As if Australia’s primary producers don’t have enough problems with AWB, there has been shock and horror this week as Meat and Livestock Australia was rocked by a computer hacking scandal.

The head of the MLA’s Livestock Investigation Unit has been forced to resign after… wait for it… a poll on the Rural Press Farmonline website was tampered with by users of computers on two IP addresses owned by MLA.

The ABC first reported the scandal on August 24, telling us:

The Rural Press poll asked readers to rate the performance of the system to trace animals from birth to death.

Early poll results showed more than 60 per cent of voters described NLIS as poor or terrible.

But a day later, after tampering by MLA staff, the poll showed 70 per cent believed the system was good or excellent.

It was not until yesterday that the MLA made a statement about the events. There’s an update on ABC Online, and a report from Rural Press.

All of which begs the question… how good is the National Livestock Information System?

It’s the 61st session of the General Assembly of the United Nations this week. Heads of government from all over the world are there. George W Bush, Hugo Chavez, Thabo Mbeki, Michael Somare, Jacques Chirac, Thaksin Shinawatra (even if he has no job to go home to); Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Robert Mugabe, they’re all there, including… um, Alexander Downer.

Instead of strutting on a world stage where The Voters Back Home won’t see him, John Winston Howard spent yesterday morning strutting on a world stage where All The Voters Back Home were watching. He gave a speech at the Crocoseum at Australia Zoo as part of the extremely kitschy globally-televised send-off for Steve Irwin. And then he toddled off to the north of Queensland for the twentieth-anniversary piss-up, er, meeting of the Cairns Group.

Let’s just recap, John-Boy: the Cairns Group is a gaggle of 18 agricultural exporting nations and is intended as a meeting of Trade Ministers. Your trade minister, Mark Vaile, is there, as he should be. The United Nations General Assembly is a gaggle of 192 nations - just about every sovereign state in the world. You, John-Boy, as a global citizen should be in New York with all of your peers, not doing a junket in Far North Queensland.

And certainly not leaving this country’s voice on the world stage to the Global Village Idiot himself.

Did I ever tell you Federal Parliament is a joke?

Despite the Prime Minister’s total apathy towards the world’s greatest current humanitarian crisis, the Government hasn’t been totally quiet on Darfur. DFAT announced on September 1 an additional $5 million in food aid for Darfur, and $510,000 to Austcare for “protection officers who will work with United Nations agencies increasing security for civilians in internally displaced person camps in both Darfur and southern Sudan.”

Bruce Baird is one of the better Liberal MP’s in the House of Reps. The member for Cook (which includes Cronulla within its boundaries), chairman of the Amnesty International Parliamentary Group and a committed Anglican, Baird has a social conscience the likes of which his colleague, the member for Bennelong, could never comprehend. On May 29 Baird introduced a motion to the House of Reps as private member’s business:

That this House calls on the United Nations to:

(1) substantially increase the level of aid to the Darfur region of the Sudan;
(2) call upon member nations to provide peacekeeping forces to quell the civil war currently taking place in the country;
(3) lift the profile of this catastrophic situation that confronts Darfur and the conflict which has already claimed 300,000 lives and seen 2.4 million people displaced;
(4) work effectively with the NGOs to ensure a substantial lift in the level of privately sourced aid going to the region; and
(5) ensure that maximum cooperation is given to peace negotiations.

Thirty minutes allotted for six speakers with a maximum of five minutes each: Baird, shadow Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, Petro Georgiou, Michael Danby, Cameron Thompson, and Laurie Ferguson. All totally in support. And then, as is normal procedure:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Barresi)—Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

You guessed it. The debate hasn’t resumed. It might. Do a word search for “darfur” on this page and see how far down the queue it is.

There’s been a couple of mentions of Darfur in Federal Parliament since that debate. Last Thursday (September 14) in the Senate, Helen Coonan outlined Government policy on the possibility of sending peacekeepers in relation to UN Resolution 1708. She at least has a better grasp on events than did her Liberal stablemate Senator Marise Payne on June 21. Poor Senator Payne thinks Darfur is in the south of Sudan.

September 16, 1956: Channel Nine begins transmission with station manager Bruce Gyngell (long before his pretty in pink days) uttering that profound line:

Hello, and welcome to television.

Well it seems that it was actually Janet Gaynor who was the first face on Australian television, during laboratory tests in the 1934. The Ipswich City Council website documents it in detail, but of course we know never to let the facts get in the way of a good anniversary.

But there can be no better way to celebrate the half-century of commercial TV in Australia than that concocted by the people behind Naomi Robson. Summed up succinctly on the editorial page of today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Naomi Robson, a glamorous and determined reporter, is on her way to save Wa-Wa, a boy marked, perhaps, for consumption by his cannibal tribe. She falls into an elaborate trap set by a fiendishly cunning Indonesian immigration official: she is asked for her visa. Not having a valid one, she and her crew are entombed alive in a three-star hotel. Using only their corporate credit cards, they cut their way to freedom and ratings success.

It’s still 48 hours away from the next episode of Media Watch, but until then we can follow the reportage from the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Telegraph and the ABC. (Where is Boris Johnson when you need him?)

Special 72-and-a-bit-years of Australian television celebratory link: the best of Naomi Robson on Youtube.

King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV 1918-2006

One of 29 remaining monarchs in the world today, the King of Tonga died yesterday. An old Newingtonian and a Sydney Uni law graduate, Siaosi Tāufaʻāhau Tupoulahi had been King since 1965, succeeding his mother, Queen Salote, who been Queen since 1918.

Tupou weighed in at times at over 200 kilograms.

Crown Prince Sia’osi Taufa’ahau Manumata’ogo Tuku’aho Tupou, a 58 year-old confirmed bachelor, is now King Taufa’ahau Tupou V.

Obituaries from the New Zealand Herald, New York Times, the Associated Press. I await the parochial Inner Western Sydney angle - there can’t have been too many kings go through high school at Newington College.

Fight no battle you are not sure of winning…
- Mao Tse Tung, from “The Present Situation and Our Tasks”, 1947

It must have been the Good Chairman’s words ringing in John Winston Howard’s ears on Tuesday when he wimped out of putting his foul Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 before the Senate.

Headed for the extremely rare situation of Liberal senators abstaining or even (gasp) crossing the floor, Johnny hoisted the white flag before facing certain defeat. It was the right call, but an even better call would have been to have not dreamed up the legislation in the first place.

With that episode brushed aside, Johnny proceeded to charge full steam ahead on that other grand concept inspired by Chairman Mao - his very own Cultural Revolution.

I didn’t intend to go to the Stop The Bombing rally in Sydney yesterday. I was shopping in the city, and as I was finishing up, saw the march in progress further down George Street. So… I hurried on down the road, pulled out the camera, followed the march up King Street and then later met up with the rally again at Hyde Park. I’ve compiled about five minutes of video which has become my first submission to Youtube.

I’ve also placed some photos of the occasion onto Flickr, and they can be seen here, but I’ll note a few now:

I took some footage of the Stop The Bombing march and rally in Sydney this afternoon. About five minutes of video can be seen on Youtube.

I’ll add some more images tomorrow and make a few comments.

http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/11/austra13964.htm

Human Rights Watch, whose Middle East arm is so busy documenting all the Israeli and Hizbollah war crimes at the moment, has had to turn its attention to Australia as the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 winds it way through Parliament.

The Bill was approved by the House of Representatives yesterday 79-62, but with three Liberal Party members voting against the motion (Petro Georgiou, Judi Moylan and Russell Broadbent). Bruce Baird abstained, as did John Forrest, who immediately resigned as National Party chief whip. The number of government members who have crossed the floor in the ten years of Howard government could, until yesterday, have been counted on one hand.

The Bill enters the Senate on Monday. There’s a very good chance that it will be voted down.

Here’s a report from today’s Sydney Morning Herald. (Parlinfoweb is down at the moment, but once it’s back, I’ll link to some of the speeches from this week’s House of Reps debate.)

It’s been an eventful week for Beazley comma B full stop. An amusing confrontation on the steps of Parliament House this morning between his Bomberness and that loosest of Liberal Party loose cannons, Wilson “Ironbar” Tuckey.

Video footage at smh.com.au - nearly as funny as George Galloway v Anna Botting.

Update: ABC Online has audio of the Tuckey v Beazley contretemps - 99 seconds worth on mp3. Tuckey was actually in the middle of a doorstop interview about the utterly appalling Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 when he accosted Beazley as he walked past and started taking him to task.