ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is disgusted with PUP Senator Jacqui Lambie





Galaxy Poll: 86 per cent of Australians want childhood vaccination to be compulsory

It's the only way to achieve "herd immunity" and thus protect babies

AUSTRALIANS want Prime Minister Tony Abbott to make childhood vaccination compulsory and close loopholes that allow vaccine refusers to put all children at risk.

An exclusive national Galaxy poll commissioned by The Sunday Telegraph has revealed overwhelming support to ensure every child is vaccinated.

The highest support for compulsory jabs is in South Australia, where 90 per cent support the call.

The poll shows 86 per cent of all Australians believe childhood vaccination should be compulsory. Only 10 per cent are opposed and 4 per cent are uncommitted.

“The majority of Australians — 86 per cent — are in favour of compulsory childhood vaccination,” Galaxy’s David Briggs said.

“This strong finding may be observed among men — 86 per cent — and women — 85 per cent — the young — 84 per cent — and the old — 86 per cent.’’

As reported last month in The Sunday Telegraph, in NSW and the ACT, 87 per cent of men and women support compulsory vaccination.

The Galaxy poll support for mandatory vaccination follows the successful No Jab, No Play campaign championed by The Sunday Telegraph that has prompted reforms to ensure kids attending childcare are fully vaccinated.

In Victoria and Tasmania, 83 per cent support vaccination of every child. In Queensland, an overwhelming 87 per cent back compulsory vaccination.

The Productivity Commission’s report into childcare recently adopted a tough line on vaccination, finding that childcare rebates “must be conditional on the child being fully immunised, ­unless care ­occurs in the child’s home”.

The results from the poll follows the tragic death of four-week-old Riley Hughes, the Perth baby who died from complications arising from whooping cough.

Riley’s parents Greg and Catherine Hughes have campaigned to raise vaccination awareness since his death just last month, raising $45,000 for the Princess Margaret Hospital hospital that cared for their son.

Mr Hughes also granted the media permission to publish photographs of their son as he fought whooping cough to illustrate the “horrific’’ nature of the illness.

“At this point in time I was still having to deal with listening to his hoarse crying because he’d screamed for so long from sheer discomfort that he’d begun losing his tiny little voice,’’ Mr Hughes said.

“Every time he caught my eyes he would stop screaming momentarily and look at me with his incredible blue eyes, almost urging me to remove this anguish that befell him. “As a father, I felt like a failure. I would have swapped places in a heartbeat.”

While Riley was too young to be immunised, his death has prompted reforms to fund free whooping cough vaccinations to pregnant women in the third trimester to help protect newborn babies.

Social Services Minister Scott Morrison has previously confirmed he was happy to consider reforms to toughen current protections.

“The commission makes some very important suggestions in this area. I am open to everything in the report. I am not ruling anything in or out,” Mr Morrison said.

Labor leader Bill Shorten has also strongly backed any moves to ensure more kids are vaccinated.  “This shouldn’t be a political issue, it’s common sense,’’ he said.

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Fast-track to university enrages Leftists

Concerns have been raised over a program which allows school students to gain entry to university without completing their final year certificate - and is only being offered to pupils at a prestigious Sydney private school.

The University of Sydney is running a pilot of a 17-week bridging diploma for Year 11 students at the elite school Scot's College, Fairfax Media reported, stirring fears among student groups and university staff that the program allows parents to 'buy' their sons entry to the sandstone university.

The program was devised by the university's commercial arm, Sydney Learning, and students who completed the course successfully were guaranteed places in a number of undergraduate level courses, including bachelor degrees in health sciences, liberal arts and science, animal and veterinary bioscience, visual arts, music and oral health, or in a diploma of law.

Minutes of a university Academic Board meeting show staff were worried over how the course was being advertised to Year 11 students 'as an alternative to completing the HSC', with 'concern noted about possible implications for the university's reputation'.

Eight Scot's students gained 'direct entry' to the university after completing the program in 2014, according to a letter sent to parents by principal Dr Ian Lambert, while 166 students completing the HSC. 

Rose Steele, the president of the National Union of Students, told Daily Mail Australia that while it was important there were alternative pathways available for students to gain entry to university, it was 'really concerning' if this program was only open to students who could afford it.

'NUS really believes education should be open to all and not just those who can afford it,' Ms Steele said.

Scot's College does not advertise their fees for tuition, sport and other curriculum activities, but in 2013 they were reported to be $30,900 per year.

Dr Lambert, the college's chief, was quoted telling the Sydney Morning Herald that the diploma was designed with students 'in the middle rank of learners' in mind.

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Unions exposed as war saboteurs

AS the Abbott government begins to take on union power and corruption, a timely new book reveals the union movement's role in one of the most shameful periods of Australian history.

What the wharfies did to Australian troops - and their nation's war effort - between 1939 and 1945 is nothing short of an abomination.

Perth lawyer Hal Colebatch has done the nation a service with his groundbreaking book, Australia's Secret War, telling the untold story of union bastardry during World War 2.

Using diary entries, letters and interviews with key witnesses, he has pieced together with forensic precision the tale of how Australia's unions sabotaged the war effort, how wharfies vandalised, harassed, and robbed Australian troop ships, and probably cost lives.

One of the most obscene acts occurred in October, 1945, at the end of the war, after Australian soldiers were released from Japanese prison camps. They were half dead, starving and desperate for home. But when the British aircraft-carrier HMS Speaker brought them into Sydney Harbour, the wharfies went on strike. For 36 hours, the soldiers were forced to remain on-board, tantalisingly close to home. This final act of cruelty from their countrymen was their thanks for all the sacrifice.

Colebatch coolly recounts outrage after outrage.

There were the radio valves pilfered by waterside workers in Townsville which prevented a new radar station at Green Island from operating.

So when American dive bombers returning from a raid on a Japanese base were caught in an electrical storm and lost their bearings, there was no radio station to guide them to safety. Lost, they ran out of fuel and crashed, killing all 32 airmen.

Colebatch quotes RAAF serviceman James Ahearn, who served at Green Island, where the Australians had to listen impotently to the doomed Americans' radio calls:

"The grief was compounded by the fact that had it not been for the greed and corruption on the Australian waterfront such lives would not have been needlessly lost."

Almost every major Australian warship was targeted throughout the war, with little intervention from an enfeebled Prime Minister Curtin. There was the deliberate destruction by wharfies of vehicles and equipment, theft of food being loaded for soldiers, snap strikes, go-slows, demands for "danger money" for loading biscuits.

Then there were the coal strikes which pushed down coal production between 1942 and 1945 despite the war emergency.

There were a few honourable attempts to resist union leaders, such as the women working in a small arms factory in Orange, NSW, who refused to strike and "pelted union leaders with tomatoes and eggs".

This is a tale of the worst of Australia amid the best, the valour and courage of our soldiers in New Guinea providing our last line of defence against Japanese, only to be forced onto starvation rations and to "go easy on the ammo" because strikes by the wharfies back home prevented supplies from reaching them.

A planned rescue of Australian PoWs in Borneo late in the war apparently had to be abandoned, writes Colebatch, because a wharf strike in Brisbane meant the ships had no heavy weapons.

There was no act too low for the unionists. For instance, in 1941, hundreds of soldiers on board a ship docked in Freemantle entrusted personal letters to wharfies who offered to post them in return for beer money. The letters never arrived.

At one point in 1942 a US Army colonel became so frustrated at the refusal of Townsville wharfies to load munitions unless paid quadruple time, he ordered his men to throw the unionists into the water and load the guns themselves.

In Adelaide, American soldiers fired sub-machine guns at wharfies deliberately destroying their aircraft engines by dropping them from great heights. Australian soldiers had to draw bayonets to stop the same Adelaide wharfies from stealing food meant for troops overseas.

You will read this book with mounting fury.

Coelbatch offers various explanations for the treasonous behaviour of the unions. Many of the leaders were Communists obsessed with class warfare. Fervent "identity politics" led them to believe they were victims and servicemen and women were "puppets of capitalism whose lives were of no consequence". Contrary to popular belief, strikes and sabotage continued, even after the Soviet Union became an ally, writes Colebatch, who contends that the Australian Left may have wanted to undermine the military in preparation for revolution after the war.

Whatever the reasons for the defective morality of those unionists who sabotaged our war effort, the traitors have never been brought to account. This story has been largely suppressed for 70 years because Labor and the Left have successfully controlled the narrative of history.

No more, thanks to Colebatch.

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Climate 'sceptic' Bjorn Lomborg's Australian influence grows as he joins University of WA

One of the world's best-known climate contrarians, Bjorn Lomborg, will establish a base in Perth as his influence in Australia grows.

The controversial Dane has struck a four-year deal with the University of Western Australia to run a policy research centre in its business school, which will focus on the nation's future prosperity.

Dr Lomborg said he planned to spend a "significant amount of time" in Australia following his appointment this month as one of the Abbott government's advisers on foreign aid.

That appointment was criticised sharply by the Labor opposition and environmental activists, who questioned why someone who played down the effects of global warming should be advising on Pacific Island nations, which are particularly vulnerable to climate change.

Dr Lomborg acknowledged on Wednesday his work had divided audiences but said he would continue to offer "rational advice on the best way to prioritise public spending".

"Australian politics seems very dichotomous, which is not a good thing if you want people to look ahead and find common solutions," he said.

"But this is not a right or a left-wing project. We'll inevitably annoy people who support some left-wing pet ideas as well as those who hold onto some right-wing ideas."

Dr Lomborg is best known for his books The Skeptical Environmentalist and its follow-up volume Cool it, which were criticised by climate scientists for underplaying the rate of global warming.

More recently, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre he founded has studied international development issues. His trademark approach is to use cost-benefit analyses to tell governments which projects produce the most social value per dollar spent.

His latest work, The Smartest Targets for the World, says, for example, that establishing free trade, ending overfishing or fossil fuel subsidies, or eliminating malaria, tuberculosis or child malnutrition represent "phenomonal" value for money. However, encouraging sustainable tourism or reducing child marriages or drug abuse are relatively wasteful uses of aid funds.

Dr Lomborg said his Perth-based Australia Concensus Centre would allow him to apply his economic modelling "to a rich country for the first time".

He said that, as with most Western nations, policy discussions in Australia tended to focus on the few years of the election cycle.

"We're going to look at long-term issues and their consequences: pension reform, infrastructure spending, what we should do with the environment, schooling, immigration and so on. Hopefully, our research will create helpful information for policymarkers.

"But, in the end, economists are not who'll decide what happens in Australia or the world: we're just putting the prices of the different options on the menu."

The university's vice-chancellor, Professor Paul Johnson, said Dr Lomborg's centre "will become the go-to place for useful economic research to inform the national and international debate".

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