Speculation continues surrounding more than 20 people missing after the boat they were travelling on capsized during a rescue operation off the Cocos Islands late last night.
So far at least 17 people have been rescued.
And as sketchy news continues to trickle through, Daily Telegraph readers weigh in. There are nineteen comments so far, here are some highlights:
Glenn Milne is perhaps best known for two things: doggedly advocating the cause of Peter Costello for most of the life of the Howard Government, and being chucked out of the 2006 Walkleys (enjoy the footage here) after assaulting Stephen Mayne.
Milne later graciously apologised to Mayne – via voicemail.
The reason Milne went for Mayne – apart from the grog – was that Christian Kerr in Crikey had linked to a blog post where claims were made about Milne’s private life. What did Stephen Mayne have to do with that? Nothing, but in Milne’s addled mind he was an appropriate target.
They managed just over a week, give or take. Ignoring Wilson Tuckey’s little outburst about Tamil suicide boats wreaking havoc on the North-West Shelf, the Federal Opposition managed to nearly get through an entire sitting week last week without making themselves the issue. Add on the previous weekend and a few days prior to that and heck, if they’d held their nerve they would have been looking at an entire fortnight of allowing the Government to stay in the spotlight.
But nope, Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce had other ideas.
The Right – speaking monolithically, of course – is exercised, no pun intended, by the Government’s legislation for a National Preventive Health Agency. The bill has been delayed by the Senate while it awaits the provision of a related report by the Government.
And no they’re not exercised by the fact that it is bloodywell preventative not preventive, though they should be.
No, it’s the Nanny State thing. Bureaucrats – shiny-arsed pencil-pushing latte-sipping faceless Canberra bureaucrats – telling Aussies what they should and shouldn’t do about their health, about what food they eat and how much exercise they get.
David Letterman’s recent troubles – boffing members of the young female staff – has given a less-than-gruntled ex-staffer the opportunity to fire a pot-shot at the sexist culture of the Letterman (and every other) writers’ room.
To this old writers’-room-runner and participant, it sounds like the standard whinge, which ignores both the nature of comedy writing, and the gendered difference in humour.
Writers’ rooms aren’t particularly masculinist (compared to say, Turkish prisons..
My word, we are such a godawfully idiotic species.
I could only laugh last night as our television networks swarmed all over a Parliamentary committee report – a report by a group of politicians, so that makes it special – about the threat posed by rising sea levels.
The report might have been concerned about the fact that 80% of Australians live within 6m of sea level but it was the people who live within $6m of sea level that they were mostly interested in.
Lateline gives us another classic – the Tony Abbott interview, in which the mad Monk suggests that the problem with the Indonesian solution is that it is less humane than the Pacific solution.
Wow.
So now, the refugee debate has switched to how humane the various responses are?
I don’t think so-
Sinclair Davidson’s post in the daily tells you everything you need to know about the problems besetting libertarianism in Australia.Davidson focuses on the new laws surrounding abortion provision in Victoria – which oblige a doctor with a conscientious objection to abortion, to refer a woman seeking such a procedure to a doctor that the first doctor knows does not have an objection to abortion.
A sensible way to accommodate religious objection while making sure that women in difficult circumstances will not be denied a legal procedure, you might think. According to Davidson you would be wrong.
The Coalition joint party room, with the encouragement of Malcolm Turnbull, today rebelled against the Government’s restrictions on MPs’ printing allowances, which were curtailed in early September after a damning report from the Auditor-General prompted the Prime Minister and Special Minister of State Joe Ludwig to quickly to reduce allowances and curb their use.
Coalition MPs are threatening to refer the restrictions to Parliamentary Privileges committees on the basis that they unfairly favour the Government, given a ban on printing for ‘electoral purposes’ will not prevent Government MPs from praising the Government but prevent Coalition MPs from criticising it. Turnbull called the restrictions “an assault on democracy”.
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