What’s the Use of Supporting Australia First?

Politics is a funny game. Most people who care at all feel politically helpless. We think we are pawns in the game, sacrificed at the whim of the players. Certainly the ordinary person in any civilized country has very little faith that his concerns matter.


The other side of this is that there is an upper echelon whose wishes matter a lot. These are apparently those who can work the system. Otherwise, we can only conclude that the system is mindless, benefitting no one.


It seems most probable to this writer that the system benefits corporate interests. These corporate interests are not merely the large shareholder corporates whose capital is privately owned: they also include power centres such as the mass media, the education industry, the legal industry, and the internationally connected secret service world.


Those of us who take an interest in history have a pretty clear idea of the power structure in the Middle Ages: it consisted of the warrior nobles and the Church. The nobles kept the mass of the population in subjugation by force of arms, and the Church assisted by deceiving them.


This writer suggests that these two classes, the soldiers and the priests, are still around, it is just that they go by different names today, and the priests teach different doctrines.


One of the most important doctrines is that of universal equality, which is interpreted to mean that we as Australians shouldn’t defend ourselves.


This is not a very friendly message to the average Australian. You don’t matter: it’s all those foreigners who through no fault of yours have got themselves into desperate straits who matter. The government of your country exists not to serve you but to keep itself in the good graces of foreign powers, who happen to want you to take in many, many desperate foreigners.


And you can’t vote against this, because both the parties agree on it.
Who are the people in these parties? In the popular imagination, they consist of many branches, consisting of like-minded people who discuss politics and make suggestions to those at the centres of power, the paid politicians.


Those of us who have been inside the system know it isn’t really like that. Party branches do exist in some places, but many of them consist largely of very old people who are fighting class battles of the past. There are some younger people, but they are mostly unscrupulous careerists. The party structure is a dead structure, maintained to provide the illusion of democracy. Anybody who tries to make a difference by joining and supporting the established political parties is doomed to disappointment. They, like the government, are not there for us.


The flip side of this is that a rotten structure should not be very hard to knock down. Politics is a funny game: a great part of applying political pressure is knowing where and how to press, what string to pull. For historical and public-relations reasons, people are still allowed to vote, and the votes are still validly counted: we saw this when, to the horror of the Establishment, a double-digit number of Pauline Hanson’s supporters were elected to the Queensland Parliament a number of years ago. Third-party activity is a danger sign to the rulers: it tells them that their two-party fraud is not fooling everyone.


Third-party activity often does not get very far, because of ineptitude by the third-party group, or because what they want is inherently insane, as with peaceniks in the past, and the Greens today. This is the challenge for us in Australia First: to conduct ourselves and our political activities in such a way as to achieve the best result we can for the Australian people. It is a great responsibility. The media will be a deadly enemy: they will try to exploit us as they exploited Pauline Hanson. The Labor Party and some of the Liberal-Nationals will condemn us in pseudo-moralistic terms. The rest of the National-Liberals will look to us for preferential voting support.


We can make a difference, at whatever level of activity we are able to manage. The great thing about a dead political structure is that it only requires a few living activists to make a difference. Lenin and Trotsky, who were very wrong in principle but who knew a thing or two about political activism, believed that in a crisis, a dozen or so activists were enough to bring over a regiment of thirty thousand men. They were looking at a bankrupt, discredited political structure, which no one but fools and opportunists believed in. Does that sound familiar?

Judicial Reform.

Just about every one of us can immediately think of a court case where we think it got “out of control”. Recently in Central Queensland there were 2 cases which highlight the need for massive judicial reform. One was a case of assault, a “glassing”. The second around the same time was a case where a pensioner was convicted for not voting in the last State election.


In the glassing case of 6 May 2010, (and in the interests of detail the offender was an aboriginal male and the victim a white man), the offender got off with a non-custodial sentence. 

The media coverage showed horrendous lacerations to the face of the victim and he also suffered significant emotional and mental harm adding to the seriousness of the crime (the victim was walking his dog by himself past a suburban hotel in Rockhampton when the offender who had been drinking in company attacked him seemingly without warning with a beer glass ). The security video shown in the media is quite clear.


Presiding magistrate Cameron Press, (who incidentally on his appointment to the bench threatened to deal very severely with offenders in violent street crime), sentenced the offender in September 2010 to 10 months imprisonment with immediate parole. This caused public outcry and in October 2010 police prosecutors lodged an appeal against the “manifestly inadequate sentence”.


In March 2011 His Honour Judge Brian Devereaux of the District Court re-sentenced the offender on appeal to the stiffer penalty of 18 months imprisonment with immediate parole. Obviously a worthwhile exercise all round.

Now compare this with the case of a pensioner before the same judge in the same month. His “crime” - failing to vote. The Electoral Commission prosecuted the pensioner in 2010 (a white man) for ”Failing to Vote without a Valid and Sufficient Excuse” and he was fined $921, which included court costs. The pensioner appealed this conviction and in an appeal in March 2011 Judge Devereaux (the same judge as in the glassing case appeal) did not overturn the original conviction. He did however excuse the pensioner of further costs of court, which saved him from further expenses of $1800.


So there you have it. Attack an innocent passer-by with a beer glass, miss his jugular vein by millimetres, hospitalise him and put tremendous emotional and mental strain on him and walk without imprisonment or even a fine. Fail to vote and feel the heat.


Local Rockhampton Labor state member Robert Schwarten who retires next election and is therefore yesterday’s man, is on public record as refusing even debate the need for judicial reform as he sees this as the “slippery slope to fascism and communism”. According to him the judiciary must remain independent even with the above outcomes. Not withstanding that his government has trade ties to communist China and Vietnam we have to ask: what slippery slope are we already on?

Could it be that the penalties associated with not voting are tied to the fact that the major parties get a monetary kick back from the public purse for every vote they attract. Surely not?


You can probably guess why the glassing offender walked free.