The test of Character

The testimonies on this blog say it all...this should win the election hands down for Tony Abbott, and that fact that it matters little, is an indictment on the culture that is today:
 

Who won last night’s debate? Ask make-up artist Lily Fontana:

Just finished doing Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott’s makeup for the People’s Forum at the Broncos Leagues Club.
One of them was absolutely lovely, engaged in genuine conversation with me, acknowledge that I had a job to do and was very appreciative. The other did the exact opposite! Oh boy, I have ever had anyone treat me so badly whilst trying to do my job. Political opinions aside...from one human being to another...Mr Abbott, you win hands down.

(Thanks to reader Josephine.)

UPDATE

Reader ausebell has a similar measure:

At the end of the night when Abbott invited the crowd to ‘ask more questions of him’ we saw Abbott swamped with people, while Rudd looked a lonely figure as a couple of young men wanted a selfie with him. No-one wanted to speak with him. He left after 5 minutes while Abbott stayed for another 1/2 hour, with a line of people wanting to meet and speak with him. I don’t think they noticed Rudd leave and I doubt they really cared.

UPDATE

Abbott’s staff confirms: OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott’s office has confirmed Lily Fontana did his make up before the forum.

“It wasn’t Tony that was rude to her,” his spokesman said.

So do other make-up artists:

Friends of Ms Lily Fontana were quick to respond to her Facebook comment:

“Anybody that has ever spent time with both men (which I have ) will tell you exactly the same,” one friend posted. “Abbott a genuine decent man, Rudd an elitist grub who thinks he is superior to all!!!!”
Another said they had also had a “very similar experience”.

“I second this Lily. I have had a very similar experience! Must run in the family as Mr Howard and Mr Costello were gentlemen with a capital G. Mr Abbott is following in their footsteps. The other, I could not even face book how he treated the crew. Just abhorrent!”

True History

Do not let people intimidate you into thinking that it was Christianity that perpetrated the vile deeds of 'colonialism' on the original Aboriginal population of Australia.
Indeed it was those of a more 'scientific' and decidedly atheistic caste whose deeds were truly vile:

Evolution and the first Australians

Darwin considered the Australian Aborigines as primitive and not much evolved from the ‘anthropoid apes’. He anticipated that the ‘wilder races’ would become extinct because survival of the fittest meant they would be superseded by the evolutionarily-advanced ‘civilised’ races. An evolutionary view of human origins underlies the World Heritage listing of the Lake Mungo site. Such a view was not good for the first Australians. Many atrocities were perpetrated on Aboriginal communities because of these evolutionary beliefs.

Incredibly, in the 1800s, it was not uncommon for Aboriginal people to be hunted and shot as specimens for science. Their remains were sent to Europe to illustrate evolution displays in museums. Only now are these remains being returned to their communities.

But the Bible records our true human history. The first Aboriginal settlers to Australia were descended from people as intelligent and inventive as any other culture at that time. Like everyone else, they were descended from Noah, who built and managed the Ark, and from a people who developed an advanced civilization around the Tower of Babel.

The Aborigines of Australia lost some of their technological know-how—it can happen in a generation if parents do not pass it on to their children. (Perhaps it was because of isolation and the pressure to cope with a worsening climate as the continent dried out after the Ice Age.) They, like other peoples, are made ‘in the image of God’ (Genesis 1:26).

Choose wisely brothers & sisters.

I would like to draw the analogy of Rudd being a wolf in sheep's clothing but I fear it would be injurious to wolves in general.
Take for instance this latest article about the creeping assault on faith based schooling:

That education is a politically sensitive issue is proven by the fact that low-fee, non-denominational, Christian schools in marginal seats, where parents are voting with their feet choosing such schools, are most at risk because of the ALP’s education policies.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2013/08/the-sly-assault-on-faith-based-schools

Solving your own 'solutions'.

The inimitable Thomas Sowell:

It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new "solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.

Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom. Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities, languages, and values.

Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.

The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the range of students who are slower learners.

By federal law, even children with severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into classes for other students — often in disregard of how much this disrupts these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children.
Parents who complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more "understanding" about the problems of handicapped students.

Nothing is easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and "compassionate" at someone else's expense — especially if the busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school educators do.
 

Amongst the many reasons why I have chosen to homeschool my youngest.
The main problem with school funding in an ideologically charged political environment is that the union see schools as places where more teachers means more union members, thus school becomes a vehicle to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for students, and the union will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct dogmas.

Zarathustra's rule!

This was lifted directly from a blog comment...it makes you think doesn't it.

I worked for a Labor MP as recently as six years ago, and the true believers really do call each other “comrade”. I nearly fell off my chair laughing the first time I heard it and wondered if it was an in-joke between two mates. But no, it was very common amongst members.

Supporters really are unthinking sheep, and when they have little to defend they resort to personal insults, like children in a playground. Sadly they appear to have lost their moral compass, if they ever had one!

Truly unbelieving of NSW (Reply)
 

When people go out of their way to identify themselves with Marxist ideology then campaign on the basis of Capitalism and democracy what does that make them?
Thus spake the ALP.

Church of the Three Monkeys

Willful ignorance is a choice and with increasing frequency it is not faith that leads us down the path of scientific irrationality, but intellectual vanity.
Never let it be said that Christians follow a path of 'blind faith' (though inevitably some will), I believe it is the evolutionists who in fact fit that description rather well:

Purpose and design have always been evident in the universe but the past few hundred years have enabled mankind to look increasingly further and deeper than ever before into the nature of matter, space and life and we are faced with layer upon wonderful layer of design, complexity and information. On the basis of our knowledge and experience of cause and effect, we should know that there is a supreme being to whom our worship and obedience are due.

This is why evolutionists have to purposely and consciously deny a creator. All of their observations and experience of life tell them that certain objects are designed, but “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28), they have to deny the evidence of their own eyes. In a sense they are denying the observations of the very science they claim to represent. This is why a brilliant scientist like Francis Crick says “biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed”.⁶ If you constantly keep telling yourself a lie, you might come to believe it, so goes the hope.

Gramsci marches on

I had to re-publish this letter (originally sent to Quadrant) because it so eruditely sums up my understanding of the cultural battle.

The Malevolent Elite

SIR: I have read Nick Cater’s recent book, The Lucky Culture. I have read Greg Melleuish’s Australian Intellectuals: Their Strange History and Pathological Tendencies. Now I have read your Chronicle in the June Quadrant.

I can’t help thinking that all these works are too generous to the “elite” classes. It takes real malevolence to accuse your own countrymen of genocide and then fabricate the evidence to support it. It takes real malevolence to dream up a climate scare and then fabricate the evidence to support it. The identification of this deep malevolent intent, and its origins, are completely missing from these texts. There are references to the left leanings of this group, but the description of the radical environmentalists who support the global warming scare as “watermelons” is now too widespread to need explanation. Your own scholarship of the “Stolen Generations” traces the origins of the myth to the Victorian Communist Party in the 1930s. The fact that the activities of the new “elites” and the Gramscian agenda run parallel suggests to me that this may be no coincidence and that this left leaning requires much more exploration.

Peter Saunders, looking at the “elite’s” push for same-sex marriage, sums up my concerns:

gay marriage will not bring the bourgeois social order crashing down, but it is one more step in Antonio Gramsci’s call in the 1930s for a revolutionary “march through the institutions”. Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, realised that Western capitalism would not be destroyed by economic class struggle, for it is good at meeting people’s material needs. What was needed, therefore, was a long-term campaign against the core institutions through which bourgeois culture is transmitted to each generation. Break the hold of the churches, take over the media, subvert the schools and universities, and chip away at the heart of the citadel, the bourgeois family, and eventually, the whole system will fall.

While describing the natural history of the “elites” in these recent publications, an analysis of their tools of trade, their principal weapons—“political correctness”, “critical theory” and “cultural relativism”—should never have been left out. This may not be economic Marxism or political Marxism, but it is certainly cultural Marxism.

Clearly, not all of the new “elite class” are self-identified Marxists, but they are arguably remnants of Joseph Stalin’s “useful idiots” and fellow travellers, still engaged in Mao’s “Long March”, but without a Mao to bring it to an end.

Alistair Crooks
Walkerville, SA