Cut wasteful spending, not just public servants

Whole departments need to be abolished.  Why do we need Federal Depts. of Health and Education when there are already large State government Depts. in those fields?

alex-philipatos Following a long-standing pre-election commitment to cull Canberra's bureaucracy, the Coalition government will cut 12,000 Commonwealth public service positions. A slimmer and more efficient public service means a smaller burden on taxpayers, but the method employed to cut the bureaucracy is questionable.

These jobs will be shed via attrition rather than by targeted cuts to departments and programs, which means that any savings can be easily reversed and the government cannot control where the cuts fall.

In the 1990s, the Keating and Howard governments set about implementing large cuts to the Commonwealth public service. In 1993, the public service consisted of 143,000 ongoing employees, and by 1999, employees had been reduced to just over 100,000 - a 30% reduction. Though there was a concerted effort to reduce the size of government by the incoming Howard government, both his government and the Keating government achieved some public sector cuts by privatising select public assets.

From 2000, public sector employee numbers rose strongly throughout the remainder of the Howard years and the first term of the Labor government. It was not until 2009 that the rate of growth eased, quite possibly because of the renewed urgency to mend the state of the federal budget. By 2012, there were 154,000 ongoing employees in the Commonwealth public service.

The cuts made in the 1990s were much steeper and more targeted than those proposed by the current Coalition government.

Abbott's planned cuts to the public service represent just seven percent of its current size and there is no guarantee that the workers who leave hold positions the government wants to shed. Nor does it address the pressing productivity issues.

There are departments, agencies and programs that should be scrapped altogether. Some departments duplicate existing state equivalents and add to red tape. Others complete functions the government should not be involved in at all, such as Wine Australia, the government's wine marketing body.

Cutting by attrition addresses none of these issues. Instead it simply requires existing departments and agencies to operate with a slightly smaller workforce on a slightly tighter budget. These departments can easily expand and rehire workers if the government loses cost discipline.

A better approach to public sector reform is to focus on productivity, eliminating waste and improving delivery of the services the community really needs. By targeting unnecessary agencies and terminating wasteful programs, the Coalition can also make long-term inroads to the federal budget position and ensure that the savings will endure beyond the current cost cutting campaign.

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The ALP of late 2013

They’ve re-sprayed the Morris Minor, put on some chrome wheels, and hung some fluffy dice from the rear-view mirror and now claim it will win a Grand Prix - but it’s still running an 800cc engine with three main bearings.

I wonder why they think that elevating a collection of extreme-left ball-busters to the front bench is appealing to anyone. Perhaps it is to the likes of Germaine Greer, Anne Summers and “comedian” Corinne Grant.

But I’m sure that Billy “Young Frankenstein” Shorten knows exactly what he is doing. He is very impressive on TV as we saw during the Beaconsfield mining disaster when no camera could escape having his face in its lens and the whole thing turned into a job application for him. True to form, he’d flown down to take advantage of the photo ops on supreme fraud and swindler, Richard Pratt’s, private jet - as any working class fellow would.

Similarly I am sure that rampant bull-lesbian and Emily’s Lister, Penny Wong, a person who’s never actually had a job requiring the making of a profit (or paid less than a 6-figure salary), will be great in Trade and Investment. She has all the right qualification as Samesame named her as one of the most influential lesbians in the country. Maybe I’m just slow, but I can’t see much connection between international trade and investment and being deft enough to buckle-up a strap-on device in the dark.

At least Joel Fitzgibbon actually knows what it’s like to get his hands dirty, having been an auto-electrician and, almost unique in the working-man’s Labor Party, seems not to have attended an exclusive GPS school. But in true Labor fashion, he inherited his seat of Hunter from his father, Eric Fitzgibbon. I am sure he was pre-selected after an exhaustive merit selection process.

It often astonishes me how often the children, nieces, nephews, wives and husbands of Labor heavy-weights get pre-selection for safe seats. Take Kim Beazley for example, both of them, both members for Fremantle and then, of course, Kim’s daughters also get Labor pre-selection. It seems there is no-one in Labor ranks who has more merit in WA than a Beazley.

But anyone can do a bit of research on the ALP’s front bench, and back bench, and you’ll be surprised just how many are “connected” - and just how many went to GPS schools, started their careers with sinecures in Union HQs, and are lawyers. For a party that was started by shearers, agricultural workers, factory and mine fodder, low-level clerks and shop assistants, they’ve really moved up in the world. I doubt you could form a Rugby League scrum with the Labor members who have ever worked in any sort of primary or secondary production. But you’d have no trouble fielding two AFL teams of careerists with law degrees. It’s been a long journey from the cloth caps and hobnail boots to the top-hats and tails, ski chalets, and private boxes at the opera.

What the ALP has become is a party of the smug and satisfied upper-middle classes for whom the working class is a theoretical construct; whose aspirations are an abstract concept; and with whom they have nothing in common. I think solid proof of the disconnect between the worker’s party and the workers they purport to represent was exemplified by Julia Gillard’s safari to Rooty Hill for a week. If you really are a worker’s party, why would you need a Labor PM to spend a week doing field research on your own heart-land?

Is it any wonder that Union membership has dropped to about 18%? How often have unionists, on the lowest wage rate, seen their officials claim salaries greater than the US President, endless perks and rorts, outright theft and fraud, and glib, educated and connected clean-hands getting appointed to lucrative positions without even the semblance of a merit selection process.

And just to rub salt in the eyes of the great unwashed, Little Bill selects Tanya Pilberserk, with degrees in Public Policy and Communications and wife of convicted narcotics importer, former GPS schoolboy and Graduate in Journalism Michael Coutts-Trotter, who was made Director General of Education by the Obeid Government in NSW - needless to say, without the slightest expertise in education other than having attended Riverview and doing a few years of porridge at Long Bay and elsewhere in the corrections system. How he got a job in the NSW Public Service after being convicted and sentenced to 9 years, though serving less than three, is anyone’s guess. I was under the impression it was impossible for anyone convicted of a serious felony to be employed in any of the Public Services.

The Morris Minor has been re-sprayed, but all the same luggage is in the boot.

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Muslim levy costs Queensland abattoirs thousands each month

QUEENSLAND abattoirs are being slugged thousands of dollars a month through a religious levy on meat exports so powerful Muslim clerics in Jakarta can raise money for Islamic schools and mosques.  The Halal certification fees can cost some meat processors up to $27,000 a month.

The Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI), the top Islamic body which orders fatwa religious rulings, has even banned a Brisbane business from operating - because it was not charging Queensland abattoirs enough to give the religious tick-off to export meat.

The scandal has stopped most of Queensland's Halal meat exports to Indonesia, as angry abattoir operators boycott the more expensive Halal certifiers endorsed by the MUI.

Australian companies that certify meat as Halal, or legal under Islamic law, must be accredited with Indonesia's MUI - which approves just one certifier per state or territory.

The MUI has suspended Brisbane based Australian Halal Food Services (AHFS) for engaging in "unfair competition'' that could "weaken (the) Halal certification movement".

Certifiers must donate a share of their revenue to mosques and Islamic schools.

AHFS - which refused to comment on Saturday - sponsors the As-Salaam Institute of Islamic Studies, based in Eight Mile Plains. It has also spent funds repairing and maintaining mosques in Rochedale and Rockhampton.

One big Queensland meat processor, which did not want to be identified, claimed it had been quoted $27,000 a month in Halal certification fees through another MUI-endorsed certifier - four times more than AHFS had been charging.

JBS Australia - the nation's biggest meat packer and exporter with more than 8500 employees - has been unable to export beef from Queensland to Indonesia.

"We need to look at options (for hiring certifiers) rather than be dictated by one supplier of a service,'' JBS director John Berry said

But MUI chairman Amidhan Shaberah said AHFS had been suspended for trying to work interstate, as well as Queensland. He said setting minimum fees and restricting one certifier to work in each state was "part of our control''.

"We have to standardise the charge to avoid any unfair competition between certifiers,'' he told The Sunday Mail during an interview in Jakarta.

The federal Department of Agriculture confirmed it had no power over approvals for religious certifiers. A spokesman said the Government "values our close relationship with MUI".

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Spread the word: Vegemite turns 90

For the better part of a century, Vegemite has divided families and friends around the world. To date we've enjoyed over one billion jars and nearly 90 billion servings. But whether you're an Edger (spread to the perimeter of your toast), Streaker (apply sparingly) or Nudist (sans butter or margarine), the iconic Aussie spread turns 90 next Friday, charging past the average Australian life expectancy. While it may not be the most epicurean ingredient, Vegemite scores a tick of approval from most of Australia's top chefs.

Shannon Bennett of Vue de Monde fame is a “less is more kind of guy” when it comes to Vegemite. During service Bennett coats eel with white chocolate and tweezes edible flowers, but like 40 per cent of Australians he begins most days with Vegemite, pairing it with quality butter on artisan toast. Bennett refers to Vegemite affectionately. His four children have been “on it” since they were young, and Bennett himself is addicted: “I'm trying to cut down carbs in the morning,” he says, “but I still can't resist the convenience or the taste of it.”

Sydney-based chef Dan Hong (Ms G's, El Loco and Mr Wong) cooks with Vegemite more than he eats it. “Vegemite has a lot of umami qualities… it's really savoury, it has that meaty flavour,” he says. On Australia Day last year, El Loco's secret taco – a regular special where diners don't know what taco they've ordered until it is in front of them – was kangaroo marinated in Vegemite with a Vegemite mayonnaise.

Back in Melbourne, Chin Chin's Benjamin Cooper also uses the much-loved breakfast staple in Japanese-style lamb braises. “It fits with Japanese food because it's quite like miso,” he says.

Cooper is one of the eight out of 10 Australians with a jar of Vegemite always in the kitchen. He regularly beefs up his braises with spoonfuls of the stuff, cooking down stocks until another dimension of meatiness kicks in. He even kept some in his cupboard during a five-year stint in England, although he never converted any Britons into Vegemite lovers.

But on occasion, the English convert themselves. Darren Purchese from Melbourne's Burch & Purchese grew up on Marmite in the Motherland, but switched to Vegemite when he moved to Melbourne. “When I first came over I wouldn't eat Vegemite… I was getting mum to send over Marmite. I got the taste for Vegemite and now I use it all the time… I reckon you could live off the stuff,” he says.

After working in his sweet studio all day, the saltiness of Vegemite is a savoury sanctuary for Purchese. He spreads it thickly on Baker D. Chirico seeded toast with Myrtleford butter, “so it's dripping down my arm,” he says. Purchese often indulges in Parmesan Vegemite popcorn, mixing butter and a tablespoon of Vegemite in a pan until glossy, then pouring it over hot popcorn and adding an avalanche of grated cheese. He's yet to explore Vegemite in his Willy Wonka-esque shop, although he hinted at a caramel Vegemite crumble with a salted oat base next Australia Day.

Adam D'Sylva (Coda and Tonka in Melbourne) is one chef who grew up as a happy little Vegemite, despite his Italian and Indian heritage. “Vegemite has a unique flavour, but there's a nice balance to it also,” he says. D'Sylva is what's commonly referred to as a Wormer, sandwiching crackers loaded with butter and Vegemite together so that squiggly worms escape from the cracker holes.

Unlike D'sylva, chef Paul Cooper from Sydney's Bishop Sessa is a Vegecadoer (one who adds avocado to their Vegemite toast). He eats it daily with his 18-month-old daughter, who's becoming a Vegecadoer just like her dad.

Over 234 serves of Vegemite are in the process being enjoyed somewhere in the world while you're reading this sentence. If you were to line up a single year's consumption of Vegemite toast, it would create a bready trail long enough to wrap around Earth more than 3.5 times. The MoVida Sydney staff account for a steady slice of these statistics. Head chef and Vegemite poster boy James Campbell feeds the kitchen team Vegemite on the previous night's sourdough for breakfast most mornings. Campbell grew up in western Victoria on a cattle station and enjoys his Vegemite for breakfast, lunch and tea. “I like the irony of it,” he says, “it flies in the face of everything culinary and balanced.”

With over 22 million jars sold every year, Campbell is onto something when he points out that whether you love it or hate it, Vegemite is “part of our DNA”.

After 90 years on Aussie shelves, one thing is for certain: Vegemite will outlive us all.

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ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is struck by the fact that Greenies are supposed to love trees yet are largely responsible for the bushfires that burn them down.




Prime Minister Tony Abbott joins Davidson Rural Fire Brigade to fight NSW bushfires

A manly man

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has taken a break from running the country to help fire crews fight the bushfires gripping NSW as a volunteer firefighter.

Mr Abbott worked a night shift helping back burn near Bilpinwith his Davidson Rural Fire Brigade from Sydney's Warringah Pittwater Rural Fire District.

NSW Rural Fires Service volunteer Tova Gallagher said she couldn't believe her eyes when she saw Prime Minister Tony Abbott decked out in his NSWRFS uniform.

Ms Gallagher, who herself is in the area fighting fires, said she didn't recognise the PM at first.  "I said 'that guy could be Tony Abbott's brother'," she said. "Oh wait, hang on. It's him."

Mr Abbott has been a member of the NSW Rural Fire Service for 13 years and is trained as a specialist breathing apparatus operator, chainsaw operator and tanker driver.

But his new job running the country has triggered safety concerns putting him and his Australian Federal Police security detail into dangerous situations.



Pictures circulating on social media show Mr Abbott riding in the fire truck and giving the thumbs up to onlookers before he posed for photos with fellow volunteers.

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"Green" responsibility for the bushfires

MORE fingers than fire hoses are being pointed this fire season as serious bush fires burn around the state.

Even as a new blaze burned near Port Stephens on Thursday, tough-talking Mayor Bruce MacKenzie was hammering the point he personally made Monday to Premier Barry O’Farrell and RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons that he believed Green-Labor policies introduced by the Carr government were still blocking hazard reduction efforts.

He wants the commissioner to return to the district with Emergency Services Minister Mike Gallacher - who has so far been all but invisible - to face local residents at a public meeting next week when the immediate emergency is over.

Mr MacKenzie, 75, a popularly elected mayor and local identity, also has a private axe to grind with the RFS.

Last year, he clashed with the RFS over concerns it raised with the Port Stephens Council for fire safety provisions during two development application hearings.

That argument plays into his bigger criticism about the increased bureaucracy in the RFS and the red and green tape he sees as preventing more hazard reductions.

That argument is not confined to Port Stephens.  Under former Labor Premier Bob Carr, the level of hazard reductions performed across the state dropped even as larger areas of land were being incorporated into the national parks of which Mr Carr was so proud.

Green groups became increasingly influential, the environmental movement flourished, bizarre New Age fads such as eco-feminism emerged among the ignorant.

Unfortunately, the NSW Parks Department was never given a budget to match its increased area of responsibilities and inevitably, it could never meet perform the amount of hazard reduction necessary, not even the bare minimum.

It was also apparent that locking up forest areas in national parks automatically increased the level of fire risk.

Before the forests were locked up, logging tracks were kept open and the forest floor was largely cleared of fuel loads by the loggers and by the stock which were permitted to graze in the Crown reserves.

Locked forests saw the tracks rapidly become overgrown through disuse and with the removal of stock, the fuel load on the forest floor rapidly increased.

Despite what the green lobby claims, the fuel loading not global warming, is responsible for the intensity of bushfires. Increasing the fuel load by a factor of four, increases the fire intensity by a factor of nearly 20.

In recent years, particularly since the Victorian wildfires of February, 2009, in which 173 people were killed, it has been easier to obtain permission to conduct hazard reduction but the permit is only the first step.

Burning huge tracts of land today (when they may well be more fuel laden than they have been for decades) is not a simple process.

To burn safely and successfully, a range of variables have to be considered ranging from the temperature and humidity, the wind speed, the amount of fuel, the moisture content and the type of vegetation.

Coastal scrub, for example, has a very oil content which serves to protect it from the salt air environment.

The Australian bush is very site specific. Some trees and shrubs can take regular burning and will grow their seeds and thrown them into the ash of recent fires, others take years for the seeds to mature and set.

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Boats will be stopped, Abbott says

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says the arrival of asylum seekers by boat has dropped dramatically since the election of the coalition government.

But Mr Abbott says he's under no illusion that people smugglers will continue to test the commonwealth's resolve to stop the flow of boats.

The prime minister told the South Australian Liberal Party annual meeting in Adelaide on Saturday that in the month since the government was elected arrivals were running at just 10 per cent of the worst level under Labor.

"I don't pretend that the people smugglers won't test us," Mr Abbott said.  "I don't say that there won't be worse months as well as better months in the time ahead.  "I don't pretend that the boats have already stopped.

"But I can say to you with great confidence, they are stopping, they are stopping and they will be stopped."

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In Qld., Jarrod Bleijie takes on unions, bikies and lawyers in one week

It has been an extraordinary week for the man they have labeled the Boy Wonder.

The state’s 31-year-old Attorney-General pushed three pieces of contested legislation through parliament this week, taking on the unions, the bikies and law firms in one fell swoop.

Jarrod Bleijie, the royal loving, rock and roll dancing, proudly Christian Member for Kawana was finally able to tick some bugbears off his list.

He was given open slather to bring motorcycle gangs to their knees.  He responded by crafting laws some have labeled “medieval”, while others rang talkback radio shows to applaud.

He took the power to determine when certain offenders – namely sex offenders, such as Robert John Fardon, a particular bane of his, left jail, out of the judiciary’s hands and into, effectively, his own.

And he went against his own committee’s advice not to apply a common law threshold to workers’ compensation claims and did just that. Which, as Attorney-General, he has every right to do.

Those laws all passed this week, just days after they were introduced into Parliament, in some cases, just weeks after ‘we are looking at doing this’ media releases were sent out.

He did it while less flattering nicknames ‘The Article Clerk’ [an old taunt, calling back to his days in a Maroochydore law firm doing just that, while he completed his law degree] and ‘Vlad the Legislator’ [a new name gifted to critics by the naming of the Vicious Lawless Associated Disestablishment legislation passed this week] were muttered under breaths, lawyers threatened to de-rail MPs re-election prospects and the unions shouted.

But the unions always shout. It was the response of the Law Society which was most telling.  Seemingly brought to the brink by Mr Bleijie’s ‘Plan B’ for keeping 64-year-old Fardon in jail, president Annette Bradfield, as circumspectly as she could, questioned whether the state’s “fundamental principle of democracy”, the separation of powers, were at risk.

Privately, Queensland’s lawyers are combing over the new legislation looking for holes.  Publicly they are calling for Mr Bleijie to declare his confidence in the judiciary.

While shadow Attorney-General, Mr Bleijie said he would never attack a judge, he has said he would have no problem questioning their judgment.  “Our judicial system needs to hand down sentences that government requires them to,” he said in Brisbane Legal in 2011.

The amendments to the Criminal Amendment Act, which allow the Attorney-General to effectively overrule a release order issued by the courts, once all appeals are exhausted, now allows him to ensure they do.

It is a hard job to argue against keeping prolific sexual offenders in prison.  So the Opposition was left with attacking the urgency of the law’s passing and the blurring of lines between state and judiciary.

Still, there was no question of the law passing.  Thursday’s late sitting debating the legislation was almost as wasted as Tuesday’s marathon effort when the anti-bikie laws went through.

When it came to WorkCover, that was easier to argue.  Mr Bleijie said Queensland’s statutory cover would mean all workers would be covered, regardless of whether they had been judged to have less than a 5 per cent injury impairment.

But Queensland has a short-tailed scheme, which means once the WorkCover statutory cover runs out, there will no longer be any further avenues an injured worker can take for compensation, if they fall under that 5 per cent threshold.

Personal liability lawyers have estimated that will be about half of all WorkCover cases.

Business groups had lobbied intensely to have journey claims removed from the legislation, which means employees would have lost the right to claim for injuries which occurred to or from work.

Mr Bleijie said he “found the balance” by keeping journey claims, but adding the common law threshold.

That “balance” meant lawyers and their staff joined union supporters outside Parliament House on Thursday, calling for “Bl-liar” to come out.  But business, that all-important sector the government vowed to listen to, are, if not entirely satisfied with the changes, content that some of what they wanted was done.

But the laws created this week to “break the spirit” of motorcycle gangs are what legal sources expect to create the biggest headache for the government, long after the hyperbole has died down.

Mr Bleijie, though, who despite the long hours in the lead up to this week has maintained the shiniest shoes in parliament, and has not faltered in matching his pocket chiefs to his tie, doesn’t seem to care.

He says when the laws are challenged – not if, because he knows that it is a foregone conclusion – he’ll just keep tweaking the legislation until the courts hands are tied.

And he’ll do it with the full support of Premier Campbell Newman, the government and the LNP.

“Not only does he have my personal support, but also he has, without question, the unequivocal, 100 per cent, rock solid support of the cabinet and those honourable members of the LNP in this place … he has the total, unequivocal support of the LNP state executive and I am confident, almost all of the 14,000 members of the LNP across Queensland who worked hard to get a government that would be strong on these law and order and safety and security issues,” Mr Newman said.

“This Attorney-General has the ticker and the guts to actually stand up to entrenched interests right across this state without fear or favour and to do what is right for Queenslanders, do what is right for Queensland families, do what is right for Queensland businesses … I could go on and on.  He has done the right thing by Queenslanders.”

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Coalition Government resurrects temporary protection visas

The Federal Government has officially reintroduced the Howard-era temporary protection visas (TPV).

Under the Migration Act, the visa gives refugees protection for up to three years and prevents the visa holder from applying for permanent protection.  Reintroducing TPVs was one of the Coalition's key election promises.

In August, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced plans to deal with the backlog of nearly 32,000 people already in Australia on bridging visas in detention centres.

He said the Coalition would introduce a rapid audit of their claims, by which a single immigration case worker would decide the refugee status of people who had arrived in Australia by boat.

Those found to be refugees would be given TPVs, with no prospect of permanent settlement - including for family reunions.

Those judged to have no refugee claim would be deported or detained, and stripped of appeal rights.

TPVs to undermine human rights, asylum advocates say

TPVs were a feature of the Howard government's asylum policy in 1999 and Mr Abbott referenced the former prime minister's own words during his announcement of the policy in August.

In an election policy speech in 2001, Mr Howard famously stated: "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."

The Rudd Labor government abolished TPVs in 2008.

Amnesty International spokesman Graeme McGregor says the re-introduction of TPVs will undermine human rights protections for asylum seekers.

"Once again, we have favoured punishment over protection of genuine refugees by choosing to repackage failed policies of the past," he said.

"The use of TPVs during the first Pacific Solution was shown to have severe mental health consequences on recognised refugees, who in many cases have fled terror and torture as a result of the insecurity around employment, residence and family reunion."

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Coalition in the ballpark on household savings from axing the carbon tax

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has announced he will introduce legislation next month to scrap the carbon tax from July 2014.   "When this bill is passed, Australian households will be better off to the tune of $550 a year," he promised in a press conference on October 15.

Minutes later, Environment Minister Greg Hunt echoed that figure, but was more precise about when it applied.  "The legislation will also bring in to being, as the Prime Minister said, a saving of $550 on average next financial year, as opposed to the current situation," he said.  "On average, it's a saving of $3,000 per family over the next six years."

The verdict:

Based on Treasury modelling, households will be better off by around $550 in 2014-15 if the current legislation is scrapped. However the following year, when the legislation moves to a floating price, the estimated impact on households drops to $280.

Mr Abbott was overstating the case to say households would be better off to the tune of $550 a year, but Mr Hunt reasonably said the legislation would mean "a saving of $550 on average next financial year, as opposed to the current situation".

Mr Hunt's claim of a $3,000 benefit to households stretches to 2020. But it is impossible to make a reliable estimate of the impact of a carbon tax on households that far beyond the forward estimates.

Mr Abbott and Mr Hunt are in the ballpark.

More HERE





First bikie arrests in Queensland under new laws

The first two people to be charged under Queensland's tough new anti-bikie laws which came into force this week have been released on bail in the state's far north.

Police officers in Cairns carried out searches on three known clubhouses, two in the inner suburb of Bungalow and one in the CBD, all of which were declared prescribed criminal locations under the new legislation.

Detectives arrested Peter Johnston and Mark Filtness at a Spence Street address that police allege to be the clubhouse of the Odins Warriors.

The men, both 47, appeared in the Cairns Magistrates Court this afternoon charged with being a participant in a criminal organisation entering a prescribed place.

They were granted bail and will be released once their passports have been surrendered, which is a mandatory condition under the new laws.

The matter will return to court on November 1.

Brazen violence and intimidation on the Gold Coast prompted the Queensland Government to come down harshly on outlaw motorcycle gangs and their members.

New laws targeting the gangs passed with bipartisan support after a marathon session in State Parliament on Wednesday night.
Australia's outlaw motorcycle gangs.

The legislation names 26 "criminal organisations", including the Bandidos, Finks and Mongols.

It restricts their members' and associates movements and meetings, and increases minimum sentences for their crimes.

Premier Campbell Newman said: "The unequivocal purpose of these laws is to destroy these criminal organisations."

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Conservative Capitalism: a strange way to remain the same

My heading above is lifted from an article by the Australian Leftist Grant Wyeth.  My leading post on Friday was also a comment on one of his lucubrations so I thought I might have a bit more fun with him today.  On Friday I solved for him his puzzle over why Left and Right are so starkly different and opposed.  Today I want to solve for him the puzzle in the heading above:  He cannot fathom that  change is in the essence of capitalism so *therefore* conservatives should oppose it, not support it

Like many Leftist writers before him (e.g. Altemeyer), Wyeth's problem is that he wouldn't know conservatism if he fell over it.  His concept of conservatism is the caricature of it that circulates in his own little Leftist bubble.

And he even realizes dimly that he doesn't know what it is.  With a schoolboy level of sophistication, he even turned to his dictionary to find out what it is!  Sad that so many historians have written in vain for Wyeth!  Altemyer is the same.

And what Wyeth found in his dictionary is that conservatives are opposed to change.  That is exactly what Leftists say about conservatives but it ignores one of the most salient facts about politics worldwide  -- that conservative governments are just as energetic in legislating for their agenda as Leftists are.  Both sides busily make new laws all the time.  And the point of a new law is to change something.  The changes that Left and Right desire are different but both sides push for change.  On Wyeth's understanding of conservatism, a conservative government that wins an election should do no more than yawn, shut up the legislature and go home until the next election!

So in good Leftist style, Wyeth ignores one of the most basic facts about politics. That sure is a weird little intellectual bubble that he lives in.  EVERY conservative that I know has got a whole list of things that he would like to see changed.  But Wyeth obviously doesn't know any conservatives.

So Wyeth finds politics puzzling because his most basic premise is faulty.

So what is conservatism?  I have taught both sociology and psychology at major Australian universities but when it comes to politics my psychologist's hat is firmly on.  One can understand conservatism at various levels but to get consistency, you have to drop back to the psychological level.  And at that level it is as plain as a pikestaff.  Conservatives are cautious.  And that is all you need to know to understand the whole of conservatism. 

In science, however, explanations just generate new questions and, as a psychologist, I am interested in dropping down to an even lower level of explanation and asking why conservatives are cautious.  And I think that is pretty obvious too. It is in part because they can be. 

As all the surveys show, conservatives are the happy and contented people.  And with that disposition, conservatives just don't feel the burning urgency for change that Leftists do.  Leftists cast caution to the winds because they want change so badly.  ANYTHING seems better to them than the existing arrangements.  Conservatives don't have that compulsion.  Leftists are the perpetually dissatified whiners whereas conservatives can afford to take their time and get things right  from the outset. 

And why does that difference in happiness exist?  As the happiness research often reminds us, your degree of happiness is inborn and, as such, is pretty fixed.  Leftists are just born miserable.

So we have now  dropped down into a genetic level of explanation. And we can at that level even derive and test a hypothetico-deductive prediction. If conservatives are happy and happiness is genetic, then conservatism should be genetic too.  And it is.  As behaviour geneticists such as Nick Martin have shown,  conservatism has a strong genetic component  -- which suggests that some people are just born cautious.  It is, of course, no surprise that caution and happiness go together.

So I think I have now gone as low as I can go in explaining conservatism.  There are of course even lower levels of explanation possible (tracing the brain areas involved, studying the DNA) but our understanding of those levels of function is at the moment so crude that anyone purporting to offer explanations at that level is merely speculating.

So having gone down the levels of explanation, I now need to go up the levels of explanation too.  What does being cautious lead to?  It rather obviously leads to distrust:  Distrust of the wisdom and goodwill of one's fellow man, both as individuals and in collectivities.  In Christian terms, man is seen as "fallen" and ineluctibly imperfect. 

But trust and distrust are matters of degree and conservatives are perfectly willing to give trust when it has been earned.  So where  ideas are concerned, conservatives usually trust only those ideas that have already been shown to work as intended or which extend existing successful ideas.  Leftists, by contrast, trust and put into action ideas that "sound" right to them  -- without bothering to test first whether their ideas really do generate the consequences that they envisage. They usually don't of course.  Leftists are theorists extraordinaire.  They have no use for Mr Gradgrind's "facts".  That theory is  useful only insofar as it is a good guide to facts seems to be beyond their ken.

The enthusiasm for "whole language" methods in teaching kids to read is an example of untested Leftist policy being implemented.  It was widely adopted in the schools but worked so badly that most schools have now reverted to phonics  -- the old "tried and tested" method.

And conservative caution leads to conservatives valuing stability generally  -- because sweeping changes could well not work out well -- and usually don't. Leftists usually seem to think they know it all but conservatives know that they don't.  So conservatives want various changes but also want to proceed cautiously with change.  They want "safe" change, change off a stable base -- a base that embodies what has worked in the past.

And the traditional conservative advocacy of individual liberty also stems from caution.  It is highly likely that a tyrant won't have your particular interests at heart so you want to be free to pursue your own interests yourself.  And in the economic sphere that is capitalism.

I think I have by now said enough to solve all of Wyeth's puzzles below but if I have left anything out, you will probably find it in my big historical survey of conservatism.

ON FRIDAY LAST WEEK in The Age, Waleed Aly wrote a thoughtful piece on the tensions that currently exist globally within “the Right” of politics. 

Aly hit the nail beautifully on the head when he wrote that modern ‘…conservative politics [has come] to be built on a contradiction: a pact between the opposing forces of free market-liberalism and social conservatism.’

However, Aly didn’t quite go far enough in explaining just how strange and counter-productive to conservative ideals this alliance has become. Modern political thought tends to view this as a perfectly consistent philosophy, but I would contend that nothing could be further from the truth.

The way I see things, World War II and the Cold War induced conservatives in the West to go looking for the most anti-socialist (both national and garden variety) philosopher and economist they could find. It led them to F. A. Hayek, a man who diagnosed the brutally restrictive machines of state-centric Fascism and Communism earlier than most. However, this was an ironic choice for conservatives, seeing he had also written an essay entitled Why I’m Not A Conservative.

However, as insightful (and misunderstood) as Hayek was (and still is), I think we need to look towards another economist for a more succinct reason as to why this is such an odd match.

Joseph Schumpeter noted: ‘Capitalism is by nature a form or method of change and not only never is, but never can be, stationary.’
Which is why I find it strange that we conventionally call capitalism “economic conservatism”, when the dictionary tells me that conservatives are uncomfortable, opposed, or suspicious, of change.

Schumpeter, however, also observed that capitalism is: ‘…a process whose every element takes considerable time in revealing its true features and ultimate effects.’

This could be considered “conservative”, in that the more rational conservatives believe change needs time to digest, not full-scale resistance. But since the post-World War II period, market-fuelled economic and social change has moved at such a rapid and multiplying pace that surely conservatives would advocate more state intervention against the market, not less?

The train, the car, the aeroplane and the internet – all major inventions fuelled and enhanced by competition and the free exchange of ideas – have been instrumental in breaking down ethnic and cultural barriers as they moved the masses out of the monoculture of the village and into the wonderful world of difference. Firsthand knowledge is the biggest enemy of the ignorant, and capitalism has given us these wonderful tools to gain it.

Furthermore, when it comes to cultural and ethnic relations, the conservative adherence to the market is again odd. If, as Hayek would promote, the state is a physical impediment to exchange amongst humans, then surely the nation is a mental one? The nation is one particularly dangerous form of collectivism that conservatives seem to have overlooked.

Swedish academic Hans Rosling has noted that a capitalist invention such as the simple washing machine was a significant tool in the women’s liberation movement. The massive amount of time it saved allowed women to educate and organise themselves. The result being that within a very short period, women now out-attend and out-perform men in education, and will soon translate this to out-earn.

The state just doesn’t have the knowledge, the mechanisms, nor the self-interest to create change on this scale. And when it has tried, it has ended up with a lot of dead bodies.

The state is a reactionary institution in the purest sense. Its role is to react to what occurs around it, and when you concentrate considerable power and prestige in it, the state is less likely to be comfortable with change that may threaten this power.

This is why I refer to both the state itself, and the ideas of “the Left”, as “structurally conservative”. Presently, “the Right” have the desire to resist change, but “the Left” have all the instruments to do so.

This is something Bob Katter understands with his conservative “Old Labor” instincts. He may be backwards, but at least he is philosophically consistent. There are no homosexuals in the seat of Kennedy, just as there are none in Tehran and Pyongyang. By a head in the sand or a gun in the hand.

However, in a modern liberal society, the issue is lost for poor Bob. The prevalence of gay characters on television now, and the popularity of a prime time show like Modern Family, indicates just how far the state in Australia is behind.

In reference to his own support for gay marriage, U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden noted:  “I think Will & Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.”

Shows such as these are not just educational tools though. Their prominence is actually a reflection of society’s values. They’re shown in prime time for a reason. The state only hears the loudest voices, the market has a much more finely tuned ear.

Aly notes that: ‘Bob Katter’s constituency have long been globalisation’s losers.’

A similar thing can be said about America’s Tea Party movement. I (smugly) call them “Reagan’s Losers”. Yet what The Tea Party miss, that Katter understands, is that they only sow the seeds of their own further discomfort by advocating for increased liberalisation from the state. The increased “freedom” they call for, is actually the freedom that will continue to create significant global, economic and social change.

Theirs is an essentially nationalist movement, they attach themselves to market-liberalism due to America’s national mythology, not due to its cosmopolitan outcomes.

This existential crisis within the Republican Party, along with the rise of UKIP that Aly mentions, the minor parties formed out of the Coalition and the irrational and unhinged rhetoric that spews from elements on the Right these days, are all symptoms of conservatives struggling to reconcile this pact with market-liberalism that doesn’t provide them with the outcomes they desire.

The changes occurring globally and locally in the 21st Century are too strong for this contradictory alliance of ideas to hold. Conservatives are going to either have to learn to embrace the era in which they live, or find a different philosophical and economic model to align themselves in order to resist it.

SOURCE

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG comments on Leftist intransigence over the carbon tax




Greens MP Adam Bandt tries to make political mileage out of fires

Bandt is a Trotskyite -- an acolyte of Leon Trotsky, leader of the Red Army in the Russian revolution and a mass murderer. Trotsky never took prisoners of war.  He shot the lot.   So Bandt has exactly the low level of fellow-feeling you would expect of that

AN unrepentant and defiant Adam Bandt has stood behind the ill-timed bushfire comments he made on social media at the peak of yesterday's NSW firestorm.

The Greens MP infuriated many when he tweeted that "Tony Abbott's plan means more bushfires for Australia & more pics like this of Sydney".

That comment came at the very moment that every TV network in Australia showed graphic images of people's houses burning.

Mr Bandt tried to hose down his comments on ABC News 24 on Friday morning, arguing:

"Well, in the last 12 months we've had the hottest year on record, the hottest month and the hottest day. Tony Abbott has picked this time to say he's going to rip up action on global warming, which is going to to mean these are the kind of fires we will see more often."

The point many have already made as a counterpoint to this statement is that Mr Abbott didn't pick the exact moment that people's houses were burning down.

Mr Bandt attempted to add further context in his comments today, carefully adding words like "tragic" and phrases like "the amazing work of emergency services". But he continued to harness the moment to say things like:

"This is what global warming in Australia looks like and it's going to mean more fires happening more often and some of them more severe when they happen."

Mr Bandt also displayed a rather troubling ignorance of Australian geography today with his repeated statement that October is very early for bushfires.

October would indeed be super-early for Victoria, where Mr Bandt lives, but hot weather always arrives earlier in NSW, and fires have long occurred in the east of NSW in October and even earlier in September and August, which are the state's driest months of the year.

THURSDAY'S STORY

PEOPLE'S lives are at risk. Houses have been lost. At latest count there are at least 40 homes burned to the ground. That number will almost certainly rise.

It is a shocking, distressing time right now in eastern New South Wales. The sky above Sydney is thick with smoke. Ash is falling from the sky in many suburbs. A dry southerly change due any minute may only make things worse as the fires change course.

So what does Greens MP Adam Bandt do?

He ignores the unfolding human tragedy and pushes his political barrow on Twitter.

"Why Tony Abbott's plan means more bushfires for Australia & more pics like this of Sydney," Mr Bandt tweeted this afternoon, along with a link to the blood red sky over Sydney

Talk about too soon.

You'd imagine that even the strongest believer in climate change caused by human activity would concede there is a more appropriate time to argue the issue of carbon pricing than when people are fleeing their homes and brave fireys do their best to protect them.

Many people on Twitter are certainly expressing that sentiment.

If the great democracy of social media is any guide, people feel that by attacking the PM's plans to abolish the carbon tax on this particular afternoon, Adam Bandt comes across as a man more interested in political points-scoring than that basic human emotion called compassion.

And politicians wonder why people don't much care for them.

SOURCE






Hundreds left homeless as the gravest bushfire emergency in a decade strikes NSW

HUNDREDS of homes are feared destroyed and Premier Barry O'Farrell has spoken of the first death to be confirmed in the distaster.

"Regrettably this is what no one wants to happen," Mr O'Farrell said of the death of a 63-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while he was fighting a fire at his home at Lake Munmorah on NSW's Central Coast.

Mr O'Farrell amde the comments from Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney where he was being briefed this morning.

The premier will head to the Blue Mountains on this afternoon where he will inspect the damage from the air and speak to the media.

While the extent of the devastation was unclear on Thursday night, one of the worst-hit areas was Springwood, in the Blue Mountains, where more than 40 homes were known to be lost.

Large fires continued to burn into the early hours of the morning with emergency warnings remaining in place for the Ruttleys Rd fire near Wyong on the Central Coast and between Lithgow and Bilpin.

A drop in temperature is expected today of about 10C with the hope that the cooler conditions will give firefighters the upper hand but 100 fires continue to burn with 20,000 hectares being lost to the inferno in the Blue Mounatins area.

But when the ashes settle, the number of destroyed or damaged properties across the state is expected to be much worse.

Elsewhere, thousands of firefighters were struggling against around 100 blazes across the state - on the Central Coast and further north, the Southern Highlands and the south coast.

It was too soon to estimate how many properties had been lost, but Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons predicted: "we'll be counting properties in the dozens, if not the hundreds." Premier Barry O'Farrell and Mr Fitzsimmons told reporters the public should brace for widespread destruction.

"It will take some days until we see the end of these fires," Mr O'Farrell warned.  "I suspect that if we get through that without the loss of life we should thank God for miracles."

Mr Fitzsimmons said firefighters faced the worst of conditions. "This is as bad as it gets," he said.

Schools at the Blue Mountains were also drawn into the drama and scores of Blue Mountains residents sought refuge at evacuation centres on Thursday night, including the Springwood Sports Club and Springwood Country Club.

While St Columba's students were kept in their school, St Thomas Aquinas School was evacuated.

"Firefighters are undertaking property protection under difficult, dangerous and erratic weather conditions," the RFS says on its website.

RFS Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers said it was one of the worst days he'd seen.  "It's probably the most serious fire risk we've faced since the early 2000s," he said.

For most of the day there were six fires at "emergency warning" level, meaning homes were at risk and residents were being asked to consider fleeing.

At least two firefighters were injured, with one man sent to Sydney's Concord Hospital with burns to his face.

The fires created traffic chaos around Sydney, with a 20km queue on the Hume Highway for city-bound traffic.

All northbound lanes on the highway were reopened about 9.45pm (AEST), the Transport Management Centre said, with just one southbound lane opening.

The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has formally declared a "catastrophe" for affected areas.

ICA CEO Rob Whelan said the group expected to have a better idea of the damage by the weekend, but added that insurers were ready to take claims.

SOURCE





Aboriginal jobs program a complete disaster, says Nigel Scullion

THE remote indigenous jobs scheme launched by Labor in July is in "crisis", with people not turning up to work and some retreating to alcohol, prompting the Abbott government into emergency talks to try to rescue the $1.5 billion national program.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion will meet his senior departmental officials today to devise an immediate strategy to get indigenous people re-engaged in the scheme, which operates in 60 remote regions.

"It's just a complete disaster, all we know for sure is that people are disengaged," Senator Scullion told The Australian.

Under the Remote Jobs and Communities Program, a single provider in each region is contracted to work with individuals, communities and local employers to help more people into jobs and build stronger communities.

Senator Scullion said he had been told participants had left the scheme and returned to drinking.  "People have told me privately that the people who were working are now 'sad'," he said.  "I can tell you that is code for a very bad state of mind. They are drinking more. This is a disaster well beyond what I expected.

"We need to move very quickly. With the wet season coming on and Christmas coming on, if people are disengaged for five months, to re-engage them after decades of work will be very difficult."

Senator Scullion cited the example of 61 people who had been on an indigenous work-for the-dole-program in Gunbalanya, 300km east of Darwin. "Now they have gone home, but they are still getting paid, so they are completely disengaged from employment," he said. "You couldn't think of a worse possible outcome."

The RJCP was designed to provide a more integrated and flexible approach to employment and participation services for people living in remote areas. Most of the communities involved are in the Northern Territory.

Senator Scullion said a new community development fund - the centrepiece of the new scheme that provides $237.5 million in funding over five years - was not providing an adequate level of support for providers to run meaningful programs.

As a result, indigenous people were being sent home or choosing to leave. Senator Scullion said the program was contracted out for a five-year period and the department would need to look at ways of improving it within its legal obligations. "We are making this a priority," he said. "We need the people to re-engage with whatever system we have.

"I have a great deal of sadness about it and I know there was no mischief from the previous Labor government but they have got it so badly wrong that it can only take a couple of days to disengage and it can then take months to re-engage."

This week, The Australian witnessed many people in the West Arnhem community of Gunbalanya approaching the minister about the collapse of the system. He has also received reports from many other communities about dysfunction in the scheme.

"They have told me that previously people were turning up to work in hundreds (and) they were significantly engaged," he said.

"When the new RJCP provider turned up in Gunbalanya they expected some of the existing deliveries to continue delivering somehow but the net consequence is that people are not turning up."

The four main programs that previously delivered employment, participation and community-development services in remote Australia - Job Services Australia, Disability Employment Services, Community Development Employment Projects and the Indigenous Employment Program - have been brought together under the RJCP.

In a speech to residents of Gunbalanya on Wednesday, Senator Scullion said he believed that the previous CDEP scheme, which both sides of politics had been trying to get rid of, was superior to the new system.

SOURCE





O'Farrell fights push to ban CSG

The O'Farrell government has rejected a Labor push to keep coal seam gas activity out of Sydney's water catchments, despite a pre-election pledge to ban the practice.

Opposition Leader John Robertson introduced legislation to Parliament on Thursday seeking a ban on coal seam gas operations in designated "special areas" surrounding major water storages. The move would rule out about 371,000 hectares around Sydney, the Illawarra, the Blue Mountains, the southern highlands and Shoalhaven.

Labor will also investigate banning coal seam gas activity from catchments in the Hunter, the central coast and north coast. It follows calls by the Sydney Catchment Authority, as reported by Fairfax Media on Thursday, for coal seam gas mining to be banned in the same areas proposed by Labor, because it "may significantly compromise" water supply assets.

Mr Robertson said coal seam gas licences renewed by the Coalition as recently as March still covered Sydney's water catchments.

In 2009, while in opposition, Barry O'Farrell told a rally opposing a central coast mine: ''The next Liberal-National government will ensure that mining cannot occur in any water catchment area. No ifs, no buts. A guarantee."

Mr Robertson said the government "has had almost three years to deliver on a core election commitment and has failed". But Energy Minister Chris Hartcher said water quality would be protected.

He accused Labor of "absolute hypocrisy", saying it approved coal seam gas exploration licences when in power. Fairfax Media understands the government will not be supporting the bill.

The debate came as the government announced measures to fast-track mine approvals by cutting conditions for future standard coal mining leases from 24 to nine.

Nature Conservation Council NSW chief executive Pepe Clarke said accelerating the development of mines that will "have serious negative environmental impacts for centuries is not good policy".

SOURCE





When two tribes go to war

The article below by an Australian  Leftist has some correspondence with reality.  Left and Right do seem to some extent to exist in separate universes.  The author does not know why, however.  I think the answer is obvious.  I think that the separation exists because the Left has a reflex of closing its ears to anything it does not want to hear.  They do that because their beliefs are so easily open to challenge.  They cannot AFFORD to listen.  Reality is against them.  They have to invent a fictional mental world where, for instance, "all men are equal", despite the perfectly obvious fact that all men are different.  All men are (allegedly) equal only in the sight of God -- and Leftists don't generally believe in him/her.

Global warming is a good example of reality denial too.  It is agreed on both sides of the divide that the total amount of warming over the last 150 years has been less than one degree Celsius.  Why is such a triviality worth notice?  Leftists never say.  Global warming scientists theorize that the warming might suddenly leap but that is mere prophecy  -- and we know how successful prophecies generally are.



Conservatives, on the other hand spend most of their time in politics discussing and refuting Leftist arguments.  Read almost anything on Townhall.com, for instance, and it will be discussing and refuting Leftist arguments and policies with appeals to the facts -- anything but ignoring them.  By contrast, the fact that Leftists do NOT generally address conservative arguments is what makes them seem alien to conservatives.  It makes them seem alien to rationality.  Leftists very often mock conservative arguments in a superficial and cherrypicked way but that is a far cry from seriously working through them and honestly addressing ALL the relevant facts -- JR

My parents don't know anyone who would vote for the ALP [Leftist party] or Greens.

My friendship and cultural circles don't know anyone who would vote for the Coalition [conservatives].

Both view those without their voting intentions as highly strange, suspicious and people to fear. The opportunities, and the desire, for conversation are non-existent.

In mainstream political discourse we talk about 'Left' and 'Right', or 'progressive' and 'conservative', as political groups, hanging on to antiquated notions of consistent political ideas, but in fact it is becoming increasingly evident that these are now simply cultural groups.

We can broadly describe a culture as the behaviours and beliefs of a particular group of people. These behaviours and beliefs compound themselves as they are continually practiced. Large distinctions in cultures occur when groups are isolated and not exposed to any different influences or practices.

Both of these cultural groups are what could best be described as 'subscription packages'; with a checklist of positions to hold in order gain membership.

For the 'Left' we have positions that fall under the umbrella of socially liberal and economically interventionist. For the 'Right' it is the binary opposite: socially conservative and economically liberal. Regardless of the outcomes they produce these are the standpoints of the tribe.

These coalitions of ideas feel consistent because everyone in the group continually reiterates them. The beliefs of the group are reinforced by the group's beliefs. With an added constant suspicion of outsiders, any attempt to influence their positions is vigorously resisted.

The internet was meant to be the great conversation, the space where difference would converge and enlightenment would prevail. Yet it instead seems to be forming into information ghettos, where these 'Left' and 'Right' groups inhabit spaces exclusive to one another. Increasingly this is even becoming the way that we consume our mainstream news.

While news outlets have always had perspectives and agendas, we are now experiencing what is best described as the 'Foxification' of news. It is a model that preaches solely to the converted and strokes and manipulates their biases. In the US we have seen Fox's tribal rival MSNBC adopt this model for the 'progressive' cultural group with similar success.

In Australia this is mimicked in a less extreme, but still significant, fashion by the News Ltd/Fairfax divide.

As a result public debate has now become an endless game of Pong, where these two cultural groups simply expel rhetoric into public space to be rejected by the other. The suspicion between the two cultural groups is so strong, that if one iterates a position then the other simply claims the opposite must be the truth.

Persuasive arguments aren't worth communicating because there is little intention of them being considered. Greater comprehension or even conversion are not motives. The objective is solely about expressing one's outrage at topic du jour.

This kind of rhetoric is designed solely to consolidate one's position within the pack. It is a combination of conformity to the group and a desire to increase your power within it. The louder you yell, the more impassioned your indignity, the more removed you are from the other reviled group.

Social media plays an important role in highlighting this phenomenon. There is the obvious echo-chamber of following only those who are members of your tribe.

However, there is also the interesting device of changing a Facebook profile picture to indicate a voting intention, or using a Twibbon to demonstrate support for a cause. These are not intended to be a persuasive arguments, in fact there is no argument at all. The audience is their peers, an indication that you above reproach with your adherence to the team.

This firm adherence to the group is expected of each member of the group, and anyone who would stray will not be tolerated.

Former ALP President and prominent Indigenous Australian Warren Mundine is a good current example of this. It is believed that he is 'selling out' by working with the new conservative government on indigenous issues. Instead it is expected that he get in the trenches and throw solution-less grenades at them. The conflict between the two tribes takes priority over any potential positive results. Conflict is the oxygen that they need to survive.

Conspicuous free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs insistence on choosing warriors like Andrew Bolt and Janet Albrechtsen to speak at their events indicates that their intentions are combative, and not persuasive.

No other organisation looking to attract sympathisers would go anywhere near such polarising figures. These are hostile acts, roadblocks to conversation that entrench mindsets and make finding consensus increasingly difficult.

During the election campaign I had to explain to my mother that Kevin Rudd's use of the phrase "working families" was an attempt to talk to her. As a member of a family that worked she was offended that someone not from her tribe would use a term that described her in his vision.

It was an indication of the depth of this cultural divide.

I'm not naïve enough to believe that differing political allegiances have ever simply been disagreements in the approach to problem solving. Yet the idea that we view our opposing group in this political culture as actively nefarious is highly detrimental to any problems being solved.

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The great climate fiction

IT is natural that when Tony Abbott told Asia-Pacific leaders he was going to repeal Australia's carbon tax he found no opposition, and a good deal of support instead. He mentioned it in plenary sessions and bilateral meetings with all the leaders.

In taking this action, Abbott is bringing us into line with Asia-Pacific practice. There is not one significant national carbon tax or emissions trading scheme operating anywhere in the Asia-Pacific.

One of the most disagreeable defects of the Rudd and Gillard governments was the way they so often misrepresented reality, especially international reality. They tried to do this on such a scale that ultimately the public could see through it on many issues, especially boats and climate change.

The politics of climate change the world over is full of rhetoric and devoid of action. If Australians are being asked to pay a tax, even if it's called an emissions trading scheme, they should compare what other countries are actually doing, not what some politician might once have said.

The ABC in particular runs a constant propaganda campaign in favour of the idea that the world is moving to put a price on carbon. But the information is never specific. Any ABC interviewer with a speck of competence or professional standards should always ask the following: Name the specific scheme? Is it actually in operation? How much of the economy does it cover? What is the price of carbon? How much revenue does it raise?

You can impose no real cost on your economy, but still have a scheme to brag about if you have economy-wide coverage but a tiny price, or a big price but a tiny coverage. Either way you have a good headline scheme to fool the ABC with.

But here are some actual facts. The UN Framework Convention on Climate has 195 members. Only 34 of those use anything resembling an emissions trading scheme. Of those, 27 are in the EU scheme. No one in the Asia-Pacific has an effective scheme.

What about these Chinese schemes we hear so much about on the ABC? There are seven designated pilot projects in China. One - that's right, one - has begun operation. That is in Shenzhen. So far all the permits are given away for free. It has had no impact at all on carbon emissions.

The Chinese government has indicated it may look at a national scheme for the five-year plan from 2016. This is at most speculative, and there are a million ways it could be completely ineffective, which is almost certainly the result. China is by far the world's biggest polluter. Its per capita emissions are now comparable with Europe's. It has some plans to reduce carbon intensity, that is, the amount of carbon per unit of production, but no plans to reduce the absolute size of its emissions.

Japan has effectively abandoned plans for an ETS. No economy-wide carbon tax or ETS is operating today. South Korea has a plan, but it will issue all permits for free in the first period and is looking to redesign its scheme partly to avoid the impact on electricity prices, which Australia's scheme had. New Zealand has a notional scheme, but the price is a meaningless $1 per tonne.

The US has no carbon tax or ETS and is unlikely ever to have one. The separate Californian scheme is frequently adduced by pro-tax Australian partisans. But this scheme covers only 37 per cent of emissions, compared with the Australian tax that covered 60 per cent of our emissions. More importantly, in California, 90 per cent of permits for electricity are given for free.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative covers several northern states in the US. But the price is $2.55 per tonne and it covers only electricity.

Canada does not have an ETS or a carbon tax. The Quebec scheme covers a minority of emissions and because the province is so reliant on hydro-electricity the scheme has little impact.

Some of the biggest carbon emitters in Asia - like Indonesia and India - not only do not have national carbon taxes or ETS schemes, they have massive fuel subsidies to make carbon-based fuels accessible to all their people. A fuel subsidy is the opposite of a carbon tax, it is a carbon subsidy.

The European scheme has a price of about $7. Famously, it covers a substantially smaller proportion of its emissions than our carbon tax did. Equally famously, in its first five years it tended to raise about $500 million a year whereas our carbon tax raised $9 billion a year. So all of Europe combined imposed a cost on itself of one-18th of the cost Australia imposed on itself.

Europe also allows, within its scheme, a certain amount of imports of Certified Emission Reduction Units, basically UN-approved carbon credits created in Third World countries. The price for these shonky bits of paper has now fallen below $1 per tonne.

Labor's Mark Butler was yesterday repeating the ALP mantra, much recited, too, by the Greens and the ABC, that not a single reputable climate scientist or economist endorses direct action of the kind Abbott and his minister, Greg Hunt, propose. This is untrue. The vast majority of the governments of the world, certainly the US and Canada, are using direct action mechanisms to address greenhouse gas emissions.

 The rise of gas as an energy source has been the key driver of reductions in the US, but tighter automobile emissions standards and many other direct action measures have also been important. Australia would be extremely foolish to move substantially faster or further than most of the world. That is what we did in the biggest way with our hugely destructive carbon tax.

To compare ourselves with the world we must be absolutely accurate about what the world is actually, really doing in its physical manifestation today, not what some EU bureaucrat or NGO activist is willing to say in an always unchallenging ABC interview. Even within Europe's compromised scheme there is a great deal of re-thinking as economic logic trumps climate change piety.

The carbon tax and the ETS are based on a complete misrepresentation of what other countries are doing. Australians have never voted for either an ETS or a carbon tax and, unless the world changes radically, are unlikely to do so in the future.

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Preoccupied by hatred of conservative leaders, the Australian Left fails to offer realistic policies

Chris Kenny

MORE than a month on from Tony Abbott's election victory there are eerily familiar signals from Labor and the commentariat.

They betray not only a failure to learn from last month's landslide but wilful blindness to similar lessons from the entire Howard era.

From the denunciation of Abbott as a "relentlessly negative" misogynist, to Kevin Rudd's pre-election warning that Abbott's policies would cause "some sort of conflict" with Indonesia, we are, as the quip goes, seeing deja vu all over again.

With the clarity of hindsight, it is accepted wisdom that Labor and its acolytes underestimated John Howard.

Yet the same clique, even some of the same players, seem to be stumbling into the same pitfall with Abbott.

Intense efforts to undermine Abbott's electability failed to prevent a strong mandate for the Coalition, and had the side benefit of lowering expectations.

And already, the chagrin in the commentariat echoes the anti-Howard whining of more than a decade ago, when by focusing their resentment on their conqueror, Labor and much of the commentariat avoided an examination of their own positions, policies and failings.

Their disdain for Howard dragged them away from mainstream concerns, while Howard made it his business to focus not on the Left critiques but on mainstream sensibilities.

Abbott saw all this and clearly learned. The Left doesn't seem to have taken heed.

In The Australian during the 1996 campaign, Glenn Milne summarised Labor's strategy. "With policy convergence almost totally achieved, the issue of Howard's stature is now a live one," said Milne. "Howard has always suffered - however unfairly - from the 'little Johnny' tag."

And on the day of the election, The Australian's own Phillip Adams captured this best when he determined to at least start the Howard years with some deft, if indignant, humour. "Howard would be a fine prime minister," he imagined, "if Dee Why or Coogee had its own prime minister. But he wants to be prime minister of the whole country."

From this distance we no longer need to imagine.

We know the Howard government substantially deepened and strengthened relations with Indonesia, China, Japan, South Korea, India and much of the region.

Support through the Asian financial meltdown was crucial, and difficulties created by the intervention to support East Timor's independence, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the trauma of terrorism in the region were often leveraged to enhance relationships rather than undermine progress.

More than a decade of economic prosperity and reform enhanced Australia's global standing. We hosted the Olympic Games, APEC, Bill Clinton, Hu Jintao and George Bush.

Howard won a landslide in 1996, clung on in 1998, consolidated in turbulent times in 2001 and defied the odds in 2004.

Throughout this period, Howard's many critics in the parliament, on the airwaves and in the oped pages made life difficult for him but never managed to knock him far off course.

In the end, it was an inconvenient drought, overreach on industrial relations and Howard's intransigence over succession that gifted Rudd the chance to replace him.

Rudd paid Labor's nemesis the ultimate compliment by winning office (deceptively, as it turns out) as Howard Lite.

Over the intervening years the signs had been obvious. But rather than adjusting policies to mainstream settings - say on border protection or indigenous advancement - the Left's obsession with hateful attacks on Howard poisoned its politics.

Yet surprisingly, right at the outset, the diagnosis was explicit. As Paul Kelly outlined in The March of Patriots, the Liberal campaign director (now Trade Minister), Andrew Robb, described Labor's malady in his National Press Club address a fortnight after Howard won office, when he outlined the rise of the Howard battlers.

"This shift is not an overnight development," he revealed. "It owes much to Labor's attempts over 15 years or more to chase the votes of the socially progressive, often highly educated, affluent end of middle-class Australia."

Robb said Keating and his colleagues came to reflect the values and priorities of this clique. "Labor ended up governing for a few and not for all of us. There are now deep contradictions within the Labor Party in regard to what they stand for and who they represent."

The inescapable shock of those words is that Robb could deliver them to the Press Club tomorrow - changing only the names - to reflect on how Labor governed under Rudd and Julia Gillard, leading to the current Abbott ascendancy.

Lessons that should have been learned 17 years ago seem unabsorbed.

For the best part of two decades, Labor has paid no more than lip service to that best known of Sun Tzu's dictates on the art of war: "Know your enemies and know yourself."

Year after year, issue after issue, the progressive commentariat declared Howard misguided, and the public wrong to have faith in him.

In the Sydney Morning Herald in February 2000 Mungo MacCallum lectured on Indonesia in the wake of Howard's East Timor intervention. His reasonable summation was that Indonesia could disintegrate or emerge as a great democracy and Australia had to prepare for both eventualities.

But he gave the prime minister no credit: "There is no sign that John Howard and his government really understand either." Really?

In The Sydney Morning Herald in 1998, David Marr looked through the prism of religion to see a shrivelled heart on indigenous issues: "Contrition is what young John Howard wasn't taught by the Methodists."

Now Marr's religious preoccupations focus on Abbott's Catholicism and its implications for women: "As a devoted Catholic he won't give up the possibility that at some point in the future, and it might be hundreds of years away, there will be a possibility to do something about abortion."

Abbott's physical stature and fitness prevent direct comparisons with "little Johnny" but the gibes about small targets and limited vision are repeated.

Unabashed about his admiration for Howard, Abbott knows being underestimated is no disadvantage in politics.

Last year Marr's essay on Abbott said: "Australia doesn't want Tony Abbott. We never have."  And three months ago, the AFR's Tingle saw problems for Abbott. "Rudd's return has only once again raised the question of whether Abbott is electable."

The day before last month's election, Tim Colebatch in The Age said even Abbott's foreign aid cuts would undermine his ambitions: "This will not help Tony Abbott's chances of getting the Indonesia co-operation he needs to stop the boats."

Since the election the tactics, the enmity and the perspectives are familiar. (Even the cacophony over entitlements this week provides an echo of the early Howard government instability on similar issues.)

In Abbott's first week, Tingle warned about the "clear rejection" of Abbott's policies by Indonesia, and when that didn't seem to be matched by reality she urged us not to "get sucked in by the Prime Minister's weasel words in Jakarta".

"Abbott said in Jakarta the only thing he was ultimately interested in was 'stopping' the boats," wrote Tingle last week. "It is not clear whether that will ever quite happen."

We will see. But after a dozen years of demonising and doubting Howard and, now, Abbott on asylum-seeker policy it seems inconceivable that the Left could continue this posturing if the boats are stopped again.

Or, perhaps the delusion will continue.

More HERE





A-G Jarrod Bleijie announces Qld Government to change dangerous sex offenders law to bypass courts

The Queensland Government plans to take away the courts' power to determine whether some sex offenders remain behind bars indefinitely.

Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie has introduced legislative amendments into Parliament, allowing him to recommend that serious violent offenders be kept in jail indefinitely.

"It does take it out of the court and it does put it in my jurisdiction," he said.  "We are rebalancing the scales of justice."

Premier Campbell Newman admits to reservations about the move.  "I want to stress how absolutely reluctant we are to do this," he said.

Mr Bleijie says his recommendation would then be signed-off by the Governor.  He says it will be another layer of protection for the community.  "It will be reserved for the 'worst of the worst' - it's legislation of last resort," he said.

He says cases will be reviewed annually by two psychiatrists.  "We have put an assessment process in there with two psychiatrists currently under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1945 as well," he said.

"The fundamental difference is though if in my view this person still poses a risk to the community, then my recommendation to Executive Council will be not to release this person."

Mr Bleijie says this is the 'plan B' he previously flagged to keep notorious serial rapist Robert John Fardon in prison.

Fardon was the first person to be detained indefinitely under Queensland's Dangerous Prisoners and Sexual Offenders Act.

The 64-year-old has spent most of his adult life in prison after being convicted of numerous sexual offences against women and children.  Fardon was briefly released under a supervision order earlier this month, but he was returned to jail when Mr Bleijie lodged an appeal against the decision.

A review of Fardon's indefinite sentence was due in August in the Supreme Court in Brisbane, but was adjourned until next month.

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Tasmania Parliament set to debate 'improved' voluntary euthanasia bill

Euthanasia advocates and opponents will be watching the Tasmania Parliament closely this week as it again attempts to make it legal for terminally ill people to end their lives.

There have been several attempts in Australia, but euthanasia supporters believe the island state could lead the nation in enacting assisted dying laws.

Tasmania's 25-member Lower House will start debating the Voluntary Assisted Dying bill today, with MPs allowed a conscience vote.

The bill, co-sponsored by Premier Lara Giddings and Greens leader Nick McKim, will allow terminally ill Tasmanians to end their lives 10 days after a process of making three requests to their doctor.

However, it is not expected to pass, with 10 Liberal Opposition members likely to be joined by three Labor MPs in voting against it.

Greens MPs remain optimistic and believe just one of two votes will decide the bill's fate.

Cassy O'Connor says there are Liberal MPs who agree with the assisted dying bill before Parliament but will vote against it this week.

"I know on voluntary assisted dying there are a number of Liberal members who are more socially progressive than the vote on the floor of the house will show," she said.

It will be Mr McKim's second attempt at introducing euthanasia laws after a bid in 2009 failed.
Tasmania Greens say bill is better than euthanasia laws in place overseas

The party believes the latest bill is a vast improvement and will be better than those already in place overseas.

"This legislation has got a very strong system of protection against people being coerced into participating in the scheme, including jail terms of up to five years," Mr McKim said.

The bill has the backing of voluntary euthanasia advocates, including the former Northern Territory chief minister Marshall Perron who introduced Australia's first laws in the territory in the mid-90s.

But after three assisted suicides they were overturned by the Commonwealth, which has power to override Northern Territory legislation.

Mr Perron says Tasmania could now lead the way.  "Elderly dying Australians are killing themselves in violent methods and it's just disgraceful and what they want is a more peaceful, reasonable option," he said.

The Liberals' Rene Hidding says research in countries where it is legal has revealed flaws. "Research in the Flanders region of Belgium has uncovered frequent abuses of the euthanasia law in most health institutions, 32 per cent of the officially reported euthanasia cases occurred without the explicit consent of the patient," she said.

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Tony Abbott primed for a double dissolution on carbon pricing

Tony Abbott will have the first half of a constitutional trigger for a double-dissolution election in place by Christmas, after announcing plans to present his carbon price repeal legislation this year.

The move keeps open the chances of another election in the first half of 2014 if the eight bill package is rejected in December as expected and then rejected a second time by a hostile Senate in March or April.

The Prime Minister released an exposure draft of the package on Monday along with a commitment to introduce the legislation as his government's first order of business when Parliament convenes for four weeks from November 12.

The government claims removal of the carbon price would send household energy prices tumbling, saving the average household $3000 over six years from July 1, when it would come into effect.

Failure to pass the repeal legislation before July 1 would either delay the scrapping substantially, or require any legislation passed subsequently be retrospective.

The government's urgency comes despite repeated Labor commitments to combine with the Greens to block any repeal in the Senate, the configuration of which does not change until July.

Mr Abbott said he wanted to give new Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, whom he described as "nothing if not a political pragmatist", a chance to repent because the election had shown clear public support for scrapping the carbon price.

"The people of Australia understandably want lower cost of living, and they want more secure jobs," Mr Abbott said.  "This bill gives them both. That's why the pressure on the Labor Party in the end not to oppose this bill, I believe, will be irresistible.  "Australian households will be better off to the tune of $550 a year.

"When this bill is passed, the government estimates that power prices will go down by 9 per cent, gas prices will go down by 7 per cent, and that means that the average power bill will be $200 a year lower and the average gas bill will be $70 a year lower."

Asked whether he wanted the Senate vote before Christmas, Mr Abbott said: "The short answer, if you like, is yes."

"But I'm only the PM," he added with a wry smile. "I realise that the Senate operates in accordance with its own rhythms and patterns. I would like the Senate to consider this matter as quickly as possible."

Mr Abbott would not repeat statements by other members of his government that the carbon price repeal would inevitably lead to a double dissolution if frustrated by the Senate.

The government preference for a vote in both houses before Christmas suggests the Prime Minister wants, at the very least, the threat of a snap poll and the political bargaining leverage that comes from keeping the option alive.

Under the provisions of the constitution designed to resolve deadlocks between the two houses of Parliament, a prime minister can ask the governor-general to dissolve both and order a fresh election if a bill is rejected or otherwise amended in an unacceptable way, twice over a greater than three-month interval.

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ALP still tearing itself apart

What you expect from a party of haters

Disquiet within the parliamentary Labor Party over the leadership contest and selection of the shadow ministry is threatening to boil over, with some MPs furious about the public presentation of harmony while in reality, the process had been "brutal and treacherous".

The depth of feeling has brought claims of dishonesty and vote selling for jobs in the caucus ballot, and an allegation that a parcel of votes was delivered to the ALP's headquarters by the Right faction last Friday, just an hour before the membership election closed.

Left faction MPs loyal to unsuccessful leadership aspirant Anthony Albanese claim the Victorian Left faction chieftain, Kim Carr, voted for Bill Shorten in the secret ballot, despite his denials.

Another eight members of the Left's 36 MPs also broke ranks for Mr Shorten, giving him sufficient votes in the caucus to overcome a 60/40 vote in the rank-and-file ballot in favour of Mr Albanese.

Fairfax Media understands that the leadership ballot got off to a rocky start because Mr Albanese, the former deputy prime minister in the second Rudd cabinet, had been led to believe that if he ran, Mr Shorten would not.

While some senior Labor figures, such as former Speaker Anna Burke and former minister Warren Snowdon, have spoken out about the insidious role of factions in the process of selecting the Shorten frontbench, there was also anger at the way the month-long leadership ballot was conducted, and the way some MPs voted.

One senior Labor source described the situation in the Left as "open warfare", with Mr Albanese said to be seeking revenge on those in his faction who did not give him their leadership vote. "One or two more votes in caucus and he would have been leader, so he's not happy," one insider said.

Another said recriminations were still being meted out in the Left, with Albanese loyalists driving them. "The knives are out, yes," the source said. "It is very clear that if you didn't vote with your faction, you're going to be punished."

While both Mr Shorten and Mr Albanese emerged from the contest professing support and respect for each other, sources suggest the relationship is more strained after the Shorten camp was seen to engage in activities that were "not in the spirit" of the ballot. These included a revelation from a taxi driver that Mr Shorten had been overheard arranging to be asked a question during a party debate between the two hopefuls.

The behaviour of MPs in the caucus ballot also provoked anger in the Albanese camp.

According to one source, Mr Albanese secured 80 per cent of the rank-and-file votes in the ACT yet he got none of the three caucus votes from ACT MPs in the separate caucus ballot.

Fairfax Media has been told a parcel of 42 votes was delivered to the ALP's head office by Mr Shorten's supporters just an hour before the ballot ended.

However, a source from the Shorten camp said it was possible votes were pooled to ensure they were counted.

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Teacher used student's log-in to access porn sites

The Opposition says the South Australian Education Department has given $30,000 in 'hush money' to a former student who was wrongly accused of pornography offences.

It said a teacher viewed hundreds of porn websites using the log-in of the then-year 10 student in 2004.

Opposition education spokesman David Pisoni said the man was still a teacher at another school.

He said the settlement required the former student to keep secret the details of the case.

"South Australians will be asking themselves what sort of an Education Department do we have when executives at the highest level appear to be running around the state with bags of money to shut people up that have criticisms or concerns or are victims of the education system," he said.

"Unfortunately the student had already been suspended and went from being a straight-A student to leaving school.

"It's a shocking situation, and for the Government to think that the best way of dealing with this is to pay someone hush money is an extraordinary development."

Premier Jay Weatherill suggested the confidentiality constraints on the former student should be removed.

"From my perspective, I think that if a victim of a particular wrongdoing wants to say something publicly, I don't think as a government we should be standing in their way, so if they want that confidentiality waived, I think that's something we should give consideration to," he said.

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Qld Government's tough anti-bikie laws passed after marathon debate in Parliament

Queensland Attorney-General Jarrod Bleijie says tough new anti-gang laws passed in Parliament early this morning are just the first phase of a crackdown on outlaw bikies.

Brazen violence and intimidation on the Gold Coast prompted the Queensland Government to come down harshly on outlaw motorcycle gangs and their members.

New laws targeting bikie gangs passed with bipartisan support after a marathon session in State Parliament, with three separate bills adopted just before 3:00am (AEST).

The legislation names 26 "criminal organisations", including the Bandidos, Finks and Mongols. It restricts their members' and associates movements and meetings, and increases minimum sentences for their crimes.

Newman vows bikies 'will be destroyed'

Premier Campbell Newman last night used his parliamentary majority to rush through the laws.  "They are very tough laws - the toughest in Australia," he said.  "The unequivocal purpose of these laws is to destroy these criminal organisations.

"I say this evening: take off your colours, get a real job, act like decent, law-abiding human beings, and become proper citizens in the state of Queensland and you won't have to go to jail.

"But if you continue to persist as members of criminal gangs, with criminal activities, creating fear and intimidation across Queensland, you will be destroyed and we make no apologies for that."

Police Minister Jack Dempsey says the laws should give assurance to law-abiding citizens.  "People need to know when they go to bed at night and the darkness of the evening comes over, that they can sleep safely in their beds," he said.

Mr Bleijie told Parliament that more anti-gang legislation is likely.  "I would fully expect... that in the two sittings of Parliament we will be debating more tough measures," he said.

"As the criminal motorcycle gang members respond to these laws - come up out of the ground from where they are hidden at the moment - we will have to introduce more laws targeting criminal motorcycle gang members."

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Bob Carr gets a grip  -- on illegals policy

TANYA Plibersek's view on refugees and migrants is shaped by a deeply personal experience, but that doesn't mean the deputy Labor leader will be soft on asylum-seeker policy.

Former foreign minister Bob Carr has warned Labor it faces years in opposition if it doesn't match the coalition's hardline border protection measures.

He has told his Right faction colleagues there should be no "daylight" between the ALP and the Abbott government on asylum seekers.

"If you want to embrace the Greens-Left-Fairfax-ABC position, you are going to go backwards at the next election," he said, according to Labor sources quoted by The West Australian.

Ms Plibersek, the daughter of Slovenian migrants, says her family's experience has given her a degree of compassion on the red-hot issue.

"I guess the difference with my parents was that they waited in refugee camps in Austria and Italy and they were offered a choice between Canada and Australia," she told ABC radio on Tuesday.

A balanced policy approach was needed to ensure asylum seekers do not take up dangerous travel options.

Allowing asylum seekers to get on a boat in Indonesia and make a dangerous journey to Australia was not the next best way to have a compassionate approach, Ms Plibersek said.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has flagged a more compassionate Labor approach to the refugee issue.

Former immigration minister Brendan O'Connor said he didn't want to see the vilification of people who were genuinely seeking asylum.

"We cannot allow people to continue to die at sea," he told Sky News.  "I'm very sensitive to the difficult issues this presents. People want to see compassion."

Parliamentary secretary Simon Birmingham said Senator Carr was offering "sage advice" to Labor.

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New Vic. rules allow speed cameras to be concealed, but police say it's OK to flash lights and warn others

POLICE say they are happy for drivers to flash their lights to warn other motorists about speed cameras.

Traffic Superintendent Dean McWhirter today said he was happy for motorists to flash their lights to warn other motorists they were approaching a speed camera.

"If that occurs I am comfortable with that because it means actually people are getting the message," Supt McWhirter said today.

Supt McWhirter also defended rule changes, revealed in the Herald Sun today, which allow the hiding of speed cameras behind bushes and road signs.

"It was done to make sure that there was some protection in relation to the mobile speed camera operators," he said. "To make sure the risk to them is mitigated.

"Unfortunately, what we know is that there have been a number of incidents where mobile speed camera vehicles have been swerved at.

"In the last 12 months there have been 247 incidents of threats in relation to mobile speed camera operators.  "And of those 247 incidents, 110 of those have been swerving at mobile speed cameras."

Supt McWhirter confirmed there would be occasions that operators would be concealed by bushes or signs to protect them.  "That's a commonsense approach," he said.

The force policy used to say that "under no circumstances" were cameras to be concealed by any covert means.  It also used to ban them on downhill stretches of road unless the site had a significant speed-related crash record.

The new rules - effective immediately - permit mobile speed cameras to be hidden behind trees, bushes, posts and road signs to lessen the risk of harm to camera operators from angry motorists.

They also allow them to be used at the bottom of hills and on slopes if the "road safety objective" can't be achieved at an alternative location.

"There is no restriction from a technical, legislative or enforcement perspective on a mobile road safety camera being operated on a slope, hill or gradient," the new rules say.

The force spent months creating its new policy after the Herald Sun revealed some cameras were being hidden despite the ban and also that fines had to be scrapped because a camera was wrongly set up on a steep hill.

Almost 510,000 motorists paid more than $103 million in mobile speed camera fines in the past year.

Victoria Police yesterday defended the changes to the mobile speed camera policy, saying they included recommendations made by speed camera commissioner Gordon Lewis.

"The amendments were made to specifically focus on the occupational health and safety of mobile speed camera operators, which is paramount in ensuring they can work in a safe environment," force spokesman Leonie Johnson said.

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Labor party hostility to Israel

EXPLAINING why her foreign minister was "so hostile to Israel" and blaming the Jewish community for the weakness of her cabinet and caucus on Israel - this was what Bob Carr had reduced Julia Gillard to in her final months as prime minister.

Leaked documents reveal the acute embarrassment Senator Carr created for Ms Gillard over the question of Australia's support for Israel.

They also provide a remarkable insight into Labor's ongoing internal tensions over the Middle East.

Ms Gillard's briefing notes for a Jewish community event in Sydney in April included talking points with suggested answers to the question: "Bob Carr is so hostile to Israel what are you doing about it?"

The then prime minister's speaking notes also included a plea for the Jewish community to lobby Labor MPs to bolster support for her position in cabinet and caucus.

"There were not many voices in caucus," she complained. "This community has work to do."

The split over the Middle East came to a head last December when Ms Gillard told cabinet of her intention to vote no to a UN resolution giving the Palestinian territories observer status at the UN.

This triggered a backlash within government, led by Senator Carr, that forced Ms Gillard to back down and instruct Australia's UN ambassador to abstain from the vote.

It is the only clear instance on record of Ms Gillard being thwarted by her own cabinet and caucus.

It ended a strong bipartisan position on firm support for Israel, demanding negotiation without preconditions towards a two-state solution in the Middle East.

Australia received diplomatic complaints from the US and Israel for failing to vote against the resolution, which passed comfortably regardless. And domestically, Jewish community leaders conveyed their disappointed to the government.

So on April 23, when Ms Gillard went to a high-powered lunch at Chifley Tower, hosted by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, she was in a difficult position. At the event she would become the first Australian politician to sign the London Declaration on Anti-Semitism.

But she also might have to apologise for her foreign minister, who had led the charge on the UN vote and also had made strident comments about Israeli settlements on the West Bank being illegal.

"I know Bob is genuinely committed to Israel's security and survival," her speaking notes suggested. "He feels exceptionally strongly on the settlements."

The notes also directly addressed the way Ms Gillard was rolled by her party on the UN resolution; and they suggested putting the onus back on the Jewish community.

"There were not as many voices in cabinet supporting a 'no' vote on that resolution," they prompted. "There were not many voices in caucus. There were a lot of members who should have been heard from - and who were not. So I believed this exposed a weakness in the community's reach compared with previous years."

This issue was so divisive for Labor that during the election campaign Labor's Melbourne Ports MP, Michael Danby, took out a newspaper advertisement to distance himself from his own foreign minister.

Once Labor's new leadership team is resolved on Sunday, it can expect to be lobbied fervently by the Jewish community to strengthen its support.

New Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who was critical of the Gillard government's posture at the UN, has signalled Australia's intention to return to a position of unstinting support for Israel.

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States and Feds at odds over homosexual "marriage"

THE Commonwealth is throwing down the gauntlet to the ACT on gay marriage as legal experts in Tasmania say there's no reason states shouldn't be able to make their own laws on the issue.

Commonwealth Attorney-General George Brandis has confirmed the federal government will challenge the ACT's same-sex marriage law in the High Court once it passes, which could happen within the next four weeks.

"Irrespective of anyone's views on the desirability or otherwise of same-sex marriage, it is clearly in Australia's interests that there be nationally consistent marriage laws," Senator Brandis said.

The Commonwealth Marriage Act provided that consistency but the ACT's law would be "a threat to that well-established position", he said.

ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell said he and Senator Brandis had a "polite but forthright" discussion about the matter during a meeting of the standing committee on law and justice in Sydney on Thursday.

"We will be robustly defending our law and asserting that our law is capable of concurrent operation with the Commonwealth law and that it is not inconsistent," he told AAP.

A Tasmania Law Reform Institute report released on Thursday has found no legal reason for states not to make laws on marriage.

But its authors do say there is no way to predict how the High Court would rule on a challenge.

The island state made a bid to go it alone on gay marriage last year when its lower house became the first in the country to pass legislation on the issue.

It was narrowly defeated in the upper house because of concerns about its legitimacy under the constitution and whether it left Tasmania open to a costly High Court challenge.

In the ACT, the first same-sex weddings could happen as early as December.

Marriage Equality chair and independent NSW MP Alex Greenwich said the fact the federal government was intervening would encourage same-sex couples to get married sooner rather than later.

"The more people we have expressing their love and commitment will make it harder for any laws to be overturned," he told AAP.

But Senator Brandis warned it might be distressing for same-sex couples who marry under the new law, only to have their union later invalidated by a High Court challenge.

"It would be better for all concerned if the ACT government waited for a short time until the validity of the proposed law was determined by the High Court," he said.

But Mr Corbell said the territory had "declined to do that" because there's strong support for the law, which could pass within the next four weeks.

"We are disappointed that the Commonwealth professes concern for same-sex couples entering into marriage in case the law is struck down when it is they themselves who are seeking to have it struck down," he told AAP.

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