motion... And we react badly or wrongly to the environment that throws things at us...

Our reactivity needs to be "relearned" as we've set ourselves into a "comfortable" corner of being beaten. As mentioned before, it's the "abuse" of the situation (drug) that makes us blind to the opportunity as small as it is... because we dream of the easy and lazy richness...

But whatever we do, we've got to realise that, at most time, learning something new that contradicts our understanding will be painful or difficult to remember whether it is right or wrong, if it is not a direct experience... As humans we need to develop our curiosity and our acceptance, while rejecting the dogmatic... It's a balanced act in which we do not relate with other humans through a total value system but through our natural "heart" that has been kneaded by encountering value systems... Thus a diverse way to be.  

There is a lot more good will out there that given credit for... But the scoundrels are trying hard to buy your soul to give it to the psychopaths... nothing wrong in being aware of this.

the chicken and the egg...

From a rabid right wing ratbag website... called Menzies House... I will not give the link... it's easy to find though...

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...

Why? The reason is simple. Because the multi-billion dollar left-wing industry relies on a quiet populace.  The billions they receive are dependent upon the Australian people being docile. And I think it’s time for us to be frank about this fact. There really is a multi-billion dollar far-left industry out there, reliant upon our taxpayers, and I am sick of tip-toeing around the issue for fear of alienating a special interest group. 

Let us be frank.

Whether it be fat cat public ‘servant” bureaucrats, safe and secure in their tenure, knowing they will never be able to get a non-taxpayer funded job in the real world. Or so-called “climate scientists”, who, without millions in funds for scaremongering would face the unemployment queue. Those reliant on sustaining a culture of welfare, so they can keep on leeching off the public purse, “helping” the less fortunate, despite all the evidence that their big-government plans never have worked. The artsy types, who live off taxpayer dollars to propagate their hate – sorry, “art”.  “Multicultural organisations”, the ABC, Unions – the list goes on - I am only just scratching the surface. Australia has entire left wing industry entrenched through all levels of government, that up until now has never been challenged. And ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!

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Isn't this sweet? This fellow is ... Tim Andrews [,is] the acting Editor-in-Chief of Menzies House. Tim Andrews graduated from the University of Sydney with undergraduate degrees in Economics and Law (Hons), followed by a Master of Public Policy. From 2006-2008 he served as Federal President of the Australian Liberal Students' Federation, and since then, has worked in Washington DC analysing fiscal policy and the effect of tax hikes on families.

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Isn't this sweet... This YOUNG fellow barely out of university nappies — who never had to fight with his fists in the streets, I believe (I could be wrong, he could have delegated some poor bastard to fight on his behalf) — has the nerve to serve exactly the same sauce he claims the left does to the right... Mate, it's a political game going back to Adam and Eve so to speak. The chicken and the egg conundrum. And you're an effin' novice at it... Some unwashed naive students might fall for the spruik, but old horses like us here have been through the wars... On yourdemocracy, I hope we show we know that the right in general is more wrong on many subjects — from climate change to social justice issues. This not to say that the left is always right... The left makes mistakes sometimes, but the right has deliberate mistakes embedded in its doozy thinking to suit the power grab. See "of liberal (conservative) philosophy..."

First, the carbon tax is not designed to affect families who earn less than... AAAAAhhhh, forget it! You're an idiot spruiking like a clever idiot selling broken records... You remind me of the creationists of the 1970s still arguing the earth was 6000 years old — and flat, edged with a flange like an apple tart...

 

That old kooks think like you, I'd be not too worried about humanity... That young people like you indulge in thinking like stupid old conservative ignoramus kooks is an effin' worry...

see toon at top... in it John Howard can't come to say the word "sorry", even after having broken Menzies' ideals. The Menzies House is a crock — a crock designed to attack the left and dismiss the liberals like Malcolm and Joe. "Jawohl, mein fuhrer", Kommandant Abbott... I can smell Nick Minchin and associates behind the Menzies House website — a nasty little place...

menzies -- the gross nazi grocer...

On 22 May 1942, Robert Gordon Menzies, then a backbench conservative MP in the Australian Federal Parliament, stewing over the decline of his political fortunes and the darkness of socialism overshadowing the Curtin Labour Government leading the nation’s war effort, delivered a fifteen-minute radio address. Briefly Prime Minister in 1939–41, Menzies was yet to lead the creation of the Liberal Party in 1944–45 from an amalgam of conservative forces. The address has become known as the ‘Forgotten People’ speech, and an iconic moment in hagiographic histories of Australian conservatism.

In it he exalted the ‘forgotten people’, those hard working ‘great and sober and dynamic’ middle-class Australians, ‘salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on,’ who placed family, God, hearth and home at the centre of their lives, essentially alone, unprotected and not helped by the powerful trade union movement.

It was to these ‘forgotten people’, and what he saw as their ‘national patriotism’, and ‘spirituality’, that Menzies would hitch his political future to, promising a free enterprise future in a society in which there would be ‘more law, not less; more control, not less.’

In May 2017, seventy-five years later, conservatives gathered in Canberra for an Anniversary dinner to commemorate this speech. It was hailed by acolytes as ‘the greatest oration in Australian political history,’ the speech that ‘laid the philosophical foundation of the Liberal Party of Australia (and) defined post-war Australia.’

It is a cosy feel-good story about the Liberal Party, obscuring much about the Party, its ideology and the politics of conservative icon Menzies. For the latter we need to go back a few years.

From late April 1938 through to early August, Attorney General Menzies went on a lengthy tour of Europe. His itinerary included Nazi Germany, where the German Foreign Office was placed at his service. In private, as even his friendly biographers have to admit, Menzies regarded Hitler as a political dreamer, a man with many good ideas. In Germany, Menzies met with many Reich identities, including the polite and genial Dr Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, the economic fixer significantly responsible for stitching the deals and links between Hitler and German banking and industrial interests that helped put the Nazis in power.

Since the Enabling Act of 1933, antisemitism, fear, intimidation, incarcerations and torture had been loosed upon the German people; the labour movement broken along with organised opposition, and the propagandist brilliance of Dr Josef Goebbels deployed to cultivate and groom compliance, cooperation and a love for the nation state and its leadership. By 1938, for Hitler and his party, it was almost mission accomplished. Outside of Germany, the term ‘concentration camp’ was known and referenced in some mainstream media outlets and in leftist literature, some of the latter joining the extensive list of 5000 publications banned in Australia during the 1930s.

Before he left Europe to head home for Australia, a wistful Menzies issued a press release in which he said there ‘is a good deal of a real spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the State.’

read more:

https://overland.org.au/2017/06/a-forgotten-address/