Latest Posts

ADF SUPPORT TO TONGA

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After receiving a request from the Government of Tonga on Friday evening, Australia, in conjunction with New Zealand, has deployed military and police personnel to help restore stability.
The New Zealand-led military deployment includes approximately 50 Australian Defence Force personnel. Their mission will be to support the Tongan Security Forces in stabilising the situation following rioting in Nuku’alfoa and to provide a force capable of safely evacuating Australians and other approved nationals if required.
The ADF contribution is drawn primarily from the 1st Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment and includes infantry soldiers and logistic personnel. The above details was quoted from a Defence Media email.  I note in the Australian that 85 personnel have been deployed including 35 federal policemen. They keep us busy, our Pacific cousins, don’t they?
Defence

Change course, Bush urged from all sides

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US President George W.Bush left Washington yesterday bound for the Asian economic summit in Vietnam with advice from left, right and centre ringing in his ears to change course, not only in Iraq but on foreign policy in general. Good Idea. Start with securing the borders of Iraq and then attacking the terrorists lines of supply and if that means destroying the factories from whence they obtain their explosives for IEDs then so be it. In whatever country they are located. The anti-war terrorist appeasement brigade have achieved one of their aims. They can now draw parrallels between Vietnam and Iraq with some degree of truth after the mid-term US elections. In ’72 and ’74 when the South Vietnamese needed support the then Democrat majority denied them hope allowing the Communist North to re-arm courtesy of the USSR and subsequently invade South Vietnam. The assassinations, reducation camps and communists policies resulting in poverty and terror for the remaining millions who couldn’t flee is now history. I would just hope we don’t repeat history just because we have forgotten the past or never understood it in the first place.
Politics, War on Terror

Refugees face new threat of ejection

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THE Howard Government will be able to more easily deport refugees on temporary protection visas after the High Court ruled asylum-seekers were responsible for proving that a return to their homelands would be too dangerous.
More than 630 asylum-seekers from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Sri Lanka, who have applied for further protection after their TPVs expired, now face a higher risk of deportation. The 4-1 High Court ruling in the parallel cases of two Afghan men found that asylum-seekers asking for further Australian protection must prove their refugee status still exists after their initial three-year visa expires, effectively putting the onus of proof on refugees, rather than the Government.
Makes sense to me but what really makes it clear that it is in the best interests of Australia is this;
Minority judge Michael Kirby described the rulings as parochial and hostile to international law.
International law be damned and what’s wrong with parochial? The High Court adjudicates for Australia – doesn’t it?
General Musings

Fun and Games

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This week I’m flat out working on the November Great Legacy Militaria Auction to be held on the 19th of November at South Brisbane. (Keep an eye on this link for items to be auctioned) At 2.00 pm yesterday just before the Melbourne Cup, I was standing outside getting a break when I noticed a weirdo accros the street yelling at the cars as they went by. Loser, I thought….unwashed drug-hyped hippy bastard….maybe the local chapter of the Greens are having a Melbourne Cup party. I went back inside as my attention span is remarkedly short when these type come into view but I should have paid more attention.

AT 4.00 pm when I was saying goodbye one lady suggested I wait as there was some weirdo ranting and raving in the lane where I had parked my Discovery and maybe he had damaged my car. I didn’t even pause but ran down to my car ignoring the idiot as I looked for any damage. Sure enough the unwashed drug-hyped hippy bastard was there and he had kicked in/thrown something at the drivers door and was now lifting wheelie bins up on his shoulder and tossing them while yelling something that seemed to have the barely discernable words “f*****g Silvertails” in it’s construction.

If there ever was a guy who stood out it was this one. Tall, dressed in dirty black with his head shaven other than a one inch mohawke down the centre that ended as a pony tail at the back. Bits of metal hanging off his face with the demeanour of a junk yard dog and twice as ugly.

I opened the car, threw my lap top and camera inside and decided to reposition the vehicle to a safer location prior to my discussing the damage with him. I drove around the block, parked close but out of site, grabbed my digital camera and went back to the scene. I am, if nothing else, dogged and I was not going to let the bastard get away with it. It occurred to me that a good pic would help to later ID him in case he escaped. I had him framed in the lens and was just about to say “Smile sunshine” when the police turned up.

Situation diffused.

It took three of them to wrestle him to the ground and apply handcuffs. I noticed they prudently wore gloves and were very professional in the handling of the situation. The police vehicle had a lockup on the back that seemed to be made of fibreglass with a smooth finish inside. I thought it would be easier to hose out considering the type of clients who temporarily resided inside and with no sharp corners there would be less chance of client injury and the subsequent swarming of lawyers.

There was a lot of Melbourne Cup Parties in the neighbourhood and some civic minded party goer had called in the event pointing out that a four wheel drive had been damaged in the fracas. There were mobs of these people on either end of the short lane watching the unprogrammed floor show that unfortunately included my vehicle as one of the props.

I gave a statement to the police and indicated that I was going to pursue restitution. This next morning I was called to a local police station where they took photos of the damage and then I went and saw an old panel beater mate and had him assess the damage and supply a quote. $1670!

Man, am I ever going to seek restitution.

The vehicle’s insured but neither the insurance company nor I are guilty of any transgression, the unwashed drug-hyped hippy bastard is and as one police woman pointed out ” He was born in 1977 and it’s about time he learnt that as an adult he will be held responsible for his actions”

I’ve got a quid says he was on drugs, not just alcohol…Ice, one policeman suggested and I will hold him responsible. Years ago some thieves broke into my car and stole all my tools – maybe a twenty year collection of good Sydchrome and Stanley tools for all occassions. They went to court and were put on good behaviour bonds but I was left with the cost of replacing the tools.

Not this time mate.

Uncategorized

Sheik Al-Halil still in the news II

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The mufti’s attitudes towards women are a Muslim problem, right? Think again says Michel Costello No, I won’t, says Kev. Michael allocates some of his column space to the fact that there are plenty of examples of white guys raping, beating and generally treating woman poorly and he’s right but that’s not the issue here. He points out that 30 years ago the situation of rape victims in Australia was bad. Society, he says, treated them as sluts. Well, I was very much around 30 years ago and I always thought of rape victims as just that, victims, and I have always been main-stream. The most common examples of these woman being treated poorly was from the legal profession as they tried to get the predatory males off the hook by suggesting that “she was a slut’ as they grilled her about her sex life. However, I don’t recall any political or religious leader saying woman deserved rape if they dressed inapproriately. Nor do I recall any such person sympathising with rapists as they were convicted and sentenced to years out of circulation. Until now. If our society isn’t blameless in this matter then that was thirty years ago and as Kim Beasley says, we have moved on. When I, as a Protestant fell in love with a Catholic 30 years ago I had to undergo ‘training’ to marry her but that was all – I can’t recall the local priest suggesting I should be killed because I wasn’t a believer. The Mufti supports those who would do this and they are doing it today. Can we please remember that. (Coincidentally all of my training was conducted by Army Padres with ammo boxes as alters but I got sufficient ‘ticks in boxes’ to front the alter) Mufti Taj Din al-Hilali hasn’t moved on, if anything he has regressed and he is a religious leader of some 300,000 Australians. What is worse is too many of those 300,000 have supported him by applause and too few have condemned him publically. Michael Costello doesn’t excuse the Mufti but he does throw in the “we’re not perfect either” line and I think that blurs the focus. Others are quick to point to the Crusades for the same reason and the counter “Yeah, but that was centuries ago, we have moved on and the radical Muslims haven’t” is so obvious I wonder why people even raise it.
War on Terror

US Mid-term elections

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Senator Kerry campaigns for the Republicans as he reminds the US that the Democrats come with left wing garbage.
Senator Kerry is a decorated war veteran who served in Vietnam. He said people were “crazy” to think he would denigrate America’s 140,000 personnel serving in Iraq.
Maybe people are crazy and are ready to believe that Kerry would insult servicemen because that’s what he does. Since he first come on the radar screen in the early 70s his stock and trade has been to dispage his own countrymen and curry favour with their enemies. Kerry in 2006 addressing a rally;
You know, education–if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.
Kerry in 1971 addressing a Senate Inquiry;
They [US servicemen in Vietnam] had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
But as we know, Kerry is also a a man of action. He went to North Vietnam and helped the communists secure leverage in the Paris Peace Talks. This from a guest at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam war;
I was a POW for nearly six years, held in North Vietnam prison camps, including the notorious Hanoi Hilton, a place of unimaginable horrors — torture, beatings, starvation and mind-numbing isolation. When Kerry branded us “war criminals,” he handed our captors all the justification they needed to carry out their threats to execute us. Thanks to Kerry, Jane Fonda and their comrades in the anti-war movement, our captivity was prolonged by years. The communists in Hanoi and Moscow couldn’t have had a better press agent to spread their anti-American propaganda.
And this from Opinion Journal;
Kerry’s apology isn’t really an apology at all. Here’s a shorter summary of it:
1. What I said wasn’t really what I said. 2. I’m sorry if you misinterpreted what I was saying by taking it at face value. 3. Republicans suck.
Why it is so hard just to say, “I’m sorry for what I said”? I trust we can get quotes from Kerry everyday from now until the mid-term US elections. It may help to remind Americans that this is what the Democrats think of the US military. Every house has a veteran and the main-steam America treats them honourably, unlike Kerry.
Politics

Global Warming High Priest writes gospel

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The new ideology, Global Warming or, on a cold day Global Change, has a new disciple in Nicholas Stern. He is the flavour of the week as the ABC put him on a pedastal and treat his every word as gospel. Stern has called for urgent world action to cut greenhouse gases or face economic failure worse than the Great Depression. It puts the global cost of global warming and its effects at $9 trillion – a bill greater than the combined cost of the two world wars and the great depression and warns us that drought and floods could render swathes of the planet uninhabitable, creating the largest migration in history. He’s put ticks in more boxes than Chicken Little ever knew existed – it’s just a pity that the science seems to be based on questionable computer modelling. He says with a 4 degree warming Australian farmlands would be rendered useless. He could be right but entering “4 degree warming” in the text box of some software doesn’t actually increase the temperature. The fact that the rise in temperature over the past century has been in the order of 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C) then we are looking at maybe 5 centuries before we have a problem; and that presumes that in all that time the human race couldn’t come up with an answer. They may even come up with a computer model that us sceptics can believe. This ideology has the Pacific Islanders reading the new Book of Revelations and demanding migration rights to Australia and New Zealand because their low lying islands are going to be swamped. It says so in the New bible. It would also be pretty cool to live in Australia with it’s social security and all but the islands aren’t about to be swamped. Scientists and other interested parties are argueing over whether the rise is .07mm a year or 5mm a year and even then king tides, natural sand redistribution, native attempts at building on the shoreline and the effects of cyclones must be factored in. Even if you believe the Chicken Littles and accept 5mm a year rise there is still no justification for causing panic amongst the locals. The next cyclone could reverse or exacerbate any sea rises and they’ve been blowing for millenia. I’m prepared to accept there is a problem and we need to be careful but the alarmist reporting prevelant today serves little purpose. Mother earth has weathered a lot in her time without the intervention of us puny humans and she will for a long time yet. Like all religions, I am pepared to study this new one but as usual I will not be taking every single word as gospell.
Climate Change

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

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JOHN Howard’s new wage tribunal for low-income earners has been accused of lacking credibility by a prominent union official, who claims it granted higher pay rises than expected to help the Government at next year’s federal election. Bill Shorten, national secretary of the Australian Workers Union and a future Labor leadership contender, says the Fair Pay Commission would not have awarded a $27-a-week increase in the minimum wage last week without the forthcoming election. That presumes Howard has the power of veto over the Fair Pay Commission and I’m not sure if that’s the case. However it is good to have the AWU’s election tactic out in the open. If any result from the IR laws is at risk of being seen as positive for the workers then Shorten can claim it is a Coalition re-election tactic. Look, the unemployment figures are the best ever. Ah yes but it’s because of the forthcoming election. Look, workers have just got another pay rise and they’re so happy. Ah yes but it’s because of the forthcoming election. Not much threat to us conservatives in that ploy.
Politics

Sheik Al-Halil still in the news

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Sheik ‘Catmeat’ al-Hilali has done a wonderful job. Todays Australian has him above and below the fold and I particularly note Paul Keating’s part in the saga. I trust we can arrange to have this entire episode recycled the week before the next election to remind voters of the risks involved with the ALP. Let him talk, quote everything he says. It will only help to reinforce in peoples mind the danger of the mind set of extreme Muftis like Al-Halil. One caveat – send him back from whence he come and report him from there so we can keep all the poison in one barrel. If he can’t be expelled because the law doen’t allow it then could I suggest it is time we looked to amending the law. Clearly the ALP should not have given this guy citizenship and I’m of the opinion that the country is entitled to have the last say as to who stays or goes and to rectify any decision that was wrong in it’s initial application. As in “well, yes, we did give you permanent residence but we now believe you represent a danger to our citizens. The individual can appeal ad nauseum then so should the government be allow to adjust obvious mistakes. A letter in todays Australian indicates there are people who still don’t get it.
WE see that, by shooting off his mouth, the poor old mufti has got himself into trouble with the Australian thought police. Let’s get real. The man may be a self-righteous dill but let’s remember that a basic Aussie right is our right to be offensive, as distinct from harmful, in the things we say and do. Dr Doug Ogilvie
Surprising that a Doctor, educated and all, should miss the point of freedom of speech. It does not include the right to preach sedition, to encourage young Jihadis to murder civilians nor to openly support those who do, such as Osam Bin Laden. The ‘poor old Mufti‘ is a dangerous poor old mufti. He encourages those who would rape or kill our woman and children. Be done with him.
War on Terror

Beasley still doesn’t understand

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LABOR has accused the Howard Government of breaking its promise over interest rates and says it is out of touch with the financial pressures confronting middle Australia.The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is widely expected to raise interest rates next month after annual inflation came in at 3.9 per cent this week. For a start “widely expected to raise” is not the same as “have raised” and Howard still has a long way to go before interest rates even approach those of the last Labor government. We would need something like a 400% rise to even get near them. Remember Beasley? Howard said Interest rates would be lower under his government than under Labor – not that they would never rise. For God’s sake man, stop inventing promises Howard never made and accusing him of breaking them.
Politics
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