Author: Kev

PAUL Keating has attacked former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s memory of recent history after he failed to recognise the former Labor prime minister’s role in modernising the Australian economy.

“But if his book is any guide, especially as it relates to Australia, those claims do not extend to him being a noteworthy economic historian,” the former treasurer said.

I have some sympathy for Keating in this matter but I won’t let it get in the way of a good laugh at his expense. Greenspan may have got Keating’s contributions wrong but anything else he says that denigrates Bush will be quoted as gospel.

Treasurer Peter Costello, in parliament yesterday, slams Labor’s plan to spend tax dollars for an indefinite cause.

IN Labor’s New Directions for the Arts, you find on page six, under the heading Supporting Australian Artists, that Labor will review the current state of artists’ incomes … It says that Labor will “review the current state of artists’ incomes and introduce initiatives that enable artists currently on welfare greater opportunity to produce work“. I will repeat that. Artists who are on welfare need greater opportunity to produce work. You might say to yourself: If you’re on welfare, you would have a lot of time to produce work if you were an artist. The member for Kingsford Smith (Peter Garrett) said that I would never have thought of something like this. Well, blow me down. I never have thought of something like this: that somebody on welfare needs more time to produce art.

It’s the kind of rubbish that the ALP are presenting as policy. Is Garrett going to double their welfare so they can produce double the work? Still, a sentence like that in policy statement may get a couple of votes.

THERE was a time when Greg Withers, husband of new Premier Anna Bligh and Queensland’s first “first bloke”, went by the name of Greg Francis. The year was 1987 and Mr Withers and Ms Bligh were expecting their first child but were keen to avoid what the two referred to at the time as “patriarchal tyranny”.

She had no great desire to name her child after her father, so the couple chose the name Francis, after Anna’s mother but with a different spelling. Joe Francis is now 20 and a film student at Griffith University. When Joe was born in 1987, in the twilight of the morally conservative Bjelke-Petersen regime, the only other option to putting the father’s name on the birth certificate was to put “father unknown”, which the two deemed too extreme. So Mr Withers changed his name by deed poll before Joe’s birth, and afterwards he reverted to being Greg Withers again.

So, she refused to take her husbands name in marriage and then refused to allow her son to take her surname when born. I wonder if she just hated her father or all men? If she forced her ‘husband’ to change his name by deed poll just to satisfy this weird convoluted thinking then I don’t like her. If her husband did it voluntarily then I don’t like either of them. And she is now leader of one of Australia’s leading states.

There is a show on TV where some pretty young thing shows videos of people hurting themselves. A baby falls over and the applause deafens. A man takes a kick in the groin and everyone rolls about laughing. A woman falls over, show her knickers and the audience thinks it’s funny That’s where I place The Chasers team. Securing laughs by going out of their way to make people look stupid. Anyone with the smallest knowledge of security will know it’s virtually impossible to completely secure a CBD in a democracy like Australia. Someone will aways be able to breach some of the security perimeters but will they be able to do anything when there. Had the Chasers been real bad guys would they have survived? I doubt it. The chances are they would’ve been targeted by marksmen all the way in and had they shown body language other than that of a group on an undergraduate dare they would’ve been dropped. Not funny unless your an undergrad, hate police or were just waiting around hoping something happened that would steal any success Howard might have claimed from APEC. I don’t fit any of those profiles – I just thinks it’s poor form.

Bob Brown thinks Howard should have stood down last year but then he would say that wouldn’t he? The fact that Bob Brown doesn’t like Howard is one of the reasons I do. Glen Milne has been agitating for years and in fact is the basis of most of the speculation over that time on Howard’s leadership. Naming angry backbenchers, worried backbenchers, a source from the Liberal Party etc, etc and never, never naming anyone, he has been a one-man ‘Howard out, Costello in’ band. But he is consistent, I’ll give him that. Today he states It is in this increasingly pessimistic context that the Liberal Party is convulsed by leadership confusion. Sorry, don’t see it. Janet Albrechtsen and Andrew Bolt have both deserted the ship and are advocating leadership change. Neal Brown, Melbourne QC and ex Lib politician states the case for sticking with Howard and puts it fairly succinctly. Some people need reminding of what a great job Howard has done and the fact that Rudd’s ascendancy in the polls relates to his cliche based policies. When the campaign starts he will be called upon to fill in the detail and then we may well see a different set of polls. How, for example, does he justify fighting in Afghanistan as ‘good’ and fighting in Iraq as ‘bad’? The Middle East is the core of the problem and has been for thousands of years. Afghanistan is just one of the battle areas of the fight against terror. The Taliban recruit from the Middle East and where does OBL come from? What will he have to say about the fact that an ALP government will have 75% of it’s front benches manned by union hacks when they only represent maybe 20% of the work force? What is his stand on defence? Are we going back to the discredited Defence of Australia or at best will we only deploy to the Pacific basin when it is clear that what happens anywhere in the world affects us. What is his Tax policy? I don’t know but I should and so should anyone thinking of voting for him I wait with baited breath for some detail.

Rudd was always going to get the media gushing over his linguistic skills when he met the Chinese. In addition to this, he represents the ALP who have always had more rapport with China than our Conservatives politicians . From Gough Whitlam’s rushing to recognize Communist China to Jim Cairns backing anything communist even as they were killing our soldiers, gives the ALP a special place in the Chinese hearts. I couldn’t help but see similarities between Howard and his ministers in a clinch with Bush and his team and Rudd and his mob in a clinch with the Chinese. One backing the right,the other the left. It has ever been thus. I find the Left’s harping about American transgressions in human rights and silence about China’s human rights abuses illuminating but not surprising. This piece of over-the-top reporting by Doug Conway in todays Australian is likewise illuminating.

The Prime Minister’s own speech went down well But when Mr Rudd started addressing the leader of one quarter of the world’s population, fluently in his own tongue, the effect was stunning. There was an almost audible intake of breath among the scores of Chinese political and business heavyweights in the audience.

Why was everyone stunned? Why did the business heavyweights take an almost audible intake of breath? Everybody in Australia knows that Rudd is a Mandarin speaker and does Conway imagine the Chinese delegation weren’t aware of this. Does he think the Chinese bureaucrats don’t brief their boss? Linguistics is a tool and a good one. It will make for easy communications but it is a skill that can always be bought. I was an army linguist at one stage in my junior ranks days and that’s where the army slot linguists initially. Being smart enough to master another language doesn’t make you a leader – it just makes you a word smith. I’d expect the Chinese and the business leaders to be impressed but not stunned, but when, as a journalist you have an agenda, then hyperbole is the way to go. I love it, the Prime Minister’s own speech went down well but Rudd’s was stunning accompanied with audible intakes of breath. Howard has worked hard at Chinese Australian relationships and no one would suggest that he hasn’t been successful but I wonder, as I’m sure Doug Conway does, how on earth he did it without being a Mandarin speaker. Must be other factors involved.

It is very clear in my mind that the reason Sydney-siders are being inconvenienced by APEC security can be laid directly on the shoulders of the sub-species promising to disrupt proceedings. Greenpeace, the Stop Bush mob of half-wits and every anarchist and radical in town are ready to attack; plans made, marbles purchased (damn! police horses are quarantined), metal inserted in faces and dreadlocks daubed with dirt and grease. Human rights lawyers are likewise ready, legal notepaper and cameras in-hand, to record the results of some idiot attacking police to the point of reaction, hoping to have their day in court denigrating the system that nurtures them. Believe me, there will have been planning sessions with legal advice suggesting, say, spitting in police officer’s faces – ‘that always invokes a response’ and don’t forget, when you’re thrown in the paddy wagon, scream out some obscenity and resist arrest so the police are forced to physically overpower you – the tabloid cameras will love it and record what we will later call ‘Police brutality’ for all to see. Tabloid TV are ready to record it all and set lower standards in media responsibility while left-wing journalists are busy penning articles based on Howard/Bush being to blame. Behind the scenes good men and woman will work hard to make life better for those are deprived, they will look at global warming and develop between them a rapport that will allow for speedier resolutions of world problems. The Police and Military will work long hours to allow them to do this all in a maelstrom of media attention on the wrong issues. While some of the left will be barracking for theses idiots, some even potential cabinet ministers, I remain hopeful that the NSW police have been given sufficient powers and moral support to lock the bastards up. I do look forward to the water canon being deployed. The sight of some of these grubs getting their first shower in months is appealing.