Scotch College “Mean Girl” named P. Wong
In Foreign Affairs not so long.
She hectored the Brits,
“Colonising half-wits!
Your history is all bad and wrong.”
Such charm and diplomacy rare
That the Brits to the door did repair.
”We’ll take that on notice,
Talk AUKUS with POTUS
And let you know whether we care!”
Liberty Itch has published the idea of a grand Centre-Right Coalition of minor parties to achieve 12 Senate seats over the 2025 and 2028 Federal electoral cycles and to use those 12 Senate seats as a bloc to counter the Greens, Labor and Liberal.
A Centre-Right Coalition would instantly eliminate preference leakage, maximise our electoral clout and concentrate our forces.
But which parties might participate? 👇
Based on most recent primary vote performances, the parties might include:
What do you think? Please participate in this flash poll … 👇
Last month, Liberty Itch revealed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses Chinese culture and the Chinese-Australian diaspora to engage in influence-grabbing, covert-operations in Australia.
Such tactics are a threat to Australian democracy as these operations are often intended to weaken the democratic process, hampering the ability of many Australian citizens and leaders to voice their dissent against the anti-freedom Chinese government.
The lack of criticism in mainstream society towards Beijing’s human rights abuses and
its interference in our country have become ‘normal’.
So, today, we are going to dissect yet another instance of Chinese Communist Party soft power in South Australia, this time through the guise of ‘arts and cultural exchange’.
The formula is simple once articulated: create fear and intimidation on one hand and use soft power on the other.
Look hard enough and you’ll discover surreptitious soft-power influence in the Adelaide Festival Centre, the heart of the arts in South Australia.
The venue, of course, is vibrant, upmarket and inviting. With its unique design and diverse range of events and performances, the Adelaide Festival Centre is well-loved by all interested in the arts.
Hosted in this iconic arts venue, the China Today Arts Week Showcase is sponsored by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, which refers to itself as a “national non-governmental organisation.” Manipulation is almost invisible, but for the listing of Xi Jinping’s wife as a Vice-President in its Beijing-based headquarters.
The China Federation of Literary and Art Circles aims to “unite and serve writers and artists, to train literary and art talents, and to promote the development and prosperity of literature and arts”, according to its website.
“Unite” is the keyword to which one should pay attention. We talked about the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in previous articles and how the UFWD conducts interference in Australia.
In essence, the UFWD aims to bring together all the forces that can be united and mobilise all people in and resources outside China for its national security interest.
All people. Artists, painters, arts lovers, business executives, residents, politicians etc. Everyone should be used to “unite” and increase Beijing’s soft power. That is the UFWD philosophy.
Although the China Today Arts Week Showcase is linked to the Chinese Communist Party, Liberty Itch fully supports the right to free artistic expression, performances and gatherings. Libertarians are not in favour of prohibiting non-violent activities.
One can, of course, undo the CCP’s deceptive and covert influence-grabbing techniques by bringing clarity and transparency to the situation. Readers of Liberty Itch can be informed of the real purpose of this CCP exhibition and make conscious choices which art providers they wish to back: those who work to connect people to their humanity, versus those people connected to the crimes against humanity in the name of the arts.
To take pleasure in authentic, top-notch Chinese culture free of CCP influence, consider backing the 2023 Shen Yun in Australia. Through this troupe, Beijing’s ability to control and manipulate the narrative of Chinese culture and history can be minimised.
Hooray!
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DnJjDESe0uo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
This just in from ABC Radio Melbourne.
For context, play from 8:30 min.
Senator Ralph Babet tells ABC that the minor centre-right parties will win senate positions at scale and form a bloc if they form a coalition.
Current discussions began after the 2022 Federal election between the writer, Liberty Itch’s Publisher, and Australian Family Party Federal Director, former Senator Bob Day.
What followed was an openness to negotiate by South Australian Liberal Democrats President, James Hol in this piece:
Thereafter, Bob Day penned a 4 part-series for Liberty Itch as follows:
‘All Great Change Begins at the Dinner Table’
How Christianity Informs Classical Liberalism
CORRECTION: A Centre-Right National Strategy
Liberty Itch then contacted the South Australian State Director of the United Australia Party, Michael Arbon, as well as South Australian One Nation Leader, Jennifer Game, for comment and input.
In short, former Senator Bob Day’s strategy culminates in the article below, a summary of which is:
The National Executive of the Liberal Democrats then formally replied through their National Secretary, here:
A Reply to “Centre-Right National Strategy”
Yesterday, Liberty Itch contacted National President of Family First, Tom Kenyon, for participation and we await his reply.
Senator Babet’s advocacy on ABC tonight for a Centre-Right Coalition speaks volumes for the cause.
More to come.
Lydia Thorpe is out!
The abrasive and race-obsessed Senator, who resigned in disgrace as Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in 2022, now resigns from the Party which made her career and had her return in 2022.
You can understand Adam Bandt’s ashen face. Loyalty be damned!
Hemmed-in by a nation-destroying fence of her own construction, she’ll now enjoy a life on the crossbench, a lone political animal with an untested, so-called, “Blak” constituency. Oh, for spelling!
The ever-upbeat Senator Ralph Babet from the United Australia Party was characteristical swift in his reponse, telling Liberty Itch:
“I welcome Senator Thorpe to the crossbench and look forward to working with her in opposition to The Voice referendum.”
The Liberal Party, under the leadership of Peter Dutton, is the limp partner in the Liberal-National Coalition on The Voice. In contrast, the Nationals have offered stiff opposition to what many call a race-eligible third chamber, a principled position despite the risk of desserters.
Social media is saturated with a more blunt assessment of The Voice: apartheid.
Senator Babet’s enterprising bridge-building is work the Liberals seem long ago incapable of achieving.
Well may Liberty Itch subscribers wish the energetic Senator Babet good luck. He will need it. Senator Thorpe was initially against The Voice, then for, now uncommitted, hardly the history of a sure-footed politican with a clear voter-base.
Leaving aside for a moment the question (very ably posed by LibDems South Australia President James Hol) of when exactly the Liberal Democrats became known as a right-wing party, former Senator Bob Day’s diagnosis of the state of modern minor party politics to the right of the Greens is characteristically sharp.
Henry Kissenger once said of Germany that it was ‘too big for Europe, and too small for the world’; so too do the political parties hovering between 2.5% and 4.5% of the federal Senate vote glance suspiciously at one another even as they cast a wistful eye towards Canberra.
I agree with Day’s assessment that the Australian minor party landscape of the centre and right have shared interests, in particular a shared enemy in the Liberal and ALP cabal whose determination to protect their political turf may soon make Whigs of my party (sorry Kenelm, it won’t happen).
Former Senator Day challenged readers to explain to him why the Coalition would raise barriers to entry for non-left minor parties, and I would gladly take him up on that gauntlet. The simple truth is that the Coalition is more afraid of having its ideological bankruptcy permanently exposed by former Senators like he and David Leyonhjelm than it is of temporarily losing seats to the left in the ebb and flow of electoral cycles.
It is crucial to realise, and to explain to our members and the voters we ask to support us, that we are the barbarians at the gates of Canberra!
All of this makes discussion of co-operation between parties like One Nation, United Australia Party, and the Liberal Democrats, more than mere idle musing, and I know as I read Bob’s words that he is serious. So in this reply, I outline why this has yet to happen, what barriers may need to be overcome, and how this process could begin.
Discussion of an alliance of minor parties and greater co-operation, in particular at a Federal level, is nothing new. Founder and former president of the Liberal Democrats John Humphreys has long said that some kind of pragmatic alliance would be a way around the ever more formidable Great Wall of Canberra.
An arrangement whereby key minor parties ran a joint ticket in each state for the Senate at the next Federal election, determining who would have number 1 spot by negotiation could allow a group of parties together to break through where each would fail or underperform alone.
So why hasn’t this already happened?
The first is that we are often our own worst enemies. Like the best game theory experiments, each party holds out hope that this election will be the election they become the next Greens in terms of electoral success and representation. The incentives not to co-operate, at least on the surface, are strong, and the consequences for betrayal high in the minds of those navigating fraught terrain.
The second is a fear that co-operation might lead to a loss of individual party autonomy or policy independence. The Liberal Democrats, for example, hold views on drug reform that might make Family First or One Nation baulk. The party is not, nor have we ever been, conservative. However, though I am proud to say that unlike a broad church I was formerly a part of, many conservative libertarians find a welcome home in our party.
These challenges and the psychology that underlie them are rational. In a zero sum mindset, it is easy to perceive only risk and negative consequence, while losing sight of possible benefit. However the impact that even half the number of senators that Bob Day suggests is possible would be immeasurable, as not too distant political history has shown.
Greater co-operation and the ability to recognize and leverage opportunities for shared interests to be realized requires a cultivation of personal relationships. This is true at all levels of our parties; at the grassroots membership, the organising level, and the political leadership.
Without knowing each other better, accepting vulnerability, and taking risks, trust cannot be built. There is an element of boldness required to take a step into the unknown, and if we are to turn our combined arms against our bipartisan oppressors rather than brandish them at one another, someone must be first to place them back into the holster.
As Australia’s foremost libertarian party, the Liberal Democrats are ready to try.
Last week we presented a solution to the nation’s current economic, social and political malaise.
We noted that facts and figures no longer mattered. That arithmetic, engineering, economics and, of course, common sense were now out the window. We also lamented that forums, podcasts and other intelligent conversations with world-leading authorities also no longer have any political effect.
But just when you think things couldn’t get any worse, along comes the nation’s Treasurer with a Whitlamesque plan to remake society and the economy using
Values-based capitalism involving public-private co-investment and collaboration and the renovation of key economic institutions and markets.
We will renovate the Reserve Bank and revitalise the Productivity Commission
It’s not just our economic institutions that need renewing and restructuring, but the way our markets allocate and arrange capital as well
Mr Chalmers proposes to do this through the efforts of ‘business, labour and government’.
If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine, I don’t know what would.
Economist Dimitri Burshtein predicts the Treasurer’s version of values-based capitalism will leave the nation broke.
To stop this madness, the major parties’ hands need to be forced through the brutal reality of balance-of-power politics.
As discussed, at the last Federal election, the total centre-right (CR) vote would have been enough to get a senator elected in every state. That equates to 12 senators elected over the two-election Senate cycle.
Substantial political power could be achieved if the CR parties formed a single party bloc, namely a:
LIB-DEM ONE-NATION UNITED-AUST SF&F FAMILY PARTY Coalition.
Note I have since included the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party who, it must be acknowledged, did well in at least two states at the last Federal election.
Such an alliance would see One Nation and UAP with 4 of the 12 seats in the parliament, Libertarians with 2, Christian Family Parties 1 and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party 1 Senate seat.
As discussed, having even one Senate seat gives a party a platform, a status, and a portal into the Federal Parliament for its members.
Working together, a twelve-seat Senate bloc would be a formidable political force.
For any project to succeed it must work effectively on three levels – strategy, tactics, and operations.
Strategy is the big picture. This is the primary aim. In our case it is to have twelve senators who can hold together for a minimum of twelve years.
Like anyone who has ever done a jigsaw puzzle, it is vitally important to have the picture on the box before you start. In other words, what the puzzle will look like when it’s finished.
In our case, we want twelve senators, representing five constituencies to hold together to save the nation from people like Jim Chalmers.
Tactics is about which Parties get to represent which States and at which election. Initially, agreement would be reached for both the 2025 and 2028 elections.
To have six senators elected in 2025 and six more in 2028, it will be vital that all six parties, in all six States agree to work together and for each other, keeping an eye on the prize.
Operations is the day-to-day admin, compliance and member servicing. A modest size Secretariat would be able to manage this.
Kurt Mahlburg, avid Liberty Itch reader and man of Faith, was testing AI app ChatGPT for political bias and posted the results yesterday …
Readers of Liberty Itch will know that I try to reserve Fridays for levity and satire as we head into the weekend. And the result of this test is anything but that.
Well done to Kurt, for alerting us to the threat.
As Friday Funnies loomed though, a response in Kurt’s comment section caught my eye, a response which proves – among other lessons – that you simply can’t crush the indomitable human instinct for freedom.
A limerick from Mike Bull …
Poet: 1.
Dystopian AI: 0.
I put it to you that the story of Henry Kable and Susannah Holmes is reason enough to celebrate Australia Day on 26 January.
Henry and Susannah arrived in Australia, an unmarried couple of convicts with an infant son, on 26 January 1788. They sailed on board of the Friendship as part of the First Fleet. Both had been sentenced to death for burglary some years before in Norfolk, England. They met and started their relationship in jail where Susannah gave birth to their first son. Their sentences were commuted to transportation to the Americas but the destination was later changed to the newly proposed colony of New South Wales.
After the long voyage, as the ships unpacked onto the shore, Henry and Susannah received but a few of their scarce personal belongings. Somewhere along the way, their luggage had gone missing.
By July 1788, the first case of civil law in Australian history was being heard in a court. Even more remarkably, the Kables, now married, were awarded £15 in compensation. In England, and just about everywhere else in the world, convicted felons didn’t enjoy such rights and all their possessions were simply ceded to the state.
The Kable court case was not a fluke. It was a direct consequence of the thoughtful planning of Lord Sydney, Thomas Townsend who, as Home Secretary just months before the First Fleet set sail, rejected the idea of using martial law in the penal colony as it was originally intended.
Lord Sydney was not about to send hundreds of prisoners to a remote gulag but instead had a vision for a free society based on
separation of powers, property rights and the rule of law.
He entrusted Governor Captain Arthur Phillip with the task of implementing his vision on the ground. It was Governor Phillip who responded to the complaint by our convicted couple Henry and Susannah Kable about their missing luggage.
The broader challenge for Phillip was enormous. Putting Lord Sydney’s seemingly fanciful ideals into practice was no easy feat. After all, it took thousands of years for these ideas to develop and mature. It was only during The Enlightenment period that they were framed in a way that could be adopted as the basis of government.
It is a childish characterisation of human history to pretend that we could have arrived at our modern understanding of universal rights with a sudden stroke of virtue.
Arthur Phillip himself believed that Aboriginal people had the same rights as everyone else.
Chances are, put in that same position, you wouldn’t have. In any other time in history, you would have had slaves if you could. If you think you are simply better than that, then you understand very little about the human condition.
We take the ideas of individual property rights and an impartial rule of law to enforce them for granted today but they are not the natural way of things. These ideas had to be envisioned, explained, understood, misunderstood, questioned, tried, rejected and envisioned again. It took brave and critical thinkers like Sydney and Phillip to set them into motion.
A free society for all, with all its flaws and contradictions, was part of the fabric of Australia from the very first moments of the Nation.
That is what arrived in Australia, together with Henry Kable, Susannah Holmes and Arthur Phillip, one 26th of January 1788.
The phrase ‘foreign interference‘ often brings to mind the covert meddling into Australian affairs by the Chinese and Russian governments, both the foes of democracy.
It’s fascinating to observe Australian politicians and the public’s attitude towards Russia and China. We are quick to reprimand Russia for its involvement in the Ukrainian conflict, yet our knees wobble when it comes to criticizing the Chinese Communist Party’s mass killing. And the wincing first-hand accounts of Uyghur concentration camp torture is altogether unsettling.
The human rights abuses continue even now on an industrial scale.
Chinese money is powerful. I hear you. What about human rights? Aren’t they important too?
Liberty Itch has now revealed a pattern of influence-peddling and unrestrained foreign interference by the Chinese Communist Party across Australia, from a violent CCP sycophant assaulting a pro-democracy former legislator in Sydney, to Labor and Coalition politicians sidling-up to Chinese Communist influence in an obsequious display in WA Liberal Leader scurries out the back exit.
Now, the spotlight is on Melbourne and a pivotal foreign interference test case.
Di Sanh “Sunny” Duong, a leader of the Chinese community, is the first individual charged under Australia’s foreign interference laws.
The prosecution and the Australian Federal Police claim that Mr. Duong, aged 67, contributed $37,000 in 2020 for the Royal Melbourne Hospital in an attempt to secure influence with former federal minister, Alan Tudge, which might later be used in support of Chinese interests.
Mr. Duong has, on record, written to a politician in the Liberal Party in the past and suggested that Australia should support China’s expansionist Belt and Road Initiative, a project that was subsequently terminated by the Federal Government in 2020 due to national security concerns.
Sarah Kendall, a legal researcher of foreign interference legislation at the University of Queensland, commented that this case illustrates the breadth of the laws. She pointed out how an activity which may seem harmless could be regarded as a criminal offence if the authorities can prove that the conduct had the intent of preparing for foreign interference.
The law is unusual for a liberal democracy in that it requires from the prosecution only that a defendant intends to use current influence in the future for the purposes of foreign interference.
This is a balancing act for a classical liberal.
Liberals want to protect our hard-won freedoms and an expansionary foreign power like the Chinese regime is a threat to those freedoms especially when operating inside Australia. On the other hand, liberals believe in individual freedom of movement, habeas corpus and the rule of law.
Mr. Duong was charged in November 2020 by the Australian Federal Police. He pleaded not guilty in 2022. He denied engagement in any foreign interference activity, despite that he was a leader of Chinese community associations overseen by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, about which Political Itch has written in China’s Covert Australian Ops.
Magistrate Susan Wakeling determined that there was enough evidence to proceed to trial.
This is the first time a citizen has been charged with facilitating an act of foreign interference, an offence that carries a maximum 10 year imprisonment.
Whatever the result, it will be a critical precedent.
Whether there is a conviction or not, Mr. Duong’s case will be just the first of many. Similar acts of foreign interference have happened and are still happening every day in each Australian state.
How effective are we in defending our democracy? Political Itch will be there when the judgment is handed-down.
Watch this space.
