The Guardian 17 May, 2006
Dingo bytes
On the Queensland Gold Coast in the 1980s under the government of fascist-minded Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a group of businessmen known as the white-shoe brigade controlled the Gold Coast City Council, using it as a cash cow for developers. Not much has changed, it turns out, with a report by the state’s Crime and Misconduct Commission last week finding there was a climate of "secrecy, deceit and misinformation" before the 2004 council election. It has recommended that charges be considered against six prominent Gold Coast "identities", including the Deputy Mayor, for their role in a developer-backed election fund. Twenty Gold Coast developers admitted to the enquiry that they made political donations during the election campaign.
They think big in the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Someone there has discovered that poor health in remote Aboriginal communities has a connection with bad diet. The Government is to provide funding for 1000 outback stores that will sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Of course, as with everything the Howard Government does, there has to be a bottom line: the stores will be franchises run for profit. And this is after destroying the democratically-elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and failing to provide basic services to Aboriginal communities such as clean water and electricity that the rest of Australia take for granted. Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough announced that Woolworths will be giving "guidance and training" in the setting up of the stores.
A report commissioned by the Howard Government has the ludicrous, and indeed insulting, proposal that a website be set up for young Australian Muslims so they don’t use overseas websites through which they might be "radicalised". The report is the product of the Government-run Muslim youth summit last December. The phoney war on terrorism has been going on since 2001 and no act of violence has taken place in Australia that could in any way be construed as being "terrorist". This is despite a concerted campaign by the Government itself to try and cause racial and religious divisions in the community.
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Defence Minister Brendan Nelson. Last week Nelson was still in damage control mode following the disgraceful bungle by a private contractor of the repatriation of the body of Private Jake Kovco from Iraq. Said Nelson, who angered Kovco’s family by publicly giving three different versions of how he died, "We must do everything we possibly can … to see this error does not ever happen again". As he uttered these words the body of the Bosnian man Juso Sinanovic, sent here by mistake, had still not been returned to his family. The family intend to sue the Australian Government.