Headlines Monday 19th April 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland PC (14 April 1738 – 30 October 1809) was a British Whig and Tory statesman, Chancellor of the University of Oxford and Prime Minister. He was known before 1762 by the courtesy title Marquess of Titchfield. He held a title of every degree of British nobility - that of Duke, Marquess, Earl, Viscount and Baron. He was also great-great-great grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II through her mother's side.

=== Bible Quote ===

“That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”- Romans 10:9-10

=== Headlines ===

Williams dies in prison - report
CARL Williams is reportedly dead after going into cardiac arrest at a high security prison in Victoria.

Women are being told to socialise with their bosses and workmates if they want to make it to the top. It's not enough to be competent, you have to be "engaged".

End to travel chaos in sight
AIR traffic likely to return to 50 per cent of its normal level today as airliners say ban unnecessary.

Rudd ups the ante in health showdown
PRIME Minister offers NSW $5bn lionshare of extra funding ahead of crunch talks today.

Police stump up killer's school fees
CARL Williams' daughter gets $8000 to go to exclusive primary - but force chiefs won't say why.

Enraged mum goes on 'terroristic binge'
MUM sets out to ruin her son after he married a woman she believed was a no good gold digger.

Keep Big Australia far, far away from me
MOST Aussies say they are open to further population growth - but it better not be in their backyard.

200 cops caught breaking traffic laws
POLICE treating road rules with contempt - speeding and running red lights without legitimate reason.

Highway cops on a road less travelled
THE distance driven by the state's highway patrol police has fallen more than 1.3 million kilometres in 12 months.

European countries loosen airspace restrictions as weather reports suggest air traffic could return to about 50 percent of its normal levels

Obama's Wall Street Tour
President plans a series of outside-the-Beltway town hall events where he will press for financial regulatory reform

Odierno: Iraq Withdrawal 'on Target'
Top U.S. general in Iraq says all combat troops will be out of Iraq by September, skirts questions about departure

Clinton Says Dems Will Hold Majorities
Former president says GOP will not pull off the kind of congressional takeover they engineered under his watch

Will Ireland Start Censoring the Web?
Ireland may be joining repressive regimes North Korea, China and Iran by censoring the Internet for law-abiding citizens. According to a report in The Irish Times, the government has been in extensive private discussions on the possibility of blocking access to certain Web sites and domains. The government hopes these filters could serve a range of uses, from blocking filesharing sites to trying to tackle cybercrime and terrorism. Critics say Internet blocking creates many problems with little real effect on illegal activity. For example, Internet users and businesses have complained about the side-effects of domain blocking, where barring access to domains can shut down hundreds of personal and business Web sites as well as e-mail addresses associated with them.

=== Comments ===

Rudd’s population policy in tatters
Piers Akerman
THE Rudd government’s population policy is in tatters two weeks after its launch. Devised to divert attention from the disastrously lethal pink batts insulation scheme, the rorted school building program and the nonsensical health policy, the population strategy has raised more questions than it has answered. - I have no problem with Australia having 420 million people, not merely 42 million. I object to mismanagement of growth that sees a collapse of accustomed conditions and service through incompetence and corruption.
Australia has the resources to support the world’s population in great comfort. But it still takes planning of the type the ALP are singularly incapable of, and the Greens are opposed to. The ALP seem to take delight in diverting any gains made in government by the conservatives towards pork barrels .. and they seem to have popular support for that with media acting as cheerleaders. Take as an example NSW, where Greiner had set the state up for great things when he got rolled by the Greens and ALP and (so called) independents. Electricity was set to be sold for some $60 billion, possible $120 billion, and the economic vandals decided they would hold onto it .. probably so as to claim the bottom line didn’t show the great wealth Greiner had left.
Now the state will have to shell out $8 billion to just keep afloat. $128 billion in 1995 terms could go a long way to fund significant reform and infrastructure .. but that is lost to ALP corruption. - ed.

Ken Goodall replied
DDB:
“I have no problem with Australia having 420 million people, not merely 42 million....Australia has the resources to support the world’s population in great comfort...”

What did you say you stand for?
What are you trying to be elected to?

Bob M replied
I have a real problem with Australia having any more population than we’ve already got. Not only is Australia an extremely dry continent, but the soil here is among the poorest in the world and generally unsuited to food production. In fact, the latest available Food Production Index (see http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/agr_foo_pro_ind-agriculture-food-production-index) shows Australia ranked at a lowly 173 out of 182 countries. It also shows that we no longer produce as much food as we consume.
The pollies can rave on about schools, roads, houses and other infrastructure as much as they want, but they’re ignoring the problem of water and food production shortages.

- Ken and Bob, my policies are neither green nor leftist, but that doesn’t mean I hate people and the environment. I like people and I like migrants and I have no problem with welcoming more to Australia .. but I recognize that we also need to invest in sustainable development to move forward. Even were Australia to make a mistake and stop migration then we still need to develop what we have. Some of the arguments against development are stupid. To say we don’t want migrants because our land is not sufficiently developed is to ignore the fact that it is insufficiently developed regardless.
Australia will need to make unique sacrifices to develop our land to the fullest, but there are vast rewards too if we do it sensibly. A person who believes in green ideals or the left wing belief in the need for compassion to rule the bureaucratic machine will recognize the fairness of my points, as will those who hold a conservative view recognizing that prosperity solves most problems. - ed.
===
SUGAR BEARS
Tim Blair
A young Serbian designer asks:

How many polar bears have you drowned in your life?

Not nearly enough. In fact, not even one. But it’s on my to-do list. Our young Serbian designer continues:

Due to global warming, polar bears are an endangered species. They live on the ice, the ice melts and more and more polar bears drown. Global warming awareness can be raised even with the smallest of gestures.

Really? Do tell:

A sugar bear drowining in your coffee or tea is an everyday reminder how fast these creatures can disappear.

Sign me up for 500.
===
ABC COMEDY
Tim Blair
This week’s column.
===
Williams dead: report
Andrew Bolt
AAP reports that murderer Carl Williams is dead. He reportedly suffered head injuries in jail and went into cardiac arrest.

I can only assume he was attacked, if the report is true.

UPDATE

Williams was in the news only this morning:

TAXPAYERS paid the private school fees for the daughter of multiple murderer, drug dealer and underworld figure Carl Williams.

The $8000 payment was made by Victoria Police command for Williams’ child to attend a top private school.

UPDATE 2

The AAP report:

AN inmate in a high security prison, believed to be convicted gangland killer, Carl Williams, has died after he suffered head injuries and went into cardiac arrest.

An Ambulance Victoria spokeswoman said paramedics arrived at Barwon Prison about 1.18pm (AEST) on Monday to find the man in a critical condition.

Two independent sources have said the man was Williams.

UPDATE 3

MTR host Chris Smith says government sources confirm it’s Williams.

UPDATE 4

Williams’ lawyer confirms he’s dead. Police say he’d been attacked:

A Victoria Police spokeswoman confirmed that a Barwon prisoner had died after being assaulted, but would not confirm that it was Williams.

”We can confirm that a prisoner has died as a result of an assault earlier this afternoon.’’…

Williams, who was serving a 35-year prison sentence for several murders, was a key player in Melbourne’s brutal underworld war that claimed about 30 lives and took police more than a decade to bring under control.
===
Control the population, not the rents
Andrew Bolt
My tip to the professor: more controls over rents will lead to fewer rental properties, not more:

Terry Burke, professor of housing studies at Swinburne University’s Institute for Social Research, said Australia had crossed a point of ‘’no return’’ in housing affordability, raising ‘’fundamental questions’’ about the role of private rental housing.

He said a range of reforms should be considered, including greater access to longer leases of up to 10 years, US-style controls over rent rises, and minimum quality standards for rental properties.

And why should investors have controls over their incomes that don’t apply to most other forms of investment?

From a Cato Institute report:

Rent control has been in force in a number of major American cities for many decades. The best-known example is New York, which still retains rent controls from the temporary price controls imposed during World War II. But this policy, meant to assist poorer residents, harms far more citizens than it helps, benefits the better-off, and limits the freedom of all citizens…

In many cities, policymakers understand that controls drive out residents and businesses. Thus many exempt significant portions of housing from controls, creating shadow markets. Yet as controls hold down rents for some units, costs for all other rental housing skyrockets. And tenants in rent-controlled units fear moving to more desirable neighborhoods since the only units available for rent are very high-priced.

(Thanks to reader Andrew.)
===
If Hindus bathed in the Jordan, it would be sacred
Andrew Bolt
Gavin Atkins notes the Sydney Morning Herald treats some sacred rivers with more respect than others.

On April 8, around Easter, the SMH writes about the Jordan, revered by Christians:

It’s official - the holy waters of the River Jordan are full of crap. Laboratory analysis commissioned by the Herald has confirmed the presence of two types of organism found only in human faeces.

A week later, the SMH writes about the Ganges, revered by Hindus:

Ten million Hindu pilgrims led by hundreds of ash-covered, naked holy men streamed into the sacred waters of the river Ganges on Wednesday at the world’s biggest religious festival…

Devotees assembled along a 15-kilometre stretch of the Ganges for a dip in the river that they believe cleanses them of sin and frees them from the cycle of life and rebirth.

“To bathe in the Ganges today gives me inexpressible happiness,” said 45-year-old Raj Kuntal from Himachal Pradesh, emerging from the chilly, fast-flowing water… Many took a few gulps of the holy water and filled plastic bottles to take away.

This time the SMH commissioned not laboratory analysis of the Ganges water to see if it, too, was “full of crap”. Having been there, I don’t need a chemist’s verdict, either about the crap in the Ganges - or the SMH:
===
Labor MP: the real illegals were Australia’s founders
Andrew Bolt
Young Nathan Murphy has become a Labor MP without ditching his tiresome brand of far-Left student politics - a brand that treats our founders as the truly illegitimate:

Civil wars and wars which Australia is actively engaged in around the world lead to the displacement of people, which is a consequence of war… Australia is not being flooded by asylum seekers. We take a minute number compared to other countries, and the numbers of boat arrivals are a tiny fraction of the 50 000 people who overstay their visas every year. It is worth noting that no boat arrival has been found to be a security risk to Australia. Further, the only illegal boats to have arrived in Australian waters were those that arrived in Botany Bay in 1788.

I wonder which law Murphy thinks the settlers of Sydney breached. Or which civil war in Sri Lanka is now driving boats here. Or why he knows better than ASIO in claiming none of the arrivals are security risks. Or why… but there I go, thinking Murphy thinks.
===
Alarmist models shut Europe’s air travel
Andrew Bolt
The massive shutdown of air traffic over Europe relied on computer models:

German airlines Lufthansa and Air Berlin said the decision to close much of Europe’s airspace was not based on proper testing. They said that their aircraft showed no signs of damage after flying without passengers.

”The decision to close the airspace was made exclusively as a result of data from a computer simulation at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London,” Air Berlin chief executive Joachim Hunold said.

“Not one single weather balloon has been sent up to measure how much volcanic ash is in the air.”

And whose volcanic ash models were relied upon? Why, those of the Met Office, which uses models to predict catastropic man-made warming, too.

(Thanks to reader Lazlo.)
===
Manne and the dismal rise of the neo-socialist
Andrew Bolt
Greg Lindsay coins a rather good word in discussing the latest preaching of Australia’s ”most influential public intellectual”:

In the introduction to the 1982 publication The New Conservatism in Australia edited by Robert Manne, the editor admits ‘to having no competence in economics whatsoever’. That has not stopped him from inserting himself into various debates about economic issues ever since. His dismal record was highlighted in the book Shutdown from 1992 that he co-edited, which declared that economic reform had failed in Australia and that ‘the most important contemporary example of economic success is Japan’, and, well you can guess the rest…

An outbreak of less serious commentary began with the setting up of a straw man some years back called ‘neo-liberalism’…

Of course the Global Financial Crisis gave neo-socialists of all kinds a whole new field to play on, and so they have. Professor Manne, highlighting his lack of expertise in economics once again, is back in print, this time in The Weekend Australian recently with an extract of a chapter in a new book he has edited with David McKnight. What’s regrettable about this piece is the tone Manne’s chapter exhibits… The mistake Manne and his neo-socialist friends are making is twofold....
===
Nielsen poll: Rudd’s lead now just 2 per cent
Andrew Bolt
Today’s ACNielsen poll will give Kevin Rudd kittens:

The poll found the Coalition narrowing the gap since early March, trailing Labor 49 per cent (up 2 points) to 51 per cent (down 2) in two-party terms.

That is now a real contest.
===
Rudd throws billions away for a deal
Andrew Bolt
The bribes get bigger as Kevin Rudd grows more desperate, and they go mostly to the state he thinks is most wobbly in its resistance:

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd will offer NSW a staggering $5 billion in extra health funding this morning as a final offer to Premier Kristina Keneally to sign up to national reforms.

NSW will be handed the lion’s share of an unprecedented national funding package, worth an extra $15.6 billion, under which the Commonwealth will lock in cast-iron health funding increases of 8.3 per cent a year.

It is the first time a federal government has agreed to such generous health funding increases to the states.

This is also rewarding arguably the most incompetent of the states. Victoria, which did the key reforms on its own, gets nothing like that kind of bribe.

UPDATE

Make things free, and people will come whether than need what you’re offering of not:

MORE than 2400 people turn up at NSW hospital emergency departments every day with non-urgent conditions such as sore threats to avoid paying the rising cost of visiting a GP.

The startling figures, revealed in a briefing document to NSW Cabinet last week, showed ED visits are rising at more than 10 per cent a year, or more than 10 times the rate of population growth.

Here’s something that should be able to be fixed without spending money, but saving it.

UPDATE 2

Michelle Grattan:

It was learned yesterday that during a spirited cabinet discussion about the health issue on Thursday, Mr Rudd referred to Mr Brumby as a ‘’control freak’’, a comment that was met with deathly silence by colleagues who often describe the Prime Minister in those terms. It is understood there are differences within cabinet about how the health battle is proceeding.

UPDATE 3

David Burchell nails it again - this is one more example of Seeming trumping Doing:

It’s hard to recall a public policy proposal of such moment that has been introduced with so little serious political purpose, but with such fastidious attention to political appearance, so that by now many citizens must have a mental image of the PM as a linear descendant of Mother Teresa.

Stripped of its grand phrases, the funding architecture of the National Health and Hospitals Network serves chiefly to move existing funds into other locations, so that it appears as if the federal government, rather than the states, is doing the financial heavy lifting. Likewise, the proposed local health networks amount to nothing more than convenient assemblages of local professional bossy-boots, each spruiking their particular institutions and localities, with the inevitable effect, as former Labor adviser John Deeble observed last week, that “the more affluent areas in which doctors and nurses would most like to work” are bound to become, over time, also the best resourced.

Unravel the righteous words about the importance of primary and community care, and it becomes clear that nothing much is about to change there, either. There are no specific proposals about nurturing “wellness”, or better treating the epidemic of breast cancers, or dealing with mental health more effectively. Nor is there any evident revision of the received view that treats old age as if it were a form of illness, so that the elderly are condemned to spending their autumn years under the cold fluorescent lighting of hospital waiting rooms.

The federal proposals won’t make the business of hospitals easier, by keeping people out of them. They won’t make the system fairer in any discernible way; nor, so far we can be told, will they work to restrain overall costs. They propose to revise our awkward and cumbersome state-federal division of health responsibilities, but in such a manner as to involve no extra policy work by the federal government whatever. In short, they are the perfect paradigm of political piety, devised with no purpose other than to displease as few of the major interests as possible, and involving an endless series of petty squabbles carefully pre-designed to have only one possible victor…

Looking back on Rudd’s proposals, by contrast, we will be bound to ask: was that really all there was?

(Thanks to reader CA.)
===
Would any help be enough?
Andrew Bolt
Pru Goward, the NSW opposition spokeswoman for community services, may well be right to say we don’t offer enough help to traumatised refugees to settle in.

But given the problems and the cultural chasm she describes, I wonder just how much help anyone could provide without sacrificing their own values, and whether even that best would be enough anyway:

At a recent seminar I attended in South West Sydney for the African Family Safety Project, the irresponsibility of our refugee program was forcibly brought home. Domestic violence is rife in parts of this community and it and their leadership groups are struggling, almost unaided, to cope with it…

The seminar’s main focus was with mostly Sudanese refugees who came from Africa under Australia’s Humanitarian program. In the four years from 2002-03 to 2006-07 escapees from the Sudanese civil war accounted for a quarter of our intake. They included boys who had been soldiers, girls and women who had been raped, men who had been tortured, men and boys who had fought for their lives and killed. Eighty-two per cent of these people have little or no English language. Why should we be surprised that there might be difficulties establishing them in metropolitan Blacktown, where they have been sent?…

We are talking about intensely traumatised people. Some will be silent, others will act. But there is also the culture gap. Some male participants complained about the nature of the Australian welfare system and what they saw as its preferential treatment of women. In the space of a few days these families had been transported from violent and lawless refugee camps or traditional community life in rural villages to brick veneer homes and welfare incomes in Anglo-Celtic Sydney. In Australia, welfare income is mostly given to mothers rather than fathers. Refugee women are in frequent contact with community services where men are not included and many men felt community service providers were breaking up their families by telling their wives they had the right to walk away from a marriage that made them unhappy. It was the men who were isolated and powerless, they said, and domestic violence was retaliation.

Male frustration was compounded by the generous youth allowances provided to their children once they turned 16. It meant their children could defy them (I assured them they were not alone in this) and traditional family respect was broken…

One young man pointed to a poster on the wall. “That poster is a lie. It says Australia is a multicultural country. It is not. We were not told our ways would not be respected, that there was only one rule and that was the Australian way,” he said.
===
Turn your home into a power station
Andrew Bolt
At least you’ll be able to spot the dills in your neighbourhood who are sucking up your taxes:

HOUSEHOLDERS will be allowed to build wind turbines on the roofs of suburban homes to generate green electricity under a sweeping overhaul of NSW planning laws.

The Sunday Telegraph can reveal the State Government is proposing to allow small windmills with a generating capacity of 10kW or less to be erected in residential areas, adding to solar panels as an option for domestic power generation.

A height limit of 3m above the roof line will be imposed and turbines will have to be at least 25m from neighbouring properties.

As with solar panels, home owners will be able to sell surplus power they generate to the electricity grid, protecting them from skyrocketing power prices.

Green policies at work, turning suburbs into industrial zones while costing everyone a bomb for unreliable power.

(Thanks to many astonished readers.)
===
Two years on, how did Rudd’s Ideas Summit change your life?
Andrew Bolt

Two years ago today, Australia’s 1000 ”best and brightest” - as chosen by Kevin Rudd - gathered in Canberra to tell the Rudd Government how to run the country for the next decade.

Tell us which of their ideas has made the most difference to your life.

Or any difference at all.

Or would have made a difference had Rudd bothered to listen to any of the dupes he gathered for his photo op.

In case you’ve forgotten that pivotal moment in our history, likened by Melbourne University Press boss Louise Adler to the coming of Moses, here’s a news item from the time: