Headlines Wednesday 29th October

Rees boasts his Cabinet even dumber
Andrew Bolt
He says it like he’s proud that his Cabinet is now 100 per cent stupid:

The Premier, Nathan Rees, has blasted former NSW treasurer Michael Costa for being a global warming sceptic, and said a new era of climate change action would start from today.
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Rudd’s $83 million mistake
Andrew Bolt
Taxpayers face the first big bill from the Rudd Government’s bungled attempt to stop a run on the banks - and causing instead a run on other financial institutions:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tonight announced the government will give Australia’s financial regulators an extra $83 million over four years to help them deal with the global financial crisis.
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As in schools, so in our suburbs
Andrew Bolt
Multiculturalism isn’t all felafels and festas:

A teenage student of Lebanese descent had developed a phobia towards young males of Asian backgrounds after he was brutally assaulted by a group of Vietnamese youths, a Sydney court has heard… The man’s lawyer, Tom Hughes, told the court today that there was racial tension at Birrong Boys High School, which had deeply entrenched racial divisions. He said the school’s grounds at recess had areas where students of Lebanese, Asian, European and Tongan descent congregated.
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Pilger’s porky
Andrew Bolt
A terrific example of Pilgerism - and from the master who gave his name to the trick, John Pilger:
A pervasive white myth, that Aborigines leech off the state, serves to conceal the disgrace that money the federal government says it spends on indigenous affairs actually goes towards opposing native land rights. In 2006, some A$3bn was underspent “or the result of creative accounting”, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.

Oh, really? Aborigines robbed of $3 billion? Let’s check that Sydney Morning Herald article which Pilger (mis)quotes:
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Green dreams answered
Andrew Bolt
Their hunger for Armageddon is as characteristic as their lack of irony. Brendan O’Neill tells of his career as a fake greenheart:

Earlier this year, I wrote an eco-satirical column under the pseudonym Ethan Greenhart, in which I (or rather, Ethan) called upon Greens everywhere to pray for an economic downturn. The column argued that nothing would benefit our human-ravaged planet more than a “big, beautiful, stock-crashing, Wall Street–burning, consumer-baiting, home-evicting, bank-busting recession.”

We need something to stop humans “raping the planet,” I said…

Not 24 hours after the column was published, “Ethan” received an e-mail (my alter ego came with his own inbox) from Valerie Stevens, chairperson of the U.K.-based Optimum Population Trust. The OPT is an influential green-leaning outfit that campaigns for strict controls on population growth. Ms. Stevens, believing — remarkably — that Ethan Greenhart is a real person, wrote: “What a marvellous piece of writing. I feel exactly the same as you!”

Consider what this means. The head of one of Britain’s most vocal Green lobby groups feels “exactly” that people who work in shops are comparable to “concentration camp guards”; that humankind is a “poisonous bacteria in Gaia’s bloodstream”; that “consumerism makes us mentally ill”; that the consumer society has “turned us into savages . . . well, not us, obviously, but certainly them”; and that a disease should come and decimate “the plague that is mankind.”
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STUNNED RUDD
Tim Blair
According to The Australian, Kevin Rudd recently took a call from George W. Bush
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Who made Henry the target?
Andrew Bolt
Peter Costello notes the Rudd Government’s use of Treasury secretary Ken Henry as a political prop:

I can’t remember a time when a Treasury Secretary did so many media events with ministers.
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NSW ALP Shambles Along
Andrew Bolt
It’s incredible that voters can’t sack these clowns for another three years:

PREMIER Nathan Rees has threatened to legislate to overturn $60,000 pay rises for the state’s top bureaucrats following The Daily Telegraph’s revelations yesterday of a secret Government pay deal…

After being forced to admit that he had known about the pay rise for more than a month but had failed to make it public, Mr Rees said he would now seek a reversal from the NSW Remuneration Tribunal which awarded it....

So shambolic is this outfit that this now counts as business as usual
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Realisation dawns: we won
Andrew Bolt
Now Strategy Page agrees, too:

The war is over.

The realisation that we’ve won the war in Iraq has been slow to dawn on the media, although it’s been clear for a year. I guess you don’t see what you don’t want to see.
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Hogan votes for humans
Andrew Bolt
I’ve said Paul Hogan’s tourism ads are far, far better than Baz Luhrmann’s new ones:

Paul Hogan’s “shrimp on the barbie” ads, after all, remain the most famous and loved, remembered even today by many who saw them 20 years ago.

How irresistible was his Australia - of beaches, bikinis, barbecues and an Opera House on the sun-lit harbour. It was an Australia populated by charming people who said “g’day” in charming accents, and not at all like Luhrmann’s - at its best without a local to be seen or endured.
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Bush corrects Rudd’s fantasies
Andrew Bolt
George Bush calls out Kevin Rudd for telling untruths about their phone call (see column below) and Rudd backs off:

The (Australian) story ... reported that when Mr Rudd argued for using the G20 as the forum for addressing the (financial) crisis, “Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say, ‘What’s the G20?’ “

Now the Washington Post has reported that a US official who monitored the call “denied that Bush made any such remark”. In addition, the official said, Mr Bush told Mr Rudd in the call that other leaders favoured a G20 summit.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister last night said Mr Bush had been deeply engaged with the G20 and the role the G20 would play in dealing with the financial crisis.

This was the topic of the conversation between Mr Rudd and Mr Bush and the reason why Mr Rudd had called Mr Bush, the spokesman said.
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The Prime Blabber
Andrew Bolt
KEVIN Rudd blabs. Kevin Rudd betrays. What’s more, Kevin Rudd seems to make things up.

And on Saturday our Prime Minister managed to commit all three fouls at once against US President George W. Bush.

Trying to sell himself as a statesman, he blabbed to The Australian all the details of a private talk he’d had with the President of our most important ally.

Not only that, he betrayed Bush by retelling their conversation in ways to make the President seem a donkey, and Rudd the genius who trained him to behave. And Bush has noticed.

Still not satisfied, Rudd then apparently made things up - to take public credit for a decision Bush had already made.

I can’t recall a greater breach of confidence, a more studied insult to an ally or a more craven attempt at big-noting from an Australian Prime Minister.
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Viva Julia, the classroom revolutionary
Andrew Bolt
JULIA Gillard isn’t leading the revolution you’d expect from an ex-boss of the militant Socialist Forum.

Her “education revolution” turns out to be not the clenched-fist kind, but more the revolving one.

Gillard, both Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister, is in fact turning us back, at least in part, to where we were before education experts went mad with ideology. She is now restoring some “three-Rs” conservative basics that should never have been ditched.

No wonder madder Labor MPs are aghast. Julia Irwin, for instance, blasted Gillard’s reforms last week as a “so-called education revolution”, demanding she do the traditional Labor thing instead of robbing private schools to pay state ones.

The Australian Council of State School Organisations even damned her for pushing a “half-baked idea dreamt up by bureaucrats and a handful of neo-conservative newspaper columnists”.

But the good thing for Gillard is that it’s all true. She has indeed gone from heading a socialist outfit that recycled ex-communists to heading a push to recycle conservative policies. - Bolt overstates things. It isn't that Gillard is conservative, but her state based colleagues have been sol left wing activist that she looks conservative in contrast. - ed.