Dingo Bytes
The Nauru Government has refused entry to Australian lawyers seeking to represent the hundreds of asylum seekers who are locked up on the island. This may be a little shady, the obvious conclusion being that the Howard Government's payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Nauru Government motivated the blocking of the lawyers. On the other hand Nauru has no problem letting in the Australian Government's lawyer.* * * Who polices the police? It's a perennial question. The force currently going through revelations of graft and corruption is the Victorian Police. The latest is that the Vic cops have been sending seized drugs to NSW for analysis because a scientist in the state's forensic laboratory is suspected of being in the pay of criminals. Just why they think NSW is squeaky clean they don't say.* * * PM Howard's Iraq trip was just a matter of time, but how typically cynical and opportunistic it was to choose Anzac Day, a day born of blood due to the treachery of the British command which set up Australian troops to be slaughtered. For the returned service personnel and their families Anzac Day is about remembrance and a desire for peace. But for the warmongering Howard conflicts are clearly something to celebrate. Instead of arriving in Iraq with a turkey, like George W Bush months earlier, Howard cooked a barbeque and quaffed a beer, arrogantly posing for the media in a nation to which he helped bring death and destruction and occupation. Some WW2 veterans have derisively labelled him "Flakjacket Johnnie". It deserves to stick.* * * The nation's major science organisation, the CSIRO, is in the throes of being privatised. All the signs that it has been infected with this lethal process have been evident for some time, to one degree or another. There are the big business appointments such as tobacco lobbyist Donna Staunton; there's the re-direction of funds from scientific research for the public good to research aimed at increasing the corporate bottom line. Now there's a pre-budget review of the CSIRO's operations by none other than Donald McGauchie, one of the architects of the 1998 attack on the Maritime Union, a former head of the National Farmers' Federation and now a member of the board of the Reserve Bank ("scum" is too good a word). The report says that the CSIRO should compete with other agencies for funds "to encourage commercialisation and collaboration".* * * CAPITALIST HOG(S) OF THE WEEK: are the nation's negligent employers, who are responsible for the deaths of more than 2000 workers a year, with many thousands more injured. Yet only one government, the ACT, has had the guts to introduce industrial manslaughter laws to bring such employers to justice.