Melbourne could run out of water in ten years because of population growth and climate change

Wotta lotta bore-water!  For a start, Melbourne already has a big desalination plant that is hardly used. 

Secondly, global warming will produce more evaporation off the oceans and hence MORE rain, not less. 

Thirdly, the Snowy scheme already pours lots of dammed water into the sea for "environmental" reasons.  That water could easily be diverted inland into the Murray river. There is already a tunnel for that purpose. And again there is already a pipeline linking the Murray to Melbourne's water supply. 

The galoots below would seem not to have a clue about the Melbourne water supply.  They are however Greenies so are probably just frauds who want to frighten people. The only threat to the Melbourne water supply is the Greenies who want to send already-dammed water out to sea


One of the world's most livable cities could be facing an acute water shortage problem in the next ten to 15 years time no thanks to climate change and population growth.

Water supply in Melbourne may fall and reach a crisis point if no precautionary methods are taken to contain the problem from today, reports The Age.

The publication says demand for water in the state is expected to exceed the supply by 2028.

According to projections made by City West Water, Yarra Valley Water and South East Water demand for water is projected to surge to about 75 percent in the next 40 years, the publication reports.

Some water corporation produced the probable scenario for the state's water supply, Environment Victoria's acting chief executive, Nicholas Aberle told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Aberle said there was a bunch of things that Melbournians can do to address the situation by incorporating several water saving habits.

He said people should learn ways on saving storm water and turning that into a valuable water resource. 'During the drought (1997 to 2009) people were managing water efficiency by only using 155 litres a day.

'People should have a behavioural change and use 100 litres of water a day and handle the water resources efficiently,' he said.

Melbourne Water spokesman Joseph Keller told the publication that people living in the state were 'encouraged to limit their consumption to 155 litres per person per day.'

At present Melbourne Water reports that residents in the state use 162 litres of water per person per day in 2016-17.

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Liberal Party leader reveals his plans to help Aboriginal communities in South Australia's APY Lands

The APY is an Aboriginal tribal area.  The Leftist government is just spending money on more bureaucracy rather than doing anything practical to help Aborigines

PLANS for Aboriginal treaties in South Australia are a “cruel hoax” that will not be supported by the Liberals, Opposition Leader Steven Marshall says.

In a move that will set the tone for how a Liberal Government would handle Aboriginal issues, Mr Marshall says symbolism will be scrapped and health, education, jobs and safety prioritised.

Speaking to the Sunday Mail during a three-day trip to the APY Lands last week, Mr Marshall said treaties were unworkable and not a priority for Aboriginal communities in South Australia.

“Treaties are a cruel hoax because they promise hope but don’t deliver practical outcomes,” he said.

“We have been here three days and nobody has raised the issue. The Anangu people want practical solutions and that is what we will be doing.

“The Government has neglected (health, education, jobs and safety) over the past 15 years while they have focused on gestures that are not practical for Aboriginal people across South Australia.”

Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kyam Maher last year announced the State Government would begin treaty discussions with Aboriginal South Australians as the next step towards reconciliation.

But Mr Marshall, who has vowed to become the first SA Premier to hold the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio if elected in March, said the Liberals will not support Labor’s treaty plan.

“Federal Labor governments from Hawke to Keating to Rudd and Gillard have talked about a treaty for 30 years,” he said.

“The problem on the APY Lands is there have been too many groups trying to provide solutions on complex issues but these are being done without any useful co-ordination whatsoever.”

Mr Marshall knows his attitude will be criticised by some in the Aboriginal community, which has previously supported the State Government’s treaty plans.

“Labor have done a lot more of the symbolic recognitions. The Liberals, by contrast, have proved to be very practical in terms of management of Aboriginal Affairs,” he said.

Mr Marshall said his Stolen Generation Bill, which was knocked back by Labor in 2014 before being reintroduced by the State Government in another form, showed his commitment to good outcomes for Aboriginal people.

Under Mr Marshall’s plan, about 300 Aboriginals would have been awarded $50,000 compensation in-line with the maximum amount payable from the Victims of Crime fund.

“The South Australian Government has still not paid a single cent to the people,” he said.

The State Government has set aside $4.4 million over five years to support the treaty process, the appointment of an independent Treaty Commissioner and governance training and support for Aboriginal nations to participate in the treaty negotiations.

Legislation underpinning Labor’s treaty plans are set to be debated in State Parliament in coming weeks.

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New Leftist government already plunging Western Australia into more debt

Shades of Kevvy Rudd and Julia Gillard

THE McGowan Government is splurging more than $7 million a day on delivering election promises.

Figures compiled by the State Opposition show that in the 130 days since the March 11 election, Labor has committed to spending nearly $1 billion in projects.

This is despite the fact Premier Mark McGowan famously told West Australians within weeks of coming to power that “we now confront the worst set of finances since the Great Depression”.

Accusing the Government of “financial recklessness”, Opposition leader Mike Nahan said the $925 million spend was unacceptable given the new administration had yet to even deliver its first Budget, which is due on September 7.

He warned Labor’s spending would see State debt soar to more than $50 billion by the next election in 2021, close to double the $27 billion debt it inherited from the former Liberal-National Government.

“The McGowan Government has committed to spending more than $7 million every single day since it was elected,” Dr Nahan said.

“To commit almost a billion dollars expenditure without any Budget scrutiny is financial recklessness and anything but the gold standard transparency Mr McGowan promised.”
WA Opposition Leader Mike Nahan, who has accused the Government of financial 'recklessness'.

According to the Opposition’s figures, spending has included the Joondalup hospital extension ($167 million), a new inner-city college at Kitchener Park in Subiaco ($68 million) and education assistants ($40 million).

Dr Nahan said West Australians were being slugged big dollars — including water and electricity bill hikes — to help pay for Labor’s pledges.

“On June 22, the State Government hit WA families with massive increases in household expenses, which it said would raise an additional $200 million over the next four years,” Dr Nahan said.

“At its current rate of spending all of those savings have been spent in the last 30 days.”

WA Treasurer Ben Wyatt yesterday fired back by mocking Dr Nahan’s record as the State’s former financial chief.

“Today clearly marks the first day in his political career that Mike Nahan has been concerned about Government spending,” Mr Wyatt said.

“However, I won’t be taking any advice from the man whose disastrous track record of financial mismanagement delivered the tight financial position that he suddenly appears to be concerned about.

“Since inheriting the worst set of books in the history of WA, the McGowan Government has got on with the job of fixing the mess left behind while also delivering on our election commitments.

“We are proud to have invested in jobs, education, hospitals, public transport and country roads, while also making the tough decisions to go towards Budget repair.”

WA Premier Mark McGowan laughed off the opposition criticising his government for spending $7 million a day meeting election commitments, saying the Liberals were spending $81 million a day.

Mr McGowan says the cash has been well-spent on a new western suburbs school and expanding WA's busiest hospital.

"He talks rubbish. For him to suddenly claim the moral high ground when it comes to debt and deficit is laughable and also embarrassing for him," the premier told reporters in Fremantle on Sunday.

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Disgusting Queensland police show no regard for the law

They hate it that they don't have a total monopoly on gun ownership

FOR a Justice of the Peace, Gympie gun dealer Ron Owen has had a lot of run-ins with the police. This month he further increased his lead over all rivals for the self anointed title, “most charged innocent man in Queensland.” Claiming to have faced more than 2850 charges, he says he has beaten them all.

The Gympie Times reports that on Thursday Ron Owen revealed that he had now received one more vindication, when police withdrew an assault charge involving a person Mr Owen claimed was lawfully removed from his McMahon Rd gun shop.

The defence was that he acted lawfully, but that police did not when an officer seized the shop’s CCTV footage.

Mr Owen says the would-be customer had become agitated at the time staff took to finalise a eight-month old lay-by, so much so that Mr Owen refunded payments, rather than take responsibility for arming him. Yesterday Mr Owen said police wrote to him this week, saying the charge had been withdrawn.

But Mr Owen insists it is not a case of him beating the law. It has always been, he says, a case of the law protecting the citizen against sometimes mistaken agents of the state.

Some of his trouble started years ago, when he published a recipe for black powder, something which he says could also be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Then came the gun de-activation case, in which he was charged with de-activating guns other than by approved methods.

He made history (and The Gympie Times front page) by re-activating an approved replica in less than 15 minutes, at the bar table of the Gympie Magistrates Court, armed only with a screwdriver and pliers. The witness forced to acknowledge his point was the head of police Ballistics.

“I would have done it quicker if I’d remembered to put the firing pin back in the first time,” Mr Owen said later. “And did you notice I didn’t use the pliers?”

Then came the gun buyback in which he proved, using data from police computers (purchased second hand at a police auction), that he was being paid less than anyone else for “millions of dollars worth of gun parts.”

An attempt was once also made to cancel his gun dealer’s licence.

Once, after civil action in which police were ordered to pay costs, he says he had to take further action to force payment. At one point he and his family were offered witness protection by the then Criminal Justice Commission.

He refused, because it would have silenced him.

He wonders how many others, without such generous legal support, have suffered serious injustice.

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What will Canberra's Human Rights Commission outlaw next?

Mayhem and mad logic in the ACT

What to do when lying facedown on the floor, hands over head, when the neighbourhood is firebombed and houses are getting sprayed with an AK-47 automatic weapon?

It is a question residents in the Canberra southern district of Tuggeranong must have asked this week with the fifth such incident in recent months, as the turf war among rival outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCG) intensifies.

“I just think it’s a matter of time before an innocent person gets caught up in that and gets injured or killed,” said Chief Police Officer Justine Saunders.

Residents caught in such terrifying situations could, while waiting for police and emergency services, draw solace from reading the secular version of the Good Book, in this case the ACT’s Human Rights Act 2004. Section 9 provides that “no-one may be arbitrarily deprived of life.”

The responsibility for ensuring compliance with that Act sits with the ACT Human Rights Commission and its president, Dr Helen Watchirs. Compared with that of her federal counterpart Gillian Triggs, Watchirs has a relatively paltry base salary of $220,381.

Unlike the federal government, the ACT’s minority government, a Labor/Greens coalition, takes very seriously the decrees of its HRC president. In July 2016 the government rejected calls from police to enact anti-consorting legislation to address the increasing and longstanding OMCG threat, citing Watchirs’ advice that the proposed laws “should have no place in a modern democratic society”.

The “level of OMCG activity in the ACT remains relatively low”, submitted Watchirs, who presumably doesn’t get out to Tuggeranong much. As recently as 2015 then Attorney-General Simon Corbell had been in favour of the legislation, declaring he did not want OMCGs to see Canberra as a “soft touch”.

The fact gangs have since come to the capital in droves is not so much them seeing Canberra as a soft touch but more a laughing stock.

Also opposing the laws was the Greens’ Shane Rattenbury, currently the Minister for Justice. Ostensibly the junior partner in the coalition, he enjoys a disproportionate influence — the green eminence, one might quip. His party’s agreement with Labor is based on having one’s cake and eating it too, for Rattenbury enjoys all the perks of being a minister while not having to observe cabinet solidarity.

As with Watchirs, Rattenbury strongly professes a belief in civil liberties, hence his opposition to the anti-consorting laws. Yet only days after opposing this legislation he introduced a private amendment to the territory’s anti-discrimination laws, since passed, to outlaw “vilification” on the grounds of religion.

This includes “serious contempt” for and “severe ridicule of” a person and/or a group of people, and it can be infringed simply by displaying an emblem on a T-shirt or a post on social media.

So what was Rattenbury’s justification for such sweeping legislation and the consequent restrictions upon freedom of speech? Very little as it turns out. He cited vandalism of an Islamic centre (for which there were already provisions in criminal law), and claimed that houses had received leaflets containing “anti-Muslim material” in opposition to a proposed mosque.

In any event this legislation appears to contravene section 16 of the Human Rights Act, which provides for people to have the right to “hold opinions without interference,” and “freedom of expression”, including “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” Surely it was only a matter of time before Watchirs objected strongly to Rattenbury’s amendment?

Not only did Watchirs not oppose this amendment: she approved of it. You heard right: the human rights commissioner who labelled the anti-consorting legislation as a “profoundly retrogressive step” heartily endorsed what closely resembles the old blasphemy laws. Religious vilification, she said last year, was “an issue”.

Clearly it must be an overwhelming issue if the numbers in the HRC annual report for 2014/15 are accurate. According to that document the HRC did not receive a single complaint of discrimination based on the grounds of “religious conviction”.

Likewise, the HRC’s support for freedom of speech does not extend to public protests that offend progressive mantra. In 2015, Rattenbury successfully introduced a private member’s bill to impose so-called exclusion zones outside health clinics to thwart anti-abortion protesters. “This is not a freedom of speech issue,” he argued.

Predictably, Watchirs supported the move. “The bill is also neutral about the type of protest that it is to be regulated, in that protest activity both for and against abortion will be captured,” she submitted, in what could be termed one of the most risible attempts at rationalisation. Presumably then she would not object to a similar exclusion zone for approved forest-clearing on the basis that the legislation also outlawed pro-logging demonstrations?

Currently three pro-life protesters — all aged in their seventies — are before the courts for refusing to pay a $750 infringement notice, with the matter resulting in international attention. It also raises interesting considerations in respect to the HRC’s views on what constitutes the greatest threat to social harmony — the bikie indiscriminately firing an illegal AK-47 in public or the elderly pensioner brandishing a set of rosary beads?

Spare a thought for the officers of ACT Police, who are trying in vain to curtail the OMCGs despite not having the legislation they desperately need. And here’s a teaser for Chief Police Officer Saunders: if the HRC were abolished and its $3.6m budget allocated to your organisation, how would you use it to combat the OMCG scourge? Of course, such a move should never even be contemplated, for where would we be without essential publications such as Everyone Can Play: Guidelines for Local Clubs on Best Practice Inclusion of Transgender and Intersex Participants?

As for what else the Greens and the HRC intend outlawing next, it is anyone’s guess. In 2015 Rattenbury demanded the removal of “offensive” advertisements from Canberra airport. “We are confronted with unwelcoming pictures of border patrol ships advertising arms manufacturers,” he said. “Given that this year Canberra was officially declared a refugee welcome zone, it is simply not appropriate that those seeking refuge from war should be greeted upon arrival in Canberra with advertising that promotes warfare and armed violence.”

It makes one wonder what is more menacing — a gang of armed bikies intent on rampaging, or a collective of righteous zealots with their grand plans for us.

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

ABC censored church’s ‘positive story' about domestic violence

And lied about it -- in good Leftist fashion. For a fuller coverage of how totally dishonest the program was, see here or my final post here on 21st. It was a classic example of Leftist cherrypicking. They ran with one little quote they liked and ignored the other facts that totally contradicted what they were claiming. There is no truth in them (John 8:44). They are Satanic

A senior female Anglican leader has expressed “disappointment” that her “positive” story in fighting domestic violence was ignored by the ABC in its controversial TV program claiming Christian men who go to church occasionally are the worst abusers of women.

Sydney diocese Archdeacon for Women Kara Hartley was ­interviewed for more than an hour by ABC journalist Julia Baird for the report on 7:30 that aired on Wednesday night, but none of her comments were aired.

“I probably wanted to promote our views and our responses more than came through — my disappointment is that there is positive work and a positive conversation, and I would have liked that to be highlighted some more,” Archdeacon Hartley said yesterday.

Archdeacon Hartley’s remarks came as the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, ­revealed he had, on request, provided the ABC with extensive comments for a related online essay by Baird and co-author ­Hayley Gleeson. But not only did Baird and Gleeson not publish any of his remarks, they falsely reported he had not responded.

Only after the diocese made an official complaint to the ABC did it amend the article yesterday.

“The archdiocese of Brisbane tried to tell ABC reporters about the work we do to assist people who are affected by domestic and family violence,” Archbishop Coleridge said.

“It’s time that the ABC took ­seriously its role to tell the story of the real Australia. It should disengage from the groupthink that has produced an antagonistic, one-sided narrative about the Catholic Church in this country.”

An ABC spokesman declined to comment. The 7:30 story by Baird and ­fellow ABC journalist Paige MacKenzie has been widely condemned for its apparent reliance on, and distortion of, a footnote in a 2008 paper by a professor of ­theology at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, Steven Tracy.

ABC presenter Leigh Sales said: “We talk about women in Islam, but statistically it is evangelical Christian men who attend church sporadically who are the most likely to assault their wives.”

But 7:30 did not report that ­Professor Tracy’s original paper actually found “there is an inverse relationship between church attendance and domestic violence”.

“Conservative Protestant men who attend church regularly are found to be the least likely group to engage in domestic violence, though conservative Protestant men who are irregular church ­attendees are the most likely to batter their wives,” his report said.

The 7:30 segment, which acknowledged “there has never been any real research” on the topic in Australia, quoted advocates claiming “the church is not just failing to sufficiently address domestic violence, it is both enabling and concealing it”.

In the segment, Baird cited concerns that “as long as women’s voices are denied within the church, domestic violence will continue”.

But it made no mention of Archdeacon Hartley, who has been in the Anglican ministry for 20 years and is a leading member of the church’s domestic violence taskforce.

Archdeacon Hartley said she had emphasised to Baird that “domestic violence in our church is unacceptable … I and the senior leadership are absolutely committed, there is no confusion”.

“The first thing we do is we listen and we believe,” she said. “We work out with them what is the best way to be safe, to be cared for … is it going to the police, is it getting you out of your home?” “I am really passionate about this work.”

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Diners served gold flakes on dessert at Bill Shorten’s inequality luncheon

SOMETIMES the irony of a situation is too much to bear. As Bill Shorten delivered a rousing speech on inequality at a luncheon on Friday, the assembled audience were being delivered desserts topped with gold.

The Opposition Leader’s speech, delivered in a ballroom in the Grand Hyatt Hotel to mostly well-off academics, public servants and media, marked a shift in emphasis for the Labor party – ranking the rich and poor equal first. The assembled crowd listened attentively as they spooned up the chocolate tart with salty caramel mousse and toasted hazelnuts, accompanied by gold leaf.

Bill Shorten made it clear the Labor party he leads will prioritise inequality before the next federal election.

“The system as it stands is accelerating inequality rather than addressing it. It is entrenching unfairness rather than alleviating it. A belligerent defence of trickle down economics is no kind of plan for Australia’s future,” Mr Shorten said.

Shorten has made it clear he will focus on inequality in coming months. But for the message to help him win the next election, it will have to travel far beyond the well-fed crowd at the Economic and Social Outlook Conference, sponsored by The Australian and the Melbourne Institute. The question is: will the rest of Australia bite?

“I think people are hungry for something more substantial than the current political fare,” Mr Shorten said, promising to do things that were in the past dismissed as too politically difficult.

He promised to go back to the “too-hard basket” and re-examine the tax options that had been put in there. But for now the details of what that might mean is scant, beyond already-announced changes to tax arrangements like negative gearing and deductions.

Bill Shorten’s speech – and one by shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen the day before – made it clear the Labor party is trying to draw on the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments. But they want that legacy understood in slightly different terms.

Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen referred to it as “a grand bargain.”

“The Hawke government floated the dollar, deregulated the economy and brought down tariffs, opening up our economy, they also embarked on a grand bargain,” Mr Bowen said.

“Reforms which opened up the economy were accompanied by new social standards, through Medicare, superannuation, increased school retention rates and the social wage. Hawke and Keating understood that these were vital reassurances at a time when there were serious threats to the status quo and that they were essential components of good economic reform.”

When Mr Shorten echoed the same sentiment a day later, Mr Bowen’s argument started to look like part of a strategy: Labor wants to make sure the Hawke Keating era is remembered not just as a period of economic reforms – but of social interventions that made them possible.

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ALP delivers ‘false’ pitch on inequality

Truth and falsehood are all the same to Leftists.  Their only aim is to sound good

Bill Shorten’s claim that ­inequal­ity is at a 75-year high is “patently false”, according to one of Australia’s leading labour market economists who suggested stagnant wage growth had made such claims believable.

Speaking just hours before the Opposition Leader railed against surging inequality in a landmark speech, Roger Wilkins, deputy ­director of the Melbourne Institute, said conventional measures of inequality showed both ­inequality of income and wealth had been falling in Australia since the financial crisis almost a decade ago.

“Inequality is still relatively high by modern standards but the narrative that says inequality is ever rising is patently false,” Professor Wilkins told the Melbourne Institute/The Aust­ralian Economic and Social Policy Conference in Melbourne yesterday.

Pointing out that the proportion of Australians over 15 with incomes less than half the median level of income had fallen to about 10 per cent, he added: “If anything, inequality has been declining.”

While Mr Shorten didn’t spec­ify a timeframe in his speech to the Melbourne Institute yesterday, he argued that Labor was the party best placed to combat rising ­inequality, saying a crackdown on tax concessions favouring high-income earners would balance the budget and help make Australia a fairer nation.

“Inequality is an economic problem, but it is not just an ­abstract concept,” he said. “Inequality is why young people, young Australians are more uncertain than they’ve been for generations. But it isn’t just about young people. Inequality is Australians going for years without a pay rise — but paying more taxes than their boss.”

Mr Shorten’s speech to the conference was seen as helping to frame his pitch for the next election, focusing on inequality and fairness. “Tackling inequality will be a defining mission for a Shorten Labor government,” he said, adding that “the system as it stands is accelerating inequality rather that addressing it. It is entrenching unfairness, rather than alleviating it.”

But the Business Council of Australia also took issue with Labor’s “fairness” platform yesterday, with strongly worded comments from chief executive Jennifer Westacott about the current political debate.

“How fair is it to let the country fall behind and be unable to compete globally and attract investment, to create jobs, better jobs and higher incomes?” Ms Westacott said. “How fair is it to spend all of our policy focus distributing an ever-diminishing pie and then have very little left? How fair is it to lumber our future generations with debt if we go on spending and expect them to pay for it?”

Professor Wilkins said Mr Shorten’s claim that inequality had been rising was “overegging” the truth and dependent on one statistic: the share of income ­accruing to the top 1 per cent of earners, which has risen from about 4.5 per cent in the early 1970s to 8.2 per cent in 2015, the latest year for which data is available.

“This is not traditionally what scholars have focused on. For ­example, it’s pre-tax and more ­importantly it’s a personal income measure,” Professor Wilkins said. “It’s conceivable all of these people in the top 1 per cent are the only earners in their households and live in large households, and when you adjust for dependants they aren’t so rich after all.”

Official statistics from the latest census show inequality has ­fallen between 2011 and 2016: the Gini coefficient (where a lower score implies greater equality) has ­declined from 0.382 to 0.366.

Professor Wilkins said wage growth, which painted a “really stark picture”, was more likely ­responsible in Australia for the ­belief income inequality had been rising, which has helped drive populist politics around the world, including the election of Donald Trump as US President.

Real average household incomes rose rapidly in Australia from about $40,000 in the early 2000s but has hovered around $52,000 since 2010. “When that stopped people started looking around a bit more; when incomes grow strongly people tend to be less concerned about its distribution,” Professor Wilkins said.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen echoed Mr Shorten’s claims at the Melbourne Institute this week. “The facts and the challenges are clear. Income inequality in Australia is at (a) 75-year high,” Mr Bowen said.

Anthony Albanese previewed Mr Shorten’s speech by saying it was based on “the issue of inequality and the fact that inequality is at a 75-year high”.

Mr Shorten and the Labor Party have been making the claim for several years with Mr Shorten telling the ABC’s 7.30 in 2015 that inequality was at a 75-year high.

Grattan chief executive John Daley agreed that properly measured inequality had not been ­rising. “There’s actually no evidence at all that rising wealth or ­income inequality has fuelled populism in Australia,” he said.

Professor Wilkins, who oversees the Melbourne Institute’s Household Income and Labour Dynamics Survey, said inequality was “probably a little bit uncomfortably high” but could be ­reduced by reducing tax expenditures, ensuring retirees paid some income tax, lifting unemployment benefits, and improving education and training. “Lifting minimum wages would be a really terrible way to improve incomes of the poor,” Professor Wilkins argued, suggesting maximising employment opportunities was among the best ways to a mitigate poverty.

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Turnbull takes high ground while Shorten looks for the bleak

The contrast between Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten could not have been greater, with one ­rekindling optimism in the potential for technology to transform our lives and the other painting a dystopian world in which a small wealthy class lords it over the struggling masses.

It was a side of the Prime Minister that has barely been seen since last year’s election. We live in a world of accelerating change, he told the Melbourne Institute/The Australian Economic and Social Outlook Conference. “Economic progress, innovation, technology have advanced humanity and changed our lives for the better,” he said.

If they were humans, the world’s biggest companies such as Facebook and Google would be at school, many at primary school.

It was understandable that ­people may feel threatened by the speed of the transformation, but they should face the future with optimism because technology was creating new jobs, and improving the quality of our lives.

“We have to harness the forces of change, make the best use of emerging technologies and secure the jobs, the opportunities of the future.”

The Opposition Leader picks up on the poor wage growth, the loss of penalty rates and the difficulty of young people gaining entry to the property market to argue that the government is failing the electorate at large while favouring a small coterie of high-income earners.

He uses a powerful metaphor of the “economy-class tax system” in which the PAYG taxpayers, many of whom have already filed their tax returns, pay the going rate less a few deductions while the “business-class tax system” enables the wealthy to reduce their taxes to less than that of a low-paid nurse.

“Inequality feeds the sense that the deck is stacked against ordinary people, that the fix is in and the deal is done,” he says.

Negative gearing, capital gains tax, superannuation and tax ­accounting deductions have ­already been targeted. Trusts are likely to be next in the attack on high-end tax.

Although Turnbull believes in the opportunity of the entrepreneurial age heralded by the internet, it was a message that did not connect with voters last year and will not play again in the next election.

It leaves the government selling its achievements, whether that is a school funding package, some “think-big” infrastructure or free trade deals while hoping the economy gathers momentum, bringing further gains in employment and easing the financial insecurity to which Shorten is playing.

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

Muslim admits killing two mothers in horror crash as he sped through a red light at 130km/h in an unregistered Mercedes

Deliberately defiant of the law.  He was using false number plates.  Young Lebanese Muslim males do tend to be very arrogant.

A young man has admitted killing two much-loved mothers in a crash in Melbourne's north when he sped through a red light in an unregistered car at more than 130km/h, slamming into a vehicle containing the women.

Mohamad Hassan, 21, faced the Victorian County Court on Wednesday where he pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing the deaths of Bozica Nikolic, 57, and Subha Deumic, 62, in the crash at Attwood in June 2016.

Five daughters of Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic delivered heart-wrenching victim impact statements in court, including one account from a woman who witnessed the collision from a following car.

Ms Deumic's daughters were driving in the car behind and watched on in horror as their mother's red Toyota sedan was flung across the road after being t-boned by Mr Hassan's black 1999 Mercedes Benz.

Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic had been best friends for 30 years and were returning home after catching up over dinner.

Hassan, a Lebanese national, was said to have been driving the Mercedes with number plates from his uncle's Nissan Triton at the time of the crash.

Detective Senior Constable Alexander Osmelak said dashcam footage showed the Mercedes speeding past another car before the crash, and afterwards the speedometer in the Mercedes was frozen at 130km/h.

Last year, Ms Nikolic's daughter Marina told 7 News of her heartache. 'Now I've lost my mum. She's not going to be there for when I get married, she's not going to be there to watch my sister grow up.  '[I'm] just not going to have a mum and that's going to be really hard.'

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Refugees in Australian-run detention centre on Manus will leave for the U.S. in October as part of resettlement plan

Refugees held on Manus Island will begin leaving for the US in October, according to the Immigration Minister.

Peter Dutton conceded he would have preferred the refugees left sooner, with the detention centre to close that month.

But a US immigration spokesman later confirmed he would return to Manus Island and Nauru, while Turnbull government ministers have insisted the deal is still on.

'Our desire was obviously to have them off tomorrow; I want Manus Island to close. We're still going to maintain Nauru,' Mr Dutton told Sky News on Wednesday night.

More than 1600 refugees have expressed interest in the resettlement deal, which is expected to offer up to 1250 places.

Questions have been raised over whether the United States will be obliged to accept anywhere near the headline figure of people after subjecting refugees to 'extreme' vetting.

But Mr Dutton appears confident the final number of places will be near the top-end of initial estimates. 'We've got an arrangement with the United States and that is to take people - in total probably about 1200 people - from both Manus and Nauru,' he said.

The Manus Island refugee processing centre will shut down at the end of October, with building-decommissioning works well underway.

The capacity of a nearby Manus Island refugee transit centre is being rapidly expanded ahead of the processing centre's closure.

Australia will remove itself from the process on August 31, meaning no more help from then for refugees returning to their home countries voluntarily.

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Federal Government threatens to strip a Melbourne council of its right to hold citizenship ceremonies as it considers moving Australia Day from January 26

A Melbourne local council will be stripped of its right to hold citizenship ceremonies if it moves them from Australia Day.

Darebin Council, in Melbourne's northern suburbs, is considering moving the ceremonies from January 26 out of respect for Aboriginals.

The council sent a survey to its advisory committee asking if the date should be changed and an event acknowledging indigenous Australian suffering held instead.

But Assistant Immigration Minister Alex Hawke sent the council a strongly worded written warning ordering it to dump the idea.

He said Darebin would be in breach of the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code, which requires ceremonies to be apolitical and bipartisan.

'You must not use your ability to preside over citizenship ceremonies or the dates they are held to delegitimise Australia Day,' he wrote in the letter seen by the Preston Leader.

'If you were to continue to use a citizenship ceremony, or your ability to preside over one, as a promotional tool for an anti-national day event, I will consider this a serious breach.'

Mr Hawke said he would revoke authorisation from anyone in Darebin who could receive the pledge at citizenship ceremonies.

The minister then told the newspaper research showed Australia Day was the most popular day to become a citizen and it was the most appropriate day for them.

'[The government will] not allow a small number of Greens controlled councils to continue a campaign to undermine Australia Day using Australian citizenship ceremonies,' he said.

Similar ultimatums were sent to Fremantle and Hobart Councils when they planned to move their ceremonies.

Fremantle folded and kept the ceremonies on January 26 but moved its fireworks and other celebrations to January 28.

Another Melbourne council, Moreland, two weeks ago voted against a proposal to move its citizenship ceremonies.

Councils were emboldened after the Australian Local Government Association voted 64-62 to lobby the government to change the date at a meeting last month.

'The ALGA board noted the level of debate and the closeness of the result of the debate and will take these matters into consideration when determining a course of action,' the association said.

Protests and violent clashes marred celebrations in 2017, while Aboriginal flags flew en masse in the streets and celebrities posted support to 'change the date' online.

Many indigenous people call Australia Day 'Invasion Day' as they view it as the beginning of a violent colonisation.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that while everyone is entitled to debate the date of Australia Day, the government does not support a change.

SOURCE





Family of US cop Mohamed Noor say officer mistakenly shot Justine Damond

JUSTINE Damond’s family have hired a high-profile lawyer who says police claims of an ambush by the Australian woman ‘have no basis in fact’ as her 911 call was released.

Lawyer Robert Bennett told CBS that Ms Damond’s family does not want Officer Mohamed Noor to continue being a police officer and are considering a civil lawsuit over her death.

“This is an unbelieveable situation,” Mr Bennett told CBS. “The person who called 911 was shot in her pyjamas. “Justine obviously wasn’t armed and there is wasn’t any reason she should have been perceived to be.

Mr Bennett hit out at claims the police officers involved feared an ambush. “It’s ludicrous,” he said. “It is disinformation being put out there for ... for I don’t know what. It doesn’t have any basis in fact.”

That news came as Jordan Kushner, the lawyer for Teresa Graham, a woman who was the subject of a complaint against Mr Noor, who gunned down Ms Damond, said the killing was another example of how Noor had failed those who had called on him for help.

Ms Damond’s family hired Mr Bennett who represented Philando Castile’s family in pursuing compensation after he became a victim of a fatal police shooting.

Ms Damond feared someone was being raped behind her house in south Minneapolis and called police at 11.27pm on Saturday night, local time, to report the incident.

SOURCE





Leftist lies about Christians from Australia's ABC

On Monday, the ABC ran a long program about historic sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Philadelphia — way off in the United States — as if we really needed to know this here and now.

But the ABC’s most ridiculous attack on Christianity came on Tuesday, with a campaign to persuade us that “the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians” who occasionally go to church.

ABC presenter Julia Baird and ABC journalist Hayley Gleeson published an essay on the ABC’s site which gave just one source for this astonishing claim: “As theology professor Steven Tracy wrote in 2008: ‘It is widely accepted by abuse experts (and validated by numerous studies) that evangelical men who sporadically attend church are more likely than men of any other religious group (and more likely than secular men) to assault their wives’.”

ABC Radio National presenter Fran Kelly accepted this without a flicker of doubt in interviewing Baird, asking: “Is it a matter of belief system?”

And they agreed the problem was “patriarchal” churches — male-led — which encouraged men to bully their wives by preaching the Biblical passage: “Wives, submit to your own husbands.”

Baird, who has since repeated her attack on the ABC’s 7.30, suggests this could be a scandal to rival priests abusing children.

“Is it true,” she asked, “that there are striking similarities to the Church’s failure to protect children from abuse, and that this next generation’s reckoning will be about the failure in their ranks to protect women from domestic violence?”

But anyone remotely familiar with Christianity and Australia should have instantly realised there’s no way “the men most likely to abuse their wives are evangelical Christians”.

First, our worst rates of domestic violence notoriously occur in Aboriginal families, where women are at least 31 times more likely to be hospitalised by violent partners.

Second, it is not the Bible but the Koran that licenses domestic violence. Christ stopped the stoning of a woman accused of adultery, but Mohammed said men could hit disobedient wives: “Admonish them, and leave them alone in the sleeping-places and beat them.”

And, third, Baird, herself, concedes deep in her online article that her American source says “regular church attenders are less likely to commit acts of intimate partner violence”. That suggests Christianity actually protects women, exactly the opposite of what the ABC implied.

But check further and it becomes clear Baird missed clear evidence that contradicts her anti-Church theory. Her single source for her big claim is Steven Tracy, a theology professor at a Phoenix seminary, who did indeed in one essay claim “conservative Protestant men who are irregular church attendees are the most likely to batter their wives”.

Tracy cites a paper by Professor Christopher G. Ellison which actually finds that other groups experience greater incidences of domestic violence, demonstrating that there are, in fact, competing views on this issue. The paper claims: “African-Americans, in particular, have higher levels of domestic violence”.

What’s more, Ellison says that men who often go to a Christian church “are 72 per cent less likely to abuse their female partners than men from comparable backgrounds who do not attend services”.

The conclusion is clear: “Our findings … suggest that religious involvement, specifically church attendance, protects against domestic violence.” Christianity literally saves.

Tracy also quotes in his footnotes a New Zealand study by Emeritus Professor David Fergusson which confirms that Christianity is a civilising influence, counter to what the ABC implied.

As Tracy writes: “... 11.2 per cent of husbands who never attended church assaulted their wives. But only 2.2 per cent of husbands who attended church at least monthly assaulted their wives, while 6.2 per cent of husbands who attended church sporadically assaulted their wives.”

This is not what Baird reported and what the ABC yesterday claimed. Why didn’t the ABC report the truth: that Christianity actually saves women from abuse? Why did it instead falsely claim — and instantly believe — the falsehood that evangelical Christians are the worst abusers? The ABC is not merely at war with Christianity. This proves something worse: it is attacking the faith that most makes people civil.

SOURCE

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

A debate we’re not allowed to have in Australia

IT’S the debate we were never allowed to have.

Until relatively recently, Australia’s population grew at a stately pace. There was an influx of European immigration in the mid-1940s, and pause from the mid-1970s, but in the 100 years after Federation in 1901, net overseas migration averaged 70,000 people a year.

Then in the early 2000s, Prime Minister John Howard opened the floodgates. Over the last 12 years, Australia’s annual net overseas migration has tripled from its long-term average to 210,000 people per year.

Our cities are bursting at the seams, roads and services are congested, and house prices are skyrocketing — particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, which attract the lion’s share of new Australians.

Over the last 12 years, Sydney has added 20 per cent to its population, or 800,000 people. Melbourne has added one million people over the same period, or 27 per cent.

According to state government projections, Sydney will add another 1.7 million people over the next 20 years, which works out to 87,000 people a year, or 1650 people per week. Melbourne is forecast to add 97,000 people per year, or around 1870 people per week, for the next 35 years.

“It’s clearly unsustainable,” said Leith van Onselen, chief economist with MacroBusiness. “The problem isn’t that immigration is good or bad, it’s just that the level is far too high for Australia to digest.”

According to Mr van Onselen, dubbed the “Unconventional Economist”, Howard “effectively ran a bait-and-switch policy”.

“He scapegoated the very tiny number of people coming by boat, and at the same time opened the floodgates on people coming by plane,” he said.

“Howard never articulated why he was doing that, he just did it, and unfortunately the following governments, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott and now Turnbull, just followed.”

Mr van Onselen, who is one of the few public commentators calling for a national debate about Australia’s annual migration intake, says there is now “tri-partisan support” between the Liberals, Labor and even the Greens to not discuss the issue.

Behind the scenes, the “growth lobby” of retailers, the banking sector, the property industry and “erroneously named think tanks” all push the “growth-ist agenda”. “Unfortunately there’s not really anybody on the other side,” he said.

Late last year, high-profile entrepreneur Dick Smith came out in support of Pauline Hanson, warning that Australia would be “destroyed” if One Nation’s immigration policies weren’t taken seriously.

Mr Smith had previously spoken out about the need for a “small Australia”, with a population of 26 million rather than 50 million. At current migration levels, Australia’s population will hit 40 million by the year 2060, compared with 33 million if the intake returned to its historical average of 70,000.

“Unfortunately you can’t have a sensible debate,” said Mr van Onselen. “The main problem is the perception of racism. The easiest way to shut down debate is to call someone racist. Our politicians and media won’t mention it because they’re afraid they’ll get associated with Pauline.

“It’s nothing to do with race — it’s an economic and living standards debate. It’s purely a numbers game, that’s all that matters. A body is a body. If you’ve got an extra car on the road, an extra person on the train, it doesn’t matter where they’re from.”

The common public argument used to promote mass immigration, particularly by the likes of the United Nations, is the need to replace an “ageing” population. The behind-the-scenes rationale is to artificially boost economic growth numbers.

Both justifications fail to stand up to scrutiny. According to the Productivity Commission, which has debunked the ageing population myth numerous times over the past 15 years, “changes in migration levels ... make little difference to the age structure of the population in the future, with any effect being temporary”.

“The reason is very simple — immigrants grow old,” said Mr van Onselen. “You can bring in a whole bunch of young people now, it will lower the age temporarily, but in 30 years time those young people are old and you have to repeat the same trick all over again. Really it’s just a Ponzi scheme.”

Which ties into the second justification. Japan, with its sluggish headline economic growth and simultaneously ageing and shrinking population, is commonly cited as an example of why mass immigration for population replacement is necessary.

At the same time, Australia’s record run of economic growth, coinciding with record immigration levels, is held up as a positive example. “All other things being equal, if you increase the population by 1.5 per cent a year, you’re going to get 1.5 per cent economic growth,” said Mr van Onselen.

“More inputs in people means more outputs in economic activity. But the problem is, although it makes the overall growth figures look good, it doesn’t actually help you on a per capita basis, which is what drives living standards.”

In fact, despite Australia’s population surging 21.5 per cent since 2003, compared with the OECD average of 8.5 per cent, Australia’s GDP per capita change has just barely outpaced the OECD — 16 per cent versus 15 per cent, despite going through the biggest mining boom in our history.

“We’re effectively spinning our tyres importing all these people, wearing out our infrastructure, making housing more expensive and degrading the environment for absolutely zero gain, in the material sense,” he said.

“The immigration program used to be a supplement to the economy, now it’s seen as a driver. Governments are using it as a lever to stop Australia going into recession. The tail is wagging the dog.”

Japan, meanwhile, has grown its GDP per capita by 11 per cent since 2003. “Japan’s unemployment rate is nearly half of ours,” said Mr van Onselen. “It’s hardly a terrible situation they’re in. They’ve got good growth at a per capita level and basically anyone who wants a job can get a job.”

According to the UN’s Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “replacement migration” is the “solution to declining and ageing populations”.

“Population decline is inevitable in the absence of replacement migration,” the UN said in a recent press release. “Fertility may rebound in the coming decades, but few believe that it will recover sufficiently in most countries to reach replacement level in the foreseeable future.”

Mr van Onselen described it as “ridiculous”. “The UN pushes a sort of open borders, globalist agenda,” he said. “It is a myth. We just need a national debate. There’s no strategy, it’s all just ad hoc. How big do we want Australia to become? How are we going to accommodate people? Is this what people want?”

Writing in The Australian, economist Judith Sloan pointed out that in 2011, Malcolm Turnbull made the “astonishing claim” that “anyone who thinks that it’s smart to cut immigration is sentencing Australia to poverty”.

“It is important that we have a measured and informed debate about our immigration policies, in terms of both numbers and the integrity of the visa categories,” she wrote.

“Are people really happy that Australia’s population will exceed 40 million in 2060? Are we really testing for skill when we set the visa categories? Has the migration program simply become a way of allowing universities to charge very high fees to international students on the understanding that the graduates can attain permanent residence?

“These are the questions we should not be afraid to pose and politicians should not be afraid to answer.”

Greens immigration spokesman Nick McKim told news.com.au: “The Greens believe in a broad and non-discriminatory immigration policy. In particular, we believe that Australia’s humanitarian intake should be increased to 50,000 people per year.

“Australians are a friendly and welcoming people and we have long and proud history of multiculturalism, which has added so much to the fabric of our country.

“There will always be debates about immigration, and it is disappointing to see so many commentators and politicians resorting to xenophobia and racism.”

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and Labor immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann did not respond to requests for comment.

SOURCE





   
Students ‘not target’ in QUT rights case

Cindy Prior’s “chief target” in her racial vilification case over Facebook posts was not the students, but her wealthy employer, the Queensland University of Technology, according to an investigation by a senior lawyer appointed by Gillian Triggs.

Angus Stewart SC ran a closed-door investigation into complaints by three of the ­students — Calum Thwaites, Jackson Powell and Alex Wood — that their human rights were breached by the Human Rights Commission in its mishandling of the matter.

Mr Stewart found that while the students did not suffer any unlawful discrimination and that their complaints were misconceived, the commission could be criticised for having made an “error of judgment” in failing to notify the students.

The Australian has obtained his 53-page report which states that “such prejudice as the ­(students) suffered as a consequence of receiving late notice (from the commission of a conciliation conference) was not brought about because they were white males”. The report, which has not been released by the commission despite it having been provided three months ago, ­includes evidence which was suppressed until fresh orders in May.

Mr Stewart found that ­although Ms Prior had always named in her complaint QUT and seven students (none of whom were notified by the commission or by QUT for a year) she had wished “to pursue her complaint initially and more aggressively against (the chief target) … with the deepest pockets”.

Mr Stewart said there was a “rational and objective basis” for the commission to treat Ms Prior’s complaint relative to QUT differently from the students, even though it was the students who were accused of writing Facebook posts which triggered her action and a subsequent $250,000 damages bid in the Federal Circuit Court. Ms Prior, who lost her court bid and a subsequent appeal, is expected to be bankrupted today for failing to pay the students’ legal costs of ­defending themselves over Facebook posts arising from her telling them to leave an indigenous-only room at QUT.

In finding that the students were not unlawfully discrimin­ated against by the commission, Mr Stewart stated: “I do not see a violation of human rights in such differential conduct.”

The students argued that they were treated shabbily by the commission and significantly disadvantaged because they were white, straight males, while Ms Prior, who was a QUT administrative officer in the university’s indigenous-only Oodgeroo Unit, was given preferential treatment as a Noongar woman.

One of the students, who had moved to Canada and was not ­notified by QUT or the commission of the complaint, was told by Ms Prior’s lawyer that he would need to make a cash settlement to prevent court proceedings. This student’s case was not examined by Mr Stewart as it was not the subject of a formal written complaint.

Mr Stewart found that in the early stages of Ms Prior’s complaint, a suggestion by one of the commission’s staff, Ting Lim, that the students not be pursued by Ms Prior “was clearly aimed at ­favouring them and it caused them no prejudice”.

He said that a year later, when the students had still not been told of the complaint in which they were named, Ms Lim was “motivated by a desire to protect the students from unnecessary notification of the complaints, and that that was at the request of QUT”.

Ms Lim told Mr Stewart during his inquiry that their sex, race or ethnicity had no bearing on the way the complaint was managed.

Professor Triggs, the outgoing head of the commission, has pledged that as a result of the QUT case there will “never again” be such a delay in notifying parties to a complaint.

SOURCE






Africa comes to Melbourne

Women in some suburbs are too terrified to leave home alone as marauding gangs of violent criminals run amok.

As gang members commit armed robberies, violent assaults and home invasions with impunity, families in Melbourne's crime-ridden western suburbs are moving out.

They say suburbs like Werribee have become too dangerous to raise children, leaving them with no choice but to leave their communities.

'I'm scared to be anywhere by myself with the kids, I don't want to walk down the street, I don't want to leave the house, I'm scared to be at home by myself,' local mother Alicia told A Current Affair.

'I'm in my 60s and Werribee used to be a lovely place and now you can't walk around after 7 o'clock at night,' said another man.

A masked gang broke into Ms Farouk's home in nearby Tarneit while she and her family were sleeping and she says crime is getting worse.

'It's getting more like a trouble zone, with the [new] Ravenhall prison, with the refugees moving in, it's getting hairy,' she said.

Home invasions are becoming all too common in Melbourne's west, as crime levels skyrocket.

Crimes that target other people like robberies and assaults have increased by 9.6 per cent in Werribee to 1015 cases this year, and a shocking 16.8 per cent in St Albans.

The new breed of brazen criminals are making life hell for business owners, holding knives to the throats of cashiers and smashing up stores.

A bottle shop owner, Mr Singh, said that young thieves did not even bother trying to hide, holding up the liquor bottles they were stealing for him to see.

Frustrated and scared residents now face the challenge of finding somewhere else affordable to live. Saying that suburbs like Werribee are no place to raise children, some residents are even considering moving into caravans to escape the street violence.

Victoria Police says it is satisfied with the progress being made against crime in Melbourne's western suburbs, but fleeing residents suggest not enough is being done.

SOURCE






Who’s afraid of the big bad climate monster?

IN Al Gore’s latest cinematic dose of climate scaremongering, a young Asian man is crying.

“I feel so scared” he wails, before vision of solicitous uncle Al patting his hand in an attempt to soothe away his fears of the apocalypse.

Scaremongering is what Gore does best, and fear is the business model that has made him rich, though his every apocalyptic scenario has failed to materialise.

In Australia last week to spruik his upcoming movie An Inconvenient Sequel, the former US vice president tried it on again, claiming Mother Nature was “screaming” and the world would ­descend into “political disruption and chaos and diseases, stronger storms and more ­destructive floods” unless we buy his snake oil.

Silly Labor premiers bought that snake oil last week, pledging alongside the grinning Gore that Victoria, Queensland, the ACT and South Australia would embrace renewables to produce zero net emissions by 2050.

They haven’t learned the lesson from SA’s extreme green experiment with renewable energy that has produced nothing but crippling blackouts and the highest electricity prices in the world.

Any normal person with such a woeful record of accuracy as Gore would be ashamed to show his face. Eleven years after his Inconvenient Truth movie scared little kids witless, his warnings of climate armageddon have come to nothing.

“Unless we take drastic measures the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years,” he told us then. Wrong. In fact the world has just been through almost 20 years in which there has been a hiatus in global warming, even as carbon dioxide has increased: an “inconvenient pause” as some wags put it.

Around the world people are waking up to the fact that their leaders have been crying wolf, while their electricity bills go through the roof.

Australia’s prosperity is built on the reams of cheap, abundant fossil fuel under our feet, and yet green zealots have forced us into an energy crisis.

But when Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly last week pointed out the logical fact that Australians will die because of high power bills, he was slammed as a “scaremonger” by the very people who worship at Al Gore’s feet.

Yes, cold kills, and electricity prices have doubled in the past decade, as uncertainty plagues the energy sector, and cheap coal-fired power is priced out of the market by government subsidies for unreliable renewable energy production.

The states, which bear much of the blame, continue with the fantasy that you can replace coal with wind and solar while simultaneously banning the development of onshore gas fields.

The iron-clad law of ­energy supply is that more ­renewables force out baseload power, which you need when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

Yet SA is pretending that the world’s biggest battery built at huge taxpayer expense by another global green huckster, Elon Musk, is going to save the day.

The diabolic task facing federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is to wrangle agreement on something approaching a rational energy policy out of the recently ­released Finkel Review.

Unlike Donald Trump, this government doesn’t have an electoral mandate for pulling out of the Paris treaty.

Tony Abbott was a climate sceptic yet he signed us up to the Paris renewable energy target of slashing emissions by 26-28 per cent by 2050.

That was all he could get through Senate where even mining millionaire Clive Palmer had been got at by Al Gore. So this is where we are.

Appointing Alan Finkel as chief scientist was one of Malcolm Turnbull’s first tasks after he deposed Abbott. Like Turnbull, Finkel is a climate true believer who drives an electric car and powers his South Yarra home on ­renewables.

He’s also an accomplished scientist and entrepreneur with a PhD in electrical ­engineering.

He’s smart but he has produced a report bullish on renewables and bearish on coal.

Finkel is right that wimpish investors have deserted coal in Australia and that electricity prices have soared because of the uncertainty that ensued since Labor’s vandalism from 2007.

But coal is nowhere near obsolete. As the Australian Minerals Council points out, coal is the world’s leading source of electricity and will be till at least 2040.

In our region countries are busy building new clean coal plants. In East Asia alone 1250 new plants are under construction or planned.

Yet in the past eight years in Australia not a single new baseload coal or gas generation unit has been built.

That has to change.

Turnbull has now come around to that realisation, telling the Liberal National Party state convention in Brisbane yesterday: “Those people who say coal and other fossil fuels have no ­future are delusional.”

Fossil fuels are here to stay, despite Al Gore.

SOURCE

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

Minneapolis: White Australian woman killed by African refugee with a record of violence

A bride-to-be shot dead by police after calling 911 to report a rape died from a single gunshot wound to the abdomen.

Autopsy results reveal Justine Damond, who was wearing her pyjamas when she was shot by policeman Mohamed Noor, died as a result of a homicide.

The officer aimed at the Australian from the passenger seat of his squad car while she spoke to his colleague on the drivers side in a back alley.

On Monday, her fiance Don Damond said the family were 'desperate for information' about her shooting - in which he referred to as a homicide.

Noor, 31, who is the first Somali-American police officer in his precinct, said he takes the family's loss 'seriously and 'keeps them in his daily thoughts and prayers', in a statement released by his attorney.

‘He came to the United States at a young age and is thankful to have had so many opportunities. He takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling. He joined the police force to serve the community and to protect the people he serves. Officer Noor is a caring person with a family he loves and he empathizes with the loss others are experiencing,' the statement read.

‘The current environment for police is difficult, but Officer Noor accepts this as part of his calling. We would like to say more, and will in the future.'

'At this time, however, there are several investigations ongoing and Officer Noor wants to respect the privacy to the family and asks the same in return during this difficult period.’

Mr Damond, who addressed the assembled media from his backyard in Minneapolis, said 'piecing together Justine's last moments before the homicide will be a small comfort as we grieve this tragedy.'

'Our hearts are broken and we are utterly devastated by the loss of Justine,' he added, as he was comforted by his son Zach during the press conference.

Don's voice broke, and the grieving fiance appeared on the edge of tears, as he described the little he did know about what took place the night Justine died.

'It was Justine that called 911 on Saturday evening reporting what she believed was an active sexual assault occurring nearby.

'Sadly, my family and I have been provided with almost no additional information from law enforcement regarding what happened after police arrived.

Both officer's bodycams were off and the squad car camera not recording when Damond - who was in her pajamas - was killed at around 11.30pm on Saturday, just a month before she was due to marry.

The shooting occurred near the intersection of 51st Street and Washburn Avenue South, in the city's Fulton neighborhood.

The driver of the squad car that pulled up in the alley behind the home Damond shared with her fiance has been identified as Matthew Harrity, a community service officer since 2016. 

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) - the state agency investigating the shooting - has so far kept tight-lipped on how the circumstances that led to the death of the yoga and meditation teacher.

They have admitted that no weapons were recovered from the scene and  according to the Star Tribune witnesses to the shooting have described Damond approaching the police cruiser in the alley behind her house.

She was holding her cell phone and talking to an officer on the drivers side before she was shot.

The only concrete statement the BCA has made so far is to confirm that 'At one point an officer fired their weapon, fatally striking a woman'. 

On Monday morning the heartbroken stepson of Damond appeared outside his home and had harsh words for Officer Noor.

'Why? Why did you do it?,' said Zach Damond.

'He has no idea the impact that he had on thousands of people. No idea.'

According to Minneapolis Star Tribune, the website Minnesota PoliceClips has audio of an exchange between dispatch and the officers involved.

One officer says that he sees a 'female standing behind a building' and 'one down' from the same location before saying they are performing CPR.

Local news have reported that Noor shot across his partner who was the driver of the squad car and both have been placed on administrative leave pending the investigation.

Police in Minneapolis are required to wear bodycams at all time, but they are not continually active and are manually switched on when an officer anticipates they will be needed.

It is not know why the squad car camera cannot be used in this case.

Noor, who joined the Minneapolis Police in March 2015, has had three complaints made against him in two years - including a lawsuit.  Two are from 2017 and one from 2016 is closed and according to Lou Raguse of Kare 11 is marked 'not to be made public'.

The lawsuit stems from a police call on May 25, 2017, when Noor and two other officers took a woman to hospital and she claimed that they carried out false imprisonment, assault and battery.

According to the ongoing lawsuit, the woman claimed that Noor 'grabbed her right wrist and upper arm' when moving her.

On Saturday night, Damond had called 911 to attend a noise and possible assault in the alley, and was reportedly speaking to the two officers through the drivers side window when the officer in the front passenger seat shot her through the drivers side door.

Neighbours told The Star Tribune they came out of their home to investigate the flashing lights and saw police trying to revive Ms Damond, who was lying on the ground.

When police arrived at her home at around 11.30pm, 'one officer fired their weapon, fatally striking the woman' as she reportedly stood in her driveway, wearing pyjamas

Ms Damond regularly held sessions at the Lake Harriet Spritual Centre, with many of her talks recorded and uploaded to YouTube.

She grew up on Sydney's northern beaches, with her father John the owner of a Dymocks bookstore at Warringah Mall and a prominent member of the community.

WHY DID POLICE HAVE THEIR BODY CAMERAS TURNED OFF?

- The use of body cameras, or portable video recorders (PVR), was initiated in Minneapolis during 2016.

- Police introduced the technology in an effort to reduce complaints about the behaviour of officers and also to ensure vital video evidence was captured.

- In Minneapolis, where Ms Ruszczyk died, the cameras must be manually switched on by police. They are automatic in other parts of the US.

- According to Minneapolis government's policy, the body cameras must be turned on by when they anticipate they may be involved in a certain situation.

- Situations where they must be switched on include: Traffic stops, arrests, physical confrontations, crimes in progress and suspicious person stops.

- It was last week revealed that the usage of body cameras among officers in Minneapolis was low as 4% in some areas when responding to 911 calls.

SOURCE





US ‘police state’ where Australian was inexplicably shot dead

That the cops almost never switch on their body cams tells you all about their attitudes

THE mid-western US city where an Australian bride-to-be was mysteriously shot dead by a cop is a “police state” run by “out-of-control officers”, according to a community activist.

Shock has turned to anger in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after Sydney woman Justine Damond, 40, was inexplicably shot “multiple times” by police officer Mohamed Noor.

The Minneapolis Police Department has refused requests to explain the incident, which is now being investigated by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA).

The bureau confirmed on Monday afternoon that Ms Damond was unarmed, saying in a statement that no weapons were found at the scene. It also said that the two officers involved had yet to be interviewed.

The incident has quickly taken on a political dimension in the state, where a spate of fatal police shootings have sparked mass protests.

Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB), said Minnesota police departments had a history of “secretive” behaviour after these incidents that denied justice to victims and their families.

“The main problem is that police have entirely too much power and almost no accountability,” Ms Gross told news.com.au.

“If you don’t hold people accountable, this is what leads to out-of-control officers engaging in dangerous and deadly conduct, day in, day out.”

She said Minnesota was a “police state” where officers had the power to “spy on people at will” and were protected absolutely when they shot people without provocation.

Police officers have killed 443 people in Minnesota since 2000, an average of 26 a year, according to CUAPB records.

“People are absolutely frustrated and upset … that somebody could be killed being a good neighbour,” Ms Gross said.

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Plastic bags are GOOD for the environment -- compared with the alternatives

News that Australia’s two largest supermarkets were completely phasing out single-use plastic bags was met with praise from environmental groups on Friday.

The move will affect shoppers in NSW, Victoria and WA, bringing them into line with South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT, which already have statewide bans on plastic bags. A statewide ban in Queensland comes into effect next year.

From next year, shoppers will have to pay 15 cents each for heavier, reusable plastic bags.

Jon Dee, managing director of environmental lobby group Do Something and founder of the National Plastic Bag Campaign, called on the federal government to institute a nationwide ban. “Such a national ban would reduce Australia’s plastic bag use by at an estimated six billion bags a year,” he said.

Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci said the supermarket handed out more than 3.2 billion plastic bags a year and “hence can play a significant role in reducing overall plastic bag usage”.

“Today’s commitment shows we are committed to taking our environmental and community responsibilities seriously,” he said.

The problem with scrapping plastic bags, however, is it increases use of bin liners.

In 2012, a review of South Australia’s bag ban found just 15 per cent of consumers purchased bin liners before the ban, compared with 80 per cent after, “increasing some scepticism about the broader environmental benefit”.

The review suggested that “any future initiatives should include a focus on changing household bin liner behaviour”. That’s because bin liners “do not break down well in modern, highly compacted landfills”, a 2014 WA government study noted.

In 2011, a report by the UK Environment Agency found single-use plastic bags actually had the lowest overall environmental impact in eight out of nine categories compared with heavier options, when the entire production and transport life cycle was taken into account.

A paper bag would have to be reused seven times to have the same “global warming potential” as a traditional plastic bag used as a bin liner, a heavy-duty plastic bag nine times, a tote bag 26 times and a cotton bag 327 times.

That study calculated that just over four in 10 of all lightweight plastic bags were reused in the place of heavier bin liners.

With 90 per cent of households using either bin liners or plastic bags to line their bins, plastic bags being phased out and bin liners discouraged, the natural question becomes — what exactly are you meant to use?

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Pauline Hanson claims victory over Islamic halal certification battle after Kellogg's, Sanitarium and Nestle stop paying fees in Australia

Pauline Hanson has hailed the decision of two major breakfast cereal makers to withdraw from halal certification as a sign that companies are responding to public pressure.

Kellogg's and Sanitarium have declared there is no need to pay fees to an Islamic business or charity to declare their products contain no pork or alcohol products, making them fit for Muslims to eat.

Nestle no longer has halal certification applied to its chocolate bars, including Kit Kat, unlike its rival Cadbury.

The One Nation leader said those corporate decisions were a win for 'all those fighting to free Australians from having to pay extra into the halal certification scam' which funds Muslim schools, mosques and religious activities.

'One Nation has kept this issue alive and tried to educate people about unnecessary halal certification so it's great to see progress being made,' Senator Hanson told Daily Mail Australia.

Senator Hanson claimed the victory after Daily Mail Australia revealed the decisions of Kellogg's, Sanitarium and Nestle on Monday.

It also come only three weeks after she successfully moved a motion in the Senate for federal cabinet ministers to investigate better labeling for halal-certified foods.

'It looks like One Nation's successful Senate motion has had a flow-on effect and companies are being forced to respond to public pressure,' she said.

A Senate committee in late 2015 recommended that senior ministers investigate ways of improving transparency in the halal certification industry.

Senator Hanson's motion covered the bipartisan inquiry's first recommendation for halal-certified food to have clearer labeling.

The inquiry had six other recommendations, including better labeling for animals slaughtered as part of a religious ritual.

Nestle still pays halal fees for Milo, Magi noodles, Nescafe coffee, condensed milk and chilli sauces.

Halal certification fees charged to food manufacturers fund Islamic schools, mosques and religious activities.

Sanitarium, the Seventh Day Adventist company behind Weet-Bix, said it saw no need to to pay third-party halal certifiers for its products sold in Australia.

'As far as Sanitarium's position on halal certification we do not use meat-based ingredients or alcohol,' a spokesman told Daily Mail Australia.

Kellogg's confirmed that it stopped paying halal certification fees last year as a commercial decision.

Sanitarium has stopped paying halal fees for its exported cereals and soy milk, but clarified it never put halal logos on its products sold in Australia.

Nestle ceased paying halal certification fees in March 2016 for its chocolate bars but still has them for Maggi two-minute noodles, Nescafe coffee and condensed milk.

'This means our products are suitable for people choosing halal or kosher foods.'

It added that its plant-based breakfast cereals and So Good soy milk were already fit for Muslim and Jewish consumption.

'We do not use and have never needed to use the halal or kosher certification symbols for our local Australian or New Zealand markets as it is unnecessary to do so,' the spokesman said, adding it had previously paid halal certification fees to export their products to 35 nations.

Kellogg's, which sells popular plant-based cereals like Corn Flakes and Special K, denied it last year changed its halal policies over public pressure.

'They're inherently halal, so we chose not to renew our certification in 2016 as part of a regular review of all certifications for our foods,' a spokesman said.

'This was a commercial decision, not the result of any public pressure or backlash.'

However Halal Certification Authority president Mohamed Elmouelhy said a public campaign against halal certification may have made companies think twice. 'Yes, of course. There was a campaign,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Elmouelhy has declined the reveal the details of his clients or where his halal fees went. 'I am not going to say what I spend my money on. This is a private company and I'm a private person, and I have every right to spend the money whichever way I want to,' he said.

But he argued companies that had halal certification arrangements would have an easier time exporting to Muslim-majority nations like Indonesia and Malaysia.

'That brings in a lot of money to the company,' he said. 'Not just Cadbury, every single company.'

Halal Choices campaigner Kirralie Smith said halal fees were unnecessary for plant-based products anyway. 'Muslims will buy their products anyway,' she said.  'They're already halal. What we're concerned about is companies paying fees to state the obvious.'

Ms Smith, a farmer from northern New South Wales, ran as a Senate candidate with the Australian Liberty Alliance at last year's federal election and is now a member of Senator Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives.

She said there was still a long way to go to achieve more transparency with halal certification regulations, with major food producers Vegemite and Bega cheese continuing to pay halal certification fees.

'I'm hoping that other politicians will continue to put pressure on the government,' she said. 

Nestle said an Australian company halal certified its foods, apart from chocolate bars.

'The fee we pay in Australia, stays in Australia. The certifier is owned by a group of community organisations who invest in programs to support their local communities,' a spokeswoman said.

She said any small change to ingredients affected the halal certification process.

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Parents want to ban the hijab for young female students in fear Islamic headscarves will takeover classrooms

Tensions threaten to reach boiling point at a Queensland primary school as parents push to ban Muslim students wearing the hijab.

Benowa State School P&C President, Brooke Patterson, called for the ban after she claimed she was asked to design uniforms for young girls which provided 'sexual modesty coverings.'

'We need to debate this now, otherwise in three months there will be a Muslim uniform in state schools in Queensland,' she told the Liberal National Party state conference.

But Ms Patterson is standing firm, claiming allowing young girls to wear religious clothing effectively creates a separate uniform for Muslim students.

'Why would you be trying to do that in a secular state? We are not deciding at Benowa State School uniforms according to a Muslim culture,' she said.

'The people who are most vulnerable to this are the poor darling girls between the ages of five and nine. Their religion doesn't say anything about prepubescent girls wearing a sexual modesty garment.'

An emergency resolution at the LNP conference calling for a general ban on clothing which obscures the face was defeated.

But a second emergency resolution calling for a ban on headscarves for children under the age of 10 was passed. 

Another delegate, Wendy Ko, argued against the resolution and said the LNP should be in favour of freedom of religion.

'We shouldn't even be having this discussion, I don't think anyone has the right to tell an Islamic family how to raise their daughter,' Ms Ko said.

Ultimately the resolution was passed.

Queensland Labor frontbencher Leanne Enoch said she was disappointed by the result. 'I think it's absolutely appalling, we live in a multicultural society,' Ms Enoch said. 'They're talking about what children should wear in schools; that is the dark ages.'

SOURCE

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

What a total and utter f*ckwit! Proof conclusive that Islam rots the brain.  See below

The claim below is both deeply offensive and utterly wrong.  Australia doesn't gas Muslims.  It gives most of them welfare payments.  Only a brain-dead person could compare the two

A leader of a hardline Islamist group has compared the treatment of Muslims to the massacre of millions of Jewish people during the Holocaust.

Muslims have become an 'existential threat' in the world today, Hizb ut-Tahrir media representative Hamzah Qureshi was recently recorded telling fellow group members.

The growing fear of Islam is comparable to Germany's declaration that the Jewish people 'needed to go entirely' almost 70 years ago, Mr Qureshi argued.

'In Europe during the 19th and 20th century the ‘Jewish question’ interrogated the status of Jews and soon morphed from an allegedly neutral inquiry into a question of serious threat,' he began.

'Numerous answers were proposed – resettlement, integration, assimilation, deportation and so on as Jews were labelled an obstacle to the German nation and the insidious enemy within.'

As fears grew, the Holocaust was offered as a 'final solution' to the 'Jewish question,' he said.

'Today though brothers and sisters there is a "Muslim question",' he said. 

'The same answers that were given for the Jewish question are now being suggested for the Muslim version – integration, assimilation, deportation and so on. Muslims have become that existential threat, that enemy within and that persistent danger,' Mr Qureshi said.

'Muslims are told that in order to be accepted they must conform to a certain set of values different to their own.'

'All this begs the confronting question. What will be the final solution to this ‘Muslim Question?’

Mr Qureshi's comments come after fellow Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman Uthman Badar was captured on camera saying Muslims who leave the religion should be put to death. 'The ruling for apostates as such in Islam is clear, that apostates attract capital punishment and we don't shy away from that,' Badar said in Sydney in May. An apostate is someone who decides to leave Islam.

His extraordinary admission was exclusively captured on camera by Daily Mail Australia and the matter has now been referred to the Australian Federal Police by Justice Minister Michael Keenan.

Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia removed references to that apostasy policy from its website as Alison Bevege, a freelance journalist, sued the group for making her to sit in a women's-only section at a separate talk in October 2014.

During the group meeting, Ms Bevege held up a printed copy of Hizb ut-Tahrir's draft constitution of the khilafah state published on the UK site, which was on the group's Australian website until 2015.

This outlines their vision for a global Islamic caliphate, which has Muslims and non-Muslims living under sharia law.

Article 7c of the document said: 'Those who are guilty of apostasy (murtadd) from Islam are to be executed according to the rule of apostasy, provided they have by themselves renounced Islam.'

Badar initially responded by saying the policy wasn't on its website before explaining how the group's apostasy policy was compatible with Islam. 'The whole thing covers different aspects of Islamic sharia law,' he said.

'The role of apostasy in Islam is very clear. Again, this is one of the things the West doesn’t like and seeks to change the role of apostasy.'

A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Michael Keenan condemned language that incites or advocates violence.

'Language that incites or advocates violence is not freedom of speech,' the spokeswoman said. 'This matter has been referred to the AFP.'

Badar's remarks came after he delivered the keynote lecture for the forum, which was called 'Sharia and the modern age'.

He said Islam was incompatible with a secular separation of religion and state, democracy, individual rights and even the process of science, which he called 'scientism'.

He compared calls to fit Islam within a secular society to domesticating a wild animal, putting Hizb ut-Tahrir at odds with secular Muslims who reject sharia law.

'The West seeks to domesticate Islam, to control, to bring within, the way you domesticate animals,' he said.

Badar described calls to reform Islam from secular Muslims as 'pernicious', 'insidious' and 'dangerous' and called for radical change. 'Always when you hear these sorts of calls, alarm bells should ring,' he said.

'The Islam people are calling for fits very well within modernity. They’re giving in to the pressure to conform.'

About 100 people were at the publicly-advertised lecture with men making up about two-thirds of the audience.

Women were segregated from the men on the left-hand side of the room, apart from Ms Bevege who stood at the back.

Following the lecture, a group of men followed Daily Mail Australia to a parked car.

One older man bizarrely demanded to know if men and women had equality in Australia.

An ex-Muslim from Bangladesh, Shakil Ahmed, attended the talk and later described his disgust with Hizb ut-Tahrir and Islamists, which orchestrated marches in his home country in 2013.

Islamists staged marches in the capital Dhaka after the murder of gay rights activists and atheist bloggers.

'Their primary demand was the death of apostates and blasphemers,' Mr Ahmed, 20,  told Daily Mail Australia.

He said it was depressing to hear Hizb ut-Tahrir voice their support for the killing of ex-Muslims in Australia. 

'What I felt instinctively is that the reason I left my country was so that I could escape from the exact same people that I found in that room,' he said.

As an ex-Muslim atheist in Bangladesh, he was discreet about his beliefs. 'Apart from a close circle of family and friends, we don't integrate with others as we don't know how they would react to our views,' he said.

Another Bangladeshi student Shubhajit Bhowmik also attended the lecture.

The Hindu blogger was on the same death list as atheist blogger Avajit Roy when he got hacked to death in 2015 in Dhaka for promoting secularism.

Farabi Shafiur Rahman, an extremist blogger and member of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Bangladesh was arrested in connection with Roy's murder.

'Once you escape from death, then you will hardly find things that will scare you,' Mr Bhowmik told Daily Mail Australia about seeing Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia leaders in the flesh. 

Another Islamist group of religious madrassah teachers, Hefazat e Islam, circulated hit lists of Bangladesh and emerged after Hizb ut-Tahrir was banned in 2009.

Like Hizb ut-Tahrir, they have campaigned in Bangladesh to dismantle parliamentary democracy, scrap aspects of the constitution that contradict sharia law and wind back women's rights.

The latest revelation about Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia comes as Islamists in Pakistan take to social media to demand the killing of atheist blogger Ayaz Nizami.

He and two others were charged with blasphemy this week by a court in Islamabad and face the death penalty.

Hizb ut-Tahrir operates in 40 nations, including Australia and the United Kingdom, but is banned in Bangladesh along with other Muslim and Muslim-majority nations including Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan.

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Qld. State opposition promises to BAN Muslim schoolgirls from wearing hijabs and burqas in the classroom

Muslim schoolgirls will not be allowed to wear hijabs or burqas inside the classroom if the state opposition come to power at the next Queensland election.

The Liberal National Party voted to ban 'Muslim modesty garments' at all Queensland state schools for girls aged younger than 10, at its annual convention on Sunday.

But despite their strong stance against religious headwear, the LNP voted against a motion to call on the federal government to ban immigration from countries where sharia law is practiced.

A day after deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce spoke to the convention, the LNP's leader Tim Nicholls fronted a full house in Brisbane to deliver a keynote address.

During his speech, Mr Nicholls ruled out any formal coalition with One Nation, before the LNP base voted on the issues of Muslim headwear, sharia law and immigration.

The urgency motion to ban headscarves for young girls was passed, but a similar call to ban headscarves across the whole of Queensland was defeated.

Also voted down was the resolution to ban immigrants from sharia law countries.

Despite those in favour calling it 'culturally incompatible' with Australian values, LNP members arguing against said immigrants should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

It comes after the LNP announced a strategy to tackle terrorism should they govern including allowing police to hold terror suspects such as Mohammed Elomar (pictured) for 28 days

Under a Mr Nicholls-led government Queensland would also become the first state in the country to have a counter-terrorism minister.

Bail and parole laws will also be strengthened in an effort to safeguard against those with known terror links re-offending.

'We can't take for granted the freedoms we all enjoy,' Mr Nicholls said on Saturday. 'International terrorist groups have proven adept at using their extremist ideology to motivate 'lone wolves' or small groups to use violence in their home countries.'

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Bernardi building his power base

Watch out Malcolm Turnbull and all eastern state Liberal Party leaders — Cory Bernardi is coming hunting for your members and your voters.

The South Australian senator’s Australian Conservatives will mark another milestone in their long march through the eastern states today with their ­formal registration as a political party in Victoria.

This adds to the Australian Conservatives’ federal and South Australian registration. Plans for the party to achieve formal registration in NSW are well under way and will be followed by registration in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania.

Most states have made it more difficult to achieve formal registration as a political party.

This makes it harder for micro-parties with catchy names and very little real community support to game the system by exchanging preferences with a vast array of other, similar micro-parties.

Some four weeks ago the Australian Conservatives gave the Victorian Electoral Commission a list of more than 500 active members in Victoria.

The registration involved the VEC writing to these people and accepting their bona fides only after it received replies. There was also a process of follow-up phone calls with some party members to authenticate their membership.

This process was completed in three weeks and a week had to elapse in case any group wanted to register a complaint against the new party’s name.

Senator Bernardi believed the Australian Conservatives would be one of likely only 14 political parties registered to contest next year’s Victorian election.

Senator Bernardi said his party had about 2500 members in Victoria. Its total national membership was approaching 13,000. Each member pays a $25 fee and there are no discounted or free memberships.

“We know we’ve got a long way to go but in five months we’ve made remarkable progress,” Senator Bernardi said.

Most Australian political parties would regard the recruitment of an extra 13,000 financial members in five months as an astronomical achievement.

“Our youngest new member in Victoria is 15 and our oldest new member will be 102 next month,” he said. “She wrote to us and said I live in a nursing home, I’ve never joined a political party before but I can see we need to make some changes. It’s wonderful that someone like her wants to make a contribution and it’s wonderful that we are attracting young people too.”

The Australian Conservatives have four MPs — two former Families First members in the South Australian parliament, plus Rachel Carling-Jenkins in the Victorian parliament who recently left the Democratic Labor Party to join the Australian Conservatives, and Senator Bernardi himself.

The party has a headquarters in South Australia that for the moment is staffed by volunteers. “We are experiencing all the problems of a start-up in a rapid growth phase,” Senator Bernardi said. “On Monday morning there might be 3000 emails waiting in our office and they will all need to be answered.”

Senator Bernardi is careful to be precise and conservative in announcing membership figures.

More than 100,000 Australians have given their email address to the Australian Conservatives. They receive material from the party and many have made donations. But Senator Bernardi counts as members only those who have signed up for formal membership of the party and paid their first year’s annual dues.

It is by no means unlikely that the party will recruit more members of parliament to its ranks before the Victorian and South Australian elections next year and the NSW election the year after, while timing for the Queensland election is uncertain.

The increasingly onerous party registration requirements in each state provide a strong incentive for the mainstream centre-right forces beyond the Liberal and National parties to come together.

The Australian Conservatives’ initial target of potential voters is 10 or 15 per cent of centre-right voters who are uneasy about the Liberal Party in its current state but also might have serious reservations about voting for Pauline Hanson.

Senator Bernardi believes he has a strong pitch to make to business as well: who do you want to have the balance of power in the Senate, the Greens, Nick Xenophon, Pauline Hanson or the Australian Conservatives?

Senator Bernardi also has big meetings planned in the eastern states that are members-only events and have been sold out with 500 or more attendees.

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The Left looks away from the Islamist threat

On a recent episode of the ABC’s Q&A American physicist Lawrence Krauss delighted the audience by claiming that in the US falling fridges posed a greater safety risk than terrorist attacks.

Variations on this theme recur in statements by those determined to minimise the threat posed by terrorists inspired by Islamic doctrine. What about bathroom drownings? Electrocutions while changing light bulbs? In Australia we could throw in fun­nel-web spiders and brown snakes. All the better to get people to focus on the real menace: an outbreak of Islamophobia in response to the attacks among the unenlightened masses.

This is pernicious nonsense. It is patently absurd to make statistical comparisons between deaths by accident, misadventure and disease with those resulting from deliberately orchestrated violence by groups determined to reshape our society.

Morally, there is no comparison between the inevitable accidents of life and planned slaughter. The terrorists responsible for the Manchester atrocity real­ly intended to kill and maim large numbers of teenage girls. People are profoundly unnerved, and rightly so, to think that we have people in our midst capable of forming this kind of evil intention and of carrying it out.

And, crucially, we are not just talking about individuals, the proverbial “lone wolves”. In case after case it turns out that the attacks are committed by organised cells, sometimes involving scores of people. In the case of the 2015 Paris attacks, for example, 23 arrests were made in addition to the eight who carried out the attacks.

Often the direct perpetrators are just the tip of the iceberg, with others providing weapons, safe houses and other support. This is a stark contrast with the rare cases of lethal anti-Islamic violence, which are almost invariably the work of lone individuals.

It is true, of course, that only a tiny minority of Muslims directly participates in these attacks, and most do not support them. But it takes only a handful of violent ­jihadists to cast a pall of fear over a society. I wonder if Krauss can point to any instances of feral ­fridges causing cities to go into lockdown, as happened in Boston, Paris and Brussels.

It is also sadly true that substantial minorities in some Muslim communities do identify with the perpetrators. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, polls in France and Britain revealed that about one-quarter of Muslims expressed some level of sympathy for the terrorists, with support strongest among the young.

According to a poll of British Muslims commissioned by Channel 4, two-thirds of those asked would not report a terrorist plot involving someone close to them to the police, a result that the former chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commis­sion, Trevor Phillips, described as “astonishing” and “troubling”.

Mao Zedong famously stated that in a guerilla war the fighters must move among the people “as a fish swims in the sea”. Suburbs such as Molenbeek in Brussels, where the Paris and Brussels terror attacks were incubated, provide just this kind of environment.

We need to also bear in mind the “sky’s the limit” mentality of ­jihadist attackers, in which catastrophically successful attacks such as the 9/11 World Trade Centre atrocity are the gold standard. Such attacks need a high level of organisation, technical competence and substantial financial backing. Those responsible would think nothing of inflict­ing hundreds of thousands or even millions of casualties, given the opportunity.

This forces Western governments to take extreme measures to ensure security, including legislative and surveillance measures that would not be contemplated in more benign circumstances.

In France, heavily armed troops patrol beaches in Nice; Jewish schools and synagogues resemble armed camps. In Britain troops were ordered on to streets after the Manchester bombing. In Melbourne ugly concrete bollards have been placed in 10 CBD locations to protect pedestrians from terror attacks. Our societies are being transformed by all this — and very much for the worse.

The most sinister aspect is the effective curbing of free speech. Starting with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, any high-profile critic of Islam has had to face the prospect of death threats.

Many have felt the impact of this, from cartoonists (including this newspaper’s Bill Leak) to historians of Islam who challenge orthodox accounts, such as British author Tom Holland, who was subjected to what he called a “tsunami of death threats” against his family after the airing of a Channel 4 documentary about his ideas.

At greatest risk are defectors from Islam, apostates such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who must take extraordinary security measures. Even today most Islamic scholars agree apostasy is a capital crime, a daunting prospect for any Muslim inclined to exercise the freedom of religion that we had assumed was an integral feature of our society, let alone to express it publicly.

Hirsi Ali can afford 24-hour security. But what about those who cannot, such as Molly Norris, of whom many readers may be unaware? She is a young cartoonist of liberal-progressive politics who was based in Seattle.

In 2010 she responded to the censorship of an episode of the television show South Park that depicted Mohammed by calling for an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”. According to a friend, “she didn’t mean to skewer or offend — she just thought people should lighten up”. This resulted in Norris being placed on a hit list by Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

After being advised by the FBI that the threat was “very serious”, Norris effectively disappeared. Seattle Weekly published this: “You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly. The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, ‘going ghost’: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity.”

She is still in hiding — in the land of the first amendment.

On YouTube you can watch a speech to the American Humanist Association by Sarah Haider, an extraordinarily articulate and courageous young woman from a Pakistani Muslim background, and a founder of the group Ex-Muslims of North America. Needless to say, her group is forced to operate like a secret society, venues and identities carefully concealed. But the most remarkable aspect of her speech was her description of reactions from her erstwhile colleagues of the progressive left.

As Haider said: “I always expected feeling unwelcome from Muslim audiences, but I didn’t anticipate an equal amount of hostility from my allies on the left … almost all of whom questioned my motives rather than addressing my claims.”.

She lists the epithets directed at people like her: “House Muslim”, “Uncle Tom” and the particularly sinister “native informant”. Who would have thought it? Self-styled “progressives” in a de facto alliance with Islamist fanatics to marginalise and suppress religious dissenters?

This is the intellectual and moral abyss that the postmodern left has fallen into with its embrace of identity politics.

SOURCE

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