Shirtfronting, Islamaphobia and sweeping national security laws all point to a political culture that’s growing increasingly more extreme
Australia is undergoing a Tea party revolution. A t-shirt that reads, “if you don’t love it, leave” is a stirring paean to patriotism. Like its American cousins, supporters talk of small government (except when it comes to finding money for defence and bombing Islamic nations), endorse hyper partisanship, oppose action on climate change, distrust non-Christians and non-Zionists and embrace insularity.
The past is celebrated, the future is feared and the present is up for grabs. Bernardi’s recent statements about his fear of Muslims and the supposed security threats of the niqab or burqa were a perfect Tea party tactic, allowing xenophobia out of the bottle with its message spread by reliable media courtiers. Abbott then rushed in to restore order and condemn the move while still expressing unease with the head-wear.
One of the central ways to break this predictable cycle is resisting the dishonest and incendiary Murdoch agenda that rewards mates and celebrates a blokey, Anglosphere myopia. It’s no wonder his publications are so keen to dutifully join any conflict with a new Muslim foe. After all, Rupert’s great vision, expressed again recently to G20 finance ministers, is damning socialism, praising deregulation, small government and unfettered capitalism. Such thinking has helped him and his mates handsomely.
Deputy Labor leader responds to Abbott’s ‘shirtfront’ threat, saying Russia needs to know how seriously Australia takes the MH17 investigation
Plibersek echoed the words of the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who said “serious politicians should choose their words” more carefully.
Overnight, the president’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Russian government did not intend to respond to Abbott’s “colourful language”, but that as a part of the G20, the Russian president was “free” to visit the summit in Brisbane
On Tuesday Abbott said his office had not requested a meeting with Putin as his schedule was being finalised and the summit was still a month away. However Abbott made clear his expectation Putin would meet him.
“I certainly expect that while he’s a guest of Australia, he will undertake to have a conversation with the Australian prime minister.”
Russia is a part of G20 and the Russian president is free to visit the summit in Australia,” Peskov said.
“His visit isn’t going to be a bilateral visit upon the invitation from the Australian side.
“As soon as Mr Putin confirms his visit we’ll make a relevant statement. The Russian government does not intend to respond to Mr Abbott’s colourful language.
“Mr Putin is unlikely to seek bilateral talks with Mr Abbott. Mr Putin’s office will be waiting for more diplomatic and pleasant occasion to get in touch with Mr Abbott’s office.”
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warns in the starkest terms of the dangers of travel to Afghanistan. In its “Do not travel” advice dated September 16 2014, DFAT writes of “the extremely dangerous security situation and the very high threat of terrorist attack”. Attacks, DFAT notes, “can occur anywhere, any time” and: “No province can be considered immune from violence.” Furthermore, DFAT warns:
Overland travel is dangerous. Taliban and al-Qa’ida members are active in many parts of the country, thereby creating a significant security risk.
These are prescient comments indeed. However, warnings of this kind, which DFAT has been voicing for a long time, seem to have had precious little impact on the handling of Naseri’s application for refugee protection.
His case was assessed by a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, Paul Millar, in December 2012. Millar expressed no doubts about Naseri’s credibility, but inadvertently showed how those who lack a “feel” for the situation in a disrupted state such as Afghanistan can get things horribly wrong. In effect, he narrowed his focus to the possibility of there being a safe route from Kabul to Naseri’s district:
The Tribunal is only considering the route for the applicant to make a journey from Kabul back to his native area. In those circumstances, the Tribunal accepts that the applicant is at risk as a Hazara of suffering harm in making that journey but the Tribunal finds that the level of risk does not reach the threshold of a real chance.
Millar added that “country information before the Tribunal is to the effect that Afghans who return to their country after seeking asylum in Western countries are not targeted for harm on that basis”.
Mr Abbott’s comments have prompted another scathing rebuke from Russian newspaper Pravda.
In an email exchange with the ABC’s AM program, Pravda journalist Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey said Mr Abbott’s comments were “the most blatant example of shit-faced ignorance and pig-headed arrogance the world has seen since the likes of Hitler or Pol Pot”.
Bancroft-Hinchey was speaking after penning an editorial for Pravda, in which he wrote of Mr Abbott that: “It is difficult to find a more blatant example of childishness, incompetence for the position, criminal intent, downright nastiness and an indication of a disturbed mind crying out for therapy. Don’t the Australian people deserve better?”.
Pravda is historically associated with the Russian Communist party and was an official government mouthpiece during the Soviet era.
“While I do not speak for President Putin, if someone ‘shirtfronted’ me, then I would throw the perpetrator over my shoulder, slam him onto his back on the floor behind me, place my boot on his face and ask ‘What was that you were saying?’ before I saw him scurry away snivelling to his sister’s for a clean pair of Y-fronts,” Bancroft-Hinchey wrote.
Treasurer Joe Hockey, speaking in London where he had been holding preparatory meetings for the G20, said he would not get into commentary about the words used by the Prime Minister, but said his comments echoed the “deep-seated anger across the Australian community about what happened to the 38 poor souls who were Australians that died on the Malaysian plane”.
“I think the Prime Minister is reflecting the anger and understandable emotion of many Australians about what happened,” Mr Hockey said.
Earlier a spokesman from the Russian embassy in Canberra described Mr Abbott’s comments as “immature”.
Alexander Odoevskiy said the comments were indicative of the fact that “Russian/Australian relations are at historic low”.
Thirty-eight Australian citizens and residents were among the 298 passengers and crew killed when MH17 went down on July 17 over territory held by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Kiev and the West have accused the Moscow-backed separatists of shooting down the jet with a surface-to-air missile supplied by Russia.
Moscow denied the charge and pointed the finger at Kiev.
Mr Peskov said in Russia’s view, the investigation into the tragedy “is not active and effective enough”.
He said “lots of data” from Ukrainian air traffic control had not been submitted to the investigators.
Russia, he said, insisted that this data was submitted.
THE Islamic State jihadist group says that it has given Yazidi women and children captured in northern Iraq to its fighters as spoils of war, boasting it has revived slavery.
The shocking development comes as researchers revealed thousands of Yazidi men in Iraq were murdered in scenes reminiscent of the Bosnian Srebrenica massacre when IS jihadists hit the Kurdish region in August.
Researchers have pieced together reports of attacks and have concluded that more than 5000 Yazidi were gunned down in a series of massacres by IS fighters, the Mail Online reports.
As the men were massacred, the IS captured and enslaved thousands of women and children.
Innocence destroyed … the IS group has admitted holding and selling Yazidi women and children as sex slaves. Picture: AFP
The latest issue of its propaganda magazine Dabiq released on Sunday was the first clear admission by the organisation that it was holding and selling Yazidis as sex slaves.
Tens of thousands of Yazidis, a minority whose population is mostly confined to northern Iraq, have been displaced by the four-month-old jihadist offensive in the region.
Yazidi leaders and rights groups warned in August that the small community faced genocide and that threat was put forward by Washington as one of the main reasons for launching air strikes.
Thousands of Yazidis remained trapped on a mountain near their main hub of Sinjar for days in August, while others were massacred and the fate of hundreds of missing women and children remained unclear.
In an article entitled “The revival of slavery before the hour”, Dabiq argues that by enslaving people it claims hold deviant religious beliefs, IS has restored an aspect of Islamic sharia law to its original meaning.
NO ESCAPE: Teen girls recall horror being held captive by IS
PURE EVIL: IS leaves headless bodies on streets of Kobane
CLOSE TO HOME: IS magazine calls for “lone wolf” attacks in Australia
Aid … A RAAF plane prepares to drop 15 bundles of humanitarian aid to Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar in August. Source: Supplied
“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations,” the article said.
“This large-scale enslavement of mushrik (polytheist) families is probably the first since the abandonment of this sharia law,” it said.
“The only other known case — albeit much smaller — is that of the enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the mujahedeen there.”
Dabiq argued that while the “people of the book” — or followers of monotheistic religions such as Christians or Jews — can be given the option of paying the “jizya” tax or convert, this did not apply to Yazidis.
INSIDE IS: Terror group a well-oiled and slick PR machine
The Yazidi faith is a unique blend of beliefs that draws from several religions and includes the worship of a devil figure they refer to as the Peacock Angel.
In a report also released on Sunday, Human Rights Watch said abducted Yazidi women were subjected to sexual assault and were being bought and sold by IS fighters.
“The systematic abduction and abuse of Yazidi civilians may amount to crimes against humanity,” the New York-based watchdog said in a statement.
According to interviews HRW conducted with dozens of displaced Yazidis in the autonomous region of Kurdistan last month and in early October, the jihadist group is holding at least 366 people.
Accounts by some of the Yazidi women who managed to escape and two who are still being held suggest the true number could be at least three times as high.
One 15-year-old girl who escaped on September 7 told HRW that the Palestinian fighter who bought her “told her with pride” that he had paid $1,000 for her.
She said the fighter took her to his flat in the city of Raqa, the group’s main hub in Syria, and sexually assaulted her.
Human Rights Watch said that the extent of the sexual abuse inflicted to enslaved Yazidi girls remained unclear but stressed that the stigma surrounding rape in Yazidi culture could explain the low number of first-hand accounts.
“When you ask them, they were never or rarely sexually assaulted. Simply put, they are scared of being killed by their own tribe,” Hanaa Edwar, a veteran Iraqi rights activist, told AFP.
“So much harm has been done. There needs to be a huge psychiatric campaign to deal with these victims,” she said.
The alliance is under its greatest strain in Turkey, which has met US requests to intervene in Kobani on behalf of Kurdish rebels not just with refusal, but with air strikes aimed instead against Kurdish groups in Turkey.
Turkish fighter jets bombarded Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) positions in south-eastern Turkey this week for the first time since the start of the peace process between the outlawed group and the Turkish government in 2012.
The attacks on the PKK came in the wake of violent clashes last week between Kurdish factions and security forces in several Turkish cities, as anger grows over perceived government inaction against the Isis attack on Kobani.
According to local media reports, the strikes came in retaliation for armed PKK offensives on several military outposts in the area.
The Turkish chief of general staff said the military “opened fire immediately in retaliation, in the strongest terms” after repeated PKK attacks in the area, and before air strikes were launched.
“Inevitably, though, having made such pains of ourselves insisting on the G20 as the steering room of the global economy, the expectations on Australia in its host year are enormous.”
Australia has “gone from lifter to leaner” on action against climate change, and must not block the topic’s inclusion on the agenda for the G20 summit in Brisbane next month, the former treasurer Wayne Swan will say.
When asked about climate change in February the prime minister said:
“We do not want to clutter up the G20 agenda with every worthy and important cause because if we do, we will squander the opportunity to make a difference in the vital area of economic growth.”
But Swan, the Labor treasurer from 2007 to 2013, says climate change previously sat at the core of the G20 agenda “not just as an environmental issue but as a core issue of sustainable economic growth”.
“In the corridors of Washington, Berlin and elsewhere, there is genuine dismay about the lack of attention to climate change in the G20 agenda,” he says.
Referring to the Gillard government’s carbon pricing scheme, which has since been abolished by the Abbott government, Swan says: “Australia has been recognised around the world as an energy-intensive nation and a beneficiary of significant commodity exports, for taking seriously its international obligations to reduce its carbon emissions.”
“At best, Australia has gone from leader to laggard on climate change,”
Swan says.
“At worst, it’s gone from lifter to leaner. This is at the very time significant players like the US and China are more willing than ever to address climate change, and international financial institutions like the IMF are highlighting the strong links between climate change action and positive economic outcomes
Mining companies are campaigning for the G20 to support continued use of coal as a solution to the global “energy poverty” crisis.
Abbott said on Monday coal should not be demonised because it was “good for humanity”.
On Tuesday the treasurer, Joe Hockey, dismissed the finding that Australia was the highest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the OECD.
Russian government mouthpiece launches colourful broadside at Australian PM, saying he runs the risk of getting his ‘teeth smashed in’
In an open letter, published on Pravda online, which is considered a mouthpiece for the Russian government, columnist Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey demanded Abbott pull his head in.
“Like any bully there comes a day when you pick on the wrong person, get your teeth smashed in and go running home to mummy blabbering like a ninny,” he wrote.
The threat was the “most crass example of stupidity the world has seen since the USA, the UK and Australia murdered Iraqi civilians in an illegal and criminal series of war crimes”.
“If you seriously think you can physically confront your guests and assault a visiting head of state and walk away freely, then you are mistaken,” he wrote.
He said Abbott had rendered himself liable for prosecution for criminal intent and incitement to violence.
Bancroft-Hinchey warned the Australian leader should not pre-empt the MH17 investigation.
“Wait for the inquiry before making your odious accusations and sounding like a foul-mouthed, despicable, pith-headed and uncouth, loutish oaf,” he said.
In London, Joe Hockey defended Abbott’s comments, saying they reflected the depth of “anger and understandable emotion” in Australia.
“There is a deep-seated anger across the Australian community about what happened to the 38 poor souls, who were Australians, that died on the Malaysia plane in Ukraine, but also to help to find ways to get justice for the families that lost loved ones,” the treasurer said on Tuesday.
Hockey said he expected talks at the G20 to include the issue of the economic sanctions that Western nations, including Australia, had placed on Russia in the wake of the MH17 crash.
“There is no doubt that sanctions are having an impact both ways,” he said.
“Russian sanctions are having an impact on Europe and European, American and Australian sanctions are having an impact on Russia.
“So if there is a way through the challenge in Ukraine then hopefully that can be identified either before Brisbane or at Brisbane.”
The newly awarded Nobel Prize for economics challenges Joe Hockey’s voodoo economics prescription for Australian economic growth, writes Alan Austin.
THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS announced yesterday bolsters the campaign for better industry regulation in Australia.
The prestigious award – officially, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences – went to Professor Jean Tirole of the Toulouse School of Economics in France. It recognises his work on how poorly regulated corporations operate to the community’s detriment. And how the problems can be fixed.
Drawing attention to industry regulation is timely for Australia as the Abbott Government strives to wind back regulation brought in by previous administrations, but with little success.
Tirole’s analysis of corporate market power has shown how big companies damage the communities in which they operate. And also how they may be regulated to everyone’s advantage. He believes different industries require quite different regulation.
The Academy noted that Tirole’s work not only described the negative outcomes of regulation failure, but recommended specific responses:
‘The best regulation or competition policy should therefore be carefully adapted to every industry’s specific conditions. In a series of articles and books, Jean Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers.’
The French Government, however, is delighted.
Spokesman Stéphane Le Foll said:
‘The Nobel Academy making this award is also a reflection of the absolute necessity in today’s crisis that we have regulation and mechanisms for stability. We must not just leave management of the economy to the free market.’
Will the global discussion this award is generating engage hapless Treasurer Joe Hockey and the Abbott Government?
Clearly, the mindless mantras he mouthed before the 2013 election have not materialised into benefits for Australia’s businesses or people.
Hockey promised this:
‘Reducing the burden of taxes and regulation, ensuring fair and competitive markets, and reducing the size of government will boost business investment and spending. And from investment and spending will come growth and jobs.’
The Abbott Government then undertook a highly visible exercise in deregulation with its Autumn Repeal Day last March — the first of two promised every year. The Government boasted that 10,000 regulations and acts would be removed from the statute books.
So what has been the result? How much better is the economy now performing?
It is, in fact, performing much worse. In the 13 months since Hockey became treasurer, business confidence has slumped, the value of the all ordinaries on the Australian Stock Exchange has fallen, consumer confidence has collapsed, the Aussie dollar is at the lowest level since 2010, inflation is up from 2.4% to 3.0% and rising, unemployment is at the highest level in a decade and government debt has blown out by $39 billion – up 22%.
The failure to regulate appropriately, Tirole shows, risks not just weaker company profits and a poorer community, but another financial crisis:
‘The gradual lowering of regulatory standards predated the recent crisis. To be sure, other developments such as “irrational exuberance,” loose monetary policy, and global macroeconomic imbalances also contributed to the crisis. But underregulation or ineffective regulation is rightly blamed for playing a central role in the crisis.’
Much of the world is now listening to Jean Tirole. Which is just as well.
But is Joe Hockey?
THE Abbott Government is a regime with a taste for authoritarianism the like of which we have not seen in Australia since World War II.
It is using the pretext of a terrorist group called ISIS, operating thousands of miles from this island continent, to strip freedoms and empower security and police agencies in a way that is frightening, so frightening in fact that the venerable Washington Post last week described Australia as a “national security state”.
The authoritarianism of the Abbott Government also manifests itself in seeking to suborn the ABC and turn it into a tame propagandist for the reactive conservatism of Mr Abbott and thuggish lieutenants like Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and Attorney-General George Brandis. Sounding more like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Russia’s Vladimir Putin than the leader of a democratic country, Mr Abbott once complained that the ABC is too often not on the side of Australia. A troubling comment and symptomatic of the intolerance of dissent and critical commentary that is part and parcel of the modus operandi of the Abbott Government.
Last week, the ABC looked as though it was buying into Mr Abbott’s implicit desire to make the ABC a loyal servant of his regime. The ABC Lateline program carried an interview last Wednesday with Wassim Doureihi, a spokesman for a radical group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. Lateline’s interviewer Emma Alberici blew up because Doureihi, taking a leaf out of Mr Morrison’s book, refused to directly answer questions.
Mr Abbott wants to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir — so much for freedom of speech. So the PM lavished praise on Ms Alberici.
“She’s a feisty interviewer … good on her for having a go and I think she spoke for our country last night,” Mr Abbott said.
Note the last part of that quote —“she spoke for our country”. It is not the job of any ABC interviewer to speak for anyone’s country. It is not the job of the ABC to attack groups and individuals Mr Abbott wants to ban. And the ABC is not meant to be a propagandist.
Instead of telling the Prime Minister that Ms Alberici is not a propagandist or a tool of the Abbott Government’s dangerously xenophobic, racist and anti-Islamic “Team Australia” concept, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott simply tweeted the interview and its transcript. But Mr Abbott’s ploy of seeking to turn the ABC into his propaganda tool by praising journalists who agree with his view of the world was not the only example last week of the Federal Government’s sinister authoritarianism.
Mr Morrison, in an act of bullying and such hypocrisy that the term needs to be spelt with a capital H, has referred workers from the Save the Children Fund to the Australian Federal Police for allegedly misusing privileged information, which is an offence under Commonwealth law. Mr Morrison is seeking to censor individuals who work in the gulags on Nauru and Manus Island from speaking out against the serial abuse of men, women and children that occurs courtesy of the minister’s policies.
What makes Mr Morrison’s action so distasteful is not just that he is seeking to stop the truth of human rights abuse emerging, but that he quite obviously leaked to a journalist recently a report that was critical of aid workers in detention centres. As noted above, capital H hypocrisy.
All this — anti terror laws, Abbott’s patting the ABC on the back for being loyal and Mr Morrison’s legal bullying — in only a month. But look at the pattern. This is a government obsessed with secrecy and pumping taxpayers’ dollars into police, spies and the military. It is a government that berates its critics in a way that makes former Liberal prime minister John Howard look positively tolerant.
Australia suffers from having no real check on an authoritarian leader like Mr Abbott. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shares many of the unfortunate undemocratic traits of Mr Abbott, but he is fortunately constrained by a cultural and legal commitment in that country to citizens having enforceable protections via a human rights charter. Even in the US, citizens have more protection against authoritarian actions than is the case in Australia.
Maybe Australians don’t care. After all, this country started its European days by wiping out indigenous Australians and as a jail for the UK. It is a country that has never had to struggle to maintain democracy. It is a lazy democracy as a result and easily scared by mythical invaders from elsewhere.
It would be a pity if the Abbott Government were allowed to continue along the authoritarian path it is taking this country down. But it will only stop if Australians realise that the democracy they think exists is being dismantled by a bunch of thugs running Canberra, and a weak opposition in the form of an unprincipled ALP.
But hey, who are we to go around banning people? God, it’s enough work to try and ban any discussion of climate change. After all, this is an economic forum and, as we all know, climate change has nothing to do with economics.
Besides, the G20’ll be a good opportunity for Tony to “shirtfront”Mr Putin.
We know because Mr Abbott told us this:
“I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin..
“I am going to be saying to Mr Putin Australians were murdered.
“There’ll be a lot of tough conversations with Russia and I suspect the conversation I have with Mr Putin will be the toughest conversation of all.”
So what exactly is a “shirtfront”? Well, looking it on the internet could just lead to confusion because the definition given there is:
the breast of a shirt, in particular that of a stiffened evening shirt.
In the AFL, however, it refers to a solid bump to the opposition player which knocks him to the ground, so, if one presumes that one is not talking about the breast of an evening shirt, one presumes that our PM is planning to give Mr Putin a solid bump. Metaphorically speaking, one hopes, as actually physically bumping another leader could lead to all sorts of nasty things being said about Mr Abbott’s lack of political finesse, and his treatment of older people. After all, Mr Putin is in his sixties and while Joe Hockey would tell you that clearly Putin is fit enough to work for another thirty years, the photos of Abbott standing over an older opponent could be used for memes with captions to the effect that Costello lacked the ticker to do this to Howard.
So, a good solid metaphoric bump that knocks Mr Putin to the metaphoric ground, because Mr Abbott will give Mr Putin the toughest conversation of all – that’ll teach the Russian Embassy to remind everyone that Mr Putin does judo, while Mr Abbott rides bikes. And Mr Putin, being a Russian, won’t be used to us plain-speaking Aussies and will be quite shocked to be spoken to in such a rough way because nobody would have ever spoken roughly to Mr Putin during in his time in the KGB.
That is, unless he doesn’t happen to meet up with him, because according to the news report I just heard, there’s been no formal request from Australia for an actual meeting between the two, with Mr Abbott revising his position and now seems to be saying that if he happened to pass Mr Putin in the corridor, he’d go over to him and give him a jolly good talking to about how we didn’t like it when that plane went down and we think you had something to do with it, so you just better get out of the Ukraine right now or else, he’ll tell Peta Credlin and she’s really tough and she’ll come to Queensland and give him a Chinese Burn and she gives really good Chinese Burns that really hurt and all the backbenchers and ministers are afraid of her…
And if that doesn’t work, he’ll tell his mum.
But whatever, calling for Mr Putin to be banned… Well, that’s just juvenile!
The current war against ISIS cannot be won with air strikes. I would go further and say it cannot even be won with a large ground force either. The reason is simple. You cannot fight an idea with guns or bombs. Guns and bombs may blow people away but the idea remains. And no matter how many people you blow away, others will come to take their place. That is the power of an idea. You can only fight an idea with a better idea. And thus far, no one in the west has been able to do that, if indeed it can be done.
One would have thought that the billions of dollars spent in just the last 25 years trying to restore some degree of peace and stability in the Middle East would have been enough to demonstrate the futility of waging wars. But no, it hasn’t. If it were not for the strategic interests of the region (i.e. Oil), the rest of the world would not have the will or desire to intervene.
And to think that Australia’s efforts in sending a couple of planes to drop a few bombs on an uncertain target will make a difference is just ridiculous. We, along with a multinational coalition, spent eight years routing out ‘evil’ and replacing it with supposedly highly trained ‘good’ for what result? The ‘good’ we left in place has disintegrated. Hugh White makes it clear that if we do it all again, this time for longer and with larger numbers, such a strategy will achieve no more than the last great effort. It might bring some form of political stability to the region for a short time, but it won’t bring a lasting peace.
It certainly doesn’t address the idea that motivates the ‘enemy’. The raw truth is, we do not know how to identify the ‘enemy’. Is it ISIS, is it Islam? Is it Israel? Is it far away Christians believing that this potent mixture of cultures and religions can ever be at peace? Even in a world without gods, there would still be conflicts but nothing as complex as this.
We should commend President Obama for at least holding back and not being sucked into sending another ground force to try and resolve this mess. But for how long can he hold back? The Hawks in the Pentagon are busting for another fight. The American people, by and large, are not. They’ve had enough. So have we, in Australia. Western interference in the Middle East has brought the conflict to our own backyards in ways no one ever dreamed of 50 or 100 years ago. We are reaping what we have sown.
I don’t think Tony Abbott has the mental maturity to realise this, and I fear that before long, he will commit us to increase our pathetic contribution to something that will make things worse.
Tony Abbott says he is going to “shirtfront” Vladamir Putin at the G20, but managing editor David Donovan says he may just be in for a shock.
IT WASN’T JUST WHAT HE SAID, it was also the way he said it.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Tony Abbott ‒ fresh from saying coal is good for humanity ‒ stood in front of an enormous coal truck in Central Queensland and, like a punch drunk pug trying to trash talk a much more highly fancied opponent, said he was going to “shirtfront” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Firstly, “shirtfront” — what does that even mean?
When I first heard Abbott say that yesterday afternoon, I thought he meant he was going to grab Putin by his shirt and not let him get away until he gave him a piece of his mind — something, I would suggest, he could ill afford to lose.
Then, however, I began hearing people from the AFL states offering their footy code’s definition — which would seem to be the act of illegally scruffing someone by the shirtfront – or laying the hip and shoulder into them – and knocking them to the ground.
Could Abbott really have just threatened assault on a foreign head of state?
Then I heard another take, which is two drunks in a bar holding onto each other’s shirtfront to stop the other from falling down so they could keep on punching. What?
Whichever one Abbott meant ‒ if any ‒ he has committed an appalling breach of diplomatic protocol in advance of a major international summit and shamed the nation.
Of course, Abbott has consistently behaved in an offensively aggressive manner toward Russia ever since he started tough-talking over Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine earlier in the year. He followed up with all manner of threats and bluster when MH17 went down in June, standing up in Parliament the next day to effectively accuse the Russians of shooting the plane down. The rashness of this statement is manifest when we consider the incident is still being investigated by Dutch authorities, who still appear be no closer to announcing the real cause. Then, of course, we were going to ban Russia from attending, and then we had to let them come and now this.
Whatever he is trying to do — it ain’t working. It is the diplomacy of the town drunk, yelling incoherent abuse into the street.
But again, it wasn’t simply what he said, it was the way he said it.
Here is a direct transcript of Abbott’s words [IA emphasis]:
“Look, I’m going to … ahh … ‘shirt front’ Mr Putin. You bet you are… ahh … you bet I am. Ahh…”
You bet you are… What?
You get the impression he had just been prepped and fired up by an advisor, perhaps his ubiquitous chief of staff Peta Credlin, who had fed him his lines and he had forgotten to personalise them.
Either way, it was a truly facepalming moment for the nation.
It must be said that Abbott is a woeful public speaker.
When he reads his remarks, he sounds like an eight year-old who has never read a book without pictures before and is still coming to grips with the written word.
When he doesn’t read his speeches and speaks off the cuff, he sounds somewhat more composed, but then usually makes some hugely embarrassing faux pas or blunder — like when he promised before the election to spend his first week as PM in Arnhem Land, for example, or this one:
But even when he is trying to parrot simple rehearsed lines, he still can’t quite get them right.
Did he even mean “shirtfront”? Who would know? One can only imagine the anxiety and distress in the prime minister’s office every time they watch him appear in front of the media.
No wonder Peta Credlin drinks.
Really, Tony Abbott should never have become Australian prime minister. John Pilger pigeonholed Abbott perfectly when he described him on IA recently as ‘aggressively weird’. He is aggressive and he is weird — and it often also appears as if all his synapses are not firing effectively.
He makes blunder after blunder and doesn’t seem to care as Australia more and more becomes a laughing stock and international pariah.
We should also note that Vladamir Putin, apart from being a former KGB agent, is reportedly an eighth dan black belt judo champion — ninth being the highest awarded and judo being the sport in which the object is to grapple or throw the other person to the ground.
Putin’s nickname is Vlad the Impaler — and after threatening violence on him, Tony Dum Dum may finally have bitten off more than he can chew.
Tony Abbott has declared “coal is good for humanity” while opening a coalmine in Queensland.
The prime minister, who describes himself as a conservationist, said coal was vital to the world and that fossil fuel should not be demonised.
“Coal is vital for the future energy needs of the world,” he said. “So let’s have no demonisation of coal. Coal is good for humanity.”
Abbott said the opening of the $4.2bn Caval Ridge coalmine in Moranbah, operated by BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA), was “a great day for the world”.
“The trajectory should be up and up and up in the years and decades to come,” Abbott said.
“The future for coal is bright and it is the responsibility for government to try to ensure that we are there making it easier for everyone wanting to have a go.
“It is a great day for the world because this mine will keep so many people employed … it will make so many lives better.
“This mine epitomises the have-a-go spirit,” he said.
In May, Abbott told a minerals industry parliamentary dinner he could think of “few things more damaging to our future” than leaving coal in the ground.
A month later, after a meeting with Barack Obama in June this year, Abbott said he took climate change very seriously.
“I regard myself as a conservationist,” he said. “Frankly, we should rest lightly on the planet and I’m determined to ensure that we do our duty by the future here.”
In Moranbah, the prime minister said he was proud to have abolished the carbon tax and the mining tax.
Last week, China imposed a 6% tariff on non-coking coal and announced attempts to address pollution in its cities by increasing spending on renewable energy. Last year, China spent $56bn on wind, solar and other renewable energy projects while Australia’s renewable industry slumped by 70%, due to uncertainty over the government’s intentions for the Renewable Energy Target.
On Sunday, the prime minister said he would prefer China’s coal tariff announcement “didn’t happen” and still hoped for a resolution to the Australia-China free trade agreement in November, before or at the G20 summit.
“We would prefer that this [the coal tariff] didn’t happen,” Abbott said.
“The fact that it seems to be happening makes it more important than ever that we get a good outcome to the free trade negotiations that have been going on between Australia and China now for many, many years.”
On Monday the treasurer, Joe Hockey, criticised the Australian National University for its decision to divest from fossil fuel companies.
“I would suggest they’re removed from the reality of what is helping to drive the Australian economy and create more employment,” Hockey said.
“I am going to shirtfront Mr Putin – you bet I am – I am going to be saying to Mr Putin Australians were murdered, they were murdered by Russian backed rebels,” Abbott said.
“It has to be by consensus and the G20 consensus is that Russia should come,” Abbott said. “I think there will be a lot of tough conversations with Russia and I suspect the conversation I have with Mr Putin will be the toughest conversation of all.
I will govern for all Australians.
I want to lift everyone’s standard of living.
I want to see wages and benefits rise in line with a growing economy.
I want to see our hospitals and schools improving as we invest the proceeds of a well-run economy into the things that really count.
I won’t let you down.
This is my pledge to you.
-Tony Abbott campaign launch speech, August 25 2013
Nice words but let’s face it – the Abbott government doesn’t give a shit about you. The evidence is overwhelming.
With one in seven Australians living in poverty, we have a Prime Minister who spends hundreds of billions on defence, security, and buying armaments. We have a Prime Minister who is so stage-managed he refuses to face the electorate on Q&A.
Our Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs has overseen the slashing of funding and the abolition of many successful initiatives that were working towards supporting our Indigenous people and closing the gap. But we have truancy officers aplenty, even if most of them are working for the dole.
We have a treasurer who feels those on welfare, the ‘leaners’, should be the ones to clear the country of debt. His justification for this is that he must cut spending and poor families get more money from the government than the rich, whilst steadfastly refusing to consider raising revenue by cracking down on tax avoidance.
He tells the world that our economy is in good shape while whipping up hysteria here about a non-existent emergency.
After coming to power on the promise of reducing the debt, Hockey has been borrowing so fast the net debt has increased from $178.10 billion when he took over to $217.55 billion at the end of August. PEFO numbers had net debt peaking at $219bn (12.7% of GDP) in 2015/16. The gross debt has risen from $290 billion to $345.035 billion – that’s extra borrowing of about one billion a week.
We have an education minister who has reneged on funding reform for schools, wants to make tertiary courses unaffordable, has closed down trades training centres, has insulted teachers, wasted money on a pointless review, and wants to rewrite history as a Christian crusade.
We have a health minister who is busily unwinding universal healthcare and preventative health agencies and who wants to discourage the poor from seeing a doctor.
On one hand we are warned about the alarming increase in obesity and diabetes, on the other we have the assistant minister for health, at the behest of her junk food lobbyist chief of staff, taking down a healthy food website.
Senator Nash insisted the health star site be pulled down a day after it was published in Febuary on the grounds it was published in error, despite freedom of information documents showing the minister was warned it would be published, and the states committing to spend $11 million on it.
In June, a watered down version of the site was reinstated, with the voluntary introduction period extended to five years from two and companies allowed to use the star ratings in conjunction with the industry’s daily intake guide. They also decided to continue voluntary pregnancy warning labels on alcohol, despite poor uptake by mixed drinks and so-called alcopops. Michael Thorn, the chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research & Education, said it was “disgraceful” and put “booze before babies”.
“The alcohol industry will be celebrating that they have been able to successfully avoid introducing a warning label on their products for almost two decades,” he said.
One of the first steps of the minister for social services, Kevin Andrews, was to wind back gambling reform laws despite recommendations made by the Productivity Commission in its 2010 report into Australia’s gambling industry and the Victorian coroner’s report linking 128 suicides in that state directly to gambling..
This is the man who, along with our employment minister (he of breast cancer/abortion link fame), wants to see young unemployed without any income for 6 months of the year, and for the disabled to get out there and get one of those thousands of jobs that are just waiting for them if only they weren’t such bludgers. He also wants to lower the indexation rate of pensions which will cause the gap in standard of living to widen. All this while cutting $44 million from the capital works program of the National Partnership on Homelessness.
We have an environment minister who wants to cut down Tasmanian old growth forests and expand coal ports and dump sediment on the reef. He has wound back environmental protection laws and the right to appeal and gone on a spree of approving record amounts of fossil fuel production. At the same time, he has overseen the destruction of the renewable energy industry. They don’t even send him to world conferences on climate change because, after all, what could he say other than sorry.
Not content with these overt attacks on the environment, the government has quietly initiated a low key, unscheduled review into Australia’s national appliance energy efficiency standards. The only formal explanation offered to date is in the Energy “Anti-” Green Paper, which refers to “opportunities to reduce the red-tape burden on businesses”.
At least they were honest when our communications minister was appointed to “destroy the NBN” and he has done a damn fine job of it. Despite Tony Abbott’s election speech claim that within 100 days “the NBN will have a new business plan to ensure that every household gains five times current broadband speeds – within three years and without digging up almost every street in Australia – for $60 billion less than Labor,” the truth has emerged.
We will be left with a sub-optimal network, a mishmash of technologies, at a time when the world is increasingly going fibre. It will end up taking nearly as long and costing nearly as much as the all-fibre network it is replacing. The industry – and many around Turnbull – is increasingly realising this. But Turnbull will not budge.
Australia is the loser – all because of one man’s pride.
Scott Morrison, our immigration minister, is about as welcoming as a firing squad. He is like Hymie from Get Smart in his robotic determination to stop the boats at any cost. That goal apparently absolves him from any form of scrutiny, criticism, or human decency. He has a blank cheque and not one cent of it will be used to help refugees.
Despite our growing unemployment, he is also front and centre in providing Gina with her 457 visa workers – no rights, no entitlements, and if they complain they get deported.
Our minister for trade is working in secret, getting signatures on free trade agreements at any cost – it’s the announcement before the end of the year that’s important, not pesky details about tariffs and the fact that we no longer have the right to make our own laws without getting sued by global corporations.
Our attorney-general, the highest legal appointment in the land, thinks defending bigots is a priority. When faced with illegal actions by the government, steal the evidence, threaten journalists with gaol time and funding cuts, and introduce laws which remove official accountability. And while you’re at it, let’s bug the entire nation and make people prove themselves innocent. Even if they haven’t done anything wrong I am sure they have had evil thoughts.
Barnaby was last seen trying to hasten the demise of a few endangered species that are standing in the way of his dams.
Warren Truss is run off his feet planning roads, roads and more roads. Luckily they dumped that idea about releasing cost benefit analyses for any expenditure over $100 million. Thank god we got rid of that pesky head of Infrastructure Australia so we could get someone who understands our idea of what ‘independent body’ means. If the people want public transport they can build it themselves.
And how’s our girl doing? She’s looking tired to me. Making a case for a seat on the Human Rights Council whilst torturing refugees, or being sent in to bat at the world leaders’ conference on climate changed armed with nothing other than a rain forest conference, must shake even asbestos Julie’s steely resolve. The Armani suits and death stare can only get you so far. When in doubt, flirt.
I know you would like a mention Jamie Briggs but for the life of me, the only thing that comes to mind is your fawning introductions for our ‘Infrastructure Prime Minister’….
”To introduce our Tony, is what I’m here to do, and it really makes me happy to introduce to you…the indescribable, the incompatible, the unadorable….. Prrrriiiiimmme Minister!”
Consider the number of shouts and whispers we heard after MH17 went down.
First the crime, then the cover-up. The criminals will be brought to justice. Putin will be held personally responsible for this act of evil. The worst peacetime atrocity in modern history. Putin ‘not welcome’ in Brisbane. Putin to be denied permission to come to Australia. Putin, if he comes here, will be ‘brought to justice’. Hundreds of millions to be spent ‘bringing them home’. A war should be suspended so we can recover the bodies. Hundreds of millions spent while we wait for the war to be suspended. A national day of mourning. A multi-faith service in a Melbourne cathedral for the innocent dead.
None of this, after Gaza, ISIS and Ebola, seems very proportionate any more.
What was clear from the start, that it was an unintended shooting down of a plane that was foolishly in air space over a war zone and mistaken for another plane, seems the case now, like a six-car pile-up on New Year’s Eve, or a Mediterranean ferry sinking in a storm.
And now we have Putin coming to Brisbane. How will he be treated? As a murderous neo-Communist dictator the ICC should put on trial for crimes against humanity? Or as what he is, the world’s most powerful man, one we should treat pretty gingerly?
The politics of the exclamation mark make it difficult for us either to greet him or to shun him. Did he personally order the shooting down of the plane? Of course not. Is his war on Ukraine illegal? Absolutely. Was his takeover of Crimea constitutional? Possibly. Will we be selling him our uranium and beef again soon? Of course we will.
So…?
Abbott and Newman are in a fix of their own making. They are accustomed to dealing with semi-fictional enemies — the wicked people-smuggler, the homegrown crucifying terrorist, the furtive criminal unionist, the heinous Kevin Rudd who personally sent boys into roofs where they were electrocuted — and faced with actual, complex, powerful humans with agendas of their own, they are at a loss as to what to do or say, lest the bad guy … answer back.
It is not beyond the bounds of likelihood that Putin will want to debate Abbott in a public place and Abbott will flee from the encounter. It is not beyond the outskirts of possibility that he will persuade some delegates that Kiev did the shooting-down and doubts will be officially articulated on this score.
But because Abbott, who deals only in menacing fictions, is unprepared for the real Putin and not just a huffing muppet he wanted not to come here, Abbott, the hyperbolist, will have no words to deal with him face to face, as Bob Carr might have done, and engage him in actual conversation. And will look, as he usually does, a fool.
The Abbott adventure gets worse and worse. Kobane will fall and Abbott will be shown to have been forbidden by Baghdad to send help there. Baghdad will fall and ISIL command the former Mesopotamia. The Budget will be rejected and Palmer demand that Hockey be sacked before any more negotiation take place. Abbott will be too weak to sack him and Turnbull will move against him.
It is no joke to say, as I have every other day for eighty-four days, that this is the worst free-elected government in a thousand years on this planet.
And, daily, it gets worse and worse.
Many incidents of violence and harassment directed at Australian Muslims have been reported recently. These are visible confirmation of fears expressed by their community, that support for the government’s…
Many incidents of violence and harassment directed at Australian Muslims have been reported recently. These are visible confirmation of fears expressed by their community, that support for the government’s new security laws and military action in Iraq would be rallied with “racist caricatures of Muslims as backwards, prone to violence and inherently problematic”.
Policing and intelligence operations have focused exclusively on members of the Muslim community. This has contributed to a public backlash against Muslims and supposed Muslims. The immediacy and scale of this outbreak of Islamophobia is alarming.
Australia has emerged as a fertile environment for Islamophobia. Stereotypical representations of Muslims in the early years of the “War on Terror” – which linked terrorism, violence and Islam – gained wide currency by the mid-2000s.
Sections of the news media, politicians and social media have re-activated these stereotypes. Muslim Australians are made to feel they are targets – for everything from the everyday racism encountered in schools and on the streets, to draconian counter-terrorism legislation that restricts civil liberties, to war and the preparations for war.
Social psychological research has shown that when public figures and media endorse negative stereotypes this legitimises prejudicial attitudes. This can influence the translation of such attitudes into discriminatory actions, as we have seen in the recent spate of attacks.
Australia now has several openly Islamophobic far-right social movements and political parties. Until recently these were generally small and operated largely in isolation. However, such groups have begun to collaborate on campaigns.
These groups also appear to be attracting more support from the wider community. The re-emergence of anti-Muslim rhetoric in public discourse has provided legitimisation for their views.
The government also appears to be a political beneficiary of the resurgence in Islamophobia. As national security concerns top the news agenda, pressures on the government on a range of other fronts, particularly the deeply unpopular May budget, have faded into the background.
The increased “terror threat” was followed by rises in the approval rating of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Coalition voting intentions.
The amplification of threats to national security has worked for struggling conservative governments before. In 2001, the Howard government was polling poorly, yet managed to snatch victory later that year. The Coalition election campaign played on racial anxieties and national security fears following the “children overboard” affair and the September 11 terrorist attacks.
In 2010, with the Coalition again languishing in the polls, then opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison sought to replicate this strategy. He urged the shadow cabinet to “capitalise on the electorate’s growing concerns about “Muslim immigration” and Muslims’ “inability to integrate”.
The Prime Minister has not been nearly as forthright in condemning acts of Islamophobia as he has been in denouncing Islamic extremists. He even weighed into the debate to dismiss Muslim community concerns. And Abbott failed to condemn the inflammatory push from within his party for a “burqa ban”.
This is in contrast to the firm and admirable stance taken by Western Australian Premier Colin Barnett. He emphasised that “Australia as a country has a history of respecting different cultures and faiths”. The reported taunting and terrorising of Muslim women and children in Perth was “unacceptable”.
The media is not blameless either, as some journalists have acknowledged. Australian Muslims have consistently identified the media as a central social institution that contributes to their marginalisation and exclusion.
Media reporting has frequently perpetuated stereotypes. It has also failed to reflect the diversity of origins, outlooks and aspirations of Muslim Australians. Journalism of this sort negatively affects other Australians’ perceptions of Islam and the Muslim community.
My research has shown that articles with lower levels of Islamophobia feature the voices of “ordinary” Muslim men and women. They humanise them. Such articles contextualise conflicts and avoid simplistic frameworks such as “good versus evil” or “War on Terror”.
The media can do more to highlight positive efforts by individuals and groups to resist and respond to oppression and conflict. More balanced perspectives can reduce the reinforcing and perpetuation of Islamophobia.
The “newsworthiness” of stories related to Islam and conflict, and the concentration of negative reporting patterns, suggest that adoption of conflict reporting standards could be another key way to curb Islamophobia.
The mass media and our politicians will be central to either exacerbating or stemming Islamophobia. Gestures of support and solidarity from the non-Muslim community, and standing up to racism, are also important.
Combating Islamophobia is vital to the wellbeing of the Muslim community, to wider community cohesion and to limiting recruitment for groups such as Islamic State (ISIS)/Da’ish. To curb Islamophobia, we must contest the political spectacle that gives rise to discriminatory and violent treatment against Muslims by the state and some non-Muslim Australians.
Jerry Brown took California from a real finacial basket case to profit in 3 years.The coalition invented one that didn’t exist and now are facing a self-fulfilling disaster and trying to blame Labour.
Los Angeles’ Skid Row has been home to thousands of homeless Angelenos for decades, but downtown development has started to squeeze the area one longtime resident described as “a giant outside insane asylum.” The city is hoping that a new 102-unit housing complex for the homeless that opened Wednesday can help alleviate the resulting tension between the area’s destitute outsiders and the new-money lofts and restaurants popping up nearby
At ground level, the Star Apartments building holds the new headquarters of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services agency that works on homelessness issues, called the Housing for Health division. The building also holds a gym with a track, a library, a garden, and art studios for residents, according to the Los Angeles Times. Residents pay 30 percent of their income — meaning they pay nothing if they have no income — with city housing funds subsidizing the remainder of the rent cost.
102 prefabricated apartment units are stacked atop the Housing for Health headquarters like children’s blocks. The final product is a modern, eye-catching structure. Seen from the street, the apartments jut out at improbable-looking angles from the ground floor facilities. The interior facing views from the apartments look over a concrete valley strung with cable-edged staircases.
More important than the aesthetics is the good the facility will do for its residents and for Skid Row as a whole. It is three times more expensive to leave homeless people on the street than it is to simply give them housing. The stability that a home provides makes it far easier for homeless people to regain their footing socially, economically, and often medically or psychologically.
This approach to ameliorating homelessness is known among advocates as “permanent supportive housing.” The federal government has begun emphasizing permanent supportive housing in the formulas it uses to divvy up funding for state and local housing authorities, signalling that the largest financial player in the fight against homelessness is putting its weight behind the idea. But despite the evidence that permanent housing with supportive services is not only effective but a cost saver, many cities around the country continue to criminalize homelessness, raise ordinances that make it harder to help the homeless, and experiment with policies that simultaneously raise money for the homeless and push panhandlers out of downtown areas.
In Los Angeles, officials hope to further smooth the Star Apartments’ residents’ reintegration into society by locating key wraparound services directly below the beds where they will sleep and kitchens where they will cook for themselves.
With an estimated 5,000 people living on the streets in Skid Row, the Star Apartments have had to be selective over the past year since the building was ready for occupants. “We want to target the people who are costing the taxpayer the most by not being in housing,” Skid Row Housing Trust executive director Mike Alvidrez told Marketplace last year. That means people who are most prone to ending up in emergency rooms and jails.
The Times interviewed one Star Apartments tenant named Bill Fisher who ended up homeless thanks to health problems and “the death of his life partner” at the age when people with mailing addresses start to get flyers from the AARP. “If somebody had told me 10 years ago I’d lose everything and end up homeless, I’d have said you’re nuts,” Fisher told the paper. He has “decorated his studio apartment with art projects, including antique sheet music, his guitar collection and an orchid suspended from a palm frond.”
The promise the building holds for people like Fisher is not invulnerable, however. Even successful permanent supportive housing programs can be undermined by bureaucratic disputes over funding and jurisdictional lines, as a community of formerly homeless families at the border between Atlanta and Fulton County learned recently when they were forced to relocate by County officials.
Hardliner tells gathering in Sydney’s west that capitalism has failed and criticises US-led campaign in Iraq and Syria
A hardline Islamic leader from a group advocating an Islamic caliphate says Muslims should be ready to make sacrifices to achieve it.
“We believe this world deserves a new world order,” Ismail Al-Wahwah declared at an event headed by the controversial Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation.
More than 200 people attended the lecture at Lakemba in Sydney’s west on Friday night where Al-Wahwah, a sheik from Bankstown, denounced Australia’s involvement in the US-led campaign in Iraq and Syria aimed at fighting Isis extremists.
The crowd was engaged and calm except for a moment of slight tension when an audience member asked the sheik about the penalty under sharia law for a Muslim leaving the Islamic faith.
A 70-year-old woman also hit out at Al-Wahwah for criticising Australian values and told him to stop waving his finger around.
Hizb ut-Tahrir advocates that secular governments be replaced and Muslim-majority countries unite under a global caliphate governed by Islamic law.
Al-Wahwah said capitalism had stopped leading the world and Muslims were ready to make sacrifices.
“If you want to change, you have to pay the price,” the preacher told the lecture – titled The War to End a Blessed Revolution.
Weeks after 16 people were detained in a counterterrorism operation across western Sydney, Al-Wahwah denounced the police officers who burst into the bedrooms of Muslim women in the pre-dawn raids.
Australian civilisation would pay the price for this for a thousand years, he said. “Who is going to fix the harm done to the women?” he asked.
The prime minister, Tony Abbott, said earlier this week that Hizb ut-Tahrir was a deplorable organisation that had an ideology that justified terrorism.
Al-Wahwah shot back and criticised Australia’s involvement in the US-led operation in Iraq.
The issue was not Iraq or Syria but America wanting to control the world, he said.
“This new invasion will kill hundreds of thousands again and the blood will be on the hands of politicians again,” he said.
Meanwhile it was reported that the convicted terrorist Abdul Nacer Benbrika has been influencing jihadist recruits from prison in a quest to become the spiritual leader of a new generation of Australian extremists.
Concerned over his growing influence, authorities have moved him to a different Victorian prison after several of his followers travelled to Syria to fight with the Islamic State group after visiting him in jail, News Corp Australia reported on Saturday.
Quoting security sources, News Corp says authorities believe Benbrika is seeking to model himself on jailed Indonesian cleric Abu Baku Bashir, the spiritual leader of the Bali bombers, who recently embraced Islamic State.
A self-proclaimed Islamic cleric, Algerian-born Benbrika is serving a 15-year jail term for leading a terrorist group in 2005 that talked of attacking Melbourne’s Crown casino and bombing the MCG.
Darwin’s Retta Dixon home was supposed to be a place of God, but that is far from how it was portrayed at a royal commission.
During eight days of hearings in Darwin, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard graphic testimony of what went on at Retta Dixon, a facility that operated from 1946 until 1980.
It was enough to cause some in the gallery of Darwin’s Supreme Court to shudder. Others shed tears.
A child at Retta Dixon who suffered seizures was allegedly tied up like a dog to a bed, and fed on the ground with an enamel plate.
Children at the home were raped, the inquiry heard, including some so badly they were forced to go to hospital where they were watched by their abuser to make sure they did not alert authorities.
One man told the inquiry of having to wear nappies to school as a boy to stop the bleeding after being sexually assaulted.
Other children were allegedly flogged with a belt until they bled.
The facility housed mainly Aboriginal children, including many who identified as being part of the Stolen Generations, and had been taken from their families far away.
It was run by Aborigines Inland Mission, a religious group now known as Australian Indigenous Ministry (AIM).
More tears were shed when the royal commission took those who lived at Retta Dixon down to the site where the buildings once stood.
Alleged victims at Retta Dixon are now looking for answers, hoping to see perpetrators brought to justice and trying to make sure the errors of the past are not repeated.
In the 34 years it operated only one worker at Retta Dixon – Reginald Powell – was ever convicted of crimes allegedly committed there.
Powell admitted molesting a 10-year-old boy and two 13-year-old boys in early 1966, but blamed weariness, work pressures and Darwin’s climate for his actions.
He said in statements to police that the affections of the children were “more or less encouraging” him and after apologising for what he did he was handed a $250, three-year good behaviour bond.
But there were numerous other allegations made over the years.
Scores alone concerned one man – paedophile Donald Bruce Henderson – who worked as a so-called “house parent” at Retta Dixon during the 1960s and 1970s.
“Once I was taken to the old Darwin hospital with a bleeding anus from being abused by Henderson. I was about nine years old.
“I was not allowed to speak to the hospital staff as Henderson was standing next to me.
“Sometimes we had to wear diapers to school so the blood didn’t come out on the school uniform.
“Some of the other kids at school knew and we used to protect each other if the other kids teased us.”
– Kevin Stagg statement to the royal commission
Mr Henderson twice had court action against him for sexually abusing children dropped, once in 1976 and again in 2002.
He was convicted in 1984 of molesting two boys at Darwin’s Casuarina Pool, long after Retta Dixon had closed, but was freed on a $500, two-year good behaviour bond.
A police document showed 86 counts against Mr Henderson that included charges of buggery, sexual assault and indecent assaults between 1966 and 1973, were withdrawn by authorities.
References were made at the royal commission to Mr Henderson adopting two children from Retta Dixon, and a note on a police file indicated the sex offender may have been linked to the YMCA.
Other allegations of sexual assault were levelled against Retta Dixon house parents and by younger kids against older ones.
None of the allegations have so far led to convictions.
The royal commission heard that despite some people who worked at Retta Dixon being concerned about mistreatment of the children, police who spoke to a manager at the facility were told he was unaware of the claims.
Lorna Cubillo, 76, lived in the home for about nine years until she was 16.
She told the commission about being groped by house parent Desmond Walter, and then beaten for refusing to clean his residence.
One of the disturbing allegations from Ms Cubillo was that a friend of hers, Ruth Dooney, was chained up like a dog to her bed, from where she was fed on the ground and forced to use a bucket as a toilet.
“Ruth used to have fits and was chained up with a dog chain to her bed because of the fits,” Ms Cubillo said.
“[She] often had bad chaffing around her ankle where the chain would rub.”
There were numerous other types of mistreatment of children at Retta Dixon described during the royal commission.
One witness, known only as AKV to preserve anonymity, said their sister was punished by being tied up and having faeces rubbed in her face.
“My sister would sometimes be tied to the clothesline, or have faeces rubbed in her face, maybe just for looking at Ms Parker the wrong way. [The sister] was very young at the time. I remember one time she was deliberately burnt with hot water by Ms Parker.”
– Evidence from AKV to royal commission
Several witnesses talked about being physically abused.
Ms Cubillo said she was usually hit with a belt across the legs as punishment.
She told the commision that when she was 14 years old, house parent Desmond Walter made her bleed.
“He hit me on the legs, hands and back. He hit me with the buckle end of the belt and it cut me on my breast, near the nipple,” Ms Cubillo said.
Another witness at the hearing, 64-year-old Sandra Kitching, said as punishment for confronting a house parent she was stripped of some of her clothes and chained up in a spare room by a house parent called Mr Pounder.
The royal commission heard details of how allegations against Mr Henderson took a long time to be investigated and, despite solid evidence to support the charges, they were dropped by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
Former police detective Roger Newman began his investigation into Mr Henderson in the late 1990s and came under fire in the commission for taking too long to find out that Mr Henderson had abused other children in the past.
John Lawrence SC, who represented some of Mr Henderson’s alleged victims, grilled the former policeman for not following up witnesses for statements.
“That wasn’t something, that wasn’t the line of inquiry that I was following and if I’ve made a mistake now, so be it,” Mr Newman said in evidence.
The inquiry also heard that once the investigation had been completed there were problems with the way it was handled by the DPP’s office.
Current NT magistrate Michael Carey worked as general counsel to the DPP in November 2002.
He was the one who at the time gave pivotal advice that saw charges against Mr Henderson dropped, shortly before the trial.
“In my view there is no prospect of having this matter go before the jury, let alone obtaining a conviction.”
– Former general counsel to DPP (now NT magistrate) Michael Carey in 2002 memo
At the royal commission he said he had no “independent recollection” of the advice, which he admitted did not meet prosecutor guidelines.
The guidelines showed it should have had a reference or analysis for new trials for Mr Henderson, and include references to Mr Henderson’s history as a convicted sex offender.
Neither of those were done.
The advice was contentious as the 15 allegations against Mr Henderson had already passed the committal stage of the court action, meaning they were found to have enough evidence to take to trial.
Mr Carey also admitted the decision in 2002 was made within 24 hours of getting the file on Mr Henderson but could not explain why it was done in such haste.
Commission chair Justice Peter McClellan said there was “crystal clear” evidence to support charges against Mr Henderson.
“In these cases from what you have read there was plainly evidence to support the charges.”
– Royal commission chair Peter McClellan to current NT DPP Jack Karczewski
The NT’s current DPP, Jack Karczewski QC, said if the charges came before him, he would pursue them.
Some alleged victims of Retta Dixon say they are determined to get redress for what they went through, and are seeking fresh charges to be laid against Mr Henderson.
At least one was angry alleged perpetrators did not appear, and thought they were getting off too easily.
After the royal commission wrapped up its Darwin hearings a group formally complained to police to try to get new charges against Mr Henderson laid.
The ABC understands that an NT policeman with the Sex Crimes section sat in on some of the commission hearings, and has been in touch with at least one alleged victim.
Some people who were housed at Retta Dixon are also seeking financial compensation.
The commission heard that one former Retta Dixon resident has been paid nearly $27,000 for abuse suffered in 1975, although the money was said to be for events unrelated to their time at the home.
There is nothing to stop alleged victims at Retta Dixon from claiming Victims of Crime compensation, even though their allegations have not been proved in court.
Such claims are decided on the balance of probabilities, not the tougher test of beyond reasonable doubt, which court cases rely on for convictions.
Some former Retta Dixon residents have pointed the finger at AIM, which ran the home, and want them to pay compensation.
The current head AIM, Reverend Trevor Leggott, apologised at the royal commission for the sexual and physical abuse people suffered at Retta Dixon, but has indicated his group cannot offer money to the victims.
He said to do so would jeopardise the group’s current work.
“I know there can be recompense in terms of money, but I know the hurt that has been caused to these people is not going to be fixed by money.”
– Reverend Trevor Leggott, general director of AIM
Documents handed to the inquiry showed AIM had net assets of about $4.4 million last year.
Some have said the assets should be sold off to pay for compensation claims, but Reverend Leggott indicated properties were mostly held by trusts and local churches, not by AIM itself.
The inquiry also heard that the Commonwealth Government, not AIM, may have been ultimately responsible for the welfare of children at Retta Dixon.
Other legal options being considered involve civil action against the 78-year-old Mr Henderson.
At the royal commission Reverend Leggott said the proceedings had driven the name of his organisation into the ground.
The Retta Dixon home was levelled by Cyclone Tracy in 1974 and the site where the facility once stood is now a fairly barren public park.
A group of Retta Dixon survivors say they will push to have the land returned to them.
I never broke my toys. I would tell on people rather than hit back. The only thing I threw was a ball. I would play the piano and sing loud, though I did learn to shout during adolescence. Swearing is something I try to avoid, without success lately.
I have this primeval feeling welling up inside me. I need to release it somehow.
I could scream but that would only vent temporarily.
What I really want to do is have a chat with Tony Abbott, in person.
My first step would be to physically usher Peta Credlin out of the room. I cannot tell you how much it makes my blood boil to see her seated at the table in all our negotiations with world leaders.
GET OUT OF THE ROAD AND LET THE EXPERTS HAVE THE SEAT.
My next step would be to shove Tony into a chair while I stood over him and explained.
STOP COUNTING ON YOUR FUCKING FINGERS.
STOP SPEAKING IN SLOGANS.
STOP BEING FILMED SITTING AT TABLES WITH GENERALS WITH BIG SIZED MAPS OR TREASURERS WITH BIG SIZED GRAPHS.
STOP TAKING PHOTOGRAPHERS AND JAMES PACKER WITH YOU OVERSEAS INSTEAD OF DELEGATES.
STOP MEETING WITH MURDOCH INSTEAD OF 120 WORLD LEADERS INCLUDING OBAMA.
STOP USING PHOTO OPPORTUNITIES WEARING LAB COATS TO PAY FOR YOUR SOCIAL FUNCTIONS.
STOP CLAIMING PAYMENT FOR YOUR CHARITY WORK AND SPORTING EVENTS.
STOP LYING ABOUT THE DEBT AND DEFICIT.
STOP TORTURING CHILDREN FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR EGO.
STOP THE DESPARATE GRAB FOR THE LAST CENT THAT CAN BE WRUNG FROM COAL.
STOP IGNORING THE SCIENTISTS.
STOP SACKING CLEVER PEOPLE TO HIRE FOOLS LIKE MAURICE NEWMAN.
STOP STRIPPING MONEY FROM EDUCATION AND RESEARCH.
STOP ATTACKING PREVENTATIVE HEALTH MEASURES.
STOP CUTTING FOREIGN AID – IT’S CHEAPER THAN WARS.
STOP PRETENDING WE ARE A MILITARY POWER AND START USING OUR STRENGTHS OF HUMANITARIAN AID, DISASTER RELIEF, SEARCH AND RESCUE, AND REBUILDING.
STOP THREATENING THE ABC.
STOP GAGGING JOURNALISTS AND PUBLIC SERVANTS AND PEOPLE WHO WORK WITH ASYLUM SEEKERS.
STOP HIDING THINGS – BLUE BOOKS, OSB, FOI CHANGES, ACCESS TO DETENTION CAMPS.
STOP TRASHING OUR INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION – COLOSSAL FOSSIL, CARBON CARTELS, BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN UAE BUT NOT WEST AFRICA, CUTS TO FOREIGN AID AND GREEN FUND, REFUGEES
STOP DESTROYING OUR NATURAL WONDERS.
STOP ATTACKING OUR MOST VULNERABLE.
STOP INCITING FEAR AND DIVISION IN OUR COMMUNITY WITH OVER THE TOP RAIDS BY HUNDREDS OF MEN IN BALACLAVAS. (beware of teenagers bearing plastic swords).
And most of all Tony……
STOP TREATING ME LIKE A NAIVE CHILD.
You need to expand your circle of advice and stop neutering those who try to tell you the truth like the Climate Change Authority and the Human Rights Commission and the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO and ACOSS to name a few.
Divine inspiration belonged to the job you decided not to pursue. Recall how Judas has been remembered? He betrayed someone he loved for money.
Tony Abbott wants to push “preachers of hate” red card legislation through Parliament.
He announces the plan with Alan Jones on 2GB.
Alan Jones, is the man who has repeatedly faced court over claims he incited the Cronulla race riots with his own on air hate speech and who launched a vicious attack on Julia Gillard based on the demise of her father. Who called for public the country’s prime minister ‒ amongst other public figures ‒ to be drowned at sea in a chaff bag.
This should be something that is overseen by a completely independent panel and has representatives from all cultures, religions and minority groups taking part.This is far too important an issue to let it be overrun by a blinkered, hypocritical rightwing agenda.
It is the same crowd that only recently, reluctantly, backed down on its election promise to amend the Racial Discrimination Act to allow people to promulgate racial hatred and bigotry. Abbott sought to give a green light to rather than a red card were Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt. How handy, then, to be discussing hate speech on the Alan Jones programme — they are the experts.
When Geert Wilders who famous follower Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011; came here Andrew Bolt, Cory Bernardi and burqa banning George Christiansen gave him the red carpet not the red card.
“Under the law that we are bringing through the Parliament, hopefully before the end of the year, it will be an offence to promote terrorism ‒ not just to engage in terrorism ‒ but to promote terrorism.”
Abbott believes a “preacher of hate” is someone who promotes terrorism, not someone who is on a soapbox making speeches designed to promote intolerance, hatred, discrimination and ignorant bigotry.
Preacher of hate Alan Jones used the Abbott interview to preach some hatred about an Islamic organisation he wanted banned.The group is called Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Banning hasn’t exactly worked a treat for bikie gangs, Banning an organisation won’t suddenly change its members’ beliefs, indeed it would seem more likely to antagonise the membership.
It is starkly ironic that the same people arguing for greater freedom of speech when it came to the Racial Discrimination Act are the same ones wanting less freedom of speech for those whose views they find objectionable. Hypocrisy writ large.
If it was a criminal offence to preach hate in Australia, maybe we would see less comments from those seeking to promote class warfare by branding people such as the disabled, pensioners, single parents and the unemployed as “leaners” (or bludgers), claiming they are parasites on society while others do the “heavy lifting”.There is no doubt that hate speech is a current and relevant topic and something our laws need to consider.
They have declared that the Prime Ministerial Indigenous Advisory Council led by Bandjalung man Warren Mundine is not only an embarrassment to First People but it is an insult to suggest itself as an advisory body representative of the First People of this continent. According to these icons of the freedom and rights struggles, the Indigenous Advisory Council, now one-year-old, has abysmally failed First People.
The National Summit will be held in November with a call out to all the legitimate representatives of First People to attend. It is expected that from the Summit an Assembly of First People representatives will be formed. There will be a representative for each Country speaking to their issues and hopes. This Assembly will then head to Canberra in the anticipation that the Federal Government – the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Tony Abbott will meet with them.
“It will not be possible for Prime Minister Abbott to refuse to meet with the duly elected representatives of every Aboriginal region of this land. To reject meeting with an Assembly of all our people, of all the people of this land, would be an insulting slap to the face to all our people, past, present and future. It would be an unbelievable act of racism,”
said Mr Sansbury, chair of the Narrunga People.
“The Indigenous Advisory Council has only one option, and that is to resign. If they have any dignity left, they should resign immediately. It is one year in office and they have not delivered a single outcome for Aboriginal people anywhere in the nation.”
“If you want to remain credible in the eyes of Aboriginal people you take the bottom-up approach, you elect people from the communities to represent their people. You do not do this handpicked approach of ‘advisers’ as the Prime Minister has, picking people only who will say and do the Government’s bidding.”
“Government is now a threat to small communities. They are looking at closing them down, moving people on into other hardships. This has been disastrous thus far, creating many social problems.”
“This whole agenda of moving our people around is what has led to so many of the current problems, the poverty, the arrests, the suicides.”
These three seasoned stalwarts of the First Peoples rights struggle each have more than forty years of fighting for their people. Now, they are bringing together representatives from all over the continent. In my travels around the continent of late, as word spreads of what these gentlemen are doing there is a buzz and people saying this is the way it should have been all along. If the Assembly of First Peoples arises from the National Summit many already believe it will be significantly historic, hugely supported and more than likely arrive as the greatest challenge this Government will face “in having to at long-last at least deal with our people.”
So Joe Hockey is telling us that we can’t afford to go to war and Tony Abbott is telling us that we can. Joe Hockey is the more persistent of the two, today telling us that Labor needed to pass stalled budget measures to pay for Iraq war.
To Bill Shorten’s credit he asked Tony Abbott whether he backed Joe Hockey’s comments. There was, of course, no response. Tony Abbott would have looked a fool if he had answered the question, and still manages to look like a fool for remaining silent. Perhaps, in future, before he talks about our fiscal position he might want to confer with the Treasurer. Whilst I have no confidence in the Treasurer (or the PM) it would be a big plus if they trumpeted a consistent message. Seriously, do these fools know what they’re doing?
As you can see it’s easy to assume that the Bible might have been talking about these too men with the quote, which I will repeat:
The mouths of fools are their ruin; they trap themselves with their lips.
I am also unable to comprehend why the media in this country hasn’t asked the same simple questions as Bill Shorten. One says we can afford to go to war, while the other says we can’t. And the media swallow each comment without even thinking of saying; “Hang on, the other day the Prime Minister/Treasurer said . . . “.
But can these fools ever be trapped with their lips while the media allows them to flap them about so thoughtlessly?
Prime Minister Tony Abbott is being urged to “correct” his Treasurer Joe Hockey, who has said the Labor opposition should pass stalled budget measures if it is “honest” about supporting the Iraq mission and its associated costs.
Mr Abbott on Thursday was asked several times whether he backed Mr Hockey’s comments, but he declined and instead praised Labor’s leader Bill Shorten for his bipartisan approach to the military action against Islamic State extremists.
Mr Shorten said he was “extremely disappointed” Mr Hockey had “chosen to make the Iraq intervention a source of political point-scoring”.
Speaking earlier in Washington, Mr Hockey said the Australian government would reveal how it would fund the Iraq mission, which is estimated to be roughly $500 million a year, in the December budget update.
However, the Treasurer said if Mr Shorten was “honest” about his promise of bi-partisan support for Australia’s mission in Iraq, he would pass budget measures currently stalled in Parliament.
“We will spend what we need to spend to defend the nation,” Mr Hockey said.
“Given that we spend tens of billions of dollars each year on defence we have the capacity to deliver what we say we are going to deliver and it’s another good reason for Mr Shorten to immediately pass the remaining measures in the budget.
“Everything comes at a cost and if Bill Shorten truly is honest about his commitment to deliver bipartisan support in relation to our defence efforts in the Middle East he’ll provide bi-partisan support to pay for it,” he said.
While Mr Abbott on Thursday declined to back his Treasurer’s call, the opposition’s treasury spokesman Chris Bowen attacked the tactic as “disgraceful” and “blackmail”.
“Just when you think Joe Hockey can’t stoop any lower, there he is. Australians won’t be blackmailed into supporting this unfair budget,” Mr Bowen said.
“It is simply disgraceful that Joe Hockey is trying to link his failed budget with national security. Under no circumstances should our international obligations be used to justify the cuts or taxes in this budget,” he said.
Mr Shorten said Australians would “see through this political game”.
“Under no circumstances should our intervention be used as a source to justify hurting Australian people through this unfair budget and the cuts and raised taxes which flow through it,” he said.
Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek also said it was “incredibly poor taste” that the Treasurer had attempted to politicise the bipartisan mission.
Speaking a short time after Mr Hockey’s media conference, Mr Abbott thrice declined to back his Treasurer’s call and said Labor should devise its own budget strategy if it wanted to continue rejecting the government’s.
“To his great credit Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has been very, very bipartisan on this,” he said on 3AW.
“I’ve had numerous conversations with Bill about this and he is an Australian patriot.
“I want our budget measures to be passed by the Parliament, I accept that the opposition is absolutely entitled to come to its own position on our budget measures…if the Labor party doesn’t want to support our budget measures I think they should come up with their own alternative measures.”
He also failed to endorse the Treasurer’s call during a later press conference in Sydney.
Mr Abbott earlier this week ruled out introducing a tax to pay for the Iraq mission.
The prime minister,Tony Abbott, has praised Labor’s support for military intervention in Iraq, distancing himself from his treasurer, Joe Hockey, who questioned the value of bipartisanship on the issue when the opposition would not pass the budget.
As Australia carried out its first air strike on an Islamic State target in Iraq, Hockey demanded that the federal opposition pass the budget in order to allow the government to meet the costs of the conflict, expected to run to hundreds of millions.
But during a morning radio interview, and at a press conference later on Thursday, Abbott declined to endorse Hockey’s remarks, pointing instead to co-operation between the major parties on the Middle East conflict to date.
Labor however moved to capitalise on Hockey’s untidy intervention. The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said the prime minister should “correct his treasurer”.
“Joe Hockey probably thought he was being clever, creating this political issue. Well it’s not,” Shorten said in Melbourne. “Every time Joe Hockey opens his mouth now he says something silly.”
“Australians will see through this political game. Under no circumstances should our intervention in Iraq be used as a source to justify hurting Australian people through this unfair budget – and the cuts and raised taxes which flow from it.”
Shorten went to a matter of policy contention within the Coalition: declaring that if the government needed additional resources to fund Australia’s military operations, it should dump the prime minister’s signature paid parental leave scheme.
Coalition MPs have continued to speak out against the generous scheme – arguing the money would better be directed elsewhere.
“Why don’t they actually go after the multinationals they’ve gone soft on?” Shorten said “There are plenty of measures that this government could do if it really is the crisis that Joe Hockey says it is.”
Hockey had told reporters in Washington that the costs associated with Australia’s military intervention were another reason Labor should “immediately pass the remaining measures in the budget”.
“Everything comes at a cost and if Bill Shorten truly is honest about his commitment to deliver bipartisan support in relation to our defence efforts in the Middle East he’ll provide bipartisan support to pay for it,” he said.
Earlier in the week, the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, declined to rule out raising taxes to pay for the conflict, but the prime minister stepped in on Tuesday to do so.
Abbott, speaking on Fairfax Radio on Thursday, would not link passing the budget and paying for the Iraq contribution, despite being given several opportunities to do so by his host, Neil Mitchell.
Abbott said Shorten had been a “patriot” on Iraq, and had been concerned to address the threats posed by Islamic State.
On the subject of the budget, the prime minister said it remained incumbent on Labor to suggest alternative savings or revenue measures to ensure long-term fiscal sustainability if the opposition did not like the government’s approach. Abbott also accused Labor of playing politics on unpopular measures such as the GP co-payment.
At a media event later in the day, Abbott said: “What is important is that the opposition continues to support our mission in Iraq and the Middle East.”
“Obviously there’s a lot of things that the government and the opposition disagree [about] but when it comes to national security it’s good that we stand shoulder to shoulder together.”
Kobanê, a small Kurdish town on the Syrian-Turkish border, has now become the ultimate test of Turkey’s ambivalence on how to engage the so-called Daesh in the rapidly worsening situation in Syria and Iraq.
The town is under siege from Daesh and fighters from the Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party) are desperately holding on. It is not likely that the ongoing US air strikes will be effective in preventing Kobanê from falling into Daesh hands and it is not yet clear whether Turkey is really ready to intervene militarily.
That hesitancy has already stirred trouble in Turkey’s anxious Kurdish population, with unrest and demonstrations spreading across several cities and reports of multiple clashes with police.
Considering what is at stake here for Turkey’s domestic politics and regional security interests though, it is perhaps not surprising that Turkey is having trouble making up its mind.
This is largely because of the hugely complex web of relationships between the five main actors – Daesh, PYD, PKK (the Kurdish armed group that has been waging a bloody conflict against the Turkish state since the early 1980s), the Assad government in Syria and the Free Syrian Army (the main opposition group against Assad).
And aside from the intractably fraught relationships they have with each other, these five all present deep individual problems for Turkey.
Let’s start with the Syrian regime, which was one of the main supporters of the PKK in the region until the capture of Abdullah Öcalan in 1999. It also played a key role in turning Daesh into the rich and strong armed group it is today, apparently buying its oil through middlemen and releasing radical Islamist militants as far back as 2011 from Syrian prisons.
Turkey has long since burned all its diplomatic bridges with Damascus and it now sees no option to protect its long-term interests but the full removal of the Assad regime. This is largely why Turkey has been insisting on the creation of a no-fly zone (most likely to be the 36th Parallel again, as was the case for the protection of Kurds in Iraq during the 1990s), as this would be the only way to stop Bashar al-Assad bombing the Free Syrian Army.
The problem is that Turkey seems to be more or less the only state demanding that. And even if it was granted its wish, it still would not trust its Western allies’ intentions for Syria’s future.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s relationships with the PYD are even more murky. Salih Muslim, the co-chair of the party, was in Ankara only days before the Kobanê offensive came to a head asking for logistical and military support.
In return for its support, Turkey demanded that the PYD join the ranks of the Free Syrian Army against the Assad regime, which it has no intention of doing. Until now, the PYD has been quite content in its relationship with Damascus; Bashar al-Assad seems hardly bothered by the possibility of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Syria and is more concerned with retaining a hold on power. With its relative security assured for now, the PYD has no reason to make such a major tactical switch.
Unlike Syria, Turkey is highly sensitive about the PYD’s possible demand for an autonomous presence in northern Syria, which could have major implications for its own domestic Kurdish crisis – forcing Ankara’s hand in negotiations over possible Kurdish territories in Turkey.
Turkey is under massive pressure from the PKK and Kurdish political groups to resume a formal peace process no later than the Kurds’ October 15 deadline. The Kurdish pressure to intervene militarily is also mounting largely because the Daesh has been inflicting huge damages on both PYD and PKK.
Daesh therefore has not just become a major security threat for Turkey across its borders with Syria and Iraq, but has also thrown off the delicately calibrated power balance between Ankara and the PKK just before the start of full peace talks.
But even so, ever since securing the release of 49 diplomats and their families from the hands of Daesh in late September, Turkey is in a better position to consider a military intervention. The US-led alliance also recognises that without the deployment of ground forces, air strikes cannot fully destroy IS.
All this puts Turkey is in a strong position to argue that the increasingly likely full-blown military intervention in Syria should not only target Daesh, but should also remove the Assad regime once and for all. And it may just get its wish.
As an early signal of support for that strategy, NATO has recently declared that it will not hesitate to protect Turkey, while the Turkish parliament has already approved a motion allowing cross-border military incursions into both Iraq and Syria.
The Turkish government is in a bind. On the one hand, it needs to respond to Kurdish demands to help Kobanê – if it doesn’t there is a real risk that the entire peace process in the country could collapse. On the other hand, the general public is highly sceptical about direct military intervention, fearing that Turkey would find itself in a deep quagmire.
This is indeed a major risk. After all, the West’s attempts to deal with the civil war in Syria and previously with the basket case that is Iraq have been highly patchy, largely ad hoc and more confusing than anything else. The fight against IS might be a priority for Barack Obama today, but Turkish fears of being left to pick up the pieces for decades to come are very real.
Even so, to reassure their erstwhile partners in the region that this is a sincere campaign, American politicians are trotting out the old mantra that “this is a campaign that will take months and years, not days and weeks”. That is good to know, as far as it can be trusted.
But in Middle Eastern politics, as in world affairs in general, even a day is long enough for priorities, interests and alliances to shift beyond recognition. The Kurds, and the residents of Kobanê, know that all too well.
The prime minister told the Alan Jones radio program on Wednesday morning Australians were permitted to “say stupid things” but the government should act to prevent people from overseas entering the country to stir up trouble.
“I am sorry we haven’t red-carded these hate preachers before but it will happen and it will happen quickly. We should have a system in place that red cards these hate preachers.”
The prime minister said Australian law only allowed groups to be proscribed if they were terrorist organisations, not if they campaigned against “Australian values.”
Under the law that we are bringing through the parliament hopefully before the end of the year it will be an offence to promote terrorism.
“what we don’t want is people coming to this country to peddle an extreme and alien ideology.”
“No one does Australia or indeed Islam any favours by conflating Islam with extremism,” he said.
Will this shut Andrew Bolt up?
Were it legal, I’d open a book on conscription being introduced before the 44th Parliament finally faces the voters. It’s what Tories do.
They’ll creep it up. The sequence goes: advisors, air-drops, air-strikes, regular army, conscripts.
On 5 November 1964, Coalition Prime Minister Robert Menzies introduced National Service aimed at boosting army numbers to 33,000 by 1966 to address a perceived weakness against the Asian Communists.
The National Service Act (1964) required 20 year-old males, ‘if selected’, to serve two years in the regular army plus three years in the reserves.
In March 1966, Coalition Prime Minister Harold Holt announced National Servicemen would be sent to Vietnam to fight with units of the regular army.
The Coalition’s answer to the ‘if selected’ question was a grotesque, almost medieval, ritual — a bastard cross of casino and death.
365 marbles, each marked with one day of the year, were placed in a barrel. If your birthday came out, it was the jungle for you. Happy Birthday!
Abbott is better placed. By denying unemployed young men any form of social support, he’s got a ready, albeit half-starving, pool of young Australian men to sacrifice on the altar of Mars.
Howard, notwithstanding the contempt in which he should be held for conspiring to create the state of mind that is ISIS, resisted the urge to conscript for Iraq or Afghanistan. It was bit like a man fighting back a Tourette’s symptom, but Australia had no appetite at the time and Howard was the consummate political animal. You could see him chafing though.
The U.S. was not so constrained. They didn’t need conscription for the War on Terror. They had a pool of poor, unemployed young people with no prospects whatsoever unless they joined the military. Many joined because it was the only way they could obtain an otherwise unfeasibly expensive college degree. Others so they could eat. Others to have their teeth fixed.
We are told our current escapade in the Levant is going to be a long war, though it’s not really a war because we don’t recognise ISIS as a state and so we can’t declare war on it. It’s an operation. A long operation.
It has already dawned on the Coalition that the best way to deal with the unemployed is to kill them. Then glorify them. Then use contrived media to entice other young men to their deaths.
Get ready for the body bags draped in flags
Family targeted in Sydney’s anti-terrorism raids launches legal action
EXCLUSIVE
The mother and her two sons are filing a lawsuit.
The mother and her two sons are filing a lawsuit. Photo: Janie Barrett
Mohamed woke to the sound of his mother screaming.
Men in balaclavas with bright flashlights had bashed the door in at 4.30am and dragged Amatuallah out of bed without giving her a chance to cover herself.
Mohamed, 15, and his brother Omar, 14, were handcuffed while police searched their south-west Sydney home for 12 hours.
“They bought in dogs to smell the place, they bought in metal detectors, they scratched the doors, they dug up the backyard, they looked through all the books and they found nothing,” Mohamed said. “Even if they found one thing, they would have charged us.”
Advertisement
The family of three will launch a civil suit in the NSW Supreme Court this week claiming they were brutally and unfairly targeted during counter-terrorism raids in Sydney last month.
Their home was one of 16 raided by state and federal police before dawn on September 18 but they were not detained or charged and they still have not been told why they were targeted.
The family’s claim of heavy-handedness is one of several arising from the largest-ever counter-terrorism raids, which netted just one suspect.
Mohamed said he wants a police officer who punched his mother to be charged. He claimed his mother tried to stop an officer from ripping her bed sheets off and was assaulted in the process.
“What really burns me from inside was hearing my mum screaming and seeing her in pain and not being able to do anything. I will remember that forever,” he said.
“My mum has covered herself all her life and all of a sudden someone punches her because she didn’t want to expose her body.”
The family have used aliases and concealed their identities to protect themselves from further backlash.
Mohamed said their neighbours have stopped talking to them and he and his brother are scared to return to school this week because they do not know how students will react.
He is even worried the unwanted attention might affect his job prospects.
Police took away the family’s laptops and mobile phones and Mohamed has not been able to complete holiday assignments before school returns.
“I’m an Australian boy, I was bred here, I’ve lived in this house for 11 years, I don’t know any other country,” he said. “Every time I go to bed I’m afraid that I will wake up at 4.30am with police over my head and handcuffs on my hands.”
Zali Burrows, the family’s lawyer, has enlisted barrister Clive Evatt to launch legal action. A complaint was made to an independent police observer at the raid who told Ms Burrows that an incident report would be provided.
A spokesman for the NSW police, who executed the search warrant, said they were not aware of any formal complaints.
“However if one is received it will be investigated thoroughly,” the spokesman said.
It’s believed Amatuallah’s family were targeted because of loose family links to a man charged with foreign incursion offences, yet they are adamant they are a law-abiding family with no links to terrorism.
Others swept up in the raids have also challenged their inclusion. Marsfield labourer Mustafa Dirani, 21, who was detained then released, said he had never even contemplated religious extremism.
Kawa Alou claims he had his nose broken and Maywand Osman suffered serious bruising on his face.
One man, Omarjan Azari, was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act after allegedly speaking via phone to terrorist Mohammed Ali Baryalei, who told him to behead a stranger.
It seems our government has learnt nothing.
Captain Abbott of Team Australia is perhaps in need of a reminder of George Santayana’s well known saying, often repeated by others, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
I’m old enough to remember the Vietnam War, and how that tragic conflict began with the provision of logistic support, followed by advisers, training, and back up of South Vietnamese forces and then the provision of Australian combat troops.
For the not-so old, and equally disastrously, in 2003, and with the false justification from flawed intelligence, Australia followed the USA into a disastrous war in Iraq.
The result was nearly 5000 coalition troops and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and a less stable nation than it was before the “coalition of the willing” attacked.
And we are still reaping the consequences, 11 years later.
As the Sydney Morning Herald headlined, ‘Abbott has learnt nothing from history’ as he commits Australia not only to humanitarian aid, but also to military equipment, and has not ruled out combat troops..
We have all seen the atrocities emerging from Iraq, as the brutal ISIS commit horrific acts of barbarism in an attempt to fill the power vacuum years of strife and instability in the region has created.
But Western nations sending in armed forces, without a specific mission, with no clear objective and no end in sight, is how we ended up here.
That’s why the Greens’ bill to require a vote of parliament to send our servicemen and women to war (Senator Scott Ludlam Media Release 3 September) seems eminently appropriate to me.
To leave such an important decision up to the prime minister is surely not right.
To commit a nation to any warlike activity surely needs to be a democratic decision.
Other nations across the world, by either law or convention, require their parliament to approve the deployment of troops to war.
In the USA it’s a vote of Congress.
In the UK it’s a vote in the House of Commons.
In Germany it’s the Bundestag.
Parliamentarians here speak at great length about the magnitude of such a decision. And they’re right.
It’s precisely for that reason that these decisions should be scrutinised and debated, and the MPs held accountable for their decision by their electors.
And on top of confirming for the first time that Washington has made a “general request” for more military help from Australia in Iraq, Mr Tony Abbott told Parliament on Wednesday that Australia was considering sending “civil and military capacity-building assistance” to Ukraine.
Perhaps that is why Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was, last week, hobnobbing with presidents, prime ministers and military chiefs at the NATO meeting in Wales.
And there I was thinking she was in need of a geography lesson, having confused the South Pacific with the North Atlantic.
And as John Birmingham wrote, “War drums muffle unrest back home”.
Australia has been propagandized.
At the same time, however, Hayden said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — “the highest standard we can meet,” he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.
The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said in an email. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”
There’s a strong whiff of hypocrisy about this new standard for collateral damage.
The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for pursuing an air campaign that cannot possibly destroy the Islamic State. If that is a strategy with limited efficacy, what is the moral argument for continuing to employ it when civilian casualties result? It is one thing when a strategy is well-designed to achieve a specific military objective but quite another when it is not. Obama now is being severely criticized by Isreael. However does anybody even consider that they are all wrong? ISIS hasn’t launched any attacks on American targets (yet), but just the mere potential apparently allows Obama to jettison the same standard he applied to Israel while our ally was under direct and continuous attacks that qualify as war crimes in any sense of the word — from an Islamist terror network not dissimilar at all to ISIS.
The decision not to put a force of ground troops to push ISIS off its ground guarantees that we will create collateral damage like this for months and years to come. If the mission is to “degrade and destroy ISIS” while they remain embedded in these cities and towns, there is no other possible outcome than massive civilian casualties. ISIS will not withdraw under air attack to the desert where they can get bombed and strafed into oblivion, after all, and without ground forces, we won’t have the means to hold any ground we might liberate anyway. Nor will we have the specific intelligence needed to avoid mistakes that happen in any war.
Remember this name Tony Abbott you voted for him I didn’t. He will kill not some “devil cult” but he will kill a lot of families like yours and mine.
After average results at university and an uninspiring football career, with the help of the Jesuit network, Tony headed off to Oxford to take up his Rhodes Scholarship. It only took a couple of games for him to be dropped from the rugby team with suggestions that his prowess had been somewhat exaggerated. Tony was strong on physicality but short on speed or finesse.
Student politics at Sydney University saw Tony, a callow youth straight from a Catholic boys’ school, given a platform to preach loud and long in his opposition to homosexuality and feminism. Further, he denounced contraception, labelling it part of the “me now” mentality. Ironically, whilst eschewing the use of contraception, Tony was an avid partaker of “me now” activities, if not the responsibility that went with them.
Tony Abbott is only one man, but this man’s unwavering belief in his own judgemnt has seen him surround himself with advisers who tell him what he wants to hear. Experts are sacked, independent advisory panels disbanded, oversight and freedom of information curtailed, journalists and the National Broadcaster threatened.
In the space of a year we have gone from world leaders in action on climate change to being called the “Saudi Arabia of the Pacific”.
‘In the year since they took office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Liberal-led coalition have already dismantled the country’s key environmental policies. Now they’ve begun systematically ransacking its natural resources. In the process, they’ve transformed Australia from an international innovator on environmental issues into quite possibly the dirtiest country in the developed world.’
Instead of looking forward to every home being connected to the NBN and school funding bridging the gap of disadvantage and inequity, we have record numbers of new coal mines to enjoy. Instead of universal healthcare and unemployment benefits, we see people on pensions feeling very afraid about their future. Instead of affordable tertiary education and housing, we see places being sold to the highest bidder.
We have moved from bringing our troops home from Afghanistan, to a war in Iraq and Syria that will inevitably lead to civilian casualties and destruction of homes and infrastructure, a move that has seen us specifically named for revenge attacks. The “humanitarian mission” line has been exposed for the lie it always was.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who formerly worked in intelligence, has accused the federal government of exploiting fears about terrorism to rush through new national security laws that push Australia towards a “police state“.
“It is clearly overreach by the security services who have basically been invited to write an open cheque. And the government, which wants to beat its chest and look tough on national security, said, ‘We’ll sign that’.”
The laws include jail terms of up to 10 years for journalists who disclose details of ASIO “special intelligence operations” and provide immunity from criminal prosecution for intelligence officers who commit a crime in the course of their duties.
Tony has great power but no sense of responsibility. He has confidence but no conscience. He has determination but no commitment. He is willing but lacks the skills. He attacks and blames but resents oversight and has never accepted accountability, and this is what scares me most.
The consequences of being wrong could/will be catastrophic and I don’t share Tony’s confidence that he, Maurice Newman and Cardinal Pell have all the answers.
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
― Thomas Paine
German Chancellor’s adviser on climate policy: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Photo: Scott Morton
A lead adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy has attacked Australia’s complacency on global warming and described the Abbott government’s championing of the coal industry as an economic “suicide strategy”.
He said calling for continued coal use was not only poor climate policy, it made little sense economically when the rest of the world was turning to renewable energy.
“China will soon come up to peak coal consumption,” he said.
“Other Asian economies might peak even sooner.
“It’s almost a suicide strategy for the Australian economy.”
His comments come after countries savaged Australia’s performance at a special climate summit of world leaders in New York last week, where US President Barack Obama said combatting global warming was a joint effort by all nations and “nobody gets a pass”.
Germany, one of the world’s biggest producers of wind energy, has set emissions cuts of 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, although it is lagging behind this target.
It has also set targets of 55 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050 – a goal that would require most of the country’s fossil-fuel energy stations to cease operating.
Professor Schellnhuber, who is also director of the Potsdam Institute, said it had been disappointing to see Australia’s retreat on climate policy after it became “the darling of the world” when Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007.
Asked about the reaction to Australia’s performance in New York, he said: “Everybody likes Australian people but nobody liked the Australian government there.”
Professor Schellnhuber said instead of backing away from policies such as Australia’s renewable energy target, the Abbott government should be exploiting Australia’s enviable position as the country with the “biggest potential” to produce renewable energy.
He said this was especially important when Australia was one of the continents most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which would hit the country in the form of unprecedented heatwaves, fires and coral bleaching.
A look at some of the reports from independent journalists, aid workers and a handful of U.N. inquiries shows no evidence of Assad committing genocide against his own people. Rather most of the atrocities committed since June 2011 can be laid squarely at the feet of the Al Qaeda based foreign backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Farouq, and Al Nusra. It is these groups which are now being labelled “moderate rebels” and which the U.S. now seeks to arm against Islamic State.
How long will the U.N. charter of non-interference hold up in the face of this convenient new threat? It’s true the Iraqi government, such as it is, has pleaded for western support against the onslaught of Islamic State, but don’t be fooled. So far as the 2003 invasion is concerned it’s mission accomplished. With the job of removing Saddam Hussein and destabilising Iraq now complete, save for establishing a permanent Kurdish state, our work in Iraq is done. It’s time now to move on to our next target – Syria.
As the dust of history settles it’s interesting to watch the official narrative take shape. Saddam was by all accounts a monster, but his Baath party were seen as a secular, pluralist government, and let’s face it, it was the U.S. which put him in power in the first place. The 2003 invasion of Iraq is now universally acknowledged as an illegal war based on a false premise. In time I’m sure the same will be said of Libya.
Let’s not forget that while the great western democracies are used to knife edge elections, just like Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar al Assad has the overwhelming support of his people. Abbott likes to talk about his mandate, as though a 2% to 3% electoral swing can really be called a landslide victory. Perhaps he should consider this: Assad was democratically elected by an 88% majority and still enjoys the popular support of most Syrians.
Islamic State has its roots in Syria and it’s pretty bloody obvious that the only player with any real hope of defeating them is the Syrian Arab Army. If ‘degrading and destroying’ Islamic State is the true objective of the current intervention, then the most logical way to achieve this outcome is by supporting the Syrian government. (I refuse to refer to them as the Assad regime.) Otherwise, what the hell are we doing? Fixing the mess we created in the first place, or simply repeating it?
Will we follow the US into Syria? Undoubtedly. What will be the result? Another bloody mess? Another failed state where terror groups are allowed to operate freely? Already this conflict has created 11.5 million refugees. How many more will there be? Since the end of WWII 90% of all war casualties have been civilians. What will the death count be this time around? What will be the ‘collateral damage’? More to the point, why is nobody talking about the elephant in the room? As new geo-political alliances are forged, what will be the ultimate result of creating such a formidable enemy right on Israel’s doorstep? Or was this part of the plan all along?
According to Abbott IS insurgency in Northern Iraq and Syria had declared “war on the world” and was an “apocalyptic death cult”
” We have not yet made a final decision to commit our forces to combat but Australian aircraft from 1/10/2014 will start over Iraq in support of allied operations”
However Australia’s new AFP chief Andrew Colvin said
“the low- tech terrorism of Islamic State represented a new kind of threat that would take years to stamp out”
Quite different from Abbott’s “world directed apocalyptic death cult”.
The two seem to be on different pages of the hymn book. However Abbott’s delay while all other coalition countries are flying sorties appears to be a document one. That Australia is being more exacting in its requirement for legal indemnity that the sheer amount of paper work is holding up Abbott’s war. What the fuck is this man trying to extort out of his apocalyptic emergency? The resettlement of Asylum seekers?
So after 3 weeks Australian airstrikes are on hold waiting for clearances from Iraq and a decision I repeat a decision by us.
Senior ADF personnel are expressing their official concerns about the delay given the rest of the coalition are in action. Julie Bishop tells us of the” gathering momentum” but not by us Julie wear are holding the coats in this fight it would seem.
Updated
Australian refuelling and surveillance planes will today start flying over Iraq in support of the international coalition battling Islamic State (IS) militants, Prime Minister Tony Abbott says.
But Mr Abbott has told Parliament there is yet to be a decision made on when to commit Australian combat aircraft to the fight against what he says is an “apocalyptic death cult”.
Australia last month sent 600 military personnel and eight F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates in preparation for joining the attack on IS targets in Iraq.
“We have not yet made a final decision to commit our forces to combat but Australian aircraft from today will start flying over Iraq in support of allied operations,” Mr Abbott told Question Time this afternoon.
“Ours are support operations, not strike missions.
http://sallymcmanus.net/abbotts-wreckage/
285. Signs a deal with Cambodia to accept Australia’s refugees for a payment of $40 million over 4 years – 26 September, 2014
284. Breaks an election promise to a publish a proposal for constitutional recognition for Indigenous people and establish a bipartisan process to try to bring about recognition as soon as possible within the first 12 months of Government – 19 September 2014.
283. Breaks election promise to build replacement submarines in South Australian shipyards, spending more than $20 billion on Japanese submarines instead – 8 September, 2014
282. Fails to provide adequate medical care to asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei who died after developing an infection from a cut on his foot – 5 September 2014
281. Delays superannuation increases for seven years costing workers thousands of dollars in retirement savings – 2 September 2014
280. Kills the Low Income Super Contribution payment and the Superannuation Guarantee which aimed to boost the retirement savings of 3.6 million workers who earn $37,000 per year or less – 2 September 2014
279. Repeals the mining tax on the profits of big coal and iron ore companies – 2 September 2014
“ISIL will claim that our involvement in this international effort is the reason they are targeting us, but these people do not attack us for what we do, but for who we are and how we live.”
Despite this narrative’s denial of the truth, the harsh reality is Australia has caused the threat to itself by striding clumsily with guns blazing and meddling in Middle Eastern affairs — something that began with military action in Afghanistan in 2001.
Last Monday, in a call for action against it enemies, ISIS urged its members to kill civilians and soldiers of the nations aligned against it, naming Australia.
They did this not because Australia is a liberal democratic country, but rather because Australia has allowed itself to become embroiled in Middle East politics and line up as an ally and soldier on the battlefield with the United States.
Why then would the PM come out and claim differently?
The prime minister is playing a political game, attempting to frame the threat to Australia in a way that absolves Australia as the cause of the threats itself.
Government needed to own the intervention and breakage it made, respectively, in 2001 and 2003 to show good faith with voters and to reduce the vicious Islamophobia we are now, unfortunately, seeing spread like wildfire through the community.
The family of 56-year-old Sydney resident Sayed Habib Musawi have told the Guardian Australia his body was found on Tuesday with signs he was tortured before being killed.
The ABC reports Mr Musawi was was pulled off a bus by Taliban militants between Kabul and Ghazni province, where he was visiting family.
Reportedly tortured and killed by the Taliban … Sydney resident Sayed Habib Musawi. Source: Facebook
Ghazni’s deputy governor Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said Mr Musawi was targeted for being an Australian citizen.
“Of course the reason is that he was an Afghan-Australian,” Mr Ahmadi told the ABC’s AM program today.
“He didn’t do anything besides that – he didn’t do anything wrong, he wasn’t a criminal, he wasn’t involved in government activities.
Mr Musawi had lived in Australia since 2000. Source: Supplied
Mr Musawi had lived in Australia since 2000 and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is providing his family with consular assistance. “The Australian Embassy in Kabul continues to seek to confirm reports an Australian-Afghan dual national has been killed in Afghanistan,” a department spokesman told AAP.
“The area where these events reportedly occurred is contested by the Taliban and it will be difficult to obtain definitive and official confirmation of the man’s death from the Afghanistan government.”
Mr Musawi’s 23-year-old son Nemat Musawi told ABC radio this morning that the family was “devastated”.
“It seems like it was all set up, because they just stopped the bus on the way to Ghazni and then they just went straight to my dad,” he said.
“Everyone has been in shock, it’s just unbelievable,” Mr Musawi’s daughter Kubra Musawi told the Guardian.“He’s an Australian citizen and yet nothing’s happened yet.
Ms Musawi, who lives in the Sydney suburb of Berala, says she wants DFAT to “find out how the Taliban knew how [her] dad was going back to Kabul”.
Habib’s destination … an aerial view of Ghazni, considered to be in one of the most volatile regions of Afghanistan. Picture: Shah Marai Source: AFP
“He wasn’t anything to do with the government there. They just wanted to stop him coming back to Australia. I don’t want anyone else to experience this. Every minute we think of my brother’s family who are still there, I can’t study or work because of the stress of it.”
Habib’s wife and youngest son, who lives in Melbourne, travelled to his funeral in Jaghori, where he was buried.
Afghanistan remains listed as a “do not travel” destination under Australian government advice to travellers.
Our shock-jock hate mongers like Andrew Bolt put a target on this woman’s back that cried Muslim. She never made it home either.
George Christensen:
“We will call out their falsehoods and call for the Extremists to be treated the same as anyone else who commits a crime or an act of terrorism.”
“The extremists are the large, well organised, and very well-funded organisations who use fear and blackmail to coerce the government and the public into adopting their extreme political and ideological views.”
“The eco-terrorists butchered the international tourism market, which sources tell me is down 30 per cent as a result of their campaign, not for the sake of the reef but for the sake of their political ideology.”
“They threaten to kill off thousands of more jobs in the resource industry because they don’t like coal, they don’t like capitalism, and they don’t like people working hard to earn a decent living.”
“Today, I put the Extreme Greens on notice,” he said. “North Queensland will not bow down to eco-terrorists. We will not allow them to lie, to smear, to defame, and to break the law for their own political purposes.”
Sources and read more:
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/coalition-mp-calls-anti-coal-protesters-terrorists-green-germs-14326
Posted
While many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line against multiculturalism, Tony Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country, writes Mike Steketee.
“The Australian Government will be utterly unflinching towards anything that threatens our future as a free, fair and multicultural society; a beacon of hope and exemplar of unity-in-diversity.”
This is how Tony Abbott expressed his defence of Australian values before the United Nations Security Council this week.
“My view was that Australia should emphasise the common characteristics of the Australian identity. We should emphasise our unifying points rather than our areas of difference.”
His views translated into action, with his government’s abolition of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research
Many conservatives continue to hold to the Howard line. According to Senator Cory Bernardi,
“the naïve … proclaim multiculturalism as a triumph of tolerance when in fact it undermines the cultural values and cohesiveness that brings a nation together”.
When police conducted anti-terrorism raids in Brisbane and Sydney last week, he tweeted:
Bernardi may be a Liberal maverick but on this issue his views are widely held amongst conservatives.
But Abbott no longer counts himself amongst the critics. Two weeks ago, he said:
“I’ve shifted from being a critic to a supporter of multiculturalism, because it eventually dawned on me that migrants were coming to Australia not to change us but to join us.”
In short, as Abbott came to realise, Australia changed migrant families more than they changed Australia.
As prime ministers need to do, Abbott is adjusting to the reality that Australia is a multicultural country. The Government frontbench includes members with strong ethnic connections – Treasurer Joe Hockey (Armenian-Palestinian), Finance Minister Mathias Cormann (Belgian), Government Senate leader Eric Abetz (German), suspended assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos (Greek) and Fierravanti-Wells (Italian).
Abbott is conscious that the ethnic vote can swing the result in federal seats, particularly in Sydney. He disappointed some of his strongest supporters with his decision to drop the so-called Bolt amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act after widespread opposition from ethnic groups.
The vast majority are as law abiding as any other Australians. They have alerted Australian authorities to planned terrorist attacks. Deriding their religion, criticising how they dress, let along branding them as terrorists, is seriously counter-productive.
Mike Steketee is a freelance journalist. He was formerly a columnist and national affairs editor for The Australian. View his full profile here.
Not Normal
Passengers caught in the security scare today. Photo: Markmyersboom Twitter Source: Twitter
SWANS fans flying to Melbourne for today’s AFL Grand Final are in a race against time after a a security scare sparked delays at Sydney Airport.
Passengers were evacuated after the man walked into Terminal 3, used for domestic flights, without passing through security screening this morning.Qantas said the delay only lasted about an hour, although any ardent Sydney Swans fans travelling to Melbourne for the AFL grand final this afternoon probably broke into a sweat.
Posted
Not Normal
Not Normal Disgusting
Toasting his Cambodian “dirty deal” with champagne was a crass and sickening move by the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, the Australian Greens have said.
Toasting his Cambodian “dirty deal” with champagne was a crass and sickening move by the immigration minister, Scott Morrison, the Australian Greens have said.
Morrison signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambodia’s interior minister, Sar Kheng, in Phnom Penh on Friday to allow refugees processed on the Pacific island of Nauru to resettle in Cambodia. Afterwards, the pair toasted their deal with champagne.
At the end of a week of much media hysteria about terrorism, the Senate passed arguably the most significant restraints on press freedom in this country outside of wartime
It requires us to seek truth, whether the truth is ugly and discomfiting or whether it is reassuring and soothing. It requires us to ask questions – a lot of questions – of very powerful people, without fear or favour.
It requires us to take the time to get things right rather than assuming in cavalier fashion that an error in the internet age is never wrong for long. And it involves taking steps to ensure we don’t inflame the tinderbox: truth is not inflammatory, but dog whistling and ethnic stereotyping certainly are.
To put it simply, this story requires what great journalism always requires: that no agenda is served other than the interests of the readers. If we are asking the state to be accountable and not abuse its power and position, then best we hold ourselves to the same standard.
If we meet this basic test, then perhaps we’ll be worth defending.
Newscorp any agenda the government wants
ious 
Like many things our prime minister says, it is simply a convenient lie.These are not good laws. They are not even laws to make Australia safer.These are cynical, opportunistic laws. Laws barrelled through under the spurious guise of protecting us against a fanatical foreign Islamic beheading cult with apparent links to Muslims in this country.
They are appalling laws, built on a lie.
There has never been an act of domestic terror in Australia. And no, a lone teenager committing a seemingly unplanned act of violence is neither a terror attack nor a retrospective justification for foreign military intervention and ramped up “counter-terrorism” powers.The so-called Islamic State ‒ a ragtag bunch of rebels occupying a chunk of land about the size of Tasmania half a world away, is hardly a threat to anyone — except if you happen to live in Iraq or Syria. American Homeland Security are quite clear on that
Yes, there may indeed be 50 or 60 Australians fighting with them, but that doesn’t make them a threat here in Australia — particularly after ASIO summarily cancelled their passports. Any supporters these foreign fighters have in this country ‒ a miniscule number at most ‒ are surely able to be easily monitored using existing laws and, if they commit a criminal act, arrested and prosecuted under the existing criminal law.
The real reason for these new powers has got nothing to do with Islamic State, or ISIL, or ISIS ‒ or whatever they are called this week ‒ but they are to do with closing down scrutiny of Australia’s spies and the Government unpublicised activities.
ASIO have been caught with their pants down on two majorly embarrassing occasions since the Abbott Government took power last year.
The first occurred when the ABC and Guardian Australia published leaks from former U.S. intelligence operative whistleblower Edward Snowden that our spies had tapped then Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mobile phone for 15 days in 2009. These revelations caused a major rift with Indonesia and is still a lingering source of tension.
It was not long after this event, on January 28, that Abbott first used his famous “team” epithet, while denouncing the ABC in an interview with on 2GB with his friend, right wing Sydney shock jock Ray Hadley [IA emphasis]:
“It dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own and I think it is a problem.
“You would like the national broadcaster to have a rigorous commitment to truth and at least some basic affection for the home team, so to speak.”
Abbott went on to call Snowden a “traitor”, saying the ABC “seemed to delight” in publishing his information:
“And of course, the ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said. That was a deep concern.”
Abbott reaffirmed his position in a subsequent doorstep, going on to condemn the ABC for working with the Guardian, or as he put it:
“… touting for a left wing British newspaper.”
There were no surprises when the vindictive Abbott left it for his broken former rival Malcolm Turnbull to announce an efficiency review of the ABC a couple of days later. This review has now called for the ABC’s budget to be slashed with some important investigative news programs, such as Lateline, in the firing line. Turnbull has also flagged cutting $200 million from as ABC budget already cut deeply in the May Budget, blatantly breaking a clear election promise.
These terror laws will stop whistleblowers exposing the Government’s undercover operations through the media.
The problem with this is that the Coalition ‒ under Tony Abbott, avowedly “open for business” ‒ is seemingly not above using the security services in an improper way to assist private individuals and corporations. Under the new laws, any whistleblower seeking to expose the security services, for instance, helping an Australian big business on the behest of a cabinet minister looking for a cosy post-parliamentary sinecure will now be shut down and any journalists assisting locked up for a long time.
These security laws, therefore, can be seen as the next stage in the Abbott programme to hamstring the ABC as an effective source of scrutiny of Government activities.
But, even more importantly, they will make Australian journalism generally reluctant to expose the Government’s undercover activities, as this could lead to them being sent to prison for a decade.
Australia’s spy network was again in the spotlight in December last year after Attorney General George Brandis ordered ASIO to raid the Canberra offices and home of barrister Bernard Colleary, a former ACT deputy chief minister, who was representing East Timor against Australia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague.
This is not democracy. No wonder they don’t want a Federal ICAC.
The Islamic State is a mirage as far as we are concerned here in Australia. It is not an existential threat to us. The grave threat, in truth, is new security laws that stifle freedom of speech, remove privacy protections, gaol journalists and serve, in the end, to limit scrutiny of the Government and its operatives.
Moreover, providing new powers to secret agents, which also provides them with civil and criminal immunity is an outright danger and threat to us as citizens. It makes these shadowy figures immune to prosecution and therefore, effectively, unaccountable for their actions. Under these laws, frankly, spies can kill us and fear no recourse.
Under these laws, there is no-one to watch the watchers. Now that is truly terrifying.
In truth, we probably expect our extreme right wing Government to implement these sorts of outrageous and unwarranted laws; certainly we can see why they are doing so. It is, however, the weak acquiescence by their so-called Opposition that is most criminal part of this affaor.
We know the ALP under Bill Shorten do not want not a cigarette paper between themselves and the Government on immigration and security matters. This is the exact small target strategy using so brilliantly and effectively by former Opposition leader Kim Beazley during such events as the Tampa Affair and Children Overboard.
However, politicians who unnecessarily sacrifice the rights of the people in the interests of popularity and power show themselves up as unsuitable for high office.
By supporting these so-called “anti-terror” laws ‒ which have nothing to do with preventing terrorism ‒ the ALP, under their current milquetoast leader, have followed the Coalition so far to the right, they are no longer truly a progressive Opposition.
And now more than ever, as the Government shuts down scrutiny and proposes gaoling journalists, Australia needs a progressive Opposition
Pity it was to an empty chamber
“We’re grateful for help that Ukraine gave us and are naturally sympathetic to a country struggling to preserve its independence and territorial integrity against a bully,” he said.
“This organisation ( UN )in fact, is founded on the principle that we should work together for the common good, and that over time, talking together and working together will improve our capacity for living together.”
One needs to ask why the mud slinging at this moment when cooperation is needed the most?
The prime minister also talked about his vision for economic growth and Australia’s determination as the chair of the G20 to help strength the world economy.
By being the only nation to drop the Carbon tax, remove RET targetsand not reveal any future plans passed 2020
“We’re strong enough to be useful but pragmatic enough to know our limits.”
We will raid the Foreign Aid and Welfare budgets for Defense and Sovereign Borders and of course sell you cheap coal….see Andrew Robb MP
“Bully” according to Abbott.
Noun
1. A person who uses strength or power to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.
Ring a bell?
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.