Dingo bytes
Big tobacco is at it again (did they ever stop?). This time it's a pushy campaign to stop a plan to put graphic photos on cigarette packets. British American Tobacco Australia has written to all government backbenchers saying the new warnings — depicting diseased mouths and eyes — will do nothing to reduce the smoking rate. Their behaviour is somewhat at odds with that claim.* * * The Howard Government has launched a new campaign to sell Australia as a tourist destination (they've already sold off every thing that rings and whistles). Called Brand Australia with the slogan "Australia: a different light", it's a marketing ploy aimed at tourists who see holidays as "an opportunity for self- development". Dingo wonders if the itinerary includes visits to remote Aboriginal communities who are forced to live in third world conditions, and to asylum seeker prison camps. That'd be seeing the place in a different light.* * * Australia's orchestras are on the chopping block. The Government has appointed hatchet man James Strong, who headed the privatised national airline Qantas, to run an inquiry into their funding. A look at Strong's CV gives an idea of what's in store for the nation's six orchestras: chairman of Woolworths, Insurance Australia, the Rip Curl clothing company and the Australia Business Arts Foundation, a body set up by the Government so it could abandon funding of the arts and hand them over to the parasitic vagaries of that corporate largesse known as philanthropy. Like the obedient little white ant that he is, Strong is also the chair of the Sydney Theatre Company and sits on the board of Opera Australia.* * * On May 15 the families and friends and others concerned about Australia's draconian new arrest and detention terror laws gathered for a rally at Goulburn Jail, south of Sydney, to demand entry and access to people charged with terrorist offences. The prisoners are being kept in the jail's High Risk Management Unit. In a statement the protesters said, "Following the exposure of the torture of such prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay by Australia's coalition partners, the inference is clear that breaches of UN standards are happening here too". For more info contact Brett Collins 0438 705 003.* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. In February 2003 Powell told the UN in relation to Iraq's alleged biological weapons factories: "Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to use them." The information came from the brother of an Iraqi defector. The informer's code name was Curve Ball who it turned out was lying to the CIA. Well, that's the story anyway. Tens of thousands of lives and an occupation later and Powell last week described the information as "inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading". And Curve Ball even provided incontrovertible proof — he did some drawings of the alleged laboratories.