It’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask Greens, they don’t give a damn
SARAH Hanson-Young and co keep up the fight in their campaign against anti-terrorism.
Why we are acting in the Middle East. Tony Abbott on Today, Nine Network, yesterday:
THIS is about Australia’s domestic security at least as much as it’s about international security because there are at least 60 Australians fighting in the Middle East with terrorist groups such as ISIL … (W)e are reluctant to reach out to conflicts overseas, but this conflict is reaching out to us, whether we like it or not.
More from the PM, on ABC television’s News Breakfast:
THE number of Australians seeking to go to the Middle East to fight with ISIL and other groups is increasing all the time. We’ve got tens of Australian who have returned from this conflict radicalised and brutalised. So, the best thing we can do for our domestic security right now is to try to extinguish this particular conflict.
This means Australia is now a terror target, the Greens insist. Sarah Hanson-Young tweet, yesterday:
ANNE at my local shops tells me she’s feeling LESS safe now that Abbott is marching us off to war ... Reckon lots of Aussies feeling the same.
Adam Bandt, on Twitter too:
I WANT a full debate & clear statement from PM abt exactly how going to war in Iraq will make Aust safer. Seems to me it’ll do the opposite
Joe Hockey has a reminder for them at a doorstop yesterday:
TERRORISTS still attack(ed) us and attack(ed) our interests well before many of the recent responses to terrorism by previous Australian governments, as in relation to the Bali attack and September 11.
Back to the Greens and the report from their pals at the Australia Institute — motto “Research that matters” — from June 23, Mining the Age of Entitlement:
OVER a six-year period, state governments in Australia spent $17.6 billion supporting the mineral and fossil fuel industries.
That research examined. Stephen Galilee, chief executive of the NSW Minerals Council, The Daily Telegraph, yesterday:
THE Australia Institute has been caught out using a massive economic deception to attack the mining industry and the jobs of mining workers ... by presenting their anti-mining propaganda as “economic research” … An analysis of the ... Mining the Age of Entitlement paper completed by economic analysts Castalia and former NSW Treasury secretary Michael Schur has revealed that the Australia Institute “grossly exaggerates the level of subsidy to the mining and resource sector”. It goes on to say that the Australia Institute’s analysis of state and territory budgets was “fundamentally flawed”, with actual government subsidies “amounting to no more than a few percentage points of the $17.6 billion claimed by the institute”.
Schur explains TAI’s basic blunder on ABC Radio’s AM, also yesterday:
IT was based on, I think, a misunderstanding of how public-sector accounting works ... Take Newcastle Port Corporation as an example. Their capital expenditure, even if it serves the mining industry, is commercial. They get commercial returns on that investment. The beneficiaries have to pay tariffs that fully recover the costs of those services.
Schur continues:
THE Productivity Commission conclude(d) ... the effective rate of assistance is negligible because it then calculates that subsidy as compared to the contribution of the sector to the economy. So the net effect of rate of assistance is almost nothing, and that’s coincidentally quite similar to what we found.
Statement from Brendan Pearson, chief executive, Minerals Council of Australia, also yesterday:
IT is now indisputably clear that the Australia Institute is little more than the research arm of the Greens party,