Piers Akerman – Saturday, June 25, 11 (09:28 pm)
AUSTRALIANS of all persuasions are united in the view that, politically, things could not be worse—until they read the next set of headlines and find that things have indeed worsened.
As revolting as things may be, a dramatic and disgusting new low in standards of integrity was reached last week in the Senate by the repulsive Greens and the nauseating Family First Senator Steve Fielding when they voted against holding an inquiry into the cover-up of the rape of an Aboriginal teenager.
As examples of the Greens’ sickening hypocrisy go, it was par for the course. Early on Thursday morning, Senator Rachel Siewert, the Greens Whip, had been making a passionate speech in defence of orang-utans threatened, she claimed, by development of palm oil plantations in Malaysia.
Two-and-a-half hours later, her leader, Bob Brown, was sordidly trying to justify his party’s vote to kill the hopes of a distressed woman still trying to have her plight examined in a public forum.
It was always expected that the Labor Party would vote against independent Nick Xenophon’s motion to have the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee inquire into what is known as the Heiner Affair, the shredding of documents by the then-Queensland Government in 1990 relating to the alleged rape of a resident at Queensland’s John Oxley Youth Detention Centre in 1988.
Too many Labor figures, former prime minister Kevin Rudd and current Governor-General Quentin Bryce, as well as current and former Queensland Labor premiers, Queensland judges and senior public servants, have been allegedly implicated in the scandal for Labor to countenance any genuine inquiry.
But Xenophon had been having talks with Fielding, who’d claimed or feigned some interest in child abuse, and was given cause to believe that the Family First senator might support his motion.
As Xenophon noted in his plea for support: “The victim at the centre of this horrific matter still has not had her say. There have been recent developments in relation to this which I believe ought to be the subject of an appropriate Senate inquiry.”
The Senate split 32-32 on Xenophon’s motion, a tied vote being counted as negative.
Fielding’s single vote would have permitted the inquiry to proceed. The Family First senator’s attempts to justify his spinelessness led to his immediate dismissal as patron of White Balloon Day, a national child abuse initiative run by the Bravehearts organisation.
Hetty Johnston, founder and executive director of Bravehearts, had said she believed it was incumbent on every member of parliament to support Xenophon’s motion—leaving aside the matters around the shredding of the documents.
She believed it raised serious issues around the rape and abuse of girls and boys at the John Oxley detention centre, that the same issues that legitimately prompted the original establishment of the Heiner inquiry remain unresolved, and that every member of parliament, especially thosevwho espouse a particular interest in child protection, owed answers to the children who were so dreadfully treated. She had no choice but to dump Fielding after his vote.
“It’s a betrayal,” she said. Fielding also betrayed his own party last week, voting down Tony Abbott’s carbon dioxide tax plebiscite, a move Family First chairman Bob Day described as “extremely disappointing”.
“Family First supports the plebiscite,” Day said. “It supports asking people for their views. Our views are very well known and we have been strong and unequivocal . . . he has contradicted party policy.”
Fielding ignominiously leaves the Senate at the end of the month—andvthere is speculation that he may be feted by Labor with a government position in return for his support in blocking the inquiry. Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said Fielding had acted reprehensibly.
“The Greens are untrustworthy, but Fielding has a job . . . or thinks he has a job,” the blunt-talking Queenslander said. “The victim really wants to be able to speak publicly but she has been paid $120,000 by the Queensland government to shut up. For me it is quite simple: It is Australia’s version of Watergate.
“This is a blunt and blatant form of cover-up in a deal with the Greens and now, apparently, Steve Fielding. What did the Labor Party say to him?
“Hetty Johnson rang me almost in tears after she had sacked him as chief of White Balloon Day. How could anyone vote against an inquiry into the rape of an Aboriginal girl?”
Joyce accused the Greens and Fielding of being party with Labor to an "organised cover-up”.
“If they think there is nothing there, let the inquiry proceed,” he said. “In life, some things worry you, this worries me to the core of my being. A girl has been raped and there has never been an open and public inquiry. Labor has never disclosed why it doesn’t want an inquiry.”
The Senate, he said, may be peculiar, there may be people with pretty extreme views, but no one ever thought they’d be complicit in outrageously dishonorable activities.
The action this week was dishonorable, he said. Even the Clerk of the Senate, Dr Rosemary Laing, said in a written advice on a submission received on this matter that “there is no doubt the subject matter is very serious”. Which surely begs another important question.
If the Clerk of the Senate, having read a submission, regards the matter as “very serious”, has the Senate acted improperly in attempting to have it swept under the carpet?
Further, the submission which she comments upon publicly has not been released, which must be a parliamentary first. Joyce’s description of this as Australia’s Watergate is most appropriate: It was not the crime that sank US President Richard Nixon, it was the cover-up.
This crime has a victim, a girl, then 14, raped in 1988. The perpetrators haven’t been charged. She received hush money from the Queensland government last year, effectively gagging her from speaking
out. She needs to have her voice heard.This is not about an old crime.
It is about an ongoing and disgusting cover-up by shameless politicians and their hypocritical supporters in a ghastly denial of justice.
Justice delayed is justice denied. It isn’t solely Fielding who is acting corruptly. All it required was one decent, honest, honourable member of the ALP to stand up. Just one.
‘All it required was one decent, honest, honourable member of the ALP to stand up. Just one’.
That’s the problem DD Ball, there isn’t one. Not one. Currently Federal Labor stinks to high heaven. And Family First’s Steve Fielding is the biggest stinker of all. He’s certainly going to be remembered for going out with a bang. Or maybe it’s a bomb ..... a stink bomb!
Don’t hold your breath, there’s nobody in the Labor Party is with a grain of honesty and integrity, nobody, they are all corrupt to the bone, they were feeding their families with proceeds from very indecent means.
To coin Sony and Cher “and the beat goes on. lardee dardee dar.” We got more of this nonsence coming up when the greens hold the country to ransome come the next sitting of parliment, the real onus was with the Labor party to show some guts and back an inquiry, it’ll come with a change of government we hope!
The Labor party is the most dishonest and most corrupt organisation in Australia. They are guided by the corrupt and flawed Ideology of the Socialist/Marxist Progressives where everything becomes a lie. Political correctness means expediantly lying when telling the truth is not expediant although there was a rare moment of honesty when the incompetent fool Garrett said” Don’t worry about what we say we will change everything once elected. Thier policies are disastrous just like what like minded Progressive Governments have done to Europe and the US with massive debt and Nations about to collapse as well as initiating the GFC and the Global warming scam. Spain went down this so called Green energy path and now have an economy spiral out of control with 22 % unemployment. A decent, honest, honourable member of the Labor party no longer exist they are made up of S.C,U.M. (Socialist, Communist, Unionist and Marxist) and many of these Lunatics are now in bed with the lunatic Islamic extremist who have teamed up to fight thier enemies, Capitalism and Jews. They believe thier enemies enemy is thier friend. No honour, no decency, no honesty from these loony Left Labor party.
DD Ball - in my post a few down, the case I have written about concerned a long time employee of Labor Members - not one of them spoke up with even a word of disquiet about what was obvious from the arrest of the MInister was a wrongful act, or indeed in support for a woman who had been a friend. Not a single union spokesperson spoke up about an employee losing her job as a result of reporting child sex crimes, including the one she paid dues to. Not a Labor figure who had used the union movement to seek power - like the former head of the ACTU - Federal Member in the next electorate, or indeed the former senior MUA leader who inherited the seat of Swansea.
This for many people goes to the heart of the lack of any kind of morality or ethics in the Labor party and their union associates. The employee concerned stood for election as an independent and garnered thousands of votes from good people seeking to punish Labor for their behaviour over this. She was undoubtedly responsible for Labor losing that seat. I too am inclined to say that there is not one single decent honest or honourable member of the ALP - not one for whom their own conscience is worth more than their political power anyway.
That is a bit much to expect when this lot of ALP members ignore emails. None will stand up for the people of Australia.
Two more years and the Country will take decades to recover internationally, morally, ethically and financially.
I can see the workers queued up outside Centrelink Offices across the Nation as Gillard looks on while industry closes down.
The worst is yet to come when a young girl cannot get justice but it takes no time for illegal boat people to access our courts and successfully sue us for compensation for mistreatment.
“Don’t Cry For Me Argentina!” Cry for victims of Labor criminality and cry for the passing of democracy in this country, and cry for Australia.
Evil people create evil government.
Miranda Devine – Sunday, June 26, 11 (08:30 am)
GERMAINE Greer is like one of those terrible reality TV shows you know you shouldn’t watch but can’t tear your eyes from.
The latest atrocity from Australia’s most embarrassing export occurred on late night TV in Britain, in a conversation about the sexualisation of children.
Greer claimed, on the BBC show Question Time, that young girls could be sexualised by “kissing their fathers goodnight”
“Little girls learn to flirt with their fathers,” she said. “You know: ‘Kiss daddy goodnight’ and all this sort of business. And you wonder whether what’s happening in marketing is responsible or whether it is actually causing it.’
The suggestion prompted immediate condemnation from the audience. One father retorted: “That is an awful thing to say”.
Of course, Greer is still hung up on the fact she thinks her own father didn’t love her. You’d think she’d be over it at 72, but no. She actually wrote a book about it, “Daddy, We hardly knew you.”
That may explain why she wants to poison the relationship of every little girl and father, but it doesn’t excuse it.
And as if she hadn’t already been offensive enough, she went on to claim that British soldiers sent to protect women and children in war zones are probably rapists.
“All soldiers in certain circumstances will rape - whether they’re ours or theirs”, she said. “If we send in ground troops [to Libya] how will we be sure they don’t do a bit of raping in their turn?”
In one sense her corrosive attitude to men performs a public service.
She was one of the chief peddlers of the lie that sexual liberation would fulfill women. She railed against the “bourgeois perversion of motherhood.”
Yet she admits to a series of abortions and ensuing gynecological problems. Despite expensive fertility treatments, she was never able to conceive a child that in the end she wanted. She was married briefly before walking out and now lives alone.
In her biography of Greer, Christine Wallace quotes a nun who once taught her in Melbourne, and refused to read her Daddy memoir.
“Don’t lend it to me. I couldn’t bear to read that that wonderful girl is so sad.’”
Greer was once wonderful and full of promise. Today she is a flesh and blood warning to young women of how not to conduct your life.
Miranda Devine – Saturday, June 25, 11 (09:20 pm)
THE new O’Farrell government in NSW is setting up a webpage on speed zones across the state as part of an audit to eliminate excessive and confusing speed changes.
Allahu Akbar! At last someone is listening to motorists after more than a decade of pain.
But it’s nowhere near enough. In the western suburbs, the former Labor
heartland of Londonderry, Tregear, Whalan, Mulgoa, Penrith and
Smithfield, where people work hard to pay bills and improve their
family’s lot, where a car is a necessity and distances can be long, cost of living increases are hitting hardest.
When you ask them what hurts, they will say electricity and fuel prices
but in almost the same breath they include fines and speed cameras.
The RTA and the State Debt Recovery Office are swear words in NSW—the most ruthlessly efficient government departments in the nation, even though they are the least beneficial to our well being.
Whether it’s an $86 parking fine for overstaying your time at a meter or a $361 speeding fine that wipes out your day’s wages before you’ve even arrived at work, or a double demerits weekend that sees you lose your licence because your elderly parents aren’t wearing seatbelts in the back seat, fines are killing us.
It is creeping totalitarianism, a regressive tax on people who can least afford it, which does little for safety or public order.
So here’s an idea for Barry O’Farrell. Cut all parking fines to $25.
Those who lose most will be councils, who have created ruthless
bureaucracies of slickly outfitted parking rangers, that they can now go and dismantle.
Forget the speed zones audit. Cut speeding fines in half, reduce demerit point penalties, apply a uniform speed across all suburban roads and raise the speed limit on our expressways to a uniform 110km/h.
Less confusion, safer driving, and with fewer fines and fewer flunkies
processing them, the government would possibly come out ahead.
Easing pain for Sydneysiders would boost the local economy, relieve traffic congestion and lift the black mood of motorists. O’Farrell would be a hero of the people.
In Victoria, the new Baillieu government is like a heroin addict
addicted to the $61 million boost to its coffers so far this year, with
a crushing 3624 fines every day reported from fixed and mobile cameras.
Yet in response to the outcry from a fed-up community, what is their
solution? “New transparency measures.”
If you have a law that thousands of otherwise law-abiding people a day
are breaking, it tells you something is wrong with your law.
But there is no incentive for governments to change—they just ratchet up the draconian punishments in a deluded effort to coerce a change in behaviour out of the citizenry. The fact is, speed limits are often too low, and they change too often.
Speed cameras too often are placed in places where they will nab the
most offenders, not positioned to prevent accidents.
Governments fleece motorists because they can, because in this deep green era, cars are on the nose and pushy minority groups of cyclists, pedestrians and luddites have been allowed to believe they have equal share of roads that were built for cars.
That’s how Lord Mayor Clover Moore has managed to get away with ripping up city streets and increasing traffic congestion with her godforsaken $80 million bike lanes.
Thankfully, new Roads Minister Duncan Gay is making murmurs in the right direction.
He thinks the ugly disjointed over-engineered bike lanes aren’t working.
“At least a couple are in the wrong spot” he told ABC-TV on Friday,
which is a polite way of saying they are an intrusive desecration of the
road which no self-respecting cyclist wants to use and which every
motorist wants to plough into the ground. Gay wants to “move” the
cycleways in Kent, College and Bourke streets, and possibly also King St.
Meanwhile, Moore is intent on moving her wrecking ball to Macquarie, Park, Liverpool, Sussex, Hay, and Castlereagh streets, to install a total of 100km of bike lanes
Gay’s public pronouncements might be reassuring but on Friday there he
was on ABC TV, meeting Greens MP Cate Faehrmann in Pyrmont to inspect bike lanes.
What made it even worse was that the cameras also showed Gay has more than a passing acquaintance with Harold Scruby, the state’s No.1
anti-car pest, who has done more to encourage governments to ramp up
draconian penalties than anyone.
We can only hope the Roads minister does not lose his nerve like so many of his predecessors.
Meanwhile, with flights grounded by ash and Qantas aborting landings in
Canberra and rerouting passengers back to their destination cities
because planes no longer carry enough fuel to circle the airport, we
need an alternative to air travel.
It’s about time governments—federal and state—made serious plans for a fast rail network linking Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
Excuses that it’s too expensive don’t wash with taxpayers who have seen billions squandered on political follies.
What kind of a tinpot country has no decent rail service linking its
capital and major cities?
I gave up my car on NYE ‘96. I couldn’t afford it. I made a tremendous loss by doing so. I have lived off public transport since. It all gets back to money. Neither public nor private transport is effective after the years of ALP control. I like what the new Liberal government is doing to the place, and I want them to do more. There needs to be better roads, public transport and more parking.
… is from page 24 of Julian Simon’s still-indispensable 1996 book The Ultimate Resource 2:
“[N]atural resources are not finite in any meaningful economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather are expanding through human ingenuity.”
If you doubt the truth of Julian’s undoubtedly true claim, ask yourself: what is it, exactly, that makes petroleum a ‘natural’ resource? Or that makes such of trees? Or of the electromagnetic spectrum? Or of land itself? The unavoidable answer is human ingenuity.
Tim Blair – Saturday, June 25, 11 (04:15 pm)
Julia Gillard, who wants to tax emissions of a colourless, odourless gas, offers an economic insight:
“Money doesn’t grow on trees,” she told reporters in Perth.
“You don’t wander around and see dollar coins somehow magically appearing out of thin air, in front of your eyes. You’ve got to know where the money is coming from.”
Gillard will seem less goofy in a week. That’s when the Greens move in.
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, June 26, 11 (05:54 am)
What was meant for protection has become a weapon:
A HUGE surge in frivolous intervention order applications is clogging up the courts and resulting in the bans being ‘’thrown around like confetti’’, frustrated lawyers have told The Sunday Age…
Justice Department figures obtained by The Sunday Age show there were 13,668 family violence intervention orders granted in the 10 months to April 30, 1300 more than for the full year of 2009-10. Over the same period, 3617 stalking intervention orders were granted - 224 more than for the whole of 2009-10…
(Lawyer Rob) Stary said the system was open to abuse because the applications were free of charge and magistrates could be reluctant to refuse an intervention order in case they were blamed for failing to prevent a subsequent incidence of domestic violence.
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, June 26, 11 (05:44 am)
I guess I should be grateful that not one of these Victorians turned up to last week’s rally for my own free speech, but I wonder why swearing seems more important to them than being free to talk politics:
HUNDREDS of potty-mouthed protesters hurled or wore obscenities in defiance of new police powers allowing crude outbursts to be slapped with an instant fine. The aptly-titled “F… Walk’’ saw up to 400 people - mainly teenagers - chanting profanities and calling for free speech, not fines in a march through the CBD today.
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, June 26, 11 (05:40 am)
The party that trots out Tim Mathieson for 60 Minutes to soften Julia Gillard’s image wants Tony Abbott’s wife to stay in the kitchen:
MARGIE Abbott has dismissed as “ridiculous” Labor Party claims her husband, Tony, is using his family to highlight Julia Gillard’s childlesssness.
As the Liberal leader’s wife prepares to join Mr Abbott and youngest daughter Bridget on a trip to Hopevale in far north Queensland to volunteer in an Aboriginal community, Mrs Abbott has also declared she’s not her husband’s “shadow” and that childcare workers are undervalued.
After Mr Abbott used his budget-in-reply speech to highlight that as a dad he knew something of the financial pressures on nearly every Australian household, Labor MPs privately complained he was using his family as a political weapon to paint the PM as out of touch.
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, June 26, 11 (05:34 am)
A prosecution that will make the abortion lobby very nervous about the obvious logcal extension:
Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.
Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit - though there is no evidence that drug abuse contributed to the baby’s death - they charged her with the ‘’depraved-heart murder’’ of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.
The Guardian report is himself so nervous that he indulges in unprofessional hyperbole:
Across the US prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.
Andrew Bolt – Sunday, June 26, 11 (05:22 am)
Once out of office, he assumed the leadership of the global green movement, steering that movement into a tsunami of defeat that, when the debris is finally cleared away, will loom as one of the greatest failures of civil society in all time…
Hailed by the world press, lionized by the entertainment community and the Global Assemblage of the Great and the Good as incarnated in the Nobel Peace Prize committee, he has nevertheless seen the movement he led flounder from one inglorious defeat to the next. The most recent, failed global climate meeting passed almost unnoticed last week in Bonn; the world has turned its eyes away from the expiring anguish of the Copenhagen agenda.
The state of the global green movement is shambolic. The Kyoto Protocol is withering on the vine; it will almost certainly die with no successor in place. There is no chance of cap and trade legislation in the US under Obama, and even the EPA’s regulatory authority over carbon dioxide is under threat. Brazil is debating a forestry law that critics charge will open the floodgates to a new round of deforestation in the Amazon. China is taking the green lobby head on, suspending a multibillion dollar Airbus order to protest EU carbon cutting plans.
It is hard to think of any recent failure in international politics this comprehensive, this swift, this humiliating. Two years ago almost every head of state in the world was engaged with Al Gore’s issue; today the abolition of nuclear weapons looks like a more hopeful cause than the drafting of an effective international treaty that will curb carbon emissions even a little bit.
The hypocrisy is one of his deadliest flaws:
Consider how Gore looks to the skeptics. The peril is imminent, he says. It is desperate. The hands of the clock point to twelve. The seas rise, the coral dies, the fires burn and the great droughts have already begun. The hounds of Hell have slipped the huntsman’s leash and even now they rush upon us, mouths agape and fangs afoam.
But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry.