The Capital Post

This is Part 2 of an interview conducted with Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan. Generously giving The Capital Post his time for around an hour, the senator touches on Australia’s water management, the science behind climate change and protecting the nation’s sovereign assets.
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By Martha Clemens
TO THOSE who want to make fear of refugees and boat people an election issue, and to those whose votes are swayed by this issue I have this to say.
You’re a despicable pack of xenophobic redneck mutants. You scum-eating fiends should be put in stocks on busy street corners and flogged.
You should be publicly exhibited for your cowardice and cruelty toward the most helpless and desperate people on the planet.
This goes out to all those who claim to talk “tough’’ on border security by locking kids up in detention centres as a “deterrent’’ to potential boat people.
To wit: There is nothing “tough’’ about being afraid of refugees. And there is nothing “tough’’ about punishing them to get at people smugglers.
Those who want the toughest border security are the ones cowering in fear. They’re afraid they’ll lose their job, they’re afraid that Australia will be overrun with refugees and they’re afraid a terrorist might get on a boat and come to Australia.
Some politicians actually want you to believe that a terrorist will pay a heap of money to get on a rickety old overloaded fishing boat and risk their life on a 50/50 shot at making it to Australia before the boat sinks.
As for the other arguments; there is no evidence to show that refugees and boat people are pinching peoples jobs and there is no evidence that we are about to be overrun by refugees even though the government has supposedly “lost control’’ of Australia’s borders.
The Liberal and National Party is heading down the grotesque political path that will again make refugees – in the guise of border security – an election issue.
Given this is the case it’s time to take a bat to the talk back radio thugs, cripple the howling rightwing columnists and hammer the clusters of political miscreants prepared to bully the helpless and exploit the ignorant.
This is an opening salvo at the scum that try and generate fear. The fact is, only punks beat up on refugees.

By Martha Clemens
THE FEDERAL Opposition cranked up their frenzied attack on the Rudd Government this week for having the gall to tax the super profits of the Big Mines. Now that Abbott has aligned his party with the Big Miners there is no backing away from the trolley load of scandalous arguments and grotesque overstatements that they’ve rolled out.
The first reactionary cab of the rank was Liberal Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources, Ian Macfarlane. The gravel voiced pinch hitter for big business prostrated himself at the feet of mining execs at a soirée just over a week ago.
“I’ve never been so ashamed in my life,” Mr Macfarlane told a mining conference in Adelaide regarding the RSPT.
Whether this bombastic delirium came from sniffing petrol on the way to schmooze with mining magnates, or whether it was just a craven linguistic blowjob is unclear at this stage. Whatever it was, no one with a sense of decency took him seriously. Even some of the mining executives blushed at the crude sycophancy.
According to him this tax on mining PROFITS is; more shameful than children overboard, more shameful than the oil for food scandal, more shameful than leading a nation into war based on cherry picked intelligence, more shameful than exploiting the racist overtones of One Nation, more shameful than Australia’s disgraceful track record with live sheep exports and more shameful than locking refugee children up in desert prisons.
“I’ve never been so ashamed in my life,’’ he said. He actually said that, and he wasn’t guzzling a bottle of Moet with his pants down at the time.
Now I’ll admit giving the Rudd Government a good kicking for their horrible mismanagement of the insulation rollout and what looks like another monster rort festival with the BER (Building Education Revolution) is well deserved.
But latching on to the anti-Rudd mardi gras float to get in bed with a bunch of mining fiends reeks of cowering to a drunken mob mentality.
Whether the tax on super profits is policy on the run or is a cynical half-baked political strategy to win votes, it should be judged on its merits.
The arguments against the tax are straight out of some deranged anti-egalitarian playbook. Salaries for unskilled truck drivers will go from $120,000 to $70,000 one mining boss said. And how can you forget the absurd superannuation argument that’s getting blanket coverage in the media. How does it work again, oh yeah, the mining blue chip stocks will get pummelled and that will hurt mum and dad investors and hard working Australian families. Give me a fuckin’ break.
Those engaging in the maelstrom of criticism might want to read and listen beyond the parochial clutch of howling right-wing opinion junkies and spokespeople representing the industry.
Do you really believe that superannuation is going to get hammered? There are plenty of blue chip stocks out there that aren’t mining stocks. And as if a tax on profits, that’s right, just on the profits, is going to make a mining company shift operations to somewhere in West Africa where they need to spend millions on security and who knows what else to maintain a foothold.
Secondly the tax is not going to make a lick of difference to where the stuff is buried. It’s not like they can just set up a factory overseas then employ children, like some of those buggers that manufacture clothing. But the biggest gap in why the mining industry isn’t about to crawl into one of its own holes and curl up in the foetal position is that China’s ferocious demand for resources will continue for the foreseeable future.
Everyone knows China is going for mega-growth in its push to be the next super-power. It’s perfectly justified for Australia to make hay while the sun shines and pump that money from our natural resources back into infrastructure for long-term economic stability. Whether this government has the competence in order to do that is another question.
But for those who believe it’s more important to just grow the mining sector or let them continue to warehouse record profits so they can expand overseas operations needs to reflect on whose interests they are really representing.
Let’s not forget how much those mining executives care about jobs when the chips are down. When the GFC hit they had no qualms about laying off hundreds of workers but do you think their salaries and bonuses went down? Hell no. And why? Because there are enough nutcases out there that think it is inappropriate to ask these multi-millionaires to take a pay cut. They even think it is appropriate to use their bastardised interpretations of Adam Smith and neo-classical economics to stick up for them.
All the Rudd Government wants to do is force these greed-heads to share around the mega-profits to all Australians. At the end of the day if the stuff needed to make steel is buried in Australia then it is money in the bank for all of us, not just for Big Miners.

They’re the headline hitmen, guaranteed to cripple their party’s standing in the polls and derail political agendas and strategies. From that infamous Latham handshake on the eve of the 2004 election to some bizarre tirade from Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey, there is always some political oddball, ideologue or deadbeat ready to feed a gaff hungry media pack. Each party has them, the minister or senator that pose a bigger risk to their own party than the opposition.

The Capital Post will run an online poll on the politician most likely to give their party a migraine in the run up to the 2010 election. Is Barnaby Joyce the frontrunner? Tell us who you think is the loosest cannon in parliament is and why?