Letter From Australia (About Denmark’s Jihadis)

Nanny State Extremism

Tim Blair
Monday 29 December, 2014
The Telegraph

To a certain extent, Australia’s jihadist contribution to the Islamic State cause in Syria and Iraq is a self-solving problem. Our brave soldiers of Allah are evidently such incompetent warriors that they are being killed at almost the same rate as they arrive.

“The overall number of Australians currently fighting with or supporting Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq has remained consistent over recent months,” ASIO deputy director-general Kerri Hartland told a Senate hearing earlier this month.  “However, this does not reflect a reduction in the number of Australian travellers. Instead it reflects the relatively high casualty rate for Australians, with the numbers of new arrivals roughly keeping pace with the fatalities.”

Keep it up, lads. Danish jihadists may be slightly more intelligent, not only surviving in greater numbers but also running back to Denmark after realising that glorious martyrdom is not a great long-term career choice. This presents obvious problems for Danish authorities, who besides dealing with an already-agitated Islamic minority in their small nation – less than one-quarter of Australia’s population – must now cope with extremists made even crazier by their Syrian frolics.

Police in the Danish port town of Aarhus have opted for the total wimp approach with their jihad returnees. “Rather than jail time, they’re given medical care for their wounds, a therapist for post-traumatic stress, and even help with homework and job applications. Their parents are also offered counseling,” reports Public Radio International. So they are actually rewarding Islamic State extremists. It’s a “get ahead by removing heads” jihadi cuddle program.

“We see this as crime prevention,” Jorgen Illum, the police commissioner in charge of the ridiculous program, told PRI. “We want to prevent young people from becoming radicalised to an extent that they might be a threat to the society.”

Considering that they’ve already signed up for warfare, it might be a little too late to worry about further radicalisation. They’re already as radicalised as they can be. It might also be doubtful that Danish therapy and homework assistance can overcome some of the education programs being run for jihadists in Syria.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Maria Abi-Habib last week revealed the full horror of Islamic State’s training regimen for new recruits. For example, children as young as eight are given lessons in beheading – using captured Syrian soldiers as practice victims.

Abi-Habib spoke with former Islamic State fighter Jomah, who has since fled for Turkey. The 17-year-old described instructors bringing three terrified Syrians before the class and calling for volunteers to behead them.”The youngest boys shot up their hands and several were chosen to participate,”Abi-Habib reports. “Afterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads.”

“It was like learning to chop an onion,”Jomah recalled. “You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck.”

Good luck to any western authorities attempting to recalibrate blood-drenched graduates from Islamic State’s killbot colleges, although Jomah himself seems quite unmoved by his introduction to throat-slashing. “I’d become desensitised by that time,” he said. “The beheading videos they’d shown us helped.”

That’s nice of them.

Following 45 days of training and a 15-day post grad course, junior jihais are divided into roles that suit their particular levels of extremist madness: becoming suicide bombers, joining the battlefield, guarding military installations or serving as bodyguards. According to a 14-year-old ex-trainee interviewed by Abi-Habib,”the stupid ones were always chosen for suicide bombers.” Which possibly explains the high Australian fatality rate.

Those Australians who survive their jihadi holidays and crawl back to our country face less friendly treatment than is dished out by the Danes. “Obviously you don’t go off fighting in foreign lands –not as a member of the Australian Defence Force – and come back and think you are not going to be on our radar,” Queensland Police Commissioner Ian Stewart said last week. “And that’s because of the experiences that they have, and the skill set that they pick up by being involved in fighting elsewhere.”

Stewart continued: “There is a potential for those within the community to commit terror, a criminal act and I don’t think we can drop our guard for one second.”

This seems like a realistic approach. Even better, of course, would be to subject all returnees to the long jail sentences available under new counter-terrorism laws. Word of these laws is said to have convinced some jihadists to hide in Syria rather than return home, which is the best outcome of all.

Well, second best.

Letter From Australia (About Trotskyite Sydney University)

Orwell Would Weep at the Demonisation of Professor Barry Spurr 

Miranda Devine

The Sunday Telegraph
November 16, 2014

I MUST assume Eden Caceda is an inspired satirical creation by Sydney University students outraged at the brutalisation of poetry professor Barry Spurr. 
 
After all, the anagram of the name is “A Decadence”. That’s one way of looking at the descent into Orwellian thought-control at the nation’s finest university, which has suspended Spurr indefinitely and banned him from campus for using “offensive” language in private emails, which he said had been hacked and sent to a left-wing website.

“Eden Caceda”, an office-bearer with the university’s “Autonomous Collective Against Racism”, ho, ho, led the campaign last week against Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s “racist” Mexican-themed staff Christmas party.  The dress code was “Mexican Fiesta — bring your own sombreros and ponchos”.  But “Caceda” was deeply ­offended by the “culturally ­insensitive” invitation.  “My family has a poncho and it is really important to us, and these people are treating it like a costume,” he said.

Spence, who made the decision to render Professor Spurr a non-person, now finds himself hoist with his own petard.  He has been forced to send an email to staff, cancelling the Mexican dress code: “I have today asked the event organisers to amend our plans so the party has no particular theme.”

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Cowardly capitulation to political correctness only ends when the barbarians are pouring molten silver down your throat. But Spence deserves everything to come, because his treatment of Spurr is a shameful disgrace.  It dishonours everything that a great university is supposed to be. Rather than exalting reason and truth, it is prosecuting Crimethink — banishing people for having private thoughts.

Spurr wrote some of his private thoughts in jocular emails to a friend in which he refers to “Mussies”, “chinky-poos” and “whores” and describes the university’s chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, as an “appalling minx”.  New Matilda has published some of the stolen emails, while the university conducts a top-secret and extremely slow “investigation” into whether they constitute evidence of closet racism, sexism, misogyny, Islamophobia etc.

Spurr said the comments were not serious, but part of a “whimsical linguistic game” in which he and a friend tried to outdo each other with extreme language. Any literate person would understand this boundary transgression. Yet one of the few people to speak up for Spurr lives in London.  “How could anyone take such deliberate touretting seriously?” wrote comedian Barry Humphries, asking if Australia has “gone slightly mad”.

You might have thought that students would rise up in fury and condemn the disgusting treatment of a good man.

Professor Barry Spurr.

But, alas, the only student protests have been by the campus Trotskyists, Socialist Alternative, who shrieked through megaphones outside Fisher ­Library that Spurr was “racist filth” and a “vile bigot” and gathered signatures to have him sacked.

In the days after Spurr was driven out, his fellow ­professors read aloud the ­administration’s ritual denunciation of him before every class, urging students who may have experienced discrimination to come forward.

Spurr is Australia’s only poetry professor. He is the world’s pre-eminent T.S. Eliot scholar. His CV, which has not yet been erased from the university’s website, shows a man of extraordinary literary and academic accomplishment. Students come from across the world just to be in his classes.  Most are dismayed by his banishment, but are so ­oppressed by the McCarthyist atmosphere on campus that they daren’t speak out.

Michael Davis is one brave exception. In a brilliant article in next month’s Quadrant, the 20-year-old blasts the university for “caving to the efforts of 100 caustic teenagers who insult and abuse a 60-something year-old who’s given the better part of his life to that same institution. There would be no University of Sydney without men like Barry Spurr, and there would be no Australia without the Western Civilization he defends.”

Of course, the reason Spurr was marked for destruction was because he helped in the Abbott government’s review of the national curriculum, recommending greater emphasis on the Western literary canon.  Along with review co-author Kevin Donnelly and four other subject experts deemed “conservative”, he has been monstered by the authoritarian Left who control education.

He agreed to help fix the curriculum because he believes English studies are in crisis. He believes democracy is under threat when its people are “inarticulate in their use of language and sub-literate in their linguistic discernment”.

Spurr has devoted his life to eradicating the sort of slovenly, deceitful, politically correct language that “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”, as Orwell put it.

Now he is its victim.

Letter From Australia (About How Christians Ought Treat Muslims in our Midst)

Muslims Need Truth and Love

by Mark Durie
Eternity
September 26, 2014

The past few weeks have been hard ones for Australians, not least for Australian Muslims. Various alleged plots by Islamic State supporters to slaughter Australians has Islam in the news. Even as I write, five out of ten of the “most popular” articles on The Australian‘s website are about Islamic jihad and national security.

What are ordinary Australians to make of conspiracy theories aired by Muslims on the ABC’s Q&A program, implying that recent police raids were staged as a cynical act to manipulate public opinion? Are Muslims being unfairly victimised by all these security measures?

How are we to evaluate Senator Jacqui Lambie’s claim that sharia law “obviously involves terrorism”? Or the Prime Minister’s decision to mobilise Australian troops against the Islamic State?

What about the Islamic State’s grandiose claim that “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women.” Or [Prime Minister Tony] Abbott’s declaration that the balance between freedom and security needs to be adjusted in favour of greater security and less freedom?

Earlier this month, an 18-year-old Melbourne man, Numan Haider, was shot dead by police after he stabbed two officers outside a suburban police station. At the time of writing, news was breaking that authorities believed he intended to behead a police officer and post the photos online.

Prison officers in Goulburn jail have struggled to contain the worst riot in ten years, during which rampaging prisoners were heard to be crying “Allahu Akbar.”

A Christian woman who works in a church close by an Islamic centre has asked her employer to install security measures to protect her and others at the church. Someone else, a convert from Islam to Christianity, reports that his personal sense of being under threat has risen, because he feels that people he knew from his earlier life as a radical Muslim are more likely to be activated to violence after the successes of the Islamic State and their global call to arms. Are such responses reasonable? Or are they Islamophobic?
Many young Muslims have been using the hashtag #NotInMyName on social media. Many are insisting that IS does not speak for them: as Anne Aly put it, “This isn’t in my name, this isn’t what Islam is about, I am against it and they don’t have my allegiance, they don’t have my support.” How then can we know the truth about Islam?

A truly Christian response to the multi-faceted challenge of “Muslims behaving badly” must embrace both truth and love in equal measure.

What is a Christian response to all this? How can we find our way through these crises: does protecting national security mean we risk losing some part of our soul?
A truly Christian response to the multi-faceted challenge of “Muslims behaving badly” must embrace both truth and love in equal measure.

Truth will acknowledge that the Islamic State ideologues do claim to speak for Islam, and that they justify their actions from the Koran and Muhammad’s example. Truth will acknowledge that IS has recruited tens of thousands of Muslims to fight for their cause, but apparently not a single Christian, Jew or Buddhist. As Brother Rachid, a Moroccan convert to Christianity put it in a widely distributed letter to President Obama “ISIL’s 10,000 members are all Muslims. None of them are from any other religion. They come from different countries and have one common denominator: Islam.”

Truth will recognise that the self-declared “caliph” of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi has a PhD in Islamic studies: he is not ignorant of Islam. It will also acknowledge that the very idea of a caliphate – a supra-national Islamic state – is a religious ideal widely shared by many Muslims. However this ideal bodes ill for any non-Muslims who fall under its power.

Truth will accept that there is a price to pay for increased security. Since 9/11 we wait in queues at airports because of the actions of jihadis. As the level of threat increases, it is inevitable that our need for increased security measures will only grow.

Truth will also acknowledge that many Muslims vehemently reject the methods and goals of the Islamic state, and that the #NotInMyName hashtag campaign is genuine and heartfelt. But this begs the question: “What is the real Islam?”

Love on the other hand, will reject stereotyping Muslims or denigrating them with labels of hatred and suspicion. Love will reach out a hand of friendship. It will show grace instead of fear, kindness instead of rejection or indifference. Love demands that we emphatically reject speech which dehumanises Muslims or pins labels on them. It will honour those Muslims who reject the Islamic State’s ideology. Love will find new friends even on the blackest of days.

It can be tempting at times such as this to chose between love and truth. Love without truth can be gullible, opening the door to many threats. I am reminded of a Persian fable. A Fox met a Heron and said “My, what lovely feathers you have, dear Heron. May I have one?” The Heron obliged. The next day they met again. Day after day the Fox’s question was repeated, and day after the day the Heron’s response was the same. One day they met for the last time. The Heron had been plucked bare, so the Fox said “Heron, you look delicious. Now I will eat you. And he did.”

Love without boundaries, at the cost of truth, can wreak incredible havoc on innocent lives. In the end, such love is false, and will prove profoundly unloving. Genuine love does not fear the truth. True love will not deny or obscure the damaging effect of sharia law upon Christians living in Islamic societies, or the atrocities being perpetrated in the name of Islam against Christians and others by the “caliphate”. It will be mindful of the words in Proverbs 24:11-12: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering towards slaughter. If you say ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it.”

On the other hand, truth without love can become merciless, excluding and cruel. Love counts the cost of aggressive argument and rejects rhetoric. It takes pains to understand the other; it seeks to see the world through another’s eyes and to hear words through another’s ears. Love nurtures life-giving relationships. It reaches out to enmity and answers it with grace. It does not jump to conclusions, but is patient and careful. It delights to partner with and nurture truth and does not fear it.

Professor Peter Leahy, former Army Chief and leading defence strategist has warned Australians that we face a war that is “likely to last for the rest of the century”. If he is right, then the troubles we are facing now as a nation are only the beginning, and dealing with the potential horrors ahead will stretch our humanity to its limits.
As Christians we are called to be salt and light in the world. If this means anything, it means staying true to Jesus’ two great statements “the truth shall set you free” and “love your enemies, and do good to those who hate you”. This is no time for circling the wagons and cowering behind them in fear.

This is a time for Australians to reach out to our Muslim neighbours, to show and receive grace. In the present difficulties many Muslims will agree with Melbourne lawyer Shabnum Cassim who stated that “the everyday Muslim just wants to get on with their day.” As a nation the fact that we need to respond realistically to genuine threats to our peace, and seek a true understanding of the religious beliefs that generate these threats, should not deflect us from the everyday task of getting on with our lives together, graciously, inclusively and generously.

Mark Durie is the pastor of an Anglican church, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Founder of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness. His book The Third Choice explains the implications for Christians of living under Islamic rule.

Letter From Australia (About Propaganda Frames)

The Bolt Report

Letter From Australia (About Self-Loathing)

This self-loathing insults Australian values

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 26, 2014

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.  Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men. . . .

In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”. 

Yes, to see Westerners criticise an “Oriental” woman-killer was to see “the powerful condemn the powerless”, according to the blurb approved by Badar. Pity those powerless murderers.

The Opera House has now cancelled Badar’s speech, but only on the grounds that his critics misunderstood the poor man. (Depressingly, not one critic was a prominent Muslim.)  As the Opera House put it, “a line has been crossed” by giving the lecture its “provocative” title, because “it is clear from the public reaction that the title has given the wrong impression of what Mr Badar intended to discuss”.

We are now asked to believe a talk entitled “Honour killings are morally justified” would say something different, although the organisers and Badar haven’t said what. The Opera House merely asserts neither Badar nor the organisers “in any way advocate honour killings” — and it cancels the talk it claims would have said the same.

How curious.

In fact, this blaming of the critics is terribly familiar. Our cultural elite doesn’t condone Islamic extremists; it just attacks those who condemn them. Example: when Dutch political leader Geert Wilders toured Australia last year to warn against the Islamist threat to our freedoms and safety, he was vilified even by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for allegedly “inciting hatred and animosity”. Example: when I criticised our leading Islamic apologist, ABC presenter Waleed Aly, for refusing to identify Nigeria’s Boko Haram as Islamist or blame it for kidnapping schoolgirls, I was damned by the ABC’s religious affairs editor as “mad”, “lunatic”, “maniacal” and “idolatrous”.

Or take Ann Mossop, co-curator of the festival that invited Badar. She has repeatedly tweeted support for an activist who defaced posters protesting against jihadist attacks on Israel with the slogan: “In any war between the civilised and the savage, support the civilised man.”

Indeed, in this cultural war, the support too often is for the savage and our will to resist is white-anted by a self-loathing of one of the richest, safest and most free societies the world has seen.

“We have a reputation at the moment as being one of the nastiest countries in the world,” feminist Eva Cox declared on the ABC’s Q&A this week. Australia has a “racist” Constitution and a “very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter”, claims Australian of the Year Adam Goodes.

Our Anzac dead were just “killed or wounded while their country engaged them in the business of killing”, Tasmanian Governor Peter Underwood reproached Dawn Service mourners this year.

Yes, we have such rotten values that we should be more open to imported ones.
Honour killings, anyone? For a cultural elite with a death wish, it almost makes sense.

Silly, Febrile Journalists

Abbott Derangement Syndrome

In New Zealand, we are familiar with what has become known as the Key Derangement Syndrome.  The reference is to Prime Minister, John Key.  For a long time, the establishment media and opposition political parties appeared to lose their ability to think when it came to the Prime Minister.  They collectively went agog and aghast whenever Key featured, seeing all kinds of sinister plots, disasters, and repeated faux pas.

Now Australia has been caught in the same syndrome, only this time it is the Abbott Derangement Syndrome.  Miranda Divine documents the nonsense pouring forth from the minds, mouths and scribblings of the media:

Lefties living in a parallel world

Miranda Devine
The Sunday Telegraph

 if you rely for your news on the ABC, the Fairfax press, the Guardian, ­Crikey, the Saturday paper, Channel Ten, a good chunk of the Canberra press gallery, Twitter, or any of the plethora of Left-leaning media outlets in Australia, you are destined to be perpetually surprised by real-life events.

As Tony Abbott stumbles across the world stage like an antipodean George Bush, Canada (or Canadia in Tony talk) becomes the latest nation to be embarrassed on Australia’s behalf.
– Chris Roylance, Paddington Qld

This is the parallel world in which Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a “Nigel No Friends”, embarrassing Australia on the world stage while copping a frosty reception from the US President.

The Age’s front page thundered last week that Abbott was endangering Australia’s relationship with the US because of his “global plan to kill carbon pricing”.

ABC’s Radio National was breathless with anticipation at the looming rift between the The Prime Minister and President Obama on climate change.  “Tony Abbott is leading the world in going backwards” was the headline on the Sydney Morning Herald’s letters pages on one of the many days of self-flagellation.

“As Tony Abbott stumbles across the world stage like an antipodean George Bush, Canada (or Canadia in Tony talk) becomes the latest nation to be embarrassed on Australia’s behalf,” wrote Chris ­Roylance of the “other” Paddington, in Queensland.

“I am embarrassed by our Prime Minister,” wailed Elizabeth Frankel from Good Hope Landing (as good a parallel universe address as could be). “Watching him during his trip abroad makes me cringe to be Australian.”

Meanwhile, in the parallel world, Melbourne radio host Jon Faine, of Winkgate fame, claimed last week to have bombshell evidence of a conspiracy to destroy Julia Gillard that the Royal Commission into Union Corruption could not examine.

Images of President Obama warmly embracing the Prime Minister must have perplexed consumers of parallel media.  Twitter had a quick explanation: that Obama was a good actor, with the diplomatic skill, patience and tolerance required of a real leader … And Abbott should be taking notes.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the White House dismissed any talk about disharmony over climate change policy as “all hat and no cattle”.

Similarly mystifying must have been the praise heaped on Abbott’s sure-footed diplomacy by Kim Beazley, the Labor leader turned US ambassador, and the positive reception the PM has received wherever he has travelled.

Letter From Australia (About a Ruinous Government)

Cleaning Up The Unlucky Country

In hindsight it will likely be told that Australia, of all the developed countries, handled the Global Financial Crisis (GFC”) the worst–and that, dear friends, from a country which went into the crisis positioned far better than most.  What caused the manufacture of such a crisis?

• A grandiose Prime Minister who cast himself in a Churchillian role
• An insecure Prime Minister who wanted to be seen as the Barack Obama of the Asia-Pacific Region
• An economically ignorant Prime Minister who thought that money could be borrowed ad infinitum.

The name of the one who is arguably Australia’s worst Prime Minister?  Kevin Rudd.

Paul Sheehan, Sydney Morning Herald correspondent, fills in the details.

Unusually, history offers a precise time and place, right down to the day, to appreciate why Australia has gone, seemingly suddenly, from a land of boom to a nation facing an austerity budget with sacrifices expected of all. The date was February 4, 2009.

On that day, for the first time in the 15 months since the Howard government had been defeated, a spontaneous upsurge of genuine unity, concern and outrage came from the opposition. It crossed all factions and cliques. It fused Liberals and Nationals.  The cause of their collective alarm was the size and scale, and haste and dubious design, of six appropriations bills that Kevin Rudd’s government was about to ram through Parliament. These bills would transform the budget.

The catalyst for this was the 2008 financial crisis that had thrown the United States and western Europe into recession and come close to fusing their banking systems. The crisis had not, however, affected Canada or most of Asia. It was countries running big government debt and deficits that were in crisis control.

At the beginning of the GFC, Australian banks were rated the best and strongest in the world; the government was running a fiscal surplus and had done for years; mining and its downstream industries were booming due to strong demand from the developing world.  But either Rudd panicked, or his vaunting ambition saw an opportunity to paint his inflated ego into history’s portrait gallery, or he was just plain economically ignorant. 

Rudd said Australia needed decisive action to avoid a recession. When the opposition caught a glimpse of what he intended it saw immediately that Rudd’s grandiosity was dangerously at work. We are now discovering in great detail, via the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Scheme, the extent of dysfunction of Rudd’s management vision.

Joe Hockey, who was about to become shadow treasurer, opened the attack on February 4. “We have not seen the six bills that are going to be introduced, debated and voted on in this place today,” he said. “These six bills will take us into $100 billion of debt.”

Malcolm Turnbull, then opposition leader, followed soon after. “In four years, net debt will be $70 billion … and the government has asked for the right, just a moment ago, to borrow up to $200 billion, or $9500 for every man, woman and child in Australia,” he said.  “The plan reeks of nothing more than panic … We do not reject the need for a stimulus at this time. Our judgment is that $42 billion is more than is appropriate right now. The government is looking increasingly like a frightened soldier who fires off all his ammunition in a panic in the first minutes of an engagement … Our judgment is that a more appropriate level of stimulus is in order, 1 to 2 per cent of GDP, or between $15 billion and $20 billion.”

All night, Coalition members, 57 in the House and Senate, rose to speak. Former treasurer Peter Costello, silent on the back bench for a year, was moved to genuine outrage.  “When you inherit an economy which has a budget in surplus and no net debt, which has unemployment at 30-year lows, where the credit rating has been restored to a AAA rating on foreign currency bonds, where you have a Future Fund of $61 billion and a Higher Education Endowment Fund, when you inherit an economy in that condition you have to find a fault somewhere,” he said. “If you cannot find a fault somewhere, what problem have you got to solve? So the Labor Party, naturally enough, looked for a problem. The trouble is, it was the wrong one.”

The problem lay with a minor matter called government debt.  Borrow in haste, repent in leisure.  It will take decades for the fiscal damage done by Rudd to be repaired–and it will inflict pain upon at least two generations of Australians.  Or, they will cave, and kick the can down the road for their grandchildren to face up to. 

When debate was finally guillotined it was 4.45am. For the opposition it was a new dawn. It did not need to wait for opinion polls or focus groups. Typical was this from former minister Bruce Billson. “The Coalition is seeking to ensure that the nation does not sleepwalk into a poorly designed, irresponsible and unsustainable package dreamt up by a panicked government,” he said. “The only certain outcome of this package is waking up to the nightmare of decades of excessive debt and deficit.”

That is exactly what happened. Rudd was worse than Whitlam. In the six years Labor was in government, the growth in Australia’s real federal expenditure was close to highest in the Organisation of Economic Co-Operation and Development – even though Australia was a resource economy with a sturdy banking sector and no housing bubble, and thus not susceptible to the financial shock in the US and much of Europe.

It is difficult to move the macro-economic needle quickly in a $1.5 trillion economy that is the 12th largest in the world (larger than Spain, which has 47 million people). In 2009, Rudd managed to jolt the needle, ramping up federal spending as a percentage of GDP.

He was also more profligate than Julia Gillard and she was no prize, loading future budgets with the Gonski education program, the national disability insurance scheme and the multibillion asylum seeker debacle without seeming to have a Gonski about how it would all be paid for.

Now that the bills are coming due, neither Rudd nor Gillard are around. It is the morning after. The clean-up. The payment due date. And the demographic challenge has loomed into focus. So let’s not confuse who did the spending and who is having to pay. . . .

A clean-up is not a crisis. We’ve already had a false crisis and are about to pay for it.

Letter From Australia (About Education and Reflexive Protectionists)

A Man Who Has Class

Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
February 05, 2014

THE vicious attacks on the expert chosen by Christopher Pyne to review the national education curriculum show just how much is at stake for the cultural revolutionaries dumbing down our schools. 
 
Dr Kevin Donnelly is their worst nightmare, appointed to snatch the curriculum back from the brink of disaster.  For his trouble he has been falsely branded a paedophile, Islamophobe, homophobe, misogynist and Christian.  In the sewers of Twitter, people have wished him dead and asked him for his opinion on vibrators.  “Go f… yourself Kevin Donnelly.”

Among his and Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire’s tasks is to decide whether the three priorities of the new curriculum – sustainability, indigenous history and culture and Asian engagement – make any sense.  Absurdly, even in maths the curriculum claims “sustainability provides rich, engaging and authentic contexts for developing students’ abilities in number and algebra”.  Good grief. Pyne has rightly queried this politically correct attempt at brainwashing. He ought to rip the curriculum to shreds, but he is taking the gentle approach.

Clear-thinking Donnelly is the perfect choice.
An unabashed critic of moral relativism, he wants education to be about “objectivity and truth”. He believes students should understand the foundations of Western civilisation and Australia’s Judeo-Christian heritage.  He thinks academic rigour and phonics and even – shock, horror – rote learning might be a good thing.

He is against the fashion of students “constructing” their own knowledge.  When university students need remedial reading classes, he knows something is wrong.  “The penny has dropped that what we are doing isn’t working well enough,” Donnelly told me. “In terms of falling standards something has to be done.”
Most parents would agree but the Marxist teacher unions are beside themselves, trawling around for something, anything, to discredit him.

The latest ploy was a story this week claiming Donnelly is homophobic because he once wrote, in his 2004 book Why Our Schools Are Failing, that teachers should not push leftist propaganda on gender and sexuality.  Donnelly criticised Australian Education Union policy that “homosexuality and bisexuality need to be normalised” in the classroom and “heterosexism” (the idea that heterosexuality is the norm) must be stamped out.  He cited the example that Cinderella and Romeo And Juliet are “condemned as heterosexist because they privilege traditional views about heterosexual love”.

Essentially, Donnelly’s view was that sex education is a sensitive and controversial topic and that parents have the right to know what is happening in the classroom.  The AEU seized the bogus story as “yet another reason why Kevin Donnelly shouldn’t be anywhere near a curriculum review”.

Kevin Donnelly / Artwork: John Tiedemann Source: DailyTelegraph

Others on Twitter claimed he would “rather have our youth committing suicide than be educated … If Kevin Donnelly comes anywhere near my children I can’t be held fully accountable for my actions. What a creep.”  The denizens of Twitter take their lead from the bile emanating from the education establishment, unions and academics who have presided over falling standards.

Worst was former NSW education director-general Ken Boston, who took to ABC radio last month with an extraordinarily unhinged tirade: “Kevin Donnelly is a polemicist. He’s not taken seriously. He doesn’t engage with reasoned argument or evidence. His views, or rantings frankly, are well-known and have been disregarded for many years. His publications are regarded as specious nonsense.”  And on and on he went for five minutes. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Donnelly could hardly be better qualified. He holds a master’s of education and a PhD on school curriculum, was on the panel of examiners for Year 12 English in Victoria and the Board of Studies.  He also was a secondary school teacher for 18 years. He is a thoughtful man who has devoted his life to education.

Boston, on the other hand, has a doctorate in “coastal morphology”. The 70-year-old devoted himself to the study of saltmarsh grasses into his 30s when he changed careers to become an education bureaucrat in Ballarat. Remarkably, he rose to the top of the NSW Education Department and landed a plum job in London as chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority but left in 2008 in a national fiasco over school tests. London’s conservative Daily Telegraph said that during Boston’s six years at the authority it “presided over the dumbing down of the curriculum, a decline in the rigour of tests and hyper-inflation in the results”.

He is hardly in a position to criticise Donnelly.  But all the vitriol is like water off a duck’s back to Pyne. The more the Left criticises Donnelly, the more he knows he’s on to a good thing. For our children’s sake, let’s hope its not too late.

Letter From Australia (About Truth Being Drowned)

Truth Founders in a Sea of Bias

Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
February 03, 2014

YOU’D think the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (“ABC”) would cheer. In six weeks, not one boat of “asylum seekers” has turned up and not one boat person drowned. 
 
Not in six years – since Labor scrapped our tough border laws and lured more than 1000 boat people to their deaths – has there been such a pause. Think what this means. Lives have been saved. Hundreds of millions of dollars won’t be wasted. Real refugees won’t be pushed out of the queues here by fakes. 

Yet here is what’s so damning of the ABC, which takes $1.2 billion a year from taxpayers under an agreement not to be biased.  Never has the ABC campaigned so furiously against our border policies as now, when the Abbott Government has shut the gate by turning back boats and sending every arrival to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Same with the Greens and many Fairfax commentators.

When the first scores of boat people drowned under Labor, most in the Left turned a blind eye. Later, they pretended Labor’s weak laws weren’t to blame.  “Tragedies happen, accidents happen,” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.
  Finally, when the death toll grew too horrific to ignore, they argued the Coalition’s plan to “turn back the boats” would never work anyway.  Said Hanson-Young: “Turning boats around … will not deter desperate people from making dangerous journeys by boat. It never has and it never will.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, likewise, predicted those Coalition policies “can’t and won’t work”.  In fact, many in the Left simply don’t want them to work. Jack Waterford, of Fairfax’s Canberra Times, wrote: “There are many people, including me, who want to see our shameful policies fail.”  ABC host Jonathan Green even gloated last November they’d failed already: “Stop The Boats. Turn Them Back When Safe To Do So. Tossed aside now for the best and most practical of reasons.”

How desperate the Left now is not to be proved wrong, which is why this Government gets no thanks.  Instead, now that Tony Abbott’s policies are indeed working, the media Left invents horror stories about them, with one Guardian writer even suggesting our navy was “shooting at boats full of refugees”.

Or take the ABC. Its campaign against these laws started with reports exaggerating how angry Indonesia was with them.  Its website also began a daily count of boat arrivals – something the ABC never did under Labor, even when three a day were turning up.  ABC presenters chose as their go-to Indonesian spokesman an MP who had a strident anti-Australian agenda, even though he was just a backbencher. Next, the ABC trumpeted secrets of our spying on Indonesia with apparent glee at the damage this would do to Indonesian co-operation.

For months, ABC presenters also demanded the Government reveal details of its interception operations, even though the head of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, warned this would give “advantage to people smugglers”.  On it went. The ABC painted the Government heartless by presenting as fact a falsehood that “an asylum seeker being held in detention on Nauru is expecting twins”.

Most absurdly, it last week claimed it had a video which “appears to back up the claims” of boat people who said the navy had tortured them by forcing their hands against their boat’s red-hot engines.  The men’s story was always implausible, and two later admitted they’d actually fallen into the engines. Their chief spokesman concedes all but one of the alleged victims now say they “were not deliberately forced to touch the hot engine”. Yet the ABC, rather than apologise, reported yet another preposterous allegation by one of the very same people: “that Australian sailors mistreated them” by briefly blinding one with a spray.  “Mistreated”? In fact, our sailors allegedly used pepper spray against one man during what another called a “fight” around their boats’ engines.

No wonder Abbott accuses the ABC of appearing “to take everyone’s side but our own”. Indeed, such reporting seems driven by an ideological assumption that conservatives are brutal and our institutions racist, and neither should be trusted against the word of asylum seekers of another “race”. 

This is just one strand in the weave of bias at the ABC, which has people of the Left hosting every one of its main current affairs shows, but it is almost certainly the bloodiest.  How many boat people drowned before the ABC would link Labor’s policies to that disaster? How many more will drown if ABC activists now smash the policies which work?
 

Letter From Australia (About a Horrible Man)

A Scientific Delusion

The Commentariat in Australia is all in a tizz wazz because a prominent someone has dared to call a spade what it really is.  One often finds Australians a bit mealy mouthed.  One is never quite sure what they mean with all the hemming and hawing and hedging and qualifications.  But not this time.

A correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald, a bastion of Commentariat orthodoxy, has recorded the shock at the outrageous statements made by a leading Australian businessman.  Since the culprit also happens to be a business adviser to the Prime Minister, that perfectly awful Tony Abbott, the paper reports that the opposition Labor party and Fairfax media have rushed off to the Prime Minister’s office with a “do you still stand by . . . . ” question of the PM.  To date, no response has been forthcoming.  Probably a case of not wanting to dignify idiocy by an answer. 

Tony Abbott’s business adviser says Australia taken ‘hostage’ by ‘climate change madness’

December 31, 2013 – 10:49AM
Jonathan Swan
National political reporter

Tony Abbott’s top business adviser says Australia’s manufacturing sector and overall competitiveness have been destroyed by climate change policies driven by “scientific delusion”. 

The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling 

In an opinion piece in The Australian newspaper, the Prime Minister’s pick as head of his Business Advisory Council, Maurice Newman, wrote high energy costs caused by the carbon tax and the renewable energy target, introduced under the Howard government, had eroded Australia’s competitiveness.  Under Labor and the Greens, Australia had been taken “hostage” by “climate change madness”.

“Climate change madness…has been a major factor in the decimation of our manufacturing industry,” he said.  “It is the unprecedented cost of energy, driven by the Renewable Energy Target and carbon tax, which, at the margin, has destroyed our competitiveness.”

Mr Newman added that he believed the green economy was killing Australian jobs.  “For all the propaganda about green employment, Australia seems to be living the European experience, where, for every green job created, two to three jobs are lost in the real economy,” Mr Newman said.  “The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling.”  Mr Newman wrote he believed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change resorted to “dishonesty and deceit” and were “intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money”.

Labor has called on the Prime Minister to ask Mr Newman to withdraw his comments “which damage Australia’s relationships with its trading partners”.

“These extraordinary comments from one of Tony Abbott’s closest advisers prove the Coalition is not serious about taking action on climate change and does not accept the overwhelming evidence of a changing climate,” the Opposition’s acting environment spokesman Shayne Neumann said.  “The worst part about Mr Newman’s ignorant comments is that he’s only voicing what we know Tony Abbott thinks about climate change.”  Fairfax Media has contacted the Prime Minister’s office for a response to Mr Newman’s comments.

Letter From Australia (About the United States)

World-class Fakery on Show

TIM BLAIR
The Daily Telegraph
December 16, 2013 12:00AM

 A RIDICULOUS and under-qualified faker took to the stage last week during Nelson Mandela’s memorial service. And next to Barack Obama was some guy who hasn’t quite mastered sign language. 
 
Thamsanqa Jantjie’s erratic performance has drawn international ridicule, but all he really did was turn the failed president’s words into a disappointing jumble of incomprehensible nonsense. As is now apparent, Obama is quite capable of achieving this by himself.

Many Australians were puzzled by American resistance to Obama’s universal healthcare plan, back when it was first proposed in 2008. They couldn’t understand why the US would not embrace an Australian-style system of health coverage.  One reason is that the system in the US was proposed by Obama and his hopeless administration. If you thought Labor’s attempts in Australia to install home insulation and run grocery price websites were lame, they have nothing on Obama’s bid to reshape the massive US health sector.

Just as Labor did in Australia, Obama initially enjoyed near-universal media support. The allegedly impartial fact-checking site PolitiFact backed Obama five years ago for this claim: “No.1, let me just repeat, if you’ve got a healthcare plan that you like you can keep it. All I’m going to do is help you lower the premiums on it. You’ll still have choice of doctor.”  According to PolitiFact: “His description of his plan is accurate, and we rate his statement True.”

Leave aside the puzzling move of judging a political promise in the absence of any action, and move ahead to this year. Millions of Americans have lost their existing health coverage. Millions find themselves waiting for months to see doctors they don’t know. PolitiFact now reports:
“As cancellation letters were going out to about four million Americans, the public realised Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong … for all of these reasons, PolitiFact named ‘If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it,’ the Lie of the Year for 2013.”

I’m not sure how to indicate “lie” in sign language, but one way might be to simply point at Barack Obama’s mouth. A pro tip there for Mr Jantjie, the next time he’s called up for top-level hand-waving duty.

Former Obama fans, who credited their hero with almost mystical powers when first elected, now realise the man’s limitations. As Jantjie is to communicating with the deaf, Obama is to the US presidency. Even Obama’s core constituency of wealthy New York luvvies is cutting him loose. Last week the New York Times, the most Obama-enthralled of all US publications, ran the most hilarious news item of the year, beginning with a paragraph for the ages:

“Many in New York’s professional and cultural elite have long supported President Obama’s healthcare plan. But now, thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers and others are learning their health insurance plans are being cancelled and they may have to pay more to get comparable coverage, if they can find it.” Thousands of opera singers! As the internet’s Dave Burge responded: “One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh one’s ass off.” Except, of course, for the dire chances of successful ass replacement surgery under Obamacare.

The Times continued: “It is not lost on many of the professionals that they are exactly the sort of people – liberal, concerned with social justice – who supported the Obama health plan in the first place. Ms Meinwald, the lawyer, said she was a lifelong Democrat who still supported better healthcare for all, but had she known what was in store for her, she would have voted for Mitt Romney.”

Americans voted for hope and change. They got hopeless change. In any language, that message comes through loud and clear.

Letter From Australia (About State Education)

Getting Value For Money

The problems with NZ government schools are not unique to this country.  A similar pattern can be discerned in Australia.  Here is a piece in The Telegraph by Piers Akerman.

The big error lies in believing money is the sole answer to educational problems.  In the past decade the education budget has increased by 40 per cent but results have declined in real terms across every subject. Australian taxpayers pay $42 billion a year for shocking results.

The Abbott government has been faced with the choice of continuing to fund bad policy and fail our children or trying to help them gain from their schooling. Given that the federal government doesn’t own any schools or employ any teachers, the choice seems simple. 

Give the states and territories some guidance on curricula, replace the hideously ideological literacy program, for instance, with the universally accepted and proven phonics method of teaching reading,
improve the quality of teachers by getting more involved in teacher training within universities, permitting school principals to assume greater responsibility and enjoy greater autonomy and, crucially, actively promote the engagement of parents or grandparents in the education of their children and grandchildren.  What happens in the classroom has far greater influence over a child’s education than the amount of money being handed out.

It is clear [Federal Education Minister] Pyne is relentlessly focused on teacher quality and training and understands that university students who don’t understand basic principles of English, let alone science or maths, are being trained as teachers.  They are the victims of failed educational fads and yet are expected to be able to teach future students.

The most hysterical criticism of the Abbott government’s plans for education has come from the teachers’ unions, because they can see their control being diminished as principals are given greater responsibility.  Hypocritically, the leftists who have always campaigned for more state schools are opposed to the creation of more state schools if they are to be given greater independence.

Independent state schools introduced in Western Australia are now so successful they are luring pupils from non-government schools, which upsets teachers’ unions and the left enormously.  The schools are owned by the state but run by principals, with involvement from parents. Parents say the education their children receive at such schools is transformational.

Pyne firmly believes he was elected to make a real contribution, not merely occupy a seat in parliament. He knew he was always going to be attacked by the educational establishment for identifying its core weakness.
Labor never tried to make the necessary changes because it didn’t want to create conflict with its trade union support base.

While the Abbott government has not cut the education funding agreed to during the forward estimates period, it is going to insist on value for money.  That’s a principle which principled principals will happily agree to.

Letter From Australia (About Resuming Normal Service)

The Great Climate Grind

Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
November 25, 2013

AUSTRALIAN pride is restored. This is no small accomplishment, considering the depths to which we sank in 2009, when prime minister Kevin Rudd offered this wince-making speech to that year’s United Nations climate conference in Denmark:

“Before I left Australia, I was presented with a book of handwritten letters from a group of six-year-olds. One of the letters is from Gracie. Gracie is six. ‘Hi,’ she wrote. ‘My name is Gracie. How old are you?’ Gracie continues, ‘I am writing to you because I want you all to be strong in Copenhagen. Please listen to us as it is our future.’ I fear that at this conference, we are on the verge of letting little Gracie down.”

We were a different country back then, outsourcing economic policy to babies and actually admitting it to the world. Happily, things have changed. For this year’s UN climatefest in Warsaw, Poland, Tony Abbott’s government didn’t even bother to send the environment minister, much less the Prime Minister and his pre-teen fan mail.

Instead we sent some delegates who quite properly treated the whole exercise as a lark, much to the consternation of Gaia’s little Gracies.

“They wore T-shirts and gorged on snacks throughout the negotiation,” fumed Ria Voorhaar, a spokeswoman for the Climate Action Network. “That gives some indication of the manner they are behaving in.”

Back in 2009, Rudd negotiated pointlessly for 40 hours, with just an hour of sleep. This year’s Australian delegates don’t go for that sort of nonsense. “They made an intervention that late-night negotiations were bad for health and should be stopped,” Voorhaar said.

And the meetings were indeed halted, with many blaming the snack-chomping Aussies and their T-shirts. “Their behaviour caused over 130 developing nations to abandon discussions on the controversial issue of climate compensation at 4am,” whined Sophie Yeo of the activist group Responding to Climate Change. “It is one thing to be tired in a negotiation meeting, another to turn up in pyjamas,” huffed EU negotiator Paul Watkinson on Twitter. “Respect matters.” With all due respect, the EU and the UN can shove it.

The Australians’ fine performance in Warsaw recalls the great Ipswich Meat Battle of 2006, when Queensland abattoir workers set a new global standard for environmental negotiations. One April morning the workers arrived at their abattoir to find animal activists had chained themselves to the facility’s killing area.

Rather than go home, the industrious workers advanced on the chained idiots. As the ABC reported: “The 12 protesters got a fright when meatworkers took matters into their own hands and used angle grinders to cut the chains off the activists so they could get back to work.”

Police are usually called to deal with protesters. In this case, the protesters actually called police. “The workers, they were standing around cheering and whooping and yelling and making lewd comments,” protester Angie Stephenson wailed. “We had to call the police and tell them to get out here straight away.”

“We begged for the police,” confirmed protester Patty Mark who said the abattoir owner joined about 40 of his workers in removing the animal activists. “They were yelling and screaming, and he got the angle grinder himself and started to cut near where we were chained. It was terrifying. We didn’t have protection on our eyes. The sparks were flying.”

If ever we send further delegations to climate talks, these boys should lead the way. “Like, this guy was coming at us with an angle grinder, so there were people shaking, there were people in tears,” said protester Noah Hannibal. “And he was just saying, you know, ‘I’m enjoying this’.” That’s the spirit. The UN better get used to it.

Letter From Australia (About Pain in the US)

No Cure as Obamacare Gets Worse 

James Morrow
The Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2013 12:00AM

IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went back on her assurance that “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”. 

In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care – the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short – Americans who liked their GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs and using those same plans.  Or as he put it in various forms to the American public more than two dozen times: “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

The only thing is, it turned out not to be true.
Experts and skeptics warned that trying to bend the US healthcare sector – which were it a stand-alone economy would be as big as France, only with more bureaucracy and worse customer service – to the will of Washington bureaucrats would be a disaster. The predictions are now coming to pass.

Under Obamacare, costs are going up for millions of Americans and the website designed to navigate individuals through the insurance “exchanges” has driven users away by the million on ­account of its poor design, buggy nature, and lack of security. . . .

How poorly has the system performed?  By one estimate in the  first month of the program just 50,000 Americans had successfully  signed  up under the new ­program.  To put those numbers in perspective, that’s about the same number of followers as The Daily Telegraph‘s Joe Hildebrand has on Twitter. Though in Joe’s favour, the federal government is not compelling anyone to follow his feed.

Yet. . . .

While government experts raised red flags about the site as early as March, by all accounts the White House did not realise there were problems until after it launched a few weeks ago, when they read about it in the papers.  This passive “who knew?” attitude was expressed by Obama himself during a recent interview on American TV when he blithely stated, “If we had to do it all over again … there would have been a whole lot more questions that were asked.”

No wonder Americans are angry and that the American president is now languishing in the polls and is sitting on disapproval numbers as ignominious as those of George W. Bush in his second term.  And in contrast to Bush, Obama has not started any unpopular major wars (the Nobel Peace Prize winner is more of a drone strike man), nor with some exceptions does he face an overwhelmingly hostile media.

Democrats in the US legislature, facing elections in just under a year and the danger of being associated with the president’s broken promise, are increasingly skittish and warning of a “crisis of confidence” in the president.  When Republicans faced mid-term elections at the same stage of George W. Bush’s presidency, Democrats swept the House and gained a commanding majority. Today, the polls are the same but the parties are reversed. . . .

Because the US Constitution does not provide for Westminster-style circuit breakers like spills or no-confidence motions, Obama does not face an existential threat to his presidency, only his legacy. Whether this is enough for him to change course again remains to be seen.

Letter From Australia (About Climate Clowns)

Australia’s Ablaze with Climate Clowns

Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
October 28, 2013 12:00AM

 AUSTRALIA is a deeply puzzling land, especially to foreign media types. Even basic geography is sometimes a cause of bewilderment. For example, in 2011 Britain’s Daily Mail tried to depict the extent of that year’s Queensland floods with a helpful map of eastern Australia. This isn’t a particularly difficult cartographic assignment, but the Mail managed to get it wrong, inventing the brand new state of Capricornia to Queensland’s north.
 
The current NSW fires have prompted similar blunders. Last week the US television network NBC ran a graphic intended to show the range of the fires. They turned out to be far more extensive than anyone in Australia was aware.

NBC may have sourced their information from a Geoscience Australia monitoring site that lists hazard reduction burns and other non-threatening fires along with the massive conflagrations throughout NSW. The result was a graphic showing almost the entire northwest of Australia covered with flames. Darwin hasn’t seen the likes of this since the Japanese bombing in World War II. Poor Capricornia copped it again as well. So did arid desert areas, which apparently now feature rare combustible dirt.

Elementary geographic and factual errors are one thing. It gets worse when ignorant outsiders lecture us about our own country.
Former US vice-president turned global warming millionaire Al Gore barged in on local affairs last week, courtesy of the ABC.

“The Australian Prime Minister has said in the last couple of hours that bushfires are a function of life in Australia and nothing to do with climate change,” presenter Annabel Crabb asked. “What do you make of those remarks?”

“Well, it’s not my place to get involved in your politics,” Gore replied, before doing exactly that.
“It reminds me of politicians here in the US who got a lot of support from the tobacco companies and who argued to the public that there was absolutely no connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer,” Gore said. “And for 40 years the tobacco companies were able to persuade pliant politicians within their grip to tell the public what they wanted them to tell them.”

Gore should know. He was one of those pliant politicians, accepting campaign contributions from tobacco companies even after his older sister died of lung cancer. If you could burn hypocrisy, Al Gore would be the planet’s single largest energy source.

Time magazine’s Brooklyn-based Bryan Walsh also took aim at Abbott in a subtle piece headlined “Climate Change Affects Australia’s Epic Wildfires – No Matter What Prime Minister Says.”  Oddly, Australian leftists lap this stuff up. Show them a non-interfering British royal and they scream about independence and a republic. The same types usually wail about US cultural domination of Australian. Show them a couple of climate clowns from Brooklyn and Nashville, on the other hand, and they can’t wait to put a link up on Twitter.

Anyway, the grand authority of Walsh’s Time piece was slightly undermined by a few subsequent corrections. “An earlier version of this article misstated that New South Wales is in south-western Australia. It is in south-eastern Australia,” read one of them.  This was followed by another: “An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a former Prime Minister of Australia. She is Julia Gillard, not Gilliard.”

So Walsh doesn’t know anything about Australian politics or even where the fires were, but he sure knows what caused them. He’s able to work that out from New York. For a more accurate view, let’s turn to former CSIRO bushfire researcher David Packham, who described the supposed link between fires and climate change as “absolute nonsense”.

“If there is any global warming, the global warming is so slow and so small that the bushfire event is totally overrun by the fuel state,” Packham continued. But what would he know? He’s only an Australian who happens to have studied bushfires for more than 50 years. Warmies prefer their climate advice to be global.

Letter From Australia (About Deadly Greenist Policies)

Why Greenies Only Make Me See Red

Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 2013 12:00AM

BILL Leak, acclaimed cartoonist, lives in one of the loveliest places in Australia: Killcare, on the Central Coast. 

  But one of the consequences of living in the middle of the Australian bush is fire.  And in pretty seachange and treechange communities, you’re likely to find yourself in a greenie council dominated by refugees from the city who haven’t a clue about the real dangers of living among trees.

So it is that at the start of a dangerous bushfire season, Leak finds himself with a backyard full of trees and flammable material that he is forbidden to clear by Gosford Council on threat of fines as high as $1.1 million.
“Here I am, living on the edge of bushland that could burst into flame at any time, and I’m not allowed to clear the land in my own backyard of trees that, in the event of a fire, will bring the fire straight into my home,” he says.

Council flora preservation policies warn that the removal of any native tree over 3m can attract hefty fines.
This “puts homes like mine in grave danger: the refusal of local councils to allow home owners to remove trees that can extend the bushland right up to our own back doors,” Leak says.  “The only possible explanation for this is the council is hell-bent on securing Green votes. I’ll accept, albeit unwillingly, the indulgence of Greens fantasies up to a point but if and when they cost me my house I think I’ll have to say, ‘A line has been crossed’.”

Yes indeed.

How many warnings do councils need before they understand that tea trees and eucalypts and other lovely natives, not to mention shrubs and organic litter on the ground, are lethal near homes in fireprone areas.  It’s bad enough that properties are being burned out by unstoppable infernos that erupt out of neglected national parks. But to actively stop people from protecting their homes by forbidding them to remove fire fuel on their own land is insanity. 

Gosford Council is not alone, or even the worst.  Wyong Council has recently sent residents in Lake Munmorah warning letters about clearing bush adjoining their properties where dead lantana poses a serious bushfire hazard.  It’s the same all over the country wherever green sensibilities have overwhelmed sensible decision making.

Who could forget Liam Sheahan, who was fined $50,000 by his local council for clearing trees around his house, only to find that his property was the only one in a 2km area which survived the Black Saturday fires in Victoria in 2009. Yet we still haven’t learned the lesson.

In 2009 Blue Mountains residents signed a petition condemning the state government for failing to carry out enough burn-offs as experienced firefighters warned the area was a “time bomb”.  Where 10 tonnes of ground fuel per hectare is regarded as hazardous, one veteran firefighter estimates there was 40 tonnes in areas that have been burned out in the past week. That’s despite a significant improvement in national parks and firetrails management in recent years.

But greenies are brilliant at warping the narrative, so instead what most people are hearing is that the bushfires have been caused by climate change, a claim not even the IPCC has made.  The ABC has allowed itself to shill for climate alarmists, claiming that the bushfire season has never started so early, when a simple record check shows raging October bushfires near Sydney on several occasions in the last century.

But Monday night’s 7.30 took the cake.  “Scientists told 7.30 the science is in, the link between global warming and bushfires has been established and it’s time for action,” it said.  But not a single scientist was produced to say such a thing. Just the usual fear-mongering greenies such as John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute, and Don Henry of the Australian Conversation Foundation, whose grave faces and confident pronouncements appeared before captions told the audience that these were not the promised scientists.

Eventually appeared Professor Andy Pitman, who is an alarmist but at least an actual scientist and halfway responsible about what he says. And nor did he say anything which backed up the conclusive link which was the thesis of the program.  The only link which has been proven conclusively is the equation between ground fuel and fire intensity. And that’s the one thing greenies don’t like talking about.

Letter From Australia (About Respek)

As a community, we owe each other respect

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
October 16, 2013 8:00PM

IS IT just that I’ve hit 54 and become more cranky? Or has the presumption of some people this week finally crossed a line? 
 
Sure, we’ve tolerated for an absurdly long time the pushy politicians, activists and special interests helping themselves to our wallets and our freedoms. Too rarely have they been called out for treating the rest of us as mere props or money-trees. Or as fools who’ll accept rubbish excuses while the imposters just help themselves to what isn’t theirs.

But this week we haven’t just had former Labor president Michael Williamson plead guilty to defrauding his Health Service Union members of $1 million, on top of his $500,000 a year salary. We’ve also heard a cacophony of oinking and snuffling and bellowing from people with a truly outsized sense of entitlement and no seeming shame about it.

Some examples?

Mining “billionaire” Clive Palmer owes $6 million in carbon tax penalties on his businesses.  But lucky him. He now has three senators he says not only want the carbon tax scrapped but all costs of the tax to date refunded – which, coincidentally, includes the money Palmer owes us.  Palmer yesterday denied his senators had a conflict of interest in demanding something so useful for their boss, whose businesses reportedly face cashflow problems.  Yet one of his senators, Dio Wang, is managing director of Australasian Resources, which Palmer owns most of and has bailed out in the past three months, with cash injections totalling $421,000.

Just help yourself, boys.

On Sunday former Speaker Peter Slipper spent a very friendly 14 minutes on the ABC’s Insiders explaining that if Prime Minister Tony Abbott could claim expenses for attending community sports events, where he raised money for charity and campaigned for votes, then Slipper should not have been charged by police over his own expenses.

How could people have been so mean to this man, making just an honest mistake as he accidentally spent our money on his pleasures?  Not raised in the interview by either Slipper or the taxpayer-funded reporter is that Slipper’s own claims involve a private trip to a string of wineries, with the driver then allegedly asked to split the charge into four smaller amounts and disguise the destinations in a way that suggested Slipper had just been shuttling around Canberra instead.

Just help yourself, too, Peter.

Then on Tuesday, independent State MP Geoff Shaw brushed past protesting taxi drivers to go up the stairs into Parliament House.  Protesters chased him, shouted abuse, grabbed him and tried to block his way. Shaw pushed one as he tried to get past. Newspapers then portrayed Shaw as a thug and the Opposition demanded he be expelled from the Liberal Party.

New rules, you see. Protesters have the right to decide who may enter Parliament.

Also in Victoria, about 40 protesters this week pushed and shoved police trying to protect a company involved in work on a road project they didn’t like. One woman hurled herself at least four times at the police and dramatically fell twice in front of the TV cameras. She was given medical treatment while fellow protesters complained to an Age journalist about police brutality.

Not mentioned in the journalist’s sympathetic report was that four of the five protesters she quoted – including the “injured” woman – were actually from the radical Socialist Party and the fifth is a self-confessed “professional protester”. None were actually directly affected by the project. Most were instead Marxists activists looking for their revolution, wasting police time and our money as they scared workers in the office and grappled with police to create some made-for-television drama.

In Melbourne on the weekend, 3000 Christians, including children, marched against abortion laws that permit even the killing of healthy babies just weeks from birth.  They were attacked by about 100 socialists and feminists, who pushed some people over, hit and kicked a politician in the crowd, threw eggs and water bombs, destroyed the marchers’ balloons, yanked placards and banners from the marchers’ hands, set fire to one placard, screamed in the face of people praying, shouted “I love dead babies”, chanted “f—” and gave the finger and blocked the march route.

No socialists were arrested, of course. They have a new right to physically stop others from holding a march.
If we are a community, it is because we realise what we owe each other.  What I’ve seen this week are people insisting we give them far more than is theirs to demand and giving in return far less than they owe in money or respect.

Since when did we tolerate such folk in our faces?
 

Letter From Australia (About Dinosaurs)

The Not-So-Lucky Country

PIERS AKERMAN
The Sunday Telegraph
October 12, 2013

[In New Zealand, the union movement has routinely criticised New Zealand for having wages set significantly lower than Australia.  Thousands of kiwis have crossed the ditch in search not only of employment, but of higher wages offered in that country.  But there is another side to the story.  Australia is starting to price itself out of world markets, due to its high wage policies.  Piers Akerman argues that you can blame the trade unions and the collusion of  big business–who have gone along to get along.  More fools them.  Ed.]

IF your son or daughter can’t find an entry-level job in the restaurant or tourism industry as the school year comes to an end, you can blame the dinosaurs in the trade union movement, Labor’s Fair Work commissioner Anne Gooley and Big Business.  Nothing chokes new employment in these areas more than Gooley’s decision to ignore calls to alter the current job-destroying penalty rate regime and reject the argument for reduced employment costs and more jobs.

With pay loadings for weekend work and public holidays now reaching 250 per cent, it is not economically feasible for many employers to keep their businesses open when demand should logically be highest.  Under the past six wasted years of Labor governments, growth in the tourism sector has been choked. The existing award rate of $34 an hour for wait staff working Sundays effectively kills such jobs.

As Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Peter Anderson said, the decision “is extremely disappointing. It’s out of touch, it reflects the entrenched attitudes in the nation’s industrial tribunals to the changed conditions in the nation’s service industries,” he said. “It shows a deafness to the realities of modern employment and ignores those who want to work.  It displays a ‘we know better’ than either the staff or the employers, and reveals antiquated industrial attitudes.” . . .

“We have gone from a banana republic-type analogy to a more southern European type analogy,” Malcolm Broomhead, of transport giant Asciano, said on Thursday.  “We now have an inflexible workforce, a high-cost workforce, an ageing population and a welfare mentality we just can’t afford.”

All true, but governments act when there is demonstrable political will in the community and big business has only now emerged from hiding after ignoring the realities of Labor’s crippling policies. The Fair Work decision is just one reminder of the cost of the failure of the business lobby to represent its membership in the face of union-friendly policies. The damage done by Labor and unions to struggling tourism in the area of coastal shipping is another.

A comparison of port costs for the potentially lucrative cruise sector was presented at a recent conference and it showed why Singapore ($11,660 for a 100-150 guest ship) would be favoured over Sydney ($52,700) or Brisbane ($52,960). Pilotage in Singapore ($800), Sydney ($3800). Berthing in Singapore ($2700), Sydney ($24,500) and Brisbane ($39,375).

The dead hand of the Maritime Union can be blamed for these restrictions on growth. . . .  But shortsighted business figures and their willingness to cosy up to Labor for the last lost six years cannot be excused for their wilful complicity in the destruction of the job market. They may want change now, but they should have put some skin in the game when it counted.

Labor and the unions have shown consistently they’d rather see businesses close than make it easier for workers to get jobs. Only now is the business lobby seeing how it damaged itself with its policy to appease Labor policy, and those seeking jobs will be the one paying the price for this folly.

Letter From Australia (About Kevin Rudd)

New Standards

Australians go to the polls tomorrow.  All the tea leaves indicate that Labour risks being consigned to the badlands for a generation.  Why?  As always there are multiple causes.  But one stands out. 

Just when you thought that politicians could not get any worse, along comes a doozie who raises the bar for every following aspirant.  Kevin Rudd, reinstated Australian Prime Minister, is that toxic dish of acute incompetence  used with a gargantuan ego condemned to relentless self-belief, spiced with a snobbish disdain of lesser mortals.   Paul Sheehan, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, delivers the following indictment of a politician from way, way beyond the Looking Glass.

Never in the previous 113 years of Australian federation has a Prime Minister created such a gap between soaring rhetoric, sweeping promises and national interventions and meagre or failed results of so many grandiose plans.

Rudd inherited a $90 billion financial firewall when he came to office, via a federal budget surplus, the Future Fund and two infrastructure funds. It took the previous Coalition government 10 years to dismantle the $96 billion debt it inherited. It took Rudd little more than one year to build it up again.

When Rudd first came to power, he spoke of the ”greatest moral challenge of our time” – global warming. He said it needed to be attacked via an emissions trading scheme. He then backtracked spectacularly when the electorate did not endorse his enthusiasm for higher energy prices.

He said Australia needed to remove the ”stain” of processing asylum seekers in offshore centres. After he duly dismantled offshore processing, 50,000 people have arrived on smugglers’ boats, more than 1000 have drowned when other boats sank and the cost of it all has blown out to $10 billion, thus far. Rudd has never accepted responsibility for this debacle and the mass detentions involved.

Instead, in an act of breathtaking hypocrisy, he has promised to send asylum seekers to a malaria-ridden island off the coast of a failed state, to a gulag in Papua New Guinea that does not even exist beyond a row of tents, and spent $30 million of government funds making false claims and election promises in breach of the spirit of the electoral laws. . . .

Then there is Rudd’s penchant for micromanaging the economy via public announcements that the federal bureaucracy then could not deliver. The list of debacles is long.

FuelWatch – dribbled away. Grocery Watch – dribbled away. Citizens’ assembly on climate change – never happened. Cash for clunkers – abandoned. Computers in schools – poor outcome, cost overruns. Green car environment fund – scrapped. National network of childcare centres – paltry outcome. National Solar Schools Program – shutting down. Network of GP superclinics – paltry outcome. Family healthcare clinics – dribbled away. Poker machine reform – largely abandoned. GreenPower scheme – ineffective.

At least none of these failures involved significant financial loss but there have been mass-scale cost blowouts. The national broadband network has turned into a money sink, over budget and behind schedule. The Building the Education Revolution program was an exercise in spending $16 billion to get about $8 billion worth of building done. The roof insulation scheme become infamous, a byword for a billion-dollar cash splash that produced false billing, over-charging, unsafe houses and four dead installers.

The recycled 2013 edition of Rudd is more of the same, a font of uncosted policies that sound suspiciously as if they were created on the plane. The Manus Island detention centre that doesn’t exist. The Brisbane deep water naval base that can’t exist. The Northern Territory economic zone written on the back of an envelope. The high-speed rail system no one can afford. Rudd is not running on his record because he can’t.
Rudd’s great advantage is that the public has never warmed to the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott. But the public has also now seen Rudd’s hot air balloon.

He has also crossed the line between exaggeration to deceit. Two of Canberra’s most senior bureaucrats, the head of the Treasury and the head of the Finance Department, had to distance themselves from Rudd’s claims that he had departmental briefings that debunked the opposition’s policy costings. In the most polite way, the two heads of department said the Prime Minister had been reckless with the truth.

The pattern of dysfunction is unmistakable. It’s why his party sacked Rudd in the first place. His ”new way” is his old way.

Letter From Australia (About Child Protection Apartheid)

End Child Protection Apartheid

Miranda Devine 

Sunday, July 28, 2013 (7:31am)
Daily Telegraph
 
IN response to last week’s column on tragic Kiesha Weippeart, bashed to death by her mother at six, a social worker contacted me. She wanted to add her voice to the chorus demanding an end to the child protection apartheid which condemns indigenous children to subpar care.

For fear of creating another “stolen generation” state and federal agencies persist with policies which keep indigenous children too long in abusive homes, and require indigenous foster carers, despite chronic shortages. In Kiesha’s case, a court overturned a decision she be kept in foster care for reasons which are shrouded in secrecy but which are suspected to include her indigenous heritage.

“We work with this every single day,” said the NSW Family and Community Services caseworker, who asked to remain nameless.
  “If little Kiesha was not Aboriginal she would be alive and well today, thriving and being cared for by loving carers. Her mother would not have been given the opportunity to murder her.
“Caseworkers do their best to keep families together but when this puts a child at risk of serious harm we have no choice but to keep that child safe and sometimes that requires removing the children from their family.

“[We] make recommendations to the court, but in the end that magistrate who has never met the children, and never seen the abuse they have endured, makes whatever decision they feel like. The fallout from the stolen generation and National Apology is a ridiculous. Aboriginal placement principle policy that we have to follow constantly leaves Aboriginal children in unsafe situations.

“This policy shows Aboriginal children that they are second-class citizens because the abuse and neglect they endure has to far exceed that of a white Australian child before we act. This policy restores Aboriginal children to unsafe situations or to family members that are not fit to look after a dog, let alone a vulnerable child, just because they are Aboriginal.  This policy removes children from loving, safe, secure foster families and places them back with ‘family’ just because they are Aboriginal.

“The same families that have generations of severe abuse and neglect are given the opportunity to continue this.  How can this be in a child’s best interests?”