It is an interesting strategy for a Liberal leader - trying to beat Labor by being even more on the Left than they are.

I know David Cameron of Britain’s Conservative Party is trying this bizarre trick, but I hope Ted Balliieu gets clobbered for it.

...Aren’t elections about offering a choice, and not more of the worst?

Except it was untrue. In fact, overdose deaths in Switzerland—the most touted example—had tripled in the five years after it opened its first injecting room, and halved only after a police crackdown. If you wanted a country that had slashed drug use you actually had to look at the United States, with its answer of tougher policing.

After pointing this out again and again to Penington, I finally had a win. His committee’s final report grudgingly conceded (in a footnote only, I recall) that, indeed, ``the mortality rate tripled with five years’’. But The Age to this day has not conceded this. The Greens still even argue injecting rooms will ``save lives’’.

It proves the point some of us fought so hard to make: that injecting rooms were an excuse to simply give up on addicts. To hide them. They would legitimise the way these users destroyed themselves and their families.

Most people, I’m sure, agreed with us. Ask yourself why so many who preached at you back then did not, and why they still won’t admit their mistake.

LOYALTY cuts both ways. So how much do we owe the dual-nationality ``Australians’’ screaming to be rescued from Lebanon?

I ask after seeing two more Lebanese leaders savage the Howard Government on ABC television for not doing more to save Lebanese Australians in Beirut.
One was Sheik Kamal Mousalmani, head of the Supreme Shiite Council of Lebanon (Sydney). The very name of his outfit says it speaks for Lebanese Shiites, not Australian ones.

Complained Constantine to Lateline: ``We are feeling like second-class citizens. We are Australians. We’ve worked in Australia. Australia is our country. We may have been born in Lebanon, but Australia is our country.’’
But is Australia ``their’’ country, really?

At least 25,000 of the Australians in Lebanon actually live there and the vast majority have Lebanese citizenship, too.

Does that make them really ``ours’’, deserving all the help that we’d give to someone living in our own street who runs into strife overseas?

More stats: At least 10,000 Britons living in Lebanon are also Lebanese citizens.
So are most of the estimated 40,000 Canadians living there, and most of the 25,000 Americans.
Belgium has 1200 dual-nationals living in Lebanon, and Denmark estimates 1000 of its citizens are still in the Hezbollah terror enclave in Lebanon’s south, where thousands of Lebanese Australians also prefer to live, worryingly enough.
In fact, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens have passports to some other country should things at their real home get as sticky as they are now, with Israel attacking Iranian-backed Hezbollah strongholds.

Yet, if these people are also Lebanese, and in Lebanon, I’d have thought it was the Lebanese Government’s job to look after them.

To insist now that they are Australians hardly seems the kind of reciprocal deal that you need to create a community. Lebanese Australians living in Lebanon can ask us for help, but what can we ever ask from them in return?
Citizenship like that sounds too much like all take and no give.

But let me be clear. The biggest issue right now is not whether we should help.
Indeed, we should give a hand—if only to those several thousand Australians who were simply visiting Lebanon, or working there temporarily. And, indeed, the first 200 or so Australians helped out were all visitors—Lebanese born, perhaps, but not Lebanese residents.

The real question is instead whether we have sold the right to be Australian too cheaply.
By allowing Australians to keep a second nationality have we have weakened our notion of what an Australian citizen should be in these fractured times?

And as this conflict warns only too graphically, does dual nationality mean we’ll be sucked too easily into wars not of our making, just because some ersatz ``Aussies’’ are in danger?

I once liked the idea of dual citizenship, probably because I also held a Dutch passport. But I know very well how being of two nationalities weakened my commitment to both. Your loyalty is always hyphenated. Always qualified.
...
I WAS forced to confront my own split loyalties when the Dutch changed their rules and revoked my Dutch passport because I hadn’t lived in Holland long enough.
While I suddenly felt less Dutch, I had to admit I also now felt more Australian. The choice had been made for me. Game over. Australian for keeps.
I doubt I’m unusual.

And it might be time for the five million Australians now with dual nationality to be forced to make that same emotional choice, whether Muslims, Buddhists or Jews. Which country is really theirs?
We need more of our citizens not just to truly commit, but to understand that being Australian is an exclusive deal—and comes with responsibilities. We need that because more than ever we depend on the loyalty of our fellow citizens simply to feel safe.

If we keep allowing or encouraging immigrants to treat Australia, not as a family but a camping ground, what do we get?
I’ll tell you.
We get an Australia in which a crowded Bankstown Town Hall in April heard Islamist speakers say the ``overriding commitment of a Muslim’’ was not to Australia but ``Allah and Allah alone’’.

We get an Australia in which Islamist immigrants are arrested and some jailed for allegedly plotting to blow up Australians for a foreign-inspired jihad.

We get an Australia in which second-generation Lebanese form ethnic gangs in Sydney that fight for turf rights to beaches in Bondi and Cronulla.

We get, too, a Victorian Government that hands a safe seat to a Syrian-Australian who has written to the dictator of Syria—a sponsor of Hezbollah—to pledge ``absolute loyalty’’.

We get a Fotis Kapetopoulos, a former Multicultural Arts Victoria boss, saying ``Greeks who ... are Australian, we pay taxes and vote, and that is enough.’’

We get Italian-Australians citizens who indeed pay taxes and vote, yet still feel so much loyalty to another government of another country that this year they elected two Australians to the Italian Parliament.

We pay ethnic groups millions to stay aloof, even as we have brawls involving Lebanese gangs in Sydney, and Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian and Greeks gangs at soccer games.

And we even get state multiculturalism ministers this week rejecting an English test for new citizens—with Victoria’s John Pandazopoulos calling it ``insulting’’, and the Northern Territory’s Kon Vatskalis saying it ``smelled strongly of racism’’.

The cries for help from Lebanese Australians should wake us up.
Help we can always offer, and will. We’re generous.

But our Australian identity? We must remember that some things are too valuable to hand out for free, or as some optional extra. Choose us or choose someone else. We’re too good for only half your loyalty and love.

The windows of our communications centre (in Strahan) were smashed with rocks. One morning, most of the town’s public phone services were cut by the police in an attempt to prevent us broadcasting news of the first bulldozer being brought by road to Strahan, where it was to be taken on a barge upriver to the dam site. I was knocked down and kicked by five youths wielding a wheel brace. Other visitors, including hapless tourists, were punched, spat on, and abused ...

Police had urged me to leave the group of Labor politicians with whom, as a new member of state parliament, I was inspecting the dam works, because they feared I might be killed. The touring MPs were met by scores of workers brandishing lumps of wood and abusive placards directed at me. With the HEC Commissioner standing by, a circle was drawn around me on the bare ground and I was warned that if I stepped outside this I would have my ‘bloody brains knocked out’. I stepped out. The two police officers present intervened and I reluctantly agreed to their request to leave the scene.

One group of blockaders who were arrested in pouring rain faced hypothermia when left for hours beside the river. A group of women travelling in the back of a darkened paddy wagon, vomiting and with excruciatingly full bladders, were refused a rest stop on the five-hour trip in the middle of the night along the winding mountain road from Queenstown to Risdon Prison.

It is instructive to look at what actually happened in Tasmania after the fateful High Court ruling in 1983. The projections for power demand put forward by the Wilderness Society proved true, whereas the Hydro-Electric Commission’s projections have been shown to be wildly high of reality. The electricity that would have been produced by damming the Franklin was not, after all, needed. In 1987 an associate commissioner of the HEC, Sir Geoffrey Foot, admitted to the media that the Wilderness Society had been right.

The Wilderness Society’s campaign not only saved the Franklin River,

- It saved an additional $2 billion being added to the state debt, the equivalent of $10 000 for every Tasmanian household. The dam would have resulted in higher power prices and consequently cost many jobs. The $2 billion that was to be borrowed to build the dam would, like any loan, have had to be repaid with interest. At the rate of 10 per cent, this interest would have amounted to $200 million annually throughout the 1980s and 1990s – a best-case rate of 5 per cent would have cost $100 million.

- This sum would have been passed on through higher electricity prices to small businesses, which are Tasmania’s biggest employers. Paying more for electricity, they would have shed jobs to keep the books balanced.

- The economic benefits to the west coast of Tasmania have been more obvious and direct. The dam would have blighted Strahan’s reputation as the gateway to the wild rivers. Nowadays more than 100 000 visitors pour into Strahan each year to see the scenic rainforest country. Wild nature is the key to Strahan’s status as the most progressive, job-creating and investment-rich town in Tasmania’s west. Without the dams, many more jobs have been created from the unflooded wilderness.

Andrew replies: I’m pretty relaxed about what I publish, as you know, [what he thinks is my first name*], and have spelled out my kind-of rules before. Stupid abuse, cut--and-paste propaganda, endless repetition, extreme length - that’s the sort of thing that has me reaching for my scissors. Oh, and sheer boredom. But as any reader has seen, I don’t flinch from publishing comments that criticise me or my works if they have even a modicum of sense, and certainly not if they pick me up on an error of fact. It’s always beeen that way here, so if you are looking for a development to convince you to stop whatever you are doing, this is not it.

... the biography that eager ABC staff planned to publish on Alan Jones -- outing the conservative Sydney broadcaster's alleged sex life and scandals... why did it commission this one -- a hatchet job on Alan Jones, called Jonestown, by the reputable Four Corners journalist Chris Masters?

Michael Kirby -- Disrobed, Kerry O'Brien's expose of the cases and crushes of this activist High Court judge, foreword by Senator Bill Heffernan, was also scrapped.

So was Jon Faine's Overheated: Under the Weather with Tim Flannery, which was sure to embarrass the global-warming alarmist.

Party Time with the ABC's Phillip Adams, co-written by Virginia Trioli and the former communist's most intimate old comrade, is banned, too. And what a shame we won't now read Tony Jones' Whitlam: Our country wasn't all he, er, stuffed.

But of course I am joking in my clomping Dutch-clogs way. No such gotcha books on these heroes of the Left would ever be written by any ABC stars. And they most certainly would never be published by the ABC.

(I should stress that my spoof titles hint at scandals I'm sure do not exist.)

And it does this with one prime objective -- to make money for the ABC. That is its sole excuse for existence.

Judged by this objective alone, which is all the board considered, publishing Jonestown made no sense.

It had already cost $100,000 to research and to legal, with at least $30,000 of legal fees still to come.

On top of that, Jones was threatening to sue for defamation, which would -- win or lose in our absurd defamation casino -- cost the ABC at least a couple of hundred thousand dollars more.

The board rightly figured the ABC had no mandate to publish something likely to cost taxpayers money. So end of story -- though not necessarily end of book, if a private publisher wants it.

To stress the obvious point: this issue was decided not on ideology, but on costs.

BUT if ideology isn't what killed the book, I suspect it is what created it. The ABC asked Masters to write Jonestown four years ago, just after Four Corners screened his documentary of the same title.

In that show, Masters had exposed Jones' influence-peddling, raked over his tawdry cash-for-comment scandals, and showed how Jones had pig-headedly taken up shoddy causes, pushing aside inconvenient facts.

These were legitimate criticisms -- and how very, very often ABC staff have made them, especially on Media Watch.

But less respectable were other insinuations in Masters' documentary. The reference to Jones' arrest in London for allegedly "outraging public decency" in a public toilet was bad enough.

But there were other winks and nods -- as I saw them -- relating to the years Jones spent as a teacher: that he'd spent "too much time with the boys", that teachers worried about his "domination of the boys", that boys found it "easy to fall under his spell", and that Jones gave boys "intense individual tutoring sessions . . . in his room till the early hours".

Nothing improper was directly alleged. Indeed, I've heard not the slightest suggestion that anything improper could be alleged.

No, this seemed on the evidence presented to be just a nasty bit of "where-there's-smoke" innuendo -- the kind of stuff that if levelled instead at, say, Justice Kirby, would have been denounced from every ABC microphone.

Such prurient smirking and sniggering over a man's private life, whether imagined or real, is as despicable as it is adolescent, and is the kind of thing the ABC's charter forbids with its demand that staff "respect legitimate rights to privacy of people featuring in the news".

From: Craig
Comment: Hi Andrew, Are you aware of a particularly lowly website (or blog) run by a [what he thinks is my real name]? It would seem that in some abortive attempt to counter your arguments, this site allows posters to spew comments of a very personal and vitriolic nature.

You are very much correct to state that the Left are inclined towards un-gentlemanly conduct, so to speak. It worries me to know that somebody who allows this to go on under their administration (thereby endorsing it) has anything to do with the judiciary, as a search of [where he thinks I work's] website (under his name, [what he thinks is my real name], reveals. [Link to what he thinks is my page at that site]

Andrew replies: Several readers have written here about his site, but it's too adolescent in tone and substance to bother me, Craig. If that's the best a trained [what he thinks I am] can do to prove me wrong then I must conclude either I'm good at my job, or he is not. I'd advise [what he thinks is my real name] not to advertise his failings as loudly as he advertises my column.

From: Simone Randall
Comment: Bolt says: "By the way, no particular website was named. How can you be certain which one I'm referring to?" Why not simply tell us which one(although, as you are aware, we already know)? Could it be boltwatch, perchance? Bolt says: "And if I really "decry a voice of dissent'' to my articles, why do I publish quite a few of those voices right here? I'll bite. My guess - so you can give your ego a boost by putting them down with some kind of glib, self-congratulatory one-liner(much like the one below this post)?

Andrew replies: If a one-line reply can destroy a post, what does that say of the intelligence of the poster?