Dingo bytes
Talk about government-sponsored persecution. A man locked up in the Australian Government-sponsored Manus Island refugee prison camp was brought back to the mainland last year after attempting to commit suicide. He was assessed as suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome. After six months in Australia he would have had the right to begin an appeal to the Refugee Review Tribunal to stay. The six months was up on January 29. On January 21 the Government had him sent to its Government-sponsored prison in Nauru.* * * The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, has leaped through an opening made by PM Howard to call for more God bothering in public schools. Based on the assumption that "God created the world, it belongs to Him", Jensen makes his argument with the almost laughable claim that there needs to be more religious teaching because otherwise there is "a vacuum for ignorance". It is interesting that Howard's tirade against the public school system has been interpreted by Jensen as a rallying call for the religious indoctrination of public school students. So that's what Johnnie, himself a religious zealot, was getting at when he branded public schools "value neutral" and "too politically correct". In fact, religion is taught in government schools in non-compulsory designated periods. Parents decide if their children attend.* * * The National Coalition for Gun Control (NCGC) has called the NSW Carr Government's handling of an escalation of handgun crimes in Sydney "diabolical". In 2001 Don Weatherburn, the Director of the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, produced a report warning the Carr Government of an increase in handgun shootings in south-west Sydney, the area that now accounts for 55 percent of all handgun shootings in the State. The NCGC continues to call on the Government to outlaw all semi-automatic handguns. Said spokesperson Samantha Lee, "You don't have to be Einstein to foresee that handgun crime in Sydney will continue to climb at an alarming rate: all you have to do is count the number of bodies."* * * The man responsible for the decisions of the Reserve Bank which have such an affect on the Australian economy and our lives, Ian Macfarlane, has spent more than $249,000 on his taxpayer-funded credit card during the past two years, mainly on travel and hotel stop-overs with his wife. Nice work if you can get it.* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is retiring National Australia Bank chief executive, Frank Cicutto. During his tenure the bank developed a "new culture". So, for his service to the system Cicutto was given a going away present of $14 million as shareholders wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars were lost gambling on currencies.