Month: September 2009

This is just getting stupid – update

Posted by Chief Blogger – 8 September, 2009

Interesting how Paul Kelly had Kevin Rudd launch his new book about John Howard. Rudd spewed out a few silly statements:

In contrast, the Mr Rudd said the Coalition was “indolent, perhaps not always opposing the great transformation reforms engineered by Labor during its 13 years in office but barely adding to that reform agenda during their 12 years in office”.

The Coalition never opposed the ALP’s market liberalisation policies because they had gotten the ball rolling with the corporatisation of the Post Master General. Speaking of ‘indolent’, would spending $6 billion on Chinese ceiling insulation qualify as indolent, or $14 billion on duplicating school halls and libraries across the country, or $43 billion on an internet network that will duplicate a system Telstra is already rolling out, or a tax regime that is based on carbon emissions – you know the stuff you involuntarily breath out?

UPDATE

I don’t think Rudd is lying, I just think he is an extremely unintelligent and poorly read individual:

Mr Turnbull said Mr Rudd’s effort was “the most graceless and ungracious political speech he had ever heard”.

He described it as “worthy of a general secretary of the Communist Party at a Communist Party conference“.

It was “genuinely breathtaking in the audacity of its dishonesty”.

Mr Turnbull accused the Prime Minister of moving beyond spin into “completely different territory” where the Government is using a political technique of “absolute falsehood”.

Combined with Rudd’s essays on the ‘evils’ of capitalism and his speech on the history wars, it is fairly apparent that he has a poor grasp on economic history and contemporary political issues. A product of the public education system. I don’t think it is too far of a stretch to say that Rudd is probably the most unintelligent PM we have had in living memory.

They just can’t help themselves

Posted by Chief Blogger – 6 September, 2009

The ABC has once again admitted their bias, albeit on an obscure ABC web page:

7pm TV News, New South Wales

On August 13, 2009, in the introduction to a story, the ABC reported “the senate has rejected a plan for the world’s most ambitious emissions trading scheme”. The ABC acknowledges that this description of the current proposed ETS legislation as the world’s most ambitious is not a widely held view and the introduction to the story should have been more neutrally written.

And it reveals the lack of neutrality of ABC writers.

ABC propaganda to help Obama propaganda

Posted by Chief Blogger – 6 September, 2009

The ABC has released a typically biased report, in which they paint Obama as a the victim of a nasty right wing attack machine, over Obama’s upcoming speech to high school students.

Next week President Obama will visit a Washington area high school where he intends to deliver a 15 to 20 minute speech encouraging students to work hard and continue on in school.

It is a conservative message and one impossible to dispute.

Yet in a sign of how dysfunctional and poisonous politics in America has become the White House has been asked to release the text of the President’s message well ahead of delivery so that parents can decide whether or not they will send children to school on that day to hear the address.

Conservatives like Andrea Tantaros are comparing President Obama’s address to the propaganda of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il.

In other words, conservatives will stop at nothing to undermine the great Obama.

Conservatives have their eye on the mid-term elections and the White House in just over three years’ time. They have already been whipped into a frenzy by right-wing radio and commentators.

They will do whatever it takes even if it means undermining a message with which they agree just because it is a Democrat President delivering it to the country’s 13 to 17 year olds.

How does the ABC know that Obama will be delivering ‘a conservative message and one impossible to dispute’ if Obama has not yet released the text of the speech? It is clear who the ABC is giving the benefit of the doubt to.

‘A victory for democracy’

Posted by Chief Blogger – 5 September, 2009

Readers may recall a Yes Prime Minister episode entitled ‘A victory for Democracy’ in which Jim Hacker does battle with the civil service to ensure the continuation of democracy on the island of St George (a fictitious island). The civil service do their best to stop Jim Hacker intervening in the affair to defeat a group of Marxist agitators intent on overthrowing the democratic government. The Foreign Office have drawn up their own policy position and they are intent on ignoring the will of government. The position on St George’s can best be summed up be these classic lines:

…every support, short of help.

I was reminded of this episode when reading a Paul Kelly article on the East Timor intervention, with reference to the great mandarin and apologist for corrupt regimes, former civil servant Hugh White:

Defence Department deputy secretary Hugh White, the leading strategist, defined what he believed were Australia’s objectives. They were: having East Timor remain part of Indonesia; ensuring ties with Jakarta were put before the fate of East Timor; retaining Australia’s military ties with Indonesia; and avoiding any Australian Defence Force deployment, if possible.

In other words, ‘every support, short of help.’ Another case of Canberra civil servants pretending to be politicians. However:

These were White’s principles guiding the Defence Department; each of them was trashed before the end of the year, proof of the violation of policy orthodoxy that Howard and Downer would entertain.

The whole Paul Kelly article is worth a read. I disagree though with one point; that the success of the mission was only due to Indonesia deciding not to challenge the intervention. As if the ADF did nothing at all to contribute to the mission’s success – it just happened by itself. This is typical left-wing historical defeatist revisionism at work.

The story of East Timor’s independence is pretty remarkable for the speed in which it took place and the people Howard and Downer convinced (Habibie, Clinton) or pushed out of the way (Hugh White) to make it happen.

A discredited government

Posted by Chief Blogger – 5 September, 2009

How did this article make it past the ABC editorial censorship board? Although one has to go looking for it. John Della Bosca and his acts of adultery are just symbolic of a political party and a government devoid of all integrity. From Quentin Dempster:

While everyone seemed to say they were not making moral judgements about the minister’s infidelity, the hubris, audacity and deceit involved in the affair added to an already formed public perception that personalities within the Cabinet and Government cared more for their puffed-up status, privileges and power-plays than they did for the welfare of the taxpaying public.

That, coupled with a campaign of white-anting of Mr Rees’ leadership by enemies within the 72-member parliamentary Labor Party, has effectively discredited Labor in government.

The ANU and media bias

Posted by Chief Blogger – 3 September, 2009

A new report from the ANU has come out claiming that the ABC is more biased towards the right of politics. I checked the ANU website and it is not a drama school comedy production. This comes after Peter Costello and John Howard both criticised the ABC for bias – so the report is suspiciously well timed. The report is here. It appears the authors of the report failed to run a sanity check over their results, because according to a media report:

…the surprising categorisation of public figures Gerard Henderson and Les Murray as pro-Labor and Hugh Mackay as pro-Coalition.

I noticed the same. The categorisation of intellectuals as either right or left is determined by how many times they are mentioned by either an ALP or Coalition politician in Hansard. While there are other aspects to the model, the breakdown of intellectuals in this way forms the basis of the whole report. A basic mention in Hansard does not seem like the basis for saying much about media bias. The authors also have no fear in using one data point for determining the political standing of an intellectual. Pretty weak stuff. The whole report seems like a rush job – using Stats 101 – designed to discredit Howard and Costello and protect the author’s fellow government employees in the ABC.

Now that I’ve played the ball, it is time to play the man. The author of the report Andrew Leigh, teaches labour economics and political economy at the ANU and started his academic career with a BA from the University of Sydney. So we know from the get go that he is a pinko commie sympathiser in bed with Big Government, Big Education and Big Media. He also has fascination with ‘top incomes’ or rich people, and seems to have rehashed the same article over and over again about the topic to get his publication details up. So that gives a fairly quick indication as to his political bias and the quality of work produced.

It’s called partial birth infanticide

Posted by Chief Blogger – 2 September, 2009

…and its against international law established after the horrors of Nazism and their use of abortion to control societal makeup:

New Queensland Health figures show 19 babies were aborted at 20 weeks or more in 2007, but rather than dying at birth as intended, the newborns were able to breathe unaided.

The babies, some as advanced as 26 weeks, were aborted using drugs to induce labour. Once born, no medical help was offered and they died soon afterwards.

The rest of the country, especially ACT and Victoria have virtually no restrictions on abortion services. What type of doctor goes to medical school to make a living carrying out these procedures?

ABC admits it has a left-wing bias – update

Posted by Chief Blogger – 2 September, 2009

The revelation came from Mark Colvin covering the US health care debate:

Faced with the debate over US President Barack Obama’s project to overhaul American health care, I’m finding it difficult to maintain the impartiality required of an ABC current affairs presenter.

I’ve had rather a lot of care from what the Americans call “socialised medicine”, here and in the UK – in fact without it, I’d be dead several times over – and some of the things that have been said against it strike me as plain ridiculous.

Ha! Ha! Ha! So the ABC favours public health care and is not shamed about admitting it. Finally some honesty from the ABC about their political bias. Colvin makes a few real crazy allegations to go with his bias:

…but the system I have encountered (NHS), while it has major flaws, does have one massive advantage for the seriously ill: you can be sure that you will not be faced with the choice of ‘bankruptcy or death’….Without all of this public medicine, in the American system for instance, I believe I would be dead, or dead broke, or both. Is that an exaggeration, on a par with Sarah Palin’s “death panels”? I think not. 

Palin is on another planet, but consider this. 4550 Australians die each year because of public hospital mistakes, in the UK it is 17000 deaths a year, of the 1.4 million people working in the NHS over half are administrators – like something our of Yes Minister and the Compassionate Society and while Australia spends 5.8 per cent of its GDP on government funded health care, in the USA with their medicare safety net and their own PBS – none of which Colvin mentions – it is 7 per cent. So who is socialist now? The NHS like Australia’s public system is not a free universal health care system – there are a range of medical services that people are required to pay for up front for, while what sort of safety net is the NHS when you face such a risk of avoidable death at the hands of inefficiently run hospitals.

UPDATE

From the UK Telegraph:

…a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.

The article primarly focuses on a letter signed by a number of preminent UK doctors, warning that many people are being put to death by NHS rules.

As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.

“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.

“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”

Abolishing the human rights commission

Posted by Chief Blogger – 1 September, 2009

I’ve called for the abolition of the Human Rights Commission on a couple of occasions. Now Paul Sheehan has picked up on the same issue:

In the 23 years of the Human Rights Commission’s existence, it has managed to spend, in real terms, about $400 million on itself while its most signal contribution to society has been to divide, not unify, by helping the construction of the greatest lie ever told about Australia: that tens of thousands of children were stripped from their families in a process of cultural genocide, a claim since reduced to ashes in the courts

…the commission has no mandate, whatsoever, from the public, it is so ideologically-driven, so institutionally narcissistic, that it cannot resist injecting itself into the process rather than waiting, with the impartiality expected of civil servants, until it receives a mandate from the public it is supposed to serve.

Note that its top priority is publicity. Above all, it wants to be quoted in the media. At the bottom of its list is service….

One day, when the political wheel has turned, the Federal Government should liquidate the commission, ridding us of another parasitic bureaucracy beyond reform.

The Commission has become a tax-payer funded lobby group for a perverted ‘progressive’ agenda. It does not provide impartial advice to government. And what good has the Commission done? Certainly it has done nothing to alleviate Aboriginal poverty or protect classical human rights – like the right to freedom of speech and religion. In fact it is doing its utmost to undermine those basic rights with its Freedom of Religion and Belief in the 21st Century project, which is specifically designed to ensure freedom from religion through the use of draconian laws with court enforcement, covering belief and practice. The purpose of the project is stated as follows:

The intent of this discussion paper is to examine and report upon the extent to which this right can be enjoyed in Australia today…

Not how one can protect and defend the right to freedom of speech/expression and religion.

Pyne is on the way out anyway

Posted by Chief Blogger – 1 September, 2009

In case you hadn’t noticed, the ABC has gone into overdrive mode to push the government’s ETS legislation. The ABC has set-up a special coverage section on its website, publishing pro-Green articles to get the kiddies into the mix. Their latest offering is a silly article outlining an attack by Christopher Pyne on the National Party for refusing to vote for an ETS.

Pyne is in an incredibly marginal seat and given the current state of MT’s leadership, he is likely to lose his seat at then next election. His opinion therefore should not really count for much. However he has taken a leading role in the Coalition, which is a mistake – Glenn Milne:

Minchin has been shut out of Turnbull’s “kitchen Cabinet” – Christopher Pyne, Michael Ronaldson, Steve Ciobo, Scott Morrison and Greg Hunt – including during the Utegate fiasco. In part, this is seen as leading moderates, like Pyne, wanting to keep him out.

No wonder the Coalition is performing poorly with those light weights pulling the reigns.