Must not question global warming

There has been such a torrent of global warming propaganda in the media that people have overlooked the most basic physics:  Global warming would produce more evaporation off the ocean and hence MORE rain, not less

WHILE large swathes of Australia endure the worst drought on record — prompting bankruptcy, desperation and suicide — our agriculture minister has refused to acknowledge climate change has any part in it.

For good measure, David Littleproud added he doesn’t “give a rats” whether climate change is man-made and said Australia should focus on keeping the “lights on” instead of switching to renewable energy.

The stunning outburst on ABC’s bush edition of Q&A last night has sparked a wave of severe criticism and there are even calls for him resign.

The audience in Lismore in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales could even be heard gasping and booing as the Minister made a series of controversial comments.

He told host Tony Jones that his electorate of Maranoa, which spans southwestern Queensland, had been in a drought for eight years, saying: “There’s no silver bullet to this apart from rain.”

However, when he was asked by the host if he believed the drought was linked to human-induced climate change, Littleproud said: “Look, that’s a big call.”

“I don’t give a rats if it’s man-made or not,” he added, saying that hardworking Aussies were already feeling the pinch from rising energy bills.

“We can’t do it at the moment,” he said. “We have to be able to turn the lights on, turn the pumps on.”

He then took aim at environmentalists — blaming them for sabotaging the national water infrastructure fund.

“My predecessor Barnaby Joyce created a national water infrastructure fund,” he said. “$2.5 billion to build water resources, to be able to irrigate and have reliability of water. “Unfortunately every time we go to build something, the state finds a reason not to and finds some frog that wouldn’t like the temperature of the dam or a butterfly that may not like it.”

At that point, Mr Littleproud was cut off by boos from the audience, but he hit back at the critics. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to make a decision … do you want an agricultural sector or do you want to live Kumbaya?” he said.

The comments have been roundly criticised on social media, with many calling for him to resign.

However, Malcolm Turnbull appeared to disagree with his Coalition colleague today, saying climate change helps cause droughts.

Mr Turnbull has owned a sheep and cattle farm in the NSW Upper Hunter with his wife Lucy since 1982 and believes this is the worst dry spell he’s seen.

“I think everyone agrees that we’re seeing rainfall that is, if you like, more erratic, droughts that are more frequent and seasons that are hotter,” he told the ABC.

Some regions of western NSW have experienced their driest 16 months on record, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, and Australia as a whole experienced its driest July since 2002.

SOURCE 






Public disservice

NATASHA BITA

PEEVED public servants have blown the whistle on cronyism and "Yes Minister" kow-towing, complaining of a work culture akin to the TV series Utopia.

The Turnbull Government's review of the Commonwealth public service, led by CSIRO boss and former Telstra chief David Thodey, has fielded gripes from hundreds of bureaucrats.

"Unfortunately a film crew is not needed for the Utopia TV show — you could literally take cameras into offices to make the show!" says one submission, signed Professor S Stoneway. "Often for simple briefings of a page or less, up to 10 levels of clearance may be required, sometimes more. "In one agency I have worked for, a Facebook post had to be vetted by seven different levels of management"

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) has told the review that "concerns about cronyism have increased" as more consultants seek public service contracts. It says a recent Australian Public Service survey found 5 per cent of employees had witnessed corrupt behaviour. "Cronyism was by far the most common form of cor-ruption witnessed ... followed by nepotism and `green-lighting, a term for decisions that improperly favour a person or company, or disadvantage another," the CPSU submission says.

One public servant told the review that "the boys' club is alive and well". "The biggest lesson I have learnt is to keep quiet, don't question the system, don't rock the boat, keep your head down and do what you are told," the anonymous bureaucrat said.

Another claimed "children of senior personnel are first to be promoted to higher levels regardless of ability". "There's this one instance, where the employee had to be extensively coached in every single task, would routinely turn up late for work just because he couldn't be bothered getting out of bed, decided to Spend extra long unscheduled lunch breaks and rock back whenever," the submission states.

Many government workers complained faulty IT systems are causing chaos. "Customers phone us over and over, seeing when their system issue will be resolved, instead of just calling once and getting great service or using online services that work," one Worker wrote.

A public servant with 30 years of experience complained the 24-hour news cyde and social media had sunk policy-making to its lowest level. 'It seems all our government, of either political stripe, wants is to increase the number of social media 'likes' it receives," the bureaucrat wrote.

Australian Public Service Commissioner John Lloyd, who will step down on Wednesday after briefing the Thodey review team, said he welcomed the review but could not comment on the issues raised.  He said the public service was "professional, effective and efficient". "People often work in it for less pay than they would get in the private sector," he said.

This article does not appear to be otherwise online but appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on 5 August, 2018






School students re-enact flight from conflict zone

This seems very unbalanced.  How about equivalent attention to the many grievous crimes committed by "refugees"?

Lauren Martyn-Jones

A BRISBANE school is taking an extreme approach to teaching students about asylum-seekers, simulating a full refugee crisis where they will have to flee a conflict zone and navigate checkpoints and boat crossings.

Hundreds of high school students at Northside Christian College will walk 12km, carry buckets of water, and role-play sick and struggling family members in a challenge designed to raise awareness about the plight of refugees.

The school's re-enactment of a refugee crisis, which includes class activities for Years 7, 8 and 9, as well as the optional trek for those in Years 7-12, is a radical take on the World Vision 40 Hour Famine Backpack Challenge.

Northside's science and drama teacher Rob Burgess, who has organised the simulation, said the activities were designed to give students a perspective on the world around them. "In Year 7, the focus is very much on survival, how to cope when your backs are against the wall and you have to make hard choices between things like food and education," he said.

Mr Burgess said Year 8 children were split into family units, and those families then broken up, with different members having to go off and complete hunting and cleaning challenges to gather enough resources to move through a checkpoint and try to make it to a boat crossing.

He said hula-hoops were used during the challenge as makeshift asylum-seeker boats. But only a handful of children in any year make it across the "sea", with the others being directed to a refugee camp where they're left to "languish" as the activities progress.

World Vision chief executive Claire-Rogers said she was personally inspired by the level of commitment and devotion displayed by the staff and students of Northside Christian College in raising awareness for the global refugee crisis.

"The 40 Hour Famine Backpack Challenge campaign aims to bring a deeper level of understanding to students across the nation by introducing a challenge where participants will understand a little of the experience of refugees," she said. "However, Northside goes above and beyond — offering their students the chance to experience and connect in a profound and immersive way," Ms Rogers said.

Northside Christian College also uses World Vision curriculum resources which teach students that if Australia were Syria, every single person in Melbourne would be killed.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said he hoped the simulation would be done without a political agenda. "If school students are nailing their core subject areas there's also a clear benefit in helping them to understand the lives of others, so long as it is undertaken free of political bias or influence," Senator Birmingham said.

This article does not appear to be otherwise online but appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on 5 August, 2018






Why Australia needs to stand firm and protect its borders

The news that Australia is refusing to join the UN’s Global Compact for Migration will cause howls of complaint at home and abroad. “Don’t you know what you are doing?” these people will cry. “Do you see who you are allied with? The US and Hungary. Really?”

The Australian government should ignore these howlers. For it is not the government of Malcolm Turnbull, or those in Hungary or the US, that is wrong. It is the UN, which keeps trying to push mass migration on to nation-states and whose officials imagine that the answer to the existence of some porous, poor and failed states is to make the world one great porous, poor and failed state. Nation-states have the right to resist this pressure, and they should.

Yet one of the most startling facts about migration in recent years has been that the greatest plaudits continue to go to those who are most reckless in their policies, while the most abuse goes to those who are most prudent. Perhaps this is because grandstanding and virtue-signalling are cheap. You can almost always get other people to pay for them.

Nobody in recent years has made so impulsive and catastrophic a decision as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Her 2015 decision to open the borders of Europe to anyone who made it there is having consequences that will roll out for years to come. Yet even as the German public turns against her and her party, she continues to be lauded across the international opinion-forming classes. Despite unleashing social and security problems across an entire continent, organs of international elite opinion and Merkel’s fellow world leaders continue to give her an easy ride. At worst she was “well-intentioned” and “naive”, they say. By contrast, the leaders of countries that refuse to accept open-borders, mandatory migrant quotas and the like are the ones that come in for execration and attack.

Nevertheless, the rule of law and the protection of the social stability and security situation in countries such as Australia are worth defending, whatever the pushback. The Australian delegation at the UN in New York was right to state that the UN had “failed to make clear distinctions between regular and irregular migrants and between refugees and migrants”. These distinctions matter. Indeed they are vital. For they are not only a defence of the law but also a prudent response to a challenge that is only going to grow. For countries that fail to secure their borders in the end cannot secure their people either.

Take my own country, Britain. More than a year has passed since it was rocked by three Islamist terror attacks. The first attack, on Westminster Bridge, claimed the lives of five innocent people including a police officer who was stabbed to death by the attacker inside the gates of Parliament. The second attack, at the Manchester Arena, killed 22 mainly young people and maimed and injured hundreds more. They were victims of a young suicide bomber who waited for them in the lobby as they streamed out of an Ariana Grande concert. In the third attack, a fortnight later, three men rampaged across London Bridge in a van and then ran through Borough Market slashing at the throats of passers-by, targeting women. While doing this they were heard to shout “This is for Allah”. Their attack injured 48 and stole the lives of eight people.

The dead that night included two Australians. Sara Zelenak, 21, was stabbed through the neck. Kirsty Boden, 28, a nurse, was stabbed through the chest as she ran to help other victims of the attack. After the third attack British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that “enough is enough”. But the truth is that she is incapable of acting because like the rest of us she is a hostage of the asylum and migration policies of her predecessors.

One year on from those attacks and that statement, the government’s only initiative has been the appointment of an “extremism commissioner”. After half a year that appointee (anti-extremism activist Sara Khan) has announced that her first priority is to gather evidence about “all forms of extremism in the UK”. So “enough is enough” turns out to mean: “We will appoint a commissioner who will appoint a board to look into unrelated issues.”

Of course one wishes Khan well. But here is one bitter truth that I bet Khan’s commission will not look into. Among last year’s attackers, most should never have been in Britain in the first place.

The Westminster Bridge attacker, a convert to Islam, was indeed born in Britain. But the Manchester Arena bomber should never have been there. His father was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qa’ida affiliate. Back in the 1990s the LIFG was opposed to Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, and he returned the favour. So when the situation in Libya got too hot for Ramadan Abedi and his wife they decamped to Britain, where they were given asylum. Weeks later their son Salman was born in Manchester.

Twenty-two years later he would repay the country that gave his parents sanctuary by detonating an explosive packed with nuts and bolts to cause maximum damage to the young skulls and spines into which they ripped.

Just this past week a British newspaper revealed that in 2014 the Royal Navy saved Salman Abedi along with other British nationals from the civil war in Libya. HMS Enterprise rescued him and 100 other British nationals when the security situation in that country deteriorated. What was he doing there? Why were he and his family ever in Britain? And why did Britain keep paying the family’s travel expenses whenever they felt like visiting the country they allegedly had fled?

An even clearer story emerges from the London Bridge attackers. And it has been even less dis­cussed. The three perpetrators that night were Youssef Zaghba, 22; Khuram Butt, 27; and Rachid Redouane, 30. Zaghba and Redou­ane were born in Morocco, an entirely peaceful and pleasant country. An inquest after the attack found that Redouane had entered Britain using a false name, claiming to be Libyan, and he was five years older than he had pretended. He had been refused asylum under his false Libyan iden­tity, exhausted his further appeals, absconded and lived under his Moroccan identity instead. So again, why was he in Britain? What was he doing for us? What did Britain get out of this deal?

The case of Butt is even more shameful. He had been born in Pakistan and was described as having arrived in Britain as a “child refugee” in 1998, his family having moved to the UK to claim asylum based on “political oppression”. What nobody has been able to explain since is why, other than saving al-Qa’ida fighters from Libya, Britain’s immigration services in the 190s were still giving “asylum” to people from Pakistan.

Pakistan in the 90s was not in a state of war. The country is — for good or ill — an ally of Britain and about as stable a country as you get in that region. His family does not appear to be among the numerous religious minorities so eagerly persecuted by the Muslim majority in Pakistan. So why was Butt in Britain? What exactly did he bring to Britain in the years that followed?

After the London Bridge attack May and London mayor Sadiq Khan eagerly launched into a debate about the role that internet companies had in tackling terror.

It is an interesting debate. But it had nothing to do with that attack. So far as is known there was no subterranean online jihadist activity going on. In fact the attackers and their associates could hardly have been more out in the open. The year before the London Bridge attack Butt was even on British television as was one of the stars of a Channel 4 show: The Jihadis Next Door. So he wasn’t exactly hiding. He was starring on prime time. May and Khan didn’t need to sit on the tech companies to avert an atrocity such as London Bridge. They just needed to turn on their televisions.

When something is staring you in the face and you ignore it, there is always a reason. One conclusion that I have come to over the years I have been covering the story of extremism and terrorism in Europe is that the one connection nobody in power wants is between anything negative and anything to do with migration. There is a reason: which is that this is a problem they have brought us.

Of course every religion and ideology can produce nutters. But it still does not make any sense — indeed, it could be said to be a form of madness — to import forms of extremism we used not to have. And this — for politicians in Britain and Europe — is the toxic underbelly of this debate. We have had, on continental Europe even more than in Britain, plenty of violent ideologies and creeds of our own. But Islamic extremism is an imported problem. A problem our politicians imported in the post-war period right up to the present.

Obviously that isn’t to say that all those people who have come from Pakistan and other Muslim countries are terrorists. Clearly not. But they have too many people among them who profess an ideology that countries such as ours are not just slow but reluctant to recognise. And if those people who have come to our countries legally show the mess of our system, what hope do we have with illegal migration at the level that supranational organisations such as the EU and UN think is perfectly fine?

A great problem for the pro-mass migration panjandrums is that the public can make all the obvious connection with our own eyes. But our politicians are incapable of providing answers. And it is not as though the answers are easy. For instance, what do you do with citizens who hate the state they are in? For most Europeans this is an unanswerable question. But because a question cannot be answered or is hard to answer, it does not follow that the question must not be asked. Yet there, for the time being Britain, like the rest of western Europe, uncom­fort­ably sits.

I am often asked by Australian friends what differences exist between Europe and Australia in these matters. And on my tour of Australia this month I look forward to hearing and learning more about this. But, broadly speaking, from the outside it looks to me like there are two clear differences.

The first is in your immigration policies. To the fury of many campaigners in Australia and abroad, a generation of Australian politicians, from John Howard onwards, made the most important realisation of all. They realised that you have a country or you don’t. And if you have a country you have to have borders and rules. Unlike Merkel and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, John Howard and Tony Abbott in particular knew the difference between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some tiny technicality to be got around by a phalanx of human rights lawyers. The difference between legal and illegal immigration is the law. The law that Australia’s representatives at the UN have once again necessarily and heroically upheld. Because if you don’t have the law then you don’t have much of a state either.

The second difference is that Australia seems to still have (though this may be on the wane) some residual common sense of a kind that appears to be almost absent in my country. There seems to remain in Australia a strain of perfectly legitimate opinion that still finds it acceptable to say: “If you don’t like it here then why don’t you hop it?” In Britain and most of western Europe anybody who uttered such a statement would be too sensible to survive.

And perhaps that’s where we are more generally. A country that imports jihadists who are down on their luck and a continent that welcomes anyone who makes it there is a continent with a deeply troubled future. The best piece of advice any Brit or European can give to an Australian today is the saddest advice of all: don’t do what we did. The happier piece of advice — and one this Brit is happy to give to our Australian friends — is: keep doing what you are doing. You are right. And don’t let anyone, not even the UN, try to tell you otherwise.

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