Don’t you just love unions, they will sell out their own members if it suits their broader agenda. They will even suck up to the Green taliban and their anti-progress policies in order to try to knife someone else.

Liberal Senate candidate Zed Seselja has hit back at the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union after its local branch declared it would actively campaign against him in the federal election.

Mr Seselja said the union was betraying its members by backing Greens candidate Simon Sheikh and his party’s ”anti-development” agenda.

The union says it is not backing any of the main parties in the election, but its stated aim is to deny the Coalition control of the Senate and the ACT branch will use its considerable resources to campaign against Mr Seselja.  Read more »

Nathan Guy lied about Stuart Nash and Labour’s position on the socialist dam in central Hawkes Bay in a press release a few weeks back. He gave the impression that Hawkes Bay is up in arms with joy about him pissing away millions of tax payers money in subsidies for a very dodgy scheme run by some very dodgy people.

Now the two highly respected and long serving mayors of Napier and Hastings, Barb Arnott and Lawrence Yule, are pointing out the obvious faults in the scheme. And the obvious stupidity of Nathan Guy lying about skepticism of a vast waste of taxpayers money.

Hawke’s Bay mayors are so concerned about the Ruataniwha Water Storage Scheme they have offered to pay for a peer review of the plan.

In a letter The Dominion Post obtained under the Official Information Act, Napier Mayor Barbara Arnott and Hastings Mayor Lawrence Yule urge regional council chairman Fenton Wilson to address four “process issues”.  Read more »

The former Labor party ratbag Craig Thomson is facing yet more fraud and theft charges. I’ll say this though, he has more cheek than a fat man’s bum to still continue as an MP.

Former Federal Labor MP Craig Thomson – accused of using a Health Services Union credit card to pay for prostitutes – has appeared in court today to face 19 fresh charges.

Mr Thomson, 48, who last week announced he would stand as an independent for his NSW seat of Dobell at the September federal election after being suspended by the Labor Party, appeared briefly in the Melbourne Magistrates Court charged with a total of 173 fraud and theft offences.  Read more »

David Cameron is having to restore some confidence after word leaked out about some of his inner circle bad mouthing activists…not unlike some of the bad mouthing that goes on inside National of activists.

David Cameron moved to repair relations with a bruised Conservative party by emailing a “personal note” to all members in which he said he would never work with anyone who “sneered” at activists.

Amid anger in the party at the allegations that a senior member of his inner circle had referred to activists as “mad swivel-eyed loons”, the prime minister said the party was held together by “a deep and lasting friendship”.

Cameron reached out after senior Tories, who were enraged by allegations that the Tory co-chairman Lord Feldman had made disparaging remarks about Tory activists, warned of a sea change in the parliamentary party as growing numbers of MPs decide that the prime minister is becoming a liability. Feldman strenuously denied the allegations which he described as “completely untrue”.  Read more »

Depression awareness is fronted here by John Kirwan. The man is a legend, not just for his rugby prowess but also because of his very public campaign to raise awareness for depression.  But could glorifying high-achievers with mental health difficulties may be more insensitive than inspiring.

Mark Brown thinks this may be the case:

If you’re a person who experiences mental health difficulties, as I do, you’ll be familiar with an oft-quoted list of inspirational fellow travellers, such as Winston Churchill and his famous “black dog” or national treasure Stephen Fry and his bipolar disorder.

The media retains a fondness for presenting exceptional disabled people as inspirational.

“Look,” they say. “Here is a person who has achieved so much. Do not lose heart, you too can overcome your disability if you follow their example.”

This may at first seem a benign point to make but, I wonder, does it do more harm than good?

The dominant positive media stories offer up high-achieving disabled people as examples of the human spirit triumphing over adversity. Other positive tales are of people rising to stratospheric heights “despite” a physical or mental health difficulty.  Read more »

The world is focusing more and more on the activities of state sponsored Chinese hackers, but it seems hacking is endemic in China.

Name a target anywhere in China, an official at a state-owned company boasted recently, and his crack staff will break into that person’s computer, download the contents of the hard drive, record the keystrokes and monitor cellphone communications, too.

Pitches like that, from a salesman for Nanjing Xhunter Software, were not uncommon at a crowded trade show this month that brought together Chinese law enforcement officials and entrepreneurs eager to win government contracts for police equipment and services.

“We can physically locate anyone who spreads a rumor on the Internet,” said the salesman, whose company’s services include monitoring online postings and pinpointing who has been saying what about whom.  Read more »

The equivalent of our Family First organisation is the ACL (Australian Christian Lobby), they are as intolerant and silly as Family First with their opposition to gay marriage.

Imagine being the child of Lyle Shelton. It must be awful to be brought up among bigotry and intolerance. Imagine what it does to your sense of yourself and of the world around you. I just hope those kids are OK, because, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t let those sorts of people be parents. There really ought to be a law.

Too harsh? You’re probably right. I’ll just tell that to my son, who, by dint of his parents, is unwittingly subjected to this kind of infantile, puerile and facile rubbish every day of his precious life.

Lyle Shelton’s Australian Christian Lobby had this to say in a statement following Kevin Rudd’s repositioning on the subject of same-sex marriage: ”The prime minister who rightly gave an apology to the stolen generation has sadly not thought through the fact that [Mr Rudd's] new position on redefining marriage will create another.”

Pardon? Creating another generation of stolen children? Are the Christians going to come in, again, and steal our kids? Hello? Is anyone home? Breathtaking in its stupidity, overwhelming in its tastelessness.  Read more »

The Australian taxpayer must be wondering today just exactly what their AUD$34 million of federal funding for Ford earlier in the year got them. Billions of dollars more has been poured into the industry that is now almost dead.

About $10 billion over seven years. That’s how much has been pumped into the car industry by federal and state governments.

But has it been a case of throwing good money after bad, especially after Ford Australia’s announcement today that it was going to halt its local manufacturing operations in 2016?

Ford Australia president Bob Graziano said for every $1 the governments gave to his company, it returned $6 back to the economy. But at the same time, he said the firm’s cost structures in Australia were uncompetitive.

Read more »

Mark Steyn blogs about the massive IRS scandal that is engulfing the Obama administration:

Left-wing groups had their 501(c)(4) applications approved in weeks, right-wing groups were delayed for months and years and ordered to cough up everything from donor lists to Facebook posts, and those right-wing groups that were approved had their IRS files leaked to left-wing groups like ProPublica. The agency’s commissioner, a slippery weasel called Steven Miller, conceded before Congress that this was “horrible customer service” — which it was in the sense that your call is important to him and may be monitored by George Soros for quality control.

This hasn’t yet made news here, but the scandal is growing.

A civil “civil service” requires small government. Once government is ensnared in every aspect of life a bureaucracy grows increasingly capricious. The U.S. tax code ought to be an abomination to any free society, but the American people have become reconciled to it because of a complex web of so-called exemptions that massively empower the vast shadow state of the permanent bureaucracy. Under a simple tax system, your income is a legitimate tax issue. Under the IRS,everything is a legitimate tax issue: The books you read, the friends you recommend them to. There are no correct answers, only approved answers. Drew Ryun applied for permanent non-profit status for a group called “Media Trackers” in July 2011. Fifteen months later, he’d heard nothing. So he applied again under the eco-friendly name of “Greenhouse Solutions,” and was approved in three weeks.

That is telling. Someone must have ordered such a pogrom against centre-right organisations.

The president and the IRS commissioner are unable to name any individual who took the decision to target only conservative groups. It just kinda sorta happened, and, once it had, it growed like Topsy. But the lady who headed that office, Sarah Hall Ingram, is now in charge of the IRS office for Obamacare. Many countries around the world have introduced government health systems since 1945, but, as I wrote here last year, “only in America does ‘health’ ‘care’ ‘reform’ begin with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents tasked with determining whether your insurance policy merits a fine.” So now not only are your books and Facebook posts legitimate tax issues but so is your hernia, and your prostate, and your erectile dysfunction. Next time round, the IRS will be able to leak your incontinence pads to George Soros.

Pure coincidence I am sure.

Big Government is erecting a panopticon state — one that sees everything, and regulates everything. It’s great “customer service,” except that you can never get out of the store..