Headlines Friday 17th April 2009

'Too early to confirm sabotage': Debus
There's still no confirmation of what caused an explosion on a boat carrying asylum seekers which killed three people as treatment on the survivors continues.

Tripodi faces expulsion for misusing allowances
NSW finance minister Joe Tripodi is in hot water for misusing his own parliamentary allowances.

Garrett's daughter ODs at Syd nightspot
Peter Garrett's youngest daughter Grace has been hospitalised after a night out in Sydney, after reportedly overdosing on an unknown substance.

Puree pizza in babies’ deadly junk diet
The mothers of two babies who nearly died after being fed pureed pizza, prawns and pork crackling, will face court over child cruelty charges.

Three dead, 10 injured as bus overturns
Three people including a toddler are dead and 10 have been injured after their V/Line coach slid across a wet highway, and flipped on its side in South Australia.

Triple-0 rules risking lives
Limitations within the triple-0 computer system and protocol could be putting lives at risk.

Sydney man stabbed while sitting in car
A man has been taken to hospital after being stabbed several times while sitting in a car in Sydney's south-west.

Britons to get cash to buy electric cars
British motorists could receive up to Stg5,000 ($A10,289) if they buy an electric car under......

German police smash child-porn ring
German police say they have smashed a global child-porn ring of some 9,000 suspected paedophiles in......
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WHERE’S KEVIN?
Tim Blair
The asylum-seeker boat explosion occurred at around 8.15am yesterday, Sydney time. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is yet to offer any comment. According to the Australian‘s Matthew Franklin, Rudd watched Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus’s press conference “from his nearby office”. If you scroll all the way to the end of this report, you’ll discover:
Mr Rudd stuck to his agenda yesterday when he launched a global institute to work towards clean coal technology.
Some four hours after the explosion, the ABC ran a positive item on the launch. No questions at all about the assumed refugees. And here’s the Age‘s Michelle Grattan:
The Government will be under pressure to examine whether its [border protection] policy needs change. It should resist being spooked …
That shouldn’t be too difficult. Apparently nobody is trying to spook it.
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IT’S A SIGN
Tim Blair
The bees of economic destruction have reached the White House.
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FIVE FEARED DEAD
Tim Blair
An explosion, followed by an explosive allegation:
Five people are feared dead and 51 are injured, including four Australian Navy personnel, after an explosion on an asylum seeker boat near Christmas Island.

West Australian Premier Colin Barnett has accused those on board the vessel of dousing it in petrol but Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus and Royal Australian Navy Rear Admiral Alan Du Toit said it was too early to be clear exactly what happened.

“It is understood that the refugees on the boat spread petrol and that ignited causing the explosion,’’ Mr Barnett told reporters in Perth.
This is the 13th such vessel to attempt arrival since the Rudd government diluted Australia’s formerly-strong refugee policies seven months ago.

UPDATE The BBC’s Nick Bryant:
Government officials have conceded in private that the end of the Pacific Solution, which was brought in after the Tampa affair in the run-up to the 2001 election, is being used as a marketing tool by Indonesian people-smugglers.
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FIRED MAN FIRES UP
Tim Blair
Racism causes heroin addiction in South Australia:
An Iranian refugee tried to set fire to a man in Norwood as a result of racism-related depression after September 11.

Kayvan Zarei, 30, of Marden, was found guilty of assault and endangering life in the District Court late last month after he tried to punch a woman and set fire to a witness outside the Norwood Centrelink office in 2006.

The court heard that Iranian-born Zarei, who migrated to Australia with his family in 1999, developed depression and a heroin addiction following a backlash against Muslims in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
A kindly judge declined to imprison him:
“The offence was committed in circumstances where you had lost your employment,” he said.

“You were suffering withdrawal psychosis from drugs, you were having difficulty coping with the stressors of your life and you reacted erratically, inappropriately, and in what was, on all accounts, a bizarre manner.”
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QUEENS OF DARKNESS
Tim Blair
It’s Earth Hour every hour for Priscilla and friends:
One of Sydney’s premier drag venues, the Imperial Hotel in Erskineville, faces running its world famous shows by candlelight because of a dispute with EnergyAustralia about the amount of electricity it can use.
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PIRATES PUNTED
Tim Blair
Poor little pirates attack another symbol of the American hegemonster:
Somali pirates attacked and damaged an American ship carrying humanitarian aid Tuesday …

The pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons at the Liberty Sun as it carried food for famine-wracked African nations, said the vessel’s owner, Liberty Maritime Corp.
Where were the interference dolphins? Meanwhile, mass jailings for another batch of flotsam:
The supreme court in Somalia’s northern breakaway state of Puntland has handed down three-year prison terms to 37 pirates detained by the French and US navies, officials say.
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Excuses made as Rudd hides
Andrew Bolt
Journalists today are almost united: don’t blame soft-touch Kevin Rudd for luring boat people to their deaths. Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald even repeats the Rudd Government’s don’t-blame-us lines as if they are his own:

The number of asylum seekers has surged worldwide since 2007, and the greater number coming to Australia has been part of that trend.

Or as the Government put it again yesterday:

A spokeswoman for the Home Affairs Minister, Bob Debus, played down the surge, saying people should keep the numbers in perspective given people smuggling was a global problem.

The wagons form a circle. Amnesty International’s spokesman couldn’t agree more:

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees had recorded a worldwide increase in asylum applications over the past year, he said. The rise in people heading for Australia was just part of this global trend.

Michelle Grattan happily agrees - again- that the Government must be cut some slack:

...a refugee tide is swelling around the world...the modest rise (in Australia) reflects the general international trend.

But how true is all this really?

Yes, the UN High Commission for Refugees reported a 12 per cent increase world-wide of asylum claims in 2008, but noted a much bigger increase in Australia and New Zealand - 19 per cent.

Since then, the number of boat people arriving has jumped dramatically, with 276 boat people arriving this year already, compared with just 179 in all of last year.

I suspect far too many excuses are being made for a Government which privately seems to know the jig is up:

Government officials have conceded in private that the end of the Pacific Solution, which was brought in after the Tampa affair in the run-up to the 2001 election, is being used as a marketing tool by Indonesian people-smugglers.

UPDATE

What illegal boat? What explosion? What dead people people? Labor’s central news site knows of no such thing.

Kevin Rudd’s media site draws a blank, too.

Nor was Rudd anywhere in the news to explain what happened or defend his policies. No, hapless Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus was pushed out there instead to take the fall:

As the Prime Minister watched coverage of the press conference from his nearby office...

Rudd’s own comments? Zip:

Mr Rudd stuck to his agenda yesterday when he launched a global institute to work towards clean coal technology.

Standard MO that from risk-averse Rudd. Who, for instance, was sent out this week to discuss the bad news from Qantas while Rudd stayed hidden?

JULIA Gillard has pledged government support for Qantas workers who lose their jobs after the company announced the global recession had forced it to lay off as many as 1750 staff.

Who again hid - and who had to step up - when the unemployment figures tanked?

And that’s the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard speaking to reporters in Canberra a short time ago about the latest unemployment figures which show a sharp rise in the jobless rate to 5.7 per cent over the last month.

Tim Blair notes that the Government has little to fear from the press gallery over the rise in boat arrivals or yesterday’s deaths. Or much else, to be frank.
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People overboard, and the kindness that kills
Andrew Bolt
AT least three boat people now dead. So how much “kinder” do Kevin Rudd’s policies seem now?

John Howard was supposed to be the cruel one, said Labor.

It was Howard when Prime Minister who put in the Pacific Solution, whisking illegal boat people to Nauru, rather than land them here.

Too harsh, said Kevin Rudd, and scrapped it.

It was Howard who cut the legal circus that allowed illegal immigrants to play the system for years, until we gave up trying to deport them.

Too harsh, said Rudd, and laid on lawyers.

It was Howard who cut the lure of benefits and then imposed on illegal immigrants the imminent threat of return.

Too harsh, said Rudd, and scrapped the Temporary Protection Visas, giving all illegal immigrants—including well-heeled ones fleeing no particular danger—instant access to permanent residency with all the tempting benefits and rights.

Too harsh, said Rudd. And enlightened opinion cheered. Now we were nice.

Really? So how nice is it to have now lured at least three people to their deaths? To have not one child overboard—oh, what a confected scandal that was—but a whole boatload of 49?
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No kisses for Bush
Andrew Bolt
SEE this picture? That’s odd, because the Sunday Age’s editor can’t. Unimaginable, she calls it.

Last weekend, her paper began yet another editorial praising new US President Barack Obama like this:

“Imagine if, only a year ago, the President of the United States had visited Turkey, addressed its parliament, then kissed the Prime Minister on both cheeks.

“That might have been considered far-fetched, but so, too, would have been the President’s affirmation that his country was not at war with Islam and that being Muslim in the US is part of the fabric of life.

“It is indeed unimaginable that George Bush would have embraced such thoughts, words and deeds.”

Pardon? “Unimaginable?” Only to the spectacularly uninformed.
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Joyce rich, but Morphett the witch
Andrew Bolt
WHY are politicians, unions and journalists not sliming Qantas boss Alan Joyce as they did Sue Morphett?

Why is Joyce not vilified as Morphett was last month, called “greedy”, a “traitor”, and, said 60 Minutes, “the most hated woman in Australia”?

Let’s compare the treatment the two bosses got when both announced plans to sack about 1800 workers.

Morphett is the chief executive of Pacific Brands, our last big clothing maker, and last year earned $1.86 million, half in bonuses she’ll now lose.

Last month she announced that to save the jobs of 7000 of her workers she had to lay off 1850 others.

Joyce, meanwhile, has a salary package at Qantas of up to $4.7 million—double what he earned last year at Jetstar—and this week announced sackings of 1750 workers.

Spot any difference so far?
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What planet are the models on?
Andrew Bolt
Anthony Watts shows that the climate models that predict warming doom (blue line) haven’t predicted what we’ve actually seen:
...in the past few years the global climate models and the measured global climate reality have been diverging.

How big must the divergence get before warming prophets admit they may be wrong?
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Welcome to future country
Andrew Bolt
The Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy receives a submission - number 176 to be precise.

If genuine, you may find it an interesting testimony to the state of identity politics, education, green dreaming and logic:

Hello

1 I am currently an undergraduate at UNISA and I am studying sustainable environments and environmental protection. My ancestors are the Kaurna people and I identify to be Aboriginal and a Kaurna elder. We have a dreamtime and that is a living experience that we do dream of business that is asociated to environmental matters, law and Native Title protection. We have sent over two thousand documents to the State and Federal Government with matters linked to environmental protection and law and these are issues that come tp light in the dreaming.

1 Emissions trading? The local guy in the twenty four hour supermarket told us that he is cashing in on that scheme? How and the hell can we trust anyone to not convolute the law or any legilation without an organised, production-based sustainability-minded, environmental Police force? (workers of sustainable iniquity)

2 In our dreaming we dreamed of massive a sea level change in the Port River system (the West Lakes end of the River) Incorporated with that dream was a vision of a volcanoe errupting in the foothills. I was trying to get closer to it but the roads were blocked. The volcano was spitting out lumps of rock, as land based volcanoes do…

5 I have never be fond of industrial pollution so I dont mind if you can shut the bloody lot down as it is a waste of resources and time to over produce useless items in excess.

6 Built environments and the production of sustainable biomass could produce a surge of organisms to soak up the carbon. Whilst we produce food and fibre as a buy product for more organisms to breed and better soil quality. The factories are wasting resources and spewing out toxit shit, perhaps we who are green should be working even harder to develop massive amounts of bio
mass whilst developing sustainable styles of agriculture that suite this environment and the associtaed ecological system( to supply a wolrd market who will be hungry soon)

7 It is better to have one sheep, one cow, one chicken and seven kangaroos than ten dead animals with no feed or water. Lets grow our way out of this problem whilst we build environments to deal with the change. If we can legislate to protect, then do it and Police those regulations with an iron fist, to support those good Policie developments.

What does it say that I suspect this is a joke, yet it is published by the Senate in all seriousness as a submission, since no one now swear it wasn’t serious?
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Apocalypse manana
Andrew Bolt
Pardon? I thought warming doom was so imminent that we had not a moment to lose?

The federal government’s own climate adviser says it might be best to dump the emissions trading scheme (ETS) and “have another crack at it” later...

But isn’t this bloke now saying manana the very same Ross Garnaut who in September said we couldn’t wait an instant longer?

There is a chance, just a chance, that humanity will act in time… Time is an essential element ... we have very little time ... very great time pressures on us… The awful reality is that we’re too late to avoid some impacts from dangerous climate change...

Something doesn’t quite fit here.
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Is Costello saying he’s a sceptic?
Andrew Bolt
Ray Evans draws my attention to paragraphs in Peter Costello’s column this week which I hadn’t properly credited, enjoying too much his earlier mockery of Kevin Rudd. Here they are:

Take climate change. The way the argument is being presented you can be for aggressive targets to cut emissions or you are for rising tides, mass drownings, increased heat-related deaths, the destruction of the planet and the death of polar bears.

Characterising this as a moral question allows the high priests of emission targets to actually measure the morality of their opponents. Supporters of a 20 per cent cut are moral, 10 per cent morally inferior, supporters of 5 per cent are grossly immoral, and so on.

If anyone questions whether these targets will be met, if they will make a difference without the co-operation of major emitters, or what will happen to those who lose their jobs in industries affected, they can be dismissed as engaging in moral subterfuge. This is a moral argument, and such people are really in favour of destroying the planet.

While the postmodern world has lost faith in absolutes - rights and wrongs in relation to private behaviour - it has discovered absolutism about the views that are acceptable in modern political discourse. Take the wrong turn and you are not just mistaken, you are immoral. It’s not that your views are immoral. You are immoral as a person for holding them.

Ray, secretary of the Lavoisier Group, is surely right when he comments:


(Costello) mocks the pretensions of carbophobes PM Rudd and Minister Penny Wong. He does not, of course, mention Malcolm Turnbull, Greg Hunt, or Andrew Robb. He does not have to. Peter Costello would not make such a comment unless he was certain that a substantial majority of his parliamentary Liberal Party colleagues agreed with him.

This reinforces the comments I have heard from a variety of well informed sources that indeed a substantial majority of the Coalition parliamentarians are convinced sceptics.
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Funny Lenin downgraded to heavyweight
Andrew Bolt
Cate Blanchett’s Sydney Theatre Company is red hot for Lenin.
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Teach up, not down
Andrew Bolt

Writer David Malouf wasn’t the only schoolboy lucky enough to be fired up by a Homer-loving teacher. Reader Steve was also the grateful student of a teacher who rejected the disastrous craze for more “relevant” education:

I studied at Banyule Primary School in Rosanna (Melb) from 1969 to 1976. Believe it or not, we were read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in Grade 3 when we were only 8. And I can tell you that most, if not all, loved it.

I recall some hade a little trouble understanding it but I certainly didn’t. I loved it and found the adventures fascinating. It was great because it taught us language, morals, adventure and inspired our imaginations. I can still visualise us sitting in class as the teacher read it to us (the books were massive hardbacks so there was only one copy). I guess I was extremely lucky to go to such a school.

Both Principals at the time I was there loved the school and we finished every assembly with the Principal stating “Banyule” and we would all the answer “is the best!” Not surprisingly, we always won the inter-school sports and if you think about that affirmation you realise that we were affirming that our school really was the best and that I must be bloody lucky to be there. As a kid I enjoyed Cubs, Scouts and Venturers, played sport religiously and I knew every kid in every house around. In Primary School it was perfectly fine to walk a mile to someone’s house as long you left by 5pm to be home for dinner......and you would walk home. The children of today have no idea of what they have missed.
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Religious Symbols Covered Up When President Obama Spoke at a Catholic University
By Bret Baier
The University of Notre Dame is not the only Catholic institution raising eyebrows when it comes to President Obama. Officials at Georgetown University covered a monogram symbolizing the name of Jesus because it was inscribed on the stage where the president spoke Tuesday. The White House asked for all symbols to be covered at the lecture hall.

Georgetown University spokeswoman Julie Green Bataille tells Cybercast News "the White House wanted a simple backdrop... consistent with what they've done for other policy speeches."

The monogram "IHS" — which comes from the Greek for Jesus — was covered with a triangle of black-painted plywood. Catholic League president Bill Donohue says: "The cowardice of Georgetown to stand fast on principle tells us more than we need to know... but the bigger story is the audacity of the Obama administration to ask a religious school to neuter itself before the president speaks there."

Burning Question

And we showed you earlier what Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on FOX News this morning about that report that got veterans so upset. She was also on MSNBC, and before that interview, her people told the channel that she would not talk much about the matter.

After the interview, anchor Mika Brzezinski said: "We should be clear, they only wanted one question." Joe Scarborough responded: "They said we could ask only one question about this story yesterday."

The Politico reports the office of Virginia Republican Congressman Eric Cantor pounced. A staff member from Rep. Cantor's office, Joe Pounder, said: "Apparently, when Democrats promise an open administration, they really only mean open as long as you ask the questions they want asked and no follow-ups on controversial topics that everyone is reporting on."

There were no such restrictions for Napolitano's interview with FOX News, nor would we agree to any.
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Protesting Big Government, Wild Spending and High Taxation
By Bill O'Reilly
Demonstrations called tea parties were held in all 50 states Wednesday — Tax Day — as many Americans oppose the rise of a federal government based upon entitlement spending. Protesters blasted the Obama administration for running up huge debts by bailing out corrupt and poorly run companies, and they oppose the entitlement society the president espouses.

However, Mr. Obama did get elected based upon his entitlement vision, so clearly many Americans support a big government colossus.

Also, it is true that the administration is changing the federal income tax code. Most Americans will pay little or no income tax to the feds. Affluent folks will be carrying the load. That class warfare approach has also been successful for President Obama.

But wherever you stand, the protests Wednesday are valid, and so is the debate over a huge tax and spend government.

While the federal tax system does favor working Americans, the state system does not, as many states like California and New York are on the verge of economic collapse. States run by liberal administrations have increased entitlement spending so much they simply can't pay the bills, so they must raise taxes on everybody.

• Oregon may raise the tax on beer 2,000 percent.

• California lawmakers raised the sales tax by one percent to 8.25 percent.

• New York has raised homeowner taxes dramatically.

• Delaware lawmakers want to raise taxes on anyone making more than $60,000.

• Wisconsin is raising corporate taxes.

The list goes on and on.

The truth is that the USA cannot afford to pay the medical bills of more than 300 million citizens without punitive taxation. Right now, health, pension and disability costs are bankrupting cities and counties all over this country, and high corporate tax states like Michigan and Massachusetts will soon be losing even more jobs, as companies are moving out. That is killing California and New York as well.

So Americans who believe in smaller government certainly have valid points. Of course, the liberal media doesn't want to hear that.

Wednesday, The New York Times and its satellite, The Boston Globe, totally ignored the tea party protests. The network news paid scant attention, with the exception of NBC News, which allowed its commentators to viciously attack Americans who support the tea parties.

Once again, General Electric boss Jeff Immelt and NBC President Jeff Zucker disgracefully permitted personal attacks on fellow Americans who disagree with their far-left vision. These men are corrupt and are greatly damaging the nation.

In the end, the folks will decide on how the federal government should be run. The next major election is a year and a half away.

But robust debate is one of America's great features, and no matter how the far left tries to damage that concept, it was on full display today.