Headlines Monday 1st December

First day of Summer in Aus.
Anniversary of the first ALP government anywhere. Queensland 1899. The leader died less than a decade later as a drunk.
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Tell ‘em he’s Henson
Andrew Bolt
If the man’s an artist, he’ll be let off with a grant:

A man caught taking mobile phone photographs of young children paddling in water at Sydney’s Darling Harbour faces child pornography charges.
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Three ways Rudd is wrong
Andrew Bolt
Henry Ergas warns that the Rudd Government has forgotten three lessons of history in battling this financial crisis:
Lesson 1: Don’t reduce labour market flexibility. During the period of the two oil shocks (in 1973 and 1979), a slew of European countries strengthened unfair dismissal provisions and gave unions greater bargaining powers. Without exception, the result was to increase unemployment and make it far more persistent… The Government’s proposed new IR laws are therefore especially dangerous…

Lesson 2: Don’t trash the capital stock. The oil shocks made large parts of the capital stock uneconomic, especially in manufacturing, as it was designed for an era of low energy prices… An emissions trading scheme is like a self-inflicted oil shock.. The Government’s combination of an ETS and new IR laws may therefore provoke anticipatory shutdowns in capacity and reductions in employment.

Lesson 3: Trying to spend your way out of recessions is a mug’s game… They are ineffectual because the lags between government spending decisions and ultimate economic impacts are difficult to predict and, at least for some kinds of expenditures, likely to be very long… Increased outlays are additionally likely to be inefficient because the setting of spending priorities is so vulnerable to rent-seeking.... Ultimately, the greatest difficulty with poor-quality public expenditure is that it is difficult to reverse.
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Computers didn’t compute
Andrew Bolt
Glenn Milne says Julia Gillard is spending $800 million more that what she’d promised on computers for schools - a stunt which won’t actually do much to improve teaching:

Kevin Rudd jubilantly announces that an extra $800 million from the commonwealth had secured the states’ agreement to the federal Government’s education revolution to supply children from Year 9 to Year 12 with their own laptops in school.
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The kindness that kills
Andrew Bolt
Exactly as predicted:

INDONESIAN people smugglers are back in business, with the federal Government conceding there has been a spike in activities…

Immigration Minister Chris Evans… denied the spike was due to Labor’s softening of refugee policy, a move experts on the ground say has encouraged people-smuggling outfits.

The International Organisation for Migration chief-of-mission in Indonesia, Steve Cook, told The Australian the smugglers had tracked the policy changes and there had been a dramatic surge in smuggling in the past 12 months.
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Our new expert in unwatched films
Andrew Bolt
There’s a very particular reason Australians should care about the way New Zealand taxpayers are forced to subsidise films they’d hate to see:

Last week we saw the release of the (NZ) Film Commission’s usual “aren’t we doing marvellously, darling” annual report… So far, so good, until you get down to a miserable failure, The Ferryman, into which the commission poured $6m of our money… Not one theatre bought this movie…
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Gore does Oprah; Steele does Gore
Andrew Bolt
Al Gore took his fry-and-die routine to Oprah’s show. Russ Steele does what Oprah wouldn’t and fact checks the professional alarmist’s claims - on temperatures, hurricanes, glaciers and Arctic ice.

And he urges readers who are horrified that Gore was given so much time to distort the truth to contact Oprah to complain.
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It’s the cartoonist who’s the joke
Andrew Bolt
Only a Sunday Age cartoonist would believe America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq caused the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington. And that the US caused the attacks on Mumbai, too.

Matt Golding is the same fool who thought Kevin Rudd wasn’t lying when he claimed George Bush said “What’s the G20?”
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No artist can be a pedophile
Andrew Bolt
I’ve already written how Kerry Negara’s new documentary on artist Donald Friend shows the arts caste defending Friend’s pedophilia.

Negara sends me further examples from the transcript of A Loving Friend which shows just how far that caste will go to excuse their sort from even the most fundamental rules of a civilised society - like not having sex with boys aged as young as nine.
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Wind farms: monuments to stupidity
Andrew Bolt
Britons are learning what an over-priced con wind power really is:

(T)he U.K., under pressure to meet an ambitious E.U. climate target of 20 percent carbon dioxide cuts by 2020, assumed the mantle of world leader in wind power production....

While 15 percent energy price rises were experienced across the E.U., in the U.K. gas and electricity prices rose by a staggering 29.7 percent. Ofgem believes wind subsidy has been a prime factor and questions the logic when, for all the public investment, wind produces a mere 1.3 percent of the U.K.’s energy needs…
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A busker would do better
Andrew Bolt
Only an arts festival could put on a sell-out show at a subsidised venue with a cast stripped down a single person - and still not make money