Headlines Sunday 22nd March 2009

Anna Bligh gives Keatingesque True Believers Speech
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has declared victory in the state election, becoming the first elected Premier in Australia's history. - evidently she thought she didn't deserve to win too. - ed
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Pauline Hanson concedes defeat in Queensland election
Pauline Hanson has conceded defeat in the Queensland seat of Beaudesert.
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Protesters force Newcastle port closure
Hundreds of environmental protesters have staged a peaceful blockade of Newcastle Port, preventing ships from entering the harbour.
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Traffic chaos as M4 banks up in both directions
Sydney-siders were forced to endure long delays along the M4 this afternoon after a series of crashes caused major headaches. The RTA says all lanes have now been reopened.
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Second Bondi shark in a month
Mystery of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith finally solved?
Great Communicator apologizes over 'Special Olympics' comment
Dead soldier a beautiful man, says wife
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Labor party sells out
Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will be in his favourite place this week - that is, a long way from Australia. - Having been illegally blacklisted from work for 22 months, I am struggling. Yet I have maintained my health insurance until recently because I had thought I would be able to find work somewhere. I recently was compelled by my circumstance to suspend my insurance, and at the same time I’ve been given a holiday by my bank for my mortgage. I am accessing my superannuation (maybe). If I am successful .. I will be one of those who don’t qualify for medicare too.
It is ridiculous. I am even feeling compelled to sell my library of some three thousand books, including Encyclopedia Brittanica and Great Books of the Western World and I am waiting on approval of my super first because once I sell any asset I will be cut, for a time, from Centerlink support .. even though Centerlink acknowledge I’m not fit to work. Rudd had better be overseas when that happens to me. - ed.
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A MACHINE HE COULD REALLY USE
Tim Blair
J.F. Beck:
George W. Bush was repeatedly attacked for misspeaking – nucular instead of nuclear, for example. Nothing is said about Obama saying defibulator (the anti-fib machine?) on Leno …

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QUEENSLAND: BLIGH OR BORG
Tim Blair
Trickery alleged: Apparently some fake Labor how-to-vote cards were handed out in Indooroopilly. They don’t seem particularly sinister.

Yet more trickery, involving both major parties:
An LNP campaign manager was taken to hospital for x-rays today after slipping on a water bomb outside her home at Sandgate on Brisbane’s bayside …

Police have attended an incident involving an LNP worker who was allegedly pushed to the ground by two men at a polling booth at the Redcliffe masonic hall this morning …

Meanwhile the ALP says a campaign worker was allegedly assaulted at Coomera on the Gold Coast this morning, and police were called to a polling booth at Buranda in Brisbane last night when a volunteer worker was allegedly attacked by a member of a rival party.
Hey, it’s Queensland.

The spirits have spoken:
Brisbane mystic Charmaine – who bills herself “The New Age Messiah” – said she “tuned in” for advice from the supernatural and found the netherworld plumps for Ms Bligh and Labor.

“I asked my spirit guides and God who I should vote for,” Charmaine said.

“Their reply was Labor will get back and create work to help the recession.”
Interestingly, their reply didn’t actually answer Charmaine’s question. - It seems, early on, that the press are keen to smear mud against the LNP. The blame is universally against the LNP, but it is absurd. It looks like the ALP have attempted a dirty tricks campaign to cast dirt on a LNP candidate that threatens an ALP seat in which the incumbent changed to Green. The LNP are accused of printing and distributing fake how to vote cards with their own names on them. ----- Now that the election is over, there are some important questions to be answered. (Sit down, Andrew Bolt, you can gloat later)
The result may have been skewed as the stimulus payments are still going out. Bligh hasn’t revealed why she had to run early. Hanson has done her job of spoiling LNP campaigning in favor of the ALP. Rudd may be encouraged to go early .. and he won’t be asked to stand aside while he is being investigated regarding Heiner.
The big question remains how many sports stadiums do Queenslanders want? - ed.
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UNSPIN THIS
Tim Blair
Canadian journalist Beverly Giesbrecht, who converted to Islam following 9/11 and launched the website Jihad Unspun seven years ago, faces beheading after being kidnapped by jihadists in Pakistan:
A video of a Canadian journalist held captive in Pakistan surfaced on the Internet Thursday in which she said her captors would “probably” kill her by the end of the month if their demands weren’t met.

“The time is now very short and my life is going to end,” a pale and tired Beverly Giesbrecht says on the video before it fades out.

The Vancouver journalist is shown sitting in a chair with a dagger mounted on the wall behind her, pointed at her head.

“We have a very short time now, I’m going to be killed, as you can see,” Giesbrecht says.
Post-conversion, Giesbrecht changed her name to Khadija Abdul Qahaar. Not that it makes any apparent difference to her Taliban captors.

UPDATE. JeffS asks: “Is she being held by moderate Taliban?”

UPDATE II. Rayhan looks on the bright side:
It is always heart warming to hear people coming to Islam especially prominant figures like journalists. Thanks for notifying us of her conversion.
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UNDERSTAND THE DECISION
Tim Blair
A bold election prediction from the New York Times:
In Queensland the general election will leave the strength of the different parties the same as before.
To be fair, that story might be a little out of date … by about 139 years. In more recent news, Anna Bligh is helping voters understand:
“I intend to be out on polling booths all day ... I’ll be talking to people and doing everything I can to ensure they understand the big decision in front of us as Queenslanders today,” she said.
That’s nice of her.
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TREES SUSTAINED
Tim Blair
Views emerge following Victoria’s bushfires:
Towering gum trees on each side of the road and a lack of fuel reduction burning turned Flowerdale’s major road into a “death trap”, a bushfire Royal Commission community meeting was told today.

Before the meeting, which was closed to the media, Flowerdale resident Pat Cowman told The Age that while she had successfully defended her home of 35 years, she would never stay back and fight another fire because the Department of Sustainability and Environment regularly refused to clear tree debris.

“My issue, which I will be telling the meeting, is with the DSE,” Mrs Cowman said. “They (the DSE) just poison the fuel and leave it dry. We kept telling them to burn but they did nothing.”
This is the first in a series of meetings ahead of a formal inquiry.
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Saying sorry to Hanson
Andrew Bolt
The Sunday Telegraph concedes:

JACK Johnson, the person at the centre of the controversial Pauline Hanson photographs affair, has emerged as a conman. The Sunday Telegraph has learned Johnson not only offered purported photographs of Ms Hanson to paparazzi agent Jamie Fawcett eight days ago, but at the same time said he had similar photographs of another prominent Australian woman posing in lingerie…

Fawcett did not tell The Sunday Telegraph that Johnson claimed to have pictures of the other woman posing with the Sultan of Brunei. That claim is plainly ridiculous and exposes Johnson as a fraud…

Meanwhile, a majority out five face recognition experts who analysed the controversial pictures said that in all likelihood they were not Pauline Hanson.

The Sunday Telegraph editor has apologised to Hanson, as have the editors of other News Ltd papers that ran the pictures he obtained:

The Sunday Telegraph has issued a full apology to Ms Hanson.

Neil Breen, editor of The Sunday Telegraph, said: “ have said all week I’d be the first person in Australia to apologise to Pauline Hanson if it were proven the photographs were not of her.

“W’ve proven it ourselves, so Pauline, I’m sorry.’’

But the apology is for running pictures that were not of Hanson, and is not for deciding that running nude shots of Hanson from three decades ago was wrong and a breach of her privacy.
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Earth Hour sponsors admit they’re hypocrites
Andrew Bolt
Earth Hour next Saturday will see hypocrites turn off their lights for just an hour to show they care about global warming - which actually halted a decade ago, and which we can’t stop even if it really was bad.

The Sunday Age won’t admit these last two facts in its coverage, but is this year is not so deep in cahoots with green propagandists that it can’t admit to that hypocrisy:

Aware of the criticism, Earth Hour’s organisers last year countered it with something concrete: businesses that signed up would need to pledge to reduce their emissions over the following year by 5 per cent. But this year, even that requirement has been dropped, and there has been no accounting of whether last year’s sponsors lived up to their pledge.

“We decided we’d actually downplay (concrete cuts) this time,” says Greg Bourne, chief executive of Earth Hour’s organiser, WWF Australia.

An analysis of the key sponsors of Earth Hour (among them Fairfax Media, owner of The Sunday Age) reveals that most have reported increased emissions in their most recent figures.
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Profiting from bad policy
Andrew Bolt
I doubt Josh Gordon and The Age understand - or want to understand - that there is no contradiction in their gotcha at all:

A KEY member of the shadow front bench was investing heavily in Australian banks at the very time Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull was attacking the Government’s banking guarantee for promoting “risky behaviour”.

Shadow health minister Peter Dutton - who served as assistant treasurer in the previous Howard government and then as shadow finance minister last year - apparently did not think the “risky behaviour” referred to by Mr Turnbull would have a detrimental effect on the share price of the big four.

So why is Dutton doing nothing that contradicts the warning of his leader? Read further the very same story:
After the guarantee was announced, Mr Turnbull challenged the Government to explain what extra regulation it intended to impose on the banks in exchange for the safety of the guarantee.

“In other countries, guarantees of this kind . . . have had the consequence of encouraging risky behaviour by banks, such as . . . making risky but high-yielding loans to boost income,” he said.

He also argued the guarantee could leave taxpayers exposed to massive liabilities and warned it could lead to “unsustainable practices”.

Turnbull’s argument is that the banks could make risky loans, knowing the they’d either clean up or the Government would bail them out. Couldn’t lose. With bank stocks said to be undervalued, that guarantee just confirms they’re a tempting investment.
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Top 10 Obama/Biden gaffes
Andrew Bolt
Toby Harnden compiles the hit prat-falls so far of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the duo whose supporters mocked George Bush and Sarah Palin as dills. The videos are a don’t-miss.

Obama’s last “Special Olympics” gaffe, however, isn’t a laughing matter for Sarah Palin, who issues a rebuke. Much more of this and Palin will seem even to the Left the candidate from Mensa by comparison.
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Where’s my warming, dude?
Andrew Bolt
Professor Syun Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Center checks the predictions against the observations:

The global average temperature stopped increasing after 2000 against the IPCC’s prediction of continued rapid increase. It is a plain fact and does not require any pretext. Their failure stems from the fact that the IPCC emphasized the greenhouse effect of CO2 by slighting the natural causes of temperature changes… The IPCC seems to imply that the halting is a temporary one. However, they cannot give the reason…

It is advised that the IPCC recognize at least the failure of their prediction even during the first decade of the present century; a prediction is supposed to become less accurate for the longer future.
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One less warming scare to freak over
Andrew Bolt
What sinking Maldives?
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Rudd’s emissions are the real worry
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann says the real pollution is the Rudd Government’s lying over its scheme to slash emissions:

For the truth is that it is not a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, but a Carbon Dioxide—pollution or not—reduction scheme.

The difference is huge and quite deliberate… There’s no question the continual harping on “carbon pollution” is intended to send a subliminal impression. We’re getting rid of all those little bits of black stuff floating around in the air. And who can possibly be against that?…

The critical disastrous point of this lie is its intersection with the utter intellectual compromise of the federal Treasury of Ken Henry and his right-hand man, David Gruen…

The so-called Treasury modelling of the CPRS scenarios purports, quite preposterously, to show that dramatically reducing out emissions of carbon dioxide will have only the most marginal impact on our national economic growth…

“GNP (gross national product) per capital grows at an annual rate of 1.1 per cent in the policy scenarios, 1/10th of 1 per cent less than the 1.2 per cent annual growth in the reference scenarios,” (out to 2050), according to Gruen.

The sheer preposterousness of asserting the ability to claim such accuracy 42 years out, on the basis of imposing the most traumatic change on the national and global economies, clearly completely eludes Gruen.

The exquisite irony of this preposterousness was demonstrated by Henry stating as—his? the Government’s?—policy aim of avoiding even a single quarter of negative growth in the very quarter growth actually went negative!

So Treasury can’t get within 0.5 per cent of GDP—the size of the negative figure—while trying to predict the present. But it purports to be able to get within 0.1 per cent of GDP 42 years into the future.
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McKnight may be righter than he thinks
Andrew Bolt
It’s a standard green smear that global warming sceptics are just corrupt say-for-pay shills for the oil industry. Academic David McKnight is typical in lazily ignoring the science to defame the speakers:

In Australia, the main group that tries to undermine the science of global warming is the Lavoisier Group. It maintains a website with links to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (over $2 million from Exxon), Science and Environmental Policy Project ($20,000) and the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide (at least $100,000).

Wow. Lavoisier has website link to a free-maket think tank? To a reputable think tank that hasn’t actually had a donation from Exxon-Mobil since 2005? Must be corrupt, then.

But the amounts McKnight bandies about are actually so pathetic that to call them peanuts is to flatter them. You want to see money so vast that you might indeed wonder at the corruption of public debate? Then check the Times’ list of the world’s green billionaires and you’ll see that money really is colored green. Here’s just a taste of the players and their investments:


1. Warren Buffett £27bn Wind power

2 Bill Gates £26bn Renewable fuel

3 Ingvar Kamprad £22bn Renewable energy

4 Marcel Brenninkmeijer £19bn Natural power

5 Mukesh Ambani £15bn Life sciences

6 Michael Bloomberg £14.4bn Natural energy

7 Michael Otto £13.2bn Green products

8 Paul Allen £11.5bn Natural fuels

9 Donald Bren £8.2bn Environmental research

10= Sergey Brin £7.5bn Green energy

10= Larry Page £7.5bn Green energy

Note that at least four on the list - Gates, Brin, Page and Bloomberg - are titans in the communications and publishing industries. A fifth until recently owned Der Speigel. Another is on the board of a prominent lobby group and think tank, Worldwatch Institute. Another has invested billions in communications, movies, and cable televesion, and donates to universities. Another contributes millions to his favorite universities. Then there’s the former member of a pro-Nazi party....

Worried that money may be skewing the debate over global warming? Perhaps you should be, after all, Professor McKnight.
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Nicely-raised barbarians
Andrew Bolt
Professor Kenneth Minogue says this moral corruption is irreversible, and will lead us to a reaction harsher than the past harshness we so lightly condemned:

According to Dispatches, a program aired on British television in January, a poll conducted for the National Union of Schoolmasters-Union of Women Teachers suggested that 97 per cent of teachers had disruptive children in their classes. Almost three-quarters (74.4 per cent) claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half (45.5per cent) noted the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence....

My argument is ...that the collapse of family and school discipline largely results from a dominant moral sentiment that we may call “the niceness movement”. Niceness as a political sentiment has many departments—political correctness is one, for example—but I am concerned largely with its sentimental undermining of authority in family and classroom. The selling point of this niceness was, as it were, that pupils would become a nicer, gentler generation, but in fact the disorderly tendencies that teachers soon lost the power to check have spilled over into the playground, where bullying has long been increasing, and from the playground this disorder has spread into the streets. Thus can politicised compassion lead to misery.
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Burnside calls for return to White Australia. I think
Andrew Bolt
Human rights campaigner Julian Burnside swears we’ve gone backwards:

If our human rights record has slipped since 1948, there is no reason to imagine that we cannot be restored to the honourable position we once held.

Pardon? Is Burnside really now hankering for a 1940s human rights nirvana in which, he would claim, Aboriginal children were stolen by racists, Aborigines were not counted in the census, the nation had a “white Australia” policy, there were no freedom of information laws, rights to free association were heavily circumscribed, divorce laws were restrictive, censorship was strict, killers were hanged, women were paid less for the same jobs, pubs could bar women, employers could refuse to hire women, and… need I go on?

Burnside chooses 1948 because, he says in his review of Geoffrey Robertson’s addled argument for a bill of human rights, that we played a “pivotal role in forming the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948”, while now “we hold the ignoble (to whom?) distinction of being the only western democracy without a bill or charter of rights’’, and are reluctant to pass laws “to restrain our darker instincts”.

This utter tosh - and Burnside’s shiny-eyed predictions of a nirvana should we pass a Bill of Rights (which would inevitably turn out to be a Bill of Don’ts to be intepreted and enforced by an unelected elite) - comes from Burnside manifesting one of the signature failings of a self-regarding intellectual.

It is the failing illustrated perfectly by that first line I quoted - a tendency to judge by plans, not reality; by laws and not the results of their implementation; by seeming, not achieving. It’s a failing that has the Left still admiring the French Revolution for its declarations of “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality”, all but oblivious to the reality that the revolution brought in fact dictatorship, genocide and wars of conquest that killed 15 million Europeans.

In this case, Burnside judges Australia by a signature on a paper 61 years ago, and a lack of another signature today. If he judged us instead by how we really were and now are, his conclusions would be dramatically different. But then, to acknowledge we’re actually moved closer to the society he’d preferred, would be to acknowledge we’ve done this not through a bill of rights, but through the deliberations of our democracy - always the best way of safeguarding our freedoms.
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Physician, write a play attacking thyself
Andrew Bolt
David Williamson’s wife writes a memoir that’s not just grisly in its frankness, but portrays the playwright famous for his moral lecturing as astonishingly cruel and lacking in self-knowledge:

One evening, as she tells it, “David broke the news that he was leaving me for someone who loved him and needed him more than I did”. The affair with this unnamed temptress lasted several months and Williamson would often update his wife on its progress: “Some days I almost forgot about her, but then he’d burst in to tell me they’d been to lunch together and she’d analysed him perfectly.”

This summary barely describes what the extract in The Weekend Australian magazine (no link) explains in cringe-making detail, not least Williamson’s many discussions with his wife of his latest doings with his lover. Why do these people do this to themselves, and then tell all to the world?
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Lawrence Springborg to step down from LNP leadership
QUEENSLAND Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg conceded defeat last night in the state's election and says he will step down from his party's leadership.

"About 15 minutes ago I phoned Premier Anna Bligh and congratulated her on her significant win this evening,'' Mr Springborg said in the Brisbane tallyroom at 8.30pm (AEST) yesterday.

"Premier Bligh deserves full credit for her election win and I wish her all the best in the next three years.''

Mr Springborg said he would step down as leader of the Liberal National Party.

"It is now time to move on,'' he said.

He said he had had three opportunities to put himself forward as the alternative premier of Queensland.

"It's been an enormous privilege to take us forward from 15 seats in 2004 to potentially 35 seats in this election,'' he said.

"However I accept my days as opposition leader are numbered and it is now up to my parliamentary colleagues to choose the team that they want to go forward to fight the next election.''

Mr Springborg also thanked his wife, Linda, for her support and apologised for being an "absentee dad for most of their life''.

He said it would be some time before final results were in but he thought the LNP could pick up as many as 10 seats.

It was a significant challenge they had been set.

"Normally those sorts of seats and the sort of swing we've had tonight might even bring about a hange of government,'' he said.

"But in the context of what we face here in Queensland, that wasn't meant to be and I very much accept the mandate of the people of Queensland.''