69 Comments

Pages: « 1 [2] Show All

51. 51
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 9:36 am | Permalink

    confessions @49

    I suspect that everyone is probably looking to see how the changes might affect their own self-interests. If we think rupe’s concerned about the ABC 24hr news channel and an NBN, then we should wait and see what happens on those two policies and how they respond.

52. 52
    Sammy Jankis
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 10:52 am | Permalink

    Andrew cannot be serious…

    Today he cites an article from the Canberra Times about Afghani refugee Gairat Baykhil and asks:

    Excuse me? We’ve helped a refugee escape persecution so terrible in Afghanistan that he travels back three times on holiday?

    So I read the article, expecting to hear of the pleasant time Gairat spent in his country of origin, lazing about the pool sipping on Pina Coladas, on “holiday”. Instead I read this:

    “…the shop under the hotel in which he was staying was bombed. One the smoke cleared and he was able to get out of the building, the 28 year-old had to sidestep several dead bodies on the way.

    On that visit, his third since arriving in Australia as a boat person in 2001, he says people were killed around him every day…”

    Yep, sounds like a “holiday” to me.

    But wait – there’s more! Andrew also remarks:

    And has family still living in safety in Pakistan?

    So I turn again to the article, expecting hear of Gairat’s family safely nestled away in a leafy suburb of Pakistan, happily going about their daily lives in comfort and security. Instead I read this:

    “He still worries about his family, which is in Pakistan…”

    The article says the family is in Pakistan. I suppose it’s only fair to assume they are safe. I mean, there’s been no report of trouble in Pakistan in recent times, right?

    And to think a newspaper blithely prints this without asking any of the obvious questions. But so many journalists reporting on boat people seem to have lost every sceptical instinct.

    I know one “journalist” reporting on boat people who seems to have lost the ability to demonstrate basic comprehension.

53. 53
    fred p
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 11:06 am | Permalink

    Why do people keep responding to the troll? It is not here for an actual debate of the issues, you know.

54. 54
    confessions
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 11:20 am | Permalink

    Possum has a great piece on the government’s asylum seeker announcement. This bit perfectly sums up my view:

    The non-policy aspects of the PM’s speech are to be commended – it was a far more pleasant kind of politics than the grubby stroking of the dark underbelly of the electorate that Howard pursued in 2001 and which some of us were half expecting to re-emerge yesterday. For the first time in a long time we had a Prime Minister that spoke about the reality of the numbers when it comes to asylum seekers arriving by boat, a political leader that treated the public like adults and sought to remove some of the heat from the issue – although not quite managing to fully substitute that heat with equal parts light.

55. 55
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 12:19 pm | Permalink

    confessions @54

    As always (or at least, that’s how I like to think it is), I’ll wait and see what they actually do, and what impact it has. That’s ultimately what matters in the real world.

    But in the political world yes, you’re right. For the ALP this is a difficult decision, one they will have to manage very carefully not to put their own base offside. For the liberals it was manna from heaven. They can talk about how they were really just trying to save the lives of asylum seekers, but that doesn’t account for the demonizing public language, the bizarrely eager way vanstone ran the immigration department (among others) and the PM’s eagerness to be seen to be aggressive toward the Tampa (all the goodwill of the 2000 olympics, sunk to the ocean floor like a stone). For the libs, “cracking down” could be profitably combined with showboating.

    The libs drew support from dumping on foreigners – when they screwed up, it wasn’t their supporters who got furious (otherwise they’d have been dispatched much earlier – history will show that liberal supporters mostly cared about interest rates). Labor will have to tread much more carefully. Just one Jovicic, Solon or Rau will probably see them having to swap the PM job again – and possibly for a liberal.

56. 56
    Bolt cherry-picks and dissembles while the world warms – Pure Poison
    Posted July 7, 2010 at 2:12 pm | Permalink

    ...] bizarre attack on the CSIRO and its new chairman — including, as PeeBee noted in the open thread, the declaration that a prediction of something still 8 years into the future [...

57. 57
    confessions
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 8:53 am | Permalink

    A couple of good posts at LP unpicking the ‘claims’ made by so called whistelblower Craig Mayne, whose claims that billions of dollars are being wasted under the BER program have appeared in the Courier Mail, the Oz and on Red Kerry. The full post is lengthy, but worth a read, and the second one lists 10 questions the MSM need to answer for their uncritical reporting of the man’s claims. And once again we see the heavy lifting of investigative reporting being done by the blogosphere, not the MSM.

    http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/07/08/analyzing-craig-maynes-claims-full-post/

    http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/07/08/lazy-media-and-the-ber-scheme/

58. 58
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:04 am | Permalink

    This one’s interesting:

    “Shame! Father donates time and money to child’s school”

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/shame_father_donates_time_and_money_to_childs_school/

    Basically, it seems that Simon Overland is a guest speaker at a 100$-a-pop fund-raising dinner for his old school. I’m not sure how it stacks up – I doubt, for example, that ANYONE is paying 100$ just to hear a police commissioner talk. I suspect that the tickets are probably being bought for the dinner and charity, rather than the floor show (unless the floor show gets quite a bit more flashy than that).

    So I kind of agree with AB. But not entirely. The guy is a high-ranking public servant, not a successful private businessman. So while I agree that there’s nothing wrong with what he’s doing (unless of course a bushfire breaks out, in which I’m sure I can rely on the Hun to pillory him later on), that does need to be kept in mind. Hiow high up the chain can it go? Can the PM speak at a 100$-a-ticket fundraiser for his old school? Yes, but ….

    I don’t know enough to judge this one, but:

    “Gillard’s Fair Work regime is very fair to a child pornographer”

    http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/gillards_fair_work_regime_is_very_fair_to_a_child_pornographer/

    Apparently a convicted sex offender got a payout (10 days’ pay – SHOCK), for unfair dismissal from his job. The circumstances are bad – he was (allegedly) harassing and stalking other employees. But FWA decided that their process was unfair, so they have to pay whatever miserable pittance the compensation amounts to.

    But … does anyone know if Uncle Toby’s (a brand of the tiny family-owned company called Nestle) would have been excluded under work choices from unfair dismissal provisions? I have my doubts, but I don’t really know.

59. 59
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:09 am | Permalink

    This speculation about senator Faulkner’s reasons for departing …

    I am absolutely certain I heard him announce his retirement well before the last election, citing “nothing more in the tank” or some such. I was quite surprised to discover that he was still in parliament at all – I’d assumed he’d have been on his way. I guess winning might have changed his mind, but I’m therefore also not surprised to hear that he’s stepping down now. If I’m right about the last announcement (and I might not be – I might be confusing him with somebody else) then it sounds to me like he’s just jack of it.

60. 60
    Blastbeater
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:23 am | Permalink

    I noticed today that Bolt sneakily tries to imply that Gillard would approve of paedophilia. That is the worst kind of smear. I am oblivious as to how he can get away with such things. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/gillards_fair_work_regime_is_very_fair_to_a_child_pornographer/

61. 61
    Tobias Ziegler
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:25 am | Permalink

    Matthew, your memory is pretty close to the mark. He resigned his Senate leadership and Shadow Cabinet roles after the 2004 election loss. After Labor returned to government in 2007 he was working on a reform agenda to improve government accountability and transparency, but he was pressed (back) into the Defence role after Joel Fitzgibbon’s run of controversy last year forced him to stand down.

62. 62
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:57 am | Permalink

    TZ @61

    No idea what he thinks about his success viz accountability (I have my doubts), but he deserves a decent send-off. He’s a pretty formidable character, and (from my distant impressions) he’s scary smart – not somebody I’d want to be facing at a senate inquiry. He strikes me as somebody you would actually WANT on a company board (as opposed to, say, be willing to take on because he might have sent a bit of work your way … not naming anybody).

63. 63
    RobJ
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 10:58 am | Permalink

    So, when Gillard grabbed the top job the other week Abbott opined that it was great that no job in Australia was barred to women… Journos joked with him, he did admit that women weren’t likely to become full forwards in AFL clubs (or something like that ) but why didn’t ANY journo ask him about women Catholic priests or bishops? Slack, slow witted media we have..

64. 64
    Cuppa
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 11:35 am | Permalink

    RobJ,

    Surely you don’t expect this country’s pathetic one-party media to ask difficult questions of Abbott! What next?

65. 65
    RobJ
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 12:04 pm | Permalink

    No I don’t…. I reckon I could do a better job.

66. 66
    Holden Back
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 2:16 pm | Permalink

    Hmm

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/industry-sectors/foxtel-shelves-telstra-net-tv-deal/story-e6frg9hx-1225889144015

    Any comments?

67. 67
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 3:06 pm | Permalink

    Holden Back @66

    “Any comments?”

    Just one: Good.

68. 68
    Holden Back
    Posted July 8, 2010 at 4:04 pm | Permalink

    I just wondered if this had anything to do with the parent compnay’s hatred of the NBN.

    Nah, that would be some species of bias overa commercial relationshiop- couldn’t be.

69. 69
    Matthew of Canberra
    Posted July 9, 2010 at 9:14 am | Permalink

    Holden Back @68

    Actually, without having any inside information, I’m more inclined to think it’s a case of not locking themselves in. Plenty of ISPs have the infrastructure to be ABLE to deliver video – I’m sure a few of them would like to have a chance to do it, if someone can deal with the licensing issues. The question is coverage, and bigpond is a big outfit. If the NBN comes along and gives everyone access to 10mb/s+, then any distributor’s going to feel pretty silly about having locked themselves out of part of that market with an exclusive deal. So I actually suspect it’s a pro-NBN move. Assuming it happens.

Pages: « 1 [2] Show All