PM right to reject global agenda set to destroy Aussie values
Scott Morrison made it clear that Canberra’s observance of the UN sweeping diktats is over. But whether the Canberra bureaucracy can shake off its internationalist mindset and adjust to the new doctrine is another thing, Piers Akerman writes.
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Prime Minister Scott Morrison has signalled a highly significant and most welcome radical departure from conventional diplomatic kowtowing to international bureaucrats.
In what are undoubtedly the most far-reaching comments he has made since becoming PM, Mr Morrison made it clear that Canberra’s forelock-tugging observance of the UN sweeping diktats is over.
“Knowing who we are and what we stand for is as true today as it ever was,” he told an audience at the Lowy Institute Thursday night.
“But it also does not serve our national interests when international institutions demand conformity rather than independent co-operation on global issues.
“The world works best when the character and distinctiveness of independent nations is preserved within a framework of mutual respect. This includes respecting electoral mandates of their constituencies.”
Then, nailing the real affliction that Western nations have become hostage to, he said: “We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.”
He didn’t define that “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy” but he has set in motion a process by which Australia can identify and neutralise its effects.
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That’s well and good but the important part is the audit — and it must look at everything we have signed up to, particularly during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years when Labor was throwing money at international organisations such as the education institute which subsequently rewarded former prime minister Julia Gillard with a global role, and a bully pulpit from whence she now castigates Australia for not handing out more money to foreign dictatorships.
An obvious target for the new audit is the IPCC, the UN’s global warming front for a new world order in which wealth will be redistributed.
Countless UN officials and former Greenpeace leaders who have gone on the record over the past decades proclaiming the fact that the IPCC is not about climate change but about establishing a new economic system have been ignored.
Instead, the Canberra bureaucracy, and sadly, our Bureau of Meteorology, have gone along with the scam and have bought the ginned-up statistics and theses of proven frauds like Al Gore and Michael Mann to scare school children like the gormless Greta Thunberg.
New measures are needed to raise and distribute $US2.5 trillion a year to developing countries, says a UN report.
The measures include new controls on the movement of money, demanding more from developed nations, targeting sovereign wealth funds and setting a global minimum tax rate for multinationals.
Under Mr Morrison’s new approach, globalism must facilitate, align and engage, rather than direct and centralise — the UN’s goal.
The UN’s approach, Mr Morrison said, can corrode support for joint international action.
“Only a national government, especially one accountable through the ballot box and the rule of law, can define its national interests. We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia.”
He also gave the snowflake Millennials a whack on the way through, noting that his generation, the Baby Boomers, “grew up under the threat of nuclear Armageddon, hoping as Sting put it, that ‘the Russians loved their children too’”.
Mr Morrison continued: “My parents’ generation grew up during the greatest global conflict in world history, including the Holocaust, the invasion of what was then Australian soil in New Guinea, the bombing of Darwin and Japanese subs in Sydney Harbour sinking ferries.
“My grandparents grew up during the war to end all wars, where every neighbourhood knew the cost as 60,000 Australians were killed out of a population of not even five million; who then went on to endure the Great Depression, before backing up to fight to defend our freedom in the Middle East and the Pacific.
“Those generations recognised the challenges of their time, and responded with a practical resilience, optimism and resolve, rather than the anxiety inducing moral panic and sense of crisis evident in some circles today.”
Far from being an international villain as the Greens, Greenpeace, Amnesty, various refugee action groups and GetUp would have the deluded and mentally squishy believe, Morrison said that at every stage Australia has played its part as a force for good, in partnership with those who shared our outlook and our values.
He noted that the key to progress was individual, like-minded sovereign nations acting together with enlightened self-interest and highlighted the success of the Marshall Plan, the rebuilding of Japan and the Colombo Plan.
In all cases, he said, it was the principled actions of nation states, most often led by the United States, binding together the liberal democracies of the western world underpinned by common values that anchor these societies.
Whether the moribund Canberra bureaucracy can shake off its internationalist mindset and adjust to the new Morrison doctrine is another thing. Given the voting patterns of the public service it is difficult to see any change coming soon.
They like their taxpayer-funded gravy train and they would love to get their teeth into the bigger, richer international slush fund.