R.G.Menzies above

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Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?

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20 March, 2010

Hilarious! Australian students become the first "Aborigines" to attend Oxford University

I wish the young people mentioned in the news story below all the best but calling them Aborigines is a laugh. I have a blue-eyed, fair-haired sister in law who is also called an Aborigine. Such is the politically correct nomenclature used in Australia. That real Aborigines have black skin, dark eyes, flat noses and heavy features is supposed to be invisible, apparently. At least the guy on the right below has something of the distinctive heavy features.

Even Charlie Perkins was not much of an Aborigine. His skin was yellowish rather than black and his nose was as narrow as mine. Such people would once have been called "half-castes" or "quarter castes" and beyond that simply "whites", though it might occasionally be observed that such "whites" had "a touch of the tar-brush" in their ancestry.

In short, the people in this story tell you NOTHING about people of wholly Aboriginal ancestry, though the do-gooders no doubt will be pretending that it does. I think it is an imposture to keep referring to people as "Aborigines" when they are clearly nothing of the sort. It certainly does no favours to Aborigines to have people held out to them as role models who are in fact effectively whites. I know Aborigines well and they have their own great strengths and virtues -- but they are not the same as the strengths and virtues of whites. May I use "paternalism" as a descriptor of the nonsense below?

Paul Gray, left, and Christian Thompson sit with Rachel Perkins, the daughter of Charlie Perkins

When Australian indigenous leader Charlie Perkins played football against Oxford university students in Britain in the 1960s, he was inspired to forgo a contract with Manchester United and return home to pursue a university education. Mr Perkins eventually become the first indigenous person to graduate from an Australian university in 1965 and went on to become a prominent Aboriginal leader who campaigned for civil rights reform.

Now two students will study at Oxford in his honour, the first Aboriginal Australians to be accepted into the prestigious British university. Christian Thompson, 32, and Paul Gray, 26, were announced this week as the inaugural recipients of the Charlie Perkins Scholarships to attend Oxford University.

Mr Gray will develop research into the neurobiological processes in children as a result of traumatic events in early life as part of a postgraduate degree in experimental psychology.

Mr Thompson will undertake doctoral studies in fine art at the Ruskin School of Art where he will conduct research on the Indigenous Australian artefacts at the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Collection. Mr Thompson, an acclaimed artist who is currently studying at the Amsterdam School of Fine Arts in the Netherlands, described it as a “life changing opportunity”. “To be one of the first two Aboriginals to ever go to Oxford is pretty wild,” he told The Times. “It’s going to be exciting to be in an environment which is all about the pursuit of knowledge.” Mr Thompson will also hold a residency with the Blast Theory art collective in Brighton in August prior to starting his studies at Oxford.

For Mr Gray, it will be his first visit to Britain. “I’m really excited about it, it’s going to be such a great opportunity for us,” he said, adding that he is a little wary of the British weather. “Luckily I don’t feel the cold too much, so hopefully it’ll be ok.”

The pair will travel to the UK next month for an orientation visit to the university and will begin their studies in October. The scholarship is jointly funded by the British and Australian governments.

SOURCE (Andrew Bolt has a more graphic comment on the matter)




Media bias about religion: Rudd's Catholic background is good; Abbott's Catholic background is bad

Rudd was brought up as a Catholic but now mainly worships at Anglican churches. He always makes clear that he has a strong Christian committment, however

TONY Abbott is a phenomenon, a former trainee priest who wears his conservative Catholicism on his sleeve; Abbott is an experiment for our politics, public attitudes and media coverage.

There is nothing new about a political leader being a Christian. Paul Keating was steeped in his Catholic background; Malcolm Turnbull was a convert to Catholicism; John Howard, reared a Methodist, practised as an Anglican; and Kevin Rudd is an Anglican who gives television doorstops outside church. Rudd provides politics with a slightly more religious face and hopes to gain from this.

Yet Abbott is different. None of the others contemplated a religious life, spent three years in a seminary or had the same depth of religious experience. Abbott's Catholicism is integral to his political personality. It runs through his speech, outlook and values. It provokes alarm from influential women and feminists.

But what is especially different is that Abbott keeps talking about his values and morality.

During last week's ABC1 Four Corners program on Abbott, interviewer Liz Jackson ventured that "maybe it's the language" he uses that helps to make Abbott so provocative. Former journalist and Peter Costello press secretary Niki Savva said this week that Abbott cannot stop talking about sex, morality and women. This raises the question: Do his advisers ever tell him to tone it down?

On this point the contrast between Abbott and Rudd is pivotal. Abbott opens the door on his moral views and Rudd, as Prime Minister, has firmly closed the door. It is fascinating that the media responds in a dutiful manner. It questions Abbott relentlessly and it largely leaves Rudd alone. Yet the views of the two men seem almost identical. What does this say about media professionalism and fairness?

In Rudd's famous 2006 Monthly magazine article he called German theologian and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer his hero and quoted him approvingly that "when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die". Rudd backed Bonhoeffer's rejection of the Two Kingdoms doctrine: the gospel being about the inner person and not the realm of state affairs. By endorsing Bonhoeffer's view Rudd offered the most assertive vision of an active Christianity in politics.

Yet Rudd's Christianity is more acceptable to the media because it enshrines a social justice agenda to support "the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed". Rudd also believes abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research are "matters of deep individual conscience", which means he is not prescriptive on such matters.

Abbott, by contrast, reflects the Catholic struggle between individual conscience and church interpretation of God's will. He flirts with being prescriptive about conscience matters. So Abbott laments 100,000 abortions annually and wants abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"; he says he finds homosexuals "a bit threatening"; and he reveals advice to his daughters not "to give it [virginity] to someone lightly".

This difference is subtle yet vital. Rudd and Abbott have similar views on same-sex marriage, abortion and euthanasia but Abbott's more prescriptive rhetoric brings him into the firing line.

Of course, Abbott is a politician seeking advantage. He judges his social conservatism will appeal to the former Howard battlers who believe in family and traditional values. Yet the differences between Howard and Abbott are illuminating; Abbott, unlike Howard, has a more explicit religious profile and this poses a greater electoral risk for him.

The truth, however, is that in hard policy terms the guise of "Abbott as Christian crusader" is overdone, exhausted and marginal. Abbott does not seek to qualify the secular state. He has made this clear for many years. He does not seek any change in abortion laws. He does not object to same-sex couples, just their marriage, like Rudd. He does not seek to impose Catholic teaching on Australia. Any such notion is untenable in Australia's secular state.

The real objection to Abbott is that he refuses to disguise his muscular, conservative Christianity. The Australian people will pass their own judgment on muscular, conservative Christianity but it is manifestly offensive to our progressive media. There are numerous examples but the most recent was the Four Corners program last Monday on The Authentic Mr Abbott. The unifying theme was Abbott's religion to an extent that would have been inconceivable in any comparable program on Rudd.

But the real issue was the treatment of Abbott's religion. It was a sustained exercise in reinforcing stereotypes where, for the umpteenth time, Abbott was portrayed as patronising about women, reactionary on abortion, prone to impose his moral beliefs and unsympathetic to the poor and homeless.

Many viewers would have loved it. This program magnified out of proportion and distorted the policy significance of Abbott's religion as distinct from Abbott's views on economics, finance, foreign policy, welfare, education, health, parental leave, industrial relations and so on that will bear directly on what an Abbott prime ministership would mean for Australians.

The more challenging and worthwhile media approach was to discover the "authentic Mr Abbott" by contesting caricature and stereotype. What, for example, is the most obvious political example of Abbott's Christianity?

It is surely his personal commitment to and visits to remote indigenous communities during his entire career. As a newly elected backbench MP in 1994 and 1995 Abbott began these three to four-day visits. They intensified when he became employment minister, then health minister. Abbott formed a relationship with Noel Pearson and became one of the great political backers of Pearson's reforms.

With more time after the Coalition's 2007 defeat, Abbott spent three weeks in 2008 as a teacher's aide working in the classroom from 9am to 3pm at Coen in north Queensland, assisting Aboriginal youngsters with their literacy, and has since followed the progress of some of these children. Last year he spent 10 days at Aurukun in Queensland assisting the truancy team.

Frankly, this shows a rare personal commitment not duplicated by any other national party leader. It is part of the Abbott story unknown to the public. Such commitment is integral to Abbott's Christianity and Catholic background. Yet it violates the stereotype of his Christianity as a negative repressive factor, which is the ABC's dominant ideological mindset.

Such a depiction of Abbott would be contentious because it would mean his Christianity leads to something worthwhile. By the way, have you ever heard on any ABC current affairs program any suggestion that Abbott's Christianity has positive as opposed to negative implications? If so, you are a privileged person.

Four Corners highlighted the welfare sector's outrage about Abbott and stamped its angry foot over his refusal to endorse Rudd's target to halve homelessness by 2020. Yes, Rudd's targets can be constructive but they do not guarantee good policy. Indeed, targets are often self-serving tokenism. At the 1998 election Kim Beazley pledged to cut the jobless rate to 5 per cent but Howard repudiated the target only to better the figure. The program did not mention Rudd's recent concession that homelessness in Australia is increasing. Is this not relevant when Abbott is being critiqued for not matching Rudd's target?

What matters are results, and this was Abbott's point. The program's choice of homeless targets to reinforce the stereotype of Abbott as unsympathetic to poverty-busting intervention was unpersuasive and revealed a pre-conceived mindset towards him.

The program briefly mentioned former One Nation operative David Oldfield, who was employed by Abbott and whose defection to Pauline Hanson was a serious embarrassment for him. Having raised Oldfield, the program declined to mention his consequence: that Abbott as a minister and without seeking Howard's approval launched a political and legal campaign against Hanson that led, eventually, to her imprisonment. Abbott once said he saw this campaign "as the most important thing I have done in politics". Yes, the ABC has covered this issue before. But the idea of a conservative Abbott pursuing Hanson, another violation of the stereotype, was nowhere to be seen in the profile.

The program, fixated on Abbott's religion, missed the obvious point: that Abbott is a classic "Lord, forgive me" Christian, open and humble about his personal failures. Abbott's Christianity underpins his beliefs but facilitates his saga of confessional changes of mind, notably on multiculturalism and parental leave. What, pray, might come next?

Neither Abbott nor Rudd wants to make religion an election issue. While it lurks in the background, it should be kept firmly in the background. It would be a serious lack of judgment if the media invested Abbott's religion with more weight than it deserves in this contest. It would be an equal lack of judgment if the media, in depicting the political meaning of Abbott's Christianity, offered a series of sustained distortions.

SOURCE




Malcolm Fraser's famous missing trousers: Maybe Mossad stole them

Andrew Bolt has below what is probably the last word on the matter. I once met Malcolm Fraser and it took a real effort of will to suppress any mention of the word "trousers" in the resultant conversation

The scary thing is that Malcolm Fraser is now so far to the Left that he probably actually believes it:

Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (is) jointly written by Fraser and Margaret Simons. According to Simons, Fraser wanted to expose himself to critical questioning. So the co-authored book attempts to be both biography and autobiography which, of course, is impossible.

As is the attempt to finally make go away what happened in Memphis, in 1986, when Fraser lost his pants… “So what happened in Memphis?” asks the book. “Fraser gave some brief comments to the media at the time but has never expanded on them. He does not intend to do so now.”

So much for the critical questioning…

The book explains (Fraser) ... went to town “hoping to find some of the famous live blues venues”. He went for a drink at the flash Peabody Hotel but “awoke in a very different place: the Admiral Benbow Hotel, a notoriously seedy dive”.

It goes on: “Today, both (wife) Tamie and (personal assistant) Heather Barwick are convinced Fraser was telling the truth, that he was drugged.”

Well, yes. The book proposes he may have been the victim of a simple crime, but hints that darker forces were at work. Who? It doesn’t say. The likely suspects were the CIA, because the US was at the time standing in the way of the sanctions, or maybe Mossad, because Israel was apparently selling arms to South Africa and didn’t want Fraser wrecking the deal.

“However,” says the book, “he prefers not to entertain conspiracy theories.”

Paul Toohey goes on to give some gossip of the kind that suggests Mossad may not have sent secret agents across the world to snatch Mal’s daks.

I once went to Memphis looking for Fraser’s pants. I did not find them but I did find other things…

Fraser had checked into the Benbow after midnight, signing in with a scrawl that appeared to read “Joan Jones” from Victoria, and paid for the room with a $100 bill. Fraser later told the Memphis Commercial Appeal he had not called the police about his missing $10,000 Rolex, passport, wallet, $600 cash and, let’s not forget, his trousers because “I had a busy schedule to keep and chances of getting my stuff back seemed pretty remote”.

Fraser was most likely drugged at the classy Peabody by an attractive woman. After the story broke, Janine Perrett, a New York correspondent for The Australian, wrote how “poor old Malcolm was suffering memory losses”.

But she could jog his memory a short time later in New York, where Fraser promised her “an exclusive interview on the merits of floating exchange rates”. The interview never happened. Instead, Fraser wanted to go with Perrett to a “dark, smoky, smoochy bar”.

SOURCE




Australian bishops lead crossing to Rome

FOUR bishops, 40 priests and thousands of parishioners from the Traditional Anglican Communion will petition the Vatican by Easter to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop John Hepworth of Adelaide, primate of the TAC, said 26 parishes in Western Australia, Tasmania, NSW, Victoria, far north Queensland and South Australia hoped to be united with Rome by the end of the year.

The move comes as 100 Anglican parishes in the US and some in Canada have announced their decisions to convert to Catholicism en masse, voting to take up an offer made by Pope Benedict XVI in November in his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (On Groups of Anglicans). The initiative allows Anglican bishops, priests and entire congregations, if they wish, to join Rome.

Archbishop Hepworth, 65, who is married with three children, said the Pope had allowed for a continuation of Anglican practices, including a married clergy. "In an age when the traditional family is under attack, the presence of a priestly family at the centre of parishes is a real gift," he said. He said the motivation for the move to Rome was a desire for Christian unity and dissatisfaction with the secularisation of the Anglican church. This, he said, included the ordination of women and practising homosexuals.

Traditional Anglicans had also become disillusioned by radical bishops such as John Shelby Spong in the US publicly disbelieving the Gospel accounts of basic tenets such as the bodily Resurrection of Christ, he said.

"Under the process, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith accepts petitions, they are then referred to the local Catholic bishops' conference which gives advice, then an Ordinariate will be established," he said. "I would like to think the process would be close to being finalised by the end of the year because the Pope wants results."

Australia's Cardinal George Pell said members of the TAC would be "most welcome" when the process unfolded. To ease the way, the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference has appointed Bishop Peter Elliott of Melbourne, the director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, to liaise with traditional Anglicans considering joining the Catholic Church. "The papal offer gives traditional Anglicans the opportunity to be united in communion but not absorbed by the Catholic Church," Bishop Elliott said. "The Catholic Church will be enriched by the very prayerful and dignified approach to worship and the sense of good taste and culture of traditional Anglicans."

Once the Ordinariate is established, ordinary Catholics will be free to attend its Masses.

Archbishop Hepworth acknowledged that some traditional Anglicans would opt not to join the Ordinariate "and they will need to be catered for".

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, Dr Phillip Aspinall, was in flood-affected areas of western Queensland yesterday and uncontactable. But in a recent statement he said that the TAC "is a group of people who are not part of the Anglican Church of Australia nor in communion with the global Anglican Communion". But at least two of the bishops involved in the petition, David Robarts of Launceston and Harry Entwistle of Perth, hold general licences within the mainstream Anglican church's Diocese of the Murray and are therefore in communion with Canterbury.

Dr Aspinall warned lay Anglicans if they wished to become Catholic "they will have to accept all the teaching of that Church including its moral teaching, for example, on contraception".

In Britain, Anglican and Catholic authorities are considering the financial implications of any mass conversions, including the possibility of church sharing or the Catholic Church taking out 100-year leases on former Anglican churches.

SOURCE




Note that my QANTAS/Jetstar and Queensland Police blogs are still getting frequent updates





19 March, 2010

Racist brawl in Melbourne

The races are not named, of course but the "very tall fellows" would undoubtedly be East Africans (e.g. Sudanese) and the other group were probably Polynesians (e.g. Maori, Samoans). Polynesians tend to be very aggressive. A fighting response to any mockery would be absolutely normal for Polynesians

Six men have been charged over a terrifying brawl at a shopping centre in Melbourne’s east yesterday. Police said the fight erupted at the Whitehorse Plaza shopping centre in Box Hill and involved nine men from two groups.

Reports allege some combatants carried knives and used chairs to attack the second group, with the fight spilling on to Whitehorse Road and surrounding streets.

Paramedics were called but treated only one man, a 19-year-old who claimed he had not been injured but was vomiting. He was taken to Maroondah Hospital in a stable condition. One bystander suffered a cut to the head but did not need medical treatment.

About 5pm, police arrested nine men over the fight. Six men, aged 18 to 23, from the eastern and south-eastern suburbs, were charged with affray. The three other men were released without charge. The six will appear in the Ringwood Magistrates Court at a later date.

Witness ‘‘Kelly’’ told Radio 3AW today ‘‘some very, very tall fellows were whistling and calling out’’ when another group responded to the noise. ‘‘Eventually it turned into a bit of a face off, a bit of a face off, and then it turned into a full-on brawl,’’ she said. She said the two groups were from different cultural backgrounds [i.e. races] and the fight went on for ‘‘10 to 15 minutes up and down the mall’’.

SOURCE




Rest easy. Your airline "security" staff will protect you from iced tea!

Filipina woman spends five days in jail after iced tea mistaken for drugs. They're deep thinkers, our security personnel

A TOURIST from the Philippines has been cleared of wrongdoing after she spent five days in custody on drug charges due to a mix-up over packets of tea she brought into Australia. Customs had detected amphetamines in three 800g packets of lemon-flavoured ice tea brought in by Maria Cecilia Silva, 29, at Melbourne airport on March 13 and handed her over to the Australian Federal Police.

In the Melbourne Magistrates Court, magistrate Jack Vandersteen ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions pay Ms Silva $5000 for her ordeal.

When her bags were searched at the airport a drug detection dog had reacted to the iced tea containers and further testing of one of the containers came back with a positive result for amphetamine.

Ms Silva was released after the prosecution withdrew a charge of importing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug. Her barrister Michael Penna-Rees said the packets of tea, which she had bought in a Philippines supermarket, had never been opened.

Mr Vandersteen took the unusual step of releasing Ms Silva inside the court instead of having her returned to the cells and released at the side entry of the courthouse. Once freed, Ms Silva was in tears and clung to a female prison guard who led her through the court to a friend who was waiting to embrace her. "She's traumatised, she's lost a lot of weight and she'll be seeing a doctor," Mr Penna-Rees said. "She's a wedding planner in the Philippines, her mother is a wedding singer and her father is a wedding musician - it's a family business. "She's a totally innocent young lady who has experienced five days in an horrendous situation having her liberty taken away and placed in cells with some serious offenders."

Mr Penna-Rees said he understood that there have been similar problems with packets of iced tea on previous occasions. [But no ability to learn from that??]

SOURCE




A new low for the ABC

"Comedian" Fiona O'Loughlin says Bindi Irwin 'creepy', needs slap in face. One hopes that the ABC has enough remnants of good taste not to employ the garbage ever again



RECOVERING alcoholic comedian Fiona O'Loughlin has sunk to a new low, calling Bindi Irwin a creep who needs a slap in the face. Viewers branded O'Loughlin spiteful and hateful after her performance on Wednesday's episode of ABC music quiz Spicks and Specks.

O'Loughlin described 11-year-old Bindi as a "bit creepy" before doing an over-the-top impersonation of the child star's voice. She then made a gesture indicating Bindi was crazy, before miming a slap across the child star's face.

The bitter outburst stunned fellow panellists, particularly Chris Durling, a former member of Bindi's Crocmen. Durling said working with Bindi was a great experience, describing her as "gorgeous" and down-to-earth. "What you see is what you get," Durling said of Bindi.

A laughing O'Loughin replied: "Yeah, a freak show."

Series regular Alan Brough waded into the awkward discussion, joking that O'Loughlin was spiteful and hateful for getting stuck into a little girl.

Viewers were quick to voice their outrage, with the ABC's online message board awash with criticism, saying the show had lost the plot. Viewers said O'Loughlin was "tasteless", "un-Australian" and a bully....

O'Loughlin discusses her battle with the booze in an interview to be published in Saturday's Herald Sun.

More HERE




Whistleblowers get protection in federal legislation

THE federal government has accelerated its push for a more open system of government by introducing the first federal law protecting public servants who reveal maladministration. It plans to reverse decades of government secrecy by protecting public servants who reveal serious wrongdoing to the media. The new scheme is intended to encourage whistleblowers in the federal public service by giving them the nation's most extensive system of legal protection and support.

Cabinet secretary Joe Ludwig, who unveiled the scheme in parliament yesterday, was praised last night by whistleblowers and legal academics for delivering a scheme that goes beyond the more limited schemes in force in the states. "It is close to world's best practice," said legal academic A.J. Brown. "It will change the culture of government," said Peter Bennett, president of Whistleblowers Australia.

The scheme will be contained in a planned public interest disclosure act that will fulfil Labor's promise to address the problems in the legal system highlighted by the case of convicted whistleblower Allan Kessing. Senator Ludwig declined to discuss the Kessing case last night, but lawyers believe the government's scheme could have been enough to prevent Mr Kessing being convicted in 2007 over the disclosure of long-ignored flaws in security at Sydney Airport. "This is not a scheme to legitimise leaking in general - it is a scheme to protect whistleblowing through appropriate channels," Senator Ludwig said.

The government plans to introduce an internal system for handling public interest complaints within the bureaucracy that will involve every agency in the federal public service. If that system fails to address concerns about serious matters in a "reasonable" time, public servants will be given legal protection if they tell the media or anyone else.

The scheme would also protect what is expected to be a smaller category of public servants who bypass the internal system and go directly to the media with public interest disclosures about serious matters. Direct approaches to the media would be protected whenever exceptional circumstances exist, in cases where a public servant believes on reasonable grounds that there is a substantial and imminent threat to people's lives, health or safety.

Senator Ludwig said the scheme would be the first stand-alone system of whistleblower protection for the commonwealth public service. It has been unveiled a week after Senator Ludwig and Attorney-General Robert McClelland welcomed a report from the Australian Law Reform Commission calling for the repeal of part of the Commonwealth Crimes Act that imposes criminal penalties for unauthorised disclosures by public servants.

The whistleblower scheme would mean complaints about wrongdoing would usually be made to a public servant's own agency and if necessary to an external agency such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman or the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. The government aims to have the public interest disclosure act in force by next January.

SOURCE





18 March, 2010

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is furious that Kevin Rudd seems to be slighting NSW in favour of Queensland




That "welcome" ritual again

Some straight talk from Gary Johns, formerly a minister in the Keating Labor government. He is referring to the politically correct custom -- recently criticized by Tony Abbott -- of acknowledging Aboriginal "traditional ownership" of the land at the outset of public meetings. I heartily agree that such tokenism is contemptible while there is negligible policing of Aboriginal violence towards their women and children -- JR

An American anthropologist studying Sydney Aborigines commented recently, "Doing culture can reinforce one's indigeneity or it can make one appear unreal." Welcome to country is a constant reminder of a people bypassed by progress. And how long should this go on? For 40,000 years until the ledger is somehow squared? Is there nothing else an Aborigine would want to be known for?

The welcome ceremony is part of a mindset that locks Aborigines out of the world in which they desperately need to engage. Government ministers offer a rote acknowledgment of traditional custodians but don't enforce truancy laws to make Aboriginal children attend school. Ministers will hold hands, walk over bridges and spend taxpayers' dollars on busybody schemes, but to do something effective such as forcing a child to attend school in the face of an ignorant parent: never.

I recall Howard government minister Philip Ruddock giving a welcome to country in Perth while the commonwealth was opposing a native title claim by the Nyungar people over Perth. Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin offers an acknowledgment at most functions, even while withholding welfare cheques from Aborigines.

Whether doing the wrong thing (not enforcing truancy laws) or the right thing (opposing poorly conceived native title claims and imposing income management for poor behaviour), the acknowledgment is trotted out. There are problems with its apparently simple wish "to show respect for Aboriginal culture and heritage and acknowledge the ongoing relationship traditional custodians have with their land". It is a gesture full of holes and with some weird fellow travellers.

One-quarter of Aborigines do not recognise a particular area as their homeland and one-quarter live in areas that may have some relationship to their original land, but those are the poor beggars who are worse off by a long way.

As for custodians, it perpetuates the myth of the Aborigine as the gentle gardener. Paul Albrecht, a former pastor at Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory, says the Aboriginal concept of caring for country is not related to environmental concerns: it's about guarding sites of significance and caring for sacred objects. Their primitive technology and frequent moves meant they did not evolve rules for land care as it is understood today.

On occasions when the substantive matter has to do with Aborigines and the function is taking place on Aboriginal land as recognised by Australian law, a welcome to country or acknowledgment is appropriate. But to indulge the concept on land that is owned by others is an insult to the latter's rights. Indeed, by overplaying the historic claims to all Australian land, the welcome acts as the original sin: it can never be expunged unless the whitefella leaves.

Peter Adam, principal of Victoria's Anglican theological institute Ridley College, was stupid enough to suggest this, saying last year that all non-Aboriginal Australians should be prepared to leave if the indigenous people wanted that, "making restitution for the vile sin of genocide". "The prosperity of our churches has come from the proceeds of crime. Our houses, our churches, our colleges, our shops, our sport grounds, our parks, our courts, our parliaments, our prisons, our hospitals, our roads, our reservoirs are stolen property," he said.

What should the three-quarters of Aborigines who are of mixed descent do? Stay or go?

In last year's Massey Lectures in Canada, anthropologist Wade Davis boldly asserted that "the other cultures of the world are not failed attempts to be modern, failed attempts to be us. Each is a unique and profound answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive?" He suggested that "the aboriginal people were never touched by the desire to improve the world" and that for them "the purpose of humanity [is] to sustain the Garden of Eden". What a paternalistic prig! Aborigines did their best to alter the environment by hunting macropods to death and burning much of Australia's forests, altering for all time the Garden of Eden.

Undertaken at the wrong time and place, the traditional acknowledgment serves the purposes of those determined to lock Aborigines out of the modern economy. If ministers don't agree, they should stop doing it.

SOURCE




Qld. Government backs down on controversial land tax grab

THE Bligh Government has caved in to demands from the property sector and will overhaul its land valuation system. From next year, commercial, industrial and residential land will be valued according to "site valuations'' which take into account the land's current market value if it was vacant. Valuations will not take into account the value of leases on that land.

Premier Anna Bligh said the change would bring Queensland into line with other states. But she said it was not expected to affect average mums and dads and would not result in significant changes to rates and property taxes. "This has been done to provide greater certainty for our commercial and industrial sectors and residential property investors, it is not a revenue measure,'' Ms Bligh said. [Ho! Ho! Ho!] She said Queensland would transition to the new system in time for 2011 valuations.

The backdown follows a campaign from the property industry against moves by the Government to retrospectively legislate to force commercial property owners to pay land tax based on valuations which took into account what their sites were used for. However, the Government is expected the today pass laws to effectively validate previous valuations so it is not forced to refund any tax to owners.

Property Council of Australia Queensland executive director Steve Greenwood said the decision was a major win for the industry which he did not believe would have been achieved without its very public campaign against the proposed legislation. A fighting fund poured tens of thousands of dollars into newspaper and radio advertising against the bill.

Mr Greenwood said while the changes to the legislation meant that land valued in 2010 would have improvements taken into account, that was a concession which needed to be made to ensure the system was overhauled in the long run. He said the State Government now had a strong commitment to get the system right by June 2011.

SOURCE




Useless NSW police

A FAMILY with two young children spent two hours waiting for police by the side of the road after apprehending a boy who hurled a rock through the windscreen of their car, only to be told officers were too busy to respond. On the same day the State Government defended triple-0 response times, the Smith family from Lismore told of their anger at being forced to release the boy who threw the rock. "I was furious. I had my two kids (Amelia, 3, and Bayley, 2) in the back of the car," Adam Smith said of the incident.

Mr Smith and his wife Beverly were driving in Lismore on Tuesday afternoon when a rock shattered the windscreen. An angry Mr Smith ran to a nearby vacant block where a group of kids were loitering and saw a young boy running off as his mates pointed and yelled out: "It was him, it was him."

Mr Smith called triple-0 and was told to wait by his car as "police were on their way". But more than two hours later, and after repeated calls to police, Mr Smith was told there were only two police cars in the area and both were busy with other jobs.

"I had the kid there. He was waiting with us. I told him the police were coming and that they would want to speak to his parents," Mr Smith said. "But it was after 7.30pm, getting dark and I couldn't keep him any longer." A final desperate call to the police operator ended with Mr Smith being told to leave the scene and make a report at a nearby police station. "What's the good of that?" Mr Smith asked.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday revealed a blow-out in police response times across NSW, with crime victims left waiting an average of more than an hour for non-urgent response. Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione yesterday defended the figures and said an increase in the number of calls to police and the inclusion of regional figures had skewed the statistics. "Our response times in (Sydney) have improved over the recent three years," he said.

"But when we're dealing with increasing community sizes in other parts of the state you have to understand that sometimes it will take us longer than 20 minutes to get to a location."

The Daily Telegraph was yesterday swamped with horror stories of experiences with triple-0 and delayed police responses. Among the stories was a woman who recently lay assaulted on a street in Glebe. The victim told the triple-0 operator she was about 300m from the police station. The operator said there was nothing that could be done if she didn't know exactly what street she was on.

SOURCE




Food Fascists trying to ban Australian food icons

Since Australians have one of the longest life expectancies in the world, it would be more logical to ENCOURAGE Australian food favourites



JOHN Joannou knows a thing or two about Chiko Rolls [pic above] and the public's continuing demand for fried food. The Parramatta takeaway store owner dunks, fries and then drains battered products of all sorts - to go with the 150kg of chips he sells every week. But Chiko Rolls, battered savs, potato scallops and other fried morsels are firmly in the sights of a conglomeration of western Sydney councillors.

The Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils will ask takeaway shops and cafes to remove the fat and salt in foods in an attempt to make the community the healthiest in the nation. "We want to be the healthiest region in Australia by 2020," the organisation's president Alison McLaren said.

To do so, fast food shops are being asked to have "healthier options" on their menus like McDonald's, which now carries a range of items approved by the Heart Foundation. One plan is to ban the use of palm oil, which is high in saturated fats.

At Lakeside Seafood, Mr Joannou doesn't quite know what all the fuss is about - he switched to healthier cottonseed oil years ago. "People want to eat healthier foods so you have to find ways of giving that to them or as a business you'd die in the backside," he said. "We started doing this years ago off our own bat." Mr Joannou has grilled fish and salads on the menu, and gives the options of no butter on burgers and egg white instead of whole egg.

He said no matter what people would still find a way to have their "bad foods". "I don't think it's going to matter what they tell people - people are still going to want to eat these sorts of foods."

SOURCE




How to stop the boats with kindness (NOT)

Andrew Bolt

PROMISES, promises. Before the last election, Kevin Rudd said he had a plan to stop boats of “asylum seekers” from getting here. “You’d turn ‘em back.”

Oooh, tough talk. So how many of last year’s 61 boats - or the 24 that have reached us this year already - has the Prime Minister turned around? Um, not one, actually. Yes, he did once ship a few boat people to Indonesia on our Oceanic Viking, but even then he soon took them back.

Result? The boats this year are now arriving at a rate faster than anything we’ve seen in decades.



You see, in July 2008, election safely won, Rudd changed his tone. No more Mr Tough Guy, he decided. He’d instead undo the strict laws the Howard government had set in place to stem the flood of boat people - laws that had cut the number of boats to just 18 in all the previous six years. My red dot on the Department of Immigration graph above marks the day that the Rudd Government announced it was going soft.

Rudd had already scrapped the temporary protection visas, which allowed us to send back boat people once their countries were again safe. He’d also abolished the “Pacific Solution”, under which boat people were sent to Nauru and Manus Island with no guarantee they’d be let into Australia.

And on July 29, 2008 - that red dot day - he told the world the era of wicked John Howard was truly over. There would now be no more automatic detention of boat people. Children and adults cleared of security risk would be set free while the Government worked out if they really were refugees. And rather than make boat people prove they were no threat, the Government would have to prove they actually were to keep them in detention.

Look at the Government’s own graph. In indisputable numbers it tells yet another insulation-style story of fine talk resulting in disaster.

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17 March, 2010

Token ceremony openings must be brought to an end

The smart-ass Leftist writer below finds fault with the Lord's prayer but says not a word about the ritual but totally hollow invocation of Aboriginal land "ownership" that leads off many official functions in Australia today. It's undoubtedly deliberate but one-sided nonetheless. The difference, of course is that Australia today is a product of Christian civilization, not Aboriginal traditions. But we see no acknowledgment of that below

There is nothing more certain to generate cynicism than having to suffer political correctness in full force. When the experience is compounded by the paternalistic condescension of those who don’t really believe what is being said or done but in their generosity are reaching down to those they really see as simpler than them, it’s intolerable.

The idea that you must open your gathering and deliberations by paying lip-service through a ceremony or incantation demanded by vocal spokespersons for what amounts to sectional interests, should offend most citizens. For many, when the ceremony invokes a cosmology or belief system that they consider anachronistic at best, or superstitious at worst, it is particularly galling.

What is surprising is that the “keepers” of the tradition involved are not themselves regularly offended by how meaningless the forced participation is, are not angered by the co-opting of a practice that means something to them but is being used and retained by others simply for political purposes. So let’s be brave enough to call for an end to pretence: starting each day of Parliament with the Lord’s Prayer (or the Our Father as it is known to some) should be challenged and the practice ended.

Wilson Tuckey has been brave enough to ignore the hypocrisy by absenting himself on most occasions from the trite formality.

And one can only be reminded of the Mantis analogy used by the David Carradine character, Caine, in the 70’s TV Show Kung Fu, observing cowboys praying before a gunfight – our politicians look like they are praying just before they go in for the kill. So let’s stop this hollow practice and relieve our politicians of the hypocrisy.

SOURCE




Now it's coconut trees that are bad



COCONUT palms may be ­symbols of the tropics to many, but a scientist says they are damaging the natural environment and may help spread dengue fever. Cape Tribulation Tropical Research Station director Dr Hugh Spencer has spent the past six years studying the impact the palms have had on native beach vegetation.

He has found the thin 50-100m line of forest that lies between the reef and rainforest - called the littoral zone - is constantly under siege from coconut palms, which edge out native trees, pounding them into submission by constantly dumping fronds and fruit on them. Coconuts that are left to rot on the ground collect water, providing perfect breeding grounds for the dengue-carrying mosquito.

To prevent the palms from conquering the beachfront at Cape Tribulation, Dr Spencer and a small group of volunteers have been regularly removing juvenile palms the only way they know - by hand. Where there used to be entire groves, native plants such as pandanus and she-oaks are slowly reclaiming the beach. "We're getting very, very good recruitment of natural vegetation," Dr Spencer said. "We've literally removed thousands of coconuts. We're all volunteers. Nobody gets paid in this place. "It basically means that we are protecting and recovering the most endangered of our forest types."

Cairns Regional Council general manager infrastructure services Ross McKim said the council did not have a policy either. But it did have a duty of care denutting palms to reduce the risk of liability. "Council is aware that the removal of coconut palms can be an emotive issue and actively manage the trees that are featured along the foreshores and parks of the region," Mr McKim said. "Council undertakes denutting and palm frond removal and manage those trees already in place, rather than remove what trees are currently there. "While we are aware that these plants may not be native to Australia, council appreciates these palms play an important part in creating the tropical feel of the region."

Dr Spencer previously took more direct action to eliminate palms from the beachfront by boring holes in a number of palms and poisoning them. The actions angered other locals, who referred to him as a "coconut killer". Dr Spencer said his relationship with his critics appeared to have simmered. "I kind of get the feeling that there is more of a mood of acceptance that they really are a problem," he said. "I get the feeling that is starting to filter though, but I don't have any proof. "I'm not having many people getting their knickers in a twist about coconuts being removed any more."

SOURCE




Police chief too fast to apologise

By Andrew Bolt

Shouldn’t the Chief Commissioner at least read a report by a heavily politicised group before accepting its conclusion that his force contains racists?

VICTORIA Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland is embroiled in another race row after admitting that there are bigots on his force…

The damning allegations were made to The Australian as Mr Overland responded to a report claiming routine over-policing, physical assault and verbal abuse by police against African youths in three Melbourne municipalities.

The full report is expected to be publicly released today and is yet to be seen by Mr Overland, who endured a difficult first year as Victoria’s top cop…

The report into police dealings with the African community, compiled by researchers on behalf of Victoria’s Legal Services Board, is based on a series of anonymous interviews with 30 young Africans, eight community workers and two police in Greater Dandenong, Flemington and Braybrook - three areas with high numbers of African-born residents…

“I have to acknowledge that, like the broader community, we all undoubtedly have some people who have racist attitudes,” Mr Overland said.

“That is not OK. It is particularly not OK if they act on those racist attitudes in a work context and where I find evidence of that, those people can expect to be dealt with very decisively.”

The irony is that as an organisation, the police have actually been soft on African offenders, not hard, dropping charges, covering up the ethnicity of offenders and deceiving the public about crime rates in Somali and Sudanese communities.

How unwise it is to now feed the perception that the reason police arrest so many African youths is that the force is racist, rather than that these youths are more likely to be involved in crime.

SOURCE




A bigoted public broadcaster

Comments below by Janet Albrechtsen on Australia's ABC. "Aunty" is derisive Australian slang for the ABC

IT was a telling moment when Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes leapt to his feet last week to protest against the critical remarks made by ABC chairman Maurice Newman.

Inadvertently, Holmes proved Newman's point. An organisation whose first reflex is to reject even the most measured criticism will end up undermining its reputation and its legitimacy. No organisation is beyond reproach. Indeed, the case for taxpayer-funded public broadcasting depends on the ABC's commitment to reflect the people who pay the bills: Australians.

Having just completed a five-year term on the board, I am the first to cheer about what is best about the ABC, an organisation filled with many first-rate professionals. From its inception in 1932, it has provided a stellar range of services. Indeed, its rural and regional network of radio stations are filled with local presenters and producers who have a real sense of the cross-section of people who listen.

But there is a difference between cheering and cheerleading for the ABC. The former means being honest enough to suggest constructive ways to make the ABC better. The chairman did no more than that.Newman encouraged a "spirit of greater curiosity and open-mindedness". There should be no sense that there is an "ABC view" but rather a respect for the audience, allowing them to make up their own minds. He mentioned the tendency towards "group-think" when reporting the causes of the global financial crisis and climate change.

Newman reminded his staff to remember the ABC charter, a polite way of saying the ABC is there to serve the people of Australia.

Those who quickly denounced Newman for editorial interference, people such as Holmes, Greens senator Christine Milne and the erroneously named Friends of the ABC, have presumably not read section 8 of the ABC Act, which imposes a personal legal duty on directors to "ensure that the gathering and presentation by the corporation of news and information is accurate and impartial".

When ABC boss Mark Scott used his first public address in October 2006 to make clear the ABC would be "looking for further diversity of voices, ensuring that the ABC is the town square where debate can flourish and different voices can be heard", he spoke directly to that duty placed on us as directors.

During that first speech, Scott announced a review of Media Watch as a first example of the ABC providing more opportunity for debate and discussion. Hence the irony of Holmes's knee-jerk objection last week.

As MW host, he is fond of quoting various sections and sub-sections of codes and legislation back at media outlets, especially radio talkback hosts who have failed to comply. Yet Holmes has disregarded the ABC's own charter when it comes to matters of impartiality and balance.

Admittedly, questions of balance are not black and white. But a media watchdog doing its job might have asked whether it was best reporting practice for a prominent ABC radio host to decide that Climategate was not worth discussing because he decided it was of no significance. Or was it good, balanced journalism for an ABC television news bulletin to cover the launch of the MySchools website with five critics (three unions and two principals) and two lone Labor government voices (Kristina Keneally and Julia Gillard) in favour? Could the producer not find some people outside the government who thought MySchools was good for children and parents?

There are other simple tests that one could ask when judging balance and impartiality.

Is it a sign of balanced journalism that factual errors in news reports about, say, the environment or the Middle East tend to skew one way: pro-green, anti-Israeli? Why was Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth not subjected to the same intense dissection as the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle? Would the ABC's Drum website run a five-part series by a single climate change sceptic? If not, why not? Clive Hamilton is no scientist, yet he was given that privilege a few weeks ago. And was it balance when an ABC reporter asked Newman on Wednesday whether he was "a climate change denier"?

The truth is that not much is required to make the ABC an even better media organisation, a truly vibrant town square of diverse opinions and perspectives. But you can see how easily group-think settles in. It happens at conservative gatherings, too. No conspiracy is necessary. The simple fact is if you spend too much time listening to views with which you agree, you grow complacent and bored. Even if a young journalist starts out with a refreshingly different perspective, Stockholm syndrome can happen in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra.

As a counterpoint, ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann must be weary of being mentioned in dispatches. Last year Holmes was "gobsmacked" when Uhlmann's political analysis extended to questioning the Prime Minister's use of religion for political purposes. Uhlmann made more ABC heads turn in 2008 when he spoke about the "theological nature" of the climate change debate and the "lunatics" attached to the end of a very long caravan.

Anyone who writes about balance at the ABC mentions Uhlmann as a standout from the rest of the crowd. It should not be like this at the public broadcaster. There should be plenty of Uhlmanns and others, too, with different perspectives. I know of only one. An ABC reporter once introduced herself to me at a gathering by whispering in my ear that she was secretly a conservative. Why whisper it? The ABC should be a proudly diverse set of people, like the country it serves. And perhaps that is the critical point. The ABC is there to serve the people who fund it. If it chooses to undermine its raison d'etre by ignoring constructive criticism, there will be greater existential threats ahead for Aunty.

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16 March, 2010

A grasshopper tale for modern Australia

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.

Channels 7, 9 and 10,the ABC and SBS show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

Australia is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green.'

Students stage a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, 'We shall overcome.' Cardinal George Pell then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.

Prime Minister Rudd condemns the ant and blames John Howard, Robert Menzies, Capt James Cook, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Bob Brown exclaims in an interview on Today Tonight that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, Labor in conjunction with the Greens draft the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and once peaceful, neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote next time.




Kevin Rudd hits new low with voters: Newspoll

KEVIN Rudd's personal approval is at its worst since he became opposition leader in December 2006, and the Coalition is in its best position on primary votes since John Howard was prime minister and Kim Beazley was Labor leader.

Despite the unveiling of the Rudd government's $50 billion plan to fix public hospitals, and the Prime Minister's frenetic media appearances and meetings with premiers over his health plan in the past two weeks, satisfaction with Mr Rudd has hit a new low of 48 per cent and dissatisfaction is at a new high of 41 per cent. This is his worst approval rating since he replaced Mr Beazley as Labor leader.

Mr Rudd declared a little over two weeks ago that Labor had been getting "whacked" in the polls for some time, and he thought they needed to "lift their game" or they would continue be whacked in the polls.

Although there was little real change in the primary vote in the latest Newspoll survey, conducted exclusively for The Australian last weekend, a one-point fall for the ALP from 40 to 39 per cent, within the three-point margin of error, means the Coalition's unchanged primary vote of 41 per cent to Labor's 39 per cent is its best position since November 2006.

Based on the distribution of preferences at the last election and a rise in the Greens' support, the Rudd government still has an election-winning lead on a two-party-preferred basis of 52 per cent to 48 per cent.

Mr Rudd maintained his clear 25-percentage-point lead over Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister, by 55 to 30 per cent..

In the past week, the government has mounted a critical campaign against the Opposition Leader for being "opposed to everything" and obstructing the government in the Senate, as well as advocating a "big new tax" on business to fund a six-month paid parental leave scheme for workers earning up to $150,000 a year.

At the same time, Mr Rudd has travelled to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne to meet the Labor premiers of Queensland, NSW and Victoria to discuss his proposal for the federal government to take over 60 per cent of the funding of public hospitals by taking back 30 per cent of the states' GST revenue.

But Mr Rudd has met resistance from the premiers and was roundly criticised for ignoring NSW Premier Kristina Keneally as she welcomed him to Sydney for the health talks.

In his campaign to lift his falling personal stocks, Mr Rudd has admitted breaking political promises, personal shortcomings and the bungling of the $2.45 billion roof insulation scheme.

According to the latest Newspoll survey, voter satisfaction with Mr Rudd fell three points, from 51 to 48 per cent, and dissatisfaction rose from 40 to 41 per cent. These are the lowest satisfaction rating and highest dissatisfaction rating for Mr Rudd since he became Prime Minister, and represent a net satisfaction rating of just seven points.

Mr Rudd has had the highest satisfaction rating of any prime minister during the 25-year Newspoll survey series of 71 per cent, reached just after the parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations, but since the end of September last year his satisfaction rating has fallen 19 points and dissatisfaction with him has risen by 16 points.

While Mr Abbott has been accused of blundering politically and putting his colleagues offside over his unilateral announcement of a paid parental leave scheme, his personal support is virtually unchanged, as satisfaction with the Liberal leader went from 48 to 47 per cent and dissatisfaction was the same on 38 per cent.

Financial Services Minister Chris Bowen yesterday told parliament the former leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, had told the ABC he thought Mr Abbott's dramatic change of heart over the emissions trading scheme was "entirely political in Tony's case". "I do accept that the Opposition Leader is a conviction politician," Mr Bowen said in question time. "But his only conviction is winning the next election: doing or saying whatever it takes to win the next election. He parades as opposing out of principle, but his only principle is opposition."

On the question of who would make the better prime minister, both Mr Rudd's 55 per cent and Mr Abbott's 30 per cent have been unchanged for the past month.

The Coalition's primary vote support has also remained unchanged at 41 per cent, the first time the Coalition's primary vote has remained at or above 40 per cent for a two-month stretch since late 2006.

While steady in statistical terms, Labor's primary vote shift from 40 to 39 per cent, to equal its lowest primary vote since the election, means the Coalition is now in the best relative position to the ALP since November 2006 when Mr Howard was prime minister and Mr Beazley was removed by Mr Rudd as the Labor leader of the opposition.

Since the middle of October last year, Labor's primary vote has fallen 9 percentage points, from 48 per cent to 39 per cent last weekend. Since the end of November last year, the Coalition's primary vote has risen 6 percentage points from 35 to 41 per cent.

But despite the Coalition's strongest primary vote showing for more than three years, Labor still holds an election-winning lead on a two-party preferred basis because of the flow to Labor of Greens' preferences.

SOURCE




The CSIRO calls this proof?

By Andrew Bolt

It’s a bizarre way to “prove” their case:

AUSTRALIA’s two leading scientific agencies will release a report today showing Australia has warmed significantly over the past 50 years, and stating categorically that ‘’climate change is real‘’.

The State of the Climate snapshot, drawn together by CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology partly in response to recent attacks on the science underpinning climate change, shows that Australia’s mean temperature has increased 0.7 degrees since 1960. The statement also finds average daily maximum temperatures have increased every decade for the past 50 years.

The report states that temperature observations, among others indicators, ‘’clearly demonstrate climate change is real’’, and says that CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology ‘’will continue to provide observations and research so Australia’s responses are underpinned by clear empirical data’’.

The report also found that the 2000s were Australia’s warmest decade on record; that sea levels rose between 1.5 and three millimetres a year in Australia’s south and east, and between seven and 10 millimetres in the north between 1993 and 2009; and that sea surface temperatures have risen 0.4 degrees since 1960.

Why is this surprisingly scanty propaganda pamphlet bizarre, and not quite honest?

First, no one is doubting that “climate change is real”. Climate changes all the time. This is not the debate.

Second, we’re talking about global warming, so why does the CSIRO and BOM’s pamphlet give only Australian temperatures? Is that because it knows that to show world temperatures stayed flat since 2001 actually casts doubt on just how much man’s gases are driving the post-mini-ice-age warming?

Third, given the CSIRO praised the since-discredited An Inconvenient Truth, claiming ”its scientific basis is very sound”, can we really trust its advocacy science?

Fourth, the CSIRO and BOM’s document does not address any of the recent challenges to the processes which produced the concensus that man is almost certainly to blame for most of the recent warming. Nor does it mention recent debate about adjustments made to Australian temperature records of the kind that increase the reported warming trend.

Fifth, what’s most at issue (other than man’s contribution to any warming) is whether any warming will in fact be disastrous, and something we must spend billions to help avert. The record so far of alarmists such as Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the IPCC and even the CSIRO itself is that the catastrophism is wildly exaggerated and we might often do better to keep our money in our pockets for the day that we’re called on to cope with whatever happens in the far-off future. But on this, again, this document adds zero to our understanding.

But, of course, this brazenly political document got the unquestioning hero treatment on the ABC’s AM program, in what sounded like the two fingers to its chairman.

UPDATE

How much can this propaganda sheet be trusted to tell you the let-the-cards-fall-where-they-may truth? Judge from this example: "...total rainfall on the Australian continent has been relatively stable"

Stable? Why didn’t the CSIRO and BOM tell the reassuring truth - that total rainfall has in fact increased?

More HERE (See the original for links)




Flood of "boat people" heads to Australia



SEVERAL hundred boat people are expected to arrive within days aboard two illegal vessels, triggering a mass transfer of refugees from Christmas Island to the mainland. The likely influx will trigger a huge taxpayer-financed operation and be seized upon by the Opposition as Kevin Rudd's "Tampa".

Darwin's immigration detention centre is on alert for the arrival of the asylum seekers who will be moved near the city after being processed at the overcrowded Christmas Island. "If one of the big boats arrives, then Christmas Island will be blown out of the water," a source said.

According to intelligence reports the illegal vessels, carrying several hundred people each, are expected to make for the Ashmore Reef area off northwest Australia rather than directly to Christmas Island, south of Java. The Customs vessel Oceanic Viking and charter aircraft are on stand-by to transfer more than 300 people to Darwin within 72 hours after either of the vessels is intercepted. If both make it to Australia then up to 600 people will be moved to the mainland.

The transfer of asylum seekers to the mainland will be politically explosive, reinforcing concerns the Prime Minister broke his election promise to turn back the boats. Private Coalition polling shows up to 85 per cent of voters in marginal seats believe Mr Rudd has not delivered on a pledge to maintain a tough refugee policy. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has repeatedly said Labor's softer border protection scheme is proving a magnet for people smugglers.

The numbers of boat people arriving in Australian waters has accelerated in recent months, with the Government saying it was a global trend. This year, almost 1200 boat people have arrived on 24 vessels - nearly half the number of asylum seekers that arrived last year. For the first time since the latest boat people crisis began, the Darwin centre on old Defence Department land at Berrimah will become a holding centre for refugees waiting to obtain protection visas.

The Federal Government has been keen to avoid having to process asylum seekers on the mainland. High-level sources said the delicate balance of 140 spare beds on Christmas Island had been the result of good luck rather than good management, but that luck was about to run out. "We are ready to use Darwin when a big boat arrives," a source said.

Boat people have to be processed "offshore" on Christmas Island for legal reasons, so new arrivals cannot be taken directly to Darwin.

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15 March, 2010

Indigenous tokenism an empty gesture, says Tony Abbott

I have always thought this custom was a sort of pious fraud but I am pretty surprised to see a mainstream political figure saying likewise

TONY Abbott has opened up a new front in the culture wars by declaring that Kevin Rudd and other Labor ministers demonstrate a misplaced sense of political correctness when acknowledging the traditional owners of land at official functions. Mr Abbott's dismissal of the modern practice of acknowledging traditional owners as "out-of-place tokenism" also won support among some Aboriginal leaders, who have described the trend as "paternalistic," The Australian reports.

The Opposition Leader said Labor politicians felt obliged to observe the practice, despite the fact it was inappropriate in many instances.

"Kevin Rudd is not an old-style lefty . . . but the Labor Party is full of people who are, and I guess this is the kind of genuflection to political correctness that these guys feel they have to make," he told the Adelaide Advertiser. "Sometimes it's appropriate to do those things, but certainly I think in many contexts, it seems like out-of-place tokenism."

But the Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation's Eddie Mulholland said it was a positive move to acknowledge Aboriginal owners. "What's Tony Abbott trying to achieve, some cheap political shot?" Mr Mulholland asked. "It's an acknowledgment that we do exist with humans. "It is not that long ago we were classified as part of the flora and fauna."

Labor backbencher Steve Georganas defended the practice, saying it was the right right thing to do. "They are the traditional owners of this land," he said, adding Mr Abbott's comments were "totally disrespectful".

Liberal frontbencher Eric Abetz said he did not generally acknowledge traditional owners of the land when making speeches. "I find it personally to be quite paternalistic," he said, adding he had done when it was appropriate. "Why don't we acknowledge a whole host of other people and indeed deities?"

SOURCE




Establishment scientists accuse climate change sceptics of 'smokescreen of denial'

More assertions -- but "models" instead of facts. You can't model anything as complex as climate. We would have accurate weather forecasts if you could

AUSTRALIA'S leading scientists have hit back at climate change sceptics, accusing them of creating a "smokescreen of denial". The CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology will today release a State of the Climate document, a snapshot of Australia's climate data and trend predictions.

The apolitical science organisations have weighed into the debate as they believe Australians are not being told the correct information about temperatures, rainfall, ocean levels and changes to atmospheric conditions.

The State of the Climate report offers Australians an easy-to-understand snapshot of data. "Modelling results show that it is extremely unlikely that the observed warming is due to natural causes alone," it states. "Evidence of human influence has been detected in ocean warming, sea-level rise, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns."

CSIRO chief executive Dr Megan Clark said both organisations felt it was time "to give Australians the facts and information they are looking for and to do so in a way that is very transparent and available". "We are seeing a real thirst for knowledge from many Australians and we are responding to that huge public demand. There is a lot of noise out there and a lot of reference to other countries and people want to know what's happening in this country."

Dr Clark said the CSIRO had been observing the impacts of human-induced climate change for many years and had moved on from debate about it happening to planning for the changes to come.

SOURCE




Families in fear of 'fuel poverty' as energy costs pushed up by Greenie nonsense

SOARING electricity prices will force more working families into "fuel poverty" where they simply cannot afford to pay for power. That is the grim prediction from an energy ombudswoman, who revealed that the number of people fearing they will have their electricity disconnected had surged by a third. In New South Wales alone more than 18,000 households had their power cut off last financial year and, with about $200 added to the average bill last July, that number is only expected to grow.

But the worst pain is expected from increases of up to 62 per cent over the next three years.

The largest retailer, Energy Australia, has an extra 36,000 customers on bill extension or payment plans - 30 per cent more than last year. The second-largest retailer, Integral Energy, has 19,000 more customers in assistance schemes - up 10 per cent.

But the real concern is that more big increases will be too much for many of these households to bear. Clare Petre, NSW Energy and Water Ombudswoman, said yesterday: "We are already receiving complaints from people who can pay now but are worried about their capacity to pay in the future."

Pricing regulator IPART proposed rises of 44-62 per cent over three years to pay for a backlog of network maintenance and the Federal Government's proposed ETS. Ms Petre said these increases could cause "fuel poverty". "It may well, that's our concern, particularly if the [ETS] comes in," she said.

Fuel poverty - a household spending more than 10 per cent of income for an adequate 21C warmth - contributed to nearly 37,000 English and Welsh deaths in 2008-09. In Australia, it isn't the cold, it's the heat. High temperatures were linked to 374 deaths in Victoria last year. IPART said a single aged pensioner would spend 7-12 per cent of income on electricity after the ETS and an average household up to 6 per cent more.

Port Macquarie mum Cassandra O'Meara said she was looking for ways to cut use after her family's power bill went from $500 to $1700 thanks to a new pool and plasma TV. "It's just ridiculous," Mrs O'Meara said of the cost jump yesterday.

SOURCE




Call to Send asylum seekers to the back of the queue

Family First Senator Steve Fielding says the Federal Government should consider sending asylum seekers who arrive by boat to refugee camps in other countries because they are "jumping the queue".

The Government has been dealing with an influx of asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat, with the 21st vessel this year being intercepted yesterday. The Christmas Island detention centre has been expanded to cope with the increase, but is nearing capacity.

Senator Fielding says while his proposal is "controversial", people smugglers are exploiting asylum seekers because Australia has become a "soft touch". He says his idea should be considered to stop the "tidal wave" of boats coming to Australia. "I think Australians would like the idea of the process of saying, 'If you're going to try and jump the queue you go to the back of the queue and wait in a refugee camp and wait your turn to come to Australia," he said.

When asked by reporters if his proposal would contravene Australia's obligations under the UN Convention on Refugees, Senator Fielding replied: "I think you can still work with the UNHCR on that issue because if they're fleeing for their lives why wouldn't they want to be waiting in a refugee camp where they're safe and sound?"

A spokesman for Senator Fielding says he is not proposing to send asylum seekers back to their home country. Senator Fielding says Australia could negotiate with countries that have refugee camps to send the asylum seekers there.

Dr Graham Thom, refugee coordinator for Amnesty International Australia says the proposal breaches international law. "It is also completely impractical and unrealistic," he said. "Australia would be trying to return refugees to countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia who are already completely overburdened with refugees.

And Dr Thom says refugee camps are far from safe. "In the camps on the Syria/Iraqi border which I visited in 2008, the conditions were appalling and extremely unsafe In these camps," he said. "Women had been burnt to death when their tents caught on fire, children had been hit and killed by passing trucks and refugees faced extreme weather conditions with little protection."

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans declined to comment on the idea. After coming to power in 2007, the Rudd Government dismantled the Howard government's Pacific Solution and abolished temporary protection visas. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has signalled that a Coalition government would "turn the boats back" and bring back a form of a temporary visa.

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


For overseas readers: The "ALP" is the Australian Labor Party -- Australia's major Leftist party. The "Liberal" party is Australia's major conservative political party.


Again for overseas readers: Like the USA, Germany and India, Australia has State governments as well as the Federal government. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


For American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security


Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.


The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"


UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.


Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.