Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan were right in the Budget to crackdown on unnecessary welfare payments. But now they're running scared, according to Alan Jones.
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Al Gore's power bill an inconvenient truth
ENVIRONMENT campaigner Al Gore is using more electricity than ever, despite pledging to cut consumption more than a year ago.
According to the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research, the annual electricity usage at the former US vice-president's home in Nashville, Tennessee, has risen by 10 per cent, The Australian reports.
Mr Gore's environmental activism inspired the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But the TCPR branded him a "hypocrite" in February last year after discovering that his eight-bathroom house had consumed nearly 221,000 kilowatt hours of electricity in the previous year - more than 20 times the national average.
Mr Gore responded by saying he was giving the house a energy-efficient makeover, fitting solar panels, low-energy lightbulbs and a geothermal heating and cooling system.
However, the TCPR has got hold of his bill again, this time comparing consumption between the 12 months before June last year, when it says he installed his new technology, and the year since then.
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Rudd cans good advice, while Swan backtracks
Andrew Bolt
Is there any senior public servant in Canbera now that doesn’t think the Prime Minister a clown - or at best an economic illiterate?
THE Rudd Government overruled a push by Treasury to stop the Bracks review of the automotive industry from considering an extension to controversial financial assistance for carmakers.
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Johns born a rambling man
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 20, 08 (01:17 am)
THE APRA gong show on Monday didn’t praise Daniel Johns nearly enough. No wonder the Silverchair frontman was wild-eyed and slurring on the Sydney stage. The blow had clearly knocked him senseless.
What did the APRA judges mean, calling Johns merely Australia‘s Songwriter of the Year?
How could they dismiss his hit, Straight Lines, as only Australia‘s Song of the Year?
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Hypocrisy hard to bear
Andrew Bolt
POOR Belle. Here’s a polar bear that never got to taste a global warming hypocrite, served fresh.
Oh, I can imagine how Belle’s mouth ran to see the welcoming committee of journalists assembled for her this week on the coast of northern Iceland.
She’d have been hungry, of course, having sailed an ice floe over from Greenland and then swum to shore.
And, if she’d read the papers, she might even have expected the reporters before her would be the last to deny her a house-warming snack.
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No jobs, no black towns
Andrew Bolt
Former Treasurery secretary John Stone says Aboriginal settlements in no-work areas should be closed:
Unless real job opportunities can be created in the remote (and very remote) areas - and by real job opportunities I do not mean the rag-bag of trumped-up economic development schemes for which the Aboriginal industry has been notorious since the days of Nugget Coombs’s turtle farms - the people in those areas will have to move or be moved out.
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Forum including stolen gen claims.
Andrew Bolt
Put your view here.
Incidentally, reader Rachel on Wednesday claimed to give me 30 names of Aboriginal children stolen for racist reasons. If you check my reply halfway down in comments here, you’ll find her list includes children who were orphans or evacuated from war zones with their mothers. Not one name I’ve managed to check so far is of a child stolen from parents because he or she were black. I think Rachel has tried to deceive us.
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Skaf appealing because victim didn't suffer 'physical injury'
Mohammed and Bilal Skaf are appealing their latest sentences and convictions on a number of rapes. Gil Taylor is at the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal. -this appeal gives legal appeals a bad name. His victims suffered. - ed.
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American facing murder over diving death
Australia will seek the extradition of American diver Gabe Watson after a coroner charged him with the 2003 honeymoon murder of his wife Tina.
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It’s their love of doom that’s the giveaway
Andrew Bolt
Another hairshirt idea from the sandwich-board apocalyptics of the Left:
ADELAIDE’S central business district should be made a petrol-free zone by 2012 to prepare for the end of affordable oil, the Australian Democrats say.
And, in the same vein, maybe the woman behind this idea should sleep in a coffin to prepare for the end of her life.
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Not truly human
Andrew Bolt
How debased are some of our people now? Stealing $5 of Santa money from a six-year-old and then bashing her father is so low that you can’t touch them.
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Sending Tokyo aid needed here
Andrew Bolt
The Rudd Government gives $35 million to a Japanese car company that doesn’t need it, but takes $5 million from an Australian one that sure does - to build something even better than the government is buying:
PERMO-DRIVE(’s) hybrid drive system for trucks promises to deliver fuel savings of up to 25 per cent, many times greater than the efficiency offered by the Toyota Camry the federal Government is backing with a $35 million cash grant…
(But) Permo-Drive chairman Colin Henson has written to the company’s 1900 shareholders, telling them the company must be put into liquidation - and the Rudd Government’s first budget was blamed.
The company was counting on a $5 million grant from the small business development program Commercial Ready, which was axed in the budget.
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Gas that bear
Andrew Bolt
The good thing about global warming, of course, is that it will help stop binge drinking by wiping out the habitat of the worst booze-pushers:
Health Minister Nicola Roxon… pointed out that Nationals MP Paul Neville, whose seat of Hinkler encompasses the city of Bundaberg, actually had a life-sized facsimile of Bundy in his parliamentary office window.
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Devine: dumb Liberals won’t be led by Catholics
Andrew Bolt
Frank Devine smells anti-Catholic bigotry in the Liberal Party. He notes Tony Abbott’s comments on appearing on the front page of The Weekend Australian ‘s magazine holding a picture of the Pope:
“A ‘Captain Catholic’ reputation is supposed to be bad for my political prospects,” Abbott bluntly declared in an attachment to an article about what is to be expected of Pope Benedict when he comes to Sydney next month for World Youth Day.I can’t say I’m convinced. The fiercest public attacks on Abbott’s Catholicism have come from the Greens and Labor, and the damage done to Abbott is the perception that he will limit people’s freedoms - and especially some freedoms particularly beloved of the Left.
The political prospect Abbott may have in mind is eventually becoming prime minister. It’s dismaying how often, indeed, one hears it said: “Abbott has no chance. He’s too Catholic."…
However, when it is said that Abbott is too Catholic to be prime minister, what is really meant - and this is the real elephant in the room - is that, because he is a Catholic, he can’t be leader of the Liberal Party.
But Devine, a Catholic, may have finer antennae than I for detecting a bit of Mick-phobia. And his admiration of Abbott is by no means misplaced.
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Goodbye again to Rudd
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s love of leaving might one day this term have colleagues urging to make that leaving permanent:
Mr Rudd has already spent twice as many days overseas on official business than John Howard did in his first year of government. In his first year as PM, John Howard spent just 16 days overseas visiting six countries. Since being elected in November Mr Rudd has spent 32 days overseas on official business in trips covering 13 countries.
Mr Rudd is also set to visit the G8 summit in Japan, pay diplomatic visits to Korea and Malaysia, attend the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga and APEC in Peru during his first year in office.
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Mbeki sells out Zimbabwe
Andrew Bolt
South African president Thabo Mbeki, the former Marxist, has a great solution to Zimbabwe’s nightmare, in which a tyrant is trying brutally to crush his pro-democracy challenger:
Mbeki has sought to cancel Zimbabwe’s presidential runoff next week in favour of talks on forming a unity government.
Brilliant! Cancel the election! Make the challenger share power with the dictator he’s already beaten! He’s mad!
Consider: Morgan Tsvangerai is being asked to share power with a man who’s already using his clout to do this to the Opposition’s followers:
The wives of at least three officials of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have been murdered. In each case, the homes of the MDC officials were burnt down. Two of the murdered wives were burnt alive, the other beaten to death.
What odds Rudd goes?
Andrew Bolt
What odds would you give that Kevin Rudd won’t last a full term?
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Rudd cans good advice, while Swan backtracks
Andrew Bolt
Is there any senior public servant in Canbera now that doesn’t think the Prime Minister a clown - or at best an economic illiterate?
THE Rudd Government overruled a push by Treasury to stop the Bracks review of the automotive industry from considering an extension to controversial financial assistance for carmakers.
Freedom of Information documents obtained by The Australian expose deep divisions within the Government over assistance to the car industry by revealing that Treasury sought to delete from the draft terms of reference for the review sections that proposed it evaluate the $480 million-a-year Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme.
Not that the Treasurer seems that much more competent:
THE Rudd Government has repealed new welfare rules just days before they would have cost 85,000 Australian workers at least $50 a week, and has ordered a review of all fringe-benefit salary packages.
Wayne Swan has promised to review his own budget measures, which The Australian this week revealed would cut benefits to hundreds of thousands of Australians from July 1 next year, in a bid to ensure there were no unintended consequences.
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UN shames itself again
Andrew Bolt
As if the United Nations needed proof it’s the natural home of any loon with an anti-American conspiracy theory:
Critics are calling for the resignation of a U.N. official who publicly supports investigating theories that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an “inside job.”
Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, investigates alleged Israeli violations of human rights law for the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.
But the former Princeton professor would also like to investigate whether “some sort of controlled explosion from within” destroyed the Twin Towers...
John Bolton, who was a marvellous US ambassador to the UN, puts it typically well:
I think [his beliefs are] fruitcake city, but among many delegations to the U.N. it’s probably the conventional wisdom.
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