Headlines Tuesday 8th July

Still no answers as police close Iguana Gate investigation
NSW Police have concluded their investigation into the Iguanas Waterfront incident and will hand a brief to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) tomorrow.

Federal MP Belinda Neal and her husband, suspended NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca, were interviewed by police last week over their alleged involvement in an argument with staff at Gosford's Iguanas Waterfront restaurant on June 6.

The pair initially decided to give a statement to police and later agreed to be interviewed after their political leaders intervened.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma ordered Mr Della Bosca to give an interview while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he wanted Ms Neal to fully cooperate with investigators.

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione said police were ready to hand the findings to the DPP.
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No quick fix for shooting gallery
Piers Akerman
THE drug minimisation lobby which recently attempted to introduce young school pupils to “safe” methods of using dangerous illicit drugs is now trying to pressure the NSW Government into legitimising its Kings Cross shooting gallery and making it a permanent fixture.

In a highly publicised stunt, medical director of the shooting gallery Dr Ingrid van Beek announced her resignation yesterday via the medium of the once-august pages of that facilitator of inner-urban deviancy, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Bemoaning the “politicisation” of the harm minimisation policies championed by the shooting gallery’s staff and supporters, notably the Uniting Church, Dr van Beek said she resigned in frustration at the NSW Government’s failure to move the shooting gallery from a trial basis to one of permanency.

Curiously, the Uniting Church, which has been paid to operate the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) seems not to share her sense of frustration. It quietly paid about $7.1 million for 66 Darlinghurst Rd - the building occupied by the shooting gallery - seven months ago and settled in double-quick time.

The price seems to be a record for the area which has had a decline in property sales and prices seriously affected because of the presence of the junkies attracted to the shooting gallery.

As one local told me yesterday: “Prices here are badly affected. One nearby property around the $5.5 million mark has been to auction twice and failed to sell because of the junkies who hang out for drugs near here.”

The same person, a strong supporter of the Cross, said other areas were booming with two new banks and a Hungry Jacks franchise all being renovated.
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Rudd warms to deceit
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd tells us to back him or suffer:

Because the fact is if we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.

Utterly false. Even Rudd’s guru, Ross Garnatu, admits that nothing we do to the nation’s emissions makes the slightest difference to the climate unless others follow our example - especially fast-growing China and India:

Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels.

Reality check: Both India and China say they won’t cut their emissions. Our sacrifices will be for nothing.

Which destroys the whole premise of Rudd’s article and makes it just a cheap exercise in fear-mongering. That’s even before we tackle Rudd’s shaky science and worse economics.
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Waiting for a warming Godot
Andrew Bolt
Today’s Age:
In line with predictions in the Garnaut review’s draft report released last week, the analysis found Victoria was likely to have more days of high fire danger ...

Also in today’s Age:
Victorian bushfires last summer destroyed about 32,000 hectares, less than a fifth of the land usually burnt out in a bushfire season.
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Do I ignore it?
Andrew Bolt
Please help resolve an inconclusive debate I’ve had with my wife and a senior colleague at work.

We all agree that there is one thing every viewer will instantly notice about Age art critic Robert Nelson in the video below. It is something Nelson clearly hoped would send a message. But the message most viewers in fact would have received in a blink of an eye would be one wholly unfavorable to Nelson and his argument. -just to clarify, Bolt does not mean Dr Nelson, the leader of the Liberal Party. One hopes that Bolt says what he sees, without favor. - ed.
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States in warm war: Victoria alarmed, Costa abused
Andrew Bolt
Now the Victoria Government is starting to freak about what Kevin Rudd will do to its power generators to “stop” global warming:

“The Victorian Government believes in establishing an Emissions Trading Scheme that reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” a spokeswoman said today. “(But) We want to ensure the Federal Government understands the impact of an ETS on low-income families, power generators and trade exposed companies in Victoria...”
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Don’t waste food, says Brown with cheeks full
Andrew Bolt
Exactly the kind of Rudd-like fingerwagging that sets a Prime Minister up for a hiding:

Families facing spiralling shopping bills were told by Gordon Brown yesterday to stop wasting food...
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Nelson’s big call
Andrew Bolt
Another brave but politically savvy call by the Opposition Leader:

BRENDAN Nelson has abandoned support for an emissions trading scheme without international action, warning Australia would be sacrificing jobs by going it alone.
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Blinded on the road to Damascus
Andrew Bolt
Now the guards are actually killing Muslims prisoners. And, worse:

They said the guards had also desecrated copies of the Koran.
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Garnaut’s pipe dream: India says no proof and no cuts
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s global warming guru, Ross Garnaut, demands that we slash our gases even though he admits this terrible sacrifice is meaningless without fast-developing countries like China and India doing the same:
Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels..... China has recently overtaken the United States as the world’s largest emitter, and, in an unmitigated future, would account for about 35 per cent of global emissions in 2030.

Add India’s emissions, and these two fast-growing giants by 2030 will be emitting half the world’s greenhouse gases. If they don’t cut back, nothing we do will make the slightest bit of difference, as even Garnaut concedes.

Small problem. Last week the Indian Government’s more pragmatic warming advisors released their National Action Plan on Climate Change, which refuses to do any such thing. All that India’s Garnauts will promise is this:

India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries...
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The big issue's not WYD, rail strikes or climate change
Alan Jones
With everything else that's going on, it's easy to lose sight of the everyday because people are still doing it tough in business and in families. It's just that things like World Youth Day and rail strikes and climate change provide little hope for people's concerns being heard, let alone understood.

To return to what I've been saying for years now, the failure of competition in this country to provide relief on prices for struggling families.

It stands to reason that if outfits like Woolworths and Coles have over 80 per cent of the market, they can do what they like to the supplier and so the farmer or the grower is doing it tough. And they can do what they like to prices because for many there's nowhere else to shop.

And we talked last week about the truck driver. He has to bear all the increases in the cost of fuel on his own. But outfits like Woolworths and Coles keep telling the customer that the price of fresh food is going to go up because of the petrol prices.

And they get away with it.
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$1000 a day to settle pedophile
AUTHORITIES plead with locals not to run pedophile Dennis Ferguson out of his new home, saying they have nowhere else to send him. - why not keep him in prison? - ed.
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Of course they were friends
Andrew Bolt
Which NGOs made these Leftist terrorists feel so comfortable?
As we learn more about the Colombian military’s daring hostage rescue last week, one detail stands out: In tricking FARC rebels into putting the hostages aboard a helicopter, undercover special forces simply told the comandantes that the aircraft was being loaned to them by a fictitious nongovernmental organization sympathetic to their cause called the International Humanitarian Mission.

It may have taken years for army intelligence to infiltrate the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and it may have been tough to convincingly impersonate rebels. But what seems to have been a walk in the park was getting the FARC to believe that an NGO was providing resources to help it in the dirty work of ferrying captives to a new location.
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Downer doesn’t have to take it any more
Andrew Bolt
Alexander Downer on journalists with two faces:

IT was early on Friday morning, the day after I formally announced I would resign as an MP. My mobile phone flickered into life signifying the arrival of an SMS.

It was from a friend in Sydney telling me a Sydney journalist called Peter Hartcher didn’t seem to like me, not one bit.

A strange message to get because on the previous day—the day of my resignation, a big and important day for me—I’d spent 40 minutes talking to him to help him with a book he is writing about the Howard years.

And the week before he’d been at a conference with me in Washington and seemed perfectly affable. He was pleading with me for time to help him with his book.

So I looked at his column. There it was. A retrospective on Alexander Downer’s career: Arrogant, pompous, incompetent, irrelevant, immature, not funny and so it went on. Well, I thought, he’d finished his interview with me, he didn’t need me any more, I was retiring, so he could tell the world what a simply appalling person he thought I was!

While he needed me he didn’t have the guts; now he didn’t, he let his poison pen rage. Mind you, we all know there’s nothing worse than an insincere opportunist.
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Never mind the data, feel the prediction
Andrew Bolt
NASA has a scare:

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

Reporters then panic:

Global warming is seen as a cause of the most severe and frequent tornadoes and worst flooding in history of the Midwest.

But former climatology professor Tim Ball says the alarmists are just getting more desperate:

Now a combination of events are driving them to raise the threat level and make increasingly false claims, forcing a coverup. The world is cooling while CO2 levels continue to rise… There are three major problems with what is being said. 1. The severe weather of this spring across the Northern Hemisphere was caused by cooler weather not warmer. 2. The IPCC and the NOAA positions that severe weather will increase with global warming is scientifically wrong. 3. The records show current weather extremes are well within long term natural variability.

For example, where are the extra tornadoes this warming has brought?