Australia: Enshrined voice for blacks betrays ideals of liberalism
By Journalist Greg Sheridan
Let’s get straight to the point. A constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament is a terrible idea, wrong in principle and harmful in practice.
It contradicts the essence of liberalism. It’s tragic the Liberal Party doesn’t have the strength of intellect or character to oppose it in principle. Liberalism’s great historic idea, which it got from Christianity, is that all people are equal in fundamental status. Liberalism’s defining project over 200 years has been removing race and gender from civic status, from rights and obligations.
This is a magnificent vision. Humanity is utterly distinctive, meaning it has ineradicable human dignity, and utterly universal, meaning every human being is equally endowed with rights and obligations. The state has no business distinguishing one citizen from another by ethnicity, heritage or gender. Yet the voice does exactly that.
Aboriginal Australians were at times brutally mistreated in our history and many have suffered continuing disadvantage. Like most Australians I honour Aboriginal culture. None of that provides any justification for breaching the principle of a colourblind state.
I oppose a constitutionally enshrined voice not because I’m a conservative but because I’m a liberal. It is not that a voice will give Indigenous Australians too many privileges. Rather it contains the message that Aboriginal Australians are fundamentally different from other Australians.
However grandiloquent the rhetoric, or benevolent the platitudes, this is a toxic and dangerous message. It represents a terrible wrong turn in Aboriginal activism towards identity politics, which is destructive anywhere it’s prominent. Identity politics is the enemy of human dignity because, in it, virtue and vice come not from your choices and actions but from your identity, defined by race, gender or other characteristics.
The purpose of identity politics is not to solve a problem but to create permanent rage and dissatisfaction, never more than temporarily assuaged by endless rituals of apology and ideological conformity.
New Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Price expressed this far more eloquently than I can in her magnificent maiden speech – a kind of Australian Gettysburg Address that should be read by all Australians. She said:
“It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character … It’s time to stop feeding into a narrative that promotes racial divide, a narrative that claims to try to stamp out racism but applies racism in doing so and encourages a racist over reaction.”
Warren Mundine, a former federal government adviser on Indigenous issues and a star Liberal candidate for a winnable seat in the 2019 election, argues a similar case. He tells me:
“I’m a liberal democrat. I love and believe in liberal democracy. The basis of liberal democracy is that everyone is equal before the law. We fought for decades to be treated as equals. Now there is no law that is discriminatory against Aborigines. Some people talk of two sovereignties – how can there be two sovereignties in one country?”
Price made the further point in a television interview that having the voice forever in the Constitution implies that Aborigines will be marginalised forever, for the whole basis of the voice is that parliamentary democracy doesn’t work for Aboriginal Australians. The voice, like all identity politics, is a partial repudiation of parliamentary democracy.
Anthony Albanese could hardly have started better as Prime Minister. His shrewdness and judgment are evident in his advancing the least damaging model possible of a voice, one that is entirely inferior to parliament and can be designed and changed by parliament. Albanese has a shrewd sense of achievable change. It is a very useful set of limitations he has put around his proposal. The best attribute of the voice in Albanese’s model is that it will have no power.
Nonetheless it is still an extremely bad idea in principle. It is also the case that no one can predict what doctrines an activist High Court might dream up in relation to a race-based political institution whose existence is guaranteed in the Constitution.
It will of course be an interesting question whether Albanese can hold the line on his preferred referendum wording. Further, the very limitations that Albanese proposes demonstrate the illogicality and self-contradiction that accompany this damaging proposal at every stage.
The voice proponents claim it is needed so Indigenous Australians can have a say on laws that affect them, as though all Australians do not have that right, and as though mainstream society today is deaf to Aboriginal voices. But at the same time it is proposed that parliament can design, amend and determine the membership, scope, functions and operations of the voice.
Parliament can do all that today if it wants to. So if there really is a practical problem of consultation to be solved, there is no reason to change the Constitution, and thereby change the very nature of citizenship for all Australians. Similarly, while it is certainly true that much policy towards Indigenous Australians has not been successful, it is just not accurate to say Aborigines have not been consulted regarding policies that affect them.
In any policy regarding remote and distinctive communities today, consultation with those communities ought to be a paramount concern for state and federal governments. Consultation in itself doesn’t necessarily solve all problems.
I was working in the Canberra press gallery when a former Aboriginal affairs minister Gerry Hand created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The Hawke government held out the same hopes for practical benefit from ATSIC as voice proponents hold out today. ATSIC was a failure. That doesn’t mean something better can’t be tried today. But there is no reason at all for this to go in the Constitution.
Previous Liberal prime ministers ruled out a constitutionally enshrined voice but the Liberal Party never argued the case in a sustained way and continued to lavishly fund pro-voice activities.
Here’s a tip for the Liberal Party: if you don’t enter an argument you can’t win it. When Peter Dutton appointed Julian Leeser, in every way a good person but a committed proponent of the voice, as Indigenous Australians spokesman. I presumed the Liberal Party was preparing a characteristic surrender.
Price’s maiden speech alone probably makes full surrender – that is, formal support for the voice – less likely. Instead the Liberals may adopt a fatuous neutrality, which is just a more ambiguous form of surrender. Thus liberalism declines, one defeat at a time.
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The ‘conversion therapy’ canard
Madeleine Kearns
In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics.
At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare. He also promised to direct the Federal Trade Commission to consider whether “so-called ‘conversion therapy’ — a discredited and dangerous practice that seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people” amounts to a deceptive act requiring consumer warnings. And he instructed the secretaries of State, Treasury and HHS “to develop an action plan” to help end the “dangerous discredited practice” in the United States and “around the world.”
The order, Biden explained, represents a countermove to “hateful attacks” by “ultra-MAGA” Republicans. He was referring to conservative pushback to LGBT activism at the state level, like Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, smeared by critics as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as various states’ female-only sports bills.
These bills enjoy broad support. A Morning Consult/Politico survey found that over half of Florida voters supported restricting teaching sexual orientation and gender identity to children in kindergarten through third grade. A poll conducted by the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found that most Americans opposed allowing trans-identifying males to compete in high-school girls’ sports, and even more opposed male participation in women’s college and professional sports. As for “conversion therapy,” a growing number of clinicians — including gay and liberal ones — have been vocal in their concern about the way the term is being misapplied to treatments for children struggling with gender dysphoria.
Of course, this is not the only instance of Biden finding executive shortcuts to push woke policies that are at odds with the views of the American public. His Title IX regulations, released on the fiftieth anniversary of the measure’s passage, would effectively redefine sex to include gender identity for every federally funded education program in the country. This would eradicate single-sex services, spaces and sports teams, and undermine parental rights when children tell their teachers they’re trans. Despite what the president may think, this is not a winning culture-war strategy.
The history of American medicine is blotted with its fair share of scandals. Among them, there’s a grisly history of medicalizing homosexuality, involving voluntary and involuntary treatment with depressants, testosterone, estrogen and other chemicals; electroshock therapy, castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy and lobotomy. Between 1952 and 1973, the American Psychiatric Association pathologized homosexuality by including it in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Of course, in the decades since, these controversial clinical practices have been rejected by medical associations and abandoned by practitioners. And, though it may be politically convenient to pretend otherwise, there is little evidence to suggest either the treatments or such attitudes persist as systemic problems.
In a 2018 op-ed for the New York Times, Sam Brinton, an LGBT activist with the Trevor Project, detailed how, at the behest of his Christian parents, he “endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor” listening to how he was an “abomination” and inevitably going to “get HIV and AIDS.” Worse still, he recalled how he was “bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity” applied to his body, and “forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex.” All this while he was only a middle-schooler. (Earlier this year, Brinton was appointed a deputy assistant secretary in Biden’s Department of Energy.)
Forcing a child to watch pornography is a felony. Causing him serious physical or emotional harm in the way Brinton describes constitutes child abuse. As for religion, the more orthodox expressions of Christianity separate acts from inclination, sin from sinner, and emphasize the dignity of each human person. That’s not to say that religious zealots, hypocrites and sadists don’t exist. Only that it is not at all clear that the abuse described by Brinton is common practice, either among licensed mental health professionals or in America’s churches.
Part of the difficulty in establishing the prevalence of “so-called ‘conversion therapy’” is the reliance on self-reporting. The UCLA Williams Institute estimates that approximately 698,000 LGBT adults (ages 18 to 59) in the US have received conversion therapy, 350,000 of whom received the treatment in adolescence. Seven percent of lesbian, gay and bisexual people in the United States have experienced some sort of conversion therapy: 81 percent from a religious leader and 31 percent from a healthcare provider. And that among LGBT adolescents (ages 13 to 17) living in states where conversion therapy is banned, some 6,000 would have otherwise received it from a licensed professional, if not for the ban. But how is conversion therapy being defined?
Again, the rather vague Biden definition includes any practice that “seeks to suppress or change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQI+ people.” First, this makes no mention of method — surely exploratory talk therapy is very different from castration? Second, it does not distinguish between religious counselors and licensed therapists. Third — and here is the biggest problem — it conflates sexual orientation with “gender identity.” This conflation amounts to a Trojan horse deployed by transgender activists to use opposition to conversion therapy to discredit watchful waiting and other time-tested talk therapies designed to help gender-distressed children feel more comfortable with their bodies.
As the journalist Helen Joyce explains in an essay for Quillette, the concept of gender identity “originated in America in the 1950s and fused into a single, dominant narrative half a century later.” In the 1960s Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst, understood it to be a matter of one’s inner sense of “masculinity or femininity.” John Money, a sexologist, believed in the power of “gender roles,” “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman.”
With advances in medical technology came an increased appetite for experimentation. In the 1990s, European endocrinologists birthed “the Dutch protocol,” the off-label use of puberty-blocking drugs, imagined as a “pause button” for children (then mostly boys) with severe and early onset “gender identity disorder” (later, “gender dysphoria”). Just as abortion was promised to be “safe, legal and rare” yet grew to epic proportions, trans activists began to champion medicalized transition on demand.
And demand is only rising. With the mainstreaming of transgenderism, the past decade has seen a massive explosion in the number of children identifying as transgender, and in a new demographic: adolescent girls. The United Kingdom’s main gender youth clinic has seen a 5,000 percent increase of adolescent female patients since 2010. Figures for the United States are harder to come by, but the ever-growing number of gender clinics gives an idea. Alix Aharon and her Gender Mapping team have documented over 600 clinics. A recent article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine reported that, between 2013 and 2019, “the number of gender dysphoria diagnoses per 100,000 enrollees increased by 695 percent,” while the “number of hormone therapy users with gender dysphoria diagnoses per 100,000 enrollees increased similarly by 781 percent.”
When Lisa Littman, a medical doctor and researcher at Brown University, first warned about “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” among teenage girls identifying as trans in 2018, she attracted much activist ire. The trans activist and English professor Jennifer Finney Boylan, writing in the New York Times, complained that conservatives were “inventing a ‘syndrome’ to undermine young people’s transitions.” Yet already, Littman has been vindicated. In her most recent survey of “detransitioners” (those who stop identifying as trans), she found that 55 percent of them “felt they did not receive an adequate evaluation from a doctor or mental health professional before starting transition.”
Moreover, in the UK, the National Health Service’s main gender youth clinic at Tavistock has been dogged by whistleblower reports of “woefully inadequate” standards of care. Sweden, Finland and France have put the brakes on medicalized transitions for minors. And even Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center, and Marci Bowers, a vaginoplasty specialist have urged greater caution. The New York Times, late to the conversation, published a lengthy report in June about how “the medical community” treating young people seeking medicalized transition “is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them.”
As the Obama administration rightly noted in its 2016 Medicare memo, “many studies that reported positive outcomes were exploratory studies (case-series and case control) with no confirmatory follow-up.” One high-quality follow-up, a 2011 Swedish study that tracked over 300 patients for thirty years, found “the overall mortality for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow-up… particularly death from suicide.”
As a matter of principle, LGBT activists would like to outlaw even voluntary therapy that tries to help mitigate or redirect unwanted sexual desires. They conflate talk therapy with long-abandoned practices and take the view that sexual orientation is immutable and to suggest otherwise amounts to “false advertising.” How strange, then, that they don’t object to the egregiously misleading claim that it’s possible to change one’s sex. Or the reckless hormonal and surgical experiments that compromise the fertility and sexual functioning of LGBT-identifying youth.
The irony is that gender affirmation, both in method and in motive, looks more like the historic conversion therapy than any other modern-day practice. Janice Turner, Times of London columnist, reported that “gay clinicians” at the NHS gender clinic in London “began to discuss how they had experienced an adolescent phase of gender dysphoria as ‘effeminate’ boys or ‘butch’ girls.” With the long-term interests of their young patients in mind, they complained to management that “we are medicalizing some people who would later identify as lesbian, gay and bisexual, not trans.” For this, they were “silenced.”
“Everything to the right of LGB is straight people,” as one LGB activist put it. Indeed, the differences between sexual orientation and gender identity are only growing more apparent. But most Democrats are not paying attention. Then there’s Joe Biden, whose views on gay rights — from his endorsement of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 to promising to sign the Equality Act on his first day in office — change with the wind.
Every medical scandal is time limited. As more wake up to the fact that the real conversion therapy in the twenty-first century is “gender affirmation,” Biden is busy making it his legacy — with young and vulnerable Americans paying for his recklessness.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-conversion-therapy-canard/
*****************************************************British government policies are geared towards benefiting the stupid and the bone idle
Rod Liddle
I was listening to a rich bastard on the radio explaining why he was feeling disinclined to give any more of his money to the Conservative party. The term ‘rich bastard’ is the one which I was habituated to use when I was a member of the Labour party and which I have disinterred now to give my opening sentence a little more punch. It was axiomatic to us that anyone with sufficient dosh to consider squandering a few hundred thou on a political party must be a bastard and was both immoral and undeserving of his wealth. Wealth in any shape or form appalled us in an almost Freudian fashion – Sigmund, you may recall, equated potty training with the accumulation of money, and the supposedly subconscious link between faeces and money has never quite been expunged from the left. The rich are still seen, rancorously and jealously, as the enemy.
Indeed, the left goes even further these days and does not like to see people who are simply reasonably comfortable and who use the food bank only because it’s a little closer to home than Waitrose and the stuff is usefully free. It is a very odd sort of selling point for a political party – to make yourself the implacable enemy of hard work, success, good luck, happiness etc. But that is what the left has done and that distrust of wealth has migrated to the centre and the centre-right parties, too, both here and across much of western Europe.
Increasingly policies are geared towards benefiting the stupid and the bone idle, or people who have made ‘questionable life choices’. There is no notion of a deserving poor any more – those who have done the right things and work hard but are still skint and could maybe do with a bit of a leg-up from the state. Virtue now tends to be viewed with suspicion and penalised rather than rewarded. The success of capitalism, unforeseen by Marx and Engels, was its adaptability, and its receptiveness to the notion that it must shift from the necessarily rather brutal system in its early untrammelled form to the welfare capitalism we have today.
But it can shift too far – and that seems to be happening now. Welfare capitalism today is concerned with subsidising a magnificently useless underclass, which is in truth a very small proportion of society, and ensuring that the virtuous poor pay for them through their taxes. At the same time, any indication of acquired wealth is looked upon darkly. Look for a moment at the odium heaped upon both Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. Meanwhile, Kemi Badenoch is reviled on the left for having prospered from a more modest background without having clambered into any one of the Labour party’s victim bunkers. Labour loves only failure. I assume that’s why it holds the NHS in such high regard.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/the-high-price-of-tory-failures/
***********************************************Australian conservative senator has attacked Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe’s description of the Queen as a “coloniser”, suggesting if she doesn’t like parliament she should stop taking her $211,250 salary.
The One Nation leader has told news.com.au that Ms Thorpe was engaging in “hypocrisy” after she was forced to repeat the oath of allegience, having inserted criticism of the royal family the first time.
“Lidia Thorpe obviously does not take her elected position seriously,” said Ms Hanson.
“She’s filling a position she does not respect, to represent people she obviously despises, in an institution she does not recognise as being legitimate.
“What we saw this morning was a stunning exercise in hypocrisy, made worse by her happily taking $211,000 a year from taxpayers for work she clearly does not intend to do.”
Ms Thorpe, an outspoken Victorian Greens Senator, has previously stated that the Australian parliament has no permission to be here and that her role as an Indigenous woman was to “infiltrate” the Senate.
Asked to recite the oath of allegiance this morning, she marched towards the despatch box with her fist in the air and then stated: “I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”
MPs then interjected, warning that “you’re not a senator” if she failed to correctly recite the oath.
“Senator Thorpe, Senator Thorpe, you are required to recite the oath as printed on the card,’’ Senate President Sue Lines said.
Senator Thorpe then took the oath again, mispronouncing heirs as the Queen’s “hairs” and successors.
She later took to Twitter to declare: “Sovereignty never ceded.”
It’s not the first time the Greens Senator has raised concerns about colonisation.
Speaking to ABC radio in June, she argued the Australian flag represents “dispossession, massacre and genocide” and accused the media of pitting her against Liberal Senator Jacinta Price.
“The colonial project came here and murdered our people. I’m sorry we’re not happy about that,” she said.
“If people are going to get a little bit upset along the way, well that’s just part of the truth telling. The truth hurts.”
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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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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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