Australians for Science and Freedom was founded with the purpose of providing a place to dream about building a better Australian society. Our founders and directors are professionals: economists, lawyers, health specialists, academics, diplomats, teachers, and investigative journalists who saw the madness unfolding during covid and have committed themselves to the effort of rebuilding Australia on sound, time-tested principles.
Today, a couple of years after our founding, our active community of free thinkers is recognised as a sane, compassionate, determined and capable force within Australia and overseas. We hold regular online and in-person cross-disciplinary conversations about how to deliver better health, education, legal services, and information to the Australian people. We regularly analyse and write about important matters that the mainstream ignores, and have produced a series of position statements on matters faced by the Australian government ranging from freedom of speech to excess deaths. In these and many other ways, we help Australians see how they personally can come to the aid of their own country.
Despite our continuing progress, frequent successes, and more exciting plans for this year, ASF exists only because of the determination and commitment of a small number of very busy people. All of us are volunteers, most of us work for a living in full-time jobs, and there is always more that we want to do than what we are able to do with the resources available. (We do not and never will accept donations from political parties or campaigns.) ASF presently receives no more than a few thousand dollars per year from even its most committed individual members and directors, and our membership fees in total amount to a similar ballpark figure per year. The scarcity of time and money necessarily limits how much we can do, and how fast.
Nevertheless, dreaming is what we were founded for, and in that spirit I offer below my thoughts on what ASF could achieve with a million dollars coupled with in-kind donations of time from our dedicated community.
1 – Progress our in-draft blueprints and practical implementation plans for new national systems of health, K-12 education, and early learning (ages 0 to 4) for Australia. This involves mainly writing and hence time, but also some support that can be purchased, as these blueprints will draw on the knowledge and experience of many existing non-mainstream or otherwise innovative health and education professionals from across Australia and the world. These people will need to be contacted and asked to provide their input (gratis) on particular points in a semi-structured manner, such as via focus groups and targeted interviews.
2 – Establish two new scientific journals under the ASF/Academia Libera Mentis imprint. Both will be open-access, peer-reviewed, academic journals, but with no large publishing house bureaucracy attached. One of these journals will be focussed on social science, and one on health science, consistent with the orientation of Academia Libera Mentis (ALM) and ASF. For this, volunteer academics affiliated with ASF and ALM will draw on their own expertise and professional networks to populate the editorial boards and lists of potential reviewers, and we will complement these in-kind donations with the purchase of copyediting, administrative assistance, and the development of an online publishing platform.
3 – Offer a three-month Academia Libera Mentis program – our alternative higher education experiment – on Australian soil, with uniquely Australian flavour. The ALM program presently offered in a Belgian castle, and for which I organised a week-long “boot camp” taster session for prospective Australian students just before Christmas, was founded by one of ASF’s founders, Paul Frijters, and its teaching staff include myself along with other highly experienced, freethinking social science, health, and aesthetics teachers from around the world. No ALM teachers have been renumerated for their efforts. ASF’s money will go towards accommodation, equipment (e.g., projectors, instruments) and travel and food costs for participants that are not covered by student fees.
4 – Develop curricula and materials customised for use in grades 9 through 12, aligned with the content of the ALM undergraduate textbook that is being finalised as I write, for consideration by the home-schooling community in Australia and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Topics covered will include education in civics, personal and family health, and the dynamics of human groups, while materials will emphasise the development of skills such as reflection on own thinking; inquisitive, tolerant and respectful discussion; and principled problem-solving.
5 – Invest in bi-monthly themed, in-person ASF community meetings in each Australian capital city to help build awareness of the need for individuals to invest personally in making positive change happen in Australian communities. Themes will be decided locally, from healthy home cooking classes to DIY physical therapy workshops to parenting workshops to Council-level policy discussions to square dancing lessons. ASF volunteers in each city will serve as hosts of these events, and the money will go to appropriate venue/equipment hire and modest catering expenses.
What if we had ten million dollars? In that case, all of the above, plus:
1 – Organise and implement a Covid-19 Vaccine Injury Inquiry, across Australia. This involves lining up vax-injured people and their relatives willing to file statutory declarations, trusted expert panels to interview them, minute-takers, film crews and suitable venues in each state, scripting, scheduling, holding, and (lightly) editing the interviews, and then disseminating the interviews through various channels to raise awareness in the community of these tragedies and bring mainstream political attention to the need for us as a society to assess and address the needs of the Australian victims of the covid vaccine mandates and coercion.
2 – Set up national experiments in participative democracy with cooperating councils. These trials will establish citizen juries tasked with appointing senior public servants, and citizen assemblies for evaluating current policies in the areas of climate, health, education, and national defence.
3 – Expand and pilot the educational materials developed for high school students aligned with the ALM curriculum. This will require renting an estate to house educational services running from primary school to university.
4 – Expand and pilot the new health system. This will involve buying and outfitting a ship on which particular health services can be delivered in international waters, and setting up the infrastructure to offer cheap and effective basic health services legally via citizen-led, community-based personal health networks, mediated by information services delivered partially in-situ and partially off-shore.
5 – Expand and pilot the new early learning system in one Australian state. This will involve teacher training and liaising with local communities.
6 – Pilot a suite of new, independent citizen-sourced news production agencies in one Australian state.
We have a dream!
