Great news from the southern hemisphere! In Australia, the Voice referendum was defeated handily, while in neighbouring New Zealand the deplorable Labour government has been turfed out in its federal election. It seems like a pretty good weekend to me! Let me speak to each in turn.

The Voice

Thankfully the Voice referendum has failed. It seems like the vote at this point is 56 per cent for the No case and 44 per cent for the Yes case. But it is the federal seat count that matters, with around 130 of the 150 seats appearing to vote no. Four of the six states had to win for this to pass. At the time of this writing, not one state approved it!

People power has prevailed. The divisive and racist Voice has been shot down in flames by the people of Australia. It even seems that 40 per cent of Labor electorates rejected it! And many aboriginal people voted against it as well with the No vote as high as 70% in some places. And this despite all the claims made that they would overwhelmingly embrace it!

So where to now for Albanese? Good question. He wasted over $400 million of taxpayer money. But we know he failed big time, as did so many in the Yes crowd who pushed often nasty and quite misleading information for so long. He and them were clearly out of touch with actual Australians who were far more worried about things like the cost of living. Albo and the Yessers targeted the elites. The No folks targeted ordinary people.

‘Yes’ supporters like Ray Martin calling us who had real concerns about it “dinosaurs and dickheads” did not help their cause either. Ordinary Australians greatly resented ugly and uncalled-for attacks like that. Also, a year ago some two-thirds of Australians supported the Voice. Today it seems close to that many Australians rejected it. So are the majority of Aussies now racist, while they were not racist a year ago?

Albo can’t blame the electorate – he can’t blame the media who were quite onside, But already those who lost are whining about hatred, racism and fear campaigns. Hmm, talk about sore losers. And this is despite the massive spending by the Yes group. Banks had put in $7 million in funding for the Yes campaign. The woke corporate world had $100 million spent on this – a tiny fraction of that spent on the No campaign. One person posted this on social media:

List of Companies based in Australia yet FOREIGN-owned promoting the YES campaign and pouring millions into it:

• ANZ (Major shareholders are Black Rock and Vanguard Group)
• CBA (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• NAB (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• Westpac (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• Coles (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• Woolworths (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group and BlackRock)
• Wesfarmers (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group and BlackRock)
• Telstra (Top shareholder group = BlackRock)
• Qantas (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• BHP (73% owned by American investors)
• Newcrest Mining (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group and BlackRock)
• Rio Tinto (Top shareholder group = BlackRock and China)
• Transurban (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)
• Woodside Energy (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group and BlackRock)
• Atlassian (Top shareholder group = Vanguard Group)

The Yes side had almost all the money, almost all the media, and almost all the corporate backing, and so on. Speaking of advertising: for the past ten days or so I have been watching my little-used Foxtel. I only have had two channels on – both conservative: Fox News and Sky News. During this period I must have seen at least 100 Yes ads aired. I did not see even one No ad! That is telling for a few reasons:

• As I said, the Yes camp is awash with funds, be it government, corporate or what have you.
• Yes, the media depends on revenue from ads but one would have thought so-called conservative networks would try to get a bit less Yes advertising and just a bit of No advertising. Perhaps money really is their bottom line.
• Despite this completely unbalanced advertising blitz, the masses rejected it and went with common sense. Well done, Aussie majority!

A few interesting snippets:

• The Yes camp had 70,000 volunteers working on election day yet they still lost.
• The seat of Lingiari, which covers the national icon Uluru, is set to vote No for the Voice to Parliament!
• This was a people’s revolt against arrogant and out-of-touch leadership.
• This shows we should let aboriginal people decide on their issues, not political activist groups, the Greens, and others.
• There were far too many unanswered questions: Who will be in on it? What will it cost? What about treaties, reparations, etc?
• There were 44 referendums before this one: only 8 won while 36 had failed.
• You need bipartisan support for a referendum to pass.
• Well done to Peter Dutton for standing strong here.
• Woke corporations are just as out of touch with ordinary Australians as are Labor and the activists.
• Australians clearly do not want to be divided by race.

Well done Australians!

New Zealand

Labour has finally been dumped by the New Zealand votes, with Christopher Luxon of the Nationals becoming the 42^nd Prime Minister of the country. The centre-right parties have done very well, all up. Figures as of the time of this writing (with around 67% of votes counted) are:

• National Party, 670,000 votes, 41 per cent
• Labor Party, 430,000 votes, 26 per cent
• Green Party, 171,000 votes, 10 per cent
• ACT New Zealand, 152,000 votes, 9 per cent
• New Zealand First Party, 102,000 votes, 6 per cent
• Te Peti Maori, 41,000 votes, 3 per cent
• Other, 69,000 votes, 4 per cent

Jacinta Ardern was horrific, especially in her lockdown tyranny, and her replacement Hipkins was another failure – he could not even deal with answering a question about ‘What is a woman?‘

It has been a long time in the wilderness for more conservative parties to be in power. Ardern first got in office in 2017. It is now time for a new face in government. We can pray for these new rulers that at the very least, they do far better than the previous lot.

Well done New Zealanders!

I will write more on these two wins in the days ahead.