Latest Posts

Stanhope gagged

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Channel Ten tried to get him to spill confidentiality again but he didn’t bite.
“I’d very much like to like to but … I can’t do that without risking some sort of legal response from the Commonwealth,” he told the Ten Network.

Now the Federal and State governments can get on with the job of getting these laws in place without Left wing antics confusing the issue. Meanwhile Beasley is attacked for trying to toughen the laws. Yep you guessed it, by the Left who want the laws to comply with some overseas human rights mob. Maybe they would have a case if they could guarantee that the overseas human rights body had the safety of Australian citizens as their first priority but I seriously doubt that is the case.

Labor’s left faction has accused Mr Beazley of being too soft and toeing the government line on terrorism measures while ignoring the party’s obligation to comply with a key international covenant on human rights. A senior Labor insider said it was time for Mr Beazley to “pull his finger out” as the faction passed a resolution reconfirming the ALP’s commitment to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Stuff the ICCPR. Australia’s elected representatives run this country, not them.

War on Terror

Another chance for the Left to get it wrong

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BAGHDAD – Iraq’s major political parties finalised alliances on Saturday ahead of Dec. 15 polls that will select the first full four-year parliament since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein. Should give the Left weeks of predicting doom, gloom and mahem followed by the normal silence; then rationalization of why so many voted. Of course the piece has to start and finish with US forces casualty lists. Can’t mention Iraq without trying just one more time to lessen the resolve of the US.
War on Terror

Alas poor D’Hage. I knew him well

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Adrian d’Hage, decorated ex army officer, theologian and darling of the left has been quoted at Margo’s and because of that, at Tim Blair’s. I once knew him well and his name popping up after all these years pushed me to do some googling for the unusual surname. I found him here, an interview with Taliban Tony at Lateline here, a speach given to the Rural Australians for Refugees here, and just to confirm a good officer’s fall into the dark side he is quoted at Sievxnews I’m not actually sure that Adrian’s fall was all that far. We were both officers at Head Quarters, 1st Division in the 80s and the shine on his Military Cross was getting somewhat tarnished then. Not to say it wasn’t earnt in the first place but a gong will only take you so far. He subsequently commanded a battalion and then later popped up as Defence Spokesman and appeared regularly on TV. John Howards rise and Adrians fall coincided and no one I knew was surprised. According to his bio he found and then lost God during his Theology studies but never lost the state of being ‘out of step’ with his military peers. The AWM have a pic of a very young D’Hage here and looking at it I can only ponder going from being awarded a good gong in the field to being quoted, and indeed writing to Webdiary is a long fall. Comments over at Tim Blairs wonder at d’Hage’s grog intake and well they should. I’ll leave the final comment to Barney in a 2001 entry in a nondescipt anti-everything forum.
Look, it took the army two decades to rid themselves of the embarrassment that was Adrian D’Hage. I wonder why a decorated Vietnam veteran only made Brigadier? Refer to him as a publicity hungry would be political commentator but not an ex army officer. He peaked at Lieutenant.
General Musings

Coppersblog

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Today’s Brisbane Sunday Mail has an article on a British Policeman blogging his daily grind. Go there – it’s good. Perhaps a Queensland policeman could do something similar as I’m sure there are a million stories to tell. Come on, one of you could do it.
General Musings

It’s going to happen guys – move on now

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As much as the left and the Intelligensia complain, the anti-terror and IR laws are going to be passed before Christmas. The ‘Shoot to kill’ red herring can stay in or out…doesn’t matter much as no court would convict a federal or local agent of murder, or even manslaughter, if he thought the other guy was trying to kill him. Oh, and don’t waste too much money on champagne celebrating the demise of Howard in the poles largely acredited to the IR Laws by optimistic pundits. The voter still has to shed the message of the ACTU/ALP adds with their lies and propaganda and absorb the truth.
Gary Morgan says: “Despite the mass of publicity, debate, and advertising by the Federal Government and the Unions, the opinions of Australians have barely changed since the last Morgan Poll on the Industrial Relations reforms in July of this year. In fact, a slightly higher proportion of Australians now disagree with the Industrial Relations reforms (49%) than disagreed in July (47%). The percentage of Australians who agree with the reforms (17%) remains unchanged since the previous survey.�
The voters don’t know enough about the reforms yet to have any firm opinion. Ads like the current government releases take time to be absorbed. Lets face it – they’re pretty boring. Surfing over at Ranting and Rambling, Hamish quotes a piece from Crikey that I can’t find so I’ve quoted it in part here. Truth in advertising would go a long way to giving Howard a postive poll for Christmas.
Much has been said about the fact that the Government is spending around $100 million advertising its planned changes to the Workplace Relations Act. But not much has been said about the pathetic advertisements that have so far been produced. The Government would be better off sacking their grossly overpaid advertising agency and media buyers and running ads like this: Advertisement One: Cameras focuses on an employee rifling through the handbag of a fellow employee and removing money from her purse. Midway through the act the thieving employee is caught by a manager and summonsed to the manager’s office. The manager tells the employee he can no longer trust him and that he will need to find another job, and offers the employee a generous one month payout. The employee swears at his manager and says he’s going to call the union. The next scene is a hearing at the Industrial Relations Commission in which the Commissioner announces that the dismissal was harsh, unjust or unreasonable and that the manager must re-employ the thief in his previous position as he was not given a proper warning before being dismissed. The Commissioner also announces that the thief is to receive pay in lieu for the time he was away from work. The advertisement then concludes with white writing on a black screen which reads:“The New Workplace Laws – Allowing thieves to be sacked.”
 The people know this type of thing goes on and will eventually accept the need for new IR regulations. Just wait and see.
Politics

Nguyen still headed for the long drop

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GEORGE Pell will urge the Pope to intervene in a desperate bid to spare drug trafficker Nguyen Tuong Van from the gallows as the Howard Government yesterday also promised a last-ditch appeal to spare the Melbourne man’s life. Desparate bid is right with only 19 percent of locals claiming to be Christian and the remainder claiming Asian based religions or no religion I can’t see Singapore’s President and Prime Minister worrying about a backlash at the next polls. I doubt whether they will jump to any request from the leader of the Catholic world and as it is their country they have the right to say – tell your citizens not to traffic drugs through our country – we don’t drugs or drug couriers here. Phillip Adams condemns Australia and calls us racist. I think Phillip has the ‘racist’ problem, not us. I agree with some of what Phillip says and I don’t support capital punishment but all of that is irrelevant if you commit a capital crime in a country that does support it. Sad but inevitable. Phillip can debate drug prohibition all he likes but unfortunately he has no sway in Singapore. Actually he has no sway in Australia either but that’s another issue
Uncategorized

Matt Price helps writer sell books

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Sing a song, act in a film or write a good book and all of a sudden you are imbued with a superior knowledge of Internatonal Affairs. You are quoted by the press and appear on television talk fests with interviewers hanging on every word you utter and your opinion becomes gospel. Doesn’t make sense to me but Matt Price in todays Australian quotes a writer who has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature as likening the Howard Government’s controversial reforms to human rights abuses under apartheid in his native South Africa. The writer, Jim Coetzee, has won two Booker prizes as well as the Nobel Prize. Clearly he is a wordsmith but has little knowledge of Australian police or legal system.
(Jim) Coetzee said the South African police “could do what they wanted because there was no real recourse against them because special provisions of the legislation indemnified them in advance”.
So? Interesting statement on South African laws as they applied at the time but they have no relevance in any debate about our proposed anti-terror laws. Still, Matt Price gets paid for the piece, Coetzee sells more books and some people will add the piece to their store of irrelevant information to be used to base their irrelevant opinions.
War on Terror

Parking Nazis strike again

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In August, 2003 I posted an article on Melbourne Traffic Nazis and commented;
The Melbourne Traffic Nazis have booked a guy for parking in a clearway even though he had the perfect excuse – he was dead at the time! The Traffic Nazi, From Sonnington Council, reportedly approached the car, looked inside and then went around the other side of the vehicle, peered inside again and then started writing out the ticket. Didn’t it occur to the ticket writer that something was amiss. I mean how many times do these people book cars with comatose bodies inside? How about a rap on the window and “Excuse me, are you OK? No. I’m paid to write tickets! I’ve seen some dead bodies in my time and they never look like their just having a nap. There is something different in the way they repose that generally poses the thought – there is something wrong here.
 Well. they are at it again….at Melbourne again. This time a guy gets a ticket for overstaying his parking limit at a local shopping center. He was dead and had been for nine days. The Traffic Nazi claims the man wasn’t visible through the cars tinted windows when the parking fine was slapped on the windscreen but the guy that sounded the alarm had no such difficulties.
Although the vehicle had tinted windows, the man clearly saw the body and went to knock on the window. Approaching the car, he detected an odour and realised the driver’s decaying body had been in the car for some time.
There’s something rotten in the state of Victoria.
General Musings
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