The Chicago Way lives on and Lincoln rolls in his grave

The Borowitz Report this week takes a light-hearted approach to the way politicians of all persuasions are said to do business in the Windy City:

December 9, 2008
Illinois Guv Offers Senate Seat to Arresting Officer
Daring Escape Attempt Caught on Tape

In what is being called one of the most daring escape attempts in the history of law enforcement, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich today offered the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama to the FBI agent who took him into Federal custody this morning.
According to U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the astonishing escape attempt occurred moments after Mr. Blagojevich was handcuffed by the agent, who was wearing a wire and captured the entire expletive-laden offer on tape.
"'You can be the [bleeping] junior Senator from [bleeping] Illinois if you let me out of these [bleeping] handcuffs,'" Mr. Fitzgerald read from a transcript. "'And if that mother-[bleeper] Barack Obama tries to [bleep] with me, I'll [bleep] him up.'"
According to Mr. Fitzgerald, "When I say ‘bleep,' he didn't really say ‘bleep' on the tape," adding, "I'm going to keep making that joke until one of you [bleepers] laughs at it."
Gov. Blagojevich has been charged with a laundry list of Federal crimes, including stealing his haircut from the dad on "The Brady Bunch."

Freedom of Information Act vs Commonwealth secrecy laws - who wins?

The Federal Attorney-General has asked the Australian Law Reform Commission to riddle him a riddle as it reviews Australia's secrecy laws:

I, ROBERT McCLELLAND, Attorney-General of Australia, having regard to:

• the desirability of having comprehensive, consistent and workable laws and

practices in relation to the protection of Commonwealth information;

• the increased need to share such information within and between governments

and with the private sector;

• the importance of balancing the need to protect Commonwealth information and

the public interest in an open and accountable system of government; and

• previous reports (including previous reports of the Commission) that have

identified the need for reform in this area.

And here is the riddle:

1–1 In light of freedom of information laws and other modern moves towards greater openness and accountability on the one hand, and the current international security environment on the other, are secrecy laws still relevant and necessary?

Is a statutory duty on Commonwealth officers not to disclose information necessary or desirable?

Are general law obligations sufficient and appropriate ways by which the disclosure of Commonwealth information may be regulated?

1–2 Do federal secrecy provisions inhibit unduly the sharing of information within and between law enforcement agencies, governments, and between governments and the private sector?........................

Given that the Freedom of Information Act 1982(Cth) promotes open and accountable government, and secrecy provisions protect Commonwealth information, what should be the relationship between these two regimes?

The answer to these questions (due in October 2009) is of more than passing interest to the mainstream media, bloggers, current or former public servants and whistleblowers generally, as it relates to penalties under the Commonwealth Crimes Act and Criminal Code and intends to consider more widely than just taxation secrecy and disclosure provisions.

Given the inherent tension between a government's desire for secrecy, the democratic need for transparent governance, public interest and personal privacy (as well as the fact that the Rudd Government is not composed of true believers and could often be mistaken for the Liberal Party on some issues) this review and government's response need watching.

Review of Secrecy Laws issues paper can be found here.

Register an interest in receiving ALRC alerts and consultation papers here.

Should you wish to give your own views on the subject, submissions should be sent to:

The Executive Director

Australian Law Reform Commission

GPO Box 3708

SYDNEY NSW 2001

Email: secrecy@alrc.gov.au

Submissions may also be made using the online form on the ALRC's homepage:

www.alrc.gov.au

The closing date for submissions in response to IP 34 is 19 February 2009.

Spending for Australia on the Northern Rivers

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants everyone who receives his extra welfare payment this week to go forth and spend for Australia and so help out the national economy.
Sorry, no can do.

The North Coast Community Housing Company put my rent up this week by more than $100 a week, with little thought as to how this will be paid or whether my welfare benefits will increase to meet this huge impost.

Despite the spin I'm hearing from the company in newspapers and on the radio, the fact remains that I will have to lay aside about $800 of the extra money coming in Canberra's December fiscal stimulus payment until Centrelink makes a decision on the inflated portion of my rent increase.

Regardless of Centrelink's decision I will be expected to pay at least $100-200 over and above 25% of my assessable income in the next month, because the housing company expects me to sub the period between the rent rise and Centrelink's new rent assistance entitlement being paid into my account.
Which makes a mockery of the housing company's claim that I won't ever have to pay more than $10 a week out of my own pocket towards annual rent increases.

That leaves me $600 to spend as and when I choose, which is better than nothing but hardly the Christmas largess that the Prime Minster envisaged for single pensioners.
So local small business and the bigger retail chains will only see a small and very temporary upward blip in their last quarter/first quarter sales figures, because the bulk of my money is likely going to feed the hungry maw of the housing company.

Merry Christmas - ho, ho, ho.

Shocked renter
Northern Rivers

* GuestSpeak is a feature of North Coast Voices allowing Northern Rivers residents to make satirical or serious comment on issues that concern them. Posts of 250-300 words or less can be submitted to ncvguestspeak@live.com.au for consideration.

Now Kev's flogging pictcha books

Now that Federal Parliament in recess until next year, it appears that (since last Friday) Our Kev has found himself a part-time job for the holidays.
Flogging a book by Fairfax Media already marked down from $56.23 to $45.99:

KevinRuddPM For those asking for a link to 'Century of Pictures,' here it is http://tinyurl.com/5oj33y Enjoy! #KevinPM Team 4:45 PM yesterday from web

KevinRuddPM Looking forward to launching the 'Century of Pictures – Celebrating 100 Years of Herald Photography' exhibition this afternoon. 12:28 PM yesterday from

Telstra having a bob each way on Conroy's national Internet filtering scheme

I have to say that I breathed a sigh of relief when I read that Telstra was not participating in the Rudd Government's live trial of a mandatory national ISP-level filtering scheme.

The Age reported last Tuesday:

AUSTRALIA'S largest internet service provider has said it will not participate in trials of the Federal Government's controversial national internet filter.

Telstra's BigPond said yesterday it would not be part of the pilot, which will run for six weeks from this month, citing "customer management issues".

It wouldn't say what the issues were but Telstra is believed to be worried about the effect on its reputation of any inconvenience to customers.

I was also rather surprised at this position because I had thought that Telstra would eventually come on board after it had wrung a few unrelated concessions from the federal government.
After all, that is its modus operandi.

However, it quickly became apparent that Telstra is actually running true to type and hedging its bet.
It also announced that it was; separately evaluating technology that allows the blocking of defined blacklists .

According to iNet News:

It is understood the Federal Government has invited some 400-plus ISPs to participate – so Telstra's decision is undoubtedly a blow to Broadband Minister Stephen Conroy's proposal.

The minister most concerned, Senator Stephen Conroy, must really be scratching for participants about now with only iNet and Optus definitely joining the trial and the sign-on date having past last Monday.

Let us hope that the version of an Internet filter which Telstra envisions is a voluntary opt-in plan, because anything else is likely to see a mass migration of its customer base.

The lighter side of Conroy's stubborn refusal to understand the severe limitations of his censorship plan is the fact that he has started a community consultation blog on the subject (which of course he intends to moderate to within an inch of its life whilst allowing pseudonym comment so that his staff may influence comment trends).

I decided to make a brief sober comment in relation to Minister Tanner's welcome post on this new blog and, surprise, surprise, I'm still waiting for my comment to be published.
Due to the time lag between lodging a comment and the same comment passing moderator's inspection, this clumsy attempt at e-consultation may yet wither on the vine.

APC's article on teh blog, The 10 sins of Senator Conroy the blogger, is here.

Populate and Perish

Successive Australian Governments have pushed the immigration barrow as an economical necessity. This claim is baseless.
There is no evidence that Australia’s current immigration policy is doing anything for the economic growth of this country.
In 1907, with a population of less than four million, Australians were the wealthiest people on earth. Now we don’t even rate in the world’s top ten.
Since the early 50’s, Australia’s population has increased by fifteen million people, an unsustainable figure in view of the problems that have developed in the Murray/Darling basin.
The withholding of water to irrigate crops in that area, in the Governments own words, will be devastating for consumers, farmers and the Australian economy.
This development should act as a warning for all Australians as we begin to pay for pushing our fragile country beyond its limits.
Australia is an arid, mostly semi-desert country with poor soils and an unreliable climate.
A United Nations report on sustainable land usage stated that Australia could adequately support a population of no more than fifteen million people.
In total disregard for this report, politicians are boasting that Australia’s population is expected to reach thirty-five million by 2050.
With our capital cities turning into congested ghettoes, and our Nation’s food bowl ruined by over production, droughts and ever increasing water shortages, how can we support a population increase of this magnitude?
The only way Australia will avert a potential calamity is to cap her population at the current twenty-one million people and implement a policy of zero population growth.
We must significantly improve our education facilities and job training programs so we can maintain an adequate skilled labour force and, we must introduce genuine incentives that will reduce this country’s brain drain.
We should also put an end to the one-way, open door policy with our near neighbours.
On the world scene an alarming report from the United Nations states that the world’s population could double to a staggering, twelve billion in fifty years.
This is a frightening statistic when you consider that in 2008, an estimated one billion people go hungry every day.
It’s inevitable, therefore, that unless we control our rampant population growth, our world as we know it today, will not survive beyond the next millennium.

The Australian Women Online soap opera drones on

Melodrama in the Discussion Forums

Posted under Site News by Deborah on Sunday 16 November 2008 at 8:33 am

The Discussion Forums became a real life soap opera this week when we discovered we had a couple of drama queens and a spy from another forum in our midst!

It all began two weeks ago when several members of a popular Australian women's forum defected to the AWO Discussion Forums in protest when two of them were banned for life. Suddenly our quiet little forum was over run by forum junkies who spent hours posting messages on topics such as, 'what did you have for dinner?' and 'what's the last thing you brought?' Not really the kind of thing we were use to discussing. But I have to admit that initially we were thrilled to have such an influx of new members in the forums. We had been struggling to attract new members to the Discussion Forums since it opened in May and even though the topic threads were lacking in substance, there was a lot of activity going on and it was quite exciting to see the message boards finally coming to life.

But right from the start I had my reservations about this group of women. Firstly, they all knew each other from another forum and often talked amongst themselves to the exclusion of others. Secondly, it soon became apparent that a few of them were carrying a lot of emotional baggage from what had transpired on the other forum. Thirdly, the group wanted to make some major changes to the AWO Discussion Forums which were contrary to our existing policy of running an open forum where there is no hierarchy of membership. And last but certainly not least, the ring leader was a major drama queen!

Shortly after their arrival another woman joined the forums who said she was from a non English speaking background. My AWO business partner and co-administrator of the forums, Danielle Hutchinson was the first to notice something wasn't quite right there. This woman claimed to be from a non English speaking background and yet the messages she posted on the forum were not consistent with her story. Danielle suspected she was from the other forum sent to spy on our new members, but I told her to just monitor the situation because we didn't want to make this type of accusation unless we were sure.

As I said the ring leader of the new members was a drama queen and when I moved some of the chat threads out of the Members Only Area to the General Chat, she threw a huge tantrum which culminated in her and two others setting up a new forum on their own. I had no problem with that until they used the private message feature on the AWO Discussion Forums to recruit members for their new forum, including one of our moderators. It was at this point the 'spy' decided to blow her own cover posting a message on the forums that only antagonised the whole situation even further. It was really quite ridiculous, a group of grown women throwing tantrums and personally attacking each other on the message boards.

Danielle and myself were finally able to calm everybody down and a few of the new members did decide to leave us. Unfortunately, the drama queen wasn't one of them and when she returned to the forums after an absence of one week, most of the remaining members deserted us - now it's more like a ghost town than a lively discussion forum.

In the middle of all of this, a few men who had objected to what I had to say on the issue of ISP filtering joined the forums just so they could argue with me about it. At one point I had to lock all new member registrations just to keep these guys out because I feared the Discussion Forums would become the battle ground for the debate on ISP filtering. Between these guys and the dramas queens previously mentioned, I tell you the soap operas on TV have nothing on the melodrama that is played out in online forums!

Poor Debs. Totally clueless and intent on being chief censor as well as managerial bottlewasher - she blames everyone else for erratic forum numbers and doesn't realise that, if she can't roll with the punches in any debate, AWO will be deserted whenever she arbitrarily locks comment (or commentators based on gender, opinion etc.) out.

I don't know of anyone who wholeheartedly relishes criticism, but unless one is willing to take it any blog (no matter how genuine or otherwise) will wither on the vine.

Australian Women Online may only survive as a pale imitation of The Women's Weekly circa 1950 is Debs keeps this up.

She may be able to survive on knitting patterns, recipes and advice to the lovelorn - I'm not sure many other readers will.

AWO forums which appear to have survived Deb's red pen can be reached here.

Crikey does community housing

In Crikey Tips and Rumours on Tuesday:

Rees Government, Dept of Housing and Office of Community Housing are allowing NSW community housing companies to raise pensioner rents this month by at least $100 per fortnight, even though they realise that anomalies in how rent assessments were produced means that many of these pensioners will be paying more than the guaranteed rent increase limit of $10 a week from their own pockets and, over Christmas/New Year will be forking out up to $79 dollars from their own pockets. At least one housing company NCCHC is telling tenants words to the effect of "like it or lump it". Tenants have noticed that this particular round of rent rises comes just four days after many of them receive Rudd's one-off lump sum payment and are wondering why Rees has decided it is alright to gouge in this way. NCCHC is telling media who ask that it will fix this up anomalies brought to its attention, but is very careful not to say this to complaining tenants thus far.

Complaints to the Australian Press Council 2007-2008

There is one thing that I can say of Australians after reading the Australian Press Council's complaints figures for the last financial year and factoring in how general readership has grown with the Internet - we are not a nation of wingers.

The rate of formal complaints received by the Press Council has fallen from 7,424 in 1988/89 to 457 in 2007/08, with complaints against regional/rural newspapers and other publications totalling 105 in this last reckoning.

Out of the 35 complaint adjudications only 18 were entirely dismissed and rather oddly 106 complaints received were withdrawn after further correspondence with the Press Council.