Richard Neville Interviews the Prime Minister of Australia 2

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Richard Neville Interviews the Prime Minister of Australia 2

This is John Howard as you've never seen him before, in a gripping interview with a long time critic. In a discussion ranging from the "wild times" of his youth, Iraq and the deadly threats facing our planet, Howard reveals many moods. All this week, segments from this strange conversation will be released EXCLUSIVELY on homepageDAILY. In this episode, John Howard accepts the change in the weather, but remains a global warming skeptic: “Climates go up, climates go down… you people are always saying gloom and doom. Ask yourself – who is Al Gore beholden to?”

To see part one of this interview click Next link above. Older Macs will require Flip4Mac, a free, self installing download.

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6 nov | This is John Howard as you've never seen him before, in a gripping interview with a long time critic. In a discussion ranging from the "wild times" of his youth, Iraq and the deadly threats facing our planet, Howard reveals many moods. All this week, segments from this strange conversation will be released EXCLUSIVELY on homepageDAILY. In today's segment, the Prime Minister recalls his courtship of Jeanette, his enthusiasm for Bob Dylan and his common bond with The Chaser.

To see parts one and two of this interview click Next link above. Older Macs will require Flip4Mac, a free, self installing download. . . read more

Richard Neville Interviews the Prime Minister of Australia 4

7 nov | This is John Howard as you've never seen him before, in a gripping interview with a long time critic. In a discussion ranging from the "wild times" of his youth, Iraq and the deadly threats facing our planet, Howard reveals many moods. All this week, segments from this strange conversation will be released EXCLUSIVELY on homepageDAILY. In today's segment, a confused Prime Minister looks back on the past and talks about saying sorry.

To see the first three parts of this interview click Next link above. Older Macs will require Flip4Mac, a free, self installing download. . . read more

Richard Neville Interviews the Prime Minister of Australia

4 nov | This is John Howard as you've never seen him before, in a gripping interview with a long time critic. In a discussion ranging from the "wild times" of his youth, Iraq and the deadly threats facing our planet, Howard reveals many moods. All this week, segments from this strange conversation will be released EXCLUSIVELY on homepageDAILY, starting today with his memories of 9/11, his fear for Australia's future and his plan for Iran. Tomorrow: why he was slow to connect with Climate Change. . . read more

John Howard is an Arselicker

24 apr | No, not just an attention-grabbing headline, it's the name of this song from The Shoothroughs. Obviously big fans of Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister. . . read more

Federal Election - Quest for the Lollipop

30 oct | For some people, being Prime Minister is like having the world's yummiest lollipop. An alternative look at recent Australian political history to see who has had the lollipop and who wants to be a sucker. . . read more

Murdoch's Transplant

23 jul | Shock! Horror! Rupert Murdoch's media discovers an organ previously undetected by News Corp's proprietor - the human heart. This find has rocked the media empire and its flagship broadsheet, The Australian, forcing it to re-assess its mission. The result is Total Rebranding. RICHARD NEVILLE analyses Rupert's move towards 'intellect and compassion'. . . read more

Australia's Hidden Empire

21 apr | JOHN PILGER reports on Australia's hidden empire - a 'sphere of influence' that stretches from the Aboriginal slums of Sydney to East Timor and Afghanistan. The arrival of new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, offers important continuity. . . read more

Little Johnny Sends in the Troops

18 jul | Some insight into the private thoughts of PM John Howard and decision to send in the military to save aboriginal children, while not saying sorry for previous generations of aboriginal children being stolen by the government. . . read more

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Emergency Email - From Cindy Sheehan

Dear President Obama,

My friend, Cynthia McKinney and Nobel laureate, Mairead Maguire and 20 other people were trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, which, as I understand, is something that you have encouraged Israel to allow.

The Honorable Cynthia McKinney served six terms in the US Congress and she was the Green Party candidate for the office that you eventually won. It is an outrage that the Israeli Navy would block the boat that she and 21 others were on in international waters and board the boat and kidnap the crew and humanitarian aid workers.

President Obama, when an American captain was kidnapped by Somali "pirates" US Navy SEALS were sent in to rescue him. He was the captain of a private, for profit, ship and the US military was used to rescue him.

What Israel did, outside of its waters, to an unarmed boat filled with aid for Gazans who have been trapped in a concentration camp by Israel, is an act of international piracy and you must demand that Israel release Ms. McKinney and her fellow captors with all haste.

I just received word that the illegally detained captives have been moved to another prison and may be charged with trying to enter Israel illegally, when they were trying to get aid to Gaza and were not even in Israeli waters.

I can't even express my immense outrage at this overt breach of international law that has been perpetrated by Israel.

Use your influence as the greatest dispenser of military aid to Israel to force that rogue state to release Ms. McKinney et. al., then we can talk about their immoral occupation of Palestine and the inhumane blockade of Gaza.

With urgency,

Cindy Sheehan

US a failed state on climate change - from George Monbiot

It would be laughable anywhere else. But, so everyone says, the Waxman-Markey bill is the best we can expect – from America.

The cuts it proposes are much lower than those being pursued in the UK or in most other developed nations. Like the UK's climate change act (pdf) the US bill calls for an 80% cut by 2050, but in this case the baseline is 2005, not 1990. Between 1990 and 2005, US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose from 5.8 to 7bn tonnes.

The cut proposed by 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill's measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it's printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.

There are mind-boggling concessions to the biofuels industry, including a promise not to investigate its wider environmental impacts. There's a provision to allow industry to use 2bn tonnes of carbon offsets a year, which include highly unstable carbon sinks like crop residues left in the soil (another concession won by the powerful farm lobby). These offsets are so generous that if all of them are used, US industry will have to make no carbon cuts at all until 2026.

Like the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), Waxman-Markey would oblige companies to buy only a small proportion (15%) of their carbon permits. The rest will be given away. This means that a resource belonging to everyone (the right to pollute) is captured by industrial interests without public compensation. The more pollution companies have produced, the greater their free allocation will be – the polluter gets paid. It also means, if the ETS is anything to go by, that the big polluters will be able to make windfall profits by passing on the price of the permits they haven't bought to their consumers.

In one respect the bill actually waters down current legislation, by preventing the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating coal-burning power stations. If the new coal plants planned in the US are built, it's hard to see how even the feeble targets in this bill can be met, let alone any targets proposed by the science.

Even so, I would like to see the bill passed, as it at least provides a framework for future improvements. But why do we expect so little from the US? Why do we treat the world's most powerful and innovative nation as if it were a failed state, rejoicing at even the faintest suggestion of common sense?

You have only to read the comments that follow this article to find out. Thanks to the lobbying work of the coal and oil companies, and the vast army of thinktanks, PR consultants and astroturfers they have sponsored, thanks too to the domination of the airwaves by loony right shock jocks, the debate over issues like this has become so mad that any progress at all is little short of a miracle. The ranking Republican on the House energy and commerce committee is Joe Barton, the man who in 2005 launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. Like those of many of his peers, his political career is kept on life support by the fossil fuel and electricity companies. He returns the favour by vociferously denying that manmade climate change exists.

A combination of corporate money and an unregulated corporate media keeps America in the dark ages. This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed. Whether he is seeking environmental reforms, health reforms or any other improvement in the life of the American people, this is Obama's real challenge.

[via monbiot.com]

We are the Pancake People - From Nicholas Carr

We used to have an intellectual ideal that we could contain within ourselves the whole of civilization. It was very much an ideal — none of us actually fulfilled it — but there was this sense that, through wide reading and study, you could have a depth of knowledge and could make unique intellectual connections among the pieces of information stored within your memory. Richard Foreman, author of the play The Gods Are Pounding My Head, suggests that we might be replacing that model — for both intelligence and culture — with a much more superficial relationship to information in which the connections are made outside of our own minds through search engines and hyperlinks. We’ll become “pancake people,” with wide access to information but no intellectual depth, because there’s little need to contain information within our heads when it’s so easy to find with a mouse click or two.

Even aside from Internet business strategies, this tendency toward distraction is built into the Net through the use of hyperlinks and search engines, and I believe it’s beginning to influence not simply how we gather information but also how we think.

I’m trying to put some limits on my Internet and e-mail use, but that’s not always possible. There are broad social and economic changes underway that reward Internet use. If you cherish the ability to concentrate deeply and be reflective, you need to set aside time to read and think every day, so that those circuits in your brain don’t get erased.

Neda...Nada From The Outsider

Juxtapose the profoundly touching YouTube images of Neda dying in her father's arms with today's ‘front page' stories from Australia's media - the continuing parliamentary hoo-hah about Utegate; the State of Origin footy fight between two players; criminals in Australian ports. And what do you get? Nada ...nothing. In conversation with our very own Alchemist, here at HPD, we lament the pathetic inability of our newspapers to focus on matters of substance, their preoccupation with trivializing our daily existence, and their erroneous belief that sales of newspapers will rise as a result.

Neda our hearts go out to you. In the hope that your experience and your blood will help turn ‘nothing' into something new.

Reach Out- By Sean Maguire

Reach Out, the respected organisation that helps to tackle youth depression, has launched a new mass ad campaign. The campaign focuses on The Nudge, ‘the oaf like blue thing you may have seen getting around', which is meant to ‘nudge' you back on track when you lose your way. A nice sentiment, but very strangely expressed, for one, nudging is rarely a positive thing- when someone asks a depressed person if they need a nudge, it usually means off a cliff. Secondly, who, apart from a five year old, would want to open themselves up to an organisation that's most public figure is a self-described oaf?

Gordon Brown's Doomed Inquiry - By BINOY KAMPMARK

Any inquiry into politically calamitous causes is bound to be better received if done transparently. The circumstances behind the Iraq War, from lead-up, commencement and execution, has been anything but transparent. Behind a very thin veil, crimes in international law have been committed with flagrant disregard. Evidence has been discounted. The campaigns have been costly and, at stages, incompetently waged.

It is then little surprise that the recent announcement by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to hold an inquiry into the origins and execution of the conflict should take place in the same circumstances it began: behind closed doors. The microscope of inquiry will be well and truly hidden, insulated in heavy, establishment wool. The Tory leader, David Cameron, has termed it "an establishment stitch-up." Given the cautious chairman who will preside over the inquiry, Sir John Chilcot, a powerless mandarin in the eyes of many, he might be right.

The entire field is already muddied by previous inquiries that did little to restore the faith of a skeptical British public in their war-hungry leadership. The 2003 Hutton Inquiry confined its investigations to the narrow circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly, a government advisor who had been critical of the British governmentâ's deeply flawed dossier on Iraqis spectral weapons of mass destruction. On its heels came the Butler Inquiry, which examined the intelligence that supposedly catalyzed the British decision to throw in its lot with the United States.

The inquiry is supposedly to be modeled on the Franks Inquiry undertaken into the Falklands conflict in 1982, eschewing the temptation to apportion blame and seek, instead, the strengthening of "the health of our democracy, our diplomacy and our military." It is intended to be independent, comprising two historians, a member of the House of Lords unaligned to any party and a diplomat. It will consider the period from the buildup to the conflict in the summer of 2001 to July this year.

We can speculate what the inquiry will be most concerned with. There are the strategic blunders - why did Britain reduce the numbers of personnel at Basra even as the Shi'ite insurgency was raging? What role did the behemoth of American unilateralism play in driving the decision?

The difficulty with this inquiry is that it already has an appearance of being toothless even before it begins in earnest. The procedure of this paper tiger will take place in camera. It has no powers of any consequence, lacking such important means as that of subpoena, relying on the goodwill of those it asks to attend. (Tony Blair will, in all probability attend to spite his long time rival, though he need not.) Evidence need not be given on oath. When ultimately published, sensitive material will be abridged for the public readership.

The final matter that further weakens the credibility of this gesture is one of timing. In politics, timing is all, and Brown has decided to sink his project before it event gets off the ground by releasing the report after the General Election. It will take twelve months to complete. "No inquiry," argues Brown, "has ever been conducted over such a long period or in such breadth." Nor, it can be said, has an inquiry promised to be so ineffectual before it even starts, so devoid of worth before a single deliberation is undertaken. With British politicians heavily derided and maligned, Brown will have done wonders to affirm the views of cynics and critics.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Imran Khan warns of Pakistan’s ‘suicide’

Pakistan's military offensive against the Taliban will backfire and fuel more extremism and bomb attacks, the cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan warned last week.
“I have never been so depressed in my life,” he said. “Pakistan is on a suicidal course.”

Khan was speaking in London, where he was visiting his two sons by his ex-wife Jemima before heading to America to raise funds for refugees displaced by the fighting.
The 56-year-old leader of Pakistan’s Movement for Justice party has been branded pro-Taliban for speaking out against the military operation, which has driven 2.5m people from their homes.

“I’m not pro-Taliban,” he said. “But my point is: shouldn’t we have looked at other options? How do you justify using heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-jets in civilian areas? Who in the world does this? Meanwhile all the top Taliban leadership have escaped. It’s so inhuman, what they have done; it will backfire.”

Khan pointed out that the launch of the operation coincided with President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit to Washington in late April, after which the US agreed a five-year deal worth $1.5 billion (£910m) a year. “Was this operation to save the people of Swat or to get dollars from the Americans?” he asked.

“Only 10 days earlier, Parliament had passed a resolution endorsing a peace deal in Swat with the Taliban. Why was there no discussion? A military operation should have been the last resort.”
Khan insisted that Pakistan would never contain extremism as long as American troops remained across the border in Afghanistan. “Hatred of America is much more than of the Taliban,” he said.

The first European Union-Pakistan summit will be held in Brussels this week at which Zardari will call for more aid for the refugee crisis.
“How do we look after these refugees?” Khan asked. “Already you see the anger. This is a very sorry chapter in Pakistan's history.”

From Christina Lamb

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21 feb

The HomepageDAILY community likes to co-create both content and process. What are you thinking right now about what we do and how we do it? Tell us about the news, videos and stories and anything else you see on HPD. What you like, what you don't like, what you'd like to see in future. Recommend a website, video or article; send us pix, new stories - share it with us and by so doing you are giving us permission to share it with the world.

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Re: My Unrealistic Wish for the Chaser

Right on, the chasers approach is exactly what is needed to make the comfortable uncomfortable and give greater accesibility for criticism and analysis of the ridiculous shit we have to continuously put up with from our political system and those running it. I only hope they manage to keep it up without compromising themselves. - Simon

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Re: Sol Trujilo

Sean Maguire is right to say that Australia has racist tendencies. Our first people have been copping it badly since the next lot arrived. When my refugee father's lot arrived in '59 he suffered racist abuse. My mother had to put up with neighbours refusing to speak to her because she'd crossed the line and married "one of them" and, growing up in the 60s and 70s. I copped it too, including a public school infants school teacher ostracising me for my wog breath. Newcomers still cop racism every day.

But while horrid things happen here all too often, I don't know that Australia is particularly racist. We don't have hostels being razed to the ground (yet). We don't have religious riots either. It isn't as bad as many many other places but that's not really the point of my letter. My main point is that I just don't believe that Sol Trujillo's accusation is made in good faith. It seems like a pretty easy way to try and distract the world from the real reason that Sol is leaving and leaving early. He failed at Telstra and he failed spectacularly. What he really is pissed about is that we're "over-regulated" because he's still caught up with the whole neo-con approach: the approach that led to our current financial meltdown. If we were even less regulated he and his henchmen could have taken us for even more of a ride. - Mouldfield

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Re: The AfPak Blues

Isn't it strange that the bad terrorist guys we need to attack all seem to have things in common: >OIL >GAS >OIL & GAS >PIPELINE ACCESS TO OIL/GAS Just one of those weird coincidences I guess. Maybe the next attack will be on a little country with huge reserves of Brussel Sprouts -just to prove me wrong. - Warren

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Re: How To Become Weapons of Mass Destruction

Well written, I really dig this article. - Peter Silver

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Re: HomepageDaily

I usually get the real news from overseas sites. How good it is to find your site after wading through the sanitized oz media for so long. Onya HomepageDaily! [this is definately not a commercial announcement]. - Woz

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Re: Ron Paul on Swine Flu

It takes courage to speak out when those around you are cowed by ignorance and fear. HPD's running the Ron Paul article shows they are one of those we can count on in Australia to hold the line and provide decent edutorial standards.When I came through Brisbane aurport on the morning of May 1st 2009 the passengers were ordered to walk in single file keeping a one metre distance from the person in front. The flight crew who I thought would be used to this sort of thing joked "they will be making us goose step in time next". This was suposedly so we could be screened electronically for "fever". This flu virus beat up like the 1976 version ramps up budgets for more police state nonsense and loss of civil liberty. HPD carries some of the only copy that speaks to the decline of criticism of the status quo. While Murdoch's papers are lobbying for the criminal class of the financial banksters HPD gives life to a wider debate. When my North American friends say "Who can you recommend for some genuine Australian insight?" HPD is tragically one of the few links I have to offer and does so with my heartfelt thanks. - Anthony Innes

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