NOT A REAL HEADLINE – JUST IN CASE IT’S HARD TO TELL!

From Wikipedia:

” In 2007, she (Bronwyn Bishop) sang a duet of Irving Berlin‘s A Couple of Swells with then Health Minister, Tony Abbott, at a fund-raiser in Sydney.

Ok, it’s a very old song. Even older than the Liberal Party, I think, but I’m not sure, but if we just keep repeating that it may be eventually considered true. That’s what a “factoid” is.

Factoid – an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.

In fact, as opposed to in factoid, Christopher Pyne, in a rare moment where he exposed his true self. told us:

“In fact 75% of the fastest growing jobs in our economy require science, mathematics, engineering or technology qualifications these days… It’s quite an extraordinary factoid to remember.”

Anyway, Bronny And Tones sang this together:

We’re a couple of swells
We stop at the best hotels
But we prefer the country far away from the city smells
We’re a couple of sports
The pride of the tennis courts
In June, July and August we look cute when we’re dressed in shorts
The Vanderbilts have asked us up for tea
We don’t know how to get there, no siree
No, siree

Mm, so no Google Maps for them, but at least they “stay at the best hotels”…

It goes on:

We would drive up the Avenue, but we haven’t got the price

Well, that’s why one needs to go by helicopter…, Joe would tell them that they need to get a good job, so they have the price. I guess this explains the obvious tension between Joe and Bronny at her press conference the other day.

We would skate up the Avenue, but there isn’t any ice
We would ride on a bicycle, but we haven’t got a bike
So we’ll walk up the Avenue
Yes, we’ll walk up the Avenue
And to walk up the Avenue’s what we like

Rather ironic really.

Wall Street bankers are we
With plenty of currency
We’d open up the safe but we forgot where we put the key

Oh well, I guess Madame LaFarge best remember quickly so that she can pay back the money…

Strange really that she’s paying back the money when it was within the guidelines. Just like it’s strange that she didn’t realise that a helicopter ride might be a wee bit on the expensive side. You wouldn’t think that someone who’d done nothing wrong would pay it back. I mean how plausible is the following dialogue.

“Hey mate, where’s that big TV you had last week?”

“Ah, I gave it back.”

“Oh, wasn’t it yours?”

“Yeah, but some bloke said that I wasn’t entitled to it and come by it fraudulently, so just to aviod confusion, I thought I’d better give it back.”

Apparently, according to our Speaker, the travel was within entitlements because part of her job is to talk about the Parliament and the way it works, so I guess that was the topiic of her speech at the fundraiser, “Our Bi-Camerial System and How A Bill Passes Through Parliament”. Or maybe it was, “Reasons Why Not Addressing A Liberal Fundraiser As Speaker Would Be Discriminating On The Basis Of Party Affiliations And A Speaker Has To Be Independent”.

Mm, I wonder if she’d be prepared to go and speak at a Labor Party fundraiser if she were asked. After all, she is meant to be non-partisan and she did say that she went to Geelong in her capacity as speaker. There ya go, Bill. Don’t move a motion of no confidence. Issue her with an invitation… See if that gets you thrown out of Parliament; I’m sure that she’s trying reach 400 Labor ejections before September.

So, if I’ve got this straight, once one is elected Speaker, one can use one’s travel allowance to go and talk to the waiters of Paris on the workings on the Australian Parliament. If one had a meal, of course, that certainly wouldn’t be part of one’s travel allowance. That’d just be a rort…

Of course, Tony Abbott has changed his tune… No, actually he still seems to be singing, “We’re a Couple of Swells” with Mrs. Bishop. Let’s say, nobody should accuse him of being inflexible, because he certainly had a different view when Peter Slipper was being investigated, when he thought that any investigation demanded that a person should stand down. In fact, Craig Thomson’s vote was “tainted”. Although I suppose Abbott’s view would be that he’s quite consistent: any Labor politician is guilty as soon as charged, and any Liberal politician is innocent, even if convicted… Just don’t mention that Peter Slipper was a member of the Liberal Party and their nomination for Deputy Speaker before he sold them out!

Don’t these people realise that their statements are all on the record, even if the Liberal Party erase them from their own Twitter accounts?

But consistency isn’t really a strong point with some people. Take George Pell…

All right, don’t!

Anyway, I noticed that Cardinal Pell was reminding us all that “the church has got no mandate from the Lord to pronounce on scientific matters. We believe in the autonomy of science.”

Yes, he certainly does. Take his speech from 2011 where he compared attempts to prevent climate change to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, where God punished humans for attempting to build a tower to heaven by giving them different languages so that they wouldn’t be able to understand one another. Among the things he told us in that speech was this little gem:

“As a bishop who regularly preaches to congregations of every age and at widely different levels of prosperity and education, I have some grasp of the challenges in presenting a point of view to the general public. This helps me to understand the propaganda achievements of the climate extremists, at least until their attempted elimination of the Medieval Warming and then Climategate. I was not surprised to learn that the IPCC used some of the world’s best advertising agencies to generate maximum effect among the public.”

After spending several paragraphs telling us about the nasty motives of those sly people who refer to others as “climate change deniers”, he then went on to say:

“My suspicions have been deepened over the years by the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views, their demonising of successful opponents and their opposition to the publication of opposing views even in scientific journals. “

Mm, gay marriage anyone? Should we have a vote on same sex marriage, Cardinal Pell? Pell then adds:

“As a general rule I have found that those secure in their explanations do not need to be abusive.”

And that’s the trouble with those “climate extremists“, they argue and abuse by calling people names like “climate change denier” or “sceptic”. Bloody extremists, can’t they just talk about the science without resorting to name calling?

However, it’s clear that Pell here is not able to talk about the science because “the church has no mandate” and it believes in the “autonomy of science”…

Mm, stem cell research anyone?

Ok, so in the 2011 speech, I guess these statements by Pell were just statements of faith because the church has no mandate to talk about science:

• “While causal physical principles such as the “greenhouse effect” are known, much else has not been established definitively. Such uncertainties include the already-mentioned water vapour multipliers, sunspot activities and cloud formation, as well as deforestation, soil carbon and aerosols. We should also add variations of the earth’s orbital parameters, asteroid and comet impacts, and variations in cosmic rays.”
• “Global temperature reached a twentieth century high in 1998, corresponding to the strong El Nino episode of that year. Subsequently, the continued warming anticipated by the IPCC did not eventuate, and, after first reaching a plateau, by 2010 temperature had cooled slightly. The failure to warm was accompanied by dominant La Nina conditions, and by a period of solar sunspot quietude.”
• “The ice-core records of the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods of the last one million years or so show a correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperature, but the changes in temperature preceded the changes in carbon dioxide and cannot, therefore, have been caused by them.”
• “The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is generally the same everywhere, but temperature changes are not the same everywhere.”
• “Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere during the twentieth century are estimated to have risen from 280ppmv to about 390ppmv today, an increase of 40%. Yet today’s total CO2 concentration represents less than 0.0004%.While opinions vary, one geochemist has calculated that only about 5% of present atmospheric carbon dioxide is derived from burning fossil-fuels; that is, just 19 parts of CO2 per million parts of atmosphere”

Some of this sounds like science, so I guess Mr Pell must have been doing it in his own time and not as “Cardinal Pell”.

But I can see why he thinks the Pope shouldn’t be putting forward views on climate change. That’s not the role of the Church – shouldn’t get involved in science unless one’s a scientist. Pope Francis has a science degree? Well, that’s not the point. The point is that Pell’s speech wasn’t about the science, because he disputed most it by using information from… um, scientists who dispute climate change. Oh, wait, many of them weren’t actually scientists, so that’s ok then.

Let’s finish off with the original Fred and Judy. Like Tony’s statements on Slipper and Pell’s speech on climate change, these things are easy to find on the Internet – we’re not quite in Orwell’s 1984 yet.

Imagine Tones and Bronny doing this. You’d pay a lot of money to make ’em promise to stop and never do it again!

Bronwyn hiding behind Tony… No, wait that’s Judy Garland… easy mistake to make.