New South Wales has the oldest Parliament in Australia.

The State has a lower, government-forming chamber called the Legislative Assembly. It is dominated by the major political parties and runs rather like a smaller version of Australia’s Federal House of Representatives or the British House of Commons.

Reverend Fred Nile, Father of the NSW Legislative Council. Likes well-researched moral crusades

The State of NSW also has a Legislative Council – an upper house akin to the Federal Senate – to which members are elected by a form of proportional representation. Other parties, such as the Greens, are currently represented in the Legislative Council. In fact, there’s a smorgasbord of political flavours in the NSW Upper House, because the quota for success is relatively low. One of the long-standing beneficiaries has been the Reverend Fred Nile and his Christian Democratic Party.

The Reverend Nile has been an MLC since 1981. He’s ‘Father of the House’. In fact, he the longest-serving NSW Parliamentarian.

Views tend to polarize on the subject of Fred Nile. His supporters believe he’s a valiant defender of traditional Christian values. Opponents tend to view him as a moralizing reactionary hypocrite.

Yesterday yet another NSW Government Minister was forced to resign from Premier Keneally’s beleaguered Labor Government.

An audit of Parliament House computer use turned up the fact that Ports Minister Paul McLeay MLA had been accessing gambling and porn sites on his parliamentary computer. Embarrassed, the Minister stood down immediately, even offering to resign from the Labor Party.

Appearing on the ABC‘s popular TV political chat show Q&A on August 30th 2010, former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser dropped a minor bombshell.

Malcolm Fraser on Q & A

80-year old Fraser was head of the Liberal-National Coalition Government between 1975 and 1983. Deeply unpopular on the Australian left back in the 1970s – especially following the controversial sacking of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 by Australia’s Governor General – Fraser has none the less emerged in later life as an elder statesman of quality.

Like Ted Heath in Britain before him, Fraser watched the centre-right party he once led moving much further to the right in the quarter century following his departure.  Like Heath, Fraser has been outspoken in his criticism. This independent stance has made the right-wing of Australian politics nervous, but his genuine liberalism strikes a deep popular chord.

Last night, 49 minutes into the show, Fraser was posed a hostile, partisan question by a young Liberal supporter in the audience.

Fraser gave a rather thoughtful response:

“There is certainly a great yearning amongst both parties for a different approach, a broader approach, one which has some vision for the future of Australia and one which really tackles difficult issues and and is prepared to explain those issues, and not respond to focus groups or today’s polls or to pressure from News Corporation.”

The elderly ex-politician paused. There was a momentary and rather embarrassed silence, followed by a few titters.

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First, imagine a scholarly and widely respected Christian leader gave a sermon last week-end, referring to Moslems as “our enemies and haters” and intoning “May they vanish from the world, may God smite them with the plague!”

The story might well have made today’s New York Times. The western media would be chattering happily about this latest nasty turn in Christian-Islamic relations. Another ‘sign of the times’, TV talking heads would be saying to each other, shaking their wise heads. Sad – but understandable given the ongoing ‘War on Terror’…

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Next, imagine a leading and widely respected Islamic scholar had given a sermon last week-end, referring to Jews as “our enemies and haters” and exclaiming  “May they vanish from the world, may Allah smite them with the plague!”

If the Imam in question lived in the ‘free world’, it’s not hard to imagine he might already be in jail. He could certainly expect ‘hate crimes’ charges and a massive media campaign against him, with all and sundry deploring his outrageous remarks. If he lived in a Moslem nation such as Iran, it would be grist to the western mass media mill… yet another ‘proof’ that Moslem societies are barely civilized.

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Finally… imagine a leading and widely respected Jewish scholar giving a lecture last week-end.

Rabbi Yosef: hopes God hates Palestinians too

Unlike the two hypothetical cases above, this actually happened.

It’s an oddity of the human character that brain surgery, a very serious matter, is often the subject of jokes.

Perhaps it’s our way of dealing with the frightening and unthinkable.

The notion of an utter incompetent engaging in something as delicate as tampering with our brains makes us squeamish. What might he do to our minds? Ouch! So we joke about it.

Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy: mash-ups by Bob Whidon

In similar vein, many informed Australians have been making jokes about Senator Stephen Conroy for some years now.

The sniggers began almost as soon as he begame Australia’s Communications Minister, after the Rudd Labor Government was elected to power in 2007. They took off the next year, when it became apparent the Minister was quite insistent on imposing a mandatory internet ‘filter’ on all Australians.

The internet can be viewed as the neuronal structure of a globalizing humanity. It provides the basis for closely interwoven global society. Information streams through the network – information about people, activities, ideas, money and other data. It travels at the speed of light. This is the information flow that binds us together and makes our interconnected world work.

Our generation has grown used to the technology and participated in its growing sophistication. We are alive at a most remarkable time in human history. It’s a time when the mind of humanity is literally coming together, in ‘real time’. We’re still at the beginning of this extraordinary metamorphic process.

With a persistance that does him credit, veteran investigative journalist and founder of Consortium News Robert Parry has been nibbling away at the 1980 ‘October Surprise’ story for a long time.

Each time he revisits the saga, Parry bites another chunk off the cookie.

Jimmy Carter - Worst President Billboard

His latest article – The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter – draws more confident and far-reaching  conclusions than before.

Parry makes a solid case that Jimmy Carter’s Administration was brought down by a conspiracy involving elements of the CIA and the far-right Israeli Government of the day. The former were ultimately answerable to George Bush senior, Vice Presidential candidate for the Republicans in the 1980 election. The latter were presumably under the control of Israel’s Prime Minister Menachim Begin, a former Irgun terrorist.

The Israeli connection helps explain how this story has taken so long to break. Parry relates (emphasis added):

As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles – with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed – history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel’s Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion – perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick – that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

At last – a documentary filmed from WITHIN the Taliban

(Scroll down for a must-see ten minute documentary made by Norwegian filmaker Paul Refsdal, using footage he took recently in Kunar Province, Eastern Afghanistan. Narrated by Alex Thompson, this remarkable insight into the life of Taliban resistance fighters was shown first on Britain’s Channel 4)

Last week, during the latest ritual national mourning  for yet another Australian soldier slain in Afghanistan, Prime Minister Julia Gillard was asked if she’d support a Parliamentary debate on Afghanistan (shorthand for Australia’s continuing military involvement in the occupation of that sovereign nation for the best part of a decade).

She refused to answer.

This is worse than World War Two, when Parliament was not gagged in similar fashion.

Julia Gillard and Bob Hawke, present & past ALP leaders who spoke at the 2010 Labor Party election launch; both notorious Zionist toadies and tag-alongs serving the US war machine

Like the rest of the Canberra Idiocracy, Julia Gillard may well live in a make-believe land – a world in which Australia’s SAS soldiers are valiant righteous heroes and the Taliban all evil villainous baddies. Perhaps she snuggles up on the sofa after a long day, in the arms of her Zionist boyfriend, and watches Cowboys and Indians movies?

Ms Gillard should watch this video too.

It’s the first documentary I’ve seen in nine years that’s filmed  from the perspective of Afghani resistance fighters. This is real journalism – something you rarely see via the shamed and discredited mainstream media.

Bob Ellis: raconteur and political fantacist

The much-loved (and occasionally reviled) veteran Australian journalist Bob Ellis has introduced a new artform into the 2010 Australian election.

Bob has begun reporting conversations that didn’t happen at all – but might well have happened.

This is more fun than chattering about unproveable anonymous ‘leaks’, that have dominated the campaign thus far. When inventing an imaginary conversation that did not happen, an author can put in more detail and even set the ambience. Perhaps this is why fiction was invented?

Here’s my own contribution to the genre…

They sat in a bar frequented by Gen Y, somewhere in Canberra, at the end of a long day. It was one month into the gruelling five-week Federal election campaign. The date was August 13th. One week to go! Time to crack a bottle and take stock.

One of the men was still anxious about the election.

“Lighten up Bruce” said his companion. “Have a drink!”

“I’m worried about Queensland” murmured Bruce.

“Don’t be” said Frank. He exuded confidence. Labor Party operatives such as Bruce wondered where he got it from.

“It’s OK said Frank. We’re putting extra troops in Queensland. Get Up’s marginals campaign will swing it. You’ll see.”

What a News Corp journalist thinks about Australians who remain steadfastly opposed to mandatory internet censorship

The relationship between the journalistic profession and the elusive but still attractive ideal of ‘democracy’ is problematic.

Julia Irwin: all it takes is guts

As long as we live in societies with a vast disparity in wealth, journalists will tend to reflect the interests of the few who are wealthy rather than the many who are not. Someone has to pay their wages, after all.

Partly in recognition of this, public broadcasters were established in countries such as Australia, Britain and the USA. But they have been prone to infiltration, subvertion, intimidation and general complacent lethargy.

Then there’s the small but significant ‘independent’ media. In Australia, it has occasionally shown the gumption to cover stories that the corporate mainstream media and largely-tamed ABC and SBS won’t touch. But undoubtedly independent media cop pressure too from powerful vested interests – and it has to pay its own bills.

Al of which is a preamble to introducing a must-read article by Antony Lowenstein, published in the popular independent Australian blog Crikey.com two days ago… but seen so far by all too few, because it’s behind Crikey’s paywall (paid subscribers only).

In my view, this is the most significant article of the entire election campaign.

It should be headine news – and it would be headine news in a real democracy with a genuine free press. Instead of that, the most effective manipulators of the Australian body politic look like they’ll make it home again, with only a handful of grumblers wise to their shenannigans.

Al Quaeda does not exist – not in the form conjured up by a never-ending succession of TV talking heads and bought-and-paid-for-columninsts.

The western world has been hoaxed by Zionist conspirators, whose power and influence within the western mass media has been crucial in selling a 1984-style nightmare to a credulous general public.

British Brigadier Roger Lane: a 'useful idiot'

Arguably, the gravest failure of all has been the role of the ‘western intelligensia’. History will record that in the first decade after 9-11, the great majority of the world’s academics favoured their careers and convenience over pursuit of truth. They should be truly ashamed. Their cowardice and conformism puts civilization in jeopardy – and has helped isolate and endanger the honourable exceptions among their ranks.

The great lie of our era – The ‘War on Terror’ along with its bogus rationales – has been perpetuated for nine long years in the western mass media and in mainstream political discourse. Each day, the terror-myth loses potency. Public exposure of the many liars involved in this gigantic hoax draws closer.

The conflict between competing paradigms is not stable. Traditionally, instability of this kind has been broken by a NEW false-flag atrocity and/or a major war: a new state-sponsored weapon of mass distraction, in other words. Yet the purveyors of mass murder and deceit have already stretched the credulity of the western masses to breaking point. It’s far from certain that another 9-11 style-atrocity would con most westerners the next time round.