“Tyranny usurps the place of equality, which is the soul of liberty, and destroys the public courage.” – Thomas Gordon.

How is it that there has become a ‘RIGHT not to be offended’? What does this mean? The RIGHT not to be offended by what, honesty, sincerity, truth?

How is it that such a beautiful country full of character, humanity, egality, such a multicultural combination of peaceful experience as we were such a very short time ago … How is it that we’ve turned our children’s worlds so uspide down? Not upside down as the famous philosophers urged, but upside down in such a draconian and selfish way … What has allowed those of us over 50 to say, we will not allow the future the same freedoms as our parents allowed us and worked so hard for us to enjoy? What magic wand has been waved into our faces which allows us to oppress our children in a way that we – true Aussies of character – would never have allowed in the past. Remember Eureka? No, … I suppose not.

Where does our King come from … oh that’s right, from the Shire – a true defender of the Southern Cross, or is it now the burning cross?

How can all these private school boys, whose prosperity was given to them by preceding generation’s fundamental beliefs in a shared humanity and in civil rights and equality before the law, now believe that all 25 million children of a free and democratic country are no longer due those same freedoms? For what reason did we allow the State – and such an overbearing and unaccountable one at that – to put itself above the people who pay its bills and to decide questions of character and conscience for our own good?

When did we shift from that old fashioned notion of justice, that one is innocent until proven guilty, to this rabid concept that unless you sit on the right side of god in a corrupted parliament, that guilt and want is to be your inheritance .. that as Dirty Dutton once maintained, “That if you want an opinion then you have to get yourself elected”? Too many questions.

Where have all those apples gone?

“Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it … it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side.” – John Stuart Mill.