Report doctored

I saw a copy of the Herald Sun lying on a table whilst waiting at the local GP.

“Why not?” I thought. Silly me, I’d forgot there’d be an Andrew Bolt column.

“How can she remain?” screamed the headline. No prize for guessing who ‘she’ is.

Anyway, the column is typically a polished regurgitation of the stuff he’s pedalled all week on his blog.

Funny how he likes to quote, or rather misquote, from a report of an Expert Panel whose authority he’s refused to accept until he found it could be incrementally milked to support his partisan agenda.

For example, he says the only qualification the Expert Panel made with regard to the Coalition’s boat turn-back policy is that it must be safe to do so and with the “permission or acquiescence” of Indonesia.

Wrong again...

3.77 Turning back irregular maritime vessels carrying asylum seekers to Australia can be operationally achieved and can constitute an effective disincentive to such ventures, but only in circumstances where a range of operational, safety of life, diplomatic and legal conditions are met:

• The State to which the vessel is to be returned would need to consent to such a return.
• Turning around a vessel outside Australia’s territorial sea or contiguous zone (that is, in international waters) or ‘steaming’ a vessel intercepted and turned around in Australia’s territorial sea or contiguous zone back through international waters could only be done under international law with the approval of the State in which the vessel is registered (the ‘flag State’).
• A decision to turn around a vessel would need to be made in accordance with Australian domestic law and international law, including non-refoulement obligations, and consider any legal responsibility Australia or operational personnel would have for the consequences to the individuals on board any vessel that was to be turned around.
• Turning around a vessel would need to be conducted consistently with Australia’s obligations under the SOLAS Convention, particularly in relation to those on board the vessel, mindful also of the safety of those Australian officials or Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel involved in any such operation.

The obligation of non-refoulement is perhaps the most problematic ‘operational’ consideration. Strictly speaking, you’d have to do some kind of reasonably rigorous assessment of the claims of each and every asylum seeker on board each and every boat before towing it back out to the open sea.

You see, Doctor Easychair? — it’s all somewhat more complicated than your one-line reformulation for idiots. How many times must we correct your simple-minded reading and comprehension?

Later today I came across a puff piece on our good Doctor Easychair by former Labor leader Mark Latham, e.g.

Bolt, in effect, is Australia’s de facto shadow minister for boat people policy, climate change scepticism, Aboriginal welfare, freedom of speech and the culture wars in general.

Read the above piece in its absurd entirety, then try reading the following sentence without gagging with laughter:

Mark Latham was once the prospective leader of this nation.

—READ MORE—

Leak suppressed

I only came across this today, but it seems to me a bit of a News £td beat-up or stunt or something...

For cartoonist Bill Leak, the nanny state is real. It has just snuffed out his attempt to launch a new business aimed at poking fun at the government.

Leak had been planning to sell cardboard covers for packets of cigarettes that would have obscured and ridiculed the graphic images of gangrenous legs and cancerous mouths that have been mandated by federal legislation. ...

He made contact with manufacturers and developed the outlines of a business plan. But after he took advice from a Sydney silk about the impact of the government’s plain packaging laws, the project was dead.

The risk of being dragged through the courts was too great. ...

Leak said the law had stifled his ability to make a political point while developing a new business.

“It was an attempt to deploy satire as a weapon against the nanny state, but the nanny state has a bigger, nastier bite than I thought.”

Oh puh-lease!

It’s written by Chris Merritt, The Australian’s legal affairs editor who offers no insight whatever on Bill’s “advice from a Sydney silk.”

He features a quote from Nicola Roxon being all defensive about the government’s plain packaging legislation, presenting the A-G as creepily unhumorous while giving no context about what prompted her remarks.

Apparently one of Bill’s mock fag packets was ‘branded’ Roxon’s Nicolatinas. Gee, subversive yet classy. And hysterically funny at some level, I’m sure.

In keeping with the clubby News £td milieu, the story has been picked up by the likes of the IPA and Tim Blair as an example of the imminent threat to free speech by instinctively totalitarian nanny-statists, etc. etc. etc.

Tragic to think in what useful capacity these bods might ever be employable if their imaginary wicked nanny-statists were ever successful in ‘silencing’ them.

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Gillard ‘backflip’ is courageous and honourable

In so far as it’s possible to do so in a race to the bottom, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has this week acquitted herself with courage and honour.

When Parliament rose at end of June with the country crying out for a solution to the critical impasse, the PM undertook to abide by whatever recommendations were arrived at by the expert panel.

True to her word she has thus far done so, and at great political cost to herself and her party.

The Opposition’s demand for an apology from the PM is utterly risible. It demurred with regard to the expert panel, sitting with comfort on its hands as the boats kept coming. As Peter van Onselen wrote at the time:

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it.

Or as Graeme Richardson more succinctly put it:

Abbott won’t budge, won’t compromise and won’t lose a wink of sleep over it...

Abbott has apparently “stopped short” of condemning the PM for having “blood on her hands” over deaths at sea since Rudd and Gillard dismantled the Howard-era Pacific Solution.

It remains to be seen whether this is some kind of quaint magnanimity, or whether he simply fears it may come back to bite him in the event Pacific Solution Mk II fails to stop the boats.

As well it may.

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UPDATE

I wonder if there’s been a cynical, opportunistic, “blood on their hands” political blame-game in the Euro Zone...

Rescue operations in the Mediterranean are hampered by poor coordination, disputes over responsibility, disincentives for commercial vessels to conduct rescues, and an emphasis on border enforcement, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper published today.

People fleeing persecution or seeking a better life attempt the dangerous crossing from the North African coast to Europe, often in unseaworthy and dangerous boats. An Eritrean man lived to tell of the deaths of all 54 of his fellow passengers when their small dinghy sank in the Mediterranean in early July, 2012, bringing the known death toll this year to 170. As many as 13,500 people have died in such efforts at crossing since 1998, including at least 1,500 in 2011, the deadliest on record. [My emphasis.]

—READ MORE—

Regime uncertainty and base partisanship

The Catallaxy Files site regularly presents a rich seam of idiocy. Most recently I was amused to read resident Perfessor Sinclair Davidson blaming Rudd and Gillard for Howard Government policy.

The argument is that spiralling energy costs commenced at mid-2007 specifically with the release of the Shergold report on emissions trading.

That enunciation of “vague government policy” contributed a significant inflationary effect on energy prices, by virtue of a handy little construct known as regime uncertainty.

But the Perfessor notes...

We can hardly blame events in 2007 on the Rudd-Gillard government. Well maybe we can.

Well, of course we can! You see, on the release of Shergold’s report...

At that point climate change policy became bipartisan with the Howard government adopting ALP policy...

See how it works? There ain’t nothing that can’t be blamed on the GillardGillardGillard.

There’s a slight  difficulty, however, for the Perfessor’s account: Climate change policy in fact became “bipartisan” somewhat earlier than he suggests.

Howard announced Shergold’s Task Group on Emissions Trading in December 2006; thus, it was obviously firmly Coalition policy before even then.

And the Task Group released an Issues Paper in Feb 2007, which surely would have given investors the jitters well before the final report was issued at end-May of that year.

Still, I’m sure such trivial details will present no difficulties for the Perfessor.

Nor will the fact that Gillard after all has now delivered certainty for the energy sector.

Or that Abbott’s blood-oath to repeal carbon pricing arrangements — which, it’s been argued, he’ll be unable to do — can only serve to undermine that certainty, with the consequence of more regime uncertainty to further exacerbate our energy price woes.

So, next time you open another shocker of a power bill... Blame Tony Abbott.

—READ MORE—

Innuendo ventured, nothing gained

Andrew Bolt continues to rake over the ‘connection’ between Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Bruce Wilson/AWU scandal...

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald has typically run dead on this scandal, although it curiously ran this video as the news started to break into the mainstream media. It is an interview with Peter Gordon, who was Gillard’s boss at the time and gives this oddly indirect character reference:

I think she has a very robust sense of her own integrity and she prefers that view to those who would assail it.

Gordon is silent on his own view of that integrity.

That’s actually, er, less than correct.  About half a minute earlier in the same video, Gordon in fact says of Gillard...

I do recall about her that she was always very steadfast about her own integrity, even when it was under attack. I think she’s got a very balanced inner sense of what her mission is, and what’s right and wrong.

In their entirety, Gordon’s remarks about Gillard could frankly almost be described as ‘glowing’.

That’s particularly interesting considering that, according to the Gillard biography Bolt himself cites, there were “tensions between Peter Gordon and Bernard Murphy, and Gillard was a Murphy ally.” (Jacqueline Kent, The Making of Julia Gillard, Viking, 2009, p. 93.)

But Gordon’s somewhat glowing estimation of Gillard is, of course, rather inconvenient to the narrative Bolt wants to construct in his post — namely, that Gillard allegedly left Slater & Gordon under (unspecified) disgraceful circumstances.

Sadly for our good Doctor Easychair, all he has is innuendo, informed by his standard selective presentation of material.

---

POSTSCRIPT

When you want to move on from your present employer, ask for the kind of “oddly indirect character reference” like the one Peter Gordon gave for Julia Gillard.

—READ MORE—

Fingers crossed in place in WA

Piers Akerman is in full hand-wringing mode about the impasse over the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Aside from declaring that “Gillard IS the national disability” (nudge, wink), he asserts

WA already has a more generous scheme in place.

Gosh, how very advanced of WA. So, one wonders, how “in place” is this western wonder?

The West Australian Government says it will trial a disability insurance scheme with or without the Federal Government. ...

WA’s Disability Services Minister, Helen Morton, says she has put forward four potential locations to her federal counterpart as the state would like to host a trial.

“We’re very keen, we’ve got our fingers crossed, we hope that we’ll be able to get one of those trial sites up and running,” she said.

One has to wonder about the gulf between Akerman’s conception of “in place” and Morton’s “fingers crossed”.

Oh, and how much “more generous”?

The State Government has not said how much money it will contribute to the NDIS.

In contrast with Akerman just making shit up as it suits him, Andrew Bolt at least has stated flat-out that “I don’t know enough,” but he’s “on high alert” anyway.

And so must we all be, with jokers like these ‘informing’ the national ‘debate’.

—READ MORE—

No smoking gun

Peter van Onselen had a column in the Sunday Telegraph in which he contends that the aim of plain packaging of tobacco products is at odds with Wayne Swan’s budget forecast of excise revenue from tobacco.

Along the way he distances himself from the term “nanny-state” while suggesting that plain packaging is a nanny-state thing.  Go figure.

But I’m not so much concerned here with van Onselen’s strained polemics against nannyism as I am that he seems to have verballed Health Minister Tanya Plibersek in such a way as to bolster his argument. He wrote:

Just last month, Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said she was “confident that plain packaging will reduce the number of smokers”.

Whereas according to the transcript of the program in which van Onselen interviewed her, Plibersek in fact told him:

Well, we are confident that plain packaging will reduce the number of smokers in the future. [my emphasis]

Van Onselen, like so many who take issue with plain packaging, just does not get that the primary aim of plain packaging is to deter young people from ever taking up the deadly habit. It’s success therefore probably wouldn’t be evident in the shorter term, and therefore would probably have negligible budgetary impact for at least the first few years.

Yet, van Onselen plods on regardless...

It stands to reason that if the government seriously expects smoking rates to decline when plain packaging legislation comes into effect, there would also be an expected decline in tax revenue.

Yet according to the forward estimates in the budget, Treasurer Wayne Swan is relying for his much-anticipated return to surplus in 2012-13 on a largely unchanged windfall from smokers. It’s the same story in subsequent years.

I think that van Onselen might be being somewhat like a dog with a bone on this.  Or maybe I haven’t properly followed his diabolically clever argument? At any rate, I tweeted him a query last night regarding his omission of Plibersek’s qualifier... but no reply thus far.

—READ MORE—

Travel lift-out consulted

Andrew Bolt believes that the political situation in Sri Lanka is sufficiently benign for the Australian government to immediately deport any and all Sri Lankan asylum seekers back to their country of origin.

His basis for this assessment? Why, no lesser authority than the travel lift-out in his newspaper.

The front page today of Escape, the Herald Sun’s travel lift-out, is dominated by a picture of two smiling Sri Lankan children, over the headline “Back to Sri Lanka”.

The report tales [sic] of “endless beaches, timeless ruins, welcoming people”, and notes correctly that “years of war” are “over” and “Sri Lanka’s looking up”.

So why is the Gillard Government still allowing boatloads of “asylum seekers” from Sri Lanka to stay? Are we again being played for suckers?

Well, it may be that his newspaper’s travel lift-out isn’t necessarily a credible source for gauging the political situation in any given country. Here’s the reality behind the rhapsodic spread quoted by Mr Bolt...

Investigations by Human Rights Watch have found that some failed Tamil asylum seekers from the United Kingdom and other countries have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and torture upon their return to Sri Lanka. In addition to eight cases in which deportees faced torture on return reported in February, Human Rights Watch has since documented a further five cases in which Tamil failed asylum seekers were subjected to torture by government security forces on return from various countries, most recently in February 2012.

The above is freely available information from a respected international NGO. I last night emailed Mr Bolt apprising him of this material, requesting his response to the following queries:

1. Will you inform your readers of the above pertinent information, of which I can only assume you've been completely unaware?
2. Can you confirm or refute whether the spread in the Herald Sun’s travel liftout, Escape, was or was not paid for by the Sri Lankan government or some agency there of?
3. If so, would you consider repudiating your blog post (or at least the quotes around the expression: asylum seekers)?

At time of writing, I’ve as yet had no response. Meanwhile, Mr Bolt’s shallow, agenda-pushing idiocy remains on display on his blog for all the world to see.

Doctor Easychair is as he does. Some people, it seems, just have no self-respect.

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Putin invoked

Janet Albrechtsen today writes:

[The Finkelstein] report eschewed John Stuart Mill and embraced a Putin-style push where people on the street are treated as too dumb to be left to read newspapers without Big Brother having the power to censor what they read.

On that, Eric Campbell tweeted today: “I’ve covered Putin’s media crackdown for 13 years. It is grotesque to liken it to Australia. This debate has gone beyond stupid.”

Indeed, contrary to Albrechtsen’s febrile godwinesque rhetoric, Finkelstein proposes nothing at all like “Big Brother censorship”. Rather, it proposes a number of options with the aim of improving checks-and-balances on our media that to date, it’s been argued, have been inadequate.

Albrechtsen is free to argue that the current regime of checks-and-balances is quite adequate, hopefully citing real-world examples (that might contribute to something known as debate, Janet). But she chooses instead to jump up and down like a chicken little, hurling semi-Godwins at “them”.

Albrechtsen also observes:

Progressives talk only about fair and balanced speech, whatever that means.

It’s somewhat surprising Albrechtsen should require guidance on the meaning of “fair and balanced,” but there it is in black-and-white. It wouldn’t tax most reasonable people to assess whether a media organisation has taken all reasonable steps to ensure its coverage of serious public policy issues is fair and balanced.

No, this tract by Albrechtsen is just another contribution to the clubby News £td fortress mentality, which fancies itself the intellectual progeny of John Stuart Mill as opposed to being merely Rupert’s trained monkeys.

—READ MORE—

Malaysia Solution deterrence with teeth

“Most asylum-seekers processed in Nauru wound up in Australia,” writes Cassandra Wilkinson today in The Australian, “which suggests in all likelihood those processed in Malaysia would too.”

That statement seems based on a common misconception about the government’s ‘Malaysia Solution’, which is that it simply substitutes Malaysia for Nauru as the site for off-shore processing of unauthorised boat arrivals.

But that is not the case. The point of the Malaysia Solution is that unauthorised arrivals sent there would not only go to “the back of the queue” in Malaysia, but would eventually be re-settled in a third country. In other words, those who have the temerity to come here by boat would ultimately never be re-settled in Australia.

This is why the government’s Malaysia plan would likely represent a powerful deterrence for those contemplating unauthorised travel to Australia as their preferred destination.

And that’s why the Coalition opposes the Malaysia Solution.

Not because they’re particularly wedded to the idea of humanitarian protections for asylum seekers — their repugnant tow-back policy exposes that conceit — but because they’re terrified the Malaysia Solution might just work in the government’s favour.

—READ MORE—

General media failure on ‘boats’ issue

Here’s a Fairfax failure on the ‘boats’ issue, from Michael Gordon in a column in The Age today headlined “Indonesia seems part of a solution”:

The Indonesian MPs also expressed concern that people smuggling syndicates in that country were now so big that they were moving into other areas of organised crime. Washer’s take-out was that any real and lasting solution had to involve faster processing and resettling of refugees transiting through the Indonesian archipelago.

This of course, was not among the three options considered and rejected over more than 48 hours of heartfelt but, too often, predictable debate in both houses of Parliament this week – Julia Gillard’s Malaysian people-swap, Tony Abbott’s return to the Pacific Solution, and the Greens’ opposition to offshore processing.

Thus, the Greens’ entire contribution to the parliamentary process this week is reduced to “opposition to offshore processing.”

Compare Paul Kelly today in The Australian:

On Thursday Milne put forward a series of proposals — taking the refugee and humanitarian intake to 20,000, boosting support for the UN High Commission for Refugees by $10 million and new Australia-Indonesia talks on regional co-operation. Morrison told the Greens he would accept them all, but their differences over offshore processing made any agreement impossible.

In other words, what the Greens were proposing pretty much coincides with what those Indonesian MPs were talking about.

So, kudos to News £td — albeit severely qualified, because Kelly is so hung up on the stunted political dimensions of the ‘debate’ that he failed to extend the narrative.

—READ MORE—

Stop-the-Boats ‘debate’ observed

I watched on television much of Wednesday’s proceedings in the House of Representatives on Rob Oakeshott’s ill-fated ‘Bali Process’ private member’s bill.

During the debate over an amendment proposed by the opposition, seeking to remove the government’s ‘Malaysia Solution’ from Oakeshott’s bill, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey spoke for the amendment. At times almost blubbering and choking with emotion, he loftily declared:

I will never, ever support a people swap where you can send a 13-year-old child unaccompanied to a country without supervision — never. It will be over my dead body. [Source: Hansard.]

Leaving aside that the government has ruled out sending any minors to Malaysia, it may be noted that Mr Hockey has not publicly expressed any objection to the Coalition’s proposal to tow boats back into international waters. This policy would almost certainly involve sending minors back to the point of departure in Indonesia, which is not a signatory to the Refugee Convention.

Hockey went on to relate how,

I fought with the previous Prime Minister [John Howard] ... about Nauru. I opposed it until the moment he assured me ... that those most vulnerable would be protected. That was when I agreed with him. I was prepared to cross the floor in a previous government with an absolute majority in this place because I disagreed with the treatment of those most vulnerable by my Prime Minister.

We may assume, then, that Mr Hockey will cross the floor to oppose boats with children on board being towed back to open waters. If he’s successful in modifying the Coalition’s policy, then it will create an incentive for people smugglers to place more children on these unsafe boats, with real potential for more tragedy.

In fact, it’s not true that people would, under the government’s scheme, be sent to Malaysia without humanitarian protections. The government had negotiated humanitarian protections with Malaysia, such that the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has expressed support for the deal. (Simon Crean had spelled all this out much earlier in the debate.) Whether those protections are in any way credible is now a question to which we’ll perhaps never know the answer. Thus, while the Malaysian Solution is a rotten deal, I’m not convinced it’s so much more rotten than dumping people on Nauru.

At some point on Wednesday, Senator Christine Milne for the Greens proposed an amendment to Oakeshott’s bill which I considered had a number of proposals for a constructive, longer-term approach to the issue of unauthorised boat arrivals (basic outline here). It’s worth noting that the Greens’ proposals would seem to some degree complementary of the bill in relation to…

The Bali Process — codifying in domestic law the good bipartisan work started by the former Howard Government in 2002, which provides a border protection and humanitarian framework on people smuggling, people trafficking and related transnational crime. This process is co-chaired by Australia and Indonesia and involves nearly 50 countries, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the Red Cross and Red Crescent.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the advisory group now being convened by the Prime Minister, to be headed by Angus Houston, proposes some very similar options, among others. But they won’t get up, of course, because they can’t be distilled into the precise three word formulation: Stop The Boats.

Of late it’s supposedly been all about “saving lives”. But Stop The Boats had political potency way before the pivotal Christmas Island tragedy of December 2010. It was crystallised in John Howard’s “We Will Decide” mantra from the 2001 Tampa election. And it didn’t shift to being about “saving lives” even after the 2001 SIEV-X tragedy with the loss of 353 lives.

“Saving lives” is a cloak of respectability for what both major parties are now agreed and resolved upon: Wiggling out of Australia’s obligations under the Refugee Convention.

From playing Alice-in-Wonderland croquet with our “migration zone”, to a Pacific or a Malaysia ‘solution’, it is and always has been about that.

Because:- The piddling arrivals at our borders, compared to say Europe or even the US, would seem to make tough, resourceful Aussies fall apart and wee into our collective little soft cock knickers.

I’d have liked to see Oakeshott’s bill get up; but with (perhaps) the Coalition’s amendment to drown the rotten Malaysia swap deal; and with Andrew Wilkie’s ‘sunset’ clause, but for no more than 6 months rather than 12; and with some rigorous monitoring of outcomes in the interim; and with serious consideration for longer-term proposals along the lines mooted by the Greens.

Of course, that’s all with 20/20 hindsight of the last few days in the comfort of my own armchair. And unencumbered with the partisan obstruction of Abbott and (to a somewhat lesser degree) Gillard. Forget the ‘purist’ Greens, they’re not the real power here.

The Prime Minister, of course, should have known, and probably did, that Oakeshott’s unamended bill would never get up.

Because it’s clear that the Coalition was absolutely terrified that the Malaysia deal might just work, delivering the ‘deterrence value’ that Nauru (it’s been said) has lost.

As Graeme Richardson wrote on this in a column today...

It would appear, however, that no matter what she [Gillard] offered Tony Abbott, if the Malaysia Solution was still on the table, he wasn’t having a bar of it.

Abbott won’t budge, won’t compromise and won’t lose a wink of sleep over it...

All in all, a collective failure and a crying shame, but inevitable due to the partisan obstruction, particularly, of the opposition. As John Howard’s biographer, Peter van Onselen, wrote on Tuesday:

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it. Perhaps Abbott thinks such tragedies reflect more badly on Labor than his own side because the government appears responsible for the mess courtesy of changing John Howard's asylum-seekers policies in the first place. [My emphasis.]

If true, then Mr Abbott deserves to sink into oblivion.

—READ MORE—

Carbon totalitarianism discerned

The following is reportedly the text of a flyer being distributed by the Opposition to butchers’ shops around the country for display in their shop windows:

The federal government estimates that the carbon tax will increase the cost of energy by 10 per cent in its first year of operation. It will also increase the cost of our suppliers. Higher electricity prices mean it will cost us more to keep our meat refrigerated.

We always strive to keep our prices at reasonable levels but because the carbon tax will make electricity more expensive, our prices will increase. We apologise for these price increases.

This is quite arguably a blatant piece of scare-mongering intended to be construed by shoppers as meaning that meat prices will increase by as much as 10 per cent within 12 months after July 1.

So there is potential there for unscrupulous operators — yep, there’s always one or two — to scare up prices and hit consumers.

But the ACCC will be wielding a big stick to discourage any such profiteering, and

... the Assistant Treasurer, David Bradbury, has warned that the Liberal leader has potentially exposed shop owners to fines of up to $1 million each.

Mr Bradbury hit out at Mr Abbott, saying he was improperly giving “businesses the green light to jack up their prices” and warned that shop keepers who put up their prices without due justification were risking large fines from the ACCC of more than $1 million for each infraction.

For this blog’s esteemed Doctor Easychair, Andrew Bolt, all this becomes...

The carbon totalitarians butcher free speech

The Gillard Government, already so hostile to free speech, now threatens to bankrupt butchers who badmouth its carbon tax...

The bit of that article which Doctor Easychair omitted to quote…

Treasury has estimated the average price rise on meat and seafood in a standard shopping basket of goods as around 10 cents a week.

Similarly, an analysis on a Sydney butcher shop with a revenue of $2.1 million per year has shown that the businesses’ electricity bill of around $22, 000 per year – representing about 1 per cent of turnover – would rise by around 0.1 per cent, or $22.

The analysis found to pass on this cost increase, the butcher would have to increase the price of a $11 packet of mince meat by approximately one cent.

Our good Doctor concludes his pastiche with…

Throw these thugs out while it’s still safe to speak.

Oh, and…

(No comments after 5pm.)

Coz that’s when Bolt knocks off for the day the butchering carbon totalitarians come out !!1!!!

As noted by Jeremy at Pure Poison, “when Andrew Bolt talks about ‘free speech’, apparently he means the right of businesses to trick customers with lies.”

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That abyssal, sinking feeling

Peter van Onselen notes some scuttlebutt one would rather hope is not true...

One well-placed Liberal source told The Australian that Abbott would rather see Labor continue to bleed politically with ongoing boat arrivals. If that means deaths at sea continue, he said, so be it. Perhaps Abbott thinks such tragedies reflect more badly on Labor than his own side because the government appears responsible for the mess courtesy of changing John Howard's asylum-seekers policies in the first place.

If true, the boat-people ‘debate’ has officially become toxic and beyond hope of resolution redemption.

Perhaps this is waxing overly nostalgic, but I’d never have thought Mr Abbott would almost have me pining for the more genteel brutality of Mr Howard.

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Surrogacy and family formation examined

An announcement last week from Attorney-General Nicola Roxon:

Attorney-General Nicola Roxon today charged the Family Law Council with examining how issues of surrogacy and family formation are dealt with by the Family Law Act 1975.

“Surrogacy within Family Law is a complex and emerging issue that needs careful consideration as an increasing number of Australian families are being formed using artificial reproductive technology.

“Our laws need to be responsive to new family situations as well as provide adequate protections for children involved.”

This came a day after a column by Gary Johns that, although supportive in-principle of marriage equality, articulated concerns of a potential “minefield for children”:

Placing to one side the ideal — natural conception within wedlock — homosexual marriage may work for children.

Heterosexual as well as homosexual marriage where IVF or surrogacy is used, however, carries the potential for donor claims during the marriage, or at its dissolution.

This may be one to watch but don’t hold your breath — the Council has until December 2013 to report back to the A-G.

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Balance achieved

Ooh, lucky me! Unusually I was home in time to catch a bit of The Drum on ABC News 24.

Particularly the bit where Joe Hildebrand called Julian Assange nasty names while slandering him as having gave up Bradley Manning to the US military.

Annabel Crabb, the show’s host (or whatever her function supposedly is) allowed it to pass unchallenged.

At best, maybe because it would have been too much like hard work to get a word in over Joe.

Otherwise one might assume she had no grasp over the facts of the discussion she was ‘moderating’.

All a neat example of what the usual suspects would call ‘balance’ at the ABC.

UPDATE: Yeesh!!! Now she’s on bleedin’ Randling.

UPDATE 2: Really looking forward to the premiere of Hildebrand’s Dumb Drunk and Racist on ABC2 tonight, to see whether some skillful editing could possibly make Joe seem halfway coherent.

—READ MORE—

Not yet done to death

The latest on the ANU death threats saga is that Australian National University has “stymied” a further FOI request by “demanding” nearly $40,000 to carry out the request.

The latest request is by the same guy whose previous FOI yielded 11 emails for the wrong time period while attempting to either verify or debunk supposed events that, anyway, were based on erroneous reports from the ABC and other outlets (including News £td, a fact that apparently still eludes The Australian).

So far as I can gather, the FOI guy’s motive for pursuing this has been his personal perception that the death-threat reports “have been used as a way to tar all critics of the climate consensus as being a bunch of dangerously unhinged lunatics who would resort to sending death threats...”

Essentially, it offends his vanity that his anti-climate-consensus cause may have been sullied by “a tiny minority of disturbed individuals.” Personally, I can see why ANU would want to discourage FOI requests that verge on the trivial or vexatious.

As a (qualified) supporter of the climate consensus, however, I can report that my own vanity was not offended in the least by a recent report in The Australian by Chris Merritt that prominent climate sceptics had been subject to abuse and threats. I’m happy to allow that there are whackos in any camp.

Nor was I particularly offended that the report, headlined as “Death threats just par for the course,” detailed nothing (in relation to the climate debate) that could seriously be considered a death threat.

The only example that would remotely qualify was an instance where “a filmmaker used Twitter to urge his followers: ‘Let’s assassinate Andrew Bolt.’”

Indeed, that kind of thing is stupid and offensive but nevertheless fairly insubstantial on the threat index, since it’s quite obviously public spleen affected by an identifiable individual.

Merritt also noted,

Sydney Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Blair says he has received “death wishes” rather than death threats. ... Most of this material arrives by email and while they are abusive, Blair says they are not real death threats.

Still, if Merritt and The Australian want to headline all this as “Death Threats,” then all their recent quibbling over the nature of threats to Australian climate scientists would seem somewhat small and hypocritical.

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Similarity noted

ABC TV’s Lateline last night revealed a hitherto suppressed government report detailing “a decades-old culture of sexual and physical abuse in the Defence Force.”

The report describes a culture where victims are discouraged from reporting, perpetrators face no adverse consequences and a “... chain of command structure in defence (which) lends itself to superiors abusing juniors with impunity.”

Ignore the word ‘defence’ in that paragraph, and you might think you were reading about the Roman church.

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Transparency of commitment

It’s going on a year ago, but I’ve only now seen this Media Diary Blog post on The Australian’s website.

It’s relatively short and sweet, so I may as well post the entire thing:

12 July 2011

Margaret Simons at Crikey has been carrying on like a pork chop about the News Ltd Code of Conduct. Apparently, nobody can find it anywhere.

The point of Simons’ raving is, of course, to try to smear local reporters with the same brush as that of the UK journalists who stand accused of phone tapping, paying off cops, and all manner of other criminal behaviour.

As part of the campaign, Simons has also been linking to Tweets that say criminal behaviour is rampant at News Ltd in Australia, and it’s surely only a matter of time before it’s uncovered, the evidence for which is zilch.

It’s as nasty a campaign as Simons has run against News for a while, and it’s also dead wrong. The News Ltd Code Of Conduct is available to all employees on the Intranet — and despite her carry-on, it’s on the Internet, and has been for years.

Simons was all big threats yesterday: “Post the code, or I will!”

Let’s save her the trouble. The New [sic] Ltd Code of Conduct is here.

What’s interesting is that the ‘here’ link points to a pdf copy of their Code of Conduct buried somewhere on the ABC’s Media Watch website.

Thus, we have a splendid illustration of News £td’s commitment to transparency — itself buried on a blog post that hardly anyone could have read, given the number of comments on that post (exactly nil).

Still, the News £td Code of Conduct makes for illuminating reading:

1.1 Facts must be reported impartially, accurately and with integrity.

1.2 Clear distinction must be made between fact, conjecture and comment.

1.3 Try always to tell all sides of the story in any kind of dispute.

1.4 Do not knowingly withhold or suppress essential facts.

And so on.

Maybe next someone could get News £td to publish the protocols for compliance with their Code.

And yes, if they really must, they can use the ABC’s bandwidth for that too.

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The Australian normalises abuse

Non-paying customers visiting The Australian’s website today may read:

Death threats just par for the course
Chris Merritt, Legal affairs editor
June 02, 2012 12:00AM

Death threats and vile abuse are real. They infect the daily lives of key players in the debate over climate change. But it's not what you think: the main recipients of this torrent of abuse are not climate scientists.

Paying customers may read the full article, which is essentially a pious reformulation of Tim Blair’s throwaway line that the odd murder of scientists in Europe “rather puts local claims into perspective.”

In Merritt’s version, those who out-man wimpy Aussie climate boffins are not the dead nuclear scientists in Europe, but intrepid Aussie journos who “are the inheritors of that great tradition in which Western civilisation has encouraged criticism of the orthodoxy in order to expose its flaws.”

These are mostly people who happen to be Merritt’s fellow employees of News £td such as Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair, not to forget his boss Chris Mitchell.

These and others have all been on the receiving end of abusive and threatening approaches from unhinged critics. In a couple of cases, going back a decade or more, there have been assaults and even gunplay.

The key contention in Merritt’s piece is that climate scientists are in fact “players” in the “public policy debate.”

Thus, “The abuse directed at climate scientists, bad as it was, needs to be kept in perspective.”

Well, this is just appalling. Taken to its logical conclusion, Merritt’s reasoning makes those murdered nuclear scientists in Europe “players” in a “public policy debate,” therefore fair game for abusive treatment at the very least.

Rather than quelling the flames of intolerance, Merritt’s piece tends towards normalising abusive and threatening behaviour in public debate.

But what’s at least as bad is that Merritt has equated the role of climate scientists with that of the journalists he’s lionised.

Climate scientists work at producing and interpreting data that informs what is, after all, an orthodoxy — that is, a widely accepted consensus.

By contrast, journalists such as Bolt and Blair work at pushing the envelope, often railing against perceived orthodoxies and sometimes inflaming their readerships to, for instance, promulgate conspiracy theories that demonise and dehumanise the targets of their ire.

In terms of their status as “players” in public policy debate, such ‘journalists’ are several orders of magnitude above scientific workers.

Noting James Delingpole’s complaint about a “run-in with a prickly ABC talk radio host,” ABC managing director Mark Scott observed:

I am sorry that he did not feel that the robust questioning he got on the ABC was the kind of questioning he wanted. But he does present himself as contrary and running against conventional wisdom, and that is what you get.

To extrapolate from that: News £td and its employees need to be much more careful about what they wish for, and what indeed they help enable.

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P.S. Astute readers will note that Merritt in this article has finally conceded for his newspaper that for which it has long been in apparent denial.

Yes folks, there has been “abuse directed at climate scientists,” and it “was bad.”

If only they’d said something like that a couple of weeks ago and maybe even elucidated just a little, it might have saved a lot of tiresome to-and-fro.

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