Menzies House

The Nazis are back—sieg heil!

EXCLUSIVE:

by William Weintraube 

Yes, there is an insidious Nazi influence at the very highest levels of the Coalition and, praise be to God, we can thank the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) for this timely disclosure in their newsletter.

Woe betide anybody who questions a newsletter with the title of “Hardhat Express”- obviously it tells it the way it is. 

The Union’s latest newsletter has reminded the world that Liberal Senator leader Eric Abetz had a great uncle Otto Abetz who was a leading Nazi - Hitler’s Ambassador to France no less.

Abbott's Right-Hand Man

Chris Rath praises the character of Senator The Hon. Eric Abetz: 

In the political world there will always be the purists and the pragmatists, the idealists and the realists, the ideologues and the ambitious. Nobody better straddles this divide in the Liberal Party than Senator the Hon Eric Abetz. Libertarians and conservatives alike should feel at ease that the next Leader of the Government in the Senate and one of the most senior members of the Abbott Cabinet will be one of us. Senator Abetz is a fusionist (economic liberal/social conservative) and a culture warrior for the right. Unlike some of his colleagues he did not enter politics for personal glory; his politics is about fighting for the cause. He leaves the limelight for others, yet everyday he puts on his armour, travels deep into the jungle of the left, and fights the gorillas head on, whether they be in the Labor Party, the Greens, the gay marriage lobby, the trade union bosses, the republicans or any dangerous form of 'ism' that threatens Western Civilisation. However, Abetz is not a firebrand nor a day dreamer, he is of the belief that it is better to get 80% of something than 100% of nothing. He is effortlessly both Leader of the Opposition in the Senate and one of the most conservative members of the Abbott Team. 

Holding on to our Christian and Democratic Values

Senator Eric Abetz, in this edited extract of a speech given at the 2012 CDP Conference, defends Christian ethical and moral values in politics: 

On the 19^th April, 2012 the ABC’s new headquarters in Brisbane was opened.

The ABC moved their Brisbane headquarters because of the concern over a cancer cluster.

At the opening, the Chairman of the ABC, a former distinguished Chief Justice of your State no less, told the assembled and I quote -

‘A few weeks ago this building was cleansed in a traditional smoking ceremony and bad spirits were expelled.

As the Governor-General and the Managing Director of the ABC have highlighted in their addresses, we are here today because of the cancer cluster that was identified at our former premises. In these circumstances, the smoking ceremony could not have been more apt’.

Really – ‘could not have been more apt’.

And you heard right ‘the building was cleansed … and bad spirits were expelled’.

On being made aware of this cringing display of political correctness, I pursued the matter at Senate Estimates the following month.

I was provided with all the politically correct gibberish one regrettably expects from the ABC today. We were told this was a ‘symbolic ceremony’ and ‘there is a strong connection with the Indigenous community …’. The staff allegedly thought ‘it would be good’. You can imagine the gush of words fully devoid of any meaningful response. In fact I was told ‘it was a lovely event’.

By the way, I am still waiting to find out how much that ceremony cost the Australian taxpayer.

But that is an aside. Because this has the potential to cost our society a lot lot more than just some dollars.

And lest the left should try the old but discredited trick of misrepresenting my comments today, I stress this was not a welcome to country ceremony or an acknowledgment of country or elders. This was a separate cleansing ceremony to ward off evil spirits and one presumes the cancer they cause.

I did have the audacity to query whether a Christian blessing ceremony had been contemplated. I think we all know the answer to that one. Another gush of words devoid of meaning other than that it was symbolic.

So, why did ‘our ABC’ go down this path?

Because it exalts the faddish, the politically correct and the trendy.

An objective analysis of this ritualistic cleansing ceremony would see it as highly insensitive to the vast majority of Australians who identify as Christians and all those others who whilst not identifying as Christians, personally support the Judeo Christian underpinning of our culture and society…

Such as, the atheist Baroness Warnock of the United Kingdom, to whom I shall return later.

But let me make this point. It was insensitive to indigenous Australians as well.

Whilst we will have the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics Census details later this month, the 2006 Census informs us that 64 per cent of our indigenous population identified as Christian. The second biggest cohort of 20 per cent was ‘no religion’.

At best, even if you added the not stated category together with Buddhism and all the others, you might rustle up an absolute maximum of 15 per cent.

So excuse me, but why was this done?  To be sensitive?  For our indigenous community? What did this actually symbolize? And for whom?

It was done for the politically correct elite who run the ABC as a symbol of their counter-culture to the mainstream of Australian society, which of course includes, lest the elite forget, our indigenous community.

We All Need To Grow Up

Senator Eric Abetz, in this edited extract of a speech given at the 2012 Australian Liberal Students' Federation Federal Council, that we need a return to personal responsibility and end the culture of victimisation and the nanny state: 

It seems that we all need to grow up. As children, we often like to blame our siblings, the family pets or some other intervening person, thing or event to escape personal responsibility. Today, I want to celebrate taking personal responsibility. In celebrating personal responsibility, we actually oppose the nanny state. We oppose the stifling notion that others owe us a living or that we are never the architects of our own misfortune.

We also oppose the notion that we don’t bear responsibility for the needs of others. That is, why you will see the left-wing activist on the street corner with a placard demonstrating against world poverty, whilst the conservative quietly donates some of his income to the less fortunate.

In recent years, there has been an unhealthy trend to outsource our responsibilities to the euphemistic ‘they’, or ‘the government’. How often have we heard ‘they’ should do something about it? Or ‘the government’ should do something about it?

The journalists regrettably never stop to ask the usually emoting person who’s all care and concern what they are doing personally or where does individual responsibility cut in. Let’s take the scourge of gambling and especially poker machines, I don’t know how often I’ve seen people on the TV screen arguing against poker machines, ‘they should be banned’, ‘they should be limited’, they should be all sorts of things, but not once, not once have I heard him say people actually need to take control of their lives. The poker machine is static, it is the individual that walks up to it and decides to put money into it.

Do I like poker machines, do I like gambling? No, but there is also the individual responsibility aspect which is always airbrushed out of the arguments and never talked about.

The Foundations of Successful Conservative Policy

Senator The Hon Eric Abetz discusses the underlying principles that lay the foundation for conservative public policy:

‘…the wise man built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall because it had its foundations on the rock…

 

The foolish man … built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose and the winds blew and beat against that house and it fell with a great crash."

 

In that parable given to us in the gospel of Matthew Chapter 7, we are taught a valuable lesson. We were taught that the foundations of a house are vital to its capacity to withstand storms.

 

The parable is equally applicable to those of us involved in politics.

 

A firm foundation is ultimately everything – for a home as well as for our personal lives and political pursuits.

 

A firm foundation as the parable tells us will not allow you to escape the storms and the floods. They will come our way no matter what.

 

The difference is – in the shape you are in after the storm has passed.

 

I hope we can be agreed that foundations are vital.

 

It is the strength of our foundations that has seen conservatism continue despite the on-going onslaughts.

 

The lack of a substantive foundation has seen the demise of national socialism, communism and all sorts of other ‘isms’. In historical terms many a political fad has come along but like with many a fad it succumbs to the letter ‘e’. The fad begins to fade.

 

By its very nature conservatism is not fad driven.

 

Conservative policy is driven by the enduring qualities of amongst other things, logic, objective truth, belief in the rule of law and the inherent value of human life from beginning to end. Well – that is how we argue our case.

 

But on what do our arguments, our advocacy rest?

 

We need to answer that question.

 

We need to grapple and wrestle with it. To fail to do so would in the terms of the parable put us into the ‘foolish’ category – a description from which we all would shy.

 

So let’s get down to what logically are the undisputed building blocks of law making.

 

Albeit, I will deal with them in reverse order.

 

Law-making is largely designed to influence behaviour in society. Laws are deigned to either encourage ‘good’ behaviour or discourage ‘bad’ behaviour.

 

I accept some laws are simply designed to help order our society and have no real moral element to them.

 

Take for example the side of the road on which we drive. I am sure there is no moral superiority in determining Australians will drive on the left hand side of the road in comparison to those countries where they drive on the right hand side.

 

But such examples aside, our laws are largely designed to encourage good and discourage bad behaviours.

 

So what determines what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’? Ultimately those are value judgments which are based on our moral framework.

 

Our moral framework is built on our world view or religious view.

 

And in this context one’s religious view can be devoid of a ‘god’. But make no mistake everyone has a world or religious view on which they base their morality – to which they seek to give expression through law-making.

In Defence of Marriage

Senator Eric Abetz's edited address to the Young Liberal National Conference in Sydney.

 

Welcome to 2012: a year which promises to be even more difficult than the last.

A year in which the cost of living will increase even further due to the Carbon Tax.

A year in which the debt burden placed on the next generation will balloon to phenomenal proportions. Quite frankly, it is hard to see how Australia can endure another 12 months of Labor's seven deadly sins.

1. Dishonesty, wholesale breaking of election promises;
2. Reckless spending and waste;
3. Racking up debt and deficit whilst...;
4. Increasing and introducing new taxes;
5. Caving into the Greens;
6. Mismanaging the economy; and
7. Being incompetent administrators.

As I said, welcome to 2012: a year in which all Liberals must work together to make the government fully accountable and outlining our policies which will deliver a better way for our country and deliver hope, reward and opportunity. A task to which I am sure the Young Liberal Movement will devote itself to with vim and vigour. As it has in the past under Michael's excellent leadership and will continue to do so under Trent's direction. Congratulations to the outgoing executive on a job well done and all the best to the new executive on its election.

On a brighter note, there has already been one good news story for 2012. Bob Brown has promised to stop talking to Julia Gillard. If that promise is fulfilled, and that would be a Green first, Labor will be devoid of an agenda and this will spare our nation of further destructive policies which are not only destructive and bad but are also a fundamental breach of the faith and trust that Labor got from the electorate.

On the economic front, we have the carbon tax. We had the promise 'there will be no carbon tax'. We will now have a carbon tax which will be destructive to cost of living, to jobs, to wealth and perversely to the environment. Just allow me to give you one brief example. Coogee Chemicals was going to set up in the state of Victoria a methanol plant with 150 permanent jobs, $1 billion worth of investment, $14 billion worth of potential export earnings. Now, given the carbon tax, they've stated publicly, they will not establish in Australia and as it happens it would have been in the Prime Minister's own electorate. Guess where they're going? To China…

Nothing Could Be Clearer

Labor sought and obtained a mandate from the Australian people not to impose a Carbon Tax says Senator Abetz.

“The Clean Energy Bill 2011 and related bills, if they are turned into Acts, should they pass in the Senate will be 19 separate acts of deceit, 19 separate acts of betrayal, 19 separate acts signifying the contempt in which Labor holds the Australian people,” Senator Abetz said today.

“Rather than debating the clean energy package, we should in fact be renaming it the 'dirty deal package' because it was struck with a dirty deal with the Australian Greens, a party, incidentally, led by a person who once advocated for coal-fired power stations in his opposition to renewable, environmentally friendly hydro generation.”

Labor’s ‘light on the hill’ is no longer powered by reliable, base load, traditional Labor thought but powered instead by faltering and flickering transitory trendy fads changing it from a once-strong, clear beam to a pale, intermittent, slowly dying ember.”

“The Australian Labor Party has not only lost its moral compass, it has lost its policy map as well,” Senator Abetz said.

“As the Greens-Labor Government foolishly and recklessly rushes to create this toxic tax, they tell us that countries all around the world are moving just as quickly. I have to concede that they are right. Countries are moving just as quickly, but in the opposite direction.”

“Canada – No to a Carbon Tax – France - No, Europe – reconsidering its position, Japan – indefinitely postponed, United Kingdom – reducing green energy subsidies, New Zealand – winding back its scheme, Russia – taking no further action, South Korea - delaying and The United States – not proceeding.”

 “It will be a $9 billion per annum tax. It will increase power bills by 10 percent. It will increase gas bills by nine percent, and that is on Labor's own assessments.

“There will be higher marginal tax rates, there will be a huge impact on single-income families and two hundred and eighty thousand self-funded retirees will be worse off.”

“The Prime Minister may have been right when she said, 'There will be no carbon tax under a Government I lead,' because it is Senator Bob Brown and the Australian Greens that are actually leading this Government,” Senator Abetz said.

Senator Abetz is a Liberal Senator for Tasmania and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate. His website can be found at http://abetz.com.au/

Must Read: Green Light for Senate Chaos

Senator Eric Abetz, in this speech to the Sydney Institute, lays out the dangers ahead with the radical extremist ideologues in the Australian Greens holding the Senate balance of power:

As of the 1^st of July Australians will be relying on the House of Representatives to block the excesses of the Senate … Who would ever have thought?

I am sure our Founding Fathers never envisaged such an outcome. Nevertheless it is a good reminder how a bicameral system provides vital safeguards.

With a Labor-Green alliance running the Senate, it will fall to the House of Representatives and, in particular, the four independents to determine our fate.

It is a worrying time for our nation and for our Federation.  The uncertainty alone will impact on our economy if the Tasmanian experience is any guide.

That is why it is opportune to have an occasion such as this (kindly provided by the Sydney Institute) to expose, examine and explore the ramifications.

On the 1^st of September 2010 Australians witnessed the spectacle of Ms Gillard and Senator Brown seated at a table signing a document with wattle sprigs in their lapels and an adoring ‘bridal party’ behind them witnessing the occasion.  The scene was suggestive of a civil marriage – albeit one of convenience.

The published photograph of the event did hold my fascination … On studying it I could not help but note its orchestration. The bowed heads and folded hands of the witnesses. Some smirking. But also the wary faces of the leaders.  And the uncertainty suggested by the large doors behind, as if everyone could somehow go back inside and have another configuration emerge.

I believe that picture tells us a lot about the alliance itself.  And for this reason it has been so commented on and reproduced. 

But away from the photo – the deal itself has implications for our nation that are extremely worrying.

So tonight I want to pose two questions.

1. With whom are we dealing?
2. With what are we dealing?