Displaying items by tag: constitution

As well as being profoundly irrational and damaging to our freedom and to our economy, elements of the Australian lockdowns may well be unlawful.  A number of legal experts question the constitutionality of things like the prevention of Australian overseas from returing home.

While a Nationals MP in New South Wales is willing to threaten future of the Coalition Government over koalas, where is the resistance in our political parties to the threats to our basic rights and freedoms visited upon us by the Covid lockdowns their own governments have implemented?

I recently attended a colloquium run by the Presbyterian Church, Religion in the Public Square. Speakers included the illustrious Augusto Zimmerman, journalist Angela Shanahan, and other cultural commentators. The talks covered the current litany of restrictions being placed on Christians in the public arena. It was sobering to hear spectrum of persecutions being waged against us both in Australia and overseas - remember this was before the results of the postal vote on marriage were known. If it was bad before, then it prosises to be much worse from now on.

There is a ‘game’ played by dysfunctional people and described by psychiatrist Dr Eric Berne in his capital little book, “The Games People Play”. People often disagree with one another. A protagonist with an ax to grind and a lack of moral, civil or mental sufficiency, sets her or his victim up against external overwhelming forces. They may disagree with the victim and have no cogent or legitimate argument so they call in the police with their ‘authority’ and a gun on their hips, and the Courts that have the full panoply of process and procedure, backed by Laws made by the complainant’s friends. The Laws, the legislators, the police become complicit in gross acts of indecency and bring that Law and authority and panoply into disrespect when they do not punish such dysfunctional protagonists. And they are complicit.

We should relish the freedom of expression that a Christian culture established and particularly that it was not founded on the moral vacuum of atheism, given the tragic outcomes of secular humanistic governments of the past (such as Communist Russia, Romania, Cambodia, China, Nazi Germany, etc.). But ancient history fares no better, it is replete with the continual narrative of ‘blood feuds’, that is, the perpetual generational ‘right’ to avenge the spilling of blood or the threat of imperialist expansionism from Greek, Ming, Khan, Persian or Roman Empires. Here the ‘peace’ of millions was dependent on the submission of subjugated nations, such as the Roman Empire’s “Pax Romana”, or the Islamic Empire’s dhimmi status for conquered people. Against this brutal backdrop comes what some historians have called the “softening effect” of Christianity.