Vale Dame Elisabeth

AUSTRALIA is the poorer today for the death at 103 of Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, who not only gave Rupert to the world but donated many fine and enduring gifts to Melbourne. What a clean smell she leaves behind.

Says It All

OFF to the golf club, which often means posting a trick shot video to hold the fort. Not today, though. This is much better value -- and just as applicable here:

The speaker is Evan Sayet.

Pillow Bitel

REFUGEES, boat people and garden variety foreign sorts determined to enter the rancid mainstream of racist Australian life know many frustrations, but those who failed to take up the following invitation should not feel any more disadvantaged than is normally the case:

Staff News
David Bitel consultations interstate and overseas

Managing Partner David Bitel will be travelling to Manila in late August. He will be visiting Dhaka, Bangladesh in early December. He also regularly travels to Melbourne & Canberra, and Auckland, New Zealand to see clients.

Mr Bitel will be available to give advice to applicants for all categories of migration to Australia and also for student visas. Applicants for most categories must have English language fluency and need to be aged under 35 years

Applicants wishing to make an appointment should email a resumé with their request for an appointment to Mr Bitel's secretary, Ina Tempra, or ring Ina on tel. +61 2 9286 8700. A consultation fee will apply.

There is a strong chance Mr Bitel will be cancelling a good many appointments over the months to come

UPDATE: The Silly report at the link above fails to mention something of which an earlier and far more edifying story referencing Bitel made an explicit point:

The Community Justice Coalition's president, David Bitel, a lawyer and a long-time Labor Party member, said yesterday that the group would not endorse a political party but would support those committed to progressive prison reforms.

''In the UK and the US it has been accepted that prison is not a solution to crime in most situations,'' Mr Bitel said. ''One has to look at the long-term consequences for those [prisoners] involved in terms of rehabilitation and in terms of their families.''

Golly gosh, but it's a mystery how that information didn't make it into print this time around.

As to making prison a nicer place, Bitel's fellow refugee advocate Marcus Einfeld might be able to offer some interesting insights.

 

Mickey and Minnie, Laura and Phil

A FORMER Fairfax hand and friend of the Billabong, recently paid to go away, writes:

Professor,
apologies for not writing but I'm out of the madhouse and don't have as much gossip to relay. You know Coorey is going to the Fin, right? Will Stutch let him wear the official Fairfax thinking cap in the office, do you reckon?
Sincerely,
etc etc etc

That's it, on the shelf behind the great man. Notice the absence of a peak, which seasoned Canberra stenographers value for allowing easier soft-palate access to the sphincters of the great and left.

There is no fair reason Phil should not be allowed to disport himself in customary garb, so Billabong visitors concerned that his new AFR editors be made at least as aware of the man's worth as are former Silly readers might want to contact  the newspaper and urge that he be allowed to continue dressing the part of a quality Fairfax journalist.

Drop a line and tell the AFR brass how much they and Coorey deserve each other. The address is: afreditor@afr.com.au

Victorians Pay, Ted Slumbers, Labor Rises

THE relentless Jo Nova has a post on Victoria's extraordinarily large and preposterously expensive desalination plant, which will add some $300 every year to the water bills of individual home owners until around 2036 or so. Apart from serving as a reminder that the same people now quoting the Doha junketeers should never be heeded, it is also an invitation to consider the sweetheart deals and waste of public monies which characterised the Bracks and Brumby years -- a profligacy any conservative premier worth his rising salinity levels would have pounded and pounded and pounded again as a reminder to voters that Labor cannot be allowed a return to the government benches.

Victoria does not have a conservative Premier, unfortunately; we have One Term Ted instead, so all the hay to be made from his predecessors' maladministration is left unscythed. With barely two years until the next election there is still time to pack Baillieu off to London, the Labor Party or some other congenial environment where fecklessness, a lack of core beliefs, and the absolute absence of backbone are appreciated. There is a lot of time and many quiet moments over a slow summer for the disaffected to discuss things likes coups, so perhaps the new year will see an end to the man before he sees an end to his own government. One lives in hope.

If (when?) we do get a new Premier, the first briefing paper he or she should read is this HR Nichols Society examination of the desalination plant and the wink-wink, we're-all-mates-here terms under which it was constructed. Here are some samples:

The consortium AquaSure made up of Degremont, Macquarie Capital and Thiess was the winning bidder with construction of the desalination plant to commence in late 2009. John Holland was the losing short-listed bidder. There were six other tenderers. John Holland’s price was lower than TD-JV...

I know of one worker who receives $3,200 per week in cash. This includes the $700 LAFA (living away from home allowance) which is tax free but is after pay-tax and before super and other add on’s which would probably bring the package to about $250,000 per annum. So my best estimate is that
most workers at the plant would receive between $200,000 and $300,000 per annum by the time they receive their redundancy payments.

There is provision for overtime at the rate of time and a half for the first two hours and double time thereafter. Supervisors on site are now being paid in excess of $1,500 per day. Union delegates are paid at the top pay rates by TD-JV plus the LAFHA but are not required to do any work....

...[management] knew when a stop work meeting would be taking place as the workers brought their boats on the back of trailers to work that day. So much for the ‘bona fides and positive relationships between the parties.

There is more of the same in the HR Nichols paper and every word is worth reading. Also worth the effort would be a quick google to find the name and contact details of your local or nearest Liberal MLA. Give them a call and insist that Ted has to go. It might just help to transform those backbench mutterings into a party room spill.


 

That "Parched" Stuff? It's Water

THAT Fairfax reporters are incompetent when not actively biased has been known and widely recognised for some time, especially by those who no longer buy or read the Silly and Phage. A young and naive lawyer shacks up with a crook, helps him via a concocted power attorney to conceal a significant property investment from his abandoned wife, and then gets fired when her malfeasance comes to light. To most, that would represent a prima facie case that the crook had been hanging his trousers on the bedpost of an arrogant and devious slut, but by the reckoning of Michelle, Lenore, Katharine, Phillip and all the other Fairfax girls it is glowing evidence of a strong, confident and admirably independent modern woman.

Perception is , of course, an entirely subjective thing, and sympathy must come easy to reporters who long ago sold their own honour for the privelege of parroting press releases and talking points from those whose approval and warm regards they value more highly than truth. So perhaps, on that score alone, the refusal by all but Mark Baker to take a closer look at the crook in The Lodge can by explained, if not endorsed.

But what about those moments when there is absolutely no room to grant the benefit of the doubt,  when those papers prove so blind to impartial reason that the visual evidence they provide directly contradicts the assertions of their own words? Here is a recent example (emphasis added at the Billabong):

WHEN is logging not logging? When it is ''ecological thinning'' in national parks, according to the governments of New South Wales and Victoria.

The two states are conducting trials in national parks on both sides of the Murray River. Under the project, trees will be cut down at 22 sites over about 400 hectares of the Barmah National Park in Victoria and the Murray Valley National Park in NSW. Most of the timber will be burnt as firewood.

The study will examine whether felling smaller trees gives more established trees a better chance of surviving in the parched environment.

Parched environment, eh? Here's the picture that appears just  a centimetre or so above that description.

It isn't just moral and political corruption that is laying Fairfax low. It's that the company has elevated blind stupidity to a prime virtue.

A NOTE: Anyone genuinely interested in the health of the Murray, particularly around Barmah (where the Professor once hooked a Murray Cod so large it could not have been landed without the assistance of a Land Rover's PTO winch), needs to read this. It will explain why those red gums need thinning, why the myth of their timeless presence is so oft and loudly repeated, and why Fairfax's green legion of environment writers should never, ever be believed, slack and lazy bastards that they are.)

Nurse Grattan With the Happy Pills

From a Michelle Grattan column of a few days ago, the latest example of Blair's Law:

MANY readers will recall Margo Kingston, a deft hand at investigative reporting and a pioneer of interactive journalism through her Webdiary. Margo left the trade a while ago and is studying nursing, interested in specialising in palliative care.

But last week, watching from afar the AWU affair unfolding, she leapt back into the fray with an online article. She remembered what many of us, in the heat of this slush fund battle, had forgotten. Tony Abbott has had his own slush fund experience, not all of it happy.

Is it too late for Grattan to take up a career in hospice nursing? All the bent words she peddles on behalf of our PM suggest she has a genuine gift for bringing comfort to those on their way out.