NEVER TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

by Jeremy Lee:
Western leaders such as Bush, Blair and Howard insist on the virtues of "democracy" - for everyone else! But they're outraged if people disagree - let alone vote - against their ideas. There is widespread bitterness and chagrin at the result of the recent referendum on re-cycling sewage in Toowoomba. Despite enormous expenditure and pressure, 62 per cent of voters said "NO" to the proposal.
But apparently that's not good enough. They were scared and ignorant. They must be 'educated'. There is disagreement as to whether they should be asked again.
Queensland Premier Peter Beattie, while describing drinking re-cycled sewage as the "Armageddon Option", nevertheless wants to widen the referendum to the whole of S.E. Queensland to coincide with the next Local Government elections - scheduled for 2008.

Centralisation and control of water is the aim:
But that's not good enough for our "democratic" Prime Minister. Under the heading "Howard Calls For Water Recycling," The Australian Financial Review (3/8/06) reported:
"Prime Minister John Howard has rejected Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's proposed 2008 referendum on recycled water. Mr Howard, who conceded that a scare campaign was responsible for the failed vote on recycled effluent in Toowoomba, said recycled water should be considered by large metropolitan cities across Australia.
When asked whether he had any regrets about his government asking Toowoomba to have a referendum before it approved $23 million in funding for a $68 million recycling project, Mr Howard replied, "I think we all learn from experience."
"The "No" campaign, led by local businessman Clive Berghofer, was well funded, and drowned out attempts by Toowoomba Mayor Di Thorley to sell the merits of indirect potable- water re-use. Significantly, Mr Howard yesterday pledged to lead the water re-cycling debate in Australia. "I support re-cycling, full stop. If I had been a resident of Toowoomba, I would have voted yes," he said."

One-sided! This report could hardly be described as 'objective!
Why would a "No" vote be considered a "failed" vote? It quite successfully described the wishes and desires of a big majority in a City of over 100,000 people. Surely, that was the idea?
And to suggest that a well-funded scare campaign "drowned out" Mayor Thorley's attempts to promote the idea of re-cycling sewage is one-eyed in the extreme.
She had a total of over $1 million in direct and indirect funding at her disposal.
She made full use of it in a welter of meetings and advertising that went on for day after day.
If anything, her campaign was one of over-kill.
If scare tactics were used at all, her portrayed scenario of perpetual drought and thirst qualified.

'Cui bono'?
Kept well hidden in the whole debate was the whole issue of "control".
Nowhere was it spelled out that this proposal was part of a world-wide globalist programme in which a government/ transnational-corporation partnership will take over control of all water in questionable and highly expensive grid-systems. The proposal is unconstitutional - but the people won't be asked about that! And, once in place, accountability is permanently removed from elected governments.

A basic engineering principle is that new concepts should always be modelled on a small scale before being expanded at major cost. There are other proposals which urgently need consideration. They could be tried on a small scale, and expanded if successful. But they preclude central control - and that's what offends the planners and do-gooders.

In a recent press statement Premier Beattie timidly suggested that praying for rain might be a good idea. This would require a resolute lead from a national leader, calling all people and churches together. It would be strongly attacked. The last to do so was the much-maligned Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen - and there was widespread rain almost immediately.
Even the scoffers were silent. A little repentance and faith in Australia would do more than all the trans-national corporations put together.

RETIRED DIPLOMATS TAKE BLAIR TO TASK

ONE WIFE IS ENOUGH!

by James Reed:
From the "theatre of the absurd file" - two recent stories about the dangers of multiple wives, especially across cultures.
At cinemas recently was a movie called "The White Masai". It is about a blonder than blonde Swiss woman who goes to Kenya and falls in love with a Masai warrior. This true story is about the clash of cultures at a personal level, an issue perhaps even more agonising than race.

The Swiss woman Corinna Hofmann left her business and her boyfriend after falling in love at first sight with the Masai warrior Lketinga. She goes to live in a cow dung hut. But she has entered a culture of polygamy and female circumcision - a culture which she immediately rebels against by trying to change the tribe and break down gender barriers.
In short, she tries to bring Western feminism to Africa. But woman have a "beast of burden" status in Masai society. Her behaviour does not go down well with Lketinga's other wives.
Lketinga gets jealous of Hofmann and accuses her of having affairs. The poor lad starts hitting the bottle - or the African equivalent.

Hofmann leaves and takes the infant back to Switzerland and writes a best seller. (See Australian 17/7/06 p.7) Such are the ways of straddling two worlds and only really belonging to one.
If Hofmann really wanted to reject the West, and not have it as a safety net in case her experimenting cultural imperialism went wrong, she should have attempted to completely integrate into Masai culture by following its full rituals, right or wrong, of female circumcision and not owning property. She should have torn up her return ticket home. But of course, when the going gets tough, Western civilisation is always there as a safety net.

Hofmann's book "White Masai" was one of the top selling books in Europe in the past decade, but if the West was not gripped by a cultural war, producing a dark night of the soul, such stories should be dismissed as casually as the antics of "Big Brother" are dismissed by those still capable of cognitive discrimination.

Back to Australia:
Aboriginal activist Galarruy Yunupingu has troubles. ("Fallout Over Four Wives," The Australian, 12/7/06, p.11). Yunupingu, a champion of Aboriginal causes, including land rights, took his fourth wife when she was twenty, a few years younger than his eldest daughter. His father, Munggurowuy had 11 wives and 24 children. Things are not going well for the activist, who now faces a domestic violence order against him by his fourth wife.
Yanupingu had his firearms licence suspended. He had 18 firearms registered but could only hand back six to police because he couldn't find the other guns. Any comments, Gun Control Australia?

The Australian states that in 2003 Yunupingu "clashed with the Northern Territory Labor Government after it passed laws that removed traditional marriage as a defence against having sex with underage children… Yunupingu accused the Clare Martin government of interfering in Aboriginal law."
I toss this over to our politically correct opponents for comment - if they dare.

UPSIDE-DOWN ECONOMICS

by Jeremy Lee
Few will forget the horror days of 1989, when interest rates reached 17%, and much higher for high-risk industries such as farming. That period was the final straw that broke the farmer's back and decimated rural communities. It was the beginning of the end for manufacturing.
Now the government that made hay out of Paul Keating's financial disasters is set to repeat them. The excuse is to "curb inflation.".

• First-year economic students know that there are two major causes of inflation:
  
  Firstly, "demand inflation", where demand outstrips supply, and competition for a scarcity of goods intensifies.
  
  Secondly, "cost-push inflation" where extra indirect costs, i.e. tax and rate increases, higher electricity and fuel costs, higher costs for raw materials and interest rate increases etc. can only be met by higher prices.

Politicians, Treasury Departments and Central Bankers all behave as though the first is the only one that matters! We were recently told that fuel prices and the price of bananas were examples that necessitated an interest-rate increase.

Yes, we have no bananas:
Bananas, it is true, are a classic - and rare -example of "demand inflation".
Cyclone Larry wiped out much of Australia's banana crop, and demand outstripped supply.

Oil prices?
A classic - and common - example of "cost-push inflation".
It certainly was not increased demand by Australians that pushed oil prices into the stratosphere. In fact, in an emergency, Australia has enough oil reserves to get along without any oil imports at all. And if we switched our car-fleet to LPG (instead of selling it to China for three cents a litre delivered we'd have no fuel problems at all!

So we have voluntarily reduced Reserve Bank policy to ONE and only one course of action. Whenever there is inflation, whether demand or cost-push, to increasing interest rates. The only beneficiaries are banks and money-lenders. The price ordinary Australians pay is a splurge of bankruptcies, homelessness, poverty and dispossession. This is the exact opposite of what we should be doing. In periods of cost-push inflation we should reduce interest rates, and if this is still not enough, reduce taxes, fees, fines and energy charges.

Bigger debts than ever:
The Australian Financial Review (8/8/06) under the heading DEBT-SERVICING BURDEN EQUALS HORROR DAYS PF 17pc, pointed out that community debt levels are now so high, and servicing takes such a high percentage of the household budget, that current interest levels are hurting as much as those of the Keating 1989 era.
More and more families are being forced to depend on credit-card debt for petrol and groceries. Without debt there is no life; but the ultimate price socially will be heavy indeed.
Both farming and manufacturing are mere shadows of their former glory. About 80% of the economy is now in "services" - much of which is swollen bureaucracy. Without our huge mineral exports Australia would be a cot-case. We have now had 50 straight months of trade deficits, which we simply tack on to our gargantuan foreign debt. Our massive exports of coal, iron ore, natural gas and other minerals, going 24 hours a day, are not enough to pay for our imports!

As the grim picture emerges, John Howard and his rag-tag Coalition will have some explaining to do. They've had a dream run so far. It looks like becoming a nightmare.

MIGRATION POLICY AN ABJECT FAILURE: REPORT

"Australia's skilled migration system has been branded an "abject failure in public policy" for importing thousands of foreign IT workers while Australian graduates struggle to find jobs," reports the Ballarat Courier 24/7/06.
The skilled migration scheme may have been the stated intention of the present government, but not necessarily the true purpose.
Are these skilled foreign migrants going to be given a one-way ticket back to their homelands? Methinks not.

I DON'T FEEL SAFER JOHN

by Brian Simpson
We have now to experience the latest 'terrorist threat', with governments around the world issuing 'red alerts' and causing major disruptions to passengers and air traffic, etc. But lets look back to an article which appeared in The Australian late last year.

According to ASIO up to 800 Muslim 'extremists' capable of carrying out a London-style attack (as was reported late last year: "800 Motivated for Terror Attack Here, Says ASIO," The Australian, 28/9/05,p.1).

Don't ask how they got here. Simply look below this article to see another in the same newspaper:
"Illegals Casting Their Nets". Illegal foreign fishermen are setting up camp along Australia's northern coastline, digging wells and bringing into Australia potentially diseased pets such as monkeys.
The Australian reports that "sightings of illegal vessels close to the coast soared over the past four years," despite "tens of millions of extra dollars being poured into border surveillance."
8108 vessels were spotted last financial year. Any one of these boats could be smuggling a nuclear device into Australia.

The federal government's energies have been directed towards putting on the law books new incitement and sedition laws designed to target "words of hate" which allegedly incite violence on racial or religious grounds. The new sedition act will give a penalty of seven years in prison.

It will work like this.
Someone says that people of a particular race should fight (in some way) people of another race/races until they leave Australia. Although these laws are marketed as being about controlling terrorists, they are really about controlling seditious thought.
What suicide bomber would care about a curb on 'words of hate'?

GEOFFREY MUIRDEN

ALL MEN ARE EQUAL - ONLY SOME MORE SO

The headlines read on NewsMax.com "Castro Was Close to Death," and continued:
"Cuban dictator Fidel Castro nearly died from intestinal bleeding, and doctors had to work for hours to save his life. According to London's Sunday Telegraph newspaper, Castro was at the exclusive Cimeq hospital in western Havana last weekend when physicians were unable to stem intestinal bleeding with drugs. That forced them to perform an emergency operation. Castro, who is 79, has not been seen in public since the operation, but Cuba's health minister has claimed that the communist strongman "will be back with us soon".

Cimeq hospital is where top communist officials on the island are treated -- a facility far off-limits to the average Cuban. According to the Telegraph, Castro received treatment on a par with the best in the world.
But most Cubans, reliant on the supposedly universal health system, have to pay for even basic drugs such as aspirin and "extras" such as X-rays."

Ah! Who still longs for that great Marxist/Leninist dream? Or should we say nightmare?

REPUBLICAN RATINGS

from David Flint's ACM Opinion Column:

Readers of this column [Professor Flint's] know that royal broadcasts rate very well. From the wedding of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to the recent programmes on The Queen, we Australians have demonstrated by our viewing that we are very interested in matters royal. It is only the political correctness of broadcasting executives that stops even more programmes reaching the public, particularly the service at St Paul's Cathedral for The Queen's eightieth birthday, and this year's Trooping the Colour ceremony.

So how does republicanism rate? The strongest proponents of the republic in the nation's largest commercial radio talkback market today are undoubtedly Mike Carlton and Peter FitzSimons. Indeed, Mr Carlton, both on radio and in print, regularly takes the opportunity to denigrate monarchists, particularly this National Convenor of ACM.
As with too many republicans, Mr Carlton's republicanism is driven principally, indeed almost wholly, by a visceral hatred of monarchy and monarchists, and not by the slightest interest in any particular form of republic. I recall particularly his gloating prediction that the funeral of the greatly loved Queen Mother would attract little interest in the streets of London, other than from confused Japanese tourists. As we said then, Mr. Carlton once again had to wipe a large amount of egg from his face.

If there was any interest in a republic among Australians, we would expect that to be reflected in the ratings of such an ultra republican. Mr. Carlton has a sharp, perhaps cruel sense of humour. As with most capital city breakfast talkback programmes, he has been able to attract leading politicians to his programme, a trend established by the Prime Minister when he decided not to allow journalists to mediate between him and the public. As a result, very big stories can break on talkback. For example, it was on Mr. Carlton's programme that Mr Mark Latham announced his policy before the last federal elections to bring back the troops from Iraq before Christmas. We could expect then that Mr Carlton's programme would rate, and rate well. But now, The Sydney Morning Herald's supplement, The Guide, of 24-30 July, 2006, reports that Sydney's listeners much prefer Alan Jones on rival station 2GB. So much so, Mr. Carlton's station is now engaged in a vigorous cost cutting exercise. When the unfortunate overnight telephone operator was declared redundant, bemused listeners heard several callers to the overnight programme attempting to book a taxi. Apparently the station's number closely resembles that of a Western Australian.

As Ms Sue Javes reports ("Axe misses talk poppies"), this "penny pinching" contrasts with the "crippling" salary bill that has to be paid to the station's presenters. Apparently Mr. Carlton receives $1 million each year and his contact runs until 2008.
She reports that staff are not impressed that more money was recently thrown at the problem. To improve Mr.Carlton's rating challenged programme, the station decided first to hire Fairfax journalist Peter FitzSimons to join Mr. Carlton, and pay him about half a million. To use the adjective the republican journalists use to describe fellow republicans, Mr Fitzsimons is a "passionate" republican, although, curiously, he has famously declared that he dreams of lying in a puddle of corgi urine.
He was the brains behind the republicans' 2006 disaster - the "mate for Head of State" campaign. The addition of Mr. FitzSimons did little to improve ratings.
Then a major television advertising campaign was launched to attract listeners for the republican duo. This is believed to have had little effect.
This confirms, if nothing else, that republicanism does not rate."

BRITISH ANGER AT TERROR CELEBRATION

From Times-online by Ned Parker and Stephen Farrell:
The following report is another example of the way news is reported these days. It depends on whether you are on the 'giving' or 'receiving' end of the terrorist act being meted out. It is surely "the philosophy of the one-way street":

The commemoration of Israeli bombings that killing 92 people has caused offence.
"As Israel wages war against Hezbollah "terrorists" in Lebanon, Britain has protested about the celebration by right-wing Israelis of a Jewish "act of terrorism" against British rule 60 years ago.
The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu the former prime minister, commemorated the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.
They erected a plaque outside the restored building, and held a two-day seminar with speeches and a tour of the hotel by one of the Jewish resistance fighters involved in the attack. Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem, have written to the municipality, stating:
"We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated."

The lie presented as fact:
In particular they demanded the removal of the plaque that pays tribute to the Irgun, the Jewish resistance branch headed by Menachem Begin, the future prime minister, which carried out the attack on July 22, 1946.
The plaque presents as fact the Irgun's claim that people died because the British ignored warning calls. "For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated," it states.

Mr McDonald and Dr Jenkins denied that the British had been warned, adding that even if they had "this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths".
City officials agreed to remove the language deemed offensive from the blue sign hanging on the hotel's gates, though that had not been done shortly before it was unveiled.

The controversy over the plaque and the two-day celebration of the bombing, sponsored by Irgun veterans and the right-wing Menachem Begin Heritage Centre, goes to the heart of the debate over the use of political violence in the Middle East. Yesterday Mr Netanyahu argued in a speech celebrating the attack that the Irgun were governed by morals, unlike fighters from groups such as Hamas.
"It's very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action," he said. "Imagine that Hamas or Hezbollah would call the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and say, 'We have placed a bomb and we are asking you to evacuate the area'."

But the view of the attack was very different in 1946 when The Times branded the Irgun "terrorists in disguise".
Decades later, Irgun veterans are unrepentant. Sarah Agassi, 80, remembers spying in the King David Hotel. She and a fellow agent posed as a couple. They danced tangos and waltzes, sipped whisky and wine while they cased out the hotel.
On the day her brother and his fellow fighters posed as Arabs delivering milk and brought seven milk churns, each containing 50kg of explosives, into the building. Ms Agassi waited across the street until her brother rushed out. She said that she then made the warning call to the British command in the hotel. Sitting in the luxurious hotel lobby, she expressed no regret. 'We fought for our independence. We thought it was the right way . . . If I had to fight for Israel, I swear even now I would do anything.'
" https://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-2277717,00.html