A simple name change is allowing many criminals to assume a new identity and escape their tainted past. - in NSW that works. -ed.
Sydney peak hours to be treated as 'special events' to deal with traffic
Every Sydney peak hour will now be treated as a ''special event'' in a desperate bid to ease congestion.
Your money's safe in the US, Timothy Geithner promies
On his first trip to the Middle East as Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner's message this week will be similar to the one he delivered to Chinese officials a month ago: your investments in the United States are safe.
Couple saved from truck by house design
An elderly couple says they've lucky to escape unharmed, after a truck slammed into their house at Smithfield.
Three-headed fish fuel chemical fears
Three-headed fish at a Noosa River fish hatchery have prompted calls for a ban on the use of farm chemicals in the area.
Snipers on patrol for penguin killers
Snipers have been hired to catch the killer of nine little penguins at an endangered colony on Sydney's northern beaches.
NT man pleads guilty over 'Fresh Meat'
A Darwin man bought a bundle of pornography containing child abuse material entitled Young Fresh......
'Petrol price war exposes exploitation'
Massive petrol discounts being offered by Coles and Woolworths show how exploitative their regular......
Mother admits killing ex with tomahawk over treatment of teen son
A woman has admitted she and her teenage son killed her ex partner after spiking his orange juice with sleeping tablets.
=== Comments ===
Rudd’s open door to illegals
Piers Akerman
The great cover-up of the illegal asylum-seeker traffic to Australia is beginning to unravel. - It is ALP rhetoric which has it that it is heartless and cold to impose community standards on migrants. I think it a travesty to confuse ALP failure on law and order with immigration. Or to confuse the immigration debate with ALP lead protest movements of the sixties. Or to confuse multiculturalism with migration.
Rudd described ALP policy with his phrase lacking ‘detailed programatic specificity.’ Thing is, Liberals like Fraser and Hewson have fallen for such claptrap in the past. The fact is Australia benefits from new migrants, but ALP policy is making it expensive to welcome them, and dangerous in security terms. The gripes of the writers who say things like “Sorry DD Ball, but I must disagree on this” actually agree with me that Law and order and security need to be dealt with properly and this is where the ALP fail. However, to say that it is migrant fault for ALP policy is to ignore the obvious reality.
As for the old multiculturalism saw, I put it to you that multiculturalism does not exist .. philosophically, there is no such thing as a multiculture. However, pluralism is the mainstay of any functioning society and I welcome the fact that Australia is a pluralist nation. - ed.
===
HE BRINGETH RAIN
Tim Blair
Cold and wet today in Melbourne. Guess who’s visiting …
===
Wasn’t it once red?
Andrew Bolt
Reader Brendan notes a change in the color of the book now being waved by precisely the same kind of people:
About 1500 Australians aged 16 to 26 are descending on the University of Western Sydney to learn about organising and to hear speeches from Tim Flannery, senators Nick Xenophon and Christine Milne, the NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, and via video link from Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations panel on climate change, and the former US vice-president Al Gore, who is training an older generation of climate change campaigners in Melbourne this weekend.
Over three days Power Shift attendees will learn “Camp Obama” style strategies from a manifesto called The Little Green Book, such as recruiting first-time voters and targeting awareness campaigns at marginal seats in the federal election next year.
===
The pain tells you it’s a real recession
Andrew Bolt
Former Treasury secretary John Stone says Kevin Rudd’s colossal wasting of your billions hasn’t saved us - and won’t:
THE Rudd government claims that Australia has dodged the bullet of an economic recession, and that its fiscal stimulus is responsible. Both claims are essentially untrue.
The first claim stems from the fact that, after declining by 0.6 per cent (seasonally adjusted) in the December quarter, our gross domestic product grew by 0.4 per cent in the March quarter, thus avoiding two successive quarters of negative GDP growth (the technical definition of a recession).
But while that definition refers to overall GDP changes, what surely matter are changes in GDP per head. Australia’s gross product per head actually fell in both the December and March quarters (by 1.1 and 0.1 per cent, respectively). In fact, it also fell in the preceding June and September quarters (by 0.1 and 0.3 per cent, respectively). So on this more meaningful basis, we have already been in recession for 12 months, with GDP per head down by 1.6 per cent.
More important still, what actually affects people’s wellbeing is not changes in production but changes in what they can buy with that production: what the economists call gross domestic income. When Australian export prices fall faster than import prices, our capacity to pay for imports diminishes, and hence our GDI falls faster than our GDP. During the December and March quarters, GDI per head fell by 1.8 and 1.9 per cent, respectively. Australians on average thus became poorer by 3.7 per cent over those six months. Some non-recession!
===
Obama’s new advisor on getting rid of humans
Andrew Bolt
Finally John Holdren can get some of his green ideas put into practice, now that Barack Obama has appointed him chief scientific advisor.
Which ideas? Well, how about these planet-saving suggestions, from a book John Holdren co-authored in 1977 with fellow eco-alarmists Paul and Anne Ehrlich (emphases mine):
In today’s world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?…
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society…
Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock…
A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men… The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births…
If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility—just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns—providing they are not denied equal protection....
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime—sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. Thus the Regime could have the power to control pollution not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but also in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes that cross international boundaries or that discharge into the oceans. The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade, perhaps including assistance from DCs to LDCs, and including all food on the international market.
The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.
You can sure understand why a man with such inclinations would be now strongly drawn to global warming theory.
But why is Obama drawn to him?
Zombietime, who uncovered Holdren’s witterings, has the context, the history, photographic evidence, and denunciation all here, along with answers to the most common objections - and asks that if Holdren has since repented his views, why has he never said so?
===
ABC likens Rio’s Hu to al Qaeda’s Hicks
Andrew Bolt
What is Lateline host Leigh Sales suggesting to Liberal MP Andrew Southcott with her absurd analogy - that Rio Tinto’s Stern Hu trained and fought with Uighur terrorists?
Andrew Southcott: This is the job of the Prime Minister, to be in touch with his counterpart on a very important issue involving an Australian citizen who’s been detained and not yet charged.
Leigh Sales: Well Dr Southcott, isn’t it a bit rich for the Coalition to be so exercised about this matter when the Coalition left David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay for two years without charge and for five years without a completed trial?
===
Dear MP: explain or abstain
Andrew Bolt
If our politicians can’t explain this graph, how can they vote for Kevin Rudd’s ruinous plan to slash emissions?
Family First Senator Steve Fielding has now sent all Senators the graph, which shows the world cooling over the past eight years despite a rise in the emissions we’re told are warming the world to hell. And he’s challenged them as he challenged hapless Climate Minister Penny Wong
This runs counter to the assumption underpinning the CPRS which says that increasing carbon dioxide emissions are the leading cause of global warming. Given the Rudd Government has failed to explain this obvious contradiction I can’t understand how any member of the Australian parliament can vote for an emissions trading scheme.
===
Don’t mention the warming war
Andrew Bolt
No more than you’d expect - or say of the ABC, too:
Peter Sissons, the veteran newsreader who announced his retirement last month, ... claims it is now ‘effectively BBC policy’ to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming.
He says: ‘I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change. The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that “the science is settled”, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.
‘But it is effectively BBC policy… that those views should not be heard.’
Sissons, of course, is famously prepared to say a truth that few would dare admit to:
UPDATE
Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian sceptic, is going global. The Spectator is the latest to warm to his cool anti-alarmism.
===
Rann’s bagging of bags is the real pollution
Andrew Bolt
South Australian Premier Mike Rann today demonstrates that the worst rubbish isn’t plastic bags, but what’s said about them by green alarmists:
Every year, four billion of these bags are dumped into Australia’s environment, clogging landfill or choking the nation’s waterways. By stopping this in South Australia, that’s 400 million bags a year that won’t be causing massive environmental damage.
Fact check on just this one paragraph of his wild piece:
1. No, 4 billion plastic bags aren’t just “dumped” on our environment each year. A Productivity Commission study estimates just 0.8 per cent of them become litter.
2. This, of course, means that South Australia is not removing 400 million bags that cause “massive environmental damage”. It’s in fact removing fewer than 4 milliion bags which end up as litter, and cause only an arguable amount of “damage”.
3. No, the nation’s waterways aren’t “choked” by plastic bags. Look for yourself.
4. In fact, the Productivity Commission reports that plastic bags, rather than “clogging” landfills, seem have “landfill management benefits including stabilising qualities, leachate minimisation and minimising greenhouse gas emissions”.
5. It seems that the “massive environmental damage” done by plastic bags has actually been massively overstated by green groups, many of which have wildly misrepresented and exaggerated the effect of bags on wildlife.
6. Removing plastic bags may in fact cause more inconvenience and even environmental harm than leaving shoppers be, again according to the Productivity Commission study.
Other than that, Rann’s paragraph is largely accurate.
===
The green religion has its first baptism
Andrew Bolt
Even a dunking in cold water couldn’t shake her new faith:
TEENAGER Anna Surridge is so passionate about climate change she organised her own eco-baptism....
The Bishop of Llandaff High School pupil worked out that the electricity needed to raise the temperature of a baptistery (for immersion baptisms) to a comfortable temperature could be equivalent to making a thousand cups of tea and that it easily holds more than 1,000 litres of water. So she decided to be baptised in a more green way… during a weekend camp near Brecon in the river Usk…
“The weather was fantastic, but the water was freezing. I was wearing a wetsuit, as was my dad who baptised me, but I most certainly could still feel the cold.”
Cold?
UPDATE
Which one is the fake green scare? Or is the answer “none”? Or, actually, “all”?
Example 1:
THE WORLD is now on course for a plague of “superdisasters” - natural catastrophes with unprecedented destruction and loss of human life, the Red Cross warns today....
“From tsunamis and earthquakes to floods and famines, mankind is ever more threatened by the forces of nature,” says the report. “With almost a billion people now living in unplanned shanty towns, with deforestation wrecking ecological defences against catastrophic natural events, and with global warming making the forces of wind, rain and sun ever harder to predict and counter, the world is at risk as never before.”
Example 2:
Today’s environmental threats can be compared in many ways to the Biblical ten plagues. When we consider the threats to our land, water, and air, pesticides and other chemical pollutants, resource scarcities, threats to our climate, etc., we can easily enumerate ten modern “plagues.” Unfortunately, like the ancient Pharaoh, our hearts have been hardened, by the greed, materialism, and wastefulness that are at the root of these threats. And, in contrast to the biblical plagues, modern plagues are all occurring simultaneously...
Example 3:
The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and the water are becoming even more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct in vast numbers – we kill off more then 40,000 each year. The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and the coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process.
Example 4:
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
The answer? See from 2:00:
===
Unscheduled Earth Hours likely
Andrew Bolt
But stopping our dirty power is the green dream, right? So there’s surely nothing to worry about here:
ELECTRICITY generators are cutting back major maintenance work, raising the risk of California-style power brown-outs, because of uncertainty caused by the federal government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme.
Victorian generator Truenergy’s managing director Richard McIndoe said yesterday that with $950 million of debt to be refinanced this year and banks wary of the impact of the CPRS on the industry, the company had decided it could not justify the cost of major maintenance…
Energy Supply Association of Australia chief executive Brad Page said there was always an increased risk of “less reliable supply” when generators cut back on routine maintenance…
The ESAA warns that the government is not giving the industry enough help to adapt to the CPRS and remain viable… The government had offered what amounted to $3.5 billion in support when the industry needed $20bn to survive the CPRS in its current form.
UPDATE
Al Gore works out on one of his computers fresh ways to cut even more power:
===
Rude relief
Andrew Bolt
Strange research that I actually believe, which which would have been more socially useful if kept secret:
SWEARING can lessen the feeling of physical pain, scientists have discovered....
“Increased aggression has been shown to reduce sensitivity to pain, so it could be that swearing helps this process.”
Huff and puff classes for expectant mums should now get a whole lot more interesting.
===
Mirror needed
Andrew Bolt
Ian Rintoul denies it, but there is at least the possibility that this refugee advocate helps to lure illegal boat people here, only to blame government when the predictable drownings occur:
REFUGEE advocate Ian Rintoul denies having any contact with people-smugglers, whom he describes as “poor people’s travel agents”.
And he blames Australia’s border protection policies for the probable loss of 20 or more lives from a boatload of refugees that went missing in Indonesian waters last Wednesday.
The Australian last week revealed that Mr Rintoul was in regular mobile phone contact with a passenger on the sinking vessel, who told him the engine had failed.
===
China really means it
Andrew Bolt
If true, it’s trouble not just for Stern Hu but for all our future dealings with this authoritarian regime:
PRESIDENT Hu Jintao personally endorsed the investigation into Rio Tinto that led to the criminal detention of iron ore executive Stern Hu and three staff, according to Chinese Government sources.
The investigation appears to be part of a seismic realignment of how China manages its economy, with spy and security agencies now promoted into top strategy-making bodies.
The fact of top-level support for the Rio Tinto investigation makes it even more unlikely that the Shanghai State Security Bureau will reverse its decision to detain Mr Hu and his Chinese citizen colleagues, Liu Caikui, Wang Yong and Ge Minqiang.
UPDATE
Yesterday federal ministers were sent out to attack Malcolm Turnbull over his call for Rudd to pick up the phone to his Chinese counterpart to demand the businessman’s immediate release.
But if there is a view in the community that such action is required, then Rudd has only himself to blame.... The fact is Rudd’s efforts to leave the impression that he would, as Prime Minister, have both special access and clout in Beijing have been concerted. Those efforts have ensnared him in a great foreign policy irony; Rudd came to his prime ministership replete with diplomatic background and Mandarin tongue, holding out the promise that handling the China relationship would be his major foreign policy strength.
It now threatens to become a manifest weakness.
===
Restage it, with Stern Hu as the hero
Andrew Bolt
China has arrested a Rio Tinto employee, Stern Hu, over a business dispute, revealing the fangs of what is still a totalitarian regime, despite all the softsoaping.
Meanwhile, Rio Tinto softsoaps the regime, sponsoring a new tour in Australia of the National Ballet of China in ”Raise the Red Lantern”, a story about a woman trapped without rights in China. Imperial China, that is, not this nice one that replaced it.
===
Ticking Turnbull, tickling Rudd
Andrew Bolt
The complete list of questions asked by reporters at Malcolm Turnbull’s press conference on Friday, after the Opposition Leader made some remarks on the arrest by China of Australian businessman Stern Hu:
QUESTION: There is a lot a stake for China as well in this, and China is accusing the Australian citizen of bribing officials from Chinese steel companies. These are serious claims, and as I say China has an enormous amount at stake here, why would they take such a course of action if they didn’t have a case?
QUESTION: The Prime Minister has accused you and Julie Bishop of trying to score domestic political points on this issue. Is that what you are doing?
QUESTION: Are you worried that you are inflaming the situation and putting at risk billions in exports to China?
QUESTION: And you are not grandstanding, you deny that? The Prime Minister says you are grandstanding.
QUESTION: As a former diplomat, surely the Prime Minister would know how to deal with such a delicate situation?
QUESTION: Stephen Smith this morning said the allegations are coming out of mainly commercial and economic issues, so what sort of implications will that have for other Australians doing business in China?
QUESTION: You say they’re political points that are being made in the Chinese media, but he’s been accused of bribery, of bribing Chinese employees of these steel companies.
QUESTION: Just on another matter, Mr Turnbull, the Prime Minister today has said that he thinks tourists should be able to climb Uluru. Do you agree with that?
QUESTION: The Prime Minister’s carbon capture and storage institute has won support form a number of international leaders, I think it’s twenty or twenty-three leaders, including President Obama. Do you congratulate him for his efforts on that front?
QUESTION: A bit of programmatic specificity, you could probably say?
Now see if you can detect a slightly different tone to the questions - especially those on global warming - asked by journalists at a press conference called by Kevin Rudd on the very same day. Again, here are all those questions, and see if journalists demand Rudd answer Turnbull’s as they demanded Turnbull answer Rudd’s. And see if a single question on global warming suggests anything but the journalist’s whole-hearted approval of Rudd’s position:
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