Headlines Sunday 27th June 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

Sir Robert William Duff, GCMG, PC (8 May 1835 – 15 March 1895) was a Scottish Liberal Party politician.
Duff was appointed Governor of New South Wales in March 1893 and was subsequently awarded the GCMG. He reached Sydney to take up his duties on 29 May 1893. In February 1895, he became ill while visiting Hobart and returned to Government House in Sydney, where he died of multiple hepatic abscesses and septicaemia on 15 March. He was interred in Waverley Cemetery. He is the only NSW Governor to have died in Office

=== Bible Quote ===

“Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD.”- Leviticus 19:18

=== Headlines ===

A French dancer strips off atop Australia's most sacred rock, saying she put on the impromptu performance as a tribute to Aborigines and their culture and to fulfill a lifelong dream

China Vows Not to Fold to Currency Reform Pressures
China is vowing not to bow to outside pressure for more currency reform, which the United States and others say is crucial to global economic recovery.

Is Another Disaster Looming in the Gulf?
Forecasters aren't clear if Tropical Storm Alex — the first of Atlantic Hurricane season — will hurt cleanup efforts

Gov. Brewer Defends 'Drug Mule' Comments
Gov. backs comments that most illegal immigrants entering Arizona are smuggling drugs, a remark blasted by critics as racist

Ghana Knocks U.S. Out of World Cup
Ghana eliminates U.S. from the Wprld Cup for the second straight time as Asamoah Gyan scored 3 minutes into overtime, leading the team to a 2-1 victory

Gillard dumps 'Big Australia'
PRIME Minister tells voters there will be no "hurtling towards" population of 36 million. - but she keeps the ALP's death grip on big business - ed.

Hardline protesters set fire to a police car and scuffle with riot officers at the G20 World Summit in Toronto as talks begin. - They don't like Swan's policies either - ed

Aussie soccer fans robbed at gunpoint
GUNMEN tied up tourists in South African hotel after Roos match, sexually assaulting one victim.

Last-ditch appeal to find baby's mother
BEAUTIFUL pic of 12-week-old Adam for only one person - the woman who abandoned him.

The wives betrayed by disgraced DJs boss
MARK McInnes's first wife warns young women not to have office affairs with lecherous bosses.

Australia to ban ultra-skinny models
THIN models could be banished from catwalks and magazines under overhaul of fashion industry.

'No one to blame' for 12-hour traffic jam
INQUIRY says communications breakdown caused chaos but critics label report a white-wash. IT WAS a freeway traffic jam that lasted 12 hours and left dehydrating children physically sick but an official inquiry has found that nobody was to blame. Former NSW police commissioner Ken Moroney's report into the handling of the crash - involving a B-double fuel tanker at Mount White, north of Sydney, at 11.40am on April 12 - identified a breakdown in communications between key agencies as responsible for the chaos. But his report claims disgraced former roads minister David Campbell acted "within accepted ministerial norms" in his handling of the situation and RTA chief Michael Bushby acted appropriately, in response to advice provided to him on the day. Mr Bushby, who was suspended on his full pay of $1400 a day after the debacle, will now resume his role within the organisation. Mr Moroney's report says the decision by the Roads and Traffic Authority, NSW Fire Services, NSW Police and other agencies to set up separate command posts led to long delays in informing the public about the mounting traffic chaos and delayed the decision to introduce contraflow traffic arrangements to reduce the 10km line of motorists stranded in their vehicles. - Moroney often seems to be an ALP police minister when he was police chief - ed.

Bloody saga of real-life killers
THEY created one of the bloodiest periods in NSW history. Now, DK's Boys are the focus of the final of Underbelly: The Golden Mile.

World leaders condemn North Korea, Iran
GROUP of Eight nations criticise sinking of South Korean warship and call on Iran to do more to respect human rights.

Why is this six-year-old on 'no fly' list?
A TRAVEL agent tells a surprised family that their young daughter is on a list of restricted fliers.

=== Comments ===

UNDER THE SEA
Tim Blair
A post-warming novel from author Kat Falls:

Ty has lived under the ocean for his entire life. Following global warming and the rise of the seas, his family joined an underwater community in hopes of living in the new frontier of the ocean floor. But When Ty meets Gemma, a girl from “topside”, who is searching the seas for her brother, she quickly makes his life very complicated.

Those topside girls … they’re always trouble.
===
They pay these pundits to predict
Andrew Bolt
Gerard Henderson checks the form of some Fairfax pundits:

Peter FitzSimons On Why Kevin Rudd Will Prevail

It’s about the Rudd thing. I just don’t get how a bloke who had nigh on record popularity only a short time ago can so suddenly be on the nose with so many voters when, to my eyes, nothing has particularly changed, apart from the mining tax. And I know, I know, the mining magnates are saying it is the end of the world as we know it if a larger chunk of the common wealth of the country goes to the Commonwealth of Australia to pay for schools, roads and hospitals, instead of into their pockets. But why do such a broad mass of people seem to be saying that, too? Particularly when they must know that if the money doesn’t come from the likes of the magnates then it will have to come from you, me and them. My bet is that if the government sticks to its guns, the electorate will realise exactly that, and Rudd’s numbers will rise again.
[Peter FitzSimons, “The Fitz Files”, The Sun-Herald, 20 June 2010.]

That was on Sunday. The office removalists arrived at the Prime Minister’s office on Wednesday.

Josh Gordon On Why Kevin Rudd Will Decisively Win the 2010 Election

No doubt about it, making predictions about the inherently unpredictable and chaotic world of politics is a fraught business. So here goes. The fashionable view in Canberra seems to be that Rudd’s leadership is moribund. The pack has caught a whiff of blood and is closing in. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph last week even went so far as to run a story quoting some bozo who thinks (but can’t be sure) that Rudd still owes him a beer after a late night drinking bout that took place in 2005. The horror.

With so much chest thumping, it would be easy to declare - as Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt did recently - that Kevin Rudd is “finished”. But I’m not so sure. My bet is that Rudd will decisively win the next election, even if Labor does lose some skin.

[Josh Gordon, “Ringmaster’s Return”, The Sunday Age, 20 June 2010...]

At 4.30 pm on Wednesday, as the plotters were moving against Kevin Rudd, Josh Gordon appeared on the Sky News PM Agenda program and declared:

I actually took the plunge last week and sort rang every backbencher with my colleague in the Sun-Herald. And we found that there was actually very little support for a leadership spill now. I think the prevailing view was that it’d be madness to switch to Julia Gillard at the late stage in the electoral cycle…

Michelle Grattan On Why Mare Gillard Is Not Even On the Racing Track

I don’t think there is any chance of a move against Kevin Rudd. And you do not have a willing replacement and clearly there is not another horse in the field. Julia Gillard has made it clear time after time that she doesn’t want to be in some very difficult coup. And I think that if the Labor Party did go down that path it would simply intensify its problems rather than help them. There’s no quick way out of this situation.

[Michelle Grattan, The-Guardian-on-the-Yarra’s political editor, in her daily Radio National Breakfast commentary spot on Tuesday 22 June.]

Despite some over-the-top speculation in recent weeks, Kevin Rudd will fight his second election, his white-knuckled followers hanging on and hoping.

[Michelle Grattan in The Age, 23 June 2010.]

Looking forward to Gordon’s apology to me tomorrow.

UPDATE
Speaking of commentators who struggle in their alleged area of expertise, here’s Kathy Lette, wife of human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, interpreting Australian politics to the British:

Australia has its first ever woman Prime Minister — and the average Aussie male is quaking in his Ugg boots.

Why? Because Julia Gillard is not just a woman, she’s an unmarried, childless, proudly undomesticated feminist agnostic — who also happens to be shacked up with a hairdresser.

In the land of cold beer and untrammelled misogyny, this is about the worst kind of human being possible… Even worse, in the eyes of Australian manhood the new premier — who replaced Kevin Rudd after she challenged his leadership this week — is not even a proper Aussie.

Lette’s fantasy betrays not just the disdain felt by a member of the celebrity Left for what was once called the “lower classes”. It also betrays the fact that she hasn’t lived in Australia since the ‘70s.

The 1870s, I’d say, considering the staleness of her stereotypes.
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BP NEVER COMMITTED SUCH A CRIME
Tim Blair
New York Times eco-writer Andrew Revkin has written a folk song called Liberated Carbon.
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If this is how they protest, imagine how they’d rule
Andrew Bolt
How come activists wanting a kinder world are so prone to violence? Once again, it’s a G20 meeting that’s struck by the hypocrisy:

While the majority of the protesters - thought to number up to 10,000 - were peaceful, members of an anarchist group known as Black Bloc became violent, setting police cars alight and smashing store windows in a downtown shopping precinct.
===
Gillard flirts with the Right
Andrew Bolt
Julia Gillard signals a move to the right - but can she actually do it without falling over her feet?

Gillard has three critical policy challenges: how to fix the mining tax brawl without blowing the Budget; how to stop the boats; and how to fix the emissions trading embarrassment without blowing the Budget or infuriating the Greens. And there’s her presentational issue: how to dodge the blame for the unprecedented rorting of her Building the Education Revolution.

The boat people issue just reannounced itself:

A BOAT carrying 96 asylum seekers and three crew has been intercepted near Christmas Island, and been immediately seized on as a key test for Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

So let’s read the signals on where Gillard will go.

On boat people, there’s been no change of policy announced yet, but Gillard has just said this:

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has declared she does not believe in a ‘’big Australia’’, signalling a major shift in policy on the nation’s burgeoning population growth.

In her first significant policy break from the Rudd-era, Ms Gillakrd said the nation should not ‘’hurtle down the track towards a big population’’.

”I don’t support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia...”

As for emissions trading, on Channel 9 this morning Gillard said she will argue for “a price on carbon” but needs “to bring the community” with her, and will announce other things. She simply laughs off a tame question about her claim last year that “delay is denial”. She lied last year, but somehow seems excused as Tony Abbott would never be. Bottom line: the ETS is being pushed as far back on the burner as she dares without seeming a “denier”.

On the mining tax, she’s asked about the effect on the Budget of any real concession to the miners, but refuses to even discuss it. Oakes does not pursue her on this. Indeed, it seems he’s showing his gratitude to Gillard for this interview by treating her with kid gloves.

Wayne Swan at the G20 meeting has just claimed the mining tax revenue is not critical for the Budget, which suggests either that any Government offer does not include much change to the billions it wants to rake in, or that any cut in revenue will come with cuts to what was promised to voters as a consequence.

(Thanks to reader CA.)

AN ASIDE

Reader ETS is right to nail this weasel word:

Gillard has reassure disenchanted voters that she does not believe in a “big Australia”. She has consequently renamed Tony Burke’s portfolio the Ministry of “Sustainable” Population.

The key word of UN Agenda 21 is “sustainable”: “sustainable development”, “sustainable agriculture”, “sustainable communities”.

Dr Esther Charlesworth, from RMIT’s architecture and design department, says the term “sustainability” has been co-opted and subverted by Melbourne’s urban elite. “It’s been used and abused by various players in the corporate, public and government sectors to justify WHATEVER it is they happen to be doing.” (The New Times Survey, June, 2008).

British author and architect Austin Williams argues that “sustainability is a dirty word, anathema to architecture and vibrant cities.”

“To me sustainability is the first thing we have to get rid of before we can clearly have a vision of what the future could possibly be,” he tells The Age.

“In the guise of looking to the future with ambition it kills ambition … it’s giving us a low-inspirational, miserable-ist, anti-human kind of response,” he says.
===
Manne emerges to bayonet the corpse
Andrew Bolt
The Left’s Professor Robert Manne, voted the Most Influential Public Intellectual in Australia, offers a scathing critique of Kevin Rudd:

... hyperactive, controlling, hectoring and interfering… what he lacks is native political instinct ... drove those around him to near-exhaustion ... bad at delegation ... cabinet has been reduced to a rubber stamp… unpopular with his ministers and his backbenchers ... domineering… surrounded himself with advisers too obsequious or too cynical ... an unresolved tension between word and action ... distance between his words and his deeds ....systemic mismanagement ... without high-level political skills they can resemble Walter Mitty dreams…

A devastating portrayal of a catastrophically inept and mendacious Prime Minister.

Manne waited until Rudd was sacked before writing it.
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Penguins die from wrong cause; CSIRO head promoted for right one
Andrew Bolt
2008:

Experts yesterday said 400 Adelie penguin chicks have washed up dead on Brazil’s beaches after migrating 2,500 miles to avoid the rain… Dozens of migrant penguins are being treated at Rio de Janeiro’s Niterio Zoo. Biologist Erli Costa said: ”This is all due to global warming.”

2010:

The cold snap that has swept across South Africa in the first week of the World Cup has killed nearly 500 African penguin chicks, South Africa’s national parks authority said.

UPDATE

Simon McKeon has just the right credentials for the Gillard Government to appoint him our new CSIRO chairman. Sure, he’s got no scientific background at all, but he has the right attitude. For instance, he’s the kind of guy to snatch at any local quirk of the weather as evidence of global warming:

Mr McKeon recalls a rainy wind that blew regularly from the south-west across Waratah Bay, next to Wilsons Promontory… ”In the last few years, that wind has … evaporated,” Mr McKeon says.

This observation helped convince him to begin minimising carbon emissions.

And he’s dedicated himself to the politics of the utterly useless gesture:

.... his conviction has led him to become a business community ambassador for Earth Hour, advocating to businesses the value of switching off their lights for one hour at 8pm on March 29.

UPDATE 2

Claims that the IPCC quoted dodgy research to assert that 40 per cent of the Amazon was threatened by global warming have been withdrawn. Christopher Booker wonders why.

(Thanks to reader The Loaded Dog.)