Wednesday 27th of November 2024
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coup de grâce .....

coup de grâce .....

And a bit of perspective is what Agriculture Minister, Tony Burke, who has a talent for getting under Turnbull's skin, gave us in question time this week.

On Tuesday, Mr Burke reminded Mr Turnbull of his decision, in the final days of his stint as environment minister, to approve a $2 million grant of federal money to the Australian Rain Corporation.

More than that, actually - the decision was to approve the $2 million and bump it up to $10 million, despite the experimental nature of the science involved and the disconcerting fact that much of the grant application's supporting literature was in Russian. "And who did he do it for?" Mr Burke asked with a flourish.

"One of his neighbours, who was an executive of the Australian Rain Corporation, the same neighbour who was a member of the election fund-raising committee known as the Wentworth Forum, with membership set at $5000 just to get into the room."

Much fun was then had by Mr Burke on the science of cloud seeding, which he resumed on Wednesday with a delicious and much-interrupted reading of an old Reuters report about Russian attempts at rain-making.

"Russian air force planes dropped a 25 kilogram sack of cement on a suburban Moscow home last week while seeding clouds ..." Mr Burke gurgled.

At this point, Mr Turnbull could stand no more.

"Mr Speaker, I rise on a point of order. This is a joke that the minister is talking about. The technology that he is attacking does not involve cloud seeding. You are a moron!" (The last comment being directed at the Agriculture Minister.)

So that's what Mr Turnbull disputes about the story?

Not the favours for a mate, not the Liberal connections of the beneficiary, not the arbitrary boosting of a $2 million grant to $10 million - but the question of whether bags of cement were to be involved?

"Last Friday afternoon, the leader of the Opposition offered his own definition of 'corruption'," Mr Burke concluded.

"He offered his own definition of what it was when you use taxpayers' resources to seek advantage for one of their mates ... Under that test, was the [rain-making] payment against departmental advice? Yes. Was it for a mate? Yes. Was it for a donor? Yes. Did somebody end up receiving that money? Yes.

"Every box is ticked, according to the Leader of the Opposition's own definition of corruption."

It does make Mr Turnbull's outrage over Wayne Swan's phone call to John Grant look kind of overdone, doesn't it?

Even the most casual scan of the Coalition's years in government will yield further context.

What about the Howard Government's 2003 decision to ramp up excise on foreign ethanol imports?

That had huge benefits for the Australian ethanol industry, dominated by Mr Howard's friend and substantial Liberal Party donor, Dick Honan, with whom Mr Howard initially denied having discussed the decision - later, he was forced to admit that he had.

Or what about the time the government bailed out the workers of a company run by the then PM's brother, Stan Howard?

These matters are never simple, but there was more meat on the above-mentioned bones than you'll find on the starved frame of this so-called ute scandal.

But the Liberals can't stop. Probably because if they did stop, they'd notice just how thin the ice is underfoot.

For sheer unbridled cheek, though, you can't go past Philip Ruddock, whose last memorable knock was as attorney general in a government which elected to deport Mohamed Haneef in 2007 regardless of his guilt or innocence of charges that he assisted a terrorist organisation.

On Wednesday, Mr Ruddock rose in question time and inquired, in those memorable papery tones, of the current Attorney General whether there had been any "improper release of information" from the Australian Federal Police investigation concerning Mr Grech.

"What is the role of the presumption of innocence in relation to Mr Grech?"

One does not like to find oneself drawn into the Prime Minister's complicated verbal universe, but sauce bottles do spring immediately to mind.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/utes-dead-cats-and-cloud-seeding-20090626-czs6.html?page=-1

bring out your dead .....

from Crikey .....

Ruddock takes us back up shit creek with a pipeline

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

Ah, the return of the living dead.

Old habits die hard with Philip Ruddock. About as hard as Ruddock's own progressive principles died when he had a sniff of ministerial power. He happily became John Howard's go-to man in the demonization of asylum-seekers and the minister responsible for that high point in Australian public life, the reference to a boy locked up in Villawood Detention Centre as "it".

The Government's "softening" of illegal immigration laws has now, according to Ruddock, produced a "pipeline" of 10,000 people a year trying to get to Australia.

You know what goes through pipelines. Not people. Maybe water, at best, but more likely sludge, or some highly unpleasant chemical. Sewage, perhaps.

Those 10,000 pipelinees, we know, are of course not white people.

Ruddock, like some of its colleagues, must be thoroughly flummoxed that Australians have thus far greeted the rise in boat arrivals generated by the Sri Lankan civil war and other regional conflicts with a reasonable amount of equanimity. It's not like the good old days, when a single boatload of asylum seekers could be guaranteed to tap into that deep-seated Australian fear of invasion from the north by different-coloured hordes.

The flow of arrivals via boat of course remains an entirely trivial immigration problem. If you're obsessed about border control, you should be picketing our airports, where illegal immigrants and future visa overstayers arrive every day by the hundreds. In July last year there were 48,500 people in Australia unlawfully, and nearly all of them got off a plane.

Philip Ruddock will tell you the Howard Government stopped the boats. But how'd it go stopping the other 95+% of people who aren't supposed to be here?

Well, turns out, not so good. In fact, so badly its Department stopped publishing the statistics in its annual report, and only properly resumed when the numbers started coming back down again after it had been replaced as Immigration Minister.

There were 45,000 people in Australia unlawfully in 1996, when Ruddock first applied its tender ministrations to the Immigration portfolio. The following year they shot up to 51,000. A good start for Ruddock, but it was just warming up. Immigration stopped reporting the numbers for a couple of years, but when we next see them, in 2000, they'd climbed to nearly 59,000.

And as we learn from the Department's 2004 annual report, they'd peaked at 59,800 in the last months of Ruddock's stint as minister. So it presided over a 33% increase in illegal immigrants. Nice work, and it didn't even have a pipeline to help it.