Frank wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2022 at 10:08am:



Go - tell it to the Solomon Islands government - not the people - the government.......

Grappler Truth Teller Feller wrote on Mar 30^th, 2022 at 7:54pm:


It is about the mentality of convicts that comes from education.
The British have been training you for generations not to be free citizens,
but a obedient subjects of her Majesty.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Paul Monk

Geopolitically, economically and in terms of immigration and multiculturalism, China is the biggest challenge we face as a country.

The biggest mistake we keep being invited to make is to think that China is well governed and just another country.

It is vital that there be a deeper and more serious understanding of how it is actually governed.
...
This is the regime in Beijing that has imposed extraordinary economic sanctions on Australia and is seeking to extend its influence and military presence across the South Pacific. This is the regime that its Australian friends urge us to mollify, in the interests of better relations, claiming that the recent deterioration in those relations has been the consequence of tactless rhetoric by the Coalition government.

Its routine behaviour towards its own people, as shown in these excerpts, is ruthless. And they are merely the tip of the iceberg, as Fitzgerald shows in detail.

This is not a regime which any of us should want to see flourish, or expand its influence. On the contrary, we have every reason to seek change in the way it behaves, for our own good and that of the Chinese people. If the other significant states of East Asia, starting with Japan and then including South Korea and Taiwan, can change from developmental dictatorship to liberal democratic governance and political decency, why not China? Change China? The problem isn’t China or the Chinese. It’s the Communist Party’s Maoism.

Paul Monk is the former head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation, the author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005), The West in a Nutshell (2009) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018), among other books.

Abolishing the rule of law

On April 28, 2017, the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court in China’s northern port city of Tianjin announced the conviction and sentencing of lawyer Li Heping for subversion of state power.

Two years earlier, the authorities had ordered the arrest and detention of more than 300 lawyers in the infamous “709 crackdown” (July 9, 2015) targeting China’s professional legal defenders.

Li was one of them. Over two years in detention, pending trial, he was tortured by electric shock and forcibly medicated with a drug that, by his wife’s account, caused “muscle pains, lethargy and blurred vision”. One month was spent in shackles, leaving him ­unable to stand.

On that same day, in Tianjin’s sister city of Melbourne, former prime minister Paul Keating took to the stage and mocked critics of China’s human rights record for being “hung up” about legal defenders in China. Speaking at a La Trobe University event, Keating dismissed concerns about the abuse of legal process in China as a trivial blip in the record of the “best government in the world of the last 30 years. Full stop”. Critics of China’s government in Australia, Keating said, were “hung up about the fact that some legal detainees don’t get legal representation”.

A giant of the Australian Labor Party and master of the larrikin idiom, Keating spoke to an adoring audience. Packed into the Melbourne Recital Centre, they laughed on cue and nodded in ­affirmation. To be fair, they were probably unaware of the trial under way in their sister city; but it is also unclear that knowledge would have made any difference to their responses. A lot is forgiven for the Communist Party of China for having – in one of the more widely circulated phrases of the past half century – “lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty”. One outspoken lawyer might have been dismissed as a fair price to pay.

In fact, Li was one of hundreds of legal defenders who had recently been rounded up, imprisoned and tortured on charges of subversion. This assault on the legal profession was no robust rebuff of overpaid lawyers, as Keating’s sideways swipe might have suggested, but a signal to China and the world that three decades of experimentation with the rule of law were over. The end was marked by the rise to power of Xi Jinping, son of senior party veteran and government leader Xi Zhongxun. Since assuming office, Xi has undertaken several measures to end the process of Reform and Opening (c1979-2009) that made China the most successful developing country in the world over the preceding three decades.

Li’s conviction, announced early in Xi’s second term, was one of many signs that the party was no longer tolerating restraints on its exercise of power.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/maoist-china-under-xi-can-never-be-our-friend/news-story/4761b93acf3be79591d97e08c098e453

Keating is a stooge.

Apparently humans are too insane to be trusted to think for themselves....

thegreatdivide wrote on Oct 17^th, 2022 at 10:53am:


But if you put those same humans into the CCP, you can trust them to do your thinking for you....

The Chinese are not sending their best:

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102108026

Cuckoo smurfing. It's a thing.
https://www.afp.gov.au/what-we-do/crime-types/proceeds-crime/money-laundering

philperth2010 wrote on Mar 18^th, 2023 at 9:00am:

It is about the mentality of convicts that comes from education.
The British have been training you for generations not to be free citizens, but a obedient subjects of her Majesty.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You are arguing with a bot, Phil!