Daily Examiner goes all coy on name of Maclean Chamber of Commerce 'spokesperson' who actually said this......

The Daily Examiner on 17^th April 2011:

“The chamber will argue the Fisheries must be relocated to a more appropriate location with the levee wall in the central business district also moved and replaced with open gates so as to not impede the views.”

Yep, screw with a reliable levee. Just the thing to bring regular visitors into town – the threat of a flood easily breaching CBD defences.

And I’m sure locals in low-lying houses will be thrilled at the thought of the extra risk and maybe less time to evacuate to higher ground.

What did the study named by the journo actually warn about?

Ah, yes; “The integrity of the levee wall must be maintained to ensure flood mitigation measures are achieved for the town.”

So Uncle Joe wants Australia to have a welfare system more like those in Asia

This is what the Opposition Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey's less government intervention and more individual self-sufficiency looks like in China, India, Japan, Burma, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia - abandoned babies, the elderly, young, sick and disabled just trying to survive.
The stuff nightmares are made of the average Aussie. But not for the man who wants to be Australia's next prime minister, Tony Abbott or Uncle Joe.

All pics at Google Images 

Doing Evil: He said she said

Sergey Brin in Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin :

The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever,…...

Clarencegirl:

You are part of that threat, Google…………… Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Google Bypassing User Privacy Settings, etc; etc; etc.

A Twitter Titter

Lines in a DMCA (Copyright) Complaint to Twitter on 2^nd April 2012:

Reported Twitter account: @myaustinwhite

Description of original work: stolen pornagraphy belonging to our client

(Administator authorized to act on behalf of all Austin White - Copyright issues).

The End of the Age of Entitlement: Hockey's speech (link to full transcript)

In April 2012 the Australian Federal Opposition’s Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered a speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London titled The End of the Age of Entitlement.

In this speech Hockey stated;

Entitlement is a concept that corrodes the very heart of the process of free enterprise which drives our economy…

The social contract between government and its citizens needs to be urgently and significantly redefined. The reality is that we cannot have greater government services and more government involvement in our lives coupled with significantly lower taxation…..

You will remember it was Margaret Thatcher who interpreted community entitlements as the right for our children to “grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so”. This broader and timeless conservative definition of our end game lays down some foundations for the role of government. Equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome is my preferred model for contemporary society.…..

Defined benefit schemes need to be phased out worldwide, including in Australia, whether they are for public servants or private sector employees. All government-funded pensions and other such payments must be means tested so that people who do not need them do not get them.

The first we heard about the Coalition’s plan to review Commonwealth welfare payments/tax concessions/other forms of government assistance with a view to reducing and/or eliminating some of these is found in an ABC TV Lateline interview on 18 April 2012.

Hockey told Lateline that:

Well, with an ageing population and an entitlement system that has seen extraordinary largesse built up over the last 50 years, Western communities, Western societies are going to have to make some very hard and unpopular decisions to wind back the involvement of the state in people's lives……

we need to be ever-vigilant. We need to compare ourselves with our Asian neighbours where the entitlements programs of the state are far less than they are in Australia…

Australia's heading in one direction, that's a reduction of entitlements and it's empowerment of people.

The full transcript of Hockey’s IEA speech can be found here.

Despite Hockey past protestations otherwise, he appears to be following the Liberal Party’s tendency to take its policy straight from Margaret Thatcher’s old playbook and the more conservative elements of the U.S. Republican Party and its Tea Party adherents.

Margaret Thatcher in October 1987:

I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.

One Tea Party leader Phillip Dennis in CNN Opinion, April 2010:

Welfare and unemployment benefits must be drastically cut.

Here is a statement on one right-wing public policy think tank, The Heritage Foundation, made in August 2010:

If we really want to get our nation back on track, one of our top priorities must be to end the age of entitlements.

Ohio Republican Rep Jim Jordan told The Washington Times in April 2011:

Unless we start looking at this fractured system as one unit, exploding costs will bring the whole thing down.

Republican Rep. Paul Ryan said in The Huffington Post on 20 March 2012:

We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people ... into complacency and dependence.

'Push to add drama' (video)

http://youtu.be/qMMDaq3EWUY

The NSW North Coast scores a pass mark when it comes to crimes involving firearms - but not so good with murder

New South Wales is a big place when you think about it – all 809,444 km²  or so of it. About 7.3 million people live within state borders, which is around 32% of the entire Australian population. Almost 8% of all Walers live on the Mid and Far North Coast.

The bad news………………

“The offence of ‘discharge firearm into premises’ rose by 41 per cent (from 71 incidents in 2010 to 100 incidents in 2011) in the two years to December 2011, according to the annual crime statistics report released today by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Around half of NSW recorded incidents of ‘discharge firearm into premises’ in 2011 were recorded in the three Sydney statistical subdivisions (SSDs) of Canterbury-Bankstown, Central Western Sydney and Fairfield-Liverpool.”

There were 410 robberies involving a firearm in NSW in 2011.

{BOSCAR Media Release on 17^th April 2012 on NSW Recorded Crime Statistics 2011 and NSW Recorded Crime Statistics 2011}

The good news………………

None of those ‘drive by’ shootings happened on the NSW North Coast. Only 10 robberies (from Bellingen right up to the NSW-QLD border) involved someone carrying a firearm – or just 2% of all robberies with firearms.

Something to think about……….

NSW recorded 75 murders in 2011. Only 4 murders are listed for the NSW North Coast but these make up 5% of all the state’s murders last year.