Category Archives: Politics – Australian

The drumbeat is getting louder

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You know, if I were over at the ABC, I would be hearing the drumbeat getting louder. This is from an article in today’s Australian with the ominous title – ominous if you think you are an untouchable media organisation even though funded by a government you do everything you can to undermine – Tony Abbott says ABC ‘takes everyone’s side but our own’.

TONY Abbott says he is concerned the ABC takes an anti-Australian stance in its reporting and wants the broadcaster to stick to straight news-gathering.

The Prime Minister said the broadcaster was, like all media organisations, entitled to report “credible evidence”.

But “you shouldn’t leap to be critical of your own country”, he said, referring to reports of alleged mistreatment of asylum-seekers by naval personnel.

“It dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own and I think it is a problem,” Mr Abbott told radio station 2GB

“You would like the national broadcaster to have a rigorous commitment to truth and at least some basic affection for the home team, so to speak.”

He said the broadcaster should have given the navy and its personnel “the benefit of the doubt” in its reporting of the matter,

“I want the ABC to be a straight news-gathering and news-reporting organisation, and a lot of people feel at the moment that the ABC instinctively takes everybody’s side but Australia’s,” Mr Abbott said.

He said he was also concerned at the ABC’s reporting of leaks by the “traitor” Edward Snowden, saying it “seemed to delight” in broadcasting his allegations.

“And of course, the ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said. That was a deep concern.”

ABC spokesman Michael Millett said the public broadcaster would not be commenting on Mr Abbott’s statements.

This no longer feels like our ABC.

A joke, right?

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This was picked up from Tim Blair but what gets to me is that since this looks like a joke, and no one even at the ABC would ever put up such a request so it must be a joke, I still think, even then, who knows?

abc - we need your help

But it is a clever parody since the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth tone is so perfectly done, and the disclaimer, that of course it isn’t true and my boss doesn’t think it’s true, but come and talk to us anyway and we can sort this out.

Because if this ad were not a joke and were the real thing, it would mean there’s a cancer at the ABC that needs urgent and immediate treatment before it spreads.

“These claims are indeed difficult to verify”

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The ABC is filled with such pathetic losers whose only claim to our attention is the billion dollars they receive from the rest of us. Take away the billion and we can find them on street corners of a Friday night selling The Green-Left Review. It is one thing to mention that a bunch of asylum seekers said that they had been abused by the RAN. It is quite another to go on with it as if there were anything more than the remotest possibility that it’s true. Unless this is being broadcast to help the government dissuade asylum seekers from coming across from Indonesia where, surely, they have already found a safe haven.

THE ABC has defended its editorial processes against a rising tide of criticism of its reports that Australian navy personnel beat and burned asylum-seekers during a tow-back operation earlier this month.

This is despite strong assertions from the government and the Australian Defence Force that the claims are unfounded and another television network, Seven, treating the asylum-seekers’ allegations with much greater scepticism a fortnight earlier.

The reports, by ABC Indonesia correspondent George Roberts, featured prominently on the network’s radio, television and online platforms on Wednesday. They centred on video footage of the asylum-seekers receiving treatment for burned and blistered hands at a medical facility in Kupang, West Timor.

The asylum-seekers claimed the burns were a result of being forced to hold hot engine pipes by navy personnel. They also alleged they were badly beaten by navy personnel before their boat was turned back to Rote Island on New Year’s Day.

“This video and the version of events given by Indonesian police appears (sic) to back up the claims of mistreatment first made by the asylum-seekers when they spoke to the ABC a fortnight ago,” Roberts said in a video report.

ABC news director Kate Torney yesterday defended the reports. “These claims are indeed difficult to verify and we have reported that too, along with Immigration Minister Scott Morrison’s emphatic denials,” she said.

It’s not so much that it’s untrue that is the issue, but that the ABC wants it to be true, and in this post-modern world will do everything to turn this fiction into truth even if the events never happened.

It’s a matter of will

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Getting things done is firstly knowing what you want to do and then doing whatever it takes to get them done.

Our new government has shown that so far as illegal migrants are concerned, where there’s a will there’s a way, or at least that’s been the case up until now and hopefully into the future. You really can stop the boats. But more importantly, it shows that if you are determined to find solutions, solutions that will work, you are more than half way towards solving the problem.

Would that I could say the same about the economy. I suppose we will eventually get a commission of audit report, around a year or perhaps more after the last election. But seriously, did we need a commission of audit to make a song and dance about the idiocies of Labor and the mess they made? Before the election there was something. Since then there has been hardly a word. And my question is why the Government has not gone in as hard on the economic side as it has on stopping the boats.

In The Australia today, there is a story on page 2 mentioned on the front page where it says:

Tony Abbott has made it clear that this will be the year in which he focuses on, and commits to economic management as never before.

On that same front page there is an actual story, that is also on the front page of the AFR, in which Bill Shorten “promises to fight for jobs in ‘middle ground’.” The AFR story is that “Shorten offers reform help”.

Why is Bill Shorten on the front pages about fixing the economy and not Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey? Where’s the plan, the strategy, the determination to fix things up?

I know it’s not the done thing to turn over these neutral public servants who run the various departments, but give me a break. These people pushed the stimulus and public spending because that is what their judgment told them was the right thing to do. Why are they still there? Why is their judgment still the primary advice the Government gets? There is not a chance in the world that they have changed their minds about the ruinous strategies they followed and therefore there is equally not a chance that they are capable of offering the advice that will bring the kinds of full scale recovery we had under John Howard and Peter Costello.

So here’s my advice. Get people at the top of our various economic agencies of government who really want balanced budgets and lower public outlays in the same way that Scott Morrison wants to stop the boats. It will make all the difference.

Australian story

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Is this a true story? From Tim Blair, in full:

A bunch of boaties are rescued by the Australian Navy after deliberately sinking their own vessel – and they’re not happy about it:

Pakistani asylum seeker, Fazal Qadir, 28, said he had set sail from an island off Java on January 5 bound for Christmas Island with 56 people from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq and Palestine on board, along with an Indonesian captain and one crew member. There was one woman with a 20-month-old toddler.

After about three or four days at sea, he said the group was spotted by an Australian aeroplane flying overhead. The boat was already leaking.

“We were very happy [when we saw them] because we thought when the boat went into the water, then they must receive us,” Mr Qadir said.

All of the people on board already knew of other vessels which had been returned to Indonesia, so were determined to be rescued rather than escorted back. One passenger took a piece of wood and prised open the hole that was already in the hull. Others rocked the boat.

When it foundered, two Australian speedboats reached them and the 12 navy personnel on board told the asylum seekers to cling to the side. The toddler was provided with a life jacket, Mr Qadir said.
The group were subsequently loaded aboard the HMAS Stuart before being transferred to a Customs and Border Protection boat. Conditions were just terrible, according to Qadir:

“The navy and Customs would not give us a phone.”

Oh no! Then came the final Australian treachery:

Mr Qadir said a small orange boat with a weather canopy was tied to the back of the Customs ship. They were told to board it because it would ferry them to Christmas Island.

At the last minute, though, a Customs officer came on board, tossed the asylum seekers a four-page document in a range of languages, and returned to the large ship, which sailed away.

The document, dated December 2013, reads: “You only have enough fuel to reach land in Indonesia. You do not have enough fuel to continue your voyage to Australia.

“The master of your vessel is now responsible for your safety. You must co-operate with the master and not act in a manner that risks your safety. You are responsible for your own actions. Your vessel is not equipped for a voyage to Australia. It is not safe to continue your voyage to Australia …”

The men said they were dropped very close to Indonesia. It took only three hours to reach shore.

Job done. Naturally, Fairfax and the ABC are outraged.

How often do you see these things even mentioned in the press?

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Cut & Paste picked up something from Mark Latham yesterday that is, unfortunately, locked behind the paywall. This is what they reproduced but is only a mere shadow of just how strange it really was. But it was the bit in bold that got to me. Who even dares mention that such problems exist? Which party is it, whose policies are they, that allow people to live one generation to the next without actually having to work? Is the only solution to have the students of wealthy schools associate with the products of these sinkholes and public housing estates? A glimpse into the real world outcomes of the helpful people of the Labor Party.

Mark Latham weighs into the issue of drunken street violence, Australian Financial Review, yesterday:

IN Sydney’s tabloid media, the knee-jerk response has been to argue for greater social separation: tougher penalties for offenders, with longer periods of incarceration. While this reaction is understandable, it does nothing to confront the core problem.

Why? Latham elaborates:

ANYONE who visits Sydney’s Middle Eastern sinkholes or outer-suburban public housing estates will know why. For every Kings Cross thug the authorities lock away, there’s a long production line of feral adolescents ready to take their place.

And he has someone to blame:

PEOPLE like (Tim) Hawkes (headmaster of The King’s School) are part of the problem. They have promoted elitist values and practices – a form of social segregation whereby the middle class has deluded itself into thinking that private wealth and private schooling can buy public safety.

Solution?

IF the headmasters and families of elite private schools truly want to protect their children they should end their segregationist ethos. They should establish regular teacher and student exchanges with underclass schools, sharing their resources and expertise in promoting responsible male citizenship. If the next generation of Thomas Kellys (the ex-King’s student punched to death in July 2013) are to come in contact with their feral peers, it’s much better for this to happen in the classroom than outside the parlour rooms of Kings Cross.

Succeeding is the best form of success

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senator hansen-young

Why does no one mention the boats any more? Because in the same quiet way that our new government is busily but silently fixing our economic problems, they are doing the same with those boat arrivals. From Piers Akerman:

OUR ABC, and Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, choked the pre-election airwaves with wild predictions that the Coalition’s turn-back-the-boats policy was unworkable.

Now the evidence is in that a number of boats have been successfully turned back, both the national taxpayer-funded broadcaster and the Greens immigration spokesman are conducting their own reversal of sorts – they are now noisily protesting that the boats should not have been turned back.

Hanson-Young, who appears to have been given a permanent news slot at “our” ABC, is competing with the cicadas for cacophany.

The Senator flippantly shrugged off any Greens responsibility for contributing to the deaths of about 200 people who tried to enter aboard an illegal people smuggler boat in December 2011 with the astoundingly superficial comment: “Tragedies happen, accidents happen.”

Hanson-Young is now dismayed the Australian naval personnel may be responsible for saving lives at sea.

No doubt a risk-filled operation but one that has genuine potential for success.

[The story was picked up from Tim Blair where I also found the lovely picture displayed above.]

Australia the best place to live and work in the world

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melbourne

From The Guardian whereof there is no source more authoritative:

Australia is rated best place to live and work for third year running

UK comes 10th in OECD index, behind US and Scandinavian countries but ahead of France and Germany

Only don’t know why they used a picture of Sydney in their story which is only the seventh most livable city in the world.

[My thanks to Beatrix for sending this along.]

The single greatest teaching moment in the history of the global warming fraud

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This is a crisis that we cannot let go to waste. At long last, a bunch of global warming cranks have put their money where their mouths were and went off to prove, in a practical way, just how much global warming has harmed the environment. And instead of finding the cove where Douglas Mawson had landed a century ago ice free and easy to navigate, they are now stuck in ice and with some luck may end up spending the next twelve months pondering their stupidity, half the time in total darkness.

This is a massive embarrassment for the global warming industry. This is an undeniable failure to use their scientific knowledge in a practical way. They have, instead, demonstrated that global warming is a fraud, with no useful insights into anything. They know nothing whatsoever about anything in relation to the actual climate on the planet earth. They have a single theory that has been tested and failed on one scale after another but on they persist, inflicting billions in costs upon the rest of us.

Chris Turney and his band of fools must become one of the major moments in the history of this debate. This is not an event that can be allowed to fade into the background, to disappear the moment these clowns are finally on dry land again. This has to become the great teaching moment where it is recognised that those who peddle global warming are idiots, absolute fools. Speaking on behalf of global warming should mark someone as naive and ignorant.

How to do this must be a major part of the thought processes that go into thinking these questions through. To christurney must become a verb meaning to believe global warming is true in a suicidal way.

UPDATE: My letter to Scott Johnson at Powerline. I sent him this post from Andrew Bolt which he put up on the Powerline Picks. I have now written to Scott again with the following note:

Dear Scott

I am very pleased to see you have put that up on your “picks” list because this is a story that needs to get around. My worry is that we here in Australia are too provincial to have an effect on any major part of the debate; if this had happened in relation to some Italian academic, say, it would have almost no impact here or I imagine anywhere else. We see it for what it is because we live here and understand our own turf quite well. Yet the great interest is that an actual climate sciences academic from one of our more important universities decided to demonstrate the impact of climate change, and has now done so but in a way that shows the opposite of what he intended to prove. We don’t often get such clear cut demonstrations of just how off the planet the global warming crowd is which is why this is a moment that should be seized on if we can.

Douglas Mawson sailed there at the end of 1913. The intent a hundred years later was to demonstrate how much easier it would be this time because of all the warming that had gone on but instead, found it not only impossible, but they are now embedded in an ice floe that may keep them there for a year if things go really bad. But like with everything else about the news today, it’s not really a story until it is not just carried but harped on by the ABNBCBS. That, I’m afraid, is not going to happen. But we can but try.

Kind regards

Steve