Tuesday 30 September 2014

Unionist Kathy Jackson's alleged credit card misuse takes total to $1.4m

Date: September 30, 2014 - 7:57PM

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Nick Toscano

Workplace Reporter for The Age

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Health Services Union whistleblower Kathy Jackson arrives at the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. Photo: AAP

Controversial unionist Kathy Jackson allegedly used union
credit cards to misappropriate more than $660,000 for her own expenses
including airline tickets, boutique hotel rooms and upmarket dinners
while on a series of lavish overseas holidays.

Her alleged expenses, revealed in bank statements subpoenaed
by the Health Services Union, also list large purchases at Melbourne
department stores and liquor shops. Thousands of dollars were allegedly
blown in single visits to some of the city's most exclusive bars and
restaurants.

The transactions relate to multiple union credit cards
controlled by Ms Jackson and bring the total amount of members' funds
she is alleged to have misused to more than $1.4 million.

Ms Jackson, the former Victorian HSU boss, rose to national
prominence for exposing the credit card misuse of her predecessor,
disgraced former federal MP Craig Thompson. He was convicted of fraud
charges earlier this year for misappropriating about $24,000 of union
funds. But Ms Jackson has come under growing scrutiny for her own
conduct and now faces a string of damning corruption claims levelled
against her by her former union.

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The latest claims, outlined in documents seen by Fairfax
Media, allege that she misappropriated members' fees to fund a five-star
lifestyle.

Acting HSU national secretary Chris Brown said the union was
"seriously considering" referring the matter to Victoria Police to
launch a criminal investigation into Ms Jackson's conduct.

Ms Jackson is implicated in the misuse of union funds to the
tune of $250,000 through union-provided credit cards, a further $250,000
in cash cheques and $100,000 in unaccounted payments.

Three union credit cards – a Diners Club card, a Citibank
MasterCard and a CBA MasterCard – were allegedly used by Ms Jackson to
fund flights and travel expenses on 18 holidays between 2003 and 2011 to
destinations such as the Gold Coast, Hong Kong, New York City and
France.

Among the alleged expenses detailed in the HSU statement of claim are:

$2200 at George Calombaris' flagship Melbourne restaurant, The Press Club, in December 2003.
$3011 for accommodation at the Paramount Hotel, New York, in January 2004.
$1742 at clothing store J Crew in Boston in February 2004.
$14,000 in cash withdrawals in Hong Kong in a week in October 2004.
$13,000 for accommodation at Astra Alpine Lodge, Falls Creek, in August 2005.

The documents allege she spent about $120,000 of union funds
on various domestic and international holidays, $76,900 on retail
products such as Apple-brand electronic goods for her personal use,
$13,000 on dozens of trips to her local grocery stores and bottle shops,
and $32,000 on entertainment.

Ms Jackson is currently being sued by her former union for
about $740,000 amid separate claims she broke governance rules when she
hired a law firm in late 2011 and when she appointed factional ally Rob
Elliott to a $150,000 position. She is also accused of misappropriating
union money in a slush fund called the National Health Development
Account.

The HSU is seeking court orders for Ms Jackson to pay back $1
million for misusing members' funds. It has applied for a summary
judgment, arguing she had failed to comply with court orders 17 times
and had been deliberately delaying the case against her.

If the summary judgment is not granted, the HSU will pursue
the alternative claim alleging Ms Jackson misappropriated $663,000 in
union funds for her own use, as outlined in the new bank records.

Ms Jackson did not attend a court hearing on Tuesday, saying she was too sick. But Mark
Irving, representing the HSU, accused Ms Jackson of faking an illness
in a bid to "avoid judgment day" for as long as possible.

"This reversion to alleged illness is something that has
arisen constantly in proceedings in this court and elsewhere to get
adjourned proceedings," he said.

Justice Richard Tracey ordered that copies of the union's
proposed orders and oral submission be sent to Ms Jackson's lawyers. He
adjourned the case until October 14.

Philip Beazley, representing Ms Jackson, did not respond to a request for comment.

Corporate tax avoidance costs Australian business

Date: September 30, 2014 - 6:37PM

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Bill Shorten

"It is not right that Australian businesses, big and
small, shoulder an unfair share of the taxation burden, while highly
profitable companies make only a minimal contribution," says Bill
Shorten.

There are two particularly extraordinary things happening in
Parliament this week that give Australians a telling insight into the
Abbott Government.

In the House of Representatives, the Abbott Government is
trying to explain why it's reopened loopholes to allow multinational
companies to avoid paying tax.

In the Senate, the very same Government is trying to ram
through legislation that will make every Australian pay a GP tax
whenever they visit the doctor, or extra tax whenever they fill up their
car.

It seems as though under Tony Abbott, taxes are only certain
in life if you're not a multinational company, with the ability to
offshore profits.

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There's no doubt that sensible discussion of revenue needs to look at the integrity of Australia's company tax base.

Companies are minimising costs through technological
progress, innovation, outsourcing and automation – maximising their
performance through sophisticated software and computer modelling.

And because successful businesses are always looking for a
competitive edge, some multinational corporations are leading the way in
tax avoidance too.

As we've seen in the pages of the Herald over the past
few days, these efforts can substantially erode a nation's company tax
base. Further, it distorts the market, unfairly disadvantaging local
businesses.

This is why, in Government, Labor announced reforms to close these loopholes and crack down on profit-shifting.

We introduced business tax integrity measures that would have clawed back more than $5.3 billion from these companies.

Time and time again, the Abbott Government has moved to water down these provisions.

After delivering the most unfair Budget in living memory, one
that has targeted: pensioners, families, students, carers, veterans and
the sick – the Government belatedly claimed it would legislate to close
multinational tax loopholes.

But as Australians have learnt the hard way with the Abbott Government, the words mean nothing.

And when it comes to cracking down on companies avoiding tax, the Government's actions don't speak loudly at all.

That's because every time Joe Hockey and the Coalition had
the chance to work with Labor to close tax loopholes in the past few
years, they voted against it.

They voted against Labor's Countering Tax Avoidance and
Multinational Profit Shifting Bill 2013, which plugged loopholes in
Australia's transfer pricing rules and anti-avoidance provisions.

They attempted to block Labor's Cross-Border Transfer Pricing
Bill 2012, which cracked down on companies overvaluing assets in
international transactions.

Now they're in government, they've walked away from Labor
measures which would have delivered $1.1 billion to the budget bottom
line.

Worse still, for all the huffing and puffing at the G20 from
Joe Hockey about the need to crack down on tax avoidance, he's signed
Australia up to a timetable that puts us behind over 40 countries,
including the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.

This means Australia won't sign up to the automatic exchange
of financial information across borders until 40 other nations are
already doing it, leaving Australia lagging behind.

Australia cannot sit at the G20 table and make the case for
co-operative international action on this important question if our
national Government is winding back legislation and re-opening loopholes
for profit-shifting.

This protection racket for corporate tax avoidance comes at a
cost to our budget bottom line – and it comes at a cost to Australian
business.

While technological developments will mean that the physical
location of some businesses matters less and less with each passing
year, the principle of paying tax on incomes earned in a jurisdiction
must remain.

This is true for the local newsagent, the local tradie and the local pharmacist.

Bricks and mortar businesses earning an income in our cities
and regional towns, and paying their taxes. And our computer games
developers, iPhone app developers and software designers that are
working domestically and marketing globally.

Small business people taking risks for their family and our
economy – creating jobs, driving growth and giving back to our
community.

They don't have the luxury of avoiding tax through complicated international loans or structures.

This is just as true for many larger businesses, which operate exclusively in Australia.

These companies employ thousands of Australians – and they pay the tax they should pay in Australia.

It is not right that Australian businesses, big and small,
shoulder an unfair share of the taxation burden while highly profitable
companies who benefit from our skilled workforce, our stable investment
environment and our growing economy make only a minimal contribution.

It's not right that the government will look to hit families
and workers with new GP and petrol taxes, and cut pensions, before it
looks to make multinational companies pay their fair share of tax.

The government has the opportunity to actually do something
meaningful here and ensure that companies pay their fair share of tax
before hiking up taxes on everyone else.

Bill Shorten is leader of the Opposition.

Woman bashed, thrown from train in racist attack

Jacqueline Felgate
7News Melbourne

September 29, 2014, 5:38 pm

A Muslim woman has been bashed and pushed from a moving train in a vicious racist attack.

Police
say the 26-year-old victim was standing near the door on an Upfield
line train when a woman approached her and started making racist
remarks.

The culprit then allegedly grabbed the victim by the neck
and hair and repeatedly slammed her head into the wall of the carriage.

She then pushed the victim off the train as it pulled into Batman railway station, police said.

Police are hoping to speak to two men who approached the woman to offer help after the attack last Thursday.Police do have a description of the attacker.

She has unusual light-coloured eye brows, short dark hair and a heavy build.

She was wearing baggy jeans, a puffy hooded top and runners.

The incident was captured on CCTV and police are now in the process of reviewing the footage.

Victoria afternoon news update - September 29

Friday 26 September 2014

#HeyASIO: Is it me you're looking for?

Martin Hirst 26 September 2014, 4:00pm 2

Media Satire

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The war on terror and the arduous job of collecting everyone's personal data is a very serious business indeed, says Dr Martin Hirst (AKA @ethicalmartini), which makes it all the more important we take the piss out of it relentlessly.

THE WAR ON TERROR AND SPYING ON EVERYONE are both very serious
matters. Indeed, the war on terror is killing people all over the world
— including, sadly, here in Australia this week.

The tragic death of Abdul Numan Haidar
is not a laughing matter. The confusion, misinformation and outright
lies being spread about this young man are appalling. That the news
media is buying into it with awful headlines and front page stories
vilifying him, his friends and even random, totally unconnected young
men should shame some journalists into silence.

At the same time, the rush to cut into our liberties
in the name of ‘protecting’ us from a shadowy threat that kills less
people than bee stings is also not something to joke about, or is it?

In the last 24 hours, a new Twitter hashtag, #HeyASIO, has burst into prominence to take the piss out of Raging Bedsore’s new surveillance powers.

Now that our security services have the right to monitor the whole of
the inter-webs with just one warrant allowing them to tap into any
computer ‘network’, it seems that nothing we do online is going to be
private anymore.

Well, Twitter has always been a bit irreverent – do you remember the wonderful #TonysMovieNight, for example?

And this week, #lifebeforeabbott has been trending too:

The rightwing trolls don’t like it and curmudgeonly columnists like Andrew Bolt complain (without even having a Twitter account) that social media is dominated by “the left”, but for those of us who:

don't like the Abbott Government;
think the terror threat is overblown;
don’t like the idea of ASIO snooping on us around the clock and, more importantly;
have a sense of humour…

… then #HeyASIO is a great way to get your message across while having a bit of fun.

Check the stream yourself and prepare for a few belly laughs.

Here’s my highlights so far.

Ethical Martini’s top 10 #HeyASIO tweets

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Thursday 25 September 2014

Targeting of Muslims risks the exact terror threat we claim to oppose –

Targeting of Muslims risks the exact terror threat we claim to oppose

Bernard Keane
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Sep 25, 2014 1:04PM

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The constant focus on the Muslim community risks prompting
exactly the kind of terrorist threat we are supposedly working to
prevent.

The eighth generation Australian Muslim abused on the street and told to “go back where she came from”.

The Muslim men at a footy match marched out by police and questioned for using their phones “suspiciously”.

The senior Muslim cleric detained by Customs for no clear reason.

The bomb threat signed “Australian Defence League” sent to an Islamic centre.

Muslims raided and detained by NSW Police and then released without charge, henceforth stigmatised as “terror suspects”.

Muslims told to leave the country if they want to follow
sharia law by an opportunistic politician who doesn’t actually know what
sharia law is.

Muslim women told they don’t have the right to dress as they please by government backbenchers.

Muslims vilified as practising a religion of hatred and
murder by a far-right News Corp columnist. Muslims vilified as
practising “hatred, thuggery and racism” by a far-right Fairfax
columnist.

“Some in
the media have even argued that an individual victim’s beheading would
somehow be more psychologically damaging to Australia than mass-casualty
attacks — a homeopathic approach to terrorism in which ever-smaller
numbers of actual victims produces ever-greater damage and fear.”

The harassment and vilification of Muslims isn’t merely the
actions of a few neo-Nazi nutjobs or shrill talkback callers. It’s
coming from all over. The footy fan who thinks Lebanese men using phones
is automatically suspicious. The police who act on this “tip”. The
politicians who seize on terror raids to vent their weird obsessions
with Muslim women. The media figures who hope to harvest clicks by
demonising Muslims.

Demonising Muslims not for anything they have done, but for who they are.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Attorney-General George
Brandis have rightly sought to take an inclusive approach toward the
Muslim community’s role in being able to stop extremism, and government
ministers repeatedly emphasised terrorism was unrelated to religion and
called for calm. But at other times Brandis has inflamed, not calmed
things, with his over-the-top rhetoric. To insist, as the
Attorney-General did yesterday, that the current terror threat was
greater than the risks of the Cold War is a new height in War on Terror
hysteria, from the man who gave us the “existential threat” of some
thugs whose idea of a terrorist strike is a random murder of an
individual. Even libertarian Senator David Leyonhjelm, who has adopted
an appropriately sceptical view of Brandis’ proposed extensions of
anti-terrorism laws, has bought into the inflated rhetoric by accusing
the government of “appeasing” Muslims — presumably an odd form of
appeasement that consists of police raids.

Nor have the media helped. Even without extreme commentators
attacking Muslims, the breathless reporting of every detail, whether
fabricated, mistaken or correct, relating to possible terrorist
incidents only makes the atmosphere more febrile, especially with the
peculiar media obsession with beheading. Even if there’s no evidence for
such a clumsy form of terrorism, inside each Muslim terrorist there is
now, apparently, a beheader. Some in the media have even argued that an
individual victim’s beheading would somehow be more psychologically
damaging to Australia than mass-casualty attacks — a homeopathic
approach to terrorism in which ever-smaller numbers of actual victims
produces ever-greater damage and fear. And the media appears to have
only a binary understanding of terrorism: you’re either a sword-wielding
Muslim fundamentalist or you’re not, with no understanding of the
demonstrated recurring role of mental illness in Western terrorists, or
how expressing unpopular political views does not immediately mean one
is a “terror suspect”.

Put aside fairness and decency toward our Muslim citizens,
if nothing else, there’s a growing risk that the constant attention,
harassment and demonisation of a single community will alienate, isolate
and enrage people who may already be at risk of being turned to
extremism, the people already convinced Australia is targeting Muslims,
whether here or overseas. This is the very problem, supposedly, we’re
trying to address. The government appears at best torn on this — anxious
to call for calm and discourage the vilification of Muslims, but eager
to whip up fear in order to expedite the passage of its terror laws and
provide a justification for its involvement in Iraq. So many of us,
including in the media, seem hell-bent on creating the very conditions
that encourage extremism and alienation, right here in Australia.

Wednesday 24 September 2014

Abbott - "It's a Matter of Trust" - The AIM Network

Abbott – “It’s a Matter of Trust”

September 25, 2014
Written by:
John Lord
8 Replies

Those with long memories will recall that Sir Robert Menzies said
that he had received, in the form of a letter, an official invitation
from the South Vietnam government to participate in the war against the
communist North. When the cabinet papers were released thirty years
later it was disclosed that no such letter existed. 521 young Australian
men lost their lives in a war that Menzies said was in our best
interests.

It’s a matter of trust.

Prime Minister John Howard went to war in Iraq based on information
he repeatedly said was true. That being that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.

It’s a matter of trust.

Recently in an interview he said he felt embarrassed when he had
found out that there were no such weapons. Not a hint of regret that, in
part, as a result of his decision 195,000 innocent people lost their
lives.

It’s a matter of trust.

Politicians in general place a lot in the trust of the people. Howard
went to many an election shouting the mantra ‘’who do you trust’’. Tony
Abbott, despite being a pathological liar, often invokes the ‘’just
trust me’’ principle as if he has some form of ownership on
righteousness when in fact trust is born of truth. A concept beyond his
comprehension.

Usually trust between people is formed by way of respect and a mutual
understanding that each can trust the other to be honest, one to one.
Put another way truth is a companion of trust and one cannot exist
without the other. Trust defines the validity of truth.

But in politics somehow there is this expectation that the collective should take the politicians good will, cart Blanche.

In matters of national security where the interests of state
supersede all else there is an obvious reason for secrecy. But it must
be a confidentially that is obtained by government by means of a
willingness to take the people into its confidence. They have to give
the people reason to trust them. That means providing enough information
to justify your actions.

It is not enough to say; “Just trust me”. There needs to be a
transparent, evidenced and justifiable case put forward to back
decisions. Otherwise the public cannot but be cynical that decisions are
politically motivated. It’s about making an unpopular government and
its Prime Minister more popular.

It’s a matter of trust.

On the subject of Climate Change the Prime minister, a known climate
denier, who a couple of years ago said it was just crap wants us to
trust his opinion on the subject over and above the facts provided by
98% of climate scientists. Just trust me. John Howard said he would
rather trust his instincts than science. I wonder if Abbott will be as
equally embarrassed when he finds out the truth of Climate Change as
Howard is about WMD.

The same of course can be said about immigration strategy. It got to
the point where Scott Morrison decided that secrecy was the best policy.
That the public had no right to know anything. Just trust me.

It’s a matter of trust.

Four polls taken after the recent National Security upgrade and the
decision to return to the Iraq war have thrown up remarkably different
results. The independent Morgan and Essential polls have retained the
status quo. That is that they have shown little variation in recent
months.

However, Newspoll and Reachtell, both show an out of character swing
to the Coalition. Newspoll of course is owned by Murdoch who is an avid
supporter of the coalition. In the Morgan poll the only group supporting
the government is the over sixty fives. They poll over all mediums
(they openly disclose their methodology) where as Newspoll only cover
landlines. So given that around 80% of Australians use mobile phones a
healthy degree of cynicism arises about Newspoll. They ask us to trust
their figures but do they find young people using land lines?

It’s a matter of trust.

Without seeming to be trivial even TV talent shows ask us to trust
them. Shows like X Factor ask us to take them on trust when they reveal
results without letting the viewing public know what the actual votes
are. This trust thing permeates itself throughout society. In
advertising, in journalism, medicine the law etc, etc. No wonder we
become cynical.

It’s a matter of trust.

In terms of trust, politics and its institutions, in the public eye,
have never been at a lower ebb. It is all part of the decline of our
democracy. Politicians like Christopher Pyne , and others, are seemingly
outraged when interviewers dare question their truthfulness. “I don’t
agree with the premise of your question” you will hear him say, “Just
trust me”.

Tony
Abbott, before being invited, decided to commit to returning to Iraq.
No debate, no discussion no consultation. Just trust me. Then he decided
to raise the terrorism threat under questionable circumstances. There
was a likelihood of a terrorist attack. No evidence to speak of just
speculation. Then we had the raids with 850 police running around doing
something or other. All based on some social media chatter. Something
the agencies monitor on a daily basis.

This time however it required a media presence all because the PM
tells us we are under attack from someone but he can’t give us any
information. Just trust me. The problem is that no one does.

We are all just so cynical of the motivation behind his decisions.
Why the need for so many police. If we were really under threat why
alarm the public. Why would you knowingly incite people to take out
their anger against others? Why would you raise, with the politics of
fear, alarm bells in the community?

The timing of the raids and the manner in which they were carried out
seemed intent on whipping people into a frenzy of hysteria. It looked
like a manufactured spectacle.

The result is that the inflammatory language of the brain-dead comes
to the fore. People like Cory Bernardi, MPs Craig Kelly and Alex Hawke
all protesting the Muslim voice. Add to that mix the unflappable Jaqui
Lambie and the flames of ignorance are further fed.

You would only do it if it were to your advantage. If it enhanced the perception of you as a strong leader.

Thus far all that has come of this is that a few men are being
questioned and one has been charged with some minor offenses. Only time
will tell if it is just all bullshit and timed to coincide with the
government’s new National Security legislation which is designed to
further augment the power of a few.

After a year in power in which the government has proven its own
ineptness it is now asking us to trust it with new draconian powers to
thwart the risk of terror attacks.

And to make matters worse the opposition supports their every move unquestioned.

I have a healthy cynicism of our Prime Minister based not just on
ideological differences but an ongoing assessment of his character.

It’s a matter of trust.

You’d have to be joking.

Author’s note:

Whilst writing this piece an event occurred in Melbourne that has been
described as an act of terrorism. I recommend you read the transcript of
this interview.

Like this:

Tuesday 23 September 2014

Australia, the United States, the Islamic State and oil

Dr Geoff Davies 24 September 2014, 6:00am 19

Energy International Politics

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**A U.S. soldier stands guard duty near a burning oil well in the Rumaila oil field, Iraq, 2003 (Image via Wikipedia)**

The current commentary about Australia’s latest Middle East military adventure ignores the obvious, says Dr Geoff Davies — oil and its impact on U.S. foreign policy.

THERE WAS A STORY from one of the Gulf Wars about a reporter asking Western troops why they thought they were there.

A US soldier said something like:

“Ah’m here to serve mah country ma’am.”

While a British soldier replied with:

“Wool, itsa oil, innit?”

As yet another Western intervention/invasion in the Middle East
gathers pace, why is the commentariat apparently oblivious to the role
of oil?

Oil has driven a century of meddling by Western countries ‒ meddling
that has fed generations of resentment and radicalisation ‒ and you can
be sure oil is behind the current interest of the U.S. in the Islamic
State (I.S.).

If you listen to what U.S. presidents say,
they always invoke freedom, peace, democracy and human rights as they
launch their brutal forays into other countries. However if you look at
what the U.S. does in the world, then it is clear freedom, peace,
democracy and human rights are irrelevant to U.S. policy.

The U.S. talks democracy, but doesn’t hesitate to cuddle up to brutal tyrants, nor to overthrow elected governments.

The CIA’s very first postwar adventure was to orchestrate, in cooperation with the British, the overthrow of the elected Mossadegh Government of Iran in 1953. Mossadegh’s crime was to take control of his nation’s oil industry from an exploitative British company. He was removed and the compliant Shah of Iran
was installed. The Shah ruled as an absolute monarch, and his
repression and the introduction of Western culture fed the rise of the
Islamic fundamentalists who eventually overthrew him in 1979, and who
have caused the U.S. such irritation ever since.

The U.S. has since undermined or overthrown a string of other democratically elected governments, including Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), and Nicaragua (1990). Its attempt to promote the overthrow of the Chavez Government of Venezuela in 2002 flopped due to popular support for Hugo Chavez.

In all cases, the democracies were replaced by repressive and usually
corrupt governments with power bases among the wealthy elites. The
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
is among the most notorious for his reign of terror, involving torture,
murder and “disappearances”, from 1973 until a popular uprising ousted
him in 1990.

The U.S. also backed and armed the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, until he over-reached and invaded Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War. Iraq played no role in the 2001 attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, but President George W. Bush used the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq, which was allegedly harbouring Al Qaeda groups. Somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 civilians are reported to have died as a result of the invasion and subsequent fighting, effectively retribution for the 3,000 who died in the WTC attack.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, governed by a repressive family plutocracy, is maintained as a staunch ally of the U.S., even though it too is accused of supplying some groups in the Middle East accused of terrorism. The key, of course, is that Saudi Arabia hosts a large fraction of the world’s oil reserves.

The I.S. group is certainly brutal and extremist, but would the U.S.
be taking any interest if its access to a strategically important
resource was not being threatened?

Human-rights abuses are being cited as a prime reason for U.S.
intervention, yet the U.S. saw no reason to intervene directly in other
barbarities ‒ even including genocide ‒ in places like Cambodia from 1975-79, Rwanda in 1994, the civil wars in the Congo over a long period, in Liberia in the 1990s, and many other parts of Africa and the world.

Evidently, human rights abuses are ignored unless they conveniently
align with reasons considered more compelling to American interests.

The public beheading of Westerners
is clearly intended as a provocation. Sure enough, it is provoking
widespread outrage that, more than anything, perhaps, is fuelling
uncritical calls for intervention. That is exactly the response I.S.
wants, as it will incite more locals to their kind of extremism and
unite reluctant locals against the outside threat.

In any case, Saudi Arabia beheads people on a weekly basis, but that evidently is of little interest, so long as no Westerners are involved.

The consistent factor in U.S. policy clearly is to defend or enhance
U.S. “interests” — which means, in practice, the commercial interests of
U.S. business.

Oil underpins all the other interests.

This is not a recent feature of US foreign policy. Howard Zinn, in his classic A People’s History of the United States,
concludes that U.S. presidents have always allowed their foreign policy
to be bounded by the interests of the country’s rich and powerful.

So a century of Western meddling has generated progressively more
resentment and more extreme responses in the Middle East. Violence
begets violence and the I.S. and the U.S. are merely embarking on yet
another turn in the cycle of violence. Why is this apparently so beyond
the critical faculties of what passes for Australia’s political
conversation?

The solution ‒ not easy, but clearly available ‒ is to desist from
further military intervention. There will, unfortunately, continue to be
violence within the Middle East, but the defensible course is to try,
by nonviolent means, to reduce the violence as much as
possible. Intelligence analyst Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning argues for the viability of such an approach.

Of course, there is the possibility that Western access to oil will
become more difficult or more expensive if I.S. continues to take over
more territory, though in the medium term it is more likely to stall and
fragment, in the absence of external intervention.

There is already an overwhelming case, from global warming,
for a rapid shift away from oil to renewable, non-polluting sources of
energy, such as solar-generated hydrogen. The further pursuit of
control over oil is wrong-headed in every respect, not least because of
its costs in blood and money.

As to the so-called leadership of Australia, it adds the spectacle of
being a pathetic lap dog to all the US follies it chooses to be
complicit in.

There is a photograph
doing the rounds of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, flanked by Foreign
Minister Julie Bishop and Attorney General George Brandis; the banner
behind them, apparently in their own words, reads:

‘Warning. There are people among us who pose a serious threat to Australia’s future.’

The irony is obvious to many of the commenters, understanding the
threat starts with those three. It is the continuing follies of U.S.
policy and our involvement in them, that make us a potential target for
domestic terrorism — not some bogus perceived external threat.

Dr Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is a retired geophysicist at the Australian National University and the author of Sack the Economists (Nov 2013). He blogs at BetterNature.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Tuesday 30 September 2014

Unionist Kathy Jackson's alleged credit card misuse takes total to $1.4m

Workplace Reporter for The Age

Corporate tax avoidance costs Australian business

Bill Shorten

TONY ABBOTT YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THE ATMOSPHERE OF HATRED YOU AND YOU MINIONS HAVE CREATED.RESIGN AND RETIRE FROM POLITICS NEVER TO RETURN

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https://au.news.yahoo.com/vic/a/25136220/woman-bashed-thrown-from-train-in-racist-attack/﻿TONY ABBOTT RESIGN

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Friday 26 September 2014

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Thursday 25 September 2014

Targeting of Muslims risks the exact terror threat we claim to oppose

Wednesday 24 September 2014

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Tuesday 23 September 2014

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TONY ABBOTT YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THE ATMOSPHERE OF HATRED YOU AND YOU MINIONS HAVE CREATED.
RESIGN AND RETIRE FROM POLITICS NEVER TO RETURN

https://au.news.yahoo.com/vic/a/25136220/woman-bashed-thrown-from-train-in-racist-attack/TONY ABBOTT RESIGN