THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Tough talk on immigration a boost for Australia's Leftist government

Tough talk on immigration a boost for Australia's Leftist government

JULIA Gillard could be forced to accept onshore processing of asylum-seekers because of a political deadlock over legislation to revive Labor's Malaysia Solution.

Yesterday, Tony Abbott crushed the Prime Minister's people swap deal with Malaysia by saying he would process asylum-seekers in third countries only if they were signatories to the UN convention on the treatment of refugees.

The Opposition Leader's stance ruled out Malaysia but allowed him to cling to his alternative proposal of processing asylum-seekers on the Pacific island of Nauru using facilities built by the Howard government.

As the impasse continues, a Newspoll indicates Ms Gillard's battle for offshore processing has coincided with an increase in her personal popularity among voters.

After two weeks of daily battle over her plan to circumvent last month's High Court ruling, which scuttled her Malaysia Solution, voter satisfaction with the Prime Minister's performance lifted from her lowest level on record.

According to the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian last weekend, voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard jumped from 23 per cent to 27 per cent and dissatisfaction fell seven percentage points from 68 per cent to 61 per cent.

As the Coalition stridently opposed the Malaysia Solution, Mr Abbott's personal approval fell five percentage points to 34 per cent and his disapproval rating climbed from 52 per cent to 54 per cent.

The government's bid to revive offshore processing remained deadlocked last night, as neither major party has the numbers to prevail, while the Greens, who control the Senate, oppose offshore processing in any form.

Last night, as he attacked the Coalition's position, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen conceded that if Labor's amendments, to be introduced to parliament tomorrow, were not passed, offshore processing would remain unlawful - the Greens position. "Therefore the obvious result of that is onshore processing," Mr Bowen said.

Last week, Ms Gillard, determined to press ahead with the Malaysia plan to deter people-smugglers from bringing asylum-seekers to Australia by boat, proposed an amendment to the Migration Act that would allow offshore processing in a location to be determined by the government of the day.

Yesterday, responding to concerns from the opposition and Labor's Left faction about the human rights of those sent to Malaysia, Ms Gillard proposed new amendments that would clearly specify that Malaysia could not send any asylum-seekers back to their country of origin and that would guarantee asylum claims would be processed in Malaysia, which is not a signatory to UN conventions.

She later told parliament the changes delivered on the "basic tenets" of the UN convention and, when coupled with agreements between the Australian and Malaysian governments, provided ample protection for the rights of the asylum-seekers.

"The eyes of the Australian community are upon us," Ms Gillard said during question time. "At the end of the day, this is not a debate between two competing policy positions - it is about executive government having the power to put in operation arrangements it sees as appropriate.

"Australians want us to resolve this issue and put it behind us. Australians want us to find common ground on this and get this done."

Mr Abbott said he was not prepared to back the Malaysia plan because it was bad policy. He said offshore processing only in those nations that had signed the UN refugee convention would "restore offshore processing, while retaining offshore protections". "It's a much superior proposal to what the government has put forward," he said. "Our proposal is a win-win."

Mr Abbott said the Coalition's policy position had been "crystal clear" for a decade. He invoked former prime minister John Howard's declaration that "we will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come".

Last night, Mr Bowen said the opposition wanted to stop the Malaysia agreement being implemented because Mr Abbott feared it would work.

But a meeting of Coalition MPs endorsed Mr Abbott's position. "If Julia Gillard wants to stop the boats she should support the Coalition's proposed amendments," Mr Abbott said after the meeting. "The right way to stop the boats is the combination of Nauru, temporary protection visas and turning boats around where it's safe to do so.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Tough talk on immigration a boost for Australia's Leftist government

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