Menzies House

Consumed by the Nanny State

Senator Cory Bernardi asks if we are entering a version of Orwell's 1984 where all persons are subordinated to a supposed collective greater good:

Did you know that a long black coffee is two kilojoules?

You’d know this if you ventured into McDonald’s recently. You would also be advised of the calorific content of every other product available from the fast food giant. One can only imagine the benefit to the regular McDonald’s consumer as they count calories while deciding between a Big Mac and an Iced Frappe.

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that fast food contains a lot of fat, salt, sugar and simple carbohydrates. Anyone in their right mind also knows that eating too much of it isn’t good for your health but do we really need to be reminded at every purchase that every burger carries a weight penalty?

Most of us adhere to the adage of moderation in all things. That means a trip to the local burger joint is a convenient and enjoyable indulgence rather than a family staple, just like a nice bottle of wine, bacon and eggs for breakfast or a rich dessert after dinner.

So why try to use the encroachment of the nanny state to reduce the pleasure of an occasional indulgence by highlighting what most of us already know and don’t want (or need) to be reminded of? Well, the advocates claim it helps parents to make healthier food choices for their children but that is surely a figment of their hopeful imagination.

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Senator Cory Bernardi is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition and a Senator for South Australia. 

Political Rock Bottom

Senator Cory Bernardi discusses how Julia Gillard can no longer be trusted: 

Public trust is a fragile gift. Often slow in being established, it can disappear in the blink of an eye...or be betrayed by a single defining moment. While most Australians like to give others the benefit of the doubt, they are not fools and recognise when someone can be trusted and when they cannot.

Julia Gillard is now firmly established in the latter category. If not already labouring under the yoke of her ‘no carbon tax’ pledge, last week’s Four Corners interview where she was evasive and curt in refusing to answer questions directly sealed the deal.

How did we get to the point where a Prime Minister is so discredited by her own words and actions?

I think it starts with betraying your true self. Most people can suppress their own instincts and personality for a brief period. They can pretend to be something they’re not in an attempt to appeal to a different group of people.

This is the much talked about ‘tell people what they want to hear’ syndrome that the public is so cynical of. Some of the real chameleons can even sound like they genuinely mean every contradictory remark.

However, in the age of citizen journalists, 24 hour news and mobile phone recording, it is only a matter of time before the hypocrisy and deceit is exposed.

The political spin doctors even try to use the public cynicism of politicians’ credibility to create an advantage. Labor did so during the last campaign with the unveiling of the ‘real Julia’. Of course this manufactured new version of Julia Gillard was even more contrived than the previous version but the stunt bought them a few hours domination of the all important media cycle.

Most of the public understand there is a certain theatre to political announcements but they will not stand for being treated like fools by their political representatives. But that is exactly how many voters are feeling the Labor government considers them.

With ever more brazen attempts to deceive, mislead and dispute, it is not only our prime Minister who is broadly discredited in the public eye. The entire federal Labor Party is now considered to have the ‘NSW Labor disease’ of seeking power only for power’s sake.

Which takes me back to the importance of being yourself in public life. It is foolish to suggest that every politician enters politics with the same ambition, ideas, capacity or motivation. Yet there seems to be an incessant demand for everyone of a particular political stripe to reflect a single viewpoint with any departure from the script viewed as dissent.

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Senator Cory Bernardi is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition and a Senator for South Australia. 

Parliamentary Pressure Cooker

Senator Cory Bernardi sums up the current political situation in Australia:

Parliament has resumed for 2012 and the political temperature has not cooled since we left last year. The pressure is already starting to show within the Labor-Greens alliance as Labor leadership tensions take hold.

That Kevin Rudd still covets the job of Prime Minister is no surprise to political observers. He has not cauterised the deep wounds left from his brutal political butchering at the hands of Julia Gillard and the faceless men of the Labor Party. The fact that many of those faceless men are prepared to even consider reinstalling Rudd as leader says a great deal about the parlous state of our federal government.

Notwithstanding the perverse pleasure in observing the leadership woes of the Labor Party, it is morbidly fascinating to see the desperate scramble by Greens leader Bob Brown to vigorously defend the power that was handed to him by Julia Gillard.

Only weeks ago, Brown was attacking Gillard for being duplicitous and breaking her word in respect to logging. Now that she is under fire from within, in a transparent bid to keep her in power (so he can remain in charge) he has now denied any broken agreement.

In fact, Brown has actually condemned any criticism of Prime Minister Gillard as ‘sexist’; further evidence that those devoid of any coherent or logically persuasive argument resort to name calling with the preferred tags being ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’. In the PC world, these are almost guaranteed to silence any dissent from those that fear the associated character assassination.

How Did The Political Left Get It So Wrong?

Senator Cory Bernardi discusses how the left have been proven wrong on every single issue:

At some point in the past few decades, the word ‘conservative’ became a pejorative slur. That’s because the few conservatives prepared to identify as such in public refused to bow down to the new orthodoxy of the left.

Now it seems that almost every one of the left’s sacred cows is being slaughtered on the altar of common sense.

Consider some of the hardest fought battles over the past 30 years: climate change, big government, welfare dependency and multiculturalism. Then reflect on the left’s arrogance in dismissing any challenge or warning about the possible negative implications of their world view.

Every passing day provides further evidence of the folly of the left policy agenda and the falsehoods it is built upon.

In respect to climate change, the planet stubbornly refuses to warm, the polar bears are inconveniently (for the eco-zealots) still with us and the green jobs have failed to materialise. The government funded computer models predicting apocalypse are repeatedly wrong. It is clear they have often been based on doctored data and ‘curve fitted’ to suit the preferred political outcome. Despite this, we are still expected to respect the ‘authority’ of these new style snake oil salesmen purporting to be experts.

Perhaps the worst offenders are the political leaders who use enviro-cred as an excuse to get their hands on more taxpayers’ money. We have been told repeatedly that Spain and California are great examples of economies creating green jobs and are a stunning model of what the new world should be. Both are now effectively broke with Spain recording 23 per cent unemployment and businesses fleeing California in record numbers.

Time to Stop the People Smugglers

The usual suspects are outraged at the ‘immoral’ determination of Tony Abbott and the Coalition to stop the pernicious trade by people smugglers. Naturally the most vocal critics of the morality of Coalition policy are those whose policies are directly responsible for 14,800 illegal arrivals since 2008 and the deaths of an estimated 600 people.

The most sanctimonious and hypocritical has to be the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young whose rhetoric and clamour for the media spotlight have regularly set new lows in party politics.

She has previously accused Qantas of being “Australia's biggest people smuggling effort” for bothering to fly people with valid visas and passports to Australia; while simultaneously scathing of any efforts to stop the pull factors attracting the veritable armada of illegal boats carrying people with no identification to this country.

Yet, when asked to be accountable for her own party’s policies, she refuses to be dragged into “nastiness and politicking”, dismissing questions about the December drowning deaths of at least 95 potential illegal arrivals by simply stating "accidents happen”.

How the mainstream media allow her to get away with the duality of being a contemporary version of Pontius Pilate and Tokyo Rose beggars belief.

Despite the Greens’ manicured propaganda efforts, recent media reports have shed a great deal of light on the plight of the Afghan economic refugee.

Cory Bernardi talks about Julia Gillard’s Broken Promises and Betrayal

 

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Cory Bernardi talks about the Anti-Whalers

 

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The Deceit at Durban

Senator Cory Bernardi on the Durban Climate Alarmist Conference:

The Green Labor left and the profiteers of climate change catastrophe have been hailing their most recent international junket as an outstanding success.

In reality, the Durban gathering of the carbon dioxide fear mongers was a spectacular failure but that won’t stop the true believers from trying to justify their futile crusade against climate change.

Our own Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said the result was a “massively historic step that has not been achieved before”.

I seem to recall the previous government mouthpiece Senator Penny Wong said a very similar thing after the failed fiasco of the Copenhagen conference – and look what came of that. Nothing, except the scheduling of more conferences to debate the need to have even more conferences to... I am sure you get the picture.

And a gloomy picture it is for Australians who have been lumbered with Labor’s carbon tax.

The ‘success’ of Durban is an agreement to negotiate by 2015 whether to reach an agreement by 2020 about emissions reduction. This is a sure sign that there will be no international action on carbon dioxide emissions under a government led by Julia Gillard.

But that hasn’t stopped her team from signing up to an international ‘Carbon Fund’ run by unelected bureaucrats allocating taxpayers’ money to those it determines are the climate change oppressed. At a time when our government continues to borrow in excess of $100 million every single day, we will now be mortgaging the future of the next generation so we can send billions of dollars to some contrived overseas organisation. Given the track record of rorts and waste in the climate change space, one can hardly be optimistic about how this money will be utilised.

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Senator Cory Bernardi is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition and a Senator for South Australia.