Headlines Sunday 23rd May 2010

=== Todays Toon ===

Bloody Sunday 1887, James Ramsay MacDonald was there, then. Still no excuse for nearly killing Britain's hope of success in WW2
James Ramsay MacDonald (12 October 1866 – 9 November 1937) was a British Labour politician, who served two separate terms as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He rose from humble origins to become the first ever British Labour Prime Minister in 1924.

=== Bible Quote ===

“You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.”- Galatians 5:13

=== Headlines ===

A draft United Nations resolution aimed at halting Iran's nuclear program has an element that may allow the country to acquire missile system from Russia.

Obama's New World Order
President vows to press for a new international order 'that can resolve the challenges of our times' and help U.S. defeat Al Qaeda

Harrowing Tales From India Plane Crash
The few survivors of Air India crash that killed 159 describe how they jumped from plane before explosion

'Rahmbo' Blowing Up Immigration Fix?
Some Hispanic lawmakers blaming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for slow pace of overhaul

Jessica Watson opens up about her love life and reveals she's dating British sailor Mike Perham who she grew close to over satellite phone during her months at sea

Foreigners buy up Aussie homes
FOREIGNERS snapped up $14.9 billion worth of property in Australia last year, real estate figures show.

Swan savages mining tax 'fear campaign'
WAYNE Swan has ripped into giant mining companies, accusing them of paying just 13 per cent tax.

Toddler killed at train level crossing
A TWO-year-old boy has died after he was struck by a freight train at a level crossing in Adelaide.

Cheap deal prediction for iPads users
EXPERTS say Australian iPad users will benefit from cheap deals when they hit our stores.

'Chook' cries foul over Underbelly series
Graham 'Chook' Fowler refuses to watch Underbelly saying the show's makers 'dudded' him.

Powerbroker takes swing at Labor parties
LABOR warlord Graham Richardson has taken a swipe at his party and said the Campbell scandal was the final straw for the NSW Government.

David Campbell's former Tranport Dept release his diary entries for F3 traffic fiasco
FALLEN Transport Minister David Campbell's office released his diary entries for last month's F3 traffic fiasco to account for an 11-hour gap in mobile phone records. The records reveal he made no mobile phone calls from 7.08am - when he had a 12-minute ABC interview - and 5.47pm, when he launched a frenzy of calls to the since-sacked RTA boss Michael Bushby. The NSW Opposition had questioned Mr Campbell about his whereabouts and movements on the day of the F3 fiasco, but he refused to respond in State Parliament. But yesterday, when asked by The Sunday Telegraph to explain the 11-hour gap in his phone records, Mr Campbell's office emailed a copy of his itinerary from his personal diary. His spokesman, Ryan Liddell, said Mr Campbell had attended meetings with the NSW transport director general Les Wielinga, the National Transport Commission and Mr Bushby.

What violent lyrics do to our children
SONGS with violent lyrics make people who hear them up to four times more aggressive, a Macquarie University study has found. Wayne Warburton, deputy director of the university's Children and Families Research Centre, said the findings should prompt a better warning system for music and encourage parents to take more notice of what's on their teens' iPods. More than 200 students aged about 21 were split into groups and played three violent songs by US artists, including rapper Violent J and hip-hop band D12. Some heard only backing music, others heard lyrics and some were exposed to the full songs and their video clips. Some lyrics referred to raping women, slitting people's throats and pushing babies onto busy streets. Students were then asked how much hot chilli sauce they would make a fellow participant eat, knowing they hated spicy food and would have to eat it all.

=== Comments ===

Diving dollar and no political sense
Piers Akerman
A FIRST-principle, rock-solid rule of politics forbids Australia’s senior ministers from commenting on the nation’s currency. To do so is to trip all the alarms in the world’s currency trading rooms.- I remember when they were bagging the economic accomplishments of the previous conservative government. Rudd had claimed that Mr Howard’s reckless spending had to stop and he gave as an example the baby bonus. As if on cue, although it preceded the Rudd election, interest rates climbed further. And so Rudd blamed the higher interest rates on the previous government too. When criticized for the result, many sprang to the ALP’s defense, claiming that they were popular and wouldn’t be if they had been bad economic managers. A few years down the track and those defenders have not made the link with government popularity again.
It is risible to claim that the GFC is anything other than a shining beacon showing the wisdom of the previous conservative government where the current administration has failed badly.
Rudd has failed to show vision. He has failed to prosecute an agenda. He has failed to make lasting improvements with his expenditure. Instead, Rudd has clearly made pork barrels and ignored the pain caused by his mistakes. But it would be wrong to merely blame Rudd for all these faults. The truth is the entire ALP front bench (the whole party machine) is rotten to the core. They put an empty suit on the world stage, because they have no one to fill it. - ed.
===
Mexico's Calderon Knows Nothing About America's Gun Laws
By John Lott
Felipe Calderon's understanding of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban is no more accurate than it is about Arizona's new immigration law.
During his trip to the United States Mexico's President Felipe Calderón received a lot of attention for falsely claiming that Arizona's new immigration law uses "racial profiling." Calderon's attacks on U.S. policies continued during his address to Congress on Thursday. Immigration wasn’t his only topic. He spent over four minutes of his address lecturing Americans and calling them on to renew the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that sunset in September 2004.

Calderon's message was simple: the reason that Mexicans are losing the drug war is because the U.S. assault weapons ban expired. Yet, Calderon's understanding of what the Federal Assault Weapons Ban is no more accurate than it is about Arizona's new immigration law. Let's review the assertions he made to Congress:

-- Calderon claimed that these were "powerful weapons." It is a common misunderstanding as the "assault weapons" ban conjures up images of machine guns used by militaries. Yet the 1994 federal assault weapons ban had nothing to do with machine guns, only semiautomatics, which fire one bullet per pull of the trigger. The AK-47s banned by the assaults weapons ban were civilian, semiautomatic versions of the gun. The banned guns fired the same type of bullets, with the same rapidity, and doing the same damage as deer hunting rifles. Their inside guts are essentially the same as deer hunting rifles -- some people just like to own these "military-style" weapons because of the way they look on the outside. The firing mechanisms in semiautomatics and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semi-automatic gun has to be gutted and replaced to turn it into a military AK-47.

Just as Mexican drug cartels are able to bring drugs into their country, they are also able to bring in really powerful weapons from around the world to defend both their valuable drugs as well their turf against competing drug dealers. Reports indicate that grenades and rocket launchers are not even available for sale in the United States and come from countries such as South Korea, Israel, and Spain. Two thousand two hundred thirty nine grenades were seized by the Mexican government from 2007 to 2009. Similarly, machine guns in Mexico originate from China, Israel, and South Africa.

It is hard to believe that Mexican drug cartels would want to get look-alike "military-style" weapons from the U.S., when they can get the real military weapons elsewhere. (more at the link)
===
Historians slam new national modern history curriculum
Laurie Nowell
HISTORIANS say the new national modern history curriculum for schools reads like a Marxist manifesto that ignores popular aspects of our past and neglects Australia's role in world politics and war.

The course, designed for years 11 and 12, is heavily focused on revolutionary struggles, colonial oppression and women's struggle for equality.

It neglects Australia's British roots and institutions and its military history, with no mention of Gallipoli, Tobruk or Kokoda, the experts say.

The draft lists World War I as a potential case study in "investigating modern history".

It lists "controversies surrounding ... memorial sites and commemorative events" as an area of study but does not mention Gallipoli or the battle of Fromelle.

In a topic headed "Australia 1880-1945", the draft lists "the formation of organised labour", "White Australia" and "wartime government controls, including conscription, control of the labour force, rationing, censorship and propaganda". (more at the link)
===
PINKO MILLIONAIRE KNOWS EVERYTHING
Tim Blair
Deep thinking from Jeremy Irons:

The world is becoming so overpopulated that nature will one day wreak its revenge, claims Jeremy Irons, the actor.

Launching himself as a green campaigner, Irons has revealed plans to make a documentary about sustainability and waste disposal, likening himself to Michael Moore, the controversial film maker, although “not as silly”.

The increasing global population would put an intolerable strain on the world’s resources, Irons said, and the gulf between developing countries and westerners living a bountiful “pie-in-the-sky” existence must be addressed …

Irons, who owns seven houses, including a pink castle …

According to Irons, his wife is “deeply socialist”. But of course.
===
TRACTOR INCLUDED
Tim Blair
Yours for just $1,075,000:
Imagine how much cheaper it would be if the seas were rising.
===
EVERYTHING HE TOUCHES …
Tim Blair
Peter Garrett takes on Bjorn Lomborg in an environmental debate and gets smooshed. He joins Mark Latham’s Labor campaign in 2004 and immediately beclowns himself. His candidacy sends gamblers rushing to the Liberals:

One punter put $10,000 on the Coalition the moment he heard Garrett had joined Labor.

Garrett finally achieves power three years later but his old friends turn against him. He attempts to insulate Australian houses and ends up setting them on fire. He launches a wave energy project and less than two months later the thing is destroyed by waves.

The man needs a change of luck. He needs a sure bet. So – putting aside his previous rejection of football clubs – Garrett turns up at the Sydney Cricket Ground on Saturday to toss the coin for the Swans-Fremantle game. The Swans haven’t lost at the SCG for nine straight matches. They haven’t been defeated in Sydney by the Dockers since 1996. What could possibly go wrong?

===
MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
Tim Blair
A mild, non-committal headline on Age writer Adam Morton’s analysis of Kevin Rudd’s recent 7.30 Report appearance:

More to the ETS delay than meets the eye

The original headline – which ran at all Fairfax online sites – was slightly more direct, however.
===
Yet another warming scare zapped
Andrew Bolt
It’s yet another of those great global warming scares pushed by every alarmist - that malaria will get much worse.

Here’s Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth:

...because of global warming, [mosquitoes] are now travelling to places where they’ve never been before. For instance, in Africa, the city of Nairobi…used to be above the mosquito line (the highest point at which mosquitoes can live)…”.

Here’s the United Nations’ Millenium Campaign:

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of severe weather events. Poor countries lack the infrastructure necessary (e.g. storm walls, water storage) to respond adequately to such events. As a consequence, diseases such as malaria are likely to expand in range, impacting more people in the poorest regions of poor nations that are already most affected by such diseases.

Here’s Oxfam:

Diseases such as malaria and dengue fever that were once geographically bound are creeping to new areas where populations lack immunity or the knowledge and healthcare infrastructure to cope with them. It is estimated that climate change has contributed to an average of 150,000 more deaths from disease per year since the 1970s, with over half of those happening in Asia.

Here’s even the president of Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, John von Doussa:

Within Australia, it has been predicted that northern Aboriginal communities will bear the brunt of climate change, with more than 100,000 people facing serious health risks from malaria, dengue fever and heat stress, as well as loss of food sources from floods, drought and more intense bushfires.

In fact, new research confirms the obvious - that malaria hasn’t got worse even in the past 100 years of warming, and isn’t likely to in the future, either:

Bednets and drugs will influence the spread of malaria far more than will climate change, according to a study that challenges fears that warming will aggravate the disease in Africa.

Many researchers have predicted that rising temperatures will cause malaria to expand its range and intensify in its current strongholds.

But unlike usual models, which aim to predict how climate change will affect malaria in the future, researchers looked at how warming affected the disease throughout the last century…

The researchers — whose work was published in Nature yesterday (20 May) — found that despite global warming, the prevalence of malaria decreased, which they attribute to disease and mosquito control programmes.

There is heated debate about how global warming will affect malaria in the coming decades (see Climate change ‘could reverse malaria patterns’) with some researchers “deeply entrenched” in their views that warming will lead to the disease’s expansion, said Peter Gething, lead author of the study and a researcher at the UK-based University of Oxford.

“[But] if we were to go back to the 1900s with the correct climate change predictions for the 20th century, modellers would predict expansion and worsening of malaria and they would have been wrong, and we believe they are wrong now,” he told SciDev.Net.

Thomas Fuller notes there are still researchers claiming in the above article that global warming threatens us with more malaria:

Matthew Thomas said that the study “plays down the potential importance of climate [change]”.

Who is Matthew Thomas? He is a researcher at… Penn State. Matthew Thomas is a researcher… at Penn State… who has just won a $1.8 million grant to study the influence of environmental temperature on transmission of vector-borne diseases. Think he has a dog in this hunt?

Ask his co-investigator on the project. Michael Mann…

Where do we ask for a refund?

Can’t we just kill all those mosquitoes with Mann’s hockey stick?
===
Keneally gives Abbott’s excuse. So where’s the mockery?
Andrew Bolt
Labor mocked Tony Abbott for saying no more than the truth:

“Sometimes in the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark.

“Which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth are those carefully prepared, scripted remarks.

“I think that most of us know - when we’re talking to people or when we’re listening to people - when we can put absolute weight on what’s being said and when it’s just the give and take of standard conversation.”

Now Labor Premier Kristina Keneally says the very same thing to excuse her savage condemnation of David Campbell, who resigned from her ministry after being caught going to a gay bathhouse:

Mr Campbell, who is this weekend fighting to save his marriage to wife Edna, received support from the Premier yesterday. Talking at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Ms Keneally said she regretted using the word ‘’unforgivable’’ to describe Mr Campbell’s behaviour in leading a gay double life. She stewed on her use of the word after using it at a media conference on Friday, and intends to apologise…

As a way of explanation, Ms Keneally said politicians were under immense pressure to deliver rapid, black-and-white judgments after events - and that to hesitate is often interpreted as a sign of weakness.

Will Keneally be vilified and mocked by the media and Labor as was Abbott? If not, why not?

(Thanks to reader Victoria 3220.)
===
Howes proves Abbott right twice over
Andrew Bolt
AWU boss Paul Howes not only tells a falsehood about Tony Abbott, but ignores the truth in what he actually said:

In a spectacular own-goal, Peter Dutton was caught out buying up BHP Billiton shares at the same time Abbott was telling everyone that those shares would soon be worthless.

Abbott did not say BHP Billiton shares would be “worthless”. But he did warn they’d be worth less - and Dutton has sure found that out. His $2000 plunge, at what he thought was the bottom of the market, has now lost him $131 on current prices.

Howes’ line comes, ironically, in a piece devoted to painting Abbott as deceitful and untrustworthy. And in which Howes defends a tax that has savaged the superannuation savings, I would guess, of most of his members.
===
Uppity women
Andrew Bolt
Of course, I disapprove of violence, but I can’t say I’m upset about this:

Women are reportedly fighting back against Saudi Arabia’s so-called virtue police, with one married woman opening fire and another punching an officer.

The incident involving the married woman happened when she was caught in an “illegal seclusion” with another man in Ha’il last week, reported The Los Angeles Times.

“She shot at the officers to distract them and allow the man to escape instant detention,” Sheik Mutlak al Nabet, a spokesman for Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as the religious police, told the Times…

A few days earlier a young woman had reportedly punched an officer of the religious police in Al Mubarrazz so badly he had to go to hospital to be treated for bruising.

Saudi newspaper Okaz wrote that the woman lashed out when the policeman challenged on the relationship she had with a man she was with in a public park. She now could face jail or the lash.
===
Just one of those moments
Andrew Bolt
Mark Steyn on the essential vacuity of Barack Obama - and a refusal to even see what he must confront:

(Daniel) Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That’s how I’d put it.

This is what the president of the United States said: “Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.”

Now Obama’s off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he’s talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased’s family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it’s the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving, and true. Indeed, for Obama, it’s the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above. Which, in its clumsiness and insipidness, is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: “The loss of Daniel Pearl.” He wasn’t “lost.” He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his “loss” merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

(Thanks to reader doc molloy.)
===
Dalai Lama blesses what chains Tibet
Andrew Bolt
Idiot praises the creed that has made him the exiled leader of a captive people:

Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama said Thursday that he is a Marxist, yet credits capitalism for bringing new freedoms to the communist country that exiled him—China.

“Still I am a Marxist,” the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader said in New York, where he arrived with an entourage of robed monks and a heavy security detail to give a series of paid public lectures.

Marxism has “moral ethics, whereas capitalism is only how to make profits,” the Dalai Lama, 74, said.

Those “moral ethics” are demonstrated daily in Tibet. And the Dalai Lama demonstrates the blindness of the true believer.

(Thanks to reader Watty.)
===
Rudd to drive business to South Africa instead
Andrew Bolt
Kevin Rudd’s tax is South Africa’s gain. Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, gloats on South African radio:

South Africa is really the beneficiary, along with Canada and Brazil, of the punitive taxes that have been introduced by Australia. Australia seems to have shot themselves in the foot when it comes to mining taxes.

There has been a howl of protest with this new super profit tax, which takes 40% of the profits away from the mining industry. Now, people are sharpening their pencils and saying should we mine and go ahead with our project in Australia or maybe we can go ahead with the one in South Africa or elsewhere because of the different situation…

We always used to say that Africa has got a bad mining code and a lot of the people don’t want to put their money there, but now we are seeing Australia in a situation were people are saying there is sovereign risk. They used to apply that only to South Africa.

UPDATE

China should gain at our expense, too:

CHINESE investors seeking resource security could emerge as major beneficiaries of the Rudd government’s resource super-profits tax, according to the president of the Australia China Business Council in Western Australia. Mr Calder said the lower returns on offer to investors under the proposed tax would deter foreign and local investment, but the reduced profitability may be acceptable to Chinese investors with downstream processing operations. Under the new tax regime, China would also face less competition for projects from rival sources of capital.

(Thanks to readers Mal and Puzzled.)
===
Gore groans
Andrew Bolt

What a waste to have got a degree when the world is about to die.

(Thanks to reader Andrew V.)
===
Trashing Australia: How Rudd got his neo-Marxist history curriculum
Andrew Bolt
What a surprise, from something produced by Stuart Macintyre for the Rudd Government:

HISTORIANS say the new national modern history curriculum for schools reads like a Marxist manifesto that ignores popular aspects of our past and neglects Australia’s role in world politics and war.

The course, designed for years 11 and 12, is heavily focused on revolutionary struggles, colonial oppression and women’s struggle for equality. It neglects Australia’s British roots and institutions and its military history, with no mention of Gallipoli, Tobruk or Kokoda, the experts say.

The draft lists World War I as a potential case study in “investigating modern history”. It lists “controversies surrounding ... memorial sites and commemorative events” as an area of study but does not mention Gallipoli or the battle of Fromelle.

In a topic headed “Australia 1880-1945”, the draft lists “the formation of organised labour”, “White Australia” and “wartime government controls, including conscription, control of the labour force, rationing, censorship and propaganda”.

But it does not mention the settlement of Australia or the deeds of the first AIF in World War I.

The draft history course was released this week for public discussion, divided into five units: The nation state and national identity; Recognition and equality; International tensions and conflicts; Revolutions; and, Australia and Asia.

Historian Andrew Garvie said the course agenda should be altered to give a more balanced view of history.

“This appears to be a very trendy, right-on curriculum. It looks heavily influenced by a Marxist view of history - there’s lots about about revolution and struggles against oppression,” Mr Garvie said.

How could this happen? Well, what else would you expect if you get Professor Stuart Macintyre, the former long-time communist and dean of Arts and Melbourne University, to help write the wretched thing?

Here Macintyre explains the history curriculum he helped to design, and in every coded word you can see the agenda to distance students from the centralising narratives of Australia, and to reorientate them from the country’s essentially British cultural and institutional traditions to anything but:

The great challenge in devising the history curriculum is to make it a curriculum that works for a wide diversity of students, that needs to be engaging for someone who might have arrived with their parents from Sudan two years ago or someone whose ancestors came here five generations ago and feel a strong attachment to particular parts of the country ...

This is a curriculum which pays substantial attention to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and I think it’s important that it does and that it gives all Australians a sense of those people, their place within Australian society, and their historical experience…

It gives greater attention to Asian history than is the case in most schools at the moment…

One of the big themes of the history curriculum is the question of sustainability. We’re working with history from the earliest times to the present and we see an extraordinary increase in human population and in human capacity but we also see consequences that raise questions about sustainability.

This is history being rewritten to destroy one of its essential roles - to give us a sense of a common past, even common myths, to build a sense of community. This is a curriculum not to unite us but to divide; not to build loyalty, but cynicism. The introduction of “sustainability” - the green agenda - suggests that the cynicism isn’t only aimed at our British and colonial past, but at capitalism as well. In the gentlest possible way, of course.

Keith Windschuttle predicted the curriculum would reflect Macintyre’s ideology:

In (Macintyre’s) volume on the period 1901 to 1940 for the Oxford History of Australia (1986), the first chapter compares the lives of five Australians:

• a fat, greedy and ruthless pastoral and mining entrepreneur who makes a fortune creating paper companies and manipulating stocks and shares;

• a poor, starving farmer who watches his wife and two children die while his surviving son becomes an embittered rural labourer and poet;

• a skilled tradesman ruined by unemployment who becomes a workers’ representative on the Arbitration Court;

• the wife of a farmer and coal miner who plays “a subordinate and domestic role” as she endures her husband’s disability and penury in Western Australia and New Zealand;

• a part-Aboriginal man who becomes a drover after pastoralists destroy his people’s way of life, and their ceremonies and customs fall into disuse.

Writ large, this political caricature of the Australian experience is the curriculum we can expect Macintyre to deliver to the Rudd government. It is no wonder that schoolchildren who have tasted earlier offerings from the same left-wing menu regard Australian history as dreary and uninspiring.

Macintyre also harbours a deep distaste for this country’s British heritage. In the concluding chapter of A Concise History of Australia (1999), he is comforted by the prediction that, just as the Romans were displaced in Britain, Aborigines and Asians will eventually supplant the colonisers of British descent in Australia.

(Thanks to reader Pronto.)
===
Campbell sets an example to the lout who outed him
Andrew Bolt
I’m entirely with Miranda Devine about Channel 7’s tawdry excuse for out Roads Minister David Campbell as gay:

Under attack yesterday for its reporting, one justification offered by Seven is that Campbell was hypocritically posing as a family man. “He’s represented himself to the people of Keira as a family man,” Walters told the ABC, “even going to the extent of sending Christmas cards to his constituents highlighting the fact that he is a man of family values. This is about pretence, it’s about integrity, it’s about character.”

But why can’t Campbell have a picture of his wife and children on his Christmas cards, like any other father?

Married in 1977 at the age of 19 to Edna, with whom he has two sons, now in their late 20s, Campbell grew up in the blokey blue-collar Wollongong suburb of Corrimal, where even in the swinging ‘70s a gay lifestyle was not an easy option for a man who liked to fit in.

And at 19, perhaps he loved Edna so much he could not bear to lose her despite any conflicts he might have felt sexually. No one knows what personal temptations he has had to overcome in his life, and that is entirely his business…

Since Channel 7 has declared it fine to moralise publicly about the private lives of people, here’s one measuring stick that puts Campbell way out in front of Adam Walters, the journalist who so viciously exposed him, in what may possibly be a personal get-square.

Campbell fathered two children with his wife and raised them in a stable, and we presume loving, family. Waters, however, has fathered three children with three women and has not stayed with any of them.

That, in my opinion, is much more reprehensible than Campbell sneaking off to a gay bathhouse, and of far graver consequence. - while I accept the above statements as true, by Devine and Bolt, they ignore the more salient point. The Cambell case highlights the failure of the ICAC. Had the ICAC been working as it should, the case would have been examined and the former Minister would have been given a clean bill of health and would be able to point those wishing to smirk and giggle at the bill. Instead, we have the ever present sense that everything is done in private, including that which should be in public view, so that we get confused about what should be private too. Because the government is not transparent, this becomes an issue. Had the ICAC worked as Greiner had set it up, this would never have been a problem. The ALP have been hoist on their own petard. - ed.