Let’s hand out some bouquets and brickbats this week. Start with the praise.  Angus Taylor and the Libs have nailed it with their immigration policy. A net cap of one hundred thousand for two years, with a very small increase in year three, is exactly what I want. (Okay, I’d go even lower but this is good.) This pledge will cover the three-year electoral cycle. It will put a huge dent in the universities’ pay-for-visa Ponzi scheme business model. Good! It is annoying to our our totally useless big business end of town, the ones who were basically silent while lockdowns caused untold economic damage, while already woeful labour relations laws were made ever more sclerotic by Labor, and while electricity costs mushroomed due to the worship of renewable energy. You couldn’t annoy more deserving people than the big end of town!

The Taylor plan also lets Australia get control over the mass importation of people with worldviews that are hostile to Western civilisation. As Taylor rightly says, this will be the biggest cut in immigration numbers Australia has ever seen. (That truth, of course, tells you as much about the current massive intake under Albanese as it does about what would be the new, reduced Taylor numbers.) Be clear, though. There is no way we’d have seen anything like this immigration pledge under Sussan Ley or under any other potential Labor-lite ‘moderate’ Liberal leader. So let’s give praise where it’s due here to Messrs Taylor and Canavan. Immigration is a lethal issue for Labor. Having to defend its current sky-high mass immigration numbers as well as its impoverishing, sanctimonious commitment to the net zero religion will cost Labor the next election. Well, Labor will lose provided that before the election the Libs and One Nation reach a sensible accommodation on recommending preference flows to each other.

Let’s also give praise and a big bouquet of roses to the Trump administration for their decision to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC). What a great and ballsy call guaranteed to annoy all the people you really should annoy! What many non-lawyers don’t realise is that international law, as a whole, barely has an enervated democratic bone in its entire body. In Britain, Canada and here in Australia treaties are entered into under the prerogative power – so it’s an executive branch power. Mr Albanese and his cabinet can basically wake up tomorrow and enter into any treaty they want, for any reason they want. Compare us to the US. Americans take treaties seriously because all proposed treaties need to pass a two-thirds vote of the Senate. The legislative branch, in other words, has a decisive say there. But far, far worse than treaties is customary international law, a sort of international common law. This customary international law is an insiders’ club all the way down with zero democratic input and a massive political slant. I have long argued that no aspect of international law is better than the domestic law of the long-established democracies like Australia. Sure, international law can be better than the domestic law in dictatorships and theocracies. But those places pay no heed to international law. It’s only in your Australias and Canadas that the lawyerly caste and other elites do all that they can to make us voters genuflect before this highly flawed thing called international law and try at every turn to expand its reach and jurisdiction.

So let’s look at the ICC. In many ways it functions like Henry VIII’s Star Chamber.  There are no juries, no peers of the accused deciding on guilt. The judges of the ICC are chosen, or ‘elected’, by the governments that joined the ICC. As of right now the member countries of the ICC represent about one-third of the world’s population. For some member countries we can have huge doubts – real scepticism – of just how independent any ICC judge is of the home government, of political pressures, and even of the patent institutional biases. By our standards here in Australia the ICC is a fake court whose members make even George Brandis-appointed Australian High Court judges look like latter-day fonts of wisdom and fairness. Oh, and this ICC court is hell-bent on undermining the sovereignty of countries that refuse to sign up to it.

Then there’s the fact that this ICC is not supposed to have jurisdiction over non-member countries. Perhaps readers might guess that that is why the ICC has never indicted any Chinese leader over that country’s brutality to its Uighur population. Or why the ICC has never put any Iranian government official on trial for slaughtering tens of thousands of its own citizens. Guess again. The idea of the ICC scrupulously abiding by its legal jurisdiction has to go out the window because it issued arrest warrants in late-2024 for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant claiming (risibly) that they are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for how they fought back against Hamas in Gaza.  So China, Iran and Israel all refused to join the ICC but only when it comes to Israel is that legal limitation on ICC jurisdiction jettisoned without a moment’s concern.

And US Secretary of State Marco Rubio obviously worries these ICC ideologue judges would like to go after US leaders too.  He’s not wrong about that either. Heck, I’m sure more than a few Democrats in the US, all the many who supported breaching every convention going to use lawfare against Mr Trump before and after his second election win, are thinking that the ICC may be able to succeed where they failed.

It almost goes without saying that the foreign ministers of Canada, France and Germany rebuked the US’s call to sanction the ICC. If you needed any further evidence this was the right call by the US, that was it. Australia should never have signed up to this ICC. And any incoming sane (aka non-Labor) government needs to withdraw us from its jurisdiction pronto. Did I mention that the retrospective changes by Team Albo to the definitions of war crimes and protected persons, changes that affect Ben Roberts Smith, may be tied to our ICC membership?

So what about a brickbat and censure to finish? Easy-peasy. That goes to the Norwegians who gave this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the woman, Navi Pillay, who as the UN’s top human rights official accused Israel of war crimes and more. This is the same UN and its human rights commission that finds Israel to be more rights-infringing than all other countries on earth, combined. It’s risible. So the Nobel Peace Prize committee that gave the award to Obama pretty much before he’d taken office now gives it to a woman who looks to ooze antisemitism and who brings patent double standards to bear on how she deals with countries. This award is supposed to go to someone who defuses conflicts, brings peoples together, builds peace. Here it goes to the usual progressive left ideologue who spouts and acts on all the usual left-wing pieties, but on steroids when it comes to Israel.

This award is now tainted and meaningless. That deserves a boatload of brickbats.  But I can’t say that it’s remotely surprising in today’s world.