DAILY TELEGRAPH EDITORIAL DESERVES A WIDER AUDIENCE

Friday’s editorial in the Daily Telegraph is one of the best I have seen – and with respect well written, it perfectly sums up the inadequacy of the Labor government in two critical policy areas. I hope the editor doesn’t mind that I feature it again here for an international audience as it is a snapshot of two major and costly failures that have inflicted a huge cost on Australian taxpayers and will continue to do so well into the future.

Of course, this is only a glimpse of a string of policy failures and broken promises administered by both the current Gillard and the previous Rudd Labor governments.

Although not featured in the following DT editorial, the recent press conference featuring two Labor Ministers – Jason Clare (Justice) and Kate Lundy (Sport) who launched a campaign to destroy the reputations of all who participate in Australian sport with what were grossly misleading and unfounded allegations about drugs and corruption is an absolute disgrace and it has certainly tarnished our international reputation.

More than likely this exercise was simply about removing our gaze from the ICAC corruption hearings into Labor activity in New South Wales and the subservient, left-wing dominated television media again, like ‘vultures at a feast’, couldn’t stop feeding on the Labor lie.

As for the more recent efforts to justify the dramatic claims made at the press conference; ASADA CEO Aurora Andruska now admits that the claim that 150 sports people were now under investigation was simply a fabrication made under media pressure. Just a big number without any evidence or specific allegations and no actual names – in other words a fictitious number drawn from a hat to feed the media scrum. It would be far too kind to descibe this whole issue as farcical because it is far more serious in terms of the damage done to sport in general.

This shocking Labor sponsored behaviour which has clearly damaged both the reputation and financial viability of all major sporting clubs, reveals the lengths that this government will go to in order to cover up their sheer and unbridled incompetence and deceit. This unjustified attack on sport also follows Labor’s destruction of the export cattle industry simply in response to a television programme about one abattoir in Indonesia. Now they want to do the same to the sport’s industry.

 

The following is that editorial comment courtesy of the Daily Telegraph: www.dailytelegraph.com.au

Border control a failure for Gillard

OF all the issues troubling the federal Labor government of Julia Gillard, the two most vexing are border control and budget constraint.

The first is made clear by the sheer weight of numbers. Last year saw the arrival in Australian territory of more than 13,000 asylum seekers, an amount similar to the number that arrived during the entire 12 years of John Howard’s time in office.

The second is probably best shown by the government’s anticipated failure to provide a budget surplus, after literally hundreds of assurances from Prime Minister Gillard, Treasurer Wayne Swan and other senior Labor figures that a surplus was on the way.

Budget problems and the border shambles are connected, as today’s exclusive Daily Telegraph report makes clear.

The government’s original 2009 contract with private security firm Serco to run Australia’s immigration detention centres was valued at $279 million. That figure has since blown out to five times the initial amount, as wave after wave of arrivals stretch immigration resources and the capacity of detention housing.

We spent around $1 billion during 2012 on immigrant housing and will most likely spend even more in 2013 – all to address a problem caused by Labor’s changes to our previously successful asylum seeker policies.

The human cost in lives lost is another factor that cannot be put aside while discussing this issue.

Seeking a more humanitarian outcome for asylum seekers has actually condemned many to deaths at sea. This was an inevitable result of policies that fail to offer as much deterrence as possible to asylum seekers and people smugglers.

Should the Labor government lose office later this year, the legacy of its asylum seeker decisions will sadly grind on. Fixing this particular problem will doubtlessly require even greater spending.