The PR Blog

I asked the question " What makes good government? " on a forum I belong to and an answer struck me as one of the best. 

" Good people make a good government. So the real question you are asking is "what makes good people?" "

Obviously, this leads to the question that if we have good people, why do we need government at all? Easy. Because we will always have bad people. We just don't want them in Government. Simple really.  

It therefore follows that we need Good people in Government to protect us from Bad people.

Instead, why is it that it seems to be the opposite way around? 

When I ponder this, I must ask myself what makes us actually WANT a government? To pay taxes? To be brow beaten?  Seriously, why do we have a government? I warn you now, you may detect a certain sarcastic tone today. For that, I do not apologise.  

In Australia, conservatives and libertarians tend to get along.   

Neither has sympathy for the woke, neither declares their pronouns, chooses their gender, or seeks to cancel those with whom they disagree. They both believe in things such as equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, parental responsibility, religious freedom and democracy. Indeed, some conservatives tend to think that libertarianism is merely conservatism under another name. 

That is not the case though; libertarianism and conservatism originate from quite different places.

It is worth understanding those places so that when they do diverge, it is not unexpected. It also helps those who are unsure of their own position.

A few years ago, pastor and progressive commentator John Pavlovitz asked his Twitter audience, “In your own words, how would you describe Libertarians?”

One of his followers, John Spaulding, gave an answer that quickly spread to the farthest corners of the internet.

“House cats,” he replied.

“They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”

The metaphor seems to have struck a chord, judging by how much this comment was shared on social media. But is it a fair comparison? Are libertarians rightly regarded as house cats? Let’s take a look.

Australia’s Labor Party has reintroduced its misinformation and disinformation bill. I did a deep dive into the bill last May. Among its many flaws, the biggest is its very origins.

As Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in Parliament on September 12, “This bill seeks to strengthen the voluntary code by providing a regulatory backstop.” That code was co-written by First Draft, participants in the Aspen Institute’s coordinated effort to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

If that story is new to you, the Twitter Files revealed that in August 2020 the Aspen Institute organised a “table-top” exercise with Twitter, Facebook, First Draft, and a host of media organisations including the New York Times and Washington Post, that ran through a day-by-day playbook of how they would respond to the release of a Hunter Biden laptop. The story didn’t break publicly until October, so how did the Aspen Institute know two months in advance? This story written by Guest post Andrew Lowenthal