Bad jokes escape to evening news

BAD jokes used to be confined to Christmas crackers, but now they've escaped to the evening news.

Wherever you turn, real figures look more and more like cartoon characters and cartoon characters are being treated like real people. China, for example, has snubbed Batman, but Iran's wacko President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is giving a Buckingham Palace-style Christmas message to the British people through the good offices of Channel 4. Batman is a cartoon creation. Ahmadinejad should be, but this redefining of values is 2008 all over. The fellow travellers have been given a free hand to reshape our society. Not only has David Hicks, a self-confessed supporter of terrorism with an expressed lust for the murder of non-Muslims, been lionised by organisations such as the Left-leaning advocacy group Get Up! (the body which boasted of its representation at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's farcical 2020 retrovision conference), he has now found a girlfriend from within Sydney University's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. This is the organisation which annually awards a "peace" prize, with past recipients including Hanan Ashrawi, the former spokesman for Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, who has refused to condemn terrorism-linked organisations; and, more recently, the Aboriginal Patrick Dodson, who claims to head a faction within the reconciliation movement, but wishes to see the access of non-Aboriginal Australians restricted to parts of their nation, in what some see as South African-style separatist development. The Rudd government has even left open the door to the possibility that Australia may accept detainees released from Guantanamo Bay, when US President-elect Barack Obama closes that centre, in fulfilment of an election promise. Australia already plays host to undesirables from other nations who claim, probably with good cause, that their past activities now make their homelands too dangerous for them and, let's face it, if Hicks' doesn't find bliss with his new sweetheart, he will have some familiar faces to talk over old times with. Not surprisingly, Hicks, the closure of Guantanamo and support for killers to be resettled in Australia - along with relaxation of our immigration laws to permit the speedy settlement of non-documented boat people within the country, with full access to benefits - have been supported by the Rudd government and the battalions of civil liberties lawyers who urged its election. They are now concentrating their efforts on the acceptance of a charter or bill of rights, to be adopted by the Australian Government, without a referendum of the Australian people. Despite the reality that almost every dictatorship and nation which serially offends against human rights has such a document, the lawyers, doctors' wives and inner-urban Labor Party branches claim that Australia is somehow a lesser nation for having a more than reliable system of common law, when compared with almost every other nation on Earth. As usual, schoolchildren are being targeted with simplistic propaganda, such as a cheery picture book produced by Amnesty International celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which has been a popular little Christmas gift in those politically correct homes which still celebrate religious holidays. This simplified kids' version says, for example: "If we are frightened of being badly treated in our own country, we all have the right to run away to another country to be safe'', which would leave lawyers with a lot of leeway to determine what "frightened'' means, let alone provide pressure to accept anyone who had such fears. Another passage reads: "Everyone has the right to own things or share them. Nobody should take our things from us without a good reason." But doesn't the right to "own things'' generally come from having earned them, or is welfare meant to provide the things that are to be owned? The same pre-school thinking is embedded in: "Every grown-up has the right to a job, to a fair wage for their work and to join a trade union.'' It would obviously be too confusing for the authors to explain that, in the freest countries in the world, individuals also have a right not to join a trade union. Article 25 is a real doozy: "We all have the right to a good life. Mothers and children and people who are old, unemployed or disabled have the right to be cared for.'' But one person's good life is another's meagre life; and a hint of where we should pitch our expectations comes in Article 22: "We all have the right to a home, enough money to live on and medical help if we are ill. Music, art, craft and sport are for everyone to enjoy.'' And, of course: "We all have the right to our own way of life and to enjoy the good things that science and learning bring.'' Added up, that sounds like a flat-screen TV, a decent cellar, a library, a gymnasium, a holiday house and whatever else may qualify as essential for "a good life''. That's ethos of 2008 in spades: handouts from the Government, no worries, no mention of where the cash comes from - you and other taxpayers - and no obligations. No wonder the Government is popular. A very happy new year to all our readers; see you in 2009.