Reduce Sunday penalty rates, says Productivity Commission

By increasing the number of businesses that open on Sunday, this could INCREASE the pay going to workers overall.  But, because of the unions, Turnbull is unlikely to move on this until after the next election

Sunday penalty rates for cafe, restaurant, entertainment and retail workers should be lowered to the same level as Saturday penalty rates, the Productivity Commission into Australia's workplace relations system has recommended.

But penalty rates for public holidays should remain in place, and the minimum wage should not be  abolished.

It comes just days before Christmas when retail and hospitality workers are facing one of their busiest weeks of the year.
The report recommends Sunday penalty rates for cafe, restaurant, entertainment and retail workers should be lowered to the same level as Saturday penalty rates.

The report recommends Sunday penalty rates for cafe, restaurant, entertainment and retail workers should be lowered to the same level as Saturday penalty rates. Photo: Rob Banks

The Productivity Commission was asked by the former Abbott government to review Australia's workplace relations framework to see what effect it was having on levels of unemployment, productivity, and competitiveness.

The commission's draft report, released in August, upset the Labor Party, the Greens and the union movement for recommending changes to Sunday penalty rates.

But it also upset the conservative side of politics for not recommending more radical changes to the minimum wage.

Now the Productivity Commission's final report - released on Monday - shows it has refused to assuage either side of politics on those points of controversy.

The report says the minimum wage system is working well and does not need to be changed.

It says penalty rates for shift work and overtime should stay in place, too.

However, it has recommended that Sunday penalty rates for workers in the hospitality and retail industries should be reduced to match lower time-and-a-half rates paid on Saturdays, which will reduce their overall pay.

The recommendation does not extend to emergency workers.

Employment Minister Michaelia Cash said the recommendation to reduce Sunday penalty rates was something the Fair Work Commission could adopt if it wanted to, but it had nothing to do with the Turnbull government.

"The government has no plans to change penalty rates," Senator Cash said on Monday.

"Penalty rates are set by the independent Fair Work Commission, just as interest rates are set by another independent body [the Reserve Bank]."

Senator Cash also said the Turnbull government would read the report and take any recommendations to the next election to seek a mandate for reform.

"I don't intend to play the political rule-in, rule-out game. The government is focussed on having a mature conversation with the Australian people about the recommendations in this report," she said.

But Labor's employment spokesman Brendan O'Connor has criticised aspects of the report, and Senator Cash's refusal to say which recommendations the government wants to adopt.

He said the report was "Malcolm Turnbull's gift that no worker wants for Christmas".

"If Malcolm Turnbull and this government does not want to support cutting penalty rates, then they can reject the recommendation of the Productivity Commission today," he said.

"But the Minister has chosen not to do that."

The final report includes a new recommendation in relation to the transfer of business.

One of the long-standing issues on the transfer of business is that often when a company buys out another company, there is a disincentive to bring on employees from the company that it is buying, Ms Cash said.

The Productivity Commission acknowledges it wants to look at ways to provide these companies with an incentive to take on those employees so they are not left without a job.

The inquiry report was handed to the Turnbull government on 30 November.

The report says social trends and community norms have shifted so much in recent years that Australians now expect to be able to shop, go to a pharmacy, and eat at cafes and restaurants on weekends.

It says Sunday working is now inherent in jobs in particular parts of the services sector - cafes, hospitality, entertainment, restaurant and retail industries - and Sunday penalty rates that are not part of overtime or shift work should be set at Saturday rates.

It says weekend penalty rates should be more equal across the hospitality, entertainment, retail, restaurants and cafe industries - but without the expectation of a single rate across all of them.

It says the Fair Work Commission should introduce new regulated penalty rates in one step, but with one year's advance notice.

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Unions may be losing membership but get their way anyhow

When my sister started teaching in 1976, she asked her high school civics class to name the then prime minister. Half of the students answered Bob Hawke, even though he was, at that stage, the president of the ACTU. He did not become PM until 1983. (Mind you, maybe those students really did know a thing or two.)

My guess is that if you asked high school students today to name the president (or secretary) of the ACTU, very few would be able even to hazard a guess. That goes for most adults as well. The decline in the power of the ACTU has been precipitous. No one really cares what its leaders think or say, although, bizarrely, Malcolm Turnbull invited the ACTU secretary — Dave Oliver, if you were wondering — to some kind of mini-summit to discuss reform. Bear in mind that 15 per cent of the workforce now belongs to a trade union. I’m not sure who was representing the other 85 per cent.

But while the ACTU is essentially irrelevant — does anyone take any notice of the bleatings from Oliver and Ged Kearney (ACTU president, just in case you didn’t know)? — the same cannot be said of certain unions.

These unions, many representing public sector workers, operate to rip off the public by exerting political power. It doesn’t really matter to them that there is low unionisation at large; their concerns are much more parochial and selfish. If they can achieve their ends without strike action, so much the better. Workers don’t really want to be losing pay to secure large pay rises and generous conditions.

We see this particularly at the state level where the unions representing ambos, firefighters, police, nurses and teachers, in particular, draw on the public’s general sympathy for the roles these workers fulfil to extract above-market concessions from governments in terms of pay and conditions.

While it helps if Labor is in power, the unions have figured out that, as long as they can keep the public on-side and disguise the true nature of their extremely generous pay and conditions, there is really not too much downside to the Tories (to use Anthony Albanese’s pejorative term for the Coalition) having an occasional turn in power. In any case, undermining Coalition governments is so much fun.

Take Victoria. The behaviour of the Ambulance Employees Association when the Coalition was in power was nothing short of disgraceful. Ambulances — public property — were defaced to give prominence to their industrial campaign. There was never any intention on the part of the AEA to settle the dispute with the government. The workers were on a promise from Labor and part of the deal was the ambos would contribute to the defeat of the Napthine government.

Unsurprisingly, the deal has paid off handsomely for the union and the ambos. No sooner had Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union-controlled Premier Daniel Andrews settled himself behind the big desk than the entire board of Ambulance Victoria was sacked and an extraordinarily generous new agreement was settled with the union.

In addition to a $3000 “sign-on” bonus — just a freebie, courtesy of taxpayers — the ambos secured a pay rise of 12 per cent across two years. This is at a time private sector pay rises are averaging about 2 per cent a year.

Other new allowances and changes to classifications have further inflated the ambos’ remuneration. The AEA got everything it wanted; it just required a bit of patience and having compliant politicians do their bidding.

Securing the unswerving allegiance of Labor politicians is central. This is why the unions will fight tooth and nail to ensure their dominance in terms of preselecting parliamentary candidates. Of course, union donations to the Labor Party, particularly to certain members of parliament, always focus the minds of the recipients.

While Labor pretends there are competitive selections for lower house seats, in Victoria and some other states the unions have full monopoly rights to nominate upper house members. This is why these upper houses look like retirement villages for ex-union officials whose careers in the main have been completely without distinction.

Of course it is vital for the unions to shore up their power at the federal level as well and to insist on policies enshrined in legislation that are favourable to them. We see this in terms of the extraordinarily high and rising proportion of federal Labor politicians who have been trade union officials, which is surely strange in view of the declining extent of unionisation.

Even when Labor is not in power, there is still scope for the favours to be doled out: witness Labor’s Senate blocking tactics in relation to the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission; the establishment of the Registered Organisations Commission to strengthen regulation of unions (and employer associations); and reforming the governance of industry super funds to include independent directors.

The fact the Greens are now part of the conspiracy on the public helps. The trade unions have strategically handed over funds and support to the Greens to the extent their position in respect of all union-related matters is now indistinguishable from Labor.

But here’s the real kicker: with very few exceptions, the election of Coalition governments at the state and federal levels makes not a jot of difference to the ability of the unions to get their way. In Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, the Coalition oppositions now stand for nothing apart from getting into power. They have no intention of upsetting the trade unions.

Falling numbers of union members — who cares? When you have all the politicians on your case and there are plenty of sources of income other than members’ dues, there’s barely a care in the world for most officials. And a royal commission on trade unions — just keep calling it a political witch-hunt.

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Christmas carol ban is out of tune with society

Victoria’s public schools are the frontline in the war on Christmas.  In an extraordinary decision of the Andrews government, Education Minister James Merlino issued a diktat to state government schools that has the effect of banning Christmas carols.

You may need to read that sentence one more time.  In an attempt to secularise public schools, a directive was issued last month to the principal of every Victorian public school. These new rules restrict the way in which teachers, parents and volunteers talk about religious ideas in our state schools. The most shocking aspect of the rules is that the teaching and singing of traditional Christmas carols will now be banished from the classroom.

“Praise music”, defined as “any type of music that glorifies God or a particular religious figure or deity” will be banned from music classes beginning in January. This is the last year parents will be allowed to volunteer their lunchtimes to teach kids Christmas carols for the end-of-year concert.

Most children aren’t even aware there’s a religious dimension to Christmas carols. It’s Christmas, and singing carols is just what people do. Silent Night has taken on its own significance beyond anything that may be characterised by some government bureaucrat as “praise music”. Christmas carols now form a unique genre of music, and removing them from schools has the same effect banning any other genre of music would have; it ignores an important part of the complex tapestry of musical history.

In fact, the motivation behind a ban on Christmas carols today is remarkably similar to that which parents and teachers of children growing up in the 1950s and 60s shared in relation to rock ’n’ roll. Sixty years ago, older generations worried Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry would lead a generation to juvenile delinquency. Today, the concern is that Christmas carols may lead to alarming ideas about religion and the meaning of Christmas. Christmas carols are the new subversive influence on youth that parents and teachers should be concerned about — a nonsense idea ironically given life by the fact the elite are attempting to ban them.

Of course, the government hasn’t banned all Christmas carols, just those that refer to God. So while drab, contemporary Christmas songs such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer will be spared, the traditional carols — those that drip with a rich Christmas spirit — such as Once in Royal David’s City, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and O Come, All Ye Faithful are verboten in Victorian public schools.

But it’s far bigger than all that. This is a cultural turning point. The Victorian government isn’t just banning Christmas carols; this is an attempt to strip away the meaning of Christmas. It’s an overt attack on one of the most significant events in the Christian calendar.

The decision goes to the heart of good education. Christmas, and all the ceremony and custom associated with it, has been a significant religious and cultural ritual for 1700 years. A ban on these traditions is a denial of our history. Suppressing aspects of the Christmas celebration denies a cultural heritage that has formed the basis of Western civilisation and that underpins our understanding of life and liberty.

A well-rounded education should include lessons on Christianity and its contribution to who we are today. We can’t expect the next generation to defend the values of Western civilisation if they don’t know what they are.

The inflammatory decision of the Andrews government to ban Christmas carols in Victoria’s public schools must be reversed immediately. Former Victorian attorney-general Robert Clark is to be congratulated for taking a stand on the issue. In parliament Clark called on the government to “withdraw this appalling edict and make clear that students at government schools are entitled to learn, sing and enjoy Christmas carols as they have for generations”. In the meantime, and while I’m still able to say it — merry Christmas!

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Virulently anti-Israel programs on Australia's ABC

A series of programs on ABC Radio National, produced by a long-standing anti-Israel activist, has undermined the objectivity of the national broadcaster and exposed serious failings in its editorial process. The programs may also have put the ABC in breach of its statutory obligation of ‘maintaining independence and integrity’, and its Code of Practice requiring ‘impartiality’ in current affairs.

The programs, Jerusalem: a divine crime scene, and An unholy mix – Jerusalem, religion and archaeology, produced by former Greens Marrickville Councillor Cathy Peters, presented the views of a parade of veteran anti-Israel propagandists, whose unstated purpose was to discredit the historical connection between Jerusalem and the Jewish people, and to level an array of unchallenged and inaccurate accusations against Israel in the guise of expert analysis.

An editor’s note published online described Peters as a member of the NSW Greens, an executive member of the Coalition For Justice and Peace in Palestine and a member of Jews Against the Occupation. What the ABC failed to disclose is that Peters is also a fierce proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. She was the instigator of the 2010 Marrickville Council motion urging the Council to consider boycotting all goods made in any part of Israel, as well as Israeli artists, athletes and academics. The motion, which also called on state and federal governments to adopt BDS, provoked a surge of protest and derision, especially from ratepayers unimpressed that the Council was being used as a vehicle to prosecute a pet international cause of a few Councillors.

None of this background was disclosed by the ABC. The Code of Practice requires the ABC ‘to equip audiences to make up their own minds’ about news and current affairs issues, but Peters’ audience was not given vital information about her partisan record on the issues about which she was supposedly ‘reporting’.

Further, the requirement of ‘independence’ and ‘integrity’ in the ABC Act does not merely mean independence from the influence of the government of the day and political parties, as important as that is. It also means independence from the personal opinions, agendas and private activism of program producers and journalists contracted or employed by the ABC itself. Peters’ use of her position on Marrickville Council to push an anti-Israel agenda was rejected by rate-payers. The use of the national broadcaster for the same purpose is as objectionable.

Given her background in the anti-Israel movement, it was unsurprising that the two programs were as blatantly inaccurate and one-sided as they were, featuring a panel of speakers all coming from a relentlessly one-eyed anti-Israel perspective. One panellist, Ross Burns, the former Australian Ambassador to Israel, has previously served on the board of the Palestinian lobby group, Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.

Sara Irving, described as a historian and a writer, has filed over 200 stories for the virulently anti-Israel Electronic Intifada website.

Jeff Halper, the Israeli professor, ostensibly chosen to present an Israeli perspective, calls for the eradication of a Jewish national home through a ‘one-state solution’ to the conflict, and has made the bizarre claim that Israel has developed a ‘spectral dust’ it can spray over wide areas of land, every grain of which is a sensor, programmed with a person’s DNA to track, locate and kill that individual.

Shawan Jabarin was presented as a human rights activist from a Palestinian NGO. The audience was not told that he has also had a long association with a Palestinian terrorist organisation. In 2007, a court found that Jabarin is a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ figure: ‘in part of his activities, he is the director of a human rights organization, and in another part he is an activist in a terrorist organization which does not shy away from acts of murder and attempted murder which… deny the most basic of all human rights – the right to life.’

The former Jerusalem city councillor, Meir Margalit, provided perhaps the most extreme turn of all, in likening archaeological digs which seek to understand, preserve and honour the history of Jerusalem, to the acts of wholesale archaeological destruction and grotesque vandalism committed by Isis.

The opinions of the panellists were punctuated by recordings supposedly presenting Israeli and Palestinian perspectives. The audience heard a gentle-sounding Palestinian poet reciting incantations of longing and pain. The ostensible Israeli perspective was presented in the form of thick American accents repeatedly speaking of God and King David. As if those are the only, or predominant, voices on either side.

Ignored was the vast body of historical, poetic and literary works from the empires of antiquity to Josephus to Amoz Oz, that capture the essence of the long and deep Jewish bond to Jerusalem. Instead of presenting Israel and Israelis in all their rich diversity and complexity, Peters portrayed them as a caricature, precisely as BDS leaders would have everyone see them – American interlopers, settlers with pistols and prayer shawls.

There were also straight-out factual errors. Listeners were told ‘if you’re not Jewish in Jerusalem you don’t have the right to vote.’ In fact, all citizens of Israel (Jewish and Arab) have the right to vote and enjoy identical civic rights. With the end of the Jordanian occupation of east Jerusalem following Israel’s military victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, Jerusalem’s Arab residents were granted permanent residency status entitling them to vote in municipal elections and were offered full Israeli citizenship. Some 12 per cent have taken up Israeli citizenship while the remainder are evidently deterred by nationalistic considerations and long-standing threats and accusations of treason by the Palestinian leadership.

While Peters is free to hold her views, no matter how offensive or misguided they may be, the ABC’s listeners are entitled to question why the broadcaster trusted an activist with a record of fanatical anti-Israel campaigning to produce current affairs content directly relating to Israel, and without disclosing the full extent of her biases to the audience.

At best, the ABC may have naively believed that Peters could set aside her extreme views and produce sensible, balanced content. At worst, those in charge of the ABC’s news and current affairs programming ignored their statutory and Code obligations and indulged Peters’ agenda by commissioning the programs knowing exactly what they would be getting, without requiring even a semblance of balance, impartiality or accuracy.

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Another grossly defective Jeep

See previous reports here and here.

A man has vented his frustration after shelling out $54,000 on a new Jeep only to have it completely break down two years later.

Zach Winch, from Ipswich, Queensland, is so upset with the laundry list of mechanical problems that have plagued his Jeep since he bought it in August 2013 that he made a video warning other Australians to avoid making his same mistake.

‘Do yourself a favour Australia, don’t hold back – buy yourself another vehicle,’ Zach said while standing in front his bright red Jeep with a sign reading ‘broken’ hanging from the number plate.

Zach lists the 19 mechanical problems that have plagued his 2013 Jeep in the short two years he has owned the car

Within the two years since he bought the car, Zach said the car has had 19 different faults ranging from transmission rebuild and replacement, traction control, overheating and losing power while driving.

‘To add to that we’ve had to make countless trips to and from service centres and overall in its short two year life span it’s spent more than seven months off the road,’ he said.

‘When Jeep owners say it’s a Jeep thing you wouldn't understand – they’re 100 percent correct – you wouldn't understand how hard it is to keep a jeep on the road running the way it’s supposed too,’ Zach said.

Zach’s frustration comes just months after Melbourne man Teg Sethi made a hilarious mock music video about his 2013 model Jeep Grand Cherokee that he claimed was a ‘lemon.’

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Former union boss John Maitland found guilty of misleading ICAC

The first criminal prosecution arising from the NSW corruption watchdog's landmark coal inquiries has resulted in a guilty finding against former union boss John Maitland for giving misleading evidence.

Local Court Magistrate Janet Wahlquist found on Monday that Mr Maitland "intentionally gave misleading evidence" to the Independent Commission Against Corruption during public hearings in May 2013.

She rejected expert evidence tendered by the defence that Mr Maitland may have had a memory lapse, and said it "does not require expert opinion".

Mr Maitland was charged with misleading the ICAC by not admitting he had broken a secrecy order by telling a friend about evidence he had given during a private hearing.

The ICAC caught him in a phone tap discussing the evidence.

His lawyers had argued that talking on the telephone did not breach the secrecy provisions of the ICAC Act – which say that evidence "shall not be published" – because a discussion did not amount to "publishing" the evidence.

But Ms Wahlquist rejected that claim and referred to sections of the Defamation Act in finding that a publication can be made by way of a conversation.

The court will hear submissions on sentencing on January 29.

Mr Maitland faces a maximum penalty of two years in prison, a $5500 fine, or both.

The former head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy union was embroiled in the ICAC's inquiry into a coal licence given to a company he once chaired, Doyles Creek Mining, by former state Labor mining minister Ian Macdonald. Both were found to have acted corruptly.

In an exchange presented to the court, counsel assisting the ICAC, Peter Braham, SC, opened his questioning of Mr Maitland during a public hearing in May 2013 by asking if Mr Maitland was determined to be "absolutely honest".

"I am," Mr Maitland replied.

He also admitted he was told it would be a criminal offence to talk about the evidence he gave at a private hearing in July 2012, and agreed he took the obligation seriously.

But he was then played a taped telephone call in which he told close friend Archibald Tudehope about the evidence he gave in private.

Asked if he disclosed his evidence in "direct and knowing contravention" of the secrecy order, Mr Maitland said at the time: "Not knowing, but it appears."

"Well, you knew what you were doing, Mr Maitland, and you certainly knew the order had been made?" Mr Braham said.

"I agree,"  Mr Maitland said.

"And you've lied about that fact already this morning haven't you?" Mr Braham pressed.

"It appears so," Mr Maitland replied.

"It's not a good start," Mr Braham said.

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12 men arrested over massive brawl in Seaford, Melbourne

How did I know as soon as I saw the headline that this would be an African event?

 A MAN is in a critical condition after he was repeatedly stabbed in a wild brawl involving up to 100 people outside a train station in Melbourne’s southeast last night.

Police arrested 12 men following the fight outside the Kananook Railway Station on Wells Rd in Seaford at 5.35pm. They have since been released pending further inquiries.

A 23-year-old Seabrook man suffered a number of stab wounds to his abdomen and was left at Frankston Hospital by a group of unknown men, where he remains in a critical condition.

Police investigating the fight searched three vehicles and seized weapons including baseball bats, a samurai sword and a machete.

They were from suburbs across Melbourne including Sunshine West, Carlton, Taylors Hill, Deer Park, Collingwood, Ardeer, Melton and Dandenong.

They were taken to Frankston and Mornington police stations for questioning.

Police confirmed the fight “was in the vicinity of a sporting event”, believed to be the South Sudanese Australian Summer Slam basketball competition that was held at the nearby Frankston Basketball Stadium.

It’s believed the fight started in the carpark at the stadium and the men continued brawling for about 200m towards the station.

Basketballer Abraham, who did not want his surname published, said players were preparing for the trophy presentation when they heard “yelling” from the carpark.

There were reports a man had hit another with a baseball bat, Abraham said, and players and spectators ran outside to see what was happening.

“It was at the end of the tournament and there were a few people in the carpark outside,” he said.

“Apparently one guy came up and hit one of them with a baseball bat and he got chased.”

He said a number of spectators and players went outside, but they were not involved in the fight. “We just heard people running outside and yelling,” Abraham said.  “Everyone was wondering what was going on.

“It had nothing to do with the basketball ... it was just people in the carpark (who were) drinking.”

South Sudanese Australian National Basketball Association manager Manny Berberi said he was confident players in the tournament were not involved.  “I think maybe they (drunken youths) saw the competition was on so came down, but they didn’t even come into the stadium to support the teams at all,” Mr Berberi said. “None of the players were involved.

“The police handled it very well when they arrived.”

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Reading Recovery program used in 960 NSW public schools does not work

A key $55 million-a-year program to teach struggling NSW students to read does not work, with the state's first major review of Reading Recovery warning it is offered in too many schools and has few long-term benefits.

The report, by the NSW Department of Education's Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation, found that Reading Recovery, which is used in about 960 NSW primary schools, should be restricted to the lowest performing students.

While it may have some impact on students who are really struggling with basic reading, the improvements are short-lived, the report found.

Reading Recovery has been in NSW public schools since 1984, and is also used in Catholic and independent schools. It was developed in New Zealand in the 1970s to help struggling readers in year 1 with daily individual, 30-minute lessons from a specially trained teacher.

In NSW, Reading Recovery is in 60 per cent of schools and at least 14 per cent of year 1 students take part in it.

The report found that the program is an "effective short-term intervention for remediating reading text skills among the lowest performing students" but is not an effective intervention for "students who begin year 1 with more proficient literacy skills".

"The duration of the program is only 12-20 weeks so it is equally possible that Reading Recovery students do not receive the level of support they need to sustain any short-term effects beyond year 1," the report says.

Despite its widespread use, the program – which is also in the US, Canada and Britain – has its vocal critics and earlier this year, influential US literacy academic Louisa Moats told education bureaucrats in Victoria that it was "indefensible" to spend money on the program.

"The whole approach is based on ideas that have not held up to scientific scrutiny," Dr Moats said in March.

The NSW Department of Education's general manager of strategic information and reporting, Jenny Donovan, said the report found that overall, the program was "not particularly effective".

"It shows there is a positive effect on some students in year 1, the very lowest level of ability students, but for all students by the time they reach year 3, any positive effect that may have been seen by Reading Recovery has been washed out," Dr Donovan said.

"What the report is suggesting is that Reading Recovery isn't the answer for students who have reading difficulties, and increasingly we see students whose levels of reading are not as bad maybe being subjected to a Reading Recovery treatment and it doing no good whatsoever for them."

Dr Donovan said the report found that the year 3 NAPLAN results of students with similar reading abilities were the same, regardless of whether students had completed the Reading Recovery program or not.

Leading literacy academic Robyn Cox, president of the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia, said Reading Recovery was effective for some students but it was not the only remediation program available to schools.

"One way of improving achievement in early literacy would be to enhance teachers' skills in identifying children with reading difficulties and fine-tuning their teaching strategies for this group," associate professor Cox said.

"Reading Recovery is successful for many kids but there will be some kids who have ongoing difficulties in processing print. I wouldn't want to say it is ineffective because for many kids it is just what they needed at the right time.''

A spokeswoman for the NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli said the report showed where the program was working and where other strategies to improve reading could be more appropriate.

"The minister has asked the Department of Education for advice on how the report's findings can be used to further refine the effective, targeted delivery of reading support to students needing it most," she said.

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Must not represent Australian Aborigines as cute



An ‘Australian Aboriginal Lucky Doll’ has been pulled from stores after photos of the key-ring surfaced on social media and were widely condemned as racist.

The wooden dolls were spotted at a store at Brisbane International Airport by Aboriginal activist Robin Taubenfeld.

They were painted with red, white, black and yellow and were attached to a key-ring by a leather rope which some have said is reminiscent of a ‘noose’.

A photo of the ‘Lucky Dolls’ was posted to Ms Taubenfeld’s Facebook page on Thursday, which prompted their removal from shelves the following day.  Her post has since been shared more than 400 times.

One person commented that the dolls were ‘disrespectful to The Dreaming’.

Another person said the reference to the key-chain as a ‘Lucky Doll’ was the source of people’s anger, given the conditions in Indigenous Communities regarding health, life expectancy and high imprisonment rates.

Others said it was an example of non-Aboriginal people misappropriating and profiting off stereotypes.

Many commented speculating that the dolls were likely not even made in Australia.

Some also left comments on Brisbane Airport Facebook page to express their dismay.

A spokesperson from Brisbane Airport confirmed to Daily Mail Australia that the key-chains were 'quickly' removed from shelves.

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Batteries And Bulldust: Why ‘Living Off The Grid’ Is Not As Green As You Think

The arrival in Australia of the Tesla "Powerwall" storage battery has produced lots of erections among Australian Greenies.  They see it as the longed-for solution to the intermittent nature of wind and solar power.  The article below however points out that such systems do not add up as a replacement for reticulated electricity.  The author offers nuclear power as the best replacement for hydrocarbon energy sources.

As you could probably guess from the angry tone of it, the article appeared in a far-Left publication, "New Matilda".  It is however perfectly rational and numerate in its critique of the batteries.  There have always been some Green/Leftists who like nukes.  The Left in fact hailed nuclear power when it was first rolled out in the '50s.  It was "new" so they liked it.

This is not the first pro-nuke article to appear in "New Matilda". Editor Chris Graham is evidently balanced in his thinking on some occasions.  He even published a critique of extreme feminism recently. But he did have to publish a Greenie reply to the article below which I don't think is worth linking to.


By Geoff Russell

You can bet that a newsreader who pronounces film as ‘fill-em’ will receive a flood of complaints. Similarly, spelling mistakes in the written word will be pounced upon by the eagle-eyed readers with howls of protest and claims of declining standards and the impending end of civilisation.

But when people screw up with numbers, there’s a stunned silence. Our innovation hungry Prime Minister recently announced $48m to combat falling maths science standards, but it isn’t just children that need help with numbers.

Take, for example, the Climate Council’s Tim Flannery and SBS journalist Emma Hannigan in a recent news report about household battery technologies. Flannery responded to Hannigan’s statement that sales of battery systems were predicted to be 50,000 per year for the next decade by saying "… when you get to that point, you won’t need coal fired power systems any more".

Get any 10-year-old (with a phone) to do the maths. 50,000 x 10 is half a million batteries. And how many households do we have?

Maths won’t help you here, you need data. Google it… number of households in Australia. It’s about 9 million.

So will half a million batteries make a dent in our electricity emissions? A tad useless would be an appropriate technical estimate, but since household electricity is only about a quarter of electricity, it’s really a quarter of a tad useless.

Put simply, half a million batteries, at around $7,150 dollars each (current price) is an incredibly stupid way to spend $35 billion dollars. For comparison, the United Arab Emirates bought 4 x 1.4 gigawatt South Korean nuclear plants for $20 billion (US) and they’ll all be running by 2020.

That would generate enough electricity to charge half a million 7kw Tesla batteries 126,000 times in a decade; if they could handle it. They are only rated to handle 5,000 charge discharge cycles.

But cost isn’t the biggest reason for not using big batteries in houses. Let’s consider the situation in Germany, mainly because the data comes easily to hand and because they’ve just wasted 15 years mucking around with renewables at great cost, but with trivial impact.

They expect to take 50 years to do what France did in 15 with nuclear power. Consider the following chart of German electricity use in January 2015.



Can you see the days with very little wind and sun? There’s one run of five in a row starting on the 19th of January. In the absence of their fossil fuel and nuclear plants, how much battery storage would the Germans need to cover this kind of run?

They’ve just signed the COP21 agreement that should stop them expanding their logging of forests for electricity; in fact I’d argue that Article 5 requires them to reduce it.

To make the maths trivial, lets assume they only need to supply 50 gigawatts of power for five days. That’s 5 x 24 = 120 hours. Do the sums and you’ll see that the batteries will need to supply 6,000 gigawatt-hours of energy (120 x 50). A gigawatt is a ‘1’ with 9 zeros. So, how many fully charged Tesla 7 kilowatt-hour Powerwalls would you need to supply this? All those zeros make what is a trivial calculation look complex: 6,000,000,000,000 divided by 7,000 is 857,142,857.

That’s 857 million batteries at a current cost of … $6.1 trillion dollars.

In the real world, many industries need their electricity in a particular form, but the numbers at least give us a feel for the scale of the problem.

But, as I said, cost isn’t the biggest reason people shouldn’t do this.

Consider the much-vaunted Tesla gigafactory? When it’s finished in 2020, it will produce batteries for half a million vehicles a year. That’s impressive and useful, but how many such giga factories will it take to supply batteries for those five days of German power?

Each year the giga factory can produce 35 gigawatt hours of battery storage. So how many years of production will it take to supply 6,000 gigawatt hours worth of batteries… 6,000,000,000,000/35,000,000,000… roughly 171 years; assuming Germany is the only customer.

You can do such calculations without all those zeros by using the Exp button on your phone calculator App.

But of course, real engineers wouldn’t use Tesla Powerwalls for such a purpose, they’d go for something much cheaper like pumped hydro. This is where you pump water from a low place to a high place when you have cheap electricity and then let it fall back down through a turbine to generate electricity at some later time.

It’s great when the geography is suitable and you don’t mind trashing some high mountain valley.

But surely batteries will get cheaper? Agreed. The Climate Council has just published a modest battery report. They make a general claim that the cost of battery storage should fall to $200 per kilowatt hour by 2020.

If that comes to pass, the Germans could provide for a run of 5 cold still days using an as yet undeveloped technology at a projected cost of just $1.2 trillion. That makes me feel much better!

So we probably can’t afford them, and it will be incredibly tough to build enough of them, but there’s still another far more important reason that using big batteries in houses, or for general grid backup, is dumb enough that it should be made illegal where there is no actual need.

Has the penny dropped yet? Here’s a hint. The world sells 70 million cars a year and the Tesla giga factor will make half a million car-sized batteries a year when it’s finished in 2020.

It should be obvious now… we will desperately need good, big batteries for electric vehicles.

Batteries and hydrogen fuel look to be our only choices for vehicles. So we shouldn’t be wasting valuable battery production resources to make batteries for houses because some puddle shallow thinkers reckon it’s cool to live off-grid.

We know how to cleanly and efficiently power houses; you build nuclear power plants and hook them into a grid. In developing countries, there is a pressing need for grids and that will be a huge challenge. Wasting valuable battery production capacity on powering houses will make everything that much harder.

The whole batteries-in-houses idiocy is part of what is inevitable when rich countries transfer spending decisions from Governments to individuals via low taxation rates and small government; or more accurately, incompetent Government; Governments who no longer have the skills and vision to pursue major projects in the national interest, let alone the international interest.

Traditionally, when Governments spent money, there was at least a fighting chance that a competent bureaucracy would act rationally and in the public interest.

But when it’s up to individuals, particularly rich, self-centered individuals who can’t think quantitatively, then they will buy Tesla batteries and Tesla will happily supply them.

If Tesla boss Elon Musk had even half the environmental concern he professes, then he wouldn’t make the bloody things.

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Former PM Tony Abbott hints he will be staying in politics

FORMER prime minister Tony Abbott has hinted he won’t quit politics and fired a warning shot over Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s tax reform plans at a gathering of Liberals who remain furious he was knifed as PM.

Mr Abbott rallied a crowd of supporters at an invite-only event organised by former Defence Minister Kevin Andrews who also hinted the ex-PM would not quit politics.

As the Turnbull government weighs options to increase the GST to 15 per cent, Mr Abbott warned any reform must meet his tax mantra to ensure taxes were lower and fairer.

"I have a very simple mantra when it comes to tax change,’’ Mr Abbott said. "The results of tax change has got to be tax which is lower, simpler and fairer. If it doesn’t produce taxes that are lower, simpler and fairer it’s not reform. It is just change. "We want change that’s worth it, not just change for changes sake.’’

His comments came on the same day a ReachTel poll found just over 50 per cent of voters in his Liberal electorate believed he should quit.

"I will be working to ensure that we have the best possible government out of next year’s election,’’ Mr Abbott said. "We will do everything we humanly can to ensure the best possible Coalition government is there in Canberra. And I know we will all be working, together, for that great end.’’

Mr Andrews said he looked forward to "working together’’ with Mr Abbott in the "years ahead".

His suggestion that Mr Abbott will not leave politics follows the former Prime Minister’s recent decision to delay an announcement on his future until later next year.

"We don’t know where that journey ends. We often don’t know how it will end," Mr Abbott told the attendees.  "To lead our country for two years was the greatest honour of my life. It’s all happened thanks to you.  "I know there’s been a few ups and downs this year. It’s important that we keep them in perspective.’’

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Anti-vaxers taking posters and pamphlets promoting vaccination in hospitals and clinics

Dangerous and deluded fanatics

ANTI-vaccination vandals are ripping down posters that promote the benefits of lifesaving injections at hospitals and health centres.

They claim they are trying to protect children by removing vital information, even stealing pamphlets from childcare centres in attempts to prevent parents knowing when and why they should vaccinate their families.

One woman suggests taking the action further by printing A5 sheets listing "vaccine affected deaths" to place on parents’ cars at childcare centres.

One anti-vaccination vigilante is a Melbourne hospital nurse, who says she refuses to immunise patients. She is under review by Australia’s health watchdog after boasting she had falsified her employment details to hide the fact she had not been vaccinated.

A father last month boasted of roaming through a Melbourne hospital with his sleeping baby while his partner was in a medical appointment.

"I came across the room we actually attended when we did our antenatal classes, as nobody was in there I pushed the pram in and had a look around," he wrote.

Anti-vaccination campaigner, Mary Parkes, has boasted online of tearing down vaccination posters. "I soon found the ­important whooping cough vaccination poster, plastering the false message into the faces of people. I proceeded to take it off the wall and hide it under one of the cupboards. One less bullshit sign is a small win."

A fellow female anti-vaccination supporter responded with a photo of stolen and vandalised posters, with the message: "When I was in hospital last week my husband removed quite a few vaccination posters. He took them to the car and edited them but didn’t manage to put the edited versions back up unfortunately."

A registered nurse who works at a Melbourne hospital told how she stole the health information from her child’s childcare centre last year.  "These brochures were scattered all over my kid’s child care ... needless to say I took every single copy home for ­recycling (they don’t know who did it) ... the poster is huge it’s hard to see ... ugh ... made me sick ...

"Here it was mission impossible ... but pretending to look at other brochures I just grabbed them ... there were 40-50 of them ... I also removed the reorder application lol. "And I’m the president of the Committee lol."

Mary Parkes, an artist who now lives in Mullumbimby, boasted she did the same at the local parenting rooms at Townsville shopping centres, "ripping them up and binning them."

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Black dolls used to represent the baby Jesus in two Australian nativity scenes



Just a Leftist stunt of course. The Dandenong hospital doll above.  It is not literally black, of course, but it has the same colour as many people who are called black.  It is essentially a representation of an African. As such, it is likely to be an inaccurate representation of the historical Jesus, who would have had the coloring of other Mediterranean people.  He would have been a stocky little swarthy-skinned guy with dark eyes and dark hair like a modern-day Southern Italian.  That is of no importance in itself as the traditional European representation of Jesus as tall and blond is also inaccurate.

What is of some concern, however, is that this stunt feeds into and encourages now-common misrepresentations of history.  Some American blacks claim that all sorts of European inventions were in fact the work of Africans.  And Muslims often deny any historical association of Jews with Israel.  These are simply ego-salving lies but they do contribute to confusion about where the truth lies. And this is essentially another lie.  We all wade through a sea of lies as we go through life so it is sometimes a major challenge to figure out what the truth is.  Adding to the lies is therefore very unhelpful

Black achievements in many fields are much less than white achievements and Arab achievements are much less than Jewish achievements but the starting point for doing anything about those gaps is to accept their reality -- not lie about them


In the wake of the controversy surrounding a black doll representing baby Jesus at Pascoe Vale state Labor MP Lizzie Blandthorn’s office, Dandenong Hospital has also used a similar doll for its scene.

Ms Blandthorn said her staff members had fielded complaints, but Shane Butler, spokesman for hospital operator Monash Health, said feedback had been positive. "The nativity scene at Dandenong Hospital features a baby perhaps best described as being of Middle-Eastern ethnicity," Mr Butler said.

"We have had no negative feedback from passers-by, and, in fact, our staff have received a number of positive comments about the nativity scene."

The doll’s colour sparked fearsome online debate yesterday. Fired up readers were divided over the use of the black doll, with some arguing that Jesus could have been black or olive-skinned, due to his Middle Eastern roots, others saying history had always depicted him as a white man, while some wondered why it was an issue because they did not believe he existed.

Eddie had a simple message for those arguing over the colour of the doll.  "Really, it’s Christmas, so all who believe in the birth of Christ, let’s just celebrate it and be grateful that someone has put up a nativity scene," Eddie wrote.

Some said Ms Blandthorn was "grandstanding" and questioned if MPs should be allowed to erect nativity scenes at all, considering the multicultural electorates they represent.

"What is relevant here is simply that a Labor MP has deliberately done this to get a negative reaction from people and I suspect to try and prove a point," Leslie wrote.

Jason wondered: "Should politicians be putting nativity scenes in their office windows? I think this might be a broader issue to talk about."

Paul thought Jesus had "blond hair and blue eyes".  "You’re in good company Paul, so did Michelangelo and Da Vinci," John replied.

Guy said readers were creating an "incredible amount of fuss over the accuracy of a depiction of... a fictional character! Lol."

Yesterday, Ms Blandthorn told Leader she wanted to present a "multicultural" nativity scene in keeping with her diverse community it Pascoe Vale.

"Some people have suggested it wasn’t appropriate because it was dark-skinned, but my view is it’s more historically accurate given the part of the world in which the nativity happened," she said.

Ms Blandthorn said people were free to represent the nativity how they wished. "I’ve got a Mexican nativity set at home, which has dark-skinned llamas," she said.  "Culturally, people represent the nativity in ways that mean something to them."

Maria, who didn’t want her surname published, said she felt using the black baby was "changing what Jesus was".  "I’m not saying he would have been blue-eyed and blonde, but I don’t think he would have been that black either," she said.

"It sounds like I’m being racist but I’m not. I’m Italian, I was born here, and I used to get called a dago — I don’t like racism.

"All I can say is that he can’t have been black because that’s then going into Africa."

The Archdiocesan Vicar General Monsignor Greg Bennett said Jesus was Jewish, "and we can presume his appearance would have reflected the people of the Middle East".

"However, throughout the centuries, the images of the Holy Family in art, sculpture and windows have reflected the diverse cultures of the world and therefore the depictions of the Holy Family have reflected this reality," Monsignor Bennett said.

"Jesus was born for all people — all nations — in history for history."

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More Queensland police arrogance



Taken at the Morayfield shopping centre in S.E. Queensland on December 14 at 6:37pm

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The picture of the car seems a bit wobbly.  I wonder what that is about?







Crocodile baloney

The Warmists never stop.  Always a new scare.  This time it's crocs that are going to eat you as a result of global warming.  Why?  Because global warming will drive them towards the cooller waters of Southern Australia.  Just one problem:  Crocs are reptiles and they LIKE warmth. The warmer they are, the more active they are.  So where are they generally found?  In TROPICAL Australia -- around Cape York Peninsula and the Top End.  It's the HOTTEST part of Australia that they like.  They vote with their feet to show the best habitat for themselves. No wonder those who know crocodiles well in the wild dismiss the laboratory study reported below

And I have done my usual trick of looking up the underlying academic journal article (Diving in a warming world: the thermal sensitivity and plasticity of diving performance in juvenile estuarine crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus)).  When I do that, I often find that the authors have concluded what they wanted to conclude regardless of what their results show.  And so it seems here too.  I note the following sentence in the Abstract: "Maximal dive performances, however, were found to be thermally insensitive across the temperature range of 28–35°C".  Come again?  28–35°C is the temperature range they studied and the central claim of the article is that crocs can't stay underwater for long if the water is hot.  Yet that sentence asserts the exact opposite.  I give up!

The little lady whose Ph.D. research the article was based on -- Essie Rodgers -- would appear to have been very poorly supervised


Essie


Saltwater crocodiles may be forced to migrate from the north of Australia to the southern states because of global warming.

A University of Queensland study has found the man eaters may be ill-equipped to adjust to rising water temperatures, prompting them to migrate to cooler environments.

The researchers found the higher water temperatures hindered their diving ability, putting the young crocs at risk from predators.

Professor Craig Franklin of the university's School of Biological Sciences said they have found crocodiles are not hardwired to adapt to water temperatures – unlike other cold blooded animals.

'It's likely that if the water is too hot, crocodiles might move to cooler regions, or will seek refuge in deep, cool water pockets to defend their dive times,' he said.

Lead author for the study, PhD student Essie Rodgers, said the study showed increases in water temperatures severely shortened crocodiles diving times.

'Crocodiles are ectothermic animals – where environmental temperatures strongly influence their body temperatures,' she said.

The lethal temperature for crocodiles is in the high 30s to low 40s, making water a critical refuge for the reptiles to avoid dehydration.

Experts have cast doubt on the study, with Crocodylus Park expert Grahame Webb telling NT News the prehistoric animals are highly resilient.

'They've been through plenty of dramatic changes in temperature and they've gone through that okay,' he said.

'I think its important to be careful with these doomsday predictions.'

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How do a third of the top Australian companies pay no tax?

The comments below are a corrective to a minor public uproar  going on at the moment.  The writer is probably a bit optimistic about profit shifting however.  A lot of that does go on internationally.  American companies are particularly prone to it because of the high American company tax rates.  And our company tax rates are similar to the U.S. ones.

But all the huffing and puffing is needless anyway.  A 2% turnover tax (on gross receipts)  would be simple to levy and would ensure that all businesses paid their way.  Any business that was sent bust by such a tax would be very shaky anyway


Almost 600 of the largest companies operating in Australia did not pay income tax in the 2013 to 2014 financial year, ATO figures show.

These are wealthy companies with high annual incomes and it has led to speculation that Australia is missing out on billions of dollars of tax.

How much? According to a 2014 report, about $8.4 billion dollars a year. The corporate tax rate is set at 30 per cent, but almost a third of companies are paying an effective tax rate of about 10 per cent, according to the report.

And this is while there is talk of increasing the GST to 15 per cent to make up for a shortfall in taxation revenue. The GST hike would raise about $27 billion per year.

You may ask, how does a company avoid paying tax?

Here we get to an important distinction; between tax deductions (legal) and tax evasion (illegal). Not paying tax does not necessarily mean tax evasion.

Give us an example

One of the more controversial examples is a company like Apple.

The technology giant has a total income of about $6.1 billion, but only $247 million (about four per cent) of that was taxable income.

It paid $74 million tax - 30 per cent of its taxable income, or one per cent of its total income.

So what is taxable income? It's a company's total income minus expenses. If a company doesn't turn a profit in a financial year, it doesn't pay any tax.

This happens quite often.

In the last decade, each year between one fifth and one third of the top 500 companies have not made a profit. The number of companies not paying tax in 2013-14 was nothing unusual.

For example, Qantas and Ten Network are two of the companies that paid no tax. They also recorded losses of $2.84bn (Qantas) and $80mn (Ten).

If a company does make a profit, it can also make deductions to reduce its taxable income. These deductions are perfectly legal. They include:

    Prior year losses (a company can deduct losses from a previous financial year from its taxable income in the current financial year)

    Research and development (money spent on R&D earns tax credits)

    Franking credits (a company can offset its tax liability against the dividends it pays to shareholders)

This is why it can be misleading to look at taxation as a percentage of total income, rather than taxable income. The more interesting figure is the difference between total income and taxable income.

The figures released by the ATO do not explain why there is a difference - in many cases it's a result of tax deduction, not tax evasion.

The ATO figures simply show there is a difference, and this is nothing new.

To work out if there is anything illegal about the difference, you need to closely audit a company's accounts; a project for another day.

So nothing to see here?

Not really.

Tax deductions may be legal but they may not be good policy. The release of the ATO figures may generate debate about whether there are too many corporate tax deductions.

Aside from this, there are also murkier ways a company can reduce its taxable income. The dark arts of corporation tax evasion include:

    Debt dumping - a company brings debt from one of its overseas subsidiaries into Australia to reduce its taxable income.

    Profit shifting - a company sends profits offshore to avoid tax.

To get back to the example of Apple, in April, senators at an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance accused the company of shifting profits overseas, namely to Ireland.

Apple boss Tony King denied this was the case.

The inquiry came after the Australian Financial Review reported Apple had shifted an estimated $8.9 billion in untaxed profits over the last decade from its Australian operations to a tax haven structure in Ireland.

The ATO figures are no 'smoking gun' of corporate tax avoidance, but they may put the onus back on some companies to explain how they are paying little or no tax.

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Australian and Japanese universities now to recognize one-another's degrees

STUDENTS with degrees from Australian universities will have their qualifications recognised by Japan next year.

Universities in Japan and Australia have also agreed to deepen ties in the area of energy, health and medical research.

The two steps were taken Friday on Malcolm Turnbull’s first trip to Japan as Prime Minister, where he is promoting his “ideas boom” message.

Mr Turnbull met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe following a morning in which he took a selfie with the world’s most advanced humanoid robot ASIMO during a visit to the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo.

Recognition of Australian degrees would not only encourage freer movement between the two countries “but also that of ideas”, he said.

A roundtable with leading researchers in innovation and Australian university vice-chancellors was followed by the signing of a new deal with Japan on regenerative medicine.

Regenerative medicine includes treatments around stem cells and gene therapy intended to restore the function of damaged organs and tissues.

The market in Japan for regenerative medicines is projected to grow to more than $17 billion by 2030, according to the Japanese government.

The deal involves a memorandum of understanding with Japan’s peak industry body, the Forum for Innovative Regenerative Medicine. Austrade and FIRM will identify ways to help Australian and Japanese researchers and companies collaborate to advance commercial outcomes and therapies.

The Prime Minister also used his bilateral meeting with Mr Abe to raise Australia’s concerns about Japan’s whaling plans, as well as discuss trade and investment.

“Australia is very disappointed that Japan has resumed whaling in the Southern Ocean this year,” Mr Turnbull told reporters in Tokyo.

“We will, as good friends should, be upfront and frank about our differences of opinion, put them on the table and deal with them and seek to resolve them,” he said.

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Australia plays key part in Ramadi fight

Australian combat aircraft, special forces and training troops have contributed to operations which have killed about 1000 Islamic State insurgents in bitter fighting around the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

Chief of defence force joint operations Vice Admiral David Johnston says IS is under growing pressure on multiple fronts and its ability to move forces and resupply was increasingly constrained.

Much of the fighting now centres on Ramadi, 100 kilometres west of Baghdad, which was seized by IS in May.

Some 500 of their fighters are believed to remain.

"An accurate number of how many have died in the fight is almost impossible to obtain," Vice Admiral Johnston told reporters in Canberra on Friday.

"We'd think more than 1000 Daesh (IS) fighters would have died."

Australia's 80 special forces facilitated air strikes for the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service brigade, the lead unit of Iraqi military forces seeking to expel IS forces from Ramadi.

That led to more than 917 air strikes.

The majority of those missions occurred in the vicinity of Ramadi, killing many IS fighters, the destruction of more than 420 defensive fighting positions and 85 IS vehicles destroyed, many of them vehicle-born improvised explosive devices.

The 300 Australians and 100 New Zealanders had now jointly trained more than 3000 Iraqi troops, many engaged in fighting around Ramadi.

"Iraqi commandeers have observed a commensurate improvement in the confidence of their forces who have received this training," Vice Admiral Johnston said.

There had been improvements in targeting, which combined with the Iraqi military shift to offensive operations had boosted the tempo of air strikes, including by Australian aircraft.

Since starting operations in October 2014, RAAF aircraft have flown more than 1000 missions, releasing more than 600 bombs.

That includes 12 missions over Syria during which nine bombs were dropped.

Colonel Matt Galton, who commanded the first training team rotation, said Iraqi troops had it in them to win the fight and that training had had a visible impact.

"It's a matter of time until they do retake Ramadi and hopefully, in the not too distant future, they will start to move further north," he said.

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Measured or faked climate?

A Finnish professor looks at the hanky panky in a climate record from Australia -- showing how "adjustments" have turned a cooling trend into a warming one.  My rough translation from the Finnish below.  Finnish is a really pesky language

I wrote earlier today  on the Paris climate agreement, and in connection with our neighboring area, changes in climate statistics graphs.

I compared the current GISS statistics in 2011 to previous  statistics. And I was shocked. See below the past equivalent comparisons of Alice Springs climate statistics.

By way of background  I on April 16, 2012 made ​​a screenshot of Alice Springs temperatures developments, because it differed significantly from months earlier. Which differed from the earlier again (and which does not exist anymore on the GISS website, even though it was still there in March 2012 when I took the screenshot of the then uploads). In April 2012, the statistics showed a  climate that cooled dramatically.



The Alice Springs temperature history, however, was once again changed dramatically  on 10/22/2014 far as the screenshot shows.



Time changes in the Australian climate statistics do not, however, stop there. From the evidence of the current GISS: Look at the  image today. It tells more than a thousand words.



Pay attention to the last, and its differences to previous years.  And think about why all the latest measurements have been in need of repair? Originally they seemed quite unbiased.

Compare also the magnitude of the changes throughout the period. Most simply, it is by evaluating the images with minimum temperatures. You will see that in the last hundred years, climate change has accelerated remarkably high between October 2014 and to this day.

This is due to the fact that a hundred years ago temperatures have been shown to have cooled considerably compared to the current high.

After all, have we just been fooled? Surely!

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The thought police are livid about my cartoon? Now that’s funny



Bill Leak

I don’t know an associate professor of sociology at Macquarie University called Amanda Wise, but she knows me. She knows me so well, in fact, that she’s not only able to tell me what my cartoons mean, but she’s also able to tell me what I was thinking while I was drawing them.

There I was, naively thinking that if I drew a group of poor Indian people trying to eat solar panels contained in parcels sent to them by the UN anyone seeing the cartoon would assume it meant the people in it were hungry. But, no. What I thought I was thinking wasn’t what I was thinking at all. According to Ms Wise, my “unequivocally racist” cartoon drew on “very base stereotypes of third world, underdeveloped people who don’t know what to do with technology”.

These and other startling revelations were included in an article by Amanda Meade in The Guardian on Monday. As well as being sternly reminded by the shocked Ms Wise that my cartoon would be unacceptable in Britain, the US and Canada (heaven forbid!), I was also told my cartoon was “racist” by no less an authority than Yin Paradies of Deakin University, whose research includes the economic effects of racism.

Professor Paradies didn’t think I’d made the people in my cartoon look hungry, either, but rather, in my own twisted, racist way, I’d managed to portray not only them but the entire population of India as “too stupid to handle renewable energy”.

I’ve been reliably informed my cartoon also triggered a hostile response from the sanctimonious but bloodthirsty mob who spend their time trawling the internet looking for anything they find offensive to provide them with an opportunity to join the orgy of competitive compassion and moral grandstanding that is Twitter.

Such people, understandably, are probably on a bit of a high at the moment having just spent a couple of weeks watching heroic and revered climate scientists such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Robert Redford spouting a series of hypocritical platitudes in Paris that culminated in world leaders signing up to an agreement to meet again in five years so they can sign another one, thereby saving the world from an impending environmental catastrophe. Again.

No wonder they’re angry. First chance I get I spoil the party by reminding them that, back here, in the real world, there are billions of people who not only lack food, health, water and education, but also have no access to electricity, and more than 20 per cent of them live in India.

And there’s something obscene about the fact that there are billions of others who’ve had all those things all their coal-power-driven lives and they’re now distributing solar panels to the world’s poor because they think that provides a virtuous, if inadequate, form of electricity for which they should be grateful. I think that’s racist, I think it’s condescending, and I think it’s immoral. But it’s also the truth, and when an impertinent cartoonist dares to tell the truth these days he’d better watch out because telling the truth is a dangerously subversive thing to do.

It has the same ability to simultaneously shock some people while amusing others that four-letter words used to have when Lenny Bruce discovered he could use them to such devastating effect that his audiences would still be laughing while he was being dragged offstage by the police and arrested for obscenity.

In court, Bruce argued he was being denied his right to freedom of speech, and so he was. But I can’t help thinking he had it easy, living at a time when the only people who had to stand up for their rights to freedom of speech were comedians who wanted to say f. k in public.

And not only that, but the only people he had to worry about offending were undercover coppers in the audience whose job it was to be offended so they could arrest him for doing his job.

These days, the undercover policemen in the audience waiting for him to swear would be the least of his worries. They’d be outnumbered 100 to one by members of the Politically Correct Thought Police Task Force, all armed with iPhones and Twitter accounts, ready to pounce the moment he said something that might not necessarily offend them but could, potentially, offend someone else.

There’s no doubt the cartoon I drew for Monday’s paper offended a lot of people. While they might not have enjoyed looking at it, I’m quite sure they enjoyed using it as an excuse to parade their moral vanity.

And, while I prefer to discover there are people who think my cartoons are funny, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t derive a certain amount of pleasure from discovering they enrage the ones that don’t

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The young white male has slipped educationally

 Paul Sheehan

Young white men are losing their traditional advantages in Australia. Their once dominant position is being eroded incrementally, in measurable ways, with each passing year.

The Higher School Certificate results provide an annual snapshot of this relative decline (and it is relative, not absolute). The superior performance of young women compared with young men remains strong.

This year, when I took out all the niche language subjects, apart from the one subject everybody has to sit, English, 37 females topped NSW in a subject, compared with 22 males.

No male domain is safe any longer. Young women topped the state in automotive examination, business services, financial services, primary industries and legal studies.

Traditionally, mathematics, mathematics extension, mathematics general, modern history, ancient history and geography were male bastions, but this no longer applies. All six subjects were topped or co-topped by young women in 2015.

The disproportionate academic success of students of Asian background was repeated in 2015. It has been structural for decades. They dominated the hard sciences again, topping physics, chemistry, information processing and technology, mathematics, mathematics extension 1, mathematics extension 2 and information and digital technology.

Take away nine subjects topped by males of Asian background, and males of European background topped only 13 of the 59 non-language subjects, or 22 per cent. This is a marked underperformance, given that European-background males make up just under 30 per cent of HSC students.

The slippage is relative. Young white males might be as productive as ever, but relative to other groups, they are falling behind.

The majority of students at Australian universities are women. The majority of graduates are women, including the majority of graduates in the professions. The disparity has been widening for years.

Inevitably, the impact of this change is rippling through the workforce. The number of women who are the main income-earners in their households has been a rising trend for years.

There are still disparities in income that favour men – a point of enduring contention – but our society has yet to work out an affordable way to bridge the income gap created by women taking extended leave to have and raise children. This reflects a structural gap more than a discriminatory one.

In terms of reputational slippage, young white men are in relative decline. I was stunned by a recent survey in Britain in which white men in their 20s placed spectacularly last in a rating of reputation.

The survey was conducted by YouGov, a British international market research company. In summarising its survey, YouGov wrote: "Data from 48 separate surveys reveals that young white men are seen as the worst ethnic, gender or age group on five negative traits, and the second-worst on five positive traits.

"The people we regard as the laziest, rudest, most promiscuous, drunken drug-takers are white men in their 20s."

Sheehan goes on to elborate about the poor ratings of young white men in Britain but seems not to realize that political correctness would have had a large effect on the results.  For instance, given their high level of criminality, young black men  would undoubtedly have been very negatively rated but to do so would be on the brink of illegality in Britain today.  A British pastor has just been prosecuted for saying that Muslims serve the Devil

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Uber legal in NSW, taxi owners to be compensated

UBER is legal in NSW after Premier Mike Baird’s cabinet agreed on giving the ride-sharing service the green light.

Cabinet today agreed to immediately legalise the UberX service, and finalised a compensation plan for taxi owners who will see the value of their plates drop dramatically.

The Uber Black service — similar to a limo or premium option — is already legal.

Transport minister Andrew Constance said today: “NSW will have a new transport economy.”

More than 50 taxi and hire care regulations have been immediately repealed.

“As of midnight tonight ride-sharing services in NSW will become legal,” Mr Constance said.

About 5800 perpetual plate owners will be given a $20,000 flat fee for the plate ownership, with multiple plate owners able to claim for a maximum of two plates.

A compensation fund budgeted at $250 million will be distributed on a case-by-case basis for plate owners who purchased them recently

The legalisation of the controversial cab service will mean traditional taxis will still have the exclusive right to pick up passengers from ranks and off the street, and will have exclusive access to Sydney Airport.

Uber drivers will now have to pay a licence fee and undergo criminal checks, as well as regularly get their cars checked for safety.

The compensation plan agreed to by the government includes a one-off fixed payment for the ownership of taxi plates, as well as a scaled compensation fund where owners who have held taxi plates for the least amount of time to be eligible for a bigger payout.

Mr Constance said customers had moved with technology. “It’s time for industry and and government to move the same way,” Mr Constance said. He said the changes mean a $30 million reduction in regulatory costs for the industry.

A point-to-point task force recommended the $20,000 payment for perpetual licences, and an industry adjustment of up to $142 million. More than 90 per cent of licensees, who own one or two plates, will receive the $20,000 payment.

Mr Constance said he expects all fares to come down as a result.

NSW is the second jurisdiction to legalise UberX, following the ACT in October.

SOURCE






Queensland debt to grow to almost $80b

Queensland's Labor government looks increasingly unlikely to stop total state debt climbing to almost $80 billion within three years.

A $1.5 billion write-down in mining and payroll tax revenue has also increased total debt by $865 million since the budget was handed down in August.

Treasurer Curtis Pitt's first budget forecast total debt hitting $77.1 billion by 2018/19, but his Mid-Year Fiscal and Economic Review, released on Tuesday, shows it's now on track to hit $79.7 billion by then.

"Of course, we want to see it go down," he said.

"(But) the important point from our perspective is we are focused on the kind of debt that actually impacts directly on Queenslander taxpayers - and that is general government sector debt."

However, general government sector debt was also set to grow from $37.9 billion this financial year to almost $41 billion in 2019/19, according to official figures.

Shadow treasurer John Paul-Langbroek accused Mr Pitt of trying to trick Queenslanders about the state's level of debt.

"Curtis Pitt is literally speaking in tongues, the tongues of Treasury," he said.

The government has outlined further measures to cut general government sector debt.

Debts owed by the state-owned Ports of Gladstone, North Queensland Bulk Ports and SunWater will be shifted from the government's balance sheet to their own books.

A special $150 million dividend will also be collected from power firm Stanwell Corporation.

Mr Pitt said the measures would trim $1 billion in general government debt this financial year.

The government also plans to save $680 million by proceeding merging state-owned energy networks Ergon and Energex and making generators Stanwell and CS Energy more efficient.

Labor promised to merge power generators during the state election, but has since been advised against the move by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Mr Pitt said the $6 million annual cost of an expanded cabinet, from the 14 to 17 ministers, would be offset by reducing government advertising, contractors and consultants.

He added that he was in no hurry to get the state's AAA credit rating back because Treasury has advised it would be "imprudent".

"We will continue to chip away at debt, but we need to get our priorities right," Mr Pitt said.

"We think this is a very responsible approach to economic management in this state."

SOURCE

Plankton and global warming:  CSIRO make a mountain out of a pimple

A totally boring finding to the effect that warm-water creatures tend to live in warm water has been hyped into a threat to our fish dinners

I noted yesterday a new report that said plankton were dying out due to global warming.  And plankton are an important part of the marine food chain so the implication was that our fish dinners are threatened!  As someone who likes fish dinners I take that seriously, but I recently noted another threat to my fish dinners that turned out to be "poorly understood" so I was inclined to be suspicious of this threat too.   But I was a bit rushed for time yesterday -- I had to set aside some time for a sociable  dinner of excellent chili con carne -- so I contented myself with noting just a few immediately apparent oddities in the news report yesterday.

But today I have had time to look up the underlying academic document. It is Plankton 2015: State of Australia’s oceans, by Anthony Richardson et al., which describes itself as a "brochure".  It is NOT an academic journal article that has undergone the rigors of peer review etc. And the apparently most relevant piece of research by others that they cite turns out to be an unpublished honours thesis!  Rigor get thee behind me! 

It is basically a bureaucratic document from the CSIRO, a once respectable but now rather controversial publicly-funded Australian scientific research organization.  Warmists have got hold of it so there goes scientific caution and integrity.

And the latest "brochure" is a good example of its intellectual decline and irresponsibility.  The very first statement in their "Summary for Policymakers" is: "Climate change is altering plankton distributions".  That is partly all well and good:  Plankton distributions along the long East coast of Australia do appear to have changed in various ways.  But no evidence that any have died out is presented and there is no note of any significant shrinkage in overall abundance -- so the threat to our fish dinners dies at that point.

But what about the first part of that sentence?  Is "Climate change" behind the plankton change?  We delve further into the report and find that claim most interestingly expanded:

"Water temperature off Maria Island (east coast of Tasmania) has warmed by 1.5°C since 1944, and is a consequence of global warming and its influence on the intensification of the warm, poleward-flowing East Australian Current (EAC). The EAC now makes more incursions into Tasmanian waters than previously. The increase in strength of the EAC is likely to be a response to climate change, and has contributed to ocean warming off Australia ~3–4 times the global average."

Isn't that fun? It's changes in ocean currents that are now the culprit and those changes are now only "likely" to have been effected by global warming!  Not a single piece of evidence or reference is given to support that "likelihood" however.  Let me guess why:  There isn't any.  It's just a statement of Warmist faith.

So they have NO data about effects of global warming.  And in fact it is worse than that.  Their findings are demonstrably NOT an effect of global warming.  They are a result of LOCAL warming.  How do we know that?  Becauae, as they themselves admit, the warming in Australian waters is much greater than the global average.  If it's not global, it's not global, if I need to put it that way.

So what the report amounts to is a report of totally predictable effects of a change in ocean currents.  And ocean currents change all the time and tend to be cyclic anyway.  So the opportunistic  pseudo-scientists of the CSIRO have dressed up a perfectly routine and uninteresting piece of research as if it proved something dramatic:  A threat to our food chain from global warming.  It does nothing of the sort.  It is just self-serving propaganda designed to shore up their research grants -- JR.






Grand Mufti’s links to banned Egyptian sheik stir up tensions

Australia’s Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, has visited and is recorded as publicly supporting a Middle Eastern sheik who urged the world’s Muslims to fight in Syria, approved suicide bombing and has been banned from the US, Britain and France.

They discussed “the role of ­Islamic communities in Australia”, according to Qatari media, which published a photograph of their meeting in the capital, Doha.

Dr Mohammed’s name and his Australian National Imams Council are also listed on a petition calling on Interpol to remove Qaradawi from its wanted list.  He is sought by Egyptian authorities on charges including incitement to murder and aiding a prison escape.

The petition says the charges are politically motivated. The 89-year-old Qaradawi is considered the spiritual head of Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood and is a prominent opponent of the Egyptian government.

He sanctioned suicide attacks on Israeli civilians as “heroic martyrdom operations”, described the Holocaust as “divine punishment” of Jews and has appeared to justify the killing of apostates. He was denounced as a “theologian of terror” in a statement against the use of religion to incite violence signed by 2500 Muslim intellectuals from 23 countries in 2004.

However, the petition that lists the name of Dr Mohammed and ANIC as supporters describes Qaradawi as a “moderate imam”.

News of the statement was published in Arab media and by Reuters on December 15 last year — the day gunman Man Haron Monis took hostages inside Sydney’s Lindt cafe while claiming ­allegiance to Islamic State.

Another Arabic news website, Al Hiwar (The Discussion), listed the names of those who supported the statement. It listed the names of Dr Mohammed and ANIC in a report dated December 22, 2014. Sahn Thaman, an Islamic ­research and study centre, also ­recorded the names.

Egyptian-born Dr Mohammed is widely seen as a Muslim Brotherhood supporter. Like Qaradawi, he is a graduate of Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni Islamic learning.

Dr Mohammed did not reply to written questions put via his spokeswoman.

Asked for confirmation that the Grand Mufti signed the petition or consented to it, a spokeswoman declined to comment yesterday.

A few weeks after he met Dr Mohammed, in May 2013, Qaradawi called on Sunni Muslims around the world to travel to Syria to fight Shia Muslims and other “infidels” supporting the secular Assad regime.

He told worshippers at the Umar bin al-Khattab mosque in Doha: “Everyone who has the ability, who is trained to fight ... has to go. I call on Muslims to go and support their brothers in Syria.  “We cannot ask our brothers to be killed while we watch.”

The Syrian war soon became a magnet for would-be jihadists from the West.

An estimated 110 Australians were fighting with extremist groups — mostly Islamic State — in Syria and Iraq last month, the Attorney-General, George Brandis, said. At least 41 have been killed.

Rodger Shanahan, of the ­Australian National University’s National Security College, said Dr Mohammed and ANIC — which claims to represent most of Australia’s Sunni clerics — should have condemned Qara­dawi’s influential Syria sermon for “advocating violence in the name of religion.”

“Here was a leading Sunni scholar calling on people to go to Syria to kill people on the basis of their religious faith, and Aus­tralia’s Sunni leadership did not call him out — no press release, no newspaper article, nothing,” ­Associate Professor Shanahan said.

He described ANIC and the Grand Mufti’s support for Qara­dawi as hypocritical given their response to the Paris terror ­attacks.

They cited Western foreign policy, military intervention and “Islamophobia” as “causative factors” of terrorism but failed to also blame religious motivation.

Professor Shanahan said ANIC and Dr Mohammed were “happy to rail against the policies of Australia or the West” but failed to criticise Qaradawi’s “intolerant views on Christians, Jews and Shia Muslims” and his call to arms in Syria.

This showed ANIC’s “complete unwillingness to confront the issue of Islamic violence and those who advocate it,” he said.

Qaradawi reaches a huge global audience via his website and his long-running “Sharia and Life” program on Al-Jazeera Arabic television, with an estimated 60 million viewers including in Australia.

Chairman of Sydney’s Parramatta Mosque Neil El-Kadomi said Qaradawi’s rhetoric might have encouraged young Aus­tralians to go to fight in Syria. “When Qaradawi called for jihad in Syria, how many lives were lost because of his speech?” he asked.

Mr El-Kadomi described Dr Mohammed’s support for Qara­dawi as “a stupid move” that would divide Muslims in Australia. “Qaradawi did a lot of wrong things.  “We should be encouraging peace, not supporting people who tell people to go and fight and kill.”

Mr El-Kadomi argued publicly with Dr Mohammed over his perceived failure to support Mr El-Kadomi when he found himself in the media spotlight following the murder of police employee Curtis Cheng on October 2. He was shot by a 15-year-old boy who prayed at Parramatta Mosque.

Australian National University lecturer Raihan Ismail said Qaradawi was notorious for his rhetoric against non-Sunni ­Muslims. “Some Muslims would naturally be unhappy if the Grand Mufti acted in a way that could be seen as political in nature, especially concerning a divisive figure like Qaradawi,” Dr Ismail said. “However, if you are sympathetic towards the Muslim Brotherhood, you will also be sympathetic towards Qaradawi.”

The deputy chairman of the Islamic High Council of Australia, Sheik Ibrahim El-Shafie, said Dr Mohammed’s support for Qara­dawi risked creating a backlash against Muslims in Western ­societies.

Dr Mohammed was “only speaking for himself and maybe a small group around him. Most Muslims in Australia and around the world would disown such extremist views,” Sheik El-Shafie said.

The Islamic High Council, a Sunni organisation that distances itself from the larger ANIC, has called for intensified efforts to fight terrorism, including banning “extremist views which promote terrorist acts.”

SOURCE






Coal may be down but still has spark as BHP expands Hay Point terminal

BHP Billiton has opened the last of its $US10 billion in developments by cutting the ribbon at the expanded Hay Point coal terminal.

While the $US3 billion project was sanctioned in 2011 at the height of the mining boom, the coal giant is expecting the current slump, which has pushed coking coal prices to the $US70 a tonne range, to get worse.

And it warned that it was prepared to shut mines if they were cash-flow negative “for any period of time”.

But it’s not all bad news. BHP is considering a brown fields expansion of the new Caval Ridge mine, near Moranbah, to improve productivity of its wash plant.

Premier Annasaticia Palaszczuk said the opening of the Hay Point terminal was a sign of confidence in an industry that was the backbone of the Queensland economy.

She said Queensland coal exports reached a record 219 million tonnes in the last financial year.

SOURCE






This wasn’t terrorism, they say. Sure

Clover Moore is a Greenie extremist and an all-purpose nut

Standing in Martin place yesterday, to mark the one year anniversary of the Lindt café siege, Lord Mayor Clover Moore unilaterally declared: “It wasn’t a terrorist event.”   

“I thought it was really important as a city leader to stress that this is a one-off, isolated event by someone who shouldn’t have been out on bail, a very violent background, clearly a mental illness, ”she told the ABC.

The small fact that the Iranian-born self-styled sheik Man Haron Monis Man Monis took 17 people hostage in the name of Islamic State seems to have escaped our city’s senior civic leader.

He asked police to deliver an Islamic State flag to the Lindt café that day but made do with a black Islamic flag of the type used by al-Qaeda.

His message to media outlets through his terrified hostages was that Australia was under attack from ISIS.

In its propaganda magazine Dabiq, ISIS later praised Monis as a “mujahid in the path of Allah”.

“Monis added his name to the list of Muslims who answered the [caliph’s] call to strike those waging war against the Islamic State.”

Sure, it wasn’t terrorism, Clover.

What does it take for people like our Lord Mayor to understand the threat of a totalitarian Islamist ideology which is dedicated to establishing a worldwide Caliphate under Shariah law in preparation for the Final Battle against the kuffar.

Whether it’s ISIS or al-Qaeda or Boko Haram, the ideology is the same, and it’s attracting millions of supporters around the world.

It doesn’t help mainstream Australian Muslims to have deniers like Clover running cover for terrorists, or fanning a false sense of grievance and victimhood in their community.

Sydneysiders don’t need the Lord Mayor to shield us from the truth to be cohesive and decent. The spontaneous crowds who went to Martin Place in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocity to pay their respects to the dead and show strength and unity in the face of terror are a silent rebuke to her insult.

The biggest insult was the “Illridewithyou” hashtag that Clover lauded yesterday, claiming that after the siege, “Muslim women in particular felt fearful travelling on public transport and there was this spontaneous hashtag “I’ll ride with you” and there were thousands and thousands and thousands of tweets. That’s who we are.”

No. The hashtag was the worst leftist fraud, defending theoretical victims of Islamophobia while the real victims were still hostages of a violent Islamist. Did the hash-tivists not realise the hostages were still in mortal danger?

The Greens candidate who began it all with tweet on a train in Brisbane had imagined the incident that sparked the hashtag.

Rachael Jacobs had been reading about the Sydney siege on her phone when she saw a woman in front of her fiddling with her headscarf, a sign she immediately decided was fear of Islamophobia.

“It was obscene moral posturing, endorsed and promoted by Clover, in a direct inversion of the truth”

So she tweeted her compassion for “victims of the siege who were not in the cafe”.

She never spoke to the woman and said later: “She might not even be Muslim or she could have just been warm”.

It was obscene moral posturing, endorsed and promoted by Clover, in a direct inversion of the truth.

“The very real risk that the siege might set off a chain reaction of tit-for-tat attacks on Muslim Australians, fanned by tabloid columnists, was quickly dampened by our multicultural, harmonious society,” she said.

There were never going to be tit for tat attacks on Muslims, just as there weren’t after the two other ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks in Australia in the last 15 months.

The Left’s opportunistic incitement of Muslim victimhood is divisive and dangerous.

You can see it in the violent so-called “anti-racism” counter protests anytime Reclaim Australia or any anti-Islamisation group gets together. The violence invariably starts with the socialist and anarchist groups staging the counter-protests.

You saw it on Sunday at Cronulla when mask-wearing abusive counter-protesters outnumbered anti-Islamists barbecuing a pig five to one.

It was the ten year anniversary of the Cronulla riots and the counter-protest that sparked.

There is no excuse for the violence of the thugs and drunken yobbos who attacked innocent Muslim passers-by that day. No one is interested in root causes, no matter how many lifeguards were beaten up beforehand or bikini-clad women harassed.

But in the organised, brutal revenge attacks the next two days, we saw the seeds of the Islamist threat we face today.

Carloads of Muslim thugs from Lakemba and Punchbowl descended on the Sutherland Shire armed with baseball bats and machetes to send a message for Sydney. They broke shop windows, smashed up cars and attacked anyone not cowering behind closed doors. It was a criminal show of strength that never was properly answered.

But history has been rewritten now, so that all we hear about is Islamophobia. Cronulla has become synonymous with Muslim victimhood.

We cannot let Clover and the hashtaggers do the same with the Martin Place siege.

SOURCE