Month: January 2010

The EU, China and Haiti

Posted by Chief Blogger – 22 January, 2010

Even Obama can ditch the his spirit of mediocrity and be useful, from the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker:

Within hours of Port-au-Prince crumbling into ruins, the US had sent in an aircraft carrier with 19 helicopters, hospital and assault ships, the 82nd Airborne Division with 3,500 troops and hundreds of medical personnel. They put the country’s small airport back on an operational footing, and President Obama pledged an initial $100 million dollars in emergency aid.

Although I have the distinct feeling that the DoD may have taken matters into their own hands.  Anyway, compare and contrast with the EU, a body politic that has basically bureaucratised failure and ineptitude:

…European Union geared itself up with a Brussels press conference led by Commission Vice-President Baroness Ashton, now the EU’s High Representative – our new foreign minister. A scattering of bored-looking journalists in the Commission’s lavishly appointed press room heard the former head of Hertfordshire Health Authority stumbling through a prepared statement, in which she said that she had conveyed her “condolences” to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, and pledged three million euros in aid.

And then consider the response from the rising power of China:

China sent a 60-strong search and rescue team to Port-Au-Prince, capital of the Caribbean nation, and the Red Cross Society of China donated 1 million U.S. dollars in emergency aid.

China also decided to send emergency humanitarian aid worth 30 million yuan (4.41 million U.S. dollars) to Haiti.

To put this in perspective, Australians alone have so far given AUD1.2 million in private donations to World Vision Australia.

What a surprise….

Posted by Chief Blogger – 22 January, 2010

….Treasury Sec Ken Henry wants to increase taxes on the middle class :

“The tax system needs to be prepared for the probability that in order to finance the government-provided goods and services demanded by the community, revenue needs will grow strongly in the longer term,”

….mmmm, demanded by the community or by certain cliques that have captured the public good? As evidence…

Dr Henry said there was a strong case for new taxes to tackle environmental challenges.

And let’s not forget those living on the hog charity workers:

SOME of Australia’s lowest-paid workers could be stripped of salary perks worth up to $30,000 as part of a massive tax overhaul.

In a big challenge to the charity sector, the Henry tax review will recommend the clawback of fringe benefits tax concessions used by 60,000 organisations.

These allow church-based hospitals and nursing homes, the Salvation Army and other welfare agencies to provide top-up payments to their workers….

Catholic Health Australia has received advice from accountants KPMG that the tax clawback will cost its 75 hospitals an alarming $72 million.

It’s called socialist compassion.

Seeking forgiveness

Posted by Chief Blogger – 22 January, 2010

YouTube superstar and MEP Daniel Hannan on a recent visit to New Zealand on what Britain should do as soon as it leaves the wretched EU:

Until 1972, they (NZ) enjoyed as high a standard of living as any country in the world, but the artificial diversion of Britain’s trade flows that followed EEC membership was calamitous for New Zealand. That the Common Market turned out to damage Britain’s economy, too, was no consolation. Since then, advances in technology have made regional blocs redundant. It is as easy to sell to the other side of the world as to the next town. Capital surges around the planet at the touch of a button. British businesses find it easier to deal with countries which share their language, common law system, commercial traditions and accountancy practices than with countries which simply happen to be geographically close. Our very first act when we leave the EU should be to offer unrestricted commercial access, including free movement of labour, to Australia and New Zealand. It’s the least we can do.

Like the prodigal son returning home.  I’m sure ANZ would reciprocate. The only question everyone has is if David Cameron is up to it? And also I suppose, what is Kevin Rudd doing to lobby for it?

Kill joys come out to spoil the party

Posted by Chief Blogger – 21 January, 2010

The recent visit of Prince William has made Australian republicans look like a group of mean spirited kill joys. Like a drunken family member at a family celebration that loses all sense of proportion and manners by attacking others at the party. The latest comes from Malcolm Turnbull’s (remember him) former advisor Chris Kenny in an article in the Australian newspaper.

Kenny makes a basic fundamental mistake by claiming that a future King William would become Australia’s head of state. This tired discussion has been had time and time again, yet the republicans still can’t get it through their heads that the head of state, as adjudicated by the High Court, is the Governor-General with the Crown as Sovereign. They are two related yet separate roles that Mr. Kenny might want to familiarise himself with before making the case for an ill-defined republic.

Given that the very basis of Mr. Kenny’s argument is false, we could end the discussion here. However Mr. Kenny, contrary to the views of his former master Mr. Turnbull, wants the head of state to be elected by the people. He considers this to be the key issue in the debate.

….at the very pinnacle of our system of government, we place a person who wins their position as a family heirloom…

Many republicans probably avoid this argument for fear it gives oxygen to the push for a directly elected president.

So be it; if Australians want a directly elected president, that is what we should get. I would argue that having a two-thirds majority of the parliament endorse a head of state proposed by the government of the day would protect the balance in our existing system while injecting a sufficient level of democracy and merit.

So which is it, a directly elected GG or one elected by 2/3 of Parliament? I don’t think there is anything stopping the PM from having a vote of confidence in Parliament about the suitability of our current head of state, Her Excellency Ms. Bryce. However, if Mr. Kenny wants a directly elected President he should just pick the model:

1. US, 2. Russian, 3. French, 4. German, 5. Chinese, 6. Argentinian, etc…

Which one? None of them are very appealing. We are still waiting for the answer from republicans. Mr. Kenny of course is also silent, but after having expounded how Australia is less of a democracy because of our constitutional monarchy, he then drops a bomb shell in case people like what they see in Prince William:

…popularity can’t be the issue.

So even if Prince William is popular, you know the will of the people and all that stuff, we can’t let our democracy suffer because of it:

It is the substance of the argument that must be won: ensuring that our respect for democracy and merit is reflected at the pinnacle of our system.

In other words, we must not let the will of the people get in the way of democracy. This is what’s so concerning about the republicans. They think democracy is more about merit – a neat set of qualifications – than having a mandate from the people. That mandate was given in 1999. A mandate that the republicans have been in denial about ever since. If republicans have their way we will be stuck with a system that is based more on autocracy by vague qualification than democracy by popular mandate. Popularity is the issue.

Another bronze medal performance

Posted by Chief Blogger – 21 January, 2010

Australia has once again come in third on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, as one of only seven countries that are now considered economically free in the world. That group of seven does not include either the USA or UK, the latter of which has fallen out of the top ten.

Now given that Hong Kong and Singapore – who both ranked above Australia – are city-states, Australia can rightly claim to be the most economically free country in the world.

Australia’s ‘freedom score’ is unchanged from 2009. I am not certain that the index has fully taken into account the latest Rudd changes to workplace laws and the advent of the budget deficit; next year they will likely have a negative impact on Australia’s score. From the WSJ about the US’s demise and its warnings for Australia and Rudd’s campaign of environmental facism and big debt and big taxes:

….study after study shows a strong correlation between economic freedom and prosperity….

The public sector can’t match the vitality of the private sector in promoting growth. Governments, even those that promise change, are primarily agents of the status quo. They tend to reflect the views and needs of those already holding political or economic power. Even democratic nations have their vested interests. Real change, however, can happen when those outside the mainstream have the freedom to try new things: new production processes, new technologies and new methods of organizing workers and capital.

I’m in two minds

Posted by Chief Blogger – 16 January, 2010

It is clear that Abbott considers that the Coalition can not win the next election without a few green votes, so he has proposed a ‘green army’ to add to a list of growing green initiatives:

TONY ABBOTT: Well, a lot of traditional Labour voters are very unhappy about Mr Rudd’s great big tax masquerading as an environment policy, and I think a lot of middle of the road people and Green voters will be attracted to the sorts of initiatives that I’m flagging this evening.

I think in particular people want to see real action sorting out the problems of water in the Murray-Darling Basin and I think people want to see real action by the application of a ‘green army’ to the sort of land management, natural heritage problems that we’ve been wrestling with and losing for the last 100 years.

I’m a little concerned about thousands of Australian youth being part of some type of state-run ‘green army’, call it what you want, sounds to me like a green shirt brigade that could be manipulated by less trusting political leaders to violate the natural rights of others. Now I know that the Coalition needs to offer up a few environmental sacrificial lambs to win votes, but amassing or pressing thousands of youth into some type of environmental service society, where propaganda and enviro indoctrination would likely be rife, is just a little unnerving.

Give local communities the power to deal with their own local environmental problems, don’t impose solutions from large state-run organisations made up of over-zealous youth.

And the rest of the three hours is just ads

Posted by Chief Blogger – 16 January, 2010

From the WSJ on the diabolically boring NFL:

“There were no stolen generations”

Posted by Chief Blogger – 16 January, 2010

…so argues Keith Windschuttle in the Quadrant and his latest book: The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008.  By the strength of his Quadrant article, it seems the intellectual climate on the issue will begin to turn. Some observations made by KW.

- Not one Federal Court ruling has upheld the idea of a generation of Aboriginal children having been forcibly removed from their parents for the purpose of destroying the Aboriginal race,

- The High Court ruled in 1997 that there was no Aboriginal genocide,

- The figure of 50,000 children having been ‘stolen’, as argued by the PM and others, is a work of fiction. Archival evidence shows that just over 8,000 children were removed from their parents between 1910 to 1970 – some voluntarly  – for a range of legitimate child welfare reasons, or reasons that were also given for removing white children from their parent(s) at the time.

 - Very few infants were ever removed from their parents, the majority being teenagers who later returned to their parents after education and workplace training, while full blooded Aboriginals were mostly left alone by government officials,

Most children affected had been orphaned, abandoned, des­titute, neglected or subject to various forms of domestic violence, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse.

- In other cases parents regularly accompanied their children to Aboriginal settlements or children were placed with Aboriginal foster parents,

- During the period of the so-called ‘genocide’ the Aboriginal population actually increased 68 per cent,

 - The Joseph Lyons Commonwealth government in 1933 rejected proposals to regulate the marriage of Aboriginal half-castes,

- There is no evidence that Aboriginal activists thought there was an Aboriginal genocide during the 1960s and ’70s and…

A greater mystery is that some of the best-known of an earlier generation of Aboriginal activists had been in an even better position to see what was going on. In the 1940s and 1950s, William Ferguson, Walter Page and Pearl Gibbs actually served as directors of the Aborigines Welfare Board of New South Wales, one of the very organisations then committing the purported genocide. Yet they never realised what was happening. Of all people, they were the ones who should have identified it first. How could they possibly have missed it? If the Stolen Generations story was true, then at that very time, right across Australia, in all states and territories, scores of white welfare officials, backed by parliamentarians and senior public ser­vants, were forcibly removing Aboriginal children to put an end to Aboriginality. How did these hundreds of white people, for a period of more than sixty years, maintain the discipline needed to keep the whole thing so quiet that Aboriginal activists like Ferguson, Page and Gibbs were oblivious to its existence? Why did no one leak the truth? A conspiracy on this scale must have been the best-kept secret in Australian history. On these grounds alone, the inherent implausibil­ity of Read’s thesis should always have been self-evident.

Automotive musings

Posted by Chief Blogger – 16 January, 2010

Ever since GM pulled the plug on Pontiac and hence Holden’s export programme to the US, there has been ongoing off again on again speculation that Holden will export to the US under the Chevrolet badge:

General Motors North American boss Mark Reuss has named Chevrolet as the new potential US home for the Australian Holden Commodore, keeping alive the prospects of a billion-dollar export program for Holden.During an interview with Fairfax at the Detroit motor show, Reuss said General Motors wanted the Commodore in its North American model line up, effectively replacing the failed Pontiac export program. 

“There isn’t any impediments to it, other than we have to make sure the number of portfolios we put into Chevrolet …. is right for the dealer network.”

Well, we will see. I think Holden would be better off without GM, as a niche rear wheel drive car maker. Prospects for Ford Australia look a little more dim though. Apparently Ford chief Alan Mulally indicated that he wants Ford to have one large car platform for the whole world. Speculation is that this means the demise of the Falcon, to be replaced by a front wheeled drive Taurus like vehicle.

I can’t believe that would happen. Ford needs a large rear wheeled drive car – the Falcon is the only car they have that fits that bill. Customers won’t buy a Taurus like vehicle in the same numbers like the Falcon. If customers want a large front wheeled drive car they look to Toyota, etc….not some second rate Ford that is cobbled together in the same antiquated and incoherent fashion as the Ford ’19th century live axle’ Mustang.

Dick Cheney “gets results”

Posted by Chief Blogger – 16 January, 2010

Dick Cheney has been ranked as the number on US conservative by the UK’s Telegraph:

Obama is finding out that the Islamist threat was not something dreamed up by Cheney and Bush. The President has been repeatedly rattled by Cheney, as illustrated by his decision last May to time a speech so that it would coincide with the former vice-president’s address at the American Enterprise Institute. It was Cheney who framed Obama’s delay on deciding his Afghanistan surge strategy as “dithering” – and the characterisation stuck.

Cheney is also a good friend of Australia, having visited the place on a number of occassions. The same cannot be said of Obama and his VP.