BID FOR BOTH
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (04:18 pm)
Among items being auctioned tonight at a fundraiser for the family of Sydney crime reporter Les Kennedy, who died earlier today after a battle with cancer:
$250,000 worth of legal representation for anyone accused of murder.
And:
“Footy with Fitzy” - join Peter FitzSimons for box seats at the rugby.
GLOOTING IN GLONDON
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (07:01 am)
Speaking on The Drum, former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh reveals a thus-far unknown cause of London’s riots:
Recently the police have lost the moral high ground in London because of the Murdoch thing …
Give Haigh enough time and he’ll probably link the riots to climate change denial. Interestingly, despite his acute awareness of the motivation behind Britain’s fire children and his general predictions of riots everywhere, Haigh seemed unaware of recent rioting in Paris. Co-panellist Fran Kelly had to inform him about the destructive activities ofcar-b-q “youths” (yes, she really did use that word). Haigh continued:
I don’t think these people are criminals. I think these are people that are hugely disadvantaged … were the kids in Soweto criminals when they took on the South African government?
Justice now! End apartheid in Birmingham! Allow Liverpool to vote! And stop money being given to Asian street children:
The owner of the fancy dress shop torched in Clapham Junction last night is talking to the BBC. He says a lot of the profits from the shop, Party Superstore, went to a charity to help street children in Asia.
I prefer Fran’s analysis, at 3:20:
For a lot of people, this is a chance to gloot.
Readers are invited to supply a definition for this brilliant new word.
UPDATE. Haigh’s friendly little justice achievers don’t like Mazdas. Rage against the Miata!
UPDATE II. The SMH decides that 24-year-old riot apologist Laurie Penny is the authentic voice of London youth:
Violence is rarely mindless.
Oh, sweetheart. Tell it to the elderly man fighting for his life after being set upon by goons who’d set a bin alight. Or to the fellow who was bashed and robbed by violent thieves. Total intellectuals, they are.
The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.
The politics of this are located entirely within Laurie’s tiny pointed head. By the way, the SMH is currently promoting this piece – sourced from Penny’s blog – on the front page of its website. Media Watch may wish to ask some questions.
A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost 10 times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
“Civil unrest”? These lawless idiots are destroying their own communities. Two hundred years ago they’d have been transported to Australia. Now, however, they’re stuck in the incinerated remains of their own squalid British hell-pits.Sucked in, as the saying goes.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all.
Except anything worthwhile. With this piece, the SMH has sunk to its lowest point since 2001.
UPDATE III. The Wall Street Journal reports:
In the north London neighborhood of Dalston, rioters were held in check Monday night—but not by the police.
Hundreds of Turkish and Kurdish men, many armed with broken billiard cues, poured onto the streetsto protect their businesses and homes from the kind of mayhem that was laying waste to other parts of London.
If we follow Bruce Haigh’s logic, these defiant shopkeepers are equivalent to the apartheid-era South African government and the gangs who are attacking them aren’t criminals. Locals aren’t backing down:
In some instances, skirmishes turned violent. “The police wanted to arrest one of my friends because he punched some of the guys,” said a waiter at the Somine restaurant. “We didn’t let them.”
Good.
LOOK DOWN, STUPIDS
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:46 am)
Back in March, only Kim Beazley could tell in which direction things were headed:
(Via HuffPo and Holly B.)
THRILL OF VICTORY, SHAME OF THE FEET
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:42 am)
One million dollars worth of rugby league talent in $6 worth of footwear:
Roosters players Todd Carney, Nate Myles and Frank-Paul Nu’uausala depart Sydney’s Judgement Bar at 2am. Carney’s contract is apparently on the line over this. Must be something to do with the venue. The last time I was in the Judgement Bar at 2am, I quit my job at the Bulletin later that day.
UPDATE. Let us praise well-dressed sportsmen.
SCHELLNHUBER NOOSENHORROR
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:39 am)
Via RWDB, failed Greens candidate Clive Hamilton’s latest panic attack:
Anti-tax populism now verges on extremist violence. At a public lecture on 12 July in Melbourne by eminent German climate scientist Hans Schellnhuber, a protester from a far-right “citizens group” brandished a noose. The urbane Schellnhuber was shaken and left the country with this warning to fellow climate scientists: “Some day some madman will draw a pistol and shoot you. It will happen - to me or somebody else. I’m pretty sure about that.”
Brandished a noose, you say? Never saw that before in Australia. Incidentally, the noose nut was a LaRouche moron whose horrifying “threat” ended when he was escorted from the event without resistance.
IGNITED KINGDOM
Tim Blair – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (04:08 am)
This building, set ablaze by London’s freewheeling informal shoppers, was built in 1871:
So it has survived the Fenian dynamite bombings of the 1880s, World War I zeppelin attacks, the Blitz, IRA terrorism and the slaughter of 52 people by Islamic psychopaths in 2005. But it was brought down by a new generation of incendiary urban scum:
Here’s one of the looters, caught inside an electronics shop where he was advancing social justice issues:
Click for further images from an extraordinary photo gallery.
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Eugene Robinson blames the S&P’s downgrading of Uncle Sam’s credit on the protracted refusal (until the very end) by Uncle Sam – a licentious borrower – to borrow even more (“A downgrade’s GOP fingerprints,” August 9). Mr. Robinson scolds, “If you threaten not to pay your bills, people will – and should – take you seriously.”
Why is the first remotely serious effort in ages to oblige government not to borrow beyond a certain limit portrayed as fiscal imprudence?
Asked differently, why would creditors be spooked by a debtor’s ‘threat’ to honor his vow to keep his debt from growing? Creditors, it seems, wouldapplaud the keeping of such a vow.
The downgrade is far more plausibly a consequence of Uncle Sam breaking that vow – and doing so in a way that reveals his cowardly refusal, at the end of the day, to address his addiction to spending greater and greater sums of money now and passing the bills on to taxpayers later.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Sunday Age given the question it would hate to answer
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (03:45 pm)
As I reported on Monday:
It’s a chance you’ve sure grabbed, as the Sunday Age now reports through gritted teeth:The editor of the fiercely warmist Sunday Age offers you an opportunity:
Ever complained about media coverage of climate change in the media? Here’s your chance to change it.
The hundreds of questions already submitted to The Sunday Age’s Climate Agenda cover plenty of ground — from teasing out the science to asking about the real world impact of climate change and the Government’s policy, to criticising media coverage of global warming.
The newspaper has teamed with Melbourne-based group OurSay to enable people to post questions they wanted answered on climate change, and to vote for other people’s questions. Voting ends on September 2 and The Sunday Age has commited to reporting on the 10 most popular questions.
The top question so far, with more than 230 votes, listed by Jason Fong soon after the project opened on Sunday, asks: ‘’The very point of Australia’s carbon tax is to reduce global warming. How much will reducing 5 per cent of Australia’s around 1.5 per cent contribution of global CO2 emissions reduce global temperature by?‘’
But you can tell that’s not the question the Sunday Age wants, because the headline to this report curiously asks another:
Who is funding climate change sceptics?
So be warned that if there is any way for the paper and its gaggle of Leftist allies to knock off Jason’s question, it will find one. As the paper says:
...the top questions might not survive the voting process, which has more than three weeks to run
I don’t think we should let them off the hook. If you agree, vote here.
(Thanks to reader Brendan.)
I am grateful for Jason’s posting. I never look at the Age and would never have known about the possibility had he not posted it. It allows 7 votes for each issue. I suggest giving your 7 to Jason’s question. I would also like support on my issue to do with Hamidur Rahman. If you feel so moved, please vote there too.
Wed 10 Aug 11 (04:05pm)
Jews seen at riots
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (01:50 pm)
Only one ethnic or religious group involved in London’s riots was singled out for mention by the otherwise fashionably blind Guardian’s reporter - and it’s the only one the Left feels licensed to vilify:
The make-up of the rioters was racially mixed. Most were men or boys, some apparently as young as 10….But families and other local residents, including some from Tottenham’s Hasidic Jewish community, also gathered to watch and jeer at police.
That paragraph has since been modified, no doubt after a flood of complaints:
But families and other local residents representative of the area – black, Asian and white, including some from Tottenham’s Hasidic Jewish community – also gathered to watch and jeer at police.
And there now appears this postscript:
• This article was amended 9 August 2011. A description of onlookers in a Tottenham crowd has been expanded to give details of the main groups observed by the reporter.
(Thanks to reader Bob.)
On the danger of always Doing Something
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (01:20 pm)
Excellent point by Rowan Dean:
Commentators, the Prime Minister and numerous cabinet ministers have criticised Tony Abbott for his ‘’mindless negativity’’. But could it be that ‘’mindless positivity’’ is even worse?
From indigenous welfare to climate change, mindless positivity is the political strategy that believes doing anything is better than doing nothing and places a premium on highly visible actions first, and complicated questions later (such as ‘’is this thing actually going to work?’’)
(Thanks to reader James.)
We’re just showing we can do what we want
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (12:55 pm)
The authentic voices of lazy, envious, self-absorbed morons with a monstrous sense of entitlement.
UPDATE
Former Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh sounds like a moron, too:
Recently the police have lost the moral high ground in London because of the Murdoch thing …
Feel free to add in comments below the most moronic justification you’ve heard given for London’s feral revolt.
CSIRO pays for praise
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (12:01 pm)
The CSIRO, notorious for its warming alarmism, is effectively bribing journalists to praise it:
CSIRO Medal for Journalists - Enter Now!
For the first time journalists will be acknowledged and celebrated alongside CSIRO’s scientists and researchers at the organisation’s prestigious in-house award ceremony.One award, a travel grant of $5000, will be given by a CSIRO appointed judging panel.
This award encourages and showcases exceptional reporting that promotes awareness of science and its impact to the Australian community.
This year an inaugural award for journalists will acknowledge their role of communicating science in ways that help Australians to engage with science…
The applicant must submit work which demonstrates how:
• it promoted the impact of CSIRO’s science performance
• they have effectively communicated the work of a CSIRO employee and or their partners
• they highlighted the significance of the work to the local or the broader community
• they communicated the benefits to individuals, industry or society.
Let’s see which shameless journalist seeks its cash, and for what.
UPDATE
The CSIRO finds it’s easier to indocttrinate children that to fool their parents:
AUSTRALIAN kids are clashing with their parents over the importance of climate change, a survey has found.The survey, by research groups Bayer and the CSIRO, found one in three families disagree on the importance of climate change with one in five parents saying they didn’t believe in climate change.
“It is encouraging to see that children are taking what they’ve learned in the classroom and using it to educate their parents on how to reduce their carbon footprint,” Peta Ashworth, from the CSIRO’s Science into Society Group, said today.
“When it comes to young Australians and their knowledge of the environment, it is clear the work done in schools is creating some healthy debates about sustainability and being green at home.”
Usually when adults disagree with children, you’d expect the older to be wiser. Why does the CSIRO assume the opposite?
(Thanks to reader John.)
Now Turkish abbatoirs accused… but the Four Corners footage is questioned
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (10:57 am)
This could get very ugly. No wonder Joe Ludwig is scrambling:
Animals Australia has just completed an initial investigation of Turkish abattoirs, where about 8 per cent of Australia’s live cattle exports end up.
The animal welfare group said it told Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig about the footage yesterday and that it would be handing it over the next day, rather than making it public…
But rather than keep it quiet, the Minister chose to reply publicly, urging the group to deliver the footage immediately - a move which puzzled the animal group.
But Liberal Senator Chris Back today he claims he’s been told that a taxi driver employed by Animals Australia paid slaughtermen to kill two of the cattle shown by Four Corners being abused and brutally slaughtered. He says Animals Australia assured him it had nothing to do with the payments.
He says the driver was paid 150,000 rupiah. “The (abbatoir) worker had since been ostracised by his community.” The slaughterman filmed has been bashed, Black said, and his wife raped in retribution.
Back says he has not spoken to the worker (the driver?) himself, but to a third party who had.
The result of the Four Corners’ report and the Government’s overreaction was the “worst man-made disaster” to hit the Top End.
Back gets very hostile questioning from the media pack. Animals Australia’s Lyn White gets much gentler questioning, with one journalist asking her to comment on Back’s “rant”.
White says the payments, if made, were not made by a driver but a local animal rights advocate. She knows nothing about any payments, and denies that Animals Australia did any such thing. She does not know of any retribution.
“No payments were made.”
UPDATE
I’d have thought the allegations could have been checked out by now:
An Indonesian language website, ‘Detik Finance’ raised claims that slaughtermen at the abattoirs had been paid Rp 50,000 (equal to $5.52 Australian), quoting the vice chairman of the North Sumatra Cow and Buffalo Indonesian Cattlemen Association Elianor Sembiring.
The article dated June 5 appears to have been the source of rumours about payments that circulated in Darwin and Canberra shortly after ‘A Bloody Business’ was broadcast. It was translated into English and posted on the web on Thursday.
The original story, translated:
Slaughtermen received Rp 50,000 each for Australian cattle cruelty video
Following the cattle cruelty issue, the head of North Sumatra - Cow and Buffalo Indonesian Cattlemen Association (PPSKI) found that this video is actually a made up story created by the ABC TV.Elianor Sembiring, vice chairman of North Sumatra DPD PPSKI, said that she has asked to the slaughtermen in Binjai abattoir and she still could not understand what is the objective of this attempt. She also added that she got this information after conducting investigation to the three abattoirs in North Sumatra. “A slaughtermen was being paid, there were 3 of them. The ‘bule’ (foreigners) came there themselves, so the slaughtermen showed their ‘actions’”, Elianor said.
Elianor mentioned that they will form an investigation team that will also cooperate with police department. She also said that this issue has affected the total of cattle killed in North Sumatra. The decrease reaches up to 45%.
Messenger shot. Then London burned
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (09:53 am)
Mr Heath last night dismissed Mr Enoch Powell from the Shadow Cabinet. It became clear that the members of Mr Heath’s Shadow Cabinet were unanimous that Mr Powell would have to go. Several Front Bench members let it be known that they would resign if Mr Powell remained. Two of the leading figures in the drama appear to have been Mr Maudling, deputy leader of the party, and Mr Hogg, chief home affairs spokesman. Both are understood to have been appalled by Mr Powell’s inflammatory speech....
A statement issued by Mr Heath said: “I have told Mr Powell that I consider the speech he made in Birmingham yesterday to have been racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions. This is unacceptable from one of the leaders of the Conservative Party."…
But there is no doubt that a major factor in making up Mr Heath’s mind was the certainty of a further 24 hours of unfavourable press comment - even from normally Conservative newspapers.
The consequence of the consequence:
War declared:
UPDATE
Brendan O’Neill suggests another deadly contribution:
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs.
The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit.
The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain “mentally fit”, has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.
UPDATE
Reader JH:
On the Drum with Annabel Crabb, Bruce Haigh doesn’t think the rioters are rioters, but are instead poor disadvantaged protesters rising up against oppression like the “youth of Soweto”.....
Fran Kelly was desperately trying to say the same thing, but didn’t quite have the guts to open her mouth and spew her mind..... Annabel looked a little startled when Haigh stated that he didn’t think that people burning, looting and bashing were criminals or culpable....
These people are bizarre]...... Of course he finishes by saying he doesn’t condone it.... LoL… But he just spent all that time saying he doesn’t think they’re criminals. Go figure that logic
(Thanks to reader CA.)
UPDATE
On it goes:
UPDATE
Max Hastings on the loosening controls over the underclass:
Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.
But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.
This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.
It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.
A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
UPDATE
Faces of the rioters.
UPDATE
Tim Blair on the astonishing excuses being made for the rioters on the ABC and in the Sydney Morning Herald.
UPDATE
A Denise DiPasquale and Edward Glaeser 1996 paper on riots:
We examine the causes of rioting using international data, evidence from the race riots in the 1960s in the U.S., and Census data from Los Angeles, 1990. We find some support for the notions that the opportunity cost of time and the potential costs of punishment influence the incidence and intensity of riots. Beyond these individual costs and benefits, community structure matters. In our results, ethnic diversity seems a significant determinant of rioting, while we find little evidence that poverty in the community matters.
Trust and a sense of community are criticial. You don’t destroy what you think is yours. And you don’t think it’s yours if many strangers have a share:
Neighbourhood-level analysis also throws up a startling finding: trust is lower in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Residents of multiracial neighbourhoods are more likely to agree that “you can’t be too careful in dealing with most Australians”. In particular, neighbourhoods where many languages are spoken tend to have lower levels of trust, suggesting that the main issue may be whether people can communicate effectively with those living nearby. The effect of diversity operates on immigrants and locals alike. In more linguistically diverse suburbs, both foreign-born and Australian-born respondents are less inclined to trust those around them.
The negative relationship between trust and ethnic diversity is not unique to Australia. Separate studies looking at the US, Britain, India, Kenya and Pakistan have shown that diversity is associated with lower levels of trust and less investment in shared resources. In the US, work by Alberto Alesina and Eliana La Ferrara has produced very similar results to my own: holding constant a raft of other factors, US cities that are more diverse tend to be less trusting. Other research has reached similar conclusions.
(Thanks to reader Immanuel.)
Creating one underclass, and importing another
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (07:16 am)
BRITAIN’S riots show what happens when we underestimate the underclass. Or when we even more stupidly import one.
Three days of arson, looting and violence started, not surprisingly, in Tottenham, coyly described as “very diverse”. That means it has a large population of people of African and Caribbean descent, and is poor, crime-riddled and sullen.
This time the flashpoint was the shooting by police of Mark Duggan, which led family, friends and locals to protest outside a police station.
There they were joined by yobs summoned by SMS and Twitter, the technology of the mob.
Duggan actually best symbolised fault lines which have yawed open in Britain. He was black, although barely a single report dared say so, so irresponsibly timid has been the reporting.
He had three children with his girlfriend and another with someone else. Thus does the underclass ape the destructive freedoms too lightly flaunted by the more monied.
And he’d the adopted the culture that makes a rabble puffed with pride. He was a crook with a gun, a nightclubber who gave a finger to the camera. He was trash, blinged as success.
Yet to the mob at the police station he was a martyr, allegedly “executed” by a police force seen as an invading army, yet only too eager to apologise for its largely invented “racism”.
And it was on. Over the next three days, the riots spread over London, and on to Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. And they spread to tribes of every colour, as ferals celebrated the freedom to dominate and to steal.
One video I’ve seen shows a black man gently helping a badly bleeding Asian to his feet, so a white thug could zip open his backpack and steal everything in it.
Animals. Just animals in a mad pack.
We’re now told that this is not a “race riot” like all those others Britain has suffered. Yet race may indeed be a factor, not least for adding to the bonfire—and for helping to make the born-right-there trash feel even more unmoored in their own country
Why they dodge these debates
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (07:07 am)
Janet Albrechtsen on the results of last week’s debate in Sydney between sceptics and warmists. No wonder Tim Flannery didn’t dare front.
Labor admits its policies kill boat people
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:41 am)
BEGGING Bob Brown’s pardon, but may I at last discuss the dead of Christmas Island without the Greens leader again demanding I resign?
You do remember those 50 or so people who drowned last December, don’t you, Bob?
You know, the boat people - some just children - whose wooden vessel smashed into the rocks?
I’d hate to make you cross by again pointing out the Gillard Government has blood on its hands.
But, Bob, now even the Government itself buys my argument, and last week even released more evidence of its guilt.
Too late, of course. In December I wrote that Prime Minister Julia Gillard should have seen the Christmas Island tragedy coming, given up to 170 boat people had already been lured to their deaths by Labor’s reckless policies.
But how you raged, Bob, at the truth being told: “Andrew Bolt’s call, while bodies were still in the ocean, for Julia Gillard’s resignation ... lacked human decency. He should resign.”
But maybe it’s time at last for our talk, Bob.
See, I heard Immigration Minister Chris Bowen on Monday offer a familiar defence of his policy to send 800 boat people to Malaysia under the people-swap deal he signed a fortnight ago.
Let’s ignore the pigs’ breakfast the Government has made of this - announcing a deal 11 weeks before signing it, in which time more than 500 more boat people arrived.
Ignore also that the Government seems not to have figured activists would fight its swap in court.
Ignore that it’s already agreed to take 4000 refugees from Malaysia even if it never manages to send one of the 800 boat people it plans to swap in return.
Such incompetence is what we’ve learnt to expect from this lot.
Let’s focus instead on the excuse Bowen now gives for this people swap.
“Stopping people smugglers selling passage to Australia on leaky boats like the one which smashed against the rocks at Christmas Island last December remains important,” he insisted on Monday, after the High Court granted a temporary injunction to stop him sending back any of the 105 boat people who’ve arrived since that Malaysian deal was signed.
Bowen has been explicit - the Government must change its laws to stop luring boat people to their deaths.
Boris heckled
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:35 am)
London Mayor Boris Johnson gets heckled about his holiday and the lack of police protection. But he’s right to tackle the man at the end who seeks to blame the police for the rioting.
Now, children, here is why Labor is the best thing ever
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:30 am)
I thought Noni Hazelhurst did Playschool just because she had a particular talent for talking to children. Now it’s clear she just has a habit of talking to everyone as if they were children, needing only Noni to teach them how to vote Labor.
Labor good.
Liberals bad.
(Thanks to reader Stu.)
UPDATE
The Australian gives Richo and Noni a little reality check:
ABC1’s Q&A on Monday:
GRAHAM Richardson: It has worried me now for some time, particularly on radio, that I hear her referred to constantly as “Julia”. No one ever referred to John Howard as John or Johnny.Noni Hazlehurst: No.
Richardson: Everyone always said “Prime Minister”.
Hazlehurst: Not “Kevin”.
Richardson: And, yes, I do think it’s because we haven’t had a woman prime minister before. I think all those people who have been doing it ought to think long and hard about whether they really want the office of prime minister to be denigrated in any way, shape or form.
Parliament, September 30, 1984:
PAUL Keating: For five years Little Johnny Howard was up to his proverbial --
Mr Speaker: Order! The honourable member is imputing an improper motive there.
Anthony Albanese in parliament April 12, 2000:
IN 50 years’ time children will be read bedtime stories about Little Johnny Howard, who stole from the poor to give to the rich.
Mark Latham in parliament, October 15, 1996:
I REMEMBER how the Australian people in the 1980s got to know him as “Little Johnny Howard”. They are starting to recognise that . . . he is “Little Johnny Coward”.
Tom Switzer in The Howard Era:
[JOHN Howard] was called a “fool” (Michael Leunig), an “unflushable turd” (Mungo MacCallum), a “scheming, mendacious little man” (Alan Ramsey), who silenced dissent (Clive Hamilton), corrupted the public debate (David Marr) and used right-wing religious activists to indoctrinate the nation (Marion Maddox). He was also “far and away the worst prime minister in living memory” (Phillip Adams) who had a “pre-fascist fetish to attack minorities” (Margo Kingston). Under his government, Australia headed towards an “increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the political culture” (Robert Manne), became “a backwater, a racist and inward-looking country” (Greg Barns) and was “condemned at the court of world opinion as callous and inhumane” (Sun-Herald, Sydney).
And thus does Gillard’s tax make liars of them all
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:26 am)
Taxing credibility in NSW:
One Labor MP said yesterday it seemed Mr Robertson had misled caucus after he attempted to hose down his previous comments.
The Labor leader, who does not deny telling caucus on Monday that MPs would “never hear me say I support a carbon tax”, ... said yesterday: “I support the position the Prime Minister is out there advocating, and that is putting a price on carbon, a significant economic reform that we are seeing being put in place by the federal government. I support a Prime Minister who is doing something about reducing carbon emissions and is putting a price on carbon.”
(Thanks to reaer the great Waisuli.)
Cut the debt
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:19 am)
Warwick McKibbin, former Reserve Bank board member, says it’s time Labor stopped thinking its huge spending saved us. Keynesian economics is a bust:
Australia is now likely to be hit with a second global shock. This is different from the GFC in a critical respect. It is a concern over excessive government debt so the response in Australia should not entail a new fiscal package. Indeed with few other countries able to respond with fiscal expansion, it is unlikely that extra government spending would stimulate the Australian economy at all.... Together with a likely perception of increasing fiscal risk from further debt expansion the policy may even be counterproductive now.
A fiscal contraction or even sticking to a fiscal surplus target in 2013 when revenues fall would impart a larger negative shock into the economy. Better to allow fiscal stabilisers to adjust—that is, revenues to fall and expenditures to rise—to buffer the shock with a clear policy of debt stabilisation across future years as increased deficits are brought back into surplus but not by an arbitrary date.
Bad fiscal design always has an unexpected cost. Why is a flood tax being introduced just as the economy slows? The forecast that this would help dampen the boom is now likely to be wrong. There clearly should be an urgent review of the mismatch between spending commitments in the pipeline and highly uncertain revenue. This is essential to better understand future fiscal vulnerability.
The delusion that what saved the Australian economy from the GFC was entirely fiscal policy needs to be jettisoned. Yes, it helped, but many other factors were far more important, such as a flexible exchange rate, independent monetary policy, a strong regulatory system and well-capitalised banks. These are the factors needed to do the heavy lifting this time and should be given due credit for last time.
UPDATE
The Government cannot afford to break yet another promise, even when it make sense to do so:
JULIA Gillard and Wayne Swan have rejected expert advice to rethink their plan to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13, vowing to deliver the promise despite the worsening global economic meltdown.
Gillard may take 4000 refugees for nothing in exchange
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (06:14 am)
The Gillard Government has made such a cock-up of its people swap with Malaysia that it could end up taking 4000 of their refugees for not one of the 800 boat people Australia is meant to send in exchange, if the High Court overrules it:
Clause 7
(Agreed Numbers)
1. The Government of Malaysia will accept up to an agreed maximum of eight hundred (800) Transferees. The Participants understand that the agreed number of transfers may occur prior to any resettlement pursuant to Clause 5.
2. The Government of Australia will resettle four thousand (4,000) persons over four (4) years as referred to in Clause 5 commencing from the date of this Arrangement at a rate of approximately one thousand (1,000) per year, (although recognizing that less may be settled in the first year and any shortfall will be taken up in subsequent years);
UPDATE
Making it up as they go along… Now plan F for the children:
THE federal government is forging ahead on talks with Papua New Guinea to reopen the Manus Island detention centre at the same time that it is fighting a High Court challenge against its Malaysian plan.
While confident of winning the case, a government source said a permanent facility on Manus Island would take some of the political heat out of the Malaysian plan.
Children, for example, could be sent there to what would be an Australian-monitored facility instead of back to Malaysia, which has a poor record in human rights.
Horrible thought: do they run the national economy like they run boat people policy?
UPDATE
Had the Left not demonised Nauru and Howard so successfully, the Gillard Government might well have chosen the better option again:
PROMINENT Catholic intellectual and lawyer Frank Brennan has savaged the Gillard government’s Malaysia Solution.
“I presume what was accepted in Canberra on both sides of the political fence was that some version of the Pacific Solution had to be found, but it had to be more ruthless than the original Pacific Solution,” Father Brennan said…
“In Nauru, at least the Australian government was providing healthcare and education,” he told The Australian.
(Thanks to reader the Great Waisuli.)
Lloyd says no
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (12:31 am)
Geothermal flops again
Andrew Bolt – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (12:07 am)
Another dud geothermal project:
A RADICAL plan to power campus airconditioning and heating from hot aquifers under the University of Western Australia has collapsed after the company at the centre of the project pulled out yesterday.
The Green Rock Energy company said it could not meet federal government demands to raise $7 million to match commonwealth funding for the project in the current economic times.
The $16m project was touted as a stepping stone to large-scale geothermal cooling across premises ranging from shopping centres and hospitals to entire suburbs in Perth....
The company will return $250,000 as the unspent balance of the initial $350,000 it received from the federal government for the project.
(Thanks to reader Rosalind.)
. The worst of it is that he is a policeman.
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