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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;

Ars Technica | Crikey

I read recently about the alleged extreme fire risk with the building that houses the Kindercraft centre at City Hall in Brisbane.

What wasn’t explained was what this fire danger was. Are they allowing the kids to experiment with matches? Do the staff enjoy a cigarette inside the building? Are they using flammable liquids as play toys? Why is it that this building is a terrible fire risk, and any other building isn’t?

Every childcare centre I have ever been in is full of things that burn, why aren’t they all fire traps?

And lastly, if it is such a terrible danger, why is it only a danger because there is a childcare facility there? The tenor of the article seems to imply if we filled it with adults they would be just fine.

There are probably very good answers to these questions, it’s just a pity the courier mail couldn’t devote a column centimetre or two to explaining them.

Now I’m reading that the wicked camper folks (who most people would know send out dilapidated looking graffiti emblazoned combi vans into the world) are in trouble with Premier Bligh; Apparently one of their campers has "Save a whale, harpoon a jap" on it.

Big deal. Its a joke. It’s mildly amusing, and generally meaningless, until a bunch of politicians with nothing better to do weigh in and make a fuss, then its front page news.

If Anna is so worried about this comment, she better get down the nearest intersection and start flagging down cars with bumper stickers, because I can assure Anna if she lived in the real world she’d see a hell of a lot more offensive stuff on cars than this wicked camper.

Come on, get a life and get on with important things!

Seriously. Yellow Cabs has had to sack some Muslim cab drivers because they refused to allow passengers with Guide Dogs into their cabs. The good news is that they have been sacked, and nobody is complaining about their rights.

A small win for Australians there, hopefully this is the start of some common sense prevailing. Yeah, I doubt it too.

The Northern Territory’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald says the Federal intervention into remote Aboriginal communities should be abandoned and the legislation underpinning it should be repealed. [ABC Story]

Seriously. Tony needs to get out more. Tony needs to realise how nuts things are in many indigenous communities, and realise that if the rest of us are going to consider ourselves moral human beings, we have to try and do something to fix it.

Sure, the intervention hasn’t worked miracles. I doubt anything we try ever will. But there are two types of people in this world. Those who try, and those who do nothing.

I can tell you I’d rather be on the side of the tried and failed than the did nothing and whined about it brigade.

Tony clearly just feels miffed that the fed’s cut out some of his powers, and would prefer that more children were raped and conditions stayed terrible if it means he can have his powers back. Sheesh.

We need to continue to improve on the start that was the Howard Governments Intervention, and perhaps over the next 10-30 years, with constant review and improvement, we can make a difference in the lives of these people.

Or we can do nothing.

Now here is the years best example of Kevin Rudd’s "say one thing, do another" approach to leadership. After months of his party’s constant complaints that "Work Choices" might lead the odd worker to be a bit worse off than they were previously, Kevin comes out and tells us that under his new and improved industrial relations package, workers will be worse off.

Okay, so he said he refused to guarantee they wouldn’t be. By his own standards, that’s the same thing. Why do you think he refused? Because he knows full well that many workers will be worse off. We currently live in basically full employment. Anyone who wants a job can get one, and anyone worth anything can get a better one. So how is it that employers are perceived to have so much power? One reason: Because Kevin said so.

The truth is that Work Choices let employee’s negotiate time off to spend with their family, a higher rate of pay for better quality work, or any other benefit they thought would make their lives easier. But now, we are back to the old style, take what the government says I should give you. Guess what? That’s all you are going to get.

Why is it, for example, that childcare centres, who simply cannot get enough staff (ring one and ask, I guarantee they are looking for staff), refuse to pay any more than the award? It’s because they are not allowed to negotiate conditions with their staff, so they are forced to dole out the same deal to all the staff, some of whom deserve a lot more money, and some, believe me, deserve a lot less.

We’ll just add this to the list of broken or forgotten election promises we’re keeping here at Cranky Queenslander. Rest assured by the time the next election rolls around, it will be a long list!

I am a big fan of Violent Acres. She does have a habit of dropping the F-Word a lot, and while I try to curb my own cursing, I manage to get past it because her irreverent insights into American culture are so spot on.

A recent article about gift giving really made he shout "hell yeah!", so I thought I’d link to it here so anyone reading my rubbish could find something a little more interesting

I’m constantly amazed not only at how poorly the average human being can behave, but also by how others can seek to make excuses for the behaviour. The latest step toward moral decay is this Henson characters photographing of naked children.

I think this article in the Sydney Morning Herald shows how we are sliding down the slippery slope. Let me pull out the key phrases;

It’s a triumph of the philistines

The title of the piece says it all. If you are upset by the fact that children are being stripped naked and photographed, my must be a philistine. There is no way you can just be a concerned citizen who thinks children’s naked bodies should be confined to the family bathroom. Clearly there are a lot of people who don’t have a problem with their children being on public, naked, display. That worries me for a start.

No other contemporary Australian artist in any medium enjoys such an exalted reputation or has a more devoted market for his work.

So what? His reputation has nothing to do with the question of being allowed to strip children naked and photograph them. Seriously. I can’t understand this argument at all. If I went next door, borrowed the neighbours two little girls, took all their clothes off and photographed them, I would be in prison right now. And rightly so.

it would be foolish to write them off as "pornography".

This is where the lewd sector try and skew us off point. These photos are NOT pornography. That doesn’t mean they are okay though. They are indecent, morally bankrupt and wrong, but are not porn. The writer of this and other similar pieces need to get back on topic. You cannot possible tell me its okay to photograph naked children.

It is not surprising that many people are shocked and disturbed by images of naked adolescents

No it is not, and this is the first statement that gets close to reality. However, you can see the writers use of the word adolescents to make the kids seem less like kids.  We are talking about 12 and 13 year olds here. They are children, and you should refer to them as such.

He obtains the full co-operation of his subjects and their families, many of whom have remained friends.

Again, so what? So he as willing accomplices in his dirty work? If I have a few mates who think its fine to help me rob the local ANZ, does that make it all right?

The real point here is that the parents of these children should also be charged. They have cooperated in the exploitation of their children, and they should be made to understand the seriously of this. They should have the kids taken from them and placed in foster care where they can be safe from this kind of rubbish.

This case has the potential to drag on for many months in the courts, giving the world a ring-side view of the narrowness of our minds

Oh, I see; If I think that children should be children and not paraded around naked for the world of perverts to get off on, then I am narrow minded? I wonder if the writer of this piece has children, and if so, would they mind dropping them at my place for a little nude photo shoot. I’ll put the pics on the internet and call the art, it’ll be great!

No, they wouldn’t. And any self respecting parent wouldn’t either. Who is looking after the children?