IT'S because cars are evil that you had to pay $1.40 a litre or more for your petrol this week.

Cars are not a vice, but a virtue. And the Howard Government should give motorists a break from these soaring petrol prices by cutting its excise by 10c a litre.

We can sure afford it. That kind of cut would cost $3.8 billion, when the Government has a surplus tipped to be as high as $14 billion.

And we sure are hurting, as world demand for fuel outstrips supply. Treasurer Peter Costello admits prices are "really killing people".

We also know a cut in excise is a fair and cheap way to give back a surplus.

It assumes we still share the dumb notion that petrol deserves to have the life taxed out of it -- that cars are a sinful luxury that choke the air and clog the roads. Tax us more and we might even be moral and take a train instead.

But our cars are a public good. We use them to take the children to school or their sports. We use them to go to work across town, where trams don't go, or to zip when we need to rather than waste good family time waiting for a bus.

We use them for shopping, or bringing stuff we made to people who want to buy it. We use them for taking a break with the family, catching up with friends, or touring our lovely country.

WHO would have thought that 20 years after a nuclear explosion at Chernobyl vomited poison on the planet, we'd be mourning a disaster even more deadly.

But last week a bus carrying wedding guests from Raha, in northwest India, skidded off a rainy road and plunged into a pond.

At least 51 people died, more than have been killed so far by the Chernobyl blast.

The Chernobyl accident killed very few people. More lives were lost from the panic than from the explosion.

Perhaps you should have listened instead to the world's greatest authorities on Chernobyl's effects on health -- experts who last year tried yet again to calm the world with the facts.

These were the members of the Chernobyl Forum -- scientists and doctors drawn from eight specialist United Nations bodies, including the World Health Organisation, International Atomic Energy Agency, UN Environment Program and UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. With them were others appointed by the worst-hit countries: Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. A smarter jury you won't get.

Their 600-page report last September concluded that the only long-term health effect of Chernobyl was thyroid cancer in children, easily cured in almost every case.

...On he chattered, assuming he'd be heard: Yes, Chernobyl had hit hard the workers at the site, and the children who'd suffered thyroid cancer afterwards.

...What makes this tragedy worse is that the children they were carrying were in fact perfectly safe.

Dr Frank Castronovo, associate professor of radiology at the Harvard Medical School, summed up in his study on birth defects: "The scientific information available now shows no evidence that the radiation exposures of pregnant women from Chernobyl produced any harmful effects."

So, who does he blame for all those dead children? "(N)ewspaper reporters playing up anecdotal stories of children with birth defects and leukemia."

Greenpeace, ever shameless, got acres of space in newspapers this month to again tell tales of radioactive corpses.

It had a new study, it claimed, that put the true death toll from Chernobyl at 200,000 so far, with another 93,000 to die lingering deaths.

Stuck in hyperdrive, it insisted that "one nuclear reactor can contaminate half the Earth".

Who called out Greenpeace for spreading such nonsense? Which reporter thought to accuse it of peddling baseless fears yet again of the kind that once terrified women into killing their unborn children?

Agreed, Chernobyl was a tragedy. But the greater and deadlier tragedy was the fear deliberately spread by people who are still at that reckless game today.

Let's remember Chernobyl, but we remember it best by not forgetting who used it to frighten people to death.

IT should have been a warning that Bob Brown backs our newest asylum-seekers, now waving ethnic flags and demanding Indonesia get out of "their" West Papua.

The rule is: What the Greens leader wants is rarely worth having. Watch out.

Indonesia has already lost East Timor after our soldiers intervened -- rightly -- in that Christian land (leading Osama bin Laden to declare us his enemy).

Its leaders also know that the wife of independent East Timor's first president is an Australian, Kirsty Sword, who secretly worked for the East Timorese resistance when she was an aid worker funded by our government.

No wonder so many Indonesians don't trust us. Their Parliament this month even handed out a list of influential Australians accused of helping the separatist movements, especially in Papua.

And then this boat of 43 Papuans, mainly independence activists, slid ashore on Cape York, and within less than two months all but one of them got refugee status from some anonymous Immigration Department official. And they got it despite Yudhoyono ringing our Prime Minister to guarantee they'd be safe back home.

No one knows how these activists made the grade as refugees, and so fast. All I've heard is that the decision was allegedly influenced by the latest report by the US State Department on human rights in Indonesia.

So I've read it and found . . . not at all the genocidal police state you'd think from all the hype lately.

Yes, Indonesia's security forces aren't much better than those of many other poor nations. As the State Department reports, they last year "continued to commit unlawful killings of rebels, suspected rebels and civilians in areas of separatist activist" in Indonesia.

But only two such killings in West Papua are cited -- the beating to death of a man in January, allegedly by soldiers, and the shooting of a suspected rebel in a police raid in April. Moreover, "in Papua there were no credible reports of disappearances during the year".

True, Indonesia's Human Rights Commission -- it now has one -- reported 35 cases of Papuan rebels and other captives being tortured.

Four men were also jailed for flying the rebel "morning star" flag -- which does sound tough.

But the separatists aren't all the gentle natives you might think from Bob Brown's endorsement.

One allegedly murdered a civilian in March last year. Another was indicted by a US grand jury over the murder of American civilians. Four police and an intelligence officer were beaten to death by separatist protesters in Jayapura last month.

What is astonishing about the last incident, though, is the restraint of the police after losing so many officers. They did not fire wildly into the crowd, or go on a rampage of revenge -- as you'd expect in a police state.

As the US State Department says, while too few police are held responsible for human rights abuses, the Indonesian Government at least is now sacking some and prosecuting others.

And overall it concluded: "During the year there were significant improvements in the human rights situation."

Is this a hellhole from which we should be taking refugees? So I understand Yudhoyono's anger, not least because we have made his reforms so much harder.

He's cracked down on Islamist terrorists, helped stop the people smugglers who plagued us, and is slowly reforming the economy.

One of the greatest dangers in such hard and changing times is that this sprawling country could yet fall apart. Indeed, there are already independence movements -- some strong -- in Aceh, South Sulewesi, Kalimantan, the Moluccas and West Papua. And all these sores have wept corpses.

Dealing with all this would be hard enough without meddling from outsiders, but what alarms Indonesians is that several of these movements have been backed by Australians, many on government money.

Yudhoyono, having already given Aceh partial autonomy, last year agreed to give West Papua more, too, as well as a bigger slice of government cash. Local elections have just been held.

But if he gives more concessions now, it will make him look like a patsy of the Australians trying so hard to break up his country. Already his ultra-nationalist rivals are circling, gloating.

What more do our fat-bottomed "Free Papua" critics want?

Do they really think a province of 1.5 million ethnic Papuans and 1 million other Indonesians can be torn from Indonesia without many people getting hurt?

Without yet another Melanesian beggar nation like Papua New Guinea being created?

Without other ethnic wars being touched off all over Indonesia?

And for what? For a Noble Savage fantasy. Think of the key images of the Free Papua movement -- forest tribes against the corporate state. Tribes that want to close the giant American-designed Freeport gold mine, in the heart of an ancient forest.

And so 17 million viewers watched the first episode to see what the fuss was about. And how quickly they turned off -- just 10 million are still watching, and the show seems doomed.

Many also salivated at what it meant for the female politicians of their choice.

So Bob Kunst of hillarynow.com, a website promoting the candidacy of Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton, wife of president Bill, enthused to Vanity Fair: "Hillary must have friends at ABC."

It was much the same story here for Channel 7. The first show, hyped in part by chatter that Labor's Julia Gillard could benefit in her tilt for Labor's leadership, screened in March and was watched by 1.7 million people.

The real problem seems to be the kind of leader that notoriously Left-wing Hollywood yet again fed them -- one too "nice" to be true, or even safe.

...I suspect most viewers figured this kind of president was so unreal as to be dangerous if she ever got her hands on true power. Click.

And I have no doubt Julia Gillard and Hillary Clinton know that, too.

Female politicians who want to be taken seriously can't afford to live up to this debilitating stereotype of "feminine politics". The ones who succeed in the West tend to take the world as they find it -- tough and hard. List them: Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and the great Margaret Thatcher.

So, yes, impeach Geena Davis. She failed not because she was a woman, but because she was as wet as a typical Hollywood activist. We prefer the Right woman for the top job.

THANK Aboriginal "elder" Robbie Thorpe for one thing, as his "sacred fire" burns in our Botanic Gardens.

In February Treasurer Peter Costello was monstered for saying Muslims shouldn't come to Australia unless they accepted basic Australian values.

And he listed them: democracy, the freedoms of a secular state, and "loyalty first -- loyalty to Australia".

For this he was called a Muslim-basher by most of our leading Muslim groups.

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils declared "Islam law teaches that when you go into a country you embrace the laws of that country".

The Islamic Council of Victoria said: "Muslims are Australians first."

The Lebanese Muslim Association claimed the "majority of Muslims . . . accept Australian values".

Last Saturday a small Muslim group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, held a public meeting at the Bankstown Town Hall to discuss whether Australia's Muslims really should subscribe to those values Costello mentioned.

The answer was: No. No to democracy, a secular society and Australia first.

For instance, Usman Badar, president of the University of NSW Muslim Students Association, told the 300 or so people that "Western values are not worthy of human subscription".

Take democracy: "Democracy sounds nice enough, (but) not to a Muslim . . . Sovereignty is for none but Allah." And "Allah did not say . . . whatever the people want, we'll have this."

As for a secular society, "it relegates Allah to the margins of public life and places human beings above him. This, to put it blatantly, is as blasphemous as it gets".

Nor was any overriding loyalty to Australia possible. "The overriding commitment of a Muslim is to Allah, and Allah alone."

I expect to hear the usual protests -- that Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Students Association are small, representing few people.

But surely it's now clear that far too many Muslim activists and leaders have at times seemed to reject Australian values and even Australians themselves. To remind you of some of them:

There's more, but you get the message. Perhaps it's time more responsible Muslim leaders got it, too, and realised they'd do more good by criticising their radicals than by attacking those who confront them.

The hard truth is more Muslim spokesmen need to join us on the right side of that battle . . . and to fight with us, not against.

WE know reporters are on yet another witchhunt now that some are referring to the AWB "wheat for weapons" scandal.

Can any prove that Saddam indeed bought weapons -- rather than palaces or Mercedes -- with the money AWB slipped him in defiance of United Nations sanctions?

Given this urgent -- and justified -- interest in what Downer and his officials knew, the same reporters and papers might have been expected to have paid close attention last week to John Agius QC, counsel assisting the Cole inquiry into the scandal, when he outlined what he'd found on this very point.

Agius told the inquiry he had not, in fact, found "any document at all which indicates that AWB mentioned Alia to any representative of the Commonwealth of Australia at any level, at any time before the announcement of the UN's Volcker inquiry (last year)".

What's more, "we have also not been able to support any suggestion that any representative of the Commonwealth of Australia was told by AWB that AWB was using Alia."

Had Agius instead said, "Golly, I've got documents here which prove Downer was told", think he'd have got more attention?