General Disgrace
Orangutans Revealed as Non-Core Promise
Remember that creepy election campaign video of Howard being conspicuously affectionate towards young Daniel and his toy monkey?
As it turns out, Daniel’s father is now shocked, shocked to learn that his disabled child has been ruthlessly exploited for election propaganda and then tossed, tossed aside. Apparently the promise to Save the Apes will not now be honoured, as it is rightly viewed within the bureaucracy as a last-minute barrel’o’pork:
Heritage Strategy Branch assistant secretary Greg Terrill withdrew the funding commitment in an email.
“The minister’s decision to provide new funding to support the work of the orang-utan protection units was made during the caretaker period and is considered by the department to be an election commitment,” he wrote.
I suppose now Rudd will make moves to override the public service and honour the promise, because it’s a fairly impossible PR situation, but REALLY. Sad for the kid, and probably for the apes or whatever, but do you know what? The video was and is foul, its intent was obvious, and more fool/shame on the family for letting it go ahead.
Libs show they've learnt nothing from Leaflet-Gate
Imagine saying this to a room full of journos:
As the Liberals drowned their sorrows on Saturday night, one former senior Liberal adviser blamed the result on “the f—ing Chinese”, an apparent reference to Asian voters in Bennelong turning against Mr Howard.
If that was the case in the end, I wonder why?
If this is the calibre of mind that ran the election - not to mention the Government - then we were even worse off than previously thought and you can bet that there will be hidden, lingering piles of shit to clean up that no one ever dreamt of. Stuff you, we’re through with you and your little dog too.
Pell Defends Human Rights Of Some
Pell makes his first foray into academic life with a book of ten short essays pondering the relationship between church and state. Depressingly, this is what he chooses to focus on:
Dr Pell said a “false analogy” between alleged discrimination against homosexuals and racial discrimination was beginning to appear in Australia. He cited English newspaper reports of two foster parents to 28 children being forced to give up their work because authorities wanted them to teach that homosexual relationships were as acceptable as heterosexual marriages.
A big problem with this sort of thing, apart from the obvious, is that Pell is often taken by mainstream political commentators to represent a Christian Voice; to speak with authority for the Christian Vote, or at least to be representative of Christian Views or something. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
At the weekend, Paddington Uniting Church held a candidates electoral forum which specifically addressed the outcomes of HREOC’s Same Sex: Same Entitlements report, and which was attended by a variety of lower house and senate candidates from parties other than the Liberal Party (who declined the invitation). From all reports, the most boisterous moment of the forum occurred when the Christian crowd questioned Labor MP for Sydney Tanya Plibersek’s inability to budge on the party line on gay marriage - which is, of course, that there shouldn’t be any. Thing is, they were heckling from the left.
Second Class Workers
Billionaire Harvey Normam chief wants to create a second class of worker - comprised of foreigners - with lower pay and fewer rights than domestic workers.
BILLIONAIRE retailer Gerry Harvey says Australia needs a two-tier wage system to allow employers to pay foreign guest workers less than locals.
The Harvey Norman boss said Australia’s prosperity was creating a labour shortage and endangering the nation’s competitiveness.
He said a growing number of Australian manufacturers were moving overseas, where cheap labour was plentiful.
He called on the Federal Government to allow foreign workers on fixed visas to form a second tier to the labour market.
“Australia doesn’t have cheap labour. Many overseas workers would be prepared to move here for a much better life and half the money Australians earn,” he said.
“When you get unemployment down to four per cent, to three per cent, to two per cent, business can’t get the labour.
“I’ve got horse studs and it’s difficult to get staff.
“Workers would rather work in the mines where they get paid twice as much.
“Fruit- picking companies are relying on backpackers.”
I’m sure we all feel sorry for Gerry and his understaffed horse-studs.
Encouraging wolves
Well, not necessarily; and this is certainly not what encouraging investment is about
Encouraging investment in real estate will put upward pressure on prices. Which is something the government want to do, because it is helpful to homeowners, who are politicians’ bread-and-butter constitutency, especially those with mortgages, who can’t be allowed to go into negative equity.
This might then have the follow-on effect of stimulating housing construction, which is of course the industry that acts as a paymaster for NSW politics, and then will increase the housing supply, which might bring down house prices and put more rental properties out there, easing the pressure on the supply of rental housing. Assuming that any fall in house prices doesn’t stimulate population growth beyond the levels of housing stock growth.
Alternatively, by pushing house prices up, new investment in the property market stops people being able to buy their own homes, thus keeping them on the rental market, just under less favourable conditions introduced, and probably with higher rents since the house prices have risen.
Media Watch take note
Screen-captured from the Daily Telegraph’s website earlier today, this absolutely foul headline and graphic:
Of course, this relates to the highly publicised case of the woman who is suing her gynaecologist for impregnating her with twins. The case is on the nose, if you ask me and thousands of others, but it has nothing to do with the woman in question being in a committed same-sex relationship and everything to do with the tensions involved with engaging a capitalistic model for managing the reproduction of human life.
However, clearly the establishment has decided that the focus of the case is actually homosexuality, and hence we get ridiculous graphics and gross, sexually suggestive headlines like this one; and then we get Guy Barnett irrelevantly calling for a moratorium on IVF for womens without mans. Another excuse for homosexual vilification and grandstanding. And so it goes.
Iraq death toll tops 1 million
Guest post from my greenest leftist friend, who doesn’t have his own blog and wants only to be known as Jason
Somehow the Australian MSM managed to miss a story last week that Iraq’s death toll now tops 1 million.
Ah well, good thing we got rid of that murderous Saddam Hussein, eh?
This article sums it up pretty well:
If we’re not enraged, let’s ask ourselves why. Is it because the slaughter of Iraqi’s is happening thousands of miles away? Is it because they are not like us in appearance or religion? Would we, say, feel the loss of British or Irish people more intensely? We Americans are upset about the loss of lives of American soldiers. When we’re not shopping at the mall or watching Sunday football, we’re concerned about this. But the death of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s? We don’t feel that. We don’t imagine what it looks like. Our politicians don’t convey the terrible weight of what we’ve done to that country. Perhaps there is something to be angry about. Very angry.
They look like they're wearing turds with collars
Considering that Janette Howard was apparently integral in choosing the version of our National Poncho that graced the backs of the APEC World Leaders (tm), I was a bit horrified to see that they didn’t seem to come in women’s sizes:
click image for full size bland
It’s just one of those things; a bushman’s coat is designed to fit, well, a bush man. I don’t really blame RM Williams, although this sort of thing doesn’t exactly hurl glory upon them. They probably fulfilled their brief. However it seems clear that the brief was at wildly fault, which would also be indicated by the wierdly-dyed collars on the garments.
All in all a tepid disappointment. I was really hoping for some kind of over-the-top Jenny Kee design, which would seem to me to be in the general Spirit of APEC. Plus I assume there would have been a version of a Kee Extravaganza that would have fitted both men and women leaders. Foul, boring, and ill-fittingly sexist - you’ve got my vote, Janette!
Shame Andrews, Shame
Update: the law council agrees with me, but then they would, wouldn’t they.
THE supposedly damning internet chat-room conversation between Mohamed Haneef and his brother included an entreaty for Dr Haneef to leave his contact details with the British police before leaving Australia.
But this detail was omitted by the Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, when he went public with the discussion.
Mendacious and incompetent. A very dangerous combination for a minister who literally has life and death power over other human beings.
Think that’s hyperbole? If so, it might interest you to know that Andrews’ non-reviewable ministerial power to expel any non-citizen from the country extends to asylum seeker entrants who, having failed at the first instance to make it through the refugee review tribunal (one of whose members is Mirko Bagaric, an academic who has made headlines for his endorsement of the use of torture), have only the hope of applying directly to the Minister for immigration to grant asylum.
Nobody and nothing is able to compel the Minister to grant asylum, regardless of the circumstance, and the Minister doesn’t always make the best decision. Instances where asylum seekers, having exhausted their avenues of appeal, have been deported from Australia back to the life-threatening situations that they’ve fled have been well recorded by projects like Deported to Danger. This ministerial power is dangerous and needs to be reviewed. And look whose judgement we’re relying on to get it right!
It seems pretty clear that Andrews has attempted to distort the truth in the public arena on Haneef’s case, and it appears to be for political reasons. Regardless of any other evidence the Federal Police may or may not have on Haneef, it’s clear that Andrews has acted mendaciously in selectively releasing seemingly incriminating parts of this transcript, which upon examination of the whole have proven to far less significant than we were led to believe. And he’s stuffed up completely by using material that was not privileged, in a circumstance where the lawyers in the case had a history of releasing transcript documents to the media.
Sack him.
Hanson jumps anti-Muslim bandwagon – how far behind can Howard be?
Incredibly, I think Pauline Hanson has managed to say at this time the most offensive raft of things I think I’ve ever heard her say. I feel like the effort of refuting her nonsense is hardly worth it, but my level of anger is such that I can’t refrain.
From associating female genital mutilation with Islam, to claiming to speak on behalf of brainwashed Muslim women, to associating Muslims in general with terrorism, to cryptic comments about Muslims ‘saying that our girls are like the meat market’ (she is of course here thinking of just one Muslim, and he didn’t quite say this – he compared women who didn’t wear hijab in general to uncovered meat – the meat market comparison is frankly a much more apt one to describe various Western night spots) and ‘the bible that is urinated on’ (anyone?). The least surprising bit was Pauline’s reiteration of Fred Nile’s call for a moratorium on Muslim migration.
Still, this is the policy part of what she’s saying – and we should be concerned, because, as she points out, there’s a history of government stealing her ideas. On the other hand, perhaps this policy won’t be adopted by the mainstream. Though Hanson is trumpeting the success of her anti-indigenous policies from way back, a plank of her original platform that wasn’t taken up was a call for the restriction of immigration by Asian migrants, which is basically the same shit as her new one about Muslims, being founded on nothing but xenophobic prejudice. It’s interesting that despite there being several times as many Asians in Australia now than there were then, nothing bad seems to have come of it, and Pauline, far from getting more worried, seems to have dropped the issue in favour of vilifying Muslims.
Perhaps the reason no-one took action against Asian migration back then and no-one will act against Muslims now (although Howard is getting pretty desperate for a crowd-pleaser) is what it would mean to have moratorium upon one group’s migration when the migration regime is as strenuous as it is today. Muslims aren’t just turning arriving in Australia willy-nilly. Muslims who migrate are (just like all other immigrants to Australia today [except New Zealanders]) either 1. refugees in dire need 2. joining their families or 3. people with needed skills. Just which of these groups does Hanson want to ban? Let people die in the Sudan because as Muslims they are themselves to blame for the barbarism they’re fleeing from? Don’t let people’s elderly mothers come and live with them in Australia because said mothers profess Islam? Don’t let some rural community have a doctor because the only guy who wants the job is a Pakistani?