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Project SafeCom News and Updates 6 March 2006
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Project SafeCom
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Mar 05, 2006 09:42 PST
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Project SafeCom News and Updates 6 March 2006
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¤ - In this Edition - ¤
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1. Howard didn't know
2. Climate Change Policy and Anxiety Reduction
3. Lawyer seeks cap on deportation powers
4. Immigration decisions 'need review'
5. Badraie payout no 'backdown'
6. Are Muslims the Only Real Australians?
7. Freedom to offend
8. Mufti slams advisory group
9. PM legacy a mean nation
10. When the good people are left in the dark
11. Moguls force delay in Australia media law changes
12. Communist debate grips Vietnam
13. Honours galore for Age writers
14. Having fun while the credit lasts
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-|| as the 'Project SafeCom Daily News and Updates'.
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================
1. Howard didn't know
================
(source unknown)
with apologies to Banjo Paterson
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him at the wheat board, years ago
He was chairman when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him
Just on spec, to make the point, that "Howard doesn't want to know".
And an email came directed, not entirely unexpected
(And I think the same was written in some Middle Eastern bar)
'Twas his CEO who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it,
"Trevor Flugge's gone to Baghdad and we don't know where he are.
But when he left Australia, he was going to meet with Alia,
A trucking mob in Jordan, who were keen to grease the wheels
For 10 per cent commission, they could swing Saddam's permission
To get our wheat accepted: it's the mother of all deals.
But I guarantee, Prime Minister, that there's nothing at all sinister:
The chaps at DFAT told us that the sums looked quite okay.
When you're selling wheat in billions, what's a quick 300 million?
If it keeps the Nationals happy it's a tiny price to pay."
Sitting here at Kirribilli, I've been thinking, willy nilly
That it's somehow reminiscent of the children overboard:
But I can handle Rudd and Beazley as I always do, quite easily,
By endlessly protesting that there's nothing untoward.
I'll tell Bush next time I meet him at
The White House, when I greet him,
That I'm sure he'll understand about the wheat board's quid pro quo:
He'll forgive this minor error in the global war on terror
When I look him in the eye and tell him Howard didn't know.
===================================
2. Climate Change Policy and Anxiety Reduction
===================================
New Matilda magazine
By: Rob Paterson
1 March 2006
The threat of global climate change is now a regular feature in all forms
of media and countless conversations across the globe.
We are not in a movie where a superhero’s powers will save the planet
before the credits roll up the screen. Among those of us who are informed
about climate change, anxiety levels are rising steadily.
Steven Covey in his book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’
describes a large circle or ‘area of concern’ within which is a smaller
circle representing our ‘area of influence’.
He writes that if we expend energy outside our personal circle of influence
we will achieve little, our stress levels will rise, and our area of
influence will actually shrink.
On the other hand, if we are careful to find out what our area of influence
is and then work steadily within it, it will grow.
We can extrapolate from this to develop a method for dealing with the
anxiety caused by climate change.
Climate scientists generally agree that cutting global greenhouse gas
emissions by at least 60% before 2050 provides the best chance of
stabilising the average rise in world temperature at around 2oC higher than
it is now.
Even this, however, will be cutting it fine. Tim Lenton, of the UK’s
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, emphasises that we must start
to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible to have any chance
of preventing the melting of the Greenland ice cap. This will become
unstoppable if the earth warms by an average of 2.6oC.
All countries must put a co-operative international approach to tackling
climate change before national self-interest.
This will be no simple task. Emissions cuts must happen despite the fact
that the world’s population will grow from the current 6.5 billion to 9.1
Billion in 2050, and that growing middle classes in developing countries
are turning to high-emissions, consumer lifestyles like our own.
Over the past three weeks momentum has built to push Australia towards
joining the co-operative international effort to reduce emissions. The ABC
Four Corners program on the ‘Greenhouse Mafia’ and Clive Hamilton’s speech
‘The Dirty Politics of Climate Change’, delivered at the high level Climate
Change and Business Conference in Adelaide, have given fresh impetus to our
climate change conversations.
Practical policy measures to stem climate change can be divided into a
number of key areas.
Regulations, and intergovernmental and business co-operation
Caps on greenhouse gas emissions are a central part of the Kyoto protocol.
Market mechanisms such as emissions trading may help countries to reach cap
targets. As well as caps, climate change or CO2 charges will need to be
assigned to greenhouse gas emissions to enable deep cuts to be achieved.
This will increase market efficiency by directing emissions allowances to
activities with greater economic benefit.
New Zealand is the first country to begin to implement charging for carbon
emissions. This early adoption will put them in an excellent competitive
position if globally negotiated charges are introduced.
If the business sector is given sufficient warning and the CO2 charge is
introduced gradually, the transition to low emission economies should be
relatively smooth.
The global insurance industry will take a lead in determining policy in
relation to climate change. Munich Re, a major global re-insurer, studied
weather data and found there were less than 200 weather-related disasters
in the 1950s versus over 1,600 in the 1990s. Nearly 100 companies from 25
countries have joined the UNEP Insurance Industry Initiative which is
pressuring governments and business to cut emissions.
Renewable electricity generation will take a lead over CO2 geosequestration
or nuclear power because of significantly lower carbon emissions costs in
the entire energy generation cycle.
Countries with multiparty coalition governments that have a strong
environmental focus are leading the way in the transition to low emissions
economies.
Sweden has committed to a plan to slash demand for fossil fuels and
drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. This includes such
initiatives as projects to collect methane from livestock and other
industry waste to power the Swedish transport fleet.
By expanding the renewable portion of national electricity generation by
more than 1.5% per year, Germany is challenging the myth that renewable
energy is not able to supply a country’s total electricity needs. It is
planned that all Germany’s electricity will come from renewable sources by
2050.
Technological advancements
Placing a climate change charge on carbon emissions will channel funding
into renewable energy and energy saving technology and reduce emissions
from transport, agriculture and industry.
In Australia, the first task is to put an end to the coal industry’s
excessive influence over policy responses to climate change. Research into
the geosequestration of CO2 generated from coal may still form part of the
mix of R&D into climate change abatement measures, but it should not
continue to receive the lion’s share of greenhouse research funding. As a
matter of urgency, equal support must be given to R&D on renewable energy
and energy efficiency or Australia will fall behind in the transition to
the low-carbon world economy.
The assistance we have pledged under the Australian and US initiated
‘Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate’ (AP6), to help
countries such as China develop renewable technology, is insignificant
compared to the work that China is already doing in this area. Though the
dialogue involved in then AP6 is welcome, modelling by the Australian
Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE) shows that emissions
will in fact rise 100% by 2050 under the plan. Without significant
emissions cuts, the AP6 is nothing more than a public relations exercise
directed at voters in Australia and the US.
Education & publicity campaigns
Broad public access to unbiased education and advertising about climate
change will reduce emissions as well as lead to demand for better
mitigation policies from government.
At present, very high levels of advertising feeds growth in consumption of
goods and services. Rapid annual growth in greenhouse gas emissions is the
final result.
As an example, there has been a very high rate of purchase of imported
large screen television sets by Australians over the last 5 years. The
manufacture and importation of each of these sets creates huge amounts of
greenhouse gases.
On the other hand sales of solar water heaters have remained virtually
static. Solar water heaters are made in Australia and reduce annual
household greenhouse gas emissions by about 1/3rd. The cost difference
between them and a conventional hot water service is about the same as the
cost of a medium priced large screen TV, yet only 4% of Australian
households have a solar water heater.
If the public are well educated about climate change they will make
purchasing decisions that reduce emissions. This then makes governments’
job of achieving national emissions reductions targets easier.
Effective messages that promote community, social and environmental values
above a pervading ‘riches are everything’ message will also strengthen
climate change prevention.
Systemic economic change for sustainability
Careful step by step restructuring of economies will be a necessary part of
fighting climate change.
The current world economic system favours large companies over stable local
economies.
As an example, global agricultural corporations benefit from transport
costs that do not take carbon emissions into account. The transfer of
packaged, processed and fresh food over huge distances is therefore very
cheap but damaging to the climate.
Many products are simply ‘swapped’ between continents. One country may
export citrus to a country on another continent while at the same time
importing citrus from the same country. When climate change charges for
carbon emissions are introduced this will become much less common and
significant greenhouse gas savings will result.
Road-freight transport is predicted to double in Australia over the next 15
years. This will be very detrimental to emissions reduction efforts.
One of the easiest ways to reduce our personal ecological footprint is to
eat foods that are produced locally. Diverse local economies will once
again be competitive when the invisible subsidies promoting climate change
are removed.
The power of public influence
The scientific evidence that human induced climate change is a reality is
now overwhelming.
The failure of our government to join the co-ordinated international effort
to avert impending disaster abandons current and future generations of
Australian voters and the population of the world as a whole to an
unpalatable future.
The Environment Minister’s repeated assertion that ‘Australia is a global
leader in tackling climate change’ is, rightly, losing credibility.
It appears we are approaching the point where token gestures by government
and industry lobbies will no longer silence an increasingly concerned public.
If we each develop a detailed understanding of the global and personal
effort required to avert serious climate change, it will allow us to
determine accurately where we can exert our influence to address the
problem. Our ability to place pressure on governments and businesses puts
them within our sphere of influence.
If public pressure mounts steadily and shows no sign of abating we will
witness an end-of-slavery, end-of-apartheid, collapse-of-the–Berlin-Wall
kind of watershed. The stakes are certainly as high or higher!
About the Author
Rob Paterson is an independent Sustainability Facilitator based in Adelaide
working on water and climate change issues. He has previously been an
adviser to Senator Meg Lees and has worked as a consultant, manager and
scientist for rural industries in Australia and Indonesia.
http://www.newmatilda.com/policytoolkit/policydetail.asp?PolicyID=316&CategoryID=11
===============================
3. Lawyer seeks cap on deportation powers
===============================
ABC ONLINE NEWS
Sunday, March 5, 2006. 5:07pm (AEDT)
The lawyer for the Australian woman Vivian Solon, who was wrongfully
deported to the Philippines, says the Immigration Minister's powers should
be reviewed.
The Commonwealth ombudsman has called for an urgent review into an
immigration law that allows the deportation of long-term Australian
residents on character grounds.
Lawyer George Newhouse says the Immigration Minister's powers stripped Ms
Solon and many others of their rights to remain in Australia.
"The minister has enormous power and it's my observation that it has been
overused and it is too wide and needs to be capped," he said.
"The minister needs to be accountable for these sorts of very broad
discretions that can destroy people's lives."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200603/s1584350.htm
===========================
4. Immigration decisions 'need review'
===========================
The Australian
March 05, 2006
NEW claims of harsh treatment and wrongful deportation by the immigration
department have prompted the lawyer for Vivian Alvarez and Cornelia Rau to
call for greater accountability.
Solicitor George Newhouse said the cases of Robert Jovicic and Gulteckin
Sayin, two non citizens deported on character grounds, further showed that
powers available to the immigration minister and immigration department
need to be reviewed.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone recently allowed Mr Jovicic, a former
Melbourne resident to return home from Serbia, where he had been living
destitute on the streets.
The move came only weeks after Commonwealth Ombudsman John McMillan found
Senator Vanstone's department had unfairly deported people with criminal
records who had lived in Australia since they were children.
Mr Jovicic, 39, was born in France and arrived in Australia as a
two-year-old with his Serbian-born parents and brother and sister, but
never became an Australian citizen.
Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock ordered him deported in June
2004 after he was jailed for committing a string of burglaries to support a
heroin addiction.
Immigration lawyer Michaela Byers said Gulteckin Sayin, 43, was wrongfully
deported to Turkey in 1997 after serving a nine year prison sentence for
drug and robbery offences.
Mr Sayin arrived in Australia from Turkey in 1971 as a nine-year-old with
his parents who live in Sydney and are now Australian citizens, Ms Byers said.
Ms Byers said although Mr Sayin was receiving medical treatment for his
kidney problem in Turkey his parents were worried it was not adequate.
Mr Newhouse said the decisions and discretions exercised by the minister
and the department's officers should be open to judicial review.
"If they had to prepare decisions and present them to a judge, before
deporting or detaining someone, they would be taking a lot more care with
other's people's lives."
Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez was wrongfully deported to the
Philippines, and Australian resident Cornelia Rau was held in immigration
detention in Australia for 10-months.
Ms Alvarez could expect a compensation payout in excess $1 million by the
end of this month.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18361138%255E1702,00.html
=======================
5. Badraie payout no 'backdown'
=======================
news.com.au
From: AAP
March 05, 2006
IMMIGRATION Minister Amanda Vanstone says she does not believe a $400,000
payout for an Iranian boy traumatised after being locked up in immigration
detention is a backdown.
Shayan Badraie, now 11, was just five years old when he first witnessed
attempted suicides and abuse at Woomera and Villawood detention centres.
After months of hearings, his lawyers have accepted an out-of-court
settlement of $400,000 from the federal government, which will also have to
pay Shayan's legal bill of more than $1 million.
The family, which lives in Sydney, has been granted permanent Australian
residency visas.
Senator Vanstone today said an offer was made to the Badraie family's
lawyer some time ago but they turned it down.
"An offer was put to the young man's legal advisers some time ago and that
offer was rejected," she told the Nine Network today.
"The Commonwealth didn't want to proceed."
Senator Vanstone said she did not see the payout as a backdown but as a
better result for all those involved.
"I don't see that as a backdown, I see that as finally a better result
where things can be resolved without continuing of litigation," she said.
"I wish that the family had accepted an offer earlier."
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,18355946-29277,00.html
===============================
6. Are Muslims the Only Real Australians?
===============================
Anti-immigrant backlash betrays multiculturalism on which country was built
2006-02-28 06:54
OhMyNews, Korea
Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Tessa)
In a speech on February 24, Australian Treasurer Peter Costello stated that
immigrants should not be admitted to Australia unless they to commit
themselves to the "compact" of core Australian values. Specifically
identifying Muslims who embrace radical causes, he added that those here
already who deny those values should be stripped of their citizenship and
expelled.
The response from the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Kim Beazley,
was not to condemn these comments as divisive, but merely to ask why the
government had not been more effective in keeping out such disruptive and
revolutionary immigrants in the past.
These statements, according to the Australian media, have upset Muslim
leaders. To prove the point, prominent Australian Muslims, given their
thirty seconds before the television cameras, duly express concern. They
suggest, a little diffidently, that Australia should be willing to allow
diversity, to accept people with different, even disturbing views. They
mention that disreputable word "multiculturalism."
I still remember the delight my multicultural family experienced when, as
eager would-be-migrants, we visited the Australian High Commission in
London to apply for visas in 1981. The brochures we were given, and the
information provided by the friendly High Commission staff, emphasized that
Australia was a country of migrants whose core values were openness to
diversity and tolerance of difference. There were even colored pictures to
prove the point.
Like first-car buyers in a showroom, we believed the sales pitch. And for
the first 15 years of our lives in Australia at least, we were not
disappointed. Multiculturalism, of course, was controversial. Not everyone
liked the word, and there were endless debates as to what it meant. No one
ever suggested it was going to be easy. But there was also confidence that
Australia was gradually creating a society whose very identity was founded
on that most wonderful of human values -- the willingness to live alongside
people with different habits and ideas, the ability even to like those with
whom one deeply disagrees.
But those core values, it now turns out, were just a passing fad. "Our" new
core values, as enunciated by Treasurer Costello, are apparently "economic
opportunity, security, democracy, personal freedom, the physical
environment and a strong physical and social infrastructure." Tolerance and
diversity have evidently gone the same way as punk rock and Rubik's cubes.
And, if we are to believe the media reports, the only people who are
seriously upset by their comments are "Muslim leaders."
Where are the rest of them: the many prominent politicians who, throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s, swore their bipartisan allegiance to values of
diversity; the academics who built their careers researching
multiculturalism; the High Commission employees who sold us multicultural
Australia?
Are they not upset too? Or have they all been assimilated into this
amorphous but all-powerful "we" who clamor for state protection of their
values, security and strong infrastructure? Why, I wonder, are Muslim
leaders the only people speaking up loud and clear for the thing that I was
led to believe was the Australian way of life?
It is, indeed, a symptom of our looking-glass world that, when the media
need people willing to stand up for the supposedly Western liberal values
of tolerance, pluralism and openness, they turn first to prominent Muslims.
The Western liberalism to which Beazley, Costello and Australian Prime
Minister Howard claim to be heirs was built precisely on the belief that a
democratic nation cannot exclude ideas that its leaders, or even the
majority of its people, find repugnant. The most culturally vibrant of
societies have been those -- including the U.S., France and Britain in
certain phases of their histories -- that were willing to let in people
with radically different ideas and ways of life, from anarchists to Amish.
What liberals understood then, but have forgotten today, is that democracy
is never safe or comfortable, because (almost uniquely amongst ideologies)
it cannot be defended by censorship, prison bars or the exiling of
dissidents. This has always involved risks, and the risks in the past were
no less then than they are now. The anarchist bombs of the nineteenth
century and communist conspiracies of early twentieth were just as real as
Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiya today.
But now our "liberal" leaders on both sides of politics want us to exclude,
not only the actively criminal, but also those liable to commit what in
pre-war Japan was known as "thought crime"; the refusal to embrace the core
ideology of the national polity.
Our leaders suggest that there is some "test," some magic technique for
achieving this. They propose that, in order to defend Australian democracy,
it is necessary (and possible) to introduce screening processes which,
alongside the chest X-rays, the AIDS tests and fingerprinting, will certify
that recent or future immigrants are free from the taint of revolutionary
ideologies or anti-Australian values.
This is arrant nonsense, and (since nobody conceals the fact that it is
targeted at one particular section of the community) it is deeply divisive
nonsense. Immigrants will always retain a wide variety of different ideas
and values. Some of those already here will (let us fervently hope) go on
inventing new ways to be different, even heretical, in the future.
Australia cannot remain truly open, liberal and democratic and at the same
time be guaranteed protection from dangerous thoughts. And if we lose sight
of that fact we (all Australians) will still be living with consequences of
our mistake long after the political ambitions of Peter Costello and Kim
Beazley are footnotes in the history books.
So, thank you, Muslim leaders, for standing up for what I thought were the
real Australian values.
And as for the Christians, atheists, Jews, Buddhists, parliamentarians,
media stars, academics, business leaders, trade unionists and others who
may also feel upset at the trashing of those values -- c'mon guys, lets
hear a bit of leadership from you.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=276786&rel_no=1
================
7. Freedom to offend
================
The Australian
OPINION
Phillip Adams
March 04, 2006
DEATH of a princess? For most readers those words will mean just one thing:
August 31, 1997, when Princess Di and Dodi Fayed died in Paris, triggering
one of the greatest overreactions in media history. Among the conspiracy
theories you'll recall the allegations by Dodi's father, the Egyptian-born
owner of Harrods, that the British had murdered the couple – either MI5
acting on the orders of Buckingham Palace or Downing Street or both – to
prevent a politically unacceptable marriage between Diana and a Muslim.
Some older readers will remember Death of a Princess as the name of a film
screened 26 years ago concerning another pair of star-crossed lovers. About
a Saudi princess publicly beheaded in 1977 because of an adulterous and
politically unacceptable affair, it remains one of the most controversial
documentaries in history. Not even Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 comes
close.
With few daring to talk on the record, director Antony Thomas went for
re-enactments. "She committed a grave sin against Islam, and she had to be
sacrificed," said a Saudi, while another observed: "It's the story of 200
million people – the whole Arab predicament . . . how much of our past must
be abandoned for your modern world."
In an attempt to head off a BBC screening, the Saudis threatened to run
British business out of the Gulf. Diplomatic relations with the UK would be
broken – the British ambassador was recalled. And the Saudis warned of
sanctions, including pulling the plug on British oil supplies.
Similar tactics were employed to stop the film airing on US public
television. It was at a bad time for the US. With his attempt at freeing
American hostages in Iran resulting in a fiasco, Jimmy Carter's presidency
was deeper south than Georgia. The economy was in chaos and the last thing
America wanted was another oil shock. Alarmed members of Congress joined
with the State Department and Mobil Oil in bullying PBS, which screened the
film anyway.
But where the BBC and PBS refused to submit, our ABC folded – and I was
among those protesting loudly. (This led to my first death threat.) Then,
seeing a ratings opportunity, the Seven Network bought Death of a Princess
and asked me to participate in a discussion after the screening. I remember
pushing my way through an angry crowd. Then the studio filled with cops and
sniffer dogs. There'd been a bomb threat.
But not only Muslims resent criticism. Long before the fatwa on Salman
Rushdie, Australian Catholics were officially informed, from every pulpit
in the country, that it was a sin to read any newspaper that published
Phillip Adams or to listen to any radio station that broadcast him.
Question Ariel Sharon's conduct in Lebanon, his appalling wall in Israel or
other aspects of Likud's policies and wait for the hate mail accusing you
of anti-Semitism. And any critic of Bush and his various wars gets used to
vilification from both fellow columnists and feral bloggers. Treason is the
least of their accusations.
However, if you want real trouble, try to make a film about the local
branch of the Ustashi, the Croatian Nazis whose savageries during World War
II shocked even Hitler's SS. As late as the mid-1970s they were running
secret training camps in Victoria with, some believed, a degree of official
approval and help from our military. The purpose? To mount terrorist
attacks on Tito's Yugoslavia.
When these began, I wanted to tell the Australian story in a feature film.
That is, until the Ustashi started bombing the Yugoslav consulate close to
my home – and phoning my family with death threats.
You won't find me condemning a newspaper for publishing cartoons offensive
to Muslims, Catholics, Jews, Croatians or Martians. Official censorship and
self-censorship are, in the long term, greater evils than the nastiest
doodlings. But that doesn't mean I'll be congratulating that Danish rag
either. It's a right-wing Christian publication whose editor, just two
years ago, refused to publish cartoons of Jesus "because they might cause
offence". In a country whose claims for tolerance – just like ours – have
taken a battering over migration issues, it was a deliberately provocative
decision.
In Denmark and around the world, only two groups benefited from the
cartoons: right-wing loonies and Muslim extremists enjoying their dance of
death. Everyone else has to endure the consequences. Pity the moderate
Danes, Christian and Muslim.
Even when it's wrong or reckless, speech must be free – whatever the price,
whatever the cost. As Rushdie asked when sentenced to death by Khomeini and
co: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend it ceases
to exist."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18338947%255E12272,00.html
=====================
8. Mufti slams advisory group
=====================
The Australian
By Richard Kerbaj
March 06, 2006
AUSTRALIA'S Islamic spiritual leader has demanded a meeting of moderate and
radical imams after slamming John Howard's hand-picked Muslim advisory body
as "stillborn".
Sheik Taj Din al-Hilaly accused the Prime Minister of setting up the
14-member Muslim Community Reference Group to disseminate government
"propaganda" under the guise of an elite Islamic body.
He said its members did not have the insight or community links to stamp
out Islamic extremism in Australia.
"What kind of people have they (the Government) chosen?" he said during an
interview conducted in Arabic.
"Either the Government thinks that we're blind to accept (most) of the 14,
or the Government itself is blind."
The 65-year-old mufti said he wanted to express his love for the country he
has made his home since 1982.
"The love for Australia and belonging to Australia is in my blood," he said.
He said he was planning to convene a meeting of the nation's moderate and
radical imams as soon as practicable to debate the issues of Islamic
extremism and try to put an end to it.
"Those who agree with us (and become moderates) will be considered a part
of our community," Sheik Hilaly said. "And those who don't agree, I will
personally report them to the relevant authorities and have them deported."
Sheik Hilaly admitted that small pockets of the Muslim community subscribed
to extremist ideologies.
He said the reference group would not be able to directly confront
extremists because there were no radical members from whom the advisory
body could gain an insight.
Sheik Hilaly, a reference group member who has never personally attended
any of its meetings, criticised the body for its lack of "transparency and
vision".
"All the group members do is travel business class to Canberra without
achieving any results," the mufti said.
"Ask any of them what they've achieved, and they themselves don't know.
That's a waste of time and government resources."
Sheik Hilaly's comments come after the reference group's chairman, Ameer
Ali, recently expressed a lack of confidence in some of its members who he
said lacked "expertise".
The reference group was set up six months ago in the wake of the London
bombings to advise the Federal Government on community-related concerns and
to improve connections with the 300,000-strong Australian Muslim community.
Sheik Hilaly said the decision to set up the reference group reflected the
Government's desire to "impose" who it believed should represent the Muslim
community.
"But how can I trust a Government which claims to want to benefit the
society when its open policy was to fight Saddam Hussain in Iraq, but it's
secret policy was to approve payments to his regime," Sheik Hilaly said,
referring to the AWB wheat scandal.
"We must rely on ourselves and the honest Australian public to build our
Muslim community and rid ourselves of these liars (within the Howard
Government)."
Fractures within the group surfaced last month when The Australian revealed
that Sheik Hilaly had threatened to withdraw his allegiance and "break up"
the group unless another member, Mustapha Kara-Ali, whom he accused of
having connections to a "radical" organisation, was kicked off the group.
But Sheik Hilaly had one of his representatives attend last week's
reference group meetings in Canberra, despite Mr Kara-Ali's attendance. The
sheik said this was an attempt to express his concerns about the youth
representative.
During the meeting, Andrew Robb, parliamentary secretary to the Minister
for Immigration and Mulicultural Affairs, Amanda Vanstone, said specific
employment programs for young, unemployed Muslims were needed to ensure
religious extremism did not take hold in Australia. Mr Kara-Ali has
repeatedly rejected accusations that he is linked to the controversial
Islamic Charity Projects Association, but has refused to distance himself
from the ICPA which has been accused of being a violent cult organisation.
Mr Kara-Ali yesterday said that should the mufti continue his "ill-informed
and baseless accusations", he would sue him.
The Australian recently reported that DIMA, which has responsibility for
the Muslim advisory body, had gagged the 14-member group.
The reference group chairman, Dr Ali, who also heads the Australian
Federation of Islamic Councils, refused to comment yesterday. A spokeswoman
for Mr Robb last night said the minister had nothing further to add to the
statement he made at last week's group meeting.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18359166%255E1702,00.html
====================
9. PM legacy a mean nation
====================
The Courier-Mail
Peter Charlton
02mar06
HAS it been only 10 years? It seems the Howard Government – and, most
certainly, it is a government dominated by the Prime Minister – has been in
office much longer.
The five years of Paul Keating, the eight years of Bob Hawke, seem ages
away. John Howard's mastery of politics, and his undoubted ability to win
elections, so apparent in the past decade, has been remarkably at odds with
the cautious, tentative politician of the 1980s. Howard was then a loser.
Now, he is a winner and, should he choose to remain in the job, will be a
winner in the future.
The 10th anniversary of his 1996 election win – better described as
Keating's own goal – has attracted much comment, most of it laudatory. The
Howard Government has given us a goods and service tax, an increasingly
complicated taxation system and massive industrial relations changes, the
impact of which is yet to be felt.
It has also given us gun control, a certain positive. East Timor is no
longer an Indonesian conquest but a new nation, but the role of the Howard
Government in this process remains for the judgment of historians after the
opening of the archives.
Howard sees everything through a prism of domestic politics. His invitation
to then president Habibie to hold elections in East Timor had much to do
with the change in ALP policy on East Timor. What followed seems to be more
accidental than deliberate. In any event, Howard received the kudos for the
work done by the Interfet forces, and general Peter Cosgrove didn't do
badly either.
There has, however, been an ugly side to the Howard years. In October 2001,
when Howard addressed the Liberal Party's election campaign audience in
Sydney – a sleek, smug audience baying for protection – he uttered the
watchwords for that campaign: "We will decide who comes to this country and
the circumstances under which they come." On the surface, unremarkable enough.
The reality was different. Women and children locked up behind barbed wire.
Australian citizens locked up or deported. An Immigration Department
hearing its master's voice and obeying with enthusiasm. And a total
rejection of the egalitarianism values that greeted refugees in the 1950s.
Before his election, Howard promised to "rejuvenate" the relationship with
the United States. At the time, this claim was disregarded as just another
piece of election campaign rhetoric. After all, Hawke and his defence
minister Kim Beazley had been famously close to the Americans. Keating and
Bill Clinton had a relationship founded on friendship and respect.
What more could Howard do? At first, very little. He was uncomfortable with
Clinton, no doubt finding both his politics and personal style distasteful.
With George W. Bush, however, it was different. He found a soul mate.
Both Bush and Britain's Tony Blair have come in for sustained criticism for
sending troops into Iraq on a lie: that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons
of mass destruction. Howard has largely escaped similar criticism, possibly
because our commitment was small and, mercifully, we have suffered no
fatalities.
But the fact remains: Howard put Australians in harm's way for no good
reason and on the basis of a lie.
He has benefited politically, though. The 2004 election launch featured a
series of much enlarged photographs of Howard posing for the camera with
soldiers. He has farewelled, and welcomed home, every deployment: Timor,
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Solomons, the aid missions in the wake of the tsunami.
Howard's father and grandfather both fought in World War I. No doubt he
thinks "meanly of himself" for not having worn a uniform since his days in
the Air Training Corps at Canterbury Boys High.
But this does not excuse his shameless exploitation of the armed forces for
his own political purposes. Nor does it excuse the politicisation of senior
levels of the armed forces, most notable during the "children overboard"
affair in 2001.
Indeed, the politicisation of the public service generally might yet be
regarded as the most important legacy of the Howard years.
When he came to office, he sacked six departmental heads immediately. For
those who remained, and those who were appointed in place of the sacked
six, the message was clear. Tell the Government what it wants to hear and
don't tell the Government anything that might prove remotely embarrassing.
From "children overboard" to the AWB saga, the pattern is the same. The
Howard Government lives in a sustained state of plausible deniability.
Keating used to complain that "the bar was set higher" for Labor
governments. By that, he meant a higher standard was demanded. In a way, he
was right. Howard's decision to live at Kirribilli House in Sydney, a
splendid Gothic pile on the harbour, has attracted only mild criticism. Had
Keating chosen to do the same, his decision would have been greeted with
outrage.
Equally, Howard's hugely expensive overseas jaunts have gone largely
unnoticed, as has his decision to exclude the travelling press gallery from
his aircraft. For the past decade, Howard has governed with one single
precept in mind: what is best for John Howard and the Liberal Party. He has
had a huge influence on the country by appealing to the lesser angels of
our national character. As a result, Australia is a meaner, diminished nation.
Peter Charlton, national affairs editor, was The Courier-Mail's political
editor in Canberra when the Howard Government was elected in 1996.
http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,18323089%255E27197,00.html
================================
10. When the good people are left in the dark
================================
Sydney Morning Herald
By Michael Pelly
March 4, 2006
MARY Gaudron spends part of the year based in a three-bedroom house in the
south of France and working for the United Nations' International Labour
Organisation.
The former law school classmate of Philip Ruddock says the 60th birthday of
the UN was celebrated with much fanfare in Europe last year.
However, she reckons it's not surprising that in Australia the anniversary
virtually passed unnoticed.
She told a lunch at NSW Parliament House yesterday for the Jessie Street
Trust that human rights abuses are occurring across the world, with
Australia an offender when it comes to its treatment of the most vulnerable
in society.
"They don't interfere with nice middle class men and women like us, they
pick on the difficult people," she said.
"They pick on the nonconformists, the troublemakers, the dissidents and, as
often as not, they pick on the mentally ill and mentally disabled."
She pointed to the "most serious violations" of the rights of Cornelia Rau
and Vivian Solon and referred to men whom the Herald revealed yesterday had
been held for 3½ and five years.
And she mentioned an 11-year-old Iranian, Shayan Badraie - who will receive
$400,000 after yesterday settling a claim for the trauma he suffered in the
Woomera and Villawood detention centres after 63 days of a NSW Supreme
Court case.
"For that [case] there won't be any change out of a million dollars, I
promise you. Moreover, it is said that the damages aspect would be in the
order of a million dollars," speculated before news of the settlement was
known. "Now, I have been around this town long enough to know that abuses
occur not only because people are vulnerable; they occur as often as not
because good people do nothing and as often as not good people know nothing.
"Detention centres are set apart and isolated from the mainstream of
society and deliberately so, so that you won't know what's going on."
In fact, Gaudron sees arguments beyond the humanitarian for closing
detention centres.
"If we won't do it because of the terms of article 14 (of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights which says everyone has the right to seek and
enjoy asylum in other countries), if we can't do it out of fellow feelings
with other human beings, at least there is a better-than-respectable
argument that we should do it on economic grounds."
It was a rare public appearance from a woman who set many firsts herself:
the state's first female QC, the first woman to be a solicitor-general
(NSW) and then her High Court breakthrough. She is now part of a panel
working on ways to redesign the administration of justice at the UN and
retains her role as a judge with the International Labour Organisation
Administrative Tribunal.
The last time Gaudron publicly spoke on any issue was two years ago, when
Ruddock called her an armchair critic for her comments on the detention of
David Hicks.
"In dismissing my criticisms of Guantanamo Bay, the Attorney-General quite
correctly said that it was the courts of the United States that would
decide if David Hicks's detention was lawful," she said. "At this stage
they are four years too late in doing so."
Gaudron said such a situation could not occur in Australia because of
section 75(v) of the constitution, which says any person - citizen or non
citizen - can restrain public officials from acting beyond their authority.
"It has no equivalent in any other constitution. It has no equivalent in
America. And it is only because America has not got that equivalent
provision that we have that legal black hole known as Guantanamo Bay."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/when-the-good-people-are-left-in-the-dark/2006/03/03/1141191849414.html
========================================
11. Moguls force delay in Australia media law changes
========================================
Cosima Marriner
Wednesday February 22, 2006
The Guardian
Last minute lobbying by the Packer and Murdoch interests has halted
government plans to deregulate Australia media ownership. The
communications minister, Helen Coonan, was due to unveil the blueprint for
media reform this month.
The law which prevents a proprietor from owning more than one newspaper, TV
or radio station in any capital city was to be scrapped. The ban on foreign
investors owning more than 15% of a TV network or 25% of a major newspaper
was also to be repealed. This would have opened the way for Rupert
Murdoch's News Limited to buy the Packer-owned Nine Network, and a foreign
player such as Pearson to acquire the Fairfax-owned Australian Financial
Review. Any changes to the law were virtually assured as the government
controls both upper and lower houses of parliament.
However, it is understood that after many years of lobbying for media
deregulation, the Murdochs and Packers have had a change of heart at the
eleventh hour. Sources have told the Guardian these players would prefer
the status quo rather than the broader changes proposed.
The main issue is the opening up of datacasting - a technology that uses
leftover free-to-air television spectrum to broadcast new services. The
Murdochs and Packers are concerned this would open the door to competing
pay TV or narrowcast television services which could threaten their jointly
owned pay-TV company Foxtel or the Packers' Nine Network.
The law reforms are held up in the office of the prime minister, John Howard.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,1715048,00.html
===========================
12. Communist debate grips Vietnam
===========================
Thursday, 2 March 2006, 17:39 GMT
By Nguyen Giang
BBC Vietnamese Service
In Vietnam, February and March are supposed to be a good time for
relaxation, after the exuberant Lunar New Year.
But Vietnamese media have been absorbed since the end of January in a
difficult and sensitive debate - over the leadership of the Communist
Party, or rather a lack of it.
Online news services and newspapers have run discussion forums and printed
articles containing questions which were impossible to ask a few years ago.
The debate had become so heated that the party's newspaper has recently
stepped in to try to prevent it from "running in a dangerous and harmful way".
It all began early this year with a formal request by the party leadership
for people's views on its political platform in the run-up to its 10th
National Congress, expected to take place in the next few months.
This has provided a rare opportunity for many intellectuals, journalists,
lawyers and even government officials to criticise what is perceived to be
widespread corruption and abuse of power by a number of the party mandarins.
For example, economist Bui Kien Thanh said on a webcast talk show on
Vietnamnet, one of the country's leading online news services, that "if the
party is genuinely serious about democracy, they must allow Vietnamese
people to choose their political leadership".
Another guest speaker, Nguyen Dinh Luong, also made very direct comments,
saying: "There have been many lies about the government's economic
achievement, and in general, a lot of political diseases in the system, due
to bad policies and poor leadership."
Nguyen Dinh Luong is no dissident, but a high government official who
represented Vietnam at the US-Vietnamese Trade Agreement negotiations some
years back.
In the south, pro-reformist Tuoi Tre newspaper has launched a series of
articles by Nguyen Trung, a former diplomat and currently an adviser to
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai.
These have criticised "lack of democracy" in the party, and claim it has
lost its direction after two decades of economic reforms.
Online users have flooded Tuoi Tre's forum with comments about Nguyen
Trung's views.
Some have gone so far as to question the party's control over government
departments and over almost every aspect of the economy.
The Communist Party of Vietnam currently has a final say in the nomination
of all senior government officials to important posts in all ministries and
state-owned co-operations, where many corruption cases have recently been
investigated.
Gambling scandal
In January, Vietnamese police arrested Bui Tien Dung, a senior government
official who was alleged to have bet more than $2m (£1.1m) of state money
in illegal football gambling.
Such cases have given the forum participants the opportunity to make their
point.
Recently the debate has moved from underground bulletins and online letters
by dissidents and religious groups to public life.
And more people have joined the discussion, by sending out letters to the
media to call for political change. Some have even called for a pluralistic
political system.
"Pluralism has worked well in economy over the last 20 years, now it's time
to try political pluralism too," Le Cong Dinh, a lawyer in Ho Chi Minh
City, told the BBC's Vietnamese Service.
Such talk must be alarming the conservative faction in the party. In a late
February issue of Nhan Dan newspaper, the party's chief ideologue, Nguyen
Duc Binh, launched an attack on those who had questioned the principle of
socialism.
A better place to discuss socialism and the future of the party, he argued,
should be an internal magazine, instead of in the national and regional press.
He said, for example, that a new plan to allow businessmen to join the
party was "unnatural".
"Open discussion, through all sorts of letters disseminated around the
country, is harmful," he said.
Nguyen Duc Binh's intervention suggests that those expecting a big change
in Vietnamese politics may be wrong.
However, modern Vietnam has changed so much that it is difficult for the
party to stick to the traditional interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. Do
Ngoc Ninh, director of a party think-tank in Hanoi, dismissed Nguyen Duc
Binh's view as "his own private opinion".
Twenty years of economic reform have also encouraged a number of young
professionals, such as lawyers Le Cong Dinh, Le Quoc Quan and journalist
Phan The Hai, to speak out about politics.
And, still in their mid-30s, they can afford to wait for change.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4766846.stm
=========================
13. Honours galore for Age writers
=========================
The Age
March 6, 2006
THE Age has trumped Victoria's premier media awards by winning 10 honours,
more than any broadcast or print media outlet.
The success at the Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards was headed by The
Age's national news editor, Michael Gordon, who won the Graham Perkin Award
for journalistic excellence. Gordon won for his April report into the
"forgotten" 54 refugees detained on Nauru.
The Age's editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, said the awards reflected the
newspaper's commitment to quality journalism.
The newspaper was also "highly commended" in a further 10 awards.
Business journalist Christian Catalano won the young journalist of the
year, and Sushi Das won the honour for best columnist. Andra Jackson won
the Quill for the best news report for her revelation about the detention
of Australian Cornelia Rau in the Baxter detention centre. The transport
Quill was won by Dan Silkstone and Royce Millar for their examination of
the state's beleaguered public transport system, which was headed "Off the
Rails".
Opinion editor Mark Baker won the award for the best three headlines,
including "She's not the ant's pants, but let's not get our knickers in a
knot", a report about the former underwear model Michelle Leslie. Gary
Tippet won best print feature for "April's story", and Bill Farr won for
best page layout. Ron Tandberg won for best illustration in any medium.
Photographer Sandy Scheltema won the Quill for the best feature photograph
— a picture of a Vietnamese victim of Agent Orange.
The newspaper's online team won for its report "Waves of destruction" about
the causes and effects of the Boxing Day tsunami.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/honours-galore-for-age-writers/2006/03/05/1141493547911.html
==========================
14. Having fun while the credit lasts
==========================
The Age
By John Legge
March 6, 2006
FOR most Australians, the Howard decade has been a good time, economically
at least. Real incomes have risen, unemployment has fallen, and owners of
ordinary houses in suburban Sydney and Melbourne have turned into property
millionaires.
The rising value of the dollar and the removal of the last tariff barriers
have seen shops and showrooms flooded with high-quality, low-cost imported
goods.
There is, of course, an elephant in the front garden: Australia's net
foreign debt is now more than $53,000 a household, or a bit over twice the
median disposable household income. For two of the past 10 years,
Australian families have been spending money that was borrowed, not earned.
To assume that the Howard prosperity will last is to assume that
Australia's overseas creditors will not only never want their money back,
but that they will lend us even more into the indefinite future.
Most people do not yet realise that there is something nasty on the
woodshed as well.
On coming to power, the Howard Government systematically crippled
Australia's innovation infrastructure, and the effects are already showing.
Under Labor, investment in research and development by Australian
businesses was rising at a rate that would have put Australia in the top
quarter of OECD countries by now. Under Howard, this investment is falling
and Australia is heading into the bottom quarter.
Under Labor, exports of high value elaborately transformed manufactures
were rising at a rate that would have stabilised Australia's overseas debt
by 2004 and be reducing it by now. Under Howard, exports of these
manufactures have fallen and high-value goods manufactured by other
countries drive the balance of trade deficit.
The amount that the Government saved in the context of a total Commonwealth
budget by withdrawing support for innovation is a joke. The research
syndication scheme cost the Government nothing: it just diverted money from
tax scams into vital early stage finance for innovators.
Maintaining the Bureau of Industry Economics cost a few million dollars a
year but, as we now know, Howard and his ministers don't want to hear
advice that might contradict their preconceptions. The big-ticket items,
maintaining support for the CSIRO and Australia's universities and
continuing the 150 per cent research and development tax allowance would
have cost at most $5 billion a year, less than half the surplus.
Australia's ability to run up ever higher international debts has spared
most Australians any pain from the reduction in our national innovation
capacity, but the country is living on borrowed time.
Fundamentally, economic growth means earning more money, as individuals,
households and nations.
As far as the economists who kept their jobs under the Howard Government
are concerned, this means producing more by working harder. To these
economists and their political masters, the last word on international
trade was uttered by the British economist and politician David Ricardo in
the early 1800s when he set out his theory of comparative advantage.
The economists who lost their jobs suspected that there may be an
alternative: instead of working harder, work smarter. Instead of producing
more of last year's product, produce a newer and better product. As far as
individuals are concerned, there is no contest: next time you are ill, do
you want to be bled by 100 19th century doctors or treated by one modern
one? The importance of innovation in international trade is explained by
Porter's theory of competitive advantage.
Few people, and fewer politicians, understand innovation and even fewer
understand why it is important to the rest of us.
Innovations, lots of them, mark the difference between a 19th century
doctor and a 21st century one, but innovation has no place in the computer
models that replace the brains of the Government's economists: there is,
when you scrape away the camouflage, no room in these models for more than
one product.
On Ricardo's low road of comparative advantage, Australia would remain a
price-taker, selling commodity products on the world's markets, and if the
world did not want to buy enough to keep our living standards up, then
consumption would be cut. Since no respectable economist supports
rationing, cutting consumption would be done by reducing real wages by
failing to adjust them for inflation; by outright cuts in wages and
conditions; and by increasing unemployment.
On the high road of competitive advantage, Australians would produce new,
innovative, high-value products to trade in the world's markets; the high
prices would make generous wages affordable, earn the innovative firms good
profits, and have enough left over to invest in further innovations.
The Howard Government chose the low road from the start with its attack on
Australia's innovation system, and the numbers show how effective that
attack was. The WorkChoices legislation, replacing the award safety net
with a mean set of minimum conditions, has set the choice in concrete — why
should firms innovate to stay profitable when they can cut wages and
increase hours instead?
Australia under Howard is like a gambler drawing a cash advance on his
credit card to feed the poker machines: fun while the credit lasts, but not
after that.
John Legge is a teaching fellow at Ballarat and Swinburne universities. The
report The High Road or the Low Road? Alternatives for Australia's Future
published in 1999 by the Australian Business Foundation and available on
the internet.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/having-fun-while-the-credit-lasts/2006/03/05/1141493543873.html
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