Rudd is Obama's bitch

If I held any remnant hope that a change in government meant Australia's foreign policy was no longer dictated by Washington, that fell away yesterday when Kevin Rudd announced that he would be sending more Aussie soldiers to the US & NATO alliance war in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
When Rudd fronted the cameras to tell us he was sending more troops into harm's way he mentioned the US President by name at least 5 times.
And don't think it wasn't noticed that this announcement was timed to take advantage of whatever nationalistic sentiments were still in the air after ANZAC Day.

The hunt is on for 1.2 million 'missing' Australian voters

There are over 1.2 million people in the Australian population who are eligible to vote but who haven't registered with the Australian Electoral Commission according to a recent media release.

Electoral Commissioner, Ed Killesteyn said the AEC was stepping up its efforts to find these missing Australians and encourage them to enrol to vote.
"We are currently sending over 550,000 personally addressed letters across the country to where we think these Australians—about half of those missing from the electoral roll—might be living.
The mail-out package will include an enrolment form and reply paid envelope.

I will be interested to see how this drive to find these 'missing' voters turns out.

Because I can't help wondering just how many are phantoms created by incorrectly spelt names being originally entered into government digital databases.

I once had a digital shadow because one letter was left off my name during an AEC update of the rolls and this caused me no end of problems at the polling booth until it was sorted.

Who reads Bolt and Blair anyway? An update

I've often wondered who actually reads Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair's MSM blogs.

It seems I'm not alone in this as it is mentioned from time to time in the blogosphere.

Google Trends cannot give a definitive answer, but it most usefully supplied this short profile of who visits News.com.au websites in 2009.

It is likely that those who read Murdoch's online newspapers mostly hail from Australia and America, favour the Herald-Sun, are sports fans and look up telephone numbers on the Internet.

Not the same profile as those visiting the Prime Minister's official website , the Australian Financial Review online, Crikey's website, the Club Troppo blog or even visitors to local newspaper the Northern Star .

Byron Shire Echo finds itself kissed by the pawn fairy?

Smack bang in the middle of a Byron Shire Echo article on 21st April 2009 about an upcoming event involving school children came this little line.

I'm still wondering what it's all about.
What one earth is mention of an American site like this doing on a free online newspaper?
Will the Byron Shire Echo be the first NSW North Coast newspaper to make it onto Conroy's URL blacklist? {smiling evilly}

Update:
The Byron Shire Echo's woes continue.
I'm told that visitors to its website on 6 May 2009 found that they had been diverted to yet another p#rn site and a video involving a group grope.

South Park's ignorance of Australian politics only refects the rest of the world

There have been a number of mentions of a recent episode of the animated comedy South Park which depicted the Australian Prime Minister as John Howard instead of Kevin Rudd.

I honestly don't think the issue rates much attention, because it only reflects the real level of the world's knowledge of Australia and this lack of depth has been well-known for years.

Kevin Rudd and Labor coming to power in 2007 may have created a wave of interest across the nation but in general the world shrugged, yawned and rolled over.

Here are Google Trends for the terms Kevin Rudd and Prime Minister Rudd (January 2007 to date) showing the spatial distribution of Internet searches using that search engine.

"kevin rudd"

"prime minister rudd"

It is evident that only in Australia is there enough interest in Kevin Rudd to drive high volume search traffic.

If anyone thought otherwise then they have been reading too much into national mainstream media reports since Kevin 07 and his team contested the last federal election.

The hunt for a perfect hamburger is taken seriously in Grafton NSW

M. Allison writing a letter to The Daily Examiner editor defines the perfect hamburger on 23 April 2009.

Then on 25 April, according to Clarrie Rivers who sent on these images, the burghers of Grafton bit back.

Click images to enlarge

The Iced Vo-Vo War and how to survive it

ABC News gave us the good oil on that Iced Vo-Vo war between Arnott's Biscuits and Krispy Creme.
It's a case of duelling lawyers at dawn.
But before anyone starts to beat the patriotic drum and talk about Aussie icons - both these companies are U.S. clones.
Arnott's is owned by the multinational Campbell Soup Company and Krispy Creme is an international franchise.
The Iced Vo-Vo is now about as Australian as the doughnut and quality was substituted after 1997.
So go for each other's throats fellas, because in all this a dinkum Aussie has the neutrality of the Swiss (and those of us who remember when a local biscuit really was a cut above the Yanks best will look on with amusment as you fling money at law firms during this global recession).

Put the kettle on will ya, Darl and bring in a few of those bickies from the CWA.....

Pic from Nice cup of tea and a sit down

Is Clarence Valley Council being honest with NSW Planning Minister Keneally over proposed West Yamba development?

In February this year Clarence Valley Council resolved to accept the Maclean Local Environmental Plan 2001 (West Yamba Amendment) and sent this planning instrument down to the NSW Minister for Planning Kristina Keneally for her consent.

But was Clarence Valley Council completely honest with the Minister?

Nowhere in the West Yamba Amendment and accompanying documents does Council point out that most of the land directly below Sullivan's Lane in West Yamba is now privately owned land and has been since the late 1990s.

Clarence Valley Council is always at pains to refer to this land as "Other land, owned by Birrigan Gargle Local Aboriginal Land Council and land subject to a Land Claim, south of Sullivan's Road is not included in the Draft LEP" and words to that effect in other parts of the documents.

However, these documents also show that Council expects to funnel natural drainage/storm water/flood waters, displaced by West Yamba development landfill, onto this privately-owned environmentally sensitive land "south of Sullivan's Road" via a designated unfilled floodway/drainage corridor with a relatively narrow end point.
Thereby potentially increasing the amount of such water flowing across this land and possibly causing more damage than might naturally occur.

Section of the Draft West Yamba LEP Map showing the floodway/drainage corridor

The Clarence Valley Council map shown here clearly shows the floodway/drainage corridor (used to mitigate required landfill in the proposed large-scale development) is intended to deposit water onto Lot 201 DP729134, a 229.6ha lot owned outright by Birrigan Gargle Local Aboriginal Land Council.

Indeed if Council's own documents are to be believed, the development of West Yamba could not go ahead unless Yaegl land is used as a dumping ground for drainage and flooding problems associated with this proposed development.

The last time I noticed, Australian law still allowed a property owner to sue state and/or local government for that kind of arbitrary action.

Which may explain why Clarence Valley Council appears to be attempting to massage the facts in order to obscure ownership details in documents before the Minister.

Sometimes being that cute can backfire - especially when the ghost of Rylands v Fletcher still roams court corridors in Australia.

And now there are eight........

According to Computer World there is another ISP signing on for the Rudd-Conroy mandatory national ISP-level Internet filtering scheme 'live' trial:

Optus joins seven other ISPs in participating in the filtering - Primus Telecommunications, Highway 1, Nelson Bay Online, Netforce, OMNIconnect, TECH 2U and Webshield.

Well that makes eight ISPs that I'll be buying goods and services from when Hades freezes over.