Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Wednesday November 18th
Glen - Breakfast Host: …
Not far away from Christmas and already the strange stories have started appearing :
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From the wires :
Santa has promised children he would travel around the world to bring them Christmas presents despite the global swine flu pandemic.
“I swear that Christmas will not be cancelled this year,” Father Christmas told Finnish national broadcaster YLE, explaining that many children were worried he would catch swine flu.
Santa told the world’s children he would definitely see them at Christmas and added neither he nor the elves would fall ill thanks to his wife’s good care.
(Think the Claus family mightn’t be the most progressive bunch)
“Take care of yourself. But if you have caught swine flu, take it easy and follow the advice given by your father, mother and doctors,” Santa said.
According to Finnish legend, Santa Claus lives in a cabin atop the Korvatunturi mountain in Finnish Lapland.
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Not sure what the North Pole types think of that…
All I want for Christmas is Sarah Palin’s book - don’t want anything too heavy over Summer.
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Marius - Politics:
In politics, as in life, silence often says more than words.
In any political debate it is as important to notice who is not talking as who is. And today the silence from the government in the national debate over asylum seekers is deafening.
The past month, with the asylum seekers refusing the leave the Oceanic Viking, has been the toughest time politically for the Government in its two years in office.
It has lost some altitude in the polls - plummeting to a position where it is now facing the prospect of winning the next election with a thumping, increased, majority. The Prime Minister himself has seen his personal support collapse from towering to now merely dizzying.
Not the most threatening position for a government, but still enough to get some Labor nerves jangling. The Government’s response has been to limit the debate as far as possible, principally by not participating in it, while the opposition has been trying to make as much hay as humanly possible while the political sun shines.
My evening round of calls to line up politicians for a morning interview on NewsRadio was largely taken up on Tuesday evening with trying to find “talent” to talk about the prospect of the asylum seekers leaving the Oceanic Viking today.
The Opposition, understandably, was very available. The Government, naturally, was not.
Still you have to put in the requests, and as I was sending a sequence of unproductive texts to government minister press secretaries, I had one eye on SBS News and its coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to China.
His “town hall” style meeting in Shanghai had seen the authorities lift the curtain of censorship a little to allow some questions from the carefully vetted audience and a restricted broadcast, which didn’t go much beyond the city itself.
The SBS coverage showed an American journalist at the end of the meeting trying to talk to one of the students in the audience, but being prevented by a very insistent official.
Back here, my texting continued and two more ministers declined my request for an interview on asylum seekers.
There’s no substantial common ground between what was happening in Shanghai and the stonewall I was getting from Canberra - but there are diverting similarities. China is an autocratic state, its leaders do not have to deal with a free press.
Australia is one of the world’s oldest democracies, with politicians, from the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader down, who genuinely in favour of freedom of the press. But they are also passionately interested in a favourable press.
Right at the sharp end of message delivery all political figures and their media minders from Shanghai to Sydney are trying to achieve the same end - favourable coverage. They want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
China’s leaders do it by edict, Australia’s politicians do it by practising the sometimes dark arts of media management.
One of the key tools at a government’s disposals is to turn down the volume on a politically damaging issue.
The level on asylum seekers has been turned down to zero - and that silence speaks volumes.
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Mark - Breakfast E.P.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has certainly stirred up controversy with his attack in federal Parliament last night on the Church of Scientology:
” Scientology is not a religious organisation; it is a criminal organisation that hides behind its so-called religious belief”, he told the Senate, “What you believe does not mean you are not accountable for how you behave.
The letters received by me which were written by former followers in Australia contain extensive allegations of crimes and abuses that are truly shocking-crimes against them and crimes they say they were coerced into committing. There are allegations of false imprisonment, coerced abortions, embezzlement of church funds, physical violence, intimidation, blackmail and the widespread and deliberate abuse of information obtained by the organisation. It is alleged that information about suspicious deaths and child abuse has been destroyed, and one follower has admitted he was coerced by the organisation into perjuring himself during investigations into the deaths of his two daughters. These victims of Scientology claim it is an abusive, manipulative, violent and criminal organisation, and that criminality is condoned at the highest levels.”
He wants a Senate inquiry into the Church of Scientology and its tax-exempt status.
You can read the full text of his speech here - and then vote on the issue via our news poll, in the middle of our web page!
By coincidence, last week the NewsRadio Breakfast team received a letter from Cyrus Brooks, the vice-president and the head of Community Relations for the Church of Scientology in Australia.
He was writing in response to a short BBC piece we ran recently about the Church of Scientology being convicted of fraud in France.
The case revolved around complaints from two women, one of whom said she was manipulated into paying more than $32,000 to the Church in the 1990s.
Mr. Brooks says all the money was returned to the woman, “yet the unusual French justice system allows it (the original complaint) to be used vindictively by an anti-religious group and in France’s case, there is a long history of discrimination against minority religions. We are appealing the ruling and feel confident that this will be reversed.”
For the record, the French government does not accept that Scientology is a religion.
We rang Mr. Brooks this morning to ask him for a reaction to Nick Xenophon’s attack.
He described the Senator’s speech as an outrageous abuse of Parliamentary privilege and he categorically rejected the allegations.
But Cyrus Brooks says the Church of Scientology would be happy to comply with any parliamentary inquiry into its activities.
Perhaps Mr. Brooks would be well advised to start gathering the information he would need for such an inquiry now.
For example, this morning he was unable to say how many Scientologists there are in this country, or give even a rough, ball-park figure of the Church’s annual income.
Quite unusual for someone who is the Vice-President and the Head of Community Relations for the Church of Scientology in Australia
