Category: Politics (Page 35 of 43)

Over a month ago I wrote about Defence Minister Fitzgibbons’s relationship with Chinese/Australian business woman Helen Liu:

Fitzgibbon may genuinely have forgotten how well he knows Ms Liu, his visits to China with her, the functions he attended with her, and the gifts he has received from her. In that case he is an idiot and cannot be trusted with the Australia’s defences.

Or he lied about them. In that case, he thought he had something to hide. If he thought he had something to hide, he probably did.

Andrew Bolt referred today to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald about a covert enquiry by Defence Department officials into that relationship.

When Ms Liu re-appeared in Sydney in the early 1990s, she suddenly had access to large sums of money, began amassing a multimillion-dollar property portfolio and started courting Australian political figures.

In 1993 she paid for Mr Fitzgibbon and his father, the federal Labor MP Eric Fitzgibbon, to travel first class to China to attend the opening of a hotel development. Mr Fitzgibbon was not an MP at the time but was expected to succeed his father as the federal member for Hunter in NSW.

Ms Liu has strong ties with senior Chinese Communist Party figures and has enjoyed considerable support from the Chinese Government-controlled Bank of China. Between 1995 and 2007, her companies donated $40,000 to Mr Fitzgibbon’s election campaign funds and another $50,000 to the NSW ALP.

All of that is of interest. Mr Fitzgibbon has either lied about or has genuinely forgotten about the nature of his relationship with Ms Liu. Regardless of the findings of the enquiry, in other words, regardless of whether Ms Liu really is a spy or not, Joel Fitzgibbon is not a  suitable person to be responsible for Australia’s defences.

“There were limits to what we could do and we didn’t get all of the story, but what has come out later about Fitzgibbon’s failure to declare trips to China only strengthened the concerns,” the official said. “There are big questions about just why the minister has been so obligated to Helen Liu and what the full extent of their relationship has been.”

Indeed.

But what is really of interest in the SMH story is that the enquiry, which is obviously necessary, is not in any sense official. Even though concerns were raised about Fitzgibbon’s relationship with Liu, departmental hierachy did nothing. The enquiry is being conducted ‘underneath the radar’ by concerned Defence Department staff.

But now those staff are being ferretted out and subjected to an inquiry:

The Defence Department has confirmed that the inquiry by the Defence Security Authority into the covert probe into Mr Fitzgibbon is “still under way” and that a report will be finalised soon for submission to Mr Fitzgibbon. A month ago, the Defence Secretary, Nick Warner, confirmed that more than 200 defence officials had been interviewed and that 850 had signed statutory declarations denying any involvement in investigations into Mr Fitzgibbon’s personal affairs.

Senior Defence Department staff did nothing when faced with serious allegations about the relationship between the Defence Minister and Ms Liu, and the strong possibility this could be a national security issue of grave concern. And now they are conducting a witch hunt into the people who were responsible enough to take that matter seriously.

The media should be all over this. It’s the kind of story that might make people think about buying a newspaper.

And doesn’t the Government have some sort of policy about protecting whistle-blowers?

Sri Lanka’s now virtually complete victory over the Tamil Tigers has been all but ignored in the western media.

But it may very well have been a motivating factor in the March 3 shooting attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team at Lahore.

Links between islamic extremism and the Tamil Tigers have been ably explored by Melanie Phillips.

While there are victories against terrorism in the Philippines and in Sri Lanka, Pakistan is looking increasingly, and worryingly, insecure.

Pakistan armed forced have been pushing back Taliban fighters in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Dir and the Swat Valley.

But there is deep distrust of the West amongst ordinary Pakistanis. In his column in yesterday’s UK Times, Anatol Lieven noted that there was such strong support for the Taliban in Northern Pakistan that to remove them entirely would require a level of repression of local people that would be politically impossible.

It is not that the majority of Pakistanis like the Taliban – how could they, given the brutality with which Sharia has been implemented in the North West? Nor is it that they accept the Taliban view of the nature of Islam, although radicalism is far more prevalent than we might like to believe.

It is rather that suspicion if not outright hatred of the West outweighs any fear of the Taliban, who, even if mistaken, are seen as belonging, as part of the Islamic fellowship.

This suspicion of the West manifests in (to us) outrightly irrational views about world events. For example, the following text appeared in Monday’s edition of the Pakistan Daily, in an article titled Israeli Terrorism=US Invasion of Pakistan:

Recent tragedies, both in India and Pakistan (Mumbai carnage, Islamabad Marriot bombing, attack on Sri Lankan Cricket Team and Police training centre in Lahore) – bore all the hallmarks of Mossad ‘false flag’ operations being blamed on Pakistan and Islamist groups.

There is widespread belief that the 9/11 attacks were a joint US/Israeli operation to justify military actions in Muslim lands.

Today’s Pakistan Daily front page story is: Is the United States Preparing For War in Pakistan To Kill More Muslims, Central Asia, OIL?

Regular headlines like this: US Afghan Strikes Kill Dozens, Including Women and Children, add to the anger and suspicion.

In these circumstances, when ordinary Pakistanis believe the US, not the Taliban, is causing chaos in Pakistan, it is unwise in the extreme for the US to be issuing orders to the Pakistan government.

Doing so is harmful to the point of being dangerous, because it reduces the government’s credibility with its own people, and consequently its ability to deal with the Taliban insurgents without further enraging the populace.

The West needs to keep its collective mouth shut and let the largely sensible Pakistan government handle this crisis itself.

Until, and pray this does not happen, the Taliban gain so much ground and power that it is clear they will take control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

This is hardly a news flash – it happened a week ago. But I had seen nothing about this in the mainstream media, and only heard of it this morning from Uppity Woman.

A fuller version of the story can be found on the (US) ABC website.

As senators, both President Obama and Vice President Biden co-sponsored the Community Choice Act. During the campaign, then-Sen. Obama said the “legislation is vitally important to the independence, community integration, and equality of hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities,” that it will help to empower them “to take full advantage of their talents” and “ensure that everyone can live independently as full citizens in their communities.”

At the moment, disabled people can only use Federal social security funds to access nursing home care. The Community Choice Act would have amended the Social Security Act so that disabled people can use those funds to support them to live at home. More dignity for them, better for their local communities, and less expense for the taxpayer.

But now that he is in office, this does not seem to be such a high priority for Obama as it was when he was campaigning.

At least, not such a high priority as firing the CEO of General Motors, or threatening Chrysler lenders.

A $1.2 million arson attack on forestry equipment. Selfish, irresponsible, idiotic, criminal. But pretty much no risk of anyone being harmed.

But attaching wires to trees where loggers cannot see them to make those trees fall in ways loggers will be unable to predict?

MP Daniel Hulme claims activists have put lives at risk by setting up booby traps. He said they were to blame for a trap in the Styx Valley, which Forestry Tasmania said could have seriously injured or killed a timber faller.

A strand of fencing wire was strung between two trees in a forestry coupe last month, 30 metres above the ground so the wire could not be seen from the ground, Forestry Tasmania told police.

A contractor discovered the trap after a tree limb was snapped by the wire as a tree fell to the ground, fortunately missing the faller. Such traps redirect the path of falling trees or limbs, meaning workers, believing they are standing in a safe spot, can be struck.

This is a callous disregard for life – greenies believing their political views are so important that it doesn’t matter if workers are killed or injured.

I wonder what their views on waterboarding are?

Former US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice talks with students at Stanford University.

As always, she is intelligent, dignified, respectful of others. She respects the students who question her enough to listen to them, and to give straight answers to their (often poorly informed) questions.

Key moments:

First, do what’s right…

Unless you were there in a position of responsibility after September 11 you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that we faced in trying to protect Americans. A lot of people are second guessing now but let me tell you the second guessing that would have hurt me more is if there had been 3,000 more Americans dying because we didn’t do everything we could to protect them…

Do your homework…    Read….

In relation to waterboarding, etc:

1) Torture is illegal in the US.

2) The President made it clear that no matter how urgent the need to protect the US from further attacks, anything that was to be done had to be legal.

And 99 more awesome thoughts about the 100 days of awesomeness, from Doubleplusundead.

Here’s a sample:

12 When his wife twisted off the Queen of England’s head like a beer cap, he reattached it with nothing more than the sweat of his brow
13 You can see his awesomeness from space
14 He fires CEOs like other presidents change socks
15 He can hold two contradictory opinions and still be the model of consistency
16 White House maids report that the Presidential Toilet smells like roses and honey even when he forgets to flush
17 He encourages hate-mongers to moderate themselves via his silent presence, like he did at the Summit of the Americas.  Or in his church.

“This is a modest number,” said Huang Yueqin, the director of the National Centre for Mental Health.

Mental illness has now overtaken heart disease and cancer as the biggest burden on the Chinese health system, according to the World Health Organisation.

Does this mean that one in every thirty people in the world is a mentally ill Chinese?

And why do socialist dictatorships have such high rates of mental ilness?

A few people, including Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, have picked up these comments from Sir Michael Caine, originally published in the  UK Telegraph:

“The Government has taken tax up to 50 per cent, and if it goes to 51 I will be back in America,” he said at the weekend. “We’ve got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I’m 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let’s get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up.”

Sir Michael is a perfect example of someone who came from nowhere and got somewhere, by thinking, planning and working.

Lots of people don’t like to think or work, and would rather imagine that the poverty and dullness of their lives is caused by people with money keeping them down, or by bad luck, or indeed by anything except the likely real causes, stupidity and laziness.

The best hope for people who are in that situation is not to have some bleating social worker pat them on the hand and say ‘There, there, it’s not your fault, the system is keeping you down, you never had a chance.’

Sir Michael and thousands of migrants to Australia prove that no matter what your background, you can succeed if you are willing to think and work hard.

People who are unhappy, poor, lonely, need to hear that in many cases their unpleasant situation is a result of choices they have made. And (and this is something that really is empowering) that they can change their situation by changing those choices. That is, if they want things to be different, they have to act differently.

Gordon Brown’s (UK) and Kevin Rudd’s (Australia) government do not see things in that way. Both seem to be driven by resentment of people who have worked hard and done well.

Both Brown and Rudd are determined to introduce tax regimes which will undermine future economic development. Those regimes will undermine development by taking so much of the income of those who risk money they have saved for years, mortgage their homes, etc, to develop new ideas and new businesses, that no sensible person would bother.

 Or if you were going to bother, you would go to some other country to do it.

Such policies are economic suicide. Taxes come from successful, profitable businesses, and the people they employ. Without profitable businesses, there is no tax income. If there is no tax income there is no legislature,  no infrastructure, no social services.