Skip to main content

Skeletons in the closet?

A change in government usually reveals and exposes things the previous government did - or did not do.

To date the new Rudd Government has been silent about anything "uncovered" to date. Of course it is still early days. Mike Carlton in his weekly column in the SMH reflects on what skeletons might tumble from the closet:

"If the new Rudd government follows hallowed custom, one of its first tasks in power will be to rummage through the cupboards of its departed predecessor, looking for skeletons.

There should be plenty of them after almost 12 years. A good many of the more incriminating documents will have been shredded or carted away by frantic Coalition ministers in the panic that followed the election result, but a thorough forensic search will surely turn something up. It always does when governments change.

The departmental files on the fanciful Iraq war intelligence or the AWB scandal might be a fruitful field for study and I suspect there is much more we could learn about the Immigration Department's carefree practice of banging people away behind the razor wire of the detention centres if it didn't like the look of them.

Then there is the case of Mohamed Haneef, the deported Pakistani doctor. As he lurched from blunder to bungle in that dizzy affair, the former Immigration Minister, smarmy Kevin Andrews, would hint darkly that, ah, there was a much more sinister side to the story that, regrettably, he was unable to reveal for security reasons.

It would be interesting to find out what, if anything, that was all about.

I expect the job of uncovering these and goodness knows how many other bleached bones will fall to John Faulkner, the new special minister of state, known to friend and foe alike as "Whispering Death".

In opposition he was a relentless inquisitor at Senate estimates committees. In government, he will strike terror into the stoutest public service hearts."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more