Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten better watch out come election time.
Once more Australians are educated about what Islam means, the ALA might be attracting a lot of votes.
"ALA seems to exude a patient confidence and purpose knowing there is a swelling tide of unhappy, disaffected voters looking for a new voice. So far they are not on the radar of most of the mainstream media (MSM), which is the way the party has wanted it. " The Rise Of The Australian Liberty Alliance
Thu 1 Oct 2015 08:49:53 pm / 3181 COMMENTS
In the wake of a tidal wave of Liberal Party desertions, Paul Zanetti interviews the playmakers at the head of a front-running Conservative alternative, the Australian Liberty Alliance (whatever that means) who are launching later this month:
The inside story behind the "secretive" new political party about to shake up the Liberal Party - and Australian politics.
Liberal Party MPs and officials were hoping their support base would settle down after the parliamentary coup, which cut down a first-term Prime Minister, but two weeks from Tony Abbott’s demise the shock and awe has turned to unabated rage in the traditional conservative base.
Supporters could never have imagined the Liberal Party would stoop to Labor tactics. Tony Abbott mistakenly depended on this for survival.
You only have to check into talkback radio, read online blogs, news sites or social media to realise the Party has a problem. Caller after caller tells the same story.
“I’ve voted Liberal all my life…”.
“I’ve handed out how-to-vote cards for the Libs for the past 20 years…”.
“I’ve been a member of the Liberal Party for…”.
And they all end with the same line:
“But I will never vote for a Liberal Party led by Malcolm Turnbull.”
And they certainly didn’t vote for that at the last election. Party loyalists feel betrayed.
The Libs’ strategist Mark Textor shrugs them off, “the loss of disgruntled conservatives will be outweighed by the appeal of a more moderate party to swinging voters. The qualitative evidence is they don’t matter,” Mr Textor said.
“The sum of a more centrist approach outweighs any alleged marginal loss of so-called base voters.”
So, where do the ‘conservatives-of-no-consequence’ go to if the Libs clearly are prepared to sacrifice them in exchange for the party lurching further Left?
If online comments, newspaper letters and the airwaves are any guide, two early options seem to be either Family First or even Pauline Hanson (again) if you’re a Queenslander looking for a Senator.
The name that pops up more than most lately, is Australian Liberty Alliance (ALA), even though many don’t know much about who they are. Their popularity is based on word of mouth and online shares of their manifesto from their website and a Facebook page. They’ve even been described as “secretive”.
So, exactly what is ALA?
The party stemmed from an Islam-critical organisation called the Q Society, named after the Melbourne suburb of Kew (Q) where the initial planning meetings were held in 2010.
The society is aligned with the global SION (Stop The Islamisation Of Nations) movement headed by Pamela Geller, famed US freedom fighter and organiser of the Garland, Texas, Mohammed cartoon exhibition which ended in two dead jihadists.
“Q’s intent is to educate Australians on the Islamisation of our schools, food chains, judicial system and democratic institutions, implementing Islamic Sharia law, which has occurred in parts of the UK and Europe.
“This ‘Islamisation by stealth’ is often done by claims of discrimination or victimisation, to which a tolerant society will succumb. No other religion makes such demands on societal institutions.
“Long before ISIS came into our living rooms and invaded online news feeds, Q had warned of the violent nature of Islam whose will is to establish a global Islamic caliphate as instructed by its founder, and promoted by Islamic clerics”, explained Debbie.
This, Q warns, is the duty of all followers, (but in reality they accept it is taken seriously by only the most devout).
The Q Society appears to have been well ahead of the game, certainly ahead of our news services and parliamentarians and long before ISIS exposed the horrors of Islam’s ambitiously bloody jihad.
This jihad has since reached into Australian homes luring impressionable and vulnerable youths creating a billion dollar headache for our Federal Government, police and security forces.
Q’s warnings seem prophetic as we look back on the Sydney siege, multiple arrests of homegrown terrorists and 120 Australian jihadists recruited to fight for ISIS.
The Q Society has sponsored campaigns against halal certification, which had zero public awareness a few years ago, but today is front-page news. Not that they take credit, although they have been pumping out educational online videos on halal certification schemes in Australia.
This material has spread virally spawning anti-halal certification websites and social media boycott pages.
The ABC’s Four Corners investigation recently reported that halal certification fees fund the growth of Islam by financing local and offshore mosques and Islamic schools. Halal certification is now a subject of a current Senate inquiry.
Non-Muslims today seem more aware than ever about core Islamic beliefs.
In this digital information age, Islamic teachings and texts are available at the click of a mouse to the non-Islamic public. Australians are now paying attention. In this environment the Q Society has grown its membership and representation in all States.
Q’s lobbying of politicians to warn of the ‘true nature of Islam’ fell on deaf ears, at which point the Q Society considered forming a political party.
In February 2013 the Q Society sponsored the visit to Australia of Geert Wilders. The experience in the lead-up to the visit was an essential trigger to forming the Australian Liberty Alliance.
During August and September 2012, the Gillard Labor Government delayed the issue of a visa for Wilders.
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen granted the visa only after the Q Society had to postpone the tour due to the visa uncertainty.
The tour was overshadowed by a total of 30 venues cancelling, or refusing bookings, with some reneging on fully paid contracts two days before the scheduled event.
Companies and newspapers were too afraid to accept advertising, online ticket companies feared potential hacking attempts and the Westpac Bank was unwilling to process credit card payments for fear of reprisals.
Ironically, this climate of fear - and threat to freedoms - was the type of intimidation the Q Society had been warning about all along.
What the Government and others had hoped would just “go away” has in fact led to a larger movement in a new political party. Despite not yet having launched, ALA is now bigger than the Q Society and growing rapidly in membership and supporters.
It would be wrong to classify the Q Society or the ALA as racist or bigoted. It supports immigration and says it has no objection to homosexuals. Its platform is non-racist and ethnically-inclusive. The Party’s policies call for a cohesive society, which promotes integration and not segregation.
“Tolerance” the Party says, “should be mutual. The teachings of Islam, which discriminate against non-Muslims, homosexuals and women, are incompatible with core Australian values.”
Their message is that Islam is more than a religion, it is a complete belief system and ideology incorporating political ambition via a legal system (Sharia), and global war (jihad) promoting criminal conduct and human rights abuses, all sanctioned by a deity to advantage the faith. Its aim is the destruction of non-believers and its intention is to establish world domination (a Caliphate).
Debbie points to the teachings of the founder of Islam, the prophet Mohammed, the Qur’an, the Sira (Mohammed’s biography) and the Hadiths (a collection of Mohammed’s recorded sayings and actions). Sira and Hadiths together form the Sunna, the way of the Prophet.
These texts are the proof of their warnings to non-Muslims or kuffrs (kufars) who must convert or die, when numbers become large enough to take control.
The Q Society refers not only to texts but also to history as warnings. They also point to Europe where Islamic enclaves have led to no-go zones for non-Muslims and local authorities where crime has accelerated in proportion with Islamic immigration, in particular against kuffrs.
While ALA was founded on stopping the Islamisation of (spread of Islam in) Australia, the Party’s manifesto shows a broad base of policies including:
· smaller government
· integration not segregation
· reconciliation (no apartheid)
· affordable cleaner energy,
· citizenship and community
· improving health care
· ageing in dignity
· freedom of information
· smarter learning
· better future
· back to basics for public broadcasting
· fairer trade while securing Australian jobs
· reciprocal foreign ownership of Australian land
· protecting the environment
· restoring civil society
· advancing the natural family
· foreign affairs and aid
· defending Australia
· Constitutional change (opposed) and,
· lower income tax, but broader consumption taxes.
You can read their manifesto in full here: http://australianlibertyalliance.org/downloads/ALA_MANIFESTO_OG14001R1.pdf
The Party is launching in Perth on October 20, where its first parliamentary candidates will be introduced. Dutch MP, Islamic-critical Geert Wilders, will be visiting Australia for the launch.
Debbie Robinson, the public face of ALA is also Q’s Perth based President who explained she is a nurse who came to the Q Society as a professional carer increasingly concerned about what it is that drives people to commit violent crimes after witnessing too much of it during her nursing days.
She is a trim and attractive auburn haired lady in her 50s who is articulate and has been involved in endurance sports, apart from politics, all her life.
Her studies of violent behavior led her to question Islam, which uses jihad to enforce its bloody dominance and growth.
“Each time I saw another victim of violence I’d ask myself what could motivate someone to do that to a fellow human being. My curiosity led me to do a lot of research into the psychology of violence. My opposition to Islam comes from that”, said Debbie.
Robinson said the catalyst for her awareness was a visit to Melbourne when she witnessed a violent anti-Israel rally. She picked up a flyer and found the organisers were the Muslim Students Association, Students for Palestine and the Socialist Alliance. She still has that flyer.
When she returned home she researched further. What she discovered about Islam horrified her. She decided to get involved in opposing the ideology. She looked for a political party with awareness or policies on Islam but found none. It was at this point in 2010 she discovered the fledgling Q Society.
Her first meeting was in Sydney with 12 members in attendance and Robinson volunteered to do whatever she could to help.
“I came into it purely as a humanitarian”, she said. “People who don’t know me wrongly accuse me of being a bigot or racist, but that’s never been me. I’ve always been a carer, which is why I became a nurse and why I’m now concerned about Islam.
“I’m not anti-Muslim, I’m anti-Islam. There’s a difference,” she explains with conviction.
“Islam is a ruthless ideology, just as Nazism or Communism are. That’s what I oppose. I’m not opposed to the people. If you’re opposed to Communism it doesn’t mean you’re anti Chinese or anti Russian.
“Muslims are also victims of Islam, just as non-Muslims are. You only have to look at how various sects of Islam justify the slaughter of fellow Muslims in the name of the one religion if one sect does not adhere to the same view, or is not sufficiently strict in their faith. They are regarded as apostates. Apostasy is punishable by death.
“Muslims who don’t want to remain in this religion are trapped under threat of beheading. What other religion does that today? It’s gone on for centuries and it’s going on right now, every day”, said Debbie who was getting quite animated.
“Naïve or uneducated commentators talk wishfully of a ‘moderate’ Islam or ‘extreme’ Islam. But there is no moderate or extreme Islam. There is just one Islam. There are Muslims who are good people not because of Islam, but in spite of Islam.
“The minority that follows Islam to the letter, the ones who wish to practice ‘pure’ Islam, and copy their founder, are a threat. But how do you tell who they are in a community?
“The political class in Australia - and overseas – has looked the other way for too long, with leaders wrongly suggesting that Islamic jihad and beheadings ‘have nothing to do with Islam’.
“Those practices are core Islamic teachings found in the Qu’ran. The politicians have let the people down by ignoring the truth. At ALA we hear this every day. There is a huge public awakening”, explained Debbie.
The ALA was formed about 18 months ago after Q’s privately commissioned polling by Roy Morgan Research showed a total 36% ‘very likely’ and ‘likely’ to vote for a political party proposing to stop or reduce immigration from Islamic countries.
That’s more than three times the best figures for the Greens, which polls between 8% and 12%. Translated to the Senate a political party with that size vote could hold the much-coveted balance of power ahead of the Greens.
Robinson says that since the Turnbull overthrow of Tony Abbott membership enquiries have surged. Before the coup, their Facebook page had 40,000 weekly post views. The week after the Turnbull coup this surged to over 800,000 views.
“We don’t widely promote or advertise, not yet, apart from social media posts. New supporters are finding us. It’s word of mouth and social media shares.
“We’re very careful about who we’ve already selected as candidates and will select in the future. We’ve spent the past 18 months building the legal, administrative and electoral framework of the party and candidate selection.”
Robinson points to Europe showing conservative, anti-Islamic immigration parties on the rise. A large flow of immigrants has caused a backlash, which has lit nationalist sentiments.
France’s, outspoken Conservative leader, Marine Le Pen, leads the polls ahead of Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy.
The French presidential frontrunner continues to gather support with her slamming of the European Union for creating a trumped up Syrian refugee crisis, which she says is not Syrian and not refugee-centred. She champions Christianity over Islam.
Dutch anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party ran for the first time in the 2006 election where it gained nine seats. In 2014 it won 15 of 150 seats in the House of Representatives.
Wilders calls the recent mass migration into Europe, “an Invasion.”
Denmark, known for being liberal, (as in small l liberal), and for its generous welfare system shifted sharply to the right in the recent election, when it voted out its left-wing leadership in favour of a conservative multi-party Government.
The right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP) made the biggest gains, capturing 21.1 per cent of the vote, up from 12.3 per cent in 2011 on a platform of the economy/welfare and Islamic immigration.
The DPP is now the largest right wing party with 37 seats in the 179 seat parliament. Neighbouring Finland is also experiencing a swing to the right.
The national Finns Party is the second biggest party in the Finnish parliament with a strong anti-Islamic immigration policy and is part of the country’s governing coalition.
In Sweden the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats has become the largest party in Sweden according to recent polling where it has received 25.2 per cent approval rating, almost doubling since last September’s parliamentary election. It is ahead of the governing Social Democrats on 23.4 per cent and the leading centre-right moderates on 21 per cent.
Austria’s anti-immigration Freedom Party has this week doubled its vote and seats in State elections in upper Austria, the leading industrial area in the country. The party had the biggest gains in the region with over 30.4 per cent of the vote securing 18 seats.
The Party’s chief, Heinz-Christian Strache admitted the results exceeded expectations, saying, “I’m overwhelmed by this amazing election.”
He went on to say, “Today’s election was not about upper Austria, but about one topic only, namely asylum. The winners amplified the understandable fears and concerns of the people.”
Strache has argued for a fence to be built on Austria’s border to stem migrant flows.
The Europe of Nations and Freedom is a political group in the European Parliament launched on 15 June 2015 by France’s most popular presidential front-runner Marine Le Penn and Holland’s Geert Wilders.
The group comprises anti-immigration European parties, the Freedom Party of Austria, the Flemish Interest, the Polish Congress of The New Right and a former UK Independence Party (UKIP) member.
Ralf Schumann, National Secretary of the ALA says the awareness of Islam here is no less than in Europe. “The parties”, he explains, “are similar in principle with the same voter base.”
Although our borders are secure for now, the PM who secured our borders has been replaced by a new socially progressive Prime Minister, albeit toeing the conservative party line for now.
Many conservatives don’t trust Turnbull, they wonder how long it will be before he reverts to type. This is what is what appears to be driving the mass resignations from the Liberal Party and pushing them towards a viable alternative.
It seems a Turnbull led Liberal Party can only benefit the ALA.
Debbie Robinson is well aware that Left critics will attack her and the Party, but she takes it in her stride. In Europe, similar attacks have only contributed to the awareness and rise of the centre-right, anti-Islamic parties.
“All political parties are criticised by opponents and journalists. That’s the way it should be in a democracy. I accept and value that. But under Islamic law you don’t enjoy freedoms to oppose or criticize”, said Debbie.
“Critics are beheaded or crucified, including bloggers and journalists. Homosexuals are stoned or thrown off buildings. The recent case of the young man in Saudi Arabia facing public beheading followed by the crucifixion of his headless corpse in a public square is another example of Sharia law. We oppose that. Saudi Arabia is even considered a moderate Islamic country.
“Anybody who criticises or opposes us would have to be either uneducated about Islamic teachings, or sympathetic to Islamic ideology.
“Those who oppose the growth of Islam in Australia are free to vote for ALA and our other policies, if they agree. That freedom is what we cherish.
“I don’t see our policies as Right or Left. They are what’s best for Australia and its people to protect our values. Our environmental policies are green and our fair trade policies to protect Australian jobs would make the Labor Party proud. We want to preserve what our forefathers fought for”, explained Debbie.
It’s apparent ALA is not another One Nation or PUP, which were both built on misdirected impulses with questionable candidates, personality clashes, and flawed erratic policies that led to inevitable implosions.
ALA seems to exude a patient confidence and purpose knowing there is a swelling tide of unhappy, disaffected voters looking for a new voice. So far they are not on the radar of most of the mainstream media (MSM), which is the way the party has wanted it.
If the juggernaut in Europe and social media in Australia are any indication, the MSM haven’t yet realised what is on the way. Neither have the other major parties.
But that’s bound to change after the ALA launches this month.
I came away believing this is a sound Party of substance and commitment with the promise of longevity. They have clearly done their homework and it’s my belief that they have every chance of snaring a well-deserved place in the Australian political spectrum. www.zanettisview.com
