Headlines Saturday 14th March 2009

Ship leaking oil in Brisbane River, Bligh's fault?
The cargo ship at the centre of one of southeast Queensland's biggest environmental disasters has now leaked oil in the Brisbane River.
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Fatal unit fire under suspicion
Sydney police investigating a fatal blaze in the western suburb of Auburn are treating the fire as suspicious.
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Customs investigates possible Sydney airport cancer cluster
Customs is investigating a possible cancer cluster at its Sydney airport office after three women were diagnosed with the disease in a three-year period.
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Friends say Peter Garrett is a better musician than politician
He may be a government frontbencher but Peter Garrett has proved he hasn't lost any of his trademark Midnight Oil moves, busting them out in Canberra last night.
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Teen allegedly found with 94 ecstasy pills remains behind bars
A teenager is spending a second night behind bars after appearing in court over the discovery of almost a hundred ecstasy tablets in a school bag.
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Rudd has no idea how to spend surplus .. you spend it.
A new survey showing Australians are still more likely to spend than their Asia-Pacific neighbours will give the federal government some heart a day after being hit with the worst unemployment rate in nearly four years.
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ANZ denies sending 500 jobs to India
One of Australia's big banks will create 500 jobs in India, prompting calls for the Rudd government to withdraw its deposit guarantee scheme from financiers that shift employment offshore.
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Men cleared after brutal brawl with police
Stoner criticises overseas clothing... while wearing an Italian suit
Garrett blocks development near NSW park
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Risk of disease rising due to immunisation slackness
Parents who don't get their children immunised are putting us all in peril, according to Alan Jones.
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CHANGE!
Tim Blair
Who to believe: February 5 Obama or March 12 Obama?
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ILLUMINATION OF A NATION
Tim Blair
This year’s Hour of Power – or Earth Hour, as some call it – fast approaches:
8:30PM local time, wherever you live on planet earth. Saturday 28 March 2009
Those not living on planet earth are presumably excused. Earth Hour losers at the Age crank up the lightless excitement:
Grand prix organisers and the AFL said they supported Earth Hour and planned to participate, but were unable to say how.
Saturday qualifying at the Australian Grand Prix will be concluded (during daylight hours) by the time Earth Hour begins. It’s a little difficult to turn lights off when they aren’t on. Of course, if qualifying were held under lights, organisers could always bring events forward in the same way that Cate Blanchett’s play was rescheduled last year to dodge the Hour’s forbidding darkness.
And managers of Etihad Stadium at Docklands were unable to say whether they would turn down any lights during the St Kilda-Sydney match.
Consider the legal consequences of deliberately turning down lights during an AFL match. Then commence planning for Hour of Power 2009.
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As she was screeching…
Andrew Bolt
James Jeffrey speaks too soon:

CATHERINE Deveny’s column in last week’s The Age, which marked International Women’s Day by describing her tampons as ”vagina bullets”, may be her last contribution to Pravda-on-the-Yarra.

The self-described “professional pain in the arse and serial pest” has gone on strike after new editor Paul Ramadge declined to honour an agreement Deveny had struck with his predecessor Andrew Jaspan for a pay rise that, according to one Age insider, would have taken her into the stratosphere… Deveny’s departure is a sad blow to this paper’s Cut &Paste section...

Never fear, James, Deveny today provides plenty of cut-and-pastables for those seeking evidence of the decline of a once-great paper - and of parenting skills, if not of civilisation:

MY SON wants to be a doctor. To illustrate his curiosity about the human body, allow me to share with you a couple of his recent questions: “Mum, do you masturbate?” and “How do gay men have sex? Do they tie their penises together or do they wee into each other’s mouths?” If anyone has the answers, feel free to go to my website 50reasonschildrenshouldhavetheirmouthsstapledatbirth.com.au

What’s astonishing is not that you can find a Deveny in a country of 20 million people, but that a leading newspaper asks that person to be its star columnist. And readers cheer.
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Save the planet! Hurt people!
Andrew Bolt
What violence couldn’t be excused to “save the planet”?:
PEOPLE are being urged to break into shops, “disable” four wheel drives and throw pies at people by an extreme environmental group being promoted by the NSW Greens.

The group Rising Tide is planning a blockade of the world’s biggest coal port in Newcastle, for which Greens MP Lee Rhiannon has held a “direct action and civil disobedience” workshop to prepare protesters…

Rising Tide said people concerned about climate change should also “shut down” petrol stations and blockade power plants. The suggestions are contained in a list of 64 “actions” posted on the group’s website.

A spokeswoman for Rising Tide stood by the list, saying the actions were “trivial” compared to the threat of climate change.

And I’ll ask again: What is it with the Left and violence?

UPDATE

Speaking of tribalism and violence - and an increasing barbarity:
AT least two people were arrested in a bloody confrontation between supporters at last night’s NAB Cup final at Docklands…

One police officer, who asked not to be named, said it was the worst footy brawl he had seen. It was out of the ordinary. Every single unit in the ground got called and I don’t ever remember that happening before,” he said.

The video is an insight into a culture that’s sick. Then again, maybe they were just gtrying to save the planet.
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Rudd will help those he puts out of work
Andrew Bolt
The Australian is muscling up:

Mr Rudd has abandoned a proud tradition of reform… (P)attern bargaining by stealth, increased union rights of entry and access to non-union workers’ records and compulsory union bargaining will cost jobs…

Asked this week whether he could guarantee that no jobs would be lost because of his IR changes, Mr Rudd guaranteed “that Australians will not have redundancy payments stripped away from them”. It’s little comfort for Australian workers.

Guaranteeng to look after people you’ll help put out of work is a measure of this Government’s ideological madness.
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Al Gore must be a woman
Andrew Bolt
The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenburg, who can’t report on an international conference of distinguished warming sceptics without spitting, discovers another reason to ignore their facts:

It would be easy to dismiss this gathering as a pity party for people on the fringes of modern thought.... The 600 attendees (by the organisers’ count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers.

Sounds bad. So what damning conclusions on warming would Goldenburg draw from this gathering of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the body doing most to push her apocalyptic faith:
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Carrion feasts, Obama fans look away
Andrew Bolt
Not content with picking tax dodgers, sleazes, influence sellers and anti-Israeli appeasers of terrorists, Barack Obama adds to his team Adolfo Carrion:

The man who is President Obama’s newly minted urban czar pocketed thousands of dollars in campaign cash from city developers whose projects he approved or funded with taxpayers’ money, a Daily News probe found. Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion often received contributions just before or after he sponsored money for projects or approved important zoning changes, records show.

Never mind, says Obama. Just pay some of it back and she’ll be sweet:
The White House told urban czar Adolfo Carrión on Wednesday to pay the architect who did work on his Bronx home more than two years ago.

The Daily News reported that Carrión,,,, had the architect draw up renovations in early 2007. That work came as Carrión’s office was reviewing the architect’s plan for a housing project. Carrión still hasn’t paid for the work, raising questions about whether it was a freebie done to win approval of the project… It is illegal for city officials to accept gifts from entities they know are doing business or are about to do business with the city.

Had George Bush surrounded himself with such people, how full would the papers be of his Team of Crooks?
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Two legs good, four legs Pacific Brands
Andrew Bolt
Labor and the unions vilify, harass and threaten Pacific Brands when it tries to save its remaining 5000 Australian jobs by shifting production to China. But what’s “obscene” for a company, is OK for some comrades:

PREMIER Nathan Rees has defied his own party and defended the outsourcing of 10,000 NSW jobs overseas… The Premier was reacting to revelations in The Daily Telegraph that almost all police uniforms, ambulance uniforms, 626 train carriages and nurses outfits were being made in China.

UPDATE

Who best deserves monstering by Labor and the ACTU. A Premier who has not created wealth - or jobs - or a boss like Pacific Brands’ Sue Morphett:

Married, with two children by her mid-20s, she went into the family bakery business after her father died, wholesaling Bird’s Country Mill bread mix. She has written a cookbook that sold 75,000 copies, owned a milk bar and built a plum-pudding business with a million-dollar turnover. All before moving to Pacific Brands in her mid-30s after her third child reached school age.
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Improper: Bryce exposed by her own PR
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd must have known it was a gross breach of protocol to use the Governor General to lobby African nations for his controversial bid for a UN Security Council seat. That’s why he didn’t mention this in a press release to announce Quentin Bryce was visiting Africa.

Bryce herself must have known her lobbying was in gross breach of her duty to keep out of politics, which is why she didn’t mention it in the highly selective and incomplete itinerary of her trip that she published.

But her media secretary, apparently less clued in to a Governor General’s duty to be impartial and apolitical, gives the game away to the ABC - which itself took a month to realise Bryce had in fact breached the conventions of her office:

Now an email from the Governor-General’s office confirms the principle reason behind her trip was to lobby on the Australian Government’s behalf.

ABC Radio’s Sunday Profile had been requesting an interview with the Governor-General for six months and last month those requests came to fruition.

The Governor-General’s media secretary wrote an email to the program proposing the African trip would be a good subject for an interview planned down for this week.

“Can I suggest that the interview focus on that trip, which is all about Australia’s bid for a seat on the Security Council? It’s a tougher peg and will provide a bit more meat,” the email read.

The secretive arrangements for this trip strike me as furtive and even underhand, and the lobbying as an unprincipled use of the Governor General’s position. This - and the Liberals’ opposition to Bryce’s political lobbying - make it beyond question that Bryce either give up the trip or her office. She is heading rapidly for a constitutional crisis, driven not by any issue of principle but by her ego alone.
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Jobs for dangerously green mates
Andrew Bolt
Hmm. What job to give a deeply green former water minister whose refusal to build a new dam or find alternative supplies has left Melbourne dangerously close to running out of water?

A TRUST has been set up to help scientists influence Government policies about water and the environment…

Federal Water Minister Penny Wong announced $1 million in Government funding for the trust… Trust chairman John Thwaites, a former Victorian deputy premier, said the new body would bring together young scientists and policymakers.

This isn’t just giving a green mate a taxpayer-funded job. It’s rewarding a catastrophic failure.
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Charles warns against his gases
Andrew Bolt
Another eco preacher warns the world against gases of the kind he just blew out of the back of his private plane:
Prince Charles, 60, and Camilla, 61, were on a 10-day, three-nation tour taking in Chile, Brazil and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands - the research inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution - meant to draw attention to the challenges posed by climate change.

UPDATE
Charles sure gases on royally:

Charlie’s private Airbus A319 (above) will seat just 29, but the aircraft holds 134 passengers when used commercially.
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Be not afraid
Andrew Bolt
Cardinal Pell is right. The only argument was whether he was right to say it, or whether such double standards are justified:

THE West has become scared to criticise Islam and accepts death threats by Muslim extremists as normal, Cardinal George Pell has suggested in a speech in England…

“Many in the West have grown used to practising self-censorship when it comes to Islam, just as we seem to accept that ex-Muslims who criticise Islam and extremism, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, require round-the-clock police protection,” he said.

“You can be persecuted for hate speech if you discuss violence in Islam, but there is little fear of a hate-speech prosecution for Muslim demonstrators with placards reading ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’.”...

UPDATE

Speaking of Islamist violence safer not discussed, Amsterdam police disrupt an alleged bomb plot:

“Last night (Wednesday), around midnight, we received a telephone call warning that three men were planning to carry out an attack with explosives in Amsterdam,” police commissioner Bernard Welten said.

The call came from Brussels and named home furnishing retailers Ikea among other large stores to be targeted.

During the course of the day, investigators arrested six men and a woman between the ages of 19 and 64, all with dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, said spokeswoman Hanane Lechkar.
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Rudd is the world champion spender
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd has bet more than any other leader on spending his way out of a recession. Jack the Insider worries it could be a losing bet:

Australia’s two stimulus packages of $52 billion combined account for 5 per cent of our GDP, compared with the United States $1.2 trillion dollar spend at 2.9 per cent of US GDP.

Other developed economies don’t come near Australia’s high water mark of 5 per cent of GDP. Gordon Brown’s Government will spend around 2.5 per cent of GDP, as will Spain. Canada is hurling the cash around at 2.4 per cent of GDP while France, already blighted by a huge budget deficit, will spend just 1.9 per cent of GDP. In Germany, Angela Merkel’s Grand Coalition (is spending) 1.4 per cent of Germany’s 2008 GDP…

Australia leads the developed economies in its reaction to the global financial crisis. It is yet to be determined if this is recklessness or good management.

I fear a disaster to make Whitlam seem a conservative.
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Where are Gore’s hurricanes?
Andrew Bolt
Remember how Al Gore exploited Hurricane Katrina to flog his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which warned of more to come?

Remember how Bill Clinton even suggested those predictions were already coming true?

It is now generally recognised that while Al Gore and I were ridiculed, we were right about global warming. . . It’s going to lead to more hurricanes.

Ryan Maue says you can relax. One more scare seems a fizzer:

UPDATE
Meanwhile on the ABC’s PM, a wide-eyed reporter asks a warming alarmist to tell him even more about worsening hurricanes and a warming that actually halted a decade ago. Not a single reference is made to observational data. Not a single sceptical question is put.
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Chaos: yet another Obama pick quits
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama loses yet another member of his team in what’s going from farce to worse:

Democratic sources say that H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration. It’s the third withdrawal of a top Treasury Department staff pick in less than a week.

The extraordinary bungling in picking a team only underlines the fact that Obama has never run anything in his life but a campaign, and is now floundering in office.

Let’s review the other people he tried to pick - or did despite their history of tax troubles:
Charles Freeman, nominee as chairman of the National Intelligence Council: quit after criticism of his attacks on Israel and support for dealings with Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as of his financial ties to Saudi Arabia.

Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, commerce secretary nominee: quit over Obama’s stimulus package and centralisation of power.

Tom Daschle, Obama’s nominee for Health and Human Services: quit for failing to pay taxes.

Ron Kirk nominated as U.S. Trade Representative: picked despite owing an estimated $10,000 in back taxes.

Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary: picked even after failed to pay taxes

Bill Richardson, Obama’s first nominee as Commerce Secretary: quit after being investigated over financial irregularities, campaign contributions and construction contracts.

Nancy Killefer: Obama’s new chief performance officer: quit for failing to pay taxes

And let’s not forget some politicians he didn’t pick but inherited or worked with:
Rod Blagojevich, Illinois Governor: sacked after trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat

Chris Dodd: given cheap mortgages by Countrywide, one of the lenders he oversaw as chair of the Senate banking committee, and received donations from the now collapsed Fannie Mae.

Charlie Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee: failed to pay taxes.

This is beyond inept, and would be damned in the media if Obama were anyone but Obama the Messiah. So dysfunctional is his administration now that we read even this:

Britain’s most senior civil servant has complained that Downing Street is finding it “unbelievably difficult” to make arrangements with the United States for the crucial G20 summit. Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary,… said that No 10 was having trouble even getting in touch with key personnel at the US Treasury department. “There is nobody there,” he told a civil service conference in Gateshead. “You cannot believe how difficult it is.”

UPDATE

Another day, another pratfall:

An aide to President Barack Obama is on leave from his White House job after the FBI raided his old District of Columbia government office Thursday, arresting a city employee and a technology consultant on corruption charges, a White House official said. The charges were lodged against the two men at a federal court hearing as the FBI finished searching the city’s technology office, which was led until recently by Obama’s new computer chief, Vivek Kundra.

Kundra, however, is said not to be the target.
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If white nurses aren’t safe, what hope the children?
Andrew Bolt
Some Aboriginal communities are so dysfunctional that white workers are not safe:

THREE serious sexual assaults of female public servants on Queensland’s Cape York have again called into question the level of security being provided to government employees working in Aboriginal communities. Police are investigating complaints from two commonwealth government-contracted employees after men allegedly broke into their accommodation while they slept and attempted to rape them.

Why are such workless communities kept alive with welfare payments when their cultures are clearly so toxic? What hope have the children there? Be sure, after all, that if it’s this dangerous for white women, it’s even worse for Aboriginal. Note that one of these communities is the infamous Aurukun, where children are pack-raped and even the Indigenous Affairs Minister won’t stay overnight.