Limited News Snippets

The May 28 edition of the Sunday Telegraph moaned about the families of terror suspects receiving increased payments from Centrelink and also receiving assistance from the Legal Aid Commission.

The story, authored by Lincoln Wright, carries a headline of “Terror suspects’ $1M welfare gift”. Wright claims his paper carried out an “investigation”, going onto provide details of increasing payments made to families of the accused.

Investigation? What investigation? Did they obtain records under FOI? Did Mr Wright attend his local Centrelink office and ask a few questions? Did Centrelink staff breach Commonwealth privacy legislation and provide otherwise confidential details to the Tele?

What actually seems to have happened is that the paper used publicly-available formulae to calculate how much the terror suspects earned. There was no investigation. Mr Wright and the paper have in fact carried out no investigation.

Even more laughable is the paper’s claim that “Legal Aid services have boosted the total bill for taxpayers to more than $1 million”. Really? Is that an increase specific to these trials? Or is that a general increase in Legal Aid funding arising from the recent Commonwealth Budget? Or is that an estimate from the upcoming NSW and Victorian State Budgets?

Apparently, the paper wants us to believe that anyone guilty of the crime of being married to or parented by a terror suspect should be sentenced to mandatory destitution. But then, if concerned friends of the family decided to fundraise, the same newspaper would make an issue about “Pro-terror Muslim extremists raising money for their own”.

Apparently, the Telegraph also wants us to believe that there is already a fair amount of indignation in the grassroots. Hence quotes from representatives of such prominent organisations as “People Against Lenient Sentencing”.

I thought I would check the Yellow and White Pages to see if I could find this prominent and influential organisation. Just as I expected, there was no listing. I then did a search on the national names index of the Australian Securities & Investments Commisssion (ASIC). Again, no listing.

So who is this organisation? Who is Steve Medcraft? I wonder if Lincoln Wright would be prepared to tell me? I might just ring him on Monday and find out …

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Allegedly conservative columnist Piers Ackerman also finds time to moan. His targets are those nasty boongs who are victims of an inner-city Marxist ALP conspiracy called “self determination”.

And we all know how nasty and left-wing that conspiracy is. After all, it is supported by such radical leftists as Malcolm Fraser, Paul Keating and Aiden Ridgeway. Reds under Piers’ bed!

Or perhaps Ackerman wants to return the blasted Abbos back to the good old days when they received less money for doing the same job. After all, he finds time to lament “the 1965 equal wage case which saw Aboriginal stockmen granted the same wages as Europeans on stations across Australia's northern pastoral districts.”

Perhaps he reckons the black bastards should be happy getting less, so long as their families were allowed to sleep outside and have a few scraps of last night’s dinner and a couple of aspirin tablets thrown their way. After all, treating the boongs as equals is something only those bloody Afghan Muslim cameleer buggers would do.

Perhaps the best way to treat the blasted Abbos is to make them just like us. Get rid of their customs and cultures by throwing their customary law out the door. Let’s be honest. Which die-hard conservative, which believer in the maintenance of the status quo would allow the 20,000 year cultural landscape of the blasted boongs to compete with the 200 year Pommy/Irish cultural new kids on the block?

With friends like Piers to embarrass them, serious conservatives don’t need too many more journalistic enemies.

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Everyone’s favourite Dutchman, Andrew Bolt, spends his 26 May column in the Herald-Sun complaining about how the status quo of multiculturalism is once again destroying our nation. How so?

Always a purist on (mono-)cultural issues, Bolt laments that lots of Aussies attending the soccer game were barracking for Greece.

Yep, the choice of which team the crowd supports in soccer represents a dangerous threat to our nation and its culture. According Bolt, this shows a “clash of loyalties” and is part of the great conspiracy known as the “shame-Australia-shame movement”.

But hang on. Weren't the Greeks one of those wonderful European waves of migrants that John Howard claims always put Australia first? That have adjusted well and become part of mainstream Australia? That don't share the nasty extremist traits of those blasted Muslim arrivals?

Andrew, of course, doesn't find space to address this chink in the neo-Conservative cultural armour. Instead, he engages in some good old-fashioned wog-bashing. Maybe someone put too much chilli in his yeeros. Or was that a kebab? Who gives a toss. They're all the bloody same, those bloody wogs!

© Irfan Yusuf 2006