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Thursday, 5th February 1998
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THIS WEEK - LIVE FROM THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION by our correspondent Peter Mackay


International:

The LOUD pornographic image discredits the moral stand of the politically correct.

Early yesterday afternoon I was phoned by the General Manager of the Australian Council for the Arts, Michael Lynch who informed me that he had rectified the situation and had had the pornographic image of Pauline Hanson MP removed on Monday.

He confirmed that he had had discussions with Deborah Klika and Margaret Searles following my contacts yesterday.

I told him that the image was still up that morning but accepted his word that the image had been removed since after we had a difference of opinion as to when the image was finally removed from Loud.

I phoned his secretary shortly thereafter after discovering the large pornographic image was still on-line on Loud. She viewed the pornographic image on Loud after I gave her the URL. I then contacted Mr Lynch just after 5pm (New South Wales time). He confirmed that he had just viewed the image on the Loud site and was working at immediately rectifying the situation.

The image on the right replaced the pornographic image of Pauline Hanson that took nearly 100 hours to be removed after the first complaints were made by email to the Minister for Pornography, Communication and the Arts, Senator Alston. The date and time (5.35pm, Wednesday 4th February) on the image confirms the struggle to get the image removed from the Loud web site.

This is the URL that once carried the pornographic image on Loud - which is currently replaced by the image above. We had obviously not given the URL out where the image was carried earlier because of the misfits in our society who obviously read these pages.

Hopefully this will be the final chapter in this unsavoury chapter which classically reveals the obscene manner in which mainstream Australians are treated while "politically correct" groups are treated like some sort of sacred cow - an argument which Mr Lynch agreed with.

I have learnt to be more than skeptical about senior bureaucrats - but Mr Lynch has my email address and has promised to send me an apology to Pauline Hanson from the Australian Council for the Arts regarding this matter. An apology  to be published on this news page. If and when it arrives he will regain my support for the job that he is trying to do... but if it doesn't .... well let's just wait and see.

You will now understand the value of keeping an archive on-line.

News Limited to be investigated for tax fraud.

Don't expect to read about this is your News Limited papers but the media giant is being investigated by a number of countries around the world for tax fraud.

The complex company structure with all roads leading to the tax-free Cayman Islands has got governments looking into the company's payment of taxes.

Poody -tat Soorley the scumbag strikes again.

A Brisbane family in the western suburbs has been forced to pay Au$20,000 for a small piece of land valued at just Au$11,000. The purchase follows the accidental building of a garage encroaching on council land by the family, the Kemptons.

When the Kemptons discovered the builders error they offered to pay Au$13,000 for the strip of unused council land but in a council meeting earlier this week Lord Mayor Soorley declined the offer.

Using his Labor numbers in the council Soorley forced the family, who were in a no win situation, to pay Au$20,000 justifying his outrageous action thus, "If you are on council land get off - it belongs to the people of the city.

"With every sale (like this) we will get more money, with every buy we will pay less - I don't apologise for that."

Count your lucky starts you don't live in Brisbane - at least until poody tat moves on.

 


Making the news" -
an indepth exposé of media and political collusion at the highest possible levels in Australia.


Political:

A Lump of Constitutional Cheese

It was Eric Bullmore, the Shooters' Party representative to the Constitutional Convention in Canberra, who first brought up the subject of rats.

He mentioned Senate Deputy President Mal Colston as an example of the appointment model gone wrong. Of course, he had forgotten that Colston was elected, rather than appointed, so it was really pretty much an own goal, but still, it was the highlight of a pretty ordinary speech.

Old Parliament House makes a very good maze. It's a warren of twisty passages, all alike. Wood panelling, cream paint and red carpet, repeated endlessly. Delegates and media scurry around, feeding off each other and looking for a way out of the rat-race.

There are three lumps of cheese in the maze. Three different sets of rats are sniffing the breeze, each trying to find the tucker first, and trying to recruit other rats to the hunt along the way. We've all been running around for three days now, and the twists and turns of the constitutional maze are growing familiar.

Head rat, Malcolm Turnbull, is pretty sure he can see his cheese clearly. He has a vision of a republic with a Governor-General elected by a two-thirds majority of a joint sitting of Parliament. He's been seven years on the trail, and it's only these last few turns that are slowing him down and the last few rats tripping him up.

Monarchy Mouse, Kerry Jones, has found her cheese a long time ago, and is jealously guarding it. Trouble is it's going off.

And the third team of rodents, a very mixed bag of ratbags led by one time Brisbane Lord Mayor Clem Jones and Ipswich Councillor Paul Tully have been running around aimlessly, squeaking loudly in their pursuit of the democratically elected Big Cheese.

This last batch were trapped in a dead end when two important resolutions were defeated on only the second day of the Convention. Far from sending the monarchists home for an early shower, it looked like the radical republicans might be packing their bags.

But Lab Supervisor Ian Sinclair relented and opened up a hidden gate by changing the rules to lower the threshold for the direct election team. Their resolution had been soundly defeated, but when Gareth Evans and his Resolutions Committee decided to enact retrospective rules and allow resolutions with only 25% of the convention vote to proceed to further consideration, he set the radical rats scampering with renewed enthusiasm. Scared by their near-death experience, they huddled together in the late afternoon and formed the Direct Presidential Election Group with scant regard for television news deadlines.

The DPEG (obviously not a name chosen with an eye to posterity, otherwise they would have called themselves People for an Elected President) now claim they have at least 27 members and possibly five more nibbling at the edge. As the Australian Republican Movement has only 26 delegates, this is very stiff cheddar for Malcolm Turnbull.

Still, the act of kindness has only barely kept them in the running. From where they are, the twists and turns of the maze keep them from their prize. Without codification of his powers, a president elected by the people is a non-starter. With his powers rigidly codified, such a president has no power at all. Their popular election model is either pointless or unobtainable. But popular with the people, if not constitutional experts.

Turnbull's Special Majority Model is good, long-established and reasonably well-supported. It would probably work very well, and it might well get up were it not for two major flaws. Firstly, it is opposed by far more delegates than support it, so at the moment it is not a candidate for consensus. Secondly, the people don't like it -- they distrust politicians and if it came to a two-thirds vote, they would rather do the voting than trust the sort of politicians who elect and appoint Mal Colston to the Senate Deputy President job. Far too many people thought that he had been getting a lot more than his fair share of nibbles, and Eric Bullmore may well have irretrievably linked the name of Colston to that of Turnbull.

As I predicted yesterday, today's buzzword was "McGarvie Model", and this bit of bait was being dangled in front of Australians for a Constitutional Majority. It is becoming increasingly obvious to ACM that most delegates support some sort of republic. Some of them purely hate the Queen and would go to any lengths to see her removed. Others are intent on updating the symbols -- we are no longer part of a thriving British Empire, and even if the Queen has no real power and no practical ability, she is perceived as being an anachronism. Maybe a republic would not actually change anything but the names on the constitutional doors, but more and more people are seeing this as something to strive for.

And, as Professor Greg Craven pointed out, the monarchy has been destabilised. With over half the population in favour of a republic, the people would see a lack of any tangible result from the election-convention-plebiscite-referendum process as some sort of sneaky cheating way of retaining the Queen, and resolve to get it right the next time around. Just as Paul Keating won the 1993 election by an unexpected series of flukes, the people made very sure that he got the boot the next time they got a ballot paper in their hands.

We might get five or ten more years of the status quo, but eventually the ALP would claw its way back into government and run a referendum rigged to give a republican result.

So the constitutional monarchists are finding their decks clearing as more and more rats jump ship. It was Peter Costello yesterday, Senator Robert Hill and Tony Abbot today. All true blue vein monarchist hopes, they are now sniffing hungrily around the three blind mice of the McGarvie Model. If this three person Constitutional Council is bound to appoint the Prime Minister's nomination for Governor-General, then one wonders why have three people unable to debate or dissent, when clearly only one is required.

But the last word came from a polished double act of Don Chipp and Ron Boswell. Chipp, a monarchist, was sinking his teeth into the direct election model:

"Secondly, there would be the question of financing the campaign of that candidate. How many millions of dollars would be required? Why don't some of the republicans who are pushing this model tell us their estimates of the amount of funding a person in this country would need to stand as a candidate for president? The corollary of that is to whom he or she would be indebted and for how much after receiving those millions of dollars."

"There's no such thing as a free lunch." interjected Boswell, patting his ample tummy. Don Chipp agreed, concluded his remarks, and together they went off to the dining room for their free lunch.

email the editor

You say:

Carol Moore Letters
Editor
THE ECONOMIST London,
United Kingdom

----------------------------------------------------

Subject: A letter to the editor re. - "At last, a court that war criminals must take seriously" (The Economist, 1/31/98)

Dear Ms. Moore:

Was the Economist editorial - "At last, a court that war criminals must take seriously" (The Economist, 1/31/98) - supposed to be a farce? Or a satire? Surely, your editors did not expect to be taken seriously by singing praise to such a kangaroo court? At least not any more seriously than the American "pollsters" are taken seriously who allege that 69% of Americans are brain dead (by supposedly supporting Bill Clinton despite his "Zippergate" and other transgressions). If you keep that up, soon enough you'll only be writing for your colleagues in the "establishment" media, while the readers take time out for a good laugh.

Your editors seem to be out of it when it comes to real news about the "war crimes," read "politically correct" court which the United Nation has set up in the Hague. Here are just a few "sound bites" to whet your readers' appetites:

"Former Croatian intelligence officers accused top government officials of covering up the 1991 slaughter of Serbs in central Croatia," the Associated Press reported on Jan. 27. The former soldiers also complained that the International War crimes Tribunal in The Hague was not acting on evidence they provided, and was "slow or unwilling" to prosecute the offenders.

"We gave them statements, tapes, footage as evidence and we expected some indictments, but nothing has happened," former Croat officer Mirko Levar told reporters in Zagreb on Jan. 27.

Levar, and his former colleague Zdenko Ropac, said they testified before Tribunal investigators in The Hague, Netherlands, in early December. They also said they had met Tribunal investigators last summer in Croatia to tour some areas where bodies reportedly were buried.

Where were the Economist reporters on Jan. 27? Too busy taking down instructions from the New World Order politicians about how "the International War-Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is beginning to show teeth," as your editorial alleged?

No worries, as the Aussies like to say. You're in "good company." Your editorial sure sounds like a mockery of justice which Janet Reno has made of the American Justice Department. Instead of being blind, her kind of "justice" has acquired a 20/20 political vision. Just as that of Louise Arbour, a French-Canadian judge, who is the chief prosecutor at The Hague.

But I do like your cartoonist's sense of humour. He depicted both former Bosnian Serb leaders - Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - as having holes in the soles of their worn out shoes. No wonder. After being bombed by NATO in 1995, all the Serbs received from the "international community" was about 2% of its aid to Bosnia, according to General Charles Boyd, writing in the FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Jan-Feb/98 issue.

Some "rewards!" Some kangaroo court! Some Economist editorial! Your readers deserve better - the full truth.

Best regards,
Bob Djurdjevic,
Founder,
Truth in Media,
Phoenix, Arizona

Subject: Comments on Australian News of the Day

`Dear Ms.Hanson,

Sorry to hear of abuse of you, supported by Australian Government (senator Richard Alston).

I did not seem to be able to access the site mentioned in the "News of the Day", please supply path within "Land Media Festival of Youth Culture and Arts", (in the old days it would have been called "Yobos Culture"), where do I find "The Issue".

I can not judge, if the mentioned material is pornographic without seeing it.

If it is pornographic, there is a simple answer to it, print it out and send to the police and ask them to prosecute them for publishing pornography on the net, and to prosecute the senator for financing it, also report it to CJC, because this appears to be a criminal mater, that the Government finances pornography, and ask the CJC to tell the Government to stop any grants to them and to confiscate any money they have left and give it to Queensland flood relief, it will do a lot of good there, and the Queensland Premier after calling back all the rubbishy grants will have enough money for the flood disaster without having to ask people to give generously.

Apparently senator Alston used the excuse, that this type of publication is Art, or Artistic Expression, it does not hold water, because where will it stop, will we allow publishing paedophilia, sodomy etc., and according to what I understand senator Alston implied that, provided it is published under "Artistic Expression", it will be OK.

No wonder we have so much crime, our youngsters have no morals, thank to example senator Alston seems to be giving them.

Do you think, it be OK., with senator Alston, provided I call it "ART", or Artistic Expression, to have something of equally good taste published on the Internet, with Senator's wife's head superimposed on it, will she enjoy it, after all it will be Artistic Expression ? Will she enjoy being portrayed in this type of Artistic Expression ?

Highest regards.
Richard Borowski.

Subject: the issue

I checked the filth links on LOUD again today (Wed.) The large image has gone and is replaced with the following message; "this image has been removed subject to complaint and legal advice."

Well that's not good enough. The thumbnail picture is still there and I urge everyone to keep e-mailing the "Senator for Porn" until that image is also removed.

S.E.Wagger

Subject: Comments on Australian News of the Day

Dear Sir

Good to see that my Thought for the Day is inspiring some feedback. I'm sorry that Graham Strachan finds it a little intellectually challenging, however thanks for the offer of a prize though! Did you see the message I sent you in the latest edition of 'The Local Bulletin' . I'm sorry but it was in a cryptic form but if you look closer you will probably see it!

Oh did you see the bad sportsmanship of the South African cricket team. Fancy putting a wicket through the door of the umpire's dressing room because you're not happy with a decision. Probably the effect of too many steroids and performance enhancing drugs....

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:
'Come into my web said the spider to the fly' has taken on a whole new meaning since the advent of the Internet (a good example of being objectively humourous)

Independent Candidate for the Federal Seat of Blair? mm!
Barry A Sampson Searle (oh, 'Barry' will be just fine!)

Subject: Work for the dole

Dear Editor

I am astonished that Kim Beazley and Martin Ferguson among others have slammed the Howard government's 'work for the dole' scheme. Obviously none of their children are unemployed.

I have an unemployed 20 year old still at home. I think it is high time that he developed a sense of 'mutual obligation' by being asked to participate in work schemes, do voluntary work, undergo training etc. Why on earth should he sit at home and collect money for nothing? He has a good life: he is well fed, his laundry is done, he is fond of the cinema, he has even bought shares in Telstra - something his parents could not afford to do!

He is a good lad and does not object to my insistence that he rise and breakfast with the rest of the family who work and attend school. He cheerfully does any work we ask of him. But he receives a government benefit, and so to my mind he is obligated to the wider community. He agrees, as did my husband when he suffered his bouts of unemployment.

I wholeheartedly agree that it is not the fault of the young people themselves that they have no work. Once, fifteen and sixteen year olds were welcomed into the workforce as juniors in every job and even most professions. Now nobody wants them, especially as they now leave school at the age of eighteen and nineteen. The situation of the young is a sad indictment on the late twentieth century, despite all its impressive technical wizardry.

The likes of Beazley and Ferguson are wrong to suggest that because the Australian economy cannot provide real jobs, unemployed people are under no obligation to earn their benefits. They are wrong to suggest that any 'work for the dole' scheme is somehow demeaning. If the economy cannot deliver real jobs, surely it is better for the unemployed to participate in 'work for the dole' schemes rather than lounge around in private misery. At least participation in the scheme gets them out of bed in the morning, and gives them the satisfaction of both having earned their benefit as well enjoying of the society of workmates.

All parents I have spoken to about this agree with me. If the Labor elite thinks otherwise it looks very much like Labor is still floating around in the cloud-cuckoo land of PC. That is what lost it the last election. We hoi polloi may be despised for our opinions, but there are more of us than there are PC freaks.

Name Withheld

Subject: convention

Is there a real means to respond to the call of a delegate to swamp the convention with our wishes re what is transpiring?

Our member for FISHER peter slipper issued the address www.dpme.gov.au/convention but I cannot get through. I only have this to say: How can the delegates vote on anything when most of the time when the speakers are talking half of them are not in the chamber. They are in committee, so the ABC told us. When any Monarchist was talking, many actually walked out. Reminds me of when Pauline speaks in the so called democratic Parliament. The ignorant bastards all walk out and have a beer I suppose.

I repeat, how can they Vote without hearing all the views expressed? I am sure the convention is rigged for two eventualities: maintain the status quo, after all they succeed already in bypassing the constitution: or they would rather rewrite it to cover their illegal contraventions to date, to protect themselves from prosecution by a possible future One Nation type Government.

It's meself speakin,
Philip Madsen

Business:

Silver is apparently the metal to buy at the moment following the revelation that billionaire Warren Buffet has bought 129.7 million ounces of the semi-precious metal or quarter of the world's annual production.

Who can forget the late 1970s when Bunker Hunt tried to corner the silver market sending the price up to over US$50 per ounce from less than US$3 an ounce just 12 months before.

I made a killing on 20kgs of silver.... selling two weeks before the price crashed to just US$5 per ounce in early 1980.

Since Buffet's move the price has risen from US$4.30 to nearly US$7 per ounce.

Personal trivia, from the global office:

Another beautiful day in paradise.

Have a good one.


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