Personal opinions from a denizen of a land Down Under.
Australian Opposition leader Peter Dutton is either lying or else is unable to read. Those are the only two reasons why he has been asking questions about the detail of the Voice.
It took me just half-an-hour this morning to answer all his questions. I had to refer to just one website.
As Senator Patrick Dodson has said, the Australian people are being asked to vote “on principle, not on detail”. Continue reading “Voice questions: Dutton is either lying or else he cannot read”
With elections in the state of Victoria just a week away, politicians are in a feverish mood as they try to rustle up support to win their seats.
The rush to push their barrows has been sped up no end after early voting started on 14 November and reports emerged of big numbers voting ahead of the election. More than 2.2 million of the state’s registered 4.4 million voters are expected to cast their votes before election day. The first four days of early voting saw 556,193 people exercise their franchise.
Thus one can understand why badly crafted election propaganda like a Sky News documentary titled The Cult of Dan Andrews are making an appearance. The opposition is desperate to make inroads into the Labor vote, but with a leader like Matthew Guy, who went backwards in the last election, the task ahead is like rolling a huge boulder up a mountain. Continue reading “Credlin doco indicates Libs growing desperate as Vic election looms”
Australia finally has a change of government. After nine long years under Liberal/National rule, the Labor party has ensured that it will lead the next administration.
Labor won the most seats in Saturday’s election and it remains to be seen whether they will govern in their own right or as a minority government.
But they will have the first shot at governing given that they have close to the 76 seats needed for a majority in the lower house.
Continue reading “After nine years, Labor finally wins government in Australia”
Politicians normally try to keep their private lives separate from their public personas. And the media generally respect this separation, unless any probing can be justified as being in the public interest.
But some politicians purposely ventilate aspects of their private lives when they feel that it will help them in their jobs.
And that is the case with the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison who has, right from day one, broadcast the idea that he is a Christian, claiming that this is what drives him. Continue reading “Is Scott Morrison really a Christian?”
An indication of how far The Age, a tabloid newspaper that is published from Melbourne, has sunk can be seen from a letter to subscribers [note, not those who read it free] from the editor, Gay Alcorn on 2 April.
Perhaps to imbue said document with importance, Alcorn chose to place it behind a paywall. [The Age home page can be read without payment and a limited number of articles are also free to read, before the paywall kicks in.]
But Alcorn apparently considers her writing so important that it has to be paid for. Of such stern mettle are editors [and journalists too] made. Heaven forbid that the common man should be able to read this important missive.
[I worked for the website of The Age for nearly 17 years, from June 1999 until May 2016.]
Continue reading “Important news from The Age. It’s the sainted editor speaking…”
The incestuous relationship between Australian journalists and politicians has been exposed again, with the journalist in question being the political editor of news.com.au, Samantha Maiden [seen below in a picture from YouTube].
The politician, sadly, is no longer in this world; Kimberley Kitching, a senator from the Labor Party, died on 10 March of a suspected heart attack. [More on Canberra’s incestuous culture here and here.]
Given the way that News Corporation, the empire owned by Rupert Murdoch, used alleged events prior to Kitching’s death to accuse other Labor senators of contributing to the stress that led to her exiting the mortal coil, nobody except an idiot would have assumed that the topic would not come up for discussion during political programs on the weekend after her death. Continue reading “Incestuous relationships in Canberra once again on display”
In 1991, the US, aided by a number of other countries, waged a war given the moniker Operation Desert Storm, to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, after demanding billions from that tiny country which it claimed it was owed because the Kuwaitis had stolen oil from wells which were on the Iraqi side of the border.
Iraq’s demands came after a long and debilitating eight-year war with Iran, during which Kuwait backed Iraq and often suffered attacks to its oil tankers in the Gulf as a result. When Kuwait did not give in, Baghdad’s forces invaded and took over the country in a matter of days. Continue reading “Loose lips sink ships. Joe Biden does not seem to know that”
Twenty years after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the mastermind of the attack, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, has still not been put on trial despite having been arrested in March 2003.
KSM, as he is known, was picked up by the Pakistani authorities in Rawalpindi. Just prior to his arrest, the other main actor in the planning of the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, was picked up, again in Pakistan, this time in Karachi.
A report says KSM, Ramzi and three others appeared in court on Tuesday, 7 September. KSM was reported to be confident, talking to his lawyers and defying the judge’s instruction to wear a mask.
Continue reading “When will 9/11 mastermind get his day in court?”As the US marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, a theory, that can only be classified as unadulterated BS, has been advanced: the event led to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq which in turn led to the emergence of Donald Trump.
Such a narrative sits nicely with Democrats: the election of the worst US president, a Republican, was caused by the actions of another Republican president, George W. Bush.
Part of this logic — if you can call it that — is that Trump’s opposition to the wars launched by Bush put paid to the chances of his brother, Jeb, gaining the Republican nomination.
Continue reading “War on terror has nothing to do with the rise of Trump”National Bird is a disturbing documentary. It isn’t new, having been made in 2016, but it outlines in stark detail the issues that are part and parcel of the drone program which the US has used to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and a number of other countries.
The use of remote killing was even seen recently after a bomb went off at Kabul Airport following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. There were boasts that two people responsible for the blast had been killed by a drone – only for the truth to emerge later.
And that was that the people killed were in no way connected to the blast. Using faulty intelligence and an over-quick finger, America had pulled the trigger again and killed innocents.
Continue reading “Killing people remotely: the fallout of the US war on terror”