A race riot in Australia

Those evil intolerant whites? The KKK? No. Indians versus Africans. But with no whites involved, it will be forgotten overnight, unlike the hugely publicized events at Cronulla a few years ago. Indians are generally very peacable people so ....

RACIAL tension may have been behind a brawl this week when taxi drivers turned on each other outside a Tullamarine cafe. Up to 30 drivers, some brandishing weapons, spilled onto Melrose Drive from the Melrose Lounge, a witness said. A 25-year-old man was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital with a cut above his eye, bruising and swelling.

It was initially suggested the fight was between Sudanese and Indian drivers. However, other witnesses said the fight began between a Somalian driver and an Indian driver before mushrooming into a brawl between Indians and drivers from various African nations.

A leader in the recent taxi protests in Melbourne's CBD told 3AW the fight was sparked when an Indian driver tried to skip the queue. "The Indian driver tried to jump the queue, and one of the Somalian drivers said, 'You can't jump the queue, you have to do the right thing, this is wrong', and they started fighting."

Other taxi drivers and airport staff claimed racial tensions were often evident at the airport rank, with queue-jumping enough to spark mass arguments and violence. Taxi driver Nabjot Gall said the fight broke out just before 8pm Wednesday. Drivers used carjacks as weapons and one man was smashed in the face, he said. "The fight went on and got bigger and bigger," he said. An Australia Federal Police officer confirmed members attended a "minor" incident at the cafe, but refused to comment further.

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Economic rationality under attack

The final installment of the very beneficial Hawke/Keating reforms is being opposed on the usual narrow-minded grounds. Very sad that one Labor government seems intent on undoing the good work of another

At least one Australian car maker could be forced out of business under a new push to slash automotive tariffs. In a submission to the Bracks Review of the car industry, the Productivity Commission called for auto tariffs to be halved to 5 per cent and other industry assistance scrapped. And it lashed out at a plan by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for a $500 million green car fund, saying it would not help lower greenhouse gas emissions.

The commission said cutting tariffs would cost jobs, but it might not be a bad thing for the industry if a local car manufacturer closed down. "Were one of the local assemblers to cease operations at some point, the volumes achieved by the remaining assemblers would increase," it said. The commission said each automotive job "saved" by tariffs was costing taxpayers $300,000. Slashing assistance to the car industry would add $500 million to the Australian economy, it said.

Unions and the car industry attacked the report. Australian Manufacturing Workers Union vehicle division secretary Ian Jones said there would be huge ramifications if a major car company player left Australia. "It would place the entire supplier sector in jeopardy, and as a consequence, that would place the entire industry in jeopardy," he said. "To simplistically say that one car manufacturer should leave is an absolute demonstration of ignorance about the way the industry works."

Ford, which recently announced its Geelong engine plant would close, said the company was committed to Australia. "We certainly are not going anywhere," a spokesman said. GM Holden voiced a similar commitment, while Toyota's local operations are going strong. The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries said the commission's claim that the closure of one car maker could help other players in the industry was wrong.

The Federal Government has sidelined the Productivity Commission by appointing former Victorian premier Steve Bracks to complete the review on the car industry. A spokeswoman for Industry Minister Kim Carr yesterday said the Government would not be commenting on individual submissions to the review.

Mr Rudd is expected to discuss plans for the hybrid Toyota Prius to be built in Australia when he meets executives in Japan next week. The Government's $500 million green car innovation fund will run for five years from 2010. The PM yesterday told Parliament he was determined to help the Australian car industry lift its international competitiveness and make more fuel-efficient vehicles.

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The invisible critics of global warming

By Andrew Bolt

The boys from the ABC's Chaser [a satirical programme on public TV] show a map of Australia in their new show at the Athenaeum with a pink dot to indicate the whereabouts of our very last global warming sceptic. Actually, there's just a single pink dot in that entire expanse, and it's plonked right over Melbourne. Over this tower with Herald Sun on top, in fact. To be absolutely specific, it's over this very chair in which I'm now sitting, typing furiously with a mad cackle and hair all wild.

This is chuffy news, and I yesterday asked Julian and the guys to send me a copy of their Power Point presentation as soon as they're through with it. I figure it will give me terrific bragging rights in a decade, or probably much sooner, when suddenly the landscape will be crowded with experts who've sprung like instant weeds after drought-busting rains to say, ahem, they never fell for this scare either. They'd warned all along it would end in tears of laughter. But I'll expose those fair-weather pundits. I'll drag out the Chaser's map and say: Hah! Where's your pink dot?

But I'm fantasising. I know the glory isn't mine alone. The country has mysteriously turned out to be filled with sceptics already, and the real marvel is why the Chaser and its braying audience can't see them. It's as if hundreds of thousands of people, some of them prominent scientists, are made of glass and cannot be detected by an ABC-trained eye. Nor can even the noisiest of them be heard by an ABC ear - or the ear of almost anyone in the media.

Take Dennis Jensen, for instance. This federal Liberal MP, who has a PhD in physics, gave a speech in Parliament outlining the latest scientific evidence that the world stopped warming a decade ago. He had charts from the four international bodies that measure world temperature, including Britain's Hadley Centre, showing that since 1998 world temperatures have stayed flat, contradicting all official predictions. And he warned: "This data shows that the temperature has flatlined over the last 10 years. "Observation does not fit theory and yet the theory is deemed correct."

You'd think evidence that the world may no longer be heating - indeed, say some sun-studying scientists, may even start cooling - might be of interest to reporters, given our governments are spending billions to pretend to stop a warming that may not be happening, and may not be our fault. Or even bad. Yet not a single newspaper or television report mentioned Jensen's speech. He was so invisible that there's no pink dot for him on the Chaser map.

In the two days since Jensen spoke, the evidence he's right has firmed. Now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of those four temperature monitors, has found that the temperature of the lower troposphere has cooled more in the past 16 months than it warmed in the previous 100 years. A blip, maybe, but unexpected.

And, with satellites and weather balloons not detecting any warming of the troposphere in tropical regions, again contradicting the predictions of every global warming model, it's no wonder 31,000 scientists, including Australia's Prof Bob Carter, last month signed a petition declaring there was still no proof humans were warming the world to hell. But Carter is also so invisible that there's no pink dot for him, either.

Nor are there pink dots for the several Rudd ministers and parliamentary secretaries who, like some senior Liberal frontbenchers, admit they doubt man is heating the world to Armageddon, either. Not that these heroes deserve to be dotted, since they keep so schtum in public.

Yet why not a pink dot for, say, Michael Costa, the NSW Treasurer? Here's a man who makes news every time he opens his noisy mouth, except when he croaks "global warming is a crock". Then he can't be heard, or not so clearly that the Chaser will dot him.

In fact, the whole country has just gone dotty without the Chaser managing to notice. If we really do think man's gases are cooking the world into a stew we must, of course, stop using all this petrol, and all this cheap but very gassy coal-fired electricity. And at first both the Liberals and Labor thought we indeed wanted to do just that. That's why both went to the last election promising to bring in an emissions trading scheme, to whack up the prices of gassy things so high that we'd use something else.

Kevin Rudd's climate guru, Ross Garnaut, for instance, cheerily recommended we pay more for petrol - maybe 20 cents a litre at least - so we'd drive solar-powered shoes instead, or cars run on mung beans. But, oops. Fact is, voters now confess they're actually so mad about prices at the bowser that hang global warming: they'd rather save petrol money instead.

Shocked, the Government is now backpedalling fast, promising now not a planet-saving 20-cent-a-litre green tax (sshhh!), but a vote-saving cent-a-litre FuelWatch saving instead. And maybe even a cut in the GST on petrol. The Liberals are offering even more - a five-cents-a-litre cut in excise - and they add that they sure won't include petrol in their emissions trading scheme. Save the planet from warming? Are you crazy?

So hand the pink dots around, and I urge you all to wear them with pride. Do not be ashamed to be dotty, because global warming is a faith that even its loudest preachers seem not quite to believe. Do you think Al Gore really believes the gassy doom he predicts in An Inconvenient Truth? Then why does he use in just one of his three homes 20 times more power than the average American family uses in a year? Dot him.

Do you think golfer Greg Norman really thinks global warming is such a menace that this is why he's told staff they must fly "carbon neutral on their Qantas flights"? Then why does he offset his own air travel not by planting trees for the planet, but by asking his ex-wife to pay half his $17 million tax bill on his private jet? Dot him, too.

And do you think Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson really means it when he warns "the clock is ticking" on our warming doom? Then why did he use a private chopper this year to drop into Brisbane to chat about his latest gassy whiz - selling joyrides into space?

Come on. Who really believes this global warming faith, when it's high priests include Sir Richard Brazen? It's a creed preached by sinners to the insincere. So let the Chaser strike us all pink - such a healthy colour, after all. But first feed my ego, boys. Print me off a copy of your map

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Victims of crime do have rights, says judge

Some unusual sanity in the justice system -- where the overaching aim always seems to be the softest possible treatment of the criminal

The Supreme Court's most experienced criminal judge has defended the rights of victims to be taken into account when sentencing offenders. Justice Philip Cummins yesterday criticised as "misconceived" a Victorian barristers' publication that had said that victims' rights were irrelevant. "Accused persons have important rights, rights which I fully support," the judge said. But victims had important rights also, he said, adding: "All citizens are entitled to the protection of the law."

Justice Cummins said some rights were enshrined in legislation and common law, and others were a matter of treating people with decency. He said a Victorian Bar News editorial was misconceived. The magazine had said: "Victims are members of the community and as such they do have rights. But those rights are not relevant to the sentencing process."

Justice Cummins outlined eight rights of victims during a pre-sentence hearing for convicted murderer John Thomas Glascott, a clairvoyant who shot dead solicitor David Robinson in Fairfield in 2006. The rights of victims listed by Justice Cummins were:

THE right to a full and prompt investigation.

THE right to be treated with respect and sensitivity during investigations.

THE right to be informed and consulted by the prosecution.

THE right to minimum delays in the court system.

THE right to be treated by the court with respect, consideration and understanding.

THE right to be heard at sentencing by way of victim impact statements.

RESPECT for victims in the sentencing process.

THE impact on victims and their families to be taken centrally into account during the sentencing process.

Justice Cummins yesterday took into account victim impact statements from Mr Robinson's widow and their three sons. Mr Robinson, 56, was shot dead on July 10, 2006, in a lane outside his law practice after he had taken his son Nick there to print out his homework. Glascott, who a jury had found guilty of murdering Mr Robinson, held a grudge against him for losing his home in a divorce settlement.

Prosecutor Susan Borg said yesterday that in his short statement, Nick -- then 16 and now 19 -- blamed himself because he was the reason his father returned to his office. Justice Cummins replied: "He should not blame himself."

Mr Robinson's wife of 21 years, Helen, said in her statement that the investigation had taken a toll on the family. "They have also lost Mr Robinson as a breadwinner and as a confidante and someone who the boys, her three boys, can look up to," Ms Borg said.

Glascott will be sentenced on June 30. Ms Borg said sons Tom, 21, and Hugh, 16, wrote about the milestones in their life that their father would miss.

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