As a small child, my parents took me each year to have my photo taken with the Santa enthroned in the (now long gone) Forges of Footscray department store.

I suspect it (like my baptism, first communion and confirmation) were things that were more for my parents’ benefit than for me – a photo of your toddler with Santa is one of those things a parent wants to cherish.

Adults are not really interested in having photos taken with Santa. After all, Santa is not real – he is probably some poor bloke who is rather down on his luck and wanting to supplement his pension by wearing a red suit and white beard (I try not to be too cynical like the people who suspect Santas are all just winos). And the myth of Santa Claus has more to do with a clever late 19th century Coca Cola advertising campaign anyway.

But whilst children are regularly, photographed with the supposedly famous and powerful figure of Santa Claus, Grown ups are also interested in having their photos taken with supposedly famous and powerful figures. Like politicians, current and former, for example.

And Grown ups are prepared to pay far more for the privilege.

Take businessman and former veteran of the Peoples Liberation Army Huifeng ‘Haha’ Liu for example. He has spent at least $21,125 in buying his photo opportunities to pose with former Liberal Prime Ministers John “Santa” Howard and Tony “Elf” Abbott, and with federal Liberal MPs Michael “Elf” Sukkar and Gladys “Mrs Santa” Liu (no relation, I think).

The two following links discuss him if you want further details:

https://www.clownworldau.com/story/huifeng-haha-liu/

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-04/asio-red-flags-liberal-donor-over-foreign-interference-risks/13018938

OK… now that you have chuckled over the Clown World blog and pondered the serious article in the ABC Newsfeed, you know that ASIO see this former member of Communist China’s armed forces as a threat to Australia’s national security for some reason or other.

Comrade ‘Haha’ is obviously no laughing matter.

There are two things about this chap which I find troubling.

The first is his creation (with the encouragement of such people as Gladys Liu and various misguided government officials) of the Australian Emergency Assistance Association Inc (AEAAI), an organisation funded by the Communist Chinese government through its consulate, which has 50,000 contacts in Australia on WeChat and a claimed 1000 ‘volunteers’ ready to rush at a moment’s notice to the side of any ethnically Chinese who is the victim of a crime (whether they are a PRC citizen or an Australian of Chinese descent) to provide assistance and to report back to the Chinese Consulate (just ‘in case’ these people need consular assistance).

As you might notice from the ABC article above, people are concerned that this is a way in which the Chinese Consulate is gathering information on the Chinese diaspora for other purposes.

In August last year, I did discuss, elsewhere in this blog, that the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, at Article 55.1, places ‘a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of the State’ on Consular missions. It appears to me that, with the tacit complicity of those domestic officials who have supported the AEAAI, that through this organisation, the network of PRC consulates in Australia is overstepping their boundaries.

Secondly, this chap has a habit of making quite generous donations to the Liberal Party. Whether he was an Army officer or ‘other rank’ during his time of military service, the Peoples Liberation Army is not open to people who are politically unreliable in the eyes of the Communist Regime. Service in the PLA is highly coveted. Either he is a Communist Party member or at the very least very committed to the Communist Party’s agenda.

Yet the Liberal Party has, supposedly, a history of opposition to Socialist and Communist ideology, and a philosophical basis grounded in liberal philosophy (ie the rights of the individual). So why are we seeing them give Comrade Haha the time of day, let alone accepting donations and having him pose for photos with senior Liberal luminaries?

There have been significant problems unearthed in the media in recent years about how the Liberals operate. This is not the first time that Liberal politicians or ex-politicians have been somewhat compromised in their quest for donor monies. Take the ‘lobsters with mobsters’ scandal which embarrassed then Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy in mid 2017. Or the various reports regarding irregularities allegedly involving various officials and MPs in the recruitment of new members en masse from various church groups and other sources – the type of activity commonly referred to as ‘branch staking’.

The Liberals need to clean up their act. Instead of pursuing donations from foreign non-citizen communists and their sympathisers who are trying to curry favour and influence with elected officials, they need to focus on listening to ordinary Australians (ie Menzies’ ‘The Forgotten People’) who are not multi-millionaires with tens of thousands of dollars to donate, but who otherwise will support ideas which promote individual liberty and feel a sense of genuine patriotism to the Australian nation.

Obviously, with a very small parliamentary majority, the Liberal party will not kick out any of its MPs – that is a degree of political suicide any government will see as one step too far (dethroning Prime Ministers is as far as it goes). But some things, such as loyalty to the nation and the integrity of our democracy, mean that perhaps our major political parties need to start booting out those MPs, former MPs, and lobbyists who are too closely aligned to foreign interests.

So, we might say ‘Haha’, but I don’t think anyone is laughing. This is all something which is very serious.

A lot of memes have been sent to me over the past few days marking the end of the old year and the start of the new year.

Most of them farewell 2020 with some profanities of some sort – I will not repeat them because, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, swearing gives people an excuse not to listen to you (or to read you, although I have very few actual readers on this blog).

Which got me thinking as to what the next orbit around the sun formally known as Anno Domini 2021 has got in store for us.

When the covid first invaded our consciousness in January last year, one of the many names it had (and yes, it seems to have had as many names as Aragorn son of Arathorn or The Phantom) was the Novel Coronavirus.

I’m not sure about you, but for me, the novelty of the pandemic and its cause has definitely worn off.

Novelty aside, 2021 still has a coronavirus literally plaguing us, just as 2020 did. In fact, I think this year could be worse.

Let’s look at some numbers:

. as of today, there are approximately 85 million recorded cases of covid worldwide

. the number of cases is doubling every 72 days

. the fatality rate is currently approximately 2.2%

. vaccinations in the USA are occurring at 200,000 people per day – as a double shot, at this rate, it would take 10 years to vaccinate the USA alone.

So, taking a hard look at the reality that these numbers mean (maths was always one of my stronger subjects in school), the number of covid cases could very possibly double 5 times over the course of 2021, meaning 32 times as many cases as we have now. That would mean an approximate 2.7 billion cases by the end of 2021 worldwide, and almost 60 million more covid related deaths.

This is not some sort of eschatological crisis (I have not changed my views from what I wrote last January). It is simply mathematical reality as to what is quite possible, and the realisation that countries like the USA need, if they were to try and get the covid under control within the next year, they need to vaccinate at a daily rate ten times higher than they currently are.

If Australia were to start vaccinating immediately (and I am glad we are waiting to see how things go in the USA and UK first), we would need to vaccinate 150,000 people per day to get it done by the end of 2021.

And that would be assuming that most people are going to be reasonable about vaccinations. We live in an era where vaccinations are now seen skeptically by a large part of the population. [As an aside, the refusal of militant islamic fundamentalists in certain remote pockets of the world to permit vaccinations has prevented the elimination of polio, which is now making a comeback. So if there is skepticism around polio vaccinations amongst some not particularly reasonable people, imagine what the reaction will be to a covid vaccine.]

Hence, I am rather cautious as to what to expect in 2021. I am still maintaining a large stash of toilet paper, which I am replenishing with regular visits to the supermarket, and I will not be too surprised if I continue to spend a large proportion of my working hours this year seated at my dining table in front of my laptop.

I just hope that is the worst that I see this year. We all are worried about the people we care about succumbing to this plague.

You can probably surmise that I am a fan of Tolkien.

Nature-wise, 2020 has been a good year for sighting native animals in my street. I saw a kookaburra across the road in August, and in autumn I sighted an owl in my gum tree on two separate nights. There have been various sightings of marbled geckos, mostly around the BBQ.

And on the weekend, I spotted a lizard, probably a blue tongue, darting into the pile of wood propped up against one side of my house (a recently dismantled fence which I am keeping for BBQ fuel).

It is gratifying that, even as suburbia grows further and further out, there are still native animals in the confines of my backyard.

Is it too much to wish for a koala to take up residence in my gum tree?

During the current trade crisis with Communist China, I have been reading a lot about Chinese ownership of various Australian interests.

Aside from wineries (an issue very close to my heart), Chinese Communist interests own Ansell, Swisse, Bellamys, Altinta Energy, and Energy Australia.

Landbridge, a Chinese company closely aligned to the communist regime, has a 99 year lease on the Port of Darwin. This was approved in 2015 by then cabinet minister the Hon. Andrew Robb, much to the chagrin of our friends and allies, the Americans. A year later, Mr Robb, in retiring from politics, accepted a $880,000 per year consultancy with Landbridge immediately upon his departure from Federal Parliament.

He resigned from this consultancy in February 2019, just as laws were being tightened on lobbying and foreign interests.

But in being reminded of this ‘consultancy’ and the circumstances under which it was entered into today, I cannot help but wonder about some of our elected officials and what their motives are. It is a bad look, and casts doubt on the probity of the process which led, a year before the consultancy, to a decision potentially prejudicial to our national security being made.

Our politicians are, compared to the rest of the population, generously paid. They are also given generous provision for their retirement. All we really expect that they should be honest and act in the best interests of the nation. There should be limits on their ability to profit in their retirements from their political careers in ways which could benefit foreign interests.

Let me start by saying that I like the wines made at Kilikanoon. A few years ago, I had a half dozen wines delivered to me by the then Wine Society (a cooperative which tries to save money for its members by bulk buying wines at deep discounts to the recommended retail price and on selling at cost to its members).

The Kilikanoon wines in that box were a bit unusual, in that they were made from French grapes by Kilikanoon. But I liked them, and I was happy that I did not pay full price for them.

The escalating trade crisis which Communist China has inflicted on most Australian exports in recent wines has led to calls to boycott Chinese products, and most recently a list of 41 Australian wineries has circulated in the past week which are apparently owned by Chinese interests. The suggestion is that Australians should boycott those wineries.

I think it is important, when thinking about boycotting anything, as to whether you are hurting yourself, or people whom you do not want to hurt by participating in a boycott.

After all, Communist China is not doing itself any favours by placing bans on Australian coal, meat, wine or barley, to just name a few products. Their main other source of coal is Mongolia, and there has been disruption to their industry from switching Australian coal off. Similarly Chinese beer, minus Australian barley, is going to be a whole lot more expensive.

And refusing to accept Australian meat and wine is just cutting off your nose to spite your face. Why would you deny yourself such great quality food and drink?

Of course, the Communist regime which rules China does not care about Chinese people per se. The Great Leap Forward, as even Homer Simpson knows, killed perhaps 60 million people.

Before boycotting those 41 wineries which are purportedly Chinese owned, we should think about a few things.

One is that a lot of Australians are employed by such wineries, and that their continued viability is important for preserving those jobs.

Another is that wineries in a lot of regions are interdependent to some degree, as fostering the local wine tourism. Kill off one winery, or perhaps three or four in an emerging wine region, and the cellar door sales for all might plummet as wine tours become less viable. That can have knock on effects on hotels, cafes, restaurants and niche retail in small towns.

And a third is that if someone happens to be ethnically Chinese, or even born in mainland China, but now an Australian citizen committed to their new country and to making a life here, they should be treated the same as any other Australian. After all, I think anyone in their right mind would rather live in Australia than in a highly polluted communist dictatorship.

So boycotting Chinese owned Australian wineries becomes a much more complex issue than would appear at first. The problem becomes more one as to whether we can identify wineries owned by individuals and entities closely connected with or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and its regime, and if so, what would be the local economic impacts of having those wineries suffer from a boycott?

As an aside, I have seen the list of 41 wineries, and I must say, there are only five which I know anything about. Aside from Kilikanoon, there is Burge Family Wines (which does not mention Chinese ownership on its website, and is a separate entity from the Grant Burge Wines of which I am very fond), Chateau Yaldara, Ferngrove, and Cimicky Wines (a friend of mine is a huge fan of the latter).

This does suggest, when you look at the various giants who own most of the wine industry in Australia (I do own 1000 Treasury Wine Estate shares, so I do have a dog in this fight), that Chinese interests are pretty little.

But that is not to say that Australian wine exporters are not going to suffer. Perhaps it is our patriotic duty to redouble our purchases of Penfolds wines now that China does not want them (and perhaps Treasury can lower the price of Bin 28 or Bin 389 to something more reasonable). We drink a lot of domestic wine already – maybe we should become better informed as to who owns the various labels of which we are so fond before we buy them.

I would hope that there is a silver lining, that the wine exporters who have been shipping premium beverage to China focus instead on our local market, and lower their price to something which makes it better value for money.

As for Kilikanoon? Chinese owned or not, if one of the wine discounters I regularly buy from phones me and offers me a case of their wines at a deep discount to the regular recommended retail price, who am I to say no?

A couple of years ago, in an unexpected display of Walkey Award-worthy investigative journalism, the writers of gossip magazine New Idea (commonly called ‘No Idea’ by those who do not read it) ended the political career of National Party MP Andrew Broad.

Mr Broad, it transpired, had been trying to pick up women (whilst married) on a sugar baby website. One of those women decided, given that she had not profited from meeting him, to sell her story to New Idea.

That is probably the most truthful and accurate piece of reporting printed in New Idea in recent times. But it did meet the criterion of tittilating gossip, which is what the readers (if you can call them that) of New Idea and similar magazines buy it for.

Which segues me to the title of this post. Jennifer Aniston is one of the long standing cover girls of these gossip magazines, given her beauty, succession of handsome boyfriends and husbands, and the general drama of her personal life (which would delight the readership as they indulge in a spot of schadenfreude). For a long while, New Idea would run cover stories announcing either her pregnancy or (after she reached an age where this was no longer likely) her adoption plans.

If half of the reports about Jennifer Aniston’s supposed pregnancy were true, she indeed would have as many children as the proverbial old woman who lived in a shoe.

What has caused me to go on this rant about gossip magazines this morning (at a time when Australian Army war crimes and the activities of communist China are far more pressing), is that last week’s cover story for New Idea combined the mix of editorial malice and superficiality which is innate to the gossip magazines.

The cover featured a picture of the former Home and Away starlet known then as Bec Cartwright and now as Bec Hewitt, wife of a former leading tennis champion. The heading to the story was ‘Dumped’.

Of course, it did not relate to what first comes to mind (ie the end of the Hewitt marriage), but rather to something to do with Bec Hewitt’s now somewhat superfluous acting career.

Cover stories featuring the insinuation that the long married Hewitts have broken up are one of the staples of New Idea, along with Jennifer Aniston’s personal life and the supposed activities of various younger Royals. You can see why – rich, good looking, famous. The bored housewife pushing her trolley down the supermarket aisle is going to get her fix of schadenfreude from the cover story, and buy the gossip magazine.

I am not sure how long this has generally been the formula followed by gossip magazines, but it does offend me for several reasons. One is the blatant dishonesty of the cover stories. Another is that these stories are, aside from untrue, pretty shallow. But the most serious is that they represent a degree of thinly veiled malice.

Over the past few years, just about all of the so called Lads’ Magazines such as FHM, Ralph, Loaded and Zoo have closed down. They were accused of promoting ‘rape culture’. At the very least, they were sexist and silly, focusing on images of artificially big breasted young women, alcohol abuse, fast cars and other toys for boys. The public outgrew those sorts of silly publications.

Is it not time that the public outgrew New Idea and Women’s Day? I wish it were so.

Have you ever seen a real dead body? Relatively few people do, and hopefully very rarely. I have only three times – just after my father died, at the open casket rosary reading for an uncle, and at an open casket funeral for the father of a close colleague. It is not something you really want to see, and you should never trivialise it, as the body is all that is left of someone who in life was loved by others.

About two or three years ago, an exhibition toured Australia which was called ‘Real Bodies’. It featured the corpses of various dead people, stripped down to their muscles and organs, and preserved using a process called ‘plasticisation’ or some such. These bodies were often posed in such a way as if they were undertaking actions in real life, like running or kicking a soccer ball. I was sickened to the stomach when I read of it.

These bodies all originated from Communist China, and they all seemed to be of young people. Young people are statistically less likely to die of natural causes, which makes me wonder how exactly these bodies were sourced. I have grave suspicions that, in a country where involuntary organ transplants occur from dissidents and political prisoners, those bodies were the remnants of lives which had been violently cut short by the regime.

Definitely not something to view for one’s own amusement.

I was thinking of this exhibition this week when I was reading about the Chinese government’s inflammatory tweet about Australian war crimes, featuring a doctored photo.

As I have written recently in this blog, I am appalled by the revelation that some of our troops have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

But there is a big difference between those war crimes and the crimes against humanity committed in Communist China. Australian war crimes have been committed by individuals and units in violation of our laws, and where the only blame that can be laid at the feet of the Australian nation is that of a failure of leadership in the defence forces, rather than a condoning of such atrocities. These have not been covered up. They have been investigated and prosecutions are to follow. People will be held accountable.

The Communist Chinese state is totally different. Right now, aside from its involuntary organ donation program and its provision of freshly slain corpses for museum exhibits that trivialise the lives of those who have died, it continues to repress its Uyghur minority, with millions detained in what could be best described as concentration camps. It continues to repress the formerly independent nation of Tibet. It constantly ignores international law.

That the Communist Chinese state behaves in this way is not surprising – they are after all a totalitarian dictatorship which has, over its 70 year history, been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of their own people. The free people of Taiwan and the formerly free people of Hong Kong have great reason to be anxious, as they are the first at threat from this tyranny after the people on the mainland.

And we need to remember that there is a very big moral difference between our own nation and Communist China, for all that those inflammatory twitter images seek to present Australia as worse than they are. The Commonwealth of Australia does not condone war crimes or crimes against humanity by its agents. It punishes those who commit such crimes. The Peoples Republic of China, on the other hand, has a policy of committing crimes against humanity against its own people. That is a big difference.

Australians are not always good at picking their folk heroes. Ned Kelly is still seen by many, and not just by the bogan element, as a rebel against oppressive authority, rather than as a petty criminal from a family of petty criminals who turned into a cold blooded murderer and hostage taker.

Similarly, Breaker Morant, executed during the Boer War for murder, has been seen by many as a martyr and a scapegoat for the failings of British imperialism. Few look at the details of what he did, and what his legal defence was.

The accusations on which Morant was charged included the summary execution of a wounded prisoner of war, four other prisoners of war, and of the killing of at least four civilians. His defence did not centre on his innocence of the guilty deed, but that he was following orders to ‘take no prisoners’ issued by Lord Kitchener.

This defence, some five decades later, would become infamous as the Nuremberg Defence.

The trial of Breaker Morant and several of his fellow officers, for what effectively were war crimes, is one of the few times that any Australians have been accused and held to account for such abhorrent conduct. That he has, despite his deeds, been seen since that time as a scapegoat and a martyr rather than as a war criminal is indicative that there is a lesson in this episode that we have not learned.

This is a particularly salient point this week, on the release of the Brereton Report into alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan which has found that at least 39 civilians or prisoners have been murdered by Australian special forces troops, and recommended that criminal charges be brought against 19 soldiers.

How could this happen? Australia has a great affection for its defence forces, and for the tradition of citizen soldiers who have volunteered for duty in defence of the nation in two world wars, a tradition which makes up a great part of the foundation history of the Australian nation. Our firm belief is that our soldiers fight fair, despite the brutality of war, and that we protect civilians.

When did we stop being the good guys?

The Brereton Report does not come as a major surprise. In recent years, various journalists have run stories, based on allegations made by former soldiers present, of war crimes committed in Afghanistan by various soldiers. One of those, the VC winner Ben Roberts-Smith, has taken court action for defamation against the Fairfax press on allegations made against him. He has in the past day announced that he has put his medals up as collateral to fund his legal defence, coming forward as one of the men likely to face charges as a result of this report.

There appear to have been some very significant shifts in culture within the special forces, as well as some serious failings in leadership that have led to this situation. Whilst patrol leaders (ie NCOs) appear to have been the ring leaders in the actual perpetration of those war crimes, such activities do not occur in a vacuum. The leadership of special forces, as anywhere else in the Army, lies with commissioned officers. What were squadron and regimental commanders doing whilst SAS patrols were systemically committing acts against unarmed civilians or helpless prisoners? At the very least, they were not sending the right messages, or setting the right tone, for the culture and the behavioural expectations of their units.

More worryingly perhaps, many of these former special forces officers have since progressed into the higher levels of command in the Army. Whilst they are not accused of complicity in war crimes, the failings in their leadership of the special forces is something for which they need to be held to account professionally.

This is perhaps where the issue of Breaker Morant comes right back at us. He committed war crimes, and the complicity of his senior officers, including Lord Kitchener, was never established, despite his attempt to argue that he was simply following orders. Whilst it goes without saying that officers of the Australian Army would never, in this day and age, give such unlawful orders, the failure of their leadership to prevent such behaviour from occurring, or to take action on it much sooner than has been the case, is a matter of grave concern. Whilst it is unlikely, given the findings of the Brereton Report do not accuse any officers of misconduct, that any unit commanders are going to face court over the actions of their subordinates, there is a need to admonish those commanders for those failings in leadership.

Maybe it is time that the Defence Forces stop valuing and rewarding service in the SAS so highly amongst its officers. Leadership of the Defence Forces needs to fall on the shoulders of those officers who are capable of leading in an honourable way, and of inspiring their troops to behave honourably, not upon those who turn a blind eye or deaf ear to a toxic culture.

I lost $50 last week. I bet with one of my friends that Trump would win the presidential election. The ‘enthusiasm gap’ between him and Biden (ie the number of crazy-scary people who would go to rallies to support Trump as compared to Biden), as well as the recent proof that opinion polls are about as good as calculating election results as a toss of a coin, convinced me that Trump was going to win.

And until his petulant display since the election result has clearly been in, I would say that his performance as president has not been, despite his perpetual tendency to behave like a 14 year old rather than a 74 year old, not too bad.

Now of course, the crassness (which readers of this blog would know I define as ‘rich people behaving badly’), mendaciousness, and general lack of dignity of his behaviour has me thinking that, despite my very conservative inclinations, Trump leaving the White House in 70 odd days time might be a good thing.

However, America has been through worse presidential election crises. 2020 is a ‘fake’ crisis, and even the one which people still might remember, the contested ballot in 2000 in Florida, was pretty much a storm in a tea cup, easily resolved.

For real crises, let’s look at 1800 for starters, when the villain of the musical Hamilton almost became president due to tying with his running mate, Thomas Jefferson. That was when the electoral college was not popularly elected in each state. Vice President Aaron Burr has always captured my imagination as the most interesting of America’s maverick senior statesmen.

Now of course, Trump probably is in the process of surpassing him.

Or let’s remember 1824. The election was split closely enough that it fell into the House of Representatives where Anthony Hopkins lookalike (remember Amistad) John Quincey Adams was elected president over Andrew Jackson.

[Adams fils might not have been the greatest of presidents, but he was a great man, and more importantly, a very decent man, one who spent his whole life, including a career in the House of Representatives after his presidency, defending individual liberty and opposing slavery.]

And there there is the Compromise of 1877, under which the contested election of 1876 was decided in a shady deal, where Republican Rutherford Hayes [you might remember he was mentioned in The Simpsons in the ‘We are the mediocre presidents’ song] was accepted as president by the House Democrats in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former confederacy. And so civil rights in the southern states was set back 80 years or so.

American democracy has always had its shaky moments, and this is an important thing to remember (Abraham Lincoln got elected despite not even being on the ballot as an option in most of the southern states, which his opponent Douglass saw as a matter of concern which caused him to campaign even harder there in vain in order to try to preserve the legitimacy of the system). I am a student of American history, and I know it better than most Americans do (I say so without any trace of arrogance, but a tinge of concern, being an outsider looking in).

[As a footnote – you would remember from such classic 1970s TV shows as The Dukes of Hazzard and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo that law enforcement and civic leadership in the rural south at least has been seen as a corrupt joke by Hollywood, although that has ignored the real problems in the great metropolises.]

I expect that America will get through the next 70 days OK, and that it will then seek to work on building a new aspect to the always changing consensus which keeps it going, but which is always at risk of falling over. What it needs to realise is that there is a problem with the Antifa and other violent illegal movements of the left, as much as there is of the Trumpist populist chauvinists of the right, and that there is a much bigger institutional problem (of which Biden as a lawmaker has long been a part) where a very large proportion of the population is unnecessarily criminalised and incarcerated.

America is not communist China. But it does need to stop imprisoning people severely and potentially unjustly, and it needs to stop militarising its police forces. Maybe then it can really become the Land of the Free that it sings that it is.