Category: Australia

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@KevinRuddPM meets with Madeline

Armenian holocaust denialTwo more tweets have appeared on the newly founded @KevinRuddPM informing us patient followers that he has respectively arrived in Washington and had briefings with the Treasurer and Embassy Staff in preparation for tomorrow’s meeting, and met with Madeline Albright, she of the blithe gaffe that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children through the hideous sanctions over Iraq were “worth it”.

No doubt Ms Albright, presently a top advisor to Obama on national security, would have some pertinent insights into the global stock market schmozzle, given her past position on the NYSE Board. Albright resigned in 2005 after the Grasso scandal.

Considering her past opposition toward recognising the Armenian genocide which occurred during the final days of Ottoman rule in World War 1, the importance of Turkey as one of the trusty US land-bound aircraft carrier vassal countries in the Middle East and the concurring predilections of newly appointed Chief Advisor to Obama, Rahm Emmanuel, along with Obama’s grovelling to AIPAC, it would be surprising indeed if the US shifted its current position to the Holocaust suffered by the Armenian people.

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@KevinRuddPM in a Twatty Twitter

Pipped at the post by @TurnbullMalcolm by several weeks, @KevinRuddPM is getting off to an embarrassing, stumbling start. A couple of hours after we first followed Kevvie, all his followers were wiped clean – in a supposedly inexplicable Twitter crash. We readded ourselves quickly, yet were not followed back. In fact, we had to delete then add ourselves again later so Kevvie would follow us, after his Twitter Team announced all followers were to be automatically followed. Democratic governments are the servants of the people, not the other way around, after all.

Unlike Malcolm’s constant, urbane twitterings which are written by none other than the man himself and which include direct, pertinent responses to his followers, Kevin and his Twittering Team have managed just 7 flaccid, dead fish declarations, and no public responses. Twice, his eager followers have been reminded, groan, that Kevvie is off to the G20 in Washington. Has Kevvie no mobile with him on the plane to Washington whereby he could ameliorate his limp Twitter image? Should we infer that he is too busy collecting his thoughts for that great occasion and being a man can only think about one thing at once? With Conroy continuing to make a dill of himself with his unworkable, unpalatable internet censorship proposals, Kevvie is adding insult to injury with his inept handling of the powerful social networking and communication tool Twitter has become – creating the distinct impression Kevvie and his team just don’t understand the internet at all.

Surely his media advisers had studied @BarackObama and @DowningStreet prior to launching into the twitterverse? Get it together Kevvie – why didn’t you set up another identity a while back and practise with your friends to avoid being labelled a Twitter noob?

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Prevent the Victoriana epidemic

ConroydomsThe drift of the ALP to the right during Howard’s reign was palpable and now, nearly a year after the ALP winning the last federal election, Christian fundamentalism has inserted its cloying puritanical payload firmly into the Oz body politic. With the Family Fist joyously inserted into its nether regions, whilst ignoring the admonishments of savvy internet doctors and pleas of free speech advocates, the ALP Government is exposing Australia to the risk of serious infection by the sinister Victoriana bacillus. Minister for Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, exhibiting the most florid symptoms of technological denial and prudery, is refusing to backtrack on his seriously flawed bleatings that other western democracies employ internet condoms similar to the pricked sheath he proposes. In fact, Conroy’s proposed internet censorship regime is shared only by such human rights champions as China, North Korea, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Conroy is avoiding the question of exactly what ‘unwanted material’ he’s hoping to block from dainty Australians’ minds, whilst attacking and attempting to gag learned critics of his plans. Is this the thin edge of a totalitarian wedge which Conroy, along with the sexually repressed, intolerant religious right, is pushing?

Paws off, ConroyThe Government needs the support of the Greens and Opposition to ram net censorship legislation through, so they are unlikely at present to succeed. However, Conroy is still signalling the commencement of censorship trials from December 24 and has called for expressions of interest from ISPs. Quite possibly the Government has another agenda – their attack on the internet, being pre-doomed to technological failure, may still prove a successful tactic in obtaining the support of Senators Xenophon and Fielding for other Government bills.

What to do? prevention of a nauseating epidemic of Victoriana is better and less costly than cure. There’s an online petition at Computer World worth signing. Folks can also contact Conroy direct here.

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The biggest loser

Would have to be the Labor Party in Queensland. The low number of voters – just 70% – presenting at the compulsory Regional Council polls attested to the lack of enthusiasm Queenslanders had for the forced amalgamations. It would be interesting to know how many voters only voted out of fear of losing representation. Along with the distinctive results from last year’s plebiscite, the abysmal turnout supports the view that amalgamation was not endorsed by the people, and neither did the people give the government a mandate to betray their will with forced amalgamations.

In Brisbane, the Libs picked up 6 Council seats, whilst in Townsville, long term ALP mayor Tony Mooney lost his position to Thuringowra mayor, Les Tyrell.

Captain Bligh boasted about the hard decisions made to produce “larger, better equipped councils in place across all our major regions”. Better equipped to charge us higher rates and to carry out unilateral armslength State decrees in defiance of resounding public dissent is our cynical reaction.

Sunset at Boreen Point

Despite the present State Government’s South East Queensland Regional Plan and Infrastructure Plan and claims that the State government wishes to slow development on the coast of South East Queensland and move population to Beaudesert and Mt. Lindsay, our Sunshine Coast region’s concept of sustainability, determined as Bob Abbot envisages through community consultative processes well known to Noosa residents, may clash with the State’s vision to which our new super Council must defer, given that there is still no Federal legal recognition of local government. The Sunshine Coast and other regions which desire and plan for more realistic and truly sustainable development and population caps with majority support from their electors and which had opposed amalgamation can still be overridden by the State. The States can also argue for Federal support on the basis outlined by Andrew McNamara, Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation, when he supported population distribution omitting to mention the addition of a more sensible, palatable and sustainable federal policy of negative population growth with a truly innovative economic strategy to match. Rudd has thrown his national condom out the window as well.

Regardless of the warm, fuzzy wording of the SEQRPIP, the travesty of Traveston Dam has already provided a clear example of the State Government sacrificing the environment and existing landholders for the “greater good of Queensland” … in other words, the good of those requiring development at the expense of irreplaceable natural habitat and communities.

As Captain Bligh called her new lieutenants to a Brisbane summit, Bob Abbot expressed similar suspicions about Bligh’s real agenda:

“I’ve got a great fear that the next attack on local government will be in the planning sphere and I think they (state government) need to look very closely at what the communities are saying about how they want to be managed in the future as regards to development,” he told a Brisbane newspaper.

“Any further attack on local government in the development sphere would create another Gold Coast highway koala corridor type fiasco for the government – and would bring them down.”

Centralised decision-making may facilitate government planning aligned with big money, yet a government markedly out of step with its constituents could pay a high price at the next State election. Big Bob, with 70% of the Sunshine Coast vote has a clear mandate for sustainability. Perhaps Captain Bligh is counting on voters forgetting her and Beattie’s attack on democracy by then, yet Howard’s end was largely due to his deafness to the voice of the people, from his outrageous disregard of public feeling against his draconian no choice work laws, his ignorance of the realities of climate change to his pandering to Bush with the disgraceful war on Iraq.

When politicians step above their role as servants of the people, the people whom they are elected to represent will teach them humility.

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How low could Joe go?

Good on you, Bob … you ARE the man for the big job. A positive future is now possible despite the shoddy, undemocratic amalgamation and one third the previous representation enforced by autocratic State Government decree. The whole Sunshine Coast can incorporate Noosa’s sensible planning for sustainability.

95% of Noosa voters backed the man they know can deliver for the Coast as well as he has done for them. 70% of the entire region selected Bob.

Joe Natoli’s last ditch desperate, repugnant appeal to the Coast’s homophobic bigots is captured for posterity on Youtube. Given Bob Abbot’s resounding majority election to the mayoral job, it seems Joe, in running a negative campaign, vastly underestimated the intelligence of the electorate. The good sense and decency of Coast voters has saved us from an overdevelopment, divisive menace.