Category: General Musings

From today’s The Australian ‘Strewth column; DEMOCRACY is a precious gift. The incoming government is just loving it. It has the Labor leadership elections to milk — and boy, it is not going miss an opportunity. Like Julie Bishop yesterday:

“Given that the last two Labor leaders were betrayed by one Bill Shorten, I guess the only way you stop that betrayal going on is for Labor to vote in Bill Shorten. I mean, he can’t stab himself in the back, can he?”

Seems about right to me.

It’s not so much that the ALP are in denial when they say it was disunity that lost them the election, it’s that they say it and expect people to believe. To help them with their debrief I give them some hint of why they were turfed out.

• The Craig Thomson scandal and the alleged misuse of credit cards;
• The prime minister openly defending and supporting Craig Thomson in parliament, an additional scandal;
• Defending Peter Slipper’s behaviour with the hypocritical misogyny speech;
• Killing the beef live export industry overnight;
• FBT changes that hit ordinary workers;
• Introducing vast amounts of red tape for business;
• Demonising immigrant workers and using the ATO to hound immigrant workers;
• New regulations that made child care costs skyrocket;
• The Australia day race riot;
• The AWU affair;
• The suppression of reporting of the AWU affair;
• The Finkelstein attempt to remove free speech;
• 300 billion in debt with an annual interest bill for us taxpayers of over 10billion;
• The numerous promises to deliver a surplus;
• the announcements that a surplus had been delivered when it hadn’t;
• The attacks on the most profitable sector of the economy and then surprise when that sector slowed down;
• personal vilification of wealthy individuals such as Gina Rinehart;
• The hiking of electricity bills;
• The chaos of border protection;
• The carbon tax lie;
• Getting in bed with the Greens when they didn’t have to – the Greens would never have supported Abbott in anything; and
• Any amount of other debacles.

(List mostly compiled from commenter DD at Catalaxy) Rudd was out of step to the very end I didn’t hear him congratulate Tony Abbott but I did hear this;

It would be un prime ministerial of me to say Bill Glasson eat your heart out, so I won’t.

By far the strangest concession speach I have ever heard. Be gone and be quiet Rudd. Slipper got 920 votes in the election but more importantly, nearly 3,000 people voted for Craig Thomson in Dobel.  What the hell were these people thinking? Worse still, over 29,000 people voted for Swan in my electorate Lilley, indicating they have no concept of debt.  I would hate to see their credit cards. I look forward to a stable and competent government and the wailing of the children of the Left. It will be music to my ears.    

I picked this up at Catalaxy. Worth sharing 40 maps that will help you make sense of the world  

Listening and watching the media it would appear Rudd is fixing some of the problems of Australia.  The fact that he is fixing the problems that he himself caused doesn’t appear to be clear in the mind of a lot of commentators. He offers sympathy for the families of the drowned boaties without mentioning the fact that he caused the circumstances whereby their lives were put in peril in the first place. On Sunday the tabloid papers were all screaming “Carbon tax scrapped” but of course he hasn’t scrapped it, he has just brought the change over to an ETS on sooner than previously planned. No, hang on, he is talking about doing that.  As I understand it he has to take that to the House. Correct me if I’m wrong but it will need a vote and neither the Greens or the Libs would be onside for that one. I hear Wong on the radio touting that bringing forward the change to an ETS will take pressure off family budgets.  I wonder how that can be when the ALP have been talking up how the Carbon Tax wasn’t placing pressures on family budgets.  Seems you can have it both ways if you ignore one or more truths. As Abbott says;

Just ask yourself what an emissions trading scheme is all about. It’s a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.

Carbon Credits is also questionable with nothing sold to someone mostly using government funds.

THE great experiment with foreign sporting coaches is coming to an end and the Kiwis can go back to being our arch enemies. Just weeks after South African Mickey Arthur was replaced by Australian Darren Lehmann as the nation’s cricket coach, Victorian-born Queensland Reds boss Ewen McKenzie is poised to take over from New Zealander Robbie Deans as the Wallabies coach. It never sat easy with me that we would have an All Black coaching the Wallabies – a bit like Ho Chi Minh teaching me how to soldier. Brett Harris, the journo, must be young when he says ‘the Kiwis can go back to being our arch enemies’. They always were and always will be Brett.

THE man who killed Jill Meagher was a serial rapist on parole for previous offences when he raped and murdered the young ABC employee. Chief Crown prosecutor Gavin Silbert SC said Bayley was a “sexual predator” who showed a modus operandi of exerting physical power over his victims and threatening to kill his victims. The details of Bayley’s history have previously been suppressed, but can now be published after Justice Nettle today revoked his earlier suppression order. Mr Silbert said Bayley knew as he raped Meagher that he was likely to serve the maximum rape penalty of 25 years in prison if he was caught.

“Accordingly, he had no option but to kill her,” Mr Silbert said.

That’s like about 20 cases of rape – I wonder if the Parole Board members have any trouble sleeping at night?  

Nothing wrong with letting boat people into the country without papers. How many more are there and how long will it take for ASIO to identify the problems as the government cut their funding , human rights lawyers block every move to sort it out and the Greens and other useful idiots agitate against secure borders. Our borders are totally infiltrated and the government does nothing!

Interested in the boat people debate?  Do you wonder why the Left support the boat people and the Conservatives don’t? Do you remember the Vietnamese boat people and the ALP’s hatred of them? Gough Whitlam said

 I’m not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their political and religious hatreds against us” 

It should be noted that the Vietnamese didn’t hate us, as in ordinary Australians but they did hate communism (for very good reasons) and that is where Whitlam and the unions were coming from.  Those that couldn’t flee the retribution in South Vietnam died in their millions as the communists did what they do best – slaughter and/or send to reeducation camps those who had the temerity to fight for freedom. The Vietnamese were fleeing a communist state and the ALP of the time and the union leaders were very clearly pro-communists or anti-US which is the same thing.   The same people today reason that Iraqis and Afghans are fleeing US influenced regions and are therefore welcome.  The left wing Tamils, inventors of the suicide bomber’s vests are likewise welcomed for the same reason – their left wing politics I lived through those days when Australia was governed by a socialist government with very clear connections with the communists of the world. Our service in South Vietnam was denigrated by the Left, Communists Generals were dined out by Jim Cairns, one-time Deputy PM and life under Whitlam reminded us every day of how the world had changed.  Communism was the new ‘way to go’ and wearing the uniform of your country was frowned upon. It was humiliating and it looked like we had lost the Cold War which I enthusiastically contributed to for 13 months of my life but within a decade reason had prevailed.  Whitlam was a nightmare memory and President Reagan correctly identified the ‘Evil Empire’ and proceeded to flog them until the collapse of the Berlin Wall. If you are interested at all in the truth then you do need to read this report by Hal G.P. Colebatch