Noticing the Australia Day Awards

For a couple years I’ve run my eye over the Australia Day nominations, and noted the outsized representation by certain demographics relative to their population group size within Australia.

Total Order of Australia honor lists recipients 2020:

837 Awards for General Division,
26 Military Division,
236 meritous awards,
so around 1100 in total.

In terms of Demographic skew take for example Jewish celebrated award winners, being 41 in total. That actually amounted to 4% of the total awards (3.7% to be more precise)…. sounds reasonable – or does it? Per the 2016 Australian census Australia’s total Juicy population was 91,000 out of a total population of 24m… or 0.38% of the population, so they appear to be OVER-REPRESENTED by a factor of 10.

I did a similar study the following year in 2021 and last year in 2023 the ‘Australian Jewish News‘ compiled the list for me, a mere 25.

Anyhow, I haven’t bothered running the numbers yet for this year. I’m waiting for the AJN to compile the list for 2024 again for me – I’m pretty sure I’ll know what the answer is; somewhere between egregiously over represented to ‘wtf how do they think they’ll get away with it!‘

Speaking of “WTF how do they think they’ll get away with it!” I thought I would turn my eye to other matters this year following Drago’s link into yesterday’s comments:

Where upon may autism kicked in and I took it upon myself to verify and find out more about this claim – so I looked it up and it was indeed there and this is what the very specific $27,500,000 purpose was for:

“A grant has been awarded to rapidly implement additional security measures for the Jewish community in the context of the Israel/Hamas conflict, with a focus on Jewish schools and pre-schools.”

https://www.grants.gov.au/Ga/Show/97a480cd-910a-474c-90ab-a616dd808a72

This prompted me to do a little bit more research this morning to see what other grants were given out.

Searched “Catholic” in the Australia Day Award site’s search bar for Grants and sorted by publish date, while there were multiple grants for greater than $1m, in the main they were sub 200k. In terms of the +$1m there were some stand outs like $8.1m to GA353135 “Disability Support for Older Australians”, or $1.9m to GA353025 “Indigenous Boarding Providers 2024 expansion” .

Note that each purpose was generic and all inclusive to other Australians, it wasn’t limited to ‘older Catholic Australians’ or ‘Indigenous Catholic Care.”

Now let us take a look at a couple more grants using “Jew” in the search bar:

Well, as I’ve already discussed first up at King of the pile and 3 times the amount of the largest single grant towards Catholic charities we have GA352404 distributing $27.5m for ‘Enhancing Security for Jewish Communities Program‘. Looking back in past years “Community Safety” seems to be a re-occurring theme for Jewish Australia Day award grants, not as excessive as the $27.5m we’ve just witnessed, but certainly in the multiple hundreds of thousands.

Next up we have a total of $1,447,101 across two grants to care for old Jews. I won’t begrudge them too much as much of the Catholic allocation was caring for the old. However I will say that it did seem a little excessive for 0.38% of the population, consider the largest Catholic old age care grants was for $8.1m and Catholics are still nominally something like 20% of the population.

But it was the other 3 major grants that I found interesting

GA353340 granting some $549,227 again in the category of “Community Safety” to be used for ‘Securing the Jewish Museum of Australia’:

“A grant has been awarded to support religious schools and pre-schools, places of worship and faith-based community centres to address the risk of crime and violence motivated by religious or racial intolerance. The grant is expected to fund the installation of security infrastructure and the engagement of security guards at the Jewish Museum of Australia in St Kilda, Victoria.”

GA352772 granting some $527,167 again in the category of “Community Safety” to be used for “Safeguarding the Sydney Jewish Museum”:

“A grant has been awarded to support religious schools and pre-schools, places of worship and faith-based community centres to address the risk of crime and violence motivated by religious or racial intolerance. The grant is expected to fund the engagement of security guards at the Sydney Jewish Museum in Darlinghurst, New South Wales.”

GA352770 granting some $402,928 again the category of “Community Safety” to be used for “
Install security fencing and employ guards at North Eastern Jewish Centre”

“A grant has been awarded to support religious schools and pre-schools, places of worship and faith-based community centres to address the risk of crime and violence motivated by religious or racial intolerance. The grant is expected to fund the installation of security infrastructure and the engagement of security guards at the North Eastern Jewish War Memorial Centre in Doncaster, Victoria.“

I had no idea how big the Jewish War Memorial is in Doncaster so I thought I would google it to find out:

If it has more than 1000 names on it for Jews who fought for Australia I would be surprised, but anyway we not get the privilage of forking over $400,000 a year so the Jewish community can hire Jewish security guards through a Jewish security company to guard it.

So the breakdown of Australia Day Grant Awards has the Australian Jewish community getting nearly $30million dollars in grants to go towards their “security”.

How much ends up in the hands of Jewish Security companies? I have no idea, but if I were to guess it would start at $28.5m

Mazeltov!