Oz Election Thread #4 - Gillard's Labor

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thought I was doing really excellent.

Yes your English has been impeccable, until this last post which is significantly more stilted than your previous two posts.

I was particularly impressed by your use of the vernacular. 'Front door', 'shame, shame on you', 'a thousand pardons'.

Now stop pulling my leg.

I've been sick for quite a while.

He also mentioned a Liberal Party representative who declared that every new boatload of refugees was a positive bonus to the Liberal Party. (!!!)

Fascinating what these chumps will say to US Embassy folk. I so wish the Liberal Party member had been identified.

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Fascinating what these chumps will say to US Embassy folk. I so wish the Liberal Party member had been identified.

Yes, that would be very interesting to know!
Such a surprisingly candid comment!

You should probably lose the second syllable of your handle.

Gillard under pressure to explain WikiLeaks comments
Updated 3 hours 21 minutes ago


Mr Assange was freed on bail by the High Court in London overnight. (AFP: Adrian Dennis)

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is under renewed pressure over her initial response to the WikiLeaks controversy.

At one stage Ms Gillard labelled the actions of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "illegal". It was later downgraded to "grossly irresponsible".

But today at a press conference in Sydney there was a slightly different tone after an investigation by the Australian Federal Police.

"The Government believed it was appropriate to refer the matter to the Australian Federal Police. We've done that now. We've received the advice and the advice is that there have been no breaches of Australian law," Ms Gillard said.

Ms Gillard says she only meant it was against the law to steal classified cables, not release them as the whistleblower website has done in recent weeks.

But Acting Opposition Leader Julie Bishop says Ms Gillard should admit she went beyond that.

"There is no room here for the Prime Minister to weasel out of it," she said.

Ms Bishop says Ms Gillard's comments were irresponsible.

"She is a lawyer. She well knows about the presumption of innocence," she said.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam says Ms Gillard must formally retract her comments.

"There's just some really important principles, not just fundamental legal principles, but obviously this gentleman has legal rights that should respected," he said.

"I think it's very, very awkward for the Prime Minister and the Attorney-General to be rushing to judgment before any charges have even been brought in relation to these matters." ......

"We therefore call upon you to condemn, on behalf of the Australian Government, calls for physical harm to be inflicted upon Mr Assange and to state publicly that you will ensure Mr Assange receives the rights and protections to which he is entitled, irrespective of whether the unlawful threats against him come from individuals or states."

Balibo five: our secret blacklist
Philip Dorling and Nick McKenzie
December 18, 2010

THE Australian government has quietly blacklisted a prominent Indonesian political figure implicated in the Balibo five killings while working with Indonesian authorities to manage the fallout from the scandal.

Secret US diplomatic cables reveal that Australia has declared Yunus Yosfiah - a special forces captain during the 1975 invasion of East Timor - to be ''persona non grata'', a sanction that would bar him from entering Australia.

New South Wales Deputy Coroner Dorelle Pinch found in 2007 that Yosfiah had ordered and participated in the murder of the five Australian newsmen at Balibo.

He later became an army general, was minister of information in the late 1990s and remains an influential figure in Indonesian politics.

Cables sent from the US embassy in Jakarta confirm that Australian officials worked privately with the Indonesian government as it tried to "manage" the political reaction to the NSW coronial finding that the Indonesian military had executed the Balibo five.

In a cable dated November 21, 2007, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age, the head of the political section at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Justin Lee, is reported to have told US officials that he had ''reviewed the coroner's report with the Indonesian government''.

''He had stressed to his Indonesian interlocutors that Australia wanted to work with the GOI [government of Indonesia] carefully on the matter,'' the cable says.

''The Indonesians replied that they also wanted 'to help manage' the issue, although they categorically rejected the allegation that Indonesian security forces committed human rights violations or war crimes.

''Lee noted that the soundings he picked up in private were 'much more constructive' than the tenor of some of the public remarks. He added that as far as he knew there were no active duty TNI (Indonesian army) members implicated in the Balibo incident.''

After the coroner's finding, Indonesian foreign affairs spokesman Teuku Faizasyah said: ''In our view, this case is closed and should stay closed.''

The embassy cable reveals that despite Australia taking no formal action against Yosfiah, Mr Lee privately told the US diplomats that he was blacklisted. ...<cont>

Rejected asylum seekers should go home: UN
December 19, 2010 - 4:04AM

The UN refugee agency says Australia's immigration detention system is being clogged by growing numbers of rejected asylum seekers who should be sent home.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees regional representative Richard Towle says large numbers of people now coming through the asylum system in Australia are not refugees and "the challenge is how to find fair and humane and effective ways of allowing them to leave this country to go home", Fairfax newspapers report.

The deportation of failed asylum seekers has already been announced as central to the government's efforts to stem the flow of boats.

So far, however, only a handful of asylum seekers have been deported. The government is believed to be examining further incentives for people to return home.

Mr Towle told Fairfax that improved political conditions in Sri Lanka and changed methods for assessing Afghan asylum seeker cases have led to the jump in the number of rejected cases, most "left sitting in the detention centres in Western Australia".

He also called for greater regional co-operation and improved conditions in South-East Asia to prevent asylum seekers from making the perilous voyage from Indonesia. He said the problem has little to do with Australia's border protection policies, but rather a "protection vacuum" throughout the region that has been forcing people to risk their lives on unseaworthy vessels.

No one has found a solution to boat tragedies
by Bernard Keane

Despite the drama surrounding the Christmas Island tragedy, despite the hysteria from extremists on the Right and Left desperate to exploit it — and despite the government’s peculiar reaction to it — the basic policy problem around asylum seekers remains the same.

Australia still handles a trivial number of asylum seekers compared to many countries, despite the conflict-induced surge in refugees from the Middle East and conflicts such as the Tamil insurgency. There’s no policy problem around our refugee intake, except that for a country of our size and wealth it should be at the very least a little higher. There is a policy problem around the apparent ease with which people can enter Australia on tourist or student visas with the intention of staying here permanently, but that seems to attract little attention even from bigots. ...<cont>

Deluded politicians sell out our freedoms
Martin Flanagan
December 18, 2010/the AGE

ON A Four Corners program in 1989, Bob Hawke spoke about then minister for defence Kim Beazley: ''Kim's a paradox, of course. He's a man of peace. He gives you the impression at times he wouldn't mind a little war as long as there weren't too many casualties, just to see it all worked out, in fact. I'm joking about that a bit.''

In 2006, as opposition leader, Beazley told the Americans we would support them in the event of war with China - including, it seemed, over Taiwan. This is an assurance Bob Menzies refused to give the Americans during his prime ministership. Now, through WikiLeaks, we learn that while prime minister last year Kevin Rudd raised with the Americans the issue of using force against China, suggesting we'd be in it if they did.

With two superpowers getting restive in our region, I had assumed the aim of Australian diplomacy would be to minimise tensions. Not so, it seems. We're talking tough, we want to be seen as fighters. John Howard suffered from that complex - which came, I suspect, from his family having a strong World War I mythology that included his father and grandfather meeting, as soldiers, on the eve of the Battle of Mont St Quentin.

But Beazley came from a family actively involved in the cause of peace, while Rudd - who can explain Kevin Rudd? I merely note that he is a phenomenon in his capacity to cause offence. A fighter? Kevin's a fighting machine. Not enough that we are currently enmeshed in two wars with no foreseeable end, he offers to send troops to Pakistan.

Rudd calls himself a brutal realist in relation to China. Brutal realists invariably assume they know best on the basis that the rest of us are deluded.

Abraham Lincoln presided over a catastrophic civil war that cost him his life. Here is one of his many wisdoms: ''The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present; the occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves.''

Lincoln was talking about our ability to shape reality. Meanwhile, we have Mark Arbib telling the Americans what was going on inside the Australian government in advance of that knowledge being available to his parliamentary colleagues and the press gallery.

The Australian Labor Party long ago ceased to be the voice of labour. It is now not particularly Australian. What we are left with is the Party - in its characters and their ambitions, not unlike Ricky Gervais's The Office.

Come Anzac Day next year, of course, we will have a tsunami of patriotism. Perhaps on that day we might consider the question of what is the morality of sending young men and women off to fight and die in a war about which the government is publicly optimistic and privately pessimistic? I direct the question to both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition since this whole sorry business that is Iraq and Afghanistan starts with leaders, with Howard, Tony Blair and George Bush.

If the world were to disintegrate into two competing empires, the American and the Chinese, I would prefer to live in the American.

The Chinese government's authoritarian nature is summed up by its response to the freedom of the internet. But if we surrender the right to disagree with the Americans, particularly when we feel they are being badly led, we surrender a basic freedom - one, I would argue, that was won at Gallipoli: the right to a distinctly Australian view.

Bush lacked gravitas. If you want to know what gravitas is, read Lincoln's second inaugural address. Bush was out of his depth as a world leader. Sarah Palin would be worse and sure proof that the great experiment in human liberty that is America has gone into reverse. I do not wish to be anti-American, but I do wish to be pro-Australian.

Songman Neil Murray is a great Australian story. He's the farm boy from western Victoria who drove north in a ute in the 1970s and ended up living at Papunya in the Northern Territory, speaking an Aboriginal language, before returning to western Victoria about 10 years ago.

Murray's song My Island Home closed the Sydney Olympics. They also wanted to use another of his songs, Native Born, but didn't because he refused to take out a reference to the homeless of our cities. But Native Born begins with a question we might now ask: ''Australia - where are your caretakers gone?''

Martin Flanagan is a senior writer.