Brave Chinese citizens have yet again risked imprisonment challenging their country’s regime.
They took to the streets to fight the Chinese Communist Party’s prolonged and inhumane lockdown, a policy which caused residents trapped in their high-rise apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to be burned-alive.
In scenes from the security state rarely accessible to the world, Chinese people gathered in the Shanghai streets and chanted ‘CCP, step down. Xijiping, step down!’ The chanting showed the citizens’ barely concealed contempt and dissatisfaction with their government, seemingly well beyond just its strict COVID measures.
The whereabouts of the protest leader you see in this video is unknown.
His family were eye-witnesses to him being handcuffed and unceremoniously bundled into a van. There is no official paperwork of his arrest. His family reported that three days after the arrest, there is still no trace of the young man.
He was simply ‘made to disappear.’
China is the world’s most heavily surveilled country. Intrusive facial recognition software, a tool used to thwart human rights and civil liberties, is now being routinely exploited by the Chinese Police State. Facial recognition systems log nearly every single citizen in the country, with 372.8 cameras per 1,000 people.
Chinese authorities have reportedly begun tracking-down people who took part in the demonstrations. Students are always the weakest and easiest to pick off. Others who attended the protests are being rounded-up without scrutiny from international media.
This wasn’t sufficient intimidation for the despotic regime. The Chinese Government immediately made its military presence felt more publicly as it rolled-out armoured tanks on the street.
Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the Government now has the technology to corral freedom-activists more secretly to avoid the world’s condemnation. The Chinese Communist Party, with all the apparatus of a surveillance state and growing superpower, seemingly acts in fear of its own defenceless citizens.
These actions are a continuation of well-documented brutality evident in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. (Warning: the next video depicts graphic violence on an unarmed civilian. Viewer discretion recommended.)
You could be forgiven for feeling despair at the state of Australian politics right now.
Ditto for the West as a whole.
Unfortunately, despair doesn’t take us where we need to go.
There are four forces pulling us in the wrong direction at the moment. The quick summary is that the Liberty-Authority war is raging but Liberty is losing too many battles, our politicians don’t know how ‘mixed’ our mixed-economy should be and so are preferencing Authority in that war, there’s a kind of matrix hanging over us which makes things hard to change, and we aren’t giving our parliamentarians the right incentives to stop.
What we urgently need is clear-thinking on these four forces, an action plan to counter them and a lot of good people like you to follow the plan.
This article will give you the clear-thinking and the action plan.
Read what follows then decide whether you’ll join the fight.
LIBERTY-AUTHORITY WAR
First, the Liberty-Authority war is raging but Liberty is losing too many battles.
There are two extremes in government: 100% Liberty and 100% Authority.
Total Liberty is a utopia, which can only fleetingly exist before Authority is needed to stabilise it. At 95% Liberty and 5% Authority, stability is possible. Imagine 1880s London or 1980s Hong Kong. In this light-touch government, the enterprising individual flourishes to produce a dynamic, Liberty-loving productive society. Individual independence, live and let live lifestyle, free-trade, creativity, flair, ambition, initiative, vision, self-reliance, energy, innovation and self-actualisation abound. The society throbs with entrepreneurial instinct.
Total Authority is a dystopia, which inevitably collapses from the murder, starvation or flight of millions. It is frequently reformed out of necessity. At 95% Authority and 5% Liberty, the Liberty manifests as a barely-tolerated, hardscrabble barter just to ward-off widespread starvation. Imagine 2020s North Korea or 2020s Eritrea. The economy is small and centrally controlled. Basic needs are unmet. In this despotic, heavy-handed government, enterprise is crushed, initiative regarded with suspicion and people cower in fear and repression, forced into a life of misery. There is no spark in its people, no verve, no passion, no striving, no vivacity.
Australia sits nowhere near these two ends of the spectrum, of course. It would be feeble-thinking however to surmise that we are exempt from the Liberty-Authority war. All societies are subject to it, Australia included, and Liberty is losing.
Consider Authority’s recent wins:
Border closures
Vaccine mandates
Emergency power legislation enshrined and ready for reactivation
Job terminations over mandates
QR codes to track your movements and bar entry
Elected politicians denied entry into parliament
Peaceful citizens shot in the back with rubber bullets
Home detention of the population
Laws requiring employers to gather private medical data
Secrecy over vaccine purchase terms
Door-to-door visits for covid vaccine rollout
Opaque health information about vaccine injuries
Construction of covid detention camps.
Think that’s the end of it?
First, none of these powers has been removed as covid wanes.
Second, at the time of writing, there were 122 bills before Capital Hill, Canberra. This figure obviously changes but you can review the list at anytime yourself here.
I want you to think of the Commonwealth Parliament as a school of ravenous piranha. Every time a new law is passed, your personal and financial Liberty is being thrown in the legislative pond for thirty seconds. You scramble out with razor cuts all over your bloodied body. Then you’re pushed back in by errant leaders and the populist mob for another gasping swim. Again and again, the body politic is attacked, your Liberty weakened with every new law passed.
During my frantic attempts to call MPs during the covid overreach, part of my epiphany that the Liberal Party – far from being an agent for small government – is complicit in this process was a question I posed to an MP. I asked this person to find out from the Parliamentary Library how many Commonwealth statutes are active. The experts couldn’t come up with a number. We are suffocated with so many laws, we don’t know how many there are!
We’ve fought 121 years in Australia over whether we need more economic and personal Liberty on the one side, and whether we need more Authority and protection on the other.
Authority is winning.
One of the issues is that our fellow citizens are increasingly expecting government to be an end-to-end solution to every risk we face in life. What we demand of our governments is that they increasingly manage the risks of life which we have handled privately in the past. Fear is a powerful motivator.
We have to make our politicians understand that we don’t expect them to carry all the risks in our lives.
As Lord Jonathan Sumption said in a recent trip to Australia:
“If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong.”
I think he’s being optimistic about ‘nothing can go wrong’ but you see his point.
MIXED ECONOMY
Second, our politicians don’t know how ‘mixed’ our mixed-economy should be and so are preferencing Authority in that war.
Throughout time immemorial, we have sought to balance these competing but innate needs. On one side, creative, independent, self-actualising Liberty and, on the other side, risk-avoiding, dependent, protective Authority.
Democracy, coupled with its ‘mixed-economy’, tries to navigate between the two. That is, there is constant tension within a mixed-economy democracy to balance Liberty and Authority.
How are each enabled?
The general rule of thumb is that the bigger a government’s budget, the greater the means by which our leaders can impose Authority.
Big government budget means more Authority and less Liberty.
Small government budget means more Liberty and less Authority.
So, what’s the trendline in Australia.
If we use government expenditure as a percentage of GDP as the litmus test since Federation in 1901, we see an obvious trend. I’m going to use cut-offs at the end of each Liberal government (or its predecessor equivalents) since centre-right Liberals are reputationally supposed to be the small government, pro Liberty advocates.
Here’s what we discover:
Deakin (third government): 5%
Menzies (second government): 17%
Fraser: 26%
Howard: 37%
Morrison: 45%.
The trend is clearly from Liberty to Authority.
We need to jettison this old Keynesian term ‘mixed economy’. It’s an umbrella phrase which masks intent. An economy set at 90% Liberty and 10% Authority is a mixed-economy of a sort. So is 10% Liberty and 90% Authority. Even comparing Alfred Deakin’s 5% government economy versus Scott Morrison’s 45% government economy, the two look nothing like each other.
Using the term ‘mixed-economy’ gives licence to the Authority-lovers to execute socialism-creep.
During our lives, government is becoming ever larger and the piranha are being fed. Government has the growing means to intervene, coerce and limit our Liberty by a thousand imperceptible cuts over time.
And the truth is that the Liberal Party has been completely unsuccessful over 121 years in reversing the trend.
Why?
TOCQUEVILLE’S MATRIX
Well, third, there’s a kind of matrix hanging over us which makes things hard to change. I call it the Tocqueville Matrix.
The answer is that we’re in a system bigger than ourselves. We can laugh at analogies with the film The Matrix all we like. However, the reality of our predicament today was well uncovered, not by the hacker Neo in that movie but, 187 years ago by the classical liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in his celebrated essay “Democracy In America”, the result of a fact-finding mission for France.
Alexis de Tocqueville. 1805-1859. Classical liberal.
Though published in 1835 on the other side of the planet, it was highly relevant to Australia at the time. The free-settled Province of South Australia was just one year from proclamation. A mere fifty-four years later, Sir Henry Parkes delivered his famous Federation-rallying Tenterfield Oration in which he said “Surely what the Americans have done by war, Australians can bring about in peace.”
Here’s what Tocqueville witnessed of the new American republic, at this point only two generations old. As you read his words, pay attention to the creaking tension between Liberty and Authority, and the ongoing, overall impact of democracy on its people:
“The protecting power of the state extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of Man is not shattered but it is softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced to act but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates and extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals to which the government is the shepherd.”
Dare tell me this is not Australia in 2022.
I’ve shown you our legislative losses. I’ve revealed the legislative agenda in progress. I’ve shared that we don’t even know how many laws are on the books. This is Tocqueville’s ‘complicated rules, minute and uniform.’
Further, who are our ‘most original minds and the most energetic characters’? We may not be shattered as a people. But who will deny we are ‘softened, bent and guided’?
The word ‘enervates’ means ‘to make a person drained of energy or vitality.’ If this is how you feel right now about politics, it’s the Tocqueville Matrix of democracy working you over! Resist it. Let your innate self-reliance and self-actualisation radiate.
I could have sworn Tocqueville was in Australia from 2020-2022 when writing that last sentence.
If you feel that your fellow citizens exhibit foggy thinking, if you believe they make terrible electoral choices, then take heart. We know why …
Australia, like all Western liberal democracies, has placed an apparatus over its citizens. This apparatus of uncountable statutes and a million regulatory miscellany soften, bend and guide us. Initiative, vigour and swashbuckling verve are all discouraged as is self-reliance. Our innate creativity, independence and self-actualising Liberty has been dampened. We are less Errol Flynn, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Sir Douglas Mawson, and now more a half-thwarted version of our true selves.
Sir Douglas Mawson OBE FRS. 1882-1958. First to climb Mount Erebus and reach South Magnetic Pole.
Authority has taken over Liberty as the primary force in Australia. We accommodate too much. We fund too much. We have power-hungry, entrenched legislators. Our fellow Australians are too prone to expect government to manage all the risks of the world.
PARLIAMENTARY INCENTIVES
Fourth, we aren’t giving our parliamentarians the right incentives to stop.
Our politicians, specifically the ones housed in the seat-holding incumbency parties of Labour, Greens, Liberals and Nationals, often spend ten to twenty years working towards preselection. They aren’t going to rock-the-boat once in power after that investment of time.
We need term limits. We also need the hard work within party preselection processes to turnover long-time incumbents.
Another issue is that we, as a people, are simply unpractised to tell a politician ‘no’! We advocate for spending on our pet projects and our politicians say ‘yes’ to everyone. It’s unsustainable. And when we argue for cuts, we are vulnerable to the ‘what government program are you going to end?’ We need a coherent, well-practised push-back to this. Citizens can’t keep acting like toddlers asking for more and politicians need to be disciplined in saying ‘no’.
We are terrible at applying constant pressure on our representatives between elections. They rarely hear from us after a poll. We need to visit them, form relationships with them, lobby them, guide them and, yes if necessary, threaten them with electoral backlash.
In fifty-four years, I’ve not seen one protest outside an electorate office by citizens angry about the MPs big spending tendencies. Not one.
We aren’t giving them the right incentives to correct.
AN URGENT ACTION PLAN
So, here’s what you need to do.
For Liberal and National members:
Action 1: Gather fellow members and advocate for a three-term limit. Make clear to an MP in his or her third term that this is it. Say it’s not personal, it’s a systemic position about renewal. Encourage challenges if the MP won’t budge.
Action 2: Make clear at State Council that you demand budget reductions in government. Educate MPs on the importance of reducing budgets. Ask for their game plan to achieve this. Embarrass elected officials who lack the courage to reduce the size of government. Normalise talk of smaller government. As a group or faction, make clear you will be targeting MPs who don’t work towards this.
Action 3: Gather fellow members and internally advocate for policy not tactical preferencing. Discourage tricky tactics which ultimately splinter the centre-right. Shame and seek the removal of any state director or parliamentary leader who supports tactical preferencing to Labor or the Greens ahead of the more Liberty-friendly emerging parties.
For members of the Liberal Democrats, the United Australia Party, One Nation, the Nationals outside coalition, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers and the Democratic Labor Party:
Action 4: Write to the local MP. Meet and lobby the MP. Educate the MP. Make clear that you want the next budget to be less than the current one. Make clear you want government expenditure as a percentage of GDP to be 40%, then 35%, then 30% and so forth year by year
Action 5: Advocate for a formal coalition and joint tickets. Joint tickets are important. They plug the preference leaking so prevalent on the centre-right. Work towards agreement that each emerging party gets to lead one upper house race. This is a near-guaranteed strategy for a bloc of six senators.
Action 6: Organise in vulnerable Labor lower-house seats to perform what I call the Purple Flip. This is Teal but in reverse. Identify and draft well-known local leaders to run as independents, perhaps tradies or sports figures, who project their working-class background but, due to their success, lean centre-right for its aspirational, social mobility message. Publicly appeal to aspirational voters in these Labor electorates, say they’ve been forgotten by Labor, and privately convince the die-hard but never electorally successful Liberals and Nationals in the seat to vote tactically for the independent.
The simple truth is that, if you don’t take these actions in concert with like-minded centre-right people, that big government trendline will continue to 50%, 57%, 63% and so on.
In democracy, you have to fight for the right balance between Liberty and Authority. Liberty is losing the battle for dominance. We are fast heading to an Authoritarian Australia. Covid overreach surely taught us that. Looming issues of digital passports, facial recognition systems and digital currency are facing Liberty-lovers right now.
You must act. The alternative is that you live, as Tocqueville pointedly wrote, as a ‘timid and industrious animal’ or we just continue to scratch-around in the political wilderness.
We can do better. Let’s steel ourselves now for the battle ahead.
To be clear, I don’t know who’s going to win the Victorian election later tonight, 26 November 2022.
How can I or any of us?
However, I’m going to make a prediction as I write this at 3:20pm ACDT 26 November 2022, and have the prediction published just minutes before the polls have closed so you know I’ve not had any input from the counting of the votes. There’s my accountability, dear reader, to you.
Labor will win!
If my prediction is wrong, take all future predictions from me with a grain of salt. Throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at me. I’ll deserve it.
Right now, I’m quietly confident in making this prediction, however ghastly it may be.
And here is my reasoning. Hear it through …
Heavens know, Dan Andrews and the Labor Government he leads in Victoria has been revolting.
Who can forget the litany of failures …
Rubber bullets in the back, pregnant woman arrested in her pyjamas for a Facebook post, the world’s longest lockdown, businesses crushed, women and children manhandled for not wearing masks, family nest-eggs shattered, MPs arrested and denied access to their democratically elected seat in Parliament House itself, elderly citizens having their pelvis fractured as they are slammed to the ground by overzealous police, churches ordered to close at the point of police intrusion into sacred spaces, and a once vibrant city – the envy of the world – hollowed of its sparkle.
There will be a long-tail to this shocking overreach. Early figures are indicating that the rates of men aged 18 to 44 presenting with myocarditis, a long-term heart condition, have doubled. Yes, 2X. Men in their prime, cut low.
Most devastating to the soul was the sight of a young man, hitherto mentally healthy, taking his own life on a Melbourne street by setting himself ablaze whilst in the grip of a lockdown-induced depression. The depravity of this Government’s policies is chilling.
Free people have a right to be free. Free people have a God-given right to practise their religion. It’s part of our Christian-informed civil libertarian culture. And our Faith gives us Grace. It’s who we are. It’s how we cope with a world of sin.
And Dan Andrews failed as a standard bearer of those freedoms.
Why then do I predict this tyrant will be returned to office?
Why do I put my predictive reputation on the line and call the election for Labor even before the polls have closed?
The answer is that people don’t vote for “anyone would be better than” candidate X.
Our good citizens require an informed choice, a differentiation upon which they can decide.
And I’m afraid to say it but the Liberal Party’s leader, Matthew Guy, has failed to differentiate his Party.
How could he?
He’s limp, insipid, hardly the embodiment of inspiration and action!
Beyond the personal characteristics of the leader, the seeds of the Liberal Party’s failure in this election were planted in 2020. Throughout the entirety of the covid pandemic, if that’s what it was and is, the Liberal Party played a small target, Labor-lite game.
The Liberal Party could have weighed multiple harms to the community of Labor’s draconian covid measures, things like job loss, depression and endless racking-up the State debt for future generations to absorb, instead of robotically following bureaucratic health advice to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation, a knowledge of John Stuart Mill, the fortitude to use the minds our Lord gave them, and the courage to avoid groupthink.
The Liberal Party could have heeded the warnings of the worst civil liberty abuses in 100 years, passionately articulated in the Victorian Bar Association’s extraordinary and unprecedented open letter from sixty-four Queens Counsel.
Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation through a bedrock of principles.
The Liberal Party could have rallied the churches, giving cover and much needed support to pastors and priests throughout the State, stunned that worshipers were to have doors slammed in their faces.
Liberal MPs didn’t. They aren’t Christians, most of them. That would take differentiation through Faith.
At every opportunity, the Liberal Party Opposition Leader has looked politically anemic. You don’t win by hedging. You don’t win by staying small. You don’t win by cloning yourself using a tyrant as the mould.
You win by standing for something. You win by inspiring people for a better tomorrow. You win by giving people hope. You win by serving others in practical, helpful ways. You win by differentiating yourself from the tyrant.
None of this was done by Matthew Guy and his Liberal Party in Victoria.
I therefore don’t need to watch the election coverage tonight.
Labor will be returned.
Lack of differentiation and beliefs will be the reason.
Pray for the people of Victoria.
And if my prediction is wrong, pray for the people of Victoria anyway.
If you listen to rare public forays by senior members of the security establishment, the spies and their agencies, we in the West are under threat from several fronts. Looming front and centre, they say, is an expansionary Chinese Communist Party.
To be clear, Liberty Itch has no quarrel with the Chinese people.
However, Liberty Itch is sceptical of government of all stripes, whether in the West or the Chinese Communist Party. Government has a nasty habit of suppressing its people, sometimes stripping freedoms one imperceptible step at a time, its citizens in a saucepan of the slow boil kind. Sometimes government makes swift and savage moves against its people. History is replete with examples of both.
So well may we ask: Is the Chinese Communist Party friend or foe, our ally or adversary? We in the West welcome and educate their students. We trade with their corporations. Australia, the United States and indeed the entire OECD are beneficiaries of China’s emergence. Our shared prosperity is enormous as China brings a billion citizens out of agrarian life into a century-delayed Industrial Revolution and today’s Information Age simultaneously. The project is breathtaking.
But as Liberty Itch discovered, geopolitical relationships are complex. Material wealth is soulless if not accompanied by human rights. We cannot be so naïve or selectively blind as to ignore civil liberties in our estimation. The Dragon we feed and enable today should be ready to take its place on the world stage as a force for good.
With an open mind, Liberty Itch therefore embarked on an investigation, a series of tell-all interviews with people with particular direct experience with the Chinese Communist Party. The stories are real. The events described happened and cannot be ignored. What each does is illuminate, directly and personally, how the Chinese Communist Party acts from a civil liberties perspective.
Our first guest in this series is Fiona Hui.
You can see the former flight attendant in Fiona instantly. Urbane, impeccably-dressed and possessed of a welcoming smile, she possesses a charm hard not to like. She has navigated many of life’s milestones and responsibilities already while retaining her youthful energy.
First impressions rarely tell the whole story. As you peel-away the onion layers of her life, normality gives way to heartache, the collapse of her homeland, the incarceration of a loved one and a fight for survival with lessons for all freedom-lovers who value their civil liberties.
So her story is yours. There are some timely warnings for all of us.
Here’s Liberty Itch’s short interview with Fiona Hui.
LI: When did you become an Australian citizen?
FH: Although I have been living in Australia for nearly 20 years, I only became an Australian citizen very recently, in 2021. I applied for my citizenship in light of the loss of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong in 2019. At that point, I realised that Australia is my only home, so I submitted my citizenship application.
LI: Prior to this, you were a citizen of which country?
FH: Prior to 2021, I was a citizen of Hong Kong. I was born and raised under the British rule in Hong Kong.
LI: You lived in Hong Kong during which years?
FH: I lived in Hong Kong since I was born in 1980, until 2004, when I left Hong Kong and came to Australia to pursue a liberal arts education.
LI: What was life like in Hong Kong in those early years?
FH: As a successful former British Colony from 1841–1997, Hong Kong is a unique place blending East and West. I always felt free, safe, and connected to the West when I was a child and a young teenager. I enjoyed living in a ‘very Chinese city’ essentially, but also appreciated the opportunities to be exposed to Western literature, music, philosophies and ideologies. It was dynamic, stimulating and exciting.
LI: Why did you leave Hong Kong?
FH: I left Hong Kong for a Western higher education. I did not imagine Hong Kong could become what it is today when I left. Like most people. I have taken democracy for granted and couldn’t imagine otherwise.
LI: From the handover by Britain in 1997 to your departure, what changes did you notice in Hong Kong?
FH: Since the handover in 1997, there has been a steady and gradual erosion of Hong Kong freedoms. Since the structure of democracy was already in place, Hong Kong people had been asking for ‘universal suffrage’, all adult citizens should be able to vote for their government representatives, as highlighted by the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement in 2014.
In 2019, 70-80% of the Hong Kong population participated in the largest and longest Hong Kong protests in history, in demonstration of the City’s strong will to safeguard Hong Kong’s declining civil liberties and freedoms.
Then in 2020, the National Security Law was introduced by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Under this law, any pro-democracy movement was suddenly classified as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion’.
2020 was the year when Hong Kong lost its press freedom, the rights to peaceful protests, and the complete collapse of the rule of law.
LI: I believe this is the time we saw footage of Chinese Communist Party agents breaking into the The Epoch Times and smashing the printing presses with sledge-hammers …
FH: Yes. They actually set fire to the bureau. The building was aflame.
LI: How did these changes impact your family initially?
FH: My family was fine for many years after the handover. The whole world thought China was opening-up and we could work together for a more prosperous world.
LI: Your brother was a Hong Kong democratically-elected parliamentarian. How did his status slowly change?
FH: It was not until 2019 with the breakout of large-scale protests in Hong Kong that it started to seriously impact my family. My brother, Ted Hui, being a vocal pro-democracy legislator, was frequently arrested due to his involvement in mediating the protests, wanting to protect young people and ordinary citizens from being abused and arrested. Like the majority of the population, Ted was pepper sprayed, tear-gassed, abused and arrested many times. In the end, his parliamentarian status was completely disregarded by the Hong Kong Police and the Chinese Communist Party. They just treated him like a ‘criminal’. Democracy had suddenly become a serious crime.
LI: How did your brother and other democratically-elected parliamentarians reconcile the freedoms bequeathed by British rule and a growing autocratic influence from the Chinese Communist Party?
FH: They have never reconciled the loss of freedoms. Some of his MP friends are still in prison. Many like Ted, went in ‘exile’ and continued with the movement overseas, lobbying governments of the Five Eyes, warning them of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party regime. I guess they are now all ‘colluding with foreign forces’, as the Chinese Communist Party would describe it.
LI: How did things come to a flashpoint?
FH: The prolonged protests in 2019, combined with the noble and pure intention of democracy-loving Hongkongers, and the Chinese Communist Party led by a psychopathic Chinese President Xi Jinping have all contributed to this flashpoint.
LI: What role did you play in responding to the loss of civil liberties?
FH: I was not interested in politics at all prior to 2019, I had a great life in Adelaide. Who cared? However, the 2019 Hong Kong Crisis made me awake. The images and live-streaming of abuse in Hong Kong stunned me. I was in disbelief that freedom could be lost like this overnight. I couldn’t believe that people could be thrown in prison for protesting and speaking. It was all just unimaginable.
So I became a ‘democracy activist’.
Then I discovered CCP activism in my adopted country of Australia. So I exposed the CCP’s interference in Australia and politicians who were working with the CCP for their own self-serving interests.
I joined the Liberal Democrats for a period because I saw that they had good policy in support of libertarianism and humanitarianism principles. I also connected with organisations and communities who cared about our civil liberties.
FH: My brother got ‘invited’ by some young, democracy-loving Danish politicians and libertarians to attend a ‘Climate Conference’. It was staged so that Ted had an excuse to get out of Hong Kong. At that time, his passport was detained by the Hong Kong Court, but the judge decided to release his passport so that Ted could attend this ‘conference’. The judge made a fine decision but, to this day, I don’t know whether he was subsequently imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party!
Ted escaped also because many people around that world have played a part in helping him and praying for him. This includes the Australian Government and many nameless men and women within and outside our government. We have some good people in this country, who have empathy, intelligence, capability and goodwill. God bless Australia.
LI: What did you leave behind?
FH: My family and I won’t be able to go back to Hong Kong for a long time. Under the current circumstances, I’ve convinced myself there is not much worth going back for anyway. I miss the mountains. I miss the views. Any love I had of shopping there is tainted by the lack of a free press, no free speech, no rule of law. Home is where the family is. Australia is my only home. Look forward rather than backwards!
LI: Why choose Australia to live?
FH: I chose Australia due to its beauty, its reputation in higher education and its proximity to Asia.
LI: What worrying early-signs in sliding from democracy to tyranny do you see in Australia?
FH: The early-signs were shown during the last two years: how our governments managed COVID, especially in Melbourne, the prolonged lockdowns, and the mandatory vaccinations in various industries.
Modern technological advancement means that people are more easily monitored. I’m worry about the introduction of My Gov Accounts, facial recognition cameras in our City here in Adelaide, digital IDs and yet more business-crushing IDs for company directors.
We have to be careful how people in positions of power use these mechanisms. They could be used to make us a more effective country, or they could be used as a means of monitoring and control. It all depends on how you view the government and the people holding those powerful positions.
We need to be awake and alert.
LI: How quickly can that slide happen, in your experience?
FH: The loss of freedom could happen so quickly that people will be in disbelief. Just look at Hong Kong. A clean, proper judicial system could end so fast. Unimaginable.
LI: What can your fellow Australians do to counteract this?
FH: Stay aware and united with fellow Australians. Unity and helping others in need. Play a part to end the divide and polarisation in society. Be the change you want to see in the world.
LI: What do you think the outlook is for Australia?
FH: Australia is a lucky country. I believe that we will continue to be blessed. Be careful of the ‘doom and gloom’ presented in the media. I feel hopeful and positive about our country.
In a quiet moment today or even right now if that’s possible, read the lyrics below whilst watching this clip … and tell me this doesn’t make you more determined politically.
“We’re not gonna sit in silence, We’re not gonna live with fear” could well apply to the last two and a half years. So, are you going to “Make a noise and make it clear”?
We have the chance to turn the pages over We can write what we want to write We gotta make ends meet, before we get much older We’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
This time, we know we all can stand together With the power to be powerful Believing we can make it better Ooh, we’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
Ooh, we’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make the noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
Two hours ago, Elon Musk’s long-anticipated acquisition of Twitter was completed.
Hopes now run high that at least one social media platform can operate for all and free speech restored.
Time will tell.
As an avid user of the platform, I believe the following needs addressing:
1. Bots. The system is fouled by fake accounts created by algorithm. The platform must be cleansed on this problem.
2. Bad-Faith Actors. I’m not talking about typical anonymous accounts, but rather accounts run by nation-state troll farms at call centre scale. I’m constantly inundated with this scourge. They used to be easy to spot: low follower numbers, homogeneity of digital assets in the profile feed, short sentences in broken English. They are now becoming harder and harder to spot. They sit like sleeper agents in good citizens’ follower list for what sinister purpose or misinformation we are yet to learn. Get rid of them.
3. Safety & Integrity. It almost goes without saying that the previous management, the CEO, CFO, Corporate Counsel and Policy Officer now unceremoniously terminated by Musk, actively pursued centre-right users with the Safety & Integrity Department. It used a pincer movement to suppress centre-right users. The first was the dreaded algorithm which flagged people and then spurted automatic double-speak messages to put people in a procedural cul-de-sac. Then it referred a select few of the targeted users to an inadequately small Safety & Integrity Department of actual humans who them mercilessly cancelled many honest users with unfavoured political views. Ending this double-pincer is huge priority to restore the platform.
4. Advertising. As a B2B businessman, I have no need to advertise on Twitter. It’s a B2C platform. Even if I were wishing to advertise to the retail or B2C markets, I wouldn’t use Twitter. How can targeting occur when most handles are anonymous. It’s a very low-value, hit and miss way to reach new customers.
5. Caves and Common. A ‘cave’ is a place in an online community where a person can retreat or pursue more focused relationships. A ‘common’ is where you’re in the flow of action, in the bright shiny lights of the site. Because Twitter is all common, is feels like a brutal fight club. There’s little respite, little joy, little reprieve. Twitter groups or rooms would be a fantastic innovation.
6. Anonymous Handles. Of course, most people tweet with the protection of anonymity. But for the advertising issue, I think that’s OK. However, the site would be far better if people declared their identity. It would temper the fight club feel of the platform and users would be more likely to self-moderate. As there are advantages to anonymity, like speaking truth to power and whistleblowing, I think a hybrid model would work well. So users could still have an anonymous handle, but with limited reach or features. Upgrading to full user identification would allow greater reach and features.
Whatever changes are made by Mr Musk, one thing is certain. The property is now in the hands of a man who knows how to make things happen.
It will be interesting to watch.
It will be even more interesting being a Twitter user.
So is the propaganda and freedom-busting laws which have accompanied it.
Thankfully now, the hysteria seems to be dissipating and we should all feel more comfortable pushing back. The laws which are eroding our civil liberties? Removing them will take years.
In light of Pfizer executive Janine Small’s admission to the the European Parliament that their covid vaccine does not stop transmission, government policies around the world which sought to deny the vaccine-hesitant their basic human rights are now discredited.
The media, which relentlessly proselytised ‘the vaccine stops the spread’ and ‘you are selfish if you don’t take the vaccine’ in order to retain their broadcasting licences, revealed just how inadequate they are as a bulwark against government overreach.
So much for our Fourth Estate!
Both government and media co-opted celebrity too in their efforts to control. Sometimes the mouthpieces were celebrities who even previously held high office.
Take this clip doing the rounds on social media …
“The only way we prevent this is to get vaccinated” was wrong, says Pfizer itself.
And the “Screw your freedom!”, from a former Republican no less, is chilling.
Sometimes it takes years before the present catches up to history, proving past events and decisions wrong.
In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s case, mere months.
Well may the Terminator have said “I’ll be back.”
Given Mr. Schwarzenegger’s visceral “screw your freedom” remark, let’s hope at least he never again returns to the public square, especially when mouthing government and media propaganda now discredited by the very manufacturer of covid vaccines.
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