Piers Akerman
STATE Treasurer Michael Costa is entitled to challenge his critics but using his medical condition as a weapon in his battle to privatise NSW’s power generators is not on.
Costa, who never made a secret of his struggle with depression, declared that, while he may be mad his enemies are stupid - and there’s no cure for that.
There’s no doubting that the Treasurer has made a contribution to public life in NSW.
He is one of the few in State Cabinet to have ever exhibited any independence of thought, but some of his decisions have been little short of lunatic, and now that he’s raised the issue of his mental health, it is fair to ask whether his condition has been responsible for some of his more egregious decisions.
Take his spur-of-the-moment decision to fire former TransGrid chairman Philip Higginson in November 2006.
Higginson had served the company extremely well for 12½ years. He enjoyed a rolled-gold reputation in the business community (and still does) for good governance which he had built over 40 years in senior management positions in manufacturing and mining.
He had paid his dues as a good citizen, using his talents effectively working for such public institutions as the Botanic Gardens, the Conservatorium of Music, the Salvation Army and the University of NSW. Indeed there is no one in the current Government with a record to match his service to the public and private sector.
Unlike so many heads of quasi-government institutions, he was no toady. He fought an attempt by the Treasury, among the most politicised of government departments, along with health, education and transport, when it attempted to hide a $1 billion debt incurred by another state utility in TransGrid’s books.
He was shafted, however, when he refused to buckle to Costa and appoint a nominee favourable to the NSW ALP and the trade union movement to the board of the Energy Industries Superannuation Scheme (EISS).
In hindsight, his dismissal seems even crazier now than it did two years ago, because Costa was pushing the interests of his current opponent on electricity privatisation, Bernie O’Riordan, the state ALP and ETU boss.
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BABY STASI
Tim Blair
Hey, kids! Are climate crimes being committed in your house? Perhaps your uncles, aunts or friends from school are climate criminals.
It’s time to fight back, children. It’s time for ... the Climate Cops! Hit that link to join Skye, Will, Oscar, K’eyush and Poochie in their hunt for bad boys.
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PREACHY BORES BORING
Tim Blair
Peter Huber writes:
To judge by actions, not words, the carbon-warming view hasn’t come close to persuading a political majority even in nations considered far more environmentally enlightened than China and India. Europe’s coal consumption is rising, not falling, and the Continent won’t come close to meeting the Kyoto targets for carbon reduction. Australia is selling coal to all comers.
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UNPOPULAR FOR NOTHING
Tim Blair
The SMH’s Paola Totaro wastes twelve paragraphs telling readers that British PM Gordon Brown is unpopular—without offering a reason why this might be so.
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FIRST THEY KILL YOU, THEN THEY COMPOST YOU
Tim Blair
Glenn Garvin’s excellent review of a recent Penn & Teller warmy takedown ends with the spooky line: “I’m pretty sure I hear the Climate Police at my door.”
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BARACK W. OBAMA
Tim Blair
Change he couldn’t believe in:
Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged today that he had failed to understand how much violence would decrease this year in Iraq ...
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DAMIAN SIGNS OFF
Tim Blair
South Australian academic and conspiracy crackpot Damian Lataan rails against censorship:
It seems that only the rightwing are now allowed to comment on Tim Blair’s Blog at Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Telegraph.
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HOSPITAL BLOCKED
Tim Blair
An unusual definition of a hospital’s role, from Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins:
The Oscar-winning liberals recently attended a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing to oppose St. Vincent’s plea to build a new, larger hospital on West 12th Street, three blocks from their home ... Sarandon said in a statement: “Improving the hospital is a great idea. However, this can be accomplished without compromising the neighborhood.”
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JEEPS WORTH SEEING
Tim Blair
The Age‘s Tim Colebatch urges readers to look right:
As the Liberal Party turns into a battleground between those who believe Australia should do its share to tackle global warming and those who deny that global warming exists, the graph at right is worth seeing.
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HAIL THE HAILMEN
Tim Blair
Faux snow in Sydney:
For the first time since 1836 it has snowed in Sydney - at least that’s what the locals are saying.
Meteorologists say technically it was soft hail, but that didn’t stop the locals making snowmen.
Technically they’re softhailmen.
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BIG BELIEVER BELIEVES
Tim Blair
Barack Obama ain’t so speechalicious without his teleprompter. Change of super-speecher into speech-mangler you can believe in! The blundering Berlin bedazzler lately finds himself grilled by a determined Modo:
I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.
“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa.”
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JOKES MADE
Tim Blair
“I don’t see anybody else doing John Edwards/Rielle Hunter jokes,” emails Jim Treacher. “And for good reason, probably.”
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DOGS ARE GOOD
Tim Blair
DeusExMacintosh notes a refusal to acknowledge that there are genuine points of cultural incompatibility between British secular law and Islamic cultural practice:
Abuse and vilification of Muslims is a fact, but so is abuse and vilification by Muslims. Hostility seems to be part of the accommodation process for any large group of immigrants; in this case, however, a goodly part of the hostility is coming from the immigrants themselves, apparently in the expectation that the host culture will make all the changes and do all the accommodating.
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If Wong was in Brisbane, she’d spruik global cooling
Andrew Bolt
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told me that the proof of global warming - in a decade of no rise in the globe’s temperature - was a drought in the Murray-Darling basin. But if the Rudd Government thinks regional changes in the weather are now proof of global temperature, what does it think this proves:
BRISBANE could be frozen by record low temperatures this week - with the mercury expected to fall to around zero degrees Celsius on Wednesday… Last July the mercury dropped to minus 0.1 degrees at Brisbane Airport - a record low for the Brisbane area.
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Hansen is the odd one
Andrew Bolt
James Hansen, Al Gore’s global warming guru, is coming under increasing pressure, as Christopher Booker reports:
There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Hansen has been for 20 years the world’s leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore’s closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.
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Jane's last words for her 'champion' Glenn
IN a book to be released this week, the late Jane McGrath tells of her love for husband Glenn, their children, and her dream to grow old.
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Brave, bold … UPDATE Not quite
Andrew Bolt
Brendan Nelson should win respect, but many media commentators will be furious:
BRENDAN Nelson has secured the support of shadow cabinet for a tougher line on emissions trading that makes support for a scheme conditional on action by big polluters including China and India.
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McCain ahead, or Gallup behind
Andrew Bolt
It doesn’t sound quite right, but maybe voters are saner than I thought:
Newest Gallup Poll shows McCain insignificantly ahead.-- Yesterday the Gallup Tracking Poll showed Obama ahead by 9 points (49-40). Earlier today (Monday) that dropped to Obama ahead by 8 points (48-40). Both were of registered voters.
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The media gates less guarded
Andrew Bolt
Nine’s undermining of the legendary Laurie Oakes isn’t the only sign of the traditional gatekeepers of the Canberra press gallery losing their clout:
ALAN Ramsey, Fairfax Media’s long-serving Canberra political pundit, took a dramatic downgrade in The Sydney Moaning Herald on Saturday with his usual two-thirds of a page cut to just two half columns as Michael Duffy got the prime spot. Scuttlebutt in Canberra suggests Ramsey is the latest staffer to run foul of editor Alan Oakley.
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The rise of the Heating Youth
Andrew Bolt
Beware the eco-fascists, warns Dr Richard North:
Can I be the only one more than a little disturbed by the latest campaign to be fronted by energy company npower?
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Barbarians bred
Andrew Bolt
At some stage we will be finally scared enough to realise there is something profoundly wrong in the way we are socialising children - or failing to:
VIOLENT crime is at an all-time high in Victoria with assaults, robbery and aggravated burglaries soaring in the past year.
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Water wasted on humans
Andrew Bolt
Environment Victoria gives Premier John Brumby an excellent solution to the shortage of irrigation water that is driving farmers broke, and food prices up:
The Premier appears fixated on water infrastructure projects as the remedy to over-allocation, climate change and drought. He ignores the fact that buying back water for the rivers is the only demonstrated way to boost their flows.
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The Liberals are news because they are witches
Andrew Bolt
Gerard Henderson smells a witch-hunt:
The media’s focus on the Coalition with respect to climate change can be readily explained. First, the apparent difference between the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, on the one hand, and Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt on the other, gets noticed because it is viewed in the light of the current leadership tension within the Liberal Party. Second, the overwhelming majority of journalists who report politics and the environment are true believers in the humans-cause-climate-change thesis and maintain that Australia should take a lead in reducing carbon emissions. They hold to this belief irrespective of the position taken by the developed world (including the United States and Canada) and the developing nations (including China and India).
The level of intensity among those reporting and/or commenting on the debate is surprisingly high from members of a profession who traditionally pride themselves on scepticism, if not outright cynicism.
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Start arguing, boys
Andrew Bolt
The Liberals have a lot of arguing to do to back their new position on an emissions trading scheme:
But the latest Newspoll survey has confirmed widespread public support for an ETS, with 60 per cent of voters backing the adoption of a scheme “regardless of what other countries do”.
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Costello now the Liberals’ Messiah
Andrew Bolt
Lots of silver in ther lining for the Liberals. Brendan Nelson is making the hard policy decisions, and in the wings sits a Messiah ready to inherit all his hard work and none of his bruises:
PETER Costello is overwhelmingly the first choice among voters to lead the Liberal Party, as Brendan Nelson stakes his leadership on trying to delay the Rudd Government’s carbon emissions trading scheme....
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