>>13286902

Parliament of Australia - Senate Estimates

Legal And Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee - Monday, 22 March 2021

Senator KENEALLY: …In relation to ideologically motivated extremism, you cited in your annual threat assessment, as an example of a group that does not neatly fit under an umbrella term of right-wing extremism, the involuntary celibate movement, with its extreme misogynistic and violent ideologies. Are there other examples you can provide to us that you are seeing emerge in Australia that fit under 'ideologically motivated' but do not fit neatly under 'right-wing extremism'?

Mr Burgess: Again, I'll be careful here. We focus on groups or ideologies that are going to promote violence. QAnon, we can have a conversation about them. Some people think they do; other countries may have a stronger view. It may well be the case, but that's another strange ideology. These individuals have some form of a conspiracy-theory-led ideology that is of concern. I'm not sure where you could put that on a political spectrum. Again, that's why we don't think the assignment there is helpful.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Senate_estimates/legcon/2020-21_Additional_estimates

https://parlview.aph.gov.au/mediaPlayer.php?videoID=536735 (14:46:07)

https://qanon.pub/#4612

Repost from Q Research General #16855

>>13305307 (pb)

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>>13311373

Repost from Q Research General #16860

>>13309100 (pb)

A matching Video. They don't hide it anymore.

Lil Nas X - MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) (Official Video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k

(All pb) >>13305307, >>13305313, >>13305318, >>13305371, >>13305380

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>>13311373

>>13311389

https://qanon.pub/#925

https://qanon.pub/#3931

https://qanon.pub/#1832

https://qanon.pub/#4627

https://qanon.pub/#3594

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MK0j765ko4

What has QAnon got to do with Australians?

It is often called a cult, but that implies something limited and small. Others suggest it is better understood as a new religion, or political movement. It could be both.

Margaret Simons - MARCH 28, 2021

1/4

It was mid-December, three weeks before rioters stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was driving through the Northern Rivers region, just south of the Queensland border, and listening to podcasts by Pete Evans, Australia’s most prominent proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories.

I had asked Evans for an interview. I told him I wanted to understand his path from celebrity chef to paleo diet enthusiast to Trump supporter and proponent of QAnon. He did not reply. But others had agreed to talk.

The hippies, everyone I spoke to agreed, had been the beginning of this region’s reputation as a place for those prepared to question authority or, as one naturopath and QAnon conspiracy theorist put it to me, to “seek their own truth”.

Evans posts several new episodes of his Evolve podcast each week. I listened to him interview a former Victorian public servant, Sanjeev Sabhlok, who resigned because of Premier Daniel Andrews’ coronavirus lockdown - which Sabhlok described as “the great hysteria”. Another interview was with British “teacher, mystic and award-winning poet” Richard Rudd, who told Evans the world was self-regulating by culling itself and, almost as a throwaway line, described democracy as “mob rule”.

For the most part, Evans adopted the stance of the wide-eyed student, albeit one convinced that nothing mainstream media or most politicians said could be trusted. He said he “glances” at QAnon, just as he “glances” at mainstream media.

But as December progressed and Donald Trump escalated his claims about a stolen election, Evans became more explicit. On January 6 - the day of the Capitol riots - he interviewed ‘Dave’, who puts out one of the most popular US QAnon podcasts, introducing him as a “truthseeker”. Dave said Biden would never be president. Trump had won the election.

The next day, Evans posted a video to Instagram. He was wearing a wetsuit in camouflage colours. He jerked a thumb to his chest and asked: “Are we going into battle? Maybe. Seems that way.”

According to a study by the US NGO The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, by the middle of last year Australia had become the fourth-biggest country in the world for QAnon social media content and discussion, and while the United States still overwhelmingly dominates, the Australian footprint is growing - as it is in Britain and Canada.

The QAnon movement has swallowed up virus denialism, suspicions about 5G (which some believe causes COVID-19) and parts of the anti-vaccination movement, as well as ancient, almost archetypal tropes of anti-Semitism, of evil enemies eating babies.

Meanwhile, a new ecosystem of media and influencers has been created - podcasts, vodcasts, video ‘documentaries’ and books.This world overlaps with the mainstream media. The two most popular websites linked to by Australian QAnon posters are those of Sky News and The Australian, both owned by News Corporation, according to the Institute of Strategic Dialogue. The third most popular is the ABC.

There were many different groups among the mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6 - including pre-existing racist groups such as the Proud Boys and the veteran-dominated right-wing militia the Oath Keepers. But why did tens of thousands of ordinary Americans spend time and money answering Trump’s call to come to Washington? The vibe, the linking idea, the evangelism and the binding network was QAnon.

(continued)

>>13313378

2/4

It’s best to put aside, so far as you are able, rigid ideas of left and right in trying to understand QAnon. Think organic food is something inner-city lefties worry about? When the so-called ‘QAnon shaman’ - the man in the horned headdress arrested after the Capitol riots - requested organic food in prison, he was true to type. Organic food is big with QAnon, part of its suspicion of big business and chemical companies in particular.

QAnon is often called a cult, but that implies something limited and small. Others suggest it is better understood as a new religion, or political movement. It could be both. Lutheranism was both, when Martin Luther was able to spread his ideas through Europe thanks to the revolutionary media technology of his times - the printing press.

There is something medieval about QAnon. It has brought myths and the fantastical back to the centre of public life, after the printed word and the Enlightenment pushed them to the fringes.

It has been able to do so because of the disruptive media technologies of our times. Now, for the first time in human history, anyone with an internet connection can publish to the world within minutes of deciding to do so. There is lots to celebrate; voices once excluded from public debate can now be heard. And there is lots to fear; voices once excluded from public debate can now be heard.

I am not a technological determinist. Human beings make technologies, and human beings decide how to use them, but we can see what the academics call the ‘affordances’ of social media in QAnon, with its own ecology of influencers, sources and ‘facts’. Don’t tell a conspiracy theorist that they need to look at the evidence. They have been. They have lots of evidence, just different evidence from you.

Engaged signal

Mullumbimby is probably best known as Australia’s centre of opposition to vaccination. Only 52 per cent of five-year-olds in the area were fully immunised in 2015–16, compared with 92.9 per cent nationally.

Tashi Lhamo, a high school teacher and mother of small children who lives there, is intelligent, easy to like and clearly an effective campaigner and lobbyist. She doesn’t want to talk about vaccination. Her focus is on 5G technology. Thanks to the campaign Lhamo has led, so far the Byron Shire has blocked the rollout of 5G.

Lhamo assures me that she does not believe 5G causes COVID. Rather, she thinks the “crazy” idea has been put about by the mainstream media and telecommunications companies to discredit people like her who have legitimate concerns.

She sees significance in the fact that Telstra holds shares in “the Murdoch Press”, and also in the fact that Chief Health Officer Brendan Murphy’s wife is a lawyer who has worked for media companies. (Telstra owns about 35 per cent of Murdoch’s Foxtel pay television company. Murphy’s wife is a professor specialising in media law and a member of the SBS board.)

“I started to read about the internet of things that 5G is going to allow … And I just thought our exposure to wireless radiation has increased a quintillion times in our lifetime and it’s going to go up again. It’s not a future that I would like my children to be left with.”

She began to lobby local councillors and found support among the Greens, who held four of nine seats on council. In the early days she asked Evans for help because his Facebook page had more than a million followers, and “he was the only celebrity in Australia that was having the conversation”.

Lhamo is aware of QAnon. “When it first came on the horizon, I saw it in my periphery, and I was like, let’s have a look at what they’re on about … now I give it no weight at all.”

(continued)

>>13313391

3/4

Sarah Ndiaye is one of the Greens councillors who has helped Lhamo. Ndiaye is not a 5G sceptic, or anti-vaccination, but she understands why people don’t trust government.

Tony Abbott said he wouldn’t cut funding to the ABC, and then he did. Doctors are prevented from telling the truth about how we treat refugees in detention. The government raids journalists and locks up whistleblowers, and they ignore climate change science. “Why should people like Tashi trust them? I’m not as cynical as people like her are. I have a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of governance, but I don’t resent their distrust.”

Ndiaye has a background as a journalist. She says it is about critical thinking - going to original sources, triangulating information, being prepared to question.

But critical thinking is what QAnon people say they are doing - and the rest of us are failing to do. They call us #sheeple - people like sheep, because of our trust in authority.

I wonder why I believe differently to Lhamo. It’s not true to say it’s about scientific evidence. It’s more about authority - accepting the word of an elite. I am not a climate change scientist, nor an expert in infectious diseases, nor knowledgeable about radiation, yet I believe in COVID as a real threat, and in human-induced climate change, and am calm about 5G. I trust in certain kinds of qualifications, certain kinds of consensus, certain kinds of authority.

I have heard many stories of Australians pulled into QAnon. There is the senior accountant - once part of an Australian state anti-corruption body - who has cut off his contact with friends and now spends most of his time interpreting “Q-drops”. There are doctors and lawyers and journalists of all ages and localities.

The wellness industry - naturopathy, homeopathy - is a recognised ‘soft’ path into the QAnon world. And which of us has not taken a vitamin supplement for which there is no, or only dubious, scientific evidence?

And then there is reality. There is corruption. There are reasons to worry about big pharmaceutical and chemical companies and their power. There are abusers in Hollywood. There are paedophiles in the churches. There is Harvey Weinstein. There is Jeffrey Epstein.

In Nimbin, where the hippies settled after the 1973 Aquarius Festival, I learned that, despite popular belief, the hippies never dropped out. They were angry, some of them. Alienated. They had high hopes and many of these were dashed. And yet they stayed engaged.

Arguably, the Australia environment movement started here when some of the recently settled hippies heard the Terania Creek rainforest was to be clear-felled. They mounted the first physical blockade to protect rainforest in Australia. They won. Neville Wran’s government saved the forest, and today it is part of the Nightcap National Park.

Through protest, through petitions, through public speaking tours, for causes both local and global, powerful and hopeless, the hippies continued to engage. They are still doing it today.

When they succeeded it was not on their own, but because other institutions of liberal democracy also acted. Neville Wran’s government for the Terania forest. The High Court in the Tasmanian Dams case. Bob Hawke and the Daintree Forest.

Compare the hippies to the mob that raided the Capitol in Washington. The latter had no list of demands, no proposed program for bringing about change. Some of the militia organisations apparently had plans - to capture and maybe even kill lawmakers - but when Trump failed to lead them, most of the QAnon mob had no idea what to do.

Will this movement now fade away? Or will its followers remain - disconnected, angry, beyond the reach of the rest of the world - waiting for a more effective leader?

Ndiaye represents the challenges faced by politicians in a representative democracy when some of their electors are “finding their own truth”. It is the trajectory of people like Lhamo that will determine the future of this political problem. Engaged, changing and changed, like the hippies - or isolated, distrusting, perhaps dangerous?

(continued)

>>13313401

4/4

Can Australia be different?

Associate Professor Aaron Martin, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne, believes there are real differences between the US and Australia that mean groups such as QAnon are less likely to become mainstream here.

European Australia was founded as a “pragmatic exercise” by the British. We never had the revolutionary fervour, or the passion of the pilgrims fleeing religious persecution. On this account, the things that so often disappoint about Australia - its lack of idealism, its middle-of-the- road blandness - may be strengths.

Martin admits his optimistic view of Australia is challenged by our political failure to deal with climate change policy. There, public policy has not followed the science. He also worries about the impact if one of our far-right parties displays more competence than has been the case so far.

And against his optimism, there is the clear evidence that QAnon has a fast-growing local following. LNP MP George Christensen has backed Trump’s claims that the US presidential election was stolen. Liberal Craig Kelly has too, together with endorsing unproven treatments for COVID and questioning the need to vaccinate. In Victoria, Liberal MP Bernie Finn posted to his Facebook page claims that the deep state was behind Trump’s removal.

I thought social media might help refresh journalists’ sense of mission - and could be powerful when combined with the newsroom virtues of disinterest and verification. But the truth is the democratic story is playing out most intensely elsewhere, out of the reach of professional journalists and their dwindling audiences.

Could we arrive at a time when the new media are more responsible custodians of the public conversation than the owners of the printing presses and broadcasting licences? How will the decisions be made, and who will make them?

I have one thing in common with QAnon. I would have been content if Julian Assange had been pardoned. His radical acts of disclosure overlap with what journalists are meant to do. If we promote the role of the governing class as including media, do we also accept that governments will never again lose control of what gets disclosed and how, and who gets to weave meaning from the facts? Or, to peg back this social media-enabled disease, will we have to accept the very thing QAnon warns of - government mind control?

Margaret Simons is a freelance journalist, author and honorary principal fellow at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne. This is an edited extract of an essay she wrote for the Autumn 2021 edition of Meanjin.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/what-has-qanon-got-to-do-with-australians-20210209-p570sl.html

Liberal MP Andrew Laming to quit politics at next election

Cameron Gooley - 28 March 2021

Queensland backbencher Andrew Laming will resign from politics at the next election, after allegations aired by Nine News in a series of reports.

"Andrew is not re-contesting the next election for the LNP, we'll find a new candidate and that will be up to the preselectors," Deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg said.

It comes after two prominent female Liberal politicians said Dr Laming should resign from federal politics in a joint appearance on the ABC's Insiders program on Sunday morning.

During their appearance, Katie Allen and Sarah Henderson said Dr Laming's alleged behaviour was unacceptable.

In a statement late on Saturday night Dr Laming said he would take medical leave and use the time to complete counselling services he had previously committed to.

In a statement released on Sunday morning, he said he would take courses in empathy and communication "not just to be a better MP, but to be a deeper and more empathic person".

"The common thread of the last week has been not demonstrating anything close to understanding how my actions affect others," he said.

"I intend to own those mistakes."

Last week Nine News aired allegations that Dr Laming had used Facebook to accuse one woman of misappropriating funds from a charity organisation she worked at, which she denies.

Before the story aired Dr Laming apologised for and retracted his online comments in Parliament, but later reporting alleged he had downplayed the apology in a Facebook post — and Prime Minister Scott Morrison directed him to seek professional counselling.

"I’m very pleased he's going to be taking some time off," Dr Allen said on Insiders.

"I really think he needs to have a pretty serious look about whether he's going to recontest the next general election."

Sarah Henderson told Insiders host David Speers she hoped Dr Laming would leave Parliament.

"We can certainly say as Liberal women this is not good enough … I'm not comfortable with [the alleged] conduct, and I hope Andrew makes the right decision."

Labor says Laming should resign from Parliament

Labor said news that Dr Laming would not recontest his seat was not good enough, and Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese called on him to resign from Parliament altogether.

He also said Labor would consider denying a pair arrangement with the Coalition if Dr Laming has not returned by the next parliamentary sittings.

"There's a range of measures available to the Labor Party when Parliament resumes … we regard these circumstances as being very different from the circumstances whereby someone has a health issue," Mr Albanese said.

A pair arrangement occurs when the Opposition agrees to have one of its members abstain from a vote if a government MP cannot attend Parliament.

The Coalition currently has a one seat majority in the House of Representatives, where Dr Laming sits, after Craig Kelly moved to the crossbench last month.

If Dr Laming were to resign from Parliament, the government would lose its already slim majority – but Mr Kelly has previously guaranteed confidence and supply.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-28/andrew-laming-wont-contest-his-seat-next-election/100033900

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbAFSN11BRs

Repost from Q Research General #16874

>>13319822 (pb)

>>13319657 (PB)

>Aust pm talks about taking down global pedophile network

>>13319682 (PB)

Got vid, it's just after the 30second mark:

s/ https://youtu.be/NKqiJ6p6qn8 (3:21)

>>13320397

>>13322581

Dutton becomes defence minister

29 Mar 2021

Sky News Australia

Peter Dutton will take over the role of defence minister, Scott Morrison has announced.

Mr Morrison praised Mr Dutton’s record as home affairs minister, thanking him for his years of service.

Mr Dutton will also take on the role of Leader of the Government in the House.

Stuart Robert receives the portfolio of employment, workforce, skills, small and family business.

Christian Porter also remains in cabinet, acquiring the role of minister for industry, science and technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKqiJ6p6qn8