Strengthening Australian Demagoguery

‘I may disapprove of what you say and will deny your right to say it'

What do you get when you bring together two Rhodes Scholars, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a New Endowment for Democracy regime changer, a Master of Philosophy from Cambridge and a lifelong economist and bureaucrat?

You get a neo-Malthusian death cult’s vision for a dystopian society delivered via a textbook example of trauma bonding.

What is trauma bonding?

”Trauma bonding is the attachment an abused person feels for their abuser, specifically in a relationship with a cyclical pattern of abuse”.

Please excuse my gentle hyperbole but that was my experience of reading this 15 July 2024 report:

Strengthening Australian democracy - A practical agenda for democratic resilience by the Strengthening Democracy Taskforce.¹

The leader of the cult is our much loved Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Clare O’Neil. Using tips she may have acquired from her anaesthetist husband or some Yuval Harari hacking therapy, the first half of this graphic design masterpiece was a lullaby of acceptance and reassurance.⁷

Our once World Economic Forum Young Global Leader wanted me to love her along with the story she and her Taskforce friends were telling. I came to know her as Clare.

There were very occasional cultish hints that my behaviour may not be up to standard and in need of correction (an essential part of the trauma bonding process). This gently forecast the horrors to come but suggested nothing too jarring at this early stage.

For most of the first 40 pages, we were friends discovering the wonderful story that is Australian Democracy. We were women voting before everyone else. We were innovators and adaptors. We drew inspiration from our long traditions of strengthening democracy through ingenious means. We were nurturers and safeguarders of this sacred, fragile treasure we call DEMOCRACY. Oh, please don’t drop it.

On your feet and cry out with me: D - E- M - O - C- R- A - C - Y.

Clare and her team continued:

“Australia’s democratic ingenuity include our electoral inventiveness, integrity innovations and vibrant civil society”.

Then we were told on page 17:

”In today’s changing media environment, many Australians continue to admire and support our public broadcasters as constant sources of quality information and key players in our democratic arenas of public debate.

Australia’s free, independent media has long underpinned its democratic strength, ensuring people have access to credible information about matters of public interest. In today’s changing media environment, many Australians continue to admire and support our public broadcasters as constant sources of quality information and key players in our democratic arenas of public debate”.

There was an article recording this collaboration, which stated it began in November 2022, but it has been taken down. In truth, they had been working together to suppress public debate for much longer.

Hang on, where was our Taskforce going with this? It was at this point, I became a little uneasy. A tension slowly entered the room. It was like someone raising a toast to an unsavoury, unwelcome uncle or Aunty.

We are all in danger again

The mood changed. Suddenly, our democracy was in danger. You and I may well be part of the problem. It was all a bit confusing because I was being rolled in with malign foreign interests as a threat to democracy.

In a recent speech, Clare explained (see video below) that people like me may soon share a cell with race-baiters, sexists, transphobes, misgenderers, fat shamers, disabled dissers and other madmen. Our Attorney-General is currently drafting legislation to deal with cases of vilification. Where might that start or end? My tension grew approaching alarm.

I then learned that some of us may be ungrateful. Not only that. We may also be under median income, not very well educated, born in Australia and not ABC viewers (see page 23). Is that you? Watch out.

p24 Strengthening Australia’s Democracy

Now, they’re using Rand’s Delphi Method here so before you go ahead agreeing with anything, be sure where they’re taking you. You would be a fool to say democracy isn’t important when 85% think it is. A difficult person might ask, what do you mean by democracy?

Be careful with that free-floating 80% who like the look of innovation. Innovation of what? That 72% may have you agreeing with social media censorship. And watch where that 49% acceptance of corruption in our democratic institutions might lead. See related article on Trust for a different perspective.

The good people of Hotham

Clearly, there are better people than you and me and they make up the over 100 ethnic groups that live in Clare O’Neil’s Melbourne electorate of Hotham. These are people who have just arrived and share Clare’s love of democracy and elections.

Unlike us, they have been deprived of the right to vote in their countries of origin that Clare described as fascistic, nepotistic, corrupt, oppressive and violent. They live for the thrill of the vote. They dress up. They dress their families up in their national costume. Smiling people voting for the first time in their lucky lives.

Relive the experience with me as she speaks to an Australian Electoral Commission audience on 25 June 2024.

Click below for Clare’s voting day experience.

Why can’t you be like that, I hear you say. Well, I don’t have a national costume for a start. I have the clothes I wear every day. And getting dressed up like a ponce to go to vote would have friends and family asking about my sanity. They’d certainly call me a show-off too, once a great Australian crime.

Is that your experience of election day? Is that the DAY you hold politicians to account like the people of Hotham? How do you do it? Maybe we should have elections every day on the smallest of issues?

We Own Democracy

This is where I started to break free of the cult’s spell. I had been through the full trauma bonding process. From love to rejection to a conditional affection. In her talk, Clare was telling me I should be grateful for the gift of democracy that she and her team treasured, nurtured and seemingly intended to innovate.

Sadly, I think our democracy has a few cracks and I don’t think our Young Global Leader and our political class has been careful with it at all. These cracks showed up glaringly during the recent Covid-19 saga.

This report states:

“Australia’s national integrity system is based on foundational institutional strengths, including the separation of powers (which divides the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government)”.

This remarkable integrity and separation of powers has been most evident in the duplicitous performances from Therapeutic Goods Administration staff (drug approvers) at Senate hearings. Our courts failed to administer justice to the TGA’s victims and our political class was unwilling to hold people in official positions to account.

There are many more examples but worse than an Australian show-off is a bore. So I’ll leave further tales for another time.

“Claire seemed to be claiming that she and her team owned democracy”

As I reflect on the powerful messages contained within the Taskforce’s report, a few stood out. Most particularly, Claire seemed to be claiming that she and her team owned democracy. They knew what it was and how it should be used. It reminded me of Tony Fauci’s “I Am Science”.

Now, please excuse my negligence in failing to introduce you, formally, to our cult, sorry, Taskforce experts. I think it is important that we know who wants to Strengthen Our Democracy. That might help us to understand how they intend to do it.

Clare O’Neil - Minister

In 2004, at 23, our youngest ever Mayor ascended the Dandenong throne. She worked a few years at McKinsey and Co before entering Parliament for the federal seat of Hotham in 2014.

Clare studied at Monash University before it became a Sustainability Development Institute, Moderna vaccine manufacturing hub and dismissed the usefulness of anti-virals in the treatment of Covid-19. She went on to receive a Fulbright Scholarship which led her to Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government in Massachusetts.²

This is the typical career path for the modern Labor politician and is the reason for her strong affinity with Labor’s working class roots. I imagine she has kept in touch with the Kennedy School where excellent work is being done in uncovering the well paid alchemists behind worldwide dis and misinformation conspiracies.³

Modesty must have prevented her from sharing with us her graduation from Klaus Schwab’s government influencing operations, the Young Global Leader (YGL) program. Luckily, we are here to correct this unfortunate omission. You will find Clare in the YGL alumni.

Larry Diamond - democracy expert

“Upon its founding, the [New Endowment for Democracy] NED assumed some former activities of the CIA. Political groups, activists, academics, and some governments have said the NED has been an instrument of United States foreign policy helping to foster regime change”. ⁴

In fact, a lot of people say it. Larry was founding co-editor of NED’s Journal of Democracy ⁵ from 1990 to 2022 and doesn’t mind a bit of regime change himself. He is now a senior consultant at NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, co-chairs Hoover's China Global Sharp Power Project ⁶ and Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region Project.⁷

The Stanford King Center on Global Development tell us:

”During 2002–03, Diamond served as a consultant to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was a contributing author of its report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest. He has also advised and lectured to universities and think tanks around the world, and to the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental agencies dealing with governance and development. During the first three months of 2004, Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.⁸

Lucky Iraqis.

Here is Larry urging Obama to overcome his squeamishness and get stuck into Gaddafi.

“If Barack Obama cannot face down a modest thug who is hated by most of his own people and by every neighboring government, who can he confront anywhere?” ⁹

Larry on democratic intervention in Syria and Yemen:

“That means that the United States, together with the U.N., the European Union, the Arab League, and Turkey, will need to engage directly with Syria’s rulers in intensive diplomacy. Of course, this should be backed up by intensified targeted sanctions. But the goal should be to induce the Assad regime to accept a negotiated exit and transition, as is unfolding in Yemen, or to fracture the regime over time and peel away its pillars of support”.

Ngaire Woods - democracy expert

If the United Nations and the World Economic Forum were serious about addressing unemployment, as they claim to be, they could go a long way to achieving this by taking a few jobs back from this Rhodes Scholar.

From a quick search, she plays a role with the following organisations:
Centre for Global Development, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Lancet-Covid-19 Commission, Stephen A Schwarzman Education Foundation, L’Institut National du Service Public, Rio Tinto, Alfred Landecker Foundation, School of Management and Public Policy at Tsinghua University, Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, Financing the Global Commons - Pandemic Preparedness and Response, Global Future Council on the Future of Complex Risks - World Economic Forum, the Ditchley Foundation and is Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government.

She has been a Non-Executive Director on the Arup Global Group Board and on the Board of the Center for International Governance Innovation and the Van Leer Foundation. From 2016–18, she was Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Values, Technology and Governance. She has also served as a member of the IMF European Regional Advisory Group, and as an Advisor to the IMF Board, to the Government of Oman’s Vision 2040, to the African Development Bank, to the UNDP’s Human Development Report, and to the Commonwealth Heads of Government, and to the UK Government’s Department for International Trade.

Ngaire is also featured in over 100 articles on the World Economic Forum website:

Leila Smith - democracy expert

Is the CEO of The Aurora Education Foundation.¹⁰ She presents a gentle tear in the fabric of this story by going to Cambridge instead of Oxford. Though like Clare, she went to Harvard too. Leila is a Knowledge Translation Manager at the Lowitja Institute, a senior consultant with the Nous Group and Policy & Programs Manager at the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association.

Rod Simms - democracy expert

Was chief economics advisor to Prime Minister Bob Hawke. He was also chosen by Julia Gillard to head the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Despite picking up this gig through the Labor Party and a historically close working relationship with Labor Prime Ministers, Rod assures us he is NOT a Labor man.

Jeni Whalan - head of Democracy Taskforce

On 25th June this year, Clare O’Neil spoke to an Australian Electoral Commission audience at the Australian University. Her talk was titled “The Future of elections: Integrity and trust in a changing environment” (see below).

At the end of her address she noted the great work that Dr Jeni Whalan was doing as part of her Strengthening Democracy and Cohesion Taskforce. So who is Jeni Whalan?

She appears to be another Rhodes Scholar from her time at Oxford University. While there she wrote a book: How Peace Operations Work: Power, Legitimacy, and Effectiveness. This study, obviously, marked Jeni as the ideal person to deal with local Twitter trolls and Facebook fact fudgers.

In the preface of the book, she also noted her immense debt of gratitude to Ngaire Woods (how ever does she find the time?) Jeni also worked at Social Impact Bond incubator, The Paul Ramsay Foundation where she advised the Monash Sustainability Development Institute’s Fire to Flourish project and was Director of Systems Design at NSW Department of Education.

A couple of final notes on the Taskforce

There can be no doubt that this is a powerful international team. Two Rhodes Scholars, two Harvard grads and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader should make you sit up straight. These are places where young aspirants go to learn the rules of empire.

How much time they have for our petty local concerns is yet to be determined. Maybe they don’t matter.

They may be occupied with more important matters like working for billionaires who build institutions reflecting their values and interests. Thus we have the Blavatnik School of Government where, happily, Ngaire Woods found a well appointed home.

Yet, our Taskforce won’t be short of advice from the other side of the Atlantic where both Leila Smith and Minister Clare studied at Harvard.

Historian, Matthew Ehret, has done some excellent research on the Cecil Rhodes’ project in this article. ¹¹ He also discusses the Rhodes Scholarship and compares it to the Young Global Leader program in this excellent video. ¹² It offers a history of the International Union of Conservation, the World Wildlife Fund and the eugenicist Julian Huxley’s founding of both.

How will our democracy be strengthened?

How will this intrepid Taskforce save our democracy? Firstly, by shutting us up if we express opinions that conflict with its views and that of its funders. Communications Minister, Michelle Rowlands will help.

How will they do that? The same way they did last time. Clare’s own department (with a different owner) responded to another Young Global Leader’s demand (Greg Hunt) telling Home Affairs to advise Facebook to close down people saying things he and Big Pharma didn’t like. ¹³

This was democracy at its finest, Australian style.

Covid-19 propaganda, in some form, may need to be protected again. Yet, there are many other bright new narratives that are in certain need of stiffening in our fragile democracy.

Some popular tropes like climate change, don’t need naming. They are bludgeoned into our consciousness hourly through mainstream media. This is a central condition of the ABC’s membership of the Trusted News Initiative.

Others other are hidden or distorted in mainstream news like Managed Retreat, Wellbeing and disturbing trends in food production which are covered in Kate Mason’s excellent research.¹⁴

On pages 44-51, we are shown ideas that might improve our democratic practices. This is where innovation takes flight.

It seems women will play the key role here. This is reflected in 3 of 5 women making up the Taskforce and in women’s prominent citing in the report. As an aside, the terms woman / women / girl / female appeared 16 times in the document. Family twice and man / men / boy / parent not at all. This is in keeping with the UN / WEF Sustainable Development Goal’s needs.

There are suggestions for schooling children on civics. These include inoculating them against stupid, cranky uncles and parents who need not be listened to.

Other innovations are prebunking, text messaging courses, local hairdressers and barbers hosting COVID-19 vaccination clinics and challenging disinformation (actually happened in the US), 99 person assemblies, citizens’ assemblies, 43 person panels, “deliberative town halls”, Citizens’ Juries and other “labs, incubators and accelerators” to promote right thinking. This is about achieving public consent via carefully orchestrated sortition.

Some straight talking from the Minister

Many lessons are inculcated in the citizen who reads the “Strengthening Australian Democracy” report but you hear something with a sharper tone when Clare is talking to “her” people in the YouTube clip below.

She explains to her audience that Australians originally saw social media as a way of looking up high school friends and making meaningful connections with people across the world. She claims that it is now driving polarisation, entrenching binary views and values. That is exactly what the main products Twitter and Facebook did during the Covid-19 saga with government sanction.

I had personal experience with this. I still don’t understand why posts that were unacceptable to Facebook censors in 2021 to mid-2023 were suddenly permissible after that time. Were enough of us mRNA or AZ injected by then? We know what happened at Twitter. Musk bought it.

Having been part of a political system that deliberately divided us, Clare is hinting none too gently at plans to reimpose this censorship in order to secure unfettered passage for additional anti-societal agendas. This foreshadows dark times and is about much more than social media. This is about controlling all forms of communication.

In the video, we are reminded of the remarkable social cohesion that exists in the minister’s electorate. People come from across the world to south-east Melbourne where they bring a fierce desire to make Australia a better, kinder place.

”On every single street in my suburb, there are dozens of beautiful stories of people who come from countries all over the world and share and focus on their common unity”.

Well done Clare. Are you feeling the warmth? Well, here comes the chill.

”But across Australia those metrics of connection, we can see that they are in decline. They are actually in long term decline but particularly in steep decline in recent years. A key indicator has been the increase in Australians reporting experiences of prejudice based on their ethnicity religion and migrant status in recent years. And that trend has REALLY, REALLY hotted up in yea.. in recent months as the conflict has started in the middle east”.

Are you a racist too?

Where are we going here? Do we need Laura Tingle or some other ABC peon to remind us were are racists? Do we need to clone Clare and install her in the other 150 Australian electorates?

Clare tells us the mood of Australian democracy has darkened in recent months with the Gaza conflict. Who is responsible for this? Are they people from two ethnic groups who identify in an uncohesively hostile manner with each other. Or is it from outsiders who pick a favourite or both?

Why is it not stirring up trouble in Hotham while it is everywhere else in the country? How is government helping? Is it? Is any part of media helping?

Don’t look to people like me as the cause of this trouble. I am more worried about Government lies and deceptions. Typically, government use of bait and switching is on full display here. Conflating disparate issues for politicians’ own purposes.

I am not responsible for either and deeply resent being used to prosper Clare’s cultish purposes. I want no part of this cult.

The only problem I am likely to cause is by asking unwelcome questions. That may soon be a criminal act in the land of the fair go.

UPDATE: On 28 July Labor’s Tony Burke took over the Home Affairs Portfolio.

1. Strengthening Australian Democracy - Home Affairs Department

2. Clare’s impressive Wikipedia entry

3. Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

4. National Endowment for Democracy Wikipedia entry

5. National Endowment for Democracy - Larry Diamond

6. China Global Sharp Power Project

7. Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region

8. Larry Diamond at the Stanford Kings Center for Global Development and Freeman Spogli Institute

9. New Republic: Obama Must Face His Fears In Libya by Larry Diamond

10. Leila Smith and The Aurora Education Foundation

11. The Rhodes Scholars guiding Biden’s Presidency - an article byMatthew Ehret

12. History of Rhodes Scholars and Young Global Leaders - a video by Matthew Ehret

13. Alex Antic discussing censorship of Facebook by Department of Home Affairs

14. Kate Mason’s substack