A Mothers Love ...thanks from a Daughter, when Angels live among us and quietly go about their business, surely WE can HELP, even just a little.

Dear Mum, Love Turia

Ali Smith

60 Minutes

http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8652218

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Sunday, May 12 is Mother's Day - a time to thank our mums for their unconditional love and unwavering selflessness.

Over the years, 60 Minutes has met some very special mothers and Celestine Vaite is one of them.

She's nurtured her daughter, Turia Pitt, back to health after Turia was severely burnt while competing in the Kimberley ultra-marathon.

For this Mother's Day, Turia has written her mum a letter to say "thank you".

Dear Mum book featuring Turia Pitt's letter: www.randomhouse.com.au

Turia Pitt is an advocate for DonateLife: www.donatelife.gov.au

Contribute to Turia's Making a Difference fund at makingadifference.gofundraise.com.au

If you would like to help burn victims through the Sydney Burns Foundation, download the Concord Burns Unit Donation Form here.

http://www.sswahs.nsw.gov.au/Concord/PDF/donate_advice_burnsunit.pdf

So what happened to Turia Pitt?

Alan Jones Terry McCrann on Madame Gillard and the Australian Labor Party

Mildura Brewery goes ahead with anti ANZAC "comedian" Catherine Deveny

RSL angry as Catherine Deveny comedy show goes on

Amy Harris 
The Daily Telegraph 
May 02, 2013 12:00AM



THE owners of a Mildura bar have stuck by the scheduled appearance of controversial comedian Catherine Deveny tomorrow night despite demands of a boycott following her anti-Anzac Day outburst.

Mildura Brewery co-owners Stefano DePieri and Donatta Carozza have attracted the scorn of locals and the Mildura RSL after they refused to cancel Deveny's show.

Deveny, who was famously sacked by Fairfax Media in 2010 after making disparaging comments about Rove McManus' late wife Belinda Emmett, claims she has also been the subject of death threats in the wake of comments published on her Twitter feed.

In the tweets which sparked the outcry, Deveney wrote that "Days like #anzacday are simply a rewriting of history to stop the sucked in and ripped off burning down parliament and killing politicians."

She added: "I would like to see parades, medals and glorification for survivors of domestic violence, mental illness and sexual abuse #anzacday."

Mildura RSL branch president Alec Ouchirenko said this week: "It just makes me feel sick in the stomach for someone to run down the Anzac tradition the way she is."

Ray Hadley speaks with Stefano DePieri

Gallipoli ANZAC Hero Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his Donkey

ANZAC Day 2013 Australia remembers it's finest

Madame Gillard's "John"

No dragons live in PM's perilous fiscal fantasy

Miranda Devine 
The Daily Telegraph 
May 01, 2013 12:00AM

'IMAGINE a wage earner, John, employed in the same job throughout the last 20 years.

"For a period in 2003 to 2007 every year his employer gave him a sizeable bonus. He was grateful but in his bones knew it wouldn't last. The bonuses did stop and John was told his income would rise by around five per cent each year over the years to come. That's the basis for his financial plans.

"Now, very late, John has been told he won't get those promised increases for the next few years but his income will get back up after that to where he was promised it would be. What is John's rational reaction?"

This was Julia Gillard's patronising attempt to explain her government's latest budget crisis. In a speech this week the Prime Minister used "John" to explain why it's the fault of everyone but her feckless spendthrift government that there will be a $12 billion revenue shortfall in the year she promised a surplus.

"John" appears to be the human embodiment of her government, two weeks before Wayne Swan hands down his fifth Budget, complete with its fifth deficit.

In the real world, a man who found his income reduced would tighten his belt. His family would look at the household budget and figure out what luxuries to give up.

Lamb might be off the menu, for instance, as would the Foxtel subscription, and the HCF membership. The holiday overseas might become a trip to the Forster caravan park. Private schools would have to wait until Year 11.

This is the sort of thrift Australian families have practised as a prudent response to global economic uncertainty, job insecurity, and a mercurial government, with household savings tripling in two years.

But the Prime Minister scoffs at such parsimony.

In "John's world" - that arcadia of protected jobs, plenty of cash and government benefits that flow like water, when John's income is cut, he doesn't curb spending.

Eat two-minute noodles for dinner? Take his kids out of private school?Perish the thought, says the PM.

He borrows money to keep his "family and lifestyle intact" because tomorrow is always another day of free money.

You can only understand John's behaviour if, like everyone in government, the public service, academia and a good deal of the media, he has a protected job sheltered from the disciplines of the market.

In the real world, mistakes have consequences, dad loses his job, incomes fall, people can't pay their mortgages, kids are pulled out of private school and belts are tightened by necessity.

The division in Australian society exploited by Gillard and Swan is not between left and right, haves and have-nots or even insiders and outsiders.

It's between those who have protected incomes and those who are exposed to the real economy - the small business owners who create wealth, the PAYE employees who work for the wealth creators.

In John's world, an 18-year-old working as a "glassie" on Anzac Day in a Balmain pub earns $550 for 11-hours work, because his employer is obliged to pay double time and three quarters under the Fair Work Act.

The result is that youth unemployment has skyrocketed to an average of 18 per cent and students can't find casual jobs once taken for granted by their parents. Only pizza delivery and off-the-books labouring is immune from the new harsh economic realities.

In the real world, bustling suburban high streets have become ghost towns on Sundays because shop and restaurant owners can't afford to pay penalty rates.

In John's world this is a "fair go" for workers.

The ABC lives in John's world, which is why it received an extra $10 million this year and reflexively spruiks for the federal government.

Take, for example, Four Corners' belated discovery of more than 1000 asylum seeker children in detention, after five years of see-no-evil journalism.

During the Howard era it couldn't focus enough on detention centres. But apart from once in 2011, it hadn't touched the subject since 2008 when it featured the reminiscences of detention centre guards in the Howard era, starring special guest villain Philip Ruddock, who had not been immigration minister for five years.

Meanwhile, the actual Rudd government was dismantling border protection policies, with the result that a trickle of two boats per month has exploded to more than 2000 people a month - and hundreds of asylum seekers have drowned. The cost to the taxpayer is more than $2.2 billion a year.

In John's world, this is a good policy. In John's world, $6 billion thrown at schools to please militant teacher unions will fix our children's declining performance in reading and maths, when evidence around the world shows little correlation between money and educational outcomes.

In John's world, the financial woes of the federal government are the fault of John Howard and Peter Costello.

In the real world, Howard and Costello inherited a budget in deficit in 1996 and left $22 billion in surplus in 2007, plus a $60 billion future fund.

Spending has blown out by 35 per cent a year since Labor came to office. Eighty cents in every dollar of income tax goes to social welfare and the government keeps promising to spend more.

Only in John's world is this sort of profligacy sustainable.

In the real world it is the road to ruin.

Money for Nothing :The Welfare State disease.

Radio 2GB's Michael McLaren speaks with Benjamin Herscovitch, Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies, who discusses the dangerous growth of the welfare state.

Better Late Than Never : The Bolt Report 21413

Remember It's "Their ABC" and why that is so.

Many years ago whilst attempting to enter a polling booth to cast my vote in an Australian federal election I was accosted by some bearded arse clown wearing an ABC tee shirt and the obligatory faux Akubra Hat and RM Williams boots,that's what these types are known to wear to prove their "Tru Blue Aussie" cred to scruffy "Tradesman types" like me,demanding I vote for one of their approved candidates as opposed to my approved candidate.
Needless to say I told him and his fellow dissidents get out of my way and POQ, as did many others in my vicinity who were also harassed by these arse clowns much to their surprise.
Some years later I was engaged in an on air radio discussion,where I coined the phrase " It's "Their ABC" in response to an in house promo by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on its Television and Radio networks that went something like "Blah Blah Blah oppose funding cuts for .........its your ABC " "...just 8 cents a day (week) is all it costs taxpayers" blah blah so keep supporting the ABC  and oppose any government that is talking about budget cuts.

Evan at eight cents a day / week it is priced way too high, back then, as it is now,the ABC is more like the public relations arm of the Australian Labor Party / Green Loons / left Independents / The Australian Council of Trade Unions / GetUp / Arse Clown Feminists / assorted Loon ratbags and Multicultural Industry free loaders,their apologists and more recently, the voice / advocate of illegal,predominantly Muslim male "immigrants" from the middle east.

The article below by Geoffrey Luck reveals how the ABC has been reduced to a plaything of the progressives paid for by the very people they hate the most... Australians.

Boston Muslim Terrorist Bombing: "Their ABC" rallies to defend their Savages of Choice,

How the left colonised the ABC

by Geoffrey Luck
Quadrant
April 27, 2013

This week The Australian newspaper gave a page to an extract from Nick Cater's forthcoming book The Lucky Culture  – and the Rise of an Australian Ruling Class. It dealt with the radicalisation of the ABC, one of the essential steps – along with the subversion of school curricula and the authority of the universities – in the progressive movement's rise to  power.

In the extract, Nick expertly traced the process by which the young turks of Current Affairs achieved their goal, defeating a disinterested and bewildered management. But Nick wasn’t here when this happened; his analysis depended on working backwards from what he sees today. As a result he misses some crucial points – he doesn’t see how management fell into a trap of its own making; he doesn’t understand how the News Division, which was intended as the bulwark against the intrusion of subversive news techniques, was hobbled by policy and therefore contributed to the fall.

It can all be laid at the feet of Talbot Duckmanton – the urbane, pipe-smoking eminence grise who ruled the ABC with an iron hand in a kid glove from 1965 until 1982. Duckmanton had begun his career as a sporting commentator, but as I realised many years later at a reception in London, he had always wanted to be a journalist. He was almost pathetic in his admiration of peers such as the BBC's Director General Charles Curran who had been a distinguished foreign correspondent.

In 1951, a year after I joined the ABC in Brisbane, Duckmanton was appointed Assistant Manager for Queensland. Despite my lowly status as a cadet, I came to his notice, leading to his assessment of me as "prickly" which he never thought necessary to review. Promotion to Manager Tasmania followed, and then a prestigious appointment to join the BBC commentary team for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Soon after was appointed a member of the three-man team sent around the world to study television, followed by the role of Co-ordinator of television. His career was already seen as on a fast track to senior management.

What Duckmanton brought back from that television study was a profound fear of the impact of television film on broadcast standards, especially in News. In staff lectures and policy statements, the warning was given that pictures of exciting but irrelevant events could easily distort news values. Techniques then current in BBC interview programmes, such as the "talking head" that filled the screen were to be banned. "Jump cuts" - rapid transition from one frame to another scene were also out. BBC programmes which had journalists interviewing, commenting and backgrounding had alarmed him as corrupting the purity of delivered reports. It was for the ABC to provide the facts, the public to make up its mind.

So when television began in Australia in 1956, television news on the ABC was launched as radio news in vision. The reports were read in the order dictated by news values set by the Controller of News for both radio and TV; Illustration was restricted to three minutes of film in the 15-minute bulletin, and there were graphic cards to convey headline facts and figures. These sometimes got out of order – one night as director of the 7pm bulletin, I called for a card with the Prime Minister's name to be superimposed on his photograph, only to see a pair of ram's horns sprout from Mr Menzies head!

Despite bulletin restrictions, News launched two programmes of film. The first, Newsreel, scripted on overseas newsfilm flown in daily from BCINA (the British Commonwealth Newsfilm Agency, later Visnews) ran immediately after the nightly news bulletin. (I have documented elsewhere that when Four Corners began in 1960, Michael Charlton or Bob Raymond would try to steal Newsreel film from the rack in the editing room). On Sunday evenings, News presented Weekend Magazine, a 15-minute programme produced, reported and scripted by News journalists from around Australia, and later, from overseas offices. Stuart Littlemore, who featured in The Australian's photograph of the 1973 TDT team, cut his teeth in Australian television on W.E.M. This gives the lie to those – including the later current affairs teams and academics – who have promoted the false history that News journalists had no experience in broadcasting. As long ago as 1953 in Longreach, I compiled and read a daily 7-minute bulletin of regional news. I also recorded reports for News Review, the Talks Department programme on a Minifon wire recorder and later the first portable machine, the Emitape.

When Duckmanton was appointed General Manager in 1965 to succeed Sir Charles Moses, he was already acutely aware of the growing pressures to introduce a new way of backgrounding and interpreting the news. The BBC which was very much the ABC's model for broadcasting had showed the way. He was also determined to get his hands on the levers of power in news matters. The changing of the guard gave him his chance. When the Controller of News, W.S. ("Wally") Hamilton was elevated to the position of Assistant General Manager (Administration), Duckmanton did not permit him to take responsibility for News with him (as we all hoped), but appointed himself Editor in Chief. Every Friday morning, the new Controller of News, Gil Oakley, and the Directors of Radio and TV News, Russ Handley and Jack Gulley, were summoned to Broadcast House for a review of the week's output, and a briefing on policy. "The Friday Follies", they called it, and came back to their offices to pass on the latest petty dictates of a man with determined ideas, but no understanding.

It was there that Duckmanton ring-fenced the News Division, prohibiting it from expanding into the dangerous waters of what was then termed Public Affairs. News was to be the bulwark against the forces that could destroy the ABC's credibility – programmes that introduced interpretation, comment, opinion and analysis. News bulletins were to be read, reporters’ voices were not to be heard. This misinterpretation of the social forces at work, and a complete inability to comprehend how to apply journalistic training, principles and ethics in the new age, resulted in the debacle that Cater describes. Duckmanton could not separate interpretation and background from opinion; when the crisis came he had no principle or theory of news on which to rely. These are facts that you won’t find in the official ABC histories, biased as they are in favour of the Current Affairs people who swayed the historians.

In radio, The Talks Department ran parallel to News, and their paths rarely crossed. News Commentary and Notes on the News had always been written and delivered by contract outsiders, academics and specialists. Their views had been kept quite separate from the evening News Review, a 15-minute collection of reports, mostly from around Australia, by Talks officers who had been trained as broadcasters, not journalists. These, like the news bulletins were factual and un-opinionated. They contained interviews, but the programme was pre-recorded and often stale.

The dam broke in 1967 with the launch of TDT. This came about from a management power play in head office, not from a journalistic revolt as commonly believed. Ken Watts, a former schoolteacher who had come up through education broadcasting won the powerful position of head of television programmes in the managerial shuffle that followed Duckmanton’s appointment. The Commission had become alarmed at the ABC’s poor market share and was demanding brighter, more attractive programmes.

Described by the ABC’s historian Ken Inglis as having a reputation “for being ruthless, for encouraging, drinking with and promoting clever young people, and for caring about the quality and popularity of programmes,” by 1964 Watts had already assumed control of Four Corners (which had got into serious political trouble for its bias and irresponsibility). Then in1966 he proposed a daily programme of current affairs, modelled on the BBC’s Tonight show. It went to air in 1967 as TDT -This Day Tonight.  TDT. It had a huge budget, resources denied to other divisions, especially News, and with Ken Watts, who knew nothing of news, its disciplines, responsibilities or ethics as editor-in-chief. The brief was to break the mould of news reporting; its first Executive Director, New Zealander Allan Martin was given free rein. Some News journalists such as John Crew and Ken Chown, appalled that the News Division was being hog-tied to bulletins, defected to TDT.

The resultant programme - chirpy, irreverent, critical, intrusive and rude, provided a confusing mix of serious items and interviews and undergraduate humour, but it quickly won a big audience. TDT took the mickey out of politicians and soon had both ministers and ABC management on the edge of their chairs each night. It was the beginning of the new era, when ABC staff first took it upon themselves to declare what was wrong with the country; “what needs changing” as Martin said at the time. The Vietnam War, which TDT opposed, directly in comment and indirectly through choice of interviewees, accelerated the process. By 1969 the Commission was heavily criticising Watts and his TDT baby for editorialising, and mistakes of taste and judgement.

News journalists could only look on aghast as TDT became embroiled in one crisis after another – most traceable to breaches of ethics or news principles in sensationalist pursuit of ratings. There is no doubt the News Division either could or would ever have mounted such a programme. Watts was funded to the extent of a fresh team of fifty people, hand-picked from newspapers and broadcasters in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Front man Bill Peach had been trained in the ABC but was poached from Channel 10 where he compered a current affairs programme that pre-dated TDT but like it, modelled on the BBC’s Tonight. TDT lasted until 1978, gradually smoothing its rough edges and increasing in respectability. Its contribution to broadcasting had been to crush the power of political interference in the ABC, and  making politicians answerable to the news cycle. But the other, more sinister enduring legacy had been the propensity to blur reporting and editorialising, interpreting and commenting, analysing and opinionising.

If Four Corners and TDT showed that the ABC had been careless about allowing two parallel news organisations to flourish, the launch of radio’s AM, five months after TDT, and PM two years later, proved that management did not know what it was doing. It provoked a demarcation issue that wasted resources, set off decades of hostility within the ABC over broadcast news that took the first strike by journalists to begin a rationalisation and integration.

The ABC needed a programme like AM, to bring actuality and voices to the reporting of news. It was under the command of Selwyn (“Dan”) Speight a seasoned newspaper man – a type that critics of the News Division like Tim Bowden later condescendingly described as not broadcasters. Speight however had studied the BBC’s Today programme and was sound enough a journalist to adapt to audio practices without compromising principles. He quickly saw the value of high-quality circuits available from new undersea cables to deliver voice reports and interviews about the major world events to Australian breakfast-time audiences. At the political level, a major turf war had begun – a war which the News Division’s incompetent management was unable to fight. They had missed the bus.

Wally Hamilton, no longer working from his power base as head of News, saw his journalists being side-lined. He fought against Duckmanton’s objections to establish the principle of reporters’ voice reports in radio bulletins. The grudging concession was a limited number of News circuits from overseas offices, mainly London and New York.

In 1968 I was appointed London Editor and sent off with a strong message from Hamilton to develop voice reporting for radio and increase contributions to television’s Weekend Magazine.

When I arrived, I found that the separate Current Affairs group had a nightly circuit to Sydney at 8pm and refused to allow News to send reports on it. At 8.30pm the BBC used the Sydney circuit to transmit World RoundUp, a quarter-hour collection of correspondents’ reports specially produced for the ABC. These two bookings effectively blocked News reporting. We had only two booked circuits a week – on Sunday and Tuesday nights. My protests that it was absurd to expect news to happen to our convenience on those two days met apologies, but no success in gaining access to the Current Affairs circuits when necessary.

I solved the problem by persuading the BBC to transmit World RoundUp an hour earlier, a solution that suited them since its programme was produced live, exclusively for Australia. The change meant that Current Affairs could no longer refuse to extend the circuit time for my reporters to send their voice reports. This became vital as major news stories developed – the Northern Ireland troubles, the first terrorist hi-jacking of aircraft, the 1970 British elections, the Common Market negotiations and much more.

The so-called studio in London had been built by a contractor specialising in public address systems and could not handle live broadcasts. Current Affairs staff had to first record their items, and then play the tape down the line to Sydney. The first time Wally Hamilton visited London, I persuaded him of the impracticability of a studio that couldn’t broadcast. He found me £3000 from his budget, I found a couple of moonlighting BBC engineers, and we re-built the studio to the latest standards. I was pretty sure most of the cabling and switchgear came from a BBC warehouse somewhere, but I didn’t ask.

The change in direction was not without problems. As we pumped more and more reports down the cable to Sydney, Duckmanton rebelled. Famously, he passed the message back up the line through News executives: “There’s too much talking in the bulletins!” In Sydney, the money spent leasing a new building and installing new studios with the latest switching equipment for Current Affairs had been denied to News, which had to struggle with antiquated recording gear in an inadequate booth. It could not record telephone calls. Sydney sub-editors didn’t adapt well either. Used to handling news on paper, they were incapable of editing tape on the run as inserts for the morning bulletins. So an instruction was issued that no voice report could be put to air until it had first been transcribed! Few of our London reports got to air before the 7.45am bulletin.

I returned from London in 1971 to report economic and financial news for both radio and television, and broadcast a weekly radio programme The Week in Business (TWIB). I was the only finance or economic reporter in the ABC, and Russell Warner, who had taken over the running of Public Affairs Radio in 1972, tried to attract me to work for AM and PM. So much for News journalists not being broadcasters!

News continued to train its cadets in microphone and recorder work and send its experienced reporters to overseas posts from which they broadcast – radio and television reports, special mid-year and year-end roundups and increasingly hard-hitting Weekend Magazine essays. The News/Current Affairs divide was simmering in the background.

Then came The Dismissal, November 11, 1975, and war broke out. Warner got approval from Ken Watts (who was by then Controller of Programmes) to seize the two landlines from Canberra to “cover” the event, preventing News journalists in Canberra filing copy or voicepieces. Duckmanton, self-proclaimed editor-in-chief stood idly by while this hijacking of a breaking news story by a programme unit designated as providing depth and analysis excluded the very people trained and responsible for such coverage. The three and a half hours broadcast has gone down in ABC mythology as a triumph of modern broadcasting. However, for listeners, it was a disastrous breach of the most basic rules of broadcasting, because it failed to tell them what had happened.

I was on study leave at the time and driving back into town from a field trip. On the car radio I heard an endless list of academics, constitutional experts and psephologists pontificating about the significance of something which they never stopped to explain or recap. It was hugely unintelligible. A brief news bulletin on the half hour reported that the Whitlam Government had been dismissed, but without explanation or details. The Canberra bureau could not update, political correspondent Ken Begg got one brief report out. There was no actuality sound. The event lit the fuse for a major confrontation over the responsibilities of the two sections, and in effect, the right to report news. A four-hour stop-work of journalists ensued, the first in the history of the ABC. Viewed impartially, the Dismissal broadcast was a demonstration of the power of fiefdoms, and a colossal failure of senior management.

Earlier that same year News had launched Newsvoice, a belated attempt to show how reporters around Australia and overseas could present a broadcast programme that was not a read bulletin. It was developed by Duncan Fairweather, and Terry Brown, who had reported from New York as an ABC correspondent. With no studio in the News building, they had to run up the hill with their tapes to the main Forbes Street studios – as I had to do every Friday night with TWIB.  But management quarantined Newsvoice at the dead hour of 5pm where it languished without proper support or facilities.

The crisis point was reached in 1976 when management, under Warner’s influence, decreed that Current Affairs would broadcast the National Wage Case decision. Journalists around Australia threatened to strike. It took ten days of negotiations and heated meetings to hammer out a compromise. News Division specialist reporters won the right to break the story live on air and explain the judgement; Current Affairs then interviewed politicians, unionists and businessmen. At last a sensible definition of roles was emerging, and the power of Current Affairs was broken.

Later that year, I persuaded one of Australia’s leading behavioural scientists Dr John Hunt, to conduct a seminar for News journalists to consider their future in broadcast news. Overwhelmingly, they supported the integration of News and Current Affairs; demanded the right of News journalists to report in voice and vision, and a clear delineation of the roles. They called for the Commission to recognise the initiative and endorse the principles. But the Commissioners never saw the document. Talbot Duckmanton, ever the bureaucratic manipulator, headed it off. It was to be many years before News and Current Affairs were rationalised, all ABC recruits were trained as broadcasters, and the organisation caught up, thirty or forty years late, with the rest of the world.

But the damage had been done. There is not space here to detail all the stages of insidious penetration of the ABC’s integrity: Alan Ashbolt’s Marxist influence on the young impressionables of his Special Projects Unit; the recruitment of graduates and others without the discipline of news training; the incompetence of News executives in failing to train and fight for the right, in a changing world, to provide news interpretation without opinion. Yet the principal blame falls on senior management – Talbot Duckmanton the wily mandarin intent on manipulating the Commission and keeping his nose clean; Clem Semmler the effete intellectual who wanted the ABC to remain stuck in radio aspic, Daryl Miley, the old stager of programme shuffling, Keith Mackriell and Graham White the ultimate fence-sitters, and Ken Watts, the aggressive ambitious game-changer who created programmes that trampled balance, fairness and impartiality to death in the name of news entertainment. 

Geoffrey Luck was an ABC Journalist from 1950 until 1976. During that time he was the first ABC cadet, Queensland; Journalist in Charge, Longreach; Journalist in Charge, Mt Moresby; Sub-editor National Radio News; TV News scriptwriter & director; News Editor, Papua New Guinea; Chief of Staff National Newsroom; London Editor; Economics & Finance Correspondent

"Why cannot the word “Muslim” be used in a context where the religion and some of its adherents are subject to criticism?"

The nameless peril of Muslim terror

by Des Moore
Quadrant
April 23, 2013

Why cannot the word “Muslim” be used in a context where the religion and some of its adherents are subject to criticism? Apparent answer: because leaders of Western societies believe all faiths should be treated equally, even to the point of turning a blind eye to the fact that some ardent believers in the Muslim creed are outspoken in advocating acts of terror as legitimate components of their faith.

It is a major concern that the initial reactions of government leaders and most media commentators to the Boston bombings has been to ignore or brush aside the wider policy implications for the West. The record of the past week does not promote a sense of confidence.

First, there was a widespread attempt to avoid linking the fact, as became clear  later that same week, that the bombers were believers in, or heavily influenced by, the Muslim religion. It has now been reported that the bombers lived close to a local mosque, in an area near Boston where a considerable number of Moslems live, and that one of the bombers spent six months at “home” in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where the population is 80% Muslim and eruptions of insurgency in the name of establishing an Islamic state are a grim fact of daily life. Today come further reports that the elder bomber may have murdered three ‘friends’ by “slashing their throats right out of an al Qaeda training video.” 

Des Moore on Islamic terror:
Can governments handle it? // Soft words for hard men 

Second, while we look to the United States to be the leader of the Western world,  President Obama has consistently avoided using the word "Muslim". Indeed,  initially he did not even describe the bombings as terrorist acts. William Vizzard, a US criminal justice professor at California State University speculated that Obama might have hesitated to use the religion's name because it had become a ‘loaded word’, verbal shorthand for Islamic terrorism. This precisely describes the Boston attack. While it is too early to pass judgment on whether the relevant US agencies have learned anything from the mistakes before the September 11 massacres of 2001,  the apparent pass given the eldest bomber is worrisome. Quizzed by the FBI after a tip from Russia, he was turned loose with an apparent clean bill of health.

Third, the Australian Government, represented by Attorney General Dreyfus, made a woeful attempt to dismiss the web link between one of Australia’s extremist imams and the American bombers. This continued the government’s attempt to play down terrorism's risk to Australian security. The Opposition seems to have said nothing  on this (or any other) aspect. Are all our political leaders scared of criticising Muslim extremists for fear of losing votes or being accused of racism and discrimination?

Criticism by a political (or other) leader of extremist views held by some Muslims might cost votes in one or two electorates. But it is surely too important to ignore such views and leave the prevention and response solely to intelligence agencies, as Foreign Minister Bob Carr seems to advocate. Factual statements about terrorist activity by extremists may be controversial, but the dubious fear of political damage should not breed a dangerous and irresponsible silence.

The number of Islamic believers in Australia has not yet reached levels comparable to those of the UK and Europe, where an electoral backlash could occur. Although heavily concentrated, the total number of Muslims in Australia is 400,000 to 500,000, a very small percentage of our population. 

Fifth and finally, it is quite simply absurd to suggest that “it is too late to do anything about the problem.”  There is a variety of policy actions that could – and should – be taken without delay. The first of those must surely be  to acknowledge that a problem exists.



Des Moore, a former Deputy Secretary of Treasury, is Director of the Institute for Private Enterprise.

Boston Muslim Terrorist Bombing: "Their ABC" rallies to defend their Savages of Choice,

Boston tragedy has another casualty now: Islam

184 Comments

CHLOE PATTON

America's Islamophobia industry has seized on the Boston bombing to bolster its campaign of misinformation and fear-mongering. We would do well to pay careful attention, writes Chloe Patton.

Local commentators have variously described reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured 183 others, as "restrained", "refreshingly honest" and wholly different to what unfolded after September 11, 2001.

True, this time round we were spared the "with us or against us" clash of civilisations rhetoric from those in power. And thankfully, save for a hijab-clad woman punched while dropping her daughter at a Boston playgroup and a Bangladeshi man bashed for looking Arab in the Bronx, we have not seen the same wave of violent attacks on Muslims that gripped the US in the wake of 9/11.

Full article at      http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4651400.html

This article is so full of so many FACTUAL inaccuracies aka. "Gillards" that the author must surely be deliberately Lying. WHY?  

Muslim sterotyping Down Under " Terrorist Man" costume "......"It's disrespectful to so many - Muslims.."

Baulkham Hills store bans 'disrespectful' terrorist costume

DAVID CATT 

HILLS SHIRE TIMES 

APRIL 26, 2013 10:07AM

RED Riding Hood, Spider Girl, Lil Bee... and Terrorist Man?

A Baulkham Hills discount store has moved quickly to remove from sale a highly offensive novelty costume depicting a stereotypical Arab man, complete with turban, beard, white robes and army camouflage vest and holding a large assault rifle.

The packaging identifies the costume as "Terrorist Man''.

A Hills Shire Times reader contacted the paper earlier today, complaining about the costume on sale for $32.99 at Red Dollar at Stockland Mall Baulkham Hill.

                           

It was hanging right alongside children's and adults novelty costumes including nurses, superheroes, animals and policemen.

"It's disrespectful to so many - Muslims, victims of terrorism and the general community - and is a terrible example to children,'' the reader said.

The costume comes in sizes small (8-10), medium (12-14) and large (16-18).

When confronted, the store's manager removed the five costumes from sale and apologised, saying she understood the complaint ``given what's happening at the moment''.

It is unclear whether the same costume is for sale in other stores around the Hills and Sydney.

                          

Does this depiction of a Muslim above,resemble the pictures of Islam's finest shown below?  Of course not say the Islamist's and their Multicultural Harmony Day apologists.

Left click image to enlarge

The Heiner Affair just wont go away

Heiner Affair inquiry getting down to business


Piers Akerman 
Daily Telegraph
Wednesday, April 24, 2013 (12:06am)

It would seem that Prime Minister Julia Gillard is not the only Labor figure to reach for the “naïve” defence when the hard questions are asked.

Yesterday, Dean Wells, a former Labor Attorney General in the Goss government, told the Queensland Child Protection Inquiry which is looking into the Heiner Affair that the Cabinet decided to shred internal documents because they were inexperienced and wanted to protect employees from defamation.

He said the 1990 order to destroy documents from an investigation into a youth-detention centre was the Cabinet’s baptism of fire as the first “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” decision.

He is the third Cabinet minister to be summonsed to the inquiry - the first under newly expanded terms of reference - that is investigating the long-running Heiner Affair disgrace.

“We had been out of office for 32 years,” Wells said.

“We did not know what was normal and within the area of the Cabinet’s concern.

“What we did know that a minister had a problem that an inquiry that had been established by her predecessor had been pulled up.”

The Heiner Affair centres on the destruction of documents from retired magistrate Noel Heiner’s investigation into allegations of mismanagement at the John Oxley Youth Centre.

It later emerged a girl, 14, was raped at the centre in 1988 and claims grew of a coverup of sexual abuse allegations.

The girl, now a woman, at the heart of this matter, still wants justice.

She was awarded approximately $140,000 in a hush-hush ex gratia payment or possibly compensation in June, 2010, by the Bligh Labor government.

Commissioner Tim Carmody asked why the government would offer to indemnify a man, then destroy the documents which might be produced in a court in a case against that same man.

“That suggests no one thought about those two colliding facts,’’ he said.

Wells said the government believed it wrong to keep documents which he believed contained untested allegations of misconduct which did not involve criminal behavior.

But Carmody said the Cabinet knew it was dong something quite “risky” which required serious thought.

“It was such a serious decision it was deferred twice,’’ he said.

Yet the Cabinet did not appear to apply careful consideration before green-lighting the shredding.

“It (the consideration given) seems to have been less than might have been expected,’’ Carmody said.

“The questions that seems to have been obvious don’t seem to have been asked.’’

Carmody suggested the documents contained not so much allegations of child sexual abuse but accusations related to industrial strife inside the John Oxley centre.

But he also suggested there were two competing sides in the equation - one side wanted to keep the material and one side wanted it destroyed.

He suggested the Labor Cabinet had taken one side, and allowed the destruction of the documents.

The inquiry continues and the commissioner is due to decide on the criminality of the shredding of the documents on May 6.

In as much as a number of the most senior judges from across the nation have in the past decided that the shredding of documents foreshadowed to be needed as evidence was prima facie a crime, Carmody’s decision will be eagerly waited.

The Heiner Affair has never been properly investigated despite 11 reviews and it has cast a shadow over the Goss Cabinet and a number of senior public servants including the former prime minister Kevin Rudd, who was Premier Wayne Goss’s chief of staff and later director-general of his Cabinet office.

It may be that the Newman government will finally see justice done in this long-running scandal. 

Gallipoli ANZAC Hero Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick and his Donkey

Simpson and his donkey are Gallipoli heroes, despite new efforts to trash the legend

Candace Sutton
April 23, 2013 3:53PM

Angry men want to diminish Simpson's legacy 
But those who recommended him were no slouches
Simpson's CO's granddaughter explains 

THEY'RE at it again: angry men are attacking the legend of Gallipoli war hero, Simpson, of donkey fame.
Only this time, it’s more serious. The latest round of salvos seems determined to consign the nation's favourite Anzac hero to the dust bin.

Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick's story is well known. He was the stretcher bearer who ferried wounded Australian soldiers to safety at Gallipoli on the back of a donkey for 24 days, until he was shot through the chest by the Turks on May 19, 1915.
Simpson and his donkey are immortalised in statues at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, and his story is told in children's books and school history classes.

In the years since World War I, he has come to embody the Anzac legacy's greatest traits of mateship and selfless sacrifice.

As many have eulogised, Simpson has had his critics, who have attacked his right to such a high place in the hearts of Australians.
A succession of commentators has tried to make their names debunking his legend and dispelling the "myth" that Private Simpson was anything special.

Historians and journalists have pontificated at length, lecturing us poor Australians our simplistic "need" to hold up Simpson's example and mythologise our young nation's role in the first world war.

Books have been written bagging poor Simmo and anyone who has dared to believe his tale of heroism.
But this year, the poor man has attracted new levels of scorn and claims of fabrication.

In the lead-up to Anzac Day 2013, no doubt annoyed that Simpson would again enjoy his annual outing of national hero worship, the anti-Simmo squad have let it rip, calling his story "fraudulent" and "a lie". Why all the anger?
Two articles in the last week have Simpson's claim to legend in tatters.

Journalist Mark Baker said that "much of the legend of the man with the donkey has been built on false or faulty evidence, richly embellished over the years as history has been turned into hagiography".
Writer Jan Wositzky was next, writing that Simpson was nothing without the donkey. "Take the donkey out of the picture and the story dies".
Both commentators said Simpson had been found to be no more or less courageous than the other stretcher bearers operating on the Gallipoli peninsula.

This fresh attack on Simpson's reputation comes in the wake of a federal Defence Honours and Award Tribunal rejecting his case for the ultimate recognition of courage and sacrifice, the Victoria Cross.
The tribunal announced its decision last month not to award Simpson a VC. Simpson's failure to qualify for a VC was technical and utterly predictable, as I wrote in May 2008 when the tribunal was just being formed.
But the anti-Simpson team now seek to obliterate his legend once and for all.

"Just about every word that has ever been written or spoken about Simpson, apart from the bare facts of his civilian life and his basic military service, is a lie," said Graham Wilson, in a private submission to the tribunal.

Wilson is a seasoned opponent to the Simpson legend. In a previous attack, he made the astonishing call that Simpson may have actually cost diggers' lives, saying it was "not a great leap of the imagination to actually wonder how many men at Gallipoli died because a stretcher-bearer team was short a man due to Simpson's absence".

Mark Baker quotes from Wilson's submission and says the Simpson story is "largely a myth inflated and exaggerated by the sloppy work of journalists, amateur historians and jingoistic politicians".

Another submission, by journalist and Gallipoli historian, Les Carlyon, said the Simpson "myths are stronger, and more numerous, than the facts. Simpson became the legendary figure of Gallipoli, not on the peninsula itself, but in Australian and British newspapers months after his death. He was beatified, then canonised".

Baker goes on to list the "fraudulent" claims of Simpson's deeds uncovered by Wilson and concludes that the tribunal was "unable to find any witness accounts of a specific act of valour ... which could single out Simpson's bravery from other stretcher-bearers in the Field Ambulance".

In saying so, Baker has unwittingly stumbled upon the truth, and it doesn't detract from the bravery of Simpson's actions at Gallipoli.
Certainly his legend has been burnished since, by people who bathed in his reflected glory and who probably never met him, but that does not make his original story untrue and undocumented.

In May 2008, when the tribunal was being formed as a Labor election promise "to take the politics out of medal decisions", the Defence Department told me the rules for establishing proof of valour to award a VC meant Simpson would miss out.

"It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make an award of a Victoria Cross to Simpson for his action at Gallipoli during World War I," a Defence Department spokesperson said.
He said recommendations "must be supported by signed statements of at least three eyewitnesses of the act for which the award is recommended. These statements should be on oath."

Simpson was previously recommended for the Victoria Cross on three occasions, in 1915, 1967 and 1995.
To examine why all of these VC bids have failed, let's go back to Anzac Cove,1915.

Witness accounts of Simpson at Gallipoli exist but they are mostly unspecific diary accounts of his journeys up and down the gullies from battlefield to dressing station.
My grandfather, then

Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Sutton, was Simpson's commanding officer of the medical unit, the 3rd Field Ambulance at Gallipoli.

His war diaries, available for reading at the Australian War Memorial, provide a meticulous account of his war in Gallipoli and later in France.

Among his diagrams of the ships off Anzac Cove before the landing, accounts of numbers and injuries of the wounded, descriptions of bright beautiful days on the peninsular interrupted by gunfire, Sutton remarks on Simpson's deeds at Gallipoli.
It was with Sutton's approval that Simpson was allowed to work independently in collecting casualties, living apart from his fellow soldiers in what was technically desertion.

He gave his Red Cross armband to Simpson for the donkey's snout, in a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of the animal as an enlistee.
Sutton's diaries also recount an "extraordinary order" regarding military award recommendations made in May 1915 by the senior Australian medical officer at Anzac, Colonel Neville Howse, who achieved his own VC in the Boer War.
And herein seems to lie the problem.

According to Simpson's biographer, Tom Curran, Howse's directive, which flabbergasted Sutton, was to assign the award recommendation to a more junior officer, and that is what happened with Simpson.

Curran says the bearer officer, Captain Fry, "recommended Simpson for the VC under an inappropriate category of heroism, citing a single pre-eminent act which could not be substantiated, instead of sustained selfless heroism over a prolonged period".
After Simpson was "shot through the chest" on the morning of May 19, 1915, as Sutton noted in his diary, he was buried at 6.30 that evening at Hell Spit, on the southern end of Anzac Cove.

The day after Simpson's death, Colonel John Monash, then the commander of the Australian Imperial Force's 4th Infantry Brigade at Gallipoli, sent a submission to Australian and New Zealand Divisional Headquarters.

Monash wrote: "I desire to bring under special notice, for favour of transmission to the proper authority, the case of Private Simpson ... [who] has been working in this valley since 26th April, in collecting wounded, and carrying them to dressing stations."
Sutton who, unusually for a commanding officer had condoned Simpson's abandonment of his unit, wrote in his diary on June 1, 1915: "I think we will get a VC for poor Simpson".

As history records, the witness accounts of Simpson's deeds are unspecific, such as Monash's description of Simpson's "fearless rescues" of "all cases unable to walk ... [he] moved unconcernedly amid shrapnel and rifle fire".

Lt Col Sutton noted in his diary: "It is difficult to get evidence of any one act to justify the VC; the fact is that he did so many."
While neither Sutton nor Monash made a formal recommendation for a VC for Simpson, their accounts of Simpson's bravery are arguably sincere and believable. They were no slouches.

Sutton was promoted to colonel, served in France at Pozières and Bullecourt, got a gong from King George V, and was twice mentioned in dispatches.

After taking charge of the Australian 3rd Division in France, Monash was made Australia's military commander of World War I in May 1918.

ANZAC Day 2013 Australia remembers it's finest

Anzac Day is one of Australia’s most important national commemorative occasions. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War.

When is Anzac Day?

The official naming of Anzac Day occurred in 1916 and since then, has fallen on the 25th of April each year.

What does 'ANZAC' stand for?

'ANZAC' stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. On the 25th of April 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of the allied expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. These became know as Anzacs and the pride they took in that name continues to this day.

Why is this day special to Australians?

On the morning of 25 April 1915, the Anzacs set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula in order to open the Dardanelles to the allied navies. The objective was to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, and an ally of Germany.

The Anzacs landed on Gallipoli and met fierce resistance from the Ottoman Turkish defenders. Their plan to knock Turkey out of the war quickly became a stalemate, and the campaign dragged on for eight months.

At the end of 1915, the allied forces were evacuated. Both sides suffered heavy casualties and endured great hardships. Over 8,000 Australian soldiers were killed. News of the landing on Gallipoli and the events that followed had a profound impact on Australians at home. The 25th of April soon became the day on which Australians remember the sacrifice of those who had died in the war.

The Anzacs were courageous, and although the Gallipoli campaign failed in its military objectives, the Australian and New Zealand actions during the campaign left us all a powerful legacy.

What does Anzac Day mean today?

With the coming of the Second World War, Anzac Day also served to commemorate the lives of Australians who died in that war. The meaning of Anzac Day today includes the remembrance of all Australians killed in military operations.