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.

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.

Glenn Beck is a smug, smooth-talking, conformist lackey of the super-rich, posing as a ‘man of the people’, original thinker and populist philospher.

Championed in recent times by Rupert Murdoch’s odious Fox News US TV network, Glenn’s ego has now become a global phenomenon.

Last week-end, he strutted improbably at a August 28th Lincoln Memorial rally as a leader walking in the shoes of Martin Luther King – a false messiah preaching to the seriously deluded.

The bizarre story was reported as far away as wintry Australia.

Unfortunately, like most shock-jocks, Glenn has a past. People keep tapes.

This one is a beauty…

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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.

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.

Is there anything worse than a 63 year military occupation?

Perhaps there is?

More from Palestine Think Tank TV here.

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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.

Unlike the two hypothetical cases above, this actually happened.

Even in the ill-informed western world, we don’t have to get all our news through the distorting prism of Zionist bias.

But it does take a little effort to get a more complete and accurate view of the world.

Reviewing the western mass media’s reportage of the globally-publicized spike of ‘Islamophobia’ currently surging through the USA, one encounters various flavours of opinion.

They range from well-intentioned bleating about the need to protect the rights of innocent Moslems – to the most extraordinary, extremist vilification of Islam and its adherents. A wide range of views are given expression… in true democratic style.

Well, almost all views. Absent is the analysis of authentic anti-Zionist commentators.

You won’t, for instance, hear Mark Glenn interviewed by the mainstream western media anytime soon. His message jars.

Heretically, he suggests Islamophobia is a deliberately manufactured phenomenon.

Mark believes it’s the product of some very illiberal and sectarian forces, but not Christian or ‘western’ interests in any meaningful sense.

On the contrary, he sees Islmophobia as the handiwork of Zionists, working to advance the interests of an expansionist State of Israel.

It would be nice if the western media allowed such opinions free expression. On the other hand, one can understand why they don’t. A marketeer doesn’t promote alternative brands.

Fortunately, the Iranian media doesn’t suffer such strict censorship.

Even though Mr Glenn’s views irritate the western plutocracy, Iran’s English-language news service Press TV featured him quite recently.

It takes a lot to silence the Israel Lobby, but a well-chosen question can do the trick.

Al Jazeera should be complemented on assigning independently-minded journalist Clayton Swisher to cover the recent AIPAC Policy Conference. Nice work all round.

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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.

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.

This morning I woke up thinking of my old friend Huw Davies, who took his own life in early 1994.

Huw was a talented art photographer and ‘life artist’.

His friends adored him for his kindness, his compassion, his amazing energy and above all for a wonderful sense of humour.

About a year before his death, I had an intense debate with Huw about prospects for humanity. I took the optimist side, arguing we’re not only part of creation, but a special and significant part – for all our faults and weaknesses.

Huw – in blacker mood than I’d  seen him before – countered that humans are more like a lethal virus. I clearly remember him saying that if humans ever truly escape from the bounds of this planet, we’ll screw up the rest of the universe too.

I still can’t agree with Huw about that. Yet 15 years on, it’s hard to adduce much evidence he was wrong. I don’t think Huw believed all humans as intrinsically evil. His point was about the powerful (those most likely to head for the stars).

Perhaps our outward progress is stalled until we develop the wisdom to coexist and co-evolve?

I wish Huw was still around to continue the discussion.

In the last years of his life, Huw Davies developed a style for retouching photos by fingerpainting. The similarity with the painting style of Vincent Van Gogh was obvious. Somewhat later, he became intensely depressed and took his own life, like Vincent before him.

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.

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.