Headlines Thursday 29th January 2009

Rees asks Rudd for $2.5b hospital handout
New South Wales Premier Nathan Rees plans to rebuild the state's major hospitals, but to do so he wants a $2.5 billion handout from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
===
Church schools to ban gay teachers, hijabs
Religious schools will be able to reject gay teachers and prevent students from wearing hijabs and other religious garments under proposed changes to anti-discrimination laws in South Australia.
===
Man arrested for stalking young girls
Police have arrested a man accused of following young girls in Sydney's north-west.
===
'50 million jobs will be lost in 2009': ILO
Two years of global financial and economic meltdown could leave over 50 million more people unemployed by the end of 2009, risking social unrest, the International Labour Organization said.
===
Govt handouts prompt $500m pokies boom
There are suggestions a large proportion of the Federal Government's stimulus package went into poker machines, after poker machine revenue jumped $500m last month in NSW alone.
===
Three teens die in Vic car crash
NSW Labor set to promote Robertson
Two charged over Qld double murder
Hamas 'would recognise' pre-1967 Israel
===
Wen, Putin blame US over economic crisis
Chinese and Russian leaders Wen Jiabao and Vladimir Putin have blamed the United States for causing the global economic crisis on a gloomy first day of the Davos forum.
Both leaders on Wednesday called for a new attitude by US President Barack Obama, while deepening pessimism over the future of the global economy enshrouded the World Economic Forum.
Chinese premier Wen said America's voracious appetite for debt and "blind pursuit of profit" had led to the worst recession since the Great Depression which has rocked the 2,500-strong political and business elite gathered in the Swiss mountain resort.
Putin said the disappearance of some Wall Street titans in the past six months testified to the errors committed.
Wen blamed the crisis on "inappropriate macroeconomic policies of some economies" and "prolonged low savings and high consumption," in a lightly veiled attack on the United States.
He blasted the "excessive expansion of financial institutions in blind pursuit of profit and the lack of self-discipline among financial institutions and ratings agencies" while the "failure" of regulators had allowed the spread of toxic derivatives.
Wen said the crisis had posed "severe challenges" for China and that it needed 8.0 per cent growth in 2009 to maintain social stability while the International Monetary Fund predicted 6.7 per cent for this year.
The Chinese leader called for faster reform of international financial institutions and for a "new world order" for the economy.
The Russian prime minister followed him to the podium and said the crisis had been a "perfect storm".
He also took aim at US banks and the outgoing US administration.
"Although the crisis was simply hanging in the air, the majority strove to get their share of the pie, be it one dollar or one billion, and did not want to notice the rising wave."
=== ===
Fighting for the right to speak without fear
Piers Akerman
FREEDOM of speech and a free press are among the freedoms we take for granted in Australia. To those unfortunate enough to live in other nations, principally those outside the West, such freedoms are as rare as clean water. - I feel a little uncomfortable saying that a major difference between free Australia and dictatorship elsewhere is our rule of law which embraces liberal freedoms .. because it often doesn’t. It fails. Yet in its failure, we still have moderate to high success.
When the question was posed to the senate last year if the Department of Education had paid attention to the grave accusations made by David Ball the reply was interesting for what it failed to provide, highlighting my point. The answer suggested there was a struggle in the bureaucracy to determine if David was a teacher who had a job. The answer then gave a long winded ‘no.’ So a grave accusation was made and the government admits in parliament it ignored it .. suggesting that the government was struggling to know what, epistemologically, a teacher is.
But to say that Australia is successful only because of a culture is to overvalue one thing and deny those that have fought so hard to preserve that culture.
In short, I think we need more than the right to be able to speak without fear. We also have, and need, the right to be heard. - ed.
===
BIG LIST EVEN BIGGER
Tim Blair
Remember that consensus we used to hear so much about?
Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009.
===
MESSAGE THE SAME
Tim Blair
The anti-immigration slogan “F… off, we’re full” was displayed by many stupid (and destructive) kids during Australia Day. Much condemnation followed. Next year, these youngsters should just explain that they are deeply-concerned environmentalists who are worried about our ecological sustainability. Controversy avoided.
===
Melbourne crumbles, Government to fall
Andrew Bolt
Melbourne now pays the price of being too green and mushy to build the infrastructure to match its booming population, or even to cope with the weather.

Water:

MELBOURNE’s summer water storage levels have slumped to their lowest point in 25 years… Yarra Valley Water managing director Tony Kelly, said Victorians were now using an “unacceptable” amount of water…

Power:

TENS of thousands of houses sweltered through the night as sizzling heat caused power outages across the state.... “These extreme temperatures and excessive use of air conditioning can impact on the electricity distribution network,’’ Mr Batey said.

Transport:

MELBOURNE’S train system buckled under the strain of Wednesday’s heat, forcing maintenance workers to cool the rails with water… But commuters were left boiling mad after enduring more than 150 cancelled services in one of the system’s worst days in recent memory…

PUBLIC Transport Minister Lynne Kosky has blamed ”underinvestment over a long period of time” as a key factor in the poor performance of Melbourne’s public transport network in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, having spent so much with so little to show:

THE Victorian Government is close to breaking one of its promises to voters with the budget close to slipping into the red for the first time in 15 years.

Water restrictions, power cuts, cancelled trains, choked freeways ... this Government is now heading for a shock defeat at the next election.

UPDATE

But at least Victoria isn’t yet NSW:

SENIOR doctors at Dubbo Base Hospital are threatening to quit after running out of morphine and watching patients in the intensive care unit swelter in 37 degree heat for five days because pharmaceutical companies and maintenance contractors had not been paid.

The last hospitals I heard of that were running out of morphine were in African war zones.
===
Good for unions, bad for jobs
Andrew Bolt
Have you noticed that Kevin Rudd’s economic “reforms” tend to come with very nasty unintended consequences?

THE commercial shipping industry has warned the Rudd Government that it could move its operations and hundreds of jobs offshore because of the new industrial relations laws.
===
Bligh’s bounty of gases
Andrew Bolt
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh wants the state’s children to cut their planet-murdering emissions:

We are working to put Queensland out ahead of the pack…to make Queensland schools world leaders in reducing their carbon emissions…

Bligh herself, though, gases on in her personal jet, the only one allocated to any state premier:

QUEENSLAND Premier Anna Bligh has breached her Government’s guidelines by flying in the state government-owned jet at a cost to taxpayers of $3000 an hour to watch the football… The guidelines were sidestepped for a trip by Ms Bligh and Sports Minister Judy Spence in September 2007 in the jet to Townsville to watch a rugby league match between the Queensland Cowboys and the New Zealand Warriors.
===
Labor’s green power runs out of wind
Andrew Bolt
Victoria in this heat wave has been desperate for electricity, not least for all the airconditioning. So how have our green-dazed Labor Government’s new windfarms been helping out the state’s supplies?

Well, to start with, let’s check the winds at Wonthaggi over the past three days, and see if they’ve been strong enough to drive the six turbines that now despoil that coast:

28/1 3:00pm CALM

28/1 09:00am 4km/h

28/1 06:00am 4km/h

27/1 3:00pm 7km/h

27/1 09:00am 9km/h

27/1 06:00am 4km/h

26/1 03:00pm 15km/h

26/1 09:00am CALM

26/1 06:00am CALM

Hmm. Not enough breeze to even fan a face. Thanks heavens for coal.
===
Being green kills the planet
Andrew Bolt
For a green believer, it’s like a sheet of paper with “PTO” printed on both sides:

Peter Jones suggested that an “urgent” review of Labour’s policy on recycling was needed to make sure the collection, transportation and processing of recyclable material was not causing a net increase in greenhouse gases.

Mr Jones, a former director of the waste firm Biffa and now an adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor,.... suggested that much of the country’s waste should simply be burnt to generate electricity.

Meanwhile, yet more evidence that recycling is a gigantic con - or at best a mere genuflection:

Last month, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that councils in England and Wales were dumping more than 200,000 tons of recyclable waste every year – up to 10 per cent of all the glass, paper, plastic and other materials separated out by householders. Thousands of tons of recyclables are shipped to China because of insufficient capacity and demand in Britain.

In some parts of the country, residents have to sort their waste into as many as seven containers, including food waste bins, which has helped councils to justify the scrapping of weekly bin collections.
===
“Politics” is only a sin of the Right
Andrew Bolt
Fox News reports:

Obama Urges GOP to Keep Politics to a Minimum on Stimulus

And from the Wall Street Journal, this report on Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in Congress:

Pelosi Lashes Out at Bush, McCain Over the Financial Crisis
===
Grandchildren stolen
Andrew Bolt
The we-know-better brigade in Britain has astonishing powers to meddle in the most intimate of family relationships:

Two young children are to be adopted by a gay couple, despite the protests of their grandparents. The devastated grandparents were told they would never see the youngsters again unless they dropped their opposition.

The couple, who cannot be named, wanted to give the five-year-old boy and his four year old sister a loving home themselves. But they were ruled to be too old - at 46 and 59.

For two years they fought for their rights to care for the children, whose 26-year- old mother is a recovering heroin addict. They agreed to an adoption only after they faced being financially crippled by legal bills.

The final blow came when they were told the children were going to a gay household, even though several heterosexual couples wanted them. When the grandfather protested, he was told: ‘You can either accept it, and there’s a chance you’ll see the children twice a year, or you can take that stance and never see them again.’
===
African kills Asian. Australians blamed
Andrew Bolt
Look hard enough, and you’ll find an Anglo to blame:

An African migrant who viciously bashed a father to death with a full bottle of wine in a random attack has been jailed for eight years.

Leong Lim, 45, was walking home from a pokies venue when he was attacked in a Springvale park and repeatedly hit over the head with a bottle of Passion Pop on March 3 2007.

A Victorian Supreme Court judge said on Wednesday that Australian culture was partly to blame for the attack.

And no, the judge wasn’t referring to our culture of taking in people who find it so hard to fit in that they end up killing people.
===
Bush gets the tofu vote
Andrew Bolt
The Dalai Lama, the guru of the Left before Al Gore, will have millions of his fans choking on their lentils. First, although he wouldn’t - literally - hurt a fly, he seems to draw the line at terrorists:

“It is difficult to deal with terrorism through non-violence,” the Tibetan spiritual leader said delivering the Madhavrao Scindia Memorial Lecture here…

“They (terrorists) are very brilliant and educated...but a strong ill feeling is bred in them. Their minds are closed,” the Dalai Lama said.

Which might help explain his even more grievous offence against Leftist dogma:
So, does he advocate the let’s engage terrorism and terrorists policy of the new US administration by talking to Iran, Hamas, Shining Path or even the Chinese Communists? He didn’t exactly say that but he left the audience stunned when he said ”I love President George W Bush.”