The bailout to end all taxes
Guest post by Gavin R. Putland
In Australia we have the world’s most overpriced housing. Federal and State governments and the Reserve Bank live in fear that the bottom will fall out of the housing market, leaving recent buyers with negative equity, causing a financial collapse and depression after the example of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In a desperate attempt to keep the music going, governments have been pumping taxpayers’ money — your money — into the housing market.
The Federal Government brought in the First Home Owners’ Boost to inflate a fresh bubble at the bottom of the housing market, and kept it going just long enough for the bubble to spread to the top of the market — through first-time buyers leveraging their grants, then sellers leveraging their capital gains, and so on. The original $7000 Federal grant for first-time buyers is still in place. Various State governments have their own grants on top of this. Instead of bailing out the banks, Australian governments in the main are trying to bail out the housing market before the problem reaches the banks.
Amnesty International loses its credibility; Gita Sahgal “suspended.”
Amnesty International sounded like a great idea when I first heard of it. Their ideal of supporting he release and rights of political prisoners worldwide sounded like a really worthy cause way back. It still would be but unfortunately Amnesty turned out to be more driven by leftist politics and grandstanding towards that end, rather than being a crusading group determined to stand up to oppression regardless of who was carrying it out, or their ideology.
It became blindingly obvious that the organization was agenda driven when despite the horrors being committed by the communist block and its allies, it preferred to look for its villains in the West especially the US. I guess if you are going to take on governments, its safer to pick those with a strong ideal of due process.
Now, the head of Amnesty International unit for Women’s Rights, Gita Sahgal, has been suspended by the group, for opposing the alliance of the group with a top Taliban supporter in the UK Moazzam Begg. Begg is the leader of the “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners based on supporting the Guantanamo prisoners, of whom he was a member until 2005 after being picked up in Pakistan in the wake of the Afghan invasion.
Ms. Sahgal states that only accepted her job at AI after insisting to Widney Brown, senior director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty, that she be allowed to address their alliance with Begg and his group. It would be difficult for any serious supporter of women’s rights to accept an alliance with such a misogynistic group as the Taliban or their supporters. Read more »
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