Piers Akerman: Labor, the Greens and GetUp should let the law deal with the lawless

ACTU secretary Sally McManus, who has backed illegal strike activity and rogue activist organisations like GetUp, is trying to rally the remnants of the once powerful trade union movement, Piers Akerman writes.

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“When leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands.”

Those words were written by Ralph McGill, a columnist for the Atlanta Constitution when lynchings, bombings and cross burnings reached a frenzied peak in the US 60 years ago but they eerily foreshadowed the emergence of the current protest movement and people such as the radical ACTU secretary Sally McManus who has backed illegal strike activity and rogue activist social media-based organisations like GetUp and the anti-Adani protest.

Australia, fortunately, has never faced internal strife on the scale of the US Civil War, or the US civil rights riots, no matter how much Marxist historians may try to rewrite history (and they try mightily and they have been mighty successful).

The great changes in the law in our country have been evolutionary, they have followed debate (often passionate) and have occasionally blazed the path for legislatures in other parts of the Anglosphere.

ACTU secretary Sally McManus at the Queensland Unions and work protest march on November 20. Picture: AAP/David Clark

Industrial throwback McManus is trying to rally the remnants of the once powerful trade union movement with rabble rousing addresses that went out of fashion with six o’clock closing. Her back-of-the-truck bellicosity was out of style before bell-bottomed trousers appeared and disappeared.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, the nation’s most successful modern Labor Prime Ministers contributed to the economic strength of the nation by working with business and employers, not by taking the crudely adversarial path McManus has embraced.

Just going back to the US analogy for a moment, when McGill wrote his piece, the Mayor of Atlanta, William Hartsfield, visited the site of a bomb blasted synagogue and declared: “Every political rabblerouser is the godfather of every sneaking cross-burner and dynamiter at work in the South today.”

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month tried to smear US President Donald Trump by comparing his Twitter posts to the deranged ramblings of the Ku Klux Klan and others and similarly here, the Left-wing media including the ABC, the Guardian and Crikey, have conjured up fantastical conspiracies involving a non-existent clique from a mythical alt-Right who miraculously undermined the weakest prime minister in recent times, Malcolm Turnbull, and forced conservative policies on a cowed Liberal Party.

Malcolm Turnbull was one of the “weakest prime ministers in recent times,” Piers Akerman writes.

Even Turnbull believes this humbug, according to his whining remarks to the Bar Association, and his apparent desire to unseat leading members of the Coalition including Tony Abbott, Angus Taylor, Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce certainly warrants the motions to expel him from the Liberal Party.

Underlying the blatant attempts by Labor and its sympathisers to encourage illegal activity is the Left’s emphasis on social constructs such as gender issues.

The play school Tasmanian Lower House with its turncoat Liberal Speaker Sue Hickey has demonstrated how governments can make truth-denying laws in the name of fairness, equity and diversity when it passed a law giving parents the option to choose whether their child’s gender is recorded on their birth certificate and remove the requirement for people to have sexual realignment surgery to have their legal documents altered.

This is patently stupid as there is a law which transcends the Apple Isle’s piddling parliament and that is the Law of Nature and it is written in chromosomes which are the basis for scientific sexual identity for the overwhelming majority of species.

As expatriate author and one-time feminist heroine Germaine Greer succinctly put it during an interview with the BBC in 2015: “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a c**k..”

If the Tasmanian Upper House passes this legislation it will only be a matter of time before some hapless immigration official somewhere in the world questions the officially-stated gender of some Tasmanian transgender individual and is sued for discrimination.

The key to monitoring of communications lies in the judicial oversight that the provision and swearing of a warrant entails. Labor, the Greens and GetUp should get out of the way and let the law deal with the lawless.

The whole basis for the relatively rapid onslaught of identity politics lies in the Left’s obsession with social engineering and its failed Marxist theory that society would work best if it were ordered along the disastrous principles described by the affluent Karl Marx. The Left is forever presenting staggering denials of fact as if they were reasonable propositions.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s proposition that equipping homes with publicly-subsidised energy-inefficient batteries will in some miraculous manner conjure up greater reserves of the stable and dispatchable energy needed to power industry and operate household appliances is flatly unbelievable.

The stand-off over the need for security agencies to be able to secure warrants to intercept and decipher encrypted communications is beyond critical.

The argument is simple enough – for average people – but becomes a complex civil rights and freedom of speech issue for those who have graduated through the Marxist courses of the Leftist universities.

At the most basic level, it is a reality that security agencies are been able to secure warrants to read mail and tap telephone calls on presentation of a case for reasonable suspicion of criminal or terrorist activity.

Terrorists are using encrypted communications to avoid detection.

That they are encrypted doesn’t lessen their lethality but in the minds of some it does in some wonderful way heighten their claim to a greater protection than do ordinary mail or unencrypted phone calls.

There is no logical explanation for this claimed mysterious transformation and the law should not entertain the notion that it exists.

The key to monitoring of communications lies in the judicial oversight that the provision and swearing of a warrant entails. Labor, the Greens and GetUp should get out of the way and let the law deal with the lawless.