One of the few times I’ve agreed with the fossilised champagne socialist Philip Adams is when he described former Labor leader Mark Latham as the kind of “maddie” that Australian politics needs from time to time. “Maddies” like Latham, and former PMs Paul Keating and Tony Abbott, Adams said, occasionally came along to kick over the apple carts and blow some much-needed fresh air into parliament.
Latham’s leadership was the last time I voted for Labor – indeed, when I was proud to hand out how-to-vote cards for the once-great party. Latham shook the political system (not least among his achievements, reforming the staggeringly generous parliamentary pension scheme).
Now elected to NSW parliament for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Latham is shaking the tree again, delivering a stirring defense of the West that has the elite spitting up their skinny soy lattes. quote.
New One Nation NSW MP Mark Latham has railed against the Left and political correctness in his maiden speech in the NSW parliament, accusing people of trying to bring down western civilisation through a campaign of “cultural Marxism”.
He also said he would move legislation allowing nuclear power into NSW and said the federal Opposition spokesman on the environment, Mark Butler, would become the “minister for blackouts” with his pro-renewables approach and compared the push for renewables to a “pagan religion”.
Mr Latham, who with a One Nation colleague and several other crossbenchers will hold the balance of power in the upper house in NSW, said he and others were in the “fight of our lives” to bring back the values of Western civilisation. end quote.
Latham is, if opinion polling is to be believed, speaking for the majority when he defends Israel Folau and decries the nonsensical idea that players must be “role models” of leftist orthodoxy. quote.
“Mr President, I stand with Israel Folau…Footballers are not role models for anyone, other than in enjoying their sporting ability.
“I say to any young person: if you are looking for guidance and inspiration in life, study Churchill, Lincoln, Reagan and Roosevelt, not Todd Carney. By the way, that’s Ronald Reagan, not Reg Reagan…the corporate PC-elites are wanting to control all aspects of their employees’ lives — their religious and political views, how they speak and think, how they behave, even in their own time away from the workplace.
“This is a stunning intrusion on workers’ rights. Yet far from condemning the new serfdom, Labor and the trade unions have been cheering it on. end quote.
As Latham says, attacks on freedom of speech and on Christianity are symptomatic of a poisonous campaign against the West itself.
quote.
“It’s like a scene from The Life of Brian, a case of: What has Western civilisation done for us? Only advanced healthcare and education; architecture, engineering, information technology, free speech and the rule of law.
“ In fact: this chamber, this parliament, in this city, all our public institutions and the material comforts we take for granted — none of them could exist without the greatness of the West…Yet still, among the Leftist elites…sneering at our civilisation and its achievements has become their new pastime.
“They preach diversity but practice a suffocating cultural conformity, wanting everyone to be just like them.
“They argue for inclusion but as soon as a Christian, a conservative, a libertarian, a nationalist, a working class larrikin, an outsider from the vast suburbs and regions of our nation disagrees with them, they crank up their PC “outrage machine to exclude them from society. “
They are tolerant of everything except dissenting values and opinions — meaning, of course, they are tolerant of nothing that matters, only themselves.” end quote.
Much of the poison of anti-Westernism spreads from the left’s stranglehold on education in particular. quote.
The garbage of Safe Schools, Wear-It-Purple days, ‘HeadRest’ indoctrination and the other crackpot theories making some NSW classrooms more like a Hare Krishna meeting than actual education…The New Left are the new primitives of our time: junking the importance of evidence, of recorded history, of biological science, to pretend that all parts of our lives (especially race, gender and sexuality) can be fluid, that everything we know and feel around us is, in fact, ‘socially constructed’.” end quote.
In Latham, Australian politics has finally found a politician who is not afraid to say what ordinary Australians are increasingly forbidden to say. quote.
”Mr President, Everywhere I travel, parents and grandparents, workers and communities…ask me, ‘What’s happened to our country; where has this nonsense come from?’ The answer is clear. The Leftist project, then and now, is about control…pushing cultural Marxism.
“Instead of seeking revolution at the top of government, it has marched instead through our institutions…The fightback for freedom is long overdue.” end quote.
theaustralian