Well, we had to do something during all those boring government ads!

Australia's population nudged over the 21 million mark in June this year. For the first time in years the annual birthrate is looking healthy at 1.85 babies per woman in the country.

Now some might say that the baby bonus encouraged a few more pregnancies. But I think that more people switched off the tellie to escape those long and boring federal government ads which ran during the last year of the Howard Government, and found much better things to do with their time than be alert and alarmed.

"The Australian" has a nervous breakdown after its horse failed to come in

The Australian gives space to Mark Steyn, a Canadian columnist and film and music critic, who laments the fall of the Howard Government as "A loss for civilisation".

After reading this unmitigated tripe, I was at a loss for words. Pity Steyn wasn't.

Though it was somewhat amusing to see John Howard's name still connected with this sort of clumsy attempt at a xenophobic scare campaign. 

The Australian Steyn article yesterday:
 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22857673-7583,00.html

Rudd gets no honeymoon from Media With Conscience News - A Site without Borders

Gideon Polya who had for years taken the fight right up to the Howard Government over its participation in the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq, now reminds Prime Minister Rudd that leaving any Australian troops in Iraq for another three years will inevitably involve this country in further violations of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention.

His editorial states: "Most Australians don't like child-killing, mass murder and war and are overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush Iraq War. We certainly didn't vote for the continuing complicity of Australia in the passive mass murder of Iraqi kids at the rate of 0.1 million every year --"

Polya full editorial on 1 December 2007:

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18458&Itemid=1

It is my understanding that Mr. Polya's war crimes complaint to the United Nations and The Hague is still extant.

Taxing conundrum

If a fine is a tax for not behaving well and a tax is a fine for doing well - what exactly is the GST?

Time for the Federal Government to revisit how the GST is calculated on some goods on supermarket shelves, in order to iron out anomalies which see the poor sometimes paying up to 11-12% consumption tax on certain items.