Dingo
Mark Latham's first act as Labor leader was to preside over his Party's collusion with the Government in voting down a proposal to send the latest draconian ASIO powers legislation for scrutiny to a Senate committee. The Greens wanted to send the legislation to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee. "Any legislation subject to controversy should at least go before a Senate committee", said Greens Senator Bob Brown. "To deny such a serious Bill any scrutiny is to trample on our democracy."* * * You can tell there's an election looming when PM Howard tries to beat up an issue into a sensationalist piece of media drama. Last election he exploited asylum seekers. Last week he waded in with a shot at the legal injecting room trials in Sydney, telling the NSW Government that they threatened Australia's medicinal opiate industry. The injecting rooms provide a safe environment for addicts to inject, with health professionals on hand in case they overdose. The alternative — if it can be called that — is for users to be found dead in the street. Now the Federal Government is saying the UN Narcotics Control Board has sent it an objection to the trials. The suspicion is that Howard initiated correspondence with the UN body. Said the director of the St Vincent Hospital Drug and Alcohol Service, Dr Alex Wodak: "This is a hollow threat and says more about political positioning before a federal election than it does about policy."* * * The noxious embrace between big business and government has come about because governments are increasingly an extension of the corporations whose interests they represent. People nowadays are more cynical than ever about their elected representatives, and not without cause. The stoush over a proposed waste dump in the Sydney suburb of Auburn is a classic example. Transnational waste corporation Collex has been given the go ahead by the Labor State Government to build a waste dump there. When residents won a decision in the Land and Environment Court to have the project stopped, the Government introduced legislation to override the Court's decision. It turns out that Collex has kindly donated $100,000 to the Government's coffers. The capitalist think tank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has calculated that governments internationally are involved in bribery-related crime to the tune of US$89 billion a year, enough to overcome world hunger.* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE YEAR: This being the last Dingo for 2003, the prize Hog of the Year is new ALP leader Mark Latham. Who owns Mr Latham? A curious question, I know, but a pertinent one. If you watched the ABC's 7.30 Report on December 2, the day Labor's parliamentary right-wing clique elected him as leader, you may have been given the answer. Host Kerry O'Brian informed viewers there would be no interview on the show that evening with the incumbent because Latham was appearing exclusively on Kerry Packer's Nine Network.