By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
TURNING Point Australia’s leader Joel Jammal is a sharp and well informed political operator who is under no illusions about the future direction of Australian politics – and his prediction is not as bad as we might fear.
Jammal is a student of Australian and American political history, and told a packed auditorium on the Gold Coast on Sunday night that the political scene of Australia was ripe for change, as indicated by The Voice referendum vote.
“The Voice referendum was the turning point,” he said, pun intended. “It was the political class versus the people. It was a binary vote (yes or no) and an overwhelming win for the people. Even in communist Victoria it was 55 percent voting no.”
The Voice in turn gave birth to the March for Australia movement in opposition to unchecked immigration. Jammal is well aware of immigration-based scams including the existence of fake universities in Sydney and the organised scamming of the NDIS.
Jammal noted that his father was allowed to come into Australia from Lebanon under the old White Australia policy because he was judged of suitable character. The policy was amended in 1958 to allow non-British Europeans into Australia.
These are the people Turning Point Australia is targeting, in addition to university students, in the same manner as the late Charlie Kirk, whose death had left him “numb”.
Turning Point Australia had its roots in the Covid protests and has been running it Australia for four years. Jammal and his associates were put in touch with TPUSA by Nigel Farage, when he toured Australia.
The organisation, while inspired by the work of Charlie Kirk, is run independently of TPUSA and does not receive financial support from them. The US organisation has been running for 13 years, and after Kirk’s assassination, received 150,000 inquiries for setting up new chapters in US high schools and colleges.
Jammal also noted the insightful political/historical work of Neil Howe and the late William Strauss titled The Fourth Turning, and said it was highly significant that the beleagured Liberal Party of Australia had just turned 81 years old. Thirty years ago Howe and Strauss developed a provocative new theory of American history that is highly relevant to the Liberals’ history.
Looking back at the last 500 years, Howe and Strauss uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly 80 to 100 years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years.
Jammal, while not rejecting the Liberals as a political force, noted that they had declined dramatically in all states except, perhaps, Queensland. They had also lost sight of their original “We Believe” statement developed by Robert Menzies.
However that should not preclude well informed people joining the Liberals or some other party and voting in pre-selections for the right candidates. Jammal works with people across the board.
He was speaking at a meeting organised by a local pentecostal church and attended by some 300 people.
Jammal, whose family were Lebanese immigrants to Australia in the early 1960s, himself attends Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel’s Christ the Good Shepherd Assyrian Orthodox church in Wakeley, Sydney.
The Bishop, who became a Tik Tok celebrity followed by hundreds of thousands of young people worldwide, was the target of a much publicised knife attack in 2024 that left him blind in one eye.
