By David Truman
The key issue in most Western countries today, including Australia, is globalism versus nationalism.
In Europe, the nineteenth century was the century of nationalism, with many nationalities struggling free themselves from larger empires – the Russian empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire in particular – or to unify people speaking the same language and sharing the same culture into single national entities: Italy and Germany. Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia and Smetana’s Ma Vlast’ are assertions of national identity of Finland and the Czech lands. The “Mighty Handful” or “The Five” Russian nationalist composers of the late nineteenth century are similarly a celebration of Russian identity.
The conflict of competing imperial ambitions of the major European powers in the First World War led to the first supra-national organization, the League of Nations. This was not able to prevent the Second World War (caused by Nazi Germany’s desire for national territorial expansion, and also Japan’s desire for empire). After the European and Asian bloodbaths, the United Nations was created. And in Europe, France and Germany pushed for the creation of the European Common Market (EEC), which later morphed into the European Communities and now the European Union (EU).
In international trade, the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and now the WTO (World Trade Organization) have been key enablers and policers of economic globalism, whose mantra is the efficiency of the global economic system . This is notnecessarily the same as the interests of individual national states and populations.
Both the UN and the EU have become overbearing pushers of global and supra-national law. In 1945 the UN established UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which maintains the World Heritage List. In 1983, the Australian High Court ruled that the federal government had the right under the Constitution’s external affairs power to overrule the state government in the Tasmanian Dams Case, because the area impacted on by the proposed Gordon below Franklin dam had been inscribed in the World Heritage List. This set a major precedent allowing a disturbing intrusion of supra-national law into domestic politics.
In 1948 the UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – later incorporated into Australian law by the Whitlam government’s Racial Discrimination Act 1975. This Act established the Australian Human Rights Commission, which has sought to insert supra-national law into Australian practice, with disturbing potential for activist Commissioners to overrule natural justice (as in the QUT students case).
In the 1970s we saw the rise of the North-South Dialogue and rhetoric about a New International Economic Order (NIEO). This wrote itself into the UN Law of the Sea Convention (1982), by requiring states other than developing countries to share revenue from exploitation of their continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles. It also established a revenue-sharing regime for the Deep Seabed beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.
The tenor of these moves was international-socialist. The United States refused to ratify the Convention for its unacceptable infringements of national sovereignty, in particular in activities on the deep seabed.
Within the EU, the role of the Commission – a collection of unelected foreign bureaucrats – has become intrusively overbearing, nowhere more starkly than in the ongoing attempt to compel member nations to accept quotas of “migrants” against the will of their national governments and electorates. Control over immigration policy was certainly a key issue in the Brexit referendum in Britain.
Agendas for globalist standardization and control are throwing up major issues in national politics. The UN’s Agenda 21, in its current update Agenda 2030, creates huge scope for erosion of national sovereignty and local democracy. See separate article on Agenda 21/2030.
Freedom and Heritage Society of Australia asserts as a non-negotiable principle the primacy of THE WELL-BEING OF PEOPLE IN OUR AUSTRALIAN COMMUNITY, including the protection of our values and willingness to defend our borders and way of life. The efficiency of the global economic or political system must come a very distant second.
In July 2018 the UN finalized the text of a Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, with a view to having countries sign it in December 2018. This very large bureaucratic document proposes extraordinarily objectionable, intrusive infringements on national sovereignty. Our then Minister for Border Protection, Peter Dutton, very rightly announced that Australia would refuse to sign it. The issue here, as elsewhere, is the effrontery of the UN (like the EU) in brazenly seeking to trample on democratic freedoms.
Unfortunately the benighted Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand did sign it.
The issue of allegedly human-induced climate change is another cause of globalist hyperventilation.
Globalism imposes groupthink. In this, certain views are acceptable and others are not. Anyone who expresses some misgivings about climate change, for instance, is labelled a denier, a sceptic and a bad person. Similarly, anyone who expresses some misgivings about mass immigration is labelled a xenophobe, a racist and a bad person. This is an unacceptable destruction both of free scientific inquiry (including the right to hold and test competing views) and free speech – core values of Western civilization.
In Australia, August 2018 saw the dumping of a Prime Minister essentially over issues of globalism versus national interest. Malcolm Turnbull decided to ratify the Paris Agreement and the target of a 26 per cent to 28 per cent cut in CO2 emissions by 2030 relative to 2005, the day after Donald Trump was elected US President. At that time he already knew full well that Trump planned to take the US out of the Paris Agreement with potentially adverse consequences for Australia of the US withdrawal. Right up till his removal by the party room, Turnbull wanted to push on with the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) even though this meant bizarrely uncompetitive electricity prices for Australian industries and household consumers, as well as unreliability of supply. Surely the debacle of power failures in South Australia – blackout of the entire state – had already made that clear?
Freedom and Heritage Society of Australia is firmly on the side of the national interest, not globalist dreams that leach the content out of our democracy and subject us to the dictates of foreign bureaucrats and corrupted international bodies. The UN Human Rights Committee is a classic case in point – previously chaired by that paragon of human rights, Saudi Arabia!
