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Tuesday, 20th January 1998
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Pauline Hanson's farewells her mother.
Yesterday I attended the funeral of Pauline Hanson's mother, Mrs Nora Seccombe (78) who died last week in a nursing home on the Gold Coast.
Pauline gave the eulogy breaking down several times as she spoke of her mother being her inspiration. She spoke of the long hours that her parents worked to ensure that their seven children never went without. "Mum would go through the list of our names when I phoned, is that Carolyn, Lorraine, Judy, Pauline..."
Pauline's father, Jack, sat beside her at the church service obviously distraught after being separated from the woman he loved after 54 years of marriage. Pauline sitting beside him comforting him during the service. "Mum loved him more than life itself," Pauline said when talking about her mother's bedside vigil when Jack was very sick.
"Her grit, determination, honesty and compassion is in all of us," Pauline said. "Now she is gone. I will miss her love and advice I sought so often."
A truly remarkable family.
The Australian Labor Party's (ALP) pre-selection candidate for Oxley raises the anti in her own house
The ALP's pre-selection candidate for Oxley, Anne Scott, responded to my challenge in the Queensland Times yesterday - once again refusing to provide a public forum to prove that the ALP were behind the violence at One Nation meetings, the promotion of the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the government when MAI negotiations began.
But her brush off raised the ire of her compatriots in the ALP as can be seen on the letters page of today's Courier Mail under the heading "Praise for Hanson." This article can also be found at the link above.
Howard tells the tourism industry to find another benefactor.
We live in incredible times.
In one hand the Coalition government, under instructions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan billions of dollars in currency exchanges to other countries - money created through a simple book entry. In the other hand the Coalition tells the Australian tourism industry, devastated by the sudden downturn in Asian tourism, to go away when they come cap in hand.
Cathay Pacific shed 760 jobs this week - with 460 being fired from their head office in Hong Kong.
Tourism leaders believe that about 16% of Australia's tourism market has just simply disappeared following the dive in Asian currencies. The net effect is believed to be a loss of about 24,000 jobs in the industry in Australia.
"We are facing a significant short term trauma and investors and workers alike deserve a sophisticated and appropriate response from our government, Tourism Task Force Chief Christopher Brown said.
Howard's response was a classic with Brown's earlier claims about "Pauline Hanson's" effect on tourism coming home to bite him on the bum. Howard saying that the industry had withstood other problems, including those they alleged were caused by Pauline Hanson.
"We were told a few months ago that the utterances of the Member of Oxley had damaged our tourist industry. I'm not suggesting the situation is analogous to that. But I simply make the point that you shouldn't react in a knee-jerk fashion.
"I'm not going to get into the business of giving running responses to the understandable entreaties of different industry groups when they believe their circumstances may have been adversely affected," Howard said.
The hunt for Skase's hidden millions getting close to success.
Skase's trustee in bankruptcy, Max Donnelly of Ferrier Hodgson, said the failure to freeze Skase's commercial interests in Spain was not a serious blow to his strategy to get back Skase's millions.
Howard confirmed that the chase would continue saying, "I think there is a great feeling in the Australian community that this man ought to be pursued with all the vigour that is available to the law both here in Australia and elsewhere. It is appropriate that resources be spent in pursuing somebody who plunged to the depths of robbing ordinary Australians."
However, Howard failed to point out that the missing millions, once reclaimed, will be claimed by foreign banks and the "ordinary Australians" won't see any of the money that have been reclaimed through the costs in the search that the tax payers of Australia have been underwriting
Making the
news" -
All glory to the master should be the headline in today's News Limited papers with both the Australian Newspaper and the Courier Mail presenting ALP leader Kim Beazley as some Titanic coming home. (For our overseas readers Beazley is always "cut off" at the chest - if they tried to get the entire torso around the waistline into the picture you would have an iceberg effect with the head being the tip of the iceberg).
Yesterday at the Hobart conference Beazley urged Labor members to consider themselves "keepers of the flame" of Australian dignity.... accusing Prime Minister John Howard of causing "pain in Australia's soul".
"We do not merely aspire to win the next election," Beazley said, "we have an absolute imperative to win that election because the dignity of the Australian nation and the dignity of the Australian people is under attack.
"We gather here as keepers of the flame. That flame is Labor's concern for the dignity of Australian politics, the Australian nation and the Australian people."
Amongst developments at yesterday's conference were:
The Labor party's new slogan is: Leadership, Integrity, Security.
Which is not bad when we hear on the same day that the party's two former Prime Minister's Bob Hawke and Paul Keating take on the role of high profile lobbyists for two of Australia's largest insurance companies wanting to break into the Chinese market.
Keating in the one corner for Colonial Mutual and Hawke for Colonial's
fierce rival, National Mutual.
Another perfect day in paradise.
Have a good one.
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