Who’s speaking here? “We are a free and fair nation. But that doesn’t mean we should let bad people play for us for mugs, and all too often they have. Well, that’s going to stop.”
Amazingly, it was the Mad Monk speaking during his weekly broadcast, a PR concept he’s borrowed from the White House.
But he wasn’t talking about Google, Facebook, Amazon or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the other giant multi-nationals that rob Australia of billions of dollars in tax revenue.
Abbott is not going after the tax thieves who treat Australians like “mugs”. Oh no. Next week he will introduce draconian laws to attack civil rights and liberties as he pursues his “war of terrorism” agenda.
Since his “near-death” experience in the party room vote, when almost 40% of his own MPs votes against his leadership, Abbott has taken every opportunity to scare the living daylights out of Australians and change the political climate with enhanced police state powers.
Abbott has figured: It worked for President George W Bush and won him a second term, why shouldn’t it work for me?

Mad Man in cockpit

In his video message Abbott said Australia had been giving “the benefit of the doubt” to new arrivals for too long.
“There’s the benefit of the doubt at our borders, the benefit of the doubt for residency, the benefit of the doubt for citizenship and the benefit of the doubt at Centrelink.
“And in the courts, there has been bail, when clearly there should have been jail.”
If enacted into law, this diatribe would tear up centuries of English common law on which the Australian legal system is based. Take away reasonable doubt, and the rule of law is struck down, and so is the presumption of innocence. It turns our current legal system, and the concept of natural justice, on its head.
Abbott’s wild foray into the field of law is based on prejudice and ignorance. It is also based on the rap sheet of one individual – Man Haron Monis, the Lindt Café gunman.
ASIO and the AFF have concocted events surrounding his arrival in Australia, his naturalisation, citizenship, work opportunities and legal cases. The most dramatic fact omitted from this scenario is that the Iranian-born fantasist and criminal conned ASIO and the AFP and he became their paid informer. They believed he was a former Iranian intelligence officer – despite warnings from the Iranian Embassy in Canberra that he was a dangerous criminal who should not be believed. Iran offered to share criminal intelligence with ASIO but it was knocked back at the urging of the Israeli Mossad.
Now Abbott is attempting to cover up the criminal conspiracy which allowed Monis to operate unchecked in Moslem circles in Sydney, going steadily madder and more psychopathic.
In short, as a result of ASIO and AFP’s colossal bungling of the supervision of their “asset”, there is to be a draconian crackdown on desperate people from war zones and other catastrophes seeking asylum in this country.
Abbott will happily turn the country into “fortress Australia” if it will save him another few months as PM.
Australia is in danger of being hijacked by a mad man, or is it a Mad Monk?

Bali 2 executioners

By general agreement, the Bali Two facing execution, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, have apologised for their crime and expressed remorse; they’ve reformed themselves and committed to rehabilitation and helping others.
I wonder if senior AFP officers and members of John Howard’s security Cabinet can make the same claims?
A high-level tip-off was given to Indonesian security about the arrival of the nine Australian heroin traffickers in 2005. They could have been stopped and arrested in Australia but they were allowed to fly to Bali where they were picked up, charged and jailed.
At the time, Howard had joined George Bush’s “war on terror” and Australian spies wanted to ingratiate themselves with Indonesia’s secret police.
What better way than to hand over the names of a group of young heroin smugglers who were flying into Bali as tourists?
A royal commission seems the only logical way to investigate this
unprecedented murderous conspiracy. Who gave the orders? Was it ASIO, the AFP, the NSW Crime Commission or all three? Did diplomats from the Department of Foreign Affairs participate? What did Cabinet ministers know? What is the text of the security protocols between Australia and Jakarta?
Families of the Bali 9 and their lawyers will receive overwhelming public support for such a public investigation. Abbott will certainly oppose such a move and so will Attorney-General George Brandis, but what about the Labor Opposition, the Greens and the independents?

The Simkin factor

When the ABC’s closet Liberal, Mark Simkin, quit his Canberra job as Chief Political Correspondent to become Abbott’s communications director the Press Gallery universally broadcast the view that their former colleague would turn around the fortunes of the PM and the Coalition.
The facts are that the Liberal Party’s primary vote has slipped to an election-losing 35% and Abbott’s popularity has dropped to 24%.
If Simkin was responsible for Abbott’s National Press Club speech to “redefine” his message for 2015, then he is being overpaid and taxpayers should be demanding a refund.

A bloodied Modi

Keep a close eye on the “world’s biggest democracy”, aka the uneducated, unhygienic, ungovernable, poverty-stricken conglomerate called India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing nationalist party, the BJP, has just been trounced in state elections in Delhi.
The anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party, translated as the Common Man’s Party, won 67 of the assembly’s 70 seats. The BJP won just three seats and the National Congress Party, which has run Delhi for 15 years, none.
Modi’s “rock star” treatment by politicians, the media and crowds of expat Indians in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra during the G20 is starting to look decidedly premature. Some BJP leaders are calling for mass conversions to Hinduism while others are raising sectarian tensions by claiming that Moslems are seducing Hindu women to convert them to Islam.
Queensland’s new Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will have to negotiate with pro-Modi coal conglomerate, Adani, which is planning to develop the Galilee Basin coal mine.
She has already ruled out taxpayer funding of the rail link between the central Queensland mine to the Abbott Point coal terminal.
The ousted LNP government promised Adani “open slather” in the Galilee Basin and tens of millions in government subsidies.