Monthly Archives: December 2015

How many of these are there?

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I looked at this and thought that there had to be something wrong. It couldn’t be this easy to defraud the government of $16 million, but it is. And these have been picked up only because they were so greedy. How many are around that only defraud the government of a million or two?

Six people have been charged in Melbourne’s western suburbs for allegedly submitting fraudulent claims for taxpayer-funded family day care payments worth nearly $16 million[!!!!!].

Australian Federal Police have also seized assets worth $1.1m that are believed to be proceeds of the alleged crime, including two Melbourne properties, a “significant amount” of funds in bank accounts and two luxury vehicles.

The AFP arrested the alleged scammers with a range of serious fraud offences after executing a number of search warrants yesterday. . . .

“It will be alleged that members of this group have repeatedly submitted false claims on behalf of family day care centres in Melbourne’s western suburbs, particularly to exploit the Grandparent Child Care Benefit scheme,” AFP Manager Criminal Assets, Fraud and Anti-Corruption Commander Peter Crozier said.

“This scheme helps grandparents with the childcare costs for grandchildren in their care. It covers the full cost of fees associated with up to 50 hours of childcare per child per week.”

So you tell me how this could happen? The supposed moral of the story is exactly the other way round.

“Perpetrators of fraud are on notice: you will be caught and there are severe consequences, including the possibility of jail time,” Senator Birmingham said.

“This tough stance is necessary to ensure our taxpayer dollars are directed to those operators doing the right thing, compliant with Family Assistance Law and delivering high quality, flexible and affordable child care to families.

What it really says to me is that these Commonwealth programs are run by such dills that there is money there just for the taking if you are larcenous enough to try your luck.

A deeper shade of economic ignorance

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The greatest political disaster of Keynesian economics was to shift the political focus away from how to raise living standards to how to increase the number of jobs. And the Keynesian answer of increased public spending has been the wrong answer on both counts, it neither increases real incomes nor adds to the number of jobs. For an example of the profoundest idiocy, I have been sent this article on Jobs to flow from NDIS in SA. I won’t mention names, but the article came with a note which read, “Reference your article on the electricity woes in our state, please read what Mr Weatherill said yesterday about NDIS being the future for jobs in our long-suffering state. Someone needs to save us!” Someone needs to save us all since these are the same beliefs that are found everywhere across the political void, with Malcolm a serious carrier of the disease. This is what that article said:

More than 6000 jobs will be created by the full rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in SA, Premier Jay Weatherill says.

The increased workforce will provide support for 32,000 people when the scheme is fully operational from July 2018.

Many of the new jobs will go to people in the northern suburbs who will be hit hard by the closure of car maker Holden in 2017, the premier says.

“This scheme is important because for too long people with disabilities have not been included in all of the benefits of our society,” Mr Weatherill told reporters on Wednesday.

“For too often they have been second-class citizens in our community.”

The premier said the disability scheme would also provide the biggest boost to job creation in SA over the next few years.

Job opportunities will include 1600 positions for support workers, 1500 for personal assistants, 900 for therapists and more than 500 for mental health nurses.

Mr Weatherill said more than 1700 of those were expected to go to workers in the northern suburbs, hopefully to those who face losing their jobs with the decline of the car manufacturing sector.

“Some people have already transitioned into disability care and the NDIS will provide many more opportunities for those who work in declining industries,” he said.

JOBS EXPECTED TO FLOW FROM THE NDIS IN SA:

1600 organisational support workers

1500 personal assistants

900 allied health therapists

800 case managers

600 local area co-ordinators

550 mental health nurses

400 direct care workers

Either a job pays its own way or it does not. There are lots of worthy and important tasks that we should undertake if we can afford them. But if you are of the view that these kinds of things will create growth and prosperity, you could not be more in the dark about what actually makes a community prosperous. This is such deep set ignorance that unfortunately only insolvency may be able to cure.

What is to be done?

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This is what Arthur Cummings II, the FBI’s executive assistant director in charge of counterterrorism and national security investigations in the United States, has said about trying to get cooperation from Muslim groups in dealing with terrorist threats.

The FBI has outreach programs to try to develop sources in the Muslim community and solicit tips, but Mr. Cummings found little receptivity. He found that while Muslims have brought some cases to the FBI, Muslim leaders in particular are often in denial about the fact that the terrorists who threaten the United States are Muslims.

The article should be read in full. Fascinating detail of the kind that seldom becomes available.

Meanwhile this is what the head of ASIO in Australia has said, and done with the full support of the PM and Julie Bishop:

ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis has phoned Coalition poli­ticians to urge them to use the soothing language favoured by Malcolm Turnbull in their public discussion of Islam.

In what is thought to be an unprecedented intervention in politics by a head of the spy agency, Mr Lewis is said to have told the MPs that their more robust comments risked becoming a danger to national security. It is believed the Office of the Prime Minister has been involved in arranging for these phone calls to take place.

I take it that ASIO finds the same lack of cooperation as does the FBI in America but is hoping for a better result. The kid gloves treatment does however seem to lead to the kind of problem that has surfaced at Rotherham where the preference was to let the abuse continue rather than to feed various non-PC attitudes, even if as in this case they were accurate.

See if you can work out what Merkel meant

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Merkel gets seven minute standing ovation for this:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who just last week was named TIME magazine’s 2015 Person of the Year for her stance on the refugee crisis, received a seven-minute (or nine-minute, according to some reports) standing ovation Monday for a speech at her ruling Christian Democratic Union congress in which she promised to “tangibly reduce” the number of refugees coming into her country. Still, The Independent reported, she said it was Germany’s humanitarian duty to take in war refugees. “We are going to manage this — if there are obstacles to overcome, then we will have to work to overcome them. We are ready to show what we are made of.” Germany has taken in an estimated one million refugees this year. . . .

Another noteworthy theme that turned up in Merkel’s speech was disdain for multiculturalism, according to The Washington Post. “Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie,’” the chancellor said. She went on to say that Germany may be reaching its limit in terms of accepting more refugees. “The challenge is immense,” she said. “We want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably.” . . .

Despite her vow to reduce the number of refugees coming into the country, Merkel still refused to set a ceiling on the number of migrants allowed to enter Germany, or to deploy more controls on the country’s borders “until necessary.” But she acknowledged the enormity of the challenge that mass immigration presents for Germany and called on other European nations to help share the burden. Her plan to reduce refugee numbers focused on Germany’s support for tougher measures on the European Union’s border, specifically the sea between Greece and Turkey. And she still plans for the German government to give billions in aid to help Turkey cope with its refugee population. She also wants measures to speed up the return of migrants who failed to qualify for asylum.

She must be using Stalin’s technique of executing the first person to stop clapping.

“He hasn’t done much yet”

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I can no longer get through a Janet Albrechtsen column since she like so many others over at The Oz has gone beyond ridiculous as shills for our new PM. But really, this is just stupid.

The current PM deserves an A ­because so far so good.

Malcolm Turnbull earns early good marks too for setting a new tone and focus. Positive words are no substitute for good policy but there is undeniable power in a dose of upbeat leadership.

Turnbull’s can-do attitude (even if he hasn’t done much yet) makes a change from the wet blanket worn by Tony Abbott as PM, whose whingeing about the Senate grew tiresome. Turnbull’s approach to the still recalcitrant Senate is different, and welcome. But again, it’s only so far so good.

I don’t know whether she caught her paper’s front page this morning, you know, where it talks about debt and the never-to-arrive surplus. Well we shall see how Mr Positive deals with all of this.

The government is on track to spend more than $21 billion a year on interest payments on commonwealth debt — more than it spends on public hospitals — as it puts off a budget surplus until early next decade.

A grim update to the federal budget shows that government spend­ing is growing faster than planned while tax revenue has fallen short of forecasts issued just seven months ago, widening this year’s deficit to $37.4bn and inflicting greater damage in later years.

Scaling back its ambitions, the government yesterday talked of delivering budget surpluses “as soon as possible” but abandoned a forecast by Joe Hockey in May that promised a surplus by 2019-20. Instead, small surpluses would be delivered from 2020-21.

Well, Janet, what do you think about all of that? And how do you suppose fixing any of it can be done with the Senate the way it is? Such muddled reasoning really is an irritation and not the best way to start the day.

Electric karma

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This story is so incredible that you have to wonder how these people cannot see the irony of their idiotic situation. As I read it, they are having trouble building metallic inputs for solar panels because their wind-powered electricity grid is not generating enough power and the intermittent supply is raising electricity costs. Read it yourself.

South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis called a crisis meeting of energy users and suppliers today to deal with sharp rises and falls in wholesale electricity prices that threaten the redevelopment of a Port Pirie lead and zinc smelter to make metals for solar panels and mobile phones, even with a $291 million government subsidy.

The volatility in wholesale prices – caused mostly by the state’s reliance on wind power and the ability of coal and gas power stations to charge high prices when the wind drops – is creating havoc for industry in the state, which is one of the country’s most economically depressed.

“The state government recognises we must do more to address issues in the market as we transition to a low-carbon economy,” said Mr Koutsantonis, who also serves as Energy Minister.

Is there really no mechanism for these people to learn anything?

Defending the indefensible

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As Orwell said, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” What brought this to mind was this passage from a story in today’s Australian: Sydney siege: one year anniversary

On the first anniversary of the Sydney siege, the city’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore has said that it “wasn’t a terrorist event”.

“I thought it was really important as a city leader to stress that this is a one-off, isolated event by someone who shouldn’t have been out on bail, a very violent background, clearly a mental illness,” Ms Moore told ABC TV this morning.

“It wasn’t a terrorist event. I didn’t want our multicultural harmonious community to be divided,” she said.

Ms Moore will now have to provide a definition of what is a terrorist event so that we will know one when we see one.

Well then, who should we vote for?

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First this about Mr 41%: Trump Is Going To Break Your Heart. The central point:

When he dumps you, when he goes back to the New York liberal roots that are at the core of his being and starts talking about how he’s decided to switch back to his old positions, that it’s reasonable to take your guns, to liberalize immigration, and to keep Obamacare, you’re going to feel like fools. You’re going to be humiliated. And the GOP establishment, which is terrible, is going to be looking at you saying, “I told you so.”

Then there is this about Ted Cruz: Ted Cruz: The Anti-Reagan.

Like many of his rivals for the Republican nomination, Ted Cruz has embraced the mantle of Ronald Reagan. He regularly cites the Gipper as an inspiration, and last week gave a foreign policy address at the Heritage Foundation that was laced with tributes to him: “As Reagan knew well, the best way to project America’s leadership is by protecting and promoting America’s strength and this principle should always guide our actions.” I didn’t know Ronald Reagan (neither did Cruz), but I do know a lot about him. And from what I know, it’s fair to say that Ted Cruz is no Ronald Reagan. In many ways, he is actually an anti-Reagan.

That is, he criticises fellow Republicans, is unreliable on foreign policy and cannot get on with anyone. Trump feels like the emergency bailout position if there was no one else around, that is, if the next Republican President fails to deliver balanced budgets, a freer economy and a sound immigration policy.

Jihad free zones

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jihad free zone

David Solway on the impossibility of dealing with Islamic terrorists. As part of an interesting and reflective article, he answers this question, where do such jihadists derive their power?

First, they are not bound by the Geneva conventions, they do not wear uniforms, they do not regard civilians as non-combatants, they do not care for the wounded, they do not respect the sanctity of rescue and medical corps, and, what should be immediately obvious, they do not take prisoners; they take hostages. Which is to say, they are out-and-out barbarians with no redeeming traits and their only connection with what we call civilization is deceptive and parasitical. As PJ Media columnist David Goldman writes in the Asia Times, “The trouble is that very large numbers of Muslims are willing to kill themselves in order to harm enemy noncombatants, and the number appears to be increasing. To my knowledge that is something new under the sun. Japanese kamikazes and Nizari assassins in the Middle Ages, like the pre-1917 Bolsheviks, were willing to die to kill public officials or soldiers. But the murder of noncombatants through suicide attacks (or attacks likely to prove suicidal) is something we have never before witnessed.”

Second, they are subjectively invincible. They do not take casualties. Their bodies are like weapons; when these are spent, they can be discarded. In other words, they do not die, but are immediately translated into Jannah, the Muslim heaven, where they will revel eternally in sparkling brooks, fruited orchards, and harems of sloe-eyed virgins. In a sense, they are the zombies of the modern world, the armies of the living dead who, as they are fond of saying, love death more than we love life. They cannot be defeated, they can only be quarantined, kept at bay, left to rave and rampage in the killing grounds of their own countries.