THE DESTRUCTION OF MELBOURNE

by Eric D. Butler
The Victorian Kennett Government's grandiose programme for revolutionising Melbourne's road system, including the introduction of tolls to meet the financial cost, has resulted in a wave of critical comment. Noting what happened in the recent Queensland State elections, where it is estimated the Goss Government lost four seats because of its proposed new toll road to the Gold Coast, the rather lack lustre Victorian Labor Opposition has opposed the Kennett Government's road programme but without offering any genuine alternative. Labor accepts the inevitability of Melbourne becoming even bigger, compounding the problems, which are ruining Melbourne as a civilised city.

The estimated total financial costs, running into billions, of the Kennett Government's road programme, will inevitably be exceeded. The lives of thousands of people, including those being compulsorily moved to make way for freeways and other constructions such as tunnels and overpasses, will be shattered. It is impossible to estimate the emotional costs. And at the end of this upheaval the basic problems resulting from crowding too many people into a city, which is already far too big, not only will remain but will have been increased.

As demonstrated by its determination to destroy genuine Local Government, the Kennett Government slavishly worships the god of efficiency, as measured in purely financial terms. But true efficiency must also be measured in terms of human satisfaction. Premier Kennett heads a centralist government, which believes that progress can be measured in terms of numbers.

Premier Jeff Kennett has made it clear that he is a strong supporter of multiculturalism as witnessed by his criticism of N.S.W. Labor leader Carr who has called attention to the growing problems of an over swollen Sydney into which the biggest proportion of migrants concentrate. Jeff Kennett's reaction to the Cahill comment was to say that Victoria was ready and willing to take an even bigger flow of migrants. Such a flow can only increase the problems of Melbourne.

There was a time when governments of different labels at least paid lip service to the philosophy of decentralisation, which was generally regarded as desirable. During the time of the Victorian Bolte Governments there was one Minister who made a genuine effort to encourage policies of decentralisation. This was the late Jim Manson who, unlike his wimpish successors in the Liberal Party, was always available to speak on League of Rights platforms, on constitutional and other issues of fundamental importance. League smearers appear to have overlooked that Jim Manson was one of a number of Liberal and National Party politicians who have appeared on League platforms. But, of course, this was before Zionist leader Leibler and associates made it clear that no party politicians were to be associated with the League of Rights in any way.

I would be surprised if one Member of the Victorian Coalition Government has ever heard of, still less read, one of the great classic studies of Big Cities, The Culture Of The Cities, by American authority Lewis Mumford. The study was of special interest of Social Crediters because it demonstrated that there were certain increments of association, by individuals living together in towns and cities, but Mumford demonstrated that there was an optimum size of approximately 300,000 for a city beyond which the diminishing law of returns set in.

Mumford showed how as cities become bigger the cost of providing basic services, like power, communications, water and transport, progressively escalated. Crime rates increase in the bigger cities, requiring bigger police forces, health problems become greater, requiring more health services and bigger hospitals. Basic realities can be temporarily masked by great engineering skills, but the costs become progressively greater.

Both short and long-term policies are required to prevent Melbourne from becoming a monstrosity like Los Angeles, a sprawling mob of insanity choking itself to death. The present Melbourne train and tram service should be modernised and improved, encouraging people to make use of it and leaving their cars at home. A policy of political and economic decentralisation should be implemented, this requiring that the programme of forced Council amalgamations be ceased immediately. It can easily be demonstrated that what is proposed could take far less than the billions to be spent on trying to make Melbourne even bigger.

DOUBLE STANDARDS ON FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTING

by David Thompson
Australia appears to be leading the international pack in the waves of abuse that have been washed over the French for daring to exercise their prerogative to test their nuclear weapons underground, which is not banned by the Non-Proliferation Treaty until 1996. The Labor Party has been stung into a much more vitriolic condemnation of the French than Foreign Minister Evans' relatively measured protest, when the announcement was first made, by the almost hysterical anti-French feelings generated among the public.

The long-term results for Australia could be profound. First, we now appear to develop diplomatic relationships as a function of opinion polling, a fundamental departure from long standing Australian foreign policy practices. But it is also clear that the Prime Minister has quickly grasped the prospects for the re-election of a tired and sloppy Labor administration in the anti-French sentiment.

For many months now, the "green" vote has been bleeding away from the A.L.P., as was demonstrated dramatically during the Queensland election, when the "green" preferences were directed towards the Coalition. The greens are now drawing up proposals to target marginal A.L.P. seats. But the anti-nuclear sentiment can be "milked" by Mr. Keating and the A.L.P. in order to stem the bleeding of the green vote, and perhaps provide a platform from which to launch a bid for the green vote at the next election.

The fact that the Communist Chinese Government has also tested nuclear weapons as recently as May has not had anything like the impact of the French tests. And what about the Chinese missile tests over the Taiwan Strait as recently as July? Hardly a word, and certainly no angry demonstrations outside the Chinese Embassy! The Chinese tests are unlikely to be as safe as the French tests, are conducted by a Government less accountable than the French, and for much of Australia, will probably be closer than the French tests. Mururoa is about 6,000km away from Australia, but China is certainly no further away from Perth or Darwin.

Mr. John Hyde, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Affairs, notes that only a few weeks ago Australian military personnel attended a reception in Canberra in force to mark the 68th anniversary of the foundation of the Communist Chinese Army. But our military were banned from attending Bastille Day on July 14th. Hyde asks, "Which nation's soldiers are more likely to be found standing beside our own?"

The vocal opposition to French nuclear testing is a curious phenomena. Upon what is it based? Hard evidence of previous environmental damage or radiation, from France's approximately 200 previous tests? A detailed analysis of probable environmental damage from the current test series? Such material is extremely scarce. Have the anti-French protesters really thought the issue through, and reached their own opinions, or have they been happy to have the Rupert Murdochs or Conrad Blacks, who own the communication media, do our thinking for us?

Do the Murdochs and the Blacks want an independent France, with its independence bolstered by advanced nuclear weapons, or a more subservient France, more readily slotted into some type of 'new world order'? If Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Black are unconcerned about restricting French sovereignty over their own territory, perhaps they will demonstrate equal unconcern about Australian sovereignty?

Perhaps a more important question for Australia is, do the Murdochs and the Blacks, the creatures of international finance themselves, want a Labor administration re-elected in Australia for yet another disastrous term? And is the now rampant green/nuclear vote going to deliver this?

As John Hyde implies, the political success of the anti-French strategy depends upon the public remaining blissfully unaware of the staggering inconsistencies in the self-righteous response to French testing. And, of course, the Opposition is equally craven in their scramble to exploit the resurgent anti-nuclear (or is it anti-French) hysteria for electoral purposes.

RE-WRITING HISTORY TO APPEASE THE JAPANESE

Protests against French nuclear testing has provided a background against which the commemoration of the end of the war against Japan by dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has almost made the Japanese into the victims of the Second World War, rather than the guilty party. Together with the almost inexplicable decision in Australia, not reflected in any other country, to celebrate "VP Day", and not "VJ. Day", as it really was, this leaves the inescapable impression that Australians in particular are revising the historical record to please our biggest Asian trading partner.

The truth is that it was the victory over the Japanese that was celebrated in August 1945. It was the Japanese unconditional surrender that brought the military conflict to a close. The fact that both the surrender and the victory took part in the Pacific does not tell the full story at all. The fact that Pearl Harbour is in the Pacific tells us nothing about the Japanese attack upon it, without even having declared war.

The Australian submission to Japanese diplomatic pressure to have "V.J. Day" replaced with "V.P. Day" is a type of regional cringe, in which we, who apparently desperately want to be "part of Asia", are prepared to accept complicity in the shameful re-writing of history to suggest that the Japanese were not really aggressors in wartime, but were the benign "liberators" of much of Asia from colonialism, and fought a just war in self-defence. Some ex-servicemen and ex-P.O.W's. in Sydney refused to march in the commemoration of the ending of the war as an expression of disgust.

The truth is that the naked Japanese aggression, and the brutal treatment of prisoners, was not itself confined to the Pacific. Perhaps one turning point in the war against Japan was the bitter and brutal campaigns in Eastern India, where British and Indian troops under field Marshall William Slim referred Japanese momentum at Imphal and Kohima, to then begin rolling up the Japanese imperial forces down through Burma and Thailand. This took place as much in the Indian Ocean spheres as the Pacific.
Does the "V.P. Day" celebration include the sacrifices made in the Indian sphere? Does it include the brutalisation of Australian P.O.W's. on the Burma railway? This had little to do with the Pacific, but everything to do with Japanese brutality.

Carl Bridge, who teaches Australian history at the University of New England, notes that the Japanese record includes the taking of the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, when over 100,000 Chinese civilians were killed (Australian, 11/8/95). Add to this the "pacification" of Malaya and Singapore (are they now in the Pacific?) in which over 50,000 mostly Chinese civilians were executed in what today has become known as "ethnic cleansing", and even the Bosnian Serb's record can be compared with favour to that of the Japanese.

To insist that the Japanese accept the reality of the past, and face their culpability, is not a demand for vengeance. Many of those living today were not then born, and should not be burdened with the guilt of their fathers. For the most part the Australians, even prisoners of war treated in the most brutal way, have forgiven their Japanese opponents. But this is no reason to re-write history.

To forgive is not to forget the Japanese record or gloss over the atrocities, or else we also forget (or at least belittle) the sacrifices made by Australians and their allies. To forget the murder of the nurses at Ambon, the Sandakan and Bataan death-marches, the camps like Changi, is to betray a shining thread in Australia's cultural heritage, in a cringing quest for acceptance in "Asia". And "Asia", of course, tells us quite bluntly that we are not Asian at all, but European.

Having celebrated the 50th anniversary of what Churchill called an absolute victory for the Commonwealth and Empire; let us also insist that the truth continue to be told, in both the European and Asian theatres of the war.

ABORTION: 'JANE ROE' RECANTS

DOUG COLLINS UNDER ATTACK IN CANADA

From the Friends of Freedom Newsletter, in British Columbia, we observe a report that the first major attack on the (not very politically correct) North Shore News columnist, Mr. Doug Collins, has opened with a hearing before the B.C. Press Council on July 25th. This hearing, the result of a complaint about Collins' columns on Schindler's List, and others, having had the effect of "denying the holocaust", was heavily attended by Collins' supporters, and the Council's decision reserved. Doug Collins is also to appear before the B.C. Human Rights Commission for the same columns in what will be the first major test of British Columbia's new Human Rights Code, which appears to give politically appointed people the powers of judges to silence certain views.

The Lady Birdwood Case
In the same newsletter (July/August edition) we read a report on the case in London concerning Lady Jane Birdwood.
We quote: "Last year's recipient of the George Orwell Award, Lady Jane Birdwood, is recovering slowly from a mugging she suffered on the street where she was robbed by a black cyclist. Meanwhile, her appeal to the House of Lords of her conviction under the Public Order Act has proceeded to written arguments presented by her counsel, Douglas Case.... 'The issue of Lady Birdwood's case is a matter of public importance because truth is a matter of public importance and the right to speak it, even if someone about whom it is spoken regards it as insulting or abusive. In Lady Birdwood's case, the jury has been told for the first time that truth is irrelevant in the assessment of whether statements are insulting or abusive. They should not have been told this, and to do so contradicts the entire tradition of Western life. The common law allows truth as a defence to defamatory statements, which would otherwise be insulting or abusive. If a person cannot tell the historical truth about a group of people because someone might find it insulting or abusive, then freedom of speech does not exist.

"Brutus V Cozens, in the House of Lords, says that insulting or abusive are words of ordinary meaning, not to be further defined. They were not in that case confronted with the issue of truth. The judge in Lady Birdwood's case has extended Brutus v. Cozens to remove truth from consideration of the term "insulting or abusive" when both common sense and common law has said it should be considered in the assessment. "For this reason, the law has been extended in an unsound manner which is destructive to freedom of expression and this is of utmost importance in a free and democratic society. All such societies, at least in the British common law tradition give a special exemption and respect both in the civil law of defamation and in the criminal law for the right to tell the truth. Naturally it would be for the jury to decide if it was the truth."

Lady Birdwood was charged under the Public Order Act (similar to the proposed racial hatred legislation here) for having published, or caused to have published, a booklet, The Longest Hatred. For those who wish to assess this material for themselves in the light of the proposed Australian legislation, the League has limited stocks: $5.00 per copy from all League Book Services, or $6.50 posted.