Headlines Sunday 29th June

Love-in’s over for Rudd
Piers Akerman
THE unpleasant aftershocks from the Rudd Labor government bliss bomb will be felt this week.

On Tuesday, when Australians hope they will find some relief from the price squeezes through the tax cuts budgeted by the former Howard government and reaffirmed by Rudd Treasurer Wayne Swan, they will actually discover that the average family is actually $30 a week worse off than it was last November, when Labor won office.

That figure comes from The Financial Review, which calculated that rising interest rates, petrol prices and soaring grocery costs will swallow the expected bonus.

The ALP, which campaigned on its promises to keep petrol prices low, grocery prices low and make housing affordable, has actually done the opposite.

The “working families’’ courted so assiduously by Mr Rudd and his team are now paying $152 a month more, on average, than they were in November, business confidence is at the lowest on record, and small business confidence in the ability of the Rudd government to deliver anything of value from its policies has plummeted from 47 per cent in November to 10 per cent.

This government - which promised not to play the “blame game’’ - has blamed everyone and everything for its plight.
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Black result in Gippsland
Andrew Bolt
Former Labor Senator John Black picked a hell of way last week to advertise his consultancy business:

AT Australian Development Strategies, we think that Labor’s Darren McCubbin has a pretty good chance of winning Gippsland.
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Cooling coming
Andrew Bolt
A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia has a warning to global warming believers not immediately obvious from the summary:

Based on our claim that changes in the Sun’s equatorial rotation rate are synchronized with changes in the Sun’s orbital motion about the barycentre, we propose that the mean period for the Sun’s meridional flow is set by a Synodic resonance between the flow period (~22.3 yr), the overall 178.7-yr repetition period for the solar orbital motion, and the 19.86-yr synodic period of Jupiter and Saturn.

Or as one of the authors, Ian Wilson, kindly explained to me:

It supports the contention that the level of activity on the Sun will significantly diminish sometime in the next decade and remain low for about 20 - 30 years. On each occasion that the Sun has done this in the past the World’s mean temperature has dropped by ~ 1 - 2 C.
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But Borders’ wrapping comes free
Andrew Bolt
Reader Greg is as cross with the Borders’ plastic-bag levy as am I. But he’s found a way around it - a way that also costs Borders both cash and credibility:

I ... noticed that the cashiers were offering customers plastic bags for 10 cents which was to be donated to some green cause - then I saw the blackboard notice on the wall behind the counter: “free gift wrapping for all purchases”! So I declined the plastic bag (10 cents is 10 cents!) and asked for the gift wrapping - the cashier completed my transaction then moved to the end to wrap our books - then she realised (listening to me chatting to my daughter Alex) that I was just trying to avoid paying 10 cents, as she accused me, “Are you just trying to avoid paying 10 cents! then you won’t care how well I wrap it then” No, it’s not the 10 cents, it’s the fact that I have to pay for a plastic bag! Tell your boss, I said. I certainly will tell everyone, she huffed. This felt great - but my daughter was a tad embarrassed.
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Another Profit of Doom
Andrew Bolt
$ir Nichola$ $tern, like Al Gore, is set to make real $$$ from the global warming terror he helped to whip up with his discredited report.

Climate Resistance reports:

Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the famous Stern Report, which underpins many an argument in favour of climate change mitigation, is behind a ‘carbon credit reference agency’ launched today.
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Dawn at the EU pay office
Andrew Bolt

A very funny, and very damning gotcha on the rorting of European Union MPs. Serious message: the EU is too unaccountable, and democracy too weak in this diluted, distant form.
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Iemma is on the way out
By Linda Silmalis
THE hunt has begun for a scapegoat in the Iguana-gate scandal, with MPs being told last week of upcoming changes in the office of Premier Morris Iemma.

Rattled by the worst Newspoll for any state government in recent years, senior Labor sources say it is just a case of how long Mr Iemma will remain leader.

Mr Iemma's staff, in particular chief of staff Josh Murray and media adviser Glenn Byres, are also in the firing line.

"Michael Costa was telling MPs that the problem with Morris's performance is his staff, and there should be a wholesale change of staff in his office,'' one source said.

Many do not believe a change of staff will rescue the Premier, however.
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Spinning has its rewards
Andrew Bolt
Arguably Kevin Rudd’s greatest apologist on Sky News, where he appears regularly as a “commentator”, is Bruce Hawker. By sheer coincidence, such spinning turns out to have some side benefits:

A COMPANY that provides strategic political advice to the Prime Minister’s office is also being paid by mining and energy companies to lobby the Government as it prepares to unveil its greenhouse strategy.

Hawker Britton, overwhelmingly made up of former Labor staffers and party insiders, is working for at least six companies that would be nervously watching the Government’s emissions-trading deliberations.
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Warming priests defocked on Sunday
Andrew Bolt
Sunday‘s Adam Shand finds the debate on global warming that Tim Flannery claims is over. Oddly enough, the debate Shand finds is between experts who doubt man is truly heating the world to hell and non-expert evangelists who insist he is.

This is also the first time that I recall mainstream television reporting that the world has not warmed over the past decade.
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The thieves with green bags
Andrew Bolt
Here’s a perfect way to infuriate your customers:

SUPERMARKET shoppers will pay between 10 and 25 cents for every plastic bag they use when levies are trialled in a few weeks. Up to 10 Safeway and Coles supermarkets are being recruited by the State Government for the month-long trial, due to begin in August.
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Yes, something’s sure buggered in Malaysia
Andrew Bolt
Those morons who have made a joke of Malaysian democracy just don’t give up:

MALAYSIA’S opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, will be investigated over new allegations of sodomy, police said today, the same charge that saw him jailed a decade ago.
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Liberals storming back
Andrew Bolt
Labor seems set to once more get in first, before the voters:

Labor MPs are hardening in their resolve that (Premier Morris) Iemma must be sacrificed to give them a chance of holding on to government in 2011.

The results of today’s Sun-Herald/Taverner Poll will be the final straw… An election held now would propel the Opposition into government with a 56-44 two-party preferred landslide. That is in stark contrast to a Sun-Herald/Taverner Poll conducted in February, which found Labor hanging on 51-49.

Add that to the souring against Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, and the Liberals should realise where the platform for a national rebuilding lies. That said, I would not rule out a win at the next federal poll, either - a win that six months ago seemed impossible.
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Labor a sinking Titanic: O'Farrell
There's speculation New South Wales premier Morris Iemma will be forced out of the top job in the wake of another bad poll result against the state government.
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Labor takes out Kororoit by-election
Labor, the Liberals and even the independent are claiming moral victories after Labor's Marlene Kairouz won the weekend's Kororoit by-election.

However the Victorian Electoral Commission is predicting a two-party preferred swing against the State Labor Government of 13 per cent.

Labor held the safe western suburbs seat - an industrial and residential area taking in Caroline Springs, St Albans and Deer Park - by 26 per cent before Saturday's poll.