Australia: Sharing power with people of colour

The good old Leftist racism again below. Why cannot we judge people's competence without referring to their race? If the agitators below were to come up with just one example of a minority person who missed out on a prominent job when a less competent mainstream person got it, then they might have made a case. But they did not.

And judging competence needs to be multidimensional. A person who is otherwise competent but who has a thick accent or an intrusive religion could quite rightly be judged as not ideal for a position involving a lot of contact with the public

And note that many people with a minority background in Australia were not born here. And it can take a lifetime to build up the social skills and competencies to succeed in the political sphere. You have to be perceived as "one of the boys" (or girls) to be politically successful -- and that can take very fine tuning indeed. Many try but few succeed

And note that, ever since the conservatives put the very Aboriginal Neville Bonner into the Australian parliament, there have been many others elected who have some Aboriginal background. There have been 52 Indigenous members of the ten Australian legislatures. The Minister for Indigenous Australians in the current Federal government -=- Ken Wyatt -- identifies as Aboriginal

So the claim that minorities are systematically kept out of power in Australia is blatant rubbish on several levels. It's just another Leftist whine and just another example of the Leftist obsession with race

The Diversity Council of Australia says racism is "when an individual or organisation discriminates, excludes, or disadvantages someone because of their race, colour, descent, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and/or immigrant status".

Other social scientists and academics also argue that racism requires both racial prejudice and institutional power. But it's a contentious definition because there are several levels of racism, such as internalised or interpersonal racism.

What one can't deny, though, is the fact that those who are in power, such as in governmental institutions and workplaces, are overwhelmingly white.

For example, the Australian Human Rights Commission, in a 2018 report, found that about 95 per cent of senior leaders in Australia came from an Anglo-Celtic or European background. Only 0.4 per cent are Indigenous Australians and under 5 per cent had a non-European and non-Indigenous Australian background.

"The people who make decisions about who can come into the elite are the people who are the current members. And they are very reluctant to recognise quality in people from backgrounds they don't understand," Mr Jakubowicz said.

What 'be a little less white' means

Anti-racism educator Robin DiAngelo says white people need to stop being defensive, and start talking about racism.

Peter Mousaferiadis, the founder and CEO of Cultural Infusion, said that as a result, the created system gives people who are connected to that cultural hegemony a privilege — or "white privilege" — while other people outside the group miss out.

The belief that white people have superior knowledge, opinions and capabilities is an obstacle for people of colour to gain similar power in society. Adding to that is an additional barrier for those whose native language isn't English.

That's why the focus should be shifted to having a wide representation of backgrounds, to help debunk that thinking.

"If we focus on representation, then we're going to create organisations and systems that mirror the environment," Mr Mousaferiadis said.

"Representation will iron out power for one particular group. The power will become more evenly [shared]."

But if we fail to do this, and if organisations don't mirror the reality of diversity, it can create tension.

Let's talk about racism, not cultural diversity

Racism is so "systemic" that it's "embedded" in workplaces, according to the Racism at Work report published by the Diversity Council Australia (DCA) on Monday.

Dr Virginia Mapedzahama, a co-author of the report, said those words focus on the "positive or celebratory things" and obscure a painful truth. "If we just concentrate on things like harmony, there's the side that we're not actually focusing [on]. There's another conversation that was silenced and we are not having," she said.

Like "harmony", words like "diversity" and the bureaucratic acronym "Culturally and Linguistically Diverse" (CALD) often miss the point.

Would we be better off without 'CALD'?

Our varied backgrounds and experiences are all classified as culturally and linguistically diverse by the government. But the term's limitations may outweigh its utility.

"CALD is a problematic term. It derives meaning from the supposition that within a given population there is a subset who can be aggregated into a separate category," Mr Mousaferiadis told the ABC.

He said the continuation of accepting the CALD concept perpetuates the problems that organisations are attempting to overcome because it "normalises and entrenches the binary" between CALD and the dominant cultural group.

Further, it's an unhelpfully blunt term for a wide array of experiences — it can include Australians whose ancestors arrived more than 150 years ago from China and speak fluent English, as well as the Afghan refugee family who arrived in Australia a month ago.

The term "has had its day", Mr Mousaferiadis said, adding the focus should not be on identity itself, but what communities actually need.

Dr Virginia Mapedzahama said while concepts of diversity and social cohesion are important, "if we use those conversations as entry points to discussing racism, we're not going to get to eradicating racism at work".

That's why many social scientists and anti-racism advocates keep reminding us to listen to the voices of people with lived experiences of racism.

But there are also barriers there — as Mr Jakubowicz points out, the linguistic aspect is often forgotten in discussions about racism, and we may unconsciously or consciously discriminate against people who have different accents.

When we don't hear accents in mainstream media, such as radio or television, it reinforces biases, Mr Jakubowicz said. "They're quite comfortable with people who look different, but very uncomfortable with those who sound different," he said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-23/talking-about-racism-during-celebration-of-harmony-week/100925672

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Gender ideology nearly covered up a sexual assault

A woman was raped on a single-sex ward at an unnamed hospital in Britain last year.

Compounding her trauma was the hospital and police’s refusal to believe her accusation because woke procedure demanded they say ‘there was no male in the hospital’.

This, of course, has turned out to be a lie perpetrated on behalf of LGBTQ+ politics.

After the cover-up, it took the hospital and police 12 months to admit that the woman was indeed raped and that the perpetrator was transgender ‘woman’.

British House of Lords parliamentarian Baroness Nicholson blew the whistle in a speech given at 1am last Wednesday, London time.

‘You cannot rape if you do not have the structure of a male,’ she helpfully pointed out to woke colleagues blinded by rainbow mist in their eyes.

She is calling for an amendment to the so-called Equality Act to bring ‘the rights of women to have their dignity, privacy and safety reaffirmed and brought back into the centre’.

She told the Parliament, ‘Those three things have disappeared.’

She was scathing of how laws had been changed without debate allowing men to appropriate women’s gender through ‘self-identification’.

‘Self-identification […] has deliberately been pushed through, almost surreptitiously, without debate in either Chamber. I think that that is scandalous. My gender – my sex– has been made less dignified in hospital.’

Heart-breaking was her description of what happened to the woman – now a friend of the Baroness.

The National Health Service and police cover-up eventually fell apart because of the existence of CCTV footage and ‘nurses and observers’.

‘During that year [of the cover up] she [the rape victim] has almost come to the edge of a nervous breakdown, because being disbelieved about being raped in hospital has been such an appalling shock,’ Baroness Nicholson told Parliament.

‘The hospital, with all its CCTV, has had to admit that the rape happened and that it was committed by a man. The police have therefore changed their tune and become enormously supportive and helpful, and the case is going ahead.

‘The result of annexe B (of the Equality Act) is that hospital trusts inform ward sisters and nurses that if there is a male, as a trans person, in a female ward, and a female patient or anyone complains, they must be told that it is not true – there is no male there.’

This is the big lie rainbow politics forces upon us where similar laws have been passed in the woke West, including Australia, whether it is in hospitals, school toilets or girls’ sports.

Baroness Nicholson went on.

‘I think it is completely wrong that the National Health Service should be instructing or allowing staff to mislead patients – to tell a straightforward lie. It is not acceptable.

‘The impact on my new friend is appalling.’

Anyone who thinks Baroness Nicholson is some anti-trans bigot should read her entire speech.

She touchingly relates how she once helped a constituent who had been marginalised and discriminated against after undergoing gender reassignment surgery and returning to her village.

‘It was not easy socially for her and I helped on that as well,’ Baroness Nicholson told Parliament.

Despite her tolerance and care, she has made it clear that women’s safety, privacy, and dignity must take precedence.

This tragic rape and scandalous cover-up must serve as a wake-up call to the blind acceptance of LGBTQ+ political demands.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/gender-ideology-nearly-covered-up-a-sexual-assault/

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Putin and Biden have a lot in common

Vladimir Putin has given an address to the Russian nation that urged his country to be patient with the current pain. He said he is working to restructure economic life to deal with the ongoing disaster in employment, goods access, productivity, technology, and inflation. It’s transitory, he explained, a result of the war sanctions, and all the fault of the West.

He has this totally under control, he says. Just trust the government.

Many people do. People in cities are skeptical but he remains widely popular in rural areas. Meanwhile the government works to silence dissent, punish those who protest, and control the media.

This story sounds strangely familiar, doesn’t it?

Biden’s White House daily urges this country to be patient with the current pain. They are working on ways to address the ongoing mess with inflation, declining financials, goods shortages, supply-chain woes, mail that barely functions, and a medical system that is throttled, distorted, and wildly expensive. It’s all the fault of Putin for invading Ukraine, thus necessitating severe economic sanctions and driving up the cost of everything.

It’s the price we pay for freedom! All we are supposed to do is trust the government. Biden has this totally under control. People are skeptical but he remains popular in some circles, mostly in large blue-state cities. People are suffering but it’s another country’s fault. Meanwhile, the government works to silence dissent, punish those who protest, and control the media. All this control is getting worse.

It’s getting creepy how government policies are increasingly copying each other. It’s not unlike the final global equilibrium in Orwell’s “1984”: three large states that are indistinguishable in despotic ambitions, constantly trading places to demonize the other and urge their citizens to do the same. There’s always a scapegoat.

After the end of the Second World War, we had a sense that governments of the world were competing over economic and social systems. Which had the most freedom? Which nations were rich vs. poor? What kinds of policies do nations have and which policies are best at promoting economic growth, human rights, and peace?

There was of course the Cold War, which pitted the “free world” against captive nations and an evil empire. What an innocent time that was! It lasted 40 years, which in retrospect seemed like mostly pretty good years for the West. We had a sense of what we were and what we were not. We had a model of what we never wanted to become, and that was a tyrannical communist state.

The changes from 1989 and forward fundamentally altered that perception. Communism went away and even the remaining communist empire of China itself opened up its economy to trade, ownership, and enterprise. That binary world was blown apart. Our lizard brains that look for easy stories were challenged by new forms of what not to be. Terrorism fit the bill for some years but it couldn’t last.

As we now look at the large world alliances—dominated by Russia, China, and the United States and their respective allies—it is increasingly difficult to distinguish their policies in principle. There is a push in the U.S./NATO for a China-style social credit system. Russia uses brutal tactics for suppressing dissent that it copied from China. China copies the U.S. system of industrial subsidies and fiscal and monetary stimulus. The U.S. copies China in its lockdown strategy for virus mitigation.

Each government aspires to the same: total political and social control, while allowing just enough freedom to keep the wealth machine running to provide the revenue. Each country has its political elites and its administrative apparatus.

What burned this copycat system in place were the lockdowns of 2020. They began in China, expanded to Italy, and were quickly copied by the United States. That was a devastating moment because it told the world: this is good science! If the Bill of Rights and the Constitution in the U.S. was not enough to stop this from happening, surely this virus could kill us all! Very quickly after that, most states adopted that very system.

They also copied the wild spending, the monetary expansion, the police state tactics, the vaccine mandates, the surveillance, the travel restrictions, and the demonization of dissent. All governments in the world blew up in size and scope. They have stayed that way. Now we are left with the results of massive and ubiquitous authoritarianism plus rampant inflation and debt, along with slow economic growth and goods shortages.

All these nations too have kept media empires that reflect the prevailing line plus a small dissident press that is barely tolerated and often fighting for attention and even existence.

What states in the world resisted? There were only a few. Sweden. Tanzania. Nicaragua. Belarus. South Dakota. Later, the most open states in the world were in the United States: Georgia, Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Wyoming. These are now the outliers in the world, actual places of freedom. Other quasi-rational places are Denmark, Norway, and The Netherlands.

So far as I know, ten years ago, there were zero predictions out there that these would be the new free lands in the whole planet Earth.

In Orwell’s book, there are three superstates that forever rule the world: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Is this our future? Maybe. I actually doubt it. What we actually see happening is a global awakening for freedom. It’s happening. Slowly, but it’s out there. A major factor here is just how poorly the elites have performed. Their plans have failed and they have only generated poverty and chaos. The orthodoxy of control has generated too many anomalies to maintain public credibility.

Biden, Putin, and the CCP all face the same problem: they preside over systems that are underperforming and generating enormous unrest at all levels. The leaders blame each other while the people in all countries are left to suffer. We are just at the beginning, but this strategy of deflection could end very badly for the arrogant political class that imagines no limit to their power.

The great hope that freedom lovers have is in the replacement of one set of political leaders with a different group. That is essential and will likely happen, but it is only the beginning of a solution. We’ve learned in the last two years that the real problem is much deeper.

The political leadership in these countries has become a veneer of a problem over which citizens have very little if any control: the administrative state that is unelected and deeply entrenched in its management of the well-funded bureaucratic state. This state mostly ignores the comings and goings of political leaders; in fact, it has disdain for them. It is this machinery that has taken full control in most countries of the world. Any political change worthy of focus needs to deal with this quickly and completely.

What’s more, this administrative state has figured out a fabulous trick for getting around the legal limits on state action: it has developed a close relationship with the biggest players in the private sector, which can justify any level of surveillance or censorship based on the technical truth that they are merely private actors and therefore not subject to the rules that restrict governments.

This new system is a dramatic challenge to the liberal cause, which is now surrounded by enemies on all sides. The key battle of our times is not only about limiting the power of government, which has metastasized in every direction all over the world, but also its allies in industry and media. The liberal cause has very little experience in this area. The solution likely rests with a dramatic change in public philosophy: the replacement of the lust for power with the love of liberty itself.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/politicians-of-the-world-unite_4353859.html

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Leftist conspiracy theories fall aparts

For the last five years, the Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived conservative enemies.

Their method has focused on one major projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in general, and Donald Trump in particular.

Now they have been caught admitting to such nefariousness. Apparently, they still are exuberant about their slick shamelessness and simply can’t keep quiet. Or they believe radically changed conditions, such as the implosion of the Biden Administration, prompt necessary admissions.

Hillary’s the One

For nearly five years anyone who objected that the partisan Christopher Steele and his “dossier” were fraudulent, that Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS was a paid opposition hit team, and their joint birthing of “Trump-Russia collusion” was a myth, was smeared as a denialist or conspiracist.

But examine what has transpired since 2016. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation found nothing. Mueller in congressional testimony was either addled or disingenuous. He even claimed he knew nothing of Fusion GPS or the dossier, the twin catalysts for his own investigation.

The more Mueller meandered, the more it was clear that his henchman, partisan lawyer Andrew Weissmann, had hijacked the left-wing “All-Star” and “Dream Team” of lawyers and was running the charade. The more the Left boasted of the legal eagles set to tear apart Trump, the more glaring their failure to find any such evidence supporting their conspiracies.

Christopher Steele, once the object of left-wing adulation who sought to warp the 2016 election by leaking his smears, is now a pariah. Indeed, he is relegated to the clown-like status of a Michael Avenatti. Steele has testified to what we already knew: He has no notes or sources to substantiate his ludicrous file.

One of his two “Russian sources” turned out to be a left-wing minor researcher at the liberal Brookings Institution, Igor Danchenko. He is now under indictment for lying. The other is a former Clinton operative Charles Dolan. He now admits he has worked for the Russian government and its affiliates for years.

So ponder that creepy circular firing squad: Hillary Clinton paid for Christopher Steele to find dirt on Donald Trump. She hid her checks by using the firewalls of the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Fusion GPS.

Steele, who had not been in Russia in years, simply concocted the story, in part from the fantasies of a Clinton employee! So in the end, Hillary sought to smear Trump with a phony charge of Russian collusion by colluding herself with the Russians, albeit through various firewalls!

When the investigators found nothing for their $40 million investment, serial leaking, and character assassination, when the author of the slanders cannot even point to a single source, and when his two informants are either under indictment or worked for both Hillary Clinton and the Russian government, then the accusers of conspiracy stand so accused.

Gasbags Gaslighting

When Donald Trump alleged that he had been wiretapped—apparently tipped off by a whistleblower—the country had a good belly laugh. Trump was deemed paranoid, a nut. Why would anyone in the lame-duck Obama Administration bureaucracy or the Clinton campaign have sought to monitor Trump’s communications? Who would even have had electronic access to such top-secret confidential communications, the very Domain Name System logs of candidate and then President Trump?

But now we know that one Michael Sussmann—working again for Perkins Coie, and being paid by the DNC, as a front for candidate Clinton—contacted “techies” who as contractors had access to Trump’s most confidential and private communications.

Sussmann then was told that a Russian bank, Alfa, had a back-channel line of direct communications with Trump. He then went to the FBI to substantiate to the media that his inventions were worthy of government investigation. Everyone from the ubiquitous Bruce Ohr to the Zelig-like Peter Strzok was somehow connected to the hoax. In truth, the bought techies searched Trump’s private logs for any and everything, and came up only with a Russian bank likely sending one-way spam to a Trump server.

In other words, Trump was a recipient of electronic noise. But it was useful pings that gave the media a second life to “collusion”—another “bombshell” disclosure planted roundabout by Hillary Clinton who was still slandering Trump as a Putin puppet.

Again, this sorry tale is not some allegation from the Right. We know the details from a writ of a federal prosecutor who had indicted Sussmann for purportedly lying. Soon he and his techie contractors will likely try to blame one another to avoid indictments, and we should expect even more conspiracies to emerge from those alleging conspiracy.

Conspiracy Cons

Most Americans concluded that January 6 was a buffoonish riot, in which hundreds of deluded protesters broke into the capitol, vandalized the premises, and disrupted the government. The public saw it as an embarrassment and believed the perpetrators deserved to be punished.

But not the Left. They saw “conspiracy” in this keystone bunch. Soon they were screaming about an “insurrection” aspiring to a “coup d’etat,” and demanding over 20,000 soldiers to prevent a second wave.

Very quickly, however, discrepancies in the left-wing narrative arose. “Five killed” proved to be one person “killed,” conservative protestor Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed military veteran lethally shot by a capitol officer with a checkered record, whose identity was mysteriously concealed from the public for months.

The other four died from either natural causes or the press of the crowd. Officer Brian Sicknick was not murdered by insurrectionists as alleged. In truth, he died the next day of natural causes. Anyone who complained that the government suppressed communications concerning its preparations for the demonstration, thousands of hours of videos, and widespread use of FBI informants among the protestors was dubbed a nut, or perhaps an alt-Right traitor himself.

Hundreds were arrested on trumped-up charges. Many sat in solitary confinement without charges filed for months. The Left cooed about a right-wing revolution foiled.

But do not believe just conservatives that January 6 was a riotous charade trumped up into a politically useful “insurrection.” Instead listen to a left-wing New York Times reporter, Matthew Rosenberg. As an “investigative journalist” he both whipped up public outrage at the riot and in private bragged on a hidden microphone to a female acquaintance that it was mostly a bad joke, a break-in by spontaneously rioting buffoons.

Or as Rosenberg put it of the supposedly violent insurrectionaries and the fear they instilled among reporters, “It was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6] outside and we were just having fun! . . . I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol] building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f-ck off!’”

And what did the ace New York Times reporter conclude of the trauma from the “coup”?

I’m like come on, it’s not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger . . . These f-cking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the f-ck up. They’re f-cking bitches.

And was the riot preplanned and carefully orchestrated? Hardly: “They were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

How about the “conspiracists” who believed there were lots of FBI operatives and informants among the rioters? They too were on to something: “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Rosenberg is no conservative. He is not even a disinterested liberal observer. He is an activist New York Times reporter whose official “disclosures” helped to feed the false narrative of a right-wing coup—one that we now know he never even believed in himself.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14082&omhide=true&trk=title

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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