from Crikey ….

Sinodinos takes the stand: if he didn't know, it doesn't wash ….

from Crikey …..

Arise, sons of privilege.

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years - concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

Last December, Xanana Gusmão, the prime minister of Timor-Leste, was on an official visit to the world’s newest nation of South Sudan when he received an urgent call from Dili. Officers from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police had just taken files and computers from the Canberra office of Bernard Collaery, one of the lawyers advising Timor-Leste in a dispute with Australia over a treaty that divided the spoils of the $40 billion Greater Sunrise oil and gas field.

The Abbott government might as well end the pretence and shut up the accountability shop.

When Robert Menzies won elections, he would reassure voters that he would govern not just on behalf of those who voted for him but also on behalf of those who didn’t. It was a promise to put the national interest above partisan interests and a recognition that almost half of the electorate always votes for the other side.

from john passant …..

Good old ‘lying rodent’ George Brandis, our esteemed Attorney-General. Evidently everyone has the right to be bigoted.

In assuming the highest office in the land, our new Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, has promised to observe ‘values that respect & uphold equity, compassion, generosity, tolerance & energetic ambition’.

Who is Tony Abbott? Do we know him? I would not ask these questions, for example, of John Howard. His family was very much fashioned by World War I – both his father and grandfather enlisting (one incredible story has them meeting up, on the battlefield, a few hours before the lethal hostilities resumed). John Winston Howard, born in 1939, got his middle name from Winston Churchill. John Howard is what was once known as an Australian Briton.

Cardinal George Pell, former archbishop of Sydney, has departed for Rome to take charge of Vatican finances. His last acts in Sydney involved rationalising the contradictions in his leadership style caused by the chasm between moral and spiritual leadership of his community, and legal and fiduciary management of its assets and finances. For 30 years his has been the authoritarian, cold, unfeeling, and arrogant face of the church corporate in Australia.

from mike carlton ….

Shed no tears for Arthur Sinodinos. It was greed and folly that brought him down, a lethal cocktail for politicians at his level, and all his own work.

Financial planners will be able to break the financial advice law with impunity unless a client takes private action, the government says.

An explanatory memorandum tabled with the changes to Labor's Future of Financial Advice legislation says the Australian Securities and Investments Commission ''will not take enforcement action in relation to the specific FOFA provisions that the government is planning to repeal''.