Wild weather, storms to lash NSW as residents battle bushfire on Queensland's Fraser Coast

Telegraph (Australia)

"Lifesavers seek protection from the wind and rain at Bondi Beach today, traditionally a popular destinations for tourists and locals alike to celebrate Christmas Day." ED: Not always like the image of OZ we see here....

Another bright day in multicultural Sydney

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"A news roundup from today’s Sydney Morning Herald, giving another bracing insight into the success of our immigration program. ..... It’s a question many south-west Sydney communities are grappling with as the gang founded by the murderer Bassam Hamzy attempts to flex its muscles in Sydney again. ...... With shootings and gun crime reaching fever pitch, the group’s insignia of two crossed AK47 machine guns has appeared at crime scenes with increasing regularity. .....In October, Yehya Amoud was shot dead as he and a friend, Bassam Hijazi, sat on Greenacre Road in an expensive Mercedes that bore the number plate ‘’B F L’’. And in August, a 16-year-old boy was shot in the leg in a driveway scrawled with ‘’Brothers 4 Life’’ graffiti. .......The Lakemba Mosque had posted the religious ruling or ‘fatwa’ on its Facebook page on Saturday morning, warning followers it was a “sin” to even wish people a Merry Christmas."
Shot man refuses to assist police (Telegraph,Australia)- "The attack follows a number of shootings in western Sydney in recent weeks and six shooting murders in the area since August."

This Australian sued because she claimed to be Aboriginal and some disagreed...... she won.

"Identifying as Aboriginal but light skinned, Bindi Cole started creating works around the issue of identity.  ......
Conservative columnist Andrew Bolt wrote a column accusing Bindi of choosing to identify as Aboriginal in order to give herself 'political and career clout'.
Bindi and several others named in the column brought a class action against Andrew Bolt and won, with the court finding he had breached the racial discrimination act."

Aboriginal woman, Tasmania,photo taken 1866.

This very articulate Aboriginal - Dallas - on his blog Black Steam Train makes some interesting observations about "white identifiers" :

Insight - that Aboriginality show

'Once upon a time, the paler activists were an asset to the Aboriginal cause.  Now, they have become a liability.  Sprouting bullshit such as 'our white skin is a result of the rape of the colonisers', they are no longer laughable and tolerable in small doses - they are promoting a view of life that just continues to perpetuate the victim mentality and does their cause no favours...." (view full article here)

and here....

Conflict of interest? Only for the whites...

'The original promise of the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 2006 was to allow Aboriginal people to be involved in preserving their heritage and culture, to provide protection to our most sacred sites.  The reality is, in most cases, it has done completely the opposite." 
(view full article here)

Gillard’s Budget promise exposed for the con it always was

Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun (Australia)
"Many pro-Gillard commentators will now try to praise Gillard for being “responsible” by abandoning her surplus promise with the economy “unexpectedly” brittle. In fact she should be condemned for breaking yet another false promise - one that gave her cover for spending too much for too long. Gillard has been not just dishonest but reckless and must pay. Else what are political promises ever to mean? A final warning. There will be many apologists now saying there is little difference between a small surplus and a small deficit anyway, so what’s the big deal? The deal is this:
 - a broken promise
 - a promise that excused huge deficits in previous years.
 - a failure to deliver a surplus even when the economy was growing well and commodity prices were at record highs.
 - the removal now of one last brake on Labor’s spending, with many commentators and special interests demanding a deficit blowout. (If Gillard can be forgiven, say, a $3 billion deficit now, why not round that out to $5 billion and cram in a few more election bribes?
 I fear a Rubicon has been crossed. If China falters now, we are in terrible trouble.

Ed: Like Blair/Brown New Labour UK government, the Rudd/Gillard Labor Australian government has racked up colossal debt during a time of plenty for others to pay off.

Australia you are so totally gay

Telegraph
"I mean "gay", of course, in the offensive, playground, politically incorrect sense of the word. As in: "Your Dad's car is totally gay." Or: "That shark was so gay he didn't even manage to take your whole leg off." This is the kind of usage that would you have you arrested in Australia these days, such is the gag-making political correctness of the land they once called the Lucky Country but which now ought more properly to be named the Haringey of the Southern Hemisphere.
When I tell this to people who've never been to Oz they are usually surprised. Australia, they imagine, is a rugged, no-nonsense place where the men all look a bit like Crocodile Dundee (or, at least, the late Steve Irwin), and where their idea of a chat-up line to the Sheilas on Bondi beach is "Hey Sheila. Do you want a ****?" (to which they'll add, if Sheila is reluctant: "Well would you mind just lying there while I have one?")
But it's just not true. Australia handed in its testicles to the progressives long ago."
Now Read this: Do not try writing this at home (Andrew Bolt,Herald Sun Australia)

Is Blair Bonkers ?

Tony Blair: immigration has been good for Britain (Telegraph)
" Mr Blair has been repeatedly criticised after his Government issued official predictions forecasting that 13,000 people would move to Britain after immigration controls were lifted from Eastern Europe in 2004. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans subsequently relocated to this country putting pressure on schools and other public services. However, the former Prime Minister also refused to accept that this policy had been misguided. .......“Talk of leaving [the EU] is dangerous, immensely damaging to Britain’s long-term interests,” he said. “I think the UK has an opportunity to play a part in shaping the new Europe and it should seize it. And we should neither have an empty chair nor empty gestures.”
ED: Hummm.... yes!

Alien nation: The new census reveals a Britain that would be unrecognisable even to our grandparents

Daily Mail
"London is rapidly becoming a separate nation, as different from England as Scotland or Wales are, with indigenous British people now in a minority, in some areas a very small minority indeed, and incidentally with extremes of wealth and poverty not known since Edwardian times."

How Blair conned the Tory Party into selling its soul

Daily Mail
"Unfashionable and unpopular though it is, I have always admired Mr Blair. I disagreed with almost all he did. But I never doubted that, after Mrs Thatcher, he was the most adept politician of modern times.
One of his skills lay in sowing confusion and doubt among his opponents, wrong-footing them and driving them to panic. I had hoped the Tories at the time were intelligent enough to see his game for what it really was. But I was wrong. ......Ever since, the party has been obsessed by attempting to de-toxify its image — but in the process has come perilously close to losing its soul. The legacy can be seen in numerous policies today. The Government wastes nearly £10 billion a year on overseas aid because it wants to combat the Left-wing notion that being Conservative can be synonymous with being racist. It ring-fences money in a wasteful and over-managed National Health Service because to cut even a penny would, it has decided, signify an attack on the ‘vulnerable’. It squanders money on useless wind-farms because to rely on non-renewable energy would suggest Conservatives want to destroy the planet."

Would Leveson care to comment?

Catallaxy Files (Australia)
"The political response: In a phone call to the editor of this newspaper, [Director of Communications for UK Prime Minister David Cameron] Craig Oliver indicated that the article may be poorly timed as “she [Maria Miller] is looking at Leveson at the moment.” The comments came less than 24 hours after an adviser to the Culture Secretary telephoned a reporter working on an article about Mrs Miller’s expense claims to “flag up” the minister’s role in implementing new press rules. … [Craig Oliver] then raised the fact that Mrs Miller was leading the Government’s response to the Leveson Report which recommended statutory press regulation. .....
The Daily Telegraph has decided to disclose details of the private conversations amid widespread concern about the potential dangers of politicians being given a role in overseeing the regulation of the press. Funnily enough Leveson seems to have denied that this was ever his intention in the clips I posted this morning."

Immigration and Labour’s unforgivable betrayal of the British people

Daily Mail
"Whatever the explanation, it is certain that Labour acted in a way that was contrary to the wishes of most of the population, whose concerns grew year by year as unchecked immigration, particularly in London and the South-East, put ever greater pressure on housing, land, schools, hospital care and other services. This was a kind of betrayal — a betrayal of ordinary people by the ruling class. And also by the media class. For with one or two honourable exceptions such as the Mail, newspapers did not question government policy. As for the BBC, it treated moderate critics of mass immigration almost as though they were racist. When during the 2005 general election the then Tory leader, Michael Howard, expressed misgivings about the high level of immigration — while emphasising that he was in no way a racist — he was habitually treated by the BBC as an extremist. I recall one interview by a sneering Jeremy Paxman, who attempted to paint him in the darkest colours. .......But be in no doubt that a historic change took place in the first decade of this century that will transform Britain for ever. Without the people being consulted, without any debate, without even the Labour government admitting what was going on, there was a quiet, yet seismic revolution. There can be no going back. I believe Labour had a choice. I believe it could have controlled immigration, as it once said it wanted to do. I believe that is what most British people of every origin wanted. Labour politicians behaved with monumental arrogance and presumptuousness, and with no regard for democracy. It was as though Britain was their country, not the country of the people who happen to live here."

Royal hoax DJs accused of 'playing dumb'

Stuff NZ
" The Australian radio DJs linked to the death of the British nurse Jacintha Saldanha had been trained "not to air any prank calls without permission" and are now "playing dumb", a source from besieged Sydney station 2Day FM claims. The claim appears to contradict interviews given by DJs Michael Christian and Mel Greig where they said they were not aware of the approval process for prank calls. The source said all 2Day FM presenters, producers and content managers were compelled to undergo "decency and standards" training every six months, in compliance with a ruling from the industry watchdog. The training sessions, run by 2Day FM's in-house lawyer Tania Petsinis, include the specific instruction "not to air prank calls unless they get the subject's permission ... if there is doubt about a prank call, there is a clear chain of command in management that we have to escalate the call through".

Yes, immigration can bring huge benefits. But on this scale and at this speed, it's too much to cope with

Daily Mail
"But the mass immigration that has been taking place in Britain over the past decade has dramatically changed the cultural make-up of this country. If immigration occurs gradually — as it did in Britain on and off for centuries — then immigrant communities feel the need to integrate. Over time they become essential, indeed defining, parts of the life of the country. But immigration on the scale revealed in the new census is a recipe not for integration, but fracture. It spells the end of our unified national way of life. With immigration continuing at this rate, the British way of life becomes simply one option in a set of lifestyle choices — something you might adopt if you care to, but only in the way you might take up yoga or swimming."

'British whites' are the minority in London for the first time as census shows number of UK immigrants has jumped by 3million in 10 years

Daily Mail
"Just 44.9% of Londoners are White British, according to census data - 7.5million residents of England and Wales were foreign-born in 2011 - Census data reveal just 59% now call themselves Christian as a quarter say they have no religion and 5% are Muslim - Less than 90% of country is white for the first time ever"

The Chancellor's medicine may be harsh. But Ed Balls would be economic poison

Daily Mail
"A few weeks ago I happened to meet Balls’s boss, Ed Miliband, in a TV studio. He said: ‘You don’t seem very impressed with what the Government is doing. Shouldn’t you be joining us?’ I responded that on the day he stands up and says: ‘I apologise humbly to the British people for the fact that the last Labour government, of which I was a member, wrecked the economy and squandered all our money,’ I might start to think about it. Miliband lapsed into silence, and on that note we parted.
......For his part, Ed Balls offers a far larger and more dangerous deceit: the scandalous pretence that we can sustain the lifestyle which he and Gordon Brown told the British people they could have, without earning the means to pay for it. If Balls ever had to practise his political principles as a businessman, his deceitful prospectus would be exposed as a Ponzi-style scheme that would earn him a stiff prison sentence for fraud. More seriously, if ever again he is allowed to get his hands on the Treasury tiller, any chance of restoring this country to solvency will vanish up the chimney. Every time we voters get frustrated by David Cameron or George Osborne, we must remind ourselves of the lurking Balls menace."

Britain is going bust

Terry Smith
"Far from moderating this recklessness, the Labour government got in on the act, increasing public spending by 42%, in real terms, between 1996-97 and 2006-07. Then, when the imaginary – borrowed - growth of the pre-2008 period fell away, government, professing itself just as bemused as almost everyone else, slumped into a larger deficit than any other major economy, and started racking up stupendous amounts of public debt.
This process has left Britain in a hole, but hardly anyone has stopped digging. Needless to say, debt continues to escalate, and the current government has been criticised by many for “cuts” which actually left real public spending higher in 2011-12 (£696bn) than it was in 2008-09 (£673bn), let alone 2000-01 (£498bn). "

A case of lies, damn lies and our rocketing national debt

CityAM
"GO on, take the quiz. You know you can’t wait, so here goes. Which of these statements do you believe to be most accurate: a) the coalition is planning to cut the national debt by £600bn between 2010 and 2015; b) it is planning neither to reduce or decrease it; or c) the coalition is planning to increase the national debt by around £600bn. The obvious, undeniable answer, as readers of this fine newspaper will all know, is c)."

Why I, as a British Muslim woman, want the burkha banned from our streets

Daily Mail
"Thanks to fundamentalist Muslims and 'hate' preachers working in Britain, the veiling of women is suddenly all-pervasive and promoted as a basic religious right. We are led to believe that we must live with this in the name of 'tolerance'.
And yet, as a British Muslim woman, I abhor the practice and am calling on the Government to follow the lead of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and ban the burkha in our country. The veil is simply a tool of oppression which is being used to alienate and control women under the guise of religious freedom. .....I have read the Koran. Nowhere in the Koran does it state that a woman's face and body must be covered in a layer of heavy black cloth. Instead, Muslim women should dress modestly, covering their arms and legs. Many of my adult British Muslim friends cover their heads with a headscarf - and I have no problem with that. The burkha is an entirely different matter. It is an imported Saudi Arabian tradition, and the growing number of women veiling their faces in Britain is a sign of creeping radicalisation, which is not just regressive, it is oppressive and downright dangerous. The burkha is an extreme practice. It is never right for a woman to hide behind a veil and shut herself off from people in the community. But it is particularly wrong in Britain, where it is alien to the mainstream culture for someone to walk around wearing a mask."

Mining crunch hits profits – rate cut expected

Financial Review (Australia)
"Reserve Bank governor Glenn ­Stevens and the Reserve Bank board are scrambling to kick-start growth amid signs the resources investment boom will start to taper off next year. One of the Reserve Bank’s worries is that exports are being hit by the strong dollar, which is being held up by purchases from central banks even as local interest rates have been cut. A group of influential academic and business economists acting as a “shadow” central bank board said the economy wasn’t in such bad shape and urged Mr Stevens to hold his nerve. But the latest data suggests the economy could fall into a deep slump during the 2013 election year unless housing construction, manufacturing and consumer spending pick up. “At the moment it looks like the non-mining economy is expanding at less than 1 per cent per annum and that’s where 85 per cent of the economy is and 97 per cent of the work,” Goldman Sachs Australia chief economist Tim Toohey said. “If you’ve got mining rolling down, and clearly the government is not going to add much to employment, the big driver has to be the non-mining side of the economy.”

Mining boom over. Nothing to show. Harder times ahead

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"I repeat: the crisis we face is that the mining boom is over with nothing to replace it. And what on earth did we do with all that easy money? What trash did we buy? What surpluses squander? "
.....Mr Morse says China’s growth will slow from 10.5pc to 5.5pc by 2020 - Credit Suisse thinks it could be as low as 4pc, and the US Conference Board 3.7pc - but the crucial twist is that appetite for resources will wane as the Politburo calls time on history’s greatest building boom in history and opts instead for a modern, sleek, consumer and service-driven economy..."

'This is as bad as a world war': Bank of England boss's grim view of financial crisis which has left a debt 'that will be paid by our grandchildren'

Daily Mail
"Andrew Haldane: People 'had every reason' to feel 'deeply upset and angry'- George Osborne to admit bringing public finances back to order will take longer than expected - He has to find more than £23bn through further cuts and tax rises by 2017 Institute of Fiscal Studies said era of austerity could last until 2018"

Why did none of the Aborigines there notice the Aboriginal song was a con?

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun (Australia)
"....After the film, Wadi took to the stage, having been introduced as a Pintjantjatjara man from Mutitjulu. He addressed the audience, answering questions about his culture before singing a song “in language”, a performance that brought some in the audience to the verge of tears...
In August this year, Wadi appeared in Sydney’s Downing Centre District Court, charged with 30 counts of fraud. Only this time, Wadi wasn’t Wadi, son of an “Aboriginal magic man” from Uluru; he was Dallas Gwilliam from Neutral Bay in Sydney. As soon became apparent, Gwilliam, who is 40, was not Aboriginal and had never served in the military. As part of the case against him, DPP lawyer Steve Higgins accused Gwilliam of having constructed “an elaborate web of lies”, a statement which, though true, seems dismally inadequate. Gwilliam’s con was ever-evolving and wildly improvisatory, a 20-year jazz solo of A-grade bullshit in which he had posed not only as Aboriginal royalty and a special forces veteran, but as a Shaolin monk, seeded tennis player, telco millionaire, martial arts expert, UN peacekeeper and Chinese racing-car driver."

The new police commissioners appointing their friends as deputies - on up to £68,000 a year

Daily Mail
" New unelected jobs are being created even though police and crime commissioners (PCCs) already have offices full of staff
Many have handed them to friends and political allies
Use of taxpayers’ money to put PCC's 'mates in cushy jobs' will damage public confidence, expert warns"