You probably saw it the other week, as I did. That long list of corporations that gave millions of dollars in “donations” to the Voice “Yes23” campaign. Reports vary, but the charity set up to handle donations for the Yes23 campaign (yes, a charity, with tax deductibility for all donations over $2) received $47.46m (separate to other donation funding such as the $11.12m received by the University of New South Wales). Approximately, $35-36m of those funds raised came from the corporate sector. Corporates, like the ANZ Bank ($2.54m), Woodside Energy (2.18m), Commonwealth Bank ($2.05m), Westpac ($2.05m), Wesfarmers ($2m), and many others contributed – and who can forget QANTAS planes decked out in freshly painted “YES23” livery and offering free air travel to “YES23” campaigners, courtesy of the soon-departing CEO, Alan Joyce? Individual philanthropists gave millions, too, (one individual donation was $7m).
What individuals do with their own money is a matter for them, of course. But when corporations “donate” funds to such causes without the consent of their shareholders, that’s a red flag for me. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the cause at any one time, why do corporate boards think they have the right to do this kind of thing? I mean, we’re not talking about the daily operations of the actual business, are we?
Or are we?
I did some checking and cannot find a single instance where corporations had the approval of shareholders to spend such massive amounts on a political campaign. Not one. I can understand trade unions shelling out to help ‘their’ federal government’s campaign – but who has a choice if you’re the rank and file?
I have formed the view that many of these donating corporations did not consult their shareholders (who actually own the companies) because they saw it as a cost of doing business in this country with the current bunch of woke government(s) and government departments. Successive governments have rapidly expanded themselves through various departments and have set the scene for their policies to be shared with religious-like fervour, especially the reckless climate policies being relentlessly rammed down the throats of the public with fanatical zeal. The public service around the nation now exceeds 2.5 million employees and the associated unions have seen to it that they are the pacesetters when it comes to wages and conditions – including even more work from home leeway. With those sheer numbers of public servants – 10% or the population – and virtually all government departments, state and federal, enforcing ever new and increasingly imposing regulatory rigidities, the cost of doing business has soared and productivity is struggling. This is a bone of contention for many business groups commenting lately.
And so, I ask the question: “when the subtle suggestion was made to many CEOs to donate to the YES23 campaign, did they really have a choice, or were they yielding to a new way of doing business in order to survive?”
One commentator, Maurice Newman, writing recently in Spectator Magazine, opined,
“Like Germany in 1933, corporate leaders kowtow to the new orthodoxy. Through non-disclosure agreements and secret meetings, favoured companies gain access to confidential government information, a privilege which buys partisan support and ongoing loyalty. The word fascism comes to mind.”
So, if you don’t donate when asked, it is more difficult for you to do business. Now when we add to this the willing – and symbiotic – collusion of the largely woke media with government and education institutions, especially on issues such as climate change and woke social engineering, we begin to understand that our nation is in trouble, and most don’t realise how seriously. We’re blissfully unaware – and this is not some silly conspiracy theory rhetoric. Just carefully observe what has already happened and is now firmly in place. We need to stop, reflect, and try and understand the times. And the signs are there to see.
Back in 1956, Russian-born American writer and philosopher, Alice O’Connor (more famously known by her pen name, Ayn Rand) wrote these words,
“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
What prophetic foresight. If ever there was a recent example of this in our own state of Victoria, it was when the parliament gave then premier, Daniel Andrews, unfettered emergency powers without insisting on any due process (as specified in the Act) for the parliament itself to enforce. Suddenly, citizens were forced to live and operate only with permission, from travel and work to religious services, to weddings and funerals, to sitting on a park bench eating an ice-cream. I’m sure you remember those dark times. I do. In hindsight we can become very wise. It is hard to see coming something like what Rand coined “ultimate inversion” - the polar opposite of the opening phrase of both the constitutions of India and the United States (“We the people”) - when it is actually occurring. Rand saw this coming nearly 70 years ago.
One of the strategies that paves the way towards ultimate inversion is to create fear and then demonstrate that ‘we’re doing this for the safety of everyone’, and things like ‘we are following the (unelected) medical, scientific or (conflicting) expert advice’. This is often a fake moral ground construct, the sort of thing that has driven the climate change agenda for twenty years. We are told by our federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy that “we have to trust the science”. But this is increasingly difficult when scientific research is often found to have been faked or is biased in some way. For example, the University of Alabama’s Professor John Christy, and his team of experts, checked 108 climate change models from scientists and universities around the world – studies relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which sets parameters for carbon reduction policy development for member countries, including Australia. Christy’s team found that all 108 models had been “tweaked” by the scientists (he means “fudged”) who built them to arrive at their biased predictions of temperature increase in 100 years’ time. Every single model had deliberately exaggerated predicted temperature increases by at least two and a half to three times per year – this is huge in climate science. Yet, our government continues to say, on climate change, we have to trust the science, and then weaponise that science to create fear and force legislative change for their own socialist agenda.
The average person in the street, perhaps suspecting that this isn’t all kosher, has no accurate data to contradict the official line, and so, has to fall into line or risk ridicule. Are we approaching ultimate inversion? It looks like it. The are ample signs of it as more and more legislation is passed – and planned - that removes more and more freedom for the citizenry.
So, what do we do? Well, we don’t panic. We don’t quit. We don’t retreat or shrink back. NO! We take our roles as priests and intercessors very seriously. We are the salt of the earth. If we do not intercede because we are too busy, if we never seem to get around to it, if we think others can do it for us, we are in danger of losing our saltiness. We must NEVER think our priestly intercession has no effect. IT DOES!
Matthew 5:13 (NIV) [Jesus] "You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Think on these things … and pray! Join us at the prayer meetings this week.
Ps. Milton
[Sources: Maurice Newman (Spectator Magazine, April 6, 2024; Wikipedia, (Alice Connor); Inconvenient Facts: the Science Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know, by Gregory Wrightstone, pp. 40-45.]