RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/politics/tony-abbott-we-have-got-to-roar/

Below a slightly and lightly edited transcript of former PM Tony Abbott’s address to the recent CPAC conference in Brisbane. ‘What we need right now in Australia is not a Reform Party,’ he said, citing the rise of Nigel Farage’s populist movement in the UK,  ‘but a reformed party’, especially in the Liberal wastelands of Victoria and NSW.

It’s wonderful to be here in Brisbane! It’s wonderful to be with so many people who love our country and want it to be better. Like me, I am sure that you believe that this is the best country in the world. Our job is to keep it that way. The contemporary tragedy, as we all know, is that this country is drifting backwards. The fact that millions of people would live here if they could is a great vote of confidence in Australia. But we’re not as good as we should be, and our job is to make us better, quickly.

Our economy is stagnant. Real disposable incomes – that’s to say living standards – have dropped almost 10% in the last three years. For the past two years, we have had declining GDP-per-person. Our productivity has gone backwards from where it was a decade ago. Our government wants to close down the great productive industries that have made us rich, whether it’s the coal industry, the gas industry, the salmon industry, the logging industry – and I will get on to the energy train wreck later!

Our society is fragmenting.

We have three flags, not one. Some 80 Labor-Greens councils are refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day. We have too many migrants, and too many of them are living in Hotel Australia rather than joining Team Australia.And yet you can hardly blame them when we have a left establishment which is embarrassed about our Anglo-Celtic core culture and does not like our Judaeo-Christian ethos – even though it’s these things that have made us great.

Our strategic peril is deepening all the time. As communist China continues the biggest and the fastest military build-up in history, we sit complacently. We say it’s all okay because we just might get some nuclear submarines in 10 or 15 years. But on that point, all I can say is, God save the King – who did have a meeting with President Trump and was able to raise the importance of the AUKUS agreement in a way that our Prime Minister never has.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/09/28/keir-starmers-colonial-arrogance-over-palestine/

“The uncomfortable truth is that this conflict is not about lines on a map. Hamas is waging a religious war against Jews. To pretend otherwise is wilful blindness. To recognise a Palestinian state now is not an act of courage, but of weakness in the face of pressure from anti-Israel and anti-Western extremists.”

Keir Starmer’s decision to recognise a Palestinian state is being dressed up as a bold moral gesture. His supporters frame it as a step towards peace and justice in the Middle East – all very noble-sounding. But scratch the surface, and the move looks less like moral leadership and more like the latest instalment in Britain’s long, disastrous habit of meddling in the region.

The idea that statehood can be bestowed by Western fiat is pure imperial fantasy. We’ve been here before. From the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman lands like slices of cake, to the Balfour Declaration a year later, Britain has always presumed it could redraw borders and manufacture states with a stroke of a pen.

The results were disastrous. Britain and France artificially created Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, installing pliant kings and ignoring ethnic and religious realities. They split the Kurds across four different states, dooming them to a century of statelessness and persecution. During the Palestine Mandate (1920-1948), Britain swung between contradictory promises, first to the Jews, then to the Arabs, stoking resentment on both sides. In Lebanon, French colonial meddling hardened sectarian divides that still fuel political paralysis and violence today. In short, the imperial powers mistook maps for reality on the ground, and in doing so sowed the seeds of endless conflict.

It is astonishing that, after all this, Westminster still imagines it can ‘solve’ the conflict by declaration. Recognition of Palestine from London doesn’t bring peace closer. If anything, in the wake of the 7 October 2023 attacks, it rewards extremism while sidelining the difficult, grinding work of institution-building, negotiation and compromise.

What makes this even more absurd is the hypocrisy. The same anti-Israel activists who denounce Israel as a ‘colonial project’ are cheering Britain’s latest colonial gesture – a decision taken in Whitehall and imposed on the Middle East, without the consent of the people who actually live there. Apparently, colonial meddling is fine, so long as it’s in service of fashionable causes.

Nor does Starmer seem to have much understanding about the Palestinian cause. Its leaders have never been interested in establishing a state that will live peacefully alongside Israel. Neither the Palestinian Liberation Organisation nor Hamas have ever genuinely sought compromise and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Even the supposedly moderate Palestinian Authority, which currently governs the West Bank, has repeatedly rejected two-state offers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pearls-before-swine/

When, since its founding in 1945, has as much truth been spoken in any UN chamber as was spoken by Donald Trump in his masterful hour-long oration on September 23? As part of “High-Level Week,” during which heads of government from around the world take their turns in the spotlight, most of them boring the General Assembly to death for fifteen minutes or so before shutting offstage, Trump was electrifying. Like J.D. Vance in Munich last February, he served up some home truths, mostly about the countries of Western Europe, which he criticized for failing to curb mass immigration, for relying on “green energy,” and for continuing to buy into the idea of climate change, which he described – wonderfully – as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He explained his preoccupation with Europe: “I love Europe. I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake…you want to be politically correct and you are destroying your heritage.”

You might expect at least some members of the Western European political establishment to appreciate Trump’s advice and recognize that he was speaking the truth. No, on second thought, you wouldn’t expect that, and neither would I. The men and women filling that auditorium on First Avenue would, with very few exceptions, be among the last people in the world to give a fair hearing to Trump’s views. They’re lockstep globalists for whom climate change (however it happens to be defined at the  moment) is an undeniable truth and mass Islamic immigration to Europe an absolute good. I’ve written before about the time, many years ago, when I tried to convince an audience of diplomats in Washington, D.C., that there was a dark side to the flood of Muslims that had been entering Western Europe for the past few decades. They dismissed everything I said out of hand, calling it “anecdotal” and implying that I was something of a hysterical fool. Even now, when the seriousness of the problem is far more obvious than it was then, members of the diplomatic corps cling to their fatuous certitudes.

Yes, some of the General Assembly delegates laughed the other day when Trump was being funny. And they applauded him at the end – a sharp departure from the utterly rude reception he got when he last addressed that body seven years ago. Yet they gasped when he dared to question the religion of climate change. And none of them, I’m sure, had their minds changed by anything he said.

As with the politicians and diplomats, so with the media. Throughout Western Europe, Trump’s speech was not just characterized as “scathing,” “blistering,” and so forth but was also roundly mocked. In Norway, where the four reporters who covered Trump’s speech for Dagbladet quoted Hilmar Mjelde, a poli-sci professor and so-called “US expert,” as calling Trump’s comments on climate change “really radical.” Eirik Løkke, another “US expert” – a category of Norwegian academics, by the way, who invariably turn out to understand almost nothing about America and Americans – called Trump an “extremely narcissistic” man whose “extremely childish” statements amounted to “babbling madness.” Løkke appears to have made the media rounds: he told NRK that Trump “has a problematic relationship with reality” and told VG that Trump had “flooded” the hall “with nonsense all the way through.”