Headlines Saturday 21st March 2009

Queensalnd election day .. remember to vote for LNP for responsible government.

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Billion dollar facelift for Opera House
The NSW and federal governments are considering a $1 billion restoration of the Sydney Opera House.
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Families of Bali Nine tell their stories
The nights are the worst, say families of the Bali Nine ringleaders, clinging to hope as their loved ones launch final appeals against their death sentences.
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Bligh narrow's gap in race for Queensland's top job
Polling booths have opened for the Queensland State election with the Labor Party expected to lose its massive parliamentary majority, and may even lose government
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Australian Indigenous health getting worse, survey reports
Australia's indigenous population suffers a higher infant mortality rate and a lower life expectancy than those in New Zealand, Canada and the US.
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Fourteen year old arrested after high speed chase
A 14 year old has been arrested following a police chase on the Hume Highway in Sydney's south west.
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Appeals court refuses Madoff bail
A US appeals court on Friday denied bail to Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff, who is in jail awaiting sentencing for massive fraud.
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Afghanistan unrest kills 70: officials
Polls open for razor's edge Qld election in which corrupt ALP government are projected to win
Fair Work bill farewells Work Choices and welcomes union excess
Obama, the Great Communicator "Special Olympics" gag falls flat
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Policy dictated not by the head, but by headlines
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised an era of evidence-based policy, but so far most of what we've seen has been about headlines, according to Alan Jones.
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Sanctimonious arrogance let to Einfeld’s downfall
Piers Akerman
A two-year minimum sentence is barely enough time for the disgraced former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld to consider is fall from grace.
Once the poster boy for inner-urban liberals who sanctimoniously believe their very public good works absolve them from the rules which govern society, Einfeld stood tall in the circles of the Left for his willingness to challenge the conservative Establishment on a range of social issues.
But, in pleading guilty to perjury after years of legal obfuscation which enmeshed his most intimate associates, he has shown himself to be one of the more shallow public figures characters, not a person worthy of admiration.
Whether Einfeld wanted to avoid the $75 speeding fine, or the demerit points associated with his breach of the traffic laws, is immaterial.
NSW Supreme Court Justice Bruce James detailed the lies that the forme judge told police and found that Einfeld engaged “deliberate, premeditated perjury” and “planned criminal activity”.
There will be some deluded people who feel that Einfeld has been shamed enough by being publicly dragged through this affair but that was entirely his own decision.
Some will claim that Einfeld’s past good works should, in some way, excuse his crimes. As if.
And some, me included, will think of Marcus Einfeld’s late father, the former deputy premier Sid Einfeld, for whom the the stretch of freeway near Bondi Junction is named, and consider what Sid, a man of blameless reputation, would make of his son’s behaviour.
If Einfeld Junior is at all remorseful, and his conduct would seem to make such a prospect dubious, he might think of his father’s character and the humility he exhibited throughout his life of service, and consider his own arrogance and where it has led him.
It’s doubtful that his two year sentence will give him sufficient time to absorb and understand his father’s well-deserved record, or experience the shame he should be feeling now.. - I have to side with Piers here too. In taking that view I consider the testimony of the newling inquiry into Cabramatta which showed remarkable similarities to my testimony I’ve not yet been able to bring before parliament or a court of law.
The item is a minor item, the transgression is not. In much the same way, I’d feel the same were an attorney general to do the previously accepted activity of releasing criminals early because mob bosses needed them to do a job, or if a drunken driver left a hospital with their own blood in an evidence bag. In fact, in the case of the latter two, I’d vote out the government that accepted it. - ed.
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QUEENSLAND GETS VOTEY
Tim Blair
Under former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queenslanders lost the right to march and the right to public assembly. Under former premier Peter Beattie, they lost the right to smoke in pubs.

It’s clear which of these is the greater loss to a vibrant and inclusive democracy. Have you ever heard anyone say: “I’m dying for a march”? Or: “Can I borrow a demonstration, mate?” And how many times have you heard this:

“Where’s Dave? His drink is getting warm.”

“Oh, he just stepped outside for a quick public assembly.”

And I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen anyone with a chanting hippie attached to his shoulder as a “march patch” to cure assembly cravings.

Anyway, Queensland is holding an election today. They’ll probably hold a couple more by the time we in NSW get around to our next election, which – in case you’re marking each day off on your wall, in the manner of a prisoner, or Barry O’Farrell – is still more than two years away.

Or 736 days, to be exact. A week is a long time in politics, but 105 weeks? That’s about four weeks longer than an elephant’s gestation period. Somewhere in the world today an elephant will get knocked up, and it will still have time to give birth (in a hospital toilet, if the NSW health department has anything to do with it) and teach the kid basic trunk manners before Nathan Rees makes his concession speech.

Queenslanders think their election is a big deal, but state elections these days are mostly just expensive ways to find out who is in power federally. A swing of close to seven per cent against Labor is tipped today, which tells you that Kevin Rudd is the Prime Minister.

Current Queensland Premier Anna Bligh would now be an unbackable favourite to become the first woman actually elected as a state leader had John Howard been returned to power. If she loses, Labor’s Emily’s List chickpower gals are going to come at Kevin Rudd like feminist spider monkeys.

Queensland has held four elections since widespread cable television was introduced in Australia, and each one is a startling reminder to Sky TV politics addicts of how different Queensland is to southern states.

If you’re planning any drinking games tonight, for your own safety don’t base any moves on “shirtless man in background during candidate’s interview”. You’ll be dead or in jail by 9pm. An early taste of this year’s election is at the Queensland Greens website, where a charmingly amateurish video presents Senator Bob Brown‘s speech at the Greens’ campaign launch.

Several vocal infants were in the audience, which gives viewers the impression that Brown was speaking to a particularly eco-minded creche. Or maybe the toddlers were climate change skeptics, given the timing and volume of their interjections:

Brown: “We Greens have been at the forefront of . . .”

Two-year-old child: “YA YA YA YAAA! YAAA!”

On balance, I’d say the kid won. It doesn’t take much to knock down Bob Brown’s arguments. As for tonight’s result, my entirely unreliable prediction: We won’t know the result tonight. It’ll roll into Sunday, and eventually Bligh will sneak in over the LNP’s Lawrence Springborg.
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SUFFER!
Tim Blair
Just one week from Earth Hour – also featuring Hour of Power full-illumination festivities – and environmentalism takes another hit:
For the first time in Gallup’s 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.
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COMEDIANS RESIST CHANGE
Tim Blair
Mainstream satirists still struggle for a comedic hook into Barack Obama. Teleprompter addiction might be a start:

Further examples – prompts, if you will – here and here.

UPDATE. How much ammunition do you need?

UPDATE II. Hadn’t seen this before. Feel the love:

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ARC OF ELLE
Tim Blair
Within five years, Elle Macpherson went from promoting Tab …

… to promoting Miller Lite. Certain thematic consistencies were observed, however.
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ONLY A NUANCE
Tim Blair
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano dispenses with the term “terrorism”:
“I referred to ‘man-caused’ disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.”
Mark Steyn has already noted the Obama regime’s decision to call enemy combatants something other than “enemy combatants” (Steyn’s suggestion: “future Facebook friends”). It’s obvious we’ll need a whole new lexicon to replace many words and phrases found unpleasant by Obama and his ever-so-slowly-incoming administration:

OUT: axis of evil IN: cuddle buddies

OUT: jihad IN: jeepers!

OUT: suicide bomber IN: carbon reductionist

OUT: fundamentalist Islam IN: Islam is fun

OUT: beheading IN: behugging

We could have used a few gentle alternative terms during the Bush years (OUT: waterboarding IN: punky-dunking) but chances are they wouldn’t have caught on.
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SERIOUSLY
Tim Blair
This photograph won $25,000:

UPDATE. As it happens, $25,000 is the exact price for a repellent dog-man sculpture, also in Sydney. This amount must be a standard unit in the art world.
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GOOD QUESTION
Tim Blair
“Why,” asks Rupert Murdoch, “do we never hear calls for Hamas leaders to be charged with war crimes?”
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PREZ RAISES AWARENESS OF DOWN’S SYNDROME DAY
Tim Blair
Wisecrackin’ Barack makes with the spazz gags during his Leno appearance. Treacher has more from Obama’s raucous routine.

UPDATE. Obama apologises to Special Olympics chairman Tim Shriver:
Mr Shriver told ABC’s Good Morning America that Mr Obama had apologised “in a way that I think was very moving” …
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CARTOONY VIEWS
Tim Blair
Newsreader and insect worshipper Kent Brockman:
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: democracy just doesn’t work.
Warmenist and Obama worshipper James Hansen:
The democratic process doesn’t quite seem to be working.
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JUSTICE FOR JUSTICE
Tim Blair
Ticket-dodging Justice Marcus Einfeld is off to prison for at least two years. The lying Living National Treasure was brought down by The Daily Telegraph‘s Michael Beach.

UPDATE. Further on Einfeld, including video.

UPDATE II. We shouldn’t forget that former Mark Latham staffer and ABC and SBS presenter Vivian Schenker was also involved in Einfeld’s scam:
The story had shifted again, significantly. There was no mention of being in Forster. Instead there was an elaborate scenario about how he had lent his car to Brennan, that his girlfriend Sylvia Eisman was taking his mother to see a play called Menopause, that he “suddenly remembered” he had an arrangement to meet Schenker for lunch at Pilu restaurant in Freshwater. He borrowed his mother’s car for this expedition. In her original statement to the police, Schenker falsely stated that she was in Mrs Rosa Einfeld’s car on the lunch trip.
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ENGLAND GETS TOUGH
Tim Blair
Osaka’s Mikako Hayashi wanted to marry her British fiancé in England – but new rules, introduced to curb the immigration of Pakistani child brides, forced a change of plan.

(Via Chris P.)

UPDATE. Pakistan isn’t just a source of child brides. It has child jihadists, too:
Col Naeem showed me some video footage, much of which made me so nauseous that I had to turn away. There was one of a young boy cutting the throat of a captured, prostrate Pakistani soldier who was pleading for mercy just before his death, and another of a nine-year-old shooting a blindfolded captive in front of a crowd of onlookers.
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COMMUNITY SELF-SUSTAINING
Tim Blair
Headline of the week:
Polar bears shrinking, eating each other due to global warming
Via AC, who emails: “The concept of miniature cannibalistic polar bears really made my day.”

UPDATE. Headline of the year:
Explorers On Global Warming Expedition Stranded in North Pole by Cold Weather
Actually, things sound seriously grim for these guys:
“We’re hungry, the cold is relentless, our sleeping bags are full of ice,” expedition leader Pen Hadow said in e-mailed statement. “Waiting is almost the worst part of an expedition as we’re in the lap of the weather gods.”
(Via Dan F.)

UPDATE II. Bad day for warmies. Two reporters working for Al Gore’s hobby media outlet and their Chinese guide have been seized by North Korea.
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Never mind what Turnbull actually said
Andrew Bolt
Laurie Oakes goes after Malcolm Turnbull again:

Ministers in Kevin Rudd’s government were quietly appreciative of a Jones interview with Malcolm Turnbull last Thursday, however. It fitted neatly into the narrative that Labor is building about the federal Liberal leader.

Politics may be (in part) about perceptions, but shouldn’t reporting be about the facts? Why is Oakes treating as a gotcha a Labor line which he admits"may be a bum rap” - one he says “it is true” was contradicted by Turnbull’s own statements?

This is strange.
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Seeming good, ending jobs
Andrew Bolt
Labor cheers as jobs are destroyed before its very eyes:

KEVIN Rudd has fulfilled his election pledge to scrap Work Choices and establish a new industrial relations order, after a Senate deal with Family First’s Steve Fielding yesterday ...

After a day of tense negotiations, Julia Gillard persuaded Senator Fielding to allow her to keep her promise to define a small business, for purposes of unfair dismissal concessions, as having fewer than 15 workers…
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So much for Obama’s ethical revolution
Andrew Bolt
Barack Obama’s picks are becoming more farcical by the day. Consider this his Halliburton - only this time with a real scandal behind the slogan:

Obama administration special envoy Richard Holbooke was on the American International Group Inc. board of directors in early 2008 when the insurance company locked in the bonuses now stoking national outrage. Holbrooke, a veteran diplomat who is now the administration’s point man on Pakistan and Afghanistan, served on the board between 2001 and mid-2008.
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Orange alert
Andrew Bolt
Are some professional alarmists just looking for stuff to ban?

Netball Queensland bans oranges at half-time…

Netball Queensland, the umbrella body for 82 netball associations, has sanctioned the ban based on the high acid levels of oranges and the potential harm to children’s teeth
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If Pakistan now falls to the Taliban
Andrew Bolt
Rageh Omaar returns to Pakistan - and warns that we may soon face a terror nation more deadly than any Islamist force before it:

What is happening in Pakistan presents a much deeper, more elemental challenge to the entire world that is not faced anywhere else in the so-called war on terror.

Put simply, Pakistan represents the first realistic prospect for a jihadist movement to capture a nation-state, or at the very least to control large parts of it.
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One of these women is Aboriginal
Andrew Bolt
This New Racism is becoming farcical. From the Queensland election:

Not one protester turned up to the event kicked off by Coomera candidate Leeanne Enoch, the first indigenous woman preselected for a winnable state seat by the ALP, acknowledging the traditional owners of the land.
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Contradict a green at your peril
Andrew Bolt
Confront a green zealot and you could be hauled up for persecuting a religious minority:
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Government gives Melbourne not water but mud
Andrew Bolt
To think they built this disaster instead of a dam on a river that twice flooded last year:

VICTORIA’S top water officials are preparing for the controversial north-south pipeline to deliver much less water than promised, under new water supply forecasts for Melbourne.
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Making Bush look brilliant
Andrew Bolt
And when Barack Obama finally tries winging it without his teleprompter:

Towards the end of his approximately 40-minute appearance, the president talked about how he’s gotten better at bowling and has been practicing in the White House bowling alley.

He bowled a 129, the president said.

“That’s very good, Mr. President,” Leno said sarcastically.

It’s ”like the Special Olympics or something,” the president said.

When asked about the remark, the White House had no comment.

Can you imagine the uproar if silly old Bush had said this? Or given the British Prime Minister lousy DVDs that didn’t even work at home? Or kept picking tax cheats? Or could barely speak without a teleprompter? Or signed unprecedented $500,000 book deals as he assumed office?
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No class to Rudd’s class war
Andrew Bolt
The vicious and unprincipled bash-the-fat-cats campaign unleashed by the Rudd Government has already had its critics:

TELSTRA chairman Donald McGauchie has demanded an end to the blame game over the global financial crisis and pleaded with shareholders to trust the executives who preside over their stricken companies… “In my view we are seeing too much of the blame game. People who cannot find a way through themselves seem intent on inflaming division in every way imaginable. Blaming people for the issues we now all face will get us nowhere, hold us back, build anger and social dislocation … making the trip back ultimately harder.”

The Australian Financial Review this week editorialised against the Government’s cheap shots and especially its counterproductive plan to cut executive payouts (no link), and now The Australian does, too:

WAYNE Swan does not look like a class-war warrior, but he is starting to sound like one. “The Rudd Government is determined to ensure regulation of executive pay keeps pace with community expectations, particularly as job losses increase as a result of the global recession,” he said on Wednesday in announcing legislation to give shareholders control over severance payments. In case anybody missed the point, his colleague Superannuation Minister Nick Sherry added that instead of a gold watch, exiting executives now received “a truckload of gold bullion”. Everybody clear on that? The rich are making merry while workers struggle to meet the mortgage. This is less scapegoating than a stunt, less a subtle message to the battlers than a full-throated chorus of Solidarity Forever. Given problems in the Senate, the Government is keen to change the subject and this is an excellent way to do it…

In the long run, the only loser from this foolish affair will be the Labor Party. Mr Swan has desecrated the memory of the business-friendly Hawke and Keating governments and raised the ghosts of Labor leaders who believed in class conflict. He is taking us back to the 60s, if not the 30s.