The Whisper Spread

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People feel the democratic compact between voters and government has been shattered. They are fleeced by record levels of taxation, only to see billions poured down various sinks.

Politicians are interfering more and more in their lives, telling them not just how to behave but how to think, rewarding the irresponsible and punishing the dutiful — while failing to deliver the absolute essentials of providing security against crime and conserving the nation’s identity....

The decay of religion...has given rise to moral relativism, which regards all beliefs and principles as being of equal value and truth as a relative concept. This has given rise to multiculturalism, which masquerades as the promotion of equal rights but is actually a disguised form of cultural and national self-loathing.

This in turn lies behind the idea that nations are illegitimate or passé, and that the world’s problems can all be solved by everyone on the planet coming together to harness the power of reason to arrive at a solution. But, in robbing people of their national identity and capacity to believe in anything except the fiction that reason trumps all, this is an essentially irrational negation of self-interest.

No less irrational is the overreach of science which, as London writes, has been hijacked by secular fundamentalists who want to supplant religion by asserting that only in science can truths be found.

Such ’scientism’ — as this overreach is termed — goes beyond the ability of science to explain the nature of the world around us and claims to tell us how life began. Yet the assumption that science provides a complete theory of knowledge is itself fundamentally unscientific.

Science generates more questions than it can answer. The more science unravels the mysteries of the world for us, the more mysterious it becomes. And, as the many scientists who are also religious believers demonstrate, there is no inherent conflict between religion and science.

The dogma that science provides the answer to every question and so supplants religion has led to a junking of the moral codes deriving from Judaism and Christianity that underpin western society.

This loss of cultural nerve has created an unwitting collusion between secular zealots and the Islamists who have declared war upon western civilisation, and who believe — correctly — that a secular west will be unable to resist them.

Science, rationality and the pursuit of truth are intimately related to the religious traditions of the west. If those traditions are not defended from within against the threat from without, this will be how the west was lost.

Melanie Phillips.



Most people age badly. Alcoholics and addicts age particularly badly. The Block has aged badly. It has been particularly quiet in recent days. Few drug dealers harass passers by. The hard drinking street alcoholics who use the area as their lounge room are drinking somewhere else. For days now, there have been no drunken arguments at 3am, torrents of foul abuse carried on the night air. In the mornings, people aren't wandering around in an ice fuelled daze, gathering their thoughts for the first score of the day, looking at the people who are going to work as if they were from another species, aliens from another planet. Instead this shattered home of aboriginal activism in Australia has been quiet, subdued. Change is clearly afoot.

Kids aren't playing in front of the giant aboriginal flag painted on the side of the wall. The needle bus, when it comes, appears to have few customers. The shadows, the shallows of self interest, appear every where. The head honchos of the Aboriginal Housing Company always flash around in the latest Commodore. The rest of us, the workers, can barely afford to pay the bills. Crime and government largess are clearly afoot, hand in hand. Coddled, contrived, connived, protected by the left, these aberrations continue as never before. Police cars cruise through the area every half hour. The beggars have been moved on.

Anyone raising doubts about any of this is branded a racist. What's it matter anyway, it's someone else's money? Hundreds of brand new houses were built down there in the 1970s, and it was going to be the grant centre of aboriginal pride in Australia. The left gifted this prime land to them. There's little subsequent governments have been able to do; as the place deteriorated into the city's major heroin market. People came from everywhere to score, the jostling, excited, expectant hordes. Nothing like that moment before the score. Footage and stills still exist of those trampling crowds.

The dealer the dealer, he's coming, he's coming. The whisper spread. Corrosion came from within. The authorities stepped in. Love was lost, he could smell the crude cattle crushing, the excitement, the determination to get their hands on the best gear around. Even now when the back lane is empty, the scene of nothing but the occasional murder and happenstance deal, as they gather around and mix up and stumble back out into the open space of the Block. Now it's all gone quiet. They've been moved on.

Behind are the derelict houses, row after row, street after street, shuttered, vandalised, boarded up, nothing but a slum. All those houses, built with such public fanfare, have been trashed. While all the white c...s, as the Block's denizens often call their white neighbours, have looked after their houses, renovated them; and they now often sell for $600,000 or more, here there is nothing but desolation, the lowest common denominator, trash and ruin. A brand new $4 million community centre lies barely used, no normal people are willing to risk being robbed to get to it.

On the other side of the station a brand new theatre lies unused. A shop selling emu oil, all set up with government funds to encourage aboriginal enterprise, has never opened its doors. Once the money ran out that was it. No purpose. No courage. No decency. No integrity. Just the decay and chaos of collapse, tax payer funded collapse. Millions of tax payer dollars get drunk every year. Pension day, and carton after carton makes its way down the Block. Our thanks? Getting called: "You white c...ts." The left is pulling their old tricks, hiding what is really going on.

An unadvertised public meeting attracted two people; because no one heard about it. But they can still claim they held a public meeting, and public apathy was so bad that no one showed up. Shock and despair ripple through the surrounding streets. They'll just wreck it all all over again, why wouldn't they, they don't care, they didn't have to work for it, they say. A 60 bed hostel? It will just be another slum. There's a story that Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of the Block, was warned that it would ghettoise and rather than being a source of black pride would become a stigma for them all. The advice was ignored. Just as now, Labor pours scorn on everyone who dares to disagree with them; while spouting on about diversity and multiplicity and the pleasure of the play; the meshing of ideas. They are as bigoted and narrow minded as those they fight against.



THE BIGGER STORY:

Police car damaged and youth arrested - Taree

2008-10-22 06:17:54 Police Media

Police have charged a teenager with multiple offences after the car he
was driving allegedly crashed into a fully marked police car on the mid
north coast overnight.

Shortly after 1.30am today police were advised that a red Holden
Commodore sedan had been stolen from Taree.

Officers patrolling in the Purfleet area sighted a similar vehicle and
continued patrolling along Breakneck Road.

As the police vehicle travelled west, the stolen vehicle which was
travelling east crossed to the wrong side of the road and allegedly
accelerated at the police car.

The driver of the police car attempted to avoid the Holden but the two
vehicles collided.

The teenage driver of the Holden attempted to flee but was arrested by
police after a short struggle.

The 17-year-old local youth was conveyed to Taree police station where
he was charged with steal motor vehicle, drive manner dangerous, mid
range PCA, unlicensed, intimidation, resist arrest and use weapon to
avoid arrest.

He has been bail refused to appear at the Taree Children's Court later
today.

The police officers, a man and woman, suffered only minor injuries as a
result of the collision however both cars were extensively damaged and
required towing from the scene.

ABC INSIDERS:

BARRIE CASSIDY: Okay, why is it to important that the Government releases the economic advice that underpinned the announcement of its package this week?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Barrie, because I believe in accountability and I believe in Parliament.
We have a Prime Minister who has made some enormously important statements about the economy - this $10.4-billion fiscal stimulus; these unlimited guarantees for bank deposits; guaranteeing banks whole sale term funding. These are very big measures.

John Howard, were he Prime Minister today, would have given a ministerial statement in the Parliament and the Opposition leader would have then had the opportunity to respond.

Kevin Rudd has treated Parliament with contempt. He is running the same sort of media spin approach to politics that the State Labor Governments have done and which has been so decisively rejected here in New South Wales. No debate - he refused to have a motion on the issue so that we could have a debate; no ministerial statement. It’s one television performance after another and a speech at the press club.

He won’t answer. You ran some of my questions earlier. Every question we have asked this week has been a reasonable one seeking economic and financial information. The responses have been a torrent of abuse. So throughout this week the Opposition has been asking questions about the economy. The Government has just been hurling abuse at the Opposition.

BARRIE CASSIDY: So what are you suggesting there, that they’re not putting out this information because they don’t have it? Because it’s all based on guess work? Or are they hiding something?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, look they clearly do not believe that growth next year will be two per cent, which is what Kevin Rudd said was their most recent estimates. If they thought economic growth was going to be, GDP was going to grow next year at two per cent, I think we all know they wouldn’t be putting $10.4-billion into the pockets of Australians, into this fiscal stimulus package, almost all of which of course will be given, handed out just before Christmas. So clearly they’ve got a lower number in mind but they refuse to say what it is. So they’re not being transparent.

The second thing Barrie is that they are not prepared to discuss the consequences of their actions. I mean, let me give you an example. As you recall, a week or so ago we called, the Opposition called for the guarantee on bank deposits, this is deposits with banks, be increased to not less than $100,000. And our reason for that was firstly to give depositors greater confidence in these difficult times but also to ensure that we didn’t see all of the deposits in Australian institutions moving into the big four, and there has been that move as you’ve seen the huge increase in deposits at CBA.

Now the Government then went out and said we will now have a deposit guarantee which is unlimited. So it doesn’t matter whether the deposit is $100,000 or $100-million. Now the consequence of that has been that the short term money market has been severely curtailed. The commercial paper market has been curtailed because an obligation, commercial paper if you like, issued by Telstra or BHP now has a lower credit rating than a deposit with the smallest credit union in Australia.

Now, that is a consequence of what the Government has done and this is one of the reasons why we wanted to sit down and talk to them about this in a bipartisan way, because when you intervene in free markets, when governments intervene in free markets, they need to make no more intervention than is absolutely necessary because you can have unintended consequences which are adverse.

Now this is an issue, really, that they should be, they should have done this beforehand. They should now be talking to the Reserve Bank, getting the Reserve Bank’s advice about the deposit guarantee, debating it in Parliament and then no doubt we can reach agreement.

You know we are really reaching out to the Government to help Barrie, but whenever we do that we are just treated with contempt and scorn.

BARRIE CASSIDY: Well you seemed fairly frustrated during the week when they rejected your suggestion of a bipartisan motion in the Parliament.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well I don’t know if it was a matter of, it was more disappointment than frustration. I mean it has had its lighter moments in that.

If you have a sort of black gallows sense of humour you may recall on Thursday, Julie Bishop the shadow treasurer asked Wayne Swan whether the Government guarantee on whole sale funding, the fee charged for that, would be higher for a BBB rated bank than for a AA rated bank. Now as Wayne was getting up to speak, Lindsay Tanner who is far more capable than Wayne Swan I think as we all know, said “Just say yes, Wayne”.

But Wayne obviously didn’t hear it or wasn’t prepared to be prompted and waffled and went on, you know said nothing basically, but leaving one with the conclusion that he doesn’t understand that if the guarantee fee is not higher for less credit worthy banks than it is for the most credit worthy banks, you will never get the less credit worthy banks off that guarantee.

Now so there’s the Treasurer of Australia, doesn’t understand the implications of what he’s doing. And it underlines Barrie why the whole sale term funding guarantee for banks which could put the Commonwealth Government and us as taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars must be the subject of legislation.

The government is trying to work out a way of putting this through without it even being debated in Parliament. So what price accountability? What price looking after the taxpayers’ interests? What price democracy if you’ve got a Prime Minister who treats Parliament with such contempt?



Dead rat in the back streets of Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW, Australia.