If  conservatives want to copy Trump, embracing Putin is the worst place to start (?)

Like Mr Trump, I see some virtue in Vladimir Vladimirovich and I have written to that effect on several previous occasions. (See here. Scroll down). I like Mr Putin nearly as much as I like Mr Trump, in fact.  So I am one of those evil people that the Leftist Australian  journalist  below is inveighing against. Vladimir Vladimirovich is in fact an exceptionally enlightened ruler by Russian standards.

The Leftist writer below, David Wroe, tries to make the case that Putin and Russia generally are dangerous, evil and should be shunned.  Which is amusing.  A few decades back Leftists would hear no ill about Russia -- at a time when there really was cause for concern about Russia. The points made below are however specious and are typical of the Leftist habit of telling only half the story. 

Mr Putin is somehow blamed on the shooting down of a Malaysian airline over Ukraine. But the Ukraine was at the time in a civil war and was known as dangerous airspace -- and most airlines kept away from it even though that increased their costs.  It was penny-pinching bureaucrats running the Malaysian airline who took the big risk of flying their plane over Eastern Ukraine.  It is they who are to blame

It took Russia's intervention to set in train the now almost complete destruction of ISIS but our friend below can only complain that the defeat helps the Syrian government. 

The Syrian government is certainly brutal but dictatorships seem to be the only sort of regime that works in Muslim lands. Islam is an authoritarian religion.  "Submit or die" is its historic message. Democracy didn't last long in Egypt. Turkey  has once again returned to a version of the authoritarian rule that has characterized most of its history and vast American efforts to democratize Iraq and Afghanistan have certainly been an abject failure.

I could go on but I think I have said enough to show that it's just the usual dishonest Leftist propaganda below.  You believe anything in it at your peril>


David Wroe

The Trumpification of the right wing of Australian politics has begun.

On Sunday night, Coalition backbencher George Christensen defended Vladimir Putin's Russia, saying on Twitter it had been "demonised unfairly" and asking, "What threat do they cause us or the West?"

This is a startling message to a country that lost 38 people in the shooting down of flight MH17 in the skies above Ukraine. In his tweets, Mr Christensen distanced Moscow from involvement in MH17 and said only that separatists "allegedly" shot down the plane, though on Monday morning he clarified that he accepted most investigators' conclusion that "separatists backed by Russia" were responsible.

But his string of tweets point to an affinity with the US President's foreign policy view that strong men who pursue their country's national interests with scant regard to the international system are to be admired and emulated.

Pauline Hanson did much the same on Monday morning, saying "I've got no problems with Vladimir" because he is "a strong leader" who is "standing up for his nation" and that's what Australians want of their leaders too.

Newsflash to them both: Australia is not the US or Russia. It is a middle power that needs rules and a level playing field. As one of our finest foreign policy thinkers, former Department of Foreign Affairs head Peter Varghese, put it in a 2015 speech: "Australia can neither bully nor buy its way in the world, so an international, rules-based order is in our best interests."

Take another one of Christensen's Sunday night tweets: "Russia [is] the real reason ISIS is losing."

Moscow has propped up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad but has targeted a wide range of anti-regime forces, not just the Islamic State, and has indiscriminately bombed civilians, killing thousands.

Its intervention has removed any incentive for Assad to compromise and allow a political solution in Syria, ensuring that Syrian Sunnis will feel aggrieved for at least another generation. That will help seed the next generation of sectarian fighters and jihadists that will replace the Islamic State when it is defeated.

By contrast, the Australian Defence Force has for more than two years carefully targeted Islamic State forces in airstrikes while advising and training Iraqi forces on the ground. Not one civilian is known to have been killed in Australian air strikes, and the ADF's efforts alongside the US have tried to avoid empowering the Assad regime.

Mr Christensen also called Russia "a democracy" and branded the hacking of US political parties "fake news", even though Mr Trump himself has admitted Russia was responsible for the hacking and US intelligence agencies have stated in a public report that Russia hacked political parties for the express purpose of tilting the election in Mr Trump's favour.

Russia is working to break up Europe and tear up the international system of rules and norms that has made the last 70 years the most prosperous and stable the world has seen. It wants to return the world to spheres of influence around powers that use might to make right.

That is the threat Russia poses to us all.

SOURCE






Pauline Hanson outlines One Nation’s blueprint for Australia

Pauline Hanson has outlined her blueprint for Australia which would include forcing newlyweds to have pre-nuptial agreements and changes to the tax system.

Pauline Hanson insists her One Nation party could form government one day as she outlined her blueprint for Australia which would include forcing newlyweds to have pre-nuptial agreements and changes to the tax system.

“I haven’t started a political party to sit on the backbenches for ever and a day,” Senator Hanson told the Seven Netwok tonight as she arrived in Canberra for the start of the parliamentary year this week. “I think there is a place, in the future, for One Nation on government benches.”

Asked about government MPs who laughed at that prospect, Senator Hanson replied: “The last laugh will be on them.”  Earlier today Coaliton MP Christopher Pyne burst into laughter when asked during a media conference in Adelaide what he thought about Senator Hanson’s outline for the country if she were to be the country’s leader.  “Leader of what?” Mr Pyne grinned. “I think it is unlikely that One Nation’s going to form a government in Australia.”

Senator Hanson’s blueprint for Australia includes a flat two per cent tax rate for everyone - even welfare recipients and has pre-nuptial agreements for newlyweds. “Family law is high on my agenda. It needs court-approved premarital agreements on finance and parental issues,” she told the Sunday Mail.

The One Nation leader said under her vision for a “better Australia,” she would as Prime Minister, also cut the number of politicians, limit migration, introduce an Australian identity card, and axe the GST.

She would also set up a royal commission into Islam.

Senator Hanson said one of her priorities was changing the family law system to ease the burden on the courts. She would force couples into pre-nuptial agreements outlining how they would deal with their children and assets if a relationship broke down.

“Family law is high on my agenda. I just think it needs a complete overhaul,” she told the newspaper. “It needs court-approved premarital agreements on finance and parental issues. So before someone goes into a relationship or a marriage, you must have a premarital agreement. It would be confidential (and lodged with courts). “We’ve got to free up our court system. It’s overloaded. A lot of judgments aren’t being handed down for years.”

She said the public saw her as the woman next door rather than a career politician.

“People see me as I could be their sister, their mother, their neighbour next door,’’ Senator Hanson said. “They don’t see me as a career politician ... They’ve seen me running a small business, rearing kids by myself. They see this person, I’ve had knockdowns, I’ve been in prison, I’ve come out of there and guess what? They haven’t beaten me, I’ve got up again. They can throw everything at me and I’ll still keep doing what I believe in.

“I don’t change my tune, whichever way the polls are going. If you look at what I said 20 years ago, it’s exactly what I’m saying today. I’m a type of person who can make a decision. The past makes you more aware of what not to do in the future.”

SOURCE






Australians support making it HARDER for Muslims to come to Australia - with 44 per cent supporting Donald Trump-style measures

Almost half of Australians support a Donald Trump-inspired measure to make it more difficult for people from Muslim-majority countries to come to Australia.

Newspoll found more than half of Coalition voters supported blocking citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen from travelling Down Under.

President Trump's executive order also blocked all refugees from travelling to the U.S. for 120 days, and put an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees.

Overall, Australians were divided on whether we should follow that lead.

44 per cent of all respondents said Australia should take similar action, and 45 per cent opposed the measure.

11 per cent of the 1,734 respondents were not committed.

The Newspoll question was: 'Donald Trump has introduced changes that make it harder for citizens from seven mainly Muslim countries to enter the U.S. Would you be in favour or opposed to Australia taking similar measures?

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has refused to comment on the executive order.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has said she would go further than President Trump's measures.

SOURCE






Australia needs to wake up to climate change racket

Now we hear from an eminent whistleblower with America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that the organisation used dodgy data to claim the “pause” in global warming from 1998 never existed, and had rushed to publish without the usual checks in order to influence the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This latest scandal comes on top of previous embarrassments for the climate alarm community. There was the 2009 “climategate” batch of leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that were published on a Russian website three weeks before the Copenhagen summit, revealing a staggering level of fraud, manipulation, and deceit.

Another batch of leaked emails, dubbed Climategate 2.0, a couple of years later, showed eminent climate scientists conspiring to have PhDs stripped from their sceptic rivals, to have journal editors fired for publishing papers they didn’t like, and colluding with the media to slant coverage.

All the fakery adds up to the conclusion that the whole global warming crusade isn’t about science, but politics — and big money.

The NOAA scandal couldn’t have come at a better time for US President Donald Trump to strengthen his resolve to ditch the Paris climate agreement stitched up by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

And in turn Trump’s defection should encourage the Turnbull government to tear up our own Paris climate agreement which they foolishly ratified in November, after Trump won the US presidential election.

Tony Abbott is right: even though it was his government which made the deal, he recognises the changed circumstances of the world. We need to scrap the unreasonably punitive renewable energy targets of 26-28 per cent we have committed to abide by in 2020.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg keeps telling us it’s a better deal than the Labor Party’s 50 per cent renewable energy target, but that’s not the point.

Low-cost, coal-fired energy has underpinned this nation’s prosperity. With our abundant resources we should be the world’s low-cost energy superpower, as Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce keeps saying.

Higher RETS equal higher electricity prices, and an unreliable power supply, which is the death-knell to business, as we are seeing in South Australia.

By kowtowing to climate nonsense, successive governments have proven they have no intention of putting Australia first, and this is what is driving the Hanson phenomenon. Scrapping the United Nations control of our energy mix would be an enormous morale boost to the country.

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