Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Tue Mar 21st Todays News

Lots of people are coming out saying that they see racism everywhere. Racists always do. But it is wrong to confuse rudeness with racism. At the moment, there is legislation that does not appropriately address racism, but which is supposed to. Section 18c of the racial discrimination act in Australia allows for a journalist or a cartoonist to be prosecuted as racist for raising important issues, but has no bite when terrorist sympathisers spout their nonsense. Two aspects of the law make it very bad. The first is the onus of the offence resting with the person being offended, rather than the person giving the offence. So that a university student might point out the hypocrisy of segregation and be sued for it. The second part of the act which is troubling is the partisan position of the Human Rights Council  of Australia. It seems to have no competent member at the moment, so that it chases its' tail in hounding cartoonists, university students or journalists if they are perceived to be conservative. The law is an ass. It needs to be changed. To be improved. And the oversight body disbanded. 

I am very good and don't deserve the abuse given me. I created a video raising awareness of anti police feeling among western communities. I chose the senseless killing of Nicola Cotton, a Louisiana policewoman who joined post Katrina, to highlight the issue. I did this in order to get an income after having been illegally blacklisted from work in NSW for being a whistleblower. I have not done anything wrong. Local council appointees refused to endorse my work, so I did it for free. Youtube's Adsence refused to allow me to profit from their marketing it. Meanwhile, I am hostage to abysmal political leadership and hopeless journalists. My shopfront has opened on Facebook.

Here is a video I made Acquainted with the Night 

 Acquainted with the Night is a poem by Robert Frost. It first appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and was published in 1928 in his collection West-Running Brook.



=== from 2016 ===
I greatly appreciate the help and love I have been given as I try to settle in Melbourne. I haven't much, but I've been given much. Still waiting on that bond Ray White Cabramatta claim they have sent to me, minus $100. Three weeks after I left, leaving behind a new oven and air conditioner. But I must be more grateful that I don't have courtiers like Emperor Antoku in 1188 in Japan, he went to the throne age three. But five years later, after losing a naval battle, a courtier drowned him to spare him the indignity of losing the throne. I can live with indignity. Malcolm Turnbull lives with indignity all the time. The PM is asking the senate to make a decision for him so he can call an election. It isn't even a clever call, but the longer he delays the more likely an implosion from support of the party he undermined and divided. Katich is running for the GOP, hoping to deny either Trump or Cruz. He is definitely going to be successful with one. Meanwhile, the world is heating up over the Democrat primaries. Will it be Hillary or Sanders? It is a two horse race and a horse will definitely win. 

For some, at the moment, the Sex Party has more credibility. 
=== from 2015 ===
Will Colvin has told the world why he should be unemployed. But he isn't. He is paid by the ABC for work despite his bragging of his employer abuse. The reason may be that his incompetent journalist father is also employed by the ABC. Suggesting a closed shop the like of which ended many years ago on the waterfront. One possible excuse for Will's fraudulent employment at News.com.au is that there was an assumption of competence not made at the ABC where supervision is trained to turn blind eyes to bias. News.com.au paid him to party, so why move to the ABC? Why should the government bankroll the family of bludgers? They could do better work working for the dole, which is supervised better and which safeguards against political commentary. 

Today is the New Year, called Newroz, in Iran which in 1935, the Shah named instead of Persia, because Iran means Land of Aryans and that is how Iranians know it. Aryans are a sect of Christians who don't embrace the Trinity in their theology. There are many Aryan sects today that are completely unrelated to Iran. In 1844, the Bahá'í calendar began. In 1152, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine had her marriage to King Louis VII of France annulled by the pope. She had failed to bear French sons, although she had given him two daughters that were declared legitimate. Two years later, she married her second cousin, 8 years her junior, Henry II of England. For England she bore eight children, including five sons, three of whom were to become king, including Henry the young king, Richard I and John. In 1188, Emperor Antoku acceded to the Japanese Throne, age three. Five years later he would lose a naval battle and be drowned in a river by a courtier wanting to spare him losing his throne. In 1413, Henry V became king of England. In 1800, the new Pope, Pius VII, was crowned pope with a temporary papal tiara made of papier-mâché. 

In 1861, Confederate VP Alexander Stephens gave the extemporaneous Cornerstone Speech which set out Democrat ideals they never felt the need to repeal. In the speech, he compared the constitutions of the Union with the confederacy, and said "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." In 1871, Journalist H M Stanley set out to find evangelist David Livingstone. In 1918, the German Spring Offensive began. In 1925, The Butler act absurdly prohibited the teaching of Evolution in Tennessee. In 1933, Dachau was completed. In 1937 the Ponce Massacre took place where nineteen people in Puerto Rico were gunned down by US forces and so the world saw how a Democrat President was to be excused for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1946, The LA Rams signed the first black player, Kenny Washington, the first Black player in American Football since FDR had hoodwinked Blacks to support Democrats. In 1960, under Apartheid in South Africa, police opened fire on unarmed black demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180. In 1980, as Carter announced the US boycott of the Moscow Olympics, the TV Program, Dallas, aired its House Divided episode which resulted in eight months of fantasy flashbacks over the shooting of JR. In 2006, Twitter was born on this day.
From 2014
It was a strange concept. Simple and straight forward, like all good ideas. It built in complexity. It was placed in a movie and became very popular and well known as the theme for the Exorcist, but Tubular Bells is not a horror track. The second side is a comedy track. It took me a long time to get to the second side, because I liked the first so much, and the second began in a more sophisticated way. Vivian Stanshall, born on this day in 1943, was in his late twenties when he recorded his voice over. He was a party person who got along well with Keith Moon. His voice then was that of an old drunk. Perfect for the concept. 

Also on this day in 1556, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake. Mary had had an ax to grind with him over her mother's divorce. Cranmer had approved it in doctrinal terms. But Mary was not in a position to kill him for it. He was accused of heresy and tortured. After two years, when he was said to be reconciled with the Catholic Church, he was executed. At his execution, he recanted his reconciliation. Queen Elizabeth 2nd has not got that authority, but then neither did Mary. Mary had willing supporters engaged in a power struggle. A strange concept.
Historical perspective on this day
In 537, Siege of Rome: King Vitiges attempted to assault the northern and eastern city walls, but was repulsed at the Praenestine Gate, known as the Vivarium, by the defenders under the Byzantine generals Bessas and Peranius. 630, Emperor Heraclius returned the True Cross, one of the holiest Christian relics, to Jerusalem. 717, Battle of Vincy between Charles Marteland Ragenfrid. 1152, Annulment of the marriage of King Louis VII of France and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. 1188, Emperor Antoku acceded to the throne of Japan. 1413, Henry Vbecame King of England. 1556, in Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer was burned at the stake. 1788, A fire in New Orleans left most of the town in ruins.

In 1800, with the church leadership driven out of Rome during an armed conflict, Pius VII was crowned Pope in Venice with a temporary papal tiara made of papier-mâché. 1801, the Battle of Alexandria was fought between British and French forces near the ruins of Nicopolis in Egypt. 1804, Code Napoléon was adopted as French civil law. 1814, Napoleonic Wars: Austrian forces repelled French troops in the Battle of Arcis-sur-Aube. 1821, Greek War of Independence: First revolutionary act in the monastery of Agia Lavra, Kalavryta. 1844, the Bahá'í calendar began. This is the first day of the first year of the Bahá'í calendar. It is annually celebrated by members of the Bahá'í Faith as the Bahá'í New Year or Náw-Rúz. 1857, an earthquake in Tokyo, Japan killed over 100,000. 1861, Alexander Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech. 1871, Otto von Bismarck was appointed Chancellor of the German Empire. Also 1871, journalist Henry Morton Stanley began his trek to find the missionary and explorer David Livingstone.

In 1913, over 360 were killed and 20,000 homes destroyed in the Great Dayton Flood in Dayton, Ohio. 1918, World War I: The first phase of the German Spring Offensive, Operation Michael, began. 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was established becoming the first Communist government to be formed in Europe after the October Revolution in Russia. 1921, the New Economic Policy was implemented by the Bolshevik Party in response to the economic failure as a result of War Communism. 1925, the Butler Act prohibited the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee. Also 1925, Syngman Rhee was removed from office after being impeached as the President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. 1928, Charles Lindbergh was presented with the Medal of Honor for the first solo trans-Atlantic flight.

In 1933, construction of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, was completed. 1935, Shah of Iran Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran, meaning "Land of the Aryans". 1937, Ponce Massacre: Nineteen people in Ponce, Puerto Rico, were gunned down by a police squad acting under orders of US-appointed Governor, Blanton C. Winship. 1943, Wehrmacht officer Rudolf von Gersdorff plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by using a suicide bomb, but the plan fell through. Von Gersdorff was able to defuse the bomb in time and avoid suspicion. 1945, World War II: British troops liberated Mandalay, Burma. Also 1945, World War II: Operation Carthage: Royal Air Force planes bombed Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark. They also hit a school and 125 civilians were killed. Also 1945, World War II: Bulgaria and the Soviet Union successfully completed their defence of the north bank of the Drava River as the Battle of the Transdanubian Hills concluded. 1946, the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington, making him the first African American player in the American football since 1933. 1952, Alan Freed presented the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1960, Apartheid in South Africa: Massacre in Sharpeville, South Africa: Police opened fire on a group of unarmed black South African demonstrators, killing 69 and wounding 180. 1963, Alcatraz, a federal penitentiary on an island in San Francisco Bay, closed. 1965, Ranger program: NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes. Also 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. 1968, Battle of Karamehin Jordan between Israeli Defense Forces and Fatah.

In 1970, the first Earth Day proclamation was issued by Mayor of San Francisco Joseph Alioto. 1980, US President Jimmy Carter announced a United States boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Also 1980, Dallasaired its "A House Divided" episode, which led to eight months of international intrigue regarding Who shot J.R.? 1986, Debi Thomas became the first African-American to win the World Figure Skating Championship 1989, Sports Illustrated reported allegations tying baseball player Pete Rose to baseball gambling. 1990, Namibia became independent after 75 years of South African rule. 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones became the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon. 2000, Pope John Paul II made his first ever pontifical visit to Israel. 2006, the social media site Twitter was founded. 2009, four police officers were shot and killed and a fifth was wounded in two shootings at Oakland, California.
=== Publishing News ===
This column welcomes feedback and criticism. The column is not made up but based on the days events and articles which are then placed in the feed. So they may not have an apparent cohesion they would have had were they made up.
===
I am publishing a book called Bread of Life: January. 

Bread of Life is a daily bible quote with a layman's understanding of the meaning. I give one quote for each day, and also a series of personal stories illustrating key concepts eg Who is God? What is a miracle? Why is there tragedy?

January is the first of the anticipated year-long work of thirteen books. One for each month and the whole year. It costs to publish. It (Kindle version) should retail at about $2US online, but the paperback version would cost more, according to production cost.If you have a heart for giving, I fundraise at gofund.me/27tkwuc
===
Editorials will appear in the "History in a Year by the Conservative Voice" series, starting with August, September, October, or at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/1482020262/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_dVHPub0MQKDZ4  The kindle version is cheaper, but the soft back version allows a free kindle version.

List of available items at Create Space
Happy birthday and many happy returns to those born on this day, across the years, along with
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer
You were truly cross. You burned for that one. Still, Otto was made Chancellor. We defended the hills. Mandy will show again. Let's party. 
Deaths
===
Andrew Bolt

===

TURNBULL ALL OVER THE PLACE

Tim Blair – Monday, March 21, 2016 (12:51pm)

Shrinking Malcolm delivers an ultimatum: 
Australia will go to the polls on July 2 unless the senate passes the Australian Building and Construction Commission and Registered Organisations Bills during special sitting weeks which will begin on April 18.
In a shock move, Mr Turnbull asked Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove to recall parliament from a seven week recess to give the senate three weeks to reconsider both bills which would clean up the union sector.
Mr Turnbull also confirmed the budget would be brought forward from May 10 to May 3, regardless of whether the legislation is rejected or not.
“The time for playing games is over,” Mr Turnbull said. 
He’s made Scott Morrison look like a fool: 
Treasurer Scott Morrison, who will be handing down his first budget, had told Sydney’s 2GB radio only an hour earlier the budget would be on May 10. 
This mob don’t seem particularly organised.
UPDATE. Fairfax’s Joe Aston: 
Weeks before they cover – independent, always – a federal election to be fought on the issue of union impropriety and thuggery, all of Fairfax’s reporters in the Canberra Press Gallery are out on a wildcat strike. Oh, the irony. 
===

SMURF HOUR

Tim Blair – Monday, March 21, 2016 (4:17am)

Fads come and go. For example, did you know that during the 1990s it was briefly popular to vote for a party called the “Australian Democrats”? It’s true! You can look it up.
The Democrats died out a few years ago following pitiful returns in more recent elections. Now another formerly popular movement is creaking towards oblivion.
Earth Hour was a big deal when it was first held a decade ago. The idea, like its creators and supporters, was simple: at 8.30pm on a given March evening, citizens would demonstrate their dedication to averting climate change by turning off their lights for one entire hour.
For the first few years, people actually held Earth Hour parties and ate meals in darkened restaurants.
There might have been one or two problems — in 2010, a Canadian environment minister’s cat was set alight by Earth Hour candles — but by and large all participants had a fine, smug, stupid time.
This year was a little different. For a start, some Europeans cities decided against turning off their street lights due to what one official described as “recent events”. Explaining that “Earth Hour is a good and important arrangement”, Swedish politician AnnSofie Andersson nevertheless cancelled the usual lights-out ceremony in the city of Ostersund. “This year we chose to keep the streets lit because of the recent events.”
By that, Andersson means a surge in sexual assaults and other crimes blamed – with good reason – on Sweden’s new and extremely numerous Middle Eastern refugee population.
“The police think it’s a very wise move and that the municipality made a good decision,” Chief Constable Stephen Jerand said of the city’s decision.
(Continue reading Smurf Hour.)
UPDATE. This retarded man-child is the Canadian Prime Minister:
===

WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR BOAT

Tim Blair – Monday, March 21, 2016 (4:12am)

Britain’s Daily Mirror reports: 
Marine research fans have flooded an online poll launched to name a new, world-class laboratory ship but have shunned famous titles like Shackleton and Endeavour. 
Instead, they’ve gone for a much better name: Boaty Mc Boatface.
===

THE DEPARTMENT OF SEX, HEALTH AND SOCIETY

Tim Blair – Monday, March 21, 2016 (3:55am)

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week ordered the Safe Schools Coalition to tone down its classroom campaign or lose millions in taxpayer funding. Defenders of the alleged anti-bullying program were outraged, as usual.
“I think it’s not the program they’ve got an issue with,” Greens leader Richard Di Natale said on Sunday, accusing conservative backbench MPs of homophobia and transphobia.
“I think it’s the behaviour and feelings (of) children who are struggling with issues of gender and sexuality — I think it’s more to do with that, and there’s no question much of this, or at least part of it, is coming from a place of homophobia.”
That certainly can’t be said of academic Gary Dowsett, a professor in the Sex, Health and Society Department at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, which helped devise the Safe Schools program.
Although Dowsett was not directly involved in Safe Schools work, his views over the years on sexuality and children deserve scrutiny.
Liberal MP George Christensen last week cited in parliament a 1982 piece by Dowsett for the quarterly newsletter Gay Information. “I also have a friend, a paedophile, who is working very hard on making sense out of his relations with boys. These relations consist of, among other things, a large amount of nurture and support for these boys, a real caring for their welfare and growth,” Dowsett wrote.
“A new political position is needed for there are significant political struggles at stake. First, we have three legal/social questions to win: custody rights for gay men and lesbians; the legal right of paedophiles and their young lovers; and finally the sexual rights of children.
“The current paedophilia debate then is crucial to the political processes of the gay movement: paedophiles need our support, and we need to construct the child/adult sex issue on our terms.”
Anyone championing the “legal right of paedophiles” and declaring that “paedophiles need our support” might have expected a few career barriers. 
Not so for Prof Dowsett, however, who has since made a fortune from various research papers, many of them taxpayer-funded.
They follow a particular theme.
===

BLOCK OFF THE OLD CHIP

Tim Blair – Monday, March 21, 2016 (2:50am)

This is the biggest story since the sensational sandwich slicing shame of 2006.
===

The Bolt Report moves to Sky News

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (5:52pm)

Sorry about the delay, but I must say I was rather liking the more relaxed pace. That now changes:
Andrew Bolt’s TV program The Bolt Report will relaunch as a nightly program on Sky News in May. 
The contentious columnist will become Australian media’s loudest voice as he continues writing for News Corp Australia newspapers, including the Herald Sun, and his nightly appearances on the top-rating Macquarie Media evening radio program hosted by Steve Price. “It’s a bit scary,” Bolt laughed. “Sky has been brilliant at news. Now it’s beefing up the views. Five Four nights with the radio show as well, so it will be full on — but it’s an election year, so why not?”
UPDATE
They say that the fastest way to lose faith in the media is to read an article about a topic you actually know very well. Today I read this by Amanda Meade in the Left-wing  Guardian, and noted the many errors:
In order:
- Not Rightwing but conservative.
- The filming for the ABC wrapped in January.
- The ABC show is likely to run this year.
- The Bolt Report was not dropped. I decided to take the show to Sky instead, and keep my weekends free.
- News Corp did not refuse to keep paying for the show on Channel 10. 
Amanda has been a good media writer for The Australian. It seems to me that her desire to feed the Manichean stereotypes demanded by the tribally Leftist audience of The Guardian - one that demands I be a ranting failure - has led her once again into error. 
===

Don’t toot as I do

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (3:16pm)

James Adonis writes in The Age:
Of all the management clichés I detest, and there are many, the most nauseating would have to be “toot your own horn” or its Australian manifestation: “blow your own trumpet”.
They’re idioms for idiots because they neglect what would have to be one of the most essential leadership qualities: humility.
James Adonis writes on his website:
James Adonis is one of Australia’s most well-known employee engagement and team leadership educators… James’s academic history is supported by rich practical experience as a leader in a variety of industries.  By the time he was 24, he was managing a team of 100… James’s articles and research are regularly published in many countries… As a nationally-syndicated writer with the Fairfax group of news publications - such as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - James’s original thoughts are read by over 200,000 people every month. 
He is the author of four books… Over the past decade, James has worked with hundreds of organisations… A truly international speaker and consultant, he has worked with leaders in Australia, New Zealand, India, Dubai, Thailand, Malaysia, Germany, and Belgium… Previously, James was the President of the National Speakers Association of Australia (NSW Chapter) - the youngest person in the history of the Association to hold such an honour… Engaging. Entertaining. Thought-provoking. These are the three words most commonly used to describe James’s presentations… James doesn’t just educate. He stimulates, challenges, and inspires… 
Toot toot! 
===

Turnbull forces recall of Parliament. Election is go UPDATE: Morgan poll says Labor leads

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (10:37am)

Malcolm Turnbull has had the Governor General recall Parliament on April 18 for three weeks to deal with the two blocked bills - to restore the Australian Building and Construction Commission and make union bosses as accountable as business executives of public companies. If those two bills are not passed, there will be an early election.
(He is sniffling badly, which is a poor look. Get the man a hanky.)
The whole thing looks rather desperate. Didn’t the Government last week stop the Senate from considering the ABCC bill? This dramatic move was needed because the Greens made clear they would not call back the Senate early to allow those bills be debated and provide the Government with the excuse for an early double dissolution election.
The Budget will be brought forward to May 3. The election, therefore, will be on July 2 unless the Senate passes the two bills.
UPDATE
These two bills are important. Labor and the Greens in blocking them are acting as political enablers of union corruption, and are doing so to protect donors and mates.
But Turnbull has had very little to say about union corruption and lawlessness, which makes this seem not a bid to reform unions but to get himself the early election he desperately needs.
UPDATE
Glenn Lazarus, Nick Xenophon and Glenn Lazarus have all said they would not pass the ABCC without amendments, which the government is unlikely to adopt. Even without hearing from Jaqui Lambie or Glenn Madigan, that means the ABCC bill will go down in the Senate and the July 2 election is on.
UPDATE
From my column tomorrow:
Forcing the Governor General to recall Parliament next month shows how desperate Malcolm Turnbull is for the early election on July 2 he needs to save his skin. 
On the day that Newspoll showed his popularity in free fall, the Prime Minister announced Parliament would be forced back to sit from April 18.
But he was really announcing the election campaign has now started and will last a dangerously long 15 weeks. Poor you…
See, voters – that’s you – will now have an election campaign lasting twice the normal length, with all the drama that they tend to hate.
Moreover, while Turnbull claims the election will be a battle about union reform, it won’t.
There’s no way he can keep arguing this topic for 15 weeks. People will get bored, and most don’t think unions are a big part of their lives anyway. They’ll want to talk instead about taxes, spending, handouts, health and education.
That’s the danger. The Budget will come in the middle of this de facto election campaign and will probably show a blowout in spending and debt. There will be little money for tax cuts or other goodies.
Then you’ll have two more months before you vote to decide whether this is good enough. If I were a Liberal, I would not been keen to hear your answer. 
UPDATE
Turnbull contradicted his Treasurer yet again, this time announcing the Budget will be on May 3:
Treasurer Scott Morrison, who will be handing down his first budget, had told Sydney’s 2GB radio only an hour earlier the budget would be on May 10. 
Morrison didn’t seem impressed at being made a fool of again, after Turnbull first nixed his plan for big tax cuts:

It’s my job to deliver the Budget, it’s his (Turbull’s) job to decide on what day it’s delivered.
And to stress that point and wash his hands:
QUESTION: 
Did you factor in a double dissolution into your Budget?
TREASURER: They’re matters for the Prime Minister.
Blame Turnbull if this goes pear shaped.
UPDATE
But Turnbull gloats:
Enjoying the reaction to his bombshell announcement on Monday, Turnbull observed to colleagues that the Canberra press gallery had been wrong-footed into thinking him a hopeless ditherer: “Just because the press gallery doesn’t know what I’m doing doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m doing.”
UPDATE
The Morgan poll, which is admittedly a bit flighty, is the first to to put Labor ahead of the Turnbull Government:
In mid-March ALP support is 50.5% (up 3.5%) cf. L-NP 49.5% (down 3.5%) on a two-party preferred basis. If a Federal Election were held now the election would be too close to call.
===

Tim Blair on the amazing government funding of Professor Dowsett

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (7:32am)

Something to bear in mind as the media vilifies Cardinal George Pell (on zero evidence) of too kind to pedophile priests:
Anyone championing the “legal right of paedophiles” and declaring that “paedophiles need our support” might have expected a few career barriers. 
Not so for Prof Dowsett, however, who has since made a fortune from various research papers, many of them taxpayer-funded.
===

This Budget will be a bust

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (7:25am)

This Budget threatens to be very embarrassing for the Turnbull Government - but more an indictment of the Senate that for two years has blocked critical savings:
Weak wage growth threatens to add another $3 billion to this year’s budget deficit and casts a shadow over Treasury forecasts that individual tax payments will leap by $40bn a year over the next three years and narrow the budget deficit. 
The emerging weakness in PAYG collections ... is making it harder for the Turnbull government to devise personal income tax cuts for the May budget… Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson said ... there was no chance of wage growth lifting to match Treasury forecasts… The mid-year budget update included an $11.5bn reduction in PAYG receipts over the budget forward estimate period after Treasury revised its forecasts.
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Joe Aston: not a scab but a law-abider

Andrew Bolt March 21 2016 (7:12am)

Gutsy Joe Aston is sick of being slimed as a scab by fellow Fairfax journalists who understand neither the law nor market economics:
I am not a scab… I am turning up to work for my employer, as per my contractual obligations, and I am declining to participate in an unlawful strike organised by a union I’m not a member of. 
Heard of the Fair Work Act? ... Under it, the MEAA can apply to the Fair Work Commission, the Australian Electoral Commission will then hold a secret ballot of covered employees and then, with three days’ notice, the Commission will authorise protected industrial action. That’s the law, and it’s astounding that the ones being vilified are those of us abiding by it, and bullied for rejecting shibboleths of labour and capital that belong down a Geordie coal mine… Meanwhile, weeks before they cover – independent, always – a federal election to be fought on the issue of union impropriety and thuggery, all of Fairfax’s reporters in the Canberra Press Gallery are out on a wildcat strike.
A most excellent point.
UPDATE
Just one of a thousand bits of evidence that the ABC is irredeemably biased to the Left. And bear in mind that John Barron is, of all things, the journalist behind the ABC’s Fact Check outfit, which you’d think would be pledged to judge by the evidence and not the side:
Another example, too, of the Left just talking to the Left.
(Thanks to readers WaG311. John and Peter of Bellevue Hill.)  
===

The Left and the natural home of the bully

Andrew Bolt March 20 2016 (11:50pm)

Culture wars

 WHAT is it with the Left and violence? Why are violent political protests such as last Friday’s mainly the work of the Left?
Go through the list, starting with socialists pushing and heckling elderly supporters of Pauline Hanson.
There were also the violent protests at the Melbourne G20 meeting, the even more violent blockade of Melbourne’s World Economic Forum, the manhandling of foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop and then Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella by Socialist Alternative protesters, the harassment of people attending speeches of Dutch political leader Geert Wilders and the assaults on Reclaim Australia demonstrators.
Those are only the highlights.
I could add the Australia Day protest that was whipped up against then opposition leader Tony Abbott by Labor operatives and Aboriginal protesters, but which backfired so badly that the prime minister, Julia Gillard, had to be rescued by police.
When did you last see conservatives on the rampage like that?

Last Friday, yet another example. Socialist students stormed the Adelaide office of conservative Liberal MP Cory Bernardi and trashed it.
(Read full article here.) 
===

The Liberal club picks its own

Andrew Bolt March 20 2016 (11:50pm)


SICK of politicians who seem to be looking after each other and not you?
Labor has suffered that for years, thanks to its fossilised ties to the union movement. Of its 55 members of the House of Representatives, 23 were once union officials, including leader Bill Shorten. In the Senate, it’s an astonishing 17 of 25.
Boy, it shows. Notice how Labor still won’t cut its ties to the most corruption-plagued union, the CFMEU, which now has 100 militants facing courts?
The grip that unions and faction bosses have on Labor’s Senate preselections cuts out a lot of talented outsiders with no factional patronage.
Result: Labor struggles to get people with fresh thinking into parliament.
But here’s a crazy thing. The Liberals have long attacked this Labor machine politics, yet now have the same problem, at least in NSW. Last Saturday, the Liberals chose their NSW Senate ticket for the coming election, and what a coincidence.
Top spot went to Hollie Hughes, a little-known disability advocate who just happens to be the NSW Liberals’ country vice-president. With that insider advantage, she knocked out Jim Molan, the distinguished retired general who was chief of operations of all allied forces in Iraq and then helped the Abbott government to stop the boats.

Hughes’s victory is part of a pattern. There are six key officials on the NSW Liberals’ state executive, and four have now snaffled themselves great seats, or are poised to.
(Read full article here.)
UPDATE
And just to complete the ugly picture above:
The NSW Liberal Party has appointed Chris Stone, a lobbyist who works with powerbrokers Michael Photios and Nick Campbell, as its new state director.
And Photios was once again very active in getting up the numbers in this latest pre-selection. And so Jim Molan was beaten off.
UPDATE
David Crowe:
The Liberal Party has erupted in a furious brawl over the role of ­lobbyists in selecting Senate candidates after a “farcical” vote on the weekend that defied Malcolm Turnbull, sought to undermine a federal minister and cost retired general Jim Molan a seat in parliament. In a test of money and power, party officials allowed lobbyists Michael Photios and Nick Campbell to step in at the last minute to help decide the NSW Liberal candidates for the Senate at the next election, sparking claims of “corruption” in the process. 
The state executive will meet within days to rectify part of the outcome by confirming the Minister for International Development Concetta Fierravanti-Wells at the top of the ticket, but the party faces a wider challenge over the failure to notify candidates of the late switch to the preselection panel…
While Tony Abbott decreed two years ago that lobbyists could not hold positions as party officials — forcing Mr Photios off the state executive — the surprise move last Friday saw Mr Photios and Mr Campbell take the place of two members of the state executive in the Senate preselection panel.
The move was approved by the state executive, which is controlled by the moderate [sic] wing of the party, and was overseen by state party director Chris Stone, who was the returning officer in the preselection and until three weeks ago was an employee of Premier State Consulting, the lobbying firm run by Mr Photios and Mr Campbell…
Without the influence of the lobbyists, say some of those aware of the counting, the outcome would have put Senator Fierravanti-Wells in first position, followe­d by Mr Molan and Andrew­ Bragg, policy director at the Fin­ancial Services Council… The change was arranged later that night by NSW Liberal president Trent Zimmerman, the federal member for North Sydney, asking state executive to agree to reserve powers allowing alternates to be appointed to the preselection panel. The special powers were approv­ed and state executive members Julian Leeser and Michel­le Bishop stepped aside for Mr Photios and Mr Campbell, but there was no formal notice given to the preselection candidates. 
What a rotten, rotten business.  Note the names involved. Is this a kind of insider trading? Should any healthy political party stand for this?
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Turnbull tumbles, Liberals inch back in front

Andrew Bolt March 20 2016 (11:45pm)

The lift in the Liberal two-party vote may be no more than margin of error stuff, but the decline in support for Malcolm Turnbull this year is unmistakable and, I suspect, not finished yet:
Malcolm Turnbull’s approval ­rating as Prime Minister has ­fallen into negative territory for the first time but voters still rank him overwhelmingly as the best leader to manage the economy and deliver tax reform, and expect him to win this year’s election. 
The latest Newspoll, taken ­exclusively for The Australian, also shows the Coalition has nudged ahead in two-party-preferred terms to lead by 51 per cent to Labor’s 49 per cent due to a slip in support for the opposition…
However, the poll of 2049 voters, taken from Thursday to Sunday, shows satisfaction with Mr Turnbull’s performance has continued its downwards trajectory, falling to 39 per cent… [It] is now down 14 points this year and down 21 points since peaking at a six-year high for a prime minister of 60 per cent in mid-November. 
Like most people surveyed, I still think Turnbull can and should win the next election from here, but he’d better lift his game. The trouble is that he’ll now be so frightened that he’ll go timid and will go into the election with not much mandate for the changes we need - not least to the bloated spending. 
===

60 Minutes crew attacked by migrants: just a troublesome one per cent?

Andrew Bolt March 20 2016 (11:16pm)

 60 Minutes reporter Liz Hayes still doesn’t quite want to understand the full implications of the attack on her film crew by Middle Eastern “refugees” in Sweden:
It was Sweden. I wasn’t expecting hairy, but I think it all comes back to tensions and issues between migrants, immigrants and refugees and just the general friction that is occurring around the world… 
But it can be explained in the context of friction between cultures that is going on over there. People are in need and desperate, and when you open your doors it doesn’t always mean everyone is going to live happily ever after.
But it does mean that your open doors are letting in a menace - a hostile culture - best kept out.
But Hayes can’t yet bring herself to give up the pieties of the Left:
It’s just part and parcel of the difficult refugee scenario, and it’s a shame because I think 99 per cent of people who are fleeing are not necessarily a threat and not necessarily poorly behaved.
Really? Is that why even the police were scared to be on the streets of an immigrant suburb?
UPDATE
In contrast, the Hungarian Prime Minister warns of the deliberate invasion of Europe by people who will destroy it:
(Thanks to reader Andrew.) 
===

Tony Abbott wants to end this conflict

Andrew Bolt March 20 2016 (11:00pm)

Malcolm Turnbull will be pleased:
UPDATE
The most perceptive comment in former Labor Senator Stephen Loosley’s review of Niki Savva’s poisonous book, and one which should make him question more strongly Savva’s whole premise:
Savva does not go to great lengths to conceal her antipathy towards Abbott and [chief of staff Peta] Credlin. She can hardly be blamed, given there were demands from the government for her dismissal as a columnist with The Australian.... 
Nonetheless, The Road to Ruin would carry more weight in its conclusions had there been more balance in its assessment of the Abbott government’s strengths. Am I the only person in the Canberra orbit who has been shown nothing but decency and courtesy by Abbott and Credlin?
No.
Another prominent Leftist told me the very same thing over coffee last week, which is why she, too, isn’t buying this picture of Credlin as a vituperative hater and dominatrix.
(Thanks to reader John.) 
===

DO NOT HIRE

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 21, 2015 (4:32am)

Former News Corp bludger Will Colvin has written a helpful warning for any potential future employers. Very considerate of him. Following his unhappy experience at News, Will has moved on to more challenging assignments – such as interviewing his dad, veteran ABC tax drain Mark Colvin. Most of the interview seems to be about Will.
UPDATE. A commenter here notes that Will Colvin now has a “comfy job” providing voiceovers for the ABC’s leftoid-loaded Media Watch. Your taxes at work, people.


Much more on this second-gen deadbeat at Quadrant.
UPDATE II. Colvin senior: 
My son trained and qualified as a voiceover artist. His occasional employment at Media Watch is nothing to do with me. Nothing. 
Wow. Just as well he’s “trained and qualified”. Imagine the dangers of unleashing someone on the ABC who didn’thave a reading-out-loud diploma.
===

IT SPEAKS OF OUR DEEPEST FEARS

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 21, 2015 (3:39am)

Next week this site will present Our Oil, Our Place, an online art exhibit celebrating the role of oil in our everyday lives. The standard of submissions is impressively high, including such compelling works as Bill C’s 1972 Torana Engine (With A Dipstick):


Students of Mark Rothko’s work may detect a possible thematic homage, what with the dominant rectangular patterns and underlying sense of fragility, but Bill has captured something far more remarkable than was ever imagined by the Russian-born abstract expressionist: a Holden engine that is still running after 43 years.
Entries are still open over the weekend. Please send yours to blairt@dailytelegraph.com.au, in the name of art.
===

VAN’S MAN

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 21, 2015 (3:35am)

Marxist Guardian columnist Vanessa Badham reflects on the 1983 federal campaign run by her latter-day Twitter palMalcolm Fraser: 
His comments that a Labor victory in the election of 1983 would lead to “reds under the beds” of the nation provoked much derision in the Badham household, with lifted bedspreads aplently. 
Only in a household where thrown sandwiches were a form of communication would such behaviour make any sense. Fraser actually referred to hiding savings under beds: 
If Labor wins, your money would be safer “under your bed than in the banks”, then prime minister Malcolm Fraser warned in 1983.

Bob Hawke had the perfect retort: There was no point putting the money under the bed because “the Reds were there”. 
As usual, the Badham family was a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Mainly because they were stuck to the walls. For a far less mawkish and indulgent assessment of Fraser’s career and legacy, please read Roger Franklin.
===

BAG LIMIT

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 21, 2015 (1:59am)

Just one question:



How do they aim?
===

WE ARE ALLOWED TO TALK ABOUT IT

Tim Blair – Saturday, March 21, 2015 (1:23am)

Following the shocking Melbourne murder of a teenage girl, Fairfax’s Clementine Ford addresses male violence: 
Women are very well-versed in the things that pose a risk to our safety. Or rather, the one thing that poses the biggest risk.
Men.
This is the actual reality of the world that we live in, but apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it because it’s unfair and cruel and misandrist and mean. Don’t we know that the MAJORITY of men are good and decent people? How DARE we besmirch their names and reputations by discussing the demonstrable, evidence supported problem of male violence and its protracted, deliberate impact on women! 
Male violence against women is a shameful reality, but it isn’t the case that we’re “not allowed to talk about it”. Ford is talking about it. Any number of journalists, commentators, politicians, advocates and campaigns talk about it all the time, as well they should.
Nor is it the case that discussion of male violence is suppressed by arguments that “the MAJORITY of men are good and decent people”. That line may run on Twitter in some marginal quarters, but mainstream discussion is easily able to face the undeniable fact that a minority of men will attack, rape, injure and murder women. And the massive majority of men desperately want to stop those attacks, rapes and murders, which is why revulsion at the lenient legal treatment of Adrian Bayley and Man Monis was absolutely universal.
Change of topic. Not to diminish at all the seriousness of male violence against women, but there is another current issue that is frequently suppressed. We can use Ford’s own words – with one or two alterations – to illustrate: 
This is the actual reality of the world that we live in, but apparently we’re not allowed to talk about it because it’s unfair and cruel and Islamophobic and mean. Don’t we know that the MAJORITY of Muslims are good and decent people? How DARE we besmirch their names and reputations by discussing the demonstrable, evidence supported problem of Islamic violence and its protracted, deliberate impact on women and men and children! 
(Via Jed)
UPDATE. The alleged killer in the murder case to which Ford refers previously assaulted Tony Abbott. (Via Correllio)
===

How did a man with this CV end up doing work for the ABC?

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (11:53am)

William Colvin describes how he cheated his former employer, news.com.au, holding down a job any one of hundreds of unemployed journalists would have loved:
I decided my job at News.com.au could change from ‘writing things, sub-editing things and doing website production’ to ‘doing absolutely no work at all and seeing how long I could get away with it.’ 
I’d like to share with you some of my experiences in this new field, in the hopes that you may too become a professional not-doer of anything, and as a way to gloat in the faces of all the people in that office who I did not, did not, did not, did not like…
I figured out that if I copy and pasted a bunch of articles that I wanted to read into a text file, it looked like I was writing stuff....
Another thing I got really good at is what I like to call the “interview face.”
I’d take my phone out, grab a piece of paper and a voice recorder, and I’d make this sort of weird serious face and frantically scribble some stuff down and mutter something like “oh god late for this fucking interview” and go into one of the glass rooms and sit there doing a phone interview.
Except actually, I “could have” been having two hour Skype conversations with my friend Mislav while he was overseas in Brighton....
What you were supposed to do as night editor was monitor the website and make sure that the best stories were at the top of the page, and then compile a list of new stories taken from other sites around the network and update the front page with them at 11.30, and then monitor those until 2am ...
I realised that, instead of doing any of that, I “could” spend about half an hour compiling that list at the start of the evening, then go over to IGN’s section and play video games and watch movies until 11.30, switch over the list, write a made up handover email…
This is the best bit. This is the bit where I realised Rupert Murdoch literally “could have” paid me to go to parties and do MDMA.
I “could have” left the office, go up the road to Surry Hills, eat drugs and get wasted, and check my phone and the website every 10 minutes to make sure nothing really, really bad had happened in the world like a terrorist attack or something, and then at 2am send the handover from my phone, formatted as if it was from Outlook in the office. I “could have” done that.
But did I?
“No”.
One time I even just went out into the park next to the building during a night shift and ran around chasing pigeons for an hour to get some exercise. Anything to avoid actually working… This story doesn’t really have a point, or a moral, or a grounding in current events. I just want to give my former employers a giant f… you. F...you, News Corp. F… you Rupert Murdoch. F… you in your dessicated old sausage of a head.
So with a CV like that, and truly startling defecating and drinking habits like this, who might employ such a person again? The ABC, as it turns out, using your money:
Over the past few years he’s honed his practice, recently becoming a regular voice on the ABC’s infamous media watchdog Media Watch. 
So how could the junior Colvin have got such a job above so many other journalists with a more impressive CV?
Meanwhile, the ABC refuses to hire a single conservative host for any of its main news and current affairs shows. Apparently conservatives can’t be trusted to work conscientiously.
No, of course the ABC isn’t biased to the Left. Doesn’t ABC boss Mark Scott keep saying so?
UPDATE

Colvin senior:
My son trained and qualified as a voiceover artist. His occasional employment at Media Watch is nothing to do with me. Nothing. 
(Via Tim Blair and Quadrant.) 
===

Shorten? Really? Labor starts the real leadership debate we need

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (9:45am)

Troy Bramston:
BILL Shorten’s critics inside the Labor Party are growing. You don’t have to go far to find detractors in the party organisation, the unions or among the membership, including Labor elders, or to hear complaints about policy, strategy, communications or the slow pace of party reform. Even some of Shorten’s biggest supporters concede they are disappointed. 
There is also growing friction between Shorten and some Labor MPs… Shorten promised 2015 would be Labor’s year of ideas. But as April approaches, the year is fast getting away…
After Joe Hockey’s disastrous first budget, Shorten was convinced that a strategy of near-total opposition to the government’s policies would see Labor return to power by 2016.
However, Labor’s focus group research shows Shorten is not winning over voters. As I wrote on Monday, the research shows voters see him as a blank canvas…
“What does Bill Shorten actually believe in?” asked ABC radio presenter Jon Faine last week. “What I fundamentally believe, and I think it was Martin Luther King who said this best, but (it was) I think true then and it’s true now: ‘Everybody is somebody’,” Shorten said. The interview was a train wreck. Shorten was asked the most fundamental question for any politician — what do they believe in — and he flubbed it. 
(Thanks to reader Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

On The Bolt Report tomorrow, March 22

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (8:59am)

On the  The Bolt Report on Channel 10 on Sunday at 10am and 3pm.
Editorial: Abbott attacked for going soft. But wait, what’s Shorten’s plan? A telling tape.
Guest: Assistant Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Malcolm Fraser, the “Goebbels” uproar and the financial job ahead.
The panel: the great Michael Kroger and “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery.
Newswatch: Sharri Markson on Irish insults and the SBS.
On SBS hypocrisy, media hypocrisy and much more.
The videos of the shows appear here.
===

Fraser’s pain. And Fairfax’s playground taunts

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (8:31am)

How the Left hates

The Left’s criticisms tend to be very personal, very cruel, and very much amplified by its better access to microphones, TV cameras and newspapers.
This anecdote explains so much to me about Malcolm Fraser’s ideological trajectory:
Former Herald Sun photographer Bill McAuley visited Fraser on his Western District property Nareen in 1991 and cunningly used Fraser’s love of photography to put him at ease. 
After taking and talking pictures, both men repaired to his homestead for a few drinks and McAuley took his opportunity to ask Fraser about his lack of popularity while in office.
”The big man wiped away tears as he told me how it felt for him to be misunderstood,” recounted McAuley. “And his voice cracked with emotion as he said: ‘I only tried to do my best for the people of Australia’.”
Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald demonstrates my point by using Fraser’s death as an excuse to heap the wildest and most childish abuse on today’s Liberals:
Whatever you thought of his politics and his seminal role in the vice regal dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government almost 40 years ago, John Malcolm Fraser was, above all else, a genuine liberal in the best sense of the word. Thus he goes to his grave appalled, surely, by the oafs, boofheads and lesser ninnies that not only control the Liberal Party and conservative politics in this country these days, but take their disgrace to the summit of running Australia too.
Author? It’s Mark Kenny again.
Apologies. My error. It was Alan Ramsay, husband of Laura Tingle, mentioned below.
UPDATE
The media Left is vying to be the most abusive to Tony Abbott. The ABC, meant by law to be balanced, yesterday stepped up its own abuse in its increasingly frenzied attempts to destroy Tony Abbott. Host Jon Faine treated Abbott with a disgraceful disrespect, includingabuse, false claims and some verballing:
“What credibility do you have on bullying - you’ve been accused of it so often yourself?” Faine asked. 
“Without foundation, I would say Jon,” Mr Abbott replied…
“You yourself admit you have an aggressive streak - isn’t that the core of bullying?” Faine insisted.
“Well I’m not so sure I have ever said that in so many words,” Mr Abbott responded… “Mr Abbott, for a Rhodes scholar, how come you say so many stupid things? ... But why do you have this foot in mouth disease, what’s going on?” Faine asked.
This from a man forever denouncing “shock jocks”. Listen here to the full thing.
UPDATE
Gerard Henderson reports more childish abuse from Fairfax, then repeated by other journalists as “news” - using a room of media mirrors to make some Abbott haters in the press gallery seem a multitude:
Laura Tingle’s piece in [Friday] morning’s Australian Financial Review is headed “We are being governed by fools and it is not funny”. It commenced with a cliché and soon moved to abuse.... 
A bit like the old story of the frog that gets boiled alive because the temperature of the water in which it sits rises only gradually, we don’t seem to quite be able to take in the growing realisation that we actually are being governed by idiots and fools, or that this actually has real-world consequences.
...When it came to the “Newspapers” section on ABC News Breakfast ..., La Trobe University academic Lawrie Zion agreed with La Tingle… Dr Zion ... also quoted Monash University academic Waleed Aly[’s] ... rant about the Abbott government.
UPDATE
A thoughtful and generous tribute to Malcolm Fraser by John Howard, although ideological punches are not pulled:
I was frequently asked whether Malcolm had left the Liberal Party or if the Liberal Party had left him. The truth is that on economics the centre of gravity in the debate shifted decisively to the right in the 1980s, especially through the impact of the deregulatory approach of both the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. 
This was reflected in Australia. For example, the industrial relations policy of the Coalition for the 1975 election encouraged Australian workers to join the union of their choice. It also promised that Australian industry would be given the protection it needed. The inclusion of such commitments in Liberal policy for the 1996 election would have been unthinkable… Fraser believed in much greater government regulation of the economy than did members of the Howard government. 
But back to Fraser’s ideological u-turn, so startling. Greg Sheridan:
MALCOLM Fraser was by far the most right-wing and ideological prime minister Australia ever had. He then became by far the most left-wing and ideological ex-prime minister Australia ever had. 
And he never explained the conversion, rather engaging in a series of bizarre contortions and misrepresentations about the historical record to claim a continuity from his Richard Nixon/Barry Goldwater persona through to his later Noam Chomsky/John Pilger identity.The astonishing political migration remains unexplained and the key mystery to Malcolm Fraser.
Sheridan’s piece is a must-read corrective to much of the Left’s eulogising.
It contains examples of Fraser’s astonishing reversals, like this:
I was a Washington correspondent in the early years after Fraser’s prime ministership and he came through Washington lecturing American audiences to the effect that the Hawke government was not necessarily trustworthy on the alliance because of the influence of the Labor Left. This was before this wholesale conversion to the Left, in which he embraced virulent anti-Americanism, including many conspiracy theories about American influence and power. 
Fraser’s ideological positions were ultimately so extreme and obsessive - the kind of stuff peddled by John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky and John Le Carre - that he betrayed the very human rights he claimed to espouse:
Finally, Fraser is lionised as a champion of human rights because he condemned Howard and later Abbott over their treatment of asylum-seekers. But his extreme anti-Americanism led him into adopting a number of positions that were directly against human rights and democracy. 
Fraser was harshly critical of Hong Kong’s last governor, Chris Patten, for instituting limited democracy in Hong Kong. In 1997, Fraser blamed Patten for “waking in the minds and hearts of some citizens a desire for Western democratic forms that he knew were unacceptable to China” and urging that “ideology should be put aside and today’s reality ­accepted”.
Then, of course, there was Mugabe.
(Thanks to readers John, Lisle and Peter of Bellevue Hill.) 
===

Michael Smith on his regretful relationship with Kathy Jackson - and her Fair Work partner

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (8:24am)

Michael Smith reveals and regrets his troubled relationship with Kathy Jackson, the controversial Health Services Union boss.
He also makes disturbing allegations against her partner, Michael Lawler - all the more disturbing given Lawler is deputy president of the Fair Work Commission, a position that seems to me increasingly untenable.
Note: the more serious allegations against Lawler are denied.
UPDATE
Smith is not the first person to make allegations - also denied - against Lawler about his alleged influence over a very wealthy barrister with dementia.
UPDATE
The whole Fair Work Commission actually needs a broom through it. Judith Sloan:
A few weeks ago, I pointed to the dubious quality of the research being undertaken by the Fair Work Commission, raising questions about the impact on procedural fairness. 
It turns out there is more, much more… Let’s face it, the unions pretty much always get their way, courtesy of union-friendly members of the FWC and accommodative legislation. And if the unions don’t get their way in the first instance, they can always appeal the case, which is then heard by a union- friendly Full Bench…
There is no doubt that the internal culture of the FWC is dysfunctional, bordering on the toxic, with the president and his mates running the show while riding roughshod over particular members. That this should be occurring within a taxpayer-funded regulator that some people farcically call the “independent umpire” is extraordinary. 
===

Mundine should not look for racism where none exists

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (7:36am)

Warren Mundine, Labor’s former national president and now Tony Abbott’s main indigenous adviser, tries too hard to placate the Left with regular and often exaggerated attacks on the Prime Minister.
And he now tries too hard to find racism behind moves by the West Australian Government - backed by Abbott - to withdraw government funding from Aboriginal communities, generally comprising some eight people each, that are nowhere near jobs or schools:
Western Australia has plenty of remote non-indigenous communities as well as farming families living hours away from the nearest town. But I’m not aware of the state withdrawing services from its tiny wheatbelt communities, for ­example.
Thee is one critical difference so obvious that I am startled that Mundine overlooks it. Those wheatbelt communities are not built where there are no jobs. The very opposite. They are the centres of economic activity, producing not just jobs but the income from which come the taxes the contribute to the servicing of those towns. None of that could be said about the Aboriginal communities facing closure.
Mundine gives just one example of the discrimination he alleges:
The Guardian Australia published a report on three small communities in WA’s Kimberley region — Jarlmadangah, Looma and Camballin — that are about 100km from Derby. Only the two Aboriginal communities, Jarlmadangah and Looma, are at risk of service withdrawal. 
Looma is actually not a micro-community. But Mundine ignores a more important fact that undercuts his claim:
Camballin, a non-Aboriginal community of about 300 people [was] founded by the WA government to support rice growing in the Camballin irrigation scheme. Now it houses teachers and other non-Indigenous people who work in Aboriginal communities. 
It now actually services Aboriginal communities facing closure, and will inevitable shrink or disappear with them. Teachers won’t be post there any more. Nor will nurses. But it simply cannot be closed while Aboriginal communities around it exist.
Moreover, white towns out bush - like Tarcoola, where I grew up for a while - do close when the work goes:
The report notes there are more than 87 ghost towns across WA, almost all of them former mining centres that have vanished along with their resources base.
===

Faith Thomas bowls up a truth about the “stolen generations”

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:58am)

The "stolen generations"

I have written about Faith Thomas before:
Faith Thomas, who played cricket for Australia, explains how she became a member of what others call the “stolen generations”:
FAITH THOMAS: Nursing’s taken me everywhere, sport’s taken me everywhere, you know? Everywhere I’ve wanted to go. All Mum knew what to do was to cook...in kitchens. Pub kitchens. And she’d say, “Why bring that girl up in that environment?” So she rang Sister Hyde up from Colebrook, and she popped up to Copley, picked me and Mum up, brought me down to Quorn. And Mum said to Sister Hyde, you know, “This’ll now be your child. I haven’t named her. You give her a name."… 
I loved it. Yeah. It gave me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had, you know, if I...if Mum...and I really appreciate Mum, you know, for doing that. So I ended up with three wonderful mums - Sister Hyde, Sister Anna and my natural mum, who didn’t, um...you know, who kept in touch with me. She had to learn to read and write so that she could, um...you know, write, keep that contact. Visited every other year, so I suppose I was one of the lucky ones. I don’t consider myself a stolen generation, I consider myself a chosen...generation. 
Colebrook is also the home that took in Lowitja O’Donoghue, co-patron of the National Sorry Day Committee, who claimed she’d been “stolen” ... until she confessed that her parents had dumped her there, too,
And it was the home of Nancy Barnes, the first Aboriginal woman to run a pre-school or kindergarten in the Northern Territory and South Australia. Barnes wrote in her autobiography words almost identical to those of Thomas:
We are referred to as the “Stolen Generation”. I consider myself saved.
Why is Colebrook home significant? Because any Aboriginal child “stolen” in South Australia [back then] would have had to end up there. Yet no one has yet produced a single child who was stolen under a government policy to remove children just because they were Aboriginal and not because they needed help. And note, by the way, that Thomas tells of Aboriginal mothers being free to visit their children at Colebrook, despite the claims of “stolen generations” activists that “stolen” children were locked away from their parents or were told they were dead. 
Even more charming is this video Thomas has just shot for the South Australian Cricket Association. Please watch.
A grand lady. Someone to unite us.
UPDATE
Reader Correllio:
Grand lady indeed. A gem. What gets me most about this stolen generations lie is that it keeps grand ladies like Faith Thomas from receiving the accolades that they deserve - as self made women who live life to the full. 
Reader seadogger: 
My mother was a teacher at Kinchella Boys Home on the Mid North Coast of NSW and it was a regular occurrence for parents to bring their children there and pass them over the fence into a better world than they could provide.  
Reader Jimbo:
What a wonderful lady and such a great story. I’m sure there were some terrible excesses in discipline and exploitation to a lot of children in these homes whether white or aboriginal. I’m disgusted with that. But I,m encouraged by the success story of Faith who doesn’t hide behind the hard done by story.
Reader duty first:
I just watched that video. Why aren’t stories like this promoted more?
(Thanks to reader Owen.) 
===

A Leftist pleads to the tribe: do not forsake the Jews

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:46am)

 Dean Sherr pleads in the Guardian for fellow Leftists not to make common cause with Islamists against the Jews:
Even before the Kemp lecture, the student protesters [Sydney University “peace” professor Jake] Lynch became involved with declared that they were there to defend Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the extremist group which has been exposed as having spread antisemitic propaganda and incitement against Jews on the streets of Sydney. Hizb-ut-Tahrir, whatever their legal status, cannot be defended by any genuine anti-racist. If the radical left with which Lynch and his fellow protesters are affiliated are prepared to defend their civil rights, they must not excuse their anti-Jewish racism – a duty of which they have thus far failed. 
When progressives downplay or diminish the threat of antisemitism in the diaspora because of Israel – or, worse, fuel it – they do not extend to us those equal rights they purport to stand for. Progressives do more than dishonouring their values in this case, they diminish the unique history of Jews in Australian (and western) society, failing to acknowledge and defend us as equal, regardless of our relationship with or opinions about Israel. The left must act to repair its straining relationship with Jews and once again take up opposition to antisemitism as its cause. Antisemitism is, like all forms of racism, to be abhorred and condemned unequivocally, not reduced and marginalised by games of comparison and mitigation. It is not a partisan issue and it cannot be up to the right to own the unqualified outrage it deservedly generates. The left, and the values it holds, are far too proud and dear to our hearts for that.
These pleas are futile. The Left will not support Israel and will for some dangerous years yet give cover to Islamism. They share too many enemies, and Islamists offer too convenient a symbol of the non-white oppressed rising against Western oppression.
(Thanks to reader Brett.) 
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“Off with his head”? Why are Abbott haters such barbarians?

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:23am)

I will say it again - the far Left sounds increasingly like the far Islamist Right. Barbarians both:
A group of musicians are using art as protest and controversially calling for the beheading of Tony Abbott. 
Musicians have used song as a means of protest to the Abbott Government’s ‘bleak and sterile environment’, donating their time to compose Down the Abbott Hole.
Nothing like beheading politicians you don’t like to fix a “bleak and sterile environment”.
Just hours after its release, the song is being streamed online and played by radio stations across country. 
There are more such barbarians than you might have suspected, and the media class is keen to cater to them.
Down the Abbott Hole is performed and composed by Cairns artist Zelda Grimshaw, with contributions by drummer and recording engineer Nigel Pegrum, and saxophonists Andree Baudet and Ruedi Homberger. 
Remember those names.
The artists hope the song will inspire other Australians to voice their dissent, and ultimately escape the ‘Abbott Hole’ in which ‘fear reigns over logic, and the atmosphere is “cold as ice, black as coal”.’
The sheer, mindless unknowing of barbarians who preach death to enemies, yet consider themselves good-hearted dissenters against fear and cold hearts.
With song lyrics ‘I’ll be the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter and his Hat,’ through the medium of song, Grimshaw is prepared to be a voice for the majority.
The self-deception is astonishing. She seriously believes these hymns of hate speak “for the majority”?
‘We need to see a parliament that governs for the majority, and that governs for the future. Perhaps Tony Abbott and his hard line Catholic ministers are looking forward to an apocalypse, but most Australians want to see a move to renewable energy, and a chance for continued human habitation on earth...” 
Note the anti-Catholic bigotry? Note also that the new pagan religion is actually a crude reworking of Christian eschatology, with its own Armageddon, here called the apocalypse, and with its own call to repent.
The song concludes with Grimshaw repeating ‘Off with his head!’… and we will be free of this Abbott hole!’
Sick. Yet they somehow believe themselves to be more moral, the more violent their fantasies of hate.
(Thanks to reader CS.) 
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Britain’s former race commissar repents

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:13am)

 Allison Pearson:
Trevor Phillips [has made a] excoriating Channel 4 documentary, Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, to be screened tonight. 
You have to hand it to the former head of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission…
Phillips explains how British people, who dared to express any concern about the rapidly changing face of their country, were shouted down as racist or a bigot. Remember, that’s how Gordon Brown described Labour voter Gillian Duffy in 2010. Looking back, Mrs Duffy was rather measured in her complaints, considering the poor woman lived in the once-respectable town of Rotherham, now the child sex-grooming capital of the Western world, thanks to a group of Pakistani men who make up just 5 per cent of the local population.
“Campaigners like me sincerely believed that if we could prevent people expressing prejudiced thoughts, they’d stop thinking them,” says Phillips. He now says they were “utterly wrong” ...
The trouble is that, even as the Equalities Commission worked hard to prevent racial stereotypes, a troubling proportion of them, as Phillips concedes ruefully, turn out to be accurate. These are statistics laid out by his programme: a third of London pickpockets are Romanian (how Fagin would have loved them!); black people are six times as likely to be jailed for robbery; the Chinese are tops at people-trafficking; when it comes to drug dealing, Afro-Caribbeans are pathetic amateurs compared to the Colombians; meanwhile, white idiots are the national champs of alcohol-fuelled crime.
Phillips and a Muslim former senior Met officer agreed that the police’s reluctance to use racial profiling arose from an attitude which was basically: “OK, maybe you’d catch more criminals, but they might think we’re a bit racist.”..
Far more typical are the touchy censors who, Phillips reveals, withdrew a timely 2008 film for schools showing a twentysomething South Asian groomer luring white teenage girls into a fancy car and a life of degradation. That was way too realistic, unfortunately, so a second film was made where the groomer was a white teenager. This bore no resemblance to any present danger to any girl ever, but at least it wasn’t offending someone’s culture, except possibly white people. Bad luck, we don’t count. 
Hate the word “race”. “Culture” is more accurate, and gives more hope.
UPDATE

Related:
Nearly 400 British girls as young as eleven are believed to have been sexually exploited by Muslim rape gangs in Oxfordshire over the past 15 years, according to a chilling new report. It charges local officials with repeatedly ignoring the abuse due to a “culture of denial.”
The scale of the abuse in Oxfordshire, a county in southeast England, mirrors similarly shocking accounts of the sexual exploitation of white British girls by Muslim gangs in Bristol, Derby, Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, and implies that the problem is not isolated, but endemic.
The 133-page Serious Case Review (SCR) ...  focuses on the accounts of six girls and their contact with the authorities. The girls were the victims in the “Operation Bullfinch” trial, in which seven Muslims were found guilty, in May 2013, of trafficking and raping the girls between 2004 and 2012…An investigation cited by the paper found more than 30 instances where local authorities refused to conduct a Serious Case Review, which is required by law whenever a child is seriously harmed as a result of abuse. When investigations were conducted, in many cases the reports failed to examine how “fear, overwork, timidity, willful blindness and over-optimism” had led social workers to make bad decisions. 
(Thanks to readers Duncan, Kings, Lew and many others.) 
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Global warming? Fewer tornados this year

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:00am)

Global warming - dud predictions

Global warming was meant to bring us more severe weather events. Instead:
The US tornado count for March 2015? Zero. That’s right, so far this month there have been no tornadoes reported in the U.S. — this is only the second time this has happened since 1950, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Greg Forbes. 
March is usually a pretty big month for severe weather, but this year has been eerily quiet with no tornadoes or severe thunderstorms watches issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration…
“We are in uncharted territory with respect to lack of severe weather,” Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at NOAA, said in a statement. “This has never happened in the record of [Storm Prediction Center] watches dating back to 1970."… Since January 1st, only 20 tornados have been reported, compared to the 130 tornado average for that time period.
UPDATE
The US National Climatic Data Center reports:
With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.
Meanwhile in Australia, more signs that global warming isn’t bringing all the wild weather predicted. From the Bureau of Meteorology:
(Thanks to readers Rosalind, Spartacus and Scarbo.) 
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Islamic State claims responsibility for slaughter in Yemen

Andrew Bolt March 21 2015 (12:00am)

Islam means peace? The reach of the Islamic State is growing - this week extending first to Tunisia and now to Yemen:
MULTIPLE suicide bombings have killed at least 142 people at Shiite mosques in Yemen’s capital in one of the country’s deadliest jihadist attacks. 
The killings were the first claimed by Islamic State in Yemen and represent a strong show of force by the group in a country where the group’s rival Al-Qa’ida is the most prominent jihadist organisation, and which reacted by saying it would not attack mosques.
UPDATE
Boko Haram, now allied with the Islamic State, continues to demonstrate its brand of Islam:
Soldiers from Niger and Chad who liberated the Nigerian town of Damasak from Boko Haram militants have discovered the bodies of at least 70 people, many with their throats slit, scattered under a bridge, a witness said. 
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Confusion, chaos and buffoonery

Piers Akerman – Thursday, March 20, 2014 (8:12pm)

CLIVE Palmer’s buffoonish presence in federal parliament is a continuing indictment of the voters in the Queensland seat of Fairfax. Whatever could they have been thinking last September when they elected the erratic twerker to represent them?
 Continue reading 'Confusion, chaos and buffoonery'
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FAIRFAX ALLIANCE

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (4:04pm)

A point of clarification from Fairfax’s Clementine Ford, who wishes it to be known that the “F**k Tony Abbott” t-shirts seen at the weekend’s March in March protests weren’t the t-shirts she made and sold with some helpful Fairfaxpromotion: 
I didn’t make the ‘F**k Tony Abbott’ t-shirts white on black. Mine are black on white.


Those aren’t my t-shirts. Those are the Socialist Alliance ones. 
So Fairfax and Socialist Alliance are marching, so to speak, in lock-step. No story there for Media Watch. No story at all.
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF LABOR’S CARBON TAX

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (10:11am)

In 2010, just prior to that year’s election, then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard promised that there would be no carbon taxunder her government. Then, in 2011, Gillard announced that there would be a carbon tax under her government.
Later in 2011 Gillard and Kevin Rudd kissed in celebration after the carbon tax legislation was passed. Then, once he’d regained the Labor leadership in 2013, Rudd said that Labor did not have a mandate to introduce the carbon tax. Last July, the then-Prime Minister announced: “Today we’ve taken the decision to terminate the carbon tax.”
Earlier this month, Labor senator Louise Pratt told parliament: “We are committed to scrapping the carbon tax.” But yesterday Labor voted in the senate to keep the carbon tax.
And that’s where we are now. Labor is keeping a tax they were committed to scrapping after promising not to introduce it before it was terminated. Simple.
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PEOPLE EXPRESSING HOW UPSET THEY ARE

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (3:34am)

Evil forces are undermining the sacred March in March movement! Margo Kingston is on to it. Meanwhile, angry Marchists take issue with this site’s fair and unbiased coverage: 
• This attempt to paint a few in the crowd as representative of everyone? This is a LIE! … You are a LIAR and you won’t get away with it.
• This is not journalism.  All you have done in this ill written story is pick on people, and ridicule people by belittling what is a very LARGE sum of people dedicating their Sunday to expressing how upset they are … Don’t ridicule them. This is not a job done properly. The same can be said for this government.  Slamming people without investigatiing truths. Very unprofessional work Tim Blair!!!!!!
• Why are you not publishing replies from people who disagree with your opinion? You will find that a large portion of the people that marched that day were highly educated and not the rabble that you imply.
• You jest, because you have probably felt no discomfort in your oh so perfect and care free lives, whereas tens of thousands of people decided to stand up for what is right. You are the enablers of a bigoted and shamelessly bias Prime Minister. Label us “lefties” all you want, but when your own lives are rudely interrupted and your own feet trampled on, you will be in the streets, shoulder to shoulder with the people you mock. So, laugh it up while you still can.
• In my lifetime I’ve never seen Aussies band together like this to say ‘enough’. We now have media that doesn’t even bother to cover it’s bias. We now have govt that doesn’t feel it has to even acknowledge the people and has free reign to do whatever they like.
• I’ve been a rusted on Liberal voter for decades - but as my kids grow and as I see the changes to the world they’ll inherit I’ve become increasingly concerned.
• I will keep attending marches until the Government starts responding in an intelligent manner to our concerns.
• “Lack of focus” ??? Call yourself a journalist?  It was a very focused March Tim. It was “focused” on “No Confidence in Tony Abbott” as PM … Because of the hundreds of good programs Abbott is axing and the mass of atrocious policies this Government is advocating he has too go. 
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I’M ILMARI LAHTI

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (2:53am)

Let’s all be Finnish.
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POETS OR SPEECH-CAPABLE COCKROACHES

Tim Blair – Friday, March 21, 2014 (2:50am)

Our choice, according to Elizabeth Farrelly: 
Seems to me we have two choices. Either we form an axis of planet-lovers that includes farmers, greens, poets, priests and tourism operators, to protect nature from ourselves. Or we accept that future cockroaches, as the inheritor species, will tell their children parables about the too-clever ape-race, and how the oppressor always becomes the oppressed. 
The “axis of planet-lovers” seems to be missing a few key players. Where are the scrimshaw artists, rune decoders andmattress deliverymen? 
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Mark Scott breaches ABC code to promote a product - and get even

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (5:04pm)

Media

I’ve argued that the ABC is out of control, and managing director Mark Scott must rein in the bias.
Today comes astonishing evidence that it is Scott himself who is out of control.
The ABC has a very firm code of conduct which it insists staff observe - do not use the ABC to flog particular commercial products - either on air or on its interactive platforms.
9.4.21 Consistent with Section 16 (Involvement with commercial organisations, products and services), ABC interactive services must not be used to unduly promote commercial products or services.
One ABC interactive platform is Mark Scott’s Twtitter account; branded as an ABC account - and even carrying a reminder of Scott obligation not to undly promote commercial products:
Yet today Scott has indeed unduly promoted a commercial product - the third edition of Morry Schwartz’s far-Left The Saturday Paper. I say “unduly” because it’s a general endorsement of the paper and not of any particular read in it ... unless, of course, he wants to promote in a snide and sneaky way a get-even for the apology the ABC was forced to make to me this week:
See straight through you, Mark.
What was it it that George Brandis said this week of Labor’s no-but-yes smears of Arthur Sinodinos?
Shakespeare defined a coward as someone who was willing to wound but afraid to strike.
Scott should at a very minumum pull down this endorsement of The Saturday Paper. He is personally in breach of ABC standards. And if he refuses to comply, the boatd should make him. Their managing director seems to have let partisanship and spite overwhelm his judgement and his duty.
This is just petty.
(Thanks to reader peter H.) 
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The worst that can be fairly said about Sinodinos

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (10:10am)

I cannot believe Arthur Sinodinos was party to corruption, and I note that even Labor cannot make any allegation of impropriety against him.
Tony Walker outlines the only credible case against Sinodinos - one that questions not his morals but his judgment:
Sinodinos may have been line for a windfall $20 million payday if a dodgy deal between AWH and Sydney water was approved by the government of the day… 
With his long experience as a public servant, political adviser, and aspiring cabinet minister in a Liberal government Sinodinos should have known better. More than a few sleazy lobbyists will have crossed his threshold in his days as John Howard’s chief of staff. He should have run a mile when dubious characters bearing gifts in the form of easy money hove in sight in a NSW un­detached, as it is, from the traditions of the Rum Corps. Other states have their problems with corruption; in NSW it is endemic.
A charitable explanation for Sinodinos’s lapses of judgment came from colleague Neil Chenoweth in yesterday’s Financial Review.
“Sinodinos’s account of his three-year stint from 2008 [first as a director and then as chairman of AWH] can be summarised as fathomless ignorance,’’ Chenoweth wrote.
What is certainly “fathomless’’ is how Sinodinos could have imagined his reputation would remain untainted by his association with the sorts of scoundrels involved in what has all the appearances of a public utility scam.
Equally mystifying is his apparent ignor­ance of the provenance of some $77,000 in AWH funds that found their way into Liberal party coffers while he was the state Treasurer of the party. This oversight might be attributed to “fathomless ignorance’’, but whatever the rights and wrongs of Sinodinos’s involvement, all this is a terrible look for a minister of the Crown – and not any minister, but one who served until this week as assistant to the Treasurer. No allegation of criminality has been levelled against Sinodinos, nor of malfeasance or corruption. But his misjudgments have led him to become ensnared in a deeply unpleasant process whose destination is unclear. His political career hangs by a?thread. 
On the evidence so far, that is as tough a judgment as could legitimately be made against Sinodinos.
UPDATE
To those Labor MPs and supporters still hounding Sinodinos about not quitting or paying some higher price when he’s simply appearing as a witness, without any allegations made against him, please note the following.
No one in Labor said Greg Combet should step aside until he cleared up certain matters ICAC was investigating:
CLIMATE Change Minister Greg Combet has claimed he was “entitled to trust” a former union boss now under the cloud of a corruption investigation into the awarding of a mining licence that made millions of dollars. 
Mr Combet appeared before the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Sydney yesterday to answer questions about his relationship with former CFMEU boss John Maitland, who was a shareholder and director of the proposed Doyles Creek training mine in the NSW Hunter Valley.
Asked why, as a federal MP in the Hunter region, he wrote a letter of support in September 2008 urging then NSW mining minister Ian McDonald to support the Doyles Creek mine, Mr Combet said of Mr Maitland: “I trusted him.” But he said he did not realise Mr Maitland was seeking an exploration licence that could allow the establishment of a large commercial mine from which he stood to net millions.
No one in Labor said Doug Cameron should step aside from his own responsibilities when he had to explain certain matters to ICAC: 
Federal Labor Senator Doug Cameron has told a corruption inquiry he supported former NSW mining minister Ian Macdonald at a key party meeting because he thought he was competent. 
The Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has heard Senator Cameron stood up to Labor Party and union officials when they tried to strip Mr Macdonald of his preselection at a lunch in 2006. Senator Cameron said Mr Macdonald [since found by ICAC to have acted corruptly] had asked for another two years in parliament because he had family expenses and wanted to go to the Beijing Olympics. 
Why a different standard for Sinodinos? 
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The workers’ fiend just gave them more work

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (9:17am)

Which means more jobs for Australian workers, thanks to a woman vilified by a union leader in the March in March:
GINA Rinehart has secured backing from a group of global banks and export credit agencies for a new $10 billion ($11 billion) iron-ore mine that can feed Asian steel demand, just as miners like BHP Billiton scale back investments amid a broad decline in commodity prices. The mining magnate, who is Australia’s richest person, said lenders, including US, Japanese and Australian banks, had agreed to put up $US7.2 billion in debt to build the Roy Hill mine deep in the Australian outback. The deal was signed in Singapore on Thursday. 
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We need PNG so badly we can’t demand reform for our aid

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:52am)

Stephen Howes is, sadly, right. We are huge donors to PNG but have now lost the ability to demand it reform - or else:
The sad reality, however, is that the bilateral relationship is now focused on asylum-seekers. The detention on Manus Island of those who arrive in Australia by boat ...  has taken away all Australian leverage in the relationship. 
Our overriding objective with regard to PNG is now simply to have them on our side. It is impossible to run a $500 million aid program effectively in a country as difficult as PNG without leverage, and it is showing....
Here are four issues that should be discussed by the two prime ministers but probably won’t be…
The first is that PNG has effectively given up on its sovereign wealth fund. Millions of Australian dollars have been spent on advising the PNG government on setting up a SWF…
The second issue that won’t get a hearing is the misprocurement of medical supplies. As part of our aid program, and to combat the longstanding problem of counterfeit drugs, PNG agreed it would select a company with international certification to supply its health clinics… The third issue is the reform of PNG’s universities… The fourth and final issue is PNG’s expropriation of Ok Tedi, the country’s largest mine, and O’Neill’s continued efforts to get control of the $1.4 billion offshore trust fund of its previous owners ...
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Left dreams big, plans small. Take Rudd and Gillard…

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:39am)

On Monday, this insight into the Rudd Labor Government:
KEVIN Rudd’s department gave a pair of bureaucrats just two days to secretly draft, cost and assess the risks of its scheme to rush insulation into the roofs of millions of Australian homes. 
And his government ignored official advice to roll out the program over five years instead of two and to conduct a trial of the scheme, which ultimately cost four lives and was blamed for causing more than 150 house fires. 
On Thursday, this insight into the Gillard Labor Government:
THE agency in charge of the national disability insurance scheme has been likened to “a plane that took off before it had been fully built and is being completed while it is in the air”, in an independent report that questions its ability to roll out the flagship project… 
The report’s authors, led by former public service executive Jeff Whalan, point to woefully inadequate IT systems, staff confusion, lack of direction and vague terminology in the crucial assessments, such as the key “reasonable and necessary” supports....
In July 2011, a Productivity Commission report recommended the current design of the NDIS and that it be launched this July, with the intervening time used to prepare. The Gillard Labor government announced it would build the scheme a month later and by December had committed to launching four locations — in NSW, South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria — in July last year, 12 months earlier than recommended and two months prior to the federal election.
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The poor aren’t entitled to live rich on the taxes of others

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (8:24am)

How welfare becomes an entitlement, with taxpayers vilified as the greedy rich:
BY any measure of fairness, the situation of public housing tenants facing eviction from 296 harbourside properties in Sydney is an outrage. 
NSW independent MP for Sydney Alex Greenwich said the O’Farrell government’s decision to market properties at The Rocks and Millers Point was “social cleansing’’. On ABC radio, Fairfax columnist Elizabeth Farrelly praised the “wonderful, strange idiosyncrasy’’ of Sydney’s poorest people living in the city’s best spots… And deputy opposition leader and federal member for Sydney Tanya Plibersek said the NSW government “may as well have dropped a bomb on the centre of Sydney for the damage they will do to the community that has been there for generations”.
Ms Plibersek’s husband, NSW bureaucrat Michael Coutts-Trotter, who will oversee the relocations, was more realistic. He said the sales in a “very, very expensive area’’ would free up funding for more social housing…
Public tenants in Millers Point receive annual subsidies of $24,832 compared with $8067 in Campbelltown in Sydney’s southwest. No wonder many in Millers Point were not inclined to save for a deposit on a home elsewhere… Some of its pensioner tenants pay $96 a week for Opera House views when the market rate is $655. [Sydney Lord Mayor Clover] Moore claims the government is robbing the poor to give to the rich. To the contrary, all taxpayers, including those who spend hours commuting on Sydney’s woeful public transport and the 57,000 people waiting for public housing, have been cheated by an arcane and inefficient housing system in dire need of reform. That’s unfair.
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A Professor rages: free speech means never having to say you’re sorry for a false smear

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (7:45am)

Free speech

The really distressing thing about this inaccurate, abusive and logically incoherent article is that author Dennis Altman is a professor of politics:
It is possible that Bolt would have recourse to the laws of defamation even without the existence of the Racial Discrimination Act. But his actions in demanding an apology [from the ABC] did make rather hollow the constant refrain from the right that they believe in untrammelled free speech and the importance of countering such attacks through discussion rather than the courts.
Let me explain the reality to Altman as simply as I can:
1. I did not threaten to sue the ABC for defamation. Indeed, I have repeatedly declared my determination not to.
2. Asking people to correct a false claim is not contrary to a belief in “untrammelled free speech” or in the principle of countering “attacks through discussion rather than the courts”.  It is indeed exactly how free speech is meant to work. We argue, freely, and in that argument we (hopefully) arrive at the truth - and acknowledge it.
3. I asked the ABC to correct and apologise for false claims it broadcast against me, and I provided the evidence to demonstrate the falseness of those claims. The ABC apologised because those claims were indeed false. That is free speech at work. 
I cannot understand why the Left finds this all so shocking. Or is Altman arguing that false claims should never be corrected? For instance, will he refuse now to correct his own? Indeed, is refusing to correct error a principle he teaches his students? 
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What’s the difference between Clive Palmer and a barking cat?

Andrew Bolt March 21 2014 (7:23am)

Here’s a cat that barks for animals but meows for humans:
And here is a political leader who barks at the mining tax to Western Australians, promising he’s the only man to get rid of it…
But here is that same leader meowing at the mining tax to everyone else, claiming he’ll block its repeal unless there’s more welfare:
CLIVE Palmer says his senators will veto the Coalition’s efforts to repeal the mining tax, unless it reverses plans to axe bonus welfare payments to the children of dead or injured war veterans, including orphans.
Is Clive Palmer a barking cat?

UPDATE
But in this case Palmer is rightly meowing and it’s his lead Senate candidate who is the barking cat:
CLIVE Palmer has been pounced on for contradicting his lead candidate for the West Australian Senate election over renewable energy targets. 
Palmer United Party’s Dio Wang said on Tuesday that the existing Renewable Energy Target (RET), which requires that 20 per cent of Australia’s electricity be produced from renewable energy sources by 2020, was the right scheme for maintaining and improving the nation’s environment, and should stay as it is…
Mr Palmer said he believed the target should be voluntary. “We don’t agree with people being compelled to do anything,” he told reporters.
(Thanks to readers Gab, CA and lol.) 
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I am not a perfect sphere .. ed
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Pope Pius VII
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“Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” - 1 Peter 2:2-3
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Morning and Evening by Charles Spurgeon

March 20: Morning
"My beloved." - Song of Solomon 2:8
This was a golden name which the ancient Church in her most joyous moments was wont to give to the Anointed of the Lord. When the time of the singing of birds was come, and the voice of the turtle was heard in her land, her love-note was sweeter than either, as she sang, "My beloved is mine and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies." Ever in her song of songs doth she call him by that delightful name, "My beloved!" Even in the long winter, when idolatry had withered the garden of the Lord, her prophets found space to lay aside the burden of the Lord for a little season, and to say, as Esaias did, "Now will I sing to my well-beloved a song of my beloved touching his vineyard." Though the saints had never seen his face, though as yet he was not made flesh, nor had dwelt among us, nor had man beheld his glory, yet he was the consolation of Israel, the hope and joy of all the chosen, the "beloved" of all those who were upright before the Most High. We, in the summer days of the Church, are also wont to speak of Christ as the best beloved of our soul, and to feel that he is very precious, the "chiefest among ten thousand, and the altogether lovely." So true is it that the Church loves Jesus, and claims him as her beloved, that the apostle dares to defy the whole universe to separate her from the love of Christ, and declares that neither persecutions, distress, affliction, peril, or the sword have been able to do it; nay, he joyously boasts, "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."

O that we knew more of thee, thou ever precious one!
"My sole possession is thy love;
In earth beneath, or heaven above,
I have no other store;
And though with fervent suit I pray,
And importune thee day by day,
I ask thee nothing more."
Evening

"Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church." - Ephesians 5:25

What a golden example Christ gives to his disciples! Few masters could venture to say, "If you would practise my teaching, imitate my life;" but as the life of Jesus is the exact transcript of perfect virtue, he can point to himself as the paragon of holiness, as well as the teacher of it. The Christian should take nothing short of Christ for his model. Under no circumstances ought we to be content unless we reflect the grace which was in him. As a husband, the Christian is to look upon the portrait of Christ Jesus, and he is to paint according to that copy. The true Christian is to be such a husband as Christ was to his church. The love of a husband is special. The Lord Jesus cherishes for the church a peculiar affection, which is set upon her above the rest of mankind: "I pray for them, I pray not for the world." The elect church is the favourite of heaven, the treasure of Christ, the crown of his head, the bracelet of his arm, the breastplate of his heart, the very centre and core of his love. A husband should love his wife with a constant love, for thus Jesus loves his church. He does not vary in his affection. He may change in his display of affection, but the affection itself is still the same. A husband should love his wife with an enduring love, for nothing "shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." A true husband loves his wife with a hearty love, fervent and intense. It is not mere lip-service. Ah! beloved, what more could Christ have done in proof of his love than he has done? Jesus has a delighted love towards his spouse: He prizes her affection, and delights in her with sweet complacence. Believer, you wonder at Jesus' love; you admire it--are you imitating it? In your domestic relationships is the rule and measure of your love--"even as Christ loved the church?"
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Today's reading: Joshua 4-6, Luke 1:1-20 (NIV)

View today's reading on Bible Gateway

Today's Old Testament reading: Joshua 4-6


1 When the whole nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the LORD said to Joshua, 2 "Choose twelve men from among the people, one from each tribe, 3 and tell them to take up twelve stones from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priests are standing, and carry them over with you and put them down at the place where you stay tonight."
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites,6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever...."


Today's New Testament reading: Luke 1:1-20


Introduction

1 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught....

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There is no new Lent reading today; today is a catch-up day. If you've kept up with the daily readings so far, congratulations! If you've fallen behind, here are the readings from the last week in case you want to go back and catch up:

Monday: Matthew 13-14
Tuesday: Matthew 15-16
Wednesday: Matthew 17-18
Thursday: Matthew 19-20
Friday: Matthew 21-22
Saturday: Matthew 23-24

Have a blessed Sunday!

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