Headlines Wednesday 19th August 2009

Labor backs down to strike deal on Renewable Energy Target
A deal on the Rudd government's Renewable Energy Target has been reached between Labor and the Coalition.

Rees 'paying Ellis to put words in his mouth'
LABOR mate Bob Ellis is being paid more than $4000 a month by NSW Premier Nathan Rees for "general editorial work", the State Opposition says.

Teen porn queen's horrific final hours
Prosecutors have given the first glimpse into the brutal murder of a small town girl who lived a double life as a teenage porn model.

Armed robbers hit south Sydney bank
Two armed robbers are on the run in Sydney's south after holding up the Commonwealth Bank in Oatley.

'Slum' hospital staff demand action
Squalid operating theatres and decaying equipment are plaguing doctors and nurses at Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hospital.

Vogue model to unmask bitchy blogger
Vogue cover girl Liskula Cohen has won the right to expose and sue an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank”.

Self-help course 'reckless and risky'
A self-help course subjected a Sydney woman to dangerous regression therapies days before she jumped to her death from an office window.

Man charged 14 years after Savage murder
Police have charged a man with murder 14 years after a Sydney teenager was killed on his way home from footy training.

Stingy Kiwis take condoms over kids
The recession that stopped New Zealand spending now has Kiwis reaching for condoms and......

Tattoo holds key to gruesome mystery
Police are hoping a distinctive tattoo may provide answers after two human legs were spotted in......

Late man uses bomb hoax to delay plane
A businessman running behind schedule triggered a bomb scare on a plane in a desperate attempt to.....

Australian cricketers approached by bookmakers

AUSTRALIAN cricketers have been approached by illegal bookmakers while on the tour of England.

$50bn deal 'nation's biggest ever'
AUSTRALIA has cemented its biggest ever trade deal, a $50 billion contract to supply liquefied natural gas to China.

New arrest over Des Moran killing
A SECOND man has been charged over the alleged murder of Des 'Tuppence' Moran.

Toddler doomed to die a dreadful death
BORN into a household of extreme violence, murdered toddler Dean Shillingsworth never stood a chance.

Music downloads to eclipse CDs by 2010
REVENUE from music downloads is on track to equal CDs by as early as next year.

How police nabbed A-list's coke king
ITA Buttrose's nephew was busy last Christmas selling cocaine instead of buying gifts, and police were watching his every move.

Rudd blitz on fad diets
WEIGHT-LOSS programs and products will have to prove they work as the Government cracks down on the industry.

Freed pedophile 'will offend again'
A SEX predator with a 20-year record has been freed to a secret location despite a judge warning he will commit more crimes.

US investigating Swiss bank customers
THE US is "criminally investigating" more than 150 US customers of Swiss bank UBS on suspicion they concealed income and assets to avoid US taxes, court documents said today.
=== Journalists Corner ===
Taking America's Temperature
As objections reach a fevered pitch over Obama's health care plan, how "frank" will Barney be at his own town hall?
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Afghanistan's Election!
With insurgent violence on the rise, what will their choice mean for our troops? We take you inside!
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"Is It Legal?"
Did the paparrazi cross the line? George Clooney thinks so, and he's fighting back! We're on the case!
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Guest: Rep. Michele Bachmann
Blasted as staged, phony, even un-American! Dems attack health care protesters! But, is it really curing all the bad P.R.?
=== Comments ===
SUNNY MONEY
Tim Blair
Germany’s solar money drain – talk about death panels – is little noticed in Australia, where Paul Kelly notes:
Government support to create new renewable industries otherwise untenable has become the test of being “serious” about climate change … underwriting renewables has become the non-negotiable symbolism demanded by the new politics regardless of cost.
Just like Germany, we seem to be outsourcing our feel-good funding to China:
The opposition has been a vocal critic of the way money is being spent, challenging Environment Minister Peter Garrett yesterday over spending of up to $1bn on Chinese pink batts under his new insulation schemes.
We’re still winners when it comes to fossil fuel, however. But how does this fit with Kevin Rudd’s carbon-slashing fantasies?

UPDATE. Carbon Americans rise up against energy delusion:
About 3,500 people, or 1,500 more than expected, filed into the facility, many donning yellow T-shirts that were being handed out that read “I’m an energy citizen” …

Organizers of the event, billed as a dialogue on energy and the environment, told the Chronicle on Monday that legislation the U.S. House passed last spring will destroy millions of U.S. jobs and raise costs without reducing greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change.
===
ROBERT NOVAK
Tim Blair
Veteran columnist Robert Novak has died at 78. A fascinating final interview:
Q: You’ve had a chance to look back on your life and think about what you’ve done that was good and what was bad. What stands out?

A: Looking back, I tried to find out what the politicians were up to, which is a difficult job. I find that politicians as a class are up to no good. Sometimes they accidentally do the right thing. When I started out, I didn’t have any agenda or tablet of principles at all. But in the course of writing about things and getting exclusive information, I might have helped certain causes. I might have helped the tax-cutting cause, which I’m very much in favor of. That takes away from my mantra that I’m just a simple reporter reporting the facts, doesn’t it?
UPDATE. And a cheery obit for Hugh Millais, who has died at 79 “without ever having to suffer the indignity of full-time employment.”
===
CLOSER TO DOOM EVERY DAY
Tim Blair
The latest warming warning:
Gourmets in France are warning that unless global warming is stopped the world’s best wines will be made in Scotland.
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IT SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES
Tim Blair
Obama’s snitch hotline has been death panelled:
Following a furor over how the data would be used, the White House has shut down an electronic tip box — flag@whitehouse.gov — that was set up to receive information on “fishy” claims about President Barack Obama’s health plan.

E-mails to that address now bounce back with the message: “The e-mail address you just sent a message to is no longer in service. We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck.”
===
Aboriginal man helped
Andrew Bolt

It is wonderful to see a rare and wonderful opportunity like this being offered to someone from a race that faces so much discrimination and poverty just because of the color of their skin:

MARK MCMILLAN

2009 Fulbright Indigenous Scholarship...

Mark McMillan has received the 2009 Fulbright Indigenous Scholarship sponsored by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Mark, who is a senior researcher at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney, will go to the University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law to undertake to the newly established Doctor of Juridical Science in the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program

McMillan has also been chosen by Reconciliation Australia as the face of Which One of These Men is Aboriginal? - its campaign to break down racist preconceptions that so hurt other members of his community of white Aborigines.

RA lists his other qualifications:
A 40-year-old Wiradjuri man, Mark hails from Trangie, NSW. A law graduate from the ANU in Canberra, Mark also has a Masters of Law from the University of Arizona and will finish his doctorate - also at the University of Arizona - in 2010. Mark is Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning Research Unit at the University of Technology and is a Board member of the Trangie Local Aboriginal Land Council, Metro Screen and the NSW Mental Health Association. He is a proud father of an 11-year-old son, a proud gay man, rugby player, partner and active member of his community.

A gay white man with a law degree? Just the kind of Aboriginal who needs a special handout.

(Hmm. I wonder which Aborigines missed out on this scholarship, thanks to McMillan’s entry. Maybe the judges could explain.)

UPDATE

It’s some feat when Fulbright’s affirmative action - an indigenous scholarship - ends up leaving this year’s intake of Fellows looking just as white as ever:

And, no, that’s certainly not Mark in the middle of the back row. Mark is Aboriginal, you see.

UPDATE 2

McMillan describes the agony of not being discriminated against for being Aboriginal:
I am a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned Aboriginal Australian. Every time I look in the mirror, that’s what I see… As a child, I grew up expecting everyone to be like me, to look like me - with the blonde hair and blue eyes.

Clearly, my naive ideas about how Aboriginal people were ‘supposed’ to look were wrong. But being Aboriginal and fair and blonde was normal to me and I grew up in a world where I was treated ‘normally’. Along the way however, I noticed that not everyone was receiving the same brand of treatment and that made me angry. It has taken a while to let go of that anger…

Impeding my growth from that young person into the adult I wanted to become was the profound issue of identity. I was a ‘white’ black man… I was becoming a victim.

Racism sure has come a long way in this country if the problem now is that some people aren’t black enough.
===
His better analogy is Rees = Goebbels
Andrew Bolt


Nathan Rees reaches deep in the slops bucket:

NSW Premier Nathan Rees compared climate change sceptics to Nazi appeasers as he addressed a roomful of scientists at the Eureka Awards last night…

‘’The threat of climate change is catastrophic. In fact, the current wave of climate change scepticism smacks of 1930s-style appeasement: ‘Hide under the blankets and it will go away’. But it won’t go away.’’

Rees’s sins are two-fold. First, he truly believes that the planet’s climate is now a greater threat than World War 2, even though it hasn’t warned in almost a decade. Second, he slimes those who point out such facts - including many, many scientists far more expert than he - by likening them to appeasers of genocidal killers.

He is a disgrace, and this kind of “apology” shows he lacks not just sense, but the guts to say sorry:
Mr Rees was also asked about comments he made last night, where he compared climate change sceptics to Nazi appeasers. He said that he should have perhaps clarified his comments.

But Rees’s hysterical analogy under underlines the point Andrew Norton rightly makes:

Climate change ‘alarmists’ have been utterly relentless in their campaigning. It’s quite possibly the biggest global political campaign in history. My media survey last year found an average of 1.6 different predictions of climate doom a day…

But a recent Morgan poll suggests that maybe the constant predictions of doom is having an unintended effect. The number of people who think concerns are exaggerated has doubled since 2006, from 13% to 27%.

There is still an overwhelming majority of people who believe that climate change is happening and strong majorities in favour of policy action. But perhaps the claims of impendending disaster are sounding a little too hyberbolic, and people are beginning to mentally discount the scale of the problems we face.

UPDATE

First, in likening Rees to Goebbels, I mean only to twist his own absurd analogy to show him how grossly offensive it is. Second, to educate him on how ignorant he is, too, here is the data on warming trends since 2001:

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After the hype, comes the low
Andrew Bolt
I don’t think Barack Obama’s health plans translate to health in the polls.
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As male as they say
Andrew Bolt
A strange society. We must now ignore the fundamental precepts of biology rather than hurt the self-esteem of two women:

TWO WA female-to-male transsexuals have won the right to be considered men without having to undergo surgery on their reproductive organs.

The transsexuals won an appeal in the State Administrative Tribunal against the refusal of the WA Gender Reassignment Board to issue them with certificates recognising ``the reassignment of their gender’’.

The board had found against them because they had female reproductive systems, which it said was inconsistent with being male.

UPDATE

It was once said as a joke:

UPDATE 2

Under the WA rules, she’s surely as female as she wants to be:

SOUTH AFRICAN middle-distance sensation Caster Semenya was at the centre of an inquiry on Tuesday due to concerns about whether she is a male or female.

The 18-year-old has emerged in recent months as a top 800 metres runner, and won her semi-final in commanding fashion at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on Monday night, eliminating Kenya’s Olympic champion Pamela Jelimo along the way.

But the South African’s physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she might not be entirely female.

UPDATE 3

I overlooked this part of the WA judgment:

However, (the tribunal) was not persuaded that the presence of those organs alone, in circumstances in which there was no longer a capacity to bear children ... outweighed the other physical characteristics by virtue of which each applicant is now identified as male.

The implication here is that a woman is actually less of a woman if she is infertile - and, in this case, deliberately barren.

Now when did I last hear that offensive notion being put, and will the same critics now speak up again?
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Rees’s taxpayer-funded mate
Andrew Bolt
How can they support such a barbarian:
Labor mate Bob Ellis is being paid more than $4,000 a month by NSW Premier Nathan Rees for “general editorial work”, the state opposition says.

This is taxpayers’ money for a man who writes stuff like this:

In most war propaganda a bogyman kills or tortures children . . . It’s all so vulgar and creepy. I mean I assume Saddam, a ruthless, ambitious fan of Stalin, did bad things and killed a lot of people in his time. But kill them pointlessly? I don’t think so. He was too shrewd for that; too shrewd to make enemies needlessly.

And this, about the Iraqi terrorists who kidnapped Douglas Wood for 47 days, killed two of his colleagues and shooting other capitives in front of their hostages:

...honourable men (with) a well-treated captive...

And this:
What a hateful nation (the US) is entirely. I also bet that the plane that “crashed” on 9/11 in that Pennsylvania field was actually shot down by American fighters...

As for his personal manners…

UPDATE

Ellis in conference with another big donor, South Australian Premier Mike Rann:

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Bigger than global warming
Andrew Bolt
Reader JK faces the terrible unknowingness that confronts most husbands once a year:

If anyone here should happen to see a dishevelled, snivelling, yet curiously alluring guy, with a wild eyed stare, aimlessly roaming through Chadstone Shopping Centre this afternoon, come up and say hello.It’s the dreaded day before Mrs K’s birthday, which of course means panic stations and gift buying time. The regular receptionist at work is off this week, and I can’t trust the junior one to buy the gift for me, as she has a nasal piercing and comes from another planet.It’s not a birthday ending in zero, so I don’t have a date with the jewelry store and bank manager. Lingerie is out, due to the Incident of 2005. Vases and such are out, because I have no idea what we actually already have in our house. Domestic appliances are definitely out as they are always met with stony silence and a karate kick to the throat.I could use some sympathy or inspiration or words of wisdom or anything. Preferably in the $59.95 price range.
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Does McGeough want us to lose?
Andrew Bolt
Former Journalist of the Year Paul McGeough seems always eager to see the worst in the good, and the good in the worst.

His record so far is to predict doom and a “quagmire” for the Americans in Iraq, jeer at the ”puppet regime” that mercifully replaced a genocidal dictator, falsely accuse the then interim Iraqi Prime Minister of murder, damn as a “circus” and “soap opera” the trial of Saddam, and warn of a civil war in Iraq that never came.

Now, with US troops pulling out of democratic, booming and largely peaceful Iraq, McGeough is taking his doom-mongering to Afghanistan - no doubt to the delight of the jihadists. The Australian today contrasts McGeough’s brand of analysis with the serious kind:

Paul McGeough takes up the discredit theme with gusto in Fairfax newspapers yesterday:

WHEN he flounced on to the world stage in his braided coats of many colours in 2001, Hamid Karzai was hailed as the saviour of his traumatised nation. But battling to lock in a second term as president, he is now betraying the ideals for which so much Western blood and treasure have been spilt on the plains of Afghanistan.

It has been widely suggested that some members of Karzai’s family and his cronies are the chief beneficiaries of rampant corruption and drug-trafficking that seems immune to the presence of more than 100,000 foreign troops and the watching gaze of hundreds of diplomats.

Melanie Reid in The Times puts a more nuanced case:
MR Karzai, the West’s indecisive placeman in Afghanistan, eager to please everyone, has quietly signed an amended version of what has become known as the marital rape law to retain popularity with clerics and his male followers. The result would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The British Army now finds itself fighting in order to allow Afghan men to continue mildly unpleasant habits such as withholding food from their wives, insisting on sex and imprisoning them in their own home. (Which makes you wonder exactly what the problem with the Taliban was.) (But) amid the corruption, we must be fiercely pragmatic. The only way a new Afghanistan is ever going to emerge is if (women’s) place in society undergoes a revolution. And one can say that revolution is starting. Since 2001, women represent 27 per cent of the National Assembly. The Afghan government has committed to fast-tracking women in the civil service to 30 per cent by 2013. There is a female cabinet minister, an Afghan Women Judges Association, and two women are standing in the presidential elections. Despite the increase in rape, and the violence, and the daily dismay of being second-class citizens, the vast majority of Afghan women believe that there has been an improvement in general life. In the face of their optimism, we have to stick with them.
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Witch way did our reason go?
Andrew Bolt

SIGH. I’ve reread the Ombudsman’s report on the Melbourne council that paid $620,000 to a “white witch”. But nowhere do I see the words that most need saying.

These words, I mean: “Are you guys freaking nuts?”

This is a pity, because Victorian Ombudsman George Brouwer is literally a Dutch uncle, and thus perfectly equipped to tell a home truth that now badly needs telling.

Fact is, those of us who worriedly measure the retreat of reason in Australia are fast running out of tape.

Take this decision by Port Phillip Council to pay a fortune for advice on “change management” from Caroline Shahbaz, devotee of pranic healing and astrology, and, she giggled last year, a woman referred to as a white witch.

Indeed, her skills are supernatural, as she describes them. According to Shahbaz last year, she has a special intuition, thanks not just to her masters of psychology, but her study with astrologist Stella Starwoman and pilgrimages to ashrams in India.

“You know, I can walk into a room and pick up what the nuance is. For some people who are not familiar with that, it can be ‘Wow, how do you know that? Have you got a crystal ball’?” she said.

Well, if she did, consider it smashed.

Shahbaz’s “honesty sessions” at the council were followed by complaints of bullying and even sexual harassment among staff who also complained the joint had developed a “culture of fear”. Big surprise - not. When unreason rules, only force can end an argument.

But about all this - the irrationality, the mysticism - Brouwer said nothing.
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Silent on what saves
Andrew Bolt
THIS week’s interim report by the bushfires royal commission ignores the one thing most people writing to it said would save lives.

Not one of its 51 recommendations mentions fuel reduction burns.

That means we go into our next fire season, in just 70 days, without a word from this inquiry on what is probably our best hope of saving bush people from another inferno.

This inquiry admits it received 485 submissions from fire experts, foresters, residents and the plain frightened asking it to consider whether we do enough burning to rob fires of fuel.

Nothing was mentioned more often in submissions - not better warnings, fire refuges, the stay-or-go policy or anything else the commission’s report discusses, often with too little effective change to recommend.

(The commission’s more trivial recommendations: let’s call evacuations “relocations”; let’s stress, as if it were new, that our first duty is to save lives; let’s have a new scale of fire warnings with a category worse than “extreme”.)

It’s astonishing that the commission should say its recommendations on fuel reduction burns, on the other hand, must wait until next year. In fact, it’s put them below the green favourite of “climate change” on its to-do list.

Three things make this odd.
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Speaking about the above…
Andrew Bolt
THE Brumby government rejected a recommendation from a parliamentary committee that it triple the amount of controlled fuel-reduction burns carried out in bushfire-prone areas of Victoria just two months before the Black Saturday catastrophe killed 173 people.

UPDATE

Remember all the past warnings about the failure to burn?
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At least get better leaders
Andrew Bolt
John Pasquarelli says Aboriginal dysfunction is now worse:

IN 1959 I arrived at the Eight Mile Field at Coober Pedy with two partners and, as luck would have it, our first shaft bottomed on saleable opal....

I was made chillingly aware of the brutality that existed in the Aboriginal settlement when I noticed a young woman, obviously in distress, noodling (fossicking for opal chips) on our mine. She had a filthy old singlet wrapped around her head and face and she was covered in flies… The woman’s drunken husband had assaulted her and forced her face into a campfire, burning out one of her eyes. I drove her into Coober Pedy…

Fifty years and billions of dollars on, the nightmare continues, worse than ever… Many Aborigines run businesses, turn up at their jobs and look after their families. Signs proclaiming “Dry Area—No Alcohol Allowed” and “Alcohol Consumption Banned” are posted everywhere.

But like some mad Monty Python script, drunken Aboriginal men and women are slumped on the footpath, crumpled VB cans beside them, within feet of these signs… One morning, a large, fierce-looking alsatian cross mongrel was standing on his hind legs rummaging through a garbage bin while 100m away an Aboriginal man was doing the same thing… The town’s only ambulance is also co-opted to ferry drunks.

And carefully avoiding identifying details, Pasquarelli makes this important point:

Far too many of the people that work in the Aboriginal industry, whether black or white, are totally unsuitable to be employed. They drink too much, smoke cigarettes and use drugs such as marijuana. Yet these people should be role models and mentors, setting an example and as such they must be drug-tested in the workplace. Unfortunately, many of these people are only too willing to promote the cult of victimhood, subconsciously or deliberately, and weeding them out must be a priority.
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Choose drugs or children
Andrew Bolt
You may well ask how she came to raise such a daughter, yet her question demands an answer:

THE mother of a woman who pleaded guilty to murdering her two-year-old son and dumping his body in a suitcase in a pond two years ago has branded drugs evil and asked why more was not done to remove her grandson from her troubled daughter…

‘’[Rachel] had been trying hard and I just don’t know what went wrong,’’ her mother, identified only as Beverley, said after the plea hearing. ‘’I didn’t know back then she was back smoking pot - smoking a lot. [The Department of Community Services] should investigate people better.

‘’If they know people are on drugs they should just take the kids. I’ve said it before: drugs are evil, and I know that for a fact. And if DOCS know [a parent is abusing drugs] and they still let them keep the kids, then where’s the justice?‘’

Drugs or children - they can’t have both. But we’ve said it before…
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Yes, Holocaust-mocking cartoons are different
Andrew Bolt
An unusually brave decision, with prosecutors refusing to engage in moral relativism:

Dutch prosecutors declined on Tuesday to put far-right MP Geert Wilders on trial for distributing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. But they found that a Holocaust-denying cartoon in a separate case was punishable.

The prosecution service had received complaints about Wilders reproducing controversial Danish cartoons of the prophet on his website, as well as their display on a television programme.

It had also received complaints about two cartoons published on the website of the Arab-European League (AEL) lobby group, one of which allegedly shows Jews denying that the Nazi Holocaust happened.

The Danish cartoons and their reproduction were not punishable, the prosecution service said in a statement.

“The cartoons are about the Prophet Mohamed, but don’t say anything about Muslims. None of the cartoons are offensive towards Muslims or contribute to hatred, discrimination or violence against Muslims.” The Holocaust cartoon “is punishable because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion.”

I am uneasy about the prosecution of any cartoons, but accept the distinction here - that the Holocaust cartoon spreads race-hatred, but the Mohammed ones do not. Indeed, hatred in the case of the latter was spread not by the cartoons but by the absurdly violent reaction to them.
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Batty spending, they now agree
Andrew Bolt
Probably too much, certainly spent badly:

CANBERRA’S unprecedented stimulus spending to save Australia from the “worst recession since the Great Depression” is coming under increasing fire from economists as consensus builds that the downturn will be a shallow one…

Access Economics director Chris Richardson said, in hindsight, the federal budget could have carried less of the burden of boosting demand, and the Reserve Bank more...Outlook Economics director Peter Downes, a former Treasury bureaucrat, said the easing in the global financial crisis should prompt the government to become more selective in its choice of fiscal stimulus projects over the next two years…

Stephen Kirchner, research fellow with the Centre for Independent Studies, said the RBA would have probably cut interest rates faster and harder in the absence of the government’s spending spree. Canberra’s spending had been comparatively unproductive, supporting demand-driven imports, and quick and easy projects over more worthwhile ones, he said. ..

Sinclair Davidson, a RMIT professor of institutional economics, also backed the use of interest rates over budget spending to support the economy.

“I think the spending by the government was too much, too fast, on things with low economic returns and (that were) fiscally irresponsible,” he said.

The opposition has been a vocal critic of the way money is being spent, challenging Environment Minister Peter Garrett yesterday over spending of up to $1bn on Chinese pink batts under his new insulation schemes

That last figure is astonishing. A $1 billion taxpayer-funded stimulus - to China?