Did I imagine Jon Faine this morning on ABC 774 Melbourne, explaining the electorate’s preferences in Canberra? I thought I heard him claiming that Labor was polling roughly had a committed third, the Coalition roughly a committed third, and the rest undecided uncommitted or swinging voters.

If I heard correctly— and I am now doubting my ears because it is just so plain silly and misleading — the latest Essential Report had Labor effectively on a miserable third but had the Coalition at nearly 50 percent! with the other parties at roughly an irrelevant fifth of the preferences. Some difference, and some wishful thinking if that is what he said.

With this interpretation of statisitics, it is no wonder the left has no idea about the realities of the present political situation. Perhaps they think it is about leadership. This avoids them having to understand the problems the electorate has with their awful policies.

I’ll say that again. Policies …

UPDATE

If anything can be deduced from the consistent polls over several months, and the results of the recent NSW election and the predictions for the Queensland election coming soon, it is that there are very few swinging voters out there that haven’t made up their mind.

As for confusion about leadership alluded to above, that has become a wonderful distraction for the left so they don’t have to analyse the anger in the electorate about the carbon tax, the roof insulation, the BER, and the open door refugee policy. Add to that the recent “go soft” on the Aboriginal embassy stunt, the scrapping of the ABCC, and all the added costs of the inefficient Fair Work Australia.

So blinded by ideology and approval for this mishmash of progressive and green agendas, the ABC and those in it have difficulty understanding exactly to what most Australian’s have now become committed.

Which part of this detailed explanation of the outrageously costly and ineffective use of solar electricity does the Green movement, the Gillard government and soppy environmentalists not understand.

Why are these facts not brought up in Parliament? Why is Bob Brown not challenged on this? When will the Age start to question its green wisdom, like John Spooner bravely did about the Flannery madness on water?

Using solar, Germany is paying about $US1000 per tonne of CO2 reduced. The current CO2 price in Europe is $US8. Germany could have cut 131 times as much CO2 for the same price. Instead, the Germans are wasting more than 99c of every euro that they plough into solar panels.

It gets worse: because Germany is part of the EU emissions trading system, the actual effect of extra solar panels in Germany leads to no CO2 reductions, because total emissions are already capped.

Further to the Syrian stories below, an on the ground account appeared on The Drum today written by Fiona Hill, someone who has just returned from there.

Slowly, the full and more balanced story is leaking out. The article contains links to the Arab League (AL) Observer Mission’s report that Hill feels has no even been read by the Australian press.

How can such a different picture emerge so slowly, and only now, in an age of the internet and telephone, with our so called “informed and fearless” free press.

I spoke to Sunnis, Shias, and Christians, to Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, Assyrians and Armenians. While many pointedly complimented the apparent good character of the president (referred to at such times as ‘Dr Bashar Al Assad’) all readily expressed in detail their disgust at poor governance for too long. In the street, in shared taxi vans, in cafes, markets, and private homes the Syrians are not afraid to talk politics any more. Indeed they seemed particularly anxious to do so. But their mood is pessimistic. “Whatever revolution there was is now destroyed by armed criminals and their masters,” sighed a Sunni man wearily.

“What are your so-called Christian leaders in Australia thinking?” shrieked a Christian woman in a candlelit Aleppo home. “Don’t they realise our freedoms in Syria are the envy of other Arab countries – and impossible in Qatar?! If Bashar (Al Assad) goes, we will be lambs to the slaughter.”

Thanks to the excellent posts on the general topic of Islam by Australian Conservative, after having written my post below on the failure in Western media to provide information and adequate explanations concerning the violence coming out of Syria, my attention was drawn to a brilliantly argued piece on why the “Arab Spring’ has been such a disappointment.

Written by Andrew C McCarthy for National Review Online, it explains just how hard line and determined Islamists are, and just how soft headed we in the West have become. Some may still deny it, but McCarthy gives some overwhelming empirical evidence to support his position.

He outlines two controversal but sustainable propositions.

First, the most important fact in the Arab world — as well as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other neighboring non-Arab territories — is Islam. It is not poverty, illiteracy, or the lack of modern democratic institutions. These, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and an insular propensity to buy into conspiracy theories featuring infidel villains, are effects of Islam’s regional hegemony and supremacist tendency, not causes of it. One need not be led to that which pervades the air one breathes.

The second fact is that Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeous global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms.

The problem our apologist Western ‘liberal’ media has with Islam reminded me of a book review I wrote three years ago, What’s Left? How liberals lost their way by Nick Cohen. There is a familiar cognative dissonance going on with the Left as it is with events in Syria. simply put, Cohen asks why the left supports fascists ‘who believe in the subjugation of women, the killing of Jews, homosexuals, freemasons, socialists and trade unionists’. Yes indeed.

I have been having increasing misgivings over the present one sided reporting of events in Syria and the apparent unquestioning support for the “rebels”. Who are these rebels? Do we know? Does our press take any interest in who they might be?

Suspicion of the this one sidedness — or rather, partial and selected information — came to a head with a brief interview on the ABC, at last, with one Australian pro Asad supporter, who suggested a certain complexity to the problem there.

After listening to this interview, I spoke to a person who has spent time in Syria, for he had often told me that the country under Asad was one of the most open, tolerant and relaxed in the Middle East, with at least 55 percent of the population on the side of the government. This included, importantly, the Christian community there.

We have had, in short order, the West touting for the Arab spring in Egypt and Lybia only to find fundamentalists running the show, and there we are, soft touch as usual, shovelling in money and weapons to the Brotherhood or whichever radical group. I was already wary of this enthusiasm for a “Spring” that should perhaps best be described as an “Autumn”.

Now comes confirmation that at least the situation is more complex than anything that the Western press has been able to convey. For the first time I find an explanation and analysis of the motives of both the West and Russia and China, and just what might be going on by John R. Bradley, author of After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts, and published in the Spectator.

The West seems keen to portray the uprising as a simple story of freedom fighters opposing tyranny, when the situation is much more complex. An awful repeat of the Libyan debacle is beginning to unfold: Western reporters embed themselves with self-declared former al-Qa’ida fighters and bands of tribal fanatics, but fail to report this so as not to undermine the “Arab Spring”.

I urge you to have a look. However, it all reminds me depressingly of the story of the scorpion and the frog.

In a not surprising article from, of all places, a medical website, comes new research on the consequences of safety guidelines for children’s playgrounds. Apparently they have become so safe, so uninteresting that children no longer want to play on them. This contributes to a reduction in the physical activity they were of course designed to encourage.

According to the study, the new, safer equipment often became boring because children mastered it so quickly. To make it more challenging, kids tended to improvise, walking up the slide the wrong way, or using supports as a climbing apparatus. Sometimes younger children were drawn to the older kids’ equipment, presumably because it presented a more interesting set of challenges.

Lead author Kristen Copeland, a researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, commented that some participants said that overly strict safety standards made much of the climbing equipment uninteresting, thus reducing children’s physical activity.

“An important message from this study is that well-intentioned policies may have unintended consequences for preschool-aged children’s physical development,” Copeland said. “Daily physical activity is essential for preschool-aged children’s development and for preventing obesity…. In essence, in ensuring that young children are smart and safe, we may also be keeping them sedentary.”

I was honoured with an invitation to give an Australia Day address for the City of  Whittlesea.  Here it is:

City of Whittlesea

23^rd Australia Day Breakfast

Good morning, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It is a privilege to be here with you at the City ofWhittlesea’s 25th Australia Day Breakfast.

I would particularly like to thank Tom Love and the members of their Australia Day Celebrations Committee, for inviting me here today.

For this Australia Day talk, I thought I should firstly bring into focus some of those things that have given me a sense of place, the sense of a physical, geographic place and to belonging to this wonderful country, growing up as a post war baby boomer.

After that, I would like to raise three concerns I have for Australia as we venture forward as a nation into the 21^st century.

Finally, to end on an optimistic note, I would like to confirm the confidence I have for our future as a nation and as a people.

Sense of place

I grew up in Sandringham on Port Phillip Bay, and spent a wonderful childhood free to explore the ti-tree bushland, beach and sea. The backdrop to this playground was the distant, and to me mysterious, You Yang mountains looming out of the sea over the western horizon. The You Yangs were the stage for many sunsets, my Hesperides, that mythical place of the Ancient World where nymphs tended a blissful garden in a far western corner of the world, behind which the sun disappeared.

My parents had the wisdom, when I was six, to buy me The Australia Book, written by Eve Pownall, and beautifully illustrated by Margaret Senior, and published in 1956. Looking at it again this last week, the images reminded me of an indelible picture of our continent and the nature of its gradual exploration and development. Above all, it gave me a sense of Australia’s vastness and the extraordinary imagination, hard work and creative struggle that was required by the English, and all those that followed, to tame and civilize it.

Having also been made acutely aware, through the illustrations in the book, of the ancient Aboriginal presence before European settlement, I was very struck much later on, indeed overwhelmed, by reading the original 1852 account of the Life and Adventures of William  Buckley. The more recent Buckley’s Hope by Melbourne writer Craig Robertson, vividly filled in many of the details of Buckley’s life.

These books describe the extraordinary life of William Buckley, an escaped  convict, who lived with the Wuthowurong tribe between the Bellarine Peninsula and Lake Bolac.

The remarkable feature of the story is that Buckley lived with this tribe for thirty two years, until the arrival of Henry Batman at Indented Head in August, 1835, just before the settlement of Melbourne. The story provides a powerful account of the political, cultural and social atmosphere in the very places I knew so well, before any hint of a European presence.  Thus, in my own mind, I had always had a strong sense of the physical place I was growing up in and the “spirit” of the Aborigines that had gone before.

Trips to Sydney on the Daylight Express conjured up exotic place names like Wagga Wagga, Bethungra, Cootamundra, Gunning, Mittagong, Jugiong, Tumblong. Even now, on this visit to South Moran, I notice the place names here — Yarrambat, Yan Yean, Bundoora, Kurrack: all Aboriginal place names of course. It is they that also give me a deeper sense of belonging to an ancient land.

Whilst I have happily internalised these suggestive elements of Aboriginal culture permanently etched in our landscape, for some reason I intuitively revolt against what appears to be the overbearing, political correct zealotry of our cultural tsars that want to impose “Aboriginal culture” on our universities.

Similarly, I find it saddening and counterproductive that the cowardly term “racism” is already being used by members of the expert panel on the constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians towards those who disagree with their recommendations.

Landscape and Canberra

Between Christmas and New Year my wife and I went on a trip to Canberra. With the rains, I have to say the countryside has never looked better. The maddeningly sweet and graceful hills around Gundagai are always delightful, with the nestled river flats an impossible emerald green.

The space, the light, the weary lush freshness of our country reminds me of that wonderful expression Australia Felix, the name of a painting by Arthur Streeton. Australia Felix, ‘fortunate Australia’, ‘happy Australia’, captures the spirit of so many of our early, wistful, dreamy colonial paintings.

In Canberra, we visited the old and new parliament houses. It is here that one is forced to reflect on our history, our identity, and our institutions of decision making as a nation.

The most striking and warmly encouraging thing I witnessed in the new Parliament House was the number of Indian and Asian visitors teaming through the building, full of enthusiasm and curiosity. Dare I imagine this as some sort of pilgrimage?

The Indians clearly have a deeply ingrained understanding of parliamentary democracy and were there to learn about their new country. Some of the Chinese, according to parliamentary staff I talked to, were overwhelmed that they were allowed to simply walk into and around the very building at the centre of power and decision making in this country. I confess I was a little emotionally choked up and very moved at this willingness and desire of these new Australians to feel and be a part of our great country.

 Immigration

In this context, I come to my first concern for our future.

The duty of any government is protect our sovereignty and borders. It is surely frustrating when one political party is obstinately in denial about what has clearly worked in the past to deter refugee boats, and also frustrating when the other party does not send an unhesitating and emphatic bipartisan signal to an activist High Court that arrogantly thwarts the will of the parliament and the people.

Immigration, whilst related but distinctly different, is another aspect of this first concern. When reflecting on what can and cannot be said about whom we welcome to Australia, and what expectations we have of those who wish to settle here, I note in passing that France, from the 1^st of January this year, is toughening requirements for French nationality with a strong focus on assimilation.

In Australia, we welcome new immigrants, and I for one, want to continue welcoming new immigrants. But if Australia is so sought after, and indeed internationally is amongst the most generous of immigrant nations, why do we welcome new immigrants with seemingly so very few obligations?

At the same time, our political elites — with no good reason — want to broaden the Racial Discrimination Act to enhance multiculturalism, and to find gaps in protections of ethnic minorities from racial vilification. I hope this does not encourage those like the Waverly City Council in Sydney, which actually banned the flying of our Australian flag on the iconic Bondi Beach Pavilion for being “racially divisive”.

 Financial crisis

The second issue that I would like briefly to touch on, and which shall soon, I believe, eclipse all other problems, is that of the impending global financial meltdown.

Any sensible reading of international commentary gives one the overwhelming impression that Western political leaders are in total denial about our debt problems, and are in fact truly paralysed and incapable of any sensible action that reduces their urge to spend and borrow.

Whilst Australia, up until now, has been in an enviable position, both our main parties seem incapable of any semblance of fiscal rectitude. Both our parties have a marked propensity to indulge our growing “entitlement culture” which leads us to ever larger government, mushrooming regulation and control over our lives. Mark Steyn calls it a “decadence and moral softening”.

 Climate Change

For my final concern, I would like to briefly look at a pet issue that I have been writing about for nearly 20 years. I was brought up, like one of our most famous expatriate poets and writers, Clive James, on that wonderful poem by Dorothea Mackellar, My Country.

Like James, I was surprised at just how few of our politicians and journalists have understood Mackellar’s poem. Slowly, the meme of “droughts and flooding rains” has returned, after the arrival of the Brisbane floods and the breaking of yet another regular, predictable drought. Ask any farmer outside the Melbourne Sydney Canberra triangle. However, undeterred, Tim Flannery, our highly paid Climate Change Commissioner, toured the county with an apocalyptic vision of our major cities running out of water.

James dryly comments:

“[Flannery] always had an explanation, and the media always liked his story best, because it was a story about Australia eventually and inevitably running out of water … Then an awful lot of it fell on his head at once and he was finally seen to be short of credibility.”

Nothing in my education had suggested that the weather would be anything different. Outraged at the stupidity of failed climate models, I posted Mackellar’s poem over a year ago on my blog. I thanked her posthumously for her “rigorous historical documentation of climate change, written before any real increases in industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide, and before our modern, scientific understanding of the Indian Ocean Dipole or the El Nino Southern Oscillation”.

Why have so many good people — our scientists, our politicians, our journalists been so silly and so wrong headed? Given that we are celebrating Australia Day, how can we have forgotten the Federation Drought and those that followed. I have a photo at home of a completely dry Murray river bed taken 50 kilometres upstream of Swan Hill at Riversdale, on New Year’s Day, 1914. It shows a bullock cart crossing the dusty dry river bed. What happened to our collective memory of droughts and flooding rains?

Certainly our experts at the CSIRO failed that test miserably. Then again, what would they know about real science? This august scientific organisation is today mandating the use of Aboriginal smoking ceremonies to cleanse each new CSIRO laboratory of “evil spirits”!

The topic of climate change is long, technical and complex. However, when scientists get their predictions so wrong, when the IPCC, through its Climategate emails demonstrated that this United Nations body — hello?— is cheating and tricking the figures, when its much acclaimed “Hockey Stick” graph showing runaway catastrophic global warming turns out to be a scientific fraud — and then subsequently quietly buried — when over 30 per cent of the latest IPCC report turns out not to be peer reviewed but sourced directly from activist green pamphlets, one has to ask; if this is real science, why do so many people make up so much stuff that turns out to be hopelessly wrong?

Why does the presenter of the ABC Science Show, Robyn Williams, shamelessly claim the impossibility that sea levels could soon rise by 100 metres? Why was Al Gore’s film found, by none other than the British High Court, to be so scientifically incorrect that it had to come with a warning to schools that the film amounted to propaganda? Of course, this shoddy piece of agitprop is still being shown in schools aroundAustralia. The litanies of alarmist press releases and urgent new warnings continue unabated in the media, topped of course by our shameless ABC.

 Conclusion

I promised to finish on an optimistic note. Notwithstanding the present hiatus in good, visionary leadership in Australia, I firmly believe in our strong democratic traditions and the common sense of Australia’s people. I always think back to the 1988 Referendum, which invited us to vote ‘Yes’ on four questions. Supported by both parties and most of the media, the Australian people, smelling a rat with such collusion, gave all four of the propositions a resounding ‘No’, with their collective upturned finger. That reassured me immensely about Australian democracy, our plain ordinary, reliable common sense.

On the first of these issues I mentioned above, Refugees and Immigration, I believe the pendulum is turning and we will regain sensible control. On the financial crisis it is clear that simply no one knows exactly what will happen. I can only suggest we all sing together, Que sera, sera! On climate change, there are many signs over the last two years that the game is up for this the biggest and most costly fraud in human history. But don’t expect apologies, from anyone.

For Australia, as I said, I have never forgotten that lesson about the strength of the people’s voice to make practical decisions in spite of our political elites, and it gives me great confidence inAustralia’s future.

May I wish you all a very happy Australia Day and a radiant and optimistic future. .

Steyn again reveals the hypocrisy — or is it just naivety of the Left that I reported on here in February — over the Arab Spring, and how it takes a Jew to speak up for the millions of Christians now being persecuted.

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the “Arab Spring” is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn’t conform to their dimwitted sappiness about “Facebook Revolutions”. It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi inEngland, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

With growing incredulity, I heard an interview with Sarah Hanson Young on the ABC explaining that the tragic drowning at sea of yet another boatload of refugees coming from Indonesia had nothing to do with the Greens policy settings. She said, “Of course not. Tragedies happen, accidents happen”. 

Even Robert Manne warned Rudd publicly about the weakening refugee policy by  ”compassionate leftists”. It is all documented and discussed by Tim Blair. At the moment, yet again, the Fairfax and ABC media is letting Australia down badly with their inability to think realistically about this issue.

 Refugee advocates don’t like to discuss why these safer options are not explored. The reasons are to do with identity and culpability. Those arriving in Australia by air require passports, which makes easier the task of disproving the legitimacy of asylum claims. Those arriving from Indonesia on boats commonly carry no identification at all, allowing certain freedoms with their stories. (Additionally, the SMH reports: “Many of the asylum seekers flew from Dubai to Jakarta, where Indonesian officials are said to be ready for the migrants to arrive, charging them each $US500 to pass through the airport without visas.”) If asylum seekers purchase their own boats instead of places on boats run by people smugglers, they are liable for prosecution. So they take their chances with the smugglers. Refugee advocates blame Australia for subsequent deadly outcomes.

[Thanks to reader Andrew R]

UPDATE

Professor Bunyip has added some links and examples of how Fairfax deliberately tries to cover up news, and how it, hypocritically, bleats on about drownings at sea if it happens to be when the Liberals are in power.  Outrageous but typical.

The Left always complain of media bias. Why so? 

I was surprised and a little incredulous, as it seems were many readers when Maurice Newman, retiring Chairman of the ABC writing in The Australian, claimed that “the public broadcaster strives for balance and gets it right most of the time”. This is just so far from the truth that it can only be interpreted as a laughable piece of ‘diplomatic hypocrisy’.

A brilliant book on media bias, Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind by Tim Groseclose, would quickly disabuse anyone of just how biased and distorting is our media. Whilst writing on America, Groseclose analyses with precision just how and why the media distorts. All his arguments apply to our ABC.

Groseclose cleverly, and empirically, demonstrates just how news is transformed from factual content into a point of view. He is at pains to point out that political bias does not mean not being truthful, or reporting facts honestly, or even objectively. If there is one lesson from Groseclose’s careful analysis it is that left journalists select the issues they deal with. In this way, critical things are therefore not reported, and in interviews, certain people are never interviewed. The examples are so endless here in Australia, that one gets sick of pointing them out.

Left Turn demonstrates that mainstream American media outlets have an overwhelming left bias, that conservative outlets are far less extreme than are those of the left, and most importantly, the effect this bias in the media has on the voting public has measurably shifted the public’s “political quotient” significantly more to the left than it would have been with a more representative media. A detailed review of the book can be read in Quadrant Online by Steven Kates.

Reading the book reminded me of an article I wrote in 1998 based on studies in Australia by Professor Henningham at Queensland University. Henningham surveyed Australian journalists themselves to ascertain their impression of the place Australian media outlets lay on a spectrum from left to right. What strikes the outside observer is that the journalists themselves clearly rated the ABC as pro-Labor, indeed as the most pro-Labor of the major media outlets. The results of the survey, from left to right were:

7.30 Report
ABC News
Four Corners
SBS News
The Age
Channel Nine
Canberra Times
Channel Seven, A Current Affair
Channel Ten,
Telegraph-Mirror

— MID POINT ACCORDING TO JOURNALISTS —

Sydney Morning Herald
Courier Mail
Financial Review
The Australian

— MIDPOINT ACCORDING TO PUBLIC —

Herald-Sun
Hobart Mercury
Adelaide Advertiser
The West Australian
Northern Territory

The mid-point in this spectrum, according to the journalists was between the Telegraph-Mirror and the Sydney Morning Herald. However, a question imposes. Where would be this putative mid point be for the general public.

Henningham conducted a second but unrelated survey, ‘Ideological Differences between Australian Journalists and Their Public’. Of 173 journalists and 262 members of the public in metropolitan Australia, not surprisingly, there was an enormous difference between the views of journalists and those of the general public, with journalists consistently having more ‘progressive’ views than the general public.

Given this difference in views, I attempted to establish notionally just where the centre point of these media might lie on our political spectrum for the general public: that is, the one that delivers a close to 50/50 result on average at a general election. With caveats, I combined the results from the two Henningham studies. [see details here on third page]. I selected ten items that I believe have relative importance to the issues that were current at that time. Whilst only suggestive, when the journalists’ inherent bias is taken into account along with the electorate’s, one can hassard that the Australian people would judge the centre point in our media to be the Herald Sun. This means that the Australian public, on average, would consider every media outlet to the left of the Herald Sun to be biased towards the left. This would of course include The Australian.

I mention this short analysis only to underline the value of the very detailed and thorough analysis done by Professor Groseclose on the America media. Much more needs to be done about the complacency in the distortion of politics that our media creates. It is results like these that give irony to the absurd claimes of Maruice Newman, and above all to all those on the left climbing onto the Gillard government’s media enquiry.