Politics in Brief

A few quick thoughts…

Reverend Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party has gone off his rocker again…this time calling for an immediate moratorium on Muslim immigration for ten years, so that we can bring more “oppressed Christians” in to the nation. I have no problem with either group, but I think any move to allow or disallow immigration solely on the basis of a person’s religion is not only offensive, but an incredibly big step backwards. Thankfully Reverend Nile is in the New South Wales parliament and has no chance of changing federal immigration policies.

New South Wales police minister John Watkins has made a big error, promising that Sunday’s closure of the Sydney Harbour Bridge so that people can walk on it for its 75th birthday won’t cause traffic gridlock, as experienced when the Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liners visited the harbour a few weeks ago. Mr. Watkins claims to have a plan to avoid traffic gridlock during the 4.30am to 11pm closure…but as fas as I can tell, that plan involves people leaving their car at home.

Two weeks out from the election and he make a stupid promise about Sydney’s volatile traffic…silly silly man.

In other Sydney traffic news, the Lane Cove Tunnel’s operators claim that the air quality in it has been verified to be good, but there won’t be any cars in their until after the election. A vehicle-free tunnel probably would have clean air in it.

There’s a storm cloud gathering over the validity of a claim from federal Labor leader Kevin Rudd that his family was evicted from their house when he was a child…what that has to do with how Mr. Rudd plans to run the nation is beyond me…back to the issues please. Even another ramble about how bad Labor thinks WorkChoices is would be more interesting than this nonsense.

The idiots at the top end of Telstra’s corporate ladder are threatening the federal government with the “mother of all class actions” if their competitors are allowed to build their own $3.6 billion national high speed broadband network…perhaps Telstra’s daft CEO Sol Trujillo has forgotten that he had a temper tantrum and decided to blame the government for his decision to not build his own broadband network. If, as one of Telstra’s annoying internal mottos claims, “anything.possible”, is it not therefore possible that Mr. Trujillo isn’t the right person to provide essential telecommunication services to the country, and should quit and take his bunch of executive crazies with him “done.now”? (to quote another internal motto).

That pretty much sums up what’s on my mind right now.

Samuel