'Like children playing with fire while atop a tinder box'

Trying to explain what's happening in Australia

In yesterday's The Australian newspaper, Cameron Milner provides a clear-eyed assessment of what confronts Australia. Milner was state secretary of the Queensland ALP and chief of staff to Bill Shorten when Shorten was opposition leader. Milner's article was titled 'Spare us the spin, Prime Minister: let's be honest about true peddlers of extremism.'

In February, ASIO boss Mike Burgess warned that our great domestic threat would come from Islamist extremists. Now we witness the horrific scenes of a Christian bishop being stabbed several times in his own church in southwest Sydney while delivering a sermon. Thank god the bishop and his brave parishioners kept their lives after the brutal attack…

Crucially, Labor needs to take a hard look at itself and see whether its own twisted acquiescence and excusing blatant hate speech have contributed to what we see in our community… One imam, investigated by NSW Police, said in reference to the Gaza conflict: 'Jihad is the only solution.' He was never charged… 

Then, just after the October 7 massacre, we witnessed the national disgrace of pro-Palestinian protesters taking over the Sydney Opera House forecourt, burning flags and chanting anti-Semitic slogans. Whether protesters chanted 'Gas the Jews' became a point of contention. 

After weeks of investigation by NSW Police it was concluded protesters actually chanted 'Where are the Jews?' as if this was somehow less egregious or softened the offence. No one was charged.

It's perhaps little wonder that police - who now appear so compromised and so fearful to offend hate preachers - were unable to immediately quell protests outside the Sydney church on Monday…

But Labor appears just as compromised. Labor has been trying to avoid offending Muslim voters and forcing an exodus to the Greens or independents. In doing this, however, it has offended the Jewish community and the rest of us who value democracy and the rule of law… Labor has to stop chasing the votes and start standing up for the wider community's shared values.

Powerful words and true.

Milner also talked about how foreign minister Penny Wong 'effectively has endorsed Hamas propaganda, calling for a ceasefire and advocating Palestinian statehood with little thought to the reality on the ground in the Middle East'. 

There are many aspects to Milner's piece, and I'd like to talk about two in particular. The first is his reference to the police being 'compromised' by how they enforce they chose to enforce the law. On this, he's absolutely right. The politicisation of the police and policing in Australia is a huge issue but one politicians are afraid to confront because they've allowed it to happen. In Sydney, the police arrest a man for carrying an Israeli flag to a pro-Palestine rally. Apparently it was done for his own safety. In New South Wales, you can't show an Israeli flag in public, but you can burn one. The New South Wales Police Commissioner, Karen Webb was angry when she talked about her officers being attacked at The Good Shepherd Church after the stabbing of Bishop Ma Mari Emmanuel. A policeman had his jaw broken. Webb said about those involved in the violence - 'those that were involved in that riot can expect a knock at the door. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but we'll find you and we'll come and arrest you.' That sort of purposeful language hasn't been deployed against those shouting death threats to Jews.

Peter Jennings, formerly of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who I mentioned last week in a different context, has written today that it's reasonable for the public to ask whether the person alleged to have stabbed Bishop Emmanuel was 'in any way connected to the anti-Israel protests afflicting the streets of Sydney, Melbourne and other cities every week since the Hamas October 7 attacks. In my view our governments and law enforcement agencies have tolerated these protests for reasons never made adequately clear: Some protests have been openly violent. All are latently aggressive and scare many Australians. Whether or not the Wakeley terrorist was involved in or merely observed media reporting of these protests, it is clear that they are a permissive cauldron for radicalisation allowed on our streets for seven months.'

It's not only the New South Wales police that are compromised. In another context, a few years earlier, Australians watched as in Melbourne police allowed BLM protesters to flout with impunity Covid regulations, while at the same time anti-government, anti-lockdown protesters were arrested without compunction. Melbourne's The Age newspaper endorsed this double standard in one of the most remarkable editorials I can ever recall reading. It's from June 7, 2020.

The right to protest is an essential part of our democracy and at any other time the street marches would have deserved unequivocal praise from demanding justice for George Floyd - the African-American man killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota - but also for Australia's Indigenous population…

Yet the 30,000 people in Melbourne and 20,000 in Sydney were very likely to have been in breach of the social distancing rules designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. [No. The protesters were not 'very likely' to have been in breach of the rules. They were unambiguously in violation of the laws that every Melbournian was expected to abide by.]

The marchers are to be praised for the peaceful way in which they conducted themselves - there were no arrests in Melbourne and very few in Sydney…

This is a unique situation. Given the depth of resentment - especially against the police by Indigenous people - banning the protests would have been risky and something The Age certainly would not have supported. Mass arrests at a peaceful rally would have burnt a new scar into our body politic and exacerbated racial tensions at the worst possible time…

There is no easy solution to this dilemma and we must take a pragmatic approach, remembering the importance of the right to protest. Should the coronavirus outbreak mean our leaders again feel the need to discourage protesters, a better way to do so would be for politicians to express their solidarity with the cause and consider their demands.

There were no editorials from The Age about 'the right to protest as an essential part of our democracy' when the protests were about Dan Andrews. The editorial professed concern that enforcing the lockdown laws against BLM protesters might have 'burnt a new scar into our body politic.' The Age didn't appear to consider that the surest way to 'scar the body politic' is to have the police enforce the law against the 

government's opponents, but not the government's allies. The Age was wrong. Its so-called 'dilemma' is easily resolved. The convoluted and disingenuous arguments from The Age about why laws should sometimes be applied selectively can't obscure a fundamental truth - either the law is enforced against everyone equally - or it's enforced against no one.  

(This leaves to one side the question of what The Age meant when it said the best way for politicians to discourage protesters from breaking the law is for politicians 'to express their solidarity with the cause and consider their demands.' One of the demands of the organisers of the Melbourne BLM protest was 'to dismantle the police and justice system'.)

The second point about Milner's piece is his statement that Labor must start standing up for 'the wider community's shared values'. Another description of a 'community's shared values' is 'culture'. Not 'culture' as in works of art, but 'culture' as a particular way of life. The problem is that the ALP is often more likely to attack the Australian way of life than defend it. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are two essential elements of our way of life, and both are under assault from the government.

A nation is not just a place but a collective story that binds, unifies and links the past with the present, to map a future. This is one of the key reasons the culture wars are so important. These are struggles over meaning, identity and social purpose. We are living through a time when our traditional institutions seem to be on the road to the active denigration of British history and the repudiation of the merits, indeed the very right to exit, of Western civilisation itself. 

This form of self-denigration and repudiation is dangerous.

That's a statement about the UK, but it applies to Australia. It's by Doug Stokes, a professor at the University of Exeter in Britain, from his new book 'Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West'. What Stokes says about mutual respect is important and goes to the heart of the challenge Australia is facing.

…we must not forget that human beings have a natural tendency towards tribalism. The steady cultivation of tolerance and mutual respect must be learnt and transmitted anew to each generation through our institutions and broader culture. By amping up the friend-enemy distinction, wokery erases the neutral space of civility that the Enlightenment tried to create.

New divisive thinking predicated around racial interest articulation is beginning to emerge from what is little more than anti-white racism peddled by 'critical race theorists' in our universities, media and boardrooms.

Like children playing with fire while atop a tinder box, it reproduces a morality tale of minorities as vulnerable and defenceless and whose interests will be uplifted by benevolent and privileged progressives.

'A morality tale of minorities as vulnerable and defenceless and whose interests will be uplifted by benevolent and privileged progressives' perfectly captures Labor's narrative around its signature policy for its first term in government - the Voice. If the premise of the Voice is accepted, namely that Australians should have different political rights according to a characteristic of their identity, then in theory, there's no reason why a person's racial background should be the only characteristic to be taken into account. Religion could just as easily be a factor. Once the principle of political equality is breached, as Stokes says, we are playing with fire.

Recommended watching

• I spoke with Doug Stokes a few weeks ago on IPA Encounters. You can watch the episode here. We discussed one of my favourite topics, 'The war on our culture and how to win it'.  He talked about his book and traced the history of the assault of the left on our culture and he made a very relevant point to the debate about Australia's social cohesion (or lack thereof). This is how he expressed it in his book:

…the relatively benign conditions enjoyed in the post-war Western world are not the historical norm. In an era structurally predisposed to a greater need for national cohesion and purpose in the face of coming challenges, the call for national abasement will undoubtedly face a political reckoning.

The continued endorsement of a divisive form of collective racial guilt by what are privileged elites and relatively tiny minorities of self-interested activists is an indulgent dalliance in the context of Western decline.

• Sometime in the next few days, find a quiet time to put aside fifteen minutes to watch a new video from Peter Ridd. His YouTube series 'Reef Rebels' has proved hugely popular as he talks about science, climate change, and The Great Barrier Reef. 

  His latest video is a bit different. It's called 'What did the British ever do for us? (scientifically)'. It was released at the beginning of the week and has already been watched 25,000 times (that number will probably be bigger by the time you get this email). It's brilliant. You can watch it here.