News That's Fit To Punt - 19/Feb/2013

Just For The Record On Prisoner X

A couple of days ago, I posted up the notion that the Rudd Removal by the faction bosses might have been linked to Prisoner X more than the bad polls surrounding the Mining Tax at the time. That is to say, Kevin Rudd looking in to the passport used in the Dubai Hit may have triggered a sequence of events that led to Mark Arbib being activated as a CIA asset.

I admit, I don't really know that to be true or even likely. For all we know the CIA paid Mark Arbib to tell them which brand of socks Kevin Rudd likes to wear. We'll never know unless we beat the truth out of Mark Arbib, but we don't really support torture do we? Or do we?

Anyway, here's something that fits the jigsaw a bit more today:

Australian Jewish community leaders were privately highly critical of what they considered to be an overreaction by former prime minister Kevin Rudd and then foreign minister Stephen Smith to allegations that Israeli intelligence used Australian passports in an operation to assassinate a militant Hamas leader in Dubai in January 2010.

Following the Government's decision to expel a senior Israeli intelligence officer from Israel's embassy in Canberra in May 2010, Mr Rudd and Mr Smith attempted to defuse tension by inviting six Jewish community representatives, including then Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot, for discussions at a private kosher dinner at The Lodge. The meeting was also attended by Labor MPs Michael Danby and Mark Dreyfus.

So Kevin Rudd and company weren't fooling around. They were really looking into it and rattling cages. That this might have been uncomfortable for some (or many) espionage agencies is not that much of a leap. The Jewish community leaders of Australia were unhappy about it - Imagine how Mossad felt about it.

What would they have said to the Prime Minster? "be careful what you go looking for Mr. Rudd"...maybe? While this doesn't prove anything, you can chalk it up as another piece of the jigsaw.

Is The Jig Up For Julia?

The polls were indeed terrible, and suddenly there's a tidal wave of opinion consigning her to the dustbin of history. It's one bad poll, people! Except that's all it took to remove Kevin Rudd, so you wonder why the Caucus drags its heel to what was blindingly obvious one year ago.

Most senior ministers contacted on Monday appeared to be sticking with the Prime Minister but many said the numbers in the poll could not be ignored.
''It's simple arithmetic,'' said one. ''We can't go to an election with these numbers.''

Asked if the situation would come to a head when Parliament resumed, one minister responded: ''I don't see how it can't''.
He said he remained loyal to Ms Gillard but conceded there had been a discernible shift in momentum towards Mr Rudd in the past fortnight.

This so called momentum shift is pretty stupid and late in the game. The opportunity to fix this was March last year. Instead they trashed Kevin Rudd and hobbled any notion of riding his popularity to the polls. He's saying now he's out - which doesn't mean much in politics except he does seem to mean it - so I don't really know how they think they're going to swing a Rudd return.

Best guess is they'll attempt a Crean return or they'll draft Bill Shorten - anything but Rudd, they'll say - and watch the polls continue to suck for the ALP because "not-Julia-Gillard" isn't going to get it done for the electorate if they want to retain office. At this point in time, the question isn't if they've screwed the pooch, but how many more times will they get to screw the pooch before 14th September when we'll be mercifully rid of these bastards.  This is going to be a new kind of social torture, all the way down to the bottom of the metaphorical hill with the light at the top, where there's probably a cesspit of corruption and backstabbing; and you couldn't say they didn't have it coming.

Things are so bad I think we deserve to be punished by a Tony Abbott Government. And I'm still going to donkey vote.

News That's Fit To Punt - 16/Feb/2013

Prisoner X

The big news of the week is in fact this business of Prisoner X. What we can glean from the various headlines is that Prisoner X who committed suicide in solitary confinement in Israel was an Australian national who was also a Mossad agent. As the days have progressed, what's come to light even more slowly that the Australian Government didn't exactly rush to prisoner X's defence. They offered no consular legal assistance (which is the becoming norm it seems); and because Israel assured Australia that everything was fine, they just let that one go right by.  The story keeps changing from DFAT as to what they exactly knew or did.  Embarrassed, now they're ordering a review into the case.

In a nutshell, the Australian Government just Israel have away with one of its citizens in Israel's answer to Guantanamo Bay. In Australia, the story is being reported around the mystery of how Ben Zygier ended up in such a situation, but the most important article I've read on this is over at Time in the USA.

What Zygier — the name on his tombstone – did to bring arrest is not known. Nor is it known what he did for Mossad, though the numerous passports he held from his native Australia suggest possibilities. Agents with dual nationality are useful as scouts, moving freely in enemy countries such as Syria, Lebanon or Iran without the lingering concern that comes with traveling on forged documents. Australia turned out to be particularly helpful; by law, a citizen could legally change his or her name once a year.

Zygier changed his three or four times. The first was after he decided to become an Israeli, in 2000. Many immigrants take a Hebrew name. The country’s founding president, David Ben-Gurion, was born David Grun in Poland. Zygier chose a name that implies steadfastness; Alon is Hebrew for “oak tree.” Why did he change it again? And again? That was the question Australian authorities asked Zygier early in 2010, when a dramatic event prompted a closer look at the use of Australian passports by citizens who also claimed Israel as their nationality. The event was the Jan. 19 assassination of a Hamas arms buyer named Mahmoud Al-Mabouh. The Palestinian was killed in his bed in a luxury hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, by Mossad agents who were exposed, first, on hotel security cameras, and then by their passports. Some were forged, others were valid travel documents issued by Britain, France and other countries, including Australia, where officials were livid that Australian sovereignty was used as cover for a hit.

That official is what brings me to ask a few questions out loud. One would imagine that the passport business in the Dubai hit would reverberate through the corridors of DFAT, but also in the head of the Prime Minister of Australia who was a career diplomat at one point in his life. It's hard not to imagine Kevin Rudd letting the use of dual nationalities and Australia passports for the purposes of foreign espionage and kick murders.

At the time, the Australian Government expelled an Israeli diplomat, which is neither here not there.  Here's the crucial bit:

It’s unknown whether Zygier, who was 34, played any role at all in the Dubai assassination. But even if he did not, the Melbourne native apparently came under scrutiny in Australia as officials scoured the records of dual nationals in the wake of the killing. Zygier was in Australia at the time, studying for a master’s degree. The scrutiny could not have been pleasant, and it was not confined to official channels. After being interrogated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, he got a call from a reporter. Jason Koutsoukis indicated in the Sydney Morning Herald that intelligence sources had directed him to three men suspected of using their Australian citizenship as a cover to spy for Israel. Koutsoukis wrote that the men operated a “shell” company in Europe to sell electronic gear to Iran – something that, by several published accounts, Western intelligence agencies have indeed done, in order to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program through the sale of deliberately defective equipment.

None of the three men or the company were named in the Feb. 27 , 2010 story, but Koutsoukis this week told Britain’s The Guardian that he spoke with Zygier at the time. “Who the f— are you?” Zygier asked the reporter, denying everything. “What is this total bullshit you are telling me?”

When Zygier returned to Israel, his bosses had him arrested, Israeli officials tell TIME.

So if that assembly of events is correct, Kevin Rudd ordered a screening of all dual nationals. This would have potentially dug up many espionage agents, not just Israeli agents. Inadvertently, this would have been like flipping the carpet over to find a metropolis of rats nests. Is it any wonder then that Mark Arbib, who we know was on the CIA payroll orchestrated the removal of Kevin Rudd in order to take the heat off all the spies using Australian passports?

The question I am asking is, is this the real reason why Kevin Rudd was removed from office in the manner in which he was removed?

More On The Minig Tax And Morbid Obeidity

The continuing ICAC hearings are turning into the most in depth revelations of just how little the ALP NSW Right faction stood for in principle and just how much they were into making money for themselves. What's disturbing today is that it is this rather rum (pun intended) lot that gave the numbers to Julia Gillard to ascend to being Prime Minster.

Yes, I know it seems really awful to emphasise this, but it is what it is. Mark Arbib got the numbers through the faction machine, together with the Victorian Right and Bill Shorten and that mob. Yet, it never would have happened if Arbib had not consented to the coup, and by default there lies the lever that brought about Julia Gillard's time in office. She is a net beneficiary of the morbid Obeidity as Bob Carr is a net beneficiary of Julian Assange's exploits in leaking cables, which smoked out Mark Arbib as a CIA informant.

And the first major thing Julia Gillard did was to 'negotiate' the mining tax with the miners, and now the results of that negotiation are in, we know that it was no negotiation at all, it was more like getting dictated terms for surrender.

Gathered on one side of the cabinet table were the newly-installed Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her Treasurer Wayne Swan and her Resources Minister Martin Ferguson. On the other were the heads of Australia's three big mining companies: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

Absent were the key people from the Treasury - the ones who really understood the tax being discussed.

As the then Treasury head Ken Henry later told a Senate committee: "We were not involved in the negotiations, other than in respect of crunching the numbers if you like and in providing due diligence on design parameters that the mining companies themselves came up with."The smartest people were kept out of the room. They were ferried draft agreements and asked to examine them quickly. They were unable to test with the miners the propositions they were putting to the government.

That sounds like a recipe for a disaster, and the mining tax has been nothing short of a disaster in as much as the estimated 2billion has shrunk to 126million - Rio Tinto didn't pay a cent. Together with BHP they got a $1.7billion mining tax 'credit'.

Now, regardless of whether you agree with Kevin Rudd's stance at the time, putting in a mining tax was a matter of principle. To hobble that Prime Minster and then 'negotiate' (and again I use that term loosely) the current version is nothing but political expedience. It doesn't matter how well you are seen to 'negotiate' (it embarrasses me that I keep using this word to describe this process of hers) if you sell the country's stake down the river. In all honesty - and in principle - you have failed to look after the interests of the people.

We all suspected this was the case at time, and now that the report card is in, this stuff really should be damning Julia Gillard. She's a terrible Prime Minister, and the proper people of the ALP should be removing her. Except if the ICAC hearings are any guide, it's hard to see if there are any decent proper people amongst those who installed her.

I want to finish off by saying that Niccolo Macchiavelli wrote that the one thing a prince or a politician should not invite upon themselves is contempt, not fear, or anger. This is because according to Macchiavelli, there is no coming back from being held in somebody's contempt. The problem I have is that the ICAC hearings have exposed significant portions of the ALP as being entirely contemptible, and really, can there be a way back from that?

ALP Finishes Rinse Cycle

What Came Out In The Wash

Even though we all knew what the outcome was going to be going into the meeting today, I'm still of the opinion that these ALP power brokers are full of shit for picking Julia Gillard over Kevin Rudd. In the last 5 days of blogging (and energetic commenting over at Facebook), we kind of figured out that these people would much rather face electoral oblivion than work under Kevin Rudd. That it wasn't just Nicola Rocks-in-her-head Roxon that had this asinine opinion,it was 71 of them, plus Julia Gillard who naturally voted for herself. It would have been funny had she voted for Kevin, just to rub it in, but... no. there is no humour in politics.

I know I'm being harsh when I call these 71 members of caucus assholes but in the past I have actually been quite generous when it came to ALP leadership issues. I didn't think much of Kim Beazley and was dismayed by his willingness to embrace anti-terror legislation as if tougher-than-Johnny was going to get him over the line. Not a great moment in progressive side of politics, but ... I voted for him. Simon Crean was another leader I felt iffy about, what with his perennial inability to get some kind of narrative going against the tidal wave of conservative patter coming from the Liberals. He was like a tongue-tied mute when you needed a bard. Then there was Mark Latham - less experienced, brash, scary, violent (but exciting if you ask me) who the faction bosses hobbled on the way to the polls. I sure as hell voted for Kevin'07; and as a side issue which is what State politics is, I voted for Bob Carr, Morris Iemma and maybe even Barry Unsworth way back when. And each and every time, I didn't really question the progressive cause, nor did I stop to consider the weird bedfellows I had in rabid socialist unionists and former communists and former student politicians and even people with whom I disagreed outright.

But here's the thing: I could not bring myself to vote for Kristina Kenneally, and I couldn't bring myself to vote for Julia Gillard in 2010 because I just couldn't take the machinations that brought these people to the top of their resepective totem poles. I've wondered if this was because I was some kind of political misogynist, but no, I would have voted for Joan Krrner and Dr. Carmen Lawrence and Anna Bligh if they were in my State. (Had I been American I would have voted for Hillary Clinton over anybody except Obama). But I drew the line with these two.

What they have in common is this: Mark Arbib did the politicking to swap leaders to install both these women when it was unnecessary to do so in both instances, and was in fact detrimental to my trust of the ALP. I've been pondering about my rage and really, it comes down to Mark Arbib and his apparatchik ways.

So it is with great pleasure today to find that Arbib has resigned from Parliament.

Senator Arbib - often described as one of the "faceless men" for his role in helping remove Kevin Rudd as PM in 2010 - described his shock resignation as a "gesture of goodwill" to the party to help it heal.
Senator Arbib, who also served as Sports Minister, said that he was also resigning from the Parliament for family reasons.

He said that after he was promoted to the ministry late last year, his daughter cried because it meant he would spend more time at work.

"Don't take the job, Dad," she said.

Unlike a lower house seat, his resignation from the Senate will not force a by-election. The NSW Parliament will choose a replacement from the Labor Party.
Senator Arbib said that the past week in politics had been one of the "most difficult" weeks in Labor Party history.

He said that leadership ballots were "difficult complex and emotional" events.
Senator Arbib said that he believed Prime Minister Julia Gillard could and would win the next election but it required a commitment from the caucus to put recent events behind them.

"What it requires is professionalism," he said.
Senator Arbib said that healing the party's scars required more than talk.

"It requires more than words, it requires action," he said.
"Everyone has a responsibility, all of us have to play a part. And that includes me."

It's a real bummer that Kevin couldn't persuade his colleagues to give him another shot. I won't vote for Julia Gillard - ever - so that is just that. Yet, it is some kind of consolation that Mark Arbib has been sent packing. Oh, he'll still collect that big pension that pollies get to pull down, but it is best for the ALP that he be sent packing. Nobody's going to convince me this man was an asset for progressive politics in this country.

Good riddance.

Not Done With Despising

All this has lowered my estimation of these people in caucus, especially the ones who voted for Gillard in the face of the numbers. They're dicing the future of Australia with Tony Abbott. Which is why I am not contemplating a donkey vote at the next election. If these people are willing to dice the future of Australia with Tony Abbott, then I'm entitled to do the same with my vote.

Machiavelli said contempt was corrosive. A leader can be loved, or feared, but the option is not there to be held in contempt and unfortunately what we have here is a situation where I now hold these people in contempt. I don't think I'm alone on that little count. The tenor of people who were hoping Kevin Rudd might have persuaded a few more people are particularly frutrated today.

Here's an example - Sam deBrito:

I tell ya, every time I'm about to get well and truly sick of Kevin Rudd's two-year-long temper tantrum, someone on Mount Hubris reminds me just how out of touch much of the Labour Caucus is and how they'll happily convince you piss is Perrier depending on the day.

Tell me Brendan, Greg, and Ms Gillard; if the ballot for the Labor leadership is not a celebrity poll why the hell did you get rid of Rudd 20 months ago?

The rationalisation since has been, as O'Connor repeated Sunday, that it was "about who should lead the nation. Getting things done and doing things in the nation's interest is not always immediately popular but it's very important."

And I thought it was about Kevin Rudd's plunging opinion polls back in 2010 when you cut his throat?
Since then we've had all the words in the world telling us what a hard man Rudd was to work for, that he was a nightmare boss, but you know what?

WE DON'T CARE.

We have nightmare bosses out here in the real world and we don't get to sack them when they drive us batshit.
We don't get paid $300K like ministers do either (plus allowances!)
We don't have any of your power or influence, except for one itty bitty thing: our vote.

And you ignored this, you took it away from us back in 2010 when you sacked a democratically elected Prime Minister - in a process some might uncharitably liken to a popularity contest - and we haven't forgotten that.

And if that doesn't sound angry enough to you, here's Peter Hartcher:

The people consistently prefer Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard as Labor leader by a factor of about two to one. But Labor has gone the other way by a factor of more than two to one. For a party that is on a steady trajectory to electoral defeat, it was an extraordinary act of steely resolve. Or suicidal madness.
Under the Gillard leadership, Labor lost its parliamentary majority and then proceeded consistently to register the lowest primary vote on record.

And the only polling figures to shift in the past week beyond the margin of error was Gillard’s approval rating.
Yet the vote of 71 to 31 for Gillard suggests that Rudd, on net, has failed to win over any votes since last week. Even more remarkably, he has failed to win any votes since losing the leadership 20 months ago.

Some names have moved from one column to the other on the caucus voting lists, but, on a net basis, the caucus has shown itself to be deeply entrenched in defending Gillard.

This is a violation of one of the customary laws of leadership challenges – that the challenger carries momentum.

Mr. Hartcher's trying to be fair where perhaps between the lines you can almost see him gritting his teeth. Something's gone seriously wrong on the progressive side of politics, and this fiasco didn't come close to fixing it.

Alone, Alone, Alone

Just so I'm making myself absolutely clear once more, I will not be voting for the ALP with Julia Gillard as the Prime Minister at the next Federal election. But I won't be voting for the Libs or the Nats. I won't even vote Green because they support Sea Shepherd. I won't vote for an independent, without knowing what they stand for, but I don't imagine I'll find such an independent I can identify with.

It's actually a lonely feeling to know this much, that I've cast myself adrift from all the mainstream options.  I'm all alone out here without an option.

So the Donkey is suddenly looking like an eminently respectable candidate.