IT SOMETIMES BECOMES LOVE
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 02, 11 (07:33 am)
The Chicago Tribune‘s Julia Keller – a happy tilthead – admires our chief climate commissioner:
Flannery, an Australian who is a sort of real-life Indiana Jones — meaning that he’s equally at home in the field or in the lecture hall, a swashbuckling adventurer credited with discovering 40 species of mammals, as well as an accomplished science writer and scholar — knows that climate change is a vigorously argued topic. Instead of adding yet another shrill, angry voice to the debate, however, Flannery does something rarer …
He makes lots of money out of it. From your taxes. Keller continues:
“Our world,” Flannery writes in one of many passages that are simple yet poetic, “is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.”
Like a climate alarmist’s interdependence with a government pushing a climate tax, for example.
OUR INTERCONNECTED WORLD
Tim Blair – Saturday, April 02, 11 (04:36 am)
A book is burned in Florida by stupid people. Buildings are set afire and possibly dozens are killed in Afghanistan byinsane people.
UPDATE. ABC radio host and SMH satire columnist Richard Glover sees a greater interconnected danger:
It’s increasingly apparent that the internet may bring about the death of human civilisation, beating out previous contenders such as nuclear holocaust and the election of George W. Bush.
The agents of this planetary death will be the climate-change deniers who, it’s now clear, owe much of their existence to the internet.
Glover – dropping his satire mask a little – continues: “The net allows the climate-change deniers to bleat about the scientists and whine about a price on carbon without fear of ever hearing a different voice, right up to the point of planetary collapse.”
458 DAYS UNTIL LABOR’S GAIA-HUGGIN’ MORON TAX
Tim Blair – Friday, April 01, 11 (04:48 pm)
And now we have some government costings:
The cost of living for households would rise by $16.60 a week under a $30 carbon tax, according to just released Treasury documents …
This would work out to $863.20 a year for the average household.
That should buy a whole bunch of temperature reduction.
GRIM WEEPER
Tim Blair – Friday, April 01, 11 (01:15 pm)
Bob Brown fires back at Julia Gillard:
Greens Leader Bob Brown today attacked a “poorly advised” Julia Gillard for her savage dismissal of his party and warned her comments could be “divisive” for the agreement supporting minority government.
“The reaction we’ve already had ... one caller in tears over the way the Prime Minister has described the Greens,” Senator Brown said.
I’ve been writing mean things about the Greens for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever made one of them actually cry. Respect to the Prime Minister.
“I think, for some reason, the Prime Minister has turned her fire on the very people who have supported her in government,” said Senator Brown.
So, what are you going to do about it? Cry at her?
“I’ll talk to her about that. She’s wrong. But we’re above turning that sort of verbiage against those who vote a different way. It’s just not uniting. It’s divisive, that sort of language.”
Here’s a tissue. Speaking of divisive:
The Greens veteran also blamed “hate media” for limiting the party’s vote in the NSW election by highlighting its anti-Israeli policies - which he also disagreed with …
“And the hate media was enabled to play this issue up.”
That’ll happen … when you launch a hate campaign against Israel. The division continues:
Senator Brown said the Israel boycott proposal was against his advice and had alienated NSW voters when the party should have been focusing on bread-and-butter issues.
He had conveyed his views to Greens senator-elect Ms Rhiannon in a “robust” phone call this morning.
No word on whether either of them wept. ABC24 just ran a clip of Brown complaining about Gillard’s speech: “I would never say such things about Labor voters, or Liberal voters, or National voters.” To be fair to the Prime Minister, she wasn’t attacking Greens voters; she was attacking the Greens party.
How Sheridan lost faith in multiculturalism
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (06:42 am)
Those few of us who dared to warn have faced vlie abuse as alleged racists and threats of violence and legal action. But even Greg Sheridan now recants his support for multiculturalism:
IN 1993, my family and I moved into Belmore in southwest Sydney. It is the next suburb to Lakemba. When I first moved there I loved it.
We bought a house just behind Belmore Sports Ground, in those days the home of my beloved Bulldogs rugby league team. Transport was great, 20 minutes to the city in the train, 20 minutes to the airport.
On the other side of Belmore, away from Lakemba, there were lots of Chinese, plenty of Koreans, growing numbers of Indians, and on the Lakemba side lots of Lebanese and other Arabs.
That was an attraction, too. I like Middle Eastern food. I like Middle Eastern people. The suburb still had the remnants of its once big Greek community and a commanding Greek Orthodox church.
But in the nearly 15 years we lived there the suburb changed, and much for the worse.
Three dynamics interacted in a noxious fashion: the growth of a macho, misogynist culture among young men that often found expression in extremely violent crime; a pervasive atmosphere of anti-social behaviour in the streets; and the simultaneous growth of Islamist extremism and jihadi culture…
I was shocked to discover the growth of jihadi culture in Lakemba. We used to go to its main street for shopping and for food.
One day, waiting for a pizza order, I wandered into the Muslim bookshop. I was astounded to see titles such as The International Jew or The Truth about the Pope, amid a welter of anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and pro-extremist literature.
The revenge attacks on white Australians after the Cronulla riots originated out of Punchbowl. A number of media crews were attacked when they went to local mosques. A large number of those charged with terrorism offences in Australia stayed in or had associations with the area.
Due to the brilliant and fearless reporting of this paper’s Richard Kerbaj, who spoke perfect Arabic, we found that at a number of the mosques in the area outright hatred was being preached: anti-Semitic, misogynist, conspiratorial. Most of the time, these sermons didn’t advocate violence. The speakers were what Britain’s David Cameron has called “non-violent extremists”.
The advent of satellite television made it easier for these folks to live a life apart. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station was available on satellite packages. Most Arab homes you went into had Arabic TV playing in the background.
The anti-social behaviour became more acute…
Australia has been a successful immigration country. But the truth is not all immigrants are the same. And it may be much easier than people think to turn success into failure.
Sheridan is still a bit confused. Multiculturalism is a suite of policies that encourages and rewards people who resist assimilation and maintain a separatist or at least separate culture. Sheridan’s main point here seems rather the one he makes in that second-last sentence.
When human lives are worth less than paper
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (06:36 am)
What perverted values these protesters have, to rank the beheading of innocent people as a lesser crime than the burning by someone else of a book:
Afghan protesters angered by the burning of a Koran by an obscure U.S. pastor killed up to 20 UN staff, beheading two foreigners, when they overran a compound in a normally peaceful northern city on Friday in the worst-ever attack on the UN in Afghanistan.At least eight foreigners were among the dead after attackers took out security guards, burned parts of the compound and climbed up blast walls to topple a guard tower, said Lal Mohammad Ahmadzai, a police spokesman for the northern region…
A U.N. spokesman confirmed that employees had been killed but declined to comment on numbers of dead or their nationalities. He said the attack would not push the United Nations out of Afghanistan.
This bigotry cannot stand, and the Greens must disown it
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (06:17 am)
It is such a relief - a welcome surprise, even - that this growing support for a boycott of Israel, of all the countries in the world, has become a political issue, and one that’s backfiring on the “anti-Zionists”:
BOB Brown has moved to assert control over the Greens, carpeting hard-Left senator-elect Lee Rhiannon over her radical anti-Israel stance as he attempts to shift the party towards the political mainstream at the expense of Labor.
But as the Greens leader rejected Julia Gillard’s attack on the party as extremists who do not share the values of everyday Australians, he faced a barrage of accusations that the party was being hijacked by socialist ideologues.
Former prime ministers John Howard and Bob Hawke, former NSW premier Bob Carr and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd all yesterday denounced Ms Rhiannon’s renewed call for a trade ban on Israel…
Mr Howard, who yesterday met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior ministers in Israel, said ... it was absurd for the Greens to move for a boycott against Israel, and accused Labor of not doing enough to distance itself from the “alliance”.
“At a time when the Middle East is in complete turmoil over the fight for democratic rights, it is astounding anyone would advocate a boycott on the only stable democracy in the region,” he told The Weekend Australian....
Senator Brown yesterday branded The Weekend Australian the “hate media” for reporting Ms Rhiannon’s position, before repudiating it and revealing he had called the senator-elect to voice his views in a “robust” exchange…
Senator Brown said the NSW Greens’ push for a Israeli trade ban - as advocated by Ms Rhiannon - had cost the party votes at last weekend’s NSW election. “The NSW Greens have taken to having their own shade of foreign policy. That’s up to them,” Senator Brown said. “It was a mistake. I differ with Lee on that, and she knows that, and so do the other components of the NSW Greens who handled so badly that part of the campaign against my advice.”
This needs an open debate. Unfortunately, I’ve been forced to bow out from engaging in it as I would like. I’ve been threatened with more legal action at a time when I can’t take any more. I’ll leave it to my friend Michael Danby, the Labor MP, to put the case against, say, banning the Israel Philharmonic from playing at the Sydney Opera House:
THE campaign for an international boycott of Israel, led locally by senator-elect Lee Rhiannon of what I call the “watermelon faction” of the Greens - green on the outside but red on the inside - is designed to delegitimise Israel as a prelude to its destruction.
The boycott campaign, which its activists like to call by the less threatening, disembodied acronym “BDS”, is a tactic designed by extremist organisations such as Hamas to mask the strategy of the “one state solution”, a single state between Jordan and the Mediterranean.
This would lead to the destruction of the independent Jewish state of Israel. Any Israeli Jews who are not killed, who did not flee for their lives, would be left as a benighted minority (the Arab word for which is “Dhimmis"), in a Hamas-ruled theocratic state.
Greg Sheridan says what I don’t dare for now:
THE Rhiannon Green position in favour of boycotting Israel is deeply offensive in principle and profoundly hypocritical. It must go very close to being outright anti-Semitic because it applies standards to the Jewish state which it applies to no other state on Earth.
But of course we are not saying that Rhiannon is anti-Semitic herself, and of course she may well have Jewish friends, and this is a matter of public importance, and political discussion has been held to be protected.
AS the child of Australian communists and a former member of the Socialist Party, Greens senator-elect Lee Rhiannon insists she’s been unfairly tagged as a hardline left-winger or “watermelon”—green on the outside but red inside…
Ms Rhiannon is the daughter of women’s rights activist Freda Yetta Brown and Bill Brown, who were both CPA members....
“I am not a communist,” Ms Rhiannon told The Weekend Australian in August. “I and Greens members condemn the crimes committed under Stalin.”
She strongly denied then that she wanted to steer the Greens towards a more radical agenda and said dealing with climate change was her priority.
Paying hundreds of dollars each for nothing
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (05:51 am)
And the difference it would make to the world’s temperature is zero:
Secret Treasury documents reveal the average electricity bill would rise by $218 and gas by $114. Fuel would cost $187 more at the bowser and food prices would rise by $88 at the checkout.
The figures are based on a tax of $30 a tonne and were prepared on February 1. It includes a tax on petrol.
If petrol is excluded the price rise for households is $608 a year - $11.70 a week.
Note: this estimate includes only the price rise on essentials. It also estimates only the extra costs for households, and not, say, for small business people. For the tax to cut our emissions by the Government’s target, petrol and farm emissions will later have to be included. And the $30 a tonne must certainly rise, perhaps to $80 a tonne.
Garnaut is no expert and not infallible
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (05:36 am)
Chris Kenny warns that the Gillard Government’s chief adviser on global warming has no formal expertise on the subject:
At a recent dinner party a guest who impressed me with her detailed knowledge of the climate change debate was disbelieving when I insisted the government’s prominent climate change adviser, (Ross) Garnaut, was not a scientist but an economist.
The problem is that Garnaut’s record in making predictions in his own field of economics is not so hot that we should now trust his predictions in climatology as well:
Until he was co-opted into the climate change arena Garnaut’s most influential work was his 1989 report to the Hawke government, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy. This is where he mapped out the free-trade agenda and more. .... Even now, Garnaut’s work seems impressive. But as you would expect with picking economic trends decades in advance, it also got some things drastically wrong.
What he predicted correctly is the core of the report: that our geographic and economic complementarity with Northeast Asia would prove a great advantage....But Garnaut, like just about everyone else, did misjudge the dimensions of the resources boom that was about to sweep across the Australian economy.
He suggested coal exports would expand and perhaps double during the coming decade, and talked about the “meagre fortunes” of coking coal exports, which he said would drop in value. As it turns out, coal exports have trumped all expectations. They doubled during the following decade and have increased more than three times in volume and seven-fold in value, with the growth expectations continuing upwards. Coking coal makes up the same tonnage as thermal coal and at double the value.
On iron ore it is a similar story. Garnaut predicted that after a period of stagnation export growth would resume at a “moderate rate”, averaging a few per cent annually. But our iron ore exports have almost quadrupled in volume and increased more than 15 times in value....
The Garnaut report was optimistic about wool exports, suggesting that with some provisos the prospects were strong. Yet since then our wool exports have halved in value and dropped from nearly 10 per cent to less than 1 per cent of our merchandise exports…
But another misstep was Garnaut’s advocacy of hi-tech manufacturing development and even supporting, with heavy qualifications, the misguided idea of developing a so-called multi-function polis in Australia. The idea, taken up by the Hawke-Keating and South Australian Bannon Labor governments, was a humiliating non-event that cost taxpayers at least $100 million.
Even Ridout demands reform of Gillard’s IR laws
Andrew Bolt – Saturday, April 02, 11 (05:26 am)
When even Heather Ridout jumps out of the boat, Labor must know it’s gone too far:
Australian Industry Group chief Heather Ridout has seen enough. Widely recognised for her constructive dealings with the Labor government, Ridout called this week for a new review of the IR laws.
She warns that Australia, even compared with Europe, is uncompetitive. Ridout is not asking Labor to abandon its laws but she wants them modified. “We have tested these laws over the past 18 months and we now think it is time for amendments to the act,” Ridout told Focus. “As for productivity, our members consistently tell us it is very hard to achieve any productivity gains in the bargaining process."…
“The best thing about Labor’s industrial relations plan is that it will be good for productivity,” Gillard said at the outset in November 2007. It was Labor’s mantra for the next two years.
Good for productivity? When, where, how? What industry or business says so?…
Ridout’s main request is repeal of the Fair Work Act provisions that restrict engagement of contractors and on-hire employees. At present, unions can stop contractors coming on to site unless they have an enterprise agreement with a union, justified under the false claim of “job security”.
Ridout’s wider argument - that productivity growth “is much worse in Australia than in other economies” - is simply not addressed by Labor in relation to the industrial system. ... Ridout warns Australia’s annual average unit labour costs rose by 3.2 per cent between 1999 and 2009, well above the industrial nations average of 1 per cent. Australia was “well and truly behind the eight ball”.
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