Letter From Australia (About Victimhood, Grievance, and Entitlement)

"The Force is Strong in This One"

A politician in Australia has been caught out with her snout in the trough.  But because it's all to do with a PC cause, there is "nothing to see here.  Move along."  Nonetheless, voters have taken umbrage.

Here's a way to test your capacity for self-delusion.  If your child is too ill to go to school today, do you take her on a business trip at the taxpayer’s expense? A moral bind surely, even if it is within the so-called company rules.  But if you’re a warrior for Single Motherhood, that excuses everything.

You can attend, with a sick child in tow, an overnight jaunt to see a few whales and shuck oysters because you are simply doing your job.  In other words, tick, another problem solved in the tyranny of life known as Single Motherhood.  That is, of course, if you’re blindly entitled like the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young.

The Senator has this week been condemned nationwide for using a reported $3874.24 of taxpayers’ money to go whale watching with her daughter Kora last September in the Great Australian Bight.  Hanson-Young says she didn’t have an option and therefore had to take her unwell 11-year-old along on the trip to discuss BP’s plans to drill for oil in the marine reserve.  [Daily Telegraph]

 If anyone dare criticize this snout-in-trough behaviour, the good senator will face them down with masterful guilt manipulation.  How dare anyone persecute a single mother such as her!

Letter From Australia (About Going Nuclear)

Nuclear Power Now a Hot Option 

South Australian inquiry ordered

ANDREW BOLT
Herald Sun
February 12, 2015

ALARMISTS like Jay Weatherill now finally admit nuclear power isn’t actually a terrifying mass-killing menace. 
 
Now they say we need nuclear to stop their latest terrifying mass-killing menace — global warming.
Can you believe these guys? Nuclear power has switched from our greatest threat to greatest saviour. Yet none of these hypesters has said sorry for having peddled such baseless scares.

Take Weatherill, South Australia’s Labor Premier. As a budding politician he was “­opposed to nuclear power, all elements of it”, but this week said he’d changed his mind.  Now he is calling for a royal commission to “consider what role our state can potentially play in the fuel cycle for the peaceful use of nuclear energy”.

See, Weatherill reckons a nuclear industry might help save his struggling state.  The most obvious money-spinner would be a nuclear waste facility, like one Pangea tried to sell in 1999 that would have earned us $2 billion a year.

. . . anti-nuclear protesters are shameless. When the Fukushima reactor was smashed by a tsunami in 2011 they were at it again, with Crikey’s Guy Rundle predicting “the Japanese crews (at the reactor) will ... bleed out internally under the full glare of the world’s media”. In fact, not one person died from the radiation and the WHO doubts any will.

It makes sense. We have the stable geology and stable government to store the world’s nuclear waste, safe from earthquakes and terrorists.  But such facts never used to count with the likes of the unapologetic Weatherill. Such alarmists instead mounted the usual scare against Pangea and ran it out of town. Pangea couldn’t even get interviews with the young Howard government.

Letter From Australia (About Denmark's Jihadis)

Nanny State Extremism

Tim Blair
Monday 29 December, 2014
The Telegraph


To a certain extent, Australia’s jihadist contribution to the Islamic State cause in Syria and Iraq is a self-solving problem. Our brave soldiers of Allah are evidently such incompetent warriors that they are being killed at almost the same rate as they arrive.

“The overall number of Australians currently fighting with or supporting Islamic extremist groups in Syria and Iraq has remained consistent over recent months,” ASIO deputy director-general Kerri Hartland told a Senate hearing earlier this month.  “However, this does not reflect a reduction in the number of Australian travellers. Instead it reflects the relatively high casualty rate for Australians, with the numbers of new arrivals roughly keeping pace with the fatalities.”

Keep it up, lads. Danish jihadists may be slightly more intelligent, not only surviving in greater numbers but also running back to Denmark after realising that glorious martyrdom is not a great long-term career choice. This presents obvious problems for Danish authorities, who besides dealing with an already-agitated Islamic minority in their small nation – less than one-quarter of Australia’s population – must now cope with extremists made even crazier by their Syrian frolics.

Letter From Australia (About Trotskyite Sydney University)

Orwell Would Weep at the Demonisation of Professor Barry Spurr 

Miranda Devine

The Sunday Telegraph
November 16, 2014

I MUST assume Eden Caceda is an inspired satirical creation by Sydney University students outraged at the brutalisation of poetry professor Barry Spurr. 
 
After all, the anagram of the name is “A Decadence”. That’s one way of looking at the descent into Orwellian thought-control at the nation’s finest university, which has suspended Spurr indefinitely and banned him from campus for using “offensive” language in private emails, which he said had been hacked and sent to a left-wing website.

“Eden Caceda”, an office-bearer with the university’s “Autonomous Collective Against Racism”, ho, ho, led the campaign last week against Vice-Chancellor Michael Spence’s “racist” Mexican-themed staff Christmas party.  The dress code was “Mexican Fiesta — bring your own sombreros and ponchos”.  But “Caceda” was deeply ­offended by the “culturally ­insensitive” invitation.  “My family has a poncho and it is really important to us, and these people are treating it like a costume,” he said.

Spence, who made the decision to render Professor Spurr a non-person, now finds himself hoist with his own petard.  He has been forced to send an email to staff, cancelling the Mexican dress code: “I have today asked the event organisers to amend our plans so the party has no particular theme.”

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

Letter From Australia (About How Christians Ought Treat Muslims in our Midst)

Muslims Need Truth and Love

by Mark Durie
Eternity
September 26, 2014

The past few weeks have been hard ones for Australians, not least for Australian Muslims. Various alleged plots by Islamic State supporters to slaughter Australians has Islam in the news. Even as I write, five out of ten of the "most popular" articles on The Australian's website are about Islamic jihad and national security.

What are ordinary Australians to make of conspiracy theories aired by Muslims on the ABC's Q&A program, implying that recent police raids were staged as a cynical act to manipulate public opinion? Are Muslims being unfairly victimised by all these security measures?

How are we to evaluate Senator Jacqui Lambie's claim that sharia law "obviously involves terrorism"? Or the Prime Minister's decision to mobilise Australian troops against the Islamic State?

What about the Islamic State's grandiose claim that "We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women." Or [Prime Minister Tony] Abbott's declaration that the balance between freedom and security needs to be adjusted in favour of greater security and less freedom?

Letter From Australia (About Propaganda Frames)

The Bolt Report

Letter From Australia (About Self-Loathing)

This self-loathing insults Australian values

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
June 26, 2014

THE Sydney Opera House is Australia’s most iconic building. And on its stage in August was to be a taxpayer-funded talk: “Honour killings are morally justified.”

Be clear: the title is not a question but a statement.  Yes, in the heart of Australia we are now to rationalise the strangling, stoning, burning, beating or shooting of daughters and wives for supposedly shaming their men. . . .

In this case, Uthman Badar was invited by Sydney Opera House and the St James Ethics Centre for their Festival of Dangerous Ideas, and planned to attack critics of honour killings as the usual “secular (white) Westerner”, wickedly using these murders as a symbol of “everything that is allegedly wrong with the other culture”. Note: honour killings are only “allegedly wrong”. 

Yes, to see Westerners criticise an “Oriental” woman-killer was to see “the powerful condemn the powerless”, according to the blurb approved by Badar. Pity those powerless murderers.

Silly, Febrile Journalists

Abbott Derangement Syndrome

In New Zealand, we are familiar with what has become known as the Key Derangement Syndrome.  The reference is to Prime Minister, John Key.  For a long time, the establishment media and opposition political parties appeared to lose their ability to think when it came to the Prime Minister.  They collectively went agog and aghast whenever Key featured, seeing all kinds of sinister plots, disasters, and repeated faux pas.

Now Australia has been caught in the same syndrome, only this time it is the Abbott Derangement Syndrome.  Miranda Divine documents the nonsense pouring forth from the minds, mouths and scribblings of the media:

Letter From Australia (About a Ruinous Government)

Cleaning Up The Unlucky Country

In hindsight it will likely be told that Australia, of all the developed countries, handled the Global Financial Crisis (GFC") the worst--and that, dear friends, from a country which went into the crisis positioned far better than most.  What caused the manufacture of such a crisis?

• A grandiose Prime Minister who cast himself in a Churchillian role
• An insecure Prime Minister who wanted to be seen as the Barack Obama of the Asia-Pacific Region
• An economically ignorant Prime Minister who thought that money could be borrowed ad infinitum.

The name of the one who is arguably Australia's worst Prime Minister?  Kevin Rudd.

Paul Sheehan, Sydney Morning Herald correspondent, fills in the details.

Letter From Australia (About Education and Reflexive Protectionists)

A Man Who Has Class

Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
February 05, 2014

THE vicious attacks on the expert chosen by Christopher Pyne to review the national education curriculum show just how much is at stake for the cultural revolutionaries dumbing down our schools. 
 
Dr Kevin Donnelly is their worst nightmare, appointed to snatch the curriculum back from the brink of disaster.  For his trouble he has been falsely branded a paedophile, Islamophobe, homophobe, misogynist and Christian.  In the sewers of Twitter, people have wished him dead and asked him for his opinion on vibrators.  "Go f... yourself Kevin Donnelly."


Among his and Queensland academic Ken Wiltshire's tasks is to decide whether the three priorities of the new curriculum - sustainability, indigenous history and culture and Asian engagement - make any sense.  Absurdly, even in maths the curriculum claims "sustainability provides rich, engaging and authentic contexts for developing students' abilities in number and algebra".  Good grief. Pyne has rightly queried this politically correct attempt at brainwashing. He ought to rip the curriculum to shreds, but he is taking the gentle approach.

Clear-thinking Donnelly is the perfect choice.

Letter From Australia (About Truth Being Drowned)

Truth Founders in a Sea of Bias

Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
February 03, 2014

YOU'D think the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ("ABC") would cheer. In six weeks, not one boat of "asylum seekers" has turned up and not one boat person drowned. 
 
Not in six years - since Labor scrapped our tough border laws and lured more than 1000 boat people to their deaths - has there been such a pause. Think what this means. Lives have been saved. Hundreds of millions of dollars won't be wasted. Real refugees won't be pushed out of the queues here by fakes. 

Yet here is what's so damning of the ABC, which takes $1.2 billion a year from taxpayers under an agreement not to be biased.  Never has the ABC campaigned so furiously against our border policies as now, when the Abbott Government has shut the gate by turning back boats and sending every arrival to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Same with the Greens and many Fairfax commentators.

When the first scores of boat people drowned under Labor, most in the Left turned a blind eye. Later, they pretended Labor's weak laws weren't to blame.  "Tragedies happen, accidents happen," Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.

Letter From Australia (About a Horrible Man)

A Scientific Delusion

The Commentariat in Australia is all in a tizz wazz because a prominent someone has dared to call a spade what it really is.  One often finds Australians a bit mealy mouthed.  One is never quite sure what they mean with all the hemming and hawing and hedging and qualifications.  But not this time.

A correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald, a bastion of Commentariat orthodoxy, has recorded the shock at the outrageous statements made by a leading Australian businessman.  Since the culprit also happens to be a business adviser to the Prime Minister, that perfectly awful Tony Abbott, the paper reports that the opposition Labor party and Fairfax media have rushed off to the Prime Minister's office with a "do you still stand by . . . . " question of the PM.  To date, no response has been forthcoming.  Probably a case of not wanting to dignify idiocy by an answer. 

Tony Abbott's business adviser says Australia taken 'hostage' by 'climate change madness'

Letter From Australia (About the United States)

World-class Fakery on Show

TIM BLAIR
The Daily Telegraph
December 16, 2013 12:00AM

 A RIDICULOUS and under-qualified faker took to the stage last week during Nelson Mandela's memorial service. And next to Barack Obama was some guy who hasn't quite mastered sign language. 
 
Thamsanqa Jantjie's erratic performance has drawn international ridicule, but all he really did was turn the failed president's words into a disappointing jumble of incomprehensible nonsense. As is now apparent, Obama is quite capable of achieving this by himself.

Many Australians were puzzled by American resistance to Obama's universal healthcare plan, back when it was first proposed in 2008. They couldn't understand why the US would not embrace an Australian-style system of health coverage.  One reason is that the system in the US was proposed by Obama and his hopeless administration. If you thought Labor's attempts in Australia to install home insulation and run grocery price websites were lame, they have nothing on Obama's bid to reshape the massive US health sector.

Letter From Australia (About State Education)

Getting Value For Money

The problems with NZ government schools are not unique to this country.  A similar pattern can be discerned in Australia.  Here is a piece in The Telegraph by Piers Akerman.

The big error lies in believing money is the sole answer to educational problems.  In the past decade the education budget has increased by 40 per cent but results have declined in real terms across every subject. Australian taxpayers pay $42 billion a year for shocking results.

The Abbott government has been faced with the choice of continuing to fund bad policy and fail our children or trying to help them gain from their schooling. Given that the federal government doesn't own any schools or employ any teachers, the choice seems simple. 

Give the states and territories some guidance on curricula, replace the hideously ideological literacy program, for instance, with the universally accepted and proven phonics method of teaching reading,

Letter From Australia (About Resuming Normal Service)

The Great Climate Grind

Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
November 25, 2013

AUSTRALIAN pride is restored. This is no small accomplishment, considering the depths to which we sank in 2009, when prime minister Kevin Rudd offered this wince-making speech to that year's United Nations climate conference in Denmark:

"Before I left Australia, I was presented with a book of handwritten letters from a group of six-year-olds. One of the letters is from Gracie. Gracie is six. 'Hi,' she wrote. 'My name is Gracie. How old are you?' Gracie continues, 'I am writing to you because I want you all to be strong in Copenhagen. Please listen to us as it is our future.' I fear that at this conference, we are on the verge of letting little Gracie down."

We were a different country back then, outsourcing economic policy to babies and actually admitting it to the world. Happily, things have changed. For this year's UN climatefest in Warsaw, Poland, Tony Abbott's government didn't even bother to send the environment minister, much less the Prime Minister and his pre-teen fan mail.

Instead we sent some delegates who quite properly treated the whole exercise as a lark, much to the consternation of Gaia's little Gracies.

Letter From Australia (About Pain in the US)

No Cure as Obamacare Gets Worse 

James Morrow
The Daily Telegraph
November 15, 2013 12:00AM

IN politics, leaders live and die by their promises. Julia Gillard effectively wrote her government into the history books when she went back on her assurance that "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead". 

In the US, President Barack Obama is in similar strife over an oft-repeated promise that under his plan to overhaul health care - the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare for short - Americans who liked their GPs and their health care plans would be able to keep seeing their GPs and using those same plans.  Or as he put it in various forms to the American public more than two dozen times: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan."

The only thing is, it turned out not to be true.

Letter From Australia (About Climate Clowns)

Australia's Ablaze with Climate Clowns

Tim Blair
The Daily Telegraph
October 28, 2013 12:00AM

 AUSTRALIA is a deeply puzzling land, especially to foreign media types. Even basic geography is sometimes a cause of bewilderment. For example, in 2011 Britain's Daily Mail tried to depict the extent of that year's Queensland floods with a helpful map of eastern Australia. This isn't a particularly difficult cartographic assignment, but the Mail managed to get it wrong, inventing the brand new state of Capricornia to Queensland's north.
 
The current NSW fires have prompted similar blunders. Last week the US television network NBC ran a graphic intended to show the range of the fires. They turned out to be far more extensive than anyone in Australia was aware.

NBC may have sourced their information from a Geoscience Australia monitoring site that lists hazard reduction burns and other non-threatening fires along with the massive conflagrations throughout NSW. The result was a graphic showing almost the entire northwest of Australia covered with flames. Darwin hasn't seen the likes of this since the Japanese bombing in World War II. Poor Capricornia copped it again as well. So did arid desert areas, which apparently now feature rare combustible dirt.

Elementary geographic and factual errors are one thing. It gets worse when ignorant outsiders lecture us about our own country.

Letter From Australia (About Deadly Greenist Policies)

Why Greenies Only Make Me See Red

Miranda Devine
The Daily Telegraph
October 23, 2013 12:00AM

BILL Leak, acclaimed cartoonist, lives in one of the loveliest places in Australia: Killcare, on the Central Coast. 

  But one of the consequences of living in the middle of the Australian bush is fire.  And in pretty seachange and treechange communities, you're likely to find yourself in a greenie council dominated by refugees from the city who haven't a clue about the real dangers of living among trees.

So it is that at the start of a dangerous bushfire season, Leak finds himself with a backyard full of trees and flammable material that he is forbidden to clear by Gosford Council on threat of fines as high as $1.1 million.
"Here I am, living on the edge of bushland that could burst into flame at any time, and I'm not allowed to clear the land in my own backyard of trees that, in the event of a fire, will bring the fire straight into my home," he says.

Council flora preservation policies warn that the removal of any native tree over 3m can attract hefty fines.
This "puts homes like mine in grave danger: the refusal of local councils to allow home owners to remove trees that can extend the bushland right up to our own back doors," Leak says.  "The only possible explanation for this is the council is hell-bent on securing Green votes. I'll accept, albeit unwillingly, the indulgence of Greens fantasies up to a point but if and when they cost me my house I think I'll have to say, 'A line has been crossed'."

Letter From Australia (About Respek)

As a community, we owe each other respect

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
October 16, 2013 8:00PM

IS IT just that I've hit 54 and become more cranky? Or has the presumption of some people this week finally crossed a line? 
 
Sure, we've tolerated for an absurdly long time the pushy politicians, activists and special interests helping themselves to our wallets and our freedoms. Too rarely have they been called out for treating the rest of us as mere props or money-trees. Or as fools who'll accept rubbish excuses while the imposters just help themselves to what isn't theirs.

But this week we haven't just had former Labor president Michael Williamson plead guilty to defrauding his Health Service Union members of $1 million, on top of his $500,000 a year salary. We've also heard a cacophony of oinking and snuffling and bellowing from people with a truly outsized sense of entitlement and no seeming shame about it.

Some examples?

Letter From Australia (About Dinosaurs)

The Not-So-Lucky Country

PIERS AKERMAN
The Sunday Telegraph
October 12, 2013

[In New Zealand, the union movement has routinely criticised New Zealand for having wages set significantly lower than Australia.  Thousands of kiwis have crossed the ditch in search not only of employment, but of higher wages offered in that country.  But there is another side to the story.  Australia is starting to price itself out of world markets, due to its high wage policies.  Piers Akerman argues that you can blame the trade unions and the collusion of  big business--who have gone along to get along.  More fools them.  Ed.]

IF your son or daughter can't find an entry-level job in the restaurant or tourism industry as the school year comes to an end, you can blame the dinosaurs in the trade union movement, Labor's Fair Work commissioner Anne Gooley and Big Business.  Nothing chokes new employment in these areas more than Gooley's decision to ignore calls to alter the current job-destroying penalty rate regime and reject the argument for reduced employment costs and more jobs.