One in three Australian voters against paying for climate change 'myth'

AUSTRALIANS are rebelling against the idea they should pay to fight global warming, entrenching the Federal Government's woes on the issue.

A new survey showed more than a third of voters don't want to pay for climate-change bills. The authoritative Galaxy opinion survey also found that those who buy the family groceries and low-income earners are in the forefront of the new resistance. It is a sign much of the electorate accept Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's ETS description as "a great big new tax".

The Government's abrupt, three-year pause in introducing an emissions trading scheme angered many of the 35 per cent of voters who believe human activity is changing the climate. Now even some of those believers are refusing to pay the rises in power bills and other household costs which would be caused by an ETS, the survey has found.

About 35 per cent of all voters told Galaxy they did not want to pay a cent, and that group included 15 per cent of people who agreed with the concept of man-made climate change.

Of the change believers, 27 per cent would not pay more than $100 a year extra. Almost half - 47 per cent - would not pay more than $100 a year to combat climate change, the poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs showed. About 60 per cent would not pay more than $300 a year.

If you buy the family groceries, you strongly oppose paying much if anything for an ETS.

The survey found 37 per cent of those who bought family supplies would not pay anything, and just over half would not pay more than $100 a year.

The survey showed two-thirds of respondents were not convinced by man-made climate change, despite "billions of dollars of government propaganda," said John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs. "These polls also show Australians won't pay huge amounts of money to fix a problem they are not sure exists," said Mr Roskam.

The lower your income, the less you are likely to want higher bills, which is why nearly half the unemployed oppose the idea. The greatest opposition to paying even a cent extra came from Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.

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Dangerous police secrecy in NSW

Whistleblower on trial! Below is the man who thinks you are too inferior to know what is going on



POLICE Commissioner Andrew Scipione once tried to prevent details of a serial child sex attacker being released publicly despite the fact he remained at large, it was claimed yesterday.

The revelation came at a sentencing hearing for former superintendent Adam Purcell, forced out of the police force in part for disobeying that order.

Mr Purcell has pleaded guilty to two charges arising out of a Police Integrity Commission hearing and faced a sentence hearing in the District Court yesterday.

Purcell admits divulging details of the child sex attack investigation to a reporter.

Then-assistant commissioner Mark Goodwin told the court he had acted on orders from Mr Scipione - then the deputy commissioner - to ensure detail about the serial nature of the offences not be released.

Mr Goodwin said the directive should have been followed but he believed Purcell should have been allowed to use his discretion.

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Leftist love of destruction on show again

They're happy with anything that tears down the civilization they live in

By Andrew Bolt

I am told I've engineered the sacking of The Age's most popular columnist, noted barbarian Catherine Deveny. But I'm told that for this service to the state I must now be sacked in turn. The Left demands it. To even the score.

Yes, that really is how adolescent and tribal are the howlers who, like Deveny, have drowned out so much civilised debate. But first the background.

Deveny was fired on Tuesday by Age editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge for having sent more of her spittle-flecked tweets. This time she'd been lolling on her couch on Sunday, watching the Logies, when she spotted on the screen the demure Bindi Irwin, just 11.

Cleverly using her opposable thumbs, Deveny banged out this tweet: "I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid." This, she later explained, was one of her "grown up jokes".

Here's another, also sent this same wild night after she saw comedian Rove McManus with Tasma Walton, whom he married after his first wife died of cancer: "Rove and Tasma look so cute ... hope she doesn't die, too."

Still, it wasn't until two days later that Deveny was fired, with Ramadge declaring it was because "the views she has expressed recently on Twitter are not in keeping with the standards we set at The Age".

This startled me, I admit, because until then I had no idea The Age kept any standards at all. Until then, Ramadge seemed happy to pimp a woman whose one trick was to throw a tantrum with as many foul words as she could get away with, in the hope that this would be seen as "brave", "courageous" and "challenging", as she rather forlornly put it this week.

Until then, The Age had promoted as its marque columnist a woman whose fame rested on yelling "get your rosaries off my ovaries" to Opposition Leader Tony Abbott on television, or calling conservative broadcasters "c---s", or Anzacs "racists", or Liberal MP Peter Dutton a "boong" hater with the "face of a rapist".

I do not wish to speculate on what drove Deveny to scream so frantically for attention. But more than six months ago I warned The Age on my blog that it was exploiting someone it should instead help, and not simply because she was trashing its brand - or, indeed, pandering to a rising tide of f--- you barbarism that threatened us all.

The cause of my warning then was that Deveny had just written of standing up at a meeting to shout at Cardinal George Pell that she'd aborted her baby and wanted to know if it would go to hell.

Any wise and compassionate adult would consider this a scream of pain, fear and rage, and not at all a "grown up joke" or exercise of reason. Yet The Age continued to employ Deveny, applying that feral abacus of our dark age - subtracting sales gained from today's educated barbarians against those lost from the truly civilised, and calculating that our modern morons were many and monied.

Only this week did Ramadge conclude that in setting fire to herself, Deveny was now scorching his paper as well, as he could no doubt judge by the scathing coverage in the Herald Sun, and on A Current Affair and Today Tonight. And, who knows, maybe he read my blog as well.

IT'S that final possibility that stuck in the craw of some tribalists of the Left - who, like all collectivists, defend not principles but sides, and decided to save Deveny, or at least not lose her without an equal sacrifice from the "Right".

I read all this in the witterings of, for instance, Jonathan Green, who edits The Drum, blogsite of the ABC, once a bulwark of our culture rather than the hole in our hull. I'll quote him at length, because he's typical in both his arguments and in two critical evasions:

Age columnist Deveny was dumped yesterday by The Age's editor-in-chief Paul Ramadge, not because of anything she wrote for the paper, but because of some off-colour gags she sent out on Twitter ...

Ramadge ... gives the appearance of acting not as an immediate response to the Sunday night tweets (would Bindi get "laid" would Rove's new partner die etc) but rather in response to the heated kerfuffle drummed up by the usual stern guardians of media probity: Andrew Bolt, Neil Mitchell, A Current Affair and Today Tonight ...

All of which presents the unfortunate impression of The Age, a once fearless champion of journalistic diversity, caving to the sort of hypocritical, faux indignant cant that propels trash talk radio and tabloid TV.

LET'S ignore the fact that my contribution to this "heated kerfuffle" was, pre-sacking, a single blog item written when the outrage was already bubbling on The Age's own website.

But here we're already brought to Green's first evasion. Many Age readers - even its editor-in-chief, perhaps - have actually shared my disgust with Deveny's comments, despite being as of the Left as Green would demand.

This alone suggests that the prime author of her downfall is not me or some other "stern guardian of media probity" but Deveny herself. She sought fame and wealth through shocking people, and cannot now complain at finding those people genuinely shocked and her services no longer thought worth the expense.

Indeed, if there wasn't an edge beyond which lay disaster, no comedian such as Deveny would be able to profit by testing where it lay. They'd be merely pretending to be teetering on the painted edge of a fake volcano, and what's the daring in that?

As for my own role, I criticise many things about The Age, but never has its editor-in-chief shown any sign of taking notice. I suspect, then, that what made Ramadge sack Deveny was, above anything else, his own judgment on what she herself had done. Deveny set out to shock, Ramadge's readers were shocked, transaction complete.

But rather than blame Deveny for yet one more catastrophic lapse of taste, Green claims that any disgust at her comments cannot be honestly felt - or, as he puts it, is mere "hypocritical, faux indignant cant".

The most damning thing he can say himself is that Deveny told "off-colour gags" - in which benign category, I guess, you'd put Benny Hill sketches.

That brings me to Green's second typical evasion. As you may have noticed, not once has he repeated in full what Deveny tweeted on Logies night.

This evasion is astonishingly common among those of the pro-Deveny media Left. Check also the articles by comedian Ben Pobjie, Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham, or the Leftist gossip site Crikey.

I suspect none of these Deveny defenders quoted the words that were the immediate cause of her sacking because they secretly knew that almost anyone with a skerrick of moral sense reading them afresh would instinctively know Deveny indeed crossed a deeply dug line, and that any revulsion was quite likely to be genuine.

Indeed, what's most likely to be faux is a Greenish reaction of sophisticated nonchalance. He is a father, after all, and cannot be so dead to disgust, despite having himself once called the Down syndrome child of conservative politician Sarah Palin "a mongrel".

There's another reason that Green, the Meanjin editor, the comedian and the Crikey writer may have been reluctant to quote Deveny's words. To do so would have destroyed their other petulant defence of one of their own - that the other side is just as bad. Most, for instance, complain that if Deveny is to be sacked, then so must I.

Deveny herself complains of double standards and says this is "about gender". Or as Cunningham puts it: "It just doesn't pay to be a badly behaved woman in this town, but it certainly seems to pay pretty well to be a badly behaved man - just how much is Andrew Bolt paid again?"

But as any fool but these would know, had I been so vile as to write as Deveny did, I guarantee I'd be hounded out of my job, too, and by some of these very same people now defending Deveny. But, of course, conservatives like me are more inclined to maintain moral standards than kick at them.

Yet there are indeed questions raised by Deveny's sacking. She is indeed to some extent correct to say "nobody's editorial policy should be dictated by 'Offended from Balwyn'."

BUT this is not because of any high-minded principle of free speech. After all, Deveny remains free even now to say all she likes about the need for child stars to be "laid".

The issue is solely whether The Age is obliged to print them, and whether it's in its interests to do so. In fact, there are more than 20 million people in this country whose columns The Age won't run, and there's no reason Deveny has any more right to publication than anyone else.

Still, in making the specific decision not to publish her, The Age runs the risk every media outlet takes when it restricts the range of views it presents.

By not running a Deveny, The Age may now lose the support of barbarians and a certain kind of resentful arts graduate, almost inevitably female and poor, who mistakes rage for truth, abuse for integrity, and unreason for mystic insight.

So be it. Or, more seriously, The Age may lose the last shred of its reputation for publishing truly daring stuff.

But wait. This is the newspaper that some years ago let go its last on-staff conservative columnist, no doubt to placate "Offended from Fitzroy" - the kind of Leftist Age reader who is offended by opinions contrary to her ill-founded own.

That's why The Age for years rarely, if ever, published opinion articles questioning global warming, and still won't run one pointing out its sacred "stolen generations" are a myth.

No screams then from Deveny that The Age should publish "challenging voices". No demands then from a Green that it must be "a fearless champion of journalistic diversity". No hour-long debate then on Jon Faine's show on ABC 774 on the silencing of a different point of view.

No, to such folk it is now a greater scandal for The Age to fire a Leftist who wanted an 11-year-old to get "laid" than to drop the last staff columnist who wanted John Howard to get elected.

That's all. The tribe rages for the loss not of a principle, but of a fellow barbarian. And for the civilised, that's one thing to fear, and another to almost cheer.

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For Australia's sake, we need to ban the burqa

By Senator CORY BERNARDI

The burqa is no longer simply the symbol of female repression and Islamic culture, it is now emerging as a disguise of bandits and n'er do wells.

In Sydney this morning a man was robbed by a burqa wearing bandit who further disguised his (or her) identity by wearing sunglasses. The bandit was described by police as being of "Middle Eastern appearance". Well of course he was (assuming it was a he) because the only characteristics the victim could see were the burqa and the sunglasses. Now unless the sunglasses had 'made in Iran' stamped on them, it's fair to say that the 'Middle Eastern appearance' line was attributed to the head to toe veiling of the Islamic burqa.

In my mind, the burqa has no place in Australian society. I would go as far as to say it is un-Australian. To me, the burqa represents the repressive domination of men over women, which has no place in our society and compromises some of the most important aspects of human communication. It also establishes a different set of rules and societal expectations in our hitherto homogenous society. Let me give you a couple of examples.

As an avid motorcyclist I am required to remove my helmet before entering a bank or petrol station. It's a security measure for the businesses and no reasonable person objects to this requirement. However, if I cover myself in a black cloth from head to toe, with only my eyes barely visible behind a mesh guard, I am effectively unidentifiable and can waltz into any bank unchallenged in the name of religious freedom. Little wonder bank bandits in the UK are now becoming burqa bandits.

The same can be said for any number of areas where photographic identification is required. How many of us would ask for the veil to be dropped so we can compare the photo with the burqa wearer's face? I suspect the fear of being called bigoted, racist, Islamaphobic or insensitive would prevent many from doing what they would not think twice about under normal circumstances. Put simply, the burqa separates and distances the wearer from the normal interactions with broader society.

But there is a greater reason the burqa needs to be binned. Equality of women is one of the key values in our secular society and any culture that believes only women should be covered in such a repressive manner is not consistent with the Australian culture and values.

Perhaps some of you will consider that burqa wearing should be a matter of personal choice, consistent with the freedoms our forefathers fought for. I disagree. New arrivals to this country should not come here to recreate the living environment they have just left. They should come here for a better life based on the freedoms and values that have built our great nation.

The burqa isolates some Australians from others. Its symbolic barrier is far greater than the measure of cloth it is created from. For safety and for society, the burqa needs to be banned in Australia.

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