Cranky Queenslander

Anyone who thinks Julia will be able to ensure kids go to school by harassing the local soccer club is living on a planet far far away. This has to be the low point in policy announcements, surely?

For a start, you will have to make some effort to find out what kind of family situation is in effect for each truanting child. Are the parents doing their best to put the kids into school, and are they working with the school? There’s a big difference between a kid left to their own at 7am as the parents shoot through, and the kid who is dropped at the front gate by their parents at 8:20.

If the parents are a big part of the problem, then the intervention should be directed at them. After all, they are their kids, their responsibility, and if they aren’t doing everything they can to ensure their kids get an education, shouldn’t they be on the end of the big stick, not the local footy club?

How exactly are you going to ensure that kids who miss school don’t play footy anyway? Are you going to setup a public register of truant kids and legislate for every footy and netball club to check it before letting kids play on Saturday? Really? You must be joking.

And finally; What about the kids who truant, and who do not play sport. They get a free pass do they?

Honestly, this is a half baked and stupid idea, and Julia will eventually have to wake up to it.

The Culprit

I was listening to the Twister Wire podcast this morning, trying to get more information about the NBN, while I try to decide if it’s going to be a good thing or a giant waste of taxpayers money. While I thought the content of the episode I was listening to was okay, the presenter, one Phil Dobbie, decided to destroy any creditiblity he had by dropping a totally irrelevant and completely wrong statement at the end;

“For Tony Abbott, he wants to show how he can stop asylum seekers, trying to escape repressive regimes, unless those repressive regimes have been accommodating enough to give them a passport.”

What a bunch of tripe that is! Is this guy for real? Let’s stop for a minute and check the facts;

These “asylum seekers” pay people smugglers large sums of money to sneek across multiple borders, and eventually be packed onto rickety boats for a life threatening ride to Australia.

There is no reason they could not claim asylum in other countries they pass through, and our governments refugee resettlement program would then take some of them, as would many other countries.

Let’s also remember that plenty of them do have documents with them when they leave, showing who they are and where they are from, but then go on to destroy these papers once they get within range of Australia. Why do they do that, one must wonder?

Considering what they pay to the smugglers, it’s pretty clear many of them have the means to do things properly, so the motivation for sneaking into Australia must be challenged. Is it simply that we are the soft touch, that hands out the big bucks to new arrivals?

Even if none of that moves you, how about the fact that these rickety old boats are a death trap, and people do die both on the boats, and under the waves when they inevitably sink. The people arguing for a relaxing of our border protection laws are arguing for more people crammed on more boats and more suffering and more death.

This is NOT the kind of moving forward I vote for.

Just saw this gem on the Courier Mail website. Apparently mums are struggling to put a healthy dinner on the table. Seriously?

Okay, I will admit that as a society, we seem over the past couple of generations to have lost a lot of the home maker skills that prior generations would have taken for granted; Of particular concern is the lack of cooking skills, and a widespread lack of knowledge of nutrition.

Having put on too much weight myself in the past, and had to struggle to lose it, I know only too well that you must have a good understanding of nutrition if you are to remain healthy. That is why spent the time and energy to learn!

These struggling mums should make the effort to learn proper nutrition, and to ensure they always serve their kids a proper, healthy meal. It isn’t that hard, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than McDonalds or KFC, and they owe it to the little ones they chose to bring into this world.

Listening to the continuing CPRS debate in federal parliament today, I am still baffled that so many people seem to be accepting the Labor party’s line on the subject. To me, it seems pretty obvious we need to do things that will reduce our carbon emissions.

So why is the Labor party hell bent on imposing a new tax, instead of reducing emissions? Take labor man John Quiggin for a great example of what I am talking about;

“More generally, since the opposition plan amounts to picking some winners, and throwing public money at them, it’s obvious from first principles that it must be more expensive than the government’s ETS.”

Not to me John; The governments proposed scheme levies a huge new tax, and also guarantees to give all the tax money back in compensation. It’s obvious to me that means a nett zero effect on the economy, and will mean a zero impact on emissions;

As I understand it, the opposition are suggesting we actually spend some money on projects and technologies that will actually reduce emissions. That seems like the way to go to me, lets see some government initiatives in Solar, Wind, Tidal, Nuclear and other low/non carbon emitting technologies. How about we do something about increasing the range of electric vehicles?

Seems simple enough to me, so get yourselves into the comments and tell me why I’m wrong. (or that I’m right, either way is good!)

I think it’s fair to say the federal Labor government have over the 12-18 months, lost all credibility they had as a progressive socialist government. They have consistently professed a desire to redistribute the countries riches more equitably to those lower down the societal ladder, but the evidence is now pouring to disprove that.

Labor’s Building the Education Revolution program is providing ample evidence that Labor is pouring money in the union dominated construction sector by approving construction at massively inflated prices.

The Herald Sun reports on one such example, brought to light by the school’s principal, who must have had the silly idea he could save a whopping $140,000 by getting the work done by contractors other than those appointed by the government.

Interestingly, this is the same school where the principal earlier this year refused to allow the feds to fund a $3 million gym, because the school already had one!

I wish more school principals had the guts to check what was going on at their schools and call the government out for the complete waste of money it is perpetrating. The real irony here is the kids it claims will get a better education because of it will certainly need one, because they’ll be paying back the debt for years to come.

The release this week of the game “Modern Warfare 2″ has once again shown how poor the system of classification for such things is in Australia;

At the mature end of the spectrum, the Office of Film & Literature Classification has only two options; Stamp the game suitable for 15+, or ban it completely.

Obviously, games like Modern Warfare 2 and Left 4 Dead, while full of gore and adult themes, are not so bad that they need banning altogether.

The ABC’s Sarah Collerton has a good piece on the topic, hitting the nail right on the head; We need an R 18+ classification. As far back as 2005, Bond University released a study showing that 88% of Australians supported the introduction of such a classification for games. With all that support, you’d wonder why it hasn’t happened;

The Problem

Turns out this guy is the problem. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson. His theory is by not having an R rating, anything that might have been rated R gets banned and the kids are safe. WRONG! Turns out anything that should have been rated R gets a fresh coat of paint (or in the case of MW2, gets nothing at all), and is slapped with a M15+ rating, and the kids ALL GET TO PLAY IT.

I would suggest everyone click on Michael’s smiling face, which will lead you to his parliamentary website, from which you should bombard his inbox with requests to pull his finger out and fix this!

Everyone by now has read about the terrible treatment dealt out to a 14 year old girl on public radio by her mother and radio host Kyle Sandilands. I don’t need to repeat the details here, but I wanted to briefly register my continued disgust with this grub, and suggest we as a community should not tolerate this garbage.

I think this piece at the Herald Sun sums it up for me, and I cannot believe there are enough Victorians that are prepared to listen to the tripe that Sandilands is serving up as entertainment to keep him employed.

Come on Victoria, Stand up for whats right and stop listening!

Check out Joe Ludwig’s media statement regarding the alleged stellar effort of the Child Support Agency in making parents cough up for the welfare of their children.

Joe, you are so far out of touch with reality it’s a joke! Sure, a large number of parents have been robbed blind by the CSA, and that’s nothing to be happy about, but you also forget about all the parents who dodge their responsibilities all together by hiding their income!

This is one of the few issues I believe would benefit from a proper, in depth inquiry, as a better system must be found to address these two key problems in the current system;

Firstly, the amount of child support payable should NOT be adjusted based on the parents income. A child of a worker at Big W does not deserve to be treated as less valuable than that of a rich executive. It’s time to set a standard for the minimum level of acceptable care, value that, and make the parents pay that amount.

We also need to solve the problem of parents dodging their responsibilities; Once we have a fixed amount of support calculated, we demand that all parents pay it, regardless of their income. If they want to play hide and seek with their income, force them to do it for the rest of their lives by keeping track of the debt, indexing it for inflation and adding interest to it. Instead of waiting until their kids are 18 and then living the good life, these people will be forced to pay.

I’d go one step further too; Forth those parents who apparently cannot be bothered to generate the income required, the CSA should pay the custodial parent the money, which might motivate it’s staff to more properly investigate how it is that the non custodial parent has plasma TV’s, Playstations 3’s and other luxuries, but no income to pay child support!

Seems our esteemed leader Mr Rudd is searching far and wide for ways to make our lives just that little bit more miserable, and right before Christmas, has found a great one.

Plans are afoot, as noted in the Courier Mail, to force landlords to retain tenants against their will. Basically, once you rent a house to someone, you’ll be stuck with them.

Currently, landlords are generally entitled to give notice to their tenant to vacate the premises, but Mr Rudd believes this is causing homelessness. Apparently, if you evict someone from your home, they can’t find another one.

It’s about time the Labor party stopped meddling in Australians every day affairs. If a citizen owns a house, they should be free to rent it, or not to rent it, as they see fit. It is, after all, their house!

I can’t help but think that drawing attention to the pre election talk of Kevin Rudd’s communist leanings and love for communist China would make me seem like a bit of a sensationalist, but I can’t help myself.

Word through this past week that Kevin and his crack team of legislators are going to force all Australian ISP’s to censor the internet, blocking permanently web sites that they deem inappropriate.

They are using the word “illegal” to determine what sites will not be visible to Australian eye’s, but that is just a nice way to make most people feel like this is not a problem.

Take a look at China. They use the same rhetoric about their censorship efforts. They block stuff that they say is illegal, but we all know their definition leaves a great deal to be desired, at least by freedom loving western standards.

The fact is that Australia is supposedly a free country, and we should not be subjected to mandatory censorship. We all have it within our power to perform our own censorship on our own internet connections, decided what is best for ourselves.

It’s time to get in touch with Minister Conroy and voice your disapproval now!

Suggested Reading;

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