The latest Essential Research survey confirms the picture of last week’s Newspoll in showing a decline in Tony Abbott’s popularity, but essentially no change in voting intention. Labor has in fact lost its 51-49 lead on two-party preferred, but the primary vote figures are all but unchanged with the Coalition steady on 44 per cent, Labor down a point to 40 per cent and the Greens up one to 9 per cent. Tony Abbott’s approval rating is 39 per cent, down four points on when the question was last asked in the September 20 poll, while his disapproval is up seven points to 45 per cent. Julia Gillard on the other hand is steady on both approval (45 per cent) and disapproval (37 per cent), and her lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 47-35 to 49-33. Questions on expectations for the economy, personal financial situation and job security find respondents leaning towards optimism, while one on the Murray-Darling Basin has 36 per cent believing the government should “purchase water rights from irrigators willing to sell” rather than “leave existing water allocations in place” or “compulsorily buy water rights from irrigators and farmers” (17 per cent each).
[madcyril
Posted Friday, October 22, 2010 at 12:42 pm | Permalink
Greens back Hockey]
It surely can’t be called an unholy alliance because Hockey is catholic. What could Shanahan name it?
Oh Dio. One of my cherished etymologies demolished. I just checked my OED which agrees with snopes 🙁
I do so like to be charming
[Do what most of us have done and that is to totally ignore WeeJism.]
Hear, hear.
BigBob @ 3109
[The Germans declared war on the US within days of Pearl Harbor. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, the US would have found a reason to go to war with Germany, who they considered the biggest threat – the war against Japan was of secondary importance.]
I’d have to disagree with you on that one, BigBob – FDR would have had a hell of a job convincing the US Congress to sanction a war against Germany without Hitler’s obliging declaration.
If Germany had not declared war on the US on December 11th 1941 as part of their perception of their treaty obligations (and let’s get real, when did Hitler ever honour a treaty if he did not think there was an advantage for him in it) then the American war plans that called for a concentration on Germany first, instead of on Japan, would have been thrown into chaos, and the case to attack Germany would have been a difficult one to make before the US Congress, the US Constitution reserving ‘official’ declarations of war to the Congress.
One would assume that FDR would have to wait for ships to be sunk in the Atlantic by German U-boats, or some such further provokation, to be able to invoke war against the Germans, and if Hitler chose not to provide that provokation, one is reduced to FDR and the US military having to concoct some sort of ‘incident’ like the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964.
I can’t see it happening – FDR was a shrewd and canny politician, as well as a master strategist, and he had been battling the Isolationists (a very strong sentiment across the US prior to WW2) throughout his entire Presidency, so if the American people and the Congress couldn’t have been brought fully into a decision to go to war against Germany first instead of Japan without Germany obligingly solving that problem for them, then I can’t see any easy pathway to implementing what was known as ‘Plan Dog’ – the two front war plan.
So, Don Randall was right after all. It was “just another one of their… lunatic fringe-type ideas”.
Good on yer, Joe. That’ll go down well in the boardrooms and far-flung editorial offices of the Murdoch empire.
Expect to see the Greens raised from the political grave by Shanahan’s gofers and elevated to the status of “honorary Coalition partner”.
Or not.
[Clickity, Clickity.
http://www.unhcr.org/publ/PUBL/3cc91a0b2.pdf
I can see about 40 there along the Pakistan/Afghan Border]
So in other words there is not one refugee camp in Afghanistan. I ask again if they have to leave Afghanistan why should they go to a poor, flood-prone, taliban-infested, drone-attack-ridden corrupt country. If Pakistan can host a refugee centre, why not Australia?
Why all the sensitivity and fuss over charging three soldiers out of the tens of thousands of soldiers we have deployed in Vietnam, Iraq, Timor L’est and Afghanistan?
If only three of them have committed manslaughter, murder, torture or rape in all that time then that is a pretty good ratio. [These three are, of course, presumed innocent pending a trial.]
The reality is that if you teach people to kill, cheapen life, dehumanize the enemy, drive people half mad through excessive stress, subject them to acquired brain injury through blasts from IEDs, then they are not to be judged by ordinary standards. Of course, torture of prisoners was routine in Vietnam.
I am not sure of the Australian figure, but the British prison population contains a shockingly high proportion of war veterans.
The current injury statistics for our War in Afghanistan are a big lie, IMHO. They only count physical death and injuries. They do not count psychological injuries.
I am not sure of the Australian figure, but the British prison population contains a shockingly high proportion of veterans.
There is a sort of unwritten civilian/military consensus in Australia not to go where our soldiers have committed crimes during time of war. It is the hidden part of our national ‘debate’ on war.
As a culture we learned to be silent during the frontier wars with Aboriginal tribes and appear to have kept up the habit in all our subsequent wars.
The link below is to a wartime propaganda film made about the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. It contains many of the usual elements involved in rationalizing crimes committed during time of war. Note the machine gunning of lifeboats. Damien Parer took some of the footage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVLV67xILI4
The reason I raise all this is because I want Australia to go into its next war with open eyes about everything that war entails.
[So in other words there is not one refugee camp in Afghanistan. I ask again if they have to leave Afghanistan why should they go to a poor, flood-prone, taliban-infested, drone-attack-ridden corrupt country. If Pakistan can host a refugee centre, why not Australia?]
How are they getting to Australia?
Teleport?
All Afghans pass into Pakistan before boarding flights to Indonesia. They could just as easily wait in line at one of the refugee camps.
We take 13,500 refugee’s every year and can easily fill this quota with refugee camp refugees, why then are we taking people who are purposely and deliberately abusing the system?
And there were very, very few prisoners taken on the Kokoda Track, and in the rest of the New Guinea campaigns.
The father of a girlfriend of mine (in the halcyon days of my youth) told me that there were always plenty of volunteers for “kitchen duty” or “putting out the garbage”, as executing Japanese soldiers was variously called.
He was actually not one of those keen to dispose of the enemy, and was shipped home to a penalty battalion, where they did real garbage duty.
[… Speaking in response to claims made in a new book by John Howard that his former treasurer was an “elitist” who could not connect with average Australians, Senator Minchin said the description was inaccurate and was not supported by his own experiences with Mr Costello.
“I think that is unfair on Peter,” said Senator Minchin, who is retiring from parliament next June.]
Notable Liberal figure, Jackie Kelly – yeah, I know! – would beg to differ. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 2007:
[… She said the Treasurer lacked empathy with the battlers of western Sydney and suffered from the outdated reputation that the Liberal Party governs only for toffee-nosed, rich people from the North Shore.]
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/kelly-to-quit-at-next-election/2007/05/25/1179601633348.html
Not sure about the “outdated reputation” bit; sounds like spin to me.
BB
Look at the brainpower the Germans hounded out.
That lot certainly had the ability to build a nuclear bomb but I don’t think the Germans had the uranium resources.
[Fascism flushed away the cream of European physics: Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Michael Polanyi, Theodor von Karman, George de Hevesy, Felix Bloch, James Franck, Lothar Nordheim, Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr and Eugene Rabinowitch. Along with some sympathetic non-Jewish scientists such as Erwin Schrodinger and Martin Stobb, these men were to become the driving force behind atomic research in Britain and the USA.]
@ Boerwar
Whilst we probably had plenty of breaches of the Geneva Convention regarding warfare in Vietnam, we ( australia) were never involved in any full on atrocities like My Lai were we?
[ Get a two-for-the-price-of-one deal with Barrie Cassidy’s book
Go the three for one and throw George Bush’s upcoming book in as well]
I prefer normal toilet paper, much softer on my ….
What thoughts on the political pros and cons for the major parties in allowing a conscience parliamentary vote on gay marriage?
ah Jackie Kelly
Not much of an excuse but out comes a a favoured Chris Uhlmann interview; just love listening to this…
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2097573.htm
There’s a certain irony in the fact that while our troops are “pacifying” Afghanistan, empty houses built for the military at Inverbrackie are to be occupied by asylum seekers from … Afghanistan?
[Brown has tried to muster support for his own banking legislation aimed at trying to control “unfair mortgage increases”, which is currently before both houses.]
did any one here Christine Milne on 24/ abc that is not what i heard, she even mentioned hockey by name, i wonder where there may be a script of the interview.
they where thinking of other ways this could be done she did not back Hockey from what i understood
[There’s a certain irony in the fact that while our troops are “pacifying” Afghanistan, empty houses built for the military at Inverbrackie are to be occupied by asylum seekers from … Afghanistan?]
I think the Irony is that our Aussie troops are dying fighting for Afghanistans freedom, while healthy young Afghan men who would be perfect to fight in the Afghan forces pack up and flee to Australia and let us do all the work.
Geewizz,
I think the irony is that you are very keen to make veiled allusions to cowardice when you haven’t volunteered to do squat yourself.
A true chickenhawk.
[Oh Dio. One of my cherished etymologies demolished.]
Never mind, Laocoon. One believes it applied only to First Class and only to voyages to the East, esp India. One had to be very U and very rich indeed (“wealthy” is nonU) to afford a ticket ?stamped POSH. One feels rich, but nonU, were SOPH.
blue_green@3405
I am not sure the US prevented wars between China and Taiwan. There were small scale skirmishes between the two during early days of PRC. But what put a major dent on PRC’s plan to conquer Taiwan was a botched attempt at a major assault. The PLA (Chinese army) simply wasn’t capable enough to sustain such an assault on Taiwan at the time. This, coupled with some blind confidence and shoddy strategic planning, resulted in heavy casualties and eventual defeat to the PLA. From that moment on, the leadership of PRC realised it is a monumental task with no certainty of victory. Now with all the development on its affluent Eastern border exposed, the stake is higher than ever before. All the military build-up these days on both sides were for deterrent purposes. Despite all the tough talk (even that subsided a lot now that KMT is in power), neither sides is stupid enough to cross the bottom line, not to mention the emotional burden of waging wars on the same race, which is a growing sentiment on both sides now that the ideological bullshit about class struggle dissipated. US’s contribution in this matter? They sold bucket loads of weapons to Taiwan. I wouldn’t call this a glorious example of maintaining world peace.
AFR continues its coverage of the cost and time blow-outs on Perth’s indoor Arena
Original budget/schedule: $160m/2009
Current budget/schedule:$536m/May 2012 (builder says 2013 more realistic)
Big Ship,
It would only of taken a few ‘incidents’ to push the US’s buttons – after Pearl Harbor, the isolationists were pretty much discredited.
There were plenty of convoy opportunities to provide those incidents – the Germans just couldn’t let so much war material pass unmolested.
Gee Wizz
If the queue at the butcher’s was 135 year’s long would you still wait or would you find alternative food sources.
Given I know nothing about the Afghan issue. I thought I would look it up. Very intriguing.
[Afghans give different and usually plural reasons for their decision to migrate: perhaps an outbreak of fighting, the danger of bombing or compulsory conscription, or a threat from a personal enemy; perhaps the search for work or opportunities to trade, the need for medical treatment, or the undertaking of a pilgrimage. My main aim here, however, is not to highlight these motives in a context of diffuse insecurity but to describe how transnational networks and ongoing mobility are at the core of the strategies developed by many Afghans.
A study of individual trajectories and family strategies shows that few Afghans have never left their country since the Communist coup d’e´tat of 1978 and the Soviet intervention of 1979, and also that many have returned at some point for at least a short visit. The leaving and coming back has been constant.
While the Afghans have constituted the largest refugee population in the 1980s and 1990s, we are a long way from the figure of the victim compelled to leave his or her homeland in the face of a towering threat, with the vague hope of one day being able to return. Although migratory movements acquired an unprecedented scale during the war, they have existed for a long time in one form or another – and have remained in the memory of the members of many Afghan communities. Nor do they necessarily have the traumatic significance that is often attributed to them; individual mobility and the dispersion of families or mutual support groups are not experienced as destructuring phenomena in and of themselves. Seen through this prism, the concepts of “economic migrant”, “political refugee”, “country of origin”, “host country”, “voluntary” or “forced” migration, or even “return”, appear singularly reductionist in the Afghan context. All these categories overlap with a combined presence of political, cultural, economic and ecological factors.]
This research was done through a series of interviews over decades in Afghanistan.
A quick read of empircal evidence has changed my views immediately.
http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/1/58.abstract
OPT
[One feels rich, but nonU, were SOPH]
Yes, let’s change the subject back to the lovely Mrs Mirabella
BK? You there? BK…
The nearest thing to a “queue” for Asylum Seekers between Afghanistan and Australia is in Indonesia. The camps in Pakistan (and Iran) on Whizzer’s map are intended primarily for those who have temporarily left Afghanistan but hope to return. They are full of refugees, who the UNHCR is trying to help return to a safe home when possible, rather than people seeking asylum elsewhere. THey are not places where “Asylum Seeker” processing normally occurs.
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/34188.html provides some idea of what the “queue” is like if you manage to make it to Indonesia in the first place:
[One 17-year-old boy arrived in Indonesia after his father was “slaughtered” by the Taliban for refusing to hand over his 15-year-old daughter to a 50-year-old Taliban leader. His five brothers are missing, his mother and two sisters travelled by donkey and on foot across the mountains to Quetta after the attack.
The village elders advised them to run and now the family is separated with the young boy locked up in an Indonesian prison having nightmares every night as he cannot block out the memories of what has been done to his family. He has a sister living in Australia who would sponsor him but her application like hundreds of others from family members sits in the bottom drawer of the immigration department destined to go into the 40-year queue.
Jakarta is the first UNHCR office open for applications between Afghanistan and Australia. The boys go to the office on arrival or wait in prison for UNHCR officers, wanting to enter a formal refugee process however they soon learn that this is a myth.
UNHCR is currently registering 10 Afghans per week out of hundreds on their doorstep every Monday and Wednesday morning. Some people even sleep outside the office on the footpath to try to get in the door.
The brute reality is that there is no lawful formal way for these boys to apply for refugee resettlement in Australia.
They are stuck with a risky boat the only escape.]
[Yes, let’s change the subject back to the lovely Mrs Mirabella
BK? You there? BK…]
Yes Laocoon
Not a nice thing to do to a bloke on a Friday Afternnon!
On the (latest) mining tax kerfuffle, Laura Tingle makes the observation that it is in the big miners’ interests to do a deal where they have extraordinary input, than to risk a Greens’ designed tax
[All Afghans pass into Pakistan before boarding flights to Indonesia. They could just as easily wait in line at one of the refugee camps.]
Because refugee camps in Pakistan are shit-holes, they are dangerous places to raise a family, violent, and are a burden on the resources of a country that cannot afford it. You expect the poorest and most miserable countries on earth to house refugees but not Australia.
[The nearest thing to a “queue” for Asylum Seekers between Afghanistan and Australia is in Indonesia. The camps in Pakistan (and Iran) on Whizzer’s map are intended primarily for those who have temporarily left Afghanistan but hope to return.]
hands up who on this forum has actually been to a refugee camp? i have, and i can assure you, it’s no picnic. i find it remarkable that so many people lack empathy until it happens to them or someone they know.
BK
Just giving you an excuse to continue the Friday afternoon course of medicinal wine intake for the proboscis (is that on road to recovery?)
Laocoon
The snout is healing slowly.
I don’t think I could enjoy a red now you’ve got me thinking about a certain puff adder.
PJ
Not as far as I know and I would be surprised if we had. Australian military discipline was far superior to that of many US units, particularly towards the end of the war.
GeeWizz@3423
The problem is, you simply don’t know what the soldier did to result in charge being laid. If you do, then maybe you should be a witness at the tribunal, not here, where you run the risk of perjury. No one is above the law, and every evidence points to ample legal aid being offered to the soldiers. What you said could eqaully apply to police forces as well, yet aren’t you glad rogue elements of YOUR police force are cleared out and prosecuted (I don’t imply, of course, tha the soldiers involved are necesaarily rogue)? Let justice run its course, and if you have any real contribution to make in this case, I am sure many here will encourage you to redouble your effort so that the soldiers can be cleared. It sure beats making empty and uninformed judgement and chanting slogans.
Equally and Necessarily, sorry.
More from AFR, Geoff Kitney on the division to gag Crean:
[The division called by Pyne yesterday caught them by surprise. They quickly caucused and took the collective decision to oppose the gagging of Crean on the basis that only in the most clearcut cases of disreputable behaviour would they vote to stifle debate.
The signal to both the government and the oppoistion was clear: the cross-bench MPs will not facilitate the sort of tactical game-playing which frequently blights parliamentary proceedings]
@ Boerwar
I didn’t think so thanks for that
[Yes, let’s change the subject back to the lovely Mrs Mirabella]
On the grounds that if one can’t say anything good about a person, one should say nothing: why?
WeeJism @ 3468
[ I think the Irony is that our Aussie troops are dying fighting for Afghanistans freedom, ]
Though not you, I notice.
Boerwar@3457
Most war understate the casualties. For example, in WW1 supposedly 59,000 Diggers were killed. While only that many probably did die on the battlefield, a hell of a lot died from physical wounds in the next few years. And more than a few from the psychological ones too. No one knows how many, but reports I’ve read have suggest the death toll for 1914-20 was perhaps 75-80,000. Some believe it was even higher. Many that survived beyond 1920 still died prematurely.
As does America’s. Blacks and veterans make up a very high percentage there (and of course many are both). Most of their homeless are veterans.
IMHO, the biggest contributor to our relaxed attitude to sending troops off to war is that most have no idea. When I’m declared by popular acclimation El Presidente for Life, Generalissimo Morewest one of my first acts will be to force the media to show war as it really is. No more blurred images, or cut-aways.
Furthermore on afghanistan (from empirical academic land)
[Return to Afghanistan does not necessarily mean the end of displacements and may prompt onward passage, following a pattern of multidirectional crossborder movements. Channels of pre-established transnational networks exist between Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, as the movement of individuals to seek work, to escape drought or to flee war has been a common experience in the whole region. Despite the high levels of repatriation, the number of Afghans living abroad is still considerable. Families and individuals continue to move, and it seems unlikely that the back-and-forth movements will stop while they constitute a key livelihoods strategy. Many Afghans have been shifting from one place to the next for years – some never returning to their place of origin, others only on a temporary basis before deciding to return into Iran, Pakistan or further afield. Young men in particular, who have not travelled before, are still choosing to leave Afghanistan – suggesting that displacement is not only caused by conflict.
With the passing of time, the Afghans have woven very efficient migratory networks based on back and forth movements and the dispersion of the members.
For young Hazara male migrants for instance, migration between the mountains of Central Afghanistan and the cities of Iran offers the opportunity to broaden their social networks beyond narrow kinship and neighbourhood ties. It may be conceived as a necessary stage in their existence, a rite of passage to adulthood and a step toward manhood.
. After many years, the migratory movements are highly organized, and the transnational networks became a major, even constitutive, element in the social, cultural and economic life of Afghans. One of the most striking aspects of this migration is the huge flow of capital that it draws towards Afghanistan. Once they are in Pakistan, in Iran or elsewhere, the Afghans have to solve the technical problem of sending money they have saved to their family in Afghanistan. Official channels became progressively available after 2002, but the problem was especially acute in the 1980s and 1990s, when no banks were operational. Migration to Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries, and the very significant sum of remittances sent home, can be seen not only as a response to war and insecurity, but also as an efficient economic strategy for households and a crucial contribution to the economy of the country as a whole. ]
So it seems that labeling the Afghan arrival problem as a ‘refugee problem’ is simplisitc in the extreme. Whilst there may be elements of that, it seems it more in fitting with long-held cultural practices of regular migration and that this is used as a response to a range of problems from drought to civil strife.
[If the queue at the butcher’s was 135 year’s long would you still wait or would you find alternative food sources.]
Do you mean if you were waiting in the queue at the butchers and it was 135 Years long, and I was behind you in the queue you’d have no issues with me pushing… YOU… YOUR FAMILY… YOUR FRIENDS and anyone else in my way out of the bloody way so I don’t have to wait like you do, you’d have no issues?
This is not about alternative foods, this is all about queue jumping. We could never take the amount of asylum seekers in the world, so why the bloody hell should cashed up queue jumpers get PREFERENCE?
kakuru
He’s doing his bit. He’s dying on this blog.
5 Million sad stories out there… but the only ones the left want to hear are the ones paying people smugglers and criminal gangs. They should be ashamed of themselves.
[Because refugee camps in Pakistan are shit-holes, they are dangerous places to raise a family, violent, and are a burden on the resources of a country that cannot afford it.]
The worlds a shitty place.
5 Million sad stories, but the left will ONLY listen to the ones jumping the queue and paying criminal gangs. Think about it.
[ The worlds a shitty place. ]
It got just a little more shittier when you arrived.
GeeWizz @ 3377
[This blokes a disgrace!!!!
One day he’s got crocodile tears for the troops, the next he wants them court martialled and thrown in the slammer.
He really is a class act, only Tassies could manage to get this idiot into government.]
Come on, Ref! Red Card!
blue-green @3492
Is that similar to our youngsters taking off into the world? Mine did and one has settled abroad permanently.
(That takes me to the stupidity of HECS. While my daughter stayed for marriage, her HECS debt is no incentive to bring the accumulation of her skills and experience back here. Graduates do not have to pay HECS while overseas so we are encouraging our graduates to leave and not come back)