Darby Report 281 Sunday 12 October 2003

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TRAGIC ANNIVERSARY

On the anniversary of the Bali bombing atrocity, our hearts go out to all the survivors and to all who lost loved ones, friends and colleagues; and we salute all the medical, military and civilian personnel who saved lives and mended bodies beyond all expectation.  We join with Prime Minister John Howard in thanking the people of Bali, Australia’s true friends.

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CONTENTS OF DARBY REPORT 281 To return to this menu: Ctrl/Home

(DOUBLE) CLICK ON THE ITEM YOU WISH TO READ

Hernando De Soto – Ron Manners

Passing of Warringah’s philanthropist, Gordon Jones

Lead letter: Ambitions of Malcolm Turnbull (James Harker-Mortlock)

Lia Loover B.E.M. is recovering

Morgan Tsvangirai on Daily News Closure

EDDIE CROSS: Underbelly of Mugabenomics & Fundamental Freedoms

Cathy Buckle on Zimbabwe

WOMEN OF ZIMBABWE ARISE (WOZA)

Bring on the Capitalists

Death of Czech Hero

The French

Taiwan ROC and the United Nations

Letter from a US Marine in Iraq

Oxfam Laid Bare

Letters to Editor

Still a Very Stupid Idea – The Scully-Barr Spit Bridge Plan

Work in Progress: 200 Poets of the People (6 files totalling 925pp)

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This issue’s quotation, helpfully selected by John Woods:

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short

phrases.  ‘If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops

moving, subsidize it.’

-- Ronald Reagan (1986)

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Passing of Gordon Jones

At St Andrew’s Church Manly NSW on Tuesday 7 October 2003, former Warringah Shire President Gordon Jones, a local giant of humanitarianism and good works, was farewelled by Doris, his “precious darling” wife of 57 years, by his three sons, by his grandchildren and by a great number of friends and admirers. 

Gordon entered the building business after his return from active service, and rapidly earned a favourable professional reputation in the Manly area for the high quality of his work and his enthusiasm for employing and training apprentices.

For fifteen years Gordon served on the Warringah Shire Council, and for three successive terms he was elected by Warringah Councillors to lead them as Shire President.  Gordon Jones never accepted a salary, stipend or fee of any kind for his local government work, and similarly he always acted in an honorary capacity in the course of his many humanitarian activities, including his years of service on the Manly Ambulance Board followed by an extraordinary 25 years on the Central District Ambulance Board.  It was Gordon Jones who originally proposed the establishment of the Mona Vale Hospital, and he was the first Chairman of the Hospital Board.

Gordon’s fifty years of service to Surf Life Saving was reflected in his appointment as Patron of two Clubs, Freshwater SLSC and South Curl Curl SLSL, each of which Clubs annually honour their outstanding Surf Life Saver with the award of a “Gordon Jones Honour Blazer”.

In recent years Gordon Jones, a man of the highest personal standards, has been one of the innocent victims of a vicious and dishonest propaganda campaign against the Warringah Council.  Gordon was a gentleman of such beneficence that he may have forgiven the perpetrators.   However, the cowards who falsely tried to undermine the reputation of this scrupulously honest and compulsively generous man, while he was too ill to defend himself, should not imagine that their political crimes against decency will be forgotten.

Gordon Jones achieved more in every year of his adulthood than many people achieve in a lifetime.  We’ll remember Gordon whenever we encounter one of his worthy descendants, admire one of his buildings, greet one of his hundreds of former employees or get to know one of the countless individuals who through their involvement in the medical system or in a range of sports have gained from the generosity of Gordon’s great heart.

HERNANDO DE SOTO

Welcoming Speech By Ron Manners

Notre Dame University, Fremantle, 15^TH September, 2003

Good evening friends & distinguished guests, with a special welcome to the Honourable U.S. Consul, the Honourable Japanese Consul and to Gina Rinehart.

The written invitation to tonight’s event contained a magnificent background document on Lang Hancock, in whose memory this lecture series is named.  Those of us who were fortunate enough to have known Lang Hancock personally, will understand when I say that Lang planted many seeds amongst those whom he touched.

Lang had a relentless curiosity that he passed onto many people, myself included.  This relentless curiosity causes us to seek out people who have visionary ideas that we admire and wish to understand further.

Two years ago, with great expectation I attended an Atlas Foundation meeting in San Francisco.  It was called An Evening With Milton Friedman, a special celebratory event around the time of Milton Friedman’s 89^th birthday.

A special guest speaker at that event was to be Hernando de Soto, whom I had always wished to meet as his ideas have particular relevance to Australia.  Instead of a personal appearance, Mr. de Soto sent a video recording, the next best thing and certainly much better than nothing.

However, we are fortunate tonight that he actually appears in person and I wonder what that proves?   Could it prove that George Kailis has more influence than Milton Friedman?  If so, George, that is the supreme compliment to you.

Tonight’s printed program also includes a very detailed background document on Hernando de Soto.  Mr de Soto’s latest book, The Mystery of Capital (Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else), which last week reached No. 6 on the U.S. best selling non-fiction list, contains lessons for Australia where we see many unintended consequences of the destruction of property rights through either Native Title legislation or other “stakeholder activism” undermining the property rights of the productive sector.

The intention of such redistributions may have been well-meaning but the outcome is the severe diminishing of the level of investment, so in the end we are all losers.

Since publishing The Mystery of Capital, Hernando has increased the number of world Heads of State that he now advises.  This now totals 25.  Mr de Soto doesn’t deal with Vice Presidents or bureaucrats; he deals directly with Presidents and Prime Ministers.  He has just flown in from Sweden and after this evening’s talk will be flying direct to Beijing.

Western Australia is particularly fortunate as this will be Hernando’s only appearance in Australia during  his 24 hour stopover.

Hernando, I hope that your message is widely heard in Australia and that it helps us to lift our game.  I look forward very much to your comments and welcome you here tonight and to the podium.

Lia Looveer BEM

Lia Looveer BEM, lifelong liberty campaigner, Estonian community leader and long-serving  Secretary of the Captive Nations Council of New South Wales, is recovering at home after being hospitalised for a heart condition.  Lia’s many friends and admirers are invited to write to her at 3 Treelands Close, Galston 2159.

Daily News Closure

Morgan Tsvangirai

30 September 2003

Early this month, the Mugabe government closed down the Daily News, the only alternative voice in the form of a daily newspaper in Zimbabwe. Thousands of people have been thrown out of work. The company has lost billions of Zim dollars in revenue at a time when our economy is already on its knees. This newspaper was read by about a million people daily. It provided valuable space for diverse and different views. The closure of the newspaper merely extends the democratic deficit in this country and creates an environment of intolerance and fear. The Zimbabwean public media lost all credibility a long time ago and degenerated into a fully-fledged propaganda machine of Zanu PF. State newspapers and radio and television mirror events in our country in a manner that is devoid of any fairness and objectivity.

Since the formation of the MDC in September 1999, almost a year after the Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe group was established, the Daily News has always been in trouble with Zanu PF and the government.

You will recall that the newspaper was never allowed to circulate freely in small towns and in the rural areas. You will recall television pictures of so-called war veterans burning copies of the newspaper in Mutoko, Rusape, Shamva and other centres. The company’s property was being destroyed in the full view of the police. We, in the MDC, received numerous reports of travellers and civil servants being victimised at illegal roadblocks mounted specifically to check on readers of the Daily News in these centres.

In April 2000, the newspaper’s Harare office was bombed. A direct casualty of this act was a small art gallery below the then Editor Geoff Nyarota’s office. We understand the owner of that gallery was immediately pushed out of business. The perpetrators of this act were never brought to book.

Almost a year later, in January 2001, the newspaper’s printing press was blown up in Harare. Again no one was arrested and brought to trial for such a serious crime.

Almost all members of the company’s board of directors and its editorial staff face different charges arising from their association with that newspaper. Staff at the newspaper were constantly harassed, arrested and brutalised on untested allegations as part of a brutal campaign to muzzle the newspaper.

The Daily News represented a key addition to the range of voices calling for change in Zimbabwe’s political arena. It reflected the mood in the country and went further to play a key role in providing our supporters with an outlet to express themselves when the public media turned hostile to the wishes of the majority of our people. The closure of the Daily News is a political act. It has nothing to do with the law. The newspaper informed the world of the vicious government crackdown on the opposition before, during and after the election and exposed the electoral fraud of June 2000 and the Presidential election in March 2002.

May I make clear that we do not own the Daily News; nor do we determine its editorial agenda. Our interest in the newspaper is very clear. We feel hurt by the government’s continued onslaught on the democratic space. We are concerned about the shrinking avenues for Zimbabweans to express themselves. Our concern is the rising democratic deficit in Zimbabwe. The consequences of a gagging a society through the closure of all outlets for free speech are too serious for any democrats to ignore.

The forced shutting down of the Daily News has a lot to do with the desire to smash the MDC. Although that desire has failed to bear fruit in the past four years, Zanu PF has remained resolute to wish the MDC away. All our members of the national executive face a variety of charges, hundreds of our supporters have been killed, maimed and brutalised in an effort to destroy the party. That scheme has failed.

We believe the Supreme Court made a serious error when it refused to hear the arguments of the newspaper in its contest with the need to register under the Access to Information and Protection to Privacy Act (AIPPA). The refusal to hear the complainant’s case strengthened perceptions and reservations on the independence of the judiciary at a time when the people rely on that arm of society as the remaining protector of human rights and fundamental freedoms. As an independent nation, we are bound by international instruments that require us to respect minimum standards necessary for promoting and protecting the right to freedom of expression. Our Constitution is clear on the right to receive and impart information freely.

AIPPA was enacted specifically for the Daily News after all other attempts to squeeze the newspaper out had failed. First it was war veterans and hired Zanu PF officials who confiscated the newspaper, burning and tearing up copies on a daily basis. They beat up readers in the rural areas. They harassed vendors. Reporters were denied access to government information and to government buildings. Local investors were intimidated and editors were arrested.

AIPPA is an unjust law. It was fast-tracked through Parliament primarily to sabotage the right to freedom of expression and suffocate the free exchange of ideas and information.  AIPPA, together with the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), the Broadcasting Services Act, the Miscellaneous Offences Act (MOA) and the Labour Relations Act (LRA), among many other pieces of repressive laws, form the bedrock of legislative repression in Zimbabwe targeted at dealing with both freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The use of AIPPA to shut down the Daily News is a serious demonstration of intolerance and must leave no person in any doubt as to the desire of the regime to limit the flow of ideas and stifle freedom of expression in Zimbabwe.

The Independent Journalists Association of Zimbabwe (IJAZ) and the Daily News challenged AIPPA before the same Supreme Court on the grounds that it infringed the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech.  The IJAZ challenge was heard 12 months ago and no judgement has been made to date. The delay has never been explained; nor has the nation been informed of why no decision has been made after such a long time.

Within a short space of AIPPA life, three foreign journalists were deported and dozens of local journalists, all from the private media, were arrested. None were convicted.

We say the law was promulgated with the intention of curtailing media freedom as expressed by private citizens because no journalist from the state media has ever been harassed or arrested under the provisions of AIPPA.

We believe the rights of Zimbabweans are under siege. Repression is set to increase as long as the Daily News remains silenced. Nearly every issue of the Daily News carried reports of the state abuses. Without that regular exposure, the state may step up its brutal campaign because the government owns all the other dailies and they do not criticise the regime or expose its violence. Without the Daily News the future is bleak indeed.

It is for this reason that we believe pressure must be brought to bear on this government to re-open the democratic space and allow Zimbabweans to enjoy generic freedoms that make it possible for them to make informed decisions necessary in a free society.

The Daily News provided us with a vital channel through which to communicate with the people on a daily basis. We are denied access to the public media, which is simply a mouthpiece for Zanu PF and an outlet for their deception, lies and propaganda.  Closing down independent papers will not conceal the criminal failings of this regime. People experience these failings on a daily basis: in the queues for food, in the queues for cash and in the queues for fuel. They know who is to blame.

Our fear is that this latest assault on democracy in Zimbabwe betrays a more sinister agenda aimed at silencing all diverse voices within the country. The absence of private media exposure may well provide the enemies of democracy with the injection of confidence to implement a cynical agenda aimed at silencing their internal critics.

Despite this setback, the people of Zimbabwe have remained determined to fight for their freedom. They now controls and run 12 major towns and cities in Zimbabwe. Our success in the recent local government elections was a testament to the bravery of thousands of Zimbabweans who turned out to vote in the face of mass coercion and intimidation by the ruling party, aided and abetted by rogue elements within the security forces. These elections, however, proved yet again that our struggle is still far from over. More than 40 MDC candidates were prevented from submitting their nomination papers, scores of MDC activists were brutally attacked whilst Zanu PF again deployed the crude tactic of “food for votes” in a desperate attempt to deliver a credible showing at the polls. They failed because people desire change.

Zanu PF ministers attempted to exploit the MDC’s overall success for their own political ends by suggesting that the results demonstrated that Zimbabwe was a ‘true democracy’. Any slender chance of such misleading comments resonating around the international community would have come to a halt with the forced closure of the Daily News.

If Zanu PF is serious about the need to break the current political impasse and allow the people to set up a functioning democracy, then that party needs to add some substance to its rhetoric. People are not fools. They know that Zimbabwe cannot be a democracy when opposition legislators are tortured whilst in police custody, when people are mandated to attack political opponents without fear of prosecution and when people are prevented by law from gathering to have a political discussion unless they have received official permission to do so.

We urge Zanu PF to put the people first and discharge their basic duties by disbanding the youth militias, ending state sponsored violence and ensuring that everyone receives equal protection under the rule of law. We urge them to commit themselves to a process of dialogue for a long-term resolution of the problems currently facing us. As we have said before, only through a free and fair election, held according to SADC norms and standards, can we tackle the crux of the Zimbabwe crisis, the issue of legitimacy, and take the necessary steps to tackling the broader elements of the crisis that are polarising and destroying our country.

We are ready to engage Zanu PF in meaningful dialogue. Our victory in urban elections shows that we are no longer a mere opposition party. We are governing the country. We determine the agenda for Zimbabwe today. Our role is that of a social democratic movement fighting to extend the ideals of the liberation struggle to enable Zimbabweans to achieve peace, freedom and total democracy.

Our interest in dialogue must never be confused with capitulation. It is part of our broad strategy to end the crisis of governance in this country. Zanu PF has run out options to address the crisis, so we have taken a number of steps to give dialogue a chance. We are even prepared to make further compromises for the sake of our bleeding nation.

The key to whole saga rests with the leaders of Zanu PF and the MDC. We need to meet to unlock and remove the stumbling blocks and pave the way for the two parties to engage each other in a climate of confidence and patriotism.

Contrary to claims that Zimbabwe is under a sanctions regime, it must be remembered that the Harare Declaration of the Commonwealth is very clear on matters of governance. Zimbabwe has simply failed that test.

The Commonwealth then imposed certain measures to bring back the regime into line. The regime has remained adamant. The regime has taken no steps to address the issues raised by the international community. Such actions have forced the Commonwealth to maintain its position because there has been no significant shift in the regime’s actions. The CHOGM position must be enforced until there is meaningful change in the behaviour of the regime.

I thank you.

Morgan Tsvangirai

President, Movement for Democratic Change

 EDDIE CROSS IN ZIMBABWE

Underbelly of Mugabenomics

Bulawayo, 11th October 2003

Transparency International rated Zimbabwe 106 out of 133 countries they classed recently in terms of corruption. The sort of thing they were talking about were the usual - government officials taking bribes in return for favours, the perception of foreign businessmen abroad about what they would have to do to come into the country as an investor or contractor. Petty corruption at borders and so on. But these forms of theft of national, private or public assets pales into insignificance against what I call the activity that goes on in the name of that peculiar science - the economics of Robert Mugabe. Remember as you read this that the Mugabe government has 17 Ph.D. graduates in its ranks. Mugabe himself has 6 degrees and is widely recognised as a highly intelligent, if not, brilliant, man.

We have all the usual forms of petty corruption - policemen at road blocks - strangely racial in their activity as they target black drivers rather than white. All government contracts, almost without exception now, are only awarded after some form of corrupt practice. Our first decade of independence was not characterized by this form of corruption on any scale but by the mid 90s it was endemic and has grown exponentially since. Even so, many visitors to Zimbabwe say that our corrupt officials are no where near as avaricious as those of, say, Nigeria or the DRC.

A country can absorb these forms of corruption and still function; in fact in an environment where officials are paid low salaries it may be the only way the country continues to work at all. Like the practice in the DRC of placing a ten-dollar bill in your post box before you get your mail, you just write it off as a business expense.

No, it is another form of theft of assets that really concerns me. It is not widely recognised but everyone who works in the system knows it is going on and also recognises the huge transfers of assets that are involved. Mugabe and his collection of thieves have made this into virtually an art form.

The key is the legal system and the control over transactions in our society levied by the Reserve Bank. The informal sector largely operates outside this so you need a fairly sophisticated system to start with to make it effective.

If we take just one factor - the artificial exchange rates levied by the Reserve Bank on foreign exchange receipts by exporters and service providers. Take just one year as an example - the year 2000. In that year Zimbabwe earned US$2 554,000,000 from exports of goods and services. This was made up of US$600 million from tobacco and about US$250 million from gold - 33 per cent of all exports. The total value of all receipts from tobacco and gold were sold to the Reserve Bank at a prescribed exchange rate of 55 Zimbabwe dollars to one US dollar. Of the balance of all export receipts the Reserve Bank bought 50 per cent or another US$850 million. So the Reserve Bank purchased from exporters a total of US$1,7 billion dollars at an exchange rate of 55 to 1.

For those of you who do not know how this works, if you were to receive a payment of US$1000 into your bank account from an overseas client, a computer would reach into your account and take out US$500 and give you Z$27 500 in return. The Reserve Bank now controlled your US$500 receipts at a cost to the Bank of Z$27 500.

However the "real" value of the dollar at the time was about 350 to 1. So the effective loss to the exporter of earned income on that simple transaction was Z$147,500 or 85 per cent of the value of the currency earned. Across the whole transaction (US$1000) the loss in potential income was 42 per cent. So if we go back to the total exports of the country in that year, we will see that the effective theft of exporters’ income by the Reserve Bank in one year alone was a staggering Z$500,500,000,000 or 56 per cent of the total value of the exports of the entire country. In other words - had a free market for foreign exchange existed in Zimbabwe, exporters would have earned Z$893 billion from exports instead of Z$392 billion.

This calculation is not altogether a true reflection of real values because demand and supply inflated the value of the US dollar in open markets. If all foreign exchange was traded - the open market exchange rate would have been much stronger - maybe as much as half the nominal market price. Even under those circumstances exporters would have earned Z$55 billions dollar more from their exports than they actually did.

What makes this form of theft even more pernicious is the effect it has on the rest of the population. Everyone apart from a small coterie of Zanu PF acolytes has to use foreign exchange at the open market price for their imports. A manufacturer who wants to import raw materials or a pharmacist, who wants to import an essential drug, all have to price their needs into the market at the open market exchange rate (350 to 1). Consumers therefore have to pay for everything they buy that has an import content at the higher price. This affects everything in the country from the price of bread to liquid fuels. In effect the Reserve Bank system is therefore another layer of taxation by the State levied without knowledge or approval of the people by the gnomes behind the elaborate façade of the Reserve Bank in Harare.

In fact this hidden tax on peoples incomes could rival in value the total revenues received by the State from all other forms of taxation - in the year 2000, the sum of Z$88 billion or 28 per cent of GDP. So it has a double impact - once on the incomes of exporters and a second time on the expenditures of all consumers on everything they buy for use and consumption.

The worst part of this whole system is that the Reserve Bank only acts as an agent on behalf of the State in its management role of foreign exchange purchased through these means. So its disbursement is totally at the behest of the Government and in particular - the State President. In the Mabuto era in the DRC, it was via these means that Mabuto accumulated a personal fortune estimated at greater than his country’s national debt. It was via these means that the President of Nigeria was able to steal up to US$1 billion a year. In Angola it is estimated that up to a third of total revenues from oil sales are hijacked in this way.

In Zimbabwe the system is at the heart of the patronage system operated by Mugabe in his efforts to hold onto power. This explains the huge fortunes being accumulated by people who seem to have no talents or even business acumen. It explains the mansions being built all over the country by the new rich - almost all of them Zanu-connected. It explains the young men in dark suits and BMW cars who offer foreign exchange to normal business at the parallel market rate. It explains how we could afford 4 years of armed conflict in the DRC at a cost of US$1,8 billion so that our leaders could plunder the resources of the DRC in co-operation with the corrupt leadership of that country.

Its clever, it's legal and it's diabolical in its effects on this country. It destroys industries, impoverishes our people and distorts our democracy. But do not think for one moment that they do not know what they are doing, they do.

* * *

Fundamental Freedoms

Bulawayo, 15 September 2003

If I was to ask someone on the street what he/she regarded as the most fundamental freedoms that we should have and defend, we could all agree on the following: -

1. Freedom of association.

2. Freedom of speech.

Zimbabwe has both freedoms enshrined in its Constitution; it is a signatory to the United Nations declaration on Human Rights and has over the past 23 years signed numerous other agreements, which seek to entrench basic human, political and legal rights. They all stand null and void in Zimbabwe today.

We have no freedom of association - if I choose to join the MDC I risk losing my job, any contracts I might have with government and any chance of access to any of the resources controlled by the State. If we as an opposition Party want to hold a meeting we must seek state approval for such gatherings and this is not given as a routine, every application we submit runs the risk that it will be denied and the majority are denied. I have sat in secret gatherings of peasant farmers and their families, acutely aware at any moment that we may be raided and have to flee or face arrest. It is not a pleasant experience.

We have no freedom of speech. Many would argue that we can say what we want to in public, but everything we do is watched and recorded. Our telephones are taped (without our permission and without legal authority) on a regular basis. We are constantly prosecuted under laws which conflict with our Constitution but which the Courts refuse to either have examined in open Court or challenged in any other way.

The decision on Friday 12 September by the Supreme Court (in the form of our Chief Justice) to declare that the only independent daily newspaper was operating "illegally" when he had just ruled that they were obliged to register under a new set of laws that are blatantly in conflict with the Constitution is simply legal nonsense. It would not stand scrutiny anywhere else in the world where there is a half-decent legal system and judiciary.

But the State then acted immediately and closed down the only local means whereby the opposition can communicate with the people on a daily basis. The Daily News has been bombed twice and its editors and senior staff harassed on many occasions since it was launched. Despite all the obstacles it was selling more copies throughout the country than the state-controlled dailies. This was despite the fact that its cover price was twice that of the loss making state newspapers.

This represents the most recent and most blatant attack on our basic freedoms by a rogue regime. I hope it is enough to cause outrage in the rest of the continent and in the international community. These are not the acts of a regime that is sincere about seeking solutions to our current economic and political crisis.

Cathy Buckle's Zim Letter

Saturday, October 11, 2003 4:51 PM

Dear Family and Friends,

You have to really be on your toes to keep up with what's going on in Zimbabwe these days, particularly since we no longer have an independent daily newspaper. At six in the morning the top news headline on ZBC radio will be one thing and by 7am, the story has gone - completely - as the propaganda bosses wake up and re-write the news. In fact the propaganda has now reached such ludicrous levels that if the top news story is either football or tourism then you can almost guarantee that something really bad has happened in the country.

On Wednesday when the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions took to the streets of the capital and  5 other cities to demonstrate against taxes, fuel shortages, massively escalating food prices and the dreadful suffering of ordinary people, ZBC television chose to run the story 20 minutes into their main evening news bulletin - after football. In the capital city apparently scores of riot police patrolled the streets armed with tear gas and riot guns, determined to stop any and all demonstrators. Over 200 people were arrested, including the entire leadership of the ZCTU but the television news had no film footage at all and tagged the item onto the end of another story, prefacing the news with the word "meanwhile", as if it was an afterthought or a non-event. In fact it was an enormous event which caused world wide condemnation and hopefully reminded people outside of Zimbabwe that we are still here and still desperately trying to make our voices heard.

On Thursday evening the main news bulletin was even more ludicrous. Again football was the lead story and it went on, and on, and on. Finally, 32 minutes into the bulletin, struggling to concentrate but knowing that something really dreadful must have happened to warrant so much non news, the real news of the day came in two or three short sentences. The South African High Commissioner to Zimbabwe, Jeremiah Ndou, had been visiting one of his country's citizens who farms somewhere in Mashonaland West. The High Commissioner arrived on the farm accompanied by a South African television crew. Squatters and settlers on the farm apparently became uncomfortable when they saw the cameras and proceeded to barricade the gate and refused to let the High Commissioner or anyone else leave or enter the property. For two and quarter hours they were barricaded in and only released after high level political intervention. ZBC television went on to say that the High Commissioner had neither the right nor the government clearance to be visiting one of his citizens in the first place and insinuated that the entire event had been stage managed for the benefit of the cameras. Even more interesting was the South African Television coverage of this unbelievable outrage. On one news broadcast it was top headlines and then, just like in Zimbabwe, two hours later the story was completely gone - no follow ups, no commentary, just gone. Apparently a South African foreign affairs spokesman described the incident as a "misunderstanding." I cannot think of anywhere else in the world where the hostile barricading of a foreign High Commissioner would make as much non news as it made this week in both Zimbabwe and South Africa. South African President Thabo Mbeki has for so long insisted on "quiet diplomacy" when it comes to the appalling situation in Zimbabwe, but it seems as if a mob of farm invaders here  suddenly picked up the megaphone this week and we scored an own goal ! 

I have read hundreds of opinions and heard scores of interviews as to why South Africa has behaved the way it has throughout the Zimbabwean crisis. I'm afraid that none of the theories which range from party political bonds, to African brotherhood and nationalist togetherness - just none of them make sense to me. Perhaps I am just naive but with each day of quiet diplomacy South Africa seems to bear more of the brunt of Zimbabwe's mayhem. Their country is flooded with our legal and illegal migrants; their towns are filled with unemployed Zimbabweans, our foot and mouth-diseased cattle stray into their country as our fences and controls have gone, our malaria-laden mosquitoes wing over into their towns as we have no chemicals or manpower to spray the insects here anymore. It seems to me that South Africa's quiet diplomacy over Zimbabwe is now directly hurting that country's security systems, health structures and unemployment figures more and more and more and yet still they cannot just say very quietly and diplomatically : "Events in Zimbabwe must stop, right now." I cannot help but wonder if a referendum were held in South Africa today about the wisdom of "quiet diplomacy", what the outcome would be. Until next week, with love, cathy.

Copyright cathy buckle. 11th October 2003. http://africantears.netfirms.com My books about Zimbabwe's turmoil, "African Tears" and "Beyond Tears" can be sourced in the UK from handzup_02@hotmail.com ; in Australia and New Zealand from johnmreed@johnreedbooks.com and in Africa from www.exclusivebooks.com and www.kalahari.net  

WOZA MOYA

A WOMEN OF ZIMBABWE ARISE (WOZA) INFORMATIONAL NEWS SHEET

WOMEN OF ZIMBABWE ARISE - WOZA is a Zulu word meaning ‘Come forward’. WOZA was formed as a women’s civic movement to:

-     Provide women, from all walks of life with a united voice to speak out on issues affecting their day-to-day lives.

-     Empower female leadership that will lead community involvement in finding solutions to the current crisis.

-     Encourage women to stand up for their rights and freedoms.

-     Lobbying and advocacy on those issues affecting women.

KEY ACTIVITIES OF WOZA

1.   Non-violent civil Defiance actions such as the Valentine’s and Mothers’ Day street protests.

2.   Lobbying and Advocacy meetings. 

3.   Empowerment of women on their rights and access to resources.

WOZA encourages members to provide humanitarian assistance to their community - helping the sick, aged or orphans.

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Cockeyed systems OUT - Zvinhu zviri kokayi hatidi - Izinto ezikokayi azifuneki

THE CASH CRISIS - HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

The short answer: bad economic management by Government. It is their duty to manage the country’s economy in a way that benefits the people. Governments should budget and not spend more than they receive through taxes. For the economy to run well, enough bank notes must be printed to meet the needs of citizens and businesses.

The longer answer does not change that fact; it just shows more ways in which the Government has failed to manage the economy. Please read on the details are very important if you want to understand why you cannot easily get your money from the Bank or Building Societies. Running the government budget is similar to running the budget in our homes, but with two important differences.

1.   The first is that our household budgets are smaller than the state budget

2.   When the state runs out of money, it can usually print more.

If we could do that in our homes, we would never be short of cash. Government does have the right to print money but they should follow strict rules. When government needs money to run the country, it is supposed to collect that money in taxes. If the government spends more than what it receives as tax, it can borrow the difference as an extra tax. This money collected would be used to pay back the borrowed money. Our HIV/AIDS levies do not count as an extra tax. Those that are sick should directly benefit from this money.  

QUESTION: WHEN SHOULD GOVERNMENT PRINT MORE MONEY?

ANSWER: ONLY WHEN THE ECONOMY IS GROWING.

If the economy is growing, the amount of money printed should be equal to that growth. For our household, we say that we are achieving good financial housekeeping if money coming in is exceeding money going out. For the country we might call it good governance. The important issue here is the fact that our government has borrowed money and spent it. If the borrowed money had been invested carefully, the investment would have generated the money needed to repay the lenders. Borrowing is not bad or dangerous if the borrowed money is invested rather than being used to build expensive houses and luxury items.

However, for individuals as well as governments, it is very dangerous to borrow money and simply spend it like a small child buying sweets to ease hunger. When the time comes to pay it back, another bigger amount has to be borrowed because the lender will have to be repaid the capital and paid an additional amount in interest. As the amounts get bigger, the borrower gets deeper into debt, like the child who remains hungry and malnourished even after eating the sweets. In Zimbabwe, government has been spending borrowed money for many years, and has had to borrow to repay the loans and borrow yet more to pay the interest. If Zimbabwe had to pay this debt tomorrow, every man, woman and child in the country would need to contribute at least  $ 50 000.

QUESTION: WHO ARE THE LENDERS AND ARE THEY RESPECTED? 

ANSWER: YOU AND ME - WE, THE PEOPLE ARE THE DISRESPECTED LENDERS.

It is the ordinary Zimbabweans that PAY for the government and its people to work. We pay their water and electricity and we even pay their staff salaries. We have heard that we contributed through our taxes to build a house worth over FIFTY billion Zimbabwe dollars. How much did we contribute to this expense instead of paying to build our own houses? Government use our money through the POSB, pension funds such as NSSA. NSSA is the government’s compulsory pension scheme for the whole nation. Building Societies such as CABS and Beverly have grown because we ask them to keep our money. It is an outrage that we struggle to get our money back when we now need it so badly. We have heard that Banks are making billions of dollars of profit during these hard times but we, the owners of the money, can only draw $5000 of our own money after queuing for hours - day and night.

We did not give permission to lend our money to government; they just passed a law telling the banks and savings institutions to lend our money to the state. When the debt was growing very rapidly several years ago, government decided to cut the interest rates to reduce the amount it would have to pay to the lenders - that’s us. This seemed a good idea for government, but it was a bad move for us. The interest we earned from our savings and pension funds went down very steeply and we are suffering. Inflation was rising strongly at the time, but the money that we received in interest was too little to make up for inflation, so when the loans were repaid with interest, our savings institutions received very much less in buying power. In effect, government has used our savings without our permission, to pay off the national debt. This process has left thousands of people in poverty and made the savings held by the rest of us very nearly worthless. That is how our savings have now become a debt that averages $50 000 for every one of us.

But now government is finding that the idea was not as clever as they first thought. They have to keep borrowing to pretend to pay us back and so they will just print more money instead of earning it. They will print the money, and keep on printing it until enough has been printed to meet the payments and maybe there will be enough for us.

They were told this would cause inflation. Their answer? “So what? That is a problem for the future.” A fast track short term ‘solution’ to disaster! A hungry child buying sweets instead of eating food.

So government has been trying to print the extra money it needs. But this is also proving difficult to do because it is a cockeyed solution. Foreign exchange has to be spent on the very special paper and printing inks and on the printing plates and machinery. Unfortunately, Zimbabwe is very short of foreign currency because export industries have had to struggle to survive and many have had to shrink or close. We are even more short of foreign exchange because we now have to import food that we used to grow for ourselves.

Our own shrinking economy has caused the Zimbabwe dollar to lose most of its value, so we now need many more of them to buy a United States dollar or any other currency. This has increased the costs of importing everything and has caused more inflation. The government has been able to print quite a lot of money, but this has increased inflation even faster. It is like running in a circle. You get nowhere! The higher the inflation, the more money is needed to pay the prices and the more that has to be printed, and this then causes even more inflation. Our inflation rate is now the highest in the world. It is so high that we are finding it impossible to produce enough money to keep up with the rate at which prices and wages are rising.

WHAT CAN WE AFFORD TO BUY AS PRICES GO UP AND UP AND NOTES BECOME HARD TO FIND?

Look at how the prices for basic commodities have gone up since 1981 and at the same time less and less of us are working. There are 70% of ordinary Zimbabweans unemployed. How do they afford to feed their families?

Zimbabwe Grocery Prices 1981, 1999, 2003

When prices double, the amount of money needed to pay those prices also has to double. Wages have to go up so that workers can afford to pay the higher prices, and that makes the production of the needed extra money even more important. But we see that government has failed to do what was necessary and we see that they cannot even do the wrong things the right way.

The Zimbabwe Mint in Bulawayo opened in August 2001 to produce coins. It is now a ‘white elephant’.  We cannot even get the Banks to accept coins from us, as they seem to be worthless as money.

The rate at which we need to print notes is already more than what government can print, so we are having to spend even more of our scarce foreign currency to pay foreign companies to print notes for us. Worse still, somebody in government believes that bank notes with larger denominations will become the cause of yet more inflation, the Reserve Bank has not been allowed to produce notes with values of $5 000 or $10 000 or $20 000.

This means that we still have to print many more notes than we would need if bigger notes were permitted - any Grade Four child could tell you that - but we are not allowed to have them. Forty $500 notes would have the value of one $20 000 note and printing forty notes costs forty times as much as printing one note. How long will our authorities fail to solve problems that any 10-year-old could solve? We think that this is a very poor standard of governance and that this is what has caused the bank note crisis. It is this quality of economic management that is giving you a problem in managing your household budget and so the economy has become cockeyed. (Cockeyed means crooked, lopsided, drunk or it can be used to describe a foolish scheme.) If you have other views, please tell us.

Bring on the capitalists

September 28, 2003

Mark Steyn

SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Wanna score some government dope? In Canada, the courts recently ruled that patients suffering from AIDS, cancer and other diseases were entitled to enjoy the benefits of ''medical marijuana'' -- and not just any old marijuana, but official government marijuana, supplied to them by Health Canada, the government health system. Health Canada mulled it over and set up a program to grow the court-ordered federal pot in a disused mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba.

Of the first 10 patients to be supplied with the government weed, half claim it's the worst pot they've ever smoked. They're sending it back to Ottawa and they want a full refund. ''It's totally unsuitable for human consumption,'' says Jim Wakeford, an AIDS patient in Gibsons, British Columbia. ''I threw up,'' says Barrie Dalley of Toronto.

Health Canada insists their dope contains 10.2 percent THC, the main active ingredient. But the respected pot lobbyist Philippe Lucas says the government weed is only 3 percent THC and full of contaminants like lead and arsenic. Aren't lead and arsenic dangerous? To modify Nancy Reagan: ''Just say no to government drugs.''

One of the reasons I'm in favour of small government is because there's hardly anything the government doesn't do worse than anybody else who wants to give it a go. Usually when I make this observation, I'm thinking of, say, Britain's late unlamented nationalized car industry. But when the government of a G7 nation can't run a small marijuana sideline as well as a college student with a window box, that seems to set an entirely new standard for official underperformance. Big government goes to pot, in every sense.

Instead of its hugely wasteful ''war on drugs,'' the U.S. government might have been better just to legalize them, give the contract to the government of Canada, and in three months the entire drug market would have collapsed and guys would be huddled in darkened alleys saying, ''Hey, man, do you know where I can get some butterscotch pudding?''

Other plants in the news these days include the Gentry indigo bush. This rare shrub grows in a few selected parts of Arizona and Mexico, close to a proposed transmission line Tucson Electric Power hopes to construct to enable it to supply electricity to its southern neighbor, so that impoverished Mexicans will have better street lighting to guide them as they swarm across the U.S. border to pick up their complimentary drivers licenses and free health care from Gray Davis. But now the whole project is in doubt. Although an environmental study says the Gentry indigo bush would be unaffected one way or the other by the power line, the Center for Biological Diversity is suing the U.S. government to get the bush listed as an endangered species and thus indirectly put pressure on Tucson Electric.

Alas, Jeff Humphrey of the Fish and Wildlife Service says his agency has no money to list any new endangered species because its budget is mostly tied up in court cases brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and similar groups. Got that? If this keeps up, the endangered species list will itself be an endangered species. And the barrage of litigation on behalf of various beleaguered flora and fauna will have resulted in a spectacular increase in population for mainly one species: environmental lawyers.

The Gentry indigo bush doesn't seem to be ''endangered.'' True, you can't find it in northern Maine. But then you never could. This would seem to be yet another example of how every do-gooding cause eventually floats free of whatever good it was trying to do and becomes a self-perpetuating business all of its own. The racism industry, for example, is now so large and lucrative and employs so many highly remunerated people from the Rev. Jesse Jackson down that it has a far greater interest than the Klu Klux Klan in maintaining racism. Thus, the African-American Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee was recently moved to complain that the naming of hurricanes is racist. Apparently, blacks are being discriminated against because hardly any massively destructive meteorological phenomena are given African-American names. The black community can't relate to some white-bread wind like Hurricane Isabel. Why are there never any Hurricane Leroys? It's deeply racist and insulting to imply that only WASPily appellated forces of nature are capable of billions of dollars of coastal damage.

Which brings us, as most things do, to Iraq. In the last few weeks, almost all the big NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- have pulled out of the country, either partially or totally: Oxfam, the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders ... Is it dangerous? Maybe. When I was in Iraq earlier this year, I detected a good deal of resentment at the NGO big shots swanking around like colonial grandees in their gleaming Cherokees and Suburbans. But Iraq's a good deal less dangerous than, say, Liberia, where drugged-up gangs roam the streets killing at random, and the humanitarian lobby -- Big Consciences -- is happy to stay on.

What's different is the political agenda. The humanitarian touring circuit is now the oldest established permanent floating crap game. Regions such as West Africa, where there's no pretense anything will ever get better, or the Balkans, which are maintained by the U.N. as the global equivalent of a slum housing project, suit the aid agencies perfectly: There's never not a need for them. But in Iraq they've decided they're not interested in staying to see the electric grid back up to capacity and the water system improved if it's an American administration at the helm. The Big Consciences have made a political decision: that it's not in their interest for the Bush crowd to succeed, and that calculation outweighs any concern they might have for the Iraqi people.

Heigh-ho. For six months, their Chicken Little predictions of humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq have failed to emerge. If the country gets by perfectly fine without them, that may be a very useful lesson.

Meanwhile, who's staying on? The private sector: Bechtel and Halliburton and all the other supposed Bush cronies invited to help rebuild postwar Iraq. According to the conspirazoids, Dick Cheney planned 9/11 so that he'd have an excuse to topple Saddam Hussein and his old company Halliburton could make a killing. Fine. Let's take that as read. The fact is, right now, Oxfam and the other do-gooders have fled, and the only folks standing shoulder to shoulder with the Iraqi people are the wicked capitalists.

So, in a month when the government can't even be a competent drug dealer, and environmental nonprofit groups have bankrupted the endangered species list, and the international humanitarians have decided the Iraqis can go screw themselves, I say: Let's hear it for the private sector.

Death of Czech Hero

From Daily Telegraph of London Obituaries 25 September 2003

Forwarded by Dr. Hal Colebatch

Major-General Alois Siska, who has died aged 89, spent six days in an open dinghy on the North Sea before being captured on the Dutch coast and sent to Colditz Castle; however, when he returned to Prague from two years' hospital treatment in England after the war, he was not welcomed as a hero, but jailed and forced to do menial jobs.

On December 28 1941, "Lou" Siska - as he was known to fellow members of the RAF's all-Czech 311 Squadron - piloted a Wellington bomber in a raid on Wilhelmshaven docks on the German coast. He was turning for home after dropping his load when his port engine caught fire. Shortly afterwards, the engine fell off, and the aircraft ditched.

Siska was knocked out as his head struck the instrument panel; but he was revived by the rising waters and managed to climb out on to the port wing. Although swept off by a wave, he hung on until he was rescued by four members of his crew who had scrambled aboard a dinghy; the rear gunner had gone down with the aircraft.

A floating mine narrowly passed them by; several ships in the night failed to respond to their signals. On New Year's Day they sighted a seagull, indicating that land was close, and one of the crew suggested that they try to catch it in order to drink its blood; but they were too weak to make the effort.

After two of the crew had died and one had passed out, Siska and his front-gunner decided to end their lives with drugs from the medical box. But a cocktail of these mixed with sea-water did not have the required effect, and they now discovered that the dinghy was sinking. As they attempted to tip their two dead into the sea, the front-gunner sighted land. Later that day, they were washed up on the Dutch coast and taken prisoner.

Siska's time in the dinghy had left him with frostbitten legs, and gangrene had set in. He was taken first to a naval hospital at Alkmaar, then to a military hospital in Amsterdam, where it was decided to amputate his legs. As he was placed on the operating table, Siska had a heart attack.

All thoughts of amputation were shelved. Alternative methods of saving his legs were attempted, and he responded in some measure to the treatment. Six months later, Siska was moved to Germany where he was confined to several PoW camps until the Gestapo sent him to Prague in July 1944.

Since Czechoslovakia had been incorporated into the Reich, Siska was charged with espionage and high treason and sent to Colditz to await a court martial. He was lucky that the Gestapo was diverted by the July Bomb Plot against Hitler; the Red Cross also intervened, saying that Czechs in the RAF were British for the duration of the war.

Siska spent 10 months in the fortress, but the day before the Americans arrived he was moved to another camp, where some 300 Allied soldiers wounded at Dunkirk were awaiting liberation.

A few days later, the 12 young German soldiers at this camp abandoned their guardroom to the prisoners. Seven more Germans arrived who, having been persuaded by the senior British medical officer that the war had virtually ended, fled to a nearby forest to cook a meal; but, when an American fighter strafed them, they ran off.

Believing that the Germans' meal would be too good to waste, Siska went out to collect it. As he returned, 12 more Germans turned up, and were promptly made prisoners by Siska and his fellow inmates who had found weapons abandoned in the guardroom.

The following day, Siska hobbled out on his crutches with a white sheet to greet a column of American tanks. He was transferred to Brussels and then flown to RAF Manston on his 31st birthday, before being sent to Sir Archibald McIndoe's burns and plastic surgery unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. It took Siska two years to recover the partial use of his legs there.

Alois Siska was born at Lutopecny, Moravia, on May 15 1914. After training as a commercial pilot, he did his national service with the Czech Air Force.

Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Siska sought anonymity working in an aircraft factory owned by the Bata shoe company before the Gestapo started looking for him. A plan to steal an aircraft was betrayed, so he fled through the Fascist puppet state of Slovakia to Hungary.

There he was imprisoned and escaped from several jails before being confined in Budapest's Citadella. Again he got away, making his way through Yugoslavia to Beirut, where he joined the French Foreign Legion. But when it was realised that he was a pilot, he was sent to a newly-formed Czech air force unit in France.

After the French capitulated, Siska left the Merignac airfield near Bordeaux, and boarded a Danish cargo boat bound for England. Then as a member of 311 Squadron, he flew half a dozen missions to bomb harbour installations in the Channel ports before his capture.

After two years at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Siska returned to Czechoslovakia. But the role of the Czech pilots who had served with the RAF was being played down. He was not allowed to return to England to complete his treatment, and when the Communists gained power in 1948 he was dismissed from the Czech air force, jailed, forced to do menial jobs and exiled from Prague.

Siska's wife, Vlasta Prochazkova, whom he had married in 1949, was prevented from finishing university, and the couple were sent to a collective farm in a remote country district. Now disabled and living on a tiny pension, which was periodically reduced, Siska was not allowed to work; but he taught himself to repair watches, wireless sets and, later, televisions.

In 1961, the family, which now included their daughter, was allowed to move nearer to Prague. Two years later Siska was called to East Berlin as a witness at the trial of the Nazi lawyer Hans Globke, who had been instrumental in charging him with treason in 1944; this drew attention throughout Europe to the plight of the Czech pilots, and led to an easing of their restrictions.

By 1966 Siska was working for the Czech civil airline as a fire and security inspector, and during the "Prague Spring" of 1968 he was reinstated in the Czech air force. The Russian invasion shortly afterwards, however, led to his second dismissal.

Siska was able to return to Prague only in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Communist regime. At last he received proper recognition: in 2001, he was promoted major-general, and a fighter squadron in the Czech Air Force is now named after him.

A friendly and humorous man, Siska was, in his own opinion and that of his doctors, living on borrowed time after December 1941. He used it to the full. In his later years, he lectured to Czech schoolchildren about his wartime experiences, and was a regular attender at gatherings of the Guinea Pig Club, formed by the patients at East Grinstead. He died on September 9, three weeks after making his first return visit to Colditz.

Alois Siska was awarded a full military funeral in Prague, with a fly-past of army helicopters flying the Czech and British flags.  

AN UTTERLY STUPID IDEA

Darby Report subscribers – please oppose the stupid, wasteful and dangerous proposal to widen the Spit Bridge and increase traffic flow through Mosman, an ignorant proposal cooked up with the sole (and, sadly, successful) aim of conning the people of Manly into re-electing the Labor Party’s surrogate, David Barr MLA.

Establish an alliance with wise locals Bill McPhee, Pat Daley, Geoff Kendall, Peter Papas, Cr Jim Reid, Cr David Dickman and many others in rejecting the stupid idea which has already been rejected by the engineers.

Join the Sensible Traffic Action Group by declaring your support in an email to stagroup@hotmail.com.

Darby Report Subscribers wherever you live in the world: Please remind your favourite legislator that Zimbabweans all deserve to remain part of humanity. 

Taiwan ROC and the UN

TAIWAN DESERVES A UN SEAT

By Jeff Jacoby

The Boston Globe

September 18, 2003

As the 58th session of the United Nations General Assembly opened this week, the gavel was wielded by its new president, Julian Hunte of Saint Lucia.  When Hunte was elected to the post in June, the UN issued a statement hailing the fact that the presidency was being assumed "by a representative of the smallest country ever to hold that office."  This, it commented, was proof of the UN's "faith in the equal right of nations large and small, as enunciated in the [UN] Charter."

Nations don't come much smaller or less influential than Saint Lucia.  It is a minor Caribbean island known primarily for bananas and tourism.  With a population of 158,000, it is less than half the size of Cincinnati.  Its $700 million economy ranks in the lowest quintile of GDPs -- No. 193 on one standard list of countries around the world. (Haiiti's, by way of comparison, is $12 billion -- No. 123 on the same list.)

But however insignificant Saint Lucia might be on the world stage, in the General Assembly it is the equal of every other country.  Universality is one of the UN's core principles; the Charter makes membership available to "all . . . peace-loving states." Within the General Assembly, all states -- continental superpower and Caribbean flyspeck alike -- have an equal vote.

To be sure, that principle has some severe drawbacks.  The worst is that it makes no distinction between tyrannies and democracies -- a repressive dictatorship like Burma is as much a member in good standing as democratic Belgium or Brazil.  On the other hand, it reflects the universality of many of the world's scourges.  Terrorism, SARS, and drug abuse cross borders and ignore boundaries.  As Hunte put it upon being elected, the UN system recognizes that no nation is an island unto itself.

Except one.

Of all the nations in the world, only one -- Taiwan -- is excluded from the United Nations.  It has not even been allowed to participate in General Assembly sessions as a non-voting observer, a courtesy extended to entities ranging from the Holy See to the Order of Malta to the International Committee of the Red Cross.  This week, for the 11th year in a row, Taiwan is asking to be admitted to the UN.  This week, for the 11th year in a row, it will be turned down.

And why?  Is Taiwan guilty of some odious international crime?  Is it a dictatorship? Does it make war on its neighbours, or practice apartheid, or harbour terrorists?

No: Taiwan is blackballed from the UN because its neighbour is a bully.  The Communist government in Beijing insists that Taiwan is merely a renegade Chinese province, not a country in its own right and therefore not entitled to a seat in the UN.  That is a ludicrous stance to take in 2003, after more than half a century of Taiwanese self-rule. It is akin to maintaining that North Korea is merely a rebellious region of the Republic of Korea, or that Slovenia is nothing but a refractory district of Yugoslavia.  However reasonable such arguments might once have been, today they would be specious.

But China devotes considerable economic and diplomatic muscle to enforcing its specious position.  It throws tantrums and threatens reprisals whenever Taiwan is treated with the respect due an independent nation.  Sadly, most of the world's governments find it easier to go along with Beijing's blackball than to defend Taiwan's right to a UN seat of its own.

Once upon a time, Beijing and Taipei each claimed to be the legitimate government of both mainland China and Taiwan, and each claimed it was entitled to the UN's China seat. That dispute was settled in 1971, when the General Assembly voted to recognize the Beijing as "the sole legitimate government representing China in the United Nations."  That closed the question of who should represent China.  But it left open a different question: Who represents the people of Taiwan?  For 32 years, the answer has been: nobody.

Beijing's energetic spin to the contrary notwithstanding, Taiwan has never been ruled by the People's Republic of China.  From the founding of the PRC to the present, Taiwan has had its own government, maintained its own diplomatic profile in the world, and seen to its own defence.  There is no justification for treating it as anything less than what it is -- a nation unto itself.

In recent decades, Taiwan has transformed itself from an authoritarian one-party state into a vibrant parliamentary democracy.  Unlike its thuggish neighbour across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has become a land of liberty and human rights, a trustworthy US ally, and a responsible member of the community of nations.  Its $400 billion economy is one of the world's most dynamic -- No.  23 on the same list that ranks Saint Lucia 193rd.  Its population of 22.6 million is larger than three-fourths of the UN membership.  If minuscule Saint Lucia is entitled to a voice in the General Assembly, surely Taiwan is too.

Fifteen nations signed the petition seeking Taiwan's admission to the UN, but the United States was not among them.  This reluctance to stand up for a beleaguered democratic friend does us no honour.  The barring of Taiwan is a clear wrong. Americans should be the first to say so.

The French

Denis Boyles, National Review Online

12 September 2003  (forwarded by Erich Kern)

You would think that commemorating September 11 would be a snap for our allies, the French. After all, it was on September 11, 1814, that the Americans were victorious over the British at the critical Battle of Plattsburg. The battle was the turning point of the War of 1812 — fought by the U.S. partly in protest against Great Britain's nasty habit of kidnapping American sailors and pressing them into service in the Royal Navy, but also partly in defense of France, which was suffering under a British embargo. It was only the first time America went to war for France.

Surprisingly, the Battle of Plattsburg went unnoticed yesterday (11 September 2003) in the French press! Instead, a more recent September 11 event captured the front page of France's most august broadsheet, Le Monde: The anniversary of the overthrow of the Chilean government of Marxist Salvadore Allende in a military coup backed by the CIA. In fact, the coup — and the American role in it — was the subject of a whole series of pieces in Le Monde leading up to 9/11 (the same in the Guardian, where an emotional special report was devoted to "the other September 11").

Le Monde's lead item — "Chile, 1973: The Other September 11" — actually avoided overt Yank-bashing, leaving that to other pieces. But it's hardly necessary. Every liberal in Europe already knows what hideous evil was wrought by the Great Satan 30 years ago in Santiago when the U.S. gave its support to the Chilean military. You can argue your Belleau Wood and your Normandy and your Marshall Plan all you want. On the great moral tally-sheet of the Left all of that stuff is easily trumped by American complicity in the overthrow of Allende.

America's September 11? Just another day in the downward spiral of American prestige in the French press, where finer minds appreciate nuance and complexity far beyond the ken of your average Texas Republican. Two years ago, Le Monde famously headlined, "We Are All Americans." This year's headline is "Two Years Afterward." (Perhaps it should have been "We Are All Chileans".) The angle: George W. Bush is ridiculous for being "convinced that the civilized world is engaged in a new world war against a new totalitarianism" and for not paying attention to America's "alliés traditionnels," a term Le Monde uses without apparent irony, despite the fact that they mean France.

The Euro-left has a problem with September 11, because to express sympathy for America is not en emotion much in evidence in the European media these days. "Support" was for September 11, 2001. "Sympathy" was for September 11, 2002. This year, the prevailing sentiment is disdain. (An exception: Italy, where many editors front-paged a letter from the president of Italy to Bush expressing solidarity in the fight against terrorism. In Germany, most newspapers, even including the leftist Suddeutsche Zeitung passed on the chance to wax sardonic and made do with fairly straightforward accounts.) In France, most papers ran with the story of the bin Laden tapes or something about America's failure to crush al Qaeda, topics far more comforting to those drunk on anti-Americanism.

In fact, for a nation like France, where make-believe victories are given to he who clings most tightly to the moral edge, the Allende coup is just one more thing for which the French should thank us. First, there was the Security Council controversy earlier this year, which couldn't have come at a better time for King Jack of France. The U.S.'s plea for U.N. support provided a lofty hedge behind which the Chirac government was able to shield its dismal economic performance while it built support for some lame but controversial pension reforms.

Now, after a long, dismal August in which Le Monde reports as many as 12,000 Frenchmen died in a heat wave the size of Tucson because of a confluence of government mismanagement of health services, a deep love of the Kyoto Treaty, and a sweaty disdain for Yankee-style air conditioning — along with a propensity for every adult in France (including, apparently, most doctors) to pile into a Peugeot or Airbus and run away from responsibility for a month — we have given Chirac and his Bill Maher-like henchman, Dominique de Villepin, a chance to preen the moral feathers of France once more.

All it took was America's most recent bizarre, grotesque return to the U.N. When Bush sent Powell back to the Security Council for some postwar assistance, it was Chirac and Villepin who got the benefit of a pleasant distraction from their real problems, including all those unclaimed bodies in the morgues of Paris. Having mastered the rhetoric of pomposity by denouncing America's "logic of war" before the Iraq invasion, Villepin, according to Le Figaro, expressed his sorrow at America's "logic of occupation," while advancing France's love for "the logic of sovereignty," as reported by Liberation.

What about the logic of freon? If the U.S. lost 15,000 American soldiers in Baghdad in a month, I suspect there would have been a different set of headlines yesterday in Paris.

Another rationalist construct missing from all these French reports: the French logic of extortion. France settled with Libya years ago for the 1989 bombing of a UTA DC-10; a French judge awarded the families $33 million in 1999. The French then announced that as far as France was concerned, Libya had met its obligations and U.N. sanctions against the country should be lifted — despite ongoing efforts by the U.S. to hold the Libyans responsible for the 1988 destruction of a Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The PanAm families persisted and finally settled for $2.7 billion. France suddenly did an about-face. Villepin moved to veto any resolution easing restrictions against Libya — and thus blocking a payment of the PanAm settlement — unless the French got more money than they had settled for earlier. According to the IHT, fortunately for the PanAm families, Libya acquiesced.

Now for a pop quiz: When the latest agreement between France and Libya was reached, who said, "What matters to us is honor. We don't care about money." Was it Libya's Muammar Qaddafi? Or France's Dominique de Villepin? It was Qaddafi, believe it or not. But if you didn't know the answer, this little item, from today's Daily Telegraph, should confuse you completely.

In London, a parliamentary committee has reported that Andrew Gilligan and the BBC lied when they broadcast the allegation that the Blair government had "sexed up" its claims of Iraqi threats in an effort to convince Britons to go to war. The BBC had staked its reputation on the accuracy of that claim, yet somehow, in the fog of the British press, exemplified by this report in the Guardian, the committee's findings have morphed from an obvious indictment of the BBC into yet another Blair blunder, with defense chief Geoff Hoon accused of being "potentially misleading" (as opposed to the BBC, which was actually and persistently misleading) and once again left hanging limply in the wind. Poor Hoon could moonlight as an American flag in Paris and get more respect.

From a US Marine in Iraq

Published in FrontPageMagazine.com | October 1, 2003

Forwarded by Erich Kern

Hey Guys,

Things have been pretty hectic since the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the reporters in the press like to say over and over:

·                             We did expect some armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen;

·                             It isn't any worse than expected;

·                             Things are getting better each day, and

·                             The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal bitching and griping.

My brief love affair with the press guys who had the courage to be embedded with the troops during the fighting is probably over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S.

I'm in Baghdad now since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar. We came up in mid-June to help set up operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It represents a major shift in tactics. Instead of being sitting ducks for the snipers, we now are going after them.

I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams from the networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A teams seeking, finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are well-armed, well-paid (in U.S. dollars) and always waiting to wail for the press and then shoot some GI in the back in the midst of a crowd.

The only reason the GIs are upset (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. Then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us.

Some do hate us. But the vast majority don't, and more and more see that the GIs don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19-year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harm's way. The Iraqis saw it, too.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields. The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair and balanced press?

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about America and now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T-shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios. They participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-guy shows up in the neighborhood.

The younger kids are going back to school again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about the Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal. They see the same GIs who man the corner checkpoint also help clear the playground, install new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a couple of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good but were having fun, probably more than most Little Leaguers.

The place is still a mess, but most of it has been for years. But the hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought into the 21st Century. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are teaching their docs new techniques and one American pharmaceutical company (you know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about as greedy) donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for a year.

Safe water is more available. Electricity has been restored to pre-war levels but saboteurs keep cutting the lines. And the old Ba'ath big shots are upset because they can't get fuel for their private generators. One actually complained to General McKeirnan, who told him it was a rough world.

The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing the ones that weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they did in East Berlin, Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols of Iraqi cops and U.S./U.K./Polish MPs now in most of the larger cities. Basra has 3.5 million inhabitants. Mosul is a city of 2 million. Kirkuk has 1 million. Most of hundreds of other small towns have not had riots or shootings.

The six U.K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the ex-cops they were re-habbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I talked to, the town now has about twenty permanent vacancies in its police force. He's a big potato eater from Belfast named Huggins and knows how to handle terrorists after twenty years fighting with the IRA.

The MSNBC reported on the air that "dozens of GIs" were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an Engineer Battalion that was parked by a construction site. The truck was hit and burned, three GIs received minor injuries (including the driver who burnt his hand) and three warriors of Allah were promptly sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise.

A mosque in Fallujah blew up this morning while the local imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the local Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans hit it with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any mosque left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and BBC. One fool was dragging around a bloody piece of tin, claiming it was part of the missile.

The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one of my guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually wore around his face that made him look like a girl. He was a local leader of the Feyhadeen. We took the clown in custody and were asked rather indignantly by the twit from BBC if we were trying to shut up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and friends blown up."

I told the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a cell with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him to headquarters. They declined the invitation. Guess what played on the British Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a mosque? See the poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing his mosque and relatives? Yep. The Palestinian.

Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters and generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah. The only thing that frightens them more is hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is out that a trip to Guantanimo Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they usually start squealing like little mice when an interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No wonder the International Red Cross, the National Council of Churches and the French keep protesting about the place. They know it has proven to be very effective in keeping several hundred real fanatical psychopaths in check and very frankly would rather see them cut loose to go kill some more GIs or innocent Americans just to make W. look bad.

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a couple of Bradleys pointed their way if they decide to riot. The more we go after them and not vice-versa, I think we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah, they'll get lucky now and then, but it's showtime.

Our first objective is to get the die-hards off the street (or make them too scared to come out in them) and destroy their caches of weapons (we have collected more than 227,000 AK-47s and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

We must continue to get public services up and running so the local families can get water, sewage and garbage service, electricity, public transportation, oil fields and refineries working and a dinar that won't halve in value every month.

It's going to be a long haul (remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and West Germany) but if we don't stick with it, nobody else will, and we'll have some other loony running the place again. This place has greater potential than Saudi Arabia or Iran.

SpringFest 2003

at

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Mount Wilson, NSW

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Shostakovich: Adagio, Polka

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Sunday 26^th October 2003

Recitals 12.30pm and 2.45pm

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Enquiries: ph 9968 1232; email: tombreen@optusnet.com.au

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Australian Flag Society               Michael Darby’s Blogspot                    Jeff Jacoby

Oxfam Laid Bare

The Australian Financial Review on 23 September 2003 carried this insight by Ian Howarth.

The Australian mining industry has condemned a call by a foreign aid agency for the federal government to establish a committee to oversee the behaviour of resources companies operating overseas.  BHP Billiton was singled out by Oxfam Community Aid Abroad for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, even though the alleged incidents mostly occurred long before BHPB took over the assets. The company has denied the accusations.

Oxfam's mining ombudsman claimed that some Australian companies were guilty of "human rights abuses and environmental degradation" as well as "increasing conflict and instability in local communities". Other companies, including Climax Mining, Newmont Australia, Abelle and Rio Tinto, were accused of a variety of abuses.

Minerals Council of Australia executive director Mitch Hooke said "they [Oxfam] have no right to try and use the resources industry as leverage to impose their standards on developing nations".

Well done, Ian Howarth and the AFR, for adding to the evidence that Oxfam, like its Australian affiliate Community Aid Abroad, is a political organisation rather than a humanitarian organisation. 

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MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITY:    Darby Report subscribers – please encourage all your media contacts to interview Korea Veteran Colonel Allan Limburg, telephone 03 9561 2733, on the subject of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and its dire effect upon Aussie War Veterans. And please remind your local Federal member that reform should continue in our administration of Veterans’ Affairs.

-We´ve Got Mail

Ambitions of Malcolm Turnbull

Dear Michael,

Further to my recent letter to the Australian Financial Review (AFR, Letters, 8^th October, 2003, “Turnbull’s lack of understanding”) I think that it is worth recounting some of the history of Mr. Malcolm Turnbull’s various attempts at the ascent to the power which he clearly so desperately desires.

By one of those strange twists of fate, I was in the same year as Malcolm at the University of Sydney, although I doubt that Malcolm would even recall me. Of course, Malcolm didn’t attend many lectures, having already adopted that attitude of crypto-patrician remoteness from hoi polloi which has marked his career ever since. Whilst we muddled our way through Legal Institutions and Torts and Contracts earning a pittance working part-time at such intellectual pursuits as car parking and bar attending, Malcolm was ensconsed already in the portals of power, working as a journalist for the Packer organization. This connection would appear to have survived, despite various tribulations, to this day, if recent reports of the identity of a certain new member of the Point Piper Branch are to be believed. It was a point of gossip amongst the student slave class that apparently Malcolm actually paid another student to take notes for him. Such an allegation may have been complete rubbish, but it did appear to fit Malcolm’s character. As today, some from his elite circle were impressed, the majority, however, adopted a view of cynical disinterest in his activities..

Being the 1970’s, it was not terribly ‘trendy’ to be associated with the Liberal Party and, as an avid follower of fashion, Malcolm chose the Left for his interest and support, being reputed at one stage to have joined the Australian Labor Party and, through his association with Gordon Barton, becoming involved with the Australia Party. It is almost surplus to requirement to point out that the objective of both these parties was to keep the Liberal Party from office. Whilst Malcolm was flirting with the Left some of us were taking on the Spartacists, Trotskyists, Maoists and various other militant left wing groups in fora such as the extremely lively Students’ Representative Council and front lawn meetings (always exciting!). I doubt if Malcolm had to suffer the prejudice and discrimination meted out by Marxist lecturers to Liberal Club identities by way of marking down or even, in my case, non marking of essays and other work. However, we believed in our cause, which was something greater than ourselves, and, in the end, in 1975, we succeeded, almost beyond our wildest dreams! By 1978, in combination with others such as Tony Abbott’s group, we actually controlled the SRC with Tony as President.

However, around this time the State Liberal Party was in one of its customary states of malaise, going through some internal tumult and finally grinding to a halt under Eric Willis in the ‘Wrannslide’ election of 1976. However, in about 1983, Malcolm decided that there was an ‘opportunity’ and offered himself for preselection in the State seat of Mosman. Unfortunately for him, the preselectors decided that previous membership of the ALP was not really a qualification to be a Liberal Party parliamentarian and the ill-starred Philip Smiles was chosen to replace David Arblaster at the next election. Thereafter followed many years of State Liberal Party aimlessness only saved by the advent of the Greiner premiership in 1988. During this time of Liberal disarray, Malcolm saw it as opportune to ally himself with the ALP once again, continuing his association with the Packers and developing business links with Neville Wran and Nicholas Whitlam – two names one would probably not have seen on a list of attendees at a Liberal Party fund raiser. Not that there were many people at Liberal Party fund raisers in those days. Once again, we were against the wall, being out of government also at the Federal level,  and this was not an attractive proposition for Malcolm and his cronies.

Of course, Malcolm had made his name in the ‘Spycatcher’ case and we were all expected to be suitably impressed, particularly with his ‘patriotic’ fervour of discontent with our ‘British overlords’. And thus developed Malcolm the Republican. Taking on the mantle of a modern Julius Caesar – ‘in order to save this constitution, I need to destroy it’ – Malcolm decided to save us all and became actively involved with the Australian Republican Movement. Once again, this was not exactly Liberal Party policy, but he decided to run again for Liberal Party preselection, this time in the seat which appears to have captured his imagination permanently, Wentworth. He lost.

Nevertheless, undaunted, Malcolm turned his political energies entirely towards the ARM. Some unkind commentators may suggest that the ARM was an ALP front organization, or a platform for lost souls from various political parties seeking a public platform. From reports recently on AM it would appear that during this period of disenchantment with the Liberal Party, Malcolm once again approached the ALP, this time via that well-known left winger, Senator Bolkus of South Australia, a bit of an expert on “getting the numbers” himself. Despite its noble intentions, ARM lost the constitutional referenda in 1999, with Malcolm declaring that John Howard “would go down in history as the Prime Minister who broke the nation’s heart”. Well, there were certainly tears aplenty at the ARM wake with Malcolm surrounded by various luminaries of the Left.

However, once the post referenda hang-over had worn off, Malcolm, on the road to Damascus, sorry, Canberra, must have had a vision. He would once again try to save the Liberal Party. Therefore, he joined the board of the Menzies Foundation and took over from Ron Walker as Federal Treasurer of the Liberal Party organization and a member of Federal Executive. And who better for the job? Here was someone ruthlessly determined to wrench power from whoever had it and with the money to do it. Which brings us to the present dilemma. Wentworth, that apparent jewel in the Liberal crown (although a somewhat more marginal jewel these days) has maintained Malcolm’s interest. Rather than earning some runs on the board doing his allotted task of raising money for the Party as Federal Treasurer and potentially retiring respectably and without opposition into the burgundy of the Senate chamber, Malcolm has decided that this time Wentworth needs saving - immediately. Indeed, possibly, he has decided also that the Federal Liberal Party needs saving once John Howard retires. Not only Wentworth, but also the Liberal Party, and, indeed, Australia, and maybe even the world, needs Malcolm. Has he asked whether any of these entities wants to be saved? Well, probably not, but then, does he ever and does he have anyone to ask to whom he will listen?

Malcolm, I would suggest, even crave, humbly, that you give this up and either get back to the critical job you were meant to be doing which would earn you a great deal of respect within the Liberal Party from those of us who have been here for a long time, or get out. One thing would appear certain, given your past performances, there is every likelihood that we will be here long after you are gone.

Best wishes.

Yours sincerely,

James Harker-Mortlock

* *  * *

Reject European Federation

Hi,

My name is Stephen Phillips, I am British and very proud of that fact.  I would like to ask if there is any way we could create some sort of alliance as the United Kingdom is being forced into handing over power to the European Federation - a REPUBLICAN federation.

We would lose our monarchy but the prime minister lied to us and told us that we were not joining a federal state. The EU Convention is available for the world to see online, and it shows the amendments, most notably the word Federal being changed to Community and other parts do indeed detail a federation.

I am planning to stand as an Member of the European Parliament to try to help the UK leave the EU but I am one person and there are many more politicians wanting power in a larger country.

If I can help you in your campaigns please let me know and I hope we can work together.

Stephen Phillips

scpllb@yahoo.com

England, UK

* *  * *

Parliamentary Prayers

The NSW Greens failed on 16 September 2003 in an attempt to replace Christian prayers at the start of Upper House sitting days with a period of reflective silence.

I gave to the House ten reasons why we should retain the official practice of Opening Prayers.

1.      Australian history since European settlement was founded upon Christian beliefs. We are proud of our tradition, our faith, our culture, our belief and our people, and that is recognised in the opening prayer. How can we be a more inclusive and tolerant State if we deny the rights of believers to pray?

2.      The opening prayer in this House is a tradition that is practised by other State parliaments, our Federal Parliament and many other parliaments of the world. In New South Wales the prayer as we now have it, in our words, was established in 1934. I ask Ms Lee Rhiannon to contemplate this: If she is right on this matter of prayer then nothing matters, but if we are right on this matter of prayer then nothing matters more.

3.      This practice is supported and respected by Australian citizens. The most recent census figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for 2002 reveal that more than 70 per cent of respondents identified an affiliation with Christianity. Given that the majority of the population identifies with Christian-based religions, beginning the parliamentary day in this House with prayer is in line with the beliefs of the people whom this House represents.

4.      Prayer allows God's will and direction to guide our proceedings. In the last election the Greens gained 170,000 votes, but five times that number go to church every Sunday. Some 40 million people in Australia claim to be Christians and believe in prayer. The prayer to God is to direct and prosper our deliberations for the true welfare of New South Wales and Australia.

5.      The fifth reason to retain the prayer is that Christians believe prayer enables us to receive wisdom and the mind of God. I do not mind what restrictions others place upon themselves, but I object to someone else restricting me from expressing, in the best way I can, my concerns for the welfare of the people of New South Wales.

6.      Christians believe that prayer moves the hand of God to work in the affairs of men. His guidance will lead to the most beneficial decisions for the people whom the Parliament represents. Recently I was at a centre for disturbed children who are presented as wards of the State, children with the most challenging behaviours. When I was in a staff room I noticed a poster behind the door, which read:
             We the unwilling, led by the unqualified
             Have been doing the unbelievable
            For so long and with so little
            That we now attempt the impossible
            With nothing but prayer.
     I reflect on that statement. We do not pray to change God's will; we pray to bring our will
     into line with Him.

7.      By beginning the parliamentary day in prayer we reinforce the concept of relying on God's strength to do things rather than relying on our own strength. The frailty of human behaviour and motivation is a constant reminder for those of us who have been in the House and who meet with people in the streets.

8.      The eighth reason I offer is that an opening prayer establishes a level playing field in recognising that we are all sinners before a holy God. I heard Ms Lee Rhiannon say that parliaments around the world do not open with prayer and do not have chaplains, and so on. I remind the honourable member that in the United Kingdom the first chaplain was appointed in 1659, and the practice continues to this day. In the United States of America both the Congress and the Senate have full-time chaplains who are appointed and paid for out of the public purse. The Reverend Peter Marshall became world famous as Chaplain to the United States Senate. I have known the past three chaplains of the United States Congress and the United States Senate: Reverend Lloyd Ogilvie, Reverend Richard Halverson, and Reverend Barry Black, a man with whom I led discussions in Seoul, Korea, in June 2003. Those parliaments not only open in prayer but actually fund a full-time chaplain.

9.      The ninth reason I give is that this is a beautiful spring day in a wonderful country of peace and prosperity. It is very sad to be a people with no-one to thank. Gratitude is a sign of maturity, and politicians should be grateful to our families, our electors, the community at large, and God. I feel very sorry for a person who has no visible means of support, and no invisible means of support. In countries where non-Christian religions dominate, Christians accept the rule of the country in which they live, and we commend that to other citizens in Australia.

10.  The tenth reason I want to give is that every one of us gets caught in a busy life of tension, aggression and heartburn and we need to relax, pause, have a quiet mind, and think positively to gain perspective. Prayer enables the best perspective because it creates a sense of transcendence beyond this world. Prayer is really spiritual breathing.

I have written a small book on the theme of spiritual breathing. With the permission of the House, I will distribute it to members in their pigeonholes. I would like to present Ms Lee Rhiannon with the first copy of The Significance of Prayer in the life of members. I ask Mr Ian Cohen: What happens when a giant tree in a rainforest is cut down? Hundreds of years of growth are destroyed, and the destruction is not only of the past but also of the future. In destroying our great heritage of faith, we are destroying something of great significance. I recognise that there are dark forces that would destroy each tradition and cultural and spiritual benefit that has been won for us by men and women who have made this country, and that is being done for what has been described by someone else as cheap media attention.

We should resoundingly defeat this motion to show the people of this nation that here in this House there are people who take time every day to care, to think, and to pray for the welfare of the people of New South Wales and of this country. I urge honourable members to solidly reject this motion.

Rev Dr The Hon Gordon Moyes AC MLC

THE MOTION WAS, INDEED, SOLIDLY REJECTED

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Return from Everest

Michael,

I had a terrific time in Nepal climbing Everest during the 50th Anniversary celebrations. There are always risks associated with climbing, either your body packs it in or the weather gets you. I was with two other climbers when we were caught in a storm 300ft from the summit and had to turn around, that is less than an hour out of a seven week climb. It was a simple decision to make at the time, that enabled me to come back with all my fingers and toes, which wasn't the case for many other climbers on the mountain that day, however I still have the urge to go back and climb the last 300ft. I shared a very emotional phone call with my father via sat phone back at the south col ( highest camp 26,000ft) who then in disbelief went and measured out 300ft on his driveway

One of the guys I climbed with was Alan Arnette, whose his dispatches and photos  are worth a look. www.alanarnette.com.

Regards

Nick Dyer

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Thoughts of J.P

  The Labor Party is desperately  thrashing around trying to invent ‘silver bullet’ policies that will win it the next election.  It has finally given up talking about rolling back the GST -  no doubt pressured by Labor state treasurers who just love this Liberal tax.  Mark Latham is valiantly striving to come up with new schemes to encourage savings for those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder.  Nonetheless, his latest effort relies on the taxpayer and the hoped for goodwill of financial institutions.  Tony Abbott  the Mad Monk,  cleverly bagged Mad Mark by describing his formula as ‘Peter paying Peter.’

Too many Australians squander their money on indulgent excesses.  More than $50 billion a year is shovelled into those monstrous poker machines;  billions more is spent on junk food,  alcohol,  cigarettes and illegal drugs.  At the end of the day,  ordinary taxpayers are slugged  to help rescue those damaged by their own stupidity.  These ‘losers’ are then described as ‘battlers’ by  MPs seeking their votes.  Australian society needs to take a sensible new direction without descending into wowserism but who is to lead the way?  We are  still the lucky country -  but   even the best luck runs out.

John Pasquarelli

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Open Letter to Pauline

Pauline Hanson

BWCC

LMB 2500

RICHLANDS 4076

Dear Pauline,

I am so angry about what has happened to you.

No one can ever claim to be aware of the hurt that has been inflicted on you.

I have written a few letters to papers and wanted you to see them. To my knowledge only three have been published. 

One in the West Australian and two in local papers in Perth. The Age, Telegraph, SMH and The Courier Mail have not to my knowledge published them.

Until 6th October 2003 the West Australian had not published any.

I had planned to have a demonstration outside the West Australian on 8th October if they had not published one. I had the letters blown up to A1 size and had going to create a fuss about the non-publication. I have a Toyota Coaster Camper and planned to attach the eight letters (enclosed) around the Van.

The West Australian finally published one of my letters so forestalling the demo.

I intend to keep up my letters to the editors and plan other activity to work towards your release.  If you are able to provide me any corrections (on what I have done so far), or material or facts that I could incorporate in further letters I would be most happy to receive same.

Signed,

David James Darby

WILLETTON WA 6155

* *  * *

Death of Slim Dusty

Sad Day For Australia

Fri 19 Sep 2003

Australia's Idol and True Blue Friend Slim Dusty has passed away at the tender age of 76.  The ACMLA send their condolences to his wife Joy and family on this very sad day and the loss of a great man.

Now he will rejoice on the grandest stage of all with all his country music friends, [from Hank Williams to Johnny Cash] what a performance it will be in heaven tonight.

Paula Sheldrick

* *  * *

Malcolm Fraser

Dear Darby Report,

I would love to review Malcolm Fraser’s new book (read apologist’s narrative) for you. It seems that the poor old imperious one is having as much trouble coming to terms with HIS PAST as the rest of us. Anyway I got the book on special at Folio Books in Brisbane on a recent visit. It was only $12.00. The shop assistant suggested that they had copies on special because they didn’t have jackets. I told her I was happy with my $12.00 bargain but would be interested if she had copies of the collector’s edition. She said” I didn’t know there was a collector’s edition!”  I said ‘yes that’s the one with the jacket but no trousers’. She looked at me puzzled which is when I realised that she was only about twenty or so (probably thought I was a victim of the Richmond Report). Such is the loss of history’s colour.

Ric Forbes

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New Layout

Dear Darby Report

I like this new report layout.  It should be easier for others to go direct to your links.

Karyn Krawford

* *  * *

DE LUCA DEPARTMENT

The following letter is published for the seventh time because it has so proved popular with DR subscribers, and I would hate anyone to miss it. Perhaps it will remain as a permanent feature of the Letters Column, in the interests of the promotion of adult literacy.

You fascist

get me off your email list now you fascist fat bastard. i vote independent. i always have and always will while stupid assholes like you are ruining the big parties.

Lisa De Luca

Lisa De Luca is daughter of Rosalind De Luca OAM, and is a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Darby Report subscribers who wish to engage her professional services may contact Lisa De Luca at Suite 4, 646 Pittwater Road Brookvale, phone 9907 3297, fax 9907 4295, email: lisdel@ans.com.au.   Lisa De Luca was president of the Brookvale Branch of the Liberal Party. The brother of Lisa De Luca, one Vincent De Luca, also a former member of the Liberal Party,  failed in his attempt to gain election to the Warringah Council and failed in his attempt to unseat the popular Liberal Member for Wakehurst, Brad Hazzard MLA.  Having fallen out with his former ally, the Warringah Greens Councillor Peter Forrest, Vincent has now turned his unwelcome attention to the Manly Council, where from the gallery he makes unpleasant remarks about Liberal Councillors and waves encouragingly to his idol Cr David Barr MLA who is also the Labor-surrogate “independent” member for Manly. The unmeritorious  Barr is the sponsor of the dopiest possible traffic proposal, for building another drawbridge next to the existing antique bridge at The Spit.  (The Spit is famous as the location of Harry’s Fish Café.)  Amazingly, the State Labor Government is stupid enough to adopt Barr’s proposal.  Opponents of the proposal on 3 July 2003 delivered to Parliament House 6,200 signatures on a petition against the proposal. I am reliably advised that De Luca family members were not invited to sign.

* * * *

THOMSON FORD

IN THE MIDDLE OF AUTO ALLEY

GLEN HUNTER

Assistant Manager

33-47 Church Street, Parramatta NSW 215O

Phone: (02) 9635 7466 Fax: (02) 9687 4164 Mobile: 0413 953 813

“Glen Hunter is a great bloke in a great team” – Michael Darby

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