Grim Times for Australia’s Deplorables by Paul Walker

A tremendous article by Maurice Newman (“Road to Tyranny is Paved with Leftie Assumptions,” The Australian, September 27, 2016, p. 14), deserves mention before it disappears down the memory hole.
The primarily Left Media, he says, does not publicise that in the July election almost 600,000 voters gave their first preference to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. These are the Australian version of the “deplorables,” the term used by Hillary Clinton to dismiss the white dispossessed “uneducated.”

And Newman says that the chattering class must vilify these Australians with no debate “lest too many of us waver on the virtues of bigger government, central planning, more bloated bureaucracies, higher taxes, unaffordable welfare, a “carbon-free” economy, more regulations, open borders, gender-free and values-free schools and same-sex marriage: the sort of agenda that finds favour at the UN.”

The problem with this UN-inspired form of collectivism is that it ultimately implodes and self-destructs: big governments become a source of debt creation and regulation strangles creative enterprise. Only societies which are free and open with small governments can flourish.

However, in Australia, living standards are being eroded and wealth and income growth, falling, while a vast array of politically correct social programmes are lavishly funded. Thus, the Labor government on the basis of one television programme shut down Australia’s live cattle exports, causing massive economic hardship. People don’t matter for governments, Newman says, because they have adopted the amoral principle that the ends justify the mean.

Faith has been lost in the democratic process because “Australians feel increasingly marginalised and unrepresented. They are tired of spin and being lied to. They know that data is often withheld or manipulated.” I agree with this, but see this as the fault of the established political classes rather than the “democratic system.”

However, it is interesting to note that Newman says that increasingly more Australians no longer want, to use a motor mechanics metaphor, the same old tune-up at the “same old garage.” They want a new engine. “One Nation may not be the answer, but its garage does offer a new engine.” This is a significant comment coming in a mainstream paper.

Newman is well versed in business and the global economy and has said some things also said by James Reed, who is not so versed, in recent articles. For example: “Australia is now on that road to tyranny (of an addiction to centralism as described by F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom - available from our own Heritage Books $20.00 posted within Australia) and, with another global recession in prospect and nearly 50 percent of voters already dependent on government, the incentive is to vote for more government, not less.” That will simply be more of the same poison.

The time is ripe to work hard and to outline what this “new engine” may be on social credit principles, not only economic, but in terms of the full array of cultural, moral and political policies. Interacting and influencing the direction of One Nation would be a very good start.