Saturday, June 28, 2008

Headlines Saturday 28th June

Big subsidies once again mean bigger bills
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s big-headlines promise to cut childcare expenses with generous subsidies turns out to mean ... higher bills:

EDDIE Groves is playing our politicians for mugs. And us.

He announced this week average price hikes of 10.7 per cent, or about $6 a day, at his 1200 ABC childcare centres across the country…

Groves says these price increases, which take effect on June 30, have nothing to do with the fact from July 1 parents will have more available cash because the childcare tax rebate will increase from 30per cent to 50 per cent. Oh really.


Wait until we see what his promise to lift the surcharge on Medicare surcharge means for waiting lists and public hospital funding. This will then seem nothing.
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Oakes agrees: gas plan could kill Rudd
Andrew Bolt
It’s astonishing that only now is a bad penny dropping. Laurie Oakes:

(O)n the issue of an emissions trading scheme, Rudd threw caution to the wind before last year’s election.

John Howard had committed a re-elected Coalition government to having such a scheme up and running by 2012.

Key ALP advisers urged Rudd to adopt the same timetable. But Rudd decided he wanted to outdo Howard, so he set 2010 as the date by which an emissions trading scheme would be operating if Labor won. Now he is stuck with the consequences....

It is now dawning on many in the ranks of Labor’s caucus that 2010 is an election year.
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Fashionistas feel a heat that their thermometers don’t
Andrew Bolt
World temperatures rose just 0.7 degrees until 1998 and then stopped. But fashion airheads consult not the thermometer but the vibe to declare that winter is now like summer, and the fashions need not change either:

(S)ome of the biggest changes the multibillion-dollar global industry is undergoing have more to do with global warming than the usual shifts in season and taste…
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Winning the war you were told was lost
Andrew Bolt
Gerard Baker surveys the state of the war of terror:

We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere: in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.
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A debate!
Andrew Bolt
On global warming! Watch Sunday on Sunday (only after taping Insiders, of course).

UPDATE

A pendulum is swinging back, if Sunday‘s promo is any guide:

Today Sunday examines the political consensus building that has portrayed global warming as the most urgent crisis humankind has ever faced.

Skeptics point to the gaps in the knowledge base and the flaws in the measurement of vital climate and weather data upon which the consensus is based.

Social researchers also highlight the dangers of conducting science as a form of religion, divided into believers and deniers.
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The company they keep
Andrew Bolt
Gangsters, molls and associated riff-raff:

Confidential understands (Roberta) Williams, thrust into the spotlight after the success of Underbelly, this week approached dealmaker Harry M. Miller for representation.

But the man who made Deborah Hutton and Maggie Tabberer household names turned the convicted drug dealer down, citing loyalties to his client Melbourne gangland matriarch, Judy Moran.
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A clash of booga-boogas
Andrew Bolt
It’s just a pity that they’re driven to dump this irrational ban through an irrational fear:

THE head of Australia’s biggest blue-collar union, Paul Howes, and former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr have called for Australia and the Rudd Government to purge its prejudices and embrace a nuclear power industry…

Mr Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, told The Australian that “if we are going to be a green Labor Government, then we have to look at nuclear”.
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BBC not white enough
Andrew Bolt
Is anyone in all this asking what the viewers actually want?

Broadcasters have overcompensated for their lack of executives from ethnic minorities by putting too many black and Asian faces on screen, a leading television industry figure said last night.
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Expertise established
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
Was Lara Logan, a former swimsuit model, just training for her new job?

A veteran news reporter for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) became involved in two romantic relationships while on assignment in Iraq—one, possibly contributing to a divorce—the New York Post reported Thursday…

Just yesterday, the network assigned her to the Washington, D.C. bureau as the chief foreign affairs correspondent.
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They will say anything in hopes of spotting a left wing leader.
Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Peter Hartcher watches our next prime minister wow the crowd at the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue and gushes:

Julia Gillard has come a long way since the Victorian Socialist Left. She has made a sophisticated and successful international debut, and moved herself credibly into a new category of leadership, the category of international politics and statecraft. In doing so, she has reaffirmed Australia’s place as America’s uniquely reliable ally - the only country that has joined forces with the US in every major war of the 20th century and the 21st century, no matter how noble, no matter how misguided.

A long way indeed for a former leader of a lobby group for Communist Party refugees. But more interesting is this: When does the media lobbying for Gillard to replace Rudd start? My guess: certainly before she honors Labor’s promise to give every senior secondary student a computer.
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Rudd’s guru off to help wombats instead
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
The Rudd Government has shoved every hard economic decision to Treasury Secretary Ken Henry to solve, giving this one man too much responsibility. On top of his regular job, he’s also heading a huge review into our tax system as well as helping Infrastructure Australia figure how to spend the Government’s billions.

So it’s odd that he’s decided it’s time to vanish for a month to somewhere not even Rudd can ring:

THE man at the helm of Australia’s economy will leave his post for almost five weeks - to look after endangered wombats.
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Rudd fuels fear
Andrew Bolt
It’s a question that could and should be answered in a single word:

CHRIS UHLMANN: Will fuel be included in an emissions trading system....?

But Kevin Rudd doesn’t answer it in 553
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A sustained objection
Andrew Bolt
Beautiful Sunset
I was instantly impressed by the courage and integrity of Singaporean opposition leader Chee Soon Juan when I was privileged to meet him. I didn’t know his sister was just as admirable.

From her cross examination of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who, like his father, has an unhealthy habit of using the country’s pliant courts to sue critics like the Chees into silence
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Light dawns
Andrew Bolt
Michelle Grattan speaks for herself:

Who would have thought that Kevin Rudd would be battling with coming to grips with “cultural sensitivities” in Asia?
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Rudd’s carbon catastrophe
Andrew Bolt
KEVIN Rudd has a plan to cut your emissions that won’t work, will hurt and isn’t needed.

In fact, if the Prime Minister has any sense, he’ll check the soaring prices for oil and coal and say his painful plan has been tried on you already, and has failed, failed, failed.

Or does he just want Labor to lose the next, unloseable election?
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Polygamy not in their welfare
Andrew Bolt
WE haven’t heard the last of this call by Muslim leaders for the right to polygamy.

After all, how can a society that’s moving to give a man the right to marry another man then refuse a man the right to marry two women?

Give way on gay marriage, you must give way on polygamy. In both cases it’s about consenting adults, right?

So I couldn’t blame the sheiks who thought it was time this week to demand we change our laws to make polygamy legal.
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Too many wives confuse the Left
Andrew Bolt
The Age editor admits he’s a racist and sectarian bigot:

The mere fact that (legalising polygamy) has been raised will goad racist and sectarian bigots — though they will not identify themselves as such, preferring to proclaim instead that they are the defenders of central Australian values…

But acknowledging the plight of (polygamous Muslim) families (in Australia) does not justify a change in the law. As The Age has argued before, there are fundamental values that must be accepted by all who live in this society if the broader diversity is to be sustained.
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Filling up to bursting point
Andrew Bolt
Michael Duffy says we need to start discussing the price of record immigration:

This week the Bureau of Statistics announced that last year the nation’s population grew at its fastest rate since 1988… Net overseas migration contributed 56 per cent of that increase…

(B)ut try to find anyone today who will admit our water restrictions are the result of population growth… The same thing can be seen with other issues. Just this week in the Herald there’s been coverage of a report on road congestion…

Why has the link between immigration numbers and the above issues been ignored? ... If Kevin Rudd knew that when he bumped immigrant numbers up he’d be responsible for all the extra schools, hospitals and roads that would be needed, he might think twice.
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Hell will ice over before warmenists concede
Andrew Bolt
The North Pole is melting! Man-made global warming is here! Meanwhile, as the University of Illinois’ global warming monitors concede, the Southern Hemisphere is getting icier than ever. Which is why, of course, you never read about it in The Age.

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