Hypocrisy on the campaign trail

Labor’s badge of honour 

Last weeks’ excellent edition of Spectator Australia quietly and unintentionally identified one problem inherent in Left-leaning philosophy in generally, and the Rudd/Gillard political agenda in particular. 

It can be summed up in one word —HYPOCRISY! 

Writing in the magazine’s regular page-six Diary feature, Helen Hughes pinned down the hypocrisy of the elites when she was describing her recent visit to various Aboriginal people and their communities: 

We were up at dawn next morning for a further two-hour Cessna flight to Aurukun. Locking away vast areas of the empty lands over which we fly apparently rewards the misanthropes we have left behind discussing anthropogenic global warming under outdoor gas heaters in Double Bay. 

The second flash of hypocrisy-revelation occurred on page eight of Spectator Australia in a truly excellent article by writer Peter Day. It revealed the tragic story of two Egyptians, Maher El-Gohary 57 and his daughter, 15-year-old Dina. Both of these Egyptian citizens are under various fatwas, issued by Islamic clerics. They are in a desperate state and in daily fear for their lives. 

Their crime?  They applied to have their religion, marked on their identity cards, changed from Muslim to Christian. Mr El-Gohary, who married a Muslim woman, has been a Christian for many years. He was forced to divorce his wife because of his conversion to Christianity. His daughter, also a Christian, will be forced to marry a Muslim man once she turns 16, unless her card designation is changed. 

Maher and Dina El-Gohary are on the run, forced to move home every month or so, fearful that the clerics or Islamic fanatics will find their address and execute them. 

So you may well ask, what has this to do with hypocrisy and the present Labor government? Well, quite a bit, actually. 

Last year Mr El-Gohary and his daughter applied to the Australian Embassy in Cairo, in an “off-shore application”, for asylum in Australia. On July 20^th, just three days after Julia Gillard called the Federal election, and around the time she was organising the East Timor Solution, the Australian government rejected the application from Maher and Dina El-Gohary. 

Considering the faux compassion repeatedly expressed by Prime Minister Gillard and her Immigration, Minister Chris Evans, about the plight of refugees arriving illegally in boats, their seemingly indifference to the danger of genuine applicants is beyond belief. The El-Goharys are not displaced persons in a camp, safely across the border from their terror-ridden homeland. They are in imminent danger of execution in their homeland. 

The first word that comes to mind in all this is hypocrisy. It is also the second and third. 

In what Peter Day describes as “curtly”, a letter signed by I.J. Simpson (that’s I. J. not O.J.), the First Secretary (Immigration) — Principal Migration Officer at the Australian Embassy Cairo, stated that Mr El-Gorhary does not meet criteria for refugee status in Australia, because: 

(a)   The degree of persecution to which the applicant is subject to in the applicant’s home country; and 

(b)   The extent of the applicant’s connection with Australia. 

One might have thought that Australia being a signatory to the UN declaration on Human Rights and Refugees might have been a good enough connection. And one wonders what degree of persecution would satisfy the officious I.J. Simpson … and Senator Evans? If a fatwa and imminent execution isn’t good reason, what is? 

The nub of all this is the extent of hypocrisy that has been exercised during this campaign by Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Team Labor. They are nothing if not hypocrites and they think nothing of treating the electorate as idiots. The extent to which they practice their hypocrisy has no bounds, and to them it seems to be a character flaw that just keeps on giving. 

Julia Gillard knifed Kevin Rudd (successfully missing his gall-bladder) and then justified her perfidious act by telling the nation how the government under Kevin Rudd “had lost its way”. Team Labor then followed up by revealing Rudd’s rudeness, incompetence and total lack of prime-ministerial ability. Then bingo. Out comes the hypocrisy-wand. All is forgiven. “Kevin…mate… we need your help. Like now…out of bed, mate! 

Bugger the gall-bladder operation. 

Hypocrisy surfaces again with the Building the Education Revolution. Team Labor’s mantra is “we needed to spend the money quickly to save jobs”. Funny that, we can’t spend money on hospitals to save lives, but we can do it to save jobs. 

And then when it is discovered that about a quarter of the $16 billion spent on the BER has either gone in over-charging or rorts, we are told that a “line has been drawn in the sand and we have learnt by our mistakes”. Then the nation is told that Team Labor has the best credentials to run the economy. We are NOT in a debt building contest. The Federal government should be the most cautious spender in the nation…shouldn’t it? 

That darn “H” words just keeps bouncing back. 

We tend to forget that the fathers of modern socialism and Labor/Socialist political parties were that dynamic duo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They were two of the greatest hypocrites in history. To that add cheaters, embezzlers and fraudsters. 

According to one writer, Engels, while earnestly desiring the downfall of the capitalist society, of which he was part, “kept a stable of fine horses, rode to hounds at weekends, enjoyed the best of wines, maintained a mistress, and hobnobbed with the elite at Manchester’s fashionable Albert Club. His mate, Karl Marx constantly denounced the bourgeoisie but lived as bourgeois a life as he could possibly manage, sending his daughters to private schools and boasting at every opportunity of his wife’s aristocratic background.” 

The Marx lifestyle was kept alive by Friedrich Engels’ persistent embezzling of money from his father’s business, and giving the proceeds to Marx. While decrying the fate of the poor, Engels said of the Irish “The facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all human enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness.” 

The word “hypocrisy” means the act of pretending to have beliefs, opinions, feelings, virtues, qualities or standards. Hypocrisy involves, according to one dictionary, the deception of others and is thus a lie. 

Jung’s mention of some people who are unaware of the dark or shadow-side of their nature, should not be used as an excuse by politicians seeking high office. 

As Yuri says, in reference to hypocrisy, in Doctor Zhivago: 

Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite to what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike… our nervous system isn’t just fiction, it’s part of our physical body, it can’t be forever violated with impunity. 

Julia Gillard, that confirmed atheist, must have been wondering about hypocrisy when she attended the Mary MacKillop function and handed over $1.5 million of Federal money for the Roman Catholic canonisation of an about-to-be Saint. 

It’s Not the money, it’s the hypocrisy. 

To quote Jung again: 

Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbours under the cloak of Christian Love [or atheist love] or the sense of social responsibility or any other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges for personal power. 

Ouch! 

Yes, the modern Labor Party does wear hypocrisy as a badge of honour, but are there enough voters to see this? The Greeks have much to answer for in giving us these meddlesome words like hypocrisy. 

They tend to make us think!