I want to say that whilst I am pleased that Peter Costello has come out in favour of a conscience vote with regard to lifting the ban on RU486, I am horrified that a woman’s right to access the widest possible choice of responses to a medical condition has to come to this. Is anyone else wondering why we need a conscience vote on an abortifacient medication when abortion is legal in Australia?  As I see it, RU486 really just represents a broadening of the repertoire of responses available to women and their medical practitioners to an unwanted pregnancy. 

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When a federal Health minister and his parliamentary secretary are unable to see past their belief-systems to scientific data it is time for them to go.

This is the case for Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne.  Both are unable to accept that the abortion law stands and Australian women, the men who support them and many medical practitioners are asking for the ban on RU 486 to be lifted. 

These belief-based men – men who have little regard for science which does not support their anti-choice agenda – Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne, Ron Boswell, Barnaby Joyce, Steven Fielding, Alex Hawke, Fred Nile, Peter Slipper, Alan Cadman, Joe Hockey and Brian Harradine just cling together like a sinister sticky, dusty, paternalistic web of oppression of a the uterus.  Curiously, not one of these men have a uterus.    

Meeting with 19,999 like-minded people. 
Belmore Park, Sydney Australia.

Click for full size sedition! 

One alert Australian has complained on Radio 2UE that his privacy has been breached as a direct result of providing information to the  national security hotline.

Attorney General Ruddock has this to say about the lack of privacy on his confidential, anonymous terrorism hotline.

"Part of the problem is that a lot of this information gets into a number of hands, and one of the areas that I’m going to have looked at to see whether or not it came from this source is that information is often included on search warrants to provide a basis upon which the warrants can be exercised, and that information is handed over to the parties concerned."

With Ruddock’s history as the minister in charge of DIMIA and his clearly persistent and pervasive ineptitude, the biggest terror threat comes not from the guys stockpiling lawn food, but from anyone with a portfolio in this government.

 
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This morning as I was driving to work I heard HoWARd say (in reference to the Paris riots) that he saw a direct correlation between highly regulated labour markets and high unemployment.

"We see the domestic misery of the French people at the present time, and, unlike the Labor Party, I am not going to blame the riots in Paris on the industrial relations system that France has – but I do point out that one of the reasons for a feeling of alienation and disadvantage is the persistence of high levels of unemployment in this country against a background of other European countries with less regulated labour markets that have experienced much lower levels of unemployment."

As I swerved back into my lane I waited for the second half of the analysis.  I waited and waited, but no mention from HoWARd of the endemic racism, police violence and the policy of the French political establishment towards the rioters who are first and second generation French nationals predominantly from the North African and African immigrant community. Ok. Let’s follow HoWARd’s thinking on this.  IR reform and the WorkChoices package is going to solve unemployment rates for Australia’s alienated and disadvantaged.  How?  Not by stripping worker’s rights. 

As usual HoWARd gives us fear.  

His message is if Australia doesn’t embrace his IR bill we’ll have riots in our cities.  Australia does not have a large former African or North African group of residents so he can’t be referring to them.  The United Kingdom and New Zealand comprise the largest group of New Australians, but I don’t think that he’s referring to them either.  I think he is referring to Australians born here to parents whose first language isn’t white.

You know your leader is lying when he has to pile up such a wobbly stack of tenuously related data and play the race fear card.

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