Brave mother saves horse

Nicole Graham runs an equine dentistry business near Geelong, south of Melbourne and was out for an afternoon ride with her daughter when her horse, 18 year old Astro, suddenly started to sink as he stumbled into a mud hole.





Before she could shout a warning, the smaller horse her daughter Paris was riding also started to sink.




Dragging herself free, she managed to get her daughter and her horse out and onto solid ground and rushed back to her beloved Astro who continued to slowly sink further and further into the mud that had turned to quicksand.




Paris ran to their car and phoned for help while her mother stayed close to Astro for three terrifying hours, keeping his head high as the tide started to come in.




"I’ve been riding here for 20 years and never had a drama. I’ve never seen any signs and didn’t realise it was so boggy" Nicole said.




When fire fighters arrived, they tried to use hoses and a winch to no avail and a local farmer provided a tractor and a veterinary team and a helicopter was organised and on standby as a last resort.




After Vet Stacey Sullivan sedated Astro, he was successfully dragged from the mud by the farmer’s tractor.




A truly gutsy effort by a very brave woman.



And a happy ending.

Kevin Rudd loses leadership bid

It must have been a difficult day for Kevin Rudd and his family yesterday when Julia Gillard won the leadership battle with a convincing 71 votes to 31. He took a chance and lost his dream job of Foreign Minister and from now on, he will be sitting on the back bench, where many of his supports believe he doesn’t belong.


It’s a bizarre situation – here we have a former Prime Minister so much more popular with the Australian people than either Julia Gillard or Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, but his party won’t have him back under any circumstances. I still haven’t heard a plausible reason why they decided to dump him as PM, there were no obvious problems from the voter's point of view, and it’s quite likely he could have won the next election as leader. But it's history now and Mr Rudd left the meeting with supporters Kim Carr, Alan Griffin, Ursula Stephens, Maria Vamvakinou, Laura Smyth, Chris Bowen and Doug Cameron in tow.





Anthony Albanese is still haunted by the coup and said so. He rang the PM and told her he felt compelled to vote for Kevin Rudd in the leadership ballot and offered her his resignation. She refused to accept it. Fighting back tears, the Minister for Infrastructure said he thought the way Kevin Rudd was deposed was wrong and the only way he could register his dissent was to vote for him in the leadership ballot. He said he was raised by a single mother who told him to always do what he thought was right, no matter what it cost. He said ''It was wrong that a first-term, elected prime minister, is deposed without warning and under the circumstances in which it was done.”


Kevin Rudd promised the PM his "absolute support" and vowed he wouldn't challenge her again under any circumstances.``I dedicate myself to working fully for Ms Gillard's re-election as the prime minister of Australia,'' he said. ``I will do so with my absolute ability dedicated to that task.''

Gordon Wood released from prison

Gordon Wood fell in love with Caroline Byrne, a beautiful young model whose body was found on rocks at the base of a 100ft cliff at Sydney’s suicide spot – The Gap - 16 years ago. Last week he was released from prison after three appeal judges decided there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Wood had murdered his 24 year old girlfriend.


After four years behind bars, last weekend he was released from prison into the arms of his family, who never doubted his innocence for a minute and as he sat in the Paragon cafe in Goulburn, before heading home to Sydney, he marvelled that the cutlery wasn’t plastic and was overwhelmed by the taste of “real food”.






The 49 year old Wood once rubbed shoulders with the glamorous eastern suburbs set and was chauffeur to Stockbroker Rene Rivken at the time Caroline Byrne died. This did nothing for his reputation as Rivkin was found guilty of insider trading in 2003 and sentenced to nine months weekend detention. Banned for life from having a stockbroking licence, and suffering from a mental illness, Rivkin took his own life in 2005. As investigations began into Byrne’s death, Wood left Australia and went to work in England but was eventually extradited to face trial for her murder.


During Wood's trial in Sydney in 2008, Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC said that Miss Byrne could have only landed 'wedged like a spear' between rocks if she was thrown from the top of the cliff by a strong male. If she had decided to jump and end her life, she would not have landed where she did.


A police rescue squad officer, Mark Powderly, also told the court at the time that the state of Miss Byrne's body - lacking any injuries to her legs or body - was unlike any of the other ten to 20 victims he had recovered from the scene, known as The Gap. Tedeschi told the jury that Wood killed his girlfriend because she knew too much about the personal life and business affairs of Rene Rivkin. Wood was a tall, good-looking fitness fanatic and aerobics instructor and was seen about town with beautiful women on his arm, but because of his link to Rene Rivkin, rumours circulated that he was bisexual.





Wood said ''There are still people who think Azaria Chamberlain was killed by her mother Lindy, there are still people who think man hasn't landed on the moon. Those people you can't attempt to try and convert,'' he said. ''But I think the public opinion has shifted quite a lot since the trial, and I hope we can still move it some way further.''


Even though the judges have said there was not enough evidence to convict Wood, there still remains the mystery of how Miss Byrne landed where she did. The police bungled the case by failing to take a photograph of the body but experts have all said that she must have been propelled by something or someone. So how she fell to her death still remains a mystery.


Wood said he wished he didn’t come across as cold or arrogant but realizes that he does. ''There's a whole boarding school upbringing, I’m always very contained and wish I wasn’t.

Wanda Beach Murder breakthrough

Forty seven years is a long time for a murder case to remain open but cold case detectives have found a spot of blood on a pair of shorts from a male person taken from the crime scene of the Wanda murder case. The bodies of two 15-year-old girls, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt were discovered in sand dunes on the southern Sydney beach on the 11th January 1965.



It was school holidays and the two best friends who lived at Ryde asked their mothers if they could take their four brothers and sisters to Cronulla beach for the day. After eating their sandwiches, they decided to walk to Wanda beach, 2 kilometres north, and left their bags near rocks at Cronulla.


The two girls left their siblings and started to walk north, instead of south and when one of the children chased after them and said they were headed in the wrong direction, they just laughed and told him to go back to the others. They never came back.


There was a 40 metre bloody trail up a sand hill where one of the girls had been dragged which suggested she had run for her life before being chased and brought down. The bodies were covered in sand and both girls were sexually assaulted, beaten and stabbed to death.


Police found the evidence in crime scene boxes and are hoping that new testing methods will shed light on the guilty man/men involved. There are a number of known suspects and some are still alive.


"There is one suspect in particular that I would love to see matched against any DNA we may get in the future," one investigator said. "Luckily he is incarcerated interstate and will never be released."


Last year the Cold Case squad cleared more than 33 sexual assault cases and several murders committed in the early 1980s.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the maid

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has to return to America to face a civil suit lodged by hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo. Her allegations of attempted rape collapsed last year but the new hearing on March 15 will allow her another chance to plead her case against him. Criminal and civil laws are different. Criminal law has to prove that a party is guilty ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ but Civil law is determined on the basis of probability.


The OJ Simpson case is a good example of the difference between criminal and civil law. Simpson was found ‘not guilty’ of killing Ronald Lyle Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson and his trial made the American justice system a laughing stock.


But the law wasn’t finished with him. A civil suit was filed by the Goldman and Brown families and because Simpson couldn’t use the 5th Amendment, and unlike the criminal case, he was forced to testify. The jury awarded $8.5 million in compensation to Fred Goldman and his ex-wife Sharon Rufo for the loss of their son’s love, companionship and moral support and a few days later, punitive damages of $25 million were handed down to be shared between Nicole’s children and Fred Goldman..






Although Struss-Kahn admitted that he was involved in a sex act with the maid in his room last year, he insists she was a willing participant. And although a semen sample on the maid’s shirt matched Strauss-Kahn’s DNA sample, the case collapsed because of the credibility of the alleged victim. His defence team were the best that money could buy and it wasn’t a surprise when he won the case and was free to fly back to Paris.


This time around, one of his lawyers, William Taylor will submit a defence of ‘diplomatic immunity’ based on a UN convention covering “acts committed in a personal community”, whatever that means. One can only hope that the maid's lawyers will do a much better job than they did last time.


But it's not known if Strauss-Kahn will attend the hearing in person because he’s in trouble at home. He is facing charges of ‘complicity in pimping’ and ‘misuse of corporate assets’ in relation to a prostitute network of orgies at the upmarket Carlton Hotel in Lille, France. He admits attending many of these orgies but says he didn’t know the girls were prostitutes because they were ‘all naked at the time’ and were introduced to him by senior police officers.


In France, it’s against the law to assist a prostitute in her work and a woman has come forward and told police that while IMF chief, he tried to get her a visa so she could stay in the USA. He rejects being involved in pimping or corruption and after being interviewed by police for nearly 32 hours, he was released and whisked away under police escort.


Two weallthy businessmen have already been charged in the French prostitution case, Fabrice Paszkowski and David Roquet. Eight people are facing trial over the Carlton hotel affair including three executives from the luxury hotel, a leading lawyer and a police chief.


A lawyer himself and also a professor of economics, DSK is no fool and has powerful friends. He became Managing Director of the IMF in 2007 with the backing of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Born into a well-to-do family, his father was also a lawyer and his mother a Jewish journalist.


Strauss-Kahn boasts that he has been to many orgies over the years and has an ‘uninhibited sex life’ but has never once paid a cent for sex.

Gabe Watson's trial dismissed

A judge in Alabama has dismissed the case against Gabe Watson, the honeymoon killer, who was accused of murdering his wife while diving off the coast of Queensland in 2003. Judge Tommy Nail said that the prosecution failed to present enough evidence to send the case to a jury.


The decision will surprise many in Australia who followed the case closely and thought the prosecution had an excellent case, namely that Watson drowned his wife for insurance money. Witnesses have recently given evidence which backs up the view that Watson showed no interest in being with his wife when she was finally brought to the surface and people worked desperately to save her life - it was plain to everyone around him that this man was not in love with his wife.

Alabama prosecutor Don Valeska says the case should have gone to the jury. "I'm sick to my stomach," he told ABC Local Radio Brisbane presenter Steve Austin.


"We presented a prima facie case under the law and he said we didn't. He added "I've just contacted some of the jurors - they have already spoken to the press here and said that if they had had to vote on this case, he would not be leaving the court house."


At least Australia gave him 18 months after he pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but now he walks. Unbelievable!

Rudd decides to run for PM

Kevin Rudd took everyone by surprise yesterday by resigning as Foreign Minister. Two days ago Simon Crean and other prominent Labor MPs made scathing verbal attacks on Mr Rudd and he was furious that PM Julia Gillard didn’t come to his defence. So he decided to throw in the towel, and wouldn’t wait until he got home, he held a news conference in the US in the middle of the night.


Queensland MP Graham Perrett once threatened to quit if Julia Gillard was rolled as prime minister but now says he is surprised and disappointed that Australia has lost a “magnificent" foreign minister. “It's not often that we have a foreign minister with diplomatic skills, language skills and the gravitas of having been a former prime minister, which meant he was able to open doors around the world that not a lot of foreign ministers have had open to them."


So was Kevin Rudd a “magnificent” Foreign Minister? Naturally Tony Abbott doesn’t think so and in his column today, he says that Kevin Rudd was prone to “big talk without actions to match.” He also believes that Australia should have had a “Jakata focus rather than a Geneva one.”


As foreign minister, Rudd decided to participate in a minute’s silence after the death of North Korean despot Kim Jong-Il when our other allies boycotted the event. Mr Abbott believes that this and other examples like Labor’s softening support for Israel is because Labor is obsessed with winning a temporary seat on the UN Security Council.


But what does the average Aussie think about Kevin Rudd? His decision to soften John Howard’s asylum seeker policy was an absolute disaster. Julia Gillard came up with the Malaysian solution which the high court threw out and now asylum seekers continue to arrive every day.


The government refuses to bring in harsher penalties for boat people, the ones that worked for John Howard. Could it be that a tough approach on asylum seekers could be perceived by the UN as being unsympathetic towards refugees which would blow our chances for that UN Security Council seat? And we mustn’t forget the carbon tax, it was Kevin Rudd’s baby from the very beginning, he started it, Julia finished it and now we are stuck with it.


But Tony Abbott might never get to be PM afterall because Kevin Rudd has announced that he will now run for re-election as Prime Minister at a meeting next Monday. He said “I have many more calls still to make but their overall argument to me is that they regard me as the best prospect to lead the Australian Labor Party successfully to the next election, to save the Labor Party at the next election, and to save the country from the ravages of an Abbott government.”


He hit back at the extraordinary attack by Treaurer Wayne Swan last night. “Frankly I am shocked and disappointed by the tone and content of the intensely personal attacks that have been lodged against me overnight in Australia,” he said.


And then he dropped the bombshell - “If I was asked by the Governor-General to form a government, I would immediately advise an election. “We need a real change and the only way we can get real change is with a real election.”

Roll on Monday.

A father's betrayal

Jason Lees murdered his son by throwing him off the Storey Bridge. He was a shattered man after the breakup-up of his marriage but instead of taking his own life, he woke his sleeping son in the middle of the night, drove to Kangaroo Point, strapped him into the baby seat of a bicycle, cycled to the Storey bridge and threw him off. He then jumped after him.






A neighbour said yesterday that she saw two-year-old Brad wrap his arms around his weeping father on the back stairs of their Brisbane home where wife Danielle, a psychologist, was no longer living.


Lees, originally from Canada, was a popular teacher at a private school and everyone who knew him said he had everything to live for. Anglican Church Grammar School headmaster Jonathan Hensman described the former teacher as "enthusiastic, passionate and an honour to the profession".


"He loved his little son - he was the apple of his eye," one friend said.

Israelis not capable of Iranian strike

General Martin Dempsey


According to the New York Times today, America is trying to dissuade Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. General Martin Dempsey said it was “not prudent at this point” to attack Iran and “a strike at this time would be destabilising.”


American military analysts think it’s fraught with danger and a bad idea. Israeli jet pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across hostile airspace, refuel in the air, fight off Iran’s defenses while bombing underground nuclear sites - and they would need at least 100 planes to do it.


Michael V. Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009, said last month that airstrikes capable of seriously setting back Iran’s nuclear program were “beyond the capacity” of Israel, in part because of the distance that attack aircraft would have to travel and the scale of the task.


Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, a retired top Air Force intelligence official said “All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, let’s bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going to be that easy.” And the British agree. British Foreign Secretary William Hague told the BBC that attacking Iran would not be “the wise thing” for Israel to do “at the moment.” One fear is that the US would be “sucked into finishing he job” and they could do it in spades.


Should the United States decide to get involved, the Pentagon has the ability to launch big strikes with bombers, stealth aircraft and cruise missiles, followed up by drones that could carry out damage assessments to help direct further strikes. Unlike Israel, the US has plenty of refuelling options, bombers could fly from Al Udeid air base in Qatar, Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or bases in Britain and the United States.


But there’s a problem, experts say it will be difficult to penetrate Iran’s deepest nuclear facilities and are working on enhancing the existing 30,000 pound bomb called “Massive Ordnance Penetrator” that was specifically designed for Iran and North Korea. “There’s only one superpower in the world that can carry this off,” General Deptula said. “Israel’s great on a selective strike here and there.”


So Israel has been told, in no uncertain terms, to back off.

Sir Paul McCartney and daughter Beatrice

Cannabis has a terrible reputation and that’s why it’s illegal. There are thousands of documented cases of heavy users tipping over into paranoia and schizophrenia, especially in the young whose brains are not fully developed. Skunk today is much stronger and more dangerous than the varieties used in the 1960s. It’s true that not everyone who smokes pot ends up using harder drugs like heroin or crack cocaine but almost everyone who takes harder drugs started with cannabis.


But it obviously hasn’t affected Sir Paul McCartney who admits to having a life-long love affair with the drug. At 69, he’s decided to give it up now so he can be a better parent to his eight year old daughter Beatrice. But it looks likely his ex wife Heather Mills made him an offer he couldn't refuse. She argued that he could hardly warn their daughter about the dangers of drugs while sneaking away to have a secret puff himself. And there's another theory, he's now married to a much younger woman and cannabis is notorious for suppressing a man's sex drive.


Sir Paul once said he was a ‘pot virgin’ when first introduced to the drug by Bob Dylan and then went on to use heroin, cocaine, LSD and other psychedelics but here he is today, still standing and with a knighthood to boot.


Sir Paul McCartney is a global ambassador for Britain and should denounce drugs unequivocally and tell the world just how dangerous they really are and how many lives they have ruined. RIP Whitney Houston.

Why are Australians feeling so depressed?

Alan Kohler is chief executive and a major shareholder of Australian Independent Business Media Pty Ltd, which publishes the online investment newsletter Eureka Report and the free, 24-hour business news and commentary website Business Spectator since 2007. He wrote an important article today about why Australians are feeling less optimistic about life. They keep telling us that unemployment is low, the currency is strong, interest rates are going down, national savings are up, economic growth is solid and there’s a mining boom, so why is it so?



I can think of plenty of reasons to feel miserable – we’ve discovered that our politicians lack vision and foresight - our Parliament is in turmoil - there’s a depressingly long time to wait before the next election so the Labor government will continue to borrow more and more billions, putting us even further into debt - more asylum seekers arrive every day with no solution in sight - people are joining the dole queue in droves with more job losses predicted - Greeks are threatening to jump off tall buildings - Israel wants to bomb Iran and the global outlook for the rest of 2012 is positively bleak.



Our high exchange rate is putting pressure on manufacturing, tourism and retail but Alan Kohler thinks the main problem is that we are up to our eyeballs in personal debt.


Australia's household debt as a percentage of disposable income has been stuck at 150 per cent – the highest in the world – for about five years. Twenty years ago it was 50 per cent. In other countries it has come down, albeit painfully. Interest paid as a percentage of income has doubled in 20 years.


And the underlying cause of this is the high price of land in Australia. It is one of the mostly sparsely populated nations on earth, yet the cost of land is among the highest in the world, crippling the citizens with massive debts and leading to hugely profitable banks. The combination of rising population, a lack of arable land and artificial restrictions on residential development in cities has led to a six-fold rise in the median house price since 1986, from $93,000 to $550,000 now. Over the same period, average household incomes have risen 3.5 times. And now there is widespread terror that house prices will eventually collapse and leave millions with no equity, as happened in the United States. As a result the savings rate has skyrocketed and consumers are on strike, putting money aside for Armageddon.



Not a very optimistic view but it proves we’re not stupid. Even though we don’t really understand economics, we somehow knew that bad times were coming and acting accordingly, hence our good savings result. It's a weird feeling, watching the world falling apart from afar and hoping it won't affect us, I guess we just have to keep plugging away and hope for the best.

Gabe Watson's trial in Alabama

Tina Watson drowned while scuba-diving with her husband off the coast of Townsville in Queensland in 2003. She was on her honeymoon and very much in love with her husband Gabe. Dubbed the Honeymoon Killer, Gabe Watson, 32, was released from a Queensland prison on 11th November 2010 after serving just 18 months for the manslaughter of his wife Tina.


Alabama authorities were frustrated with Australia because we wouldn’t let him leave, they were keen to put him on trial as soon as possible, but the government was adamant - they wouldn’t send him back if he was likely to face the death penalty.


Alabama agreed that he wouldn't end up on death row, but it wasn't good enough for Canberra, they wanted a guarantee from the US Federal Government and finally got it. Watson had to wait in an Immigration detention centre in Melbourne until agreement was reached and when it was, the government released a statement "We are now satisfied that our international obligations have been met and are commencing plans for Mr Watson's removal".


ABC's Australian Story made a program about the case and it was clear from the evidence shown in that program, that Watson has indeed serious questions to answer and Alabama Attorney-General Troy King agrees and has promised to bring Watson to justice.



Ken Snyder (centre)



This morning, Ken Snyder, former US Marine and dive master said that Gabe Watson’s total lack of interest in his dying wife and “bullshit” explanation of her death made him furious.


Snyder and friend Doug Millsaps were the first to question Watson on the catamaran Spoilsport as doctors on Jazz II worked for 40 minutes to save his wife. They heard there was a missing diver and suited up to help with the search and when they asked him where his wife was, he said “She didn’t come up.”


Mr Snyder said Watson’s story – that he had to leave his sinking wife because his mask was knocked off was ridiculous. “Both me and Doug used the same term when we heard his story – bullshit, that didn’t happen” he said. Watson admits he was just “hanging out” on Spoilsport asking for hugs and showed no interest in the other boat where his wife lay dying and made no effort to see her until after she was dead.


Dr Stanley Stutz, a key prosecution witness, testified he saw a large diver envelope Tina for 10-15 seconds. "He swam over to her, in front of her, and put his arms around her armpits. I thought he was trying to save her, then they split apart and he went to the surface and she sank," he said. Dr Stutz was so alarmed he swam to his dive instructor yelling "Did you see that? Did you see that?" It was then that dive leader Wade Singleton shot to the bottom to rescue Tina, bringing her to the surface from 33 metres. Police believe that Watson turned off Tina's air, covered her to prevent her from surfacing and reached behind to restore her air to avoid suspicion.


Ken Snyder said Watson broke the first rule of diving - "Never leave your dive buddy" and didn’t hit a simple button that would have taken Tina to the surface. Snyder said the time it took Watson to get to the surface, two and a half minutes, was a “pedestrian stroll” when compared to Singleton who travelled 30 metres in one minute.


Prosecutors say Watson is a cold-blooded killer and chronic liar who planned to murder Tina for life and travel insurance policies. He also took the engagement ring he gave her off her finger before she was buried.


Tina's father was distraught when flowers he placed on Tina's grave kept disappearing so he set up a video camera and caught Watson sneaking up to the grave and taking them, one can only wonder why. Watson married Kim Lewis in August 2008, two months after he was ordered to face charges in Queensland for Tina’s death.


The trial continues.

Greece can't take any more

Greek Minister Christos Papoutsis warned that Greece cannot take any more but it’s becoming clear that they must. The pressure is mounting and this is the dramatic moment when a distraught woman, Lambrousi Harikleia, a civil servant, threatened to jump from an Athens office block where she works because she fears she will lose her job in the new round of cuts. She was eventually lead away to safety.





The Eurozone has now disintegrated into a slanging match, country insulting country and real bitterness and resentment rules. Germany, Austria, Finland the the Netherlands now believe Greece is beyond help. An 82 year old veteran of Greece’s resistance against the Nazis in WW2 is outraged by Germany’s comments that Greece was a ‘bottomless pit’. Angela Merkel appeared in a right-wing newspaper dressed in a Nazi uniform with a swastika above a headline alluding to Auschwitz and street posters also appeared of Ms Merkel in a Nazi uniform with the words ‘Public Nuisance’.





Elderly pensioners marched in the streets of Athens, worried and anxious about how they are going to survive. Today the Greek government is rushing around trying to find extra savings to satisfy EU demands as Chancellor Merkel is determined to get a binding guarantee from Greece before handing over a 130 million euro bailout.



The British Conservative Party’s leader in Europe Martin Callanan thinks it’s time for Greece to leave and that “Nobody believes that the latest package will save them, even if all the measures agreed on are implemented - by 2020, Greece would still be in a worse position than Italy is in now.”


How and when will it end?

BHP Coal Miner's Strike

As Australia’s biggest supplier of the vital ingredient for making steel – coking coal, BHP Billiton’s Mutsubishi Alliance is in trouble. Today 3,500 workers at six mines across Queensland’s Bowen Basin are on strike.


The company says the union demands will effect their competitiveness and the union says their union rights were stripped away under Work Choices and they want them back. Those rights include having union employees in safety roles, rather than managers, and 14 other outstanding issues, including housing and equal pay for employees and contractors.


Negotiations with the company have been going on for 15 months and the union says it’s time to take action. There are three unions involved and it’s the biggest industrial action since the Howard government came to power and changed workplace rules.


BHP-Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance released a statement saying it reserves the right to manage its business in a safe and commercially successful way and wants to return to the negotiating table. And the company has given the workers an option that only the very brave would dare to take up - employees who wish to continue working will be welcome to do so.


A cynic might say that surely this can’t be happening under a Labor government who introduced the Fair Work Act, but it just reinforces the gulf that has, and always will exist between management and worker.

Fair Work Australia and Craig Thomson

Craig Thomson, Labor member for the federal seat of Dobell, is accused of misusing his HSU union credit card to buy prostitutes and make cash withdrawals worth more than $100,000.


Fair Work Australia (FWA) was set up by the Labor government when it dismantled the Industrial Relations legislation of the Howard and Keating governments and was heralded as an independent, unbiased umpire.


FWA’s investigation into Mr Thompson is now in its fourth year and the public want to know why. When you look into who actually runs the FWA, it’s becomes clear that union men and women are sitting in judgement of their colleagues who just happen to be union men and women. The Labor Party and the union movement have been married for a very long time and 8 out of 10 senior ministers in Julia Gillard’s government are ex union officials. Tony Abbott had a point when he said ''Fair Work Australia should be eager to publish all correspondence, emails, file notes and phone records of contact between it and ministers so that there can be full confidence that there has been no political interference in this investigation.''






FWA say it has amassed more than 6500 pages of material and that the people subject to the probe have until March 5 to respond to the case against them. The media, like hungry wolves, will be waiting for this day to arrive with bated breath but the PM recently said it would be “highly improper” for her to ask FWA to make public their findings, which only adds fuel to the fire.


But Fair Work Australia isn’t all bad, it does some good work. Around 150,000 lowest-paid workers, most of them women, have been awarded a pay rise ranging from 18 to 41 per cent. It will benefit 120,000 women who work in difficult jobs such as working with the disabled, domestic violence, sexual assault, running homeless shelters – important people vital in looking after our most vulnerable. Well done Labor.


But getting back to the Fair Work Australia report on Craig Thomson. We all know what the bottom line is to all of this – if Craig Thomson is found guilty of corruption, he will be forced to leave Parliament which could result in the collapse of the Gillard government.

Valentine's Day 2012

Every time the Queen Mary 2 comes to Sydney, people flock to the harbour to get a glimpse of the mighty ship as she comes through the heads. And as dawn was breaking this morning, on Valentine’s Day, she was met and escorted up the harbour by a flotilla of water craft, as helicopters, amateur photographers and hundreds of people looked on. In a clever PR campaign involving a morning TV show, the Cunard line allowed the Queen to display a 4 metre wedding proposal banner which read "Marry Me Jess?” Jess and Stefan will be taken on board the Queen today for a romantic brunch.






The ship is on its third visit to Sydney and has 2482 passengers aboard, including 1169 Australians. As part of a 108 day world cruise, it is spending 28 days in Australian waters, travelling from Fremantle in Western Australia and then around the coast, stopping at ports including Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin before returning to Perth and on to Sydney, which it revisits on March 7.


Because of her size, the Queen Mary 2 is too wide and too long to dock at Circular Quay and must berth at Garden Island where she makes our Naval ships look very small.


When the Queen sails for Brisbane tonight, she will carry Matthew Flinder’s handwritten journal, logbook and an original copy of his map, published in 1814. The priceless documents are on loan from the State Library of NSW and senior curator and Flinders expert Paul Brunton is travelling with them and will give lectures to guests about the man who gave Australia its name.

Eagle Dad - Extreme parenting

A father posted a video of his three year old son forced to do push-ups in the snow in just his underpants and was seen by millions of people around the world. The little boy was crying and we were outraged that a father could be so cruel. Chinese businessman He Liesheng is proud of the name Eagle Dad and said ‘Like an eagle, I push my child to the limit so he can learn how to fly.’


He chose the name “Eagle Dad” because when a baby eagle is large enough, the mother takes it to the edge of a cliff and pushes it off and when it falls into the valley, it learns to fly. Although some may die Mr He points out, most don't and it is an extreme form of education.


In China there is a lot of pressure on one-child families and Eagle Dad believes his approach will help his son win an early place in one of China’s leading universities. He turned four last week and has already started school at an elite private primary school where the youngest pupil is supposed to be six years old.


His father has filled every minute of his day with a punishing schedule of climbing, swimming, skiing, skating, chess and martial arts. Mr He also has him repeat special phrases that will encourage him to improve himself such as “Duo Duo, you are the best. You are beautiful. You will grow up healthy. You are confident. You love physical activities. You will enjoy your life and your family.”


One such exercise, imposed when he was two years and nine months, was to stop him crying. Mr He said proudly: ‘Soon after he would wake up, we would say to him, “Duo Duo, you mustn’t cry. You have to be strong.” After we did this, he improved and he stopped crying.’






The family spent a winter break in New York where Duo Duo attended a kindergarten for three months as part of his education. On the eve of Chinese New Year, he was sent outside in the snow, and his picture went around the world.


‘I did it for three reasons, Mr He said. ‘First, I wanted to do something to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Second, I did it because China is developing very fast and I wanted to show that if a child can accept this kind of extreme education when they are young, they can overcome any difficulties the future might hold. And third, I did it because I want Duo Duo to be strong.’


He was surprised by the global reaction. ‘I didn’t realise people would react in the way that they did. In China, about 60 per cent of people disapprove of what I did, 20 per cent approve and 20 per cent don’t know what to think. But I don’t regret what I did and would do it again – or maybe another similar kind of exercise to make him stronger.’


Mr He is basking in the limelight of his notoriety and has numerous laminated Chinese newspaper cuttings of the story, he has also appeared on television and intends to write a book about his approach to parenting.


Mr He said: ‘I am responsible for preparing the schedule and Duo Duo’s mother is responsible for carrying it out. She doesn’t agree with the way I am raising him and sometimes we quarrel about it but she has seen how he has improved so she agrees to carry out my instructions.’


Mrs He stayed in New York when Mr He returned to China at the beginning of February. He said ‘Of course, she has seen all the reports in New York and is very worried about them - I don’t know if she is angry or not – but it is true to say that she disagrees with my methods.’

Servant wanted to run the Royal bath

Housekeeping Assistant Wanted, Salary around $A28,400 per year. The job advertisement appears on the Royal Household website. Applicants will be ‘committed to achieving exceptional standards of service provision’ and will rub shoulders with the Queen and Prince Philip.




Running the royal bath is just one of the required duties - the successful applicant will have to put the plug in, turn on the tap and check the temperature when the bath is full. Other duties include packing and unpacking for guests of the Royal household, ironing their clothes, helping them dress, taking care of their jewellery and arranging tea and breakfast trays to be brought to their room. The position will be based at Buckingham Palace but will move to other royal residences such as Balmoral and Sandringham during the year.






The 40-hour-a-week job requires someone with a ‘friendly, polite and approachable disposition and an ability to be discrete and maintain confidentiality’. As the modest starting salary indicates, the job is near the bottom of the Palace hierarchy.

Politicians who leak to the media

Laurie Oakes wrote an interesting article today about leaks to the media. This time it’s not about the Labor Party but the Opposition and what Joe Hockey did to catch a rat in the ranks.


It centres around “a $70 billion budget black hole” that Labor keeps saying Tony Abbott will have to fill if he wins the next election and has been repeated so many times, it’s widely accepted as fact.


In August last year when the Coalition met to look at ways of saving money, there was a leak that Hockey needed to find $70 billion to balance the books and now Hockey knows who did it. He told all his colleagues a different figure so if there was a leak, he’d know where it came from. Sure enough, soon after “a $70 billion dollar black hole” was in the headlines. This strategy has been used before and has worked a treat.


Whether the figure is 40, 50, 60 or 70 billions, it’s clear that the Opposition will need to be ruthless to get the economy back on track and it was a logical form of attack from the government when parliament resumed on Tuesday. Little wonder Gillard and Swan were able to seriously undermine Coalition credibility on the economy.

Julia Gillard Gags MPs

The PM has made the extraordinary decision to gag ministers from speaking to the press to stamp out leadership speculation. They must first get permission from her office before any meeting or private talks take place. Neil Breen, editor of the Sunday Telegraph said on morning television today that editors are being inundated with calls from Labor MP’s every day and that her caucus is leaking like a sieve.


Victorian Labor MP Rob Mitchell, a foot soldier for Bill Shorten, accused Mr Rudd and his supporters of being too gutless to challenge. "If someone wants to come out of a cowardly hiding and thinks they have the numbers, put up or shut up," he said. "And when they lose then they and their mates should just go to the backbench and wander off at the next election. And added "There is no challenge."






We also learn that the PM has rearranged the cabinet room seating arrangement and has moved Mr Rudd further away, he used to sit three seats to her left but now it’s four. So how do we know all this? Because Labor MP’s are queuing up to tell the Daily Telegraph the latest news. MPs know they will be turfed out at the next election and are desperately hoping for a leadership change to turn their fortunes around.


And what is Kevin Rudd doing? Nothing, absolutely nothing and the people who hate him are shooting themselves in the foot. When Simon Cream said that Rudd was a Prima Donna, not a team player and would never be Prime Minister again, it doesn’t help their cause. Kevin Rudd was the man who took the Labor Party out of the wilderness into government but they seem to have forgotten that bit, they got rid of him on a whim and are now paying the price.


On Monday night, ABC’s Four Corners will feature a pogram about Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party. Despite repeated requests, Mr Rudd refused to be interviewed.

Wife killer Andrew Kalajzich out of jail

ANDREW KALAJZICH walked free from jail yesterday, 25 years after he was convicted for paying hit man Bill Vandenberg $20,000 to murder his wife, Megan. She was shot dead as she slept next to her husband.


Kalajzich had it all - a beautiful wife and children, luxury homes, a respected reputation in the community as hotel and restaurant owner and all the power and privilege that went with it. Now 71 years old, he will collect an old age pension and live on a meagre income because his millions have all been spent on legal fees – to no avail. A Supreme Court murder trial, a court of criminal appeal challenge, an application for special leave to the High Court and a special judicial inquiry costing more than $3.5 million, all dismissed his protestations of innocence.


Kalajzich had an eye for the ladies and started dating a Yugoslav girl, Marcellina Iurman, who worked in his fish restaurant. In September 1973, while in a relationship with Iurman, there was a mysterious incident in which Kalajzich was driving his wife and young son Andrew when he suddenly felt sick, opened the car door and rolled out. The car, with his wife and Andrew, then seven, inside, careered over a cliff and it was a miracle they weren’t both killed. Police wrote the incident off as an accident and there was no complaint from Megan or her son.






In the mid 1980s, Kalajzich became infatuated with his executive secretary, Marlene Watson who was madly in love with him but it is not known if this was the motive for wanting his wife dead. But it soon became clear that he was determined to have his wife killed because he made the mistake of telling too many people that he was looking for a hitman to do the job.


Franciscus Wilhelmus (Bill) Vandenberg, a sometime grocer and foundry worker had no experience of firearms and on January 11, 1986, he came up behind Megan as she left her car at Fairlight but he forgot to cock the rifle and panicked, hitting her over the head with the weapon, breaking off the silencer, and left. Megan fell down a flight of steps. Kalajzich sympathised with his wife over the bungled assault but said he still wanted the hit to proceed.


At first it was decided that Vandenberg would shoot Kalajzich in the leg but later agreed he should roll off the bed instead. In the early hours of January 27, 1986, Vandenberg walked in through a door left open by Kalajzich, found the bedroom and fired twice into Megan's head and when Kalajzich rolled off the bed, he fired twice into his pillow.


Bill Vandenberg confessed to being the "Triggerman" and subsequently committed suicide in prison. In his confession, he claimed he fired two bullets into Megan's head and then two bullets into Andrew's pillow a few centimetres from his head. He claimed he deliberately missed, so that it would look as if Andrew had also been a target.


After the funeral where Kalajzich seemed distraught, he took a holiday to Yugoslavia and when he returned, on December 18 1986 he was arrested.


But he has always maintained he didn’t do it when all the evidence shows that he did. I find it strange that his family has remained faithful, his children Andrew and Michelle believe he’s innocent and so did Megan’s mother who was living with them at the time of her murder.


Kalajzich's son Andrew, who changed his name to his mother's maiden name, has a business in Fairlight and his sister Michelle lives nearby with her husband and children in Manly. Their father’s 25 year non-parole period ended in December 2011 and he’s been granted parole under strict conditions for the next three years.

Aboriginal Magistrate Pat O'Shane

Patricia June O’Shane is a magistrate of the Local Court of New South Wales and lives in Sydney. She is also an Aboriginal and former head of the NSW Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs. She will be 72 this year, the age when NSW Magistrates must retire.


Ms O’Shane has had numerous complaints about her judgements over the years, but somehow she’s survived them all and the question should be asked – has she received sympathetic consideration from the legal profession because she’s Aboriginal?


Unfortunately for Ms O’Shane, her recent ruling has upset a lot of people because it involves an assault on a member of the people we hold dear - our ambulance service. She threw out assault charges laid against a black African refugee, accused of punching a NSW Ambulance Officer after she learned that the paramedic had called him a “filthy pig”.


In questioning Christopher Martin, Ms O’Shane asked him if it would be correct to infer “that you don’t like blacks.” It seems the paramedic called him a “filthy pig” when he spat on the ambulance floor but he wasn’t given the opportunity to tell his side of the story.


Senior judges have been unhappy with Pat O’Shane for a long time, upholding 88 per cent of Supreme Court appeals against her judgements and ordering half to be reheard by other magistrates.


"If Pat O'Shane wants to retain her dignity and her reputation as a leading public figure, she may well think it is time to resign." Michael Eburn and Ruth Townsend from the Australian National University College of Law wrote in a Sydney newspaper today.


Premier Barry O'Farrell asked a question that needs an answer - why has the legal profession sanctioned unfair and unjust rulings that have been going on for decades?

Peter Slipper wants to wear Queen's Counsel Gown

It must be a terrible thing to have your photograph on the front page of a Sydney newspaper depicted as a rat and Liberal turncoat. But Peter Slipper doesn’t seem to mind, he’s making himself even more unpopular by announcing that he wants to bring pomp and ceremony back to Parliament. He wants to wear the plush gown and wig and be ceremoniously brought to Parliament in a full procession from his office into the chamber at the start of each session. We finished with all that old-fashioned nonsense in 1988 when MP’s moved into the new Parliament House.


He will never be allowed to forget what he did last year, abandoning his party to become Speaker in a hung parliament which gave the Labor government an extra vote that will keep them in government. Slipper says he left the Queensland Liberal National Party because he was being bullied. "I would not have accepted this position if my election to this office was going to guarantee the government's endurance in office," he said. "It made sense to take the job ... they bullied me out of the LNP." My guess is that if he thought he was bullied by the LNP, he aint seen nothin’ yet.






Mr Slipper is a hard man to figure out, he’s admitted to being the victim of bullying yet wants to bring pomp back into parliament, a measure that will surely draw even more contempt from his colleagues. The wig was last worn by Billy Snedden 30 years ago and was donated to the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House.


Ian Sinclair who was Speaker for 8 months in 1998 warned Mr Slipper about wearing the Queen’s Counsel gown and other accessories. “The Speaker should always “be of the people, not above the people” he said.


One MP said "Slippery is a traditionalist, he wants the respect of the parliament but the risk is he will end up looking like a clown.”

We don't need British aid says India

India's Finance Minister badly needs a lesson in diplomacy. Pranab Mukherjee insulted Britain by describing their 280 million pound aid every year as nothing more than “peanuts” and said that he and other Indian ministers tried to reject the aid last year but the British government ‘begged’ them to take it. India now finds it offensive to be perceived as a poor country and figures show that their economy is booming and could well overtake Britain’s in the next ten years.



So why did Britain give India one billion pounds of aid over the last five years? Could it have been a sweetener for them to look favourably on buying their Eurofighter Typhoon jet? They must have been bitterly disappointed by the news last week that French firm Dassault Rafale was selected to supply 126 military jets to the Indian air force. The British bid by BAE Systems Typhoon came in at second choice. But here’s the kicker – British aid is 15 times larger than the eighteen million pounds France gave India in 2009.



The French slashed its price to ensure the deal was done and it worked a treat - Indian officials said that the Dassault’s Rafale jet ‘was much cheaper than the Eurofighter’.