* Australian Athletes are being gagged by Chinese authorities with Rudd's compliance
* Rudd claims historic discoveries
* Lawyer Throws a tantrum
* Government trying to weasel out of welfare payments
* Water shortage the result of planning, not global warming
* Beattie's backflip on plum jobs
* US Democrats struggle in self inflicted race war Will Obama prove to be worse than Clinton?
9 comments:
Where is the International Olympic Committee?
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/where_is_the_international_olympic_committee/
Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng is right:
Improvements in China’s human rights were a quid pro quo for granting the games to Beijing. So how can the committee proceed as if nothing has happened when blood is flowing in the streets of Lhasa?
If the committee does not act to put pressure on Beijing, as would be consistent with its obligations, it risks this Olympics being remembered the way the 1936 Games in Berlin were.
That said, China has created in Tibet a kind of Yugoslavia. Trying to unwind the occupation and mass-immigration of ethnic Chinese will create terrible bloodshed, and it’s now riding a hand-reared tiger.
UPDATE
Rowan Callick sees no easy options, either:
Beijing will be damned by the rest of the world if it launches a fierce crackdown on Tibet, and damned by some of its own citizens if it doesn’t, especially since the media has been encouraged to present the events as senseless brutality by the Tibetans against innocent Han Chinese.
It’s all about race, stupid
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/its_all_about_race_stupid/
Dominic Lawson:
Far from liberating America from the politics of race, as Obama’s campaign purports to do, it seems quite likely that instead it will shed an uncomfortably penetrating light on the deep racial divisions that persist in a country still – and understandably – traumatised by the legacy of slavery.
UPDATE
Shelby Steele, African American author of Bound Man, a book on Obama:
Human visibility is Mr. Obama’s Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a “blank screen.”
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday—for 20 years—in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother.
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity.
UPDATE 2
Steele’s analysis does help us to understand Obama’s passionate defence, which urges us to see Wright as more than the sum of some controversial YouTube clips:
As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
And yet there was that hate-preaching, that undeniable call to black racism, that Obama was prepared to accept and endorse with his continued presence.
200,000 reasons to repent
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/200000_reasons_to_repent/
A good appointment, but a bad look - created largely by the man himself:
FORMER Queensland premier Peter Beattie has performed his most spectacular backflip by accepting a $200,000-a-year job representing the state Government in the US only months after he declared he would not take any government position.
Mr Beattie’s successor as Premier, Anna Bligh, announced his appointment yesterday as Queensland’s Trade Commissioner to North and South America, starting on June 1 and based in Los Angeles.
At the time of his resignation in September, there were rumours Mr Beattie would be appointed the Queensland government representative in London, but in December he told a Queensland newspaper he had turned down the position.
”I will not be accepting any government positions at a state or federal level. This is to avoid any unfavourable perceptions of deals or otherwise,” Mr Beattie reportedly told The Sunday Mail.
Sickie excuse
Andrew Bolt
Some cultural issues here which need tackling. I’m referring not just to the old culture of the sickie, but the new deep-sigh one exemplified by the doctor:
In what lawyers claim threatens the Australian tradition of taking a sickie, Nathan Anderson, a former trainee dealer with Melbourne’s Crown casino, failed to have his sacking overturned by the federal Magistrates Court.
Mr Anderson, 27, obtained a medical certificate after telling a doctor, Eric Salter, that he wanted to see (Kevin) Sheedy coach his last game - against the West Coast Eagles - in Perth on September 1 last year.
He was warned by Crown not to take sick leave to attend the game, but flew to Perth, later insisting he had been suffering “emotional distress” at the thought of missing the match…
Dr Salter yesterday stood by his decision to issue the certificate to Mr Anderson, which he said was based on “preventative health”.
Column - Slaves to their green faith
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_slaves_to_their_green_faith/
HERE’S a new study to make you even more cross, as you slop buckets of bath water out to your parched garden.
You know these city bans that make putting sprinklers on your roses a crime? You know these restrictions that have you toting water like a Third World coolie?
Completely unnecessary. Inflicted on you purely for ideological reasons.
What’s more, the same politicians who designed this shortage now want to give us a desalination plant that will produce water six times more expensive than the water they’d get if they dropped their ban on a dam.
Madness, and the new study that explains all this is Water Supply Options for Melbourne, by the Institute of Public Affairs’ Alan Moran, who has checked why we’re so short of water and what it will cost to get more.
In making his calculations Moran has done what Melbourne Water and the Government won’t: compare the cost of dam water with the cost of the Government’s alternatives.
But first he explores why we’re running out of water in the first place, and notes that the state’s don’t-blame-us Labor Government blames it in part on “global warming”.
In fact, the real reason our ovals are barren and gardens dead is more unforgivable: lousy government.
“Melbourne’s water supply is suffering from a combination of drought and a failure to build new storage facilities over the past 23 years when the population has increased by over 30 per cent,” says Moran.
Of course, any half-competent government would have figured that more people required more water, but ours got the green faith and could no longer think straight.
Even though Victoria gets more rain than most countries, with big Gippsland rivers last year suffering repeated floods, the Government decided to ban any new dams to “save” the rivers.
And until last year, it thought it could get by just with hair-shirt green policies - making people simply use less water, no matter the pain.
Result: not enough water. Says Moran: “Inactivity in commissioning or even searching for new supply, founded upon an ideologically optimistic predisposition in favour of demand restraint, has resulted in the state’s urban water shortages.”
I’ll translate: your water shortage was caused by bad politicians, not bad weather. Remember that with every bucket you drag to your dying plants.
Of course, that ban on new dams could be lifted today by Premier John Brumby, and there are plenty of places a new dam could quickly be built.
As Moran notes: “Water is available in quantities far in excess of those required for urban use from the catchments to the northeast of Melbourne and channelled through the basins of the Thomson-Macalister, Latrobe and Mitchell.”
On his figures, a new dam is so cheap - $1 billion, Melbourne Water once conceded - that it’s a no-brainer.
Taking construction, operating and transmission costs into account, Moran says a new dam on the Thomson/Macalister rivers would produce as much water each year as the Government’s planned $3.1 billion desalination plant, but at less than a sixth of the price - 47 cents per kilolitre to $3.01.
A dam on the Mitchell - which I’ve backed - would give us a third more water still, at just 55 cents a kilolitre. Of course, Moran’s figures may not be exact, but they’re all we have: this Government won’t allow its experts to produce or release any of its own.
You might still wonder why any government would ban a dam and insist on a desalinating plant so much more expensive. But green politics is irrational - as the Government’s other Band-Aid plans prove.
There’s its plan to plug water waste by Goulburn irrigators and then pipe its share of the “saved” water to Melbourne—a pipe dream that will produce water at $1.66 a kilolitre, three times the cost of dam water.
And there’s its ludicrous “green” policy to bribe Melburnians with rebates into installing rainwater tanks.
A 2004 study for Victoria’s Sustainable Energy Authority warned that these tanks just weren’t worth the cost, but the Government wouldn’t listen.
It instead made it compulsory to install a tank or a solar hot water system in new houses, adding $2500 to the cost of an average new home.
A study for the National Water Commission has since confirmed tank water costs up to 15 times dam water, which just shows the green faith leads not only to brown gardens but red ink.
What folly. A government first causes a water shortage, then “fixes” it by making you pay six times more for your water than you need to.
Think of it each time you’re forced into your garden at dawn to hand-water plants you’re banned from watering with your sprinklers. Think of it as you lug buckets from your bath to your wilting vegies.
Think of the politicians who force you to slave for their green faith. And pray they see the dam light.
Column - Ego trip leaves us Rudderless
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_ego_trip_leaves_us_rudderless/
AT MIDDAY on Sunday Kevin Rudd held a rushed press conference. He’d found the Kormoran!
Well, no, not him personally, you understand.
No, our Prime Meddler was merely announcing some private citizens had found a German ship you’d never heard of that had been sunk in World War II in a battle with HMAS Sydney.
Rudd himself actually had nothing to do with the find. It was just that the searchers had been given money by the Howard government via the navy, which in exchange was given first dibs on making any media statements.
And that was all the excuse Rudd needed to take over. Me, me, me!
The next day the Prime Minister held another press conference. This time he’d found the Sydney!
Well, actually it was those same searchers, the Finding Sydney Foundation, who’d discovered it.
And they’d actually discovered it the day before - indeed, smack bang during Rudd’s first press conference - and confirmed their find to their headquarters just an hour later.
But Rudd claimed the bragging rights for that, too, and delayed revealing the Sydney find until Monday morning—thus giving him two exciting goes in front of the cameras. Me, me, me!
A small insight, only, but how many other instances I could pick just like it.
The new Prime Minister is, in fact, a control freak, although not yet a particularly effective one.
And he’s about to sit a very tough exam: can he delegate, or must he learn how dangerous his kind of me-me-me meddling - especially from long distance - can be?
For some strange reason Rudd has decided to leave this month for a trip of more than two weeks overseas, taking in Washington, New York, London, Brussels, Bucharest and Beijing.
There’s nothing urgent in his itinerary, much of which - like visiting NATO headquarters in Brussels and a NATO conference in Romania - he could have left to his very able Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith.
But, no. Why leave to Smith what Rudd could do better! And what an opportunity to fluff his feathers on the foreign affairs perch he’s happiest on, and to fluff them at foreign leaders who’ve known him for years as just a dowdy Opposition spokesman.
So off he’s going, on his fourth overseas jaunt already and the longest that any Prime Minister has made so early in his term. And to make sure the press don’t miss a second, Rudd is pressing into service a second RAAF plane to cart them along.
There is, however, a catch to Rudd’s excellent adventure. It’s that control-freak thing. How is he going to keep swarming over his ministers and the media left behind while he’s away?
Indeed, there will be plenty back home for him to bother himself with if he chose. Plenty he should be bothering with.
After all, the economy is being battered by foreign shocks and his money ministers are cobbling together a tough May Budget that’s already causing the Government political grief - and could cause a lot more.
Then there are other urgent problems, such as Aboriginal communities now so devastated by violence and booze that black leaders in Aurukun and Halls Creek have begged their children be taken again.
Or perhaps Rudd, a big recipient of Chinese trips and favours, might use time at his desk to nut out a response to China killing Tibetans that’s half as tough as his response to Japan killing whales. Like vowing to “do everything within our power . . . to bring this slaughter to an end”, as he told Japan, rather than meekly asking his Chinese friends to “exercise restraint”.
And, of course, there’s still Rudd ministers - like Peter Garrett - who need help settling into office, which is why Rudd this week butted in and declared Garrett’s plans to get rid of plastic shopping bags would not include a levy. Back to you, Peter.
Of course, Rudd could argue that his team is well up to the job and can handle his 17-day absence. Certainly his ambitious deputy, Julia Gillard, would love to mind Rudd’s shop and show us how a first female prime minister would look in charge.
But is that how Rudd or his Government really work?
In fact, Rudd has long been diagnosed as a man who can’t let go.
Nicholas Stuart, author of Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography, put it crisply last year: “At some point Rudd has to realise he can’t control everything . . . learning how to delegate is a vital part of getting to the top.”
But that seems to be advice Rudd won’t or can’t heed. How many examples do you need?
There’s Rudd insisting on being the first Labor leader to be given the power to name his own ministry.
There’s Rudd bossing around his ministers, even ordering them to each visit two schools and two homeless shelters.
There’s Rudd demanding government agencies such as the CSIRO have their media releases now cleared by his office.
He’s everywhere, and it’s manic. We now see Rudd making trivial announcements a junior minister should make instead, if only for
the practice.
Why, for instance, is Rudd involving himself with poker machines—a state responsibility—or meeting photogenic sports chiefs to discuss drunken teenagers? What’s the big picture behind this frantic busy-busy?
I can understand why Rudd flew to the Bali global warming summit last December (with a third of his Cabinet, no less), even though no other head of government bothered to show up, sending flunkies instead. Signing Kyoto was good PR at home, after all.
But why is he sweating himself on stuff so small that he’s even personally ringing people like former Young Australian of the Year Huw Evans to invite him to his 2020 Ideas Summit? Didn’t Rudd promise to leave the invitations to an “independent” panel, at “arm’s length from government”?
But Rudd can’t help himself. Take his “community Cabinets”, in which he drags out all his busy ministers to some public forum so a few hundred voters can grill them to prove they are “listening” and “in touch”.
It was always going to be a monstrous waste of time, but has turned out to be even more pointless given Rudd leaves his ministers just watching on while he hogs the floor, dealing with all kinds of trivia from funding for the Caboolture Regional Arts Development to an offer of advice from a woman claiming to operate under a “new paradigm” involving Einstein and the Zulus.
Hear it from the AAP reporter who was at the Brisbane “community Cabinet”: “Mr Rudd took questions for almost two hours and in most cases answered them himself rather than passing them on to his ministers.”
Why were they there, then? To simply admire their Great Leader?
Indeed, what on earth was Rudd there for? Surely he has better things to be getting on with.
And it’s that combination of Rudd’s ever-busy meddling and his curious lack of focus that could eventually drive his Government over a cliff.
There was a warning of this only this month, when Rudd decided to visit Papua New Guinea to “mend fences” - fences that were broken only because PNG is ruinously corrupt, is wasting our colossal aid budget and last year smuggled out on an air force jet a man wanted by Australian police for alleged child sex offences.
Rudd must have had more urgent things to do - repaint the Lodge? - than to reassure PNG politicians who actually need a warning.
Indeed, one thing he should have concentrated on instead was his plan for the annual bonus for seniors and for
carers. Reports were rife that Rudd planned to axe them, and the Prime Minister, in a flying bubble over Melanesia, seemed unaware how much political damage they were doing.
And with no Rudd around, his ministers weren’t game or licensed to kill the story before that damage was done.
Only after four days, and Rudd’s return, did the Government announce it would keep the bonuses, after all.
We mustn’t exaggerate Rudd’s megalomania. Gough Whitlam still sets that standard, taking over 13 ministries when he was first elected prime minister, and initially running Australia in a “duumvirate”, with Lance Barnard his only other minister.
But Rudd has a will to control that burns more nakedly than even Whitlam’s, and which I predict will give his ministers more blisters.
His trip overseas will be his test. Can he leave it to them to do their jobs without him? And how much will they thrive - or party - in his absence?
Earn it yourself
Andrew Bolt
Peter Saunders isn’t impressed by moves to let single parents dodge work:
We still have one of the world’s most generous set-ups, but at least now single parents are expected to look for part-time work once their youngest child is at school. However, the rules stipulate that if a claimant is offered a job that leaves them only $50 better off than they were on welfare ($25 after travel and other expenses), they can elect to stay on benefits.
In other words, even if you could look after yourself and stop being a burden on others, you don’t have to.
The welfare lobby thinks this $50 figure is too low and so, apparently, does Kevin Rudd, for the Government is reportedly thinking of raising it. The argument is that ... if working leaves them little better off than being on welfare, they should not be expected to work…
But even if some people do find that working pays them little more than welfare, this shouldn’t mean they are entitled to stay on benefits. Incentives are important, but so is personal responsibility. It is perfectly reasonable to expect people to make an effort to look after themselves rather than relying on others, even if this leaves them little or no better off financially.
When Rudd and his ministers sit down to consider the idea of raising the net earnings rule for single parents on welfare, they should therefore ask themselves one simple question. If it is outrageous to continue demanding money from your family and friends when you are in a position to earn it for yourself, why is it acceptable to continue demanding money from complete strangers in exactly the same circumstances?
Excellent question.
Crawling for China
Andrew Bolt http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/crawling_for_china/
Our Olympics athletes are all being entered into the Australian crawl:
Australian athletes will have to seek permission if they want to make political comments during the Beijing Olympic Games…
ABC TV on Tuesday night reported that athletes would be allowed to speak out about politics but would have to seek permission to do so.
It reported that if athletes made political comments without permission they risked being sent home.
The idea was that giving China the Olympics would force them to adopt more Western values. Instead, our athletes may be encouraged to adopt China’s.
UPDATE
A kind-of denial:
Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) media director Mike Tancred denies the rule amounted to a gag.
He says the rule is designed to stop athletes criticising team mates, such as during the Sally Robbins incident in Athens.
A lawyer’s tantrum
Andrew Bolt
A Melbourne barrister, Jeremy Sear, breaks the law by parking over a pedestrian crossing.
Sear is duly booked, but instead of accepting his punishment he decides to humiliate and intimidate the airport official who issued the ticket by publishing the man’s name, position and picture on Sear’s blog site.
And for good measure he writes this threatening post (I’ve deleted the official’s full name):
M… G… is a miserable bastard who deserves the eternal torment of being M.. G… Instant karma’s gonna get you, son.
And this:
I intend for him to one day google his name and realise that people he treats like shit think he’s a prick. Perhaps he’ll have a second thought about being a petty arsehole.
Question: is this appropriate behavior for a lawyer? Will the Victorian Bar Council police its own?
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