Andrew Bolt's Blog, page 1911

Goodbye

That's it for me until around Australia Day next year.

I may post a few things over the break so I know where to find my ammunition for a column, but comments will be off to spare me any moderating duties.

Thanks very much indeed for your support this year, which has been so overwhelming that we've averaged only just under 2 million page impressions a month for the first 11 months of the year, despite my taking six weeks off. I'm as grateful as I'm surprised.

And have a great Christmas and wonderful New Year.

Many readers tell me they love this version, and I'm not surprised:

But I think this one might last me a few years longer (and so does Uncle John Whiteside):

And then, of course, there's the great, great Jussi Bjorling:

But if you are reading this after Christmas, with a new year before you, and want to feel like you could touch the very sky… or, even, rake it, grab it, with your hands…

Then there is Mario del Monaco.... I watch this and see life intensified almost unbearably. I see the greatest possibilities.

Just listen to del Monaco deliver that last line, and know, too, what he sings:

O giovinetta bella,


d'un poeta non disprezzate il detto:


Udite!


Non conoscete amor,


amor, divino dono, no lo schernir,


del mondo anima e vita è l'Amor!

Oh beautiful young lady,


don't discredit the words of a poet


Listen!


You don't know love.


love, a divine gift, don't scoff at it,


the life and soul of the world is love!

The full lyrics, so moving, are here.

Costello: who the hell was that woman with Oprah?

Peter Costello:

The recent visit of Oprah was a piece of sensational public relations. Time will tell whether it boosts visitor numbers. But for a week it put Australia right in the forefront of exposure to the world's largest economy. The coverage was as sympathetic as you could imagine. It had a lot of stereotypes - crocodiles, snakes and the like - but that's what tourists look for.

It helps to have our own famous people - Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe - promoting Australia in these programs and good on them for doing it. But one of our famous people who climbed on the bandwagon should not have been anywhere near the scene of the Opradulation.

Julia Gillard is the Prime Minister of Australia. She is the person ultimately responsible for sending troops into battle. She is the one who must stand up and insist our country is treated with respect in international forums. She is not a support act for a visiting US celebrity. She didn't do well. In fact, it was cringe-making.

When previous Australian prime ministers such as Harold Holt and John Gorton got star struck by the Americans, at least it was for presidents - they didn't gush in the presence of TV personalities.

The Roman poet Juvenal lamented that the politicians of ancient Rome had cheapened the empire with a policy of "bread and circuses".

The Prime Minister needs to look, well, prime ministerial. The present government is faltering. Sound government rather than media spin would give it some respect.

Two plumbers and lots of holes in the ground

Gray Bright thinks the Mario Brothers is not a good act for Julia Gillard to follow. Full routine here.

For your viewing pleasure

DVD tips for summer: my own and others'.

About pies

Reader Mick:

Hello Andrew, heard you talking about Sicilian pie on MTR yesterday. I thought you might be interested in this old movie called Big Night about two brothers that are trying to get their restaurant going by throwing a feast for some New York big shots. At about 2.30 mins they serve Il Tampino which looks like the Italian version.

Oh, yes, indeed. Oh, how glorious.

This is mine, though, from one of my favourite books, The Leopard:

The central doors of the drawing room were flung open and the butler declaimed mysterious sounds announcing that dinner was ready: 'Prann' pronn'.' The heterogenous group moved towards the dining room.

The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself. But rumours of the barbaric foreign usage of serving an insipid liquid as first course had reached the notables of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this. So when three lackeys in gold, green and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering macaroni pie, only four of the twenty at the table avoided showing pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica from affectation and Concetta from lack of appetite. All the others (including Tancredi, I regret to say) showed their relief in varying ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo. But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations.

Good manners apart, though, the aspect of these monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked....

The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

The beginning of the meal, as happens in the provinces, was quiet. The arch-priest made the sign of the Cross and plunged in head first without a word. The organist absorbed the succulent dish with closed eyes; he was grateful to the Creator that his ability to shoot hare and woodcock could bring him ecstatic pleasures like this, and the thought came to him that he and Teresina could exist for a month on the cost of one of these dishes; Angelica, the lovely Angelica, forgot little Tuscan black puddings and part of her good manners and devoured her food with the appetite of her seventeen years and the vigour given by grasping her fork halfway up the handle. Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry with greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbour Angelica, but he realised at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reserve about reviving his fantasy with the pudding; the Prince, although rapt in the contemplation of Angelica sitting opposite him, was the only one at the table to notice that the demi-glace was overfilled, and made a mental note to tell the cook so next day; the others ate without thinking of anything, and without realising that the food seemed so delicious because sensuality was circulating in the house.

There was one YouTube clip from the wonderful movie of this novel that showed that fabulous pie, but it has - alas - been deleted. Console your senses with these scenes instead:

Column - The media is bound by blood to Gillard

ONLY one resignation has been demanded by our politicians since about 50 more boat people were lured to their deaths.

That resignation, I'm astonished to report, is my own.

Last Thursday, a day after the Christmas Island disaster, my paper received this letter:





"Dear Editor.

"Andrew Bolt has blood on his hands. He stridently insisted on the invasion and killings in Iraq which led to millions fleeing. Some of those millions ended up in the ocean off Christmas Island on Wednesday.

"Andrew Bolt's call, while bodies were still in the ocean, for Julia Gillard's resignation ... lacked human decency.

"He should resign.

" - Senator Bob Brown"

There are many remarkable and deceitful things about this demand from the powerful Greens leader.

Is it appropriate for politicians to demand the resignation of journalists with whom they disagree?

Does Brown seriously believe I had the power to order a US invasion?

Does Brown truly regret the toppling of Saddam Hussein, sparing many more lives than it cost?

Has he any proof that those who died last week, many of them Iranians and Kurds, were fleeing the 2002 invasion of Iraq?

Can he explain why they've chosen only now to come to Australia, not stopping in Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia on the way?

And isn't he a contemptible hypocrite, having himself rushed out press releases within hours of earlier disasters, using the Black Saturday fires to promote the Greens' global warming policies, the Bali bombings to denounce the war in Iraq and the 2007 shootings of two good Samaritans in Melbourne to advertise the Greens gun laws?

But Brown's letter is extremely telling for another reason - one that applies to so many of my fellow journalists, too.

I cannot recall Brown calling before for a journalist to resign. Clearly, something stung him badly this time, and I think I know what it is.

Try a guilty conscience.

Try the horror of being confronted by the consequences of the weaker boat people policies Brown supported.

But widen the picture. It's not Brown alone who has singled me out for vilification after these deaths. Journalists have done the same, especially in the Fairfax media, where I've been denounced as a "village idiot" and worse than a "worthless bloodclot".

But as is so often the case with such invective, while I have been abused, I have not been disproved, and the reason for this fury is clear.

The fact is many journalists, just like Brown, have been forced to contemplate the carnage wreaked by policies they promoted out of a lazy desire to seem good.

The bodies in the ocean tell them how lethally wrong they were.

That is why my demand that Gillard resign, her Government having blood on its hand, has so outraged them.

If the Government has blood on its hands for persisting in policies that have lured so many to their deaths - more than 200 now in at least 10 known disasters since 2008 - what of the journalists who backed them?

In their guilty rage they have lashed out at me. But, far worse, they have shielded Gillard.

Barely one has held the Prime Minister to account for those policies. Too soon, they cry.

Yet it's not too soon for journalists such as David Marr to blame the navy, or a Dennis Atkins to blame the meanness of the Australian mob, or a Heather Ewart to wonder if the Christmas Islanders could have done more.

But Gillard is spared almost all such blame and questioning. It is sick.

And, I repeat, it is a sign of the media's complicity and guilt.

In the six years before 2008, Australia saw on average just three boats a year arrive with asylum seekers.

It is beyond question that tough steps taken by the Howard government had in large part put the people smugglers out of business, after a spike of boat arrivals from 1999 to 2001.

Temporary protection visas, disruption schemes in Indonesia, detention in desert camps, curtailing of access to our courts and, above all, the "Pacific Solution" - sending arrivals to Nauru and Manus Island - had stopped not just the boats, but the drownings at sea.

As I said in 2006, to the self-serving moralisers who gleefully accused prime minister John Howard of "crimes against humanity", the results of his policies were a lot less cruel than the laws his critics supported.

It is in fact the former laws supported by "human rights" activists that proved so deadly. That was because illegal immigrants thought we were such an easy touch that they got on leaky boats which sank during the voyage, drowning many hundreds.

Since the laws were changed, not one more drowning has been recorded. Cracking down on illegal boat people has saved lives, not cost them.

This is the link that Labor and the journalists backing its more "compassionate" agenda refused to acknowledge or pretended not to see, preferring to seem good than achieve it.

And so in 2008, many journalists cheered as Labor dismantled the Howard laws that had stopped the boats - and the drownings .

They cheered especially the ending of the "Pacific Solution", thereby linking themselves not only to the "reforms" but to their fatal consequences.

The Age hallelujahed that "yesterday a stain was removed from the soul of this nation".

The Australian's Mike Steketee added: "Australia at least has a policy it can justify in terms of basic humanity."

The Sydney Morning Herald's Adele Horin cried "a shameful era is over in Australian politics".

And so on, almost without exception.

See now why so few journalists dare now blame these same policies for what followed? Because what followed was death, just as predicted.

From the start, the Government was warned weaker laws would bring back the boats. The Australian Federal Police said so, as did Indonesia and the International Organisation for Migration.

Even boat people said again and again they'd been tempted by Labor's "compassion" to take to the sea.

An Afghan in Indonesia last year told The Australian: "I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM ... I have heard that if someone arrives it is easy."

Another Afghan there told the 7.30 Report: "(Labor) are accepting asylum seekers ... We pray for the Labor Party, for Kevin Rudd."

An Iraqi told the ABC: "Kevin Rudd - he's changed everything about refugees. If I go to Australia now, different."

A former people smuggler told the Courier Mail: "The immigration rules in Australia were changed and everyone knows it and that's why so many are now coming."

And with the boats - 200 of them - came the deaths.

Here I'm stuck. The Age's Michelle Grattan on Saturday accused me of "not a little distasteful triumphalism about prior warnings", but I don't know how else to prove the Government was warned its policies were costing lives than by quoting earlier warnings, and I also don't know which other journalist issued warnings I could quote.

If Grattan had said before last week the Government was luring men, women and children on to sinking boats, I'd have gladly quoted her instead.

But she never did. Not once did she speak, as the tally of known deaths jumped from five, to 14, to 25, to 42 and then, even before last week's tragedy, to as many as 170 or even more.

I confess: Many times I did write of these deaths and warned of more to come unless Rudd and Gillard changed the lax policies that were tempting boat people to risk not only their own lives but those of their children.

From April 17, 2009: "At least three boat people now dead. So how much kinder do Kevin Rudd's policies seem now?"

From November 6, 2009: "Twelve more dead. Now will the Rudd Government finally see that its 'compassion' kills?"

And so on, a dozen times or more.

Sorry about this "triumphalism", Michelle. It's actually anger, though - anger at not only the murderous vanity of this Government, but also at the refusal of so many self-serving media commentators to even report the deaths that were the consequence of the policies they praised as the restoration of our "lost humanity".

AS for Gillard, she did not want to know. Fourteen months ago, she rejected my latest tally of deaths, saying she had "no evidence" for them.

Last week came an even more unforgivable admission:

Journalist: Prime Minister, based on where this boat has come from and getting as far as Christmas Island, it then becomes quite feasible that there are or have been many other boats that have perished in the oceans and Australian authorities haven't noticed it?

Gillard: ... I'm not going to extrapolate or engage in hypotheticals about things you've got no facts on and I've got no facts on ...

Journalist: Prime Minster, have you had advice about how many other boats may have -

PM: No. I haven't.

Clearly, Gillard had never bothered to check how many people were dying as a consequence of her policies, even after being warned a year ago the toll was in the dozens already.

Not even when the death toll reached up to 170, as calculated from sketchy reports of the nine sinkings we at least knew about, she did not check.

But now she can no longer feign ignorance. Now the bill for the policies she largely authored is presented in ways even the media cannot ignore.

This time we've all seen the pictures of the latest boat to be smashed to pieces, with bodies of men, women and - God spare us all - babies slipping under the huge waves.

Remember those Labor policies the journalists cheered? See the results.

But now you see why they won't grill Gillard about the "reforms" that brought this harvest. To blame her would be to blame themselves, too.

And so this hunt for other scapegoats, whether people smugglers, the navy, the Indonesians, or even "the weather".

But never blame Julia. Never blame, by extension, her media supporters who cheered her mischief.

No, better that their accusers be driven into silence, than that the guilty be named - and the next boat saved.

Column - The Internet is God

CHRISTIANS on Saturday celebrate the birth of the son of God, who sees all and forgets nothing, damn it.

But pity us heathens, who've long thought we, at least, could sin in private, without getting torched.

For us, this Christmas, that keen-eyed God has been reborn, too. Only this time he's called the internet.

This rebirth of God will please Christians, who've missed out on the pleasure of sins to which unbelievers could discreetly treat themselves with no sign on this earth of any punishment.

It seemed unfair, but what could a Christian do, when God monitors even their thoughts with his unsleeping eye, and notes it all for the day of reckoning?

As the Old Testament warns: "Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account."

Every other major faith declares it has some deity or karma that's ever watching ... because it's actually the thought of being discovered, rather than the revulsion at having sinned, that keeps most of us on our toes.

But suddenly the internet, helped by the new manners it's helped to fashion, has ended secrecy and abolished privacy for the godless, too. We're all now watched.

Nick Riewoldt, the St Kilda captain, this week found that even a photograph of his (innocently) naked self taken by a teammate on a footy trip in the United States, and in the privacy of a hotel room, is now on Facebook and available to every home on the planet with a phone line and a computer. And there it will stay until Judgment Day.

Or take the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who leaked thousands of documents in which American diplomats noted what they considered their private thoughts about what foreign leaders considered their private behaviour. Now that's all there for billions of people to pore over.

So is Assange's own sex life, ironically.

A few taps on my keyboard and I can read what he wrote in heat to a dating site, and what he wrote in fury to a woman who turned him down.

I can even tell you his condom habits in Sweden, and whose leg he rubbed with his naked groin in a Stockholm flat.

It's all there on the internet, for the world to see until the day Assange meets his maker - or at least obituarist.

But all this is not quite enough to explain the rebirth of God. The internet may have a memory that lasts for eternity, but it still sees only what some human taps onto its screen.

Thing is, though, we now confess everything to that ever-glowing presence, tweeting even our instantly regretted first thoughts. Think of the Catherine Deveny, sacked by The Age this year after tweeting of her desire to see young Bindi Irwin "get laid".

And think also of our new culture of betrayal. Think of the dirt-dishing memoirs of former Labor leader Mark Latham, who brayed to the world what former colleagues whispered to him in confidence, trusting to a code of silence that's as dated as integrity.

It's this culture of betrayal that feeds the internet, through the yawning maws of Facebook or Twitter, which promise instant fame to the disher of the worst dirt. The Facebook Judas.

Still, this reinvention of the all-seeing God will at least force better manners on heathens today, just as the all-seeing Christian God did on Romans.

I'd bet many footballers will already have been warned that a false move at some Christmas party could become an instant YouTube sensation from Dandenong to New York. One vengeful girlfriend and their name could be mud even in Vladivostok.

Watch yourself, friends, because the internet is now watching, too. Just as God did, or always has.

Gillard's poll numbers must soon rise, or she'll soon fall

Gillard's challenge next year will be to find the issue that justifies breaking her deal with the Independents and calling an early election, on an issue that's a winner, because what's happening know is a disaster:

Newspoll chief Martin O'Shannessy sounds a warning. "Labor's primary vote is now running about four points lower than it was at the election. If we look at Victoria and South Australia, the states that polled so well for Gillard at the election, the post-election fall has been about five points."

The alarm for Gillard is that minority government may become a dead political weight for Labor at the polls.

Those lost votes aren't yet transferring to the Opposition, but the drift is still life-threatening for Labor.

And that's why I wouldn't be banking on Paul Kelly's guarantee:

There is one certainty: Labor will sink or swim with Gillard. There is no alternative leader. The caucus knows this. Given the Rudd experience, assassination of another leader would be an act of political suicide. One of Gillard's great qualities is her courage and tenacity. It is Labor's best hope.

Here's the challenge: name a single success Gillard can claim since becoming Prime Minister.

It's a tale of unrelieved bungling and dithering, which suggests there is a lot less to Gillard than meets the eye.

Gillard falls down a mine shaft

Yet another policy disaster from the Gillard Government, forced into yet another retreat:

WAYNE Swan plans to force premiers to cap state mining royalties or face financial penalties.

This comes after a government-initiated taskforce into its revised mining tax found Labor should honour its peace deal with the industry.

The backdown by the Gillard government, which accepted yesterday that the agreement with mining companies meant all current and future state royalties be credited against their federal tax exposure, came as the Treasurer faced anger from premiers.

They are reserving their right to set royalty rates and vowing to fight the commonwealth through the Council of Australian Governments.

Dennis Shanahan:

WAYNE Swan has copped another hiding over another mining tax and another prime minister has had to retreat to save their political reputation…

The Treasurer's backdown is palpable and Julia Gillard's predicament is clear: stick with an unconscionable argument or lose a mining war, a fate that cost her predecessor his job. This is probably a policy advance but it is undoubtedly a political humiliation…

After signing the politically expeditious document (with the Big Three miners), which said "all" state royalties would be credited to the mining companies under the new tax, the federal government started to slip away from it.

Retiring Treasury secretary Ken Henry said the signed document didn't cover "all" royalties. But the miners were adamant that "all" meant "all" and were preparing for another advertising war. Given that the the previous advertising war and the mishandling of the RSPT were the triggers for the removal of Kevin Rudd, there was no appetite in the government this time to face another war and another mishandled mining tax.

The Gillard government's decision to shift the minerals' tax fight from the mining industry to the states is recognition that the Prime Minister's signature on a clearly worded document was sufficient political and policy reason to give up the ill-fated campaign to renege on the deal.

Instead, the Gillard cabinet has opted for what it sees as a less complex and politically easier fight: taking on the states.

Jennifer Hewett says this is a humiliating send-off for Ken Henry:

THERE is symmetry in the announcement of Ken Henry's exit from Treasury on the same day as the release of the latest roadmap for the troubled mining tax.

Henry was the proud architect of the original resource super-profits tax that so damaged the Rudd government. Not surprisingly, the Treasury secretary was left out of the agreement negotiated between Julia Gillard and the big three miners as soon as she became Prime Minister.

Now the policy transition group has thwarted the government's attempt, publicly backed by Henry, to try to alter the terms of that deal, too...Instead, the committee, led by former BHP Billiton chairman Don Argus and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, effectively said a deal was a deal and that the agreement for "all" royalties to be deductible meant future as well as current royalties.

Note the involvement in this backdown of the Government's presiding adult, Martin Ferguson.

Terry McCrann sure does:

RESOURCES Minister Martin Ferguson has stuck a savage blow - to two of his most senior colleagues in Canberra.

He's savaged both the political judgment and the policy integrity of his own prime minister Julia Gillard and the treasurer and deputy prime minister Wayne Swan in an extraordinary way.

Ferguson has signed off on a document - without qualification - that states effectively that Gillard and Swan are either incompetent or deceitful or really some combination of both.

Mar'n for Prime Minister.

Matthew Stevens says the Gillard Government has no hope of getting the states to agree:

GOOD luck with getting the states on board.

A YEAR too late, Wayne Swan has decided to take the complexities of minerals taxation reform to the arena where the debate should have started in the first place: the Council of Australian Governments and to the premiers of Queensland and Western Australia.

The most fundamental conclusion to be drawn from yesterday's report by the Policy Transition Group is that the mineral resources rent tax will fade into history as fast as its ill-fated predecessor, the resource super-profits tax, without the active co-operation of those who run the iron ore and coalmining states.

Bear in mind, by the way, that this mineral resources rent tax is meant to be a whole lot simpler to design and run than an emissions trading scheme.

UPDATE

Now here's the bizarre thing. I completely accept that I'm not smart when it comes to taxes and finances, which is why I tend to steer clear of any analysis of my own on such things. I'm a goose here, and know it.

But if even a goose like me could spot in May the flaw that has brought the Government undone, how incompetent is this Government?

Gillard on MTR ...says in this interview that the Government knows about a problem I claimed to have spotted in my own segment - that by imposing a new 40 per cent super tax on the profits of mining companies, but deducting state royalties already paid, the Rudd Government would encourage state to lift the royalties charges, knowing they were just taking money from Rudd, not the miners.

Gillard says the Government is working on a solution to this problem, which would threaten to eat away at the $9 billion a year Rudd planned to raise, but it took a mining company to tell me that Gillard doesn't know that a solution has already been found - her own Government has already said the royalites will be capped to the level they were at on the weekend.

Except that solution never made it into the deal actually signed.

How frightening, that this Government is even worse at tax policy than am I.

May I suggest a solution to them? Do as I do, and hand all the finances over to my wife.

Do Christians also join al Qaeda, then?

The US Attorney General, with the help of ABC, turns al Qaeda into a faith to avoid mentioning the faith that turns people to al Qaeda:

In the last 24 months, Holder said, 126 people have been indicted on terrorist-related charges, Fifty of those people are American citizens.

"I think that what is most alarming to me is the totality of what we see, the attorney general said. "Whether it is an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system, an attempt to bring down an airplane over Detroit, an attempt to set off a bomb in Times Square ... I think that gives us a sense of the breadth of the challenges that we face, and the kinds of things that our enemy is trying to do."

Holder says many of these converts to al Qaeda have something in common: a link to radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, an American citizen himself.

It's no mistake. The "I" and "M" words are not mentioned once in the article.

Truth is the first casualty…