IT IS FREEDOM OR IT IS NOT! WHICH IS IT TO BE?

by Wallace Klinck, Canada
"We have to make up our minds definitively: We either respect our fellow citizen's right to make his or her own choices in life, or we do not. This is a battle of the mind which must be resolved. I remember taking a course in comparative economic systems (actually a contradiction in terms because all taught economics are of the same genre - being essentially scarcity-work oriented) where a guest professor who had been in charge of central planning for the mining industry in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime had been invited to speak on "central planning."

Originally the planners tried to conceptualize what should be produced and consumed by the population and they attempted to insert this data into input-output tables. Of course, predictably, the task became so complex that the five-year economic plan fell increasingly and hopelessly behind schedule.
So, the planners - ever reluctant to give up their regimentation of other people, decided to use differential equations to facilitate their task of mobilizing the population. After about a full week of writing equations from one side of the classroom to the other the professor suddenly halted, turned to the class and declared, "You see, it is impossible!"

I approached the professor afterward and asked, "Professor (Skoda, his name, if I remember correctly), does it not seem to you that it is the supreme arrogance for a small group of people to sit on a mountain-top and try to conceive what should be produced and consumed by all the people of a nation?" To which he replied, "Yes, when you think about it, it is."
C. H. Douglas stressed that the sole purpose of production is to serve consumption and that genuine democracy requires consumer control of production policy (not of administration). This matter is not peripheral but is central to Social Credit policy, in keeping with Social Credit philosophy.

The dangers to human life and freedom of centralized policy control over economic activity far exceed any expression of individual preferences by consumers at large. One must remember that the insane quest for survival on the steepening treadmill of debt currently drives industry and society as a whole into an increasing obsession with production and sales in a futile attempt to borrow, produce and consume our way out of financial debt… which increases disproportionately with every genuine advance in production efficiency.
Consumers must work harder and harder to meet their escalating debts and this requires support through sales of the products of their effort - irrespective of whether such products are really valuable to, or desired by, them.

Social Credit to the fore…
In a Social Credit dispensation no such problem would exist. Consumers would always have full access to the totality of consumer goods without the necessity of contracting debt. They would opt for increasing leisure and cultural activity and no longer be obsessed with "economics."

Being less pressured by the mere task of financial survival, they would have more time for genuine reflection and development through discriminating thought processes of more refined judgement and moral or ethical principles.
The climate of the current financial-economic regime based on the survival of the fittest (except for pathetic crumbs re-distributed via charity and basic social welfare) is destructive of such processes of the development of ethical thought and practice.

We must provide an environment of economic security which affords all citizens a genuine opportunity to develop and grow in their personal intellectual, spiritual and moral stature. They need freedom of choice in order to develop such attributes.

Planning for them merely suppresses their individuality and latent talents - which serves the ends of the financial tyranny under which we all now labour, live and die - a tyranny which seeks primarily a compliant, de-cultured, de-spiritualized mass world proletariat. One must always bear in mind that in Social Credit we enter into a different conceptual and practical world of awareness and experience."

THE LEAGUE OF RIGHTS, NOT A BILL OF RIGHTS!

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
So-called debate continues on an Australian charter of rights. Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in “The Statute of Liberty” has put the case for this. The case against a charter of rights is very clear. Human rights is a politically correct industry, a branch business of the legal left. The aim of such a charter is to make judges – and ultimately lawyers – the final arbitrators of right and wrong and acceptable law in our society.

The argument against this is simple. This unelected body must not be trusted with such an absolute power because the historical record shows that judges and lawyers cannot be trusted with such power. The League of Rights has championed the case for a decentralised basis to power, a pluralism of checks and balances.

The character of rights, in transferring political power to the judiciary, will result in a loss of freedom, real freedom. This is a group of people even more committed to politically correct causes than politicians. A charter of rights will magnify the present madness that we endure many times over. It will speed up the end of Australia.

GOD AND LIMITS OF SCIENCE

by Brian Simpson
Chris Knight & James Reed: The article in SAWeekend “Faith No More” tells us that atheism is a growing philosophical position in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that the number of people identifying themselves as “no religion” (i.e. atheism) between 2001 and 2006 grew by a third to 18.8%, and 11.2% didn’t answer the question at all. Among young people born between 1976 and 1990, 48% believe in God, according to a survey by Monash University, the Australian Catholic University and Christian Research Association, conducted in 2006.

Atheists rejoice in quoting such statistics. They shouldn’t. According to most past atheists, the advances of scientific rationality that would and should have led to the end of faith as religion, evaporated in the burning sunlight of scientific truth. But this hasn’t occurred. In fact, the paradigm cases of religious irrationality (for the atheist and scientific materialist), Pentecostal and Evangelical protestant churches are flourishing. Bad economic times are likely to lead to more people coming through their doors – but not, we think – the rented church halls where atheism meetings are held.

In his recent book, “Why Us?” (Harper Collins), James Le Fanu discusses the greatest scientific discoveries of our time: the unlocking of the genetic code and the neuroscientific understanding of the human brain. These fields, according to scientific materialists, promised to eliminate the ‘ghost in the machine’ and to produce a purely materialistic and mechanistic account of the world without God, spirit, mind or soul.

But the discoveries in genetics have revealed that diverse organisms are essentially identical as far as DNA goes. Form and morphological variety is not accounted for by DNA alone. Likewise, neurophysiology has yet to solve the problem of consciousness.
By contrast to the highly materialist 19th century, the 21st century world of science indicates the limits of a materialist world view. What is lacking is precisely that which science sought to remove – God, spirit, mind and soul.

It is the lack of these concepts which have ultimately philosophically impoverished our sciences. Materialism has served as a blinker that has narrowed the vision of science.It is time for that blinker to be removed so that God can once more be seen by the once-blinded, scientific eye.

TIME TO PUT SOME OF THE BLAME ON THE THIRD WORLD

by James Reed
According to biologist Allen Greer “Fewer People Would Mean Fewer Worries” (The Australian, 16/1/08, p.25). It is foolish to put all our hopes on technology to save us because population growth puts us on a technological treadmill: we have to keep running just to keep up. “Is there any problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with few of us?”

Missing from this discussion is a racial dimension: that most of the growth in human numbers that threatens to overwhelm the planet is in the Third World. Also missing is recognition that immigration is environmentally destructive because it merely makes people with less of a ‘carbon footprint’ into high emitters.
If we are to be good environmental citizens, Australia should cease to be an immigration country. It is time to end the nightmare that Arthur Calwell, Fabian socialist, unleashed on us.

Although I seldom agree with columnist Christopher Pearson, he is right about the “bloated legacy” of Robert Menzies. Menzies’ expansion of the Australian University sector was an absolute disaster that led to intellectually inferior and many D-grade academics being given tenure.

The rot is with us still and has festered into the anti-Anglo racism industry. The article by Pearson (The Weekend Australian, 19/1/08, p.26) has a photo of Bob Menzies and Opposition leader Arthur Calwell cuddling up. Birds of a feather and all that…

THE HYPOCRISY OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS

by James Reed
Environmentalist, Al Gore, has a 20-room mansion in Nashville, Tennessee heated by natural gas. The swimming pool and guesthouse are also heated by natural gas. This house consumes more energy in one month than the average American household does in a year.

All this from an environmental guru, who says that we in the West consume too much energy, thus producing excess greenhouse gas emissions. Across the world, wealthy young environmentalists from millionaire and billionaire families jet across the world emitting tonnes of carbon dioxide.

And, according to David de Rothschild, a member of the Rothschild banking family, in his “Global Warming Survival Handbook” (The Australian, 1/5/09, p.13) we should put on jumpers before turning on the heater.
I wonder if he will take his own advice?
Better yet, how about really helping reduce climate change by using the Rothschild banking fortune to help starving Africans reduce their ‘ecological footprint’? What a legacy that would be!

THE CRISIS AND COST OF DIVERSITY

by Brian Simpson
For many decades League writers, from Eric Butler onwards, have been criticising the policies which have created large scale multicultural and multiracial societies. The argument has been that such societies, as based on the historical record, fragment and become a nation of warring tribes. Evidence for this view is important in the light of recent statistics indicating that US whites are heading for a minority status by 2042 or earlier. Globally the percentage of white people will tumble from a high of 27.98% in 1950 to 9.76% by 2060.

By that time blacks will represent 25.38% of the world population (blacks were 8.97% in 1950). A press release by the US National Policy Institute (7/4/08) says that the coloured race “and their governments will be looking for elbow room and the diminished presence of whites in Europe and especially in the relatively wide open spaces [of] North America will provide such an opportunity. Countries like Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Russia can be expected to be pressured to accept collectively hundreds of millions of refugees from India and sub-Sahara Africa.”

Already there is considerable evidence that multicultural and multiracial societies face problems of social cohesion – and this is from mainstream social scientists alone. Leading sociologist Robert D. Putnam, writing in the Scandinavian Political Studies (Vol.30, 2007) concluded on the basis of his American research, that in the short term “immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital.” In “ethnically diverse neighbourhoods” residents of all races tend to “bunker down.”

“Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.” In the longer term, Putnam believes, immigration and diversity does not have these disadvantages but his arguments for this are weak, being based upon past cases of assimilation. But the West has never faced the onslaught which it faces today. The disadvantages of immigration and diversity noted by Putnam are confirmed by a more recent study by the National Policy Institute: Cost of Diversity (October 2008) which concludes that the US has become a “Tower of Babel”.

Similar conclusions have been reached in a study of the Melbourne situation: Ernest Healy, “Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion in Melbourne” People and Place, Vol.15, 2007. The ramifications of all this are frightening to say the least.

The dystopic predictions of Spengler of a decline and fall of the West are being confirmed by the hour. To deal with this issue, as James Reed and myself have argued, requires putting race, immigration and national identity issues at the top of our list of concerns.
At the moment, most freedom movement people are concerned with economic and liberty issues. The demographic time bomb will end all of this. Democracy and liberty will necessarily go in a world of population deluge.
So too will any attempt to create a sustainable economic system as social and environmental support systems will be overloaded. We will all be equal at the bottom. Then we will die out.

Thus, if we want our ideals to survive, we must immediately take a stand on opposing further immigration. If Australian could turn back the rising tide, other Western countries may also get the backbone to resist.

OVERLOAD AUSTRALIA TRAGEDY: IMMIGRATION

by James Reed
The headline says it all: “Same Boat People Seeking Asylum for Second Time” The Australian 5/5/09, p.1. Australia’s border ‘protection’ and immigration ‘policy’ are jokes. Rudd is undertaking a massive immigration program designed to change the racial complexion of Australia as part of his Asianisation program.
Australia’s population growth is largely fuelled by immigration and much natural increase comes from Australian-born children of migrants.

This increase makes the housing industry elites rich, but pushes families into crushing debt for a lifetime or more. Hospitals and infrastructure are pushed to breaking point. Water supplies dwindle but the migrants continue to pour in because it serves the interests of the elites and the people do not put up resistance.

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines in “Overloading Australia” (Envirobook, 2008, do a good job of outlining the environmental case against immigration – and the population increase for Australia. This book does go a bit beyond other such environmental critics because it deals with the new class and their manipulation of the immigration issue. There is not much here that League writers haven’t said, but hearing these things said by people of a different political slant to me is good.

Of course, O’Connor and Lines are politically correct and as expected are soft on the refugee issues. Really, if global warming, and all that, is occurring, then we should be following right wing environmentalists like Garrett Hardin and advocating a lifeboat ethics, where all immigration to Australia ends. That is the sort of environmental critique I would like to see.

GREENIE LAWYERS : CASH REGISTERS TO START SINGING?

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
Some years back there was a US lawsuit where the US Environmental Protection Agency was sought to limit carbon dioxide emissions on new cars because of global warming dangers. The case failed. But now the EPA has said that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health.
What changed its mind on this over the last few years? Probably only the election of Obama, who has made token remarks about the importance of global climate change. The hope of environmentalists is that Obama will pass legislation capping greenhouse gas emissions. A market will be created for permits to emit carbon dioxide and businesses will buy and sell the right to pollute.

Merely creating a ‘market’ does not magically solve a real world problem, although people often think that it does because the ‘market’ is ‘god’ for our capitalist society. At some point, if greenhouse gas emissions are a problem (I don’t know if they are or not), someone has to make the cuts. Does this mean that Obama is going to stand up to ‘big oil’?
Imagine the flood of lawsuits that will now come as carbon dioxide becomes the new toxic tort or asbestos. Climate change lawsuits could make tobacco/cancer litigation look like peanuts. Lawyers stand to get richer.

It seems unlikely that Obama will make a stand against ‘big oil’. The New York Times saw Obama as a presidential candidate reversing much of what George Bush stood for. But recently a New York Times editorial lamented that Obama seems to be staying with Bush policies such as indefinite military detention for those suspected of terrorism (cited The Australian 24/3/09, p.11). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

NAVIGATING THE FAMILY LAW REEF

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
Way back in 2005, John Hirst, a historian at La Trobe University, published a controversial essay ‘Kangaroo Court’: Family Law in Australia (Quarterly Essay, issue 17). Hirst described a system which was about to have substantial changes made to it by the Howard government. In particular, Hirst directed much of his criticism. against Chief Justice Alastair Nicholson, who had been replaced before the essay was published (p.111).
Cutting to the chase, Hirst’s argument is that there is a bias against men and for women in the court, especially in relation to the soft-headed way women are treated when a breach of court order has occurred, compared to the hard-headed way men were treated (pp.3-4). Mothers denying access were not effectively punished (p.5).

Further, the court at the time did not compel non-custodial parents, usually fathers, to pay child maintenance to mothers (pp.6-7), but this situation has now changed with the introduction of the Child Support Agency which is highly efficient at tracking down fathers who are not doing the right thing.

Hirst is heavy on the Child Support Agency:
“The Child Support Agency is not a caring agency. It is ruthless and relentless; it deducts payments from wages and sweeps bank accounts” (p.7). This is true in extreme cases where fathers don’t do the right thing. But these powers are established by law and the Child Support Agency has no agenda to be ‘caring’ any more than say the Australian Taxation Office has. Although, as Hirst notes, many fathers who are not seeing their children are still paying for them, the fault for this lies not with the Child Support Agency, but the Family Court or Federal Magistrates Court.

It is often complained, by men who have been divorced, that it is difficult to meet their commitments. The ex-wife gets the old family home and they have to establish a new home while paying child support. This is where you need to carefully check out the law and regulations. It is my belief, not advice, that if the man establishes a new relationship and remarries – make sure the new wife has a house of her own!* – the threshold income for assessment will alter, as it will with new batches of kiddies. (*Do I denote a touch of cynicism here Ian?... Editor.)

Check out the Child Support Agency website or have a look at the Act. There may be many legal ways of arranging one’s affairs so that one can start again, especially if the ex-wife is denying one access to children. I believe that on Newstart or Austudy, support payments could be as low as $79 a month, but again check the matter out for yourself.

Men facing these financial difficulties need to get expert legal advice and such advice need not break the bank. Men’s support groups can refer you to kindly lawyers who whilst not working for free, are at least fair enough to give you sound advice. In principle, all of this information can be ascertained by a legal appointment and some internet study. Men have often come out poorly because they simply have not done their homework and legal research. They need to treat their case seriously if they are to have a hope of defending their interests.

This position is confirmed by some recent articles:
M. Pelly, “Dads Who Fight Win Favour in Custody Cases” The Australian, 24/3/09, p.5, reports on a Family Court review which shows that the Family Court gives fathers a better deal in custody cases than ex-wives do via consent orders. Fathers who fought in court were given majority custody in 17% of cases compared to 8% from consent orders and early agreement cases. Fathers given less than 30% custody usually had an issue of abuse and violence raised. However 50/50 care outcomes were still rare, occurring in only 15% of litigated cases and 19% of consent orders. Women, thus, more frequently obtained the largest percentage of time.

There has been a good outcome for men from the Howard government’s Family Law Amendment Act (Shared Parental Responsibility Act), which introduced a rebuttal presumption of ‘equal time’ parenting. Mothers still get the majority of orders in their favour, but the situation has improved since John Hirst’s essay.

The moral of the story is that one in the end needs to legally fight back, not only in family law matters but on all issues of legal concern. Nothing beats a good legal defence. This of course may not be possible because of the expense of lawyers, but a person of average intelligence can now use the internet to research legal matters. One does not have to remain defenceless and ignorant of the law.

My aim is not to offer legal advice, rather a personal opinion in this article, but do strongly suggest that suffering men obtain it – i.e., legal advice.

A STRANGE LEGAL ARGUMENT

by Ian Wilson LL.B.
A Chief Justice of the Family Court has said that new provisions in the Family Law Act, which award costs against a party that maliciously makes untrue allegations of violence or untrue denials, may be preventing women from raising allegations of domestic violence and therefore could be removed (Sydney Morning Herald 2-3/5/09, p.3). It is a weird argument.

The law was changed because of the widely acknowledged problem of women using false claims of domestic violence to discredit men. Could it be that domestic violence allegations are down, not because of this section, but because in reality domestic violence is rarer than feminist ideology proposes that it is?

Editor’s comment: Could it be that women now think twice before making ‘untrue allegations’ or ‘untrue denials’ because they may lay themselves open to such matters as perjury? Could it be that is why such allegations are less?