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Today's
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an Aussie's viewpoint on Australia's
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Since
October 1995
Indonesia deteriorates into chaos:
The Australian dollar fell to its lowest point in 12 years, to just over 62 cents, overnight following further deterioration in Indonesia. There is now talk of it dropping even further to below 60 cents.
The chaos has resulted from the dalliances of billionaires playing with Asian currency values last year, and thus the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Asians.
These are the men who hide behind computer screens, make billions in minutes without thinking one moment of the lives they destroy in the process and who are the first to label and target people who stand in their way with names like "racist" and "bigot".
Yesterday several hundred Indonesian citizens died when caught in a fire in a large department store. The looting and rioting is happening just hundreds of kilometres from Australia's northernmost borders.
The moneymen have struck again.
Extract from the Washington Post:
JAKARTA, Indonesia, May 14 -- Indonesia's capital erupted in an orgy of rioting and looting today, with young protesters burning hundreds of stores, vehicles and offices across the city, sending panicked residents fleeing for the airport or for safety in downtown hotels. The riots exposed publicly, for the first time, the serious rifts within the Indonesian armed forces.
The death toll from today's violence was uncertain. Witnesses said the Chinatown section of North Jakarta, particularly hard hit, was devastated. Indonesia's minority ethnic Chinese community has in the past become the target of popular rage because of its economic dominance. Elsewhere in the city, businesses hoping to avoid burning and looting posted signs that said "Pribumi," meaning "native Indonesian."
Around Jakarta, homes and businesses belonging to long-serving President Suharto's relatives and close associates were singled out to be torched and gutted.
The violence forced schools and most businesses to close, disrupted transportation and caused delays or cancellations of most flights because of rioting along the main access road to the airport. Tonight, plumes of black smoke could be seen rising from several sections of the city.
Making the
news" -
Subject: sacred sites
There is only hypocrisy in aboriginal affairs. Why are homosexuals allowed to mock and desecrate the symbols of Christianity while mining is stopped at Coronation Hill because it might disturb the sleeping Bulla?
People are sceptical when they note that whenever valuable minerals are found on land, Aborigines often claim the site has sacred significance in their Dreaming. But anthropologists feel that this is perfectly legitimate. In his report for the infamous Hindmarsh Island development Lucas said, "Hindmarsh Island or any other development site will become the focus of contemporary Ngarrindjeri concern precisely because development provides an arena for asserting identity, responsibility and authority. This does not make the concern any less genuine, it merely locates it realistically within the realm of politics'".
'An arena for asserting identity'. Straight from the anthropologist's mouth. What the pastoralists are up against doesn't get clearer than that. It means that truth doesn't really matter. The idea of absolute truth, an intellectual and moral inheritance from both the pagan Greeks and our Judeo-Christian heritage, is gone. Aborigines and their white supporters are entitled to say what they like in order to achieve their political ends. The pastoralists are truly the victims of this morally bankrupt mind-set. That the Catholic Church among others condones it is beyond belief.
Geoffrey Partington (1996) says that many Aboriginal people demonstrated eagerness and willingness to leave their 'sacred' lands to have access to the wonders of British settlement such as knives, axes, tins, cloth, glass. This eagerness to learn from, and experience the benefits of a new civilisation is the universal response of a technologically inferior civilisation to a superior one. The process is the reason humanity has thrived.
Partington documents many voluntary mass movements of Aborigines who left their tribal lands. So it turns out that Aborigines are just like everybody else, in that they are capable of adapting to circumstances. Surely in the year 1998 it is of no importance whether Europeans should have come or not. They did come. History happens.
Antonia Feitz
Subject: Economically Rationalised Pork?
One of the initiatives offered by the State Government to win back the voters in the pork industry is to spend money finding export markets for pork. Reminds me of a story going around the city. …
Two semi-trailers were parked at a rest-point somewhere in NSW. "Where are you off to?" Said one. "Melbourne" was the reply, "loaded with toilet paper from Brisbane." "That's a coincidence," said the other," I'm off to Brisbane with a load of toilet paper from Melbourne."
Is that what they mean by Economic Rationalism?
Philip Madsen
Subject: party names
Albert Langer, the man who was gaoled before the 1996 election for advising people how to cast a valid optional/preferential vote, has come up with some amusing musings on the names of our political parties.
Speaking of the irony of modern Republicans desiring a Head of State at all to 'reign over us', and of the Monarchists being happy with a phony, ever-fading monarchy he wrote, "This odd nomenclature is of course not unusual here in the Antipodes, where the conservative party is called "Liberal", the party of yuppies and millionaire entrepreneurs is called "Labor", and the party of rural sectional interests is called "National", not to mention the party that wants to regulate everything it cannot actually prohibit, known of course as the "Democrats".
Antonia Feitz
Another perfect day in paradise.
Have a good one.
Recent stories exclusive to (how to) subscribe/rs of the Australian National News of the Day:
Unethical trifecta
expose Courier Mail's intellectual prostitutes - 9th May 1998
MIGA - son of MAI
exposed - 8th May
Just me and Pauline - 5th May
One Nation breakfast
- 4th May
Just who are the
Mont Pelerin
Society - 3rd May
The Internet and
the DEATH of the MAI - 30th April
Launch of Pauline
Hanson's re-election campaign - 29th April
Second One Nation
protest surprises Bob McMullan - 28th April
Sultan
of Brunei buys up big tracks of Australia - then negotiates Indonesian
"settlements" 25th April
Maritime
Union of Australia win in the Federal Court 22nd April
Just
who is behind the dock war? 19th April
One
Nation Birthday Party on Pauline Hanson's farm 10th-12th April
One
Nation state and federal candidates meet in Toowoomba 4th -5th April
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