ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is skeptical about sexual assaults at our universities






Once again we see the Muslim attitude of contempt for the rest of us

A furious mother has claimed a doctor at her local medical centre refused to see her teenage son because he prioritised Arabic-speaking patients.

Nicole Poulter claims her 16-year-old son Ryan was forced to wait an hour and 15 minutes when she took him to a medical centre in Melbourne's north suffering from appendicitis.

Ms Poulter said only one doctor was available at the medical centre and he was prioritising people who spoke Arabic over her desperately ill son.

'I was told by the receptionist that a particular doctor was only going to be treating Arabic-speaking patients,' Ms Poulter told 3AW.

She says a doctor was free when she inquired and was treating walk-in patients while her son sat in the waiting room 'septic' and writhing in pain.

'He was doubled over in his chair and couldn't sit still, couldn't find a comfortable position because of the pain. You could see he was pretty ill and he was going downhill,' Ms Poulter said.

'The doctor would put his head out the door and call other people and we were sitting right there, at his door.'

Ms Poulter said they are regulars at the medical clinic and the staff would be familiar with her family.

'It's unethical,' she told 7 News. 'You can't randomly pick and choose which cases come to you. It's just wrong.'

The 16-year-old was finally seen by a doctor after nearly an hour and a half and immediately was diagnosed with acute appendicitis.

Owners of the medical centre vehemently denied on Monday patients were treated based on the language they spoke.

Ryan has since had surgery and is recovering well.

SOURCE






Plan to punish people who pay in cash and don’t get a receipt

A PLAN to strip consumers of their legal protections if they pay in cash and fail to get a receipt has been slammed as “completely unfair” by leading advocacy groups.

The proposal was one of 35 recommendations contained in the interim report from the federal government’s Black Economy Taskforce, which argued the need for “consumer-focused action” to crack down on cash payments.

According to Taskforce chair Michael Andrew, former global head of accounting firm KPMG and current chair of the Board of Taxation, while current anti-black economy laws focused on businesses, consumers are “part of the problem”.

“We intend to examine the merits of consumer focused sanctions, including the loss of consumer protections, warranties and legal rights for people who make cash payments without obtaining a valid receipt,” Mr Andrew wrote. “This is not simply of matter of imposing new penalties, but part of a wider cultural change agenda.”

But he argued any new penalty regime “should be carefully calibrated”, with the strongest sanctions “applying to egregious behaviour or repeat offences”. “Lighter touch approaches (including ‘nudge’ techniques) will be more appropriate in many cases,” he wrote.

In a joint submission to the inquiry on Monday, the Consumer Action Law Centre, consumer group Choice and Financial Counselling Australia strongly opposed any such sanctions, warning they could cause “significant consumer harm”, have “serious economic consequences” and would not have any impact on the black economy.

They argued that such a scheme could actually create a perverse incentive for businesses to operate in cash as a way of stripping consumers of their legal rights, describing it as a “significant loophole” that would be “contrary to the intention of legislators”.

“Broadly we support efforts to combat the black economy, because vulnerable or disadvantaged people are often victims, but we think punishing everyday Australians for businesses not complying with their obligations is completely unfair,” said Katherine Temple, senior policy officer at the Consumer Action Law Centre.

In the submission, the group also questioned the effectiveness of the proposal in changing consumer behaviour. “[It] is widely accepted that consumers do not have a good understanding of their consumer rights,” they wrote.

“Consumers can’t make rational payment decisions based on keeping rights that they aren’t aware exist ... [Policy] that is based on the notion that a consumer will make payment decisions based on rational concepts sets an unrealistically high bar which most consumers should not be expected to reach.”

They added that they had been “unable to locate any international precedent or research that suggests this proposal would be effective in tackling the black economy ... both in terms of assisting enforcement agencies, and changing consumer or business behaviour”.

SOURCE






The lying BOM again

They can't even keep their story straight

RATHER than admit that temperature dropped to a record low -10.4 degree Celsius on the morning of Sunday 2nd July at Goulburn, the Bureau of Meteorology has come-up with yet another even more absurd story.

Responding to a letter from Josh Frydenberg, the Minister for  Environment and Energy, Andrew Johnson, CEO and Director of Meteorology, has claimed the weather station malfunctioned.  Previously the Bureau claimed that they had placed new limits on how cold it could get at Goulburn.

This is a contrived story, easily disproven with the following evidence.

We know that the Goulburn AWS recorded -10.4 on the morning of Sunday 2nd July from a screen shot taken from the observation page at the Bureau’s website:

The observation sheet shows a minimum of -10.4, this temperature is recorded every second and downloaded every minute. The lowest value recorded normally becomes the minimum for the day.  Contrary to previous policy, on 2nd July, this value was rounded to -10.0, which became the minimum for that day.

Subsequently, the Bureau sent an email confirming:

“The correct minimum temperature for Goulburn on 2 July, 2017 is -10.4 recorded at 6.30am at Goulburn Airport AWS… The Bureau’s quality control system, designed to filter out spurious low or high values was set at -10 minimum for Goulburn which is why the record automatically adjusted.”

In short, after initially recording -10.0 in the CDO dataset, this was changed to -10.4 three days later following a blog post (Bureau Erases Goulburn Record Minimum), an outcry on Facebook, and enquires from prominent journalists.

By 28th July when the above letter was sent to the Minister, the correct value of -10.4 had been showing in the CDO dataset for some 23 days.

This is a screenshot from the CDO database taken today, 30th July 2017. Contrary to the letter from the Bureau to the Minister it shows -10.4 as having been recorded on 2nd July 2017.

Yet in the letter from the Bureau’s Johnson to Minister Frydenberg it is claimed that: “the AWS at Goulburn stopped recording when the temperature fell below -10°C.”

This is demonstrably false. The Bureau has mislead the Minister – yet again.

SOURCE




The UN doesn’t like this free, liberal world

Jennifer Oriel

The United Nations has become a threat to the liberal international order. It weakens the constitution of liberal democratic states by ­attacking the political and cultural conditions required for their survival. It attacks the security of free-world countries and the common values that underpin free societies. In recent years, UN leadership has become more hostile to free citizens and politicians who dissent from illiberal supranational rule.

The UN often acts against the free world by targeting politicians who defend the liberty, security and safety of free citizens. In particular, UN chiefs target pro-Western politicians who defend the free world by upholding democratic rule over supranational rule and adopt secure border policy to keep free societies free. During the US presidential campaign, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said he didn’t intend to ­interfere with political campaigns but declared Donald Trump “dan­gerous from an international point of view”.

UN members attack the free world by smearing pro-Western politicians with propaganda terms such as xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism and populism. Its leadership has framed democratic citizens’ defence of free-world countries as “xenophobia”. They call democratically elected politicians who represent their people and protect them from harm “populist”. They claim secure border policy is a form of nationalism and by extension (in UN thought), an abuse of human rights. And they depict the UN as a bastion of benevolent internationalism, ­despite its track record.

In the past week, we witnessed the UN act as a seemingly illiberal and dishonest organisation. The High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, accused the Australian government of misleading the UN. He claimed the UNHCR agreed to help facilitate the Australia-US refugee transfer “on the clear understanding that vulnerable refugees with close family ties in Australia would ultimately be allowed to settle there”. To Australian ears, the supposed deal sounded improbable. It would under­mine the hard-won border policy developed by the Abbott government. Operation Sovereign Borders broke the business model of people smugglers by refusing to reward them with entry to Australia.

The gravity of the UN refugee commissioner’s claims against the Australian government prompted media to request supporting evidence. On the ABC, Leigh Sales asked the UNHCR’s assistant commissioner for protection, Volker Turk, who had given the “clear understanding” to the commission. After several attempts to clarify what agreement had been made, it appeared that the UN was misleading Australia, not the reverse. We are still waiting for the UNHCR to provide valid evidence or apologise for misleading the international community about Australia’s secure border policy. But apparently, being the UN means never having to say you’re sorry.

Since the election of Australia’s conservative government, the UN has attacked our secure border policy, counter-terrorism measures and attempts to reduce ­unprecedented national debt by curbing expenditure on discretionary foreign aid programs. In 2015, UN migrant rights rapporteur Francois Crepeau claimed falsely that he was denied proper access to offshore immigration processing centres. At the time, I questioned Crepeau’s objectivity given that he was a council member of the Global Detention Project, an activist group highly critical of such centres.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also has a history of left activism. He was president of the Socialist International at its 22nd congress, which resolved that “the goal of the SI must be to parliamentarise the global political system” by the establishment of a “UN Parliamentary Assem­bly”. Later, as UNHCR chief, ­Guterres criticised “manifestations of xenophobia … Islamo­phobia, racism” and “xenophobic parties” in Europe. While he praised Australia’s generosity in hosting and integrating refugees, Guterres made the rather extraordinary claim that our issue with boat arrivals was “a kind of collective sociological and psychological question”. No, it was a kind of 1200-deaths-at-sea atrocity.

The reason Australia’s conservative government introduced Operation Sovereign Borders was to break the people smugglers’ business model. The smuggling ­industry thrived under Labor’s ­porous border policy, which ­resulted in 50,000 unlawful arrivals and 1200 deaths at sea. Some porous border activists use asylum-seekers dying at sea to push for even more open borders. For conservatives, however, lives and procedural fairness matter more. As Malcolm Turnbull ­acknowledged in London, managing the 50,000 unlawful arrivals under Labor cost Australians more than $10 billion. And it meant more than 14,500 refugees waiting in UN camps were denied a place under Australia’s offshore ­humanitarian program.

The UN rails against conservative party politicians who defend secure border policy so that Western democracy and open society and can flourish. Human rights chief Hussein described right-wing Western politicians as “demagogues” and compared their “tactics” with those of genocidal Islamic State.

However, the UN adopts a comparatively accommodationist approach to closed and illiberal ­societies under Islamist and communist rule. Last year, the UN General Assembly honoured communist dictator Fidel Castro with a minute of silence. On that day, as on so many others, it entertained attacks on Israel’s sovereignty by Islamists. And the UN is yet to explain how its bene­v­olent internationalism includes the ­Organisation of Islamic Co­operation’s redefinition of human rights to disallow freedoms ­“contrary to the principles of the sharia”.

As high commissioner for refugees, Guterres said Islamic law and tradition “provide(d) an invaluable foundation for the legal framework” used by his office.

The UN’s capitulation to an ­increasingly illiberal international order manifests in a frontal assault on the core values that form the foundations of the free world. The liberal democratic state is sustained by a society of citizens who are taught to uphold and ­defend such values. They include the separation of powers between ­relig­ious authority and state authority embodied in the secular state; public reason tempered by the mastery of free thought, speech and objective scholarly inquiry; formal equality; the protection of free ­citizens from harm by means of ­secure borders; and the defence of free societies from the tyranny of illiberalism.

It is popular to blame Trump or conservatives for declining confidence in the liberal international order and multilateral institutions. But the decline predates Trump’s presidency by years. Liberal internationalists need to ­acknowledge there’s something rotten in the state of the UN.

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