Three independent lower house Federal MPs look like holding balance of power in Australia for a while.

Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter are presenting a list of seven demands to Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.

Mr Katter explained his motives: “All I’m interested in are the people back home. I’ll be voting for them . . . .”

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He means rural people, like those inhabiting his king-size electorate of Kennedy . . . mainly bush, plus a few towns like Charters Towers, Cloncurry, Innisfail, Mount Isa and Tully.

The question, of course is, what are his back-home people’s real interests?

Rural districts probably do have a few special needs — including a good, fast, publicly-owned, Internet service, plus decentralisation that is more than just a slogan . . . .

* * *

Otherwise, rural people need pretty much what everybody needs:

* everybody needs to live in a country generous in assistance to underdeveloped and disaster-stricken overseas communities – something rarely mentioned during the election campaign.

* everybody needs to live in a country where unborn babies are not aborted.

* everybody needs an environment free of pornography, which implies Internet filtering at service-provider level.

* everybody needs to live in a country that has no casinos.

* everybody needs to live in a country where traditional marriage is respected — and children, with rare exceptions, live together with both their mother and father.

* everybody needs to live in a country whose culture is based on the Catholic Faith.

* everybody needs to live in a country where childcare is the mother’s role – her husband working to support the family financially.

* everybody needs to live in a country whose soldiers are not fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq – whose defence force exists to defend its shores, but not to impose its brand of democracy on others.

* everybody needs to live in a country where unauthorised, boat-smuggled, asylum-seekers are processed offshore.

This blog recently recommended readers to consider voting DLP. * 

Many people did. Throw in a bit of apparent good luck with preferences — and it happened.

Now John Madigan is a Senator-elect.

What is the Democratic Labor Party all about?

* * *

(1) History

Those interested in Labor Party history know that a good case can be made for considering the DLP the genuine continuing Australian Labor Party.

The present so-called ALP being a (big) splinter-group that split off and took over through a series of dirty deeds at, and following, the party’s 1955 National Conference in Hobart.

On that occasion, a number of anti-Communist ALP members, mainly Catholics, were expelled from the party in a manner contrary to the ALP constitution.

The DLP was formed by those excluded — with policies of anti-Communism, more government funding for Catholic schools, increased defence spending, non-recognition of Communist China etc.

At its peak, the DLP got as many as 11 percent of the primary Senate vote.

But by the late 70s, the DLP hardly existed.

Recently there has been a come-back. Last Saturday the DLP obtained between 2 and 3 percent of the primary vote in Victoria.

* * *

(2) Policies

The DLP is a pro-family party. It supports the freedom of families to decide their own pattern of early care of children and of the education they receive. This means freedom from financial punishment against stay-at-home full-time mums – and against those sending children to non-government schools, or home-schooling.

The DLP opposes abortion and euthanasia.

As the name suggests, the DLP advocates actual democracy – as opposed to today’s fake pseudo-democracy. This includes the setting up of a “Citizens Initiated Referendum” system, applying to all levels of government (federal, state and local).

The DLP supports re-establishing a Federal Development Bank, diversifying and resurrecting our export industries, encouraging import-replacing industries, building new dams for secure water supply and flood control etc.

Read more at their website at: www.dlp.org.au/index.php?page=alias

* * *

Don’t these sound like more sensible policies than those of the big two (or big three) parties?

(* See: www.marymackillop.org/a-spectre-is-haunting-australia-the-spectre-of-the-greens-party)

Jesus Christ was a person of compassion.

Today’s gospel reading in Catholic churches, describes this:

Entering a certain town, Jesus met ten men who were lepers, who, raising their voices, said: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” He saw them and said: “Go, show yourselves to the priests.”

It came to pass that, as they went, they were made clean. One of them, on seeing that he was made clean, went back, glorifying God with a loud voice. He fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, giving thanks. This man was a Samaritan.

Jesus said, “Were not ten made clean?  Where are the other nine?  Has nobody but this foreigner returned to praise God?” And he said to him, “Stand up and go. Your faith has saved you.”

* * *

Everything about God is beyond our understanding — including his compassion.

Why did Jesus heal these ten?

Weren’t there lepers in every town he visited? He could have — if, in fact, he was God.

Why doesn’t God, at this moment, evaporate the water killing people in Pakistan?

We don’t know.

Compassion doesn’t mean giving everybody what they want, that’s for sure.

There is a greater good to which an event must contribute, in order for God to make it, or permit it, to happen.

That’s why Greens Party representative, Adam Bandt, now MP-elect for the seat of Melbourne, should stop using the word “compassion”

* * *

Last night, Mr Bandt claimed that the Greens stand for “a compassionate and helping hand to people who are in trouble . . . more love in this world, not less.”

All rather sickening. His party has no love or compassion whatever for the unborn babies whom the Greens would have aborted for any reason or none.

* * *

Politics brings out the worst in a community. Election time is the season for telling lies and displaying the reverse of compassion — lust for power and perks.

As always, it is up to the Church to witness to God’s love and compassion – also to his commandments and his judgement – if Australia is to be a decent place to live.

Nobody else will be doing it

Economic reasons:

* the Greens support “super” taxation of the mining industry which will damage Australia’s most successful industry.

* they plan to end Australia’s coal export industry — one of our few decent sources of export income.

* and to close all coal-fired power stations – making electricity dearer for families and industry.

* and desalinating sea water at infinite cost, rather than building  dams.

* * *

Internal corruption reasons:

* the party appears to be a fragmented bunch of squabbling factions. Once Bob Brown gives up, there will be no leadership.

* preferences are being allotted without the consent of the candidates concerned. Greens candidate for the seat of McEwen, Steve Meacher, on learning that his preferences had been “sold” as part of a deal that he was never asked about, described fellow-party members  in language that this nice, family-oriented blog cannot quote.

* the Greens attack other parties for being “poll-driven” and “populist”, while conducting exactly the same kind of “research” themselves.

* * *

Moral reasons:

* the Greens like occupying the “high moral ground” – e.g. they advocate banning junk food ads in children’s TV time – but favour exposing the same children to classroom indoctrination about the “normal-ness” of homosexual acts.

* they deny the status of traditional marriage as the basis of community life.

* their website says they want “the legalisation of marriage between two consenting adults regardless of sexuality or gender identity.” 

* also the legalisation of “access, regardless of sexuality and gender identity, to adoption, fostering, artificial insemination and IVF procedures.”

* they are committed to “ensuring all women have access to legal, free and safe pregnancy termination . . . .”

* they favour the degradation of women (and men) in prostitution and want “to end the criminalisation of consensual adult sex work.”

* they are soft on drugs — promising to “increase the availability of harm reduction programs, including needle and syringe exchanges and medically supervised injecting rooms and implement a rigorous scientific trial of prescribed heroin . . . .”

See also:

 www.marymackillop.org/the-greens-party-idealists-or-sociopaths

www.marymackillop.org/cardinal-pell-on-australia%E2%80%99s-greens-party-should-church-leaders-keep-out-of-politics

www.marymackillop.org/a-spectre-is-haunting-australia-the-spectre-of-the-greens-party

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Australian businessman Dick Smith likes to keep a high profile.

On Wednesday he posed for media photographers with a suitcase full of money — to publicise his offer of $1 million to the young Australian with the brightest ideas about curbing population growth.

He says that if something isn’t done soon Australia’s population will grow to one billion.

First up, Mr Smith wants to slash numbers of immigrants to Australia.

* * *

He calls his so-called Wilberforce Award a “global” award.

Perhaps he plans to curb world population as well?

You can’t achieve that by adjusting immigration numbers.

Cutting world population requires either preventing births or increasing deaths.

Is this whole project, then, just another vehicle for promoting same old sub-human cure-alls — sterilisation, contraception, abortion and euthanasia?

* * *

Australia’s troubles and the world’s troubles do NOT derive from there being too many people.

Cut the world’s population by half tomorrow . . . .

Would wars cease? Would casinos go out of business? Would people stop gossiping about each other, exploiting each other, bullying each other . . . ?

Not likely.

Mankind’s problems are spiritual problems. Attitude problems.

Humans are proud and money-hungry and envious and lazy and lustful and gluttonous and angry – that’s right, they’re in the grip of the seven deadly sins.

* * *

The answer to sin is not political programs.

UN Food and Agriculture Organisation Director-General, Dr. Jacques Diouf, said last year:

“On the earth there is a sufficient number of financial means, effective technologies, natural and human resources, to eliminate hunger in the world once and for all.”

So why don’t we do it then?

Pope Benedict XVI says:

 “The world has enough food for all its inhabitants, provided selfishness does not lead some to hoard the goods which are intended for all.”

He says the causes of the world’s injustices are “of the moral order”.

He has called for the creating of “a great program of education” to promote a change of thinking and “new lifestyles”.

To do this, he says, the “secularist mentality” — the excluding of religious ideas from efforts to reshape the world — must be eliminated.

Mr Joe Hockey, Australia’s Federal Shadow Treasurer, said yesterday that a Coalition government would abandon the present government’s mandatory internet filter plan and instead go back to the Howard government policy of offering free end-user filters to parents.

Shadow Minister for Communications, Tony Smith, added that a mandatory ISP-level filter scheme “would not be workable or effective”. 

A well-heeled lobby has been spreading myths about how:

(1) ISP-filtering would unacceptably slow broadband reception

(2) ISP-filtering would convert Australia into a police state where freedom of speech will disappear.

Many experts say that myth number (1) simply isn’t true.

Myth (2) could only apply if we stupidly let it happen.

* * *

The above arguments are, in fact, not the point.

The point is that if porn, advocacy of violence, crime, suicide etc. endangers vulnerable net users, including children, we must use ALL possible methods to eliminate it.

The Coalition arguments insult our intelligence.

Government policy is not merely to filter at ISP level, but also to encourage parents to do their bit, plus additional funding for Police to intercept peer-to-peer exchange of illegal material and to apprehend offenders, plus extending filtering to offshore-sourced content as well as domestically-hosted content.

* * *

The Coalition is turning a blind eye to reality.

Australia’s children are increasingly not safe — they face increasingly the likelihood of being exterminated or sexually exploited or recruited into perverse lifestyles . . . .

The Australian Crime Commission reports escalating sexual exploitation of little children by older children.

The Greens Party advocates putting adoptable children in the care of pairs of homosexual men.

Greens (and many Labor MPs) favour late-term abortion — children old enough to be born alive, needing only to be delivered intact, dismembered in the mother’s birth canal.

* * *

The ALP is showing common sense on the internet-filter issue.

The Coalition merits only our disgust.

Many thinking voters are looking out for morally-OK independents to vote for and — in the Senate — will perhaps support smaller parties such as the DLP, Christian Democratic or Family First.