Re: India-Australia News and Discussion
Posted: 16 Mar 2012 10:00
It looks like there are quite a few BRFites down under. Did we ever have meet? If not can we arrange few beers?
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
https://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/
I came as an international student in 2006 and I brought my saving culture with me. I grew up poor and knew that nothing could be taken for granted. I worked hard in a restaurant and made around $300 a week during semester and I saved at least half of it. I worked even harder (6 days a wk, 12 hr a day) during semester breaks and I saved thousands. I lived on simple but healthy meals, no alcohol, no partying, no big TV, no TV games. Now I am 26, I own two houses. The locals are just having way too comfortable lives. Not that we don't know how most young aussies spend. Big holidays, big night outs, big cars, big TV's. They just want everything BIG with SMALL efforts. You get heaps of government and family support. Your buying power is strong. So grow up Aussies! Don't be a cry baby when you don't put in the hard work. No one deserves a free meal! Read the story: "Grasshopper and The Ants". You choose if you want to be the ants or the grasshopper! I chose to be one of the ants, and I'm glad I did. = )
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/money/property/t ... z1r8QtS8YE
AUSTRALIA must find a "godfather" to protect it and cannot juggle its relationships with the US and China indefinitely, according to a prominent Chinese defence strategist.
The warning by Song Xiaojun, a former People's Liberation Army senior officer, comes after the Foreign Affairs Minister, Bob Carr, was told by his opposite number that Australia's close military alliance with the US was an outdated throwback to the Cold War era - an issue raised in two other meetings with senior Chinese officials.
Senator Carr yesterday met with the man expected to become China's next premier, Li Keqiang, in the closely-guarded Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing. Discussions centred on more conciliatory matters, including furthering trade and investment and discussions to move along a long-mooted free-trade agreement in the 40th year of diplomatic relations between the two nations.
But the question of Australia's allies in the Asia-Pacific region remains an issue.
"Australia has to find a godfather sooner or later," Mr Song told the Herald yesterday. "Australia always has to depend on somebody else, whether it is to be the 'son' of the US or 'son' of China.
"[It] depends on who is more powerful and based on the strategic environment."
Mr Song said Australia was dependant on exporting iron ore to China "to feed itself" but that it had not done enough to engage with the middle kingdom.
"Frankly, it has not done well politically," Mr Song said.
With heightened sensitivity in the Asia-Pacific region over the strategic impact of Australia's decision to allow the US to have a permanent troop presence in Darwin, Senator Carr has been keen to emphasise that it has a strong record of military co-operation with China as well.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, he said Australia was just one of two countries that had a strategic defence dialogue with China, which occurred at the chief of defence force level. The next dialogue will be held in Beijing later this year.
Senator Carr said Australia was the first Western nation to co-operate with China on a joint humanitarian aid and disaster relief exercise in Chengdu last year and the first to hold a joint live fire exercise with the Chinese navy in 2010.
HMAS Ballarat will moor in Shanghai tomorrow to mark the 40th anniversary of diplomatic relations and to further symbolise close military co-operation between the countries.
Speaking at yesterday's meeting, Mr Li and Senator Carr were keen to highlight the positive diplomatic relationships between their two nations.
Senator Carr told Mr Li he was "very conscious that this is the 40th anniversary of our diplomatic relations" and it was "an opportunity to renew and refresh and recommit to the relationship".
"My meeting today with Vice-Premier Li was an excellent opportunity to discuss ways to advance the Australia-China relationship, which has gone from strength to strength in recent decades," Senator Carr said in a statement.
Living in the 'first world', we should hope not. There are not enough resources for the number of people to all live to these standards.
What we are likely to see is a normalization of living standards between the first and third worlds, but still have the top .1% continuing to increase their wealth.
India's growth is linked to domestic consumption and export primarily of services like IT. After the GFC this has been even more so.
Hence demand for Aussie commodities like iron ore will taper off unlike the boom of China. Comparing growth stories of both countries is not possible as China's policies are dictated by government well as India is a democracy and all projects that are feasible will go through. This is a big difference so you will never see roads and bridges going to nowhere in India or ghost towns or buildings will a huge debt overhang subsequently.
Biggest challenges for India are dealing with the widespread poverty and corruption.
So the title "India isn't going to make it" is not entirely true. It will make it but at its own pace over a few decades unlike rapid China growth with huge debt induced money and definitely not as fast as BHP would like it to !!
Anyone who thought India is the next China is naiive. The fact they have a similar size population isn't enough to draw conclusions.
India is the largest democracy in the world - China isn't and sometimes it does have its advantages, India's infrastructure is decades behind China's, the hierarchical social structure (i.e. cast system) doesn't exist to the same degree in China, etc.
China may not have the same views as us on human rights, freedom of speech, etc. but it is a global powerhouse India will be challenged to match.
Australia's treatment of refugees and Aboriginal people has received scathing criticism in a report by human rights organisation Amnesty International.
In its annual review of global human rights violations, released yesterday, Amnesty singled out Australia for the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum-seekers and for continuing to "violate the rights" of its indigenous people.
Human rights group Amnesty International says Australia is still treating Aboriginal people in an 'appalling manner'.
Australia has been scolded by an international human rights group for violating the rights of Aborigines and trying to send asylum seekers offshore for processing.
"Australia continued to violate rights of Indigenous People," Amnesty International said in its annual report on global human rights in 2011.
The group criticised the government for limiting funding for housing and services like water and sanitation for Aboriginal people living in traditional homelands in the Northern Territory.
Amnesty International national director Claire Mallinson said Amnesty had been told some indigenous people in the Northern Territory were living without toilets, showers, electricity or garbage collection.
By choice. But they do make good furniture.ramana wrote:^^^ True. Frugality works amidst profligacy.
Look at the Amish all are frugal and broke.
sanjaykumar wrote:Oh dear, who will buy Australia's coal and keep them from having to work for a living?
http://www.smh.com.au/business/australi ... 1z08u.html
As Indian moves towards economic independence this kind of attack will be increasing.Kanishka wrote:
I have noticed lately there is a sudden rise in Western media's interest in all things negative about India and the subtle suggestion
how India might struggle to remain a single united country being diverse in so many ways (according to them).
A colonial-themed event at a university has resurrected an uneasy past.
The dress code on the invitation ''white tie or colonial uniform'' seemed innocent enough. College students arrived at St Paul's great hall dressed in immaculate black dinner suits with matching white handkerchiefs.
They were met by a team of Indian and south Asian waiters, dressed in colourful traditional cultural garments and college students dressed in formal attire, who served them Indian delicacies and curries.
It was St Paul's yearly ''upscale'' dinner. This time the theme was ''end of the British Raj''.
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But within days of the grand event, ideological war broke out at the University of Sydney over whether the elite college, which is no stranger to controversy, was basking in the glory of colonialism and slavery. Before long, vicious vitriol began ricocheting across Facebook.
''I am Indian and I used to go to college. My relatives suffered in colonial India. This theme offended me and brought me to the brink of tears,'' one female student wrote.
''Please, can you all come to our next party? It's Mexican themed, and we'll be celebrating all the abductions and beheadings you can poke a stick at,'' a student responded.
"I have this turban and - what luck! - it's just your size," another provoked.
Had it not been a letter to the student newspaper, Honi Soit, from an outraged arts student, Mason McCann, the white tie event may have gone unnoticed.
''I do not think the party was a celebration of Indian culture, it was a celebration of imperialism,'' Mr McCann told The Sun-Herald.
''The party demonstrates a serious deep disconnect between the culture of St Paul's and the culture of the University of Sydney. I am deeply offended by it.
''They have a responsibility as a prestigious and old institution to project a positive public image to both the other students and the public, and I think that party succeeded in doing just the opposite of that.''
In response to Mr McCann's letter which was published in full, Hugo Rourke from St Paul's, who as senior student speaks on behalf of his peers, wrote to Honi Soit to justify the party.
''It was a successful event, held in good taste and enjoyed by attendees and employees alike,'' he wrote, seemingly shocked that the event would cause such uproar.
The catering company for the event, Sodexo, were similarly taken aback by the suggestion their workers had been forced to don cultural garb.
Its state manager, Ram Devagiri, said his staff, who all have a south Asian backgrounds and work at the college full-time serving three meals a day, were having an ''absolute ball'' at the party and had become ''annoyed'' at the insinuation there were racial undertones at play.
''They are not happy that they are being dragged through this, because they actually had a great time that evening,'' he said.
''We didn't go out looking for a couple of Indian-looking blokes and bring them in. They work there all the time.''
But when it was revealed that Mr Rourke's published response had been edited, the debate shifted to Facebook and racial vilification was exposed.
"If you can find me anyone of Indian heritage who was at all offended by the evening at St. Paul's for (Jazz Dinner Dance) I'd be astounded,'' one flabbergasted St Paul's student wrote.
''That's it, ban ALL the upscale parties!!'' another wrote.
On Wednesday, the Student Representative Council passed a motion condemning the themed party by writing a letter to the college's spokesman, the warden, Dr Ivan Head, asking for an explanation.
''The meeting was very controversial, there was a lot of debate about it,'' said SRC welfare officer Rafi Alam.
''Most of the people who said it wasn't racist were white people who go to college or have friends in college, but the non-whites were quite upset about it,'' Mr Alam said, who has a Bangladeshi background.
It is understood that a handful of students boycotted the dinner.
Mr Alam said the party proved that ''racial subtext'' existed at the university.
When The Sun- Herald contacted Mr Rourke, he ''had nothing to say on the matter''. The warden, Dr Head, did not return calls.
Does the St Paul's party constitute discrimination? The president of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, Stepan Kerkyasharian, said that as long as there was no insistence that only people from the Indian subcontinent could serve as waiters, then what happened at the St Paul's function ''would not be discrimination''.
Re-enacting a period in history like the British Raj ''may offend some people but I don't think the act itself constitutes discrimination or vilification''.
''I think if [re-enactment] is done accurately and in good faith and the re-enactment itself is not offensive, is not intended to vilify and is not discriminatory, then one has to accept the historical reality,'' Mr Kerkyasharian said.
''If the message here was, 'Look, Indians are slaves … or Indians are only good as waiters' I would find that objectionable.
''But if the intent was to create this historical imagery … I wouldn't see that as deliberately derogatory or deliberate vilification of people of an Indian background,'' Mr Kerkyasharian said.
The popularity of re-enactment is growing and the Australasian Living History Federation now boasts 85 member organisations that specialise in eras ranging from the ancient to the medieval, Napoleonic, Victorian, US Civil War, colonial Australia and the two world wars.
The federation's secretary, Jessica Robinson, said some re-enactments had caused anger and those with particular potential to offend included the US Civil War, the world wars, the Crusades and colonial Australia.
But she is adamant that, when done sensitively, they can all be re-enacted without the performances in any way glorifying slavery, Nazism, religious hatred or the conquest of Aboriginal people.
''Our main rule is that we don't want re-enactment to be a vehicle for any kind of political ideology that someone is trying to force through in the modern era,'' Ms Robinson said.
Jeff Yuille is a corporal in the 2nd Virginia Living History Group, which celebrates the Confederate regiment of the same name that fought for the South in the US Civil War. Its members dress in period costume, camp out, eat period food and sometimes stage mock battles against other living history groups representing Union soldiers from the North.
Although some believe any celebration of the Confederacy is a de facto celebration of slavery and racism, Mr Yuille said his group had never experienced any protests.
Criticism of the British Raj function, he said, sounded like ''political correctness gone mad'' and only represented the view of a ''crazy minority''.
''They are reliving history,'' he said of the event.
Stephen Gapps is a historian and curator at the National Maritime Museum who conducted his PhD thesis on the history of historical re-enactment.
''I think some events are difficult to re-enact because of the long memories of the terrible events, particularly colonial [Australian] stuff and the US Civil War,'' he said.
''Some things should not be re-enacted, like events from the Holocaust,'' Dr Gapps added.
But he believes that if controversial topics are tackled with authenticity and sensitivity and ''get people from both arguments involved in the beginning'', they can be cathartic rather than divisive.
Dr Gapps said Colonial Williamsburg, an American historical theme park, represented an 18th-century landscape where slavery was common, but previously ''hardly any elements of the presentation dealt with slavery''.
It was decided to get black Americans involved in recreating a slave auction - a move that attracted hundreds of protesters - but they walked away from the performance saying ''it was fantastic and it showed the humanity of the situation''.
Holding a British Raj dinner was ''fraught with danger'', said Dr Gapps, because Sydney has a big sub-continental population, so it had to be approached carefully.
Lot of this is also sponsered by China/Pak and other inimical countries.Acharya wrote:As Indian moves towards economic independence this kind of attack will be increasing.Kanishka wrote:
I have noticed lately there is a sudden rise in Western media's interest in all things negative about India and the subtle suggestion
how India might struggle to remain a single united country being diverse in so many ways (according to them).
Sahaja Yoga founded by Mata Nirmala Devi, that is gaining greater acceptance worldwide for calming the mind and busting stress, contributes to promoting mental and physical health, according to a new study conducted in Australia.
The essence of Sahaja Yoga, described as mental silence, is much more than mere tranquillity, having several dimensions, including medically beneficial ones, Ramesh Manocha, senior lecturer of psychiatry at the University of Sydney Medical School, told IANS from Australia.
"We found that the health and well-being profile of people who had meditated for at least two years was significantly higher in the majority of health and well-being categories when compared to the (general) population," says Manocha.
After looking westwards for centuries, the enterprising Punjabi gaze has turned south - once again, I might add for this is a re-discovery. The Sikhs have been in Oz since the 1830's in Woolgoolga where they now practically own all the banana farms and cultivate some of the best fruit.Between 2001 and 2011, the number of people reporting a non-Christian faith increased considerably, from around 0.9 million to 1.5 million, accounting for 7.2% of the total population in 2011 (up from 4.9% in 2001). The most common non-Christian religions in 2011 were Buddhism (accounting for 2.5% of the population), Islam (2.2%) and Hinduism (1.3%). Of these, Hinduism had experienced the fastest growth since 2001, increasing by 189% to 275,500, followed by Islam (increased by 69% to 476,300) and Buddhism (increased by 48% to 529,000 people).
and the number of Xtian's is decreasing. I have picked this data point because the decline is quite startlingJust under a third (32.6%) of newly arrived migrants aged 5 years and over spoke only English at home. This was followed by Mandarin (10.8 %), Punjabi (3.7%), Hindi (3.3%) and Arabic (3.0%).
whereasIn the past decade, the proportion of the population reporting an affiliation to a Christian religion decreased from 68% in 2001 to 61% in 2011.
Who knows, the godless may switch back to their birth religions should the need arise.The number of people reporting 'No Religion' also increased strongly, from 15% of the population in 2001 to 22% in 2011. This is most evident amongst younger people, with 28% of people aged 15-34 reporting they had no religious affiliation.
A comment from India below. Repeated research has shown that the average IQ of white Australians is the same as that of whites in Britain and the USA. There are over 40 countries with higher alcohol consumption than Australia. Australians are generally more outspoken so may express racist views more freely but, unlike Britain and the USA, I can think of no racially-denominated killings in Australia. And we won't mention the bride murders in India, will we?That’s the central question of a new television documentary series currently showing in Australia. Fittingly, it’s called Dumb, Drunk and Racist – a provocative line coined in a Mother Jones feature last year, which told of an Indian call centre trainer describing Australians as such.The premise of the six-part series revolves around a whistle-stop, three-week tour of Australia undertaken by four Indians, in which they’re planted in various situations. They’re traveling with the host, Joe Hildebrand, a laconic, left-wing newspaper commentator whose role is to decode Australia for the Indians and the Indians for Australians.The four – a call centre worker, a law student, a television news anchor and an overseas education advisor – were selected to take part, as most had experience relevant to the show. One woman had been racially abused during a Sydney holiday seven years earlier, while another had reported extensively on interracial relations.Australian attitudes towards race have been under the scanner in recent years in India, after highly publicized violent attacks on Indians there led to breathless, often hysterical, media coverage in India.The effects were immediate: Within months, student enrollments to Australian universities fell dramatically, an issue of great alarm to education institutions which rely heavily on foreign fee-paying students.Earlier, in 2005, ugly scenes of a drunken mob directing their fury towards Lebanese Muslims at Sydney’s Cronulla Beach – known locally as the “insular peninsula” – were aired around the world. This, too, did little for Australia’s desire to raise its profile in the international community.The show is essentially an attempt to hold a mirror to Australian society and work out just how dumb, drunk and racist it really is.One episode has so far gone to air, receiving substantial publicity and ratings in Australia. Shot vérité style, the first of six episodes introduces the concept, the participants, and follows them around Sydney, during which they stumble across a verbal altercation between a potty-mouthed Muslim man and a seemingly erudite artist painting a wall mural reading “say no to the burqa,” in a liberal inner city suburb. For the first time, they witness the confused rhetoric of Australian attitudes towards race and religion.A blog post written by the host on a news website has garnered more than 600 comments (a lot by Australian standards; remember, this is a country of just 22 million people – less than that of Haryana). And during the airing of the pilot last Wednesday, Twitter was aflame with commentary.“Some revelations were more obvious than others,” said series producer Anita Jorgensen in an email interview.“It was surprising to discover that our survey in India about Australians confirmed our reputation as ‘dumb drunk and racist,” claimed Ms. Jorgensen. “When it came to racism we wondered if we’d struggle to open the debate in any meaningful way, but once we took four Indians into the streets, strong opinions soon found us. I was appalled to see our Indian travelers openly abused in the street.”In another example the experiences of call centre workers are recorded, and the kind of comments made by Australians don’t make for easy listening.“There’s so much abuse, I’m embarrassed to even say,” says Radhika Budhwar, one of the Indian participants, before listing a stream of foul-mouthed abuse that would make a sailor blush.But other experiences were a surprise: one episode takes the four to a Bachelor and Spinster Ball, or B&S Ball, a cherished tradition in country Australia of drunken, earthy revelry. “The boys had a great time,” says Ms. Budhwar. “And everybody, boys and girls, kept flashing us.”
They still do not want to be an independent republic though. I for one would love to see that happen.ramana wrote:There was a good program on PBS last week on Australia and its evolution. They are trying to come out of the UK gaze.
8:00 pmTony Robinson - Down Under [#105Z] Welcome to Australia Tony does an entrance examination to see if he'd qualify as an acceptable migrant to Australia. Trouble is, the 1930s dictation test is given in Gaelic! From its earliest days, Australia needed free migrants to grow and prosper, and it needed women. Schemes were devised to achieve both objectives, with bounties offered for bringing boatloads of human cargo from the UK and Ireland. But the people merchants got greedy, and the human toll was terrible. Through it all, Australia started to take shape as a nation. Tony traces immigration and multi-culturalism from the early 1800s, through the White Australia Policy, to the first arrival of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s. He decides that the best way of exploring a country's diversity is to talk to taxi drivers - dozens of them. duration 52:03 STEREO TVPG 8:53 pm
Tony Robinson - Down Under [#106Z] Still Stroppy Beggars
What exactly is an Aussie? In the final episode of Tony's exploration, he looks at the legacy of 222 years of British settlement. How did the country founded as a penal colony grow into a nation, and where are its loyalties today? Tony takes us to the true birthplace of The Ashes, helps re-create the first powered flight by an Australian, goes on a legal fox hunt (one of the most incongruous sights on the Australian landscape), takes a spin with invention buff James O'Loughlin in the first model Ute, retraces The Dismissal with cartoonist Warren Brown, and interrogates former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd about his convict past. From this, Tony reaches his own conclusions about how the past has influenced the Australia of today . .. and where it's heading tomorrow. duration 1:06:38 STEREO TVPG
The Minister for Tourism, Martin Ferguson, unveiled an India 2020 strategic plan last month at the annual Australian Tourism Exchange in Perth, the largest travel trade show in the southern hemisphere. "We have put a huge effort into attracting tourists from China recently and the next cab off the rank is India," he said.
The plan means that Tourism Australia's "There's Nothing Like Australia" campaign will be rolled out in Delhi and Mumbai and there will be extensive advertising on TV and digital channels as well as print.
Tourism Australia will spend $5 million on the India campaign in the next year and will also use cricketers and Bollywood stars to spruik the virtues of holidaying here. Cricketers Steve Waugh and Brett Lee have acted as advocates in the past, and more Australian Indian Premier League (IPL) players may be recruited.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/passage-fr ... z1zvYCYhvf
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/opinion ... z200b3TSpZYOU MUST understand, someone said once, that there is pure mathematics, and applied mathematics, and a subset of that called physics, the study of the mathematics of matter and motion. And then there is astrophysics. Beyond that, theoretical physics. Beyond that, speculation. And then there is rank speculation. And far beyond that we have cosmology.
Cosmology, boiled down, is the search for order about mass, energy and motion affecting the entire universe, turning mostly around theories of the Big Bang, but also containing amusing diversions such as the Black Hole discovered by John Howard, as well as the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker trilogy in five books, and Stephen Hawking's A short history of time, which no-one has ever had the time (or inclination) to finish.
At almost the opposite end of the spectrum is particle physics, the search for order, pattern and rules of behaviour of sub-atomic particles. It likewise sometimes seems in a realm of theories similar to when architectural drawings of skyscrapers are deduced from axe-marks on grains of sand, or handwriting is read by eye from 10 million kilometres away.
The general consensus of particle physicians, settled in the 1970s, is called the Standard Model, and posits an array of basic building ''blocks'' or energy packets of matter, including six ''flavours'' of quarks (bottom, top, up, down, charm and strange), six sorts of leptons (electrons, electron neutrinos, muons, muon neutrinos, tau, tau neutrinos) and up to 13 gauge bosons, or force carriers, including gravitons, photons, W and Z bosons of the weak force and gluons of the strong force. These combine in different ways to form electrons, hadrons (such as protons, neutrons, each called baryons) and mesons, like pions and kaons. Confused? So am I.
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This week saw a major development in particle physics when the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland produced a particle thought most likely to be the Higgs boson.
Its finding seemed to confirm much of the theoretical basis of the Standard Model.
The Higgs boson really ought to be called the Higgs Boson, or even the Bose-Higgson, after the Bengali theoretical physicist who, in work with Albert Einstein, first speculated its existence, in about 1924. Satyendra Bose, like a near contemporary, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and an array of other Indian scientists going back 2500 years, are giants of mathematics, yet hardly known in the Western world built in part from their discoveries. Bose, in particular, should have received the Nobel Prize sometime before he died in 1974: any number of people who built on his work did.
This provides me with my biennial opportunity to call for the construction of a museum of mathematics, designed particularly to honour the contribution of Indian mathematicians to the world. It should be built in the space between the lake and the National Science and Technology Centre in front of the National Library.
My model of the museum would be based on building an exact copy of the Jaipur or Delhi Observatory, able, as with exhibits at Questacon and as at Jaipur and Delhi, to be clambered over by children as much as marvelled at by anyone with a respect for science, for patterns and for sheer genius.
These observatories, or Jantar, built in India's Moghul period about 400 years ago, include about 20 great fixed instruments, some 10 metres high, built in masonry, capable of telling time to within a minute or two, to predict eclipses, and the movements of the sun, the moon, and the planets, as well as the declinations and coordinates of the stars.
Even dedicated mathematicians, steeped in Archimedes, Pythagorus, Euclid and Ptolemy, and at best dimly aware of an Arab contribution to maths through algebra and (they think, Arabic) numbers are often ignorant of how eastern learning, in China as well as India, preceded and established much of the scientific knowledge of the West. Our Arabic numbers, for example, are Hindu numbers. And if you think we could easily do without them, try multiplying CDLXXXIII by CIXC.
Perhaps the most famous Indian discovery, which did not reach western Europe until about the 12th century, was the invention of the concept of zero in the 7th century AD. It has been likened to the invention of fire and the wheel in terms of how it potentiated an explosion of knowledge. Without zero and Hindu-Arabic numbers, we could hardly have had a Newton, a Euler or a Gauss, let alone an Einstein.
One does not have to rank the Indians with each other, or other great mathematicians, so much as recognise that when Isaac Newton said, ''If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,'' he would have admitted, had he known, that among those raising him up were people from east of the Hindu Kush.
There is nothing in Canberra - I sometimes think Australia - which represents either Australia's links and friendship with India or India's great contribution to science and civilisation. Within a short distance of where the Jantar should be is a gift of the Government of Japan (Questacon) and a gift of Great Britain (the Carrillon).
Perhaps it should be India - or some great Indian combine - which donates a Jantar to Canberra, perhaps as 100th birthday present, given that our city's fathers are so slow to do something to recognise the primacy of maths as an art and a science. There have been, over the years, temporary enthusiasms for the proposal, and some officials have even wandered over to have a look at the Jantar - which in Jaipur is a world heritage site. But no proposal has progressed. Apparently, there's no money these days.
If we leave the future of Canberra to the imagination of the leaders of the National Capital Authority, one imagines them designating the area for a theme car park, perhaps so as to enhance the view from ASIO's Lubyanka, the NCA's crowning architectural triumph, so classically with its windows facing south for environmental and security reasons. Nor could one confidently pass on the responsibility, on non-national land, to the ACT Government, particularly in election mode. For some reason or other Andrew Barr is itching to place a stadium somewhere near Civic, possibly at Braddon Oval, which should be incorporated in a major urban development along with the ABC Flats. That, alas, is another dream, if only because a demand for imagination might be beyond the local rent seekers, who might make life hot for our local Lilliputians.
I have suggested that if we must have a new oval, and it must be built at ratepayers' expense, Barr could resume the (refurbished but vacant) Catholic Archbishop's Palace on Commonwealth Avenue, given rent free and rate-free to the church 70 years ago so that a national cathedral could be placed there.
The review considered specific allegations from 847 different people. Many had more than one allegation.
The allegations covered every decade from the 1950s to now.
The earliest date of alleged abuse was in 1951..
They were made by men and women about the conduct of individuals and groups.
The allegations were not limited to specific geographical locations. They came from different parts of the defence organisation and related to the full range of Australian Defence Force activity.
The incidents ranged from extremely serious to relatively minor.
"The behaviour complained of ranges from that which has never been acceptable nor tolerated, to that which, whilst not acceptable, has in the past been tacitly tolerated," the report said.
Review members said that at one level there had been hostility with the ADF because they were outsiders - civilian lawyers - questioning "their" ADF.
At another level there was a concern that a report by the review, drawing attention to past abuse in the ADF, could damage its reputation {or whatever is left of it!} and operational capability.
In which decade did India become a threat to Indonesia or even Australia?''Indonesia has never before been prepared to send its primary air defence asset to a foreign nation,'' Mr Farrell, who publishes the Australian & NZ Defender Magazine, said.
''The fact they are sending them to Australia indicates that Canberra and Jakarta have looked up and seen much greater threats around them,'' he said, referring to China and India.
Thousands of Australians have started a campaign to change the way their national television station broadcasts the Olympics.
They say that so far Channel 9 has shown nothing but Team Australia's successes and not much of anything else.
Australia should tie exports to ratification of test ban treaty, Crispin Rovere writes
Marc Faber, the Swiss investor and ultra bear, says there have been four mega bubbles in the past 40 years. In the 1970s it was gold; in the 1980s it was the Nikkei, and in the 1990s it was the Nasdaq. Bigger than all of them, though, has been the iron ore bubble, a tenfold increase in prices in less than a decade.
China's economy is now slowing, and although the economic data is not particularly reliable, it seems to be slowing fast. The country has two million unsold homes, with another 30 million under construction. There is a glut of iron ore and the price is falling. Where does that leave Australia? Horribly exposed, quite obviously. It has an over-valued currency, an over-valued property market, and its major customer is now desperately pulling every available policy lever in the hope of avoiding a hard landing. Whatever happens, the Australian dollar is a sell. Just how big a sell will depend on how successful Beijing is in reflating the Chinese economy.
The Catholic Church in the Australian state of Victoria has revealed its clergy were responsible for more than 600 "shameful and shocking" cases of child sexual abuse dating back to the 1930s.
However, experts said the number of the church’s victims could number in the thousands because only a small fraction of those sexually abused are believed to report the crime.
pope only apologises to christians only not to non christians.( I mean regarding conversions and slabvery and colonoialism)During a visit to Australia in 2008, Pope Benedict XVI apologised for the suffering of victims by Australian clergy and called for those responsible “for these evil deeds” to be brought to justice.