Special Bonus Blog - ABC, McGeough apologise to Akerman
Piers Akerman – Thursday, June 16, 11 (08:52 pm)
In the past 24 hours both the ABC and the former Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald have apologised to Piers Akerman for remarks made on Richard Fidler’s Conversation program.
McGeough in discussion with Fidler last week claimed that Akerman had indicated that McGeough, as an Irishman, should not enter the debate about Australia becoming a republic.
This was simply untrue.
McGeough sent the following e-mail: The pleasure of being right ... is yours Piers.
But only up to a point. You see, your complaint about something I did not say provoked research that revealed a completely different error by me ...and that, I think, does warrant an apology.
I did not talk about you commenting on my accent when Fidler interviewed me last week. However, I did allege that you had questioned the propriety of me as an Irish non-Australian editing the SMH at the time of the republic debate back in 1999.
I was sure it was you, but exhaustive research has turned up only several letters to the editor of the Tele.
So here it is in caps, not the apology you wanted, but the one you have to have - PIERS, I APOLOGISE.
I’ve copied Richard Fidler in on this email, so that he can deal with it in the context of what ever accuracy policy guides his radio show.
cheers
paul
Paul McGEOUGH
Chief Correspondent
The Sydney Morning Herald
Fidler broadcast the following on his program today: Last week on the program author and journalist Paul McGeough alleged that during the republic debate of 1999, the Daily Telegraph columnist Piers Akerman had commented that Paul McGeough should exclude himself and the Sydney Morning Herald, which Paul McGeough was editing at the time, from being part of that debate, on the basis that Paul McGeough was Irish and a non-citizen. Paul McGeough has since realised that he was mistaken in his recollection and he has apologised to Piers Akerman for this incorrect assertion. The ABC apologises to Piers Akerman unreservedly for any distress these comments may have caused him.
Fidler’s comments can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/06/16/3245665.htm?site=conversations
I have never known either ABC or SMH to apologise without being churlish. Maybe I never will.
Fri 17 Jun 11 (03:22am)
Fri 17 Jun 11 (10:54am)
DD Ball,
I don’t recall either the ABC or the SMH ever having the decency to apologise before, let alone with the any degree of sincerity.
However, there may be a positive side to this development. It could mean someone in those organisations might start to realise the damage they do to the workers of Australia through the unintended consequences of their bias.
The Australian Labor Party was established to make sure the workers of Australia receive a fair go from the people who employ them. However, the people who manage to gain control of the ALP seem to have absolutely no idea what impact their actions have on the ordinary workers concerned.
The claims that AWB workers were acting as criminals has been refuted in three courts of law overseas. In Australia, the Federal Police investigated the claims in respect to Kickbacks and decided not to proceed with criminal charges against AWB workers.
Lack of evidence is not a factor in the AWB issue. Exporting would be the greatest example of a system which is based entirely on documentary evidence showing exactly what happened.
I doubt that anything short of a Royal Commission would make the people who produced the two Four Corners episodes for the ABC to confess they used a group of paid performers to portray AWB workers acting illegally.
With regard to the SMH, could anyone imagine someone like David Marr having the decency to say sorry for the damage he has done to the workers at AWB?
The sooner the Australian media gets back to providing information in a balanced fashion the better off everyone will be.
Perhaps even the value of Fairfax shares will also get back to being above par as their present share value is in line with their journalistic performance.
No refuge for PM with no promise
Piers Akerman – Thursday, June 16, 11 (06:43 pm)
IN the most significant rejection of the Gillard Labor-Green-independent minority government yet, the House of Representatives voted to condemn Julia Gillard’s Malaysian tag-and-release refugee program.
Fri 17 Jun 11 (03:24am)
Perhaps Gillard is hoping that states which go Liberal will have a hostile media promote ALP brand. But then she would have to wait a few years .. And she has promised to cut the budget $50 billion in two years.
The PM and the First Bloke’s Shed
Miranda Devine – Thursday, June 16, 11 (04:55 pm)
THE 60 Minutes profile of the Prime Minister and her partner Tim Mathieson is one of those pieces of deceptively amiable television journalism that sticks in your mind.
The First Couple seemed as awkward as anyone would in such a situation, though Charles Wooley’s homespun charm did put them at ease eventually.
It was a public relations plus in one sense. Mathieson has been kept under wraps for so long that rumours about Boganville, as The Lodge apparently has been dubbed by Kevin Rudd, threatened to embarrass everyone.
But the First Bloke came across on TV as a decent, straightforward sort of chap. His relationship with Gillard seemed natural and easy.
Most women will cut Gillard slack for her unconventional domestic life, because they understand combining a successful career with marriage and family is often an impossible task. She gets along as best she can.
So far so good. But then came the shed.
Mathieson has a very tidy shed in the grounds of The Lodge. He is patron of the Men’s Shed Association, which empowers men to express their emotions in sheds, presumably because their vile wives won’t let them into the house.
So we were treated last Sunday night to the sight of the PM standing patiently on a concrete pad outside the shed, perfectly comfortable with being barred from entry while Mathieson and Wooley and the camera-MAN strolled inside.
It was gobsmacking. Here is a woman regarded as a shining light of Australian feminism, the most senior female politician of all time.
And here she was humiliating Australian women by belittling herself. She should have railed against the sexism. She should have stalked inside in her high heels and smoked a cigarette.
The image of the Prime Minister waiting outside Tim’s shed will endure as her greatest shame.
In response to this post about Uncle Sam’s bribes paid to the government of Brazil, my friend Reuvain Borchardt (Fordham Law, ’10), as well as commenter “hamilton,” challenge my suggestion that these payments to Brazil are unconstitutional.
They might have a valid point.
My initial thought is that the U.S. Constitution does not authorize Uncle Sam to tax Americans in order to acquire cash used to buy (allegedly) desirable commercial policies from foreign governments. Would it be constitutional, for example, for Uncle Sam to subsidize the building of steel factories in Thailand if Congress determined that such factories would redound to the economic benefit of Americans?
But on second thought perhaps the Brazilian cotton bribes do, arguably, fall under the meaning of “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.”
I’m not at all sure that such payments would have been recognized by the framers as falling within the meaning of that clause. But I’m not sure that they wouldn’t.
What do you think?
Either way, of course, the fact that a majority of the members of the House (including a majority of the GOP members) voted to keep most farm subsidies in place is itself sufficient evidence that these members of Congress take seriously neither their oaths of office nor their proclamations that they are in Washington to help reduce the size and power of Uncle Sam.
Sadly but predictably the U.S. House of Representatives just refused to make meaningful cuts in farm subsidies. (See, e.g., this report in the Washington Postfrom the Associated Press: “House keeps farm subsidies, cuts food aid as it passes food and farm spending bill.“) Buried in this bad news, however, is a speck of good news: over the objection of a majority of House Republicans, that chamber voted to end the crazy year-old scheme of sending more than $12 million monthly to Brazil in order to induce the government there not to raise tariffs on U.S. exports to Brazil.
That these payments were authorized in the first place – and continue to be supported by most GOP House members – is lunacy. In no rational universe does government A raise taxes on citizens of A in order to acquire funds for use in bribing government B not to raise taxes on citizens of B.
That a majority of GOP House members voted to maintain this unsavory scheme suggests that that party, in fact, is populated chiefly by charlatans whose disregard for their oath to uphold the Constitution is matched only by their duplicity in proclaiming a wish to rein in government while pusillanimously voting to keep it galloping ahead at full speed.
(HT Andy Roth)
… from pages 36-37 of John H. Cochrane, “How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong?” Economic Affairs, June 2011 (Vol. 31):
Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and believers in efficient marketers [sic] have just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Krugman should know better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. There is nothing about ‘efficiency’ that promises ‘stability’. Stable price growth would in fact be a major violationof efficiency as it would imply easy profits.
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Months after ordering the U.S. military to commence the still-ongoing air strikes in Libya – and, hence, after disproving his initial claim that these strikes would last “days, not weeks” – Pres. Obama, as you report, informed Congress yesterday of “the administration’s view that the Libyan conflict is too limited to require authorization by Congress under the War Powers Act” (“Obama Defends Libya Intervention,” June 16).
Can I cite Pres. Obama as an exemplar if I refuse to pay taxes this year because my view is that my income is too limited to require such payment under the Internal Revenue Code?
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
383 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S NOT-EXACTLY TAX
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (05:47 am)
Julia Gillard ponders community understanding of her “no carbon tax” pledge:
“They obviously look and say: ‘Well, she didn’t say exactly the same thing in the election campaign.’ ”
Does the Prime Minister understand what “opposite” means?
The Prime Minister conceded voters had been “disturbed” by Labor’s proposed carbon tax, which will begin in July next year, and vowed before the next election to educate and convince the community through a grassroots campaign, details of which emerged yesterday with the announcement of a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign.
More precisely, it’s a $12 million taxpayer-funded grassroots campaign. Still, it’s nice that Julia and Kevin are getting along so warmly these days:
You see cheerier faces at child visitation disputes.
MINING ROCKS
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (05:28 am)
This will make you happy all day:
(Via Dianne)
SPECIES VANISHES
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (05:26 am)
The New York Times reports:
For years, warm weather in the East Village has been heralded by an influx of young, tattooed visitors carrying backpacks and bedrolls and wearing clothes so stiffened with grit that they have come to be known in the neighborhood as crusties …
But this year, they have not materialized.
Good. NYC has become appreciably cleaner in recent decades, but could always do with fewer lice hosts. Yet theTimes finds some who miss East Village’s seasonal bench rats:
“It’s like the birds aren’t migrating this year; the salmon aren’t swimming upstream,” said Chris Flash, an East Village resident who runs a local bike courier service and an underground newspaper called The Shadow. “The whole ecology of the neighborhood is out of whack.”
You bet it is. We’re in 2011 and someone still runs an underground newspaper.
Levent Gulsoy, 55, gazed toward the empty row of benches where the travelers used to gather. “That’s not a good sign,” he said. “When one species disappears, others tend to follow.”
Mr Gulsoy seems to suggest that the crusties are a component – presumably a plankton-level component – of the East Village food chain. What a delightful possibility.
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)
BATTLE OF BLAIR MOUNTAIN
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (05:20 am)
A sweetly-named West Virginia mountain is the scene of a coal showdown:
“I don’t want to ruin the entire West Virginia economy, which is based on the coal industry. That is not my goal,” a young activist said during the march. “I just don’t want to see coal mining that destroys rivers, drives away the biodiversity of such a beautiful place and also drives away other jobs that could be in place of coal mining.”
She is surprised when told that her environmental stance against coal is interpreted by local miners as an attempt to take away their jobs.
How the notion may have occurred will remain forever a mystery.
WEINER OUT
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (04:51 am)
The prominent Democrat withdraws:
Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York said Thursday he is resigning his seat in Congressdue to the fallout from his lewd online messages to women.
“I had hoped to be able to continue the work that the citizens of my district elected me to do,’’ Mr. Weiner said at a news conference in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. “Unfortunately, the distraction that I have created has made that impossible. So, today I am announcing my resignation from Congress.”
So no more congress for Weiner. Just as well he has other interests.
UPDATE. According to a number of outlets, including the Age, A Current Affair and the SMH, Weiner is a Republican. (Via Rob B.)
RENEWABLE SOURCE
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (04:41 am)
As usual, the IPCC’s sources turn out to be less than stellar:
The world’s foremost authority on climate change used a Greenpeace campaigner to help write one of its key reports, which critics say made misleading claims about renewable energy, The Independent has learnt.
They’ve used Greenpeace before. Anthony Watts reviews the latest IPCC comedy.
(Via Benny Peiser)
SITCOM IN SEATTLE
Tim Blair – Friday, June 17, 11 (03:58 am)
An SUV encounters the puddle that never ends:
Three young women escaped a sinking SUV after a direction from a rental car GPS unit sent them down a boat launch and into the Mercer Slough early Wednesday.
The driver apparently thought she was on a road while following her GPS unit just after midnight, but she was actually heading down the Sweyolocken boat launch.
“We’ve seen sitcom parodies of something like this and to actually see it is surprising,” said Lt. Eric Keenan with the Bellevue Fire Department …
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t question driving into a puddle that doesn’t seem to end,” Keenan said.
(Via R. Black)
UPDATE. For no particular reason, except that it mentions roads and is great.
JOHNS WRONGS
Tim Blair – Thursday, June 16, 11 (05:16 pm)
The opening line from John Birmingham’s Tuesday tantrum:
Deaths threats?
That’s a rare example of two errors – typographical and descriptive – in one word. And the very first word, too. This fellow bears watching; he could be shooting for a record. Later, in comments, Birmingham replied to a sceptical reader:
It’s hurts, doesn’t it, Geoff, when some of the hard rhetoric comes back at you.
John seems to have a problem with introductory typos. From now on he shall be known as Johns, author of the Blunts Instrument column at Fairfaxs.
384 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S CONFIDENCE TAX
Tim Blair – Thursday, June 16, 11 (04:47 pm)
We’re paying for this tax more than a year before it’s due:
Concern about the carbon tax appears to be undermining consumer confidence. The Westpac Melbourne Institute sentiment index slid to its lowest level in two years yesterday, hitting a low last seen in the global financial crisis. Confidence about personal family finances slumped lower than in the crisis …
“It is unusual for tax to register as so important,” the Westpac economist Matthew Hassan said.
It’s registered with Richo:
Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson says Labor will lose the next election …
“I doubt that Labor can win the next election now,’’ he told Channel 7 this morning. “I just can’t see it happening (a Labor win).”
“You get to a point when people simply stop listening.”
He said if there was an election held this Saturday, polling was so bad he doubted there would be a Labor member standing in Queensland.
Not even Kevni? At Canberra’s annual press gallery Midwinter Ball, Julia Gillard seemed amused:
The PM joked the press gallery never engaged in “group think” and said the Cate Blanchett-fronted carbon tax campaign “couldn’t have gone any better”.
Give her credit. Those lines aren’t bad. Latest to join the carbon tax resistance movement: former ACTU president and Labor MP Jennie George.
A picture of mutual loathing
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (10:01 am)
No talkies may be safer, after all. Even a sacking...:
ALMOST a year after the coup that ended his prime ministership, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were locked in a tense closed-door meeting yesterday.
Renewed tensions between the two rivals were obvious in their body language when they were later seen walking the length of the parliamentary corridor to a Cabinet meeting - both unable to look at each other or share a word…
Labor MPs confirmed the tension between the two had become fierce and it was rare for them to meet privately outside of Cabinet, let alone during the middle of a heated Question Time.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister said “Kevin and Julia had a discussion between (parliamentary) divisions as often happens and the meeting was private as many meetings are”.
One witness claimed Mr Rudd told the Prime Minister “the argument is not of that nature, and you know it” as they walked the 100m to the Cabinet room for a further meeting.
Mr Rudd was later forced to deny at a press conference that he had leadership ambitions.
“My aspiration one day is to be one of Australia’s better foreign ministers - not the best - that’s where my heart and soul lies,” he said.
Yeah, right.
UPDATE
No, this angle isn’t any better:
UPDATE
Queensland Labor agrees. Rudd is best when quiet:
The Queensland MP, who as prime minister last year cancelled all state Labor conferences, had sought to address delegates at the two-day event in Brisbane, to be opened by Julia Gillard tomorrow.
Mr Rudd’s office said the Foreign Minister intended to “talk about his portfolio”, but Labor insiders feared he intended to use his appearance to make public attacks on factional powerbrokers he blamed for his demise.
UPDATE
They are counting now:
Friday next week marks the first anniversary of his ousting by Ms Gillard and sensitivities are high. So much so rumours swept the party yesterday that a group of MPs had gathered for drinks in a colleague’s office on Wednesday night, crunched the numbers and concluded Mr Rudd would receive 11 votes out of about 100 caucus votes.
UPDATE
Rumors, rumors:
Later yesterday, there were rumours of at least two screaming matches between Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd in the past 24 hours.
In one case, a rumour ran, the pair clashed over foreign policy late yesterday, when in fact their discussion was understood to have concerned live cattle exports.
Rudd denies:
FOREIGN Minister Kevin Rudd has rejected media reports that he and PM Julia Gillard indulged in screaming matches yesterday. ”That’s just fabrication,” he told ABC Television today.
Mr Rudd said the pair talked often about various policy challenges and talks yesterday centred on Indonesia and the decision to suspend live cattle exports.
As in, why haven’t you been helping, Kevin?
All Gillard needs is a Tampa or two
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (07:18 am)
Dennis Shanahan says Julia Gillard can still win the election, and points out that other PMs have come back from worse. But, as he says, the historical analogies aren’t actually that comforting.
That’s without even factoring in that Gillard is no John Howard.
If her Malaysian deal collapses, Gillard will be laughed out of office
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (06:55 am)
I don’t think Julia Gillard could survive the collapse of another boat people plan she’s prematurely announced.
NEGOTIATIONS over the refugee swap with Malaysia are stuck on Australia’s insistence that asylum-seekers sent to Malaysia be given identity papers to ensure they are not harassed by police and that Kuala Lumpur give an explicit commitment not to send refugees back to the country they fled…
Australian and Malaysian negotiators sat down again yesterday to hammer out the final terms of their deal, which was expected to have been concluded early last week.
It is understood Malaysia has resisted key elements of the deal. Whereas Australia wants an explicit undertaking from Malaysia not to return asylum-seekers to their country of origin, Kuala Lumpur is understood to favour a more hedged commitment.
Gilard announced this deal on May 7, nearly six weeks ago. It’s still not signed.
Where’s the foreign minister, by the way? Helping out?
NBN chief admits bad communication
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (06:51 am)
Awkward:
NATIONAL Broadband Network chief executive Michael Quigley admits corruption at his former employer, Alcatel Lucent, went far deeper than the “two rogue employees” he blamed last month, and some happened on his watch.
He concedes he may have led a meeting that included the Alcatel executive later jailed for corruption in Costa Rica.
And he admits making several errors in public statements about his knowledge and responsibility for the scandal.
But Mr Quigley has emphatically denied any involvement in the corrupt practices, and defended the integrity of the internal investigation into what has been described as one of the biggest foreign corruption cases in history.
I should obey. No, rebel. No, obey
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (06:36 am)
If the ABC is to publish smears, it should at least demand the author make them internally consistent. Instead, it now charges me with both defying and obeying my paymasters, and either way I’m bad:
How interesting to see Rupert Murdoch’s mother, Dame Elisabeth, gracing the front pages of Fairfax papers, signing a letter supporting putting a price on carbon.
Her son, Rupert Murdoch has also stated he supports tackling climate change…
Mining magnate, Gina Rinehart who is opposed to the mining tax (now Australia’s wealthiest citizen) has acquired a share and board position in Network Ten… It is an unlikely coincidence that Ten recently commissioned the Bolt Report, and put one of the most vocal voices opposing action on climate change at the helm. This Sunday TV show is essentially a pastiche of Andrew Bolt’s views and interests, which mostly coincide with those of his masters.
UPDATE
The Australian yesterday tackled this very kind of criticism:
READERS of Melbourne’s The Age yesterday were provided with an amazingly stark, if unwitting, confession about how Fairfax seems to have ceased pretending to publish newspapers in favour of political pamphleteering.
A front-page article reported that a group of prominent Australians was taking a public stand in favour of pricing carbon. The group included Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the mother of the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, publisher of The Australian. The Age’s Michael Gordon wrote: “Dame Elisabeth’s stand is consistent with the stated position on climate change of her son Rupert, but out of step with coverage in his newspapers, as reflected in the front pages of flagships The Australian and Herald Sun yesterday. While The Australian splashed with a report saying a carbon tax would force eight coalmines to close and cost thousands of jobs, the Herald Sun ‘revealed’ that the carbon tax would push up the prices of Mars bars and McDonald’s.”
In those two sentences Gordon, the paper’s national editor, no less, betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of newspapers and exposed how Fairfax newspapers such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald break faith with their readers. No longer do you need to take our word for it, it is the national editor of The Age who tacitly admits Fairfax papers share with you only the information that supports their political positions…
For a newspaper to censor or deliberately avoid points of view ... because they conflict with or undermine its own position would be a fundamental breach of trust. Fairfax editors must hold their readers in such low esteem that they will only share with them information that will help shape pre-determined opinions. What a deceptive manipulation of public discourse and an insult to the readers…
The fleeting moment of frankness from The Age enlightens us to the dark heart of Fairfax, where complex debates are distilled to simple viewpoints, peddled to a deliberately misinformed readership. This is why readers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald must have been so surprised by the demotion of Peter Garrett, the demise of Kevin Rudd and the disastrous electoral performance of Julia Gillard—because editors shielded them from the preceding bad news they didn’t want their readers to know about. The decline in relevance of these papers is directly related to their surrender to advocacy journalism.
If they cannot tell the truth about even their own report…
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (06:29 am)
Henry Ergas warns you are being told falsehoods about the Gillard Government’s latest report on global warming policies:
CONTRARY to repeated assertions by the Prime Minister, the Productivity Commission did not endorse an economy-wide emissions trading scheme. Rather, its recently released report on carbon emissions policies models an ETS that applies only to the electricity sector and excludes all trade-exposed industries.
As the commission shows, current policies aimed at subsidising renewable energy incur high costs for pitifully little outcome. No surprise then that its modelling finds that scrapping those policies and imposing a carbon price of $9 a tonne on the electricity sector would cause less harm.
But that is not what the government is proposing. Despite the PC finding that “no country imposes an economy-wide tax on greenhouse gases or has in place an economy-wide ETS”, its ETS will extend beyond electricity to the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries that are at the heart of our comparative advantage. And its carbon price will be three times that the PC models.
As the commission warns, without comparable measures in competitor countries, that could merely shift output and emissions to our commercial rivals.
And yet more evidence that Ross Garnaut, the government’s global warming guru, has been gilding the green lily about China:
Take China, the world’s largest and most rapidly growing emitter, which the Garnaut report says has “pledged large reduction targets, implemented reforms that deliver on its commitments, and set sail on a global mission to dominate new opportunities”. But the PC finds China’s abatement affects barely 1 per cent of its electricity emissions, while its abatement outlays, at one-third of 1 per cent of gross domestic product, are well below Australia’s.
Moreover, the PC’s measure of net abatement takes no account of subsidies to emissions. Recent estimates place subsidies to fossil fuel use in China at about 1.4 per cent of GDP. For each dollar spent curbing emissions, China therefore spends $4 promoting them.
(Thanks to reader watty.)
Don’t argue. We insist you are a refugee
Andrew Bolt – Friday, June 17, 11 (06:13 am)
Bizarre. Salman Qanbari is a fake refugee, and claims this government won’t believe him:
Salman Qanbari sewed his mouth shut this week at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre in a desperate attempt to get the Government to send him home…
An ethnic Kurd originally from Iraq, Mr Qanbari has been shunted between detention centres at Christmas Island, Melbourne, Darwin and Sydney since arriving and says he now just wants to return to Iraq.
”They say I can’t go home because I’m a refugee who has to go to a third country,” he said. “But I just want to go. I no longer want to be locked up.”
A spokeswoman refused to say why Mr Qanbari had not been allowed to return home but defended the treatment of him.
“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant”
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 16, 11 (05:15 pm)
Future Fund boss David Murray sounds like a business leader with nothing left to fear - especially when speaking his mind about carbon dioxide, global warming and other beat ups.
And don’t get him started on the money wasted on the “stimulus”.
(Thanks to reader Richard.)
Out of control
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 16, 11 (04:37 pm)
First Julia Gillard defies the vote of the people at the last election and says she’s inflict on us the tax she promised she wouldn’t.
Now she defies the will of Paliament, too:
Parliament has voted to condemn the federal government’s refugee swap deal with Malaysia, after an unusual alliance between the Greens and Coalition.
The lower house voted 70-68 in support of a motion by Australian Greens MP Adam Bandt calling on the government to abandon the proposal immediately. The motion was backed by the Coalition.
The Senate had previously passed the same motion.
It is the first time both houses of this Parliament have voted to condemn a government policy
Labor helps itself to $12 million for a Save Gillard fund
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 16, 11 (01:22 pm)
Utterly shameless:
Climate Change Minister Greg Combet today announced plans for the campaign, which must be signed off by the multi-party climate change committee and meet government advertising guidelines… He said the campaign would proceed before the carbon tax passed through parliament “as long as it conforms with the guidelines and there is an announced policy”.
This is not advertising to explain a government program to those affected by it. It is advertising to sell a proposal to those hostile to it.
Anyone on the climate change committee who signs off on what is effectively an embezzlement of public funds has no right to call themselves independent.
UPDATE
The Independents aren’t happy:
Independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have criticised a surprise announcement from the Federal Government on a carbon price advertising campaign…
At a media conference with Mr Windsor, Mr Oakeshott said the Government’s surprise announcement was dumb.
“Essentially, at a very sensitive time in a negotiation that is complex, there is only one word for this announcement today, and that is ‘unhelpful’,” he said.
“I would strongly urge the Government to consider and reconsider their decision.”
Mr Windsor agreed the announcement was unhelpful.
“We’re being asked to be part of a process that determines the thing they’re wanting to promote, and we haven’t finished that determination,” he said.
“So it almost puts us in a position where we’re endorsing the spending of public funds on propaganda.”
((Thanks to reader Craig.)
Overland quits
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 16, 11 (01:12 pm)
The agony ends:
SIMON Overland has resigned as Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police.
No wonder:
VICTORIA Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland has accepted full responsibility for releasing misleading and inconsistent crime figures before last November’s state election.
The figures were based on “selective, incomplete, and yet to be validated data"…
“The release of quarterly crime statistics data, particularly so close to an election, was likely to be used in a political context,” Mr Brouwer said…
Police and the Labor government had claimed a 27.5 per cent cut in assaults in the Melbourne CBD, a claim that was found to be misleading.
“In the haste to release the crime statistics just before the caretaker period, a number of senior police officers and public servants involved not only ignored the warnings about the incompleteness of the data, but also failed to realise the impact such data would have, both politically and within Victoria Police,” Mr Brouwer said.
Junking humans for the planet
Andrew Bolt – Thursday, June 16, 11 (11:00 am)
There really is a totalitarian streak to the green alarmists, who’d have humans slaving for the planet, to no real purpose:
Residents in Newcastle-under-Lyme are already being forced to follow the strict new recycling regime – with households juggling nine separate bins.
The containers include a silver slopbucket for food waste, which is then tipped into a green outdoor bin for kerb-side collections, a pink bag for plastic bottles, a green bag for cardboard, and a white bag for clothing and textiles.
(Thanks to reader Ruth.)
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