THE FALSE GOD OF EFFICIENCY

"Greater efficiency", primarily to attempt to gain more export markets, is the god of a strange collection of people known as "economic rationalists". Worshippers of this god transcend political labels, as witnessed by the fact that both Prime Minister Paul Keating and Opposition leader Dr. John Hewson are both devotees. Any differences are matters of degree, not substance. Both are anti-protection for Australian industries, and supporters of internationalism.

Measured in terms of orthodox financial accountancy, it can be demonstrated that it would be much more efficient to house people in standard buildings similar to army barracks. Allowing people to build houses of different designs on, for example, an ordinary suburban block of land can easily be demonstrated to be wasteful of both resources and space. Communal kitchens for collective housing can also be demonstrated to be much more efficient in financial terms. Such an approach to economic organisation might be justified if any group of people were living in a state of drastic shortages. Carefully rationing water to a group of lost travelers in a desert would be commonsense. But the same policy applied to a group boating across one of the great North American fresh water lakes would be one of madness. There is a degree of madness about the "economic rationalism" being advocated by both the Keating Government and the Hewson Opposition. They completely ignore human and social factors.

The sugar industry issue clearly highlights the differences between the "economic rationalists" and those with a basically different philosophy. Two articles in The Weekend Australian of May 9th-l0th bring out the cleavage. The first article by John Hyde, Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, congratulates Dr. Hewson for standing firm against the revolt in the National Party on the issue of sugar protection. Hyde writes that Hewson "is adamant that there will be no giving in to members and senators who push sectional interests".

Nations consist of many different sections, and unless it can be demonstrated that the nation as a whole is suffering because of protection for a section, such as the sugar industry, the destruction of that section in order to advance an international ideology, must be seen as an attack on the whole nation.

Well-known Roman Catholic Commentator, Mr. B.A. Santamaria, assesses the sugar industry issue from a completely different viewpoint, observing that "At serious risk are no fewer than 6,500 farms, relatively small in acreage, in social structure overwhelmingly family farms, employing some thousands of mainly seasonal workers, and the mainstay of prosperous regional centres like Mackay, Bundaberg, Ingham and Innisfail". Apart from the enormous social damage resulting from a savaging of the Australian sugar industry, Santamaria demonstrates that the resulting increase in unemployment would cost the Australian sugar consumers millions of dollars to help pay unemployment benefits. He also confirms our own view that the Federal Opposition appears to be determined to lose the next Federal Elections.

Genuine efficiency can only be measured, not merely in economic terms, but in terms of human satisfaction. If Australia is to survive, the philosophy of the "economic rationalists" must be rejected at the next Federal Elections. A good start has been made in Wills.

MORAL BLACKMAIL BY BOAT PEOPLES

Professor Lauchlan Chipman, Professor of Philosophy at Wollongong University, draws attention to the dangers and inconsistencies of new Commonwealth legislation, hastily pushed through the House, to continue detention of 37 Cambodian "boat people" until a decision can be reached on their future. Chipman points out that the Parliament has interfered with the judicial process, and that the legislation breaches international treaty obligations. Mr. Brian Burdekin, the Federal Human Rights Commissioner, also argues that the decision contravened the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This is the standard, he says, "against which the performance of governments around the world is measured".

It is quite clear, however, that if the provisions of the Convention are applied in this case, it would result in the release of the "boat people" into the Australian community. Experience shows that when their case is finally heard, they will not appear to risk being deported. There are so many illegal immigrants that it could take years to round them up, if ever. They effectively disappear into Australia, which was their original intention in any case. If Australia is to retain any controls over the type of new immigrants, it is essential to enforce the law; those who simply "turn up" by boat should be sent back from whence they came.

EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
Most of those who simply "turn up" on our coastline by boat cannot be regarded as refugees in the usual sense. Rather, they are in the nature of an expeditionary force, encouraged by their own government, and offered comfort by the internationalists with such instruments as United Nations treaties to protect them. The real question to be answered is whether Australian law can be effectively circumvented by international treaties, or whether our own Parliament can move to protect Australian interests. Even the Australian legal system bends over backwards attempting to accommodate the "rights" of illegal refugees, and the appeal to the High Court in the present case is still available to them.

We often disagree strongly with Mr. Padraic McGuinness, columnist for The Australian, but on this issue we agree completely. He writes: "(Boat people) are effectively exercising moral blackmail on the rest of the world by throwing themselves on its mercy: give us what we want or we will die... The alternative, which is what the churches and the immigration lawyers are effectively advocating, is to abandon any effective control over immigration into Australia. Perhaps this is what will eventually happen anyway…"

BLACKMAIL BY COMPASSION
It is all too typical of the type of people who advocate extensive legal defences for illegal immigrants that they also believe in all kinds of laws to control the racist backlash they are so determined to engender. It may be, of course, that Australia has no long-term future as a white enclave at the bottom of Asia, and that we will inevitably be swamped by Asian immigration. It is neither racist nor hostile to Asia to suggest that this is not at all what the vast majority of Australians want - like every other country, while change is acceptable we would not want our national identity totally to disappear...

"Some solution to the rapid turnaround and deportation of such people has to be found. But if deportation is as terrible a punishment as sinking their boats in the first place would have been, some means has to be found for transmitting the message that blackmail by compassion will not work as a substitute for proper application for refugee or immigrant status." (Weekend Australian, 9/5/1992.)

Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail has prophesied just such a situation. His powerful novel is startlingly applicable. $10.00 posted.

BRIEF COMMENTS

While the flag issue is boiling away it should not be forgotten that the issue of the republic is closely associated. If the republic is ever to be achieved, the Union Jack will disappear from the flag. The republicans continue to chip away; W.A. Senator McKiernan is now circulating a petition calling for a change to the oath of allegiance used in the citizenship ceremony. He wants new citizens to pledge loyalty to "Australia" and our people, instead of to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia. An attempt was made to change the oath in 1983. It failed when the Democrats voted against it in the Senate.

A Scottish law commission is preparing to make smacking of children illegal in Scotland. The strap has already been outlawed in Scottish schools following a European Court ruling. Britain must comply with the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Scottish Commission proposes to make it a criminal offence for parents to inflict pain to discipline children. The Director of South Australia's Children's Interest Bureau wants similar legislation here. She says we should look to Norwegian law, which prevents the use of any physical discipline. No doubt the Human Rights Commissioner will point out that we are constrained by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child!

The role of Mikhail Gorbachev in the evolving world drama highlights the fact that philosophically the Marxist-Leninists have the same roots as those International Bankers who have been promoting the One World concept for so long. The Australian of May 8th quotes Gorbachev as saying in the U.S.A. that a World Government was essential for resolving international problems. Gorbachev said in Missouri that "One epoch has ended and a second is commencing. Having long been orthodox Marxists we were sure we knew. But life once again refuted those who claimed to be know-it-alls and messiahs. A major international effort will be needed to render irreversible the shift in favour of a democratic world - and democratic for the whole of humanity, not just half of it".
Gorbachev went on to say that "Events such as regional conflicts and a new rise in nationalism also threaten emerging peace", observing that the U.N. could take on the role of a world government. The Marxists played a major role in the establishment of the United Nations and associated international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Reports from Indonesia state that a resurgent Islam is becoming a major factor in Indonesian politics, now openly acknowledged by President Soeharto. Islam is now the fastest growing religion in the world and in many areas aggressively anti-Western. What does Prime Minister Paul Keating think of this? Or doesn't he?

Mr. Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, writes in his article on May 6th that with Peacock as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, and with Hewson's own involvement in Asia, "there is very little of substance that divides the Government and the Opposition on foreign policy".

ETHNIC DIVERSITY LEADS TO STRIFE

from The Age (Melbourne), May 6th
"The penultimate delights of multiculturalism beaming into our sitting rooms from Los Angeles (the ultimate ones - of civil war - have been available on and off from Sarajevo since June, 1914) are neither new nor predicted. Alexis de Tochqueville's book 'Democracy In America', published around 1836, remains today what it was then: the definitive masterpiece on the socio-politics of the American republic. "In it he predicted more than 150 years ago that the black-white conflict would remain the decisive event shaping American history. And he was not referring to the forthcoming Civil War, which was mainly about the Union, rather than ethnicity. "America has been sinking into ethnic disorganisation ever since the harsh but functioning melting pottery of an Anglo morph Commonwealth was transformed into a multicultural goulash. Ethnic diversity leads almost invariably to ethnic strife, to civil war and to destruction.

"As one of the first to protest against the promotion of the multicultural nonsense in this country, may I add (probably in vain for what started as a marginal fad has by now developed into a manifold and lucrative political racket, about which rational debate has ceased to be possible) that opposition to multiculturalism and insistence on 'racial' homogeneity of settlers and immigrants are totally unrelated. "The 'racial' origin is irrelevant to the processes that transform an ethnically manifold input of settlers into normal members of a Commonwealth created and sustained by the English-based political culture, whose fount and origin are the British Isles.

"Australia is perhaps not one of the most brilliant human societies, because of, as has been pointed out repeatedly, punishing distances from where the action is. Yet it is one of the best governed, fed and medicated, its population is overwhelmingly loyal in peace and war, and subversive poisons are imported from overseas, now mainly America. "A striking individual example may help comprehension. Lee Kuan Yew is by far the most gifted political leader in our new 'Asian' milieu. Yet who can doubt that this thoroughly Chinese organism houses one of the top products of the Oxbridge culture?" (Frank Knopfelmacher, Gardenvale, Vic.)

Note: Dr. Knopfelmacher is a retired academic ex the University of Melbourne.

FROM ON TARGET (CANADA)

Issue of April 20th ... Comment by Ron Gostick, National Director, Canadian League of Rights
"For many years the news media, by lionising Nelson and Winnie Mandela and covering up their crimes with a mixture of 'selective' reporting and disarming euphemisms, have actually been guilty of carrying out an exercise in misrepresenting the peoples of the world. In security language, the media have been used as instruments of 'disinformation'. Just consider these facts:

"From the time Nelson Mandela was convicted of treason some three decades ago, plotting with a group of terrorists and communists to use force and violence to overthrow the South African Government and seize control of the country, the news media have led the world to believe that he was only a 'political' prisoner, being discriminated against and abused because of his colour. The media forgot his real crime, and forgot to mention that the S.A. authorities kept him in good health, gave him a university education while incarcerated, enabling him to leave prison with a degree in law, equipped to lead (or at least act as figurehead of) the communist/terrorist African National Congress (A.N.C.)... Contrast this treatment with that of dissidents and opposition leaders in other Black ruled African states who simply 'disappear'. "Just a universal 'editorial' oversight perhaps!

"Shortly before his arrest, trial and conviction, Mr. Mandela ditched his first wife and 'married' the young social worker Winnie, who - in case you didn't read it or hear it from the media - following his incarceration developed a lifestyle far removed from those she claimed to represent, including a luxurious home, financial affluence, servants and aides-de-camp, and now we learn, 'lovers'. She even had a private goon squad to enforce her edicts, going so far as to beat and have killed a young lad in her care, and order her 'hit man' to murder those she believed to be standing in her way, according to very recent revelations of former colleagues…"