It’s fantastic to see that although this dangerous exercise of the minority tail wagging the majority dog and the breakdown and phenomenon of a reverse takeover of the majority by the minority which has been created and allowed to flourish by the political class who supposedly have our backs, hasn’t gone unnoticed or unremarked by think tanks like the Centre for Independent Studies and Peter Kurti and with the swing by one and a half million people away from the major parties at the election, the common sense of the Australian people.
They really do understand what’s going on and want something done about it.
“…..The rise of Pauline Hanson has been attributed to a growing backlash against a “democratic deficit” in all western societies as human rights are being distorted to favour minorities and silence the mainstream.
The assessment comes from the author of a new report The Democratic Deficit, How Minority Fundamentalism Threatens Liberty In Australia, that says the growing influence of identity politics, and the distorted application of human rights, is placing whole areas of public debate off-limits through the use of stigma and public shaming.
In Australia, those most responsible for distorting human rights have been the Australian Human Rights Commission and publicly funded human rights legal centres, according to the report’s author, Peter Kurti, an Anglican minister and lawyer. Like many politicians, he said, those groups had fallen victim to the rise of “identity politics”, which favoured those who portrayed themselves as victims of oppression by the mainstream.
Mr Kurti, a research fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies, said: “Regular, voting members of the public are getting weary of political elites telling them how to frame their lives. Pauline Hanson’s reappearance on the national scene after 18 years is, in many ways, an indication of people’s exasperation. Distortion of rights ‘helped Pauline Hanson’
“It’s one of the factors behind Malcolm Turnbull’s near-failure at the polls. He has gone too far to the left and failed to address the kind of issues that people feel is important in their daily lives.”
Kurti’s report, published today, says Australia is being confronted by “minority fundamentalism” that has all the features of religious fundamentalism: ideological fanaticism, intolerance of dissent and total certainty about truth and falsehood.
It says “newly-minted fashionable rights such as the right to equality are threatening to trump every other right with which they might conflict”, particularly freedom of speech and religion.
This tendency had been responsible for the rise of the Safe Schools program that requires children to engage in sexual role playing, the prosecution of journalist Andrew Bolt under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act over articles that offended light-skinned Aborigines, and the attempt by a gay marriage activist to prevent Hobart’s Catholic Archbishop Julian Porteous from explaining Catholic doctrine on marriage.
The report says democratic freedoms such as free speech and freedom of religion are being eroded by identity politics under the guise of promoting equality. But, in practice, identity politics, aided by the progressive Left, threatened to foster tyranny by attacking the community’s fundamental freedoms.
The report comes at a time the Human Rights Commission has been accused of breaching the human rights of Queensland University of Technology students who had been ejected from a computer lab because they were not Aboriginal and confronted with a damages claim for $250,000 because they allegedly ridiculed the incident on social media.
“The weakening effect of identity politics is that it prioritises equality over freedom and, in doing so, locks people into specific categories at the expense of individual liberty,” the report says.
While the Human Rights Commission and human rights legal centres are supposed to protect all human rights, Mr Kurti believed these groups had let down the community.
He called for the commission to be more responsive to community concerns and stop pandering to what he described as extremists.
“We are not a country of extremes — although there are people with extremist views — but I don’t think the commission does itself any good by pandering to extremists by generating an unwanted fear and anxiety,” Mr Kurti said. “We have seen, in my view, unfortunate comments from Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane who, in some of his comments, seems to set out to inflame debates about race rather than emphasising the strength and cohesiveness of the Australian community.”
In a series of interviews after the federal election, Mr Soutphommasane described Ms Hanson’s politics as repugnant and said Australia had moved on from “the politics of Hansonism”.
Mr Kurti said he believed it was wrong for a publicly-funded commissioner to be “decrying the legitimately elected members of the federal parliament”.
“You don’t have to agree with Pauline Hanson — or the Greens for that matter — but if anybody is legitimately elected by the Australian people to take a place in the Australian parliament they deserve that place,” he said.
“And if you don’t want them there we have to vote them out. It is not right for publicly-funded human rights commissioners to start sowing dissent and dissatisfaction with the voters’ choice.”
Mr Kurti said he hoped the Human Rights Commission would be capable of reforming itself by adopting a more balanced approach to human rights “because the last thing we need is more laws and regulations”.