Government is the partner of organized crime
By Michael Duffy and Bob Bottom.
We have just finished a 21-part history of organised crime in Sydney, for a series to be published in the Herald's new iPad edition. Most organised crime took place in the 20th century, and naturally we found ourselves pondering why.
What we found is that much of it emerged following the introduction of laws banning popular pleasures. America is famous for one big Prohibition: we had a lot of smaller ones.
What happens is that illegal markets are set up to provide the banned goods and services such as drugs and alcohol or gambling and prostitution. The volume of these illegal transactions is enormous, making it profitable for organisational entrepreneurs to move in. They take two forms: the efficient businessmen, such as Abe Saffron and George Freeman, and the standover men who in effect “tax” the illegal businesses, and give permission for them to stay open. Perhaps Sydney's most famous standover man was Lennie McPherson, known in some circles as Mr Big and in others as Mr Ten Per Cent.
One example of this pattern was the 1916 Liquor Act, which made the sale of alcohol illegal after 6pm. It was to assist with wartime productivity, but was not repealed until long after World War II. It spawned dozens of illegal bars around the city catering to everyone desperate for a drink in convivial surroundings after dark. People prepared to supply them, whether Kate Leigh with her sly grog joints in Surry Hills or Joe Taylor's and Saffron's celebrity nightclubs later on, became very wealthy.
You can track the rise and fall of a great deal of organised crime against the legislative history of popular pleasures, with a decline as laws were introduced legalising prostitution and extending drinking hours, and with the creation (and later the extension) of the TAB and the setting up of NSW's first legal casino, Star City, in 1995.
The nature of the illegal pleasures shapes the nature of the organised crime that arises to provide them. Drugs are unusual, historically, because they are not sold or consumed at a relatively small number of locations. This means dealers are harder to locate and tax, making it impossible for standover men to impose a certain amount of stability on the underworld. The profits are enormous and easy, which attracts a continual stream of psychopaths into the milieu to try to rip off those already there.
For these reasons, the drug underworld is far more volatile and violent than the old underworld based on alcohol and gambling and prostitution. The days when McPherson, Freeman and Stan Smith could pretty well run the underworld for decades are long gone.
A final difference is drugs are used by a relatively small number of people. This means police and politicians are far less prepared to take bribes – an important factor in the decline of corruption in recent decades.
What does history tell us about measures that work against organised crime? The biggest success in Sydney was in 1930, in response to the violence of the razor gangs involved in cocaine and other illegal trades. Parliament passed the NSW Vagrancy (Amendment) Act, which made it illegal to be seen habitually with reputed criminals or people with no visible means of support.
Alfred McCoy, in his book Drug Traffic, calls this “one of the most authoritarian and effective measures against organised crime ever passed in a Western democracy”. Police numbers were increased and it became illegal to carry a razor. Within months the level of violence dropped. It took longer – about five years – but the cocaine trade was crushed.
The laws were draconian, but according to McCoy, “In the small-town atmosphere of Sydney in the 1930s it was generally understood who the targets were to be, and there were few abuses of these exceptional powers and fewer civil libertarian qualms.”
Would the law be acceptable today? Justice James Wood noted, during his Police Royal Commission in the 1990s, that the law gave police such extraordinary powers that it eventually became “an instrument for corruption and for the establishment of improper relationships”.
Still, harsher laws can work. One great example of this is America's RICO legislation, which allows someone to be sentenced to a long jail term if they are a member of an organisation that has committed any two of 35 designated crimes. The law has been particularly useful in locking up large numbers of criminal bosses. Writer Evan Whitton has urged NSW to consider such a law, and we think the idea deserves serious consideration.
SOURCE
Crash site 'did not exist', according to arrogant ambulance operator
Ambulance Victoria has apologised to a triple-0 caller who was told by an emergency operator that the crash site he was calling from "did not exist".
Peter Rennie was driving along the Daylesford-Ballarat Road at Dean, about 20 kilometres north-east of Ballarat, when he came across a car that had smashed into a tree on May 23. Another motorist stayed with the injured woman who was trapped inside the vehicle while Mr Rennie ran to the nearest corner - the intersection with Dean-Mollongghip Road - to call an ambulance.
He spelt out the road sign to the operator over his mobile phone, only to be told his location didn't exist. "I didn't know how to pronounce it so I spelt it out right from the start," Mr Rennie told the Ballarat Courier. "When I spoke to an operator, I was told there was nowhere in Victoria called Dean.
"I couldn't believe it. I said the system had no idea, and then I was told to check my attitude. "I said to them: 'What do we do? Do we leave this poor woman in the car to die?' " He said the operator finally found the location and sent an ambulance, before hanging up.
Ambulance Victoria spokesman Paul Howe today said the organisation had reviewed a recording of the exchange, and had apologised to Mr Rennie. He said the operator had been "dismissive" of the caller, and would receive further training in light of the mix-up. "It was purely a human error on the call-taker side and, listening to it, it clearly wasn't handled by the book," Mr Howe said.
"We didn't follow the correct protocols and we apologised to the person who made the call."
Mr Howe said he believed the tense exchange between the operator and Mr Rennie lasted minutes. "I don't believe that it was a long time, but clearly in a stressful situation anything that's going to add any anxiety or distress is not ideal, and that's what we're certainly apologising for in this case," he said.
"We've got pretty rigorous systems here, we take call-taking seriously. Obviously having over 750,000 calls a year, we investigate any complaints and we also have random audits of calls to make sure that we're following correct procedures."
He said the woman involved in the car crash was not seriously injured and was taken to Ballarat Hospital in a stable condition.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Four current articles below
Climate report an assault on democracy, says Abbott
TONY Abbott has rejected the latest climate change report from economist Ross Garnaut as an assault on democracy, warning that it proposes to give a committee of unelected appointees the power to set tax rates.
As the Opposition Leader yesterday complained of a "democratic deficit" over Labor's proposed carbon tax, Julia Gillard noted the report rejected Mr Abbott's proposal to tackle climate change through direct action measures such as planting trees.
Delivering his final climate change update report at the National Press Club yesterday, Professor Garnaut said the direct action approach risked entrenching the political culture of vested interests that had resisted economic reform for eight decades.
"The big rewards in low-emissions investments in regulatory approaches would go to those who persuaded the minister or the bureaucrat that their idea was worthy of being included in the direct action plan," he said.
"If not under the government that introduced the direct action policies then under the governments that followed."
In his report, Professor Garnaut proposed the establishment of an independent committee to set Australia's carbon emission reduction levels -- a proposal that could break the deadlock preventing Labor from winning Greens' support for the tax.
Mr Abbott seized on the proposal, warning it would put the power to set tax rates out of the hands of accountable politicians.
"There is a developing democratic deficit here," he said. "First of all the Prime Minister wasn't upfront with the Australian public before the election. Now the idea that taxes in this country should effectively be set by people who are outside the parliament, and who are not accountable to the people, I think, is just odd.
"This just goes to show how out of control the government is on this whole climate change question."
Later, the Opposition Leader continued his attack in question time, noting that the report said: "Australian households will ultimately bear the full cost of a carbon price".
"So how can (the Prime Minister) continue to maintain that her tax only makes big polluters pay?" Mr Abbott asked parliament. "Who pays? Big polluters or households? The truth is: households."
Ms Gillard accused Mr Abbott of misrepresenting the report, and hit back by pointing out that the report criticised Mr Abbott's direct action policy.
More HERE
No pain, no gain: compensation vitiates carbon tax
"Compensation" means that the tax will not have the effect that is its only justification!
ANYONE who thinks the proposed carbon tax is mainly about the environment is mistaken. That may have been where the debate started. But due to political pressure on the minority government, it has morphed into an exercise in wealth redistribution, not environmental action. And Labor has many environmental groups and advocates fooled.
Because Labor can't afford to lose seats at the next election (in fact, it needs to win seats to gain a majority), but also has to be seen to be doing something as a government, it is trying to convince voters it is acting on the environment while also compensating them for that action to a point where the action itself becomes meaningless.
Cate Blanchett is a fine actor, and as Coalition MPs have said -- before launching scathing attacks on her -- she is certainly entitled to her opinion. Blanchett is also entitled to use her hard-earned fame to spruik ideas and policy positions that matter to her. And the third parties that have funded the pro-carbon-tax campaign Blanchett is part of -- GetUp, the ACTU and the Australian Conservation Foundation -- are entitled to approach her to help.
There is nothing wrong with such campaigns. After all, the miners campaigned against the super-profits tax, and retailers and the tobacco industry are campaigning against plain packaging of cigarettes. What's wrong with individuals doing the same?
What I question, however, is the value of Blanchett taking part in a campaign aimed at convincing ordinary voters of the carbon tax's merits. I am not sure an actor of her international standing is the best person to front a campaign that affects the cost of living. It contrasts sharply with the very impressive campaign against Work Choices the union movement organised with voices from real workers under threat from the Howard government's laws in the lead-up to the 2007 election.
For that matter, I wonder whether Blanchett has thought things through. Blanchett is no dummy. She completed a degree in economics before deciding acting was her calling. However, the logical thinking necessary for an economics degree seems to have deserted Blanchett on this matter.
She has been blinded by her passion for environmental action on climate change. Consider the interview she gave yesterday to a rival newspaper.
Blanchett said "everyone will benefit if we protect the environment". Yes, but does a carbon tax do that? It won't if it causes no fiscal pain to consumers, because the whole point of a carbon tax is that it creates a price pressure on the use of dirty energy, thereby encouraging consumers and businesses to change their ways.
But Blanchett also wants to be the people's princess -- in the interview she said her support for a carbon tax was conditional on "generous assistance" for low- and middle-income earners. She has fallen for the trickery of the carbon tax and her own attempt to stay popular when advocating it.
Take with one hand (carbon tax), give with the other (compensation). The result? No price pressure or incentive for people to change their energy use.
Make no mistake, when the carbon tax is applied to businesses, they will pass on that cost to consumers to maintain their profitability. Consumers will tolerate that price rise if they are rich, and go on burning energy but simply pay more. Mainstream voters and the disadvantaged will secure generous compensation from the government (don't believe Tony Abbott when he says otherwise), which will allow them to keep consuming dirty energy without changing their ways.
The government may claim there is pricing pressure, regardless of compensation, because polluting companies will have to raise prices, but the carbon tax would have to be much higher to have a real effect.
What does all of this add up to: wealth redistribution with little impact on the environment unless the compensation is rescinded and consumers are thereby forced to change their ways -- or unless the price on carbon goes up quickly and the compensation packages don't.
SOURCE
"Eco" resort bombs
It got all sorts of awards -- from everybody except paying customers. Nice when Green/Left elitists feel in their hip pocket how out of touch they are
THE Gold Coast's embattled tourism industry has copped another blow with multi-award-winning eco-tourism retreat Couran Cove Island Resort closing its doors.
Hailed as a benchmark tourism facility when it opened 13 years ago, the South Stradbroke Island resort is to be placed into voluntary liquidation. Its owner, InterPacific Group, yesterday announced that it was putting the resort up for sale after a "sustained period of low occupancy" and years of operating at a "considerable loss".
Staff have been laid off, with those eligible provided with redundancy payments and full entitlements. It is understood a skeleton crew has been retained to maintain the sporting and eco-friendly resort's facilities.
In a statement, InterPacific said that, although Couran Cove had stopped operating as a resort, its facilities would remain accessible to owners of the private residences within the resort.
"Over the past 13 years, considerable time, energy and money has been invested to create the premium resort Couran Cove is today," it said. "However, this hasn't been enough to combat a volatile global economy, weak local tourism conditions, a lack of industry support and rising operating and infrastructure costs.
"The resort has been operating at a considerable loss for a number of years and, sadly, despite our best efforts, this is an unsustainable position for any business operation. "This is the most sensible course of action for the business and its shareholders."
Couran Cove's development on a 151ha site was spearheaded by former Olympic runner Ron Clarke before he was elected Gold Coast mayor. Billionaire American philanthropist Chuck Feeney, who bankrolled the project but later had a falling-out with Cr Clarke, reportedly has been propping up the resort - pouring $283 million into it since 1998.
InterPacific is owned by Mr Feeney's Bermuda-based charity foundation Atlantic Philanthropies.
Corporate doctors Ferrier Hodgson will be appointed liquidators today to facilitate its sale.
Industry sources said InterPacific had been unsuccessfully trying to offload the South Stradbroke Island resort for several years.
The resort has won more than 50 domestic and international awards for excellence.
SOURCE
Global cooling hits South Australia
ANYONE shivering in Adelaide this morning had good reason to do so it is the coldest start to June on record. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Vince Rowlands said the minimum temperature was a chilly 3.7C at 7.24am at Kent Town on the first day of winter. "I think it's the coldest start to a June that we've ever had at Kent Town," Mr Rowlands said.
Elsewhere around the state the mercury dropped to -2.7C in Yunta, -1.3C in Renmark, -1C in Clare and Coonawarra was -0.6C.
"Around Adelaide itself, Elizabeth got down to 4C, as far as the Hills go, Mt Lofty stayed a touch warmer because of the winds but I'd certainly expect the back of the Ranges to be pretty cold Murray Bridge got down to 1C," he said.
Mr Rowlands said the cold was to be expected with winter. "Obviously the atmosphere is a lot colder and then we get the really clear nights like we've had over the last couple of days, there's nothing stopping the heat from escaping into the atmosphere and we get these really cold conditions."
More HERE
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Government is the partner of organized crime
By Michael Duffy and Bob Bottom.
We have just finished a 21-part history of organised crime in Sydney, for a series to be published in the Herald's new iPad edition. Most organised crime took place in the 20th century, and naturally we found ourselves pondering why.
What we found is that much of it emerged following the introduction of laws banning popular pleasures. America is famous for one big Prohibition: we had a lot of smaller ones.
What happens is that illegal markets are set up to provide the banned goods and services such as drugs and alcohol or gambling and prostitution. The volume of these illegal transactions is enormous, making it profitable for organisational entrepreneurs to move in. They take two forms: the efficient businessmen, such as Abe Saffron and George Freeman, and the standover men who in effect “tax” the illegal businesses, and give permission for them to stay open. Perhaps Sydney's most famous standover man was Lennie McPherson, known in some circles as Mr Big and in others as Mr Ten Per Cent.
One example of this pattern was the 1916 Liquor Act, which made the sale of alcohol illegal after 6pm. It was to assist with wartime productivity, but was not repealed until long after World War II. It spawned dozens of illegal bars around the city catering to everyone desperate for a drink in convivial surroundings after dark. People prepared to supply them, whether Kate Leigh with her sly grog joints in Surry Hills or Joe Taylor's and Saffron's celebrity nightclubs later on, became very wealthy.
You can track the rise and fall of a great deal of organised crime against the legislative history of popular pleasures, with a decline as laws were introduced legalising prostitution and extending drinking hours, and with the creation (and later the extension) of the TAB and the setting up of NSW's first legal casino, Star City, in 1995.
The nature of the illegal pleasures shapes the nature of the organised crime that arises to provide them. Drugs are unusual, historically, because they are not sold or consumed at a relatively small number of locations. This means dealers are harder to locate and tax, making it impossible for standover men to impose a certain amount of stability on the underworld. The profits are enormous and easy, which attracts a continual stream of psychopaths into the milieu to try to rip off those already there.
For these reasons, the drug underworld is far more volatile and violent than the old underworld based on alcohol and gambling and prostitution. The days when McPherson, Freeman and Stan Smith could pretty well run the underworld for decades are long gone.
A final difference is drugs are used by a relatively small number of people. This means police and politicians are far less prepared to take bribes – an important factor in the decline of corruption in recent decades.
What does history tell us about measures that work against organised crime? The biggest success in Sydney was in 1930, in response to the violence of the razor gangs involved in cocaine and other illegal trades. Parliament passed the NSW Vagrancy (Amendment) Act, which made it illegal to be seen habitually with reputed criminals or people with no visible means of support.
Alfred McCoy, in his book Drug Traffic, calls this “one of the most authoritarian and effective measures against organised crime ever passed in a Western democracy”. Police numbers were increased and it became illegal to carry a razor. Within months the level of violence dropped. It took longer – about five years – but the cocaine trade was crushed.
The laws were draconian, but according to McCoy, “In the small-town atmosphere of Sydney in the 1930s it was generally understood who the targets were to be, and there were few abuses of these exceptional powers and fewer civil libertarian qualms.”
Would the law be acceptable today? Justice James Wood noted, during his Police Royal Commission in the 1990s, that the law gave police such extraordinary powers that it eventually became “an instrument for corruption and for the establishment of improper relationships”.
Still, harsher laws can work. One great example of this is America's RICO legislation, which allows someone to be sentenced to a long jail term if they are a member of an organisation that has committed any two of 35 designated crimes. The law has been particularly useful in locking up large numbers of criminal bosses. Writer Evan Whitton has urged NSW to consider such a law, and we think the idea deserves serious consideration.
SOURCE
Crash site 'did not exist', according to arrogant ambulance operator
Ambulance Victoria has apologised to a triple-0 caller who was told by an emergency operator that the crash site he was calling from "did not exist".
Peter Rennie was driving along the Daylesford-Ballarat Road at Dean, about 20 kilometres north-east of Ballarat, when he came across a car that had smashed into a tree on May 23. Another motorist stayed with the injured woman who was trapped inside the vehicle while Mr Rennie ran to the nearest corner - the intersection with Dean-Mollongghip Road - to call an ambulance.
He spelt out the road sign to the operator over his mobile phone, only to be told his location didn't exist. "I didn't know how to pronounce it so I spelt it out right from the start," Mr Rennie told the Ballarat Courier. "When I spoke to an operator, I was told there was nowhere in Victoria called Dean.
"I couldn't believe it. I said the system had no idea, and then I was told to check my attitude. "I said to them: 'What do we do? Do we leave this poor woman in the car to die?' " He said the operator finally found the location and sent an ambulance, before hanging up.
Ambulance Victoria spokesman Paul Howe today said the organisation had reviewed a recording of the exchange, and had apologised to Mr Rennie. He said the operator had been "dismissive" of the caller, and would receive further training in light of the mix-up. "It was purely a human error on the call-taker side and, listening to it, it clearly wasn't handled by the book," Mr Howe said.
"We didn't follow the correct protocols and we apologised to the person who made the call."
Mr Howe said he believed the tense exchange between the operator and Mr Rennie lasted minutes. "I don't believe that it was a long time, but clearly in a stressful situation anything that's going to add any anxiety or distress is not ideal, and that's what we're certainly apologising for in this case," he said.
"We've got pretty rigorous systems here, we take call-taking seriously. Obviously having over 750,000 calls a year, we investigate any complaints and we also have random audits of calls to make sure that we're following correct procedures."
He said the woman involved in the car crash was not seriously injured and was taken to Ballarat Hospital in a stable condition.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Four current articles below
Climate report an assault on democracy, says Abbott
TONY Abbott has rejected the latest climate change report from economist Ross Garnaut as an assault on democracy, warning that it proposes to give a committee of unelected appointees the power to set tax rates.
As the Opposition Leader yesterday complained of a "democratic deficit" over Labor's proposed carbon tax, Julia Gillard noted the report rejected Mr Abbott's proposal to tackle climate change through direct action measures such as planting trees.
Delivering his final climate change update report at the National Press Club yesterday, Professor Garnaut said the direct action approach risked entrenching the political culture of vested interests that had resisted economic reform for eight decades.
"The big rewards in low-emissions investments in regulatory approaches would go to those who persuaded the minister or the bureaucrat that their idea was worthy of being included in the direct action plan," he said.
"If not under the government that introduced the direct action policies then under the governments that followed."
In his report, Professor Garnaut proposed the establishment of an independent committee to set Australia's carbon emission reduction levels -- a proposal that could break the deadlock preventing Labor from winning Greens' support for the tax.
Mr Abbott seized on the proposal, warning it would put the power to set tax rates out of the hands of accountable politicians.
"There is a developing democratic deficit here," he said. "First of all the Prime Minister wasn't upfront with the Australian public before the election. Now the idea that taxes in this country should effectively be set by people who are outside the parliament, and who are not accountable to the people, I think, is just odd.
"This just goes to show how out of control the government is on this whole climate change question."
Later, the Opposition Leader continued his attack in question time, noting that the report said: "Australian households will ultimately bear the full cost of a carbon price".
"So how can (the Prime Minister) continue to maintain that her tax only makes big polluters pay?" Mr Abbott asked parliament. "Who pays? Big polluters or households? The truth is: households."
Ms Gillard accused Mr Abbott of misrepresenting the report, and hit back by pointing out that the report criticised Mr Abbott's direct action policy.
More HERE
No pain, no gain: compensation vitiates carbon tax
"Compensation" means that the tax will not have the effect that is its only justification!
ANYONE who thinks the proposed carbon tax is mainly about the environment is mistaken. That may have been where the debate started. But due to political pressure on the minority government, it has morphed into an exercise in wealth redistribution, not environmental action. And Labor has many environmental groups and advocates fooled.
Because Labor can't afford to lose seats at the next election (in fact, it needs to win seats to gain a majority), but also has to be seen to be doing something as a government, it is trying to convince voters it is acting on the environment while also compensating them for that action to a point where the action itself becomes meaningless.
Cate Blanchett is a fine actor, and as Coalition MPs have said -- before launching scathing attacks on her -- she is certainly entitled to her opinion. Blanchett is also entitled to use her hard-earned fame to spruik ideas and policy positions that matter to her. And the third parties that have funded the pro-carbon-tax campaign Blanchett is part of -- GetUp, the ACTU and the Australian Conservation Foundation -- are entitled to approach her to help.
There is nothing wrong with such campaigns. After all, the miners campaigned against the super-profits tax, and retailers and the tobacco industry are campaigning against plain packaging of cigarettes. What's wrong with individuals doing the same?
What I question, however, is the value of Blanchett taking part in a campaign aimed at convincing ordinary voters of the carbon tax's merits. I am not sure an actor of her international standing is the best person to front a campaign that affects the cost of living. It contrasts sharply with the very impressive campaign against Work Choices the union movement organised with voices from real workers under threat from the Howard government's laws in the lead-up to the 2007 election.
For that matter, I wonder whether Blanchett has thought things through. Blanchett is no dummy. She completed a degree in economics before deciding acting was her calling. However, the logical thinking necessary for an economics degree seems to have deserted Blanchett on this matter.
She has been blinded by her passion for environmental action on climate change. Consider the interview she gave yesterday to a rival newspaper.
Blanchett said "everyone will benefit if we protect the environment". Yes, but does a carbon tax do that? It won't if it causes no fiscal pain to consumers, because the whole point of a carbon tax is that it creates a price pressure on the use of dirty energy, thereby encouraging consumers and businesses to change their ways.
But Blanchett also wants to be the people's princess -- in the interview she said her support for a carbon tax was conditional on "generous assistance" for low- and middle-income earners. She has fallen for the trickery of the carbon tax and her own attempt to stay popular when advocating it.
Take with one hand (carbon tax), give with the other (compensation). The result? No price pressure or incentive for people to change their energy use.
Make no mistake, when the carbon tax is applied to businesses, they will pass on that cost to consumers to maintain their profitability. Consumers will tolerate that price rise if they are rich, and go on burning energy but simply pay more. Mainstream voters and the disadvantaged will secure generous compensation from the government (don't believe Tony Abbott when he says otherwise), which will allow them to keep consuming dirty energy without changing their ways.
The government may claim there is pricing pressure, regardless of compensation, because polluting companies will have to raise prices, but the carbon tax would have to be much higher to have a real effect.
What does all of this add up to: wealth redistribution with little impact on the environment unless the compensation is rescinded and consumers are thereby forced to change their ways -- or unless the price on carbon goes up quickly and the compensation packages don't.
SOURCE
"Eco" resort bombs
It got all sorts of awards -- from everybody except paying customers. Nice when Green/Left elitists feel in their hip pocket how out of touch they are
THE Gold Coast's embattled tourism industry has copped another blow with multi-award-winning eco-tourism retreat Couran Cove Island Resort closing its doors.
Hailed as a benchmark tourism facility when it opened 13 years ago, the South Stradbroke Island resort is to be placed into voluntary liquidation. Its owner, InterPacific Group, yesterday announced that it was putting the resort up for sale after a "sustained period of low occupancy" and years of operating at a "considerable loss".
Staff have been laid off, with those eligible provided with redundancy payments and full entitlements. It is understood a skeleton crew has been retained to maintain the sporting and eco-friendly resort's facilities.
In a statement, InterPacific said that, although Couran Cove had stopped operating as a resort, its facilities would remain accessible to owners of the private residences within the resort.
"Over the past 13 years, considerable time, energy and money has been invested to create the premium resort Couran Cove is today," it said. "However, this hasn't been enough to combat a volatile global economy, weak local tourism conditions, a lack of industry support and rising operating and infrastructure costs.
"The resort has been operating at a considerable loss for a number of years and, sadly, despite our best efforts, this is an unsustainable position for any business operation. "This is the most sensible course of action for the business and its shareholders."
Couran Cove's development on a 151ha site was spearheaded by former Olympic runner Ron Clarke before he was elected Gold Coast mayor. Billionaire American philanthropist Chuck Feeney, who bankrolled the project but later had a falling-out with Cr Clarke, reportedly has been propping up the resort - pouring $283 million into it since 1998.
InterPacific is owned by Mr Feeney's Bermuda-based charity foundation Atlantic Philanthropies.
Corporate doctors Ferrier Hodgson will be appointed liquidators today to facilitate its sale.
Industry sources said InterPacific had been unsuccessfully trying to offload the South Stradbroke Island resort for several years.
The resort has won more than 50 domestic and international awards for excellence.
SOURCE
Global cooling hits South Australia
ANYONE shivering in Adelaide this morning had good reason to do so it is the coldest start to June on record. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Vince Rowlands said the minimum temperature was a chilly 3.7C at 7.24am at Kent Town on the first day of winter. "I think it's the coldest start to a June that we've ever had at Kent Town," Mr Rowlands said.
Elsewhere around the state the mercury dropped to -2.7C in Yunta, -1.3C in Renmark, -1C in Clare and Coonawarra was -0.6C.
"Around Adelaide itself, Elizabeth got down to 4C, as far as the Hills go, Mt Lofty stayed a touch warmer because of the winds but I'd certainly expect the back of the Ranges to be pretty cold Murray Bridge got down to 1C," he said.
Mr Rowlands said the cold was to be expected with winter. "Obviously the atmosphere is a lot colder and then we get the really clear nights like we've had over the last couple of days, there's nothing stopping the heat from escaping into the atmosphere and we get these really cold conditions."
More HERE
By Michael Duffy and Bob Bottom.
We have just finished a 21-part history of organised crime in Sydney, for a series to be published in the Herald's new iPad edition. Most organised crime took place in the 20th century, and naturally we found ourselves pondering why.
What we found is that much of it emerged following the introduction of laws banning popular pleasures. America is famous for one big Prohibition: we had a lot of smaller ones.
What happens is that illegal markets are set up to provide the banned goods and services such as drugs and alcohol or gambling and prostitution. The volume of these illegal transactions is enormous, making it profitable for organisational entrepreneurs to move in. They take two forms: the efficient businessmen, such as Abe Saffron and George Freeman, and the standover men who in effect “tax” the illegal businesses, and give permission for them to stay open. Perhaps Sydney's most famous standover man was Lennie McPherson, known in some circles as Mr Big and in others as Mr Ten Per Cent.
One example of this pattern was the 1916 Liquor Act, which made the sale of alcohol illegal after 6pm. It was to assist with wartime productivity, but was not repealed until long after World War II. It spawned dozens of illegal bars around the city catering to everyone desperate for a drink in convivial surroundings after dark. People prepared to supply them, whether Kate Leigh with her sly grog joints in Surry Hills or Joe Taylor's and Saffron's celebrity nightclubs later on, became very wealthy.
You can track the rise and fall of a great deal of organised crime against the legislative history of popular pleasures, with a decline as laws were introduced legalising prostitution and extending drinking hours, and with the creation (and later the extension) of the TAB and the setting up of NSW's first legal casino, Star City, in 1995.
The nature of the illegal pleasures shapes the nature of the organised crime that arises to provide them. Drugs are unusual, historically, because they are not sold or consumed at a relatively small number of locations. This means dealers are harder to locate and tax, making it impossible for standover men to impose a certain amount of stability on the underworld. The profits are enormous and easy, which attracts a continual stream of psychopaths into the milieu to try to rip off those already there.
For these reasons, the drug underworld is far more volatile and violent than the old underworld based on alcohol and gambling and prostitution. The days when McPherson, Freeman and Stan Smith could pretty well run the underworld for decades are long gone.
A final difference is drugs are used by a relatively small number of people. This means police and politicians are far less prepared to take bribes – an important factor in the decline of corruption in recent decades.
What does history tell us about measures that work against organised crime? The biggest success in Sydney was in 1930, in response to the violence of the razor gangs involved in cocaine and other illegal trades. Parliament passed the NSW Vagrancy (Amendment) Act, which made it illegal to be seen habitually with reputed criminals or people with no visible means of support.
Alfred McCoy, in his book Drug Traffic, calls this “one of the most authoritarian and effective measures against organised crime ever passed in a Western democracy”. Police numbers were increased and it became illegal to carry a razor. Within months the level of violence dropped. It took longer – about five years – but the cocaine trade was crushed.
The laws were draconian, but according to McCoy, “In the small-town atmosphere of Sydney in the 1930s it was generally understood who the targets were to be, and there were few abuses of these exceptional powers and fewer civil libertarian qualms.”
Would the law be acceptable today? Justice James Wood noted, during his Police Royal Commission in the 1990s, that the law gave police such extraordinary powers that it eventually became “an instrument for corruption and for the establishment of improper relationships”.
Still, harsher laws can work. One great example of this is America's RICO legislation, which allows someone to be sentenced to a long jail term if they are a member of an organisation that has committed any two of 35 designated crimes. The law has been particularly useful in locking up large numbers of criminal bosses. Writer Evan Whitton has urged NSW to consider such a law, and we think the idea deserves serious consideration.
SOURCE
Crash site 'did not exist', according to arrogant ambulance operator
Ambulance Victoria has apologised to a triple-0 caller who was told by an emergency operator that the crash site he was calling from "did not exist".
Peter Rennie was driving along the Daylesford-Ballarat Road at Dean, about 20 kilometres north-east of Ballarat, when he came across a car that had smashed into a tree on May 23. Another motorist stayed with the injured woman who was trapped inside the vehicle while Mr Rennie ran to the nearest corner - the intersection with Dean-Mollongghip Road - to call an ambulance.
He spelt out the road sign to the operator over his mobile phone, only to be told his location didn't exist. "I didn't know how to pronounce it so I spelt it out right from the start," Mr Rennie told the Ballarat Courier. "When I spoke to an operator, I was told there was nowhere in Victoria called Dean.
"I couldn't believe it. I said the system had no idea, and then I was told to check my attitude. "I said to them: 'What do we do? Do we leave this poor woman in the car to die?' " He said the operator finally found the location and sent an ambulance, before hanging up.
Ambulance Victoria spokesman Paul Howe today said the organisation had reviewed a recording of the exchange, and had apologised to Mr Rennie. He said the operator had been "dismissive" of the caller, and would receive further training in light of the mix-up. "It was purely a human error on the call-taker side and, listening to it, it clearly wasn't handled by the book," Mr Howe said.
"We didn't follow the correct protocols and we apologised to the person who made the call."
Mr Howe said he believed the tense exchange between the operator and Mr Rennie lasted minutes. "I don't believe that it was a long time, but clearly in a stressful situation anything that's going to add any anxiety or distress is not ideal, and that's what we're certainly apologising for in this case," he said.
"We've got pretty rigorous systems here, we take call-taking seriously. Obviously having over 750,000 calls a year, we investigate any complaints and we also have random audits of calls to make sure that we're following correct procedures."
He said the woman involved in the car crash was not seriously injured and was taken to Ballarat Hospital in a stable condition.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Four current articles below
Climate report an assault on democracy, says Abbott
TONY Abbott has rejected the latest climate change report from economist Ross Garnaut as an assault on democracy, warning that it proposes to give a committee of unelected appointees the power to set tax rates.
As the Opposition Leader yesterday complained of a "democratic deficit" over Labor's proposed carbon tax, Julia Gillard noted the report rejected Mr Abbott's proposal to tackle climate change through direct action measures such as planting trees.
Delivering his final climate change update report at the National Press Club yesterday, Professor Garnaut said the direct action approach risked entrenching the political culture of vested interests that had resisted economic reform for eight decades.
"The big rewards in low-emissions investments in regulatory approaches would go to those who persuaded the minister or the bureaucrat that their idea was worthy of being included in the direct action plan," he said.
"If not under the government that introduced the direct action policies then under the governments that followed."
In his report, Professor Garnaut proposed the establishment of an independent committee to set Australia's carbon emission reduction levels -- a proposal that could break the deadlock preventing Labor from winning Greens' support for the tax.
Mr Abbott seized on the proposal, warning it would put the power to set tax rates out of the hands of accountable politicians.
"There is a developing democratic deficit here," he said. "First of all the Prime Minister wasn't upfront with the Australian public before the election. Now the idea that taxes in this country should effectively be set by people who are outside the parliament, and who are not accountable to the people, I think, is just odd.
"This just goes to show how out of control the government is on this whole climate change question."
Later, the Opposition Leader continued his attack in question time, noting that the report said: "Australian households will ultimately bear the full cost of a carbon price".
"So how can (the Prime Minister) continue to maintain that her tax only makes big polluters pay?" Mr Abbott asked parliament. "Who pays? Big polluters or households? The truth is: households."
Ms Gillard accused Mr Abbott of misrepresenting the report, and hit back by pointing out that the report criticised Mr Abbott's direct action policy.
More HERE
No pain, no gain: compensation vitiates carbon tax
"Compensation" means that the tax will not have the effect that is its only justification!
ANYONE who thinks the proposed carbon tax is mainly about the environment is mistaken. That may have been where the debate started. But due to political pressure on the minority government, it has morphed into an exercise in wealth redistribution, not environmental action. And Labor has many environmental groups and advocates fooled.
Because Labor can't afford to lose seats at the next election (in fact, it needs to win seats to gain a majority), but also has to be seen to be doing something as a government, it is trying to convince voters it is acting on the environment while also compensating them for that action to a point where the action itself becomes meaningless.
Cate Blanchett is a fine actor, and as Coalition MPs have said -- before launching scathing attacks on her -- she is certainly entitled to her opinion. Blanchett is also entitled to use her hard-earned fame to spruik ideas and policy positions that matter to her. And the third parties that have funded the pro-carbon-tax campaign Blanchett is part of -- GetUp, the ACTU and the Australian Conservation Foundation -- are entitled to approach her to help.
There is nothing wrong with such campaigns. After all, the miners campaigned against the super-profits tax, and retailers and the tobacco industry are campaigning against plain packaging of cigarettes. What's wrong with individuals doing the same?
What I question, however, is the value of Blanchett taking part in a campaign aimed at convincing ordinary voters of the carbon tax's merits. I am not sure an actor of her international standing is the best person to front a campaign that affects the cost of living. It contrasts sharply with the very impressive campaign against Work Choices the union movement organised with voices from real workers under threat from the Howard government's laws in the lead-up to the 2007 election.
For that matter, I wonder whether Blanchett has thought things through. Blanchett is no dummy. She completed a degree in economics before deciding acting was her calling. However, the logical thinking necessary for an economics degree seems to have deserted Blanchett on this matter.
She has been blinded by her passion for environmental action on climate change. Consider the interview she gave yesterday to a rival newspaper.
Blanchett said "everyone will benefit if we protect the environment". Yes, but does a carbon tax do that? It won't if it causes no fiscal pain to consumers, because the whole point of a carbon tax is that it creates a price pressure on the use of dirty energy, thereby encouraging consumers and businesses to change their ways.
But Blanchett also wants to be the people's princess -- in the interview she said her support for a carbon tax was conditional on "generous assistance" for low- and middle-income earners. She has fallen for the trickery of the carbon tax and her own attempt to stay popular when advocating it.
Take with one hand (carbon tax), give with the other (compensation). The result? No price pressure or incentive for people to change their energy use.
Make no mistake, when the carbon tax is applied to businesses, they will pass on that cost to consumers to maintain their profitability. Consumers will tolerate that price rise if they are rich, and go on burning energy but simply pay more. Mainstream voters and the disadvantaged will secure generous compensation from the government (don't believe Tony Abbott when he says otherwise), which will allow them to keep consuming dirty energy without changing their ways.
The government may claim there is pricing pressure, regardless of compensation, because polluting companies will have to raise prices, but the carbon tax would have to be much higher to have a real effect.
What does all of this add up to: wealth redistribution with little impact on the environment unless the compensation is rescinded and consumers are thereby forced to change their ways -- or unless the price on carbon goes up quickly and the compensation packages don't.
SOURCE
"Eco" resort bombs
It got all sorts of awards -- from everybody except paying customers. Nice when Green/Left elitists feel in their hip pocket how out of touch they are
THE Gold Coast's embattled tourism industry has copped another blow with multi-award-winning eco-tourism retreat Couran Cove Island Resort closing its doors.
Hailed as a benchmark tourism facility when it opened 13 years ago, the South Stradbroke Island resort is to be placed into voluntary liquidation. Its owner, InterPacific Group, yesterday announced that it was putting the resort up for sale after a "sustained period of low occupancy" and years of operating at a "considerable loss".
Staff have been laid off, with those eligible provided with redundancy payments and full entitlements. It is understood a skeleton crew has been retained to maintain the sporting and eco-friendly resort's facilities.
In a statement, InterPacific said that, although Couran Cove had stopped operating as a resort, its facilities would remain accessible to owners of the private residences within the resort.
"Over the past 13 years, considerable time, energy and money has been invested to create the premium resort Couran Cove is today," it said. "However, this hasn't been enough to combat a volatile global economy, weak local tourism conditions, a lack of industry support and rising operating and infrastructure costs.
"The resort has been operating at a considerable loss for a number of years and, sadly, despite our best efforts, this is an unsustainable position for any business operation. "This is the most sensible course of action for the business and its shareholders."
Couran Cove's development on a 151ha site was spearheaded by former Olympic runner Ron Clarke before he was elected Gold Coast mayor. Billionaire American philanthropist Chuck Feeney, who bankrolled the project but later had a falling-out with Cr Clarke, reportedly has been propping up the resort - pouring $283 million into it since 1998.
InterPacific is owned by Mr Feeney's Bermuda-based charity foundation Atlantic Philanthropies.
Corporate doctors Ferrier Hodgson will be appointed liquidators today to facilitate its sale.
Industry sources said InterPacific had been unsuccessfully trying to offload the South Stradbroke Island resort for several years.
The resort has won more than 50 domestic and international awards for excellence.
SOURCE
Global cooling hits South Australia
ANYONE shivering in Adelaide this morning had good reason to do so it is the coldest start to June on record. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Vince Rowlands said the minimum temperature was a chilly 3.7C at 7.24am at Kent Town on the first day of winter. "I think it's the coldest start to a June that we've ever had at Kent Town," Mr Rowlands said.
Elsewhere around the state the mercury dropped to -2.7C in Yunta, -1.3C in Renmark, -1C in Clare and Coonawarra was -0.6C.
"Around Adelaide itself, Elizabeth got down to 4C, as far as the Hills go, Mt Lofty stayed a touch warmer because of the winds but I'd certainly expect the back of the Ranges to be pretty cold Murray Bridge got down to 1C," he said.
Mr Rowlands said the cold was to be expected with winter. "Obviously the atmosphere is a lot colder and then we get the really clear nights like we've had over the last couple of days, there's nothing stopping the heat from escaping into the atmosphere and we get these really cold conditions."
More HERE
Monday, May 30, 2011
Queer judge blames Christians for spreading AIDS!
How offensive and perverse! Article below by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court judge who is openly homosexual. Christians are like Apartheid practitioners according to His Honour.
Instead of blaming Christians, might it not be a more productive strategy in the fight against AIDS to dissuade homosexual penises from entering homosexual anuses?
In 2010 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa declared that the time had come, particularly for Africans, to stop the “wave of hate” and to stand up “against wrong”.
He was referring to the wrong to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people” who are “part of the African family” and who “are living in fear.”
This news from Africa would be bad enough. But the same fear extends far beyond that continent. And in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which has afflicted humanity since the 1980s, the vulnerable are not only gays but also sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and women.
This fear exists in many countries where, despite the knowledge that science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities and sexual activities is encouraged and even sometimes promoted by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts.
They rely on their imperfect understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Dr. Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and founder of the Institute of Sex Research, demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience, the frequency and variety of its manifestations, and the dangers and injustice of punishing people for adult, private, consensual sexual conduct. [Relying on the perverted Kinsey and his discredited "research" shows the intellectual shallowness of Judge Kirby]
Most religious people are good and kind. Love for one another exists as a basic tenet in all religions and all cultures. I have myself been brought up in religious faith. I honour brothers and sisters in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.
However, officially the Roman Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the scientific evidence available about human sexuality. As they have often been in denial about science and its teachings in the past.
Just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the earth circled the sun. And as they, and the Anglican Church, originally denied Darwin’s thesis of evolution of the species, expounded 150 years ago.
Clutching onto imperfect understandings of ancient scripture, leaders of most of the spiritual faiths, instead of re-examining their holy texts by reference to science (as they did in other instances in the past), have adopted a new, irrational approach.
In other parts of the world, the hate may not always be so intense. But the stigma over sexual conduct that is often taught by religious people cannot be accepted any longer. It is now a major cause of death in the AIDS epidemic.
It has to stop. Not only because it is immoral, conflicted, irrational and wrong. But also because it is now seriously impeding the global struggle against HIV and AIDS for the saving of lives. The magnitude of the suffering demands blunt speaking at this time.
As Bishop Tutu has said: “All of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services…Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people too are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
Rightly, Bishop Tutu has drawn a parallel between the earlier, successful, global struggle against racial apartheid and the present global struggle against sexual apartheid. To the moral struggle against sexual apartheid must now be added the urgent needs of the struggle against HIV and AIDS.
More HERE
Australians want Julia Gillard and Labor gone, latest Newspoll reveals
It is often said that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them so this poll suggests a change of government
VOTERS don't approve of Julia Gillard and would kick Labor out of power if an election were held today, a new poll suggests. The latest Newspoll reveals that while there has been a bounce back in support for the Greens to 14 per cent, the ALP's primary vote remains stuck at 34 per cent.
Voters say they would elect the Coalition, but they do not approve of its leader, Tony Abbott.
The Newspoll, published today in The Australian newspaper, shows the Liberal Party turmoil of the past fortnight involving Mr Abbott and his frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey has not delivered a boost for Labor.
As Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott clashed in Parliament yesterday over the carbon tax, the PM took a blow from one of the independent MPs supporting her Government.
Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie said her plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia was an abomination. Labor had lost its moral superiority and walked away from one of the reasons he backed her as PM after the hung Parliament.
Mr Wilkie yesterday voted for a Greens motion condemning Ms Gillard's plan to swap 800 asylum seekers for 4000 refugees from Malaysia.
Another 52 asylum seekers arrived yesterday, the fourth boat since the Government announced - but has not signed - the Malaysian plan. It leaves 150 people waiting in limbo.
The only ray of light for the Government in the Newspoll came via the Greens. The jump in support for the Bob Brown-led party to lift its primary vote from 10 to 14 per cent has given Labor its best two-party vote since March.
Newspoll has the Coalition leading 52-48. The August election had both parties at 50-50. The telephone survey of 1128 people at the weekend found the Coalition's primary vote dipped two points to 44 per cent and Labor edged up a point to 34. Both moves are within the poll's margin of error.
When Ms Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd as PM Labor's support was 35 per cent. Today's poll shows she is still considered the better PM and in the past fortnight increased her lead over Mr Abbott from a wafer-thin four points to seven. But the 44 to 37 per cent lead is a far cry from the 50-31 lead she had just two months ago.
One in five voters could not decide between either party leader. That is reflected by the approval ratings, which show voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard at 35 per cent dissatisfaction 54 per cent. It's just as bad for Mr Abbott. His satisfaction ranking is 37 per cent and dissatisfaction 53 per cent.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Are you a genuine skeptic or a climate denier?
So asks JOHN COOK, writing on a site of Australia's ABC. He has the amusing assertion that those who reject Warmism consider only the evidence that suits them. Talk about the pot calling the kettle Afro-American!
Cook does link to a large number of Warmist assertions by others but is critical of none of them. He just lists them as gospel and does not at all consider whether the phenomena mentioned are caused by human action.
As can be seen on the header of GREENIE WATCH, skeptics generally accept that there has been SOME warming but dispute both its likely future magnitude and its origin.
Mr. Cook quite ignores the fact that he is peddling prophecies. And they rely purely on supposition, not evidence. And as far as I can find, Greenie prophecies have a record of complete falsity so far. Prophecy really is a mug's game.
Since he is so keen on taking into account ALL the evidence, it would be amusing to get his response to the fact that the tidal gauge data do not show an acceleration of Sea Level rise; that the NOAA -NODC data do not show a significant rise in Ocean Heat Content between 1979 and 1997; that the warming of the last 150 years has been a perfectly comfortable total of less than one degree Celsius -- etc.
In the charged discussions about climate, the words skeptic and denier are often thrown around. But what do these words mean?
Consider the following definitions. Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.
So here's one way to tell if you're a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.
When trying to understand what's happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?
For example, let's look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.
We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.
The most extreme form of climate denier won't even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They'll pull a quote out of context from a stolen 'Climategate' email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I'm sure there's a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
The hardcore denier, firmly entrenched in the "it's not happening" camp, denies each piece of evidence. When confronted by retreating glaciers, their thoughts flick to the handful of growing glaciers while blocking out the vast majority of glaciers that are retreating at an accelerating rate.
They ignore sea level rise by focusing on short periods where sea levels briefly drop before inevitably resuming the long-term upward trend. The key to this form of denial is cherry picking. If you stare long and hard enough at a tiny piece of the puzzle that gives you the answer you want, you find the rest of the picture conveniently fades from view.
Some climate deniers have found it impossible to ignore the overwhelming array of evidence that the planet is warming (cognitive bias does have its limits) and moved onto the next stage of denial: "it's happening but it's not us". After all, climate has changed throughout Earth's history. How can we tell it's us this time?
The answer, as always, is by surveying the full body of evidence. Warming from our carbon dioxide emissions should yield many tell tale patterns. We don't need to rely on guess work or theory to tell us humans are causing warming. We can measure it.
If carbon dioxide is causing warming, we should measure less heat escaping to space. Satellites have observed this, with heat being trapped at those very wavelengths that carbon dioxide absorb radiation. If less heat is escaping, we should see more heat returning to the Earth's surface. This has been measured. Greenhouse warming should cause the lower atmosphere to warm but simultaneously, the upper atmosphere to cool. That's indeed what we observe is happening.
As far back as the 1800s, scientists predicted greenhouse warming should cause nights to warm faster than days and winters to warm faster than summers. Both predictions have come true. Everything we expect to see from greenhouse warming, we do see.
So which camp do you fall in?
Do you look at the full body of evidence, considering the whole picture as you build your understanding of climate? Or do you gravitate towards those select pieces of data that, out of context, give a contrarian impression, while denying the rest of the evidence?
More HERE (See the original for links)
It's all hot air from the jet-setting eco brigade
Gerard Henderson
The Sunday Telegraph's "Carbon Cate" headline should have come as no surprise. Sure, it was a clever journalistic line in response to news that Cate Blanchett was heading the Australian Conservation Foundation's TV advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax. But Don Henry, the foundation's executive director, should have seen it - or something like it - coming.
On ABC radio on Sunday, Henry seemed unprepared for the criticism, which demonstrates just how out of touch some inner-city environmentalists are with predominant views in the suburbs and regions. Blanchett is an admirable and successful Australian. Even so, many Australians who struggle to pay their power bills each quarter do not want to be lectured to by a multimillionaire film star.
Some supporters of a carbon tax have declared that Blanchett has a right to say what she likes and said that the Academy Award winner should not be criticised on the grounds that she is rich. Both points are obvious. However, at issue is the double standard.
Irrespective of her wealth, if Blanchett lived like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, it is unlikely there would be any reaction to her telling Australians that it is time to do something about climate change. But those Australians who know who Blanchett is well understand that she has a very large carbon footprint. Not only does she live in a Hunters Hill mansion but she travels the world to practise her art.
Granted, at some cost, she has put solar panels on her family home. And she may offset her travel by arranging for someone to promise to plant trees somewhere. Yet the fact remains that she believes carbon emissions threaten the planet, and if everyone lived her life, carbon emissions would soar.
Australians in the suburbs and regions understand this. They also feel that many who live in the inner cities or wealthy suburbs close to the CBD look down on them. Blanchett and her husband, the director Andrew Upton, gave a talk to the City of Sydney in March. They looked back in happiness at the inner city of the 1980s but said that, at this time, "the suburbs could feel flat and dry and filled with sinister silence underneath the crickets and sprinklers". What snobbish bunk. (A personal declaration - I lived in the suburbs in the 1980s.)
One of the problems facing Julia Gillard is that so many of those who speak the loudest about the need to reduce carbon emissions have a personal carbon emissions footprint that would be the envy of most Australians.
Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Commission, travels the world calling for a reduction in carbon fuels. Tim Costello, World Vision Australia's chief executive, is another inveterate traveller. So is Dick Smith, who apparently feels the need to travel the world, sometimes flying his own aircraft, in order to save the world.
This is a common phenomenon. The Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, is a proselytiser for the environment. But she has been photographed travelling to work in a chauffeured car (even though she lives in the inner city) and owns a car with an off-street garage.
Shortly before Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, separated, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Gores had bought a mansion in Montecito with six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and one pool. An eco-catastrophist such as the former United States vice-president should have been able to manage with, say, three fireplaces and a mere four bathrooms. Al Gore also claims to offset his emissions. But, again, who would offset what if everyone lived like Gore?
This year Sting made yet another visit to Australia as part of his Symphonicity tour. Interviewed by Julian Morrow on Radio National, he was asked whether he felt a tension between his "environmentalist beliefs and the lifestyle of an international entertainer". The answer was, well, yes - but not really. Sting acknowledged that carbon offsets did not really work and that the criticism was justified but concluded: "I'm not given an alternative to do this life without burning fuel." Morrow accepted this.
Support for the carbon tax is highest among well-educated Australians who enjoy relatively secure employment or comfortable retirement - many of whom live in the inner cities. Concern about a carbon tax is greatest among Australians whose jobs are not so secure or who live on retirement incomes where life is a daily struggle - many of these Australians live in the suburbs and regional areas.
Viewed from the perspective of the ABC studio in Ultimo, the top 1000 emitting companies tend to be regarded as the big polluters. Viewed from Wollongong and Campbelltown, they tend to be considered the big employers. Of all the members of the Gillard cabinet, the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, understands this best.
Writing in her Open Salon blog last year, Ann Nichols put it this way: "It is very easy to preach about the value of the grass-fed, the solar, the phosphate-free and the organic when you are in a position to afford it all - or willing to decide for yourself that you can live without cars, meat or a washing machine." That is a question of affordability. Double standards add to this frustration.
It is true that the wealthy miners such as Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest publicly opposed the Rudd government's proposed mining tax. But they were urging others to do the same. It was a case of: "Do as I do." The problem with the Australian Conservation Foundation's advertisement is that the Blanchett line appears to be: "Do as I say but please don't do as I do, lest the planet burn." It's not a credible message.
SOURCE
Elitism doesn't sell
Leftist journalist David Penberthy, below, has some points of agreement with Gerard Henderson above
The decision of actors Cate Blanchett and Michael Caton to front advertisements supporting the Federal Government’s climate change policies has been denounced as a shocking act of impertinence by a pair of cashed-up lefties who have no right to enter the debate.
These advertisements are 100 per cent privately-funded and in a democracy such as ours people have every right to spend their money as they wish to make their point. That said, there’s a separate issue as to whether the advertisements are tactically smart. It’s more likely that rather than galvanising support for a carbon tax, they will have the opposite effect of alienating mainstream voters who simply want details about how much the carbon tax will cost them, and what type of compensation they will get in return.
The left of politics in Australia seems to be permanently afflicted by what could be described as the Don’s Party syndrome, whereby affluent and educated people think you can win debates by telling people what’s good for them.
Advertising executive Adam Ferrier wrote a good piece on The Australian yesterday fleshing out the point.
“One of the risks of any green campaign is that it appears like lefty, progressive, idealistic and elitist, detached from the struggles of everyday people,” Ferrier wrote. “At worst, Cate is at risk of making the cause elitist. For the millions this (ad campaign) cost, there are so many other ways to change behaviour than having an elitist talking head spruik a carbon tax as easily as spruiking x, y or z.”
The best example of this was the republican campaign, which culminated with a tragi-comic cocktail reception for the failed yes vote on the night of the ballot where Rachel Ward sobbed on husband Bryan Brown’s shoulder as Malcolm Turnbull declared that John Howard had “broken the nation’s heart”. What had really happened was that the republicans had completely stuffed their campaign by leaving much of the talking to celebrities while overlooking their first responsibility – to explain how a republic would work, why we needed one, and how life would change for the better under the new constitutional model.
The same mistakes are being made now by progressive people who believe in climate change. And the same mistakes are being made, spectacularly, by the Gillard Government. The PM looks like she is dancing to the tune of the Greens purely because of the disastrous quirk of democracy at last year’s election, where no-one actually won, and she decided to break her own promise of not introducing a carbon tax in order to form government. We are now moving headlong towards putting a price on carbon – ie, introducing a tax – and the Government is trying to win a debate when it is yet to provide people with any detail.
It’s a ludicrous manoeuvre, asking people to take you on trust when you have already breached their trust by changed the position you adopted in the election campaign. Until such a time as the Government releases details of how it will actually work, how much it will cost, how much compensation families will receive, they are sitting ducks.
The pro climate change lobby and actors such as Blanchett and Caton can say and do what it likes in an attempt to bolster its cause, and spend as much money as they wish in the process.
There is a separate issue though as to whether it will actually bolster the cause. In the absence of policy detail, and with the voters still smarting from being misled by the PM, you would have to say they’ve probably done their dough.
SOURCE
How offensive and perverse! Article below by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court judge who is openly homosexual. Christians are like Apartheid practitioners according to His Honour.
Instead of blaming Christians, might it not be a more productive strategy in the fight against AIDS to dissuade homosexual penises from entering homosexual anuses?
In 2010 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa declared that the time had come, particularly for Africans, to stop the “wave of hate” and to stand up “against wrong”.
He was referring to the wrong to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people” who are “part of the African family” and who “are living in fear.”
This news from Africa would be bad enough. But the same fear extends far beyond that continent. And in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which has afflicted humanity since the 1980s, the vulnerable are not only gays but also sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and women.
This fear exists in many countries where, despite the knowledge that science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities and sexual activities is encouraged and even sometimes promoted by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts.
They rely on their imperfect understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Dr. Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and founder of the Institute of Sex Research, demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience, the frequency and variety of its manifestations, and the dangers and injustice of punishing people for adult, private, consensual sexual conduct. [Relying on the perverted Kinsey and his discredited "research" shows the intellectual shallowness of Judge Kirby]
Most religious people are good and kind. Love for one another exists as a basic tenet in all religions and all cultures. I have myself been brought up in religious faith. I honour brothers and sisters in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.
However, officially the Roman Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the scientific evidence available about human sexuality. As they have often been in denial about science and its teachings in the past.
Just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the earth circled the sun. And as they, and the Anglican Church, originally denied Darwin’s thesis of evolution of the species, expounded 150 years ago.
Clutching onto imperfect understandings of ancient scripture, leaders of most of the spiritual faiths, instead of re-examining their holy texts by reference to science (as they did in other instances in the past), have adopted a new, irrational approach.
In other parts of the world, the hate may not always be so intense. But the stigma over sexual conduct that is often taught by religious people cannot be accepted any longer. It is now a major cause of death in the AIDS epidemic.
It has to stop. Not only because it is immoral, conflicted, irrational and wrong. But also because it is now seriously impeding the global struggle against HIV and AIDS for the saving of lives. The magnitude of the suffering demands blunt speaking at this time.
As Bishop Tutu has said: “All of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services…Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people too are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
Rightly, Bishop Tutu has drawn a parallel between the earlier, successful, global struggle against racial apartheid and the present global struggle against sexual apartheid. To the moral struggle against sexual apartheid must now be added the urgent needs of the struggle against HIV and AIDS.
More HERE
Australians want Julia Gillard and Labor gone, latest Newspoll reveals
It is often said that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them so this poll suggests a change of government
VOTERS don't approve of Julia Gillard and would kick Labor out of power if an election were held today, a new poll suggests. The latest Newspoll reveals that while there has been a bounce back in support for the Greens to 14 per cent, the ALP's primary vote remains stuck at 34 per cent.
Voters say they would elect the Coalition, but they do not approve of its leader, Tony Abbott.
The Newspoll, published today in The Australian newspaper, shows the Liberal Party turmoil of the past fortnight involving Mr Abbott and his frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey has not delivered a boost for Labor.
As Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott clashed in Parliament yesterday over the carbon tax, the PM took a blow from one of the independent MPs supporting her Government.
Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie said her plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia was an abomination. Labor had lost its moral superiority and walked away from one of the reasons he backed her as PM after the hung Parliament.
Mr Wilkie yesterday voted for a Greens motion condemning Ms Gillard's plan to swap 800 asylum seekers for 4000 refugees from Malaysia.
Another 52 asylum seekers arrived yesterday, the fourth boat since the Government announced - but has not signed - the Malaysian plan. It leaves 150 people waiting in limbo.
The only ray of light for the Government in the Newspoll came via the Greens. The jump in support for the Bob Brown-led party to lift its primary vote from 10 to 14 per cent has given Labor its best two-party vote since March.
Newspoll has the Coalition leading 52-48. The August election had both parties at 50-50. The telephone survey of 1128 people at the weekend found the Coalition's primary vote dipped two points to 44 per cent and Labor edged up a point to 34. Both moves are within the poll's margin of error.
When Ms Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd as PM Labor's support was 35 per cent. Today's poll shows she is still considered the better PM and in the past fortnight increased her lead over Mr Abbott from a wafer-thin four points to seven. But the 44 to 37 per cent lead is a far cry from the 50-31 lead she had just two months ago.
One in five voters could not decide between either party leader. That is reflected by the approval ratings, which show voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard at 35 per cent dissatisfaction 54 per cent. It's just as bad for Mr Abbott. His satisfaction ranking is 37 per cent and dissatisfaction 53 per cent.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Are you a genuine skeptic or a climate denier?
So asks JOHN COOK, writing on a site of Australia's ABC. He has the amusing assertion that those who reject Warmism consider only the evidence that suits them. Talk about the pot calling the kettle Afro-American!
Cook does link to a large number of Warmist assertions by others but is critical of none of them. He just lists them as gospel and does not at all consider whether the phenomena mentioned are caused by human action.
As can be seen on the header of GREENIE WATCH, skeptics generally accept that there has been SOME warming but dispute both its likely future magnitude and its origin.
Mr. Cook quite ignores the fact that he is peddling prophecies. And they rely purely on supposition, not evidence. And as far as I can find, Greenie prophecies have a record of complete falsity so far. Prophecy really is a mug's game.
Since he is so keen on taking into account ALL the evidence, it would be amusing to get his response to the fact that the tidal gauge data do not show an acceleration of Sea Level rise; that the NOAA -NODC data do not show a significant rise in Ocean Heat Content between 1979 and 1997; that the warming of the last 150 years has been a perfectly comfortable total of less than one degree Celsius -- etc.
In the charged discussions about climate, the words skeptic and denier are often thrown around. But what do these words mean?
Consider the following definitions. Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.
So here's one way to tell if you're a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.
When trying to understand what's happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?
For example, let's look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.
We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.
The most extreme form of climate denier won't even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They'll pull a quote out of context from a stolen 'Climategate' email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I'm sure there's a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
The hardcore denier, firmly entrenched in the "it's not happening" camp, denies each piece of evidence. When confronted by retreating glaciers, their thoughts flick to the handful of growing glaciers while blocking out the vast majority of glaciers that are retreating at an accelerating rate.
They ignore sea level rise by focusing on short periods where sea levels briefly drop before inevitably resuming the long-term upward trend. The key to this form of denial is cherry picking. If you stare long and hard enough at a tiny piece of the puzzle that gives you the answer you want, you find the rest of the picture conveniently fades from view.
Some climate deniers have found it impossible to ignore the overwhelming array of evidence that the planet is warming (cognitive bias does have its limits) and moved onto the next stage of denial: "it's happening but it's not us". After all, climate has changed throughout Earth's history. How can we tell it's us this time?
The answer, as always, is by surveying the full body of evidence. Warming from our carbon dioxide emissions should yield many tell tale patterns. We don't need to rely on guess work or theory to tell us humans are causing warming. We can measure it.
If carbon dioxide is causing warming, we should measure less heat escaping to space. Satellites have observed this, with heat being trapped at those very wavelengths that carbon dioxide absorb radiation. If less heat is escaping, we should see more heat returning to the Earth's surface. This has been measured. Greenhouse warming should cause the lower atmosphere to warm but simultaneously, the upper atmosphere to cool. That's indeed what we observe is happening.
As far back as the 1800s, scientists predicted greenhouse warming should cause nights to warm faster than days and winters to warm faster than summers. Both predictions have come true. Everything we expect to see from greenhouse warming, we do see.
So which camp do you fall in?
Do you look at the full body of evidence, considering the whole picture as you build your understanding of climate? Or do you gravitate towards those select pieces of data that, out of context, give a contrarian impression, while denying the rest of the evidence?
More HERE (See the original for links)
It's all hot air from the jet-setting eco brigade
Gerard Henderson
The Sunday Telegraph's "Carbon Cate" headline should have come as no surprise. Sure, it was a clever journalistic line in response to news that Cate Blanchett was heading the Australian Conservation Foundation's TV advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax. But Don Henry, the foundation's executive director, should have seen it - or something like it - coming.
On ABC radio on Sunday, Henry seemed unprepared for the criticism, which demonstrates just how out of touch some inner-city environmentalists are with predominant views in the suburbs and regions. Blanchett is an admirable and successful Australian. Even so, many Australians who struggle to pay their power bills each quarter do not want to be lectured to by a multimillionaire film star.
Some supporters of a carbon tax have declared that Blanchett has a right to say what she likes and said that the Academy Award winner should not be criticised on the grounds that she is rich. Both points are obvious. However, at issue is the double standard.
Irrespective of her wealth, if Blanchett lived like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, it is unlikely there would be any reaction to her telling Australians that it is time to do something about climate change. But those Australians who know who Blanchett is well understand that she has a very large carbon footprint. Not only does she live in a Hunters Hill mansion but she travels the world to practise her art.
Granted, at some cost, she has put solar panels on her family home. And she may offset her travel by arranging for someone to promise to plant trees somewhere. Yet the fact remains that she believes carbon emissions threaten the planet, and if everyone lived her life, carbon emissions would soar.
Australians in the suburbs and regions understand this. They also feel that many who live in the inner cities or wealthy suburbs close to the CBD look down on them. Blanchett and her husband, the director Andrew Upton, gave a talk to the City of Sydney in March. They looked back in happiness at the inner city of the 1980s but said that, at this time, "the suburbs could feel flat and dry and filled with sinister silence underneath the crickets and sprinklers". What snobbish bunk. (A personal declaration - I lived in the suburbs in the 1980s.)
One of the problems facing Julia Gillard is that so many of those who speak the loudest about the need to reduce carbon emissions have a personal carbon emissions footprint that would be the envy of most Australians.
Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Commission, travels the world calling for a reduction in carbon fuels. Tim Costello, World Vision Australia's chief executive, is another inveterate traveller. So is Dick Smith, who apparently feels the need to travel the world, sometimes flying his own aircraft, in order to save the world.
This is a common phenomenon. The Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, is a proselytiser for the environment. But she has been photographed travelling to work in a chauffeured car (even though she lives in the inner city) and owns a car with an off-street garage.
Shortly before Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, separated, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Gores had bought a mansion in Montecito with six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and one pool. An eco-catastrophist such as the former United States vice-president should have been able to manage with, say, three fireplaces and a mere four bathrooms. Al Gore also claims to offset his emissions. But, again, who would offset what if everyone lived like Gore?
This year Sting made yet another visit to Australia as part of his Symphonicity tour. Interviewed by Julian Morrow on Radio National, he was asked whether he felt a tension between his "environmentalist beliefs and the lifestyle of an international entertainer". The answer was, well, yes - but not really. Sting acknowledged that carbon offsets did not really work and that the criticism was justified but concluded: "I'm not given an alternative to do this life without burning fuel." Morrow accepted this.
Support for the carbon tax is highest among well-educated Australians who enjoy relatively secure employment or comfortable retirement - many of whom live in the inner cities. Concern about a carbon tax is greatest among Australians whose jobs are not so secure or who live on retirement incomes where life is a daily struggle - many of these Australians live in the suburbs and regional areas.
Viewed from the perspective of the ABC studio in Ultimo, the top 1000 emitting companies tend to be regarded as the big polluters. Viewed from Wollongong and Campbelltown, they tend to be considered the big employers. Of all the members of the Gillard cabinet, the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, understands this best.
Writing in her Open Salon blog last year, Ann Nichols put it this way: "It is very easy to preach about the value of the grass-fed, the solar, the phosphate-free and the organic when you are in a position to afford it all - or willing to decide for yourself that you can live without cars, meat or a washing machine." That is a question of affordability. Double standards add to this frustration.
It is true that the wealthy miners such as Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest publicly opposed the Rudd government's proposed mining tax. But they were urging others to do the same. It was a case of: "Do as I do." The problem with the Australian Conservation Foundation's advertisement is that the Blanchett line appears to be: "Do as I say but please don't do as I do, lest the planet burn." It's not a credible message.
SOURCE
Elitism doesn't sell
Leftist journalist David Penberthy, below, has some points of agreement with Gerard Henderson above
The decision of actors Cate Blanchett and Michael Caton to front advertisements supporting the Federal Government’s climate change policies has been denounced as a shocking act of impertinence by a pair of cashed-up lefties who have no right to enter the debate.
These advertisements are 100 per cent privately-funded and in a democracy such as ours people have every right to spend their money as they wish to make their point. That said, there’s a separate issue as to whether the advertisements are tactically smart. It’s more likely that rather than galvanising support for a carbon tax, they will have the opposite effect of alienating mainstream voters who simply want details about how much the carbon tax will cost them, and what type of compensation they will get in return.
The left of politics in Australia seems to be permanently afflicted by what could be described as the Don’s Party syndrome, whereby affluent and educated people think you can win debates by telling people what’s good for them.
Advertising executive Adam Ferrier wrote a good piece on The Australian yesterday fleshing out the point.
“One of the risks of any green campaign is that it appears like lefty, progressive, idealistic and elitist, detached from the struggles of everyday people,” Ferrier wrote. “At worst, Cate is at risk of making the cause elitist. For the millions this (ad campaign) cost, there are so many other ways to change behaviour than having an elitist talking head spruik a carbon tax as easily as spruiking x, y or z.”
The best example of this was the republican campaign, which culminated with a tragi-comic cocktail reception for the failed yes vote on the night of the ballot where Rachel Ward sobbed on husband Bryan Brown’s shoulder as Malcolm Turnbull declared that John Howard had “broken the nation’s heart”. What had really happened was that the republicans had completely stuffed their campaign by leaving much of the talking to celebrities while overlooking their first responsibility – to explain how a republic would work, why we needed one, and how life would change for the better under the new constitutional model.
The same mistakes are being made now by progressive people who believe in climate change. And the same mistakes are being made, spectacularly, by the Gillard Government. The PM looks like she is dancing to the tune of the Greens purely because of the disastrous quirk of democracy at last year’s election, where no-one actually won, and she decided to break her own promise of not introducing a carbon tax in order to form government. We are now moving headlong towards putting a price on carbon – ie, introducing a tax – and the Government is trying to win a debate when it is yet to provide people with any detail.
It’s a ludicrous manoeuvre, asking people to take you on trust when you have already breached their trust by changed the position you adopted in the election campaign. Until such a time as the Government releases details of how it will actually work, how much it will cost, how much compensation families will receive, they are sitting ducks.
The pro climate change lobby and actors such as Blanchett and Caton can say and do what it likes in an attempt to bolster its cause, and spend as much money as they wish in the process.
There is a separate issue though as to whether it will actually bolster the cause. In the absence of policy detail, and with the voters still smarting from being misled by the PM, you would have to say they’ve probably done their dough.
SOURCE
Queer judge blames Christians for spreading AIDS!
How offensive and perverse! Article below by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court judge who is openly homosexual. Christians are like Apartheid practitioners according to His Honour.
Instead of blaming Christians, might it not be a more productive strategy in the fight against AIDS to dissuade homosexual penises from entering homosexual anuses?
In 2010 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa declared that the time had come, particularly for Africans, to stop the “wave of hate” and to stand up “against wrong”.
He was referring to the wrong to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people” who are “part of the African family” and who “are living in fear.”
This news from Africa would be bad enough. But the same fear extends far beyond that continent. And in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which has afflicted humanity since the 1980s, the vulnerable are not only gays but also sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and women.
This fear exists in many countries where, despite the knowledge that science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities and sexual activities is encouraged and even sometimes promoted by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts.
They rely on their imperfect understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Dr. Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and founder of the Institute of Sex Research, demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience, the frequency and variety of its manifestations, and the dangers and injustice of punishing people for adult, private, consensual sexual conduct. [Relying on the perverted Kinsey and his discredited "research" shows the intellectual shallowness of Judge Kirby]
Most religious people are good and kind. Love for one another exists as a basic tenet in all religions and all cultures. I have myself been brought up in religious faith. I honour brothers and sisters in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.
However, officially the Roman Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the scientific evidence available about human sexuality. As they have often been in denial about science and its teachings in the past.
Just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the earth circled the sun. And as they, and the Anglican Church, originally denied Darwin’s thesis of evolution of the species, expounded 150 years ago.
Clutching onto imperfect understandings of ancient scripture, leaders of most of the spiritual faiths, instead of re-examining their holy texts by reference to science (as they did in other instances in the past), have adopted a new, irrational approach.
In other parts of the world, the hate may not always be so intense. But the stigma over sexual conduct that is often taught by religious people cannot be accepted any longer. It is now a major cause of death in the AIDS epidemic.
It has to stop. Not only because it is immoral, conflicted, irrational and wrong. But also because it is now seriously impeding the global struggle against HIV and AIDS for the saving of lives. The magnitude of the suffering demands blunt speaking at this time.
As Bishop Tutu has said: “All of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services…Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people too are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
Rightly, Bishop Tutu has drawn a parallel between the earlier, successful, global struggle against racial apartheid and the present global struggle against sexual apartheid. To the moral struggle against sexual apartheid must now be added the urgent needs of the struggle against HIV and AIDS.
More HERE
Australians want Julia Gillard and Labor gone, latest Newspoll reveals
It is often said that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them so this poll suggests a change of government
VOTERS don't approve of Julia Gillard and would kick Labor out of power if an election were held today, a new poll suggests. The latest Newspoll reveals that while there has been a bounce back in support for the Greens to 14 per cent, the ALP's primary vote remains stuck at 34 per cent.
Voters say they would elect the Coalition, but they do not approve of its leader, Tony Abbott.
The Newspoll, published today in The Australian newspaper, shows the Liberal Party turmoil of the past fortnight involving Mr Abbott and his frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey has not delivered a boost for Labor.
As Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott clashed in Parliament yesterday over the carbon tax, the PM took a blow from one of the independent MPs supporting her Government.
Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie said her plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia was an abomination. Labor had lost its moral superiority and walked away from one of the reasons he backed her as PM after the hung Parliament.
Mr Wilkie yesterday voted for a Greens motion condemning Ms Gillard's plan to swap 800 asylum seekers for 4000 refugees from Malaysia.
Another 52 asylum seekers arrived yesterday, the fourth boat since the Government announced - but has not signed - the Malaysian plan. It leaves 150 people waiting in limbo.
The only ray of light for the Government in the Newspoll came via the Greens. The jump in support for the Bob Brown-led party to lift its primary vote from 10 to 14 per cent has given Labor its best two-party vote since March.
Newspoll has the Coalition leading 52-48. The August election had both parties at 50-50. The telephone survey of 1128 people at the weekend found the Coalition's primary vote dipped two points to 44 per cent and Labor edged up a point to 34. Both moves are within the poll's margin of error.
When Ms Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd as PM Labor's support was 35 per cent. Today's poll shows she is still considered the better PM and in the past fortnight increased her lead over Mr Abbott from a wafer-thin four points to seven. But the 44 to 37 per cent lead is a far cry from the 50-31 lead she had just two months ago.
One in five voters could not decide between either party leader. That is reflected by the approval ratings, which show voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard at 35 per cent dissatisfaction 54 per cent. It's just as bad for Mr Abbott. His satisfaction ranking is 37 per cent and dissatisfaction 53 per cent.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Are you a genuine skeptic or a climate denier?
So asks JOHN COOK, writing on a site of Australia's ABC. He has the amusing assertion that those who reject Warmism consider only the evidence that suits them. Talk about the pot calling the kettle Afro-American!
Cook does link to a large number of Warmist assertions by others but is critical of none of them. He just lists them as gospel and does not at all consider whether the phenomena mentioned are caused by human action.
As can be seen on the header of GREENIE WATCH, skeptics generally accept that there has been SOME warming but dispute both its likely future magnitude and its origin.
Mr. Cook quite ignores the fact that he is peddling prophecies. And they rely purely on supposition, not evidence. And as far as I can find, Greenie prophecies have a record of complete falsity so far. Prophecy really is a mug's game.
Since he is so keen on taking into account ALL the evidence, it would be amusing to get his response to the fact that the tidal gauge data do not show an acceleration of Sea Level rise; that the NOAA -NODC data do not show a significant rise in Ocean Heat Content between 1979 and 1997; that the warming of the last 150 years has been a perfectly comfortable total of less than one degree Celsius -- etc.
In the charged discussions about climate, the words skeptic and denier are often thrown around. But what do these words mean?
Consider the following definitions. Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.
So here's one way to tell if you're a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.
When trying to understand what's happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?
For example, let's look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.
We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.
The most extreme form of climate denier won't even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They'll pull a quote out of context from a stolen 'Climategate' email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I'm sure there's a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
The hardcore denier, firmly entrenched in the "it's not happening" camp, denies each piece of evidence. When confronted by retreating glaciers, their thoughts flick to the handful of growing glaciers while blocking out the vast majority of glaciers that are retreating at an accelerating rate.
They ignore sea level rise by focusing on short periods where sea levels briefly drop before inevitably resuming the long-term upward trend. The key to this form of denial is cherry picking. If you stare long and hard enough at a tiny piece of the puzzle that gives you the answer you want, you find the rest of the picture conveniently fades from view.
Some climate deniers have found it impossible to ignore the overwhelming array of evidence that the planet is warming (cognitive bias does have its limits) and moved onto the next stage of denial: "it's happening but it's not us". After all, climate has changed throughout Earth's history. How can we tell it's us this time?
The answer, as always, is by surveying the full body of evidence. Warming from our carbon dioxide emissions should yield many tell tale patterns. We don't need to rely on guess work or theory to tell us humans are causing warming. We can measure it.
If carbon dioxide is causing warming, we should measure less heat escaping to space. Satellites have observed this, with heat being trapped at those very wavelengths that carbon dioxide absorb radiation. If less heat is escaping, we should see more heat returning to the Earth's surface. This has been measured. Greenhouse warming should cause the lower atmosphere to warm but simultaneously, the upper atmosphere to cool. That's indeed what we observe is happening.
As far back as the 1800s, scientists predicted greenhouse warming should cause nights to warm faster than days and winters to warm faster than summers. Both predictions have come true. Everything we expect to see from greenhouse warming, we do see.
So which camp do you fall in?
Do you look at the full body of evidence, considering the whole picture as you build your understanding of climate? Or do you gravitate towards those select pieces of data that, out of context, give a contrarian impression, while denying the rest of the evidence?
More HERE (See the original for links)
It's all hot air from the jet-setting eco brigade
Gerard Henderson
The Sunday Telegraph's "Carbon Cate" headline should have come as no surprise. Sure, it was a clever journalistic line in response to news that Cate Blanchett was heading the Australian Conservation Foundation's TV advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax. But Don Henry, the foundation's executive director, should have seen it - or something like it - coming.
On ABC radio on Sunday, Henry seemed unprepared for the criticism, which demonstrates just how out of touch some inner-city environmentalists are with predominant views in the suburbs and regions. Blanchett is an admirable and successful Australian. Even so, many Australians who struggle to pay their power bills each quarter do not want to be lectured to by a multimillionaire film star.
Some supporters of a carbon tax have declared that Blanchett has a right to say what she likes and said that the Academy Award winner should not be criticised on the grounds that she is rich. Both points are obvious. However, at issue is the double standard.
Irrespective of her wealth, if Blanchett lived like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, it is unlikely there would be any reaction to her telling Australians that it is time to do something about climate change. But those Australians who know who Blanchett is well understand that she has a very large carbon footprint. Not only does she live in a Hunters Hill mansion but she travels the world to practise her art.
Granted, at some cost, she has put solar panels on her family home. And she may offset her travel by arranging for someone to promise to plant trees somewhere. Yet the fact remains that she believes carbon emissions threaten the planet, and if everyone lived her life, carbon emissions would soar.
Australians in the suburbs and regions understand this. They also feel that many who live in the inner cities or wealthy suburbs close to the CBD look down on them. Blanchett and her husband, the director Andrew Upton, gave a talk to the City of Sydney in March. They looked back in happiness at the inner city of the 1980s but said that, at this time, "the suburbs could feel flat and dry and filled with sinister silence underneath the crickets and sprinklers". What snobbish bunk. (A personal declaration - I lived in the suburbs in the 1980s.)
One of the problems facing Julia Gillard is that so many of those who speak the loudest about the need to reduce carbon emissions have a personal carbon emissions footprint that would be the envy of most Australians.
Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Commission, travels the world calling for a reduction in carbon fuels. Tim Costello, World Vision Australia's chief executive, is another inveterate traveller. So is Dick Smith, who apparently feels the need to travel the world, sometimes flying his own aircraft, in order to save the world.
This is a common phenomenon. The Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, is a proselytiser for the environment. But she has been photographed travelling to work in a chauffeured car (even though she lives in the inner city) and owns a car with an off-street garage.
Shortly before Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, separated, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Gores had bought a mansion in Montecito with six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and one pool. An eco-catastrophist such as the former United States vice-president should have been able to manage with, say, three fireplaces and a mere four bathrooms. Al Gore also claims to offset his emissions. But, again, who would offset what if everyone lived like Gore?
This year Sting made yet another visit to Australia as part of his Symphonicity tour. Interviewed by Julian Morrow on Radio National, he was asked whether he felt a tension between his "environmentalist beliefs and the lifestyle of an international entertainer". The answer was, well, yes - but not really. Sting acknowledged that carbon offsets did not really work and that the criticism was justified but concluded: "I'm not given an alternative to do this life without burning fuel." Morrow accepted this.
Support for the carbon tax is highest among well-educated Australians who enjoy relatively secure employment or comfortable retirement - many of whom live in the inner cities. Concern about a carbon tax is greatest among Australians whose jobs are not so secure or who live on retirement incomes where life is a daily struggle - many of these Australians live in the suburbs and regional areas.
Viewed from the perspective of the ABC studio in Ultimo, the top 1000 emitting companies tend to be regarded as the big polluters. Viewed from Wollongong and Campbelltown, they tend to be considered the big employers. Of all the members of the Gillard cabinet, the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, understands this best.
Writing in her Open Salon blog last year, Ann Nichols put it this way: "It is very easy to preach about the value of the grass-fed, the solar, the phosphate-free and the organic when you are in a position to afford it all - or willing to decide for yourself that you can live without cars, meat or a washing machine." That is a question of affordability. Double standards add to this frustration.
It is true that the wealthy miners such as Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest publicly opposed the Rudd government's proposed mining tax. But they were urging others to do the same. It was a case of: "Do as I do." The problem with the Australian Conservation Foundation's advertisement is that the Blanchett line appears to be: "Do as I say but please don't do as I do, lest the planet burn." It's not a credible message.
SOURCE
Elitism doesn't sell
Leftist journalist David Penberthy, below, has some points of agreement with Gerard Henderson above
The decision of actors Cate Blanchett and Michael Caton to front advertisements supporting the Federal Government’s climate change policies has been denounced as a shocking act of impertinence by a pair of cashed-up lefties who have no right to enter the debate.
These advertisements are 100 per cent privately-funded and in a democracy such as ours people have every right to spend their money as they wish to make their point. That said, there’s a separate issue as to whether the advertisements are tactically smart. It’s more likely that rather than galvanising support for a carbon tax, they will have the opposite effect of alienating mainstream voters who simply want details about how much the carbon tax will cost them, and what type of compensation they will get in return.
The left of politics in Australia seems to be permanently afflicted by what could be described as the Don’s Party syndrome, whereby affluent and educated people think you can win debates by telling people what’s good for them.
Advertising executive Adam Ferrier wrote a good piece on The Australian yesterday fleshing out the point.
“One of the risks of any green campaign is that it appears like lefty, progressive, idealistic and elitist, detached from the struggles of everyday people,” Ferrier wrote. “At worst, Cate is at risk of making the cause elitist. For the millions this (ad campaign) cost, there are so many other ways to change behaviour than having an elitist talking head spruik a carbon tax as easily as spruiking x, y or z.”
The best example of this was the republican campaign, which culminated with a tragi-comic cocktail reception for the failed yes vote on the night of the ballot where Rachel Ward sobbed on husband Bryan Brown’s shoulder as Malcolm Turnbull declared that John Howard had “broken the nation’s heart”. What had really happened was that the republicans had completely stuffed their campaign by leaving much of the talking to celebrities while overlooking their first responsibility – to explain how a republic would work, why we needed one, and how life would change for the better under the new constitutional model.
The same mistakes are being made now by progressive people who believe in climate change. And the same mistakes are being made, spectacularly, by the Gillard Government. The PM looks like she is dancing to the tune of the Greens purely because of the disastrous quirk of democracy at last year’s election, where no-one actually won, and she decided to break her own promise of not introducing a carbon tax in order to form government. We are now moving headlong towards putting a price on carbon – ie, introducing a tax – and the Government is trying to win a debate when it is yet to provide people with any detail.
It’s a ludicrous manoeuvre, asking people to take you on trust when you have already breached their trust by changed the position you adopted in the election campaign. Until such a time as the Government releases details of how it will actually work, how much it will cost, how much compensation families will receive, they are sitting ducks.
The pro climate change lobby and actors such as Blanchett and Caton can say and do what it likes in an attempt to bolster its cause, and spend as much money as they wish in the process.
There is a separate issue though as to whether it will actually bolster the cause. In the absence of policy detail, and with the voters still smarting from being misled by the PM, you would have to say they’ve probably done their dough.
SOURCE
How offensive and perverse! Article below by Michael Kirby, a retired Australian High Court judge who is openly homosexual. Christians are like Apartheid practitioners according to His Honour.
Instead of blaming Christians, might it not be a more productive strategy in the fight against AIDS to dissuade homosexual penises from entering homosexual anuses?
In 2010 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa declared that the time had come, particularly for Africans, to stop the “wave of hate” and to stand up “against wrong”.
He was referring to the wrong to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people” who are “part of the African family” and who “are living in fear.”
This news from Africa would be bad enough. But the same fear extends far beyond that continent. And in the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which has afflicted humanity since the 1980s, the vulnerable are not only gays but also sex workers, injecting drug users (IDUs) and women.
This fear exists in many countries where, despite the knowledge that science now affords us about human sexuality, irrational hatred of sexual minorities and sexual activities is encouraged and even sometimes promoted by religious leaders, in supposed reliance upon their understandings of religious texts.
They rely on their imperfect understanding of what was written in ancient books long before Dr. Alfred Kinsey, American biologist and founder of the Institute of Sex Research, demonstrated the realities of human sexual experience, the frequency and variety of its manifestations, and the dangers and injustice of punishing people for adult, private, consensual sexual conduct. [Relying on the perverted Kinsey and his discredited "research" shows the intellectual shallowness of Judge Kirby]
Most religious people are good and kind. Love for one another exists as a basic tenet in all religions and all cultures. I have myself been brought up in religious faith. I honour brothers and sisters in all religions who are struggling to make a charitable, informed and unbiased contribution to the global struggle against HIV/AIDS.
However, officially the Roman Catholic and Greek and Orthodox Christian churches are still in serious denial about the scientific evidence available about human sexuality. As they have often been in denial about science and its teachings in the past.
Just as they originally denied the opinions of Galileo and Copernicus that the earth circled the sun. And as they, and the Anglican Church, originally denied Darwin’s thesis of evolution of the species, expounded 150 years ago.
Clutching onto imperfect understandings of ancient scripture, leaders of most of the spiritual faiths, instead of re-examining their holy texts by reference to science (as they did in other instances in the past), have adopted a new, irrational approach.
In other parts of the world, the hate may not always be so intense. But the stigma over sexual conduct that is often taught by religious people cannot be accepted any longer. It is now a major cause of death in the AIDS epidemic.
It has to stop. Not only because it is immoral, conflicted, irrational and wrong. But also because it is now seriously impeding the global struggle against HIV and AIDS for the saving of lives. The magnitude of the suffering demands blunt speaking at this time.
As Bishop Tutu has said: “All of us, especially Africans, need access to essential HIV services…Show me where Christ said ‘Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones’. Gay people too are made in my God’s image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
Rightly, Bishop Tutu has drawn a parallel between the earlier, successful, global struggle against racial apartheid and the present global struggle against sexual apartheid. To the moral struggle against sexual apartheid must now be added the urgent needs of the struggle against HIV and AIDS.
More HERE
Australians want Julia Gillard and Labor gone, latest Newspoll reveals
It is often said that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them so this poll suggests a change of government
VOTERS don't approve of Julia Gillard and would kick Labor out of power if an election were held today, a new poll suggests. The latest Newspoll reveals that while there has been a bounce back in support for the Greens to 14 per cent, the ALP's primary vote remains stuck at 34 per cent.
Voters say they would elect the Coalition, but they do not approve of its leader, Tony Abbott.
The Newspoll, published today in The Australian newspaper, shows the Liberal Party turmoil of the past fortnight involving Mr Abbott and his frontbenchers Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey has not delivered a boost for Labor.
As Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott clashed in Parliament yesterday over the carbon tax, the PM took a blow from one of the independent MPs supporting her Government.
Tasmanian Andrew Wilkie said her plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia was an abomination. Labor had lost its moral superiority and walked away from one of the reasons he backed her as PM after the hung Parliament.
Mr Wilkie yesterday voted for a Greens motion condemning Ms Gillard's plan to swap 800 asylum seekers for 4000 refugees from Malaysia.
Another 52 asylum seekers arrived yesterday, the fourth boat since the Government announced - but has not signed - the Malaysian plan. It leaves 150 people waiting in limbo.
The only ray of light for the Government in the Newspoll came via the Greens. The jump in support for the Bob Brown-led party to lift its primary vote from 10 to 14 per cent has given Labor its best two-party vote since March.
Newspoll has the Coalition leading 52-48. The August election had both parties at 50-50. The telephone survey of 1128 people at the weekend found the Coalition's primary vote dipped two points to 44 per cent and Labor edged up a point to 34. Both moves are within the poll's margin of error.
When Ms Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd as PM Labor's support was 35 per cent. Today's poll shows she is still considered the better PM and in the past fortnight increased her lead over Mr Abbott from a wafer-thin four points to seven. But the 44 to 37 per cent lead is a far cry from the 50-31 lead she had just two months ago.
One in five voters could not decide between either party leader. That is reflected by the approval ratings, which show voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard at 35 per cent dissatisfaction 54 per cent. It's just as bad for Mr Abbott. His satisfaction ranking is 37 per cent and dissatisfaction 53 per cent.
SOURCE
GREENIE ROUNDUP
Are you a genuine skeptic or a climate denier?
So asks JOHN COOK, writing on a site of Australia's ABC. He has the amusing assertion that those who reject Warmism consider only the evidence that suits them. Talk about the pot calling the kettle Afro-American!
Cook does link to a large number of Warmist assertions by others but is critical of none of them. He just lists them as gospel and does not at all consider whether the phenomena mentioned are caused by human action.
As can be seen on the header of GREENIE WATCH, skeptics generally accept that there has been SOME warming but dispute both its likely future magnitude and its origin.
Mr. Cook quite ignores the fact that he is peddling prophecies. And they rely purely on supposition, not evidence. And as far as I can find, Greenie prophecies have a record of complete falsity so far. Prophecy really is a mug's game.
Since he is so keen on taking into account ALL the evidence, it would be amusing to get his response to the fact that the tidal gauge data do not show an acceleration of Sea Level rise; that the NOAA -NODC data do not show a significant rise in Ocean Heat Content between 1979 and 1997; that the warming of the last 150 years has been a perfectly comfortable total of less than one degree Celsius -- etc.
In the charged discussions about climate, the words skeptic and denier are often thrown around. But what do these words mean?
Consider the following definitions. Genuine skeptics consider all the evidence in their search for the truth. Deniers, on the other hand, refuse to accept any evidence that conflicts with their pre-determined views.
So here's one way to tell if you're a genuine skeptic or a climate denier.
When trying to understand what's happening to our climate, do you consider the full body of evidence? Or do you find the denial instinct kicking in when confronted with inconvenient evidence?
For example, let's look at the question of whether global warming is happening. Do you acknowledge sea level rise, a key indicator of a warming planet, tripling over the last century? Do you factor in the warming oceans, which since 1970 have been building up heat at a rate of two-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs every second? Glaciers are retreating all over the world, threatening the water supply of hundreds of millions of people. Ice sheets from Greenland in the north to Antarctica in the south are losing hundreds of billions of tonnes of ice every year. Seasons are shifting, flowers are opening earlier each year and animals are migrating towards the poles. The very structure of our atmosphere is changing.
We have tens of thousands of lines of evidence that global warming is happening. A genuine skeptic surveys the full body of evidence coming in from all over our planet and concludes that global warming is unequivocal. A climate denier, on the other hand, reacts to this array of evidence in several possible ways.
The most extreme form of climate denier won't even go near the evidence. They avoid the issue altogether by indulging in conspiracy theories. They'll pull a quote out of context from a stolen 'Climategate' email as proof that climate change is just a huge hoax. I have yet to hear how the ice sheets, glaciers and thousands of migrating animal species are in on the conspiracy, but I'm sure there's a creative explanation floating around on the Internet.
The hardcore denier, firmly entrenched in the "it's not happening" camp, denies each piece of evidence. When confronted by retreating glaciers, their thoughts flick to the handful of growing glaciers while blocking out the vast majority of glaciers that are retreating at an accelerating rate.
They ignore sea level rise by focusing on short periods where sea levels briefly drop before inevitably resuming the long-term upward trend. The key to this form of denial is cherry picking. If you stare long and hard enough at a tiny piece of the puzzle that gives you the answer you want, you find the rest of the picture conveniently fades from view.
Some climate deniers have found it impossible to ignore the overwhelming array of evidence that the planet is warming (cognitive bias does have its limits) and moved onto the next stage of denial: "it's happening but it's not us". After all, climate has changed throughout Earth's history. How can we tell it's us this time?
The answer, as always, is by surveying the full body of evidence. Warming from our carbon dioxide emissions should yield many tell tale patterns. We don't need to rely on guess work or theory to tell us humans are causing warming. We can measure it.
If carbon dioxide is causing warming, we should measure less heat escaping to space. Satellites have observed this, with heat being trapped at those very wavelengths that carbon dioxide absorb radiation. If less heat is escaping, we should see more heat returning to the Earth's surface. This has been measured. Greenhouse warming should cause the lower atmosphere to warm but simultaneously, the upper atmosphere to cool. That's indeed what we observe is happening.
As far back as the 1800s, scientists predicted greenhouse warming should cause nights to warm faster than days and winters to warm faster than summers. Both predictions have come true. Everything we expect to see from greenhouse warming, we do see.
So which camp do you fall in?
Do you look at the full body of evidence, considering the whole picture as you build your understanding of climate? Or do you gravitate towards those select pieces of data that, out of context, give a contrarian impression, while denying the rest of the evidence?
More HERE (See the original for links)
It's all hot air from the jet-setting eco brigade
Gerard Henderson
The Sunday Telegraph's "Carbon Cate" headline should have come as no surprise. Sure, it was a clever journalistic line in response to news that Cate Blanchett was heading the Australian Conservation Foundation's TV advertising campaign in support of a carbon tax. But Don Henry, the foundation's executive director, should have seen it - or something like it - coming.
On ABC radio on Sunday, Henry seemed unprepared for the criticism, which demonstrates just how out of touch some inner-city environmentalists are with predominant views in the suburbs and regions. Blanchett is an admirable and successful Australian. Even so, many Australians who struggle to pay their power bills each quarter do not want to be lectured to by a multimillionaire film star.
Some supporters of a carbon tax have declared that Blanchett has a right to say what she likes and said that the Academy Award winner should not be criticised on the grounds that she is rich. Both points are obvious. However, at issue is the double standard.
Irrespective of her wealth, if Blanchett lived like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa, it is unlikely there would be any reaction to her telling Australians that it is time to do something about climate change. But those Australians who know who Blanchett is well understand that she has a very large carbon footprint. Not only does she live in a Hunters Hill mansion but she travels the world to practise her art.
Granted, at some cost, she has put solar panels on her family home. And she may offset her travel by arranging for someone to promise to plant trees somewhere. Yet the fact remains that she believes carbon emissions threaten the planet, and if everyone lived her life, carbon emissions would soar.
Australians in the suburbs and regions understand this. They also feel that many who live in the inner cities or wealthy suburbs close to the CBD look down on them. Blanchett and her husband, the director Andrew Upton, gave a talk to the City of Sydney in March. They looked back in happiness at the inner city of the 1980s but said that, at this time, "the suburbs could feel flat and dry and filled with sinister silence underneath the crickets and sprinklers". What snobbish bunk. (A personal declaration - I lived in the suburbs in the 1980s.)
One of the problems facing Julia Gillard is that so many of those who speak the loudest about the need to reduce carbon emissions have a personal carbon emissions footprint that would be the envy of most Australians.
Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Commission, travels the world calling for a reduction in carbon fuels. Tim Costello, World Vision Australia's chief executive, is another inveterate traveller. So is Dick Smith, who apparently feels the need to travel the world, sometimes flying his own aircraft, in order to save the world.
This is a common phenomenon. The Sydney lord mayor, Clover Moore, is a proselytiser for the environment. But she has been photographed travelling to work in a chauffeured car (even though she lives in the inner city) and owns a car with an off-street garage.
Shortly before Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, separated, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Gores had bought a mansion in Montecito with six fireplaces, five bedrooms, nine bathrooms and one pool. An eco-catastrophist such as the former United States vice-president should have been able to manage with, say, three fireplaces and a mere four bathrooms. Al Gore also claims to offset his emissions. But, again, who would offset what if everyone lived like Gore?
This year Sting made yet another visit to Australia as part of his Symphonicity tour. Interviewed by Julian Morrow on Radio National, he was asked whether he felt a tension between his "environmentalist beliefs and the lifestyle of an international entertainer". The answer was, well, yes - but not really. Sting acknowledged that carbon offsets did not really work and that the criticism was justified but concluded: "I'm not given an alternative to do this life without burning fuel." Morrow accepted this.
Support for the carbon tax is highest among well-educated Australians who enjoy relatively secure employment or comfortable retirement - many of whom live in the inner cities. Concern about a carbon tax is greatest among Australians whose jobs are not so secure or who live on retirement incomes where life is a daily struggle - many of these Australians live in the suburbs and regional areas.
Viewed from the perspective of the ABC studio in Ultimo, the top 1000 emitting companies tend to be regarded as the big polluters. Viewed from Wollongong and Campbelltown, they tend to be considered the big employers. Of all the members of the Gillard cabinet, the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, understands this best.
Writing in her Open Salon blog last year, Ann Nichols put it this way: "It is very easy to preach about the value of the grass-fed, the solar, the phosphate-free and the organic when you are in a position to afford it all - or willing to decide for yourself that you can live without cars, meat or a washing machine." That is a question of affordability. Double standards add to this frustration.
It is true that the wealthy miners such as Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest publicly opposed the Rudd government's proposed mining tax. But they were urging others to do the same. It was a case of: "Do as I do." The problem with the Australian Conservation Foundation's advertisement is that the Blanchett line appears to be: "Do as I say but please don't do as I do, lest the planet burn." It's not a credible message.
SOURCE
Elitism doesn't sell
Leftist journalist David Penberthy, below, has some points of agreement with Gerard Henderson above
The decision of actors Cate Blanchett and Michael Caton to front advertisements supporting the Federal Government’s climate change policies has been denounced as a shocking act of impertinence by a pair of cashed-up lefties who have no right to enter the debate.
These advertisements are 100 per cent privately-funded and in a democracy such as ours people have every right to spend their money as they wish to make their point. That said, there’s a separate issue as to whether the advertisements are tactically smart. It’s more likely that rather than galvanising support for a carbon tax, they will have the opposite effect of alienating mainstream voters who simply want details about how much the carbon tax will cost them, and what type of compensation they will get in return.
The left of politics in Australia seems to be permanently afflicted by what could be described as the Don’s Party syndrome, whereby affluent and educated people think you can win debates by telling people what’s good for them.
Advertising executive Adam Ferrier wrote a good piece on The Australian yesterday fleshing out the point.
“One of the risks of any green campaign is that it appears like lefty, progressive, idealistic and elitist, detached from the struggles of everyday people,” Ferrier wrote. “At worst, Cate is at risk of making the cause elitist. For the millions this (ad campaign) cost, there are so many other ways to change behaviour than having an elitist talking head spruik a carbon tax as easily as spruiking x, y or z.”
The best example of this was the republican campaign, which culminated with a tragi-comic cocktail reception for the failed yes vote on the night of the ballot where Rachel Ward sobbed on husband Bryan Brown’s shoulder as Malcolm Turnbull declared that John Howard had “broken the nation’s heart”. What had really happened was that the republicans had completely stuffed their campaign by leaving much of the talking to celebrities while overlooking their first responsibility – to explain how a republic would work, why we needed one, and how life would change for the better under the new constitutional model.
The same mistakes are being made now by progressive people who believe in climate change. And the same mistakes are being made, spectacularly, by the Gillard Government. The PM looks like she is dancing to the tune of the Greens purely because of the disastrous quirk of democracy at last year’s election, where no-one actually won, and she decided to break her own promise of not introducing a carbon tax in order to form government. We are now moving headlong towards putting a price on carbon – ie, introducing a tax – and the Government is trying to win a debate when it is yet to provide people with any detail.
It’s a ludicrous manoeuvre, asking people to take you on trust when you have already breached their trust by changed the position you adopted in the election campaign. Until such a time as the Government releases details of how it will actually work, how much it will cost, how much compensation families will receive, they are sitting ducks.
The pro climate change lobby and actors such as Blanchett and Caton can say and do what it likes in an attempt to bolster its cause, and spend as much money as they wish in the process.
There is a separate issue though as to whether it will actually bolster the cause. In the absence of policy detail, and with the voters still smarting from being misled by the PM, you would have to say they’ve probably done their dough.
SOURCE
Reactions to UCU Congress motion on antisemitism
From the Jewish Chronicle:
By Martin Bright, May 30, 2011Sarah AB at Harry's Place:
The Universities and Colleges Union has voted to distance itself from the European Union's working definition of antisemitism at its annual congress in Harrogate. Delegates overwhelmingly supported the move on the part of the union's leadership, which believes the definition from the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia prevents open discussion of Israel. The union has a history of anti-Israel activism and on Sunday voted through a boycott motion. The definition includes any attacks on the Jewish people's right to self-determination.
Last week, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust wrote to the union and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission urging a rethink on the issue. The Jewish organisations urged the union to adopt the definition of racism contained in the Macpherson report on the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence. This defines a racist incident as one which is viewed as such by the victim or a third party. EHRC chair Trevor Phillips wrote back saying he was surprised the lecturers' union had not consulted him before taking action on the issue. Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council said: "After today's events I believe the UCU is institutionally racist."
Although the result was fully expected, it was still extremely depressing to read David Hirsh’s report of the debate which has just taken place at Congress.Fair Play Campaign Group:
Today, UCU voted to reject the EUMC working definition of antisemitism, leaving nothing in its place.David Schraub at the Debate Link:
The UCU, perhaps embarrassed over continuing allegations that it harbors a culture of institutional anti-Semitism, has finally agreed to investigate complaints from Jewish members and a torrent of resignations by Jewish academics.From the World Union of Jewish Studies (WUJS):
Just kidding! Actually, they just decided to redefine the meaning of anti-Semitism itself, rejecting the commonly held EUMC definition (which affirms the possibility -- though, of course, not the inevitability -- that criticism of Israel could constitute anti-Semitism) in favor of, well, it appears in favor of no definition at all. So I guess it's not a "redefinition" of anti-Semitism so much as an erasure of it entirely -- which, when you think about it, is at least more in line with the UCU's general practice.
The World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS) condemns the British University and College Union (UCU) in the wake of its passing a motion rejecting the European Union Monitoring Committee’s (EUMC) definition of anti-Semitism. This definition of anti-Semitism is used on a day-to-day basis by the National Union of Students to combat anti-Semitism, as well as by every major British Jewish communal body.
WUJS Chairman Oliver Worth said; “The UCU has consistently shown a total disregard for the welfare of Jewish students over an extended period of time. WUJS completely rejects the assertion that Jews cannot be trusted to define the ways in which they feel discriminated against, and that the Jewish community is incapable of defining anti-Semitism. The University and College Union stinks of institutional anti-Semitism, and as an organization that exists to protect Jewish students all over the World, we are deeply, deeply concerned.”
University and College Union, UK, endorses antisemitism
David Hirsh live-blogged the discussion and vote today in the UCU Congress to reject the EUMC definition of anti-semitism. Very depressing.
(From his report) Sue Blackwell on the EUMC working definition:
(From Hirsh's report) Ronnie Fraser's opposition to the UCU motion:
(From his report) Sue Blackwell on the EUMC working definition:
Sue Blackwell to propose the motion against the EUMC. definition adopted by NUS, parliamentary inquiry, US State Department. In Jan 2010 Denis Mcshane tried to have Azzam Tammimi banned from speaking. [Tammimi is Hamas's guy in London - DH] Blackwell goes on, McShane argued that an external speaker should be rejected if they have a history of antisemitic language in line with the EUMC…” EUMC comes from the American Jewish Committee, European Jewish Congress, self confessed lobby groups for Israel. Ken Stern, author of EUMC is deeply concerned about “politically based antisemitism” otherwise known as antizionism which treats Israel as the classic Jew…. antisemites seek to qualify israel from membership of the community of nations.” In other words, if you are for a boycott, you are an antisemite. These influences are evidenced by American spellings in the document. Definition is not fit for finding Real antisemitism but is ideal for those who want to blur boundaries between antisemitism and antizionism.Where to start with this incoherent verbiage in favor of antisemitism? Because the definition has American spelling it should be rejected? American and European Jewish defense organizations exist solely to lobby for Israel? Blackwell is deliberately ignoring the bloody history of antisemitism (how she can, as a European, escapes me!) which necessitates the existence of such groups as the AJC and EJC! What is "real antisemitism" to Blackwell? Since she's opposing the use of the EUMC definition, what definition does she propose instead? From reading Tony Greenstein's repulsive response to the Engage report of the debate, I get the feeling that only someone like Gilad Atzmon qualifies as a "real antisemite" to these people (and I suspect that for some of them even Atzmon, who spouts classic antisemitic rhetoric, is not antisemitic).
(From Hirsh's report) Ronnie Fraser's opposition to the UCU motion:
I, a Jewish member of this union, am telling you, that I feel an antisemitic mood in this union and even in this room.
I would feel your refusal to engage with the EUMC definition of antisemitism, if you pass this motion, as a racist act.
Many Jews have resigned from this union citing their experience of antisemitism. Only yesterday a delegate here said ‘they are an expansionist people”. It is difficult to think that the people in question are anything other than the Jews.
You may disagree with me.
You may disagree with all the other Jewish members who have said similar things.
You may think we are mistaken but you have a duty to listen seriously.
Instead of being listened to, I am routinely told that anyone who raises the issue of antisemitism is doing so in bad faith.
Congress, Imagine how it feels when you say that you are experiencing racism, and your union responds: stop lying, stop trying to play the antisemitism card.
You, a group of mainly white, non-Jewish trade unionists, do not [have] the right to tell me, a Jew, what feels like antisemitism and what does not.
Macpherson tells us that when somebody says they have been a victim of racism, then institutions should begin by believing them. This motion mandates the union to do the opposite.
Until this union takes complaints of antisemitism seriously the UCU will continue to be labelled as an institutionally antisemitic organisation.
It’s true that anti-Zionist Jews may perceive things differently. But the overwhelming majority of Jews feel that there is something wrong in this union. They understand that it is legitimate to criticise Israel in a way that is, quoting from the definition, “similar to that levelled to any other country’ but they make a distinction between criticism and the kind of demonisation that is considered acceptable in this union
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Poll finds Queenslanders fed up with state and federal governments wasting money
WASTED: The legacy of government programs for taxpayers is $20m for Fuel Watch; $2.45b with $190m in safety checks for the ceiling insulation scheme; $13m for Grocery Watch; $308m for the set-top box program; $275m with $45m help for operators with the Green Loans program; $500m blowout on the old solar panels program and $1b for its successor; and $40m on the solar hot water program. Source: The Courier-Mail
QUEENSLANDERS have lost faith in the ability of the state and federal governments to spend money wisely. A Galaxy Poll conducted exclusively for The Courier-Mail shows 70 per cent of Queenslanders believe governments are wasting money. But the politicians say they have got it wrong.
The Courier-Mail's Waste Watchers campaign will keep an eye on how governments are spending taxpayer money.
It comes after both federal and state governments have been dogged by a series of botched or complaint-riddled programs, ranging from the deadly $2.45 billion home insulation scheme at the federal level and the health payroll fiasco at the state level.
Others include the dumped $275 million Green Loans program and two school initiatives the multibillion-dollar Building the Education Revolution which was overwhelmed by complaints of cost blow-outs and shoddy workmanship and the $1.8 billion computers in schools program, which was stalled by cost blow-outs. Both relied on the state and federal governments to deliver.
Now, the Federal Government has turned its hand to yet another big service delivery program that's already shrouded in controversy: the commitment to install TV set-top boxes for pensioners at a cost almost 10 times the price for which the cheapest devices can be bought.
Treasurer Wayne Swan insists it is the Federal Government's economic record that has kept Australia out of recession. "(There have been) 700,000 jobs created since we came to office and another 500,000 in the recent budget," he told The Courier-Mail.
He said the Government had been "full and frank" about the home insulation problems but stood by the new set-top box scheme for pensioners.
Mr Swan backed the Government's spending record, saying it was returning the Budget to surplus "more rapidly than this country has ever seen before".
But the Galaxy Poll revealed even ALP supporters were unsure when asked whether federal and state governments spent money wisely, with 52 per cent of Labor voters disagreeing.
The Courier-Mail asked the Queensland Federal Labor MPs the same question but was met with silence, with only two backbenchers Member for Blair Shayne Neumann and Member for Moreton Graham Perrett and Treasurer Wayne Swan responding.
The same question was asked of 51 state Labor MPs, with 30 responding with examples of good government spending. Another 21 did not reply, including state Treasurer Andrew Fraser.
Better off with cash
EVERY Australian household could have been handed a cheque for about $560 but instead, they got a series of botched or complaint-riddled "assistance" programs from the Federal Government that were designed to help ease household pressure.
An analysis by The Courier-Mail of a selection of major Government household schemes reveals most Queensland homes would have been better off with a simple cash boost to combat soaring living costs.
The Rudd and Gillard Labor governments have been rocked by a series of costly high-profile service delivery program failures, resulting in billions spent on dumped plans.
But myriad smaller household assistance schemes have also been dogged by complaints, delays and allegations of shonky operators.
The Courier-Mail analysis totals the household programs to about $4.8 billion the equivalent of about $567 per Australian household.
Queensland Council of Social Services president Karyn Walsh said low-income families had struggled to make ends meet over the past five years and needed all the genuine assistance they could get.
"There's been a 63 per cent increase in the cost of electricity, gas and water over the past five years and families need a lot of help to get through that," she said.
Ms Walsh said the money would be better spent on initiatives to reduce household costs on a weekly basis, and noted that many of the programs like home insulation and solar power weren't accessible by low-income families.
The big blunders are headlined by the deadly $2.45 billion home insulation scheme which was dumped after dodgy work and major safety problems, with the Government then having to budget another $190 million for safety checks.
The $275 million Green Loan program designed to assist households use energy-saving technology was also scrapped, with another $45 million budgeted to help operators left in the lurch when the program was ditched.
Two other programs designed to ease hip pocket pain, GroceryWatch and FuelWatch, were dumped before they even got off the ground at a cost of at least $13 million.
Solar panel rebates saw taxpayers first hit with a $500 million blow-out when the Rudd Government cancelled the original program with less than 24 hours notice, before later launching a new scheme. The scheme that followed has cost $1 billion but is now being rolled back ahead of schedule amid concerns it is hiking up electricity prices.
At $40 million, the Government's solar hot water program has been criticised for massive delays.
Coalition MP Jamie Briggs, who runs the Opposition's "waste watch" committee, said the Labor Government was "unable to implement a government spending program without wasting billions of dollars in the process".
"Labor's latest spending initiative overpriced set-top boxes highlights Labor's addiction to spending and proves they haven't learnt from their first-term stuff ups."
SOURCE
Children's play equipment too safe for their own good, expert warns
PLAY equipment designed by "safety Nazis" shouldn't prevent children from taking risks and enjoying themselves, a child expert has warned. More kids aged two to seven were getting injured in playgrounds because they didn't know how to take calculated risks.
A speaker at the Early Childhood Education Conference in Melbourne this week, early childhood specialist Prue Walsh said modern "plastic fantastic" playgrounds were too safe.
"Often playgrounds are designed by engineers who have no knowledge of children," she said. "Children need to actively explore and discover the world around them and to do that they need to learn to take calculated risks," she said.
Playground injuries were often a result of children being poorly co-ordinated because they did not know how to negotiate risks, Ms Walsh said. "I worry about children who don't run up slippery slides," she said.
Ms Walsh said commercial pressures, such as insurance premiums, had influenced the design of today's playgrounds. "Parents are scared of their precious children getting injured and teachers are scared of getting sued," she said.
To improve playgrounds, Ms Walsh suggested longer and bigger slides built into embankments to eliminate falls. Also, smooth boulders for balancing, shallow ponds for exploring and plenty of vegetation to provide nooks and crannies for children to crawl around.
Triple P Parenting Program founder Professor Matt Sanders said children should be in a place safe where they can have accidents and falls. "You want equipment that are in parks and children using toys that we buy to be basically safe so that kids can't be easily injured on them or accidents that easily occur," he said.
"But at the same time we should be encouraged kids to be kids and to enjoy themselves. "Exploring, climbing and experimenting is part of childhood but when it's done when adequate supervision the risks are minimal."
SOURCE
Western Australian Premier holds whip hand in tax debate
Western Australia is grabbing the gravy (Royalties) from the mining boom, thus frustrating the Feds, who need it to prop up their profligate spending
WA Premier Colin Barnett is politically in a seemingly win-win position as he challenges the federal government to get back to work and forget the tax fight.
He can afford to take the moral high ground because in the west anyone who takes the fight to Canberra is a champion and, sadly, on tax matters federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's credibility is in tatters.
Barnett is also in the fortunate position of having guaranteed income flow even if Swan cuts federal funding.
Even local ALP politicians despair about Canberra's mishandling of the debate. They openly say it is hurting their chances of re-election and stress that the mishandling of the mining tax, carbon tax, and the latest row with Barnett over royalties, means Swan has lost forever the chance for any real tax reform.
At The Australian Deutsche Bank Business Leaders Forum yesterday in Perth, outgoing Woodside boss Don Voelte echoed the views of many in the industry when he praised Resources Minister Martin Ferguson but treated Swan with contempt, saying he had been taught only to say nice things about people, so would say nothing about Swan.
Voelte may be leaving the country, and a business leader has only one vote, but a treasurer needs some credibility to do his or her job and the reality is that Swan has little respect from the business community.
The level of business distrust of Canberra is damaging at a time when the reality is the economy is not nearly as strong as the official figures may indicate. This message was driven home loudly and clearly at yesterday's forum.
Barnett also has the luxury of a steady flow of royalty income from iron ore and liquefied natural gas exports, but he, like Canberra, has no real answers on just how to spread the benefits of the boom.
The economy is a lot weaker than most people think and certainly anyone in discretionary retail would quickly agree.
The issue is how to use the proceeds to develop other industries and revive manufacturing, which Barnett can happily offload to Canberra.
He has the likes of Shell's Ann Pickard able to spend money building a research capability in Perth for her new floating LNG plant, which will be designed partly in France and built in South Korea.
Yesterday's panel was united in calling for more immigration, even targeted project-specific immigration, to help mitigate cost pressures.
Woodside has US welders on the job already at its Pluto plant who will be headed home once their work is finished. While Perth and east coast workers happily fly in and out of the big projects, that is only a short-term solution and ironically some cite the fact that Australians are too comfortable to make a big call in moving their base up to the Pilbara. Some argue a special locational tax break could be used to encourage workers to move to the west.
Barnett wants a return to a workable Council of Australian Governments format, but of course he holds the economic whip hand if he loses faith in commonwealth-state relations. That is, until he needs some help on infrastructure funding, which didn't get a mention yesterday but is a key concern.
SOURCE
Global cooling hits Sydney
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) predicts up to 20mm of rain will fall in Sydney today, with warnings of dangerous surf conditions. The State Emergency Service has warned of storms and flash flooding on the northern beaches today.
There is also a strong wind warning for waters between Port Macquarie and Port Hacking, in Sydney's south, with a swell of up to three metres predicted. Since 9am yesterday, 30.6mm fell at Observatory Hill and 15.4mm at Sydney Airport.....
Weatherzone meteorologist Brett Dutschke said it could be the coldest May in Sydney in more than 40 years. "A cloudy and wet end to the month will ensure this will be Sydney's coldest May since 1970," Mr Dutschke said.
According to Weatherzone, minimum overnight temperatures averaged less than 10.8 degrees, nearly 1 degree below the long-term average. The temperature dropped below 10 degrees on 11 nights, when usually there are only eight nights so cold in May.
A cold front dropped snow in Orange on May 12, a rare event so early in the year, Mr Dutschke said.
SOURCE
WASTED: The legacy of government programs for taxpayers is $20m for Fuel Watch; $2.45b with $190m in safety checks for the ceiling insulation scheme; $13m for Grocery Watch; $308m for the set-top box program; $275m with $45m help for operators with the Green Loans program; $500m blowout on the old solar panels program and $1b for its successor; and $40m on the solar hot water program. Source: The Courier-Mail
QUEENSLANDERS have lost faith in the ability of the state and federal governments to spend money wisely. A Galaxy Poll conducted exclusively for The Courier-Mail shows 70 per cent of Queenslanders believe governments are wasting money. But the politicians say they have got it wrong.
The Courier-Mail's Waste Watchers campaign will keep an eye on how governments are spending taxpayer money.
It comes after both federal and state governments have been dogged by a series of botched or complaint-riddled programs, ranging from the deadly $2.45 billion home insulation scheme at the federal level and the health payroll fiasco at the state level.
Others include the dumped $275 million Green Loans program and two school initiatives the multibillion-dollar Building the Education Revolution which was overwhelmed by complaints of cost blow-outs and shoddy workmanship and the $1.8 billion computers in schools program, which was stalled by cost blow-outs. Both relied on the state and federal governments to deliver.
Now, the Federal Government has turned its hand to yet another big service delivery program that's already shrouded in controversy: the commitment to install TV set-top boxes for pensioners at a cost almost 10 times the price for which the cheapest devices can be bought.
Treasurer Wayne Swan insists it is the Federal Government's economic record that has kept Australia out of recession. "(There have been) 700,000 jobs created since we came to office and another 500,000 in the recent budget," he told The Courier-Mail.
He said the Government had been "full and frank" about the home insulation problems but stood by the new set-top box scheme for pensioners.
Mr Swan backed the Government's spending record, saying it was returning the Budget to surplus "more rapidly than this country has ever seen before".
But the Galaxy Poll revealed even ALP supporters were unsure when asked whether federal and state governments spent money wisely, with 52 per cent of Labor voters disagreeing.
The Courier-Mail asked the Queensland Federal Labor MPs the same question but was met with silence, with only two backbenchers Member for Blair Shayne Neumann and Member for Moreton Graham Perrett and Treasurer Wayne Swan responding.
The same question was asked of 51 state Labor MPs, with 30 responding with examples of good government spending. Another 21 did not reply, including state Treasurer Andrew Fraser.
Better off with cash
EVERY Australian household could have been handed a cheque for about $560 but instead, they got a series of botched or complaint-riddled "assistance" programs from the Federal Government that were designed to help ease household pressure.
An analysis by The Courier-Mail of a selection of major Government household schemes reveals most Queensland homes would have been better off with a simple cash boost to combat soaring living costs.
The Rudd and Gillard Labor governments have been rocked by a series of costly high-profile service delivery program failures, resulting in billions spent on dumped plans.
But myriad smaller household assistance schemes have also been dogged by complaints, delays and allegations of shonky operators.
The Courier-Mail analysis totals the household programs to about $4.8 billion the equivalent of about $567 per Australian household.
Queensland Council of Social Services president Karyn Walsh said low-income families had struggled to make ends meet over the past five years and needed all the genuine assistance they could get.
"There's been a 63 per cent increase in the cost of electricity, gas and water over the past five years and families need a lot of help to get through that," she said.
Ms Walsh said the money would be better spent on initiatives to reduce household costs on a weekly basis, and noted that many of the programs like home insulation and solar power weren't accessible by low-income families.
The big blunders are headlined by the deadly $2.45 billion home insulation scheme which was dumped after dodgy work and major safety problems, with the Government then having to budget another $190 million for safety checks.
The $275 million Green Loan program designed to assist households use energy-saving technology was also scrapped, with another $45 million budgeted to help operators left in the lurch when the program was ditched.
Two other programs designed to ease hip pocket pain, GroceryWatch and FuelWatch, were dumped before they even got off the ground at a cost of at least $13 million.
Solar panel rebates saw taxpayers first hit with a $500 million blow-out when the Rudd Government cancelled the original program with less than 24 hours notice, before later launching a new scheme. The scheme that followed has cost $1 billion but is now being rolled back ahead of schedule amid concerns it is hiking up electricity prices.
At $40 million, the Government's solar hot water program has been criticised for massive delays.
Coalition MP Jamie Briggs, who runs the Opposition's "waste watch" committee, said the Labor Government was "unable to implement a government spending program without wasting billions of dollars in the process".
"Labor's latest spending initiative overpriced set-top boxes highlights Labor's addiction to spending and proves they haven't learnt from their first-term stuff ups."
SOURCE
Children's play equipment too safe for their own good, expert warns
PLAY equipment designed by "safety Nazis" shouldn't prevent children from taking risks and enjoying themselves, a child expert has warned. More kids aged two to seven were getting injured in playgrounds because they didn't know how to take calculated risks.
A speaker at the Early Childhood Education Conference in Melbourne this week, early childhood specialist Prue Walsh said modern "plastic fantastic" playgrounds were too safe.
"Often playgrounds are designed by engineers who have no knowledge of children," she said. "Children need to actively explore and discover the world around them and to do that they need to learn to take calculated risks," she said.
Playground injuries were often a result of children being poorly co-ordinated because they did not know how to negotiate risks, Ms Walsh said. "I worry about children who don't run up slippery slides," she said.
Ms Walsh said commercial pressures, such as insurance premiums, had influenced the design of today's playgrounds. "Parents are scared of their precious children getting injured and teachers are scared of getting sued," she said.
To improve playgrounds, Ms Walsh suggested longer and bigger slides built into embankments to eliminate falls. Also, smooth boulders for balancing, shallow ponds for exploring and plenty of vegetation to provide nooks and crannies for children to crawl around.
Triple P Parenting Program founder Professor Matt Sanders said children should be in a place safe where they can have accidents and falls. "You want equipment that are in parks and children using toys that we buy to be basically safe so that kids can't be easily injured on them or accidents that easily occur," he said.
"But at the same time we should be encouraged kids to be kids and to enjoy themselves. "Exploring, climbing and experimenting is part of childhood but when it's done when adequate supervision the risks are minimal."
SOURCE
Western Australian Premier holds whip hand in tax debate
Western Australia is grabbing the gravy (Royalties) from the mining boom, thus frustrating the Feds, who need it to prop up their profligate spending
WA Premier Colin Barnett is politically in a seemingly win-win position as he challenges the federal government to get back to work and forget the tax fight.
He can afford to take the moral high ground because in the west anyone who takes the fight to Canberra is a champion and, sadly, on tax matters federal Treasurer Wayne Swan's credibility is in tatters.
Barnett is also in the fortunate position of having guaranteed income flow even if Swan cuts federal funding.
Even local ALP politicians despair about Canberra's mishandling of the debate. They openly say it is hurting their chances of re-election and stress that the mishandling of the mining tax, carbon tax, and the latest row with Barnett over royalties, means Swan has lost forever the chance for any real tax reform.
At The Australian Deutsche Bank Business Leaders Forum yesterday in Perth, outgoing Woodside boss Don Voelte echoed the views of many in the industry when he praised Resources Minister Martin Ferguson but treated Swan with contempt, saying he had been taught only to say nice things about people, so would say nothing about Swan.
Voelte may be leaving the country, and a business leader has only one vote, but a treasurer needs some credibility to do his or her job and the reality is that Swan has little respect from the business community.
The level of business distrust of Canberra is damaging at a time when the reality is the economy is not nearly as strong as the official figures may indicate. This message was driven home loudly and clearly at yesterday's forum.
Barnett also has the luxury of a steady flow of royalty income from iron ore and liquefied natural gas exports, but he, like Canberra, has no real answers on just how to spread the benefits of the boom.
The economy is a lot weaker than most people think and certainly anyone in discretionary retail would quickly agree.
The issue is how to use the proceeds to develop other industries and revive manufacturing, which Barnett can happily offload to Canberra.
He has the likes of Shell's Ann Pickard able to spend money building a research capability in Perth for her new floating LNG plant, which will be designed partly in France and built in South Korea.
Yesterday's panel was united in calling for more immigration, even targeted project-specific immigration, to help mitigate cost pressures.
Woodside has US welders on the job already at its Pluto plant who will be headed home once their work is finished. While Perth and east coast workers happily fly in and out of the big projects, that is only a short-term solution and ironically some cite the fact that Australians are too comfortable to make a big call in moving their base up to the Pilbara. Some argue a special locational tax break could be used to encourage workers to move to the west.
Barnett wants a return to a workable Council of Australian Governments format, but of course he holds the economic whip hand if he loses faith in commonwealth-state relations. That is, until he needs some help on infrastructure funding, which didn't get a mention yesterday but is a key concern.
SOURCE
Global cooling hits Sydney
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) predicts up to 20mm of rain will fall in Sydney today, with warnings of dangerous surf conditions. The State Emergency Service has warned of storms and flash flooding on the northern beaches today.
There is also a strong wind warning for waters between Port Macquarie and Port Hacking, in Sydney's south, with a swell of up to three metres predicted. Since 9am yesterday, 30.6mm fell at Observatory Hill and 15.4mm at Sydney Airport.....
Weatherzone meteorologist Brett Dutschke said it could be the coldest May in Sydney in more than 40 years. "A cloudy and wet end to the month will ensure this will be Sydney's coldest May since 1970," Mr Dutschke said.
According to Weatherzone, minimum overnight temperatures averaged less than 10.8 degrees, nearly 1 degree below the long-term average. The temperature dropped below 10 degrees on 11 nights, when usually there are only eight nights so cold in May.
A cold front dropped snow in Orange on May 12, a rare event so early in the year, Mr Dutschke said.
SOURCE
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