Fighting for freedom - Can our Aussie cousins show the Poms the way?
Is Sir Keir making the same mistakes as the Aussie Labor PM, but several months behind him?
Montage © Facts4EU.Org 2024
With Australians defeating their government’s attempts to silence them, what can Brits learn?
Today we present an article on an intriguing subject.
It comes in the first week of the UK's formal accession to the CPTPP - the Trans-Pacific partnership. This is one of the largest trading blocs in the world and is much larger than the EU's Single Market in terms of its population. And Australia is a founder member. Facts4EU.Org published a definitive report on the CPTPP on Wednesday this week (18 Dec 2024) - if you haven't already read this, WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND IT.
The authors of the article below point out that there are some clear parallels between Australia's increasingly unpopular Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and Sir Keir Starmer’s increasingly unpopular new Labour Government in the United Kingdom. With ordinary Australians pushing back successfully against their government's authoritarian plans, the authors of this opinion piece ask a simple question.
“What can the Brits learn from the Aussies?”
- By the Chairman of Facts4EU.Org and CIBUK.Org,
and Steven Tripp, Chairman of Commanding the Narrative in Australia
Australians Defeat Albanese’s Authoritarianism – Can the Brits Do the Same?
Under the weight of the push-back from the Australian people, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s desperate attempt at censorship has crumbled under an avalanche of opposition. This was formally known as the ‘Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024' - a censorship bill, designed to silence everyday Australians.
The doublespeak was on full display in a media release put out by Communications Minister Michelle Rowland on November 24, in which she claimed:
“Seriously harmful mis- and dis-information poses a threat to safety, the integrity of elections, democracy and national security, and 80% of Australians want action.”
Unfortunately for this Australian ‘Communications Minister’, the 80% figure of support seemed to have been plucked out of thin air and ironically it is clear mis-information, as the inverse was true.
The Bill attracted tens of thousands of submissions and was opposed by everyday Aussies, along with all types of community groups, free speech organisations, and religious groups. As the vote passed the House of Representatives, in the Upper House crossbench Senators were bombarded with phone calls, letters and emails from Australians urging them to oppose the Bill.
It worked. One-by-one the crossbench Senators holding the balance of power came out to express their opposition. The dreaded Misinformation and Disinformation Bill was dead. It shows how much power the people have.
Above: Sir Keir, at that time the soon-to-be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking the knee to the now discredited 'Black Lives Matter'.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom….
Within six months of having been elected, the Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer MP should still be enjoying a honeymoon period as a newly-elected Prime Minister. However, he is already slumping in the polls with far more than half of the public disapproving of his performance.
It is little wonder that, like Albanese, Keir Starmer has donned the jacket of an internet czar after hundreds of people were arrested and some are now serving jail time for their social media posts. Echoing Albanese’s proposed Misinformation and Disinformation legislation, Starmer said social media “carries responsibility” for tackling misinformation.
Next up, did you hear “The Voice”?
Australians will be only too familiar with ‘The Voice’, but this barely made the news in the UK, Europe or internationally. The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum was a constitutional referendum held in October 2023 to change the Australian Constitution to give a very strong voice in Parliament to indigenous Australians, over and above that of non-indigenous citizens.
The proposal was rejected in every state, with only 39.9% nationally voting for it. As with similar issues in the UK, only those in the capital voted in favour.
Both Australia and the UK (and many other countries) are having ‘Net Zero’ imposed on them
Another major policy area being pursued with vigour by the two Labour/Labor governments on both sides of the world is that of ‘climate change’, or ‘Net Zero’.
For the UK, in the vanguard of the charge to increase the pace (and costs to the public) of all these policies is the UK’s Net Zero Minister Ed Milliband, or to give him his proper title: the ‘Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero’.
[Pictured: Net Zero Minister Ed Milliband and Swedish climate change teenager Greta Thunberg at an event in the UK earlier this year.]
© Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2024 - click to enlarge
In Australia, mass protests have started to take place against what can only be described as a desecration of Australia’s natural landscape – on land and along Australia’s coastline. Facts4EU.Org covered this in a recent report here.
You could fit 7 Luxembourgs and 6 Maltas into just one of these ‘Net Zero’ Albanese land-grabs. Occupying an area of 20,000km², this 'Renewable Energy Zone' for wind, solar, battery and transmission engulfs more than six entire towns.
.Starmer and Albanese in lock-step on Net Zero
At the meeting of Commonwealth leaders held in Samoa on 25 October 2024, the British and Australian Prime Ministers held a side meeting. It might have been thought this would be about trade, but instead the British and Australian PMs agreed a “Climate and Energy Partnership”.
“This partnership will ensure we maximize the economic potential of the net zero transition, and build on our long-standing cooperation on international climate action and shared commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050,” Albanese said, following the agreement.
Alas, the Australian people have not won every battle and the young are being silenced
Despite the big setback for Prime Minister Albanese over his ‘Voice Referendum’, he does not relent. His Government has now passed legislation to ban under 16s from using social media – as far as we know the most draconian such law in the world. Despite the obvious fact that parents should be the ones to decide whether their children use social media, not the Government, one of the most egregious flaws in the legislation is that while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram will be banned for the young, sites like PornHub will not.
In addition, the reality is that everybody - whatever their age - will now need to prove their age before logging on to social media, which worries many people who feel we are progressing to an Orwellian Digital ID state.
Finally, social media companies are not Australian companies and do not host their servers in Australia. How does Albanese expect to police companies over which he has no jurisdiction? This is policy made on the hoof.
Both the United Kingdom and Australia suffer from ‘the Metropolitan Elites’
In addition to many other elements stemming from a shared cultural heritage, (albeit diminishing due to immigration), both nations appear to be experiencing a common thread amongst those who govern them.
In the UK Starmer is facing rebellion and protests on the streets over his new inheritance tax on farmers, as protests mount against the budget of Rachel Reeves, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is a clear sign that like Albanese, Starmer is governing for the city elites. In Australia, the Voice referendum saw its strongest opposition the further you moved away from the city centres.
In each country there appears to be a growing, shared and profound concern amongst ordinary people that, once elected, the people who are supposed to represent their views do nothing of the kind.
- By the Chairman of Facts4EU.Org and CIBUK.Org,
and Steven Tripp, Chairman of Commanding the Narrative, Australia
Observations
Facts4EU.Org remains non-partisan and only comments on political parties' policies in relation to our four missions: independence, sovereignty, democracy and freedom. We have published the above opinion piece because it relates to two of these issues, namely democracy and freedom.
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