Month: January 2010

Let Turnbull cross the floor

Posted by Chief Blogger – 30 January, 2010

Turnbull has already declared his hand and will cross the floor to support Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. However, it appears this move may merely isolate Turnbull further from growing public concern about the ETS, according to internal National Party polling:

Sources said the research, first revealed at a meeting of Nationals MPs in Coffs Harbour on Thursday, found 75 per cent of respondents said they would prefer direct action to reduce emissions to Mr Rudd’s market-linked approach.

About 80 per cent of people worried about the impact of the ETS on their job security, while 82 per cent were concerned about its effects on the cost of living.

So opposing the ETS at least gives the Coalition a chance of winning the next election. And to think, Turnbull wanted to support the legislation to avoid making the ETS an election issue. Combined with Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, the complete failure of the Copenhagen Conference and the current tour of Lord Monckton, the worm has definitely turned on the ETS in only a couple of months. Rudd does not even talk about it anymore. Hilarious!

Guilty as charged

Posted by Chief Blogger – 29 January, 2010

Remember Climategate? Well, it has now been established:

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

The flood gates are opening.

Lord Monckton video

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 January, 2010

A good summation of the key arguments being presented by Lord Monckton on his Australia tour, care of Channel Ten.

Madam Gillard has failed

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 January, 2010

Remember how Madam Julia Gillard promised that no worker would be worse off under Fair work or what ever they call their new employment relations agenda? Well guess what?

An investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals thousands of employees – many on minimum wages – have returned to work after the Christmas break to find their pay packets docked.

About 43,000 employees working in NSW licensed clubs stand to lose $3 an hour from July 1.

Tens of thousands of office workers in NSW and Victoria will also have their casual loading cut, reducing their weekly pay by about $50.

Aged care nurses in NSW will lose up to $300 a week, prompting a warning of an “exodus” of nursing home employees….

The life-long Labor voter – who said she is too scared to reveal her full name – is furious with the Rudd Government. “I wouldn’t vote Labor if you paid me. They have kicked the worker in the guts,” she said.

Part of something called ‘award modernisation.’  And that’s before Rudd’s emissions trading scheme comes into effect, if it ever does. As I have written before, the ALP has given up on the poor. They have a new constituency now and they drink skinny goat milk with lental snacks.

Alan Jones gives into Gillard

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 January, 2010

I just got through listening to Alan Jones interviewing Julia Gillard, and disappointingly Jones failed to question Gillard over her claims, blatantly false,  that Tony Abbott wants to tell women how to use their own bodies, or words to that effect, in the context of Abbott’s fatherly advice to his own daughters. I don’t know what deals Jones has to do to get an interview with Gillard, but his omission is telling especially since the day before he was harping on about how wrong Gillard is.

Jones should realise that Gillard’s comments are a deliberate and tricky attempt to portray Abbott as women unfriendly and to behooves Jones to take her to task over the issue, since no one else in the media is likely to do so.

IPCC RIP

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 January, 2010

From the Financial Post in Canada and the impending doom facing the IPCC:

Andrew Weaver, probably Canada’s leading climate scientist, is calling for replacement of IPCC leadership and institutional reform.

If Andrew Weaver is heading for the exits, it’s a pretty sure sign that the United Nations agency is under monumental stress. Mr. Weaver, after all, has been a major IPCC science insider for years….

For him to say, as he told Canwest News yesterday, that there has been some “dangereous crossing” of the line between climate advocacy and science at the IPCC is stunning in itself.

He joins a growing list of dissenters.

Rudd’s futility

Posted by Chief Blogger – 28 January, 2010

More from Bjorn Lomborg on the futility of Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme. A scheme Rudd is going to re-introduce to the Senate for a third time:

All the major climate economic models show that using carbon cuts to achieve the widely discussed goal of keeping temperature rises under 2C would require a global tax on carbon emissions starting at $110 a ton (or about 26ca litre of petrol) and increasing to $4300 a ton (or $10 a litre of petrol) by the end of the century. In all, this would cost a phenomenal $43 trillion a year. And this is an optimistic estimate based on the unlikely assumption that politicians everywhere across the globe would make the most effective choices possible (such as choosing more efficient carbon taxes over emissions-trading schemes). The ultimate price tag could actually be 10 or 100 times higher. What we know for certain is that, according to most mainstream calculations, the cost of this solution would be many, many times greater than the climate damage it seeks to prevent.

So that pretty much torpedoes the pre-cautionary principle used to justify the ETS. It really is just a new tax by another name.

It’s none of Gillard’s business – update

Posted by Chief Blogger – 27 January, 2010

Tony Abbott recently gave an interview to the Women’s Weekly in which he relayed what he had told his daughters about matters relating to their bodies. Despite it being fatherly advice, it hasn’t stopped Deputy PM Julia Gillard from sticking her socialist nose where it does not belong:

“These comments will confirm the worst fears of Australian women about Tony Abbott. Australian women don’t want to be told what to do by Tony Abbott,” she said.

It’s not for the Deputy PM to start passing judgement on the way Tony Abbott raises his own children, especially considering Gillard does not have any. His advice was clearly for his own daughters and he stressed he was not trying to impose his will on anyone.

In The Australian Women’s Weekly article, Mr Abbott said he would advise his three daughters not to give away their virginity “lightly” and try to adhere to the “rules” on sex before marriage.

So it’s a family matter, not a government matter, and therefore does not warrant Gillard’s running commentary. Her statement reflects an earlier claim made by Abbott that she lacks life experience.

UPDATE

This episode says more about Julia Gillard’s unfitness for high public office than anything. Abbott was speaking as a parent but Gillard being the one dimensional figure that she is, lacking in life experience, only knows how to speak as a politician:

Defending Tony Abbott’s right to discuss the advice he gave to his daughters on virginity, Senator Brandis said the Deputy Prime Minister was a “one-dimensional” person who had “chosen not to be a parent”.

“The vehemence of her reaction, in fact, shows that she just doesn’t understand the way parents think about their children when they reach a particular age,” Senator Brandis told ABC radio.

“I think that although Julia Gillard is a very clever politician, she is very much a one-dimensional person and I do think her reaction, her overreaction to the, in my view, quite unexceptionable remarks Tony Abbott made as the father of daughters, is not something she would have said if she were herself the mother of teenage daughters.”

Good to see party colleagues closing ranks around Abbott.

The bolsheviks are on the march

Posted by Chief Blogger – 23 January, 2010

…which is basically the title of Mike Steketee’s article in The Australian: “Prince charming won’t stall the march to republicanism.” By the tone and content of Steketee’s article it would seem the republicans will happily trample on any one or thing that gets in their way to power, but as one US Senator in 1918 once said: “The first casualty of War is Truth”. So let’s fact check his article.

Steketee claims that  QEII is the head of state of Australia. And what source does he produce? An anonymous webmaster.

“The Queen is head of state of 15 Commonwealth realms in addition to the UK,” says the palace website, listing Australia among them.

This probably indicates the complete disdain that republicans have for the constitution and established institutions, because something called the High Court of Australia in 1907 had something different to say on the matter.

“The Governor, as the officiating Constitutional Head of the State, is accordingly named as the person to whom the notification is to be given, and the notification must be regarded as addressed to him in that capacity….

The ruling goes on, but essentially what the republicans would have us believe is that they know more about the constitution than those charged with interpreting it, many of whom helped write it!

Steketee then rattles of some opinion polls, mostly commissioned by Republicans, that predictably purport to support a republic amongst voters. The same opinion polls that were predicting a republic victory before the 1999 referendum. And look how correct they ended up being? The hard reality for the republicans is, they can’t come up with a model of constitution that is as good as the current system. Until that happens, and it is put before the electorate to scrutinise, then any opinion poll result in their favour will be mute.

Steketee then goes on to claim that Australia is not a fully independent democracy. Well if there was an opinion poll on that question, then I would gather most Australians would ardently disagree with him. It says something about the way republicans view their own country.

Nevertheless Steketee would have us believe that support for a republic is overwhelming. So what’s stopping them grabbing the power they so lustfully desire?

…Rudd’s remarks in London last April: that Australia would have a referendum on the republic “in due season”. With monarchist Tony Abbott at the opposition helm, the season may not be due for some time…

So Tony Abbott is the only person standing in the way? The only reason we are not a republic yet? One Catholic man defending a monarchy that can never be Catholic and which Steketee would have us believe really annoys Catholics. Never has an opposition leader of only a few months yielded so much power and influence….and Steketee writes for the nation’s only national newspaper.

It is now out of control

Posted by Chief Blogger – 23 January, 2010

The continuing attacks on Indians in Australia is symbolic of the ineptitude of the Rudd government. The latest comes from Brisbane:

The Indian community in Brisbane says it fears two bashings last night were copycat crimes triggered by a spate of attacks on students in Melbourne and Sydney.

Rudd and his left-wing allies believe that there is very little they can do to combat these crimes. According to their dogma, crime is a function of circumstance, be it social or economic, and as a consequence police merely respond but can’t stop or prevent crime. The issue of individual responsibility is completely lost on Rudd and his state labor allies. So the bashings will continue and our relations with India will also continue to get worse.

A recent article in the WSJ exposes this great lie:

The recession of 2008-09 has undercut one of the most destructive social theories that came out of the 1960s: the idea that the root cause of crime lies in income inequality and social injustice. As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the “root causes” theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.

It should also cause Rudd and his ‘progressive’ friends in the state Police departments across the country to also have a re-think.  That won’t happen though because it would destroy one of their main political tenants:

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration….

Instead:

The recession crime free fall continues a trend of declining national crime rates that began in the 1990s, during a very different economy. The causes of that long-term drop are hotly disputed, but an increase in the number of people incarcerated had a large effect on crime in the last decade and continues to affect crime rates today, however much anti-incarceration activists deny it. The number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2008, from 300,000 to 1.6 million.

So these attacks on Indians can be set squarely at the foot of Rudd and his ‘progressives’ that promote social theories on crime that seek to deflect blame for crime away from the individual.