Jackie Lambie is Tasmania’s very own Trumpette … Cory Bernardi and Pauline Hanson become “friended” … Bob Hawke finally deserts Israeli lobby … Why Brexit will break Prime Minister Theresa May … Donald Trump’s invitation to Buck House stirs storm of protest … Brenda has always welcomed dictators in the past … Great Crashing Bores … Festival of Dangerous Ideas …
Lambie parrots Donald Trump’s Islamophobia
This week Tasmanian Senator Jackie Lambie reaffirmed her support for US Donald Trump’s ban on migration from seven Moslem countries for three months. She also reaffirmed her often stated policy that all Moslem migration to Australia should be banned for two years and that Moslems living in Australia who support sharia law should be deported forthwith.
She told the ABC’s Q&A audience the other night: “I’m not an expert on sharia law.” Quite right too. But she is an expert on ignorance and Islamophobia.
I understand and fully support the worldwide outrage against Trump’s anti-Moslem crusade, but I don’t understand why Australians appear to tolerate Lambie’s views which are just as extreme, if not more so.
For example, why are there no street demonstrations in Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart or Brisbane against Lambie’s oral vomit? It smacks of double standards and moral equivalence: protesters are prepared to march against Trump but not against Lambie. Why?
Other annoying nitwits
Eccentric senators currently receiving feather duster treatment from the mass media are Cory Bernardi from SA and Pauline Hanson, Queensland. Bernardi has quit the Liberal Party to form his own Australian Conservatives Party but he doesn’t feel obliged to recontest his Senate seat. Most Australians believe he has a moral and political obligation to re-stand for his $200,000-a-year position wearing his new political colours.
His colleague and newest best friend, Pauline Hanson, have “friended” each other and now plan a destructive career together shifting Senate politics to the far right.
In 1975 Liberal Party Senator Reg Withers, nicknamed “The Toecutter”, joined with DLP accomplices to wreck the Whitlam government’s budget programme and today’s crazed misfits want a reprise of that era when sabotage and bastardry were common currency in Canberra.
What it comes to assessing Hanson, the media’s memory is tragically short. They seem to have forgotten that in her first One Nation incarnation in the 1990s Hanson proposed a two per cent flat tax called “Easytax”. Then it was revealed the author of this hare-brained scheme was John Cumming whose views were promoted by the far right League of Rights. The tax guru’s policy had a tidal wave of support at the RSL Club on the Gold Coast but everywhere else it was ridiculed as snake oil.
There was a time when Hanson and her hangers-on would have been run out of Queensland towns by angry citizens who have a reputation for being practical and serious-minded people. Now they are so desperate, some of them appear to be embracing her cosmeticised One Nation and she is talking about “winning” the next Queensland election, swamping the WA upper House at next month’s election and picking up a swag of seats in Victoria and NSW.
Get a grip, people, Hanson and her madcap accomplices are your worst nightmare. Act accordingly and give them all the boot.
Bob Hawke backs Palestine recognition
Bob Hawke holds the title of being Australia’s most pro-Israel prime minister. He was groomed for the dubious honour by TNT boss Sir Peter Abeles, aka “The Beast of Budapest”, who helped to finance Hawke’s expensive life-style.
But Israel’s far right Zionist leaders have stretched Hawke’s friendship to breaking point.
“I am well known as a long-time supporter of the right of Israel to exist as a state behind secure and recognised borders – nothing has changed in that respect,” he wrote in The Australian Financial Review. “The situation is clear – starkly clear. Like the Jews in the Soviet Union and the blacks in South Africa, the Palestinian has an aspiration to be fully free.
“But with a majority of the Netanyahu government openly declared against a Palestine state, they understandably see little hope in the political process. Is there not emerging the danger of Israel being blinded to the threat to its very soul and vision of its future?
“Australia was there at the very beginning. The least we can do now, in these most challenging times, is to do what 137 other nations have already done – grant diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine.”
But only days after Hawke’s measured call, US President Donald Trump threw the whole Israel-Palestine peace project into utter confusion by stating that a one-state solution was as good as a two-state solution.
Netanyahu, who was standing only metres away at a joint press conference in Washington DC could not contain his delight. Grinning from ear to ear the uber-Zionist heard the words that will set back peace talks for years and lead to a military and legal campaign to extend the boundaries of “Greater Israel” to include Judea and Samaria.
Trump’s declaration follows the all-time record amount of $90 billion given to the Israeli regime by the outgoing US President Barack Obama and the building of thousands of new settlements on the occupied West Bank since Trump’s election victory.
Netanyahu, pursued by investigators over a financial scandal involving expensive gifts from Hollywood billionaire Arnon Milchan, a former Israeli intelligence officer, is riding high after the Knesset passed legislation permitting settlers to build on Palestinian land illegally seized. The laws are replicas of ones introduced by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Australians will be alarmed when they realise that being in lock-step with Trump involves being in lock-step with Netanyahu as well.
Mrs May and the cost of Brexit
It was a truly historic moment when Theresa May, leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, passed legislation in the House of Commons to trigger Article 50 to bundle Britain out of the European Union.
Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn ordered his MPs to support the prime minister’s Bill and most of them did.
May’s prosecution of Brexit will come to haunt her for the rest of her career. It is a breach with Tory policy which dates back to Winston Churchill’s Zurich speech in 1946 when he first mentioned the challenge of building a “United States of Europe”.
Churchill’s advocacy of European union found strong support from four generations of Tory leaders – Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, John Major and David Cameron.
The 1961 Tory Party conference adopted the policy of applying for membership of the Common Market and decided to junk Commonwealth preferences to throw in their lot with Brussels.
The Labour Party under Hugh Gaitskell was passionately opposed, arguing that Britain’s future lay with the Commonwealth and it feared the erosion of Westminster sovereignty.
On February 3 Mrs May was ostracised by European leaders who virtually ignored her presence at a gabfest in Malta and excluded her from the chamber when substantial discussions began.
When the Euro-bill for Brexit is presented to Mrs May later this year, her lame prime ministership will sink. The IOU from Brussels – not mentioned in any of Mrs May’s hectoring speeches – is estimated to be roughly $50 billion to $150 billion: the amount that the British government has agreed to contribute to annual EU budgets until 2020.
When May’s government refuses to pay up, its chances of negotiating a free trade deal with the EU or any of its constituent parts will crash. Inevitably, the dispute will head to the International Court of Justice in The Hague for a long, complicated and immensely costly hearing.
By then Mrs May will be cactus and so will the British economy.
Trump turmoil at the palace
In England, 90-year-old Mrs Betty Windsor, queen of Australia, is recovering from a bad cold but some cynical observers have suggested her “illness” is a diplomatic ploy to avoid meeting US President Trump.
The invitation to a state visit was made by Prime Minister Theresa May during her ill-advised meeting at the White House last month. Since then, Team Trump has been champing at the bit to visit the “old country” which they despise but need in equal measure.
Trump refers to Mrs May as “my Maggie” while she thought he was very engaging. Asked about their relationship, Mrs May replied: “Haven’t you ever noticed? Sometimes opposites attract.”
Meanwhile, in the UK almost two million people have signed a petition protesting against Trump’s visit. The sheer number means that it qualifies to be debated by the House of Commons on February 20. A counter-petition supporting Trump’s visit has attracted just 114,000 signatures, mainly supporters of Nigel Farage’s anti-Moslem, refugee-hating UK Independence Party.
Mrs May and her Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson are working feverishly to limit the size of the Tory vote against Trump’s visit, with Johnson saying the ban is “offensive and wrong”.
Cancellation of the visit will enrage Trump who has major private investments in the UK. If he is snubbed, the thin-skinned ageing lothario will certainly retaliate and the so-called “special relationship” between Washington and London will take a battering.
One suggestion from Foreign Office toadies is for the Queen to welcome Trump at her Scottish palace, Balmoral, in Aberdeenshire. They believe that this ruse will prevent millions of angry protesters flooding The Mall to vent their opposition to the Trumpster, bringing London to a halt and making prime-time headlines across the globe.
Personally, I think the demonstrators will simply catch trains, coaches and planes to Scotland and lay siege to Balmoral.
Some brain-dead Tories believe the “Balmoral option” will damage the ruling Scottish Nationalists and set back the demand for a second referendum on Scotland’s independence. Some hope.
They also believe the nationalist cause will be badly hurt by Trump’s threaten to cancel investments worth $1.5 billion in Scotland – a luxury resort in South Ayrshire and a golf course in Aberdeen – if Mrs May postpones the visit.
As a result, independence activists will be accused by City of London Tories of scuppering “jobs and growth”. However, most Scots believe that Trump’s investment plans are bluff and bluster and he simply wants to pressure Scottish authorities into giving him a sweetheart deal to plunder the country’s resources and goodwill.
White House spin doctors are playing up the fact that his mother was born in Scotland but locals are having none of it: they can smell a chancer from miles away.
Dictators always welcome at Buck House
Mrs Windsor is a seasoned hostess when it comes to welcoming the likes of Donald Trump. In the past she has thrown her palaces open to blood-drenched dictators from around the world.
For example, Ugandan President Idi Amin visited Buck House in 1971 on the recommendation of Ted Heath’s Tory government and James Callaghan’s Labour government invited Romania’s psychotic leader Nicolae Ceausescu in 1978. Mrs Windsor was so impressed by the “Butcher of Bucharest” that she bestowed on him a knighthood, a horse-drawn open carriage ride from Victoria Station to her palace and a handmade hunting rifle with telescopic sights.
Her Order of the Bath knighthood was greeted with absolute cynicism back home where 20,000 political prisoners languished in Stalinist jails. They called it the “Order of the Bloodbath”.
James Bethell, son of the junior Foreign Office minister Lord David Bethell, recently recalled that one lone protester stood outside Claridge’s in Mayfair when the Ceausescus arrived for a state dinner. He was arrested, hustled away and later fined $100.
Amin died in exile in Saudi Arabia after being forced to flee Uganda and Ceausescu and his ghastly wife Elena were shot after being convicted of state larceny and genocide by a military court.
Whatever happened to the jewel-encrusted brooch given to Mrs Ceausescu by Mrs Windsor in 1978? Nobody appears to know …
Great Crashing Bores*
I’m a huge fan of that Ahmed Fahour. HUGE. The lefties are bagging him because he gets $5.6 million a year as boss of Australia Post. I reckon he’s worth every cent of it. I’d give him $10 million to do a job like that. Imagine getting up at 4 o’clock every morning to sort the mail and then jump on a motorbike and race around the streets delivering letters? I wouldn’t do it for quids. He’ll get a terrific bonus when Turnbull and his mates from Goldman Sachs privatise the whole thing. I reckon Ahmed’s worth his weight in gold – which is probably what they are paying him. Who said that we Aussies don’t look after refugees from Lebanon?
Festival of Dangerous Ideas*
Glenn Stevens, former governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, will make his debut as a public philosopher with a lecture on My Plan for a Dream Home for Everyone. Hired by another Liberal banker, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, to write a report on land rights for the richest people in Australia, China and America, Mr Stevens, aka “The Mumbling King Midas”, will share his thoughts on shoehorning people into ironclad bank loans, replete with juicy tax breaks, to buy not one but two, three or even four properties. Roll up to hear his inspirational ideas on home ownership. Sponsored by the Real Estate Agents Association Inc and Harry Triguboff’s Meriton Entertainment.
*GCB and FDI are works of satirical fiction.