Let us introduce you to the
Institute of Public Affairs.
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| David Hicks & wife Aloys |
Just as the USA has been plagued by 'think tanks' Australia is beset by these well funded groups who usually sing from the same song sheet : the free market will be our saviour and we should
still (despite the GFC) be worshipping at the feet of
Hayek and that old phony
Milton Friedman.
There's the usual guff about privatised medicine being a god send and currently on it's website, a homage to that nutty historian
Geoffrey Blainey who coined the term "
black armband of history'.
That's a re-visionist view of the decimation of the Aboriginal people that basically says the disappearance of the Tasmanian Aboriginals was of their own doing and not a result of hundreds of colonists using them for target practice- that the 'Stolen Generation; is a myth despite it being written into government policy in the early 1900's and anyway, all those little half caste kiddies looked much nicer in their Mission Home smocks and being wrenched from their wailing mother's arms was for their own good.
Blainey all wild-eyed collared the
Shuttle one night a few years ago at a party and gave your scribe a potted history of Aboriginal self administered negligence in failing to stay alive and mistook the fact that he was standing by the Champagne Bar from whence we re-filled our flute as a concerned interest in his crack pot ideas. Thankfully the old bugger has retired now,.
If this was the USA no doubt the IPA too would have elevated that fruit loop
Ayn Rand to Goddess like status as the loopy right have recently. Needless to say, they are Climate Sceptics.
Writing as a fellow of the IPA
Ted Lapkin in a piece titled
"Audience On their Feet For a Fraud " has berated the entire audience who watched former Guantanamo Bay prisoner
David Hicks talk about his autobiography at the Sydney Writer's Week on Sunda
Hicks plead guilty ( after 6 years confined in a tiny cell) to 'providing material support for terrorism' (apparently guarding a burned out tank). He was sentenced to time served plus another 9 months in Australia. His defending counsel including US Army
Major Michael Mori said the guilty plea was in sheer desperation to get out of Gitmo.
Despite the Pentagon's former Chief Prosecutor
Colonel Morris Davis saying that the Hicks should never have been prosecuted and his case was replete with political interference from the
George W. Bush and
John Howard governments, Lapin knows far better.
There was no evidence against Hicks but Lapkin surmises by cobbling together a series of un-related events and throws in a quote from
Martin Amis to condemn Hicks in an odd case of 'guilty by association' that somehow proves that Hicks was basically in cahoots with the former Pakistan resident
O.bin Laden.
Lapkin isn't too sure if Hicks was an "enemy combatant" or an enemy soldier in the perpetual ( but never legally declared ) War On Terror.
Despite the Bush administration attempts to legalise 'enemy combatant' status the US Supreme Court has rejected it and
Barack Obama has finally abandoned the wording.
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| Martin Amis |
He clutches at straws in his convected outrage that Hicks should be afforded an audience at a writer's forum (despite the concept that it will be an exchange of ideas) and gets to the nitty gritty: the taxpayers funded the event IE : a room and some chairs.
Lapkin has plunged the depths of quotes to justify his hate piece, from former ASIO director
Denis Richardson who during his tenure provided the false claim that Iraq was replete with WMDs to the diminutive writer
Martin Amis. who apparently said (long before his
embarrassing love letter to
Christopher Hitchens) : "
People of liberal sympathies, stupefied by relativism, have become the
apologists for a creedal wave that is racist, misogynist, homophobic,
imperialist, and genocidal. To put it another way, they are up the arse
of those that want them dead."
So there. Amis said that so it confirms all our fears about lefties and Hicks as well.
Lapkin promotes a right wing agenda via something as simple as distorting the tale of the hapless Hicks who was caught up in events way beyond his control.
But why is this tosh being published in an august organ like the
Sydney Morning Herald ?.
Probably because they provide free copy yet a few weeks ago Fairfax CEO
Greg Hywood said on the ABC's Media Watch "
What I'll be saying is that we'll be investing in creative journalism, the journalism that people read".
Lapkin's piece was certainly creative. He uses a couple of bravado boasting letters Hicks penned years ago as proof. He says we must believe what Hicks wrote then but not what he writes now.
Two weeks later Hywood said 300 staff including 80 sub-editors had to accept 'voluntary redundancy'.
At this rate, is it any wonder Fairfax's
Canberra Times ran an Trivia Quiz last week put together by
Pagemasters-the outfit who will replace the sub-editors and journalists (and 40% owned by
Rupert Murdoch) where
every answer ended up with a nickname for penis !
