Retired infantry officer. Conservative by nature and politics; Happily married and father and grandfather of eight. Loves V8 powered Range Rovers, Golden Retrievers, good books and technology and think there should be open season on Greenies.
Born in the mid forties and overdue for servicing but most parts still work.
Steve Lewis and Elizabeth Colman writing for the Australian report Simon Crean shooting the breeze with a gold Logie winner on national TV. The Arts and a lot of the media are already on your side, Simon. On Rove Live Simon played a game of Simon Says and finished with an impersonation of John Howard – I bet the audience loved it. And woudn’t the Panel just love to have him there to lend credit to their little Johnny Howard put downs. That part of the media mentioned in the article are already with you Simon. What you need to do is come up with policies that appeal to the Australians who aren’t on your side, which at this stage is most of them.
Israel, inflamed by the BBC and their left wing views of the Middle East crisis have asked the ABC not to air a BBC documentary that claims Israel used nerve gas against the Pallestinians. I thought ‘Good luck’ only to read on that an ABC publicist had already said that the ABC was committed to airing the progam and would not be censored.
Well they are censored. Clearly someone makes the decision not to air anything about the conflict that would put the Israeli position in anything but a bad light. How many times have I watched the ABC news to see items of Palestinian leaders being killed in an Israeli attack but no mention of the latest suicide bomber that blew up woman and children. Some balance! Some joke!
God I hate this. Just as the the demands to release all asylum seekers into the community have started to wane
another bloody boat load appears. There will be weeks of verbosity from people populating a parrallel universe demanding we do it all again. It does beg the question though, how did they get so close.
Last year I visited the North-West coast and sailed from Port Headland to the Monte Bello Islands. While there, waiting for the weather to clear, we were visited each day by a Coast Watch plane calling up on the radio for details of our last port, our next port, registration details of the yacht and people on board. I was actually impressed by this, as well as reassured. There is a fishing fleet operating out of Port Headland and yachts galore and it is not the cyclone season so what were they doing? Frightening!
I’m just a little wary about the Palestinians calling a three month truce. Is is an old tactic – call a truce, restock your ammo and retrain the troops. However I do hope it works for lots of noble reasons and for one of lesser nobility – I’d just love to hear the silence from the Bush/US/Howard/War haters if Bush pulls it off along with his ticks in the box for slowing terrorism, ruining Saddam’s day and otherwise giving some of us hope for a better world.
Kamu mati! says a father of a Bali victim to Amrozi as prosecutors call for the death penalty. Your dead! Maybe if we kill and bury all these terrorists in a pool of pigs blood, facing away from Mecca and with a cross around their neck and then advertise the fact heavily in the middle east we might bring about a rethink. No 28 whatever vestal virgins in heaven if you go via that sort of grave.
The Australian
reports a Network of allegedly corrupt officers infiltrated the tax office for 6 years rorting $2 million using fake tax returns and false identities. I’ll remember that when I ponder over the little white lies I tell the tax man every year.
TAX Commissioner Michael Carmody today dismissed the need for an inquiry into allegations of fraud on the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).
Hey! You’d do it to us at the drop of a hat
WMDs are still missing according to the Left. They are there, they just haven’t all been located yet. I received this link from a news service I subscribe to that lays it all out fairly logically. The article is by
Richard Spertzel who was head of the biological-weapons section of UNSCOM from 1994 to 1999. I’m prepared to believe he is simply reporting the facts as he knows them as different from some left-wing journalists who present the facts very selectively so as to promote their particular ideology.
AUSTRALIAN sailors had sex on the beach, streaked through military buses and pranced naked with rolled-up burning paper stuck between their buttocks in a wild, drunken romp at a US outpost in the Indian Ocean.
And their point is…?
The article by Natalie O’Brien, Investigations editor, and Michael McKinnon, FOI editor in this Weekends Australian bemuses me. The sailors have been at war, have been deprived, for months, of any type of civilization that Natalie and Michael would demand as their daily due, they are given leave on a military base and then allowed to cut loose. It would be news and responsible reporting to write an expose of drunken sailors ‘On duty’ but not this. If in a town and civilians are involved maybe yes – if crimes are committed, but please spare me ‘Sailors get drunk on leave” stories.
‘Prancing naked with rolled-up burning paper between the buttocks’ is called the
‘dance of the flaming arseholes’ and whereas it’s not particularly smart it can be funny if you’re there and as drunk as everyone else. I’ve seen it performed in soldiers messes from Saigon to Sydney, from Hawaii to Bangkok and I bet my Father would have seen it done in the RAN in the Pacific during World War 2. My Grandfather would have seen it performed in Egypt in World War 1 and maybe in South Africa during the Boer War. We just didn’t talk about it. What you do when on leave and drunk never makes for good stories to people who weren’t there.
So my point is, it happens and in the past we haven’t gone on about it. Most probably the journalists of the time thought there was a lot more to report on in whatever war they were covering and having some sense, let it be. Young civilians on holidays do the same silly drunken things but I have yet to see any news coverage of this. If the article started with….
AUSTRALIAN sailors, after months at war facing death everyday, had sex on the etc….I might have treated it as a human interest story but the article was presented in such a manner as to make the sailors look bad. And don’t say they were bad unless you can say you never had sex on the beach or got drunk, or did something silly to de-stress after bad days. (If you truly have never done these things then get a life!)
AUSTRALIAN sailors had sex on the beach.
AUSTRALIAN sailors had sex on the beach, streaked through military buses and pranced naked with rolled-up burning paper stuck between their buttocks in a wild, drunken romp at a US outpost in the Indian Ocean.
And their point is…?
An article by Natalie O’Brien, Investigations editor, and Michael McKinnon, FOI editor in this Weekends Australian bemuses me. The sailors have been at war, have been deprived, for months, of any type of civilization that Natalie and Michael would demand as their daily due, they are given leave on a military base and then allowed to cut loose. It would be news and responsible reporting to write an expose of drunken sailors ‘On duty’ but not this. If in a town and civilians are involved maybe yes – if crimes are committed, but please spare me ‘Sailors get drunk on leave” stories.
‘Prancing naked with rolled-up burning paper between the buttocks’ is called the dance of the flaming arseholes and whereas it’s not particularly smart it can be funny if you’re there and as drunk as everyone else. I’ve seen it performed in soldiers messes from Saigon to Sydney, from Hawaii to Bangkok and I bet my Father would have seen it done in the RAN in the Pacific during World War 2. My Grandfather would have seen it performed in Egypt in World War 1 and maybe in South Africa during the Boer War. We just didn’t talk about it. What you do when on leave and drunk never makes for good stories to people who weren’t there.
So my point is, it happens and in the past we haven’t gone on about it. Most probably the journalists of the time thought there was a lot more to report on in whatever war they were covering and having some sense, let it be. Young civilians on holidays do the same silly drunken things but I have yet to see any news coverage of this. If the article started with…. AUSTRALIAN sailors, after months at war facing death everyday, had sex on the etc….I might have treated it as a human interest story but the article was presented in such a manner as to make the sailors look bad. And don’t say they were bad unless you can say you never had sex on the beach or got drunk, or did something silly to de-stress after bad days. (If you truly have never done these things then get a life!)
The ABC bias debate. Dr Martin Hirst from the School of Journalism & Communication UQ writes to the Australian and proves the bias of the ABC by trying to prove there isn’t any. I find his letter as a case in point about what is wrong with the ABC.
If you watch the ABC, particularly the news and current affairs programmes and find yourself generally agreeing with what you see and hear then you are most probably in the political range of centre to left – if you disagree, you are most probably centre to right. It isn’t “juvenile” to comment on this, it is simply a matter of fact and has ever been thus. The point thousands of people previously, and Senator Alston recently, are trying to make, is that it is simply unprofessional to show a bias one way or the other when reporting the events of the day and to then claim it is a balanced opinion.
Calling a government “juvenile” indicates the type of bias we conservative types are talking about. Martin Hirst teaches at UQ’s School of Journalism – can’t you just see him lecturing and shaping the minds of undergrads with key phrases like ‘juvenile government’, ‘propaganda….a lie’, ‘Alston’s half-arsed whingeing’, ‘gung-ho patriotism’ and ‘the Government’s ridiculous panic-inducing anti-terrorism publicity campaign’? Good fodder for a balanced diet!
The quote from Max Uechtritz that annoyed Senator Alston:
“We now know for certain that only three things in life are certain – death, taxes and the fact that the military are lying bastards,” Mr Uechtritz is reported to have said during a forum on war reporting in Afghanistan”.
Martins letter:
Senator’s dossier is meaningless
WELL done Max Uechtritz for getting up Richard Alston’s nose again. It just goes to show how juvenile this Government can be. The 14-page “dossier” Alston’s office compiled is ridiculous and so out of context that it’s meaningless. This is a blatant case of political interference and Alston’s motive, in my view, is no more than trying to distract attention from the mounting problems of the Howard Government.
There is no substance in the minister’s allegations of bias. The situation on the ground in Iraq was very fluid and many things were said by reporters that later proved false. Let’s not forget that in the last 24 hours, the US has admitted they found no weapons of mass destruction and that they probably never existed. So the propaganda that the coalition had to invade Iraq to get rid of the WMDs was a lie.
No! The coalition invaded Iraq as part of the War against Terror – WMDs was one of several reasons – there were a lot more. The fact that Hussein has tortured and murdered hundreds of thousand of his citizens is one. Another is that we know his form – he has fired missiles at Israel; he has chemical weapons and has used them against the Iranians and his own people, he has atomic research programs for the stated purpose of creating atom/nuclear weapons and is altogether an unsavoury person.
It is the duty of independent journalists to question everything. The Senator seems to think the media’s duty in time of war is to fall meekly into line with the Government. This is not the media’s role and it is not what the public would expect. As a former journalist and now as a lecturer at the University of Queensland, I know that journalists must report without fear or favour.
The requirement is not to ‘fall in line’ but to report the facts in an unbiased manner. Leave editorials to editors and snide political comments to political commentators – we expect an opinion from these people and can allocate a loading left or right depending on their background. But the everyday journalist who fills in a line on TV or contributes to an article in the newspaper should indeed ‘question’ everything in the pursuit of professional accuracy and then when satisfied he or she has the story correct, submit for broadcast. Just the facts mate!
Martin adds
I have read upwards of 40 student essays on the Australian television news media’s coverage of the Iraq War and in each of them the conclusion drawn by the students is that the ABC did a better job than everyone else.
Besides stating the obvious that if taught by you ‘they would say that wouldn’t they’ you are hardly comparing apples with apples here. Commercial TV exists on 30 second grabs to get their story over – something to do with the attention span of the viewers maybe? Try tasking your students to compare the ABC with some major broadcasters – BBC, NBC, CNN, Fox, ABC (US) to name a few.
I’m not so much concerned about the ABC’s or Martin’s left wing sentiment as I am about the fact that he feels he has to abuse people who call it for what it is.
Senator Alston penned an article in the Age about the issue.
Judge for yourself.
Now interested in Martin Hirst I googled his name and found him billed with Margo Kingston at a symposium on the Language of War organized by Just Peace – People for Peace through Justice – in response to what it called was the “unilateral, pre-emptive and illegal military response by the US with the aim of imposing its views and authority on the nations of the world”. It was all faithfully recorded by the ABC but, strangely enough, try as I might, I couldn’t get a response for “right wing symposiums” the ABC might have recorded.
Finally an invite for Max Uechtritz. I am going to a Regimental Reunion in Wagga Wagga in August – you might like to drop in and explain to the blokes of my Infantry Battalion what you mean by ‘lying bastards’. For details visit the
website.
The Aborigine Genocide debate. If you haven’t been keeping up on the ‘how many aborigines did we kill when Aus was first settled” debate, then read on. Left-wing history revisionists are making all sorts of exaggerated claims that tell the story in their own distorted way as they try to prove ‘settlement’ equals ‘slaughter’. Keith Windschuttle released a book claiming their figures were rubbery and not based on fact. Since then the revisionists have refused to answer Windschuttle’s direct accusations. They are still at it.
This interview was reported in the Australian yesterday.
May 26, 2003
KEITH Windschuttle: Lyndall Ryan cites the diary of the colony’s first chaplain, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, as the source for her claim that, between 1803 and 1808, the colonists killed 100 Aboriginals [sic].
The diaries, however, record only four Aboriginals being killed in this period.
Reporter: It’s a devastating claim Ryan cannot refute.
Lyndall Ryan: Right. I certainly agree that the Knopwood diaries say that, but I also had another reference referring to a report by John Oxley who was a surveyor who’d been sent down to Tasmania in 1809. He said too many Aborigines were being killed.
Reporter: Okay, but how did you extrapolate from his words saying “too many Aborigines had been killed”, to “about 100 lost their lives”? Is that just made up?
Ryan: Well, I think by the way in which Oxley wrote that he seemed to think there had been a great loss of life from the Aborigines.
Reporter: So, in a sense, is it fair enough for [Windschuttle] to say that you did make up figures? You’re telling me you made an estimated guess.
Ryan: Historians are always making up figures.
I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again.
ANSWER THE BLOODY QUESTION LYNDALL!
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