Wicked man mentions racial realities

Small town Aborigines are almost entirely welfare-dependant and have a very high rate of crime.



A mayoral candidate who wants to be elected a "racist mayor" has called for Aborigines to be relocated from his southwest Queensland shire. Kevin Wise, 66, has single-handedly ignited racial tensions in Cunnamulla after he distributed 100 inflammatory flyers quoting his plans to replace indigenous families with "Vietnamese peasant families".

In the flyer he pledges to call on "the Federal Government to offer 25 indigenous families $50,000 each to relocate anywhere away from the Paroo Shire" and for their places to be allocated to 25 non-English speaking Vietnamese families". "I guarantee that within that five years, these families will have advanced this shire's wealth and future prosperity out of all proportion to that achieved to date . . ." the flyer reads.

The man who wants to be "an elected racist Mayor for Paroo" told The Courier-Mail he deliberately asked for indigenous homes to get the flyers. "I let it be known that I preferred them to go to Aboriginal households so that it wouldn't appear that I was running gutless and I was trying to sectionalise the receivership of the documents," he said. He calls Cunnamulla a "dead in the water" community and the Stolen Generations a myth.

Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Susan Booth said the comments were "hurtful" and "incredibly stereotyped". Ms Booth said she could not comment further in case the flyer became the subject of a complaint and possible action.

Cunnamulla resident Maureen McKellar held back tears as she spoke of the devastation she felt when she read the comments and called Mr Wise a racist. Another resident, John Mitchell, said the comments had "stirred up a hornets nest" and the community was now depending on Aboriginal academic Stephen Hagan to file a complaint with the Anti-Discrimination Commission.

Mr Wise yesterday maintained he was not racist. "Every bugger in town is saying what I am saying out loud, but they won't say it themselves - arguing about the dead-end Aboriginal industry and their effects on town." Mr Wise said he wanted Vietnamese families to move in because they were hard working and would tend market gardens in the community. "Aboriginals are certainly not going to put in the hard yards to establish market gardens or anything," he said.

Mayor Ian Tonkin denied his community was racist and said Mr Wise should apologise. Mr Hagan said he carefully considered giving publicity to Mr Wise's vilification but said the circulation of racist comments had to stop. He plans to complain to the Anti-Discrimination Commission.

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Queensland State government aims axe at bureaucrats

Good if it happens

The Queensland Public Sector Union (QPSU) fears jobs will be lost and frontline services cut under a state government overhaul of the public service. The government today announced five new major reform initiatives aimed at improving the sector and delivering yearly savings of up to $80 million. Premier Anna Bligh said bureaucracy needed to be reined in after growing within her government during the past decade. Queensland also faced a tough June budget as a result of upheaval on the global financial markets and tough decisions were needed, she said. "If these savings were not made from areas which are no longer priority within head offices, then we would be facing options in the budget of either deficit budgeting or not being able to grow into areas of services where we believe further growth is necessary beyond what we've already budgeted for," Ms Bligh said.

Under the reforms, the government will create a new public service commission by amalgamating the Service Delivery and Performance Commission with the Office of the Public Service Commissioner by July 1. It will also create an amalgamated civil and administrative tribunal, replacing about 26 different tribunals across the state, including the Anti-Discrimination and Small Claims tribunals. Expected savings of more than $80 million a year will be used for frontline services such as health and education, and an expenditure review committee will be established to monitor and prioritise spending across agencies and departments.

The government will also review about 600 government boards and statutory bodies to reduce both numbers and costs. Ms Bligh said the initiatives were the most wide-ranging changes in the Queensland public sector in the past decade and promised there would be no forced redundancies. "(But) there will be some public servants whose services are unable to be reallocated to frontline service delivery," Ms Bligh said.

QPSU general secretary Alex Scott said there had been more reviews of the Queensland public sector than ever before under the Bligh Labor government. "We've gone from the Smart State to the review state," he said. "We don't see any way that the government can make these savings without cutting jobs, which means cutting services."

Treasurer Andrew Fraser, who has previously vowed to "cut the fat" from the state budget, described the reforms as a belt-tightening exercise. He said agencies would not be allowed to trim frontline services to achieve savings. Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg supported the creation of one new civil and administrative tribunal, but was worried about cutbacks to services.

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Bureaucrat jobs abolished -- but bureaucrats still on payroll!

MORE than 40 Queensland Ambulance Service staff have been advised their jobs no longer exist, after a far-reaching government audit. One of Anna Bligh's first moves on becoming premier in September last year was to order an audit into the service. Ms Bligh said the service was not performing well, despite the fact Queensland spends more money per person on ambulances than any other state. Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts today told state parliament that $4 million in savings would be achieved by June this year.

The audit aims to save $12 million, to be spent on 100 frontline ambulance officers. Mr Roberts said this would be achieved within the next financial year. "Work is continuing to identify additional positions in accordance with the audit findings," he said. Affected administrative staff are being retrained or redeployed, but there will be no forced redundancies for permanent positions.

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Tell a big enough lie often enough ...

The article below is probably correct about the extent to which cholesterol can be lowered. That lower dietary cholesterol would save lives is the lie

Lowering the cholesterol of every Australian by 10 per cent would save 3000 lives a year, according to research which calls for a nationwide shift on diet and exercise. The study by Sydney researchers has found that a small, 10 per cent drop in "bad" LDL cholesterol could be achieved in just a few weeks, primarily by cutting back on saturated fats and exercising more. The shift would save 3000 people annually who would otherwise be dead from heart attack, cardiovascular disease or ischaemic stroke, the researchers at the George Institute for International Health found.

"These are quite significant findings," said Dr Rachel Huxley, the institute's director of nutrition and lifestyle. "We're not talking drugs; we're talking simple diet and exercise changes that an individual can make to lower their LDL in less than a month."

The key change would be lowering saturated fat intake, particularly full fat dairy products, convenience meals, takeaway foods, confectionary, cakes and biscuits - the biggest contributors to LDL in Australia. Statistics show about 12 per cent of energy consumed in an average Australian diet comes from saturated fats, 50 per cent above recommended levels. "If we could cut down on those food items we could make a substantial contribution to reducing the amount of saturate fats that we consume and the number of people that are dying," Dr Huxley said.

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Challenge to Rudd's economic intelligence

Protectionism reduces a nation's wealth and prosperity but Rudd seems to be listening to the ignoramuses who want it

With the general expectation that the strong demand for our resources from China, India and the developing world more generally will continue for a couple of decades, Australia is clearly looking at a long-term shift in its comparative advantage. We cannot cherish and try to preserve, as if in aspic, our existing industry structure. We have to accept that our minerals and energy industries and related industries will flourish while others will decline. The alternative is to end up with what Paul Keating called an industrial museum, created by Australia's era of high protection. Yet Rudd, whose grip on economics is tenuous, has a fatal blind spot.

He says he wants a productive and competitive Australian economy, but he also says his economic policy objective is to prepare Australia for what he seems to think is the approaching end of the China boom. His left-wing log of an Industry Minister, Kim Carr, justifies his protectionist approach to industry policy, on display in the car and textile, clothing and footwear industries, as preparing Australian industry "for a future beyond the mining boom".

Before the election, if you asked Rudd if he was worried about the sort of industry policies Carr might come up with, you would get an assurance that Carr wouldn't be making industry policy, the PM would. Presumably he is, and it is the wrong policy, pandering as it does to manufacturing unions and other vested interests Labor has put in charge of the industry reviews.

What Rudd needs to be preparing Australia for is managing a long period of resources-driven prosperity, which means not only accepting but facilitating the admittedly painful changes in our economic structure. If, as seems to be the case, Rudd doesn't like the changes being forced by the China boom, what is the alternative? Australia could, in theory, run a policy that would involve taxing away all the profits of the mining industry and then investing them, unhedged, abroad. This would have several consequences Rudd and Carr (and the unions) would presumably find congenial.

For one thing, it would discourage investment in the resources sector, relieving pressure for employment, capital, and goods and services to move to these and related industries. Because such a policy would also lower the exchange rate, this effect would be reinforced. And because the resource windfall would be taxed and invested abroad, there wouldn't be any redistribution of income from our strong terms of trade via tax cuts or government spending domestically. This would cool off the Australian economy, cut domestic spending, relieve capacity constraints and reduce inflationary pressures. It would also have a deeply deleterious effect on our future prosperity. If you think this is too silly for words, just look at what is going on with the car and textile industries.

And there is at least one other bitof it that could get into policy: storing future budget surpluses invarious government funds to prevent fiscal policy from adding to long-term pressure on inflation and interest rates. Putting present surpluses into convenient repositories such as the Future Fund and the Building Australia Fund, or into superannuation, to avoid adding to demand and interest rate pressures may be acceptable as a short-term cyclical response. But as a long-term policy for dealing with the proceeds of a long-running resource boom, it fails.

It makes sense for countries such as Norway, which has a sovereign wealth fund in which it puts its oil revenues; or, closer to home, Pacific Islands that depend on resources such as guano, or forest timber, with a limited life. But Australia's iron ore and coal and some other resources are abundant enough to deal with decades-long demand booms, and piling up billions of dollars in government funds that then have to be invested doesn't make sense. Do we want government-controlled funds owning half the Australian share market, forexample?

Governments are likely to have very different motivations from company boards, as the international controversy over the activities of sovereign wealth funds recognises. And the discipline of funding recurrent spending from recurrent revenues is an important one. Nor is storing surpluses to meet future demand from an ageing population, for example, good policy. It amounts to giving up before we start on better, alternative policies designed to lift national wealth and productivity.

Far better to use the money on tax cuts and tax reforms that have dynamic economic wealth effects, and on infrastructure that meets strict and transparent economic and social return criteria. Such policies will provide the productivity and future budget revenues to meet future spending demands. Rudd must resolve the dangerous ambiguities in his economic policies before they do some serious damage.

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