Arthur Thorne at The Noticer: Tony Burke makes a mockery of democracy

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Tony Burke makes a mockery of democracy

A few days ago, on December 22, immigration minister Tony Burke uttered statements so morally repulsive and vindictive that they must rank as some of the most appalling in all of Australian history. That’s a tough job, since Burke is competing with a whole range of remarks made by ethically compromised Australian politicians over the past two weeks alone.

In contrast to the Islamists who cut like a scythe into our “social cohesion” by murdering 15 innocent people at Bondi a couple of weeks ago, Burke decided that they effectively don’t matter, and instead turned his gaze toward the National Socialist Network (NSN) who he claimed were “[taking] hate right to the threshold without using the words violence, and escape any further terrorist listing” (I apologise if anyone has trouble trying to make sense of Mr Burke’s poor phraseology). And with these remarks, Burke assured the Australian public that democracy shall not get in the way of his arbitrary political grievances against a non-violent political activist group.

For this crime (apparently, literally) of non-conformity to the expectations of malicious politicians, the NSN must be banned and branded as something akin to “terrorists” anyway. Which means that obeying the law doesn’t mean you are innocent, it just means the law hasn’t been sufficiently altered and curated to encompass those whom the state doesn’t like and wants to target.

This is not some biased strawman – Burke said this himself as clearly as one could ever hope, continuing in reference to the NSN:

“Their behaviour needs to be unacceptable; their behaviour needs to be unlawful; their behaviour needs to be enough that we can proscribe the organisation and prohibit their activity in Australia.”

Burke’s “needs to” is actually his own personal “wants to”, and since he holds the stick with which to beat his chosen target, he can seemingly do as he and the government pleases, making it all up as they go along. It is ad hoc state terror, which leads me to ask, who restrains those who lecture us from their podiums?

This cannot possibly hold up in the High Court. How could it even be possible, so possible that Burke feels confident enough to announce it publicly? It is not just blatantly premeditated political persecution, but it is an admittance that not only are the NSN not terrorists – Burke says they don’t meet the terrorist threshold, hence his announcement of a “new form of listing for those who do not meet the terrorist organisations” – but that their non-terrorism is so personally distasteful that everything should be done to cast some reality-contorting spell that will turn them into what the government clearly wants them to be.

It shouldn’t need to be said that an ethical and just system does not punish people for obeying the law and not being criminals. Burke is literally saying that while the NSN are not criminals, they ought to be, and that he is going to do his best to make them so.

But if a group is not criminal, then they should not be made into criminals without cause; and since no crimes have been committed on behalf of that organisation, there is no legal or moral justification to criminalise them.

No democratic politician should feel emboldened enough to declare that non-violence isn’t good enough, and that even being against violence in principle isn’t good enough if people like Burke appoint themselves the divine ideological arbiters of what people and organisations believe just because he doesn’t like them.

This is a horrific betrayal of every Australian who was brought up in believing in fairness and playing by the rules, for if the rules can be changed on a whim to the disadvantage of everyone but those in power, then the rules mean nothing. It should not require taking off one’s ideological blinders to see that.

It is even worse to suggest, as Burke does, that terrorist activity is not required for an organisation to be designated a “terrorist organisation”, or something akin to it. He uses the term “hate group”, but presumably the difference in practise will be minimal or non-existent, it just needs to be a nominally different definition (and vague in any case) to become legal.

Confusingly, Burke says that the listing will be “checked against previous behaviour”, but just moments prior he admits that their previous behaviour was not criminal.

So, what about the NSN’s “previous behaviour” can possibly lead to this new type of proscription that is not based on any kind of retroactive criminal “justice” or in making things that the NSN has previously done now a crime? And what have they done anyway? Attend protests, march down the street (as Albanese ridiculously likened to terrorism in the same breath as he discussed the Bondi attack only a few days ago), celebrate Australia Day, hold conferences, exercise in the park?

These things can hardly be considered criminal, let alone unique enough to warrant some kind of pseudo-terrorist designation. So, if it is not actions, then what is it?

The only thing left is ideology.

The aim of Burke’s program, the government’s program (which will no doubt garner support from the Liberal Party and others as well), will be to persecute organisations who profess (will they even need to profess?) an ideology or set of beliefs that the government wants outlawed.

I can see no other basis on which any legislation could try to ban the NSN. Of course, whatever the government did it was always going to be ideologically motivated, but now more so than ever they’re eschewing pretexts and just saying in so many words that the NSN (and organisations like it) will be banned for political non-conformity to the state’s ideological platform of multiculturalism, or whatever is supposed to constitute “social cohesion”, which seems to mean little more than eliminating any public discourse which could spark debate and discussion the government doesn’t like.

It is easy and unfortunately tempting to get conspiratorial since the NSN is apparently close to registering its political party, and now it just so happens that a terrorist attack at Bondi is used as a casus belli to target the NSN and outright ban them on the pretext that they merely exist and are anti-Semitic (unfortunately more than a few people have taken this superficial similarity to the Bondi terrorists and turned it into a casus foederis to target the NSN as well, though conveniently, this has not been done with regard to the anti-Zionist left). And from what we know about Bondi, it seems like the government just sort of let it happen.

We have already seen the government use the false pretext of the Dural caravan hoax to push for the laws they want, so we cannot be certain they didn’t do the same with their disregard to the threat posed by the Bondi attackers, although I don’t want to push this idea too far. However, it should perhaps underline the fact that no Australian should be too trusting of the government’s official narrative. It just seems highly convenient if nothing else that one of the Bondi attackers was known and still allowed to obtain firearms as recently as two years ago.

I’m more inclined to suspect the explanation has less to do with conspiracy, and more to do with the fact that the Australian government is filled with such credulous multicultural ideologues that their sensitivity to real threats like Islamic terrorism is inverted because of the perception they have of such people being a part of the multicultural “in-group”. This is why, despite their knowledge of Islamic terrorists and hate preachers, they have no time to bother with them, let alone address the religious motivations of actual terrorists when the worst happens. Not unlike when a left-wing terrorist sets off a bomb at the Land Forces Expo in Melbourne in 2024, and the individual is given a slap on the wrist.

This failure to take real violent threats seriously is the result of their idée fixe, not only with multiculturalism as a perennial and incontrovertible moral good (the Whiggish height of the progressive “ideal”), but conversely, their hatred of the enemies of multiculturalism, which leads them to vastly overestimate the supposed threat of right-wingers, epitomised by the spectre of neo-Nazism.

The explanation for this is simple: the latter only appear more threatening because they are the existential ideological opposition to the ruling class and its regime. Opposition to multiculturalism means opposition to their morality and worldview, and therefore a disruption of their social vision; hence the preoccupation with “social cohesion”, which is used by those in power to mean the assertion of the specifically multicultural social vision.

To make it unchallengeable they use “social cohesion” as a way to essentially cheat politics by bypassing scrutiny in democratic discourse in order to assert a faux-normative imperative, which means a perception of “safety” at the expense of civil liberties and rights.

In practical terms, this means “hate speech” laws to bully the dissenters into silence.

In a real democracy these ideological disputes would otherwise be resigned to the realm of politics and theoretical discourse and debate, and would have nothing at all to do with stoking fears about “violent extremism” just because people like Burke naturally want to preoccupy themselves with their political opponents rather than the actually violent client groups that are more likely to commit terrorism.

And so, it seems likely that no matter what, the government would have acted in this way under whatever circumstances so long as it meant training their sights on groups like the NSN. In this case a pretext wasn’t even necessary, they just needed a big enough general crisis to have an excuse, regardless of how tenuous, to do what they wanted to do anyway.

This fact should go some way, in my view, to discrediting the conspiratorial idea on behalf of some of the right-wing that the NSN are “feds” (this is a problem because it gives people an excuse not to criticise the government’s despotism, and to demoralise and avoid any political unity which could help challenge what’s happening), since they didn’t have to do anything to be effectively framed as the guilty party over recent events – probably for coolly calculated reasons, since most people, it may have been hoped, are so morally offended by the concept of a Nazi that they’d forget all about what has actually happened and who was to blame.

Since I’ve mostly discussed recent remarks made by Tony Burke about the NSN, it seems fitting to quote one of the individuals who has suffered most immediately as a result of Burke’s corrupt and ideologically motivated misuse of power, Matthew Gruter, who was instantaneously deported from Australia for engaging in democratic political discourse by peacefully protesting, and wrote on X:

“You may not like or agree with everything the NSN does.. But “judge a man by his enemies”. All the worst politicians are treating them like the biggest threat to the system.”

Since I have confidence that the average Australian who is aware of what’s happening would not be in support of it, and do not like these politicians in any case (Burke himself was booed recently), I think Gruter has a point.

The Australian people are mostly threatened by overzealous, controlling, and manipulative politicians who want to take away our civil liberties to enrich themselves and silence our disapproval. Setting a precedent by banning peaceful political organisations like the NSN does nothing for our democracy or our freedoms, but it certainly benefits our politicians.

Think about that.

In any case, the most obvious political conclusion is that the Australian government cares much less about actual terrorism than it pretends to (how many words have been spent on condemning the religious ideology of the Bondi terrorists?), and fears much more that peaceful political activists might organise and try to challenge the government using the universally accepted democratic methods that are supposed to be the only legitimate ones.

This, says Tony Burke, “needs to be unacceptable” and “unlawful”.

The only conclusions that can be drawn, therefore, is that the game is rigged and democracy is fake.

Header image: Tony Burke on December 22 (Australian Parliament).