Canberra-based libertarian blogger Tex has been asked to stand as a candidate for the Australian Senate, and has written his campaign speech. I think you willl agree with me that it is a model of Australian eloquence. On the other hand, no one can accuse Tex of taking a ‘populist’ approach.
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To mark the occasion, Samizdata reader Sam Ward – better known as ‘Yobbo’ – has posted an alternative Australia Day address from Sam Kekovich on his blog. Might as well plonk it here, too. Right. It is a heinously hot day in Perth. I am off to spend the entire afternoon in the sun, drinking beer and frying steaks. January 26th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 To those who are not au fait with arcane Australian military procurement debates – and those that wish to be so – I present to you a rather fascinating discussion of the merits of the F-22 Raptor (a most superior bird) versus the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (which the Australian government has plumped for). And those that do not give a tinker’s cuss about Australian defence procurement (hell, I do not blame you), I have some quite breathtaking footage of an Su-37 being put through its paces. I believe this footage (also via Catallaxy) is of an Su-37 being exhibited at the Farnborough air show in the late 90s. Would not like to be facing this plane in a dogfight during daylight hours. According to the linked source, the Su-37 is not currently being manufactured for any particular client. Okay, Samizdata military talking heads – discuss! January 25th, 2007 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an Australian political party worth voting for! I have recently joined as a financial member. Some principles, some policies. Not bad at all. I think their taxation policy places too much of a burden on the taxpayer, but it is still preferable to the progressive status quo. January 15th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those atheists, people of the book (Christians and Jews), where will they end up? In Surfers Paradise? On the Gold Coast? Where will they end up? In hell and not part-time, for eternity. They are the worst in God’s creation. – Sheikh Taj Din Al Hilaly, widely noted as Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric and an assumed <sigh> moderate Muslim, unintentionally explains why multiculturalism is quite a bad idea. The Sheikh had, in the same sermon, described unveiled and outgoing (as in leaving the house) women as “uncovered meat”, and that “if she had not left the meat uncovered, the cat wouldn’t have snatched it.” Rape away, gents. October 26th, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
And the reason? Simple, the USA has banned Vegemite! I expect to see RAAF strikes on US targets by late this evening and Aussie SAS teams boarding US shipping and dumping cargoes of Skippy Peanut Butter into the sea. More seriously, it is just preposterous that the state interferes in the most picayune aspects of life. Next time I am in the US I intend to smuggle a jar in disguised as Marmite and smear it over the door handles of the first US federal government building to see. October 22nd, 2006 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Andrew Robb, a spokesman for the Howard government in Australia, speaking to an audience of 100 imams. Can you imagine Bush or Blair having one their spokesmen saying anything even remotely like that? September 28th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
You might like to keep an eye on New Zealand politics, where a classic shit fight is taking place. And it was all started by Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton, who is suing the NZ government for misappropriation of taxpayer money during election campaigning of 2005. For some background information check out Darnton vs. Clark, Not PC & David Farrar Having misappropriated taxpayer money and facing a lawsuit, the New Zealand government now wants to ram through legislation validating their thievery. To divert attention, they threatened to dish the dirt on opposition MPs, resulting in the exposure of an affair by the opposition leader. The dirt has come right back at them, however, with allegations that the PM’s husband is gay and that her marriage is one of convenience. Entering into the equation, also, are Exclusive Brethren who may have been snooping on the Prime Minister and tales of the government hiring private investigators to snoop on the opposition. While I do not give a damn about either the Prime Minister’s or the Leader of the Opposition’s personal lives, the amount of dirt being dished is an indication that the New Zealand government is in serious trouble.
September 23rd, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Speaking of moonbats, Germaine Greer dusts off her keyboard to put the untimely demise of her compatriot, Steve Irwin, into some sort of perspective:
So there we have it. Driven to despair by the illegal encroachment, a member of the oppressed Alternative Species community hit back against the Irwinist-BusHitler-Howard cabal. They must adopt a different maritime policy. September 5th, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
And now for a story of a nature rarely seen in the pages of Samizdata – that of government policy incompetence resulting in farce. As in the rest of the world, we Australians are starting to rankle about paying the high petrol prices experienced at present. Politicians of all stripes sense votes in this issue, and they are right to do so – I am certain the average Australian firmly believes the government should Do Something about this added financial impost. Consequently, the Australian federal government has announced that it will Do Something About It by spending other peoples’ money. That should come as no surprise to those that watch governments with a w(e)ary eye, however this latest brain fart from the sages in Canberra – to subsidise Australian motorists if they convert their petrol powered cars to Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) – is more egregiously stupid and counterproductive than most, and deserves attention. First, some background. LPG is widely available in Australian cities. All of the larger fuel stations sell it. LPG’s price is usually slightly less than half that of conventional unleaded petrol. I estimate that somewhere between 5-10% of cars have conversions enabling them to run on gas. A conversion kit, fitted, costs about A$2500. The federal government subsidy is worth up to A$2000 per conversion. There are a number of fairly simple and certain predictions one can make from such a proposal, given the circumstances outlined above. Firstly, the cost of vehicle conversion will soar due to the massive increase in demand(1). No matter – the increased investment will soon be recouped through fuel savings. That is the whole point of the subsidy; alleviate the political headache of high fuel prices by getting Australians to switch from expensive petrol to cheap LPG. Of course, all things are static – especially prices. Back in the unfortunate realm of reality, it is quite obvious that a return on the conversion investment is unlikely to be realised, because the price of LPG will also be a victim of incrementally increasing demand, as more and more gas-powered cars hit the road. The price of petrol may fall slightly, though oil (and thus petrol) is a global commodity with a more-or-less uniform price. Naturally, producers will sell their fuel in a market that provides the optimum return. Thus, supply will fall in concert with the slump in demand, leaving prices largely unchanged. And another factor to be considered by those who are thinking about taking up the government’s ostensibly generous offer – petrol excise is a major revenue earner for the Commonwealth. If this starts to dry up, lightly-taxed and increasingly-used LPG is going to look like quite an attractive target for the Treasury boys, narrowing the price gap further. The two fuels will probably reach price parity at some not-too-distant point; that is, the price of LPG will rise to meet that of petrol. Simply put, this subsidy will achieve none of its stated aims, create a bunch of unintended negative consequences and is a most elementary economic blunder. The lesson – and it should be well understood by a government that trumpets its sound economic management at any opportunity – is that subsidies do far more harm than good. The big winners will be gas conversion component manufacturers and those installing this equipment. Gas suppliers also stand to benefit. The losers will be the broad pool of taxpayers (again) and those who have invested in a gas conversion kit in the vain hope of cheaper vehicle running costs. What a marvellous outcome. LPG-powered cars do, however, emit far lower levels of greenhouse pollutants than their petrol-powered counterparts. A nation of gas-powered cars may help Australia achieve its assigned Kyoto targets. We sensibly refrained from taking on that ball and chain, however we may as well sign the bloody treaty now – our adherence to it might be the only thing we have to show from the colossal waste of taxpayers’ money that is about to take place. August 15th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whenever we are told that the state needs new powers for whatever reason, we are constantly reassured that there will be ‘safeguards’ and ‘accountability’ to protect citizens from the intrusions of powerful government agencies. You did not have to be a Brazillian living in London to have some doubts about that. And it is not just in such high profile cases that government agencies misuse their powers. For example, here in Australia, a rather colourful lawyer, one Michael Brereton has found that details of his messy private life have found their way into newspapers after a tax investigation against him failed to provide the state with enough legal ammunition to prosecute him.
The Australian Crime Commission has suffered a massive blow to its credibility by getting entangled in a domestic spat; but it might also demonstrate just how far government agencies are willing to go to ‘get at’ people its officials take a dislike to. So much for those ‘safeguards’, hey. July 28th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
My home town of Perth recently bore witness to perhaps the most shocking crime in recent memory around these parts – earlier this week, an eight year old girl was raped and murdered, her body dumped in the disabled toilet of a popular Perth shopping centre just minutes after she was separated from her parents. Now a strange twist has created even more public interest in the case. The individual apprehended and charged with the offence, twenty one year old Dante Arthurs, is rumoured to be one of the two boys who killed James Bulger back in 1993. There are a number of coincidences that have given rise to the aforementioned rumour. Perth’s local rag, The West Australian, notes that
More chillingly, The West – in its typical muckraking fashion – actually made the link between Dante Arthurs and the Bulger case last year. It put the question regarding Dante’s identity to the family then; long before he committed the offence he is currently being held for. It is quite remarkable that Dante, quizzed about his identity vis-Á -vis the Bulger case, would later go on to commit such a similar crime. When the rumour surfaced, the Western Australian police force and justice system immediately rushed to scotch it. British authorities declared it untrue; the Bulger killers were not relocated to Australia. The Arthurs family vehemently denied that Dante Arthurs is an assumed identity, masking one of the Bulger killers. They produced a birth notice, published in The West Australian in 1984, declaring Dante’s birth. This would appear to conclusively bury the rumour, however some have pondered whether the birth notice simply illustrates the depth of Dante’s cover. Personally, I suspect it is more than likely that Dante is not a re-identified John Venables or Robert Thompson, and the startling coincidences linking the two cases are no more than startling coincidences. However, it must be noted that all the parties who have denied the rumour also have a strong interest in ensuring the confidentiality of such an arrangement, if it indeed exists. If child-killers like Venables or Thompson were released, given new identities and shipped off to foreign lands – only to re-offend there in similar circumstances – the political consequences would be enormous. It would at least spell the end of such expedient methods of dealing with society’s most notorious (but presumably rehabilitated) malefactors; a scenario authorities in Britain and Australia would rather not suffer. If Arthurs is one of the Bulger killers, I have no doubt that authorities would sooner lie about it if they think such evasiveness could head off the ensuing major international scandal that would inevitably follow the breaking of such news. Unfortunately for any government agency attempting a cover-up, if the rumours are correct about Dante Arthurs, I think it likely that the truth will be explosively revealed here and in Britain sooner rather than later. There is so much public interest in the Dante Arthurs case that every angle of this tragic affair will be exhaustively probed by investigative journalists. No doubt they are at it now – wading through birth and death records, electoral rolls and the like, hunting for inconsistencies – whilst hounding their snouts within the public service for information. A devastating public service leak is a strong possibility; if there is anything to leak, that is. I still maintain that all the journalistic investigations will probably come to naught, as Dante Arthurs is most likely not Jon Venables nor Robert Thompson. However, I may be wrong and we could be seeing the early stages of a scandal that will shake the justice systems of Great Britain and Australia to their foundations. June 29th, 2006 | 158 comments - (Comments are closed)
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