Headlines Thursday 4th December

Labor’s death wish for local hospitals
Piers Akerman
THE systemic destruction of the NSW health system, highlighted by the need to helicopter a female patient to Queensland for treatment last weekend, has South Coast residents wondering where they will go for emergency care.

The Rees Government is continuing Labor’s ideologically-driven scheme to scale back services and rid NSW public hospitals of private doctors. - Della Bosca being placed in charge of health reminds me of another ALP bungle which may have led to the death of a boy and been covered up. Three questions were posed recently in the NSW senate by Marie Ficarra MLC

1) Does the former Minister for Education Mr John Della Bosca acknowledge that on the 6th of April 2007, he received a letter from a former teacher of Hurlestone Agricultural High School regarding possible negligence in the death of Hamidur Rahman?

2) Can Mr Della Bosca affirm to this house that this allegation was duly investigated given the gravity of the case?

3) What steps has the Department of Education taken in liasing with Mr David Daniel Ball and his concerns for the Rahman family.
I have only recently read the coroners report on the matter and was disturbed by some things it failed to examine. It reminds me of the Vanessa Anderson case whereby a child seems to have been buried in public. I note Della Bosca, on a separate matter, called for people to be personally responsible. Time for Della Bosca to take personal responsibility. - ed.
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MP sets himself on fire
Andrew Bolt
Erk:

A FEDERAL Labor backbencher has been blasted by the Prime Minister for allegedly trying to sell photographs he took of a man threatening to set himself on fire. Queensland MP James Bidgood took the photos on the front lawn of Parliament House yesterday when a man seeking visas for his parents doused himself in petrol. - probably when the guy chose politics and to be in the ALP he didn't know he would be lampooning the desperate and needy. - ed.
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Australia: Fake but true
Andrew Bolt
Jill Singer loved Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, and says it shouldn’t be criticised for not telling the historical truth, even though it’s, um, wrong to say it’s the truth, and in fact, er, is the truth:

The mean-spirited and literal-minded might condemn Australia on documentary rather than dramatic grounds.

But it’s a movie, for mercy’s sake - it can make its own rules.

That said, it might be a good idea to scrap textual references to the Stolen Generation that top and tail the film.

It didn’t bother my mum, however. She also loved the film, though she sniffs at my sympathy for Aborigines hurt by past assimilation practices.

If you think that makes no sense at all, then you’re mean-spirited.
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Which mob runs Thailand?
Andrew Bolt
Richard Lloyd Parry choses his words very carefully, given that Thailand still punishes lese majeste, but he wonders how a mob could take over Bangkok’s airport for so long and force the resignation of the elected Prime Minister:

The key question is how such a mob, with a few light arms at best, was able to occupy a key strategic installation such as an airport so easily and for so long. If foreign soldiers or terrorists, such as the ones who attacked Mumbai last week, had stormed Suvarnabhumi airport, there is little doubt that the Thai police and army would have fought against them. It was not that they could not keep out the PAD but that they chose not to.

And this raises the crucial question: Who is really running Thailand?
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Terrorists can read, too
Andrew Bolt
Brett Stephens warns that when terrorists kill to avenge evils against Muslims, they may be just reacting to more beat-ups by Western journalists:

When it comes to terrorists and their grievances, nearly all the Western media have provided them with a rich diet on which to feed.

In the spring of 2005, Newsweek ran with a thinly sourced item about the Koran being flushed down a Guantanamo Bay toilet. Result: at least 15 people were killed in Afghan riots. Newsweek later retracted the story, which was the right thing to do but also, in its way, exceptional. Compare that to the refusal of French reporter Charles Enderlin and his station, France 2, to retract or even express doubt about his September 2000 report on Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli soldiers during an exchange of gunfire in the Gaza Strip…

Maybe Durrah was somewhere in the minds of the Mumbai killers. If not, there was no shortage of other Israeli “atrocities” for them to choose from, mostly fictitious or trumped-up and all endlessly cited in Western media reports: the “siege” of Gaza; the 2002 Jenin “massacre”; the 1982 massacres (by Lebanese Phalangists) in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut; the execution of Egyptian prisoners of war in 1967.

(I)t’s worth wondering why a media that treats nearly every word uttered by the US, British or Israeli governments as inherently suspect has proved so consistently credulous when it comes to every dubious or defamatory claim made against those governments. Or, for that matter, why the media has been so intent on magnifying genuine scandals (such as Abu Ghraib) to the point that they become the moral equivalent of 9/11. Some caution is in order: terrorists, of all people, might actually believe what they read in the papers.
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Howard gone, boats arrive
Andrew Bolt
My goodness, but didn’t the people smugglers learn fast that Kevin Rudd was now in charge?

ANOTHER boat carrying suspected asylum-seekers has made it to Australian waters… The boat is the fifth to make it to Australian waters in recent months.
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Red alert
Andrew Bolt
Queensland was once a bold, frontier country, where they bred them tough:

TEACHERS have been told to stop marking schoolchildren’s work with red pen because it is an “aggressive” colour.
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Raining on bureau’s parade
Andrew Bolt
The Bureau of Meteorology admits:

In marked contrast with recent months, November was a wet month through most of Australia. Averaged over the continent it was the eighth-wettest November on record, with only a few areas significantly below normal. The wet conditions were also reflected in the temperatures, with daytime maximum temperatures below normal, and overnight minimum temperatures above normal, over large parts of the country.

Not quite what the global-warmists of the Bureau predicted just five weeks ago:

The national outlook for temperatures over the November to January period shows a moderate to strong shift in the odds favouring warmer than normal conditions over eastern Australia. ...Across the rest of the country, including WA, south western NT and western SA, the chances of a warmer than average November to January period are between 40 and 60%,