Andrew Bolt's Blog, page 1891

Every warming alarmist should have some nuclear power

If you buy the global warming argument, you have to buy Liberal MP Josh Frydenberg's argument for nuclear power here:

If our Prime Minister is to stay true to her promise and make 2011 the year of "delivery and decision", she needs to take the lead and initiate a comprehensive discussion about nuclear power, which happens to be the only carbon-neutral baseload energy source.

Failure to do so ignores the informed views of a long list of technical experts, environmentalists and many of Gillard's Labor colleagues.

So, why is it time for Australia to have the nuclear debate? And why is it, in the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, "intellectually unsustainable to rule it out as a possibility"?

The answer is threefold. As a leading source of uranium, Australia has a competitive advantage; as a clean form of energy, nuclear power is better for the environment; and as the only advanced economy not embracing it as the answer, it is time we caught up.

Watch this, Julia

Kevin Rudd decides to show Julia Gillard how to give a proper Australia Day speech:

For us, this will be no ordinary Australia Day. For we come together, here in our local community and in communities right across Queensland, to honour extraordinary achievements in the face of extraordinary events.

Because these Queensland floods have been extraordinary events. When Mother Nature turns her fury on men and women, it propels us back to the most basic questions of human survival. The elements strip things bare. They break our bodies. They test our souls.

And so dramatically on.

Only Aborigines may vote

A "well-intentioned" racist law encourages even smart people to think up even "nicer" forms of race-based division:

CAPE York leader Noel Pearson has insisted that Aboriginal Australians be given a vote to determine whether a referendum on indigenous recognition in the Constitution goes ahead, and has cautioned against that referendum being held on the same day as the next federal election…

"Indigenous Australians should be given the opportunity to say whether they wish to put the question to the Australian nation. If our people do not support the proposition, then it should not be put."

This is crazy stuff, holding race-based votes over race-based laws. It's even crazier when you consider that many prominent Aborigines have just as much European ancestry as Aboriginal, and often much more. But I'm forbidden on legal advice for saying more on that subject, such are our laws and my predicament.

If it's not Farrelly, it's Hartcher

Tim Blair cheats in his search for the most pretentious line written this week. He goes to a Peter Hartcher column.

Column - The argument for the Queen is like the one for Parky

JUST being asked to give the Australia Day Address should have stopped Sir Michael Parkinson from making a goose of himself afterwards.

The 75-year-old star of TV chat on Monday became the first foreigner to deliver the annual Australia Day Address in its 14-year history.

But he didn't learn the lesson. Just after giving his talk at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music he went feral.

"Why should Australia not be a republic?" he asked reporters.

"It's its own country, its own man. I find it incomprehensible that it's not that now."

Incomprehensible? That Australia is a constitutional monarchy with Queen Elizabeth as head of state is no more incomprehensible than having an English TV star give the Australia Day speech. The excuse for both is the same: if it works, we're happy.

Plainly, Australia works extremely well. We've never been troubled by dictators, and never had our fundamental freedoms threatened, even if speaking freely has become more dangerous lately than it should be.

As for the Queen, she's right where most of us prefer: far away, keeping her nose out of politics.

No problem, then. Everything sweet. If it were not, we wouldn't have Parkinson come so often that he gets to lecture us for our national day. Name another country that would be so attractive, welcoming and broadminded.

And the defence of Parky giving the address is much the same. He got asked not because the organisers thought no Australian could do it, but because they thought he'd work. And until he started to meddle in our politics, barely anyone cared that an Englishman was giving the address.

This is exactly the spirit that makes Australia so great and distinctive.

We don't care if you just use a piece of fencing wire to fix the car, as long as it works. We don't care we're you're from, as long as you try to fit in.

We don't care if you look weird, as long as you can play. In fact, we rather like you better if you're a game outsider than a born-to-winner. Think Lionel Rose.

Some recent incidents paint the point.

We had a Victoria Cross pinned to the massive chest of Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith, who single-handedly took out two Taliban machinegun positions.

His reasons were very practical and matey: "I just looked across and saw my mates getting ripped up. I just decided to move forward because I wasn't going to sit there and do nothing. I thought I'd have a crack, not to let my mates down."

Note he didn't just show guts but initiative, so prized by those who rate achievement above entitlement.

It wasn't much different - apart from the shooting - in Warracknabeal last week, when floods threatened the Wimmera town. Hardware store owner Richard Wilken rustled up equipment and volunteers to build a 6km levee over three days that saved 170 homes.

Same in Brisbane. When Hurricane Katrina had drowned New Orleans, the TV pictures were filled with people screaming for their government to help. President George Bush was sickened to see even police officers turn to looting instead, and relief convoys had to be sent in with armed guards.

But when Brisbane drowned, the citizens helped themselves. More than 22,000 volunteered the next Saturday to help clean up, queuing with shovels.

What counted was not your position. What counted was what worked, and who. That's Australia, Sir Michael.

So ask not who sits on the throne, but whether she does the job. The rest is just posturing. Most unAustralian.

This whingeing tells us it's Australia Day

Last week I wondered who'd be the first to whinge for Australia Day. As Bob Murray said:

HERE are some forecasts, hopes and suggestions for the Australia Day period: the forecast is that there will be all the usual complaints about the day, the flag, the national anthem, the Constitution, the head of state and the federal system.

And right on cue:

The 12, including outgoing Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry, say the current flag which incorporates the Union Jack, still "highlights and promotes the flag of another nation''....

The statement, released by the chairman of Ausflag, was signed by Olympians Dawn Fraser and Shane Gould and fellow sporting greats Evonne Goolagong and Robert de Castella, as well as scientists Sir Gustav Nossal and Prof Ian Frazer and Seekers lead singer Judith Durham.

But the prize has already been claimed, of course, by Sir Michael Parkinson, of all people:

Speaking to reporters in Sydney after becoming the first foreigner to deliver the annual Australia Day address in its 15-year history, Parky said ... the period after Queen Elizabeth II either dies or abdicates would be an "acceptable'' time for the nation to formally sever ties with the British royal family.

"I find it, in a sense, incomprehensible that it's not that now.''

And, of course, new Australian of the Year Simon McKeon tells the ABC this morning he's "110 per cent" behind a republic, too.

When did this tradition develop that Australia Day was to celebrate what divided us?

(No comments on blog until moderators return.)

This levy is save Gillard, not Queensland

Having frittered away billions, Julia Gillard comes asking for $3.5 billion more:

AUSTRALIANS will pay more tax under a temporary flood recovery levy set to be announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Canberra tomorrow.

Ms Gillard and senior ministers, including her deputy and Treasurer Wayne Swan, Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese and Finance Minister Penny Wong, met yesterday to sign off on a new levy expected to raise $3.5 billion.

It is understood the favoured option is to increase the existing 1.5 per cent Medicare Levy… One suggestion is that the increase would be 0.5 per cent or less,

Peter Martin says the economy is too soft to clobber it now with a levy, which the Gillard Government needs not to rebuild Queensland but to meet its promise to return to Budget surplus by 2012-13:

It's the wrong time to hit consumers further. The whole point of economic management is to soak businesses and consumers when times are good and to tighten up or hand money out when the times turn downward.

Professor Warwick McKibbin has been doing it for 10 years on the Reserve Bank board.... ''Sure, it's important not to have too much debt,'' he told BusinessDay. ''But the idea that you have to have a particular surplus at a particular point in time no matter what, is dangerous.''

Swan and Gillard are about to lead us down a dangerous path.

There will be plenty of time to impose a levy or to slash spending when the economy is on the mend. To do it now, as the economic shockwave of the flood is about to hit, betrays enormous insecurity. They must know it matters scarcely at all to government finances whether the budget hits surplus in 2012, 2015 or 2011.

But it could matter enormously to economic management.

Christopher Joye suggests the Gillard Government's promise of a return to surplus was already in deep trouble. He quotes a Royal Bank of Scotland analysis:

The risk of a delayed return to surplus already seems possible in that the monthly Budget data show that the deficit was running at annual rate of $60bn as at November, larger than the $42bn deficit the Commonwealth is forecasting for 2010-11 as a whole.

Here's how it looks:

Costello, gonged today, will get even more airtime with his opposition to a flood levy:

Former federal treasurer Peter Costello says the Gillard government doesn't need a levy, or to dip into the Future Fund, to cover the cost of the flood recovery.

(Via Catallaxy Files.)

Costello honoured

Good on him:

Former federal treasurer Peter Costello is one of three prominent public figures who have received the top accolade on this year's Australia Day honours list.

He is joined by Chief of Army Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie and Queensland Governor Penelope Wensley in being awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia (AO).

(No comments until moderators return.)

Who else would swallow them?

You'd have to be irrational to think vitamin supplements did much good:

Brian Ratcliffe, of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said that most of those taking the supplements were among the "worried well" and would be unlikely to gain any appreciable health benefits from taking vitamin and mineral tablets or fish oil capsules.

So this latest research from Roy Morgan doesn't surprise me in the least:

(No comments until moderators are on deck.)

No conservatives in Victoria. Or none that should be heard

Praise where it's due from My Mates At The Age:

A very informative letters page today, dealing comprehensively with the problems of climate change, the negative impact of the grand prix, the need for new taxes, and Tony Abbott's hypocrisy. It was very pleasing to see not a single reactionary viewpoint slip through.

(No comments until moderators are on deck.)