GILLARD/BROWN $10 bil DEAL GAVE US THE WINDMILLS

There were some things Abbott wasn’t prepared to do to gain Government in 2010... one was to “sell my arse” to Bob Brown, the other was to plaster the beautiful Aussie landscape with wind turbines. Julia Gillard was willing to do both, and anything else that secured her the keys to The Lodge.

In a previous article I said the problem with windmills is that they will all become unserviceable and useless at the one time. These hideous turbines have a life span of between 10 and 15 years and replacement costs will not attract the generous subsidies that allowed them to be built in the first place.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s slush fund consisted of a borrowed and unimaginable amount of $10 billion (by 2010 Rudd had already drained the treasury dry unnecessarily).

Applicants who wanted a piece of Bob Brown’s deficit bank had to show that other financing alternatives had been exhausted. In other words, every crazy green scheme had to have already been rejected as uneconomic by investors who can do simple sums when it comes to their own hard-earned.

Gillard had instructed the CEFC to hurriedly hand out as much in subsidies as was legally possible in the lead up to the 2013 election... (A) because she knew the contracts would be irreversible, (B) she knew struggling farmers would agree to have wind turbines installed and (C) it was clear the ALP/Green Government would lose Office even with a change back to Rudd and there would be nothing Abbott could do to reverse it anyway.

With the Greens certain to hold sway in the Senate from their 2007 six-year terms it became impossible to rid Australians of one of the most costly and destructive of the Brown/Gillard land-mine deals.

Of course they are both now in voluntary retirement sucking off the taxpayers’ teat and laughing their cosmetically challenged heads off.

One of these delightful people is intent on saving whales aboard the Green Peace while the other is intent on saving her own neck from upcoming Victorian Major Fraud Squad charges. (Once Blewitt and Wilson are charged, and they will be, Gillard is back in the witness box.)

The best course to take with these carpets of visual- and noise-polluting windmill disasters is to join two D9s with a heavy duty chain and keep motoring until every last one is flattened.

Is it any wonder the world is finally waking up to the UN’s IPCC global warming hoax. The object of publicly-funded green energy financing is to reduce atmospheric greenhouse gasses but since its inception the C02 level hasn’t changed at all yet, through normal climatic variations, North America, Europe and even Australia is experiencing record cold winters with snow extending to the Queensland border for Christ sakes.

If these ridiculous windmills are responsible for this new cold then that’s reason enough to get rid of the hideous things.

When the normal financial checks and balances of democratic free enterprise is replaced with disastrous, no penalty, taxpayer funded programs of the far Left, pull the covers over your head and pray, because that’s exactly what we’ve got with these damned windmills.

The damage wreaked by Rudd/Gillard/Brown/Rudd and a prospective Shorten carries Greek overtones.

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Liberals order purge of refugee review body

The Abbott government has overseen a dramatic clean-out of the tribunals responsible for reviewing refugee and migration claims, raising concerns the system is being loaded against asylum-seekers.

Of 38 members of the Migration Review Tribunal and Refugee Review Tribunal whose terms expired at the end of last month, only seven were appointed to the newly created Migration and Refugee Division of the ­Administration Appeals Tribunal, which is now responsible for reviewing failed visa applications.

Among the exodus were some of the longest serving RRT members, including three founding members with more than 20 years’ experience in hearing appeals and eight members with 14 or more years’ experience.

Those who applied and failed to secure reappointment were told on June 26, giving them just two working days to clear their desks.

In the past year, 37 new members have been appointed to the MRT, RRT or the expanded AAT. The class of 2014 includes a long-serving employee of Tony Abbott’s electoral office, a former adviser to the Prime Minister, a former Liberal campaign director and candidate, and a policy adviser to Liberal MP Paul Fletcher.

In appointments announced last month, Michael Cooke, a former adviser to Mr Abbott who served two terms on the MRT-RRT between 2000 and 2010, was elevated from part-time to full-time status. Mr Cooke also has worked as a flight attendant, a schoolteacher and a steelworker.

Former Liberal senator Karen Synon, who was first appointed in 2001, also got a new five-year term.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the new members had a range of experience and qualifications, including law, migration issues and administrative decision-making.

“With five-year terms of appointment, it is not unusual for new members to be appointed as terms expire,’’ the spokesman said.

Opposition spokesman on immigration Richard Marles said the pattern of change was concerning.  “It is absolutely essential that the tribunal is and has the appearance of being completely independent of government and free of perceptions of any partisan political bias,’’ Mr Marles said.

“This is particularly the case where the government has sought to restrict the appeal rights of asylum-seekers. These appointments give us concern about that.’’

On July 1, the MRT-RRT and the Social Security Appeals Tribunal were formally amalgamated into an expanded AAT.

Speaking at the official opening of the new-look super tribunal, AAT president Duncan Kerr expressed concern that so few MRT-RRT members been reappointed.

“The number of members transferring across in the transitional arrangements from the SSAT and the MRT-RRT is significantly fewer than was planned for and that which is required,’’ he said. “Without sufficient numbers of members being appointed with assignments to the new Social Services, Child Support and Migration Review Divisions of the AAT, the work required in those divisions will suffer delayed hearings and backlogs.’’

The purge of MRT-RRT members follows concerns expressed by the Coalition when in opposition about the high success rate of appeals by asylum-seekers who had been denied protection visas by the Immigration Department.

Members passed over include the entire class of 2010 appointed to the Melbourne office of the MRT-RRT by the Rudd government, a cohort criticised by conservative columnist Andrew Bolt as too soft on asylum-seekers.

Party political affiliations have never been a barrier to membership of the refugee review tribunal.

When Labor senator Kim Carr last year questioned the appointments of Mr Abbott’s long-serving electoral staff member Helena Claringbold and former Liberal candidate Nicholas McGowan at a Senate estimates hearing, Liberal senator Ian Macdonald noted former Labor staff George Haddad and Mara Moustafine also had been reappointed. Justice Kerr is also a former Labor senator.

It is not suggested the new appointees are not qualified. Among the 2014 group, former corporate spinner David McCulloch worked as an adviser to Liberal attorneys-general Amanda Vandstone and Daryl Williams, and more recently advised Mr Fletcher. Previously he worked in administrative law and served as an assisting solicitor to a royal commission.

The new appointees include Geraldine Hoeben, a barrister specialising in immigration law, former MRT-RRT member Rachel Westaway and Tigiilagi Eteuati, a senior associate of law firm Clayton Utz and a former senior legal adviser to Immigration.

Yet within the surviving ranks of the old MRT-RRT, there is anger and dismay that some of the best-performing members, including those who met stringent caseload targets, were jettisoned.

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Australian Left, maddened by the warming hoax, plans another useless carbon tax

The Labor Party was destroyed when the Gillard Government imposed a carbon tax.  A carbon tax costs money and jobs but makes no measurable difference to global warming.

Global warming seems to have paused, with no real rise in atmospheric temperature for some 18 years.

The catastrophes predicted by global warming scientists have not emerged. We have not seen worse or more cyclones, we have not seen falls in food harvests, we have not seen an increase world wide in droughts.

Most low-lying islands once thought vulnerable to inundation through global warming are in fact stable or growing in size.

Some a few scientists now warn not of global warming but a mini ice age in 15 years.

So a carbon tax is electoral poison and a costly and useless response to a problem that may well not exist anyway.

Yet:

The Opposition Leader faces a ferocious government assault and his biggest test of political will after the leak of Labor’s plans to resurrect a version of the carbon pricing scheme which contributed to its defeat in 2013.

Labor’s leaked plan looks like a version of an emissions trading scheme linked to other international schemes which at today’s prices would give us a carbon price of around $8-$10…

Leaked internal policy documents reportedly show Labor is planning a carbon pricing scheme with emissions caps that would apply to the electricity sector and a separate scheme which would apply to the rest of the economy.

Labor could also take a higher emissions reduction target to the next election if it considers the post 2020 target that is to be revealed by the Abbott Government next month too low.

Some Labor frontbenchers know this is madness. But global warming makes believers so crazed and intolerant that trying to argue against this within Labor is useless. Besides, see how many journalists won’t hear a word of criticism of the warming faith either.

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Families providing fraudulent rental documents to get kids into top Sydney public school

FAMILIES have been providing fraudulent rental documents in an attempt to gain enrolment at Cherrybrook Technology High School, one of the state’s top public schools.

Principal Gary Johnson said he had referred several cases to the police in which parents made false claims in an attempt to get their child enrolled.

Under the education department’s enrolment guidelines, families whose homes are situated in a public school’s catchment area and who can provide the appropriate documentation, ­including proof of address, are eligible to enrol at that school.

An education department spokeswoman said the school was highly sought-after because of its record of academic achievement.

Ray White Cherrybrook and West Pennant Hills ­licensee Andrew Crauford said he was aware of industry colleagues who leased properties to people for the purpose of gaining an ­address within the school’s intake area.

“I have been asked many times by property owners and tenants ‘am I able to provide a lease to put it to the school?’ but the answer is it’s illegal,” he said.

“There are clients out there who are prepared to ask the question of me and my office and the answer is always no, unless they’re prepared to sign the lease and pay the money and ­occupy the premises.” Mr Crauford said Cherrybrook Tech High authorities had phoned his office on a couple of occasions to verify the validity of leases.

Ryde Local Area Command crime co-ordinator Sgt Kerri McDonald said it was a matter for Fair Trading, not police.  A Fair Trading spokeswoman said the department was not aware of any complaints.

Member for Epping Damien Tudehope said the incident showed there was strong demand for schools in the Hills.

However, the rules in this regard were clear, he said. “We’ve got to give priority to people who live in the catchment area and certainly make sure fraudulent practices aren’t used for getting admission to our schools,” he said.

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