Caution, these people are running the show.

The Matt Price moment is an ABC faux award in memory of a journalist who tended to take a humorous view of Australian politics. It highlights the humorous, ridiculous, and genuinely funny moments in the political year. It is worth mentioning in the interest of fairness, that Mary Jo Fisher who appears here suffers from depression and it has been suggested that her medication was out of whack, and Kevin Rudd was recovering from laryngitis.

It is a somewhat disturbing to think that they were the only ones here with an excuse. It should also be a sobering thought that we voted them in and they are running this country:

Phone hacking scandal starts to unravel.

This is starting to look like the ‘déjà vu all over again’ thing. After the UK phone hacking scandal, the government, Labor, Greens, and independents here were determined to go after News Ltd in the hope of finding something they could use against its most trenchant critic. As is normally the case of late, they were cheered on relentlessly by the Fairfax press, which put the boot in daily.

Investigations so far have not found any evidence of wrongdoing by News, but are investigating Fairfax’s Age for hacking into Labor’s database, seeking information on prominent Victorians. Aint it a bitch, getting hoisted with your own petard.

In England, the paper that broke the News of the World hacking scandal, The Guardian, spent masses of column meters of print in exuberant and self righteous commentary about the behavior of their more successful competitor, only to have to conduct a strategic retreat. It now seems that their claim of deleting voice mail from the phone of murder victim, Milly Dowler is false or just plain wrong:

In July the Guardian reported that News of the World reporters had listened to her voicemail and deleted the messages. The paper has now retracted that particular claim.

"It is understood that while News of the World reporters probably were responsible for deleting some of the missing girl's messages, police have concluded that they were not responsible for the particular deletion which caused her family to have false hope that she was alive," the paper reported. The Guardian is considering publishing a correction.

Police have established that the News of the World was not investigating Milly Dowler's phone at the time the crucial messages were listened to and then deleted. Over the weekend there were fresh allegations that police might have inadvertently deleted voicemail messages, or the phone provider deleted messages automatically after they were listened to.

While the hacking of private telephones is reprehensible, there is some evidence that other papers did it as well. It appears very much like cases of the pot calling the kettle black, whereby papers that have a fair bit to hide are going after others in the hope that exposing them as unmitigated bastards somehow vindicates their own wrongdoing.

The NOTW scandal needed exposing and that is something that is a responsibility of the remaining media. The trick in avoiding the appearance of hypocrisy or poor reporting is though, getting facts straight in the first place, and not descending into wild exaggeration in the second.

Climate change; agreement to make an agreement?

Cartoon: By Lisa Benson.

At this stage it is unknown whether the rest of the world is also carrying on with the “Oh joy, Oh rapture,” warblings the Australian government is carrying on with over the last minute pseudo agreement that has come out of Durban. It seems little more than a rehash of the standard last minute agreements that have come out of Copenhagen and Cancun before it.

But according to our government it is a breakthrough of epic proportions like to pave the way to a binding …. (Add the accolades of your choice here) they’re pretty standard as well. According to the climate change minister and the rest of the climate frantic club, its just what they have been having wet dreams about all these years:

CLIMATE Change Minister Greg Combet has praised the outcome of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Duban as a significant breakthrough in tackling global warming.

The conference has agreed to begin negotiations on a new accord which would put all nations under the same legal regime.

Representatives of 194 countries agreed to move towards a new agreement to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol. Mr Combet said the outcomes in the South African city are good news for the environment. (You just have to be feeling that warm cool inner glow.)

Gillard and her government, fresh from bringing down a carbon tax on the heads of Australians are desperate to see signs, any signs, that the rest of the world will be stampeded into following suit the way the PM and Brown assured us they would. For this reason anything not totally negative coming out of this conference is good news for them.

It is difficult to read anything more into this other than the countries represented there, have managed to avoid the total embarrassment of failing to reach any agreement, by coming to an agreement that is little more than an agreement to work toward an agreement. If such an agreement occurs and what it might be is very much up in the air. There is little reason to believe that the nations that have resisted subjecting their industry to unsustainability in order to have a new tax are likely to play ball this time.

What is clear though is that there is an intent to establish a $100 billion-a-year Green Climate Fund will also be established to finance climate change adaptation for developing countries, of which we will be expected to contribute around $2 to 4 Billion. This is on top of the carbon tax. If history is anything to go by, the money that doesn’t go directly into Swiss bank accounts, will be spent on more environmentally friendly palaces for the leaders of those nations, and better armaments for the soldiers of those nations to more efficiently keep their people under control.

Massive fraud at Queensland Health.Queensland Health.

Queensland Health is a sad shell of what was formerly a well-organized department which operated very efficiently. To give some idea of the decline, the writer was in 1983 able to get a hernia operation 21 hours after reporting the injury. In 2010, a similar injury to the other side took five months from reporting it to getting an appointment with the surgeon in order to have the operation.

In recent years a series of scandals have rocked the department. First, the Health Minister Gordon Nuttall was jailed for corruption, then it was discovered that owing to failure of the vetting process, an incompetent surgeon, Jayant Patel was appointed to Bundaberg Hospital and caused a number of deaths and serious injuries to patients. A faulty payroll system was introduced which after the expenditure of hundreds of millions is still causing problems.

Now some shyster who was not adequately checked out, prior to being appointed to a position in the financial section has managed to embezzle $16 million from the department. He has prior form in New Zealand and an investigation last year was dropped after the department assured police that such a thing couldn’t happen:

More than $5 million is believed to have been transferred from the department's accounts through a sophisticated network over the past three years. A further $11 million was shifted in a single transaction in the past fortnight. …

An identical complaint about 12 months ago to the Crime and Misconduct Commission about Morehu-Barlow, who also goes by the first name Joel, was dismissed by a Queensland Health internal investigation.

However, a low-level financial officer is believed to have become suspicious and raised concerns with the chief finance officer this week. "By forging the name of a senior officer who had authority to transfer large sums, this middle-level officer has been able to deceive those that are there," Health Minister Geoff Wilson said.

The Auditor-General also failed to discover the multimillion-dollar ruse in his frequent checks but warned recently of risks because of lax financial controls. "There appears to have been a loss of focus across the public sector on maintaining basic financial controls with the number of agencies failing to maintain these controls increasing," a report in July said.

So in spite of warnings that this could happen, The department went blithely on reassuring itself that it couldn’t happen to them. No eyebrows were raised, no effort was launched to correct the problem, and despite the warning from the Auditor General, the government failed to act. The Premier is demanding answers, perhaps she should ask herself first.

The March of the Triffids

By Viv Forbes, Chairman,

The Carbon Sense Coalition 


Australia's open spaces and grasslands are being invaded by aggressive woody weeds of the eucalypt family and the feral plants they shelter such as lantana and rubber vine. This invasion is assisted by a fifth column of misguided tree huggers and climate alarmists who demand that these environmental weeds be protected and their expansion subsidised by the taxpayer!

Like Triffids, the invaders are stealthing out from every patch of bush, surrounding homes and towns, consuming grasslands and displacing grassland birds and animals, both native and domesticated.

This invasion started in neglected parks and conservation areas and was given a massive boost by the Kyoto inspired bans on controlling regrowth, even on freehold land. The final stupidity is the use of carbon credit finance to encourage the deliberate planting of woody weeds on land currently used to produce food and fibres.

For as long as humans have lived in Australia, woody weeds have been kept in check by their natural predator – bushfire. But more reckless policies, promoted by ill-advised urban tree lovers, have prevented the regular use of fire in many areas.

As wildfires in several areas have shown, the heavy fire load in this creeping bush becomes a lurking menace as dangerous to neighbours as an unexploded bomb. It must be kept in check by periodic small fires, well managed grazing animals or mechanical means. "Shutting it up" is an unacceptable and unnatural practice.

The explorers Leichhardt and Mitchell both reported the native use of fire to restore the grasslands and both remarked on the grassland and open forest they encountered. However, since their time, there has been an explosion of woody weeds into the Mitchell grass country, and into many other grasslands. It is like a cancer on the land.

These scrubby weeds and carbon credit plantations also harbour all the pests and predators that threaten native wildlife and domestic livestock – feral foxes, pigs, dogs and cats.

The global warming alarmists and others have led us into deadly delusion. Trees do not control the climate, and eucalypt plantations and infestations are not worthy of elevation to saintly status in the plant kingdom. Just like grasses, herbs and algae, they are part of the grand carbon cycle on which all life depends. If humans need to worship and protect any land plant species it should be not useless invasive woody weeds, but the valuable grasses and legumes including cereals such as wheat, oats, barley and rye, pastures such as Mitchell grass and buffell grass, legumes such as lucerne, clover, soya beans and siratro and giant grasses such as sugar cane, sorghum and maize.

It is strange that governments keen to protect farm land from coal mining are promoting policies that result in the destruction of grazing land by state protected weeds.

Viv Forbes

"By virtually ensuring that many grazing enterprises will become uneconomic, as unaddressed tree thickening continues, we are opening the door to unsustainable practices and severe damage to this State’s huge land and woodland resource base."
 - Dr Bill Burrows, 2005 "Fact and Fiction supporting the Vegetation Management Act."

In the above report Dr Burrows looks at the alleged scientific foundations of Queensland’s Vegetation Management Act. He shows that aboriginals used regular frequent fires to maintain the grasslands and grassy woodland that covered much of Australia when European settlers arrived. Since then the reduced burning has allowed dramatic growth in tree cover which displaces grassland birds and animals, increases the risk of fierce fires and reduces runoff into rivers and dams. 'Protection" of this invasive vegetation is a foolish policy.

"What a dumb legacy the so called ‘Smart State’ will pass on to its inheritors".

Comments from the Leichhardt expedition (1845), mainly from Gilbert's journal:

"on 28th February . . . emerged upon "beautifully undulating country covered with the most luxuriant grass". (Isaac River area).

"the most beautiful description of country . . well covered with grass and well adapted for sheep . . ". (Suttor River area).

"from a hill near our camp we can see to eastward a broad extent of valley with numerous fine lakes. Smoke from Natives' fires is seen in all directions around us." (Valley of Lagoons).

Expeditions by Major Thomas Mitchell, 1830-1845, mainly from "Journal of Mitchell into Qld".

"Across the mountains (in Victoria), Mitchell found excellent grazing land - land richer than any grazing land he had found in New South Wales and named this country "Australia Felix".

"We now had before us (central Queensland) water and grass in abundance to a distance as unlimited and indefinite as our hopes of discovery" (p. 94)

"…natives had disappeared having previously set fire to the grass" (p. 101)

"… travelling amongst very luxuriant grass" (p. 106).

See this also on how the aborigines created the grasslands of Australia:

Record summer cold snap.

Cartoon: By Pickering.

Yesterday Brisbane’s maximum temperature was 19.1C, the coldest since 1888, 123 years ago. At the same time Sydney was enduring the entire first week of summer with temperatures staying below 23C, the coldest since 1960.

Prior to this we had a month without rain in the South East corner, with fairly warm days, indicative according to the experts, of a long-term trend towards global warming. The unseasonable cold though we are assured is merely weather, the difference being made clear in the video clip below:


Meanwhile the Australian government is hotly denying that the temperature drop is any indication of the carbon tax being set too high.

St Louis cops move Occupy out the right way.

Image: volunteer arrestees in St Louis.

Radley Balko of “The Agitator” passes on a report from St Louis on the method used by the police there to move out the ‘Occupy’ demonstrators from the Plaza there. Radley is a libertarian advocate for rights, and a strong opponent of ‘no knock’ raids, forensic shysters, over zealous prosecutors, police militarization, and the overuse of swat squads, among other causes.

The dispersal of ‘Occupy’ has in most cases not gone well, with violence, rioting, and lawsuits being the order of the day. While Radley states that he cannot verify this at the moment, but points out that if true the police deserve praise for the way they handled what is usually a bad situation:

The first thing they did was the one that baffled me the most, at first: they gave the protesters nearly 36 hours notice, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes’ notice other cities gave. … Early afternoon on Thursday, they gave the protesters 24 hours’ notice: as of 3pm on Friday, the no structures in the plaza rule was going to be enforced, and as of 10pm, the curfew was going to be enforced. So, unsurprisingly, Occupy St. Louis put out a huge call for as many people as possible to come to the plaza by noon, to be trained in peaceful civil disobedience; local civil liberties lawyers showed up to brief them. …

So, when no cops showed up anywhere near 3pm, the protesters had their biggest rally to date (as I suspect the cops were thinking, “getting it out of their system”), and then started to drift away. Rally organizers advised people to be back before 10pm, to block the enforcement of curfew. Sure enough, by 10pm, they had 350 people down there. And scant minutes later, people were jazzed up and ready to go, because outlying scouts reported that the police were gathering, en masse, with multiple cars, multiple buses, an ambulance, and a firetruck, only a couple of blocks away!

And sometime around an hour, hour and a half later, the cops just disappeared, dispersed, without ever having gotten within two blocks of the plaza. So the confused protesters declared victory, let most of the troops go home, and fewer than a hundred of them bedded down for the night in their tents. An hour later, somewhere around 150 cops showed up. …

Ah, but the cops did more than just show up after two head-fakes and with sufficient numbers … they did right exactly what the Obama administration told everybody else to do wrong. They didn’t show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn’t show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people’s legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk … and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime.

All of the cops who weren’t busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfully occupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in.

Maybe this would not work all of the time, but it is worth considering the possibility that good police work without the use of SWAT and riot police and aggressive tactics may work better. While rabble rousers among the protestors are likely to attempt to inflame these situations, a lower key response could isolate them from the more peaceful elements and make them easier to deal with.