David Daniel Ball likes a link.
DD Ball replied to Gandalf
Fri 03 Jun 11 (09:15am)With a $50 billion deficit budget they must go to election this year. They will not introduce cuts to surplus before next election.
On another front, I am trying to find a quote from Bob Hawke. It was to do with an address he made to the UN. I understood it was his first address to the UN after becoming PM. I understand he told a joke to the assembly. It was to do with the issue of raising money for education. So (in the joke) India held a raffle in which three prizes were to be given. On the day of the raffle, millions collected outside the Taj Mahal to hear the winners declared. Third prize was given when a ticket number was called out, and walking on the heads of his fellow countrymen, the ticket holder walked over the crowd to collect his prize of a new BMW. The second prize ticket was announced, and the ticket holder walked over the crowd to collect their prize. He was handed a cake. “A cake?” was the disappointed exclamation. “But sir, came the response of an Indian official, this cake was baked by Mother Theresa.” “# Mother Theresa said the second prize winner, I want a BMW.” “No, no no!” said the Indian official. “That is the first prize.”
I had thought I had read of that in a Piers article, but I can’t find reference to it .. and the Hawke Library can’t find a reference to him ever having addressed the UN as PM.
Fri 03 Jun 11 (09:15am)
Garnaut’s report based on humbug to support Gillard’s lie
Piers Akerman – Wednesday, June 01, 11 (10:40 am)
It has not been enough for Julia Gillard to go through an election on a lie, to maintain her fiction she now must rely on a report based on outright falsehoods.
It is a painful but obvious truth that Gillard promised before the election that there would be no carbon tax under a government she led.
She leads the government and she is now promising a carbon tax. That is the big lie in Australian politics today.
Thu 02 Jun 11 (12:07pm)
Welcome home, Piers. I think once the ALP are booted from government it will be clear sailing. In the meantime there is so much chaff that needs to be batted away. This morning on Channel 9 news they put out a report saying that Mr Abbott was going to remove tax cuts put in by the ALP. The lie being that in fact he was promising to remove the tax .. many will fall for the ALP lie. The true believers.
Brad DeLong critiques Arnold Kling’s view that the economy has a recalculation problem and says it’s all about aggregate demand:
…when it comes to business-cycles–to recessions and depressions and downturns–we don’t need to model 140 million workers, 10 million firms, and 20 million commodities: we only need to model two: (OK, four): currently-produced goods and services on the one hand, and (perhaps three types of) financial assets on the other. A business-cycle downturn comes when–for any of a number of possible reasons–there is an excess demand for financial assets and a corresponding deficient demand for currently-produced goods and services, which leads to rising inventories, falling sales, rising unemployment, falling incomes, and multiplies itself into general deficient demand for pretty much all currently-produced goods and services in the economy. The downturn comes to an end when incomes have fallen so far that households and businesses are so strapped that they cease trying to build up their stocks of financial assets, and the aggregate supply-aggregate demand balance comes to an end. The depressed state of the economy comes to an end when an excess supply of financial markets induces an excess demand for currently-produced goods and services that pushes inventories down, sales up, unemployment down, incomes up, and multiplies itself into general prosperity.
In the background the market system is trying as best as it can to find the best uses and production plans for 140 million workers, 10 million firms, and 20 million commodities given the state of aggregate demand. But that is not of the essence in understanding low capacity utilization and high unemployment. The aggregate demand shortfall is.
When you ask believers in “recalculation” what pattern of production and trade proved to be unsustainable in 2007, they answer: “building so many houses.” When you ask believers why the market economy has been unable to sort out this problem in three years, they answer with nothing–silence. When you say that OK, there were $300 billion of excess houses at the start of 2007 but now construction has been so depressed for so long that there are $1 trillion fewer of houses than trend and why isn’t the 2007 pattern of production and trade sustainable again, they answer once again with nothing–silence.
That annoys me.
It is possible to find in history economic catastrophes produced by the disruption of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade–the Bengal famine of 1942 comes immediately to mind. But there is literally no evidence at all that we have such a problem right now. Our problem right now is that demand is low because incomes are low, and incomes right now are low because demand is low, and demand is not rising because there is no excess supply of financial assets to goose people to spend more. If you want to argue that there is a disruption of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade, you need to point to such a disruption right now that is large enough to produce an 8% shortfall in spending. Nobody has. Nobody has because nobody can.
The other thing that annoys me is that this is presented as something new when it is actually something very old–and it is presented without acknowledgement of the arguments made against it in the 1930s and, indeed, in the 1840s when it was made before. Friedrich Hayek and Andrew Mellon claimed–and Mellon dragged Herbert Hoover along into policies of austerity, of tax increases and spending cuts during the Great Depression–that as a result of lax monetary policy in the 1920s the economy in 1930s had too much plant and equipment and too many workers employed making capital goods, and had to suffer from a “prolonged liquidation” in order to productively redeploy resources into the consumer goods industries where they really should be. Joseph Schumpeter cheered them on, claiming that without the boom-and-bust cycle the economy would die, for it was its “respiration.” But if Hayek were correct we should see depressions both when the economy is switching resources from capital to consumer goods and when the economy is switching resources form consumer to capital goods, and we don’t: while an economy making too little in the way of consumption goods is ripe for a downturn, an economy making too little in the way of capital goods is ripe for a boom.
There is a lot to write about here, but I want to focus on two issues raised by DeLong. The first:
When you ask believers in “recalculation” what pattern of production and trade proved to be unsustainable in 2007, they answer: “building so many houses.” When you ask believers why the market economy has been unable to sort out this problem in three years, they answer with nothing–silence. When you say that OK, there were $300 billion of excess houses at the start of 2007 but now construction has been so depressed for so long that there are $1 trillion fewer of houses than trend and why isn’t the 2007 pattern of production and trade sustainable again, they answer once again with nothing–silence.
Silence. Hmmm. (Arnold responds here.)
I’m not sure what exactly DeLong is saying with respect to Arnold’s recalculation argument. He appears to be saying that there was an excess supply of houses and that excess supply has gotten even larger. Presumably, he thinks that’s because of insufficient aggregate demand rather the challenges of creating a new pattern of sustainable specialization and trade. He presumes that Arnold has nothing to say in response. I doubt it. But let me take a shot at it. When there is excess supply of something, its price usually falls. And the price of housing has fallen since the peak. But it hasn’t fallen enough, probably, because the government has been very eager to stop the price of housing from falling. Interest rates have been kept close to zero and the government has worked very hard to keep the flow of credit going by nationalizing Fannie and Freddie and keeping them in business to provide liquidity to the housing market. That in turn has made sure that the excess supply of houses is not mopped up by eager buyers. And that means that new housing starts are going to be anemic. And that means that unemployed carpenters and electricians will remain unemployed. Some have been tempted to find a new occupation. Others are going to wait, hoping the housing market will recover. It should have recovered or at least be on the path to recovery but the government has stymied the adjustment process.
Then there is this:
Friedrich Hayek and Andrew Mellon claimed–and Mellon dragged Herbert Hoover along into policies of austerity, of tax increases and spending cuts during the Great Depression–that as a result of lax monetary policy in the 1920s the economy in 1930s had too much plant and equipment and too many workers employed making capital goods, and had to suffer from a “prolonged liquidation” in order to productively redeploy resources into the consumer goods industries where they really should be.
I don’t know anything about Mellon’s influence on Hoover. Or Hayek’s. But whatever it was, it didn’t yield spending cuts. Here are the levels of federal government spending (from here, Series Y 457-465) between 1924 and 1934 in billions of dollars
1924 $2.9
1925 $2.9
1926 $2.9
1927 $2.9
1928 $3.0
1929 $3.1
1930 $3.3
1931 $3.6
1932 $4.7
1933 $4.6
Hoover took office in March of 1929. FDR took office in March of 1933. The data on spending are fiscal years, that ended in June 30 for this period. So Hoover’s budgets are roughly 1930 through 1933. Of course you have to correct for inflation. Or deflation as the case may be. In those years it was deflation. Prices of government purchases of goods and services (from here, Table 41) fell between 1930 and 1933 by roughly 10%. So Hoover actually increased spending by over 50% in real terms.
Maybe I am misinterpreting the data. If so, I look forward to hearing from DeLong about the correct source for his claim that Hoover cut spending during the Great Depression. I would hate to be answered with silence.
396 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S SNEER TAX
Tim Blair – Saturday, June 04, 11 (06:22 am)
It isn’t a war between sustainability and destruction. It isn’t a war between science and illogic. It’s a class war.
Hilali in Iran?
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (09:43 am)
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Muslim fascist, meets a delegation from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist group linked to terrorism.
One of those delegates (left) looks exactly like Sheik Taj din al Hilali, the Egyptian born imam of Lakemba mosque and formerly Mufti of Australia. Can it be?
(Thanks to many readers.)
The fashionable new bigotry
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (09:27 am)
The attempt to equate male circumcision - as practised by many Jews and Christians - with female circumcision is already suspicious. But then there’s the anti-Semitism...:
A ballot measure to ban circumcision in San Francisco has taken a strange twist with the publication, by the measure’s sponsors, of a comic book in which an anti-circumcision superhero -– blond, buff and handsome -– battles evil Jewish characters who recall the stereotypical images of classic anti-Semitism.
“Foreskin Man” was written and created by Matthew Hess, one of the leaders behind the initiative to ban circumcision, the ritual cutting of foreskin on a baby’s penis that, in the Jewish religion, is considered central to the covenant between the Jewish people and God. Opponents consider it painful and barbaric, akin to female circumcision rites in Africa that have attracted international condemnation.
Far-fetched? Not when you check out the comic:
(Thanks to reader Bob.)
Not dying, but euthanased
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (09:20 am)
Euthanasia crusader Jack Kervorkian is dead. The US ABC notes yet more evidence that euthanasia spruikers - like our own Phillip Nitschke - have a disturbing tendency to “help” lonely or single women, many of whom are not terminally ill:
1.Most of the People Who Died Under Kevorkian’s Direction Were Not Terminally Ill
According to a December 2000 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, only 25 percent were terminally ill, and 7 percent showed no signs of physical illness at all. Thirteen percent had symptoms of clinical depression, and a disproportionate number were divorced, widowed or never married....
2. An Astounding 71 Percent of Those Who Died Under Kevorkian’s Direction Were Women
(Thanks to reader Gordon.)
Garnaut’s guarantee
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (08:54 am)
Let’s remember this claim by the Gillard Government’s global warming guru, and hold him to it:
The carbon pricing proposals that I’ve put forward will not cost any manufacturing jobs.
(Thanks to several readers.)
Bob’s Bula is back and bigger
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (08:37 am)
A DESPERATE Julia Gillard dragged out Bob Hawke on Thursday to tell us why we had to back her carbon dioxide tax.
Bad move. Seeing Hawke, even in his decline, was to be reminded what a real prime minister was like.
What’s more, Hawke also reminded us to learn from one of his worst mistakes, and to reject the green religion that makes idiots of even the wise.
Hawke was there to launch the latest scare-report of what global warming might by some remote chance do - this time, to the Kakadu National Park - if we don’t adopt a tax that won’t actually stop it.
Why Hawke? Because, Gillard explained, 20 years ago he’d made the brave decision to expand the Park to include Coronation Hill, defying exactly the scares she now faces over her tax.
As Hawke said, the Coalition and mining companies claimed then that he’d kill the mining industry and frighten away investors.
“You recognise exactly the same nonsense again,” he said.
But the nonsense we recognise again is actually the green nonsense, only this time it threatens not just one mining area, but the whole economy.
Back in 1991, it was not only the Opposition that warned Hawke that by extending the park to protect what foreign minister Gareth Evans dismissed as “clapped out buffalo land”, he’d lose us a fortune and cost local Aborigines hundreds of jobs.
MOST of Hawke’s Cabinet colleagues thought the same, with primary industry minister John Kerin warning the extension could scare off investment. Which it probably did.
What made the farce worse was the reason Hawke gave for pushing on anyway - one which confirmed suspicions that he’d grown dangerously emotional and undisciplined.
It was embarrassing to see the hard-headed reformer now side with a few Aboriginal activists who insisted that mining at Coronation Hill would anger the Aboriginal spirit Bula and visit a great sickness on the land.
Maybe there is no real Julia
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (08:21 am)
The Australian’s editorial is damning:
AS Julia Gillard approaches the first anniversary of her prime ministership, she is mired in a series of paradoxes of her own making.
Constantly trying to outline what she stands for, Ms Gillard has failed to demonstrate her beliefs and leaves the nation nonplussed. When she can utter the words, “It’s time for me to make sure the real Julia is well and truly on display”, or break a core election promise, she displays an alarming lack of authenticity. It is possible the nation has stopped listening because she has shown more pretence than conviction.
This dilemma is not the Prime Minister’s alone. It betrays a deeper identity crisis for the Labor Party itself—a life-threatening tug of war between its traditional suburban base and the green Left fringe. On Ms Gillard’s watch, the green fringe is winning, with inner-city, tertiary-educated activists and advisers dominating Labor’s policy, political and communications processes....
Ms Gillard started her politics at university and was heavily involved in the Socialist Forum, a group that included former communists and favoured death duties, wealth redistribution and shutting down US bases. She plays down this leftist background but whether she’s discussing asylum-seekers, climate change or mining taxes, it is the rhetoric of the Left, and the language of the Greens and GetUp, that falls most naturally from her tongue and to which she reverts in heated discussions. Voters look at her inconsistent words, paradoxical actions and constant attempts to articulate her values, and wonder just who is the Real Julia.
Perhaps Ms Gillard encapsulated the dilemma best in her maiden speech to parliament on Remembrance Day 1998: “The end result of this political cycle is a weary people who no longer believe what politicians say and who think the politicians saying it do not even believe it themselves.”
Quite, Prime Minister.
If they’re fighting each other, they’re not fighting crooks
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (08:11 am)
Not all the facts are known. Ashby is a compromised source. Yet I’m inclined to agree with him:
BUGGING the phones of Victoria’s departing deputy commissioner of police Ken Jones, his wife and government advisers after a complaint by chief commissioner Simon Overland was ”an appalling abuse of power” by the Office of Police Integrity, former assistant commissioner Noel Ashby alleged…
“We find now Ken Jones, after a stellar career really in England and Hong Kong, never had a whisper of a problem, suddenly finds his phone is ‘off’, his wife’s phone is ‘off’, he has to sweep his house for bugs, a government minister’s adviser’s phone is ‘off’ and all this can be hidden. It is really quite extraordinary.”
The leadership of Victoria Police seems utterly dysfunctional.
UPDATE
It seems Jones’ chats to the office of the Police Minister - a Jones ally - are the target of the investigation, which can only help to convince the Minister that Overland is way out of order:
POLICE Minister Peter Ryan’s office has been bugged by corruption busters during a secret probe.
The Office of Police Integrity listened to the work and mobile phones of one of the Deputy Premier’s most senior staff, the Herald Sun has been told.
This will also make it harder for Ryan to sack Overland without seeming he has something to hide. Yet it also seems to be further evidence why he should.
But Burnside and Le are consistent. It’s the others who deserve contempt
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (07:54 am)
The plain fact is that sending boat people to a camp we built and checked in Nauru was more civilised than this plan to dump them in Malaysia, and the scandal is that so few of the Left will yet concede it:
LABOR’S support base on border security is crumbling, with a key critic of the Howard government’s Pacific Solution calling for its partial revival in preference to Labor’s “nightmare” plan to send unaccompanied children to Malaysia.
Marion Le, a refugee lawyer, last night urged Labor to reopen the Nauru processing centre - the same facility she demanded be shut in 2005 because of concern about the treatment of asylum-seekers.
She was backed by human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, who accused Labor of failure on refugees and said asylum-seekers would receive better treatment in Nauru than Malaysia.
Meanwhile, in Western Australia, 14 state Labor MPs signed a petition condemning the plan to send unaccompanied minors to Malaysia as part of the refugee swap.
Credit to Le and Burnside. But where is the rest of the Left that so furiously damned the Pacific Solution? Were they fighting for a principle or for a side?
UPDATE
For six years, the boat arrivals had been slashed to around just three a year by John Howard. Now, having unleashed a flood of them, Labor is still floundering with its fix:
EXTREMELY vulnerable asylum seekers - including young children and victims of torture - are unlikely to be sent to Malaysia, under the terms of the controversial refugee swap expected to be sealed next week....
Although the memorandum of understanding with Malaysia appears on track to be approved by the end of next week, there is believed to be growing uncertainty about the fate of the 158 asylum-seekers intercepted by Australian authorities since the deal with Malaysia was announced on May 7....Malaysian authorities are believed to be reluctant to include boatpeople who arrived before the agreement is signed…
Sources close to the negotiation yesterday dismissed the issue of caning as a red herring. It is understood Malaysia is likely to agree to assign the right of “legal stay” to any asylum-seekers transferred under the agreement. That means they will not be subject to caning on the grounds that they are illegal aliens - the reason most asylum-seekers are caned.
However, it is understood all asylum-seekers who arrive in Australia will be subject to a fit-to-travel assessment, with “vulnerable” asylum-seekers such as children, pregnant women or victims of war and trauma likely to be exempted from transfer to Malaysia.
So bring your baby and you’ll stay.
UPDATE
Ruddock is right - and Labor has allowed pride to trump principle:
FORMER Howard government immigration minister Philip Ruddock says Labor’s Malaysian refugee swap is a “diabolical situation of its own creation”, resulting from its inability to admit the success of the Pacific solution.
Mr Ruddock, who was consistently attacked by Labor over the Howard government’s border protection policies, said the Malaysian deal was symptomatic of “false pride”.
He said Labor should have reinstated the processing of asylum-seekers on Nauru and brought back the Howard government’s temporary protection visas.
UPDATE
Age reporter Katherine Murphy kindly suggests the excuses for Labor’s silent and weaselly Left:
If you ask people with concerns why they are holding fire you will hear a couple of explanations.
First rationale: there’s not enough detail yet to see the whole transaction in its settled context.
Second rationale: the Malaysia deal allows us to do the unthinkable in the current toxic political context, boost humanitarian migration by 4000 places over four years. This significant and welcome boost for refugees might be worth a bit of internal discipline, and if by some miracle we can get it right, then we might have the beginning of a regional solution to the problem.
Third rationale: every time we talk about this issue it benefits our political opponents, so how about we just shut up, at least until shutting up becomes intolerable.
True, Murphy does summon up enough outrage to brand one MP “completely and utterly shameless”.
But that MP is Scott Morrison, the immigration spokesman of the Opposition, of course. How dare he seem more humane than Labor?
Obama leads, and Gillard should follow
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (07:47 am)
Bravo, Obama. Let’s now hope Australia does the same, only this time well ahead of the summit, to make a strong point:
THE United States will not participate in the Durban III UN summit on racism in September this year, which commemorates ten years since the controversial 2001 Durban Declaration conference, officials confirmed overnight.
“We will not participate in the Durban commemoration. In December, we voted against the resolution establishing this event because we believe the Durban process includes displays of intolerance and anti-Semitism, and we don’t want to see that commemorated,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.
President Barack Obama’s administration informed lawmakers of the decision earlier this week, joining Canada and Israel in boycotting the event.
But what does it say about the corruption of the UN’s professed values that its anti-racism conferences could promote anti-Semitism?
Oprah finds a faceless love
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (07:41 am)
IN HER teary goodbye to television, Oprah Winfrey showed that not even her immense success could make everything better.
The damage is long done, with the rewards only a consolation. Although, yes, a big one.
Winfrey’s farewell speech to her audience last week showed that she, like so many successful people, was inspired to great deeds by a damaged childhood - a goad whose hurt never quite dulls.
Here’s how she put it, crying even now at the memory of what she’d gone through, 40 years before:
“It is no coincidence that a lonely little girl, who felt not a lot of love, even though my parents and grandparents did the best they could, it is no coincidence that I grew up to feel a genuine kindness, affection, trust and validation from millions of you all over the world.”
Two things shout out from that tribute to her audience. The first is the remembered pain of love denied, a pain still with her.
The second is that the love she sought so frantically to replace it with came largely from faceless millions she can and will never know.
Winfrey’s poignant description of her youth barely hints at what a highly intelligent and deeply sensitive girl had gone through.
She was handpassed between her grandmother and her separated parents, and was sexually abused by a relative from the age of nine. As a teenager she sold sex for favours and at 14 was pregnant. Her baby died after just two weeks.
For many children, it was the kind of childhood that damns them forever to a life in some self-pitying culture of failure.
For some, though, it works as an angry taunt to try even harder, to work even more furiously for approval, admiration, respect - anything that seems close to love. And to seek that affirmation from a distant world, rather than trust it to come from someone close.
It’s true, we also get many high-achievers who seem to have been floated into the world on love. Former prime minister Bob Hawke, for instance, was adored from his childhood on, giving him a confidence you can’t fake.
But think how many other politicians have great, gaping holes where a parent and their love should be.
Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd lost his father early. Former Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was abandoned by his mother.
US President Barack Obama’s father walked out on his son, who was later left with his grandparents by his mother. US president Bill Clinton had a feckless dad who died even before he was born.
Or look elsewhere. Media star Kyle Sandilands says he was thrown out of home by both his divorced parents at 15.
Billionaire Kerry Stokes was not just adopted, but at 15 found his new parents had taken off without him. Even Kerry Packer seemed driven to prove himself to a harsh father, while Lowitja O’Donoghue, who became our top Aboriginal bureaucrat, was dumped in a home by her Irish father, and was never visited by her Aboriginal mother.
Or take some of our greatest writers. Charles Dickens wrote like fury about children betrayed by their parents, having himself been left as a boy in a factory. Patrick White and George Orwell were packed off to boarding schools that they hated.
I’ve heard so many such stories that I now warn my eldest son that he’s too loved and too happy to be successful. Successful like Winfrey, I mean.
Makes all the difference when you’re threatening to kill
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, June 04, 11 (12:07 am)
What made the media and Labor forgive Labor Foreign Minister Gareth Evans is that he didn’t cross the line by adding “meow”:
Senator GARETH EVANS —I think the risk Senator Bishop runs, if I might put it gently, is not that I will ever throw anything at her, but that one of these days I will quietly, deliberately walk across the chamber and garrotte her. That is the problem she confronts; not my throwing anything at her.
(Senate Hansard, Wednesday, 11 November 1992, Page: 2798. Thanks to reader Victoria 3220.)
Henry proves the Treasury is politicised: Stone
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 03, 11 (08:05 pm)
Former Treasury secretary John Stone:
Dr Ken Henry’s appointment as a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister marks a clear watershed in the role and status of the Commonwealth Public Service.
Dr Henry, who resigned as Secretary to the Treasury last December, is entitled to take whatever job he (properly) chooses. However, the choice he has now made means that there can no longer be any shadow of doubt as to the politicization of his former role during his tenure of it.
For years now Dr Henry’s behaviour as Secretary to the Treasury has come under increasing public scrutiny. Throughout, and despite my own growing doubts, I have refrained from any public criticism of him. Indeed, in a March, 2008 Quadrant article I went out of my way to criticize his treatment by the Howard Government over a particular incident in May, 2007. (I have since come to think that the Government was right, and I was in error).
My reluctance, until now, to criticize Dr Henry (and certain other Treasury officers, such as his successor, Dr Martin Parkinson) stemmed from my deeply held belief that the Treasury is a great national institution – an institution in whose intellectual integrity (and hence, political detachment) it is imperative that we be able to have faith. Sadly, I can no longer do so on either count.
In recent days another notable Australian, Professor Ross Garnaut, has also shed all semblance of political impartiality in his intellectually laughable, but irremediably politically tainted, final report to the Prime Minister on “global warming” and the proposed tax on carbon dioxide emissions. In the process, he has finally completed his own move from the role of respected professional economist to that of political hack.
These basically related developments have not come to pass overnight. They have been, under successive governments, some 35 years in the making, and Australia today is a poorer nation as a consequence.
(An edited version of this letter appeared in The Australian.)
Bearly sane
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 03, 11 (07:49 pm)
Let me understand this. To warn us to cut our emissions, global warmists flew a huge block of ice by gassy jet from Britain to Australia?
If you want to see Sydney’s newest endangered animal you’d better hurry - it’s melting rapidly.
The two-metre polar bear has been carved from a 10-tonne block of ice outside Customs House at Circular Quay.
The block was frozen around a bronze skeleton in Britain before being sent to Australia where it was lifted by crane into Customs House Square.
These people are mad.
(Thanks to reader Tamas.)
Shameful hypocrites
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 03, 11 (11:55 am)
The excuses are pathetic:
THE Labor Left has declined to criticise Australia’s refugee swap with Malaysia, as left-leaning activist group GetUp! ruled out a campaign against the deal.
Amid revelations that the words “human rights” are absent from a draft agreement, Left faction leader Stephen Jones said it was too early to pass judgment on the deal’s humanitarian outcomes.
The draft deal would also allow unaccompanied minors to be sent to Malaysia - which canes asylum-seekers - and give the country a right of veto on which asylum-seekers it takes…
GetUp! said it would not campaign against the swap deal because to do so would ”play into the government’s hands”.
At least Julian Burnside is consistent:
Mr Burnside, a prominent human rights lawyer, said Labor should be ashamed of itself for the “scandalous” Malaysian deal.
“In most ways this is as bad as the Pacific solution and in one way it is worse because we know Malaysia has a bad track record in its treatment of asylum-seekers,” he said.
If the price of a dog is the bluebell, I’ll choose Ralf
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 03, 11 (10:29 am)
The measure of intellectuals should be to imagine them with power over you:
Outspoken Australian feminist Germaine Greer has launched a stinging attack on domestic dogs, blaming them for the ruination of a protected perennial flower, the English bluebell.
Addressing Britain’s Hay Festival on Thursday, the 72-year-old Melbourne-born academic who owns a patch of land covered in the plant that flowers in spring, pointed the finger at toxic dog poo for the plant’s scarcity.
”If you love your bluebells, kill your dog,” said Greer dramatically…
1 comment:
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