Nicholas Samios is a fund manager and small business investor with a wealth of experience spanning three decades in commercial finance and SME capital raising. In his spare time, he puts on his “Austrian School” economist hat and utilises his insights from the commercial
world to analyse the economic landscape for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
Unions and libertarians disagree about almost everything. However, they do both share one core tenet – the right to “freedom of association”. Well, maybe not so much anymore.
Freedom of association is a fundamental right cherished by libertarians, as it supports the principle of voluntary cooperation and the right to form associations to pursue common goals. It also happens to be a right incorporated in international human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Freedom of association stands as a cornerstone of a free society.
Unions rely on freedom of association for their very existence. Unless workers are free to associate, there can be no unions.
Finally, there is the question of diversity – of thought and choice! Religious schools provide an option for parents who seek an education in line with their faith.
However, a piece of recent news begs the question as to whether this right is still valued, or maybe even understood, by the union movement. Or perhaps the left’s war on Christianity gets precedence over one of the union movement’s foundation principles.
For many Christians it is their faith that has led them to libertarianism – for reasons discussed elsewhere on Liberty Itch. I won’t revisit here that any attack on Christianity is also an attack on our civil liberties.
Not all libertarians are church goers of course (albeit they should seriously consider becoming so). Secular libertarians should be alarmed, nonetheless. The debate over proposed religious discrimination laws in Australia presents a significant point of contention, particularly concerning the principle of freedom of association.
The union movement’s position on this is riddled with hypocrisy.
Firstly, the right to freedom of association also extends to religious organizations, allowing them to maintain their faith-based hiring practices. By pushing to restrict these schools’ hiring autonomy, the trade unions risk undermining the very freedom of association they hold dear.
Freedom of association is a fundamental right cherished by libertarians, as it supports the principle of voluntary cooperation and the right to form associations to pursue common goals.
Second, trade unions, which typically advocate for workers’ rights, appear to disregard this idea when it comes to religious schools’ hiring practices. This raises concerns about the consistency of their stance and whether they are applying the same standards to themselves.
Third, while the unions bemoan discrimination implicit (they say) in hiring based on faith, by limiting faith-based schools’ hiring autonomy, they may discriminate against religious individuals who want to work in environments aligned with their beliefs, thus contradicting their own principles of non-discrimination.
And finally, there is the question of diversity – of thought and choice! Religious schools provide an option for parents who seek an education in line with their faith. Limiting their ability to hire staff who share their beliefs homogenises the educational landscape and limits diversity of educational options, which is contrary to the principles of a free and open society.
Let’s call it what it is: the trade union movement’s call to prevent faith-based hiring in religious schools is at best the “politics of envy”, and at worst an unprincipled and hypocritical attack on Christianity. Let’s see if state and federal governments have the courage and integrity to resist this push.
Nicholas Samios is a fund manager and small business investor with a wealth of experience spanning three decades in commercial finance and SME capital raising. In his spare time, he puts on his “Austrian School” economist hat and utilises his insights from the commercial
world to analyse the economic landscape for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
Here at Liberty Itch, we love practical initiatives which undermine the need for government.
Afterall, if we’re constantly fighting government bloat within the bureaucracy, we’re probably going to lose. There are too many Sir Humphrey Appleby’s around, right?
So, if the battle is about making government smaller, let’s withdraw from its services.
Let’s make government redundant.
Here’s how.
Home-schooling!
Let’s step through the basics, some of the old chestnut arguments against home-schooling, its amazing advantages, a look at how big home-schooling is in Australia, what it’s like home-schooling your children, the impact of home-schooling on your household budget and a recommendation at the end based on all this information.
Let’s go.
WHO HOME-SCHOOLS?
There are three groups who decide home-schooling is the best option for their children:
Parents with advanced students Think here of particularly gifted students for whom a classroom environment is just going to slow them down. These children need accelerating to meet their potential and the school system just can’t keep up.
Parents with belief systems You’ll instinctively understand this group. Here, we’re talking about parents with strong religious or political views, often both. They feel their values aren’t reflected in the system and they are driven to ensure their children receive an education which does.
Parents with students the government can’t helpSometimes a student has such a bad time of our industrial-era schooling system that he falls through the cracks and is left behind. In these cases, the parents have no option but to withdraw their child and turn to home-school.
By far, most home schoolers are in groups one and two.
COMMON ARGUMENTS AGAINST HOMESCHOOLING
Now let’s start with what the naysayers from the Department of Education, the Teachers Federation and public education activists will tell you:
Your child doesn’t get the value of the National CurriculumThe truth is that home-schooled students are still required to cover the material within the National Curriculum. However, you can create your own curriculum which covers this and other material.
Your child isn’t taught by trained professionals I know several people home-schooling their children, trained teachers who’ve lost their jobs from covid vaccine mandates. Further, you may not think much of the quality of the trained teachers your children are currently allocated. Perhaps you’ll be better. Further still, maybe these trained teachers are predisposed to teach your child ideas you’re not comfortable with. So maybe it’s an advantage not to have these trained teachers.
Your child won’t qualify for an ATAR Wrong. Home-schooled students do qualify for university. The vast majority are better prepared and excel at a tertiary level.
Your child loses socialisation skills There are home-school networks entrepreneurially springing up all over Australia. These are home-schooling families which meet regularly to ensure students’ continued interaction with peers all under the caring supervision of parents. Bullying? Adverse peer-group pressure behaviours? Not in this environment.
You have to quit your job to do it If both parents cooperate, this can be achieved. See template household budget below.
THE 13 BENEFITS OF HOME-SCHOOLING
In comparison, the benefits are many times greater than any perceived problems. Let’s look at thirteen I could readily identify:
Less Regimentation, More AdaptationWith home-school, you’re not regimented into 9am to 3pm. You can be creative, not to lose structure but, by seizing learning opportunities as they present themselves. Astronomy at night, excursions in good weather.
Individualised, Tailored Learning ExperiencesFinally, you can educate your children according to their specific needs. No more cookie-cutter approach from the government or government-funded schools.
Rapid Student AccelerationIf your child is highly intelligent, fantastic. Now you can feed his or her curiosity at an accelerated pace.
Political EmphasisIf you are concerned that your child is being indoctrinated with left-wing dogma, now your concerns evaporate. Teach without the slant. Teach with your own slant. The choice is yours.
Religious Reinforcement
If you feel a secular education is insufficient, home-schooling puts you in the driver’s seat. Integrate Faith subjects and experiences into the curriculum you teach.
Customised Student 1-On-1 Support
If your child is falling behind, who better to fight for his or her improvement. No-one professional teacher is going to fight as hard as you. Years later, your child will thank you.
Unleashed Creativity
Home-schooling shatters the industrial-age education system’s trait of producing conformity. TED’s most popular speech at 22 million views was titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” by the late Sir Ken Robinson.
It reflects the importance of preserving and nourishing creativity, which home-schooling achieves in spades.
Total Focus On Your Children
The juggle facing families between making a living and educating children is a thing of the past. Each parent specialises. One earns. The other teaches. Both do that well. No more half-thwarted job and 3 minute parent-teacher reports at night. You’re in control.
Enhanced Family CohesionA fully-immersed family life can only benefit the family and society.
Stellar Scholastic ResultsWith all this extra care and diligence with the children, results are likely to improve.
Fosters Self-Direction and IndependenceYour children are encouraged to think and act with a greater degree of independence. Why? The mere fact that you’ve taken an independent path from government and government-funded education will be noticed by your children and reinforced by you in the mindset you instil in them. Share Liberty Itch
Develop and Finetune Your Own Training SkillsYou’ll learn new skills as a trainer and teacher. How could you not? These are portable skills of great utility which will make you more valuable in the market, should you wish to return.
Disempowering Government and the Education MonopolyWhile all this is happening, you’ve weaned one family off the government education teat and undermined the Teachers Federation monopoly. You’ve improved Australia by proving their involvement in our lives is not needed.
HOW MANY HOME-SCHOOL IN AUSTRALIA?
The home-schooling rate is 3.4% in the United States.
There are approximately 4.08 million primary and secondary students in Australia. Of these, just 30,000 are home-schooled. That’s less than 1%. But the figure increased 105% last year alone.
The days of Australians not even knowing that home-schooling exists as an option are fast ending.
More and more families are deciding to take government out of the education business.
WHAT IT’S LIKE HOME-SCHOOLING?
I have first-hand experience home-schooling my children in the United States where I lived for 12 years.
There, local government runs the public school system. The process was as easy at calling the local school district, telling them we were moving from private school to home-school, complete a one-page form and them acknowledging it. We submitted one report quarterly. The reports were rudimentary. They didn’t interfere. They respected our choice to be free.
At the time, we wanted our children to have the option to attend one of the top universities in that country. This required careful selection and timing of subjects, and results. We made a mistake in subject selection and timing because we didn’t include practical, lab-based biology at one point.
We didn’t have a laboratory. How could we achieve this?
One 30 second Google search later and we found “biology lab in a box”, hit overnight delivery and next day our garage was converted into a full-scale biology lab with the whole family dissecting pig’s eyes, frogs and lamb hearts, then writing-up the lab reports.
One of our children is an extrovert and felt the impact of not having a social environment outside the family. We were a bit slow off the mark and hadn’t joined the home-school networks designed to sort this out. However, we increased social interaction and the issue was gone.
We tracked how quickly our children moved through our heavier curriculum compared with other education options. My children typically had their work done by 1pm with a heavier workload. They ploughed through the material, much faster than traditional classrooms.
Overall, I feel my children benefitted from the home-schooling experience. They are independent-thinking, problem-solvers.
Of course, all this is an American experience from an Australian’s perspective.
Here in Australia, I contacted a teacher who lost her job due to the vaccine mandate. She decided to home-school. Today the network had shrunk a little but still active.
In South Australia, there is a well-known science competition called the Oliphant Science Awards. Past winners have included students from home-school networks in the Adelaide Hills. Past home-schoolers have placed well.
YOUR HOUSEHOLD BUDGET WHEN YOU HOME-SCHOOL
Of course, every household budget is unique and canvassing them all in this article is impossible. Let’s make some assumptions so at least we can see the impact of home-schooling under those prerequisites.
We’ll assume this is a two-parent, two child family. One parent is on $120,000 per annum and the other on $80,000. In the table below, I ran numbers assuming they are currently sending their two children to a public school, a private school or a top-tier Sydney or Melbourne private school.
Then I show what the disposable income after school fees would be if they home-schooled.
Here’s the comparison:
Therefore, for the 40% of families sending their secondary student children to private schools in Australia, you are either going to take a $30,000 hit to your family budget or make a $30,000 gain by opting for home-school instead.
What is your child and country worth?
YOUR DECISION
If you want to make government redundant, you’re going to have to take matters into your own hands.
One way to do this is to try home-schooling for your children.
The benefits are enormous, not just for your child, not just for you, but for the country.
I don’t know a better way to instil the next generation with self-reliance, independence, problem-solving, adaptability, creativity and leadership than this way.
And I certainly don’t know a better way to reduce the impact of government over the long-term than this.
Try it.
I’d love to hear your experiences with home-schooling in the comments below. You are guaranteed a reply.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
Imagine you lived in Australia and enjoyed a great life. Then the government became tyrannical, you protested for democracy, but an anti-democratic security law was passed and you were intimidated and arrested. Released, you fled to New Zealand and were granted a visa there. But the Australian Federal Police placed a bounty on your head of $A190,202 (US$127,728) and activated its security apparatus to ‘extract’ you.
Can you image this breach of your basic civil liberties? In what kind of psychological state would you be?
As far as Liberty Itch knows, this story is fictitious. However, it corresponds to a true story so similar that we need only change three facts. In the real-life version you were born and raised in British-ruled Hong Kong, a Commonwealth country. Your new home is Australia. And your name is Ted Hui. All other details are the same.
If you default to the ‘don’t-rock-the-boat’ conservative position of, ‘Yeah, well, that’s none of our business because he’s not an Australian citizen’, let’s take Mr. Hui’s situation but assume the victim is an Australian citizen. You now have the factual circumstances of Australian lawyer, Kevin Yam.
Ted HuiKevin Yam
The Hong Kong Police has issued a HK$1 million bounty on someone who is not only an Australian resident, but an Australian citizen!
Slothful ‘status-quo’ thinking might argue, “These men have obviously broken the law. They’re criminals. Police issue bounties all the time.” But there’s a lot more to the story.
When the British transferred Hong Kong to China in 1997, the City was imbued with all the benefits of British culture: a parliamentary democracy, small government, plus a robust common law judicial system protecting civil liberties and property rights. It was a stable, bustling success story. China agreed to preserve democracy there for at least 50 years.
Hong Kong Handover. 1997.
Six years in and the Chinese Communist Party couldn’t resist meddling. Small snippets at first, then an attempt to implement a security law in 2003, thwarted by democrats. The student Umbrella Movement resisted the tyranny from 2014. But by 2019, the communists had installed sufficient sympathisers to flex their coercive muscle. Pro-democracy protests continued, in some ways similar to Australia’s Freedom Rallies protesting against the Covid lockdowns, but with higher stakes. In 2020, the Hong Kong National Security Law was passed, establishing “crimes” of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organisations, control mechanisms to entrench authoritarianism.
In Mr. Hui’s case, he was elected to the Legislative Council as a Hong Kong Democracy Party MP. He lent his support to the protests. For his efforts Mr. Hui was arrested and imprisoned without trial several times, the duration each time becoming longer than the last. In jail, he was coerced to be silent about the loss of freedoms and assaulted. He was released, fled and today lives in Adelaide.
Mr. Yam’s story is that he is an Australian citizen and merely lived in Hong Kong for twenty years. He’s a legal scholar with Georgetown University’s Centre for Asian Law and lives in Melbourne.
These aren’t the backgrounds of criminals.
These are scholarly, principled men acting for democracy and freedom.
The CCP-backed Hong Kong Government is using extra-territorial arrest warrants and bounties as an intimidation tactic against an Australian lawyer. In light of the new security law, Australia rightly cancelled its extradition treaty with Hong Kong in 2020. Interpol has not been issued with a Red Notice by the Hong Kong Police. It would never be approved.
In response to the Chinese Communist Party’s bounty, Mr. Hui said it “makes it clearer to Western democracies that China is going towards more extreme authoritarianism.”
Mr. Yam stated, “It’s my duty to speak out against the crackdown that is going on right now, against the tyranny that is now reigning over the City that was once one of the freest in Asia. All they want to do is try to make a show of their view that the national security law has extra-territorial effect.”
The freedoms of speech, assembly, movement, the presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial are cornerstones of liberal democracy which libertarians cherish.
It would be an error to view these men as an overseas problem. A CCP edict that Australian citizens and residents be ‘pursued for life’ is an affront to all Australians. If you support Assange’s freedom, you will find these bounties on Mr Hui and Mr Yam abhorrent. And, being the thinking, philosophically consistent libertarian that you are, you should express support for their human rights.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
I was flattered to receive an invitation from Liberty Itch to join the team of writers.
They asked that my début article be something of an introduction: explaining how I came to notoriety, so here it is.
On 25th March I filmed trans activists rioting in Auckland’s Albert Park, preventing British women’s rights campaigner Posie Parker from speaking. I used a 360° camera attached to a three-metre-long selfie-stick so the footage is overhead, from the middle of the crowd. These cameras film in all directions concurrently and from it, flat clips can be exported.
That evening on the nightly news and over the next two days the ruling Labour/Greens regime and their media allies began to concoct a narrative that the protest had been peaceful. They used sound bites such as “peaceful protest,” “pure trans joy” and “an outpouring of aroha [love.]”
I knew the footage I had directly contradicted this false narrative so I started publishing it.
The following day my life changed.
Numerous women fleeing the attack were told by multiple officers words to the effect of “we are not here to protect you.”
I know these things to be true because the footage I have depicts it!
I used Twitter to post infrequently about my interests, stuff people weren’t particularly interested in. But oh boy, were they interested in this. On the morning of the 28th I woke to twenty notifications per second, requests from major news organisations for syndication (accepted) and for interview (declined.) By the end of the week millions of people around the world had viewed the material.
Then I started receiving requests. Primarily from assault victims, some of whom remain traumatised. With a 360° camera I’m seldom looking in the direction of pertinent material. People came to me with requests for flat exports at a certain time in a certain direction so the footage could be evidential in police complaints and subsequently prosecutions.
Of course, I agreed. And kept publishing, clip after clip, each more damning of the official narrative than the last. This didn’t endear me much to the authorities or the rainbow community, nor their left-wing supporters and the domestic mainstream media. In a small country I’m no longer a private citizen.
People came to trust in my integrity. And I’ve become something of a clearing house for information: witness statements, responses to Official Information Act requests, footage from other photographers wishing to remain anonymous and so on. Publishing this material helps to keep the pressure on the authorities (who very much want all of this to go away) to do the right thing.
Which brings me to the New Zealand Police.
On the day of the riot the police withdrew to the outskirts of Albert Park, allowing the rainbow community to get stuck into the women who were there to speak or listen. In a frenzy the rioters broke through metal barriers to get to them. Whilst this was occurring the police were in constant contact with the rainbow organisers. Numerous women fleeing the attack were told by multiple officers words to the effect of “we are not here to protect you.”
I know these things to be true because the footage I have depicts it, and I’m in possession of the OIA responses and independent witness accounts that corroborate it.
This was -at best- a significant operational failure on the part of the police. Some might go so far as to say collusion with a violent mob. It is contentious enough for the Independent Police Conduct Authority to launch an investigation. At the insistence of several victims the IPCA interviewed me two weeks ago, which of course I published, and you can listen to the testimony at my YouTube channel.
To coincide with a court hearing concerning one of her alleged assailants, Posie Parker was due to attend another speaking event in Auckland on 20th September. She cancelled because the New Zealand authorities refused to guarantee her safety. It offends me greatly that anyone is prevented from speaking in public and I am ashamed that my country is not a safe place for her to visit. The event went ahead in her absence.
Which brings me to the power of photography.
The ruling Labour/Greens regime and their media allies began to concoct a narrative that the protest had been peaceful.
The police and the rainbow community are deeply cognizant of the damage the Albert Park footage has done respectively to their reputation and their cause. To discourage violence, hold police accountable and above all keep women safe I formed a team of volunteers to film the event. We achieved these objectives.
Other photographers regularly hit me up to back them up in tricky situations, typically demonstrations. Pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, anti-co-governance, whatever. I do so because I want to prevent harm coming to anyone and for the truth to be told.
Now I’m notorious, these are increasingly dangerous situations. Demonstrators, counter-demonstrators, media, police. People I’ve never met address me by name.
Simon Anderson is a technology consultant from Auckland, New Zealand. He believes in the fundamental right of all people to exercise their democratic rights peacefully, particularly with regard to free speech. Simon came into public consciousness as a video-documentarian during the trans rights counter protests in Auckland during March 2023.
