Category: General

When is someone not an aborigine?

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 September, 2011

No doubt by now you have heard of the Federal court ruling which found against Andrew Bolt over comments he wrote about nine people who may in fact not really be aborigines, but self identify as such to claim government benefits and privileges.

The judge claimed that Bolt’s articles breached Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which is one of those laws written with enough ambiguity to allow the above nine freedom haters to use and abuse to protect their native racket.  The Herald Sun say they may appeal. The ABC is salivating tonight on the news about the decision.

Apart from the obvious freedom of speech issue, the salient issue is about who really qualifies as an aborigine. At what point is someone not allowed to be an aborigine, or does someone only have to self-identify as such to claim the range of benefits and privileges that society and the government see fit to bestow upon aborigines? Australia does not seem to have any blood quantum laws relating to those claiming to be aboriginal. For instance, some native American tribes require a person to have at least one parent to qualify for a tribe in order to qualify for US government benefits. Other tribes stipulate other qualifications. Here in Australia it seems anything goes. The above nine were claiming after the court case that they don’t have to prove their genealogical ‘identify to anybody’. This would not be an issue, except that they use that identify to fleece the rest of us of our hard earned money.

BTW, the ABC’s 730 report did not interview a single person who disagreed with the ruling.

UPDATE

“Regardless of the niceties of the case, the fact is today in Australia… journalists, commentators, ordinary citizens are not free to make critical and unpopular remarks in the course of ordinary political exchange,” Senator Brandis told Sky News.

“I think that is a terrible thing.

I don’t know how to solve the problem: change the constitution or just the law? What is clear is that self-identified Aborigines are all unproductive government funded and protected individuals, like some type of latter-day aristocracy.

Not at this address thanks.

Posted by Jeremy – 18 August, 2011

What the real choice is

Posted by Chief Blogger – 18 August, 2011

I don’t presume to think that Tony Abbott is a big government conservative. Some people say he is, but reading Abbott’s Battelines I don’t get that feeling at all. The coming election however, will be a choice between big government and affordable government – not so much small government. I am prepared to accept this, because it sets us on the road to small government during a first term coalition government. We have to be pragmatic. Supporters need to accept this early on so they don’t get a shock come election time and become disillusioned; the same way we felt when Turnbull was leading. In this context I strongly recommend readers listen to Mark Steyn talk about his new book After America. It is essentially the Battelines for our time, the ammunition to return fire against the ABC and other ALP apparatchiks. I just wish an Australian talk back host would have Steyn on to discuss his book.

We’ve won the battle of ideas, lost the implementation of them

Posted by Chief Blogger – 14 August, 2011


That’s how I spend my holidays

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 June, 2011

At the 10 minute mark the Ferrari’s get a police escort through busy traffic.

BBC gets wedding commentary wrong (I think) – I stand corrected

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 April, 2011

The BBC claimed that Prince William was travelling in the Australian State Coach. I think that was wrong. The Australian State Coach has a black exterior while the Prince was travelling in a coach with a red exterior.

I’m just saying.

UPDATE

Here is the damning proof that I got it wrong. Thanks to readers.

Gordon Brown made the list…

Posted by Chief Blogger – 2 December, 2009

…but not Kevin Rudd, in Foreign Policy’s ‘top 100 global thinkers’.  If I recall correctly FP rejected Rudd’s silly neo-liberalism essay for publication last year. The fact that Gordon Brown made the list, given the abysmal state of the UK, is a little strange . So Rudd misses out. It really is rather funny to see Rudd – who was meant to be a foreign policy guru – flounder on foreign policy from day one. He’s managed to annoy the Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Indonesians for no reason other than clumsy diplomacy. Is there anyone else in the region he wants to annoy?

However one Australian did make the list:

44. David Kilcullen

for writing the book on how America fights small wars.

Counterinsurgency expert | Washington

A gregarious former lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, Kilcullen had an epiphany as a Ph.D. student in political anthropology. At root, guerrilla movements were motivated not by radical ideals, but by mundane, everyday drives; defeating them requires protecting the population and developing an in-depth knowledge of local social networks. In 2007, as the Iraqi insurgency was reaching its height, Gen. David Petraeus brought him on as a senior advisor, and many credit Kilcullen’s ideas with saving countless lives. Now, the Aussie has begun applying his out-of-the-box thinking to Afghanistan, starting with his book The Accidental Guerrilla. “If I were a Muslim,” Kilcullen told the New Yorker, “I’d probably be a jihadist.… The thing that drives these guys — a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now — that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

….

Worst idea: The notion that the West can afford to fail in Afghanistan and still have a chance of preventing the collapse and terrorist takeover of Pakistan.

Australia Day Council denouncing Australia

Posted by Chief Blogger – 15 November, 2009

Well not quite. The Council has set-up some type of consultative process to air the views of a range of Australians, and of course  who gets the most publicity. Well you figure it out by the headline appearing the the SMH:

Identity crisis: our cross to bear

These tax-payer funded community consultative processes have become veiled attempts to air the views of the radical left – because they wouldn’t get an airing any other way. You know, Australians are just a bunch of racists and so are our national symbols. Everything from the Union Jack to the Southern Cross. And of course guess who is to blame?

…the Australia Day Council launched a campaign last week to ask which symbols and images best represent our country, opinion-makers and public figures were at odds on how to answer the question – variously describing the Southern Cross as everything from ”beautiful” to ”racist”….

Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives, said symbols such as the Southern Cross came to be associated with a new wave of patriotism under the conservative Howard government.

”Many Australians have been content to regard all expressions of national pride as thinly disguised racism,” he said. ”The result has been a surrender of all things patriotic to extreme nationalists.”

It is a bit formulaic – ‘ we are all meant to question our current symbols because clearly they are inadequate, especially after JH’. However if the Australia Day Council wants to promote this tosh they might want to consider that the only people with the identity crisis are those on the PC and radical left.

Australians for Constitutional Monarchy national convener Professor David Flint disagreed, saying critics were out of touch with the Australian people and that it was a ”pity to undermine the great symbols of the nation”.

”The fact [the symbols] have been imported doesn’t make them any less Australian.”

Australia’s worst progressives

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 October, 2009

Jill Singer, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Bob Brown, Penny Wong, John Pilger, Ross Gittins, Quentin Bryce, Kerry O’brien, Tim Flannery,  Robyn Williams, Christine Nixon, Nicola Roxin, Peter Singer, etc…

What’s the bet..

Posted by Chief Blogger – 24 October, 2009

…the story will be inspired by global warming doom-mongering:

Thirty years on and Mad Max 4: Fury Road is about to restart the local movie industry, being filmed entirely in Sydney and Outback NSW.