Australian Politics:Election 2010 First leader to the centre wins

First leader to the centre wins
The Australian
March 12, 2009

The next election is wide open and will be won or lost on a single issue -- economic management credentials

AT the last election, the times that suited John Howard for so long suddenly favoured Kevin Rudd, a fresh face presenting himself as an economic conservative. To many voters, the then Opposition Leader was an updated version of Mr Howard -- hard-headed but with a softer heart. His promises to abolish Work Choices and make a modest start on confronting climate change seemed affordable in the afterglow of 17 years of economic growth and reform.

The 2010 election, which the International Monetary Fund says will be fought in the depths of the "Great Recession", will be a different game. Wide open, regardless of opinion polls, the victor will be the party leader who has the foresight and pragmatism to break free of the current shadow-boxing over industrial relations and other economic issues and embrace the policies that the times demand. Tired, mean and tricky as the Howard government appeared to many after 12 years, an updated version of its economic management would resonate with voters struggling with unemployment and hard times.

If Mr Rudd is to step into the centre and secure his place as long-term Prime Minister, he will need to break free of the Labor Left upon which he relies too heavily for support and in shaping government policy. As a religious, socially conservative former diplomat, policy poindexter and bureaucratic nerd, Mr Rudd won the Labor leadership in December 2006 against all odds. His ambition, energy and the party's desperation after a decade in the wilderness compensated for his lack of a party or union powerbase. Queensland's Australian Workers Union powerbroker Bill Ludwig, for instance, helped him by slamming him as "no friend of the union movement".

In order to win the leadership, Mr Rudd cut a deal with Julia Gillard and her numbers man from Victoria, Kim Carr. He harnessed the Left as well as other disaffected former Crean and Latham backers who were ready to support anybody-but-Beazley. Almost half way into Labor's first term, the consequences of the Left's dominance of so many key economic portfolios is all too apparent with industrial relations and industry policy seemingly run out of a leftist ideological handbook from the Whitlam era.

It's time, in the national interest and his own, for Mr Rudd to realign his base and rebalance his Government's modus operandi by embracing the right -- including the former Kim Beazley camp. That is Mr Rudd's natural support group and the base from which two of Australia's most successful reforming prime ministers -- Bob Hawke and Paul Keating -- modernised the Australian economy.

Nobody, except perhaps Robert Manne in The Monthly, really thinks Mr Rudd, in his essay deriding the market economics of neo-liberalism, "could actually believe deeply what he wrote". As cabinet office head in Queensland, Mr Rudd was dryer than just about anybody on the horizon other than former Labor finance minister Peter Walsh. His economic razor cut a swath through the public sector that earned him the moniker "Dr Death". It was a badge of honour.

This interview between 2GB's Alan Jones and former Howard government treasurer Peter Costello says it all, I hope Costello gets the leadership of the Liberal Party as soon as possible so he can bash Comrade Rudd and Madame Gillard every chance he gets,just as he did when he was the treasurer in the Howard government.

In talking up Australia's economic difficulties, Mr Rudd is banking on gaining electoral traction from the power of incumbency. He hopes that voters, in their insecurity, will stick with the status quo. Recognising that the Senate is likely to modify his regressive industrial relations changes and the emissions trading scheme, he sees a chance to keep faith with the Left because the modifications will be forced upon him.

In current circumstances, however, this is second-rate leadership. The futility of Senator Carr wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up uncompetitive industries is self-evident. In her vast portfolio overseeing education, employment and workplace relations and social inclusion, Ms Gillard has delivered big-time for her ACTU and Labor Left comrades an industrial relations system that takes the nation back pre-Howard, pre-Keating and pre-Hawke to the rigid, centralised system of the 1970s. The past 20 years have demonstrated the propensity of labour-market flexibility to generate jobs. In the national interest, Mr Rudd must stamp his leadership on the Government by overhauling and modernising its approach before the damage is too great.

Even more extraordinary than Mr Rudd's lurch to the Left is the way Malcolm Turnbull is imitating his every action when a far simpler strategy could make him prime minister. The message the Opposition Leader should deliver every day until the polls close is that when the Liberals were in power almost every Australian grew richer, year in, year out. And what the conservatives accomplished over 12 years, Labor has undone in a bare three. It's a message Mr Howard knew how to sell when he asked whether voters believed they could trust Labor with the economy, and it is a script Mr Turnbull should memorise.

But caught up in the issues of the hour and determined to impose his own ego on the Liberal Party, Mr Turnbull shows no sign of picking up the plan that is ready-made to win the next election. Like the Government, he wants to bury Work Choices. Like the Government, he supports action on global warming. Certainly his strategy appeals to Liberals with long memories, those who hated Mr Howard during the "wets" and "dries" internal party disputes in the 80s. And it appeals to others with very short memories, who blame Mr Howard for the 2007 election loss and believe that all of his policies were poison then and are poisonous now. But in turning his back on Mr Howard's legacy, Mr Turnbull is dancing away from what can win him the next election -- the record of the Howard government.

Mr Howard's legacy to Labor in 2007 was an economy that had never been in better shape at a transfer of power. By the next election, the Howard years will look like a golden age. It beggars belief that Mr Turnbull is dancing to the Government's tune with his clumsily choreographed positions on Ms Gillard's workplace laws, which he does not like but will not fight. And it is astounding that he is tap-dancing over the detail of the Government's complex plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when he could march away from it on the grounds that it will cost jobs. Certainly the Howard government's poorly planned and presented Work Choices policy was largely responsible for the Coalition losing the last election. And Mr Howard's determination to ensure that dealing with global warming did not destroy Australian jobs was sold by Labor and the Greens as old and out of touch. But in changing course on these issues, Mr Turnbull is preparing to fight the last election, not the next one. Back then, voters listened to the Labor and ACTU message that Work Choices allowed unscrupulous employers to exploit low-skilled workers and especially young people in casual jobs.

With unemployment at a generational low, the electorate was not all that alarmed by warnings that the Labor alternative would cost jobs by reducing workplace flexibility and increasing union power. And prosperity ensured many voters were willing to sacrifice exports and economic expansion to cut back greenhouse gas emissions.

All this has changed since the global financial crisis. There is a real possibility that a million people could be looking for work by the next election, many of them young people sacked or never employed because Labor's new wages policy has made them too expensive to hire. And energy exporters, already struggling for sales, say the Government's complex ETS will cost them business. Few voters will be dazzled by these jewels in Labor's policy crown when we next got to the polls. Despite Labor's dominance in Newspoll, people are sceptical about the party. Labor came close to losing in the Northern Territory at the last election, it lost in Western Australia and it is no sure thing in the Queensland campaign. Nor are first-term federal governments guaranteed re-election. Bob Hawke's triumph in 1983 was not repeated in the closer 1984 campaign. Mr Howard's decisive win in 1996 was followed by a near political death experience in 1998 when he lost the popular vote. Mr Rudd's policy surrender to the Labor Left could yet make him a one-term prime minister because in the coming campaign, voters will ask themselves Peter Costello's question from the last one -- who can best be trusted to manage a trillion-dollar economy.

Yet in pussy-footing with internal politics, Mr Turnbull is ignoring his one opportunity -- to compare the reputations of the Labor and Liberal parties on the economy. And Mr Costello knows it, knows the next election will be fought on his issues, the economy and the need for further reform of government. Mr Turnbull must embrace the Howard agenda. If he declines to do it, the party should look for a leader who will. On either side of the political divide, the leader who captures the centre will be prime minister after the next election.

GBL : Lebanese national arrested in Sydney's occupied territories for DATE RAPE drug importation.

Man charged with importing liquid for date rape drug

The Daily Telegraph
March 11, 2009 06:40pm

A LEBANESE national has been charged with attempting to import 15 litres of a liquid used to manufacture a date-rape drug.

Australian Customs and Border Protection alleged its officers detected the 15 litres of Gamma-butyrolactone (GBL) in 12 unlabelled bottles air freighted into Sydney from Hong Kong on March 8.

GBL is a precursor to the date-rape drug Gamma-hydroxybutyrate, commonly known as GHB or fantasy, and is a prohibited import without appropriate authority.

The March 8 discovery was referred to the Australian Federal Police, who on Tuesday searched a Bankstown address and arrested a 32-year-old man as he allegedly waited to take receipt of the liquid.

The man, who faced Sydney's Central Local Court on Wednesday, could now face a maximum penalty of $825,000 and/or life imprisonment.

Just re supplying I guess for that time honored tradition by the uninvited middle eastern residents of Sydney's occupied territories.
How many "Aussie Pigs" and "Aussie Sluts" aka. Australian women and girls, were saved from gang rape by these vermin I guess we will never know.
Well done Australian Customs and Border Protection

Madame Pelosi loses broom ?

Why doesn't she just use her broom?

Why Kevin Rudd is SMILING in this world wide recession.

Comrade Rudd and Madame Rein
Australians would be smiling too if they were about to reap a $300million dollar wind fall due to the world wide recession and the policies of Comrade Rudd's Socialist Government.

UK deals windfall for Rein enterprise

Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent
The Australian
March 11, 2009

KEVIN Rudd's family finances are heading in a different direction from those of most people as the global recession helps to add as much as $300 million to the annual turnover of his wife Therese Rein's job-placement company in Britain.

Industry experts familiar with her main operating company predicted yesterday that its turnover would more than treble in the next three years from about pound stg. 60million ($130 million) to pound stg. 200million.

While most families and industries struggle with the recession, Ms Rein, who is estimated to be worth $60 million, is prospering because her firm is already winning new British government contracts and her chosen profession of helping the unemployed is one of the few businesses that continues to boom in bad economic times.

Ms Rein's decision to sell her Australian operations to avoid a conflict of interest after her husband was elected prime minister in 2007 has turned out to be beautifully timed because she concentrated on the British job market just as it was preparing for an explosion of private sector activity.

Her firm, WorkDirections UK, is believed to have doubled its turnover from the pound stg. 32 million it reported in June 2007, while its workforce has also doubled to more than 700.

That growth is mainly being driven by the British Government's injection of new market forces and private enterprise into the task of finding jobs for the unemployed, but the recession is giving her business a further boost.

The upturn in Ms Rein's fortunes comes as Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull stands by his claim that it is hypocritical of Mr Rudd to attack "neo-liberal" policies when his own family finances have benefited from the privatisation of government services.

Ms Rein's acumen and business success have been well documented, but the extent of her expansion in Britain is only now becoming clear.

"Selling up in Australia and turning most of her attention to here (in Britain) turned out to be the smartest thing she could possibly have done," one economic adviser to the British Government said yesterday.

A spokeswoman for Ms Rein's holding company, Ingeus, yesterday refused to comment on the firm's growth prospects, issuing a statement saying that "we are not in a position to speculate about our purchasers' response to current economic conditions (but we) will continue to respond to employment services tenders as they arise".

Labour now pays about pound stg. 1 billion a year to private firms and voluntary groups for job services but it is committed to giving them access to more of the pound stg. 36 billion that it spends on the unemployed each year.

The likelihood of a Conservative election victory next year suggests there will be an even bolder shift to the private sector, with the Tories promising to put many more job-search functions out to contract and to make heavy cuts at the Department for Work and Pensions, which has already lost 30,000 jobs under Labour.

With Britain suffering one of the deepest downturns in the developed world, the number of people on some form of jobless benefits is tipped to double to two million, prompting Gordon Brown's Government to increase the scale and pace of its shift to private-sector job placement.

One of the Government's flagship programs, the Flexible New Deal for the long-term jobless, has been expanded from 100,000 places to 300,000 and the upfront payments to job placement firms have been increased to help fund the start-up of what is essentially a new private industry.

Several experts in London said the next 18 months to two years would be difficult for the private providers as they struggled with their own structural changes and a shortage of job vacancies, but when the recession eventually eased the profits would roll in. When the economy finally began to create more jobs the job placement agencies would thrive because they would have large numbers of relatively skilled and work-ready people on their books.

Richard Johnson, a former executive at Ms Rein's firm in Britain who now heads one of her rivals, yesterday backed the prediction that she could triple her turnover in the next three years.

"If you do the numbers you do come up with a result like that and Therese has built a company that deserves that sort of success," said Mr Johnson, the managing director of welfare-to-work programs for Serco, one of the world's largest providers of privatised public services.

"WorkDirections has probably the best reputation in the country for quality and integrity. It pays its front-line staff more than other providers and something like 90 per cent of them have university degrees.

"That high-quality service is a point of difference in the market and it has been a very clever strategy because the trend now is all about basing payments on results and if you deliver better results you will be better rewarded."

The Government is offering 24 large five-year contracts to provide job services in different parts of Britain and WorkDirections is widely expected to win three or four contracts.

That would lift its turnover to perhaps pound stg. 105 million and similar results in the next two annual rounds of contracts would lift it to about pound stg. 200 million.

Professor Dan Finn, a welfare-to-work expert for the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion who has studied the introduction of such schemes in Australia and the US, said the first few years of the new British contracts were likely to have generous government funding.

"If you look at cases like the Jobs Network in Australia they tend to spend a lot to make sure it gets up and running, and then they tighten up the funding," he said.

"That is when the number of providers competing for business falls away ... and the quality operations like WorkDirections are left standing."

Ms Rein's firm has also entered the French, German and Swedish job markets but the greatest rewards have been offered by the structural reforms in Britain. Labour has already brought single parents and the disabled into welfare-to-work programs and is now flirting with the more radical step of using the huge pot of money that is normally reserved for unemployment benefits to pay job-placement firms for reducing the benefits bill.

Green Hoax down under Rudd's weapon of mass JOB destruction.

No room for idiocy in a harsh economic climate

Piers Akerman
News.com.au
Wednesday, March 11, 2009

CLIMATE Change Minister Penny Wong has increased the Rudd Government’s carbon footprint exponentially with the release of her 374-page emissions trading scheme legislation.

Wong has also given the Opposition a carbon neutral opportunity to stand up for average working families in the face of unprecedented environmentalist bullying from the Rudd Government.

It will have to be quick though as the global fiscal stuff-up, combined with the Government’s Bills on emissions trading and industrial relations, threaten to rapidly reduce the numbers of working families.

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is correct to focus on jobs while Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan squander the wealth of the nation on programs for which there is no sound economic reasoning.

The problem for the Government is that its plans have been tried and have failed elsewhere. On Monday and Tuesday more than 600 scientists and others met in New York to hear experts speak against the theory of man-made climate change.

Among them was the European Union President Vaclav Klaus, who said climate data did not support the theory of human causation, adding we needed to save the planet from the environmentalists.

See Comrade Rudd's Madame Wong at her best,here on the Labor Party's ABC Lateline program refusing to answer a simple question, note how many times the cameras are taken off her when she is under pressure and looks to her right seemingly seeking assistance from an off screen advisor in how best to not answer the question.
I can just imagine the fireworks in the studio after the interview concluded.

Another speaker was Californian Senator Tom McClintock who had the audience rolling in the aisles as he pointed out the inanities of the doomsayers.

The Left, he said, was now in the business of selling indulgences - you can actually calculate your carbon sins online and they’ll gladly tell you how much money to send them (all major credit cards accepted) to assuage your conscience.

His saved his harshest criticism for the radical policies that the global warm-mongers are now enacting, the same policies being pushed by Rudd and Wong.

Three years ago, in the name of saving the planet, California adopted the most radically restrictive legislation anywhere on the planet, including AB32, which requires a 25 per cent reduction in man-made carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

Until last year, McClintock said, Californian’s unemployment rate tracked the national figures, but since January, 2007, California began a radical divergence from the national figures and is now in double digits and nearly 40 per cent higher than the national unemployment rate.

Those numbers won’t mean much to the current federal ALP leadership because it is a clone of the dysfunctional NSW model - obdurate, ignorant and inflexible.

But as the numbers of jobless in Australia soar to levels not seen since the last federal Labor administration, driven by Rudd’s expensive and meaningless emissions trading system and its union-friendly industrial relations laws, the Opposition should make the running on behalf of those whose jobs Labor will kill.

Australia's Labor Socialists build a Hospital

Rooms too small at $1bn Royal North Shore Hospital - doctors

By Simon Benson
The Daily Telegraph
March 11, 2009 08:29am

A $1 BILLION hospital project is in a shambles with the discovery that its operating theatres are too small for major operations and don't meet the national standards for minimum size.
The Daily Telegraph can reveal that, of 18 theatres at Sydney's Royal North Shore Hospital 16 are below the recommended size for major surgery.

In a deepening of the crisis facing the decrepit New South Wales health system, surgeons and anaesthetists at the existing hospital, which serves a population of one million, claim that at least six theatres are so small they won't even be able to accommodate vital operating equipment.

Clinicians said they will not be able to perform major trauma, cardiac, spinal or cancer surgery in 90 per cent of the theatres as they are at least 10sq m too small.

In a repeat of the disaster at Bathurst Hospital, plans shown to the surgeons reveal that 10 of the theatres will be 52sq m and six will be 42sq m. The accepted minimum size for multi-function theatres is between 55 and 60sq m, they said.

It has also been revealed that urgent maternity patients will be located hundreds of metres away from theatres and that trauma victims transferred from the helipad to surgery would have to be pushed 259m on trolleys.

Head of Royal North Shore's trauma unit and chair of the medical staff council Tony Joseph said the situation was "ridiculous" and warned that the project was doomed to failure unless the plans were immediately redrawn.

"The surgeons have repeatedly expressed their deep concerns about the size of the theatres," Dr Joseph said. "They have said they will not be able to conduct complicated or major surgery in them."

The clinicians, who had been locked out of the design plans by the Government, have advised hospital CEO Matthew Daly of the problems.

Mr Daly is believed to have sought urgent talks with Health Department officials.

The Opposition has described the project as a "monumental blunder".

"It is either sheer stupidity or breathtaking incompetence for the Rees Government to be spending $1 billion to build a hospital where 16 out of 18 operating theatres are smaller than . . . guidelines recommend, with some so small they can't fit vital medical equipment," Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner said.

"I sympathise with doctors who are screaming in frustration trying to get the State Labor Government to realise they are building a hospital that won't be able to perform the world-class surgery that is expected of it.

"The decision to locate the helipad on top of the existing Douglas Building is utter madness. It will not only jeopardise the lives of patients, it will make NSW the laughing stock of the nation when it comes to major infrastructure projects."

Emphasis added by ANV
Australia's Doctors, Nurses and Clinicians are sought out all over the world for their skill and dedication to their profession and patients.
Since the introduction of Medi Bank now called Medi Care,thirty years of socialized medicine has seen these highly skilled and dedicated professional driven into the ground mentally and physically by the crushing weight of the Socialist bureaucracy.
The largest increase in MediCare expenditure is in the spending on and increasing the size of the bureaucracy. the back room boys and gals, union officials and hangers on, that make up the socialist Comrades all aboard gravy train, of that most infamous oxymoron the "public service"

This debacle is the Labor Party's latest three legged,four arsed 3 dicked 18 balled Donkey that they are trying to pass off as socialist medicine's prize state of the art thoroughbred racehorse.

The bio of one of Labor's movers and shakers and expert on operating theater and hospital design, NSW Health Minister John Della Bosca, below. See this link for his and his wife's most infamous contribution to public service. Socialised medicine in Australia.

Minister for Health, Minister for the Central Coast and Vice President of the Executive Council
NSWALP

John Della Bosca joined the Australian Labor Party at the age of 17, inspired by the national leadership of Gough Whitlam. Politically active from a young age John rose through his branch and electorate council to hold a place on the National Executive of the Australian Labor Party.

John has dedicated his life to the Labour-movement and creating a modern Australia. He worked as a researcher for the then Senator Kerry Sibraa, before becoming the National Research Officer for the Australian Transport Officers’ Federation. John went on to become the union’s State Organiser in 1981.

Two years later John became the State Organiser of the NSW Branch of the Australian Labor Party, then Assistant Secretary in 1985. In 1990 John became the General Secretary of the NSW Branch. For nine years John worked to ensure the working families of NSW were represented by Labor men and women at all levels of government.

John was elected to the NSW Legislative Council in 1999. He has served in a number of Ministerial capacities, including Special Minister of State, Industrial Relations, Ageing and Disability, Commerce, Education and Training.
He is now Minister for Health, Minister for the Central Coast and Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council.

Among his achievements as a Minister are an additional billion dollars in funding for disability services; a new evidence based approach to drug policy; lifetime care for people catastrophically injured in motor vehicle accidents (regardless of fault); and changes to the WorkCover scheme which increased benefits, dramatically lowered premiums and eliminated a $3.2 billion deficit.

John has raised his family on the Central Coast of NSW and is a passionate advocate of the region.

And Westmead Hospital, a Hospital Labor would describe as the "working families" Hospital, has simply run out of money

Obama bitch slapped by "Moderate Taliban"

Obama being illogical - Taliban

News.com.au
March 10, 2009 06:28pm

AFGHANISTAN'S Taliban today turned down as illogical US President Barack Obama's bid to reach out to moderate elements of the insurgents, saying the exit of foreign troops was the only solution for ending the war.

Mr Obama, in an interview with the New York Times, expressed an openness to adapting tactics in Afghanistan that had been used in Iraq to reach out to moderate elements there.

"This does not require any response or reaction for this is illogical," Qari Mohammad Yousuf, a purported spokesman for the insurgent group, said when asked if its top leader Mullah Mohammad Omar would make any comment about Mr Obama's proposal.

"The Taliban are united, have one leader, one aim, one policy...I do not know why they are talking about moderate Taliban and what it means?

"If it means those who are not fighting and are sitting in their homes, then talking to them is meaningless. This really is surprising the Taliban."

In Iraq, the use of Sunni Muslim community leaders to employ their people to patrol their neighbourhoods has been credited as one of the main reasons behind sharp falls in violence.

Mr Obama did point out that compared to Iraq, the situation was more complex in Afghanistan, where nearly 70,000 foreign troops, 38,000 of them American, are due to be joined in coming months by another 17,000 US soldiers.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been leading Afghanistan since US-led troops overthrew the Taliban in an invasion in 2001, welcomed Mr Obama's proposal.

The number of foreign troops in Afghanistan has risen steadily since Taliban's ouster after they refused to hand over al-Qaeda leaders responsible for the September 11 attacks on the US.

So has the level of Taliban attacks against the Government and foreign forces, prompting Mr Obama to term Afghanistan as a top foreign policy priority for his new administration.

Some Western politicians and military officers now say the war cannot be won by military means alone and a solution will have to involve some form of reconciliation.

Yousuf said expulsion of foreign troops was the only solution for Afghanistan's spiraling violence.

"Afghans know better how to decide about their destiny," he replied when asked if the Taliban were willing to hold talks with Karzai's Government should and when the troops leave.

Since "Community organizer" Obama took office,North Korea has told him / the USA to piss off or they will blow them away with a nuke, China is harassing US naval ships as I write, Hugo Chavez is emboldened to the point of laughing out loud at the USA,Russia is flying through the skies wherever and whenever it wants messing with US planes,Iran has promised to implement it's nuclear capacity to blow Israel off the map,the NY stock exchange is at it's lowest point of any new administration in 90 years, and the Taliban, aka Islamic Sociopaths Inc. or "moderate Taliban / Islam" have accused him of been "illogical".

Why ?...... because now THEY can.
This master tactician, this master community organizer is surely just lulling these pricks into a false sense of security.... Isn't he?

Crocodile V's Shark SEE who won

Shark versus crocodile - battle royale in NT river

By Sally McDonald
The Daily Telegraph
March 11, 2009 12:00am

THERE could only ever be one winner in this battle And this croc won the battle with a shark hands down.

The 4.5 metre saltwater crocodile went head-to-head with the shark last week only meters from a boatload of surprised fishermen.

Craig Van Lawick was aboard the commercial barramundi vessel on the Wildman River 100km east of Darwin when the croc started devouring the one-metre shark

"There was not a whole lot of sound," he said.

"All we could hear was the crunching sound."

Mr Van Lawick was unsure about the type of shark involved and said it was eaten too quickly to work it out.

Luckily another fisherman on board, Anthony Capogreco, reached for his camera and captured the animals in their brief but dramatic battle.

Australia: Socialised Medicine aka.Medi - dont - Care

Cabinet delay on drug subsidy hits 1600

Herald Sun
March 10, 2009 12:00am

MORE than 350 bowel cancer patients a month are dying as they wait for federal Cabinet to approve subsidising a $55,000 drug.

Eight months ago the Federal Government's Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee approved a subsidy for the cancer drug Avastin, which costs $55,000 a year.

The decision should have cut the medicine's cost to $32.90 for general patients and $5.30 for pensioners.

But before the subsidy can be paid Cabinet must approve the committee's ruling, because the subsidy for the drug will cost taxpayers more than $10 million a year.

Since the drug subsidy was approved 1600 patients have missed out.

Just 305 patients have been able to pay the $20,000 they need to go on to a special scheme in which the drug's manufacturer Roche helps patients with the cost of the drug.

Retired teacher Jan Plummer, who was diagnosed with advanced bowel cancer in March, 2007 has taken Avastin for two years.

She is urging Cabinet to act quickly to subsidise the drug.

"I can imagine how many people who are waiting to go on this drug and can't afford it," she said.

She says she could afford it because her health fund, NSW Teacher's Federation, is one of only a few that help pay the cost.

"God help those who don't have health cover or whose funds don't pay," she said.

She says she's been able to travel, swim and run while on the drug that's injected every two weeks.

The only side effect has been high blood pressure that's treated with tablets.

In March last year, it was revealed three costly treatments for Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis and renal disease were delayed.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon spokesman said yesterday he could not comment on when Cabinet might consider the drug.

Roche says price negotiations were settled in August last year.

Bowel cancer is the nation's most common cancer with more than 12,500 cases emerging every year. It is the second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer with 4500 people dying of it each year.

These bowel cancer sufferers DIE not because of a lack of money available to treat them, they die because they are not considered a high enough priority on the list of this Socialist Labor Governments worthy causes. (see link to previous post re PM Rudd's $75 million dollar gift to Islamic terrorists and their supporters)

The Australian Labor Party's love of, and support of, left wing loons,despots and terrorists far out weighs it's love of and concern for Australians.
Mr Rudd has as I write commanded Australia's Govenor General a close personal friend of his and his family, to leave next week for a whirlwind tour of Africa to seek the support of the various African despots, thugs and hoodlums in securing Australia a seat on the United Nations Security Council, Mr Rudd's other great priority.
Mr Rudd's obsession with grand standing on the world stage,rubbing shoulders with any loon and third world despotic African / Islamic thug who tells him what he wants to hear ie what a "great bloke Kevin 07 is", how much will it cost the Australian taxpayers to stroke his pathetic ego? how many more Australian bowel cancer sufferers will die whilst this prick struts around like the jumped up level 3 public servant he is, and will always be, telling anyone who will listen what a genius he is.

Kevin Rudd Gives away $75million to Gazan Islamic terrorists and their supporters

Prior to the introduction of Socialised medicine into Australia by the Australian Labor Party, Australia had the BEST health system in the world bar NONE,all the more reason for the Socialists to destroy it. see Socialised medicine

A life on hold, thanks to red tape

Peter Dutton
News.com.au
Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Imagine needing a complicated organ transplant to save your life. But the vital surgery that can save you has never been performed in Australia.

It is routinely performed overseas. Your doctors have said you will be lucky to survive another 12 months without the transplant.

You would hope and pray that Australia’s health authorities and Health Minister Nicola Roxon would do all they could to save your life.

Assess your health condition. Assess the treatment options and then make a timely decision on how you get your lifesaving treatment.

That is the circumstance that 36-year-old Sydney woman, Pauline Talty, found herself in last October.

Today – 20 weeks later – almost five months later - Pauline Talty remains in a Sydney hospital desperately waiting for an answer to her application to be sent to the United States for treatment.

She is being let down!

Three eminent doctors, Dr David Storey of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital; Dr Ross Smith, Professor of Surgery, formerly of Royal North Shore Hospital and Dr Michael Crawford, Surgical Director of the Australian National Liver Transplant Unit are all agreed that Pauline should be sent to Pittsburgh for a bowel transplant.

Their opinions were filed with the Federal Health Department months ago, but still Pauline is being asked to justify why funding should be provided for travel to America.

This is the sort of excessive red tape and bureaucracy which has brought public hospitals in New South Wales to their knees.

And it’s coming from a Federal Government which said it was going to “fix” health.

Imagine if you were in Pauline’s circumstances.

What would you feel? What would you say to the bureaucrats who hold your life in their hands?

"Socialism means equality of income or nothing...........Under Socialism

you would not be allowed to be poor.

You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught and employed

whether you liked it or not.

If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to

be worth all his trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly

manner; but while you were permitted to live,

you would have to live well."

Bernard Shaw.

Follow New Zealand NOT Obama

Follow the Kiwi leader, not Obama
In this crisis, our neighbour is a better economic model than the US or Britain,contends Tony Makin

The Australian
March 11, 2009

DESPITE the federal fiscal stimuli we had to have, Australia is almost certain to experience the recession it was not supposed to have.

So, with earlier stimulatory measures failing to work as expected, what alternatives would work better?

The answer is: those primarily focused on the production rather than the spending side of the economy.

Federal fiscal packages unveiled since October last year have aimed to boost consumption in the short term, in keeping with Treasury advice at the outset that the best fiscal response to the global financial crisis was to "go early, go hard, go households".

However, an arguably sounder fiscal response would have been the exact opposite: go later, go easy, go firms.

This does not mean federal policymakers should have ignored the downturn or that all aspects of fiscal stimulus packages have been unworthy. On the contrary, many infrastructure projects scheduled for future years have been overdue, there is some business tax relief and business regulation problems are being addressed.

But too much faith has been put in using fiscal policy to boost consumption on the demand side of the economy in the short run via tens of billions of dollars' worth of bonus payments. A different mix of measures should have recognised that the financial crisis first struck the aggregate supply side of the economy, not the demand side.

For federal fiscal policy to go later would have meant letting monetary policy go further in the first instance to pre-emptively manage the expected downturn in short-run macro-economic activity. The Reserve Bank of Australia has had much greater scope to do this compared with central banks abroad because official interest rates in Australia had been too high for too long before the global financial crisis hit home.

Inflation also had been wrongly diagnosed as an aggregate demand problem rather than a supply side, or cost-push, problem thanks to high oil and other international commodity prices.

The lowering of official interest rates by four full percentage points since September and the sharp exchange rate depreciation since then will do more to buffer the economy from the worst of the crisis than any fiscal action in train.

It also would have been advisable for federal fiscal policy to go easy in the light of the whack to budget revenue and the budget bottom line as a result of global commodity price falls and diminishing company and capital gains tax receipts.

Moreover, going easy on fiscal policy would have avoided the problem that will soon arise when government borrowing to fund growing state and federal budget deficits puts upward pressure on long-term interest rates, thereby limiting the Reserve Bank's discretion to lower interest rates across the spectrum.

"Go households" has meant channelling scarce federal fiscal outlays to select segments of the economy's household sector. But this has ignored the fact firms were the first victims of the crisis.

For many struggling firms, falling sales were initially less of a problem than the unavailability of credit. Paradoxically, the raft of hasty public spending initiatives implemented across the world may hold back recovery if households and markets become increasingly alarmed about higher future taxation, interest rates and inflation.

Unemployment is the scourge of recessions. However, it is the business sector, not households, that ultimately employs most people, creates most of gross domestic product and invests in the economy's future. Hence, it would have been better to assist firms' bottom line directly on the cost side through rapid regulation relief and tax relief, such as payroll tax reduction, than assist indirectly on the revenue side through trickle-down sales.

Though the federal fiscal response so far offers some business tax relief, this is dwarfed by the bonus payments aimed at boosting consumption.

Rather than following aggregate demand-oriented approaches adopted by the US, Britain and other countries, federal policymakers should look to New Zealand, which so far has avoided measures aimed directly at inflating consumption spending. Instead, the NZ Government has emphasised supply-side measures that will flatten marginal taxes levied on individuals, improve infrastructure and quickly lower the regulatory burden on business.

This is not the first time NZ has led the world in economic policy innovation. It was a Labour government there that initiated comprehensive economic reform under the direction of treasurer Roger Douglas from the mid-1980s.

This change in policy direction occurred following a currency crisis resulting from fiscal excess and included labour market reform, privatisation, public finance reform and trade liberalisation.

The breadth and depth of NZ's reforms had no precedent in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the measures were initiated before the Hawke-Keating government commendably followed suit with a similar reform program that delivered the strong productivity gains Australia enjoyed until the turn of the century.

NZ was also the first country to formally legislate for an independent central bank whose sole objective was to keep inflation low.

Years later Australia adopted a weaker version of the NZ monetary policy model, as did Britain. It's now time to emulate the spirit of NZ's fiscal response to the crisis.

We all know about NZ's rugby prowess and how often it beats Australia at the game. If we were to score Australia v New Zealand on fiscal responses to the global financial crisis so far, it would be Australia0, NZ 1.

That's not counting penalty tries where one side gets points for being obstructed by the other. Such obstruction will be evident as public sector borrowing resulting from aggregate demand management by the state and federal governments in this country pushes up Australasian interest rates at NZ's expense.

Tony Makin is professor of economics at Griffith University's Gold Coast campus.

Too simple, just common sense, Obama & Rudd are, we are told, highly intelligent, so they must be must be sending the United States ( western world) and Australia, to hell in a hand basket deliberately. See Rudd's hand outs below.

Australia's much loved,Dear Leader,Comrade Rudd salutes his adoring followers.

Family bonuses roll out tomorrow

News.com.au
March 10, 2009
CENTRELINK will start rolling out one-off payments to families from tomorrow as part of the Federal Government's $42 billion stimulus package.

Single-income families will receive a $900 bonus if they are recipients of Family Tax Benefit part B.

Families receiving Tax Benefit A will get a $950 back-to-school bonus for each child aged between four and 18.

Recipients of the carer payment or disability support pension, aged less than 19 years old on February 3, 2009, will also receive $950.

Eligible drought-affected farmers will receive $950 hardship payments from March 24, the same time a $950 one-off training and learning bonus and education entry payment is paid to eligible students.
The one-off bonus of up to $900 for taxpayers, earning less than $100,000, will flow from April.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd "...and his hypocrisy. Underline hypocrisy."

Comrade Rudd's great con game

SMH
Paul Sheehan
March 9, 2009

It is going to be fascinating to see how long Kevin Rudd, the greatest illusionist ever to become prime minister of Australia, can maintain this illusion of omnipresent leadership created by his energy, his ubiquity and his hypocrisy. Underline hypocrisy.

Rudd is on course to become the next Gough Whitlam, but Whitlam without the wit. Like Whitlam, he may win a second election before the electorate wakes up. At least Comrade Whitlam was stuck with a claque of criminals in his ministry - Al Grassby, Jim Cairns, Rex Connor - whereas Rudd has no such impediment.

So remember the words, uttered last night, by Rudd on Channel Seven: "Any person's job loss through no fault of their own is a lost job too many when it comes to me. I'm the Prime Minister of the country, the buck stops with me."

Was Rudd able to save a single one of the 2000 manufacturing jobs lost at Pacific Brands last week? No, the buck stopped with the workers. This is the man who increased the immigration program to the largest annual intake in Australia's history, and it is now swelling the ranks of job seekers. This is the man whose Government will, tomorrow, introduce workplace legislation which will increase the power of unions, and give pause to job creators. This is the man who has offered no structural relief to the great job-creating engine of the economy - small business. And this is the man who panicked at the first sign of danger and sprayed the entire $20 billion budget surplus he inherited up against a wall.

If Rudd wants to be Everywhere Man, then let him play the role and bear the consequences. Like most other Western leaders responding to the global financial freeze, he is making it up as he goes along, because we are in uncharted territory. Global industrial output has fallen faster in the past six months than it did at the advent of the Great Depression in 1929-30.

The response of policymakers has been to pump a massive increase in liquidity and government debt obligations into the system. But as the eminent economic historian Professor Niall Ferguson, of Harvard and Oxford, recently warned on his website: "The general assumption seemed to be that practically any kind of government expenditure would be beneficial, provided it was financed by a really big deficit."

Sound familiar? Ferguson continued: "There is something desperate about the way people are clinging to their dog-eared copies of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Uneasily aware that their discipline almost entirely failed to anticipate the current crisis, economists seemed to be regressing to macroeconomic childhood, clutching the multiplier like an old teddy bear.

"The harsh reality that is being repressed is this: the Western world is suffering a crisis of excessive indebtedness. Many governments are too highly leveraged, as are many corporations. More importantly, households are groaning under unprecedented debt burdens. Worst of all are the banks. Some of the best-known names in American and European finance have balance sheets 40, 60 or even 100 times the size of their capital …

"The delusion is that a crisis of excess debt can be solved by creating more debt. Yet that is precisely what most governments currently propose to do." Space precludes listing Ferguson's prescriptions but they can be found on his website, and summed up with this sentence: "The solution to the debt crisis is not more debt but less debt."

Tell that to Kevin Keynes. In opposition, Rudd opposed the GST, which in retrospect has been a tremendous stabilising influence in the economy, thanks to John Howard. During the last election, Rudd campaigned as an "economic conservative". Upon winning office, and inheriting a $90 billion financial buffer from outgoing treasurer Peter Costello, he accused the previous government of creating a dangerous inflation threat. It was a fabrication.

After the global financial storm broke, Rudd attacked the excesses of neo-liberal market capitalism even as he spent the entire $20 billion budget surplus he had inherited from the neo-liberals in an absurd attempt to claim he had kept Australia out of recession. The evolution of his economic position has been an opportunistic fraud, exposed by those on his own side of politics.

As the former Labor leader Mark Latham wrote on February 20, in The Australian Financial Review: "When Kevin Rudd lobbied me in October 2004 to become Labor's shadow treasurer, his sales pitch was straight from the neo-liberal playbook. He was enthusiastic about pro-market policies such as deregulation and reducing the size of the state. [As leader] he went to the polls as Howard-lite."

Michael Costa, former Labor treasurer of NSW, dismissed Rudd's recent attack on the excesses of market capitalism, in a critique in The Australian on February 6 as "rambling and selective" and warned that Rudd's response to the global crisis "is likely to do more damage to the economy".

As Niall Ferguson has also warned. When the recession in Australia gets worse, and Rudd's Keynesian cliches have increased the long-term cost of the government intervention, Labor will run a diversionary personal campaign against the Leader of the Opposition, simply because Malcolm Turnbull is a wealthy former merchant banker.

What, you may ask, about the multi-millions the Rudd family has made from neo-liberal policies of the Howard years? Latham had something to say about this, too: "Rudd's wife created an impressive business network and fortune from the Howard government's privatisation of labour market programs."

Rudd can trim his economic sails to pick up whatever political wind he can find because he embodies the hollowness of the pursuit of power before principle.

Alan Jones interviews Paul Sheehan 10 3 09 Americans take note

The Leader of Australia's largest Socialist political party,the Australian Labor Party, ALP, financed by the Marxist based Australian Council of Trade Unions, ACTU,has done very nicely indeed from the policies of the previous conservative Liberal Government of John Howard, he and his wife, Therese Rein (Madame Rudd?) are very wealthy and good luck to them, it was only mid 2008 that the former public servant and his partner were searching for a holiday home and were looking at holiday homes in the vicinity of 10 million dollars, Conservative Capitalist Australia has allowed them to drop the chant of "four legs good two legs bad" and replace it with "four legs good two legs better"

Who can forget Kevin 07's answer to a question during the 2007 election campaign,I believe he asked himself, "I have never been a socialist" clearly he and his wife reject totally the platform of the political party he is now the leader of.

I have never seen an Australian Labor Party leader or politician or their bankers in the ACTU, LIVE the ideology they demand be imposed upon those they despise so much,the Australian people, Mr Rudd and Madame Rudd are doing nothing any different than every other Socialist here and through out the world are doing have done and will continue to do, it's "do as I say not as I do"

Kangaroo crashes through bedroom window and terrorises family of four.....

Canberra man forced to evict break-and-enter roo... in a headlock

LiveNews.com.au

A Canberra family's had a rude awakening after a kangaroo crashed through a bedroom window and terrorised its unsuspecting occupants.

The family, from the suburb of Garran in Canberra's south were awoken in the early hours of yesterday morning when their pet dog began barking from the garden.

Moments later a kangaroo burst through a three metre high window in the master bedroom and onto the bed where Beat Ettlin his partner Verity Beman and their nine-year-old daughter Beatrix lay.

While the family took refuge under the blankets the injured animal proceeded to jump on top of them, gouging holes in the furniture and smearing blood all over the walls.

The roo then went to their 10-year-old son Leighton's room so Mr Ettlin went after it, wrestled it into a headlock and dragged it out the front door.

Jade Goody & Children Christened

Dying reality TV star christened with sons

From correspondents in London
March 08, 2009 01:28am

TERMINALLY-ill reality television star Jade Goody was christened with her two young sons yesterday in a service at the London hospital where she is being treated, her publicist said.

Max Clifford said Goody, who has cancer, attended the ceremony in a wheelchair at London's Royal Marsden Hospital.

"It was a very moving and emotional 20-minute service and there was about, I imagine, 30 people in the chapel -- just very close

relatives and friends," Clifford told the BBC.

He said Goody, who is weak and looked very thin and pale, was finding it difficult to stay awake but was conscious throughout the ceremony.

Bobby, 5, and Freddy, 4, were earlier brought to the hospital's chapel in west London by their father Jeff Brazier.

"She was very happy about the whole thing. And that is what she wanted. She wanted them all to be christened, because in her own words, hopefully through Jesus, they can stay together," Clifford said.

"On the way in she thanked everyone for coming and on the way out she was kissing them saying goodbye. I imagine that for a lot of them it will be the last time they will see her," he said.

The service was the last time she would be seen in public, the publicist added.

Goody has only weeks to live after her cervical cancer spread to her liver, groin and bowel.

I know nothing about this woman's past however,I feel her,and her children's future will be a lot better than was their past.
God Bless Them.

Masked Rock Apes protest in Malmoe Sweeden over Israeli Davis Cup matchi

Police and protesters (The Usual Suspects) clash at tennis

Agence France-Presse
From correspondents in Malmoe, Sweden
March 08, 2009 01:37am

MORE than 100 masked demonstrators (Gee I wonder who would do such a thing... masked demonstrators in Malmoe Sweeden you say? Hmmm thinking, thinking) clashed today with Swedish police outside a sports arena amid a larger protest against the Scandinavian country's Davis Cup tie against Israel.

Youths clad in black, their faces covered with masks, threw bottles of paint, stones and firecrackers at police in riot squad vans and on horseback, sending the horses into a panic.

One of the demonstrators climbed onto a police van and, applauded by the crowd, stomped on its flashing lights until they were smashed to bits.

The large police deployment then charged the demonstrators, who were shouting "Stop the Match!'', and arrested at least five people, police spokesman Lars-Haakan Lindholm said.

The violent demonstrators, described as anarchists, were part of a larger, authorised demonstration organised by the 'Stop the Match' network to protest against Israel's recent offensive in Gaza.

The march gathered between 6000 and 10,000 demonstrators, according to various estimates from police and organisers.

Citing security fears, Malmoe city council had ordered the three-day World Group first round match played behind closed doors.

Yesterday, about 200 people demonstrated peacefully outside the Baltiska Hallen arena, as Sweden and Israel each won a singles match.

Today a doubles match was underway, pitting Simon Aspelin and Robert Lindstedt of Sweden against Israel's Amir Hadad and Andy Ram.

Inside the stadium, only teams, media and guests were allowed in the stands.

A Flea Dissess a Giant or Why Obama returned Chruchill bust to UK

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
Winston Churchill
(Former member of the Communist Party)

Obama returns Churchill Bust

I can only imagine how far up Obama's arse Sir Winston Churchill would have told Obama to shove his DVD's had times been different.
"Community Organizer in Chief" yeah..thats about right.


So what were the titles of those DVD's ?

Any suggestions please post in the comments section below