Why does the working man's sport have to be banned?

The ban on greyhound racing in NSW

What nobody seems to be mentioning is that greyhound racing is the working man's sport.  You have to be pretty well off to own a racehorse but anyone can own a dog.  A dog with strong prospects will not be cheap but lots of outsiders get up so a small investment can get you into the excitement.  So lots of families do have a greyhound.  They are very docile animals and make great pets.  So you can head off each weekend with your family pet and enter into the enthusiastic world of dog racing.  It makes you a somebody in a way that you might not otherwise be able to do. 

But all that must now stop in NSW.  Why?  Why is it the little guy who is getting shafted again?  Basically because the conservative NSW government cannot be bothered to enforce the law.  The Leftist governments in Victoria and Queensland seem to have remembered for once that they represent the workers and have ruled out any ban.

There is no doubt that the practice of live baiting is cruel and that there will always be some temptation to do it.  There is a general belief that it does make the dogs run faster if they are pursuing a live rabbit.  But live baiting is already illegal and the greyhound clubs are making a big effort to end the practice.  All it needs is some serious police work to put some teeth into the ban.  Higher penalties could also be considered.

The other issue is the culling of unsuccessful greyhounds.  There are campaigns in place that ask people to adopt a dog that is too slow to win anything but the uptake is far less than the available dogs -- so lots of "slow" greyhounds are put down. That is certainly a cause for grief among the many of us who love dogs -- and I speak as a former registered dog breeder (though not of greyhounds).

But the sad truth is that unwanted cats and dogs of all kinds are put down all the time by the RSPCA and other animal shelters worldwide.  We should certainly insist that all cats and dogs of any kind are put down humanely but put down many will be.  Animal fecundity guarantees it -- and there is no dodging of that. So I do not see that putting down greyhounds is any different to putting down any other animal.

I commend the State governments of Victoria and my own home state of Queensland for their more balanced approach and urge the Premier of NSW to rethink his class war -- JR


A veteran greyhound breeder in NSW says a lot of innocent people are going to lose their livelihoods because of the state government's decision to ban the multi-million-dollar greyhound racing industry next year.

Paul Wheeler, Australia's largest greyhound breeder and owner, says the government has underestimated the number of people who will be out of a job when the ban comes into effect.

"I'm almost at the end of my working life but my son is in his mid-30s with a young family, what does he do? How does he replace his income?," Wheeler said on Sky Sports Radio on Friday.

"He's done nothing else but this all his life and so have some of the staff I've got.

"I've got two young girls working for us, they're teenagers, this is their first job from school and they've both got loans and got a car. They're terrified. They don't know what they're going to do."
A veteran greyhound breeder in NSW says a lot of innocent people are going to lose their livelihoods © AAP Image/Alexandra Patrikios A veteran greyhound breeder in NSW says a lot of innocent people are going to lose their livelihoods

Wheeler, a third-generation family business owner based in Young, says the entire industry is being punished for the actions of few.

"There's a few people (who have) done the wrong thing. We're all prepared to admit that, but there's a lot of good people out there and a lot of people are going to be hurt real bad," Wheeler said.

He believes the report of the special commission is flawed, saying in his 50 years in the industry he's never heard of the so-called prominent greyhound trainer who was interviewed by the commission and stated that live baiting was widespread.

"I don't know where they've got their advice from," Wheeler said.

"A lot of stuff that's been said in this commission, in my opinion, is hogwash," he added, after saying the report incorrectly noted that the majority of US states have banned greyhound racing.

SOURCE.  More detail here






Pauline Hanson should not be a 'scorned species', John Howard says

The former prime minister John Howard has warned media and politicians not to treat Pauline Hanson like a “scorned species” because isolating or attacking her will add to her battler appeal.

He also called for conservatives to “stay and fight” from within the Liberal party, after fierce criticism of Malcolm Turnbull’s election strategy and Cory Bernardi starting a new conservative movement that could lay groundwork for a new party.

Howard made the remarks in Sydney on Thursday at a press conference to respond to the release of the Chilcot report into the UK’s role in the Iraq war.

Asked if Hanson was an unwelcome presence in the next parliament, Howard replied: “My view is that anybody who is elected by the Australian people should be respected for that fact.”

Howard said the government should deal with Hanson “issue by issue”, as he had done, including by speaking up when he disagreed with her.

“I didn’t agree with her when she said we were being flooded by Asians because we weren’t, and I didn’t agree with her when she said that Aboriginal people weren’t amongst the most disadvantaged in our community because those things were manifestly wrong.”

Howard said Hanson was “articulating the concerns of people who felt left out” and he was “very critical of people who branded everybody who supported her as a racist because that is nonsense”.

“We are not a racist country and I wish people would stop reaching for that adjective whenever they want to isolate somebody who they don’t agree with.

“Let’s not resort to all of these isolating remarks ... there’s no good saying she will be a particularly scorned species. That doesn’t achieve anything. You have to recognise that people voted for her.”

Howard warned that in public debate in the late 90s the more Hanson was attacked “the more popular she became because those attacks enhanced her Australian battler image and she plays off that”.

Asked about Hanson’s view of Islam, Howard said he did not support her call for a royal commission into Islam and that religious freedom required people to be allowed to erect places of worship, including mosques.

SOURCE





Vanity Fair calls Australians 'throwback people'

The article below from the London Telegraph says that Australians were incensed by what was said about Australia.  So I checked what various Australian writers said about it.  I found no outrage.  The predominant tone was one of amusement. The Telegraph writer is behind the times too.  Australians are more self-confident than he expected.

 The Vanity Fair writer was totally inaccurate about so many things in Australia that it would be tedious to ennumerate them.  He was obviously relying on fleeting impressions he had got over a number of years.  But there was nothing wrong with that.  He was not writing a travelog or an academic disquisition.  He was just waxing dreamy and poetic.  Such writing has a place

I was something of a literary critic in my early days and I recognized it immediately as falling well within the conventions of poetry.  It is a form of fantasy poetry.

And the description of Australia as "throwback" people is an allusion to a common view of Australia in America -- that  Australians are a less corrupted people, like America in an idealized past.  It is a complimentary description.

The thing that REALLY steamed up a lot of people -- both in Australia and elsewhere -- was that the article was sexist.  But that is a lot of nonsense.  Why should a man not be dreamy about a pretty girl?  It is the politically correct brigade who are abnormal and perverted




They pride themselves on being a youthful, vigorous nation who have thrown off their colonial past to embrace the modern world.

So it comes as little surprise that Australians have bristled at being referred to as “throwback people” living in a country 50 years behind America.

Particularly when the description comes in a Vanity Fair article supposed to be praising one of the country’s most successful exports – Margot Robbie, the actress.

The cover profile of the Australian star of The Wolf of Wall Street and the latest Tarzan movie by Rich Cohen, a contributing editor at the magazine, remarked that to appreciate Miss Robbie fully, readers had to remember where she hailed from.

“She is from Australia,” Mr Cohen wrote. “To understand her, you should think about what that means.

“Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas.”

“Perhaps it’s time you got in your time machine and flitted over the Pacific to Australia to have a good look at a normal society,” she wrote in The Courier Mail. “Your piece has only shown that you, instead of Australians, are from another era, because your writing deserves to be published 50 years ago instead of today.”

Mr Cohen was also taken to task for apparent sexism in his article. In the opening paragraph Robbie is described as “blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character.”

The article has caused outrage on social media, where it was condemned as creepy, voyeuristic, sexist and the “worst writing ever”. “That is the biggest piece of sexist c--- introductory paragraph I’ve ever seen,” said a comment on Twitter.

SOURCE

Here is the "offensive" text:

"She is 26 and beautiful, not in that otherworldly, catwalk way but in a minor knock-around key, a blue mood, a slow dance."

"She is blonde but dark at the roots. She is tall but only with the help of certain shoes. She can be sexy and composed even while naked but only in character."

"She wandered through the room like a second-semester freshman, finally at ease with the system. She stopped at tables along the way to talk to friends. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but it was simple, her hair combed around those painfully blue eyes."

"It was Wolf that defined her. It put her up with Sharon Stone in Casino and Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull — one of Scorsese’s women."

"Robbie grew up in Gold Coast, a city on Australia’s Pacific shore, 500 miles north of Sydney. In an old movie, you might have seen a crossroad sign demonstrating just how isolated it was, just how far from the known capitals."

"Now and then, she stayed with cousins who lived in the hinterland of the hinterland, where there really were kangaroos and a dingo really will eat your baby."






Spectacular 'forests of the sea' kelp fields which span thousands of kilometres and fund a $10 BILLION tourism and seafood industry wiped out by a marine heatwave

Greenies can't help themselves.  They can't resist tying any natural disaster to global warming.  The dieoff  of kelp described below happened in 2011, in the middle of a global temperature stasis that had lasted 12 years at that point.  Over that period, global temperatures had risen and fallen to the tune of only hundredths of one degree per annum.  It was as clear an era of NON-warming as one would ever be likely to find.  So global warming CANNOT be responsible for what happened to the kelp: There wasn't any such warming at that time

Hundreds of kilometres of a remarkable kelp forest off the western coast of Australia have been wiped out by marine heatwaves, a study has found.

These 'forests of the sea' make up 90 per cent of the north-western tip of the Great Southern Reef and underpin tourism and fishery industries that pump $10 billion into the Australian economy each year.

About 2,000 kilometres of the Western Australian coastline from Cape Leeuwin in the south to Ningaloo in the north of Western Australia was analysed in a study that spanned 14 years from 2001.

A heatwave in 2011 has been named the primary cause of loss, with 100 kilometres of kelp destroyed, which made up 43 per cent of the kelp in Western Australia.  Above-average ocean temperatures in 2012 and 2013 were said to 'compound' these effects.

The demise of the kelp forests is likely permanent researchers have said in a study published in the journal of Science on Thursday.

The forests that covered 70 per cent of shallow rocky reefs in mid-Western Australia have now become 'barren', researcher Dr Scott Bennett told ABC.

Dr Bennett who helped in the survey said he thought his team had initially made an error when they dived into the reefs off Kalbarri.

'We jumped into these waters at sites we've been going to for the past 10 years expecting to see large kelp forests and it was just a desert,' he said.

'We thought we'd made a mistake and got the location wrong. It is just heartbreaking to see such a complex, beautiful, vibrant ecosystem decimated.'

Turf algae had multiplied and tropical fish communities had increased which were preventing the regrowth of the kelp because they were being eaten before they managed to re-establish.

The extensive loss of kelp forests in Western Australia provides a strong warning of what the future might be like for Australia's temperate marine environments.

Climate change was creating more frequent heatwaves helping the southward movement of warmer waters and tropical species to increase in the region.

The survey also revealed that 2.5 degrees Celsius is the 'tipping point' for kelp forests.

Associate Professor Thomas Wernberg, from the University of Western Australia worked alongside Dr Bennett and described the kelp forests as the 'biological engine' of the reef system.

'They are as critical to the Great Southern Reef as corals are to the Great Barrier Reef,' he said.

'They are up to 16 times more productive than our most productive wheat fields and provide the foundations for the ecosystem.'

Species such as abalone and rock lobster thrive in these environments which are some of the most valuable species of marine life for fisheries in Australia.

'The impact has been particularly prominent at northern reefs, where kelp forests have disappeared completely,' Professor Wernberg said.

'Recovery is unlikely because of the large grazing pressure, continued warming and the likelihood of more heatwaves in the future.'

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here