Oakeshott: An experienced liar

There were six people in the room. Morris Iemma was there with his top advisers to meet Rob Oakeshott and his key staffer. It was 2007; Iemma was premier of NSW, Oakeshott was an independent state MP. Oakeshott had a list of requests. One was that he be considered for an appointment as a minister in the Iemma Labor government.

Iemma did not dismiss the request. Before deflecting the matter, he consulted several senior ministers, including the treasurer, Michael Costa. News of Oakeshott's amenability also went back to Labor headquarters in Sussex Street, where Mark Arbib was running the state. This is the meeting Oakeshott says he does not remember.

Costa remembered it vividly last Tuesday when Oakeshott mentioned, during his soliloquy about where he was going to cast the deciding vote in the 2010 election, that he had been offered a ministry by Julia Gillard and would consider the offer.

Costa, a fiery character, started talking. Word of the 2007 meeting made it into the media. Oakeshott was asked about it the next day. He responded by telling one reporter the story was "Bullshit". He attributed it to "faceless men" of the Labor machine.

But there were no faceless men. There was Iemma, who not only confirmed to this column that Oakeshott had offered himself as a minister, but also provided details of the meeting. He recalled Oakeshott saying he may resign his seat, returning it to the Nationals. Costa supports Iemma's recollections, and Costa is the opposite of faceless.

On Friday, at a press conference, when Oakeshott was confronted with the reality that the story of his request for a ministry was coming from senior people speaking on-the-record, his response was: "I don't have any recollection of any conversation."

This is not good. This is not credible. When the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, made an offer of a ministry to Oakeshott, she did so in the context he had been previously amenable to such an arrangement.

By the time he made his announcement on Friday he had no choice but to refuse, because the offer was not just a fundamental compromise of his independence, and not just an affront to the anti-Labor landslide his electorate has just delivered the previous week, but he had just been exposed as having prior form when it came to such footsie with Labor.

In fact, the entire edifice of political innocence that Oakeshott has carefully built around himself is not credible. This self-created mythology reached its climax last Tuesday, during his dance of the seven veils, before revealing his final, crucial vote.

Oakeshott has never been an outsider, or a political innocent. He grew up on Sydney's north shore, where his father was a prominent doctor, and he attended Barker College. While still a student he went to work for the federal Liberal MP Philip Ruddock, who told me last week: "Oakeshott did work experience with me in my electorate office. It was unpaid work. He was a student. It was well before he went to work for Mark Vaile."

After graduating from the University of Sydney (honours in government), Oakeshott worked briefly at the Road Transport Forum before becoming a staffer for Vaile, the newly elected National Party federal MP for Lyne.

Three years later, after the Coalition took power in Canberra, he went to work for the Coalition's public relations operation in Canberra. Later that year his connections with Vaile were leveraged into National Party preselection for the safe state seat of Port Macquarie, which sits within Vaile's federal seat of Lyne. Oakeshott was just 26.

Six years later, in 2002, he split with the Nationals to become an independent, a decision vindicated when he thumped the National Party's candidate in the 2003 election. Just as he had first entered Parliament via a byelection in 1996, he entered Federal Parliament via a byelection in 2008 when Vaile departed early after the Coalition lost government. Oakeshott rode a voter backlash to an easy victory.

Last month, he was re-elected with a commanding majority. But Lyne also delivered an emphatic anti-Labor vote. In the House vote, the combined primary votes of the ALP and the Greens was just 17.2 per cent. This crushing anti-Labor vote was replicated in the Senate vote in Lyne, where the Coalition won 45.75 per cent of the primary vote to Labor's 30.3 per cent. The conservative parties' combined Senate vote was 53.7 per cent, to the Labor/Greens's 38.5 per cent. The anti-Labor/Greens vote in Lyne was the second biggest in the country.

When Oakeshott negotiated with the major parties after the deadlocked election as one of the three rural independents holding the balance of power, the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, proposed a permanent $1 billion-a-year increase in regional infrastructure spending. It was an offer both much larger and with less contingencies than Labor's counter-offer.

From all this, Oakeshott conjured for himself a mandate to create a Labor-Greens government. It is exactly what his electorate had just rejected. Oakeshott then stage-managed his vote as the climactic vote, delivering a speech presenting himself, like Jimmy Stewart in the classic, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, as the loveable cleanskin who took on the machine and won. But Oakeshott was actually delivering power to the ultimate machinists.

That was six days ago. It seems longer. It must seem so to Oakeshott, who has discovered that the media world beyond the adoring Port Macquarie News is a very different place, a place where Oakeshott has become Potshott.

He has spent nearly 20 years working towards this moment, his time in the national sun. But with the glow comes the heat.

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Victorian public health system "dire"

MORE than 1000 Victorian patients a day are unhappy with their treatment in the state's hospitals, the system's latest annual report card shows. The last Your Hospitals report card ahead of the November state election shows more than 250,000 emergency department patients were not treated on time in the past year - an increase on four years ago. Almost 90,000 Victorians were left on trolleys in emergency departments for more than eight hours.

The state's top hospitals failed to meet five out of nine key performance targets - worse than last year's performance. The worst-performing hospitals were in Melbourne's western suburbs, with Sunshine Hospital rated the least popular. Almost half of patients were not admitted to a hospital bed within the required period.

Opposition health spokesman David Davis said this was a "fail" for the Brumby Government, with almost 25 per cent of patients "dissatisfied" with their hospital treatment.

The Australian Medical Association warns the Victorian health system is going backwards and patients are waiting longer for access to basic medical care because of an acute shortage of beds to meet Victoria's growing population.

Health Minister Daniel Andrews admitted improvements were needed across parts of the system. "We want to provide better outcomes," he said. "More money will mean more patients get treated quickly. We always need to look for ways to improve and to do better."

THE median waiting time for orthopaedic surgery is 76 days.

Rye pensioner Alison Watson, who was left on an emergency bed in the corridors of Frankston Hospital for two days, said the system was a shambles. Despite being told in March she urgently needed an operation, Frankston Hospital has cancelled her hip replacement surgery three times in the past four months.

"I'm in pain 24 hours a day," Ms Watson said. "And to have three dates ripped away from me is also hurting my mental health. The health system is not working."

AMA Victoria president Dr Harry Hemley warns there are dire problems at hospitals in the western suburbs and Dandenong. "We have seen a steady increase in the number of Victorians being let down by our public hospitals," he said.

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Useless police again

The neighbour of a woman bashed to death in her Adelaide Hills home by a mystery intruder believes she called the police for help 16 hours before her body was found.

Retired nurse Pirjo Kemppainen moved from Finland 15 years ago for a quiet life in the village of Callington, near Mt Barker near Adelaide. Now she is dead, the victim of an apparently motiveless murder that has shocked the community.

Her killer or killers remained on the loose last night, and police and State Emergency Service volunteers will today continue scouring the area for clues. It is not known if a weapon was used in the murder.

A neighbour told The Advertiser he believed 63-year-old Ms Kemppainen, a retired nurse who lived alone, had called police at about 12.30am Saturday after hearing noises in her yard. Her battered body was found by her brother at 5pm.

When asked if the murder victim had made a call for help, Major Crime Detective Acting Superintendent Denise Gray said she would not comment.

Forensic investigators yesterday removed a ramp leading to Ms Kemppainen's back door, which had been smashed above the handle. Investigators paid particular attention to a section of wire fence at the front of her property, which was damaged and bent. The fence runs adjacent to a public walkway that follows the Bremer River and is frequently used as a shortcut for locals walking home from the Dog 'n' Ute Callington Hotel.

Distraught relatives told The Advertiser Ms Kemppainen was a defenceless woman who could have lain injured for hours before dying. "We found out late this morning that she'd been brutally bashed by somebody," relative Kylie Kemppainen said. "I don't know how long she was left there, whether they bashed her to death or whether they just left her to die on her own."

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EDUCATION ROUNDUP

Three articles below

NSW High School students think their education is irrelevant

HSC students in New South Wales have slammed the English curriculum, saying it isn't relevant to their lives and should no longer be compulsory. They want the course to give more emphasis to grammar and spelling and help prepare them for their working life.

Pupils who sat last year's HSC complained to the Board of Studies about the advanced English test and also the maths exams, saying they were too difficult.

About one in six students surveyed after last year's HSC said the exams were not a fair test and 18 per cent believed there were too many assessment tasks. An exit poll of 3300 students found the number who believed the HSC exams were a fair test fell three percentage points on 2008 to 69 per cent.

This year's HSC candidates said teachers were thoroughly preparing them for the exams but even the highest level English courses could be made more relevant to their future working lives.

Daniel Taha, of Delany College at Granville in Sydney's west, who will sit the exam this year, said he had difficulty in understanding the relevance of some texts to life. "There isn't an emphasis on grammar," Daniel, 17, said. "There's a big focus on content and so many students can end up losing the fundamentals.

"My teachers are really good at revising those fundamentals and also seeing that we are using vocabulary relevant to the advanced course." His classmate Marian Prasad, 17, also questioned the relevance of some material in English Advanced, and said it was more beneficial to students intending to study literature at tertiary level. "I would like to see more on communication so that we can be articulate in the workplace," she said.

The poll results reveal students' feelings about the strengths and weaknesses of the HSC as about 70,000 prepare to sit their final school exams next month.

Complaints were received about the Studies of Religion paper which had to be stopped for an hour at one school over concerns it contained questions not based on the syllabus. Two-thirds of the students who sat the exam later said it had not been a fair test.

Some students at a Sydney school began crying over an unexpected question they believed had not been covered during their course of study. Officials ordered a break of an hour while the students composed themselves. After the exam, 100 complaints were made to the Board of Studies.

A report prepared by the board after the exit survey said about 480 students made "generally positive" comments about their HSC experience, while 160 were negative. Less than half of the candidates said the Mathematics paper was a fair test.

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Mass exodus of experienced teachers in South Australia

And probably similar elsewhere. Schools today are a much less pleasant working environment than they once were

NEARLY a third of the state's public school teachers aged 45-plus will retire within five years, raising concerns schools will face grave staff shortages, particularly in country areas.

The University of Adelaide's Career Intentions Survey of more than 3000 public teachers aged 45 and over, found high schools would be hardest hit. Nearly 38 per cent of secondary teachers who responded to the survey said they planned to leave by 2015. The teachers union said serious staff shortages in rural areas already existed and that extensive recruitment programs needed to be put in place to keep teaching graduates from leaving the state.

The 2010 annual report by the Teachers Registration Board found there are 15,948 registered teachers aged 45-60, however, not all may be in teaching positions. The national average retirement age of teachers is 58.

Australian Education Union SA branch vice president David Smith said the large number of retiring teachers would add to the severe relief teacher shortages in regional areas such as Port Augusta and in subject specialist roles such as maths, science and technology.

Mr Smith cited the changes to the South Australian Certificate of Education and the national curriculum as a contributor to older educators wanting to leave the workforce early.

An AEU survey last week showed 84 per cent of educators believed the new SACE reforms would cause "excessive workloads". The report by the university's Australian Institute of Social Research also found:

MORE than half of the teachers aged over 55 intend to retire within five years.

RETIREMENT of preschool teachers and junior primary teachers is expected to peak in ten years.

TWO-THIRDS indicated an interest in casual employment after retirement.

There are 311 full time teaching students who started full-time studies this year at the University of Adelaide, 2807 full-time teaching students at UniSA and 612 at Flinders.

Education Minister Jay Weatherill said the department's teacher recruitment strategy, which was announced last month, was aimed at attracting enthusiastic young people into the profession.

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A great Australian asset: East Asians

Australia gives them the opportunity to realize their potential.

The claim below that the students concerned do well because they are "middle class" may have some truth but not much. The Vietnamese in particular are the children of desperate "boat people" refugees from Communist terror

The best performing school in the state, James Ruse Agricultural High School, is also the selective school with the most students from a migrant background. New figures obtained under freedom of information laws show that 95.2 per cent of students list a language background other than English in their entry application. Only 41 students from an English-speaking background are studying at the school - an average of seven in each year.

Children of migrants fill almost 80 per cent of the places offered at the state's top 10 selective high schools, which are all ranked in the top 20 HSC performers. On average only 20 per cent (or 320 students each year) are from an English-speaking background.

The dominant cultural group is Chinese, with the most applicants and the highest success rate in the entry test. Last year, 2361 applicants were from a Chinese background and 1242 were successful.

The second most represented group was Vietnamese followed by Korean. In total, 3912 students were awarded a selective school place last year, with 5516 applicants from a non-English speaking background - 42 per cent (1828) of whom were successful.

The co-director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, said the successful students largely represented middle- to upper-middle-class families from Asia who put a heavy emphasis on education and professional achievement.

He said selective schools were not providing assistance to the vast majority of families. "In NSW we are entrenching advantage within one particular ethnic group. If the NSW government was serious about equal opportunity, it would put some geographical boundaries to ensure better access to [top] schools."

A specialist in schools systems from the University of Melbourne, Richard Teese, said that the pooling of high achievers in selective and private school systems had raised the performance bar beyond the reach of students in mainstream schools. "When you pool resources like that you multiply their impact and you give the students who have access to that distinctive advantages over everybody else," Professor Teese said.

"You are setting up a situation in which you [create] extremes of advantage and extremes of disadvantage. If you took those students out of those hot-house environments they would still do well. But by combining their resources you multiply their advantage. It is a zero-sum game: some win, but others must lose."

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New government might be more stable than it looks

Despite the initial onslaught from angered Coalition members that the government - propped up by a Green and three independents - was illegitimate, defied commonsense and was even corrupt, a key point has been ignored.

The new government is a coalition of self-interest - and never bet against self-interest. For it to collapse, one of Andrew Wilkie, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott or the Greens' Adam Bandt will have to abandon it and presumably force another election.

This, one would assume, would produce a return to normal with a majority government. The four minor players would have dealt themselves back into irrelevancy.

This point has not been lost inside Labor. After all the shooting stopped last week, there was relief Bob Katter was not part of the equation. Of all the independents, he was the most unpredictable and would have been the hardest to accommodate.

The other four have their differences, but all agree in principle to a carbon tax and a profits-based tax on mining, the two most contentious policy issues on the horizon for the next three years. Katter opposes both these measures.

Nor is the point lost on the minor players. The opposition and other detractors are hoping for the Greens to blow the show up with their "extreme" policy agenda. Yet the Greens leader, Bob Brown, and his deputy, Christine Milne, are proving a lot more savvy than they have been given credit for.

When they signed the deal with Labor the week before last, it was deliberately devoid of any contentious policy ideas. Even Abbott said he would have accommodated 99 per cent of its demands.

Milne said afterwards that the Greens and Labor alone do not constitute a majority in the lower house. Everything the Greens suggest has to bear that in mind.

Last week, Brown admitted he did not push for a ministry because it would have been fuel for a Greens-Labor axis-of-evil scare campaign to exert pressure on the independents yet to make up their minds. At the same press conference, journalists tried to get Brown to say he would push for death duties, which are official Greens policy. Given neither the government nor the opposition would ever countenance such a proposal, Brown said "the answer is no".

The new arrangement, yet to be tested, has the potential to be a slow, plodding beast, but whether it collapses rests with the players, none off whom have an interest in allowing that to happen. Abbott should bear that in mind as he mulls his frontbench options this week.

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Amazing: Kevin Rudd to run East Timor immigration "solution"

JULIA Gillard will make Kevin Rudd deliver her asylum seeker solution just months after cutting him down because his own border protection policies had failed.

The Prime Minister yesterday insisted she would call the shots on foreign policy and her new minister would have to work closely with her on international diplomacy.

Mr Rudd was appointed Foreign Minister on Saturday and the Prime Minister said one of his tasks would be to help implement her plan for a processing centre for asylum seekers in East Timor.

"It will be part of Kevin Rudd's job, of course, working with the new Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, to further the Government's policy of having a regional framework and a regional processing centre," she told the ABC.

Ms Gillard cited border protection as one of the problem areas when she toppled Mr Rudd in June, saying the Government had "lost its way" under his leadership.

Hours before he was deposed, Mr Rudd warned Labor against "lurching to the right on the issue of asylum seekers". However, the Prime Minister said Mr Rudd backed her new tack, which would involve setting up an offshore processing centre in East Timor.

"I think Kevin Rudd, like me, understands that it is not in the interests of asylum seekers to risk their lives at sea and get on a boat," she said. "It's not in the interests of this nation to have unauthorised arrivals by sea. We don't want to see people pay people smugglers."

The man he deposed as prime minister in 2007 said Mr Rudd deserved time to settle in the job. Speaking from New York, where he attended a ceremony marking the anniversary of September 11, Mr Howard said: "We'll wait and see how he goes. I always judge people on their performance, and it's too early to say."

Mr Rudd took to Twitter to thank supporters for their good wishes and posted that he was: "Really looking forward to role as Foreign Minister. Lots of work to do."

Ms Gillard said Mr Rudd, a former diplomat and Labor's former opposition foreign affairs spokesman, would not run the portfolio on his own and it would be run by the Government "as a team". "We will work as a team," she said. "There will be involvement by the Cabinet. "Ultimately, of course, I'm the leader."

Labor's former foreign affairs minister, Stephen Smith,stood aside to make way for Mr Rudd.

Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop has claimed the rolled PM would be ineffective because of his strained relationship with Ms Gillard, who ousted him in July.

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Australia's coal industry is safe, insists new Climate Change Minister Greg Combet

Putting a miners' representative in charge of the environment is amusing -- and very telling

THE nation's new Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, has vowed to bring "common sense" to the climate change debate, warning that he will fight for coal industry jobs as he pursues a price on carbon.

The former union leader has predicted the coal industry "absolutely" has a future as he pursues his three key policy reform objectives: pursuing renewable energy; energy efficiency; and the development of a carbon price for Australia.

Insisting the Climate Change portfolio was an economic reform challenge, he said: "You don't take the back of the axe to the fundamentals of the Australian economy."

Julia Gillard yesterday moved to stamp her authority on her new government after elevating her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, to the senior portfolio of Foreign Affairs and shifting Stephen Smith to Defence. With 42 ministers and parliamentary secretaries, the front bench and junior ministry now outnumber Labor's own back bench.

Among the biggest winners were senator Penny Wong, who was shifted from Climate Change to the important Finance portfolio, and Peter Garrett, who takes up the Schools portfolio, despite the insulation scheme debacle happening on his watch as environment minister. Mr Combet's new role puts him in cabinet for the first time.

As part of its deal to secure government, Labor signed a formal alliance with the Greens, whose policies include the eventual phasing out of the coal industry, Australia's biggest export earner. But in an interview with The Australian, Mr Combet said his background as a former coal engineer, union official and MP with coal workers in his NSW electorate meant he did not believe his job was to shut down the coal industry. "I don't agree with that. That's not part of my job at all," he said.

"I am acutely aware of the challenges that this policy presents. But people jump to these absolute positions, and I just don't think that's appropriate. "I've got a responsibility to support those people's jobs. The coal industry is a very vibrant industry with a strong future. What you've got to do is look to how we can achieve in the longer term things like carbon capture and storage for coal-fired power stations."

Greens leader Bob Brown has described Australia as being like a heroin addict "feeding the habit" of the world's reliance on coal. The party's stated policy is to oppose development of any new coalmines or the expansion of existing coalmines and to phase out all existing coal subsidies. It wants to work towards stopping the development and granting of export licences for all new coalmines.

But in a statement last night, Greens senator Christine Milne, who has the party's portfolio responsibility for climate change, said she did not intend to rehash the policy differences with Labor as she sought to build "trust" with the new Gillard government.

"I have put in a call to Greg Combet to congratulate him and begin the exciting conversation," she said.

"In the meantime, I hope we can all respect the delicate process of building trust between people coming from different policy positions so we can achieve the best outcomes possible for the climate."

Mr Combet said his job as minister was to build a stronger, deeper consensus on climate change issues, including election campaign policies to develop efficiency standards.

During the election campaign, the Prime Minister vowed to ban new coal-fired power stations that use "dirty" technology and require that any power station built can be retro-fitted with developing clean-coal technology.

But yesterday, Mr Combet said he was not in the business of applying the adjective "dirty" to coal.

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Child killer Derek Percy paid $20,000 a year while in jail

Another bureaucracy careless with the people's money



DERANGED child killer Derek Percy has continued to be paid up to $20,000 a year in taxpayer-funded benefits despite federal authorities promising to end the rort years ago. For the past 41 years, Percy – an accused serial killer known as "The Spook" – has been given payments, contributed to by taxpayers and administered by government, because he was in the Royal Australian Navy at the time of his arrest and was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

Percy, who turns 62 next Wednesday and is Victoria's longest serving prisoner, served less than 20 months in the navy. But he is believed to have since amassed a small fortune estimated between $220,000 and $300,000 courtesy of money from the federal agency ComSuper. He has invested his government super – ranging from $5200 a year to now up to $20,000 – into cash deposits, gold investments and even a precious stamp collection.

But pressure is mounting for the funds to be stopped and stripped from the sadistic killer. Former Victoria Police inspector Tim Attrill is among those demanding the cash cease and assets and accounts accrued by Percy be seized.

Percy, who was jailed in 1969 for the horrific sex killing of Victorian schoolgirl Yvonne Tuohy, is suspected of involvement in eight other child abductions and murders. They include the Beaumont children in South Australia and Simon Brook's slaying in Glebe, Sydney.

He was an RAN member at the time of the Tuohy killing but because he was not convicted on the basis of being found insane, he was medically discharged from the armed forces in 1970 with payments of 60 per cent of his wage, which is indexed each year.

David Southwell, a veteran who served alongside Percy, said the killer would be now receiving 60 per cent of a recruit's current wage of $34,000 – meaning about $20,000. But Mr Southwell said Percy's claimed mental disorder existed before his enlistment in the navy and therefore Percy was not entitled to the medical benefits. "It should be cancelled immediately – there are plenty of other veterans who have to fight tooth and nail to get anything at all", Mr Southwell said.

In April 2007, then-Veterans Affairs minister Bruce Billson promised to investigate the payments to Percy. "This example troubles me greatly ... I am also seeking advice whether there is grounds for recovering what's been paid out," Mr Billson said at the time. But the Coalition government lost power later that year and the money has continued to flow.

ComSuper refused to comment on what it was paying Percy. "In regards to your inquiry regarding Mr Percy, ComSuper cannot comment on individual member's details," spokeswoman Danni Woods said.

Percy's navy service record "blue card", now held by the National Archives, also appears to have been altered to state his service continued from 25/11/1967 to 24/11/1976 – listing his engagement as nine years.

This is despite clear reference on the same personnel record that Percy was in the navy for just two years before being charged with the 1969 Tuohy murder and he remained in jail from that year on.

In a bizarre parallel, Former inspector Attrill also served alongside Percy in the navy in the electrical mechanics section on HMAS Queenborough and was brought into the police's cold case unit to help continuing investigations into Percy in the mid-2000s.

During his navy days, Mr Attrill remembers Percy as odd, extremely detached and fixated on carrying knives in his scabbard – an obsession he believes was reflected in later knife mutilation killings linked to Percy. "Back then I would describe him as cold, aloof and withdrawn, on reflection years later I would consider him asexual and emotionless," Mr Attrill said.

Mr Attrill said for Percy to receive the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Scheme payments, the precursor to ComSuper, he would need to have suffered a mental or physical injury because of his military service.

"On the pension issue – Percy is highly suspected of the Wanda Beach murders and the murder of Allen Redston in 1966, prior to joining the navy," Mr Attrill said. "The investigation into him, conducted by the Victoria Police cold case unit revealed incidents of child molestation and severe and alarming character traits from adolescence.

"Percy did not suddenly become affected by some experience whilst in the navy, (but) in fact entered the service with all the sadistic and murderous leanings which would later come to light. "An argument could be used to prove, on the balance of probability, that he in fact had a pre-existing condition which thus should absolve the DFRDB from pension liability."

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Absurd submarine plans could be scuttled

They haven't even got the last lot working yet. Only one out of six is at present seaworthy

THE new defence minister will come under pressure to scrap Australia's most expensive defence project - the plan to build 12 new submarines at a potential cost of $36 billion.

Defence sources have told the Herald that the change in the leadership of the Labor Party and the new government's reliance on the Greens and independents have given some people within Defence hope that the controversial submarine plan could be sunk and replaced with a more modest version.

The sources say there is likely to be a stringent review of the most recent defence white paper - in which the submarine plan was announced - and a new white paper could be drawn up ahead of schedule.

The plan to build 12 submarines is widely considered to have been the baby of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, to the extent that some with the Defence community refer to them as "Rudd's subs".

There were initial suggestions that Mr Rudd might be given the defence portfolio in the imminent reshuffle, but he is now almost certain to be the next foreign minister, which would remove one potential obstacle to the ditching of the submarine plan.

"One of the big issues for whoever ends up as defence minister in the Gillard government is going to be whether to write a new defence white paper, and if so, how soon. The 2009 white paper did leave a lot of big questions unanswered, and it did commit a lot of funds to some very big capabilities without adequate strategic argument," said Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University.

The independent MP Andrew Wilkie, a former army lieutenant-colonel and intelligence analyst who gave his support to Labor to form government, said he would need to study the case for the submarines in detail before commenting on whether he believed they were affordable. But he said he fully supported a review of the white paper.

"There does need to be a fresh look at the white paper; there are clearly question marks over the document. For example, we can't even crew the submarines we've got, so it is arguable that we can double the fleet from the current six Collins class submarines."

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, said his party did not have a concrete position on the submarines, but is keen to see large projects reviewed as soon as a new defence minister was appointed.

"There are clearly differing opinions as to whether those projects are the best way to spend the defence dollar. It's a matter of real public interest," Senator Brown said. "I think this will be a matter for the whole of Parliament to discuss, including the opposition."

Sources say there is a growing belief within the defence force - including the navy - that the money could be better spent.

The 2009 white paper was heavily criticised for focusing on large defence projects - particularly ships and submarines - but without an accompanying clear explanation of why they were needed and how they would be paid for.

"Nowhere in this white paper are we told how particular numbers of submarines, surface ships or fighter aircraft have been determined," the defence expert Paul Dibb said after the paper's release. "This leaves us with a highly unsatisfactory picture about why we need to have what some are touting as the largest expansion of the Australian Defence Force since World War II."

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Big fall in migrant arrivals - 32 per cent fall in the past year

This is a misleading report. The fall is off an initial high level. The numbers are still around twice what they were under Howard

AUSTRALIA is heading towards recording its biggest drop in immigration numbers in 90 years. Although official data will not be published until next month by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, analysis of long-term entrant figures - an advance indicator of official migration levels - show a 32 per cent fall in the past year.

Demographic experts Macroplan Australia said the number of long-term and permanent entrants - including permanent settlers, students and temporary workers - fell by 111,000 people, from 341,000 to 230,000 in the 12 months to July 31.

"The fall is the greatest since just after the First World War, when arrivals were boosted to record numbers of returning soldiers," said Robert Hall of Macroplan. "The following year, numbers obviously subsided back to normal levels." That aside, the decline in the 12 months is the largest since 1901.

"If there is only a small change in overseas arrivals then you should not take much notice, but if there is a big difference drop then you would expect that to filter through to our official migration figures," said Neil Scott, assistant director at the ABS.

Immigration was a hot issue in the federal election, with the Coalition promising to cut net migration to 170,000 each year, a figure Labor said would be achieved anyway through a natural decline from the high numbers recorded before the GFC.

The Intergenerational Report, produced by the Treasury, has assumed average annual migration of 180,000 from 2012 onwards, but Labor has been careful not to enshrine this figure as a target.

Macroplan said for net migration to fall below 200,000, the government would have to introduce a variety of new restrictions on migration quotas and visa restrictions.

It says the fall in arrivals in the past year was due to a combination of factors including the GFC, government policy reducing the number of visas available, and reports of racist violence against Indian students.

Robert Hall said a drastic cut in immigration would be disastrous. "Over the past 20 years our economic growth has been 3.4 per cent a year, but if migration falls to the Government's target of 180,000 a year, it would fall to 2.7 per cent - meaning a big drop in our standard of living," he said.

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Visa win for HIV refugee

Why is Australia rewarding fraud and lawbreaking?

AN HIV-positive African woman who masqueraded as someone else to enter Australia on a refugee visa has been allowed to stay in the country. A Family Court judge has expressed concern that treatment for the woman, given the name of Ms Freye in court documents, would probably cost taxpayers $250,000.

Despite police being told she had falsely claimed to be the wife of a male refugee already in Australia, the department had not revoked her visa, the Family Court in Brisbane heard. Ms Freye had also won custody of the other refugee's children, while their mother remains in Africa.

Details of the woman's entry were made public by Family Court Justice Virginia Bell in a custody decision delivered in Brisbane on August 20.

The male refugee, called Mr Goombe in the court decision, came to Australia in 2005 with three of his five children, as well as Ms Freye's daughter. Mr Goombe claimed he sent money to his wife for care of his two other children in an African refugee camp and applied for humanitarian visas for them.

In 2008 Mr Goombe was told his wife and children had arrived in Australia, but said he was shocked to meet Ms Freye instead of his wife. He told police that she had fraudulently posed as his wife, but they took no action, the court heard.

Ms Freye claimed she was welcomed into Mr Goombe's home, but after he made untoward advances she left, although she returned each day while he was at work to look after the children.

In his decision over who would have custody of the children, Justice Bell expressed concern about the circumstances surrounding Ms Freye's entry. "May I say that the thing that concerns me is, notwithstanding that Ms Freye came into Australia by way of masquerade, she was HIV positive at the time of the application for a visa," Justice Bell said.

"It was indicated to the Immigration Department that in fact this woman would, in all probability, cost the taxpayers of Australia some $250,000 because of the necessity of treatments. "To me this is quite staggering . . . that the Immigration Department allowed this woman to proceed.

"I have been informed that there is little likelihood of her visa being withdrawn, notwithstanding the fact the Immigration Department is now aware that she was not the person she was purported to be and was aware that in fact she was suffering from AIDS."

An Immigration spokesman said Australian law did not prevent a visa being granted to a person with HIV. [That's not the point]

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The DLP is back!

The old nemesis of the ALP

IT WAS 90 seconds before emotion got the better of John Madigan. In a factory kitchen in northern Melbourne on Friday, his children Jack and Lucy were startled when, mid-speech, their father broke down, overwhelmed by his improbable victory.

The Ballarat blacksmith, the Democratic Labor Party candidate in the Senate race, had called a news conference to announce he was set to become Victoria's most unlikely new senator - the winner in a tight, three-way contest between fellow conservatives and anti-abortionists Family First senator Steve Fielding and Liberal senator Julian McGauran.

Twice Madigan, 44, broke down during his speech, and little wonder. Here was a father-of-two whose hands are stained by the black of his trade. A man who, in a weatherboard shed in Hepburn Springs, sweats over a forge and bends pieces of hot metal to his will. Now a space waits for him on the Senate's red leather in Canberra.

Despite few witnessing this speech - The Sunday Age was the only media outlet to make the trip to the copper manufacturer in the Campbellfield industrial estate - it was yet another bizarre moment in a remarkable election. If, as expected, Madigan's win is officially confirmed this week, he will be the first DLP senator elected in 40 years.

Like Fielding, Madigan will be a socially conservative presence in the Senate, but a much less relevant one. From next July, the Greens will hold the balance of power and legislation will not depend on Madigan or independent Nick Xenophon.

But for many of its opponents, the DLP is the party that simply will not die. With a socially conservative, pro-worker, anti-abortion, anti-communist agenda, the party split from Labor in the 1950s and seemed to peter out after the 1974 election, when its balance-of-power senators were wiped out.

The party staged a Lazarus-like revival in Victoria's 2006 election when, out of the blue, Peter Kavanagh was elected to the upper house. An ugly leadership battle ensued, resulting in party officials making a complaint to police about former secretary John Mulholland and the disappearance of potentially tens of thousands of dollars from party coffers.

Now, again, the party has defied electoral odds, pushing out McGauran and Fielding for the sixth Victorian Senate spot with only 2.3 per cent of the primary vote. It increased its primary vote to 74,639, about 2400 votes fewer than the Australian Sex Party. Madigan barely campaigned - he was blacksmithing. The budget was tiny, press coverage almost zero. And yet, with 94 per cent of the vote counted, he is 7200 votes ahead of Fielding, whose party got 2.6 per cent of the vote, and 23,000 ahead of McGauran at the point where one or other is eliminated.

How did he do it?

First, there was the decline of the Liberal vote in Victoria, which one party source described to The Sunday Age as "a collapse, quite frankly". The Coalition vote was 34 per cent for the Senate, down from 39.4 per cent in 2007. This meant the Coalition had nowhere near enough votes for three Senate quotas in its own right. The third spot was open for business (the other three went two to Labor, one to the Greens).

The DLP was then able to use its preference deals from the micro parties to cobble together enough votes - 14.3 per cent - for a quota. Here Madigan was helped by preferences from One Nation, the Christian Democrats and the Liberal Democratic Party. The latter is the real surprise: the LDP disagrees with the DLP's views on gay marriage, stem cells and abortion, but its policy is to preference minor parties before major parties.

Madigan says he will approach each bill on its merits, act on his conscience and "equally represent all Victorians". He's not fond of the media spotlight and is unlikely to dress up in a giant beer bottle costume, like Fielding famously did in 2008.

Madigan - who says he is "unashamedly pro-life" but has no plans for specific private member's bills in the area of reproductive rights - comes across as authentic and earthy, a country bloke, but not blokey. On his fridge is a picture of the Pope and stacked around his house are books about former prime minister Ben Chifley, son of a blacksmith, long-serving Melbourne archbishop Daniel Mannix and the influential Catholic, anti-communist and DLP progenitor B.A. Santamaria. (Madigan, whose family has always been DLP voters, once belonged to Santamaria's youth group.)

Unlike his fellow Victorian senators, he is not of the political class. Questions about political ambition lead always to blacksmithing. In many ways, like his party, Madigan is a blast from the past. He's a nostalgic blacksmith, sentimental about Australia's diminished manufacturing industry and a man who yearns for some of the simple things of yesteryear. He names a few: higher levels of home ownership, economic stability, more family time, shops shutting at midday on Saturday. He believes in better tax arrangements so mothers have more choices to stay at home.

"I know we can't turn the clock back but I think we need to reassess what really matters to people," he says.

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Australia now has a new government

KEVIN Rudd is back in Cabinet after Julia Gillard gave him the globetrotting job of Foreign Affairs Minister just 11 weeks after she ousted him as the Prime Minister.

Today Ms Gillard confirmed that Mr Rudd - a Mandarin speaking former diplomat who was Labor foreign affairs spokesman while in opposition - would take over from Stephen Smith who moves to defence.

Following his dumping as PM, Ms Gillard promised Mr Rudd a senior frontbench position with speculation covering foreign affairs plus some other possibilities. Early in his Prime Ministership Mr Rudd was criticised for spending too much time abroad and earned the nickname 'Kevin 747' but now that role will be part of his job description.

He used his first public appearance since his appointment to underline the importance of Australia's relationship with the United States.

Accompanied by US Ambassador Jeff Bleich, Mr Rudd faced the media on the shore of Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin, and observed that Saturday was the ninth anniversary of the 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington.

Many diplomatic challenges and opportunities were ahead for Australia, its friends and partners, he said. "The cornerstone of Australia's foreign policy and security policy is our alliance with our great friends and partners in the United States," Mr Rudd told reporters.

The two nations were bonded by their resolve to defeat terrorism and were fighting side by side in the war in Afghanistan. "Let us on this day and the period ahead reflect carefully and solemnly reflect on those who have lost their lives, not just there but in terrorist attacks around the world," he said.

Mr Bleich said the US and Australia faced critical challenges. "It is great to have a government formed and the announcement of a cabinet so we can renew our effort on those important challenges," he said.

Mr Bleich said he and President Obama already had spoken to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, congratulating her on forming government. "We are confident we are going to continue our extraordinary relationship with Australia under her leadership," he said.

The US knew Mr Rudd "very well" having worked extraordinarily well with him when he was prime minister, he said. "He is a great friend and we are very happy to have the chance to work with him in this critical role," Mr Bleich said.

A group of passing school children clapped and cheered the former prime minister as he spoke to the media. "This was not organised by the department of foreign affairs," Mr Rudd quipped.

Earlier this week Ms Gillard promised: "I gave Kevin Rudd a commitment that he would be a senior member of my ministerial team, a cabinet minister, and he will be. "Kevin's status as a former party leader and his undoubted capacity meant he is deserving of a senior portfolio where the Government can best use his skills. "'His experience and intense interest in foreign affairs makes this the obvious choice."

Meanwhile fellow Queenslander Craig Emerson, the former small business, competition policy and consumer affairs minister will take over the trade portfolio from Simon Crean.

Ms Gillard has also rewarded the men who helped her oust Mr Rudd to become prime minister by giving them key jobs in her new ministry. Right-wing powerbroker Bill Shorten, who convinced Ms Gillard to challenge Mr Rudd, has been promoted to the outer ministry as assistant treasurer and minister for financial services and superannuation. Mr Shorten's NSW counterpart Mark Arbib has been given "greatly increased responsibilities" for indigenous employment and economic development, social housing and sport.

Two other factional leaders, Don Farrell and David Feeney - who both played prominent roles in ending Mr Rudd's Prime Ministership - have been promoted from the backbench to become parliamentary secretaries.

SOURCE

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is disgusted by the sham "independence" of Rob Oakeshott





A strict Christian background excuses pedophilia?

This is crazy. It's an insult to Christians. There are many millions of people from a strict Christian background and almost all develop normal relationships and marry. It's the individual who is at fault, not the religious background.

I was very religious in my teens and so was something of a late-starter with male/female relationships but it did me no harm and probably protected me from a lot of follies

A teenager who sexually abused four girls aged under six has been released without conviction because of his sexually repressive upbringing in a family of charismatic missionaries.

In an unusual judgment in the Northern Territory Supreme Court yesterday, judge Judith Kelly accepted psychiatric evidence that the lifestyle and religious attitudes of the parents had distorted the "normal psycho-social development" of the accused, who was 15 when the offences occurred.

Quoting a psychiatric report, Justice Kelly said: "The normal developmental sexual curiosity of an adolescent boy was artificially constrained by his parents and his church culture.

"In particular, there was a taboo against normal sexual experimentation with peers. "That has resulted in (the defendant) pushing to one side what is usually a much stronger taboo in relation to sexualised contact with much younger children. Whilst that might be described as psycho-pathological and a distortion of normal psychological development, it is not a psychiatric illness phenomenon and readily reversible should the external circumstances be changed."

Justice Kelly told the defendant to get an apprenticeship, start making friends with girls his own age and "just grow up like any other normal boy".

"You are not sick. You are not abnormal. You made a very bad mistake and did some very bad things," Justice Kelly said. "It appears you did not fully realise the effect your actions could have on the little girls. "I accept that you are very sorry. You need to put it behind you now and move on with your life."

Justice Kelly said it was sad the family of one victim were grieving because they believed their little girl's innocence had been "destroyed".

She rejected a prosecution submission that the defendant be sentenced under the adult Sentencing Act rather than the Youth Justice Act because at least one of the victims was subject to "stage-two grooming".

The offences occurred at various locations between September and December last year and involved the defendant placing his hands and fingers on the vaginas and bottoms of the victims. There was no evidence of penetration and the accused had told police: "I just wanted to find out what it felt like."

The psychiatric report urged the defendant's parents to be involved in joint counselling.

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Nanny knows best: Right-to-die ad banned from Aussie TV

Why can't people be allowed to hear all sides of a political issue? This is gross censorship

An advertisement which calls for a government re-think on euthanasia cannot be shown on Australian television following a "last minute" backflip by a classification body.

Pro-euthanasia advocate Dr Philip Nitschke was informed of the revised position of CAD (Commercials Advice) this afternoon. Filming for the ad was completed earlier this week.

The ad, which was to be shown as part of a $60,000 advertising spend, was scheduled to air across several Australian cities in late-night TV slots from Sunday.

"This has really gutted our program and we're pretty annoyed," Dr Nitschke said. "It has happened at the last minute ... We only went ahead with the project after we received CAD approval. The ad agency wouldn't have even embarked on this without that approval."

Dr Nitschke said he was in talks with the Council of Civil Liberties in a bid to have the decision overturned. "This is an attempt to stifle the debate about this vexed issue," he said.

The ad was inspired by the ABC's spoof marketing program, The Gruen Transfer, which recently aired two fake advertisements making a fictional call for mandatory euthanasia.

Dr Nitschke employed one of the ad agencies that had contributed to the ABC program. He said the resulting serious ad was "urging political change" and was not "convincing people to commit suicide". "It shows a person saying I didn't choose to be terminally ill, all I want is choice," Dr Nitschke said. "It says 85 per cent of Australians want this choice, why isn't the government listening?"

In an email to Dr Nitschke, CAD said it had withdrawn its earlier approval on the grounds the advertisement did not comply with the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice relating to the "promotion or encouragement of suicide". "CAD has discussed the advertisement with the television networks and they are of the same view as CAD," the email said .

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Fired for stating the obvious

The new "nobody must be upset" gospel

THE editor of a regional newspaper has been stood down after allegedly posting insensitive comments about the killing of a young policeman on his Facebook page. The publishers of the Glen Innes Examiner, a Fairfax-owned newspaper, released a statement today saying editor Matt Nicholls had been stood down following the incident.

Mr Nicholls is alleged to have written on his personal page that the killing of Constable Will Crews, who was born and bred in Glen Innes, would boost circulation of the paper. He is also alleged to have suggested the Glen Innes Examiner would "make the most" of the tragedy in which the 26-year-old officer was shot dead during a drug raid in southwestern Sydney on Wednesday evening.

The ninemsn website has reported that Mr Nicholls denied making the posts, but today the publisher of the Examiner announced he would be stood down as editor.

"The actions of Matt Nicholls, editor of Glen Innes Examiner newspaper, were totally unacceptable and we deeply regret any hurt caused to the family and friends of Constable Bill Crews and the Glen Innes community," Allan Browne, the CEO and publisher of Australian Regional Publishing, Fairfax Media, said in a statement today. "Mr Nicholls has been stood down from his position as editor, effective immediately."

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Another incompetent teacher -- dangerously so

When you make classrooms such stressful environments that only dummies or desperates would take a teaching job, this is the sort of result you have to expect. The damage wrought by the Left-inspired destruction of discipline is immense

TASMANIAN taxpayers could be up for millions in compensation if any of the high school students involved in a dodgy science experiment contract a potentially lethal blood virus.

It comes as the State Government yesterday refused to confirm whether the Dover District High School teacher who took blood samples from 18 students using the same needle had a science degree. The Mercury reports a recent report by the Tasmanian Auditor-General found that just 51 per cent of a sample group of science teachers had a university science degree.

Five per cent of teachers taking science classes had no science knowledge and were simply teaching the subject because "there was a shortage of science staff" and 10 per cent were physical education teachers with a Human Movement degree which included some science-related content.

It has also been revealed that the blood experiment is not within the Tasmanian science curriculum.

The students and their families now have a nervous six-month wait as they are tested to ensure they have not contracted the blood-borne viruses hepatitis B, hepatitis C or HIV.

During the experiment the teacher used the same needle to collect the samples from the 18 students to test blood pH levels, and dipped it each time in methylated spirits. Medical authorities say this would not have been sufficient to disinfect it.

Australian Lawyers Alliance director Greg Barns said the State Government could face a multi-million-dollar lawsuit if any of the students test positive to a blood-borne virus.

"The State Government stands to face a massive prosecution here and we are talking millions," said Mr Barns, also a Mercury columnist. "Essentially you are looking at the medical expenses of the child for the rest of their life, damage as a result of a loss of income for the rest of their life and the psychological damage that has been caused to them."

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Note that I have a special blog on Queensland cops, there is so much misbehaviour among them. A lot of entries recently.

ZEG

In his latest offerings, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG sees Australia's new government as illegitimate and mourns the death of a NSW police officer shot by a drug dealer







Young kids bashed and mutilated by cruel stepdad for over a year while Victorian child protection authorities just yawned

TWO children horribly tortured by their stepdad want him jailed for 100 years so he can't terrorise other families. The youngsters, a boy and his sister aged 8 and 6 at the time of the prolonged beatings, were forced to do 100 push-ups a day while he kicked and stamped on them.

The boy was also genitally mutilated by the man and needed surgery after he was abused with a pair of pliers.

Despite almost 14 months of bashings, six trips to hospital and numerous reports by teachers to the Department of Human Services, the children were not rescued by authorities until X-rays found multiple fractures in both.

Bone scans at Monash Medical Centre in late 2008 found 29 injuries to the boy, including three fractured left ribs and two fractured right ribs, all less than three months old, and a broken leg up to a year old. Doctors found the girl also covered in bruises and with 44 injuries, including three fractured ribs and a broken metacarpal bone.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has spent the past two years in protective custody in prison.

Yesterday, at the County Court in Melbourne, the boy, now 10, said he continued to suffer nightmares. "I think he should go to jail for 50 years because he was very mean to me and I don't want to see him again," the boy wrote in a victim impact statement read to the court. "What he did to me scares me, and if he got out of jail he would hurt me again."

His sister, now 8, wrote: "We would like him to be in jail for 100 years. We don't want him to come out because he might do it to another family."

Prosecutor Chris Beale told the court the man had been in a relationship with their mum. "The accused took over disciplining the children and became increasingly violent, repeatedly smacking, punching and kicking them," he said.

"His disciplinary regime included forcing both children to do push-ups for long periods, sometimes over an hour, and kicking them while they struggled to comply."

The man also bashed their mother and when she was heavily pregnant to him, threatened to "cut my girl out of your stomach" when she said she wanted to leave him.

He pleaded guilty to 10 charges ranging from intentionally causing serious injury to threatening to inflict serious injury. He will be sentenced next month.

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NSW public hospitals failing to treat critical cases on time

BIG regional hospitals are struggling to treat on time emergency department patients who need urgent attention, according to independent statistics that highlight a continuing bottleneck in the NSW health system.

The figures reveal a big variation across the state in how quickly patients in triage category 3 - whose condition is deemed "potentially life threatening" - are able to begin receiving medication or recommended treatment.

Government benchmarks say 75 per cent of such patients should start their treatment within 30 minutes of being assessed by the triage nurse.

But at Manning Base Hospital only 50 per cent were able to do so. At Calvary Mater in Newcastle the figure was 53 per cent, while at Lismore, Tamworth and Port Macquarie Base hospitals it was 56, 60 and 61 per cent, respectively.

The results are comparable with the state's largest hospital, Westmead (52 per cent) and Nepean (54 per cent), although other Sydney hospitals performed much better. The regional hospitals' category 3 performance was the worst in the state, where the average was 72 per cent.

Category 3, which accounts for nearly one-third of all emergency patients, was the only triage level in which the average performance statewide fell short of the official benchmark, which is recommended by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

Even after an hour, several of the worst-affected hospitals had still not begun treatment. At Manning, Westmead and Nepean, more than a quarter of patients with potentially life-threatening conditions were still waiting for care after an hour - twice as long as the benchmark.

The statistics, which relate to the April to June quarter this year, are the first significant release by the NSW Bureau of Health Information, established as a statutory agency on the recommendation of Peter Garling, SC, whose special commission of inquiry in 2008 was scathing of the state health system.

Mr Garling said hospital performance measures should be collected regularly and fed back to senior doctors and nurses, with the data "directed to better patient safety and better care, and not just to process-driven information which does not improve the patient's lot".

The bureau needed to be independent of the Health Department, he said, to insulate it from political demands.

Emergency department performance is one of the most politically sensitive hospital measures, and the bureau's report expands by more than half the number of state hospitals on which the statistics are published, compared with NSW Health's own quarterly reporting.

Hospitals including Griffith, Bathurst, Belmont, Grafton, Kempsey, Shellharbour, Shoalhaven, Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury - all of which have about 5000 emergency patients a year - are reported on for the first time, revealing many of them are missing triage benchmarks.

In another previously unpublished statistic, the bureau has also shown how long it takes for emergency patients who are not admitted to hospital to be discharged or transferred to another centre.

In the least urgent triage category 5, nearly 80 per cent of patients were discharged or transferred within two hours. For category 3 patients with potentially life-threatening conditions, 80 per cent were discharged or transferred within six hours.

The bureau's chief executive, Diane Watson, said she had access to Health Department databases and did not have to request information. Additional information on elective surgery would be published in November.

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Lazy Victoria police lose chance to prosecute drunken footballer

CHIEF Commissioner Simon Overland has been left struggling to explain Victoria Police's bungled investigations into Brendan Fevola's Brownlow antics.

The Victoria Police media department last night confirmed twice to the Herald Sun that it intended to charge Fevola over his behaviour last September.

But in an embarrassing backflip for the force, police today conceded they had left it too long to build a case. "Victoria Police have reviewed the situation regarding Brendan Fevola and the incident last September," police said in a statement. "We can confirm that Victoria Police will be taking no further action in relation to this matter."

An officer from the force’s Region One unit was meant to issue an infringement, but let it lapse. Inspector Richard Read said the delay made it unfair to penalise Fevola. Victoria Police admitted an officer would be "counselled".

"We believe that it would be unreasonable to take any further action on this matter so long after the events. We accept that the matter should have been dealt with in a much more timely manner, and the police member responsible will be counselled," a spokesman said.

"Brendan Fevola deserves to be treated in the same manner that we would treat any other member of the public, and we are clear that our decisions should not be influenced by his high profile status."

September 21 is the anniversary of the 2009 count, after which Fevola could not be charged under the statute of limitations. The likely charge was going to be being drunk in a public place.

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Yearning for rites, ritual and group membership in the world of the individual

I have long argued (See particularly the subhead "Conservatives and emotion") that there is a human need for connectedness both with a group (which can be as broad as a nation) and with the past (which can be a family past or a national past). And conservatives easily satisfy that instinctive need with, for instance, concentration on the family and love of their country and its traditions.

Leftists, however, in their hatred of their own society, are largely cut off from such satisfactions -- hence their extremism and irrationality when they find something or someone whom they feel they can identify with -- from Adolf Hitler to Barack Obama, from Nazism to the many other forms of extreme Leftism (including Communism, Trotskyism etc.)

Interesting to see similar thinking below in a Westernized Australian Muslim. The examples of ritual and custom that he gives focus on Australia but similar American customs and rituals come easily to mind: Thanksgiving, 4th of July etc.

By Tanveer Ahmed

Life in our secular and material world often lacks ritual. From praying in a house of worship to participating in a family dinner, time-honoured rites have become less common. The demands of efficiency do not care for such intangible worth.

Ramadan, the holy month of fasting when Muslims abstain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset, is ending. It is believed the first verses of the Koran were revealed during this period, and its end is signalled by the sighting of the new moon.

My family is not religious, but it is a practice we like to perform. It binds us to our ancestral past and connects us to a cultural group. Almost all cultures have some tradition of fasting. Whether it is Catholics avoiding meat on Fridays, the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur, or Native American tribes fasting to stimulate ecstatic experiences: fasting is ubiquitous.

In modern times fasting has become more associated with political protest than religion. Gandhi is perhaps its most famous proponent, but more recently in Australia, asylum seekers have become the torch bearers. Tamils protesting at the maltreatment of their brethren in Sri Lanka are the latest examples.

As a psychiatrist, myths and their associated rituals often form the backdrop to many problems I see.

A growing group of my patients fall in the category of what is called borderline personality disorder, an illness where patients cannot calibrate their emotions and often engage in damaging behaviours like self-mutilation or food deprivation. They can suffer visions and a loss of boundaries. They usually present in their adolescence.

An American study in 2008 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found the prevalence was much higher than was previously thought, at around 6 per cent.

Many of these damaging behaviours are similar to rites of passage in more traditional cultures, suggesting the disorder may be related to the failure of Western, liberal culture to provide context and myth for meaningful phases in development. Their symptoms may actually be attempts at self healing gone astray in a culture bereft of an integrative spiritual and ritualistic context.

Individual narratives have their parallels in societies and communities. Anthropologists have long had a chicken and egg argument about the relationship between myths and ritual.

Anzac Day is an example. There have been record turnouts in recent years to dawn services in venues such as Martin Place, especially among young people. A new generation of Australians have embraced the Anzac legend as their most powerful myth of nationhood, and with it has come the ritual of attending the dawn service. It has helped fill a need in a post-religious society that no longer delivers ancient certainties to young people in search of spiritual nourishment.

Our most recent election could also be construed as a grand ritual built on a myth. Modern democracies hinge on the idea of representation, of one person standing for a much larger group of people, making the decisions "they" might expect to make had they been consulted. This mysterious link between representative and represented is established and renewed in ritual form; through elections.

An anthropologist at Sydney University, Stephen Juan, argues the yearning for ritual and group membership has never been greater, especially in a society becoming more fragmented and atomised. He points to a host of trends such as rave parties, the growth in events like outdoor concerts and the rise of radical religious movements such as Hillsong or Islamic extremism as part of the same pattern.

Juan has observed that even consumer rituals such as buying presents or shopping for oneself are examples of rituals of the least nourishing kind. "When in doubt, we go and buy. It makes us feel empowered, that we are deserving of love, albeit for an instant."

But even consumer rituals can have value when used to create social bonds and nourish interpersonal relationships, a fact marketers have long exploited, often resulting in people putting consumption ahead of the social bonds the act of shopping is meant to strengthen. And yet consuming more only increases our yearning for those bonds.

SOURCE

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is deeply unimpressed by Australia's new government




Interesting offer: Conservatives may be able to legislate with Green and independent support

The Greens and the independents have offered Tony Abbott the opportunity to help govern from opposition, saying they would pass any policies with which they agreed, including paid parental leave, whether Labor liked it or not.

As the political establishment comes to grips with the concept of minority government, the Greens leader Bob Brown said the Parliament belonged to everybody, not just the government. "Please think about it," he said.

He was backed by the independent Tony Windsor, who suggested the Coalition tone down its venomous attacks on the government and independents. "There's good stuff that can come from anywhere and that's why the Liberals are silly to be running this sort of stuff," he told the Herald. "They can do things with us and the executive won't have the power to shut them down. The opposition can be part of the government, too."

The opposition childcare spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, was attracted to the idea of putting forward the Coalition's generous paid parental leave scheme which the Greens broadly favour. "Our lines of communication have always been open to anyone who wants to talk about helping to deliver our better policy," she said. The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young was keen to explore the idea.

Senator Brown suggested weekly policy meetings with Mr Abbott, as he will have with the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and mentioned possible policy deals on mental health, dental care and biosecurity.

The opportunity was offered as the Coalition abandoned Mr Abbott's pledge of a kinder and gentler polity and challenged the very legitimacy of the minority Labor government, saying it was unstable, unworkable and defied commonsense.

Ms Gillard governs with the bare majority of 76 seats, thanks to the support of the Greens MP, Adam Bandt, and the three independents, Mr Windsor, Andrew Wilkie and Rob Oakeshott.

The independents have agreed only to guarantee stability of tenure by supporting the government against reckless no-confidence motions and to ensure supply.

Mr Abbott attacked Ms Gillard, saying she was as illegitimate as her government because she had been installed by factions and then by independents. "It is a government that's utterly without a mandate," he said.

The Liberal senator George Brandis implied corruption by saying the government had "as much legitimacy as the Pakistani cricket team".

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Toy guns will have to be licensed in Queensland under new firearms laws

ANY ITEM that looks like a gun will have to be licensed under several changes to the Weapons Act being considered by the Queensland State Government. Even guns made out of materials as unlikely as soap or plastic may have to be kept under lock and key if they could "reasonably be taken to be a weapon".

The draft act says an imitation is a "reasonable copy" of a weapon that is not capable of causing death or injury. "If it looks like a gun and feels like a gun, it will have to be licensed," said a government source. "We just want to know where they are." It is unclear how the draft affects toy guns.

Failure to license an imitation weapon will carry a maximum $4500 fine under the proposals and incorrect storage carries a penalty of $750.

The proposed changes will also impose restrictions on the ownership of laser pointers, tougher penalties for selling items such as crossbows, bullet proof vests and knuckledusters without the appropriate licence, and stricter rules on firearm storage. In certain circumstances, religion will be a lawful excuse for carrying a knife and police who take their service-issue firearms home will be exempted.

A discussion draft of the Act will be available on the Queensland Police website today and Police Minister Neil Roberts encouraged responses.

But firearm owners' groups have condemned the measures as cumbersome and misguided. Christopher Ray from the Law Abiding Firearms Owners said legitimate owners were being "regulated out of existence". "We just wanted some of the burden, some of the bureaucracy and some of the paperwork taken off our backs," Mr Ray said. "Instead, they're complicating it further for law-abiding people. If we make a single minor mistake we can lose our (gun) licence for five years."

He said LAFO was also opposed to police being given "free rein" to take their guns home and leave them on the bedside table.

Geoff Jones, state president of the Sporting Shooters Association, said the crackdown on imitation weapons risked making "otherwise law-abiding people into criminals".

Mr Roberts said a requirement for permanently deactivated public monuments such as weapons on display in RSL buildings to be registered or licensed had been removed from the draft act.

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Nasty one for the Warmists: South Pacific sea levels stable

According to an instrumentality of the government of the State of Queensland

Actual sea level rise measured by Maritime Safety Queensland = 0.0003m per year. Projecting over a century that would be 3 centimetres - just over an inch.

MSQ is responsible for people's lives and so highly unlikely to fudge numbers to obtain research grants. The actual measured annual rate of sea level change (0.3 mm) is less than the error involved in measuring. It's well below actual peak rates of natural sea level rises and falls experienced in the last 18,000 years.

Such reporters of weather, climate and sea level on which people's lives depend show there are no human induced changes occurring globally in climate as screamed by alarmists seeking political or financial gain.

Excerpt from the report:

Tidal Reference Frame For Queensland

Because the sea level rise is very low, averaging 0.0003 metres per annum for the Australian continent (Mitchell, 2002), the 15 to 19 years of readings available from Queensland tidal stations is not sufficient to calculate a reasonable estimate of sea level change. Accordingly an adjustment of 0.0003 metres per annum is made to the mean sea level within the tidal reference frame.

The allowance is been calculated from the central date of the observation period at each station to the central date of the tidal datum epoch (31 December 2001).

In time, it is expected that there will a sufficiently long span of readings and that it will be possible to obtain a refined estimate of the sea level rise at individual stations. The sea level change observed at each place can be incorporated into future primary determinations in lieu of the Australia wide rise incorporated at present.

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More Muslim violence against a young girl

A man who broke into a house to attack his sister for "slutting around" has pleaded guilty to charges in Darwin Magistrates Court. Ahmed Al-Tai, 21, was expected to contest the charges, but yesterday pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, property offences and breaching a domestic violence order.

Prosecutor Sergeant Brett Verity told the court Al-Tai flew to Darwin from Broome about 3pm on June 18 after his parents told him his 17-year-old sister had run away from home. He went straight to the house the girl was staying at, smashed a window and glass door to get inside, punched her, stomped on her, kicked her and dragged her out by her hair - while their mother watched.

Sgt Verity said Al-Tai said during the attack: "You want to run around and slut around? I'm back. Where do you think you're going to go now?".

Their mother drove Al-Tai to the hospital, and then took the girl home to wash, telling her to make up a story to tell doctors before she took her to the hospital. When the girl arrived at Royal Darwin Hospital, she told medical staff she had been assaulted, and police were called.

The girl needed surgery to repair a broken tooth, and had a swollen face and a number of bruises.

Al-Tai spent about 25 days in custody after his arrest. Chief Magistrate Hilary Hannam indicated she would need a pre-sentence report and more evidence before sentencing. "It's a very serious set of facts, (committed) on two suspended sentences," she said.

Al-Tai's lawyer Gus Bernadi said the offence was "unique". "I know the offences are serious, but it came out of a particularly unique set of background circumstances," he said. [It's not the least bit unique. It is common Muslim behaviour]

Ms Hannam adjourned the matter until November. Al-Tai's bail was continued.

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Australian conservative voters betrayed

The three country independents should have looked to their own seats to decide which way to jump – the voters indicated their preferences clearly. Here are the results from the AEC website on Tuesday morning.

In New England, the Nationals got 20,337 first preference votes against Labor’s 6,472. In Lyne, the Nationals got 25,994 first preference votes against Labor’s 9898. And in Kennedy the LNP got 17,309 first preference votes against Labor’s 13,659. In all three cases the preference distribution shows that the Nationals and LNP ran second.

In all three cases the voters of those electorates have CLEARLY spoken but Windsor and Oakeshott chose to ignore that and install a Labor government. I can't imagine that their voters will be happy with them -- JR




Kevvy is back!

As if they haven't had enough bungling from him already! They must be brain-dead

DUMPED prime minister Kevin Rudd will be welcomed back into the senior ranks of the Gillard Government within days. Less than three months after she toppled him, Julia Gillard held out an olive branch and invited Mr Rudd into her Cabinet. "I gave Kevin Rudd a commitment that he would be a senior member of my ministerial team, a Cabinet minister, and he will be," she said.

Mr Rudd has been mooted for the Foreign Affairs job and has also expressed interest in health and indigenous policy.

Labor's caucus will meet in Canberra tomorrow and Ms Gillard said she expected her new ministerial line-up to be sworn in at Government House early next week.

The Prime Minister signalled she would follow in Mr Rudd's footsteps and choose her own ministry, rather than let the factions divide the spoils. "Obviously as Labor Party leader, (the Cabinet) is my prerogative," she said. "But I intend to work with (Deputy Prime Minister) Wayne Swan and with my leadership team with (Senate leaders) Chris Evans and Stephen Conroy to have the discussions to form the new ministerial team."

Ms Gillard has room to move with new appointments following the resignation of defence minister John Faulkner and the retirement of finance minister Lindsay Tanner. Maxine McKew's loss in the Sydney seat of Bennelong also opens the door for Ms Gillard to appoint a new parliamentary secretary.

The future of the so-called "faceless men" who helped Ms Gillard secure the top job will be her most contentious issue. Some sources said parliamentary secretary Bill Shorten and junior minister Mark Arbib would be promoted. Others claimed they would be kept on the outer to calm the factions. Former ACTU leader Greg Combet is a contender for a promotion, along with South Australian MP and parliamentary secretary Mark Butler.

Labor is still on the brink of a brutal internal war over its election performance. Victorian powerbrokers Stephen Conroy and David Feeney are believed to have drafted a secret motion that they plan to put to the party's national executive to oust ALP national secretary Karl Bitar.

Factional heavyweights Anthony Albanese and John Faulkner are also believed to be courting numbers for a reform group to launch a full-scale review of the party and override any attempts by Mr Bitar to establish a "soft review" of the Labor Party's performance.

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Julia Gillard's second chance

As corrupt as one would expect

JULIA Gillard has negotiated her way to victory in the August 21 election by agreeing to funnel $10 billion into rural and regional Australia, to lock in backing from two independent MPs.

But the Prime Minister's second term has come with a heavy political cost, as Labor is faced with funding the deal by stripping money from its city electorates.

Under deals finalised yesterday, Ms Gillard will hold a tax reform summit by next July and has offered NSW independent MP Rob Oakeshott a seat in cabinet.

The independents' announcement that they would support Labor ended a fortnight of uncertainty since voters stripped Labor of 16 seats in an election that produced the nation's first hung parliament since World War II.

Ms Gillard said she had heard the clear message from voters about Labor's first term in government as she dedicated herself to greater co-operation, the elimination of needless "partisan bickering" and a new emphasis on rural and regional services, including guaranteed shares of funding under major programs.

"Labor is prepared to govern," Ms Gillard said after clinching the backing of Mr Oakeshott and fellow independent NSW MP Tony Windsor. "Labor is prepared to deliver stable, effective and secure government for the next three years."

Tony Abbott conceded defeat soon after, declaring he was extremely disappointed not to have won the election but lauding the strength of Australia's democratic processes. Pledging he would not take a spoiler role in the knife-edge parliament, the Opposition Leader nonetheless promised ferocious scrutiny to keep the new government accountable.

Mr Abbott, whose election campaign performance exceeded the expectations of his party, his opponents and many pundits, said: "My job is not to become the best Opposition Leader never to become prime minister."

The weeks since August 21 have been dominated by tense negotiations as five independent and minor-party members of the House of Representatives found themselves thrust into the role of determining the election outcome.

Yesterday dawned with Labor commanding 74 of the house's 150 votes, two short of the number needed to form a government, with the Coalition on 73. Three MPs, Mr Oakeshott, Mr Windsor and Bob Katter, were left to declare their intentions.

The Coalition moved level just after lunch when Mr Katter revealed he would back the Coalition because he favoured its policies in 20 areas of concern, including its pledge to sink Labor's proposed mineral resources rent tax and a guarantee not to introduce a carbon tax.

About 90 minutes later, with Parliament House frozen in anticipation, Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott said they would support Labor, ending the deadlock and giving Ms Gillard the 76 votes needed to make an appointment to visit Governor-General Quentin Bryce.

Mr Oakeshott said he had wrestled with a "wicked dilemma" and named Labor promises on spending on education and the regions as his key motivators. The member for the NSW coastal seat of Lyne said he would consider Ms Gillard's offer of a ministry, but stressed it was not a condition of his support.

Mr Windsor said he was captivated by Labor's promise of the National Broadband Network, including the promise that wholesale prices for access would be the same across the nation.

Insisting voters wanted stability and not a new election, Mr Windsor said a Coalition minority government would be more likely than Labor to seek excuses for a fresh poll. Asked why, Mr Windsor said: "Because I think they'd be more likely to win." He said Labor was "more likely to be here for a longer period of time" if it did not see the chance of victory in a fresh election....

According to documents released last night, the funding deals involve $763m of new spending, all of which the government has offset in budget estimates.

Asked whether hospital infrastructure needs in cities would be ignored in favour of regional hospitals, Ms Gillard said her promises had to be considered within the context of all government spending.

She said the government had already delivered billions of dollars of new health capital to cities, was boosting its share of hospital funding and was building GP superclinics. "I ask Australians in capital cities to understand that what is in this agreement builds on a huge suite of changes to get our health care system ready for the 21st century," she said.

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Recipe for uncertain government

The independents backed Labor because they did not want to face another election: Pure self-interest

JULIA Gillard has won the tightest election in Australian history by the smallest margin: she is a minority Prime Minister with a 76-74 floor majority surviving on an alliance with the Greens and three out of four independents.

This is a recipe for weak and uncertain government where Gillard has a majority in neither house. The historic irony is that two independents from conservative regional seats have delivered Labor's victory.

This decision will leave a legacy of bad political blood. It will be fanned because the rural independents, unable to agree, split 2:1 yesterday for Labor and argued their obligation was to prevent another election during the next three years, ultimately an unacceptable and unjustifiable stand of dubious political integrity.

Rob Oakeshott, who has left open the option of joining Gillard's executive and becoming part of the Labor government to which he gave the kiss of political life, will be targeted by the conservative side.

The result guarantees a new flow of funds to regional Australia and will ignite a political war between the pro-Labor rural independents and the Nationals. The Abbott-led Coalition campaign against Labor is already manifest: that Gillard's minority government is without legitimacy.

After a 17-day delay Gillard has saved her prime ministership and perhaps saved her career. The relief in the Labor Party will be palpable. Having lost her majority, Gillard is salvaged by two independents, Tony Windsor and Oakeshott and she promptly visited the Governor-General late yesterday.

Within the Labor Party Gillard will enjoy enhanced authority; it is her skill, discipline and will-to-power that has kept Labor in office and saved the party and herself from a historic humiliation.

Gillard's capacity to manage this diabolical situation should not be underrated.

Abbott could not have come closer to office; he won more seats than Labor and he won more of the primary vote. But Abbott lost out in the "second election" competing for the votes of the independents, thus falling short of a miracle victory. Abbott was gracious and measured in his comments last night, saying it was time to avoid "partisan rancour".

But there is no reason to doubt his election night belief that Labor lost its legitimacy to govern. Abbott said last night the only test for Gillard's survival now was that of "good government" and the timing of the next election depended on her performance. He sensibly said he would not lightly move "no confidence".

Gillard has a survival floor majority that depends on just one vote. A single by-election or major scandal could bring her undone. Windsor and Oakeshott have not given an unqualified promise on confidence.

The raw numbers mean Gillard may govern for three years. But there are no commitments on her legislative program or her policy. Oakeshott says Gillard can claim no mandate; the independents deny the concept.

Securing contested legislation will become a nightmare. The political logic of this result will undermine pro-market reform and promote government intervention and special fixes.

Gillard has won a new opportunity to renovate Labor in office but is burdened by a minority government dependent on the Greens' Adam Bandt, along with Windsor, Oakeshott and Andrew Wilkie. In the Senate, the Greens hold the balance of power. This is a recipe for a combative and possibly bitter parliament.

The sheer unpredictability was captured in Oakeshott's line that "it's going to be beautiful in its ugliness". Quite.

"In remarkable times there is opportunity," Gillard declared last night. She has promised "stable, effective and secure" government. Gillard's mood was relief. It was her decision to authorise the June coup against Kevin Rudd and she carried that responsibility.

At their 3pm media conference that delivered Gillard office, Windsor and Oakeshott made clear they backed Labor on two grounds: stability and policy. Windsor was down-to-earth, nominating broadband and climate change as the policies that tipped him to Labor. Oakeshott was agonising, sounding like a guilty man and trying to insist it was a "line ball" choice. It was unconvincing.

The policies he nominated as decisive were broadband, climate change and regional education.

But the Windsor-Oakeshott argument on stability is contentious in the extreme. Indeed, it will become a moral and political gift for Abbott.

They backed Gillard, they said, because the best chance for a three-year term was under Labor. Windsor even said Abbott would be tempted to an election some time because he'd be "more likely to win". Oakeshott declined that view but both independents made clear their vote for Gillard was based on a determination to get a three-year parliament; that is, the stability argument.

Yet in this situation there is nothing special, ethical or superior about a three-year parliament. What, pray, is wrong about another election at some stage? Why shouldn't the people get the chance to decide the issue that the independents arrogantly assume is their right to decide for the next three years? How ineffective does the parliament have to become before the people get the right to elect a new parliament?

These comments smack of the independents putting their own interests first. The assumption in the Gillard-Greens-independent position that the parliament must last three years is inconsistent with the Constitution (sections 28 and 57) with its repudiation of a fixed-term parliament and its enshrining the notion of a parliament that endures subject to its workability. This rule is more vital than ever in the present situation.

Understand what happened yesterday. The independents decided to back Labor and to avoid letting the people revisit this contest for another three years.

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