"Little Black Bastard"

An eagle-eyed regular Whisper's reader (we have thousands) draws our attention to the photograph we published of the late Stephen Hawkings (with walking stick) marching to protest the Vietnam War with Vanessa Redgrave, writer Tariq Ali and others in the late 1960s.
Directly behind Hawkings and holding the banner is a very young Australian dancer, actor, director and choreographer Noel Tovey.
Tovey is part Aboriginal and enjoyed a very successful theatre career in the UK including teaching at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre and the world famous RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art). At one stage he also ran a successful Art Deco antique store in London.
His autobiography Little Black Bastard is recommended reading.
The title refers to an earlier life as a teen in Melbourne when he worked as a male hustler for a time . The insult was hurled at him by coppers as they shoved him into a cell after arresting him.
By co-incidence Whispers just borrowed Tovey's second book And Then I Found Me from the local library.

The last time Whispers encountered Noel was at an event at the Sydney Town Hall where the guest of honour was then PM John Howard. As Howard got up to speak Tovey hurled some choice insults at Howard over the Iraq War, and then stormed out of the building.

Strangest story of the week

Broadcaster Phillip Adams who chairs the Late Night Live program on the ABC's Radio National is a particular favourite of Whispers. Each day when we are traveling by car we avidly listen to Adam's show when it is re-broadcast. His mixture of guests with their take on world affairs is always fascinating as is Adam's presentation.

But now word reaches us the Adams and an ABC crew have been banned from visiting India. They have been denied visas after planning the trip for weeks. Why? This is a real mystery. Many consider Adams a bit of an old 'lefty'. Indeed former Prime Minister John Howard on one of his regular attacks upon the ABC and the (ill-conceived) view it was too "left wing" famously pondered "where is the right-wing Philip Adams.?"
Australia's media seems to have ignored this bizarre insult which can only be political but India's Hindustan Times has the scoop.

Whispers has spotted Adams around town in the past but he now appears to have retired to the country after selling his magnificent Paddington home. On one memorable occasion we attended a party in Queen Street Woolahra for the launch of the famed Prince Lorenzo Montesini's (left) autobiography, wittingly launched by Philip.

About NSW Kids in Need Foundation Cocktail Party

This year's event will be in the presence of The Honourable John Howard OM AC Former Prime Minister of Australia.

Alan Jones AO will host the event and interview Mr Howard about his time as Prime Minister.

6pm-8pm Saturday October 21st, Kirribilli House, Kirribilli Ave, Kirribilli
Dress code: Lounge Suit

By purchasing tickets to this event you’ll be helping the NSW Kids in Need Foundation raise valuable funds to make a real difference in the lives of children.

Event Highlights include:
Cocktail Party with Canapés and Beverages
Master of Ceremonies 2GB’s Alan Jones AO

NSW Kids in Need Foundation Limited fundraises for the following six kid’s charities:
• Bear Cottage Children's Hospice
• The Burns Unit at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead
• Central Coast Kids in Need
• Duke of Edinburgh's International Award – Australia
• Muscular Dystrophy NSW
• SHINE for Kids.

You can purchase one or numerous tickets – Tickets are limited to the first 150 people.

¹ $285 is tax deductible

Hick's Prosecution Dropped

Hicks at Boomerang

 NEWS THAT the Federal government has dropped the case against David Hicks over his book Guantanamo, My Journey under proceeds of crime legislation complicates the claims used against him the US Military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay where the incarcerated Hicks entered an Alford plea, a US technical device where the accused admits the prosecution has enough evidence to find him guilty. In that way, the evidence is never tested in court.

In return Hicks was immediately repatriated to Australia after years of being held in jail on no charge.

NSW Governor Marie Bashi

Hicks was castigated by then PM John Howard   and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as being the "worst of the worst", an ironic charge from 2 politicians who failed to notice under their watch the Australian Wheat Board was illegally bribing Saddam Hussein with over $200M.
The Shuttle met David Hicks and his wife at a cocktail party in 2010 at the Sydney harbourside mansion Boomerang (where Mission Impossible 2 was filmed) and it was difficult to reconcile the dastardly image painted by politicians with the polite young man. NSW Governor Marie Bashir also chatted to the couple in a friendly manner.

An opinion writer of the right leaning IPA 'think tank' who contributes to the ABC's The Drum also attacked attendees of the 2011 Sydney Writers Festival  for listening attentively to Hicks tale about his treatment at Gitmo where he says he was drugged and tortured. In this piece published in the SMH, "Audience on their feet for a fraud"  he calls them 'incredulous fools".
 The Shuttle tangled with that writer via email but thankfully he has now gone to the bosom of Opposition leader Tony Abbott as an adviser. That's the same Abbott who was also a Minster in Howard's government where he also apparently over-looked a stream of emails indicating that against UN sanctions, the AWB was sending hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to the Saddam regime. Despite the mass of evidence produced during an investigation and Downer's evidence he couldn't 'recall' seeing memos about the scandal, no-one was every charged (or required to enter an Alford plea).
Incredulous fools indeed!.

Put The Union Jack Out

Today begins four days of celebrations for the diamond jubilee of HRH Queen Elizabeth 11 of Australia (and other places). We expect to see the streets of Sydney lined with Union Jack bunting. Yesterday Her Maj went to the races at Epsom for the Derby with mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins singing the national anthem. The only time the Shuttle has encountered The Queen at the races was at Royal Randwick when she visited in 2001 and the royal party arrived by coach and horses to parade down the track in front of a few hundred thousand punters. As the crowd were stopped  from crossing the track (including us) to allow the procession to pass, a crusty old pensioner oblivious to the who the VIPs were, moaned to the policeman holding us back saying :"I don't care if the bloody Queen of England's coming, I need to place a bet!"
PS: The little couple at the back waving excitedly from the commoner's enclosure are John & Jeanette Howard. Johnny was at the Palace this week to get a shiny bauble for ensuring Australia remained a British colony.
Here is an exclusive message from Her Majesty for Shuttle readers on this special occasion :

Right Royal Punch Up

Barry Everingham

Verbal fisticuffs have broken out between Australian republican advocate and Melbourne journalist Barry Everingham and the vocal defender of the British Royals, the immaculately attired and coiffured  David Flint who is head of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy (ACM) .

David Flint

Everingham, who has been described as the "ultimate name dropper" is something of an expert on the royals and has reported on royal weddings for US cable TV MSNBC.
 He penned a biography of Princess "Pushy" Michael of Kent and his royal connections appear to be impeccable.

He's sipped cocktails with the late Princess Margaret and was once told by HM The Queen at a party on the Britannica in Kuwait Harbour  to "be as naughty as you like" before she quizzed him about Sultan Qaboos of Oman's new palace in Muscat (the Shuttle has been inside-it's magnificent!).
 Everingham is a contributor to the ABC's The Drum and News Ltd's The Punch. One delightful piece from his biog tells how he once danced with Imelda Marcos after being commanded to by Lady Mary Fairfax.

Writing for Independent Australia, an on-line forum in a piece called Fantasies & Follies of Flint Everingham says:
"David Flint’s rantings and slurs on anyone who disagrees with him is a disgrace to the monarchist cause"  calling Flint a "disgraceful upholder of a moth eaten, out-of-date and insulting system of inherited privilege" . Heady stuff.

Flint has cried foul and responded a week ago in this piece on the IA website crying 'defamation' and says numerous furphies have been perpetuated about his relationship with former PM John Howard who successfully scuppered the Republcian referendum in 1999.
Howard appointed Flint ( a former head of the Press Council ) as head of the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) but that appointment ended in tears when Flint resigned in 2004 after being interviewed by Rado csar John Laws on his morning show whilst the ABA was investigating Laws over the 'cash for comments' scandal.

We feel sure there is much more titilation to come from this scuffle but in the meantime, here is David Flint wearing his Mystic Meg hat with predictions in 2010 where he confidently predicts the mining "Super Profits Tax will end in a legal minefield " (hasn't happened yet) and that Julia Gillard will be defeated at the general election in 2011. She won.

Kevin Rudd's Wacky Cat Jasper

 Foreign Minister and former PM Kevin Rudd has another reason to celebrate following his successful heart operation two weeks ago, and the news that Colonel Gaddafi may be on the run (he was the only Australian politician to support the Libyan rebels when the coup began).

Kevin has won a competition to produce a unique Australian blend of Twinings afternoon tea. He knocked out 4 other challengers-shock jock Alan Jones, Kerri-Anne and John Kennerely , folk singer John Williamson and world surfing champ Layne Beachley. Proceeds from the sale of the tea go to the RSPCA.

Kev's recipe : smoky Russian Caravan with full bodied Irish Breakfast and then add light Ceylon Orange Pekoe. 
And to show how successful the blend is, we've unearthed a video of Kevin trying to coax his cat Jasper to taste the brew:

Dame Edna stars in The Hobbit

Maybe not Dame Edna Everage but her manager (and many say  the two have never been seen in the same room at the same time) Barry Humphries is to join the cast of The Hobbit.

The Peter Jackson $500M movie starts filming next March in New Zealand and Humphries will play the Goblin King.

It's not Barry's first acting role. He appeared as Rupert Murdoch in the 1980's TV series 'Selling Hitler' about the scandal involving the Sunday Times newspaper and the fake Hitler diaries, the Kath & Kim movie and Barry McKenzie Holds His Own based on the Private Eye magazine comic script.

Humphries contributed some immortal lines to the 2 McKenzie films such as when McKenzie is collared at a London party by a pompous  Hooray Henry who asks him : "tell me Mr McKenzie, is it true Australia is full of homosexuals?" to which McKenzie replies:
"No that's just the publicity we put out to attract the Pommy migrants"

Tomorrow at mid-day Dame Edna Everage will give a twenty minute talk at the Black & White charity committee's Woman of Achievement lunch. The Shuttle bring carry a full report.

In the meantime-here is a slice of Aussie culture from a Barry McKenzie fillum with the wonderful John le Mesurier.
And if you think that's an exaggeration  : In 2007 newly elected PM Kevin Rudd dumped former PM John Howard's 'migrant test' that required prospective migrants to know amongst other things who Don Bradman and Mervyn Richardson were!.( Richardson invented a lawn mower).

Malcolm : Call Your Cousin Angela Lansbury Now

Malcolm & Lucy Turnbull

Former Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has been having a hard time lately with Liberal Party supporters of the leader, Tony Mad Monk Abbott out to ensure Turnbull never becomes leader again.

Turnbull was never popular with the hard right. The self made millionaire, former barrister and banker (estimated worth : $300M) is seen as a bit of a latte sipping elitist probably more suited to the Labor Party which it's reputed he once tried to join.

The problem for the party is that Turnbull is  popular amongst the rank and file members who see Malcolm as their best bet to return to power, if only he could act like a politician. He does have a tendency to cut to the chase having come lately to politics.

Perhaps he should turn to his cousin  the legendary actress Angela Lansbury for acting lessons on how to present himself as a politician rather than a man in a hurry to get to the top job so he can show the country just how it should be done.

Lansbury was out last week in New York and attended the Actors Fund Annual Gala at the New York Marriott Hotel. As our picture show, she is remarkably fit looking and as large as life at the fabulous age of 87.

Angela Lansbury & Hunter Ryan Herdicka (Rob Rich)

Turnbull's mother was the academic and actress Coral Lansbury who is Angela's cousin. She split with Malcolm's father when he was nine and went to live, like Angela in the USA.

Turnbull is not only the richest politician in the country, he's probably one of the smartest as well. He worked for a  number of years as Kerry Packer's personal lawyer before taking on the might of Margaret Thacher's government in the famous Spy Catcher trial when he successfully defeated the British government's attempts to block publication of the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright.

He made a motza with the merchant bank he started with Nicholas Whitlam, the son of former Labor PM Gough Whitlam and then sealed his fortune during the dot.com boom. As chairman of the Republican Movement Turnbull really felt the loss of the referendum when the country voted in 1998 to keep the British royal family as head of state.

Turnbull blamed the loss on the machinations of then PM John Howard  but he joined Howard's Liberal Party as a minister which most perceived as Howard's attempt to 'keep his enemies closer'.
When Turnbull produced an excellent paper on housing affordability recommending the adoption of European style housing associations and co-ops plus spending more on government housing, the paper was quietly shelved by Howard.

Turnbull is clearly in the wrong political party. He should ask his cousin for some tips. The Lansburys have long been on the left of the political spectrum. Angela's father was a politician and member of the British Communist Party and her grandfather was the leader of the British Labour Party.

Angela now lives in a New York apartment having returned from Ireland where she lived for a number of years. She starred in the film Gaslight when she was just 19 and went on to make a string of Hollywood films co-starring with the leading Hollywood stars of the day. She's probably most famous for the long running TV series Murder She Wrote.

At the Actors Fund Gala Bebe Neuwirth was honoured while Al Pacino received The Lee Strasberg Artistic Achievement Award

Ghastly Right Wing Think Tank Attacks Writer

Let us introduce you to the Institute of Public Affairs.

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.

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 !

UK's Andrew Gilligan Outed as Pauline Hanson Supporter

With lips quivering in that inimitable manner that makes her appear so brittle that she may shatter at any moment, or at least burst into tears, Pauline Hanson lashed out in the media at the preferential voting system that today denied her a seat in the NSW upper house, the Legislative Assembly.

For days Pauline was ahead on first past the post votes. As absent votes were counted she slipped into second place with a Green and a Liberal MHR finally seizing the last two spots.

Seats in the Upper House are worth their weight in gold and are the cushiest lurk in town . A 6 year term at about $180K  per annum and if you win a second term you qualify for a lifetime pension, gold travel passes and all sorts of goodies.

Pauline has cried foul on the AV system and questioned it's relevence-the same system that millions of Brits will vote for or against in an historic referendum in May.

An unlikely supporter has come forth in the form of Andrew Gilligan writing in the UK Telegraph. In a piece titled "AV- it's nothing to shout about" he gives  a few examples of NSW politicians elected under the AV vote :

"At a drunken party in his parliamentary office, the Police Minister, naked but for a pair of “very brief” underpants, climbed on top of a female MP and pretended to have sex with her. The Health Minister, who was 53, used his office to entertain his 26-year-old mistress. The Ports Minister visited porn sites on his official computer.

The Regional Development Minister – known to the local tabloids as “Sir Lunchalot” – charged taxpayers for a holiday to Dubai and Italy. The Education Minister promised to “stand by” her husband after he was arrested buying ecstasy. Several ministers were implicated in a corruption scandal involving a female town planner who approved illegal high-rise buildings in return for sexual favours and designer handbags. And the Aboriginal Affairs Minister? Well, he is doing 14 years after his conviction on multiple counts of child sex abuse."

Ouch !

(He missed out on the replacement Police Minister who was recently embroiled in a sandal involving a gay bath house)

Gilligan actually gives a pretty balanced run-down on how AV voting works in Australia despite being an obvious opponent of it. He also gets stuck into Question Time in Canberra and the insults that fly back and forth.

But are our politicians any worse than their British counterparts in the insult department ?. We sought out our resident parliamentary insult expert , the great Mungo MacCallum who provided a list of some of the choicest terms used by the master of put-down, former PM Paul Keating who referred to various Opposition members as :

harlots, sleazebags, frauds, immoral cheats, blackguards, pigs, mugs, clowns, boxheads, criminal intellects, stupid crooks, corporate crooks, friends of tax cheats, brain-damaged, loopy crims, stupid foul-mouthed grub, piece of criminal garbage, dullards, stupid, mindless, crazy, alley cat, bunyip aristocracy, clot, fop, gigolo, hare-brained, hillbilly, malcontent, mealy-mouthed, ninny, rustbucket, scumbag, scum, sucker, thug, dimwits, dummies, a swill, a pig sty, Liberal muck, vile constituency, fools and incompetents, rip-off merchants, perfumed gigolos, gutless spiv, glib rubbish, tripe and drivel, constitutional vandals, stunned mullets, half-baked crim, insane stupidities, champion liar, ghouls of the National Party, barnyard bullies, piece of parliamentary filth, lick spittal dogs vomit.

Keating once labelled Treasurer Peter Costello as "all tip and no iceberg"and described John Howard as a 'like a desicated coconut":
When the Opposition attacked him over his late filed tax return Keating said they were "playing the man not the ball" . A Liberal MP exclaimed ": "Oh, for goodness sake, Mr Keating! Only last week you called the Opposition front-bench 'sleazebags'!"
Keating replied "But that was a generic term, describing the Opposition front-bench as a whole. I wasn't insulting any particular person."

We nearly lost Pauline for awhile. She sold up a year ago and emigrated to the UK claiming Australia was full of Muslims and other undesirables ( a DNA ancestry test once revealed her origins as being central Turkey) but soon returned claiming that Britain was "full of immigrants". The irony was lost on her.

Here's Pauline in her famous 'I'm dead' video :

The Great Dissenter

He's been described as a paradox - a conservative monarchist and radical left leaning activist -Justice Michael Kirby, recently retired judge in the highest court of the land.

 A biography of m'learned judge has just been published with Kirby's backing.
The Shuttle has read the book and it's a cracking read.

At the launch of the book Kirby described himself as a gay man who is still a 'second class citizen' in Australia. He's been an active supporter for gay marriage rights and often addresses young gays and lesbians speaking out on civil rights.

On the High Court he was known as the 'great dissenter' in many cases that changed law. His judgements were regarded as 'liberal while written with thoughtfulness and compassion'. It's said the PM Paul Keating appointed Kirby to the High Court to "upset the Tories"

As a young lawyer just out of Sydney University in the 1960's, Kirby was defending Aboriginal activists and student demonstrators. In one case he took on the defence of 24 students who had been arrested demonstrating for black civil rights in the USA outside the US Embassy. He got everyone off the charges and soon moved onto local civil rights cases. As President of the NSW Court of Appeal Kirby was the first judge to issue media releases and was an advocate for Human rights, animal rights, HIV-AIDS and Aboriginal land rights.



Johan van Vloten & Michael Kirby

In 1999 Kirby really shocked few when he quietly 'came out' whilst still sitting on the bench of the High Court of Australia, revealing a fact that was common knowledge.  In his Who's Who entry he listed his long term male partner as Johan van Vloten, a Dutch newsagent.

The outcry from the right wing was deafening. Calls for impeachment came from every angle claiming that Kirby, by announcing he was gay had obviously broken the law when homosexual acts where illegal while he had been sitting as a judge for two decades.  Most including numerous journalists seemed to completely overlook the fact that Kirby had simply announced that he was gay and made no mention of sexual acts.

And then came the great 'rent boy' scandal when PM John Howard's bovver boy Senator Bill Heffernan announced late one night in Parliament that a High Court judge had mis-used government hire cars to cruise an infamous under age male hustler spot in Sydney.

Kirby kept quiet during the fracas while Howard 'suggested' he step aside and that he may call for a Commonwealth Police investigation into Kirby's fitness for office. The great manipulator Howard soon had egg on his face.  When the matter was found to be a fraud Heffernan made a sincere and unequivocal apology. Howard demonstrated his innate meanness by remaining silent.

 Kirby's scalp was one the right wing had been after for ages but he says he wasn't the real victim of the crude scandal, but that the Parliamentary system had been damaged. Kirby said that the long held tradition of Standing Orders in the Westminster system was that sitting judges should be immune from attacks by parliamentarians.

 Heffernan was censured by the Senate and afterwards apologised for making the allegations. Kirby promptly responded: "I accept Senator Heffernan's apology and reach out my hand in a spirit of reconciliation. I hope my ordeal will show the wrongs that hate of homosexuals can lead to"

 Following this gracious acceptance, Who Weekly magazine named Kirby among the 25 Beautiful People of Australia. Kirby however feels aggrieved that his name and Heffernan's are forever linked on Google.

Since retiring in Kirby has travelled the world speaking at law symposiums where he has a reputation  as an eloquent and powerful orator, having given a vast number of speeches over his career on a diverse range of topics. While President of the International Commission of Jurists he encouraged that organisation to give more consideration to human sexuality as an aspect of human rights

You can buy A.J. Brown's biography Michael Kirby: Paradoxes/Principles here

 Kirby's life has been fascinating and he is a man who is regarded as one of the world's great jurists.

You can listen to or download a podcast of an interview with Michael Kirby on the ABC here.

Liberal Senator In A Tizz Over David Hicks

Just days after we reported that David Hicks who spent nearly 6 years banged up in Guantanamo Bay, attended a party for the Wayside Chapel at Boomerang (and the Daily Telegraph said he was "partying with the jet-set), Liberal Senator George Brandis (left) has accused the ruling Labor government of not moving quickly to recover the profits from David Hicks's memoirs under the "proceeds of crime" laws because it "fears a backlash from the political left."

Oh really ?



Brandis was one of the chief cheerleaders of former PM John Howard who solemnly intoned in Parliament in 2003 that Iraq was awash with WMD and described in detail the non existent "human shredding machines" that Saddam Hussein was prone to use on his subjects.



David Hicks



Howard later indicated that Australian SAS troops had already entered Iraq weeks before a decision to go to war had been made- one he himself decided he had the power to make without a Parliamentary vote unlike our allies the UK & USA - and soon we were participating in a war that has seen a million Iraqis displaced and hundreds of thousands killed on a slew of falsehoods.

Does George Brandis honestly want a case to be pursued against Hicks over the  profits from his 'crime' ?.

 Most except the most pedantic accept that the reason Hicks pleaded guilty was  to get out of the hell-hole in Cuba where he faced year upon year of incarceration without trial.

The US chief Army prosecutor at Gitmo who resigned (one of at least 7) over the disgraceful legal tactics  there has said Hicks should never have been charged and his case was riddled with political interference from both Howard and George W.Bush.

The charges labelled against Hicks were a bizarre mish mash of gobbedlly gook that accused him of being an 'enemy combatant' in a 'war' which was, and wasn't declared and therefore after some Olympian leaps of logic the Geneva Conventions didn't apply to those captured.

A case against Hicks in an Australian court to recover any profits made from his book would surely bring out the most learned legal minds just itching to examine the role of a whole host of US & Australian politicians. The repercussions could be most unpleasant especially for George Brandis' (an intelligent barrister who parrots absurdities that he surely cannot believe) beloved John Howard. ( According to rumour Brandis once referred to John Howard as "that lying rodent Howard".He's never denied it)

Brandis may well find that what he wishes for may just happen. The outcome may not be what he desires.



Ben Ferencz



To read the Alice in Wonderland type case that was mounted against Hicks his Wikipedia entry is most illuminating.

## Now 90 years old the legendary legal mind Ben Ferencz was the US Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials and he sent several Nazis to the their execution after WW2. He eventually went to work for the International Criminal Court and has been an outspoken advocate for the rule of law during his distinguished career as well as a critic of various government's  illicit activities.

Ferencz gave a speech on the 8th March  titled :

"My Government Today Prepared to Do Something for Which We Hanged Germans"

### In a response to the Daily Telegraph's question as to why Hicks had been invited to the Boomerang party, a Wayside Chapel spokesman said "we were honored to have David Hicks as a guest as we were honoured by all who attended"

The Gadaffi's and Nicole Kidman

Sunday's Sun Herald will publish a story about the Qaddafi family links with Australia and in particular some of the adventures in Oz of the Libyan dictator's two sons Saif al-Islam and his younger brother Al-Saadi.

The pair have visited several times and met with both Labor and Liberal politicians including the former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer ( Or Lord Downer of Tikrit as journalist Mike Carlton calls him)

Just as dictators-as long as they are friendly to western interests-are warmly welcomed into the arms of British and American political circles, Australia follows suit.



Saif al-Islam

 The Qaddafi's are reported to have inspected several multi million dollar properties including an office building in Sydney they planned to turn into an embassy after Canberra re-instated diplomatic relations .

 Whilst British and US leaders have been quick to jump on the bandwagon of 'democracy' for the Middle East as repressive regimes seem to be on the slide, Australian diplomats and politicians appear to have been struck dumb offering no support for the Libyan citizens taking their lives in their hands by venturing onto Tripoli streets with one notable exception- former PM Kevin Rudd


According to the Herald Al-Saadi also dined with Nicole Kidman at a Sydney hotel reputedly to discuss film investments (it's one of the downsides of being a movie star-meeting with potential investors ). That information comes from a celebrity security firm. Whether this actually happened remains to be seen but there is an odd link between Kidman and the Qaddafis.



Al-Saadi.

In 2003 Al-Saadi became embroiled in a drama at Port Douglas when a party with several prostitutes went awry. One of his bodyguards pulled a gun and police were called. It was rumoured that two girls were badly beaten and received pay-offs to drop their complaints. Outraged tour operators who went unpaid by the young Qaddafi wrote to then prime Minister John Howard about Qaddafi and his 20 strong entourage . They were ignored. Oil, gas and construction deals in Lybia far outweigh trivial matters like a few bashed working girls.

There is even a claim Al-Saadi walked out of a Kings Cross brothel leaving an unpaid $7000 tab.

Nicole Kidman starred in the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut along with her then husband Tom Cruise. The movie is about sexual experimentation and after it premiered in Sydney a series of monthly Eyes Wide Shut sex parties began where guests wore masks and indulged in sexual encounters with strangers.



The parties were staged in empty exclusive Eastern Suburbs mansions that were for sale.  One tale that swept the East was how the Qaddafi brothers inspected a harbour side mansion with a price tag of twelve million dollars.  The real estate agent, a glamorous blond invited her prospective clients to one of the raunchy parties that was to be held that weekend and they accepted and arrived at the party with 6 minders who all joined in the night's activities.

She is reported to have said after :

 "they were quiet awful. Rough, rude and fairly unsexy. They never paid the $500 a head donation and it was wham bam with no thank you Mam. Quite frankly I was glad when they left. Mind you, one well know society hostess  ****** was sorry to see them go but she loves rough sex !"

Pairings and Partings

The former Premier of NSW Bob Carr once described him as "the Rumpole of the Lower Traffic Court"- colourful barrister Malcolm Duncan has passed away suddenly at the age of 54.

Duncan was a regular sight around Kings Cross and Potts Point where he was born and lived his entire life.
Taking on what some said were lost causes, he regularly tackled in the city courts issues that he saw as  'attacks on democracy' . One of his regular targets was the Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore who Duncan told the Shuttle was"out to turn Sydney into a bureaucratic nightmare where one will have to file a form in triplicate to the appropriate council office just to cross the road"

Duncan, a conservative was an adamant opponent of the Kings Cross  Medically Supervised Injecting Room but despite this he attended the launch of a book about the centre by it's director Ingrid van Beek.

Earlier in the week he had unsuccessfully attempted to obtain an injunction to prevent it's publication. The book described him in less than flattering terms during the very public political battles to keep the injecting room open. Malcolm was particularly miffed at being described as 'florrid' in the tome. but he couldn't keep away from the party and on spotting Clover Moore there he said "does she have the appropriate planning permission to be here !"

Despite his professed conservatism Duncan moved in many circles, supported the new nightclubs and discos springing up in the Cross with their extended drinking hours, successfully railed against Town Hall plans to redesign Fitzroy Gardens and wrote a blog on the left wing writer Margot Kingston's Webdiary where he described former PM John Howard's 11 year term as The Howard Drears and filed amusing chapters on his two books-The Great Australian Novel and The Chronicles of Nadir.

Duncan will be sorely missed-certainly by his political opponents who begrudgingly put up with Duncan's regular measuring of their campaign posters. Perched perilously atop a ladder in the busy Kings Cross streets during elections with a tape measure Malcolm would check the posters adhered to the rules and more often than not, would place his own above theirs at the same time.

Malcolm stood as an independent at almost every state and Federal election usually getting around 500 votes. He'll miss the appointment he had early next month with the private eye Frank Monte to give him some of his election tips for the March 2011 state election and next week the political rally he was staging in Kings Cross against the ruling Labor Party.
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Oliver and Roxy

Anthony & Terry

They were both at the recent Hermes beach party and they have just announced their engagements. Shoe designer Terry Biviano has told the world she and her current beau the Sydney Swan's footballer Anthony Minichiello will be getting hitched . Terry is also due to join the cast of the new Foxtel reality TV show WAG Nation which will follow the daily lives and adventures of sportsmen's wives and girlfriends.


And the effervescent boss of top PR firm Sweaty Betty Roxy Jacenko was sporting a sparkler on her hand that our diamond adviser says "looks like 5 carats to me!" when she arrived at the bash with her fiancee stockbroker Oliver Curtis. Perhaps these two should get their honeymoon in early. The Shuttle's legal mole says Curtis may soon be called to appear before some sort of official body over the affairs of his friend John Hartman who was jailed recently after being found guilty of insider trading.

and so it comes to pass..

     3 months ago tSS predicted then Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull would either start a new political party or defect to Labor if he lost a leadership battle.

     Today he has announced he will cross the floor on a crucial vote on climate change proposals, defying his leader Tony 'Mad Monk' Abbott. Abbott's climate policies will turn out to be a lame duck mess when examined in full (and when he actually decides what they are). They'll receive as much impact as when he recently announced viginity was a virtue before marriage. Thousands of teens yawned , looked mildly bemused and went on rutting as before.

It has begun.

        The Liberal / National Party Coalition shot themselves in the foot when they booted Turnbull. The  Rhodes scholar, ex-merchant banker, barrister and Kerry Packer adviser has notched up bigger scalps than the current PM Kevin Rudd.

         He took on Margaret Thatcher's government when they tried to ban the memoirs of ex MI5 spy Peter Wright and his SpyCatcher book. Turnbull trounced them in the English courts. Turnbull succeeded in the Maralinga nuclear fallout trial in Britain when he led the cause for compensation for indigenous people whose lands had been bombed relentlessly by British nuclear testing in the 1950's. A few weeks after the testing ended in 1961 some signs were stuck about the sacred Aboriginal lands warning of the potential radium fallout-written in English.

     When a reluctant former PM John Howard added Turnbull to his ministry he consistently ignored Malcolm's advice. With home ownership stretching beyond the grasp of thousands of Aussie families, Turnbull introduced radical proposals for mass housing programs based on age old European and British housing societies that had served those communities so well for decades. They were ignored.

     5 years ago at a political party function tSS told Turnbull his dreams would be dashed by joining the Liberal Party. His natural home was the centre left Labor Party that would leap upon his obvious talents.

      While political pundits and timeservers on daily newspapers delight in a brief re-surgence in the Coalition's poll fortunes they ignore the quickly shifting populace that is Turnbull's constituency that no longer takes in just the well-heeled Eastern Suburbs of Sydney that house the richest in the nation, but also now include working class areas and the gay and lesbian conclaves of the inner city. Turnbull scraped in at the last election when a blue ribbon Liberal seat began turning left. Malcolm has less than 12 months before a general election to do the obvious-switch parties if he wants to retain his Wentworth seat or just leave. The line of succession has already been decreed. Rudd will serve as PM until 2015 after he increases his majority next year, wins a further election and then hands over to the first female Oz PM, Julia Gillard.

       It is then Turnbull will be in a commanding position if he joins Labor now. As it is, he is a dead man walking as is the entire Coalition for at least 10 years.

       Why will they not listen ?

# fact: Turnbull's cousin is the British actress Angela Lansbury

# fact 2. The British Maralinga tests make Australia the most nuclear bombed country on the planet with 21 major devices and many smaller ones exploded. Some areas are still contaminated.

# fact 3 'Maralinga' is an ancient Aboriginal word for "field of thunder".

# check out:  Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians

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Update : Crikey has done a round-up of various political writer's views on Malcolm Turnbull's speech in Parliament on climate change. Most agree his views were presented with more conviction than PM Kevin Rudd's. Has Turnbull singled the first move in a tactic that would see him placed in a powerful position and having a direct influence on whoever governs ?. The Demcrats under Don Chipp dominated in the Upper House for decades when they held the balance of power with just a handful of senators with both main political parties negotiating deals . The Greens under Bob Brown have almost claimed that position but a small break-away Senate party could scupper their plans and Turnbull with just 2 other Senators could become kingmaker.

Malcolm Turnbull has a fortune estimated at $100M. He is only interested in politics for one reason-to affect change. You read it here first.

the things people say...

    A political moment overcomes tSS as we read today that the Sydney Morning Herald reports: Iraqi rage at Blackwater decision in US court by their Baghdad correspondent Michael Hastings.

A speech by former PM John Howard to Parliament in 2004:

 " I again take the opportunity of reaffirming the correctness of the government’s assessment in predeploying our forces, and I record the bitter opposition of the  Australian Labor Party when that decision was taken. Not only was the military operation completed quickly and successfully but it is also worth recording that all of the doomsday predictions, particularly the many that came from those who sit opposite, were not realised.

     The oilwells were not set on fire; there were not millions of refugees; the dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were not breached to bring on catastrophic flooding; and there was no long, drawn out, bloody, Stalingrad style street-to-street fighting in Baghdad. For all of this we must be immensely grateful, but it is a reminder of the hysteria and the doomsday predictions that often accompany operations of this kind. And, just as many of the predictions about a Western Front style holocaust that were made in 1991 when the land war commenced were proved wrong, so the predictions on this occasion have been proved wrong.

       The decisive  victory of the American led coalition reflects enormous credit on the strength and the determination of the leadership of President Bush.

      Again I remind the House of the way in which his role was vilified and traduced by many of those who sit opposite and of the way in which speaker after speaker from the Australian Labor Party impugned his integrity, assaulted his judgment and called into question his ability to lead the United States in this very difficult conflict. History has proved them wrong.

The performance of the President has illustrated how infantile their protests were, and the leadership that he has given on this occasion, I believe, will bring about a permanent change in attitudes in the Middle East."

Yeh, sure.

update ## my favourite green-grocer in Kings Cross was very excited after the fall of Saddam and made a trip back to Iraq in 2005 where he was born. He returned within a week and said he had secured a job in a government ministry and was off again within the month. His family in Australia..or relatives in Iraq have never heard from him again.

If you think the noughties were fun...wait until we bring news of what is in store for us all according to Nostradamus !

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Apologies accepted !!

  And it was nice to see the same newspaper yesterday finally picked up our tale of Nicole Kidman attending the Carols by Candlelight delivered by us on 22nd December after she had previously claimed life in Sydney was a living hell because of the media (we politely left her alone on the night) and demolished the utter nonsense printed in an unnamed newspaper ( the Daily Telegraph ) that actor Matt Damon and his family were cutting a swathe throughout small holiday townships on the south coast of NSW during their non-existent cruise aboard the giant liner The World. He was skiing in the US.

                          Check out The World's website-there are still plenty of apartments for sale including the 6 bedroom penthouse where for a lazy few million dollars you can sit and watch the sea for hours on end. What fun

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