Right Pulse has been going now for 6 months. So far I’ve had 2500 unique visitors, 8000 visits and 39000 pages accessed. Thanks everyone for your support. I am trying to devote more time to the site – that’s probably the biggest challenge I face. The site is not designed for mass readership, which might explain why hardly anyone posts comments. That’s okay by me, I don’t need to be any busier. I’ve noticed on a few occassions that issues I’ve raised have evenutally found their way into the Australian main stream media. Cheers everyone…
Month: October 2008
Income tax and welfare
Posted by – 3 October, 2008
From the editorial desk of The Australian:
More than four million Australian families now receive more in handouts than they pay in income tax, with the income-tax-free club covering 42.2 per cent of the nation’s 9.7 million families. This churning of taxpayers’ money to the government, through the income tax system, and its return by way of a complex system of family payments, with a vast army of bureaucrats in the middle assessing eligibility and administering the payments, desperately needs major reform. It should be a priority of the Henry taxation review. A flatter system of taxation, with lower marginal rates but fewer deductions and handouts, would be simpler, cheaper and more efficient.
As Gerald Ford once said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” This is probably the worst legacy of the Howard government, although I would take him over every PM since Menzies.
Laissez-Faire dead?
Posted by – 3 October, 2008
A couple of days ago French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared the following, regarding the USA financial melt down:
Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished
Well the mortgage securitisation market in the USA is 80 per cent controlled by the US Government, so what’s so free about that market? But this is the irony, the French socialist economy along with Germany and Italy are slipping into recession:
The National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies, INSEE, forecast that after the French economy shrank by 0.3pc in the second quarter, gross domestic product would fall by a further 0.1pc in the third and fourth quarters of 2008.
A technical recession occurs when the economy contracts in two successive quarters….
Europe’s economy contracted in the second quarter, the first time it shrank since the launch of the euro almost a decade ago. Gross domestic product fell by 0.2pc in the eurozone, which comprises the 15 nations that subscribe to the single currency.
The decline was prompted by a second-quarter contraction of Europe’s two biggest economies – Germany and France – as well as a fall in Italy.
So I’d conclude that socialism is finished, again and again and again…How many times does socialism have to be shown to be inadequate before the left gets it? There is a reason you guys lost the Cold War!
Was it really plagiarism?
Posted by – 1 October, 2008
A recent hoo ha ha has blown up in Canada when it was discovered that the former Canadian opposition leader, Stephen Harper now PM, gave an address on the Iraq War in 2003, a few days after John Howard spoke on the same subject, which used large tracts of Howard’s speech without recognition. Harper’s speech writer has subsequently resigned for plagiarism, while the opposition leader Stephane Dion seems to be insinuating that George Bush was giving speech templates out to fellow leaders to use in their addresses in favour of the war.
“Canadians want their country to speak with its own voice on the world stage,” Dion said. “Stephen Harper plagiarized the coalition of the willing of George W. Bush about the war in Iraq. Stephen Harper should be expelled.”
A claim, if it is really being made, is ridiculous, especially since in 2003 after thirty years in politics John Howard was yet to employ a speech writer. That occurred in 2004.
Australian economist John Kunkel, who served as Howard’s speechwriter from 2004-2007, said plagiarism in speechwriting is not uncommon in any political system and said he doubts Howard was offended by the incident.
“I think he’d probably find it mildly amusing,” Kunkel said. “He’d probably have a good degree of sympathy for his good friend, Mr. Harper.”
The former prime minister often spoke off-the-cuff and Kunkel said Howard did not have a designated speechwriter before he took on the position in 2004. To help craft his speeches, Howard often tapped the knowledge of whichever adviser was specialized on the topic he was speaking to, such as foreign policy, Kunkel said.
Kunkel said any rumor that a Bush administration official wrote the speech – or part of it – and distributed it to conservative allies “sounds incredibly far-fetched and somewhat fanciful.”
Ditto. Well anyway given that both PM’sare loyal servants of the Crown, was it really plagiarism to begin with? Officials and representatives are able to lift and use each other’s words without recognition because it is all meant to come from the same source, QEII. Stephen Harper, while HRH’s loyal opposition leader was using words from another of HRH’s loyal servants, John Howard, to explain the same point. So what is the point of the matter? For the angry left this is:
Canadians didn’t want to go to war then and five years on we’re even more convinced we were right. The plagiarism case is merely a means of reminding Canadians with video about who was on the right side of history.
If being on the wrong side of history means ending the rule of a savage dictator who killed 300,000 people and replacing him with a democracy and bringing to an end useless UN sanctions that had led to the deaths of 500,000 children, as estimated by UNICEF, then I guess Howard and Harper are on the wrong side of history. Being on the right side of history, according to the angry left, is probably making statements like the one discussed below:
On May 11, 1996 this woman (Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright) was asked by a television interviewer for “60 Minutes” whether she was troubled by the fact that Clinton-supported sanctions had resulted in the death of 500,000 Iraqi children. “It’s a hard choice,” she replied, “but we think it’s worth it.”
Leftists should keep Albright’s response in mind when they wail about civilian casualties as a consequence of Bush’s war in Iraq. Iraq Body Count keeps track of these casualties, and they are less than one-fifth the number of innocent civilians (mostly children) killed in the aftermath of sanctions.
And if you believe the characterisation made by the author of the above snippet, then Frankenstein might have a case to make for plagiarism against Albright.
‘Climate extremists on another planet’
Posted by – 1 October, 2008
Such is the title for this fairly brutal assessment of the green left within the context of the Garnaut report , from the editorial desk of The Australian:
In his maiden speech a fortnight ago, WA Greens senator Scott Ludlam complained that the “fossil economy knows only how to grow”. Mr Ludlam, whose world view was shaped growing up “in the back of a van that was somewhere different every day” told parliament: “When our economy fails to grow, we call it a recession; but an entity that knows only blind growth we call a cancer.” The fossil growth economy, he said, gave “pulp mills that erase ecosystems while showering its neighbours with toxic emissions … the tragic industrial vandalism of the Ice Age heritage on the Burrup Peninsula … burnout, family breakdown and fly-in, fly-out workforces.” Would stagnation, unemployment and poverty be preferable?
The Greens clearly place people second and their environmental agenda first in their political agenda. It is a striking admission that a carbon emissions scheme would damage the economy, otherwise why complain and make a case against economic growth as the Greens do? From Terry McCran in the Herald Sun with his article, “Now, should we destroy the economy?”:
There is no way even the Rudd Government is going to embrace a policy to destroy the economy, in the wake of this week’s disaster on Wall St and the Hill – the US House of Representatives.
What, Rudd is going to get up and announce the wrecking of the economy starts now: barely 60 weeks away on January 1 2010? Before the next election?
There is no way that China and the US are going to agree to slug their economies in recession with punitive policies to send them in even deeper.
If the Prime Minister persists with his ambition for a global agreement to reduce emission, he won’t be preaching to the converted but an audience which will make the one he addressed in New York last week look like the MCG last Saturday.
An unhappy audience. In fact responses to the Garnaut report have been fairly critical, except of course for Paul Kelly’s some what muted response – hedging his bets both ways no doubt to try and please the Greens and Rudd.