It’s Time to go Juliar Dullard

Australia has the most incompetent government since Federation headed by the red-headed bimbo Juliar-the Marxist-Watermelon – Dullard. This particular government is in fact illegitimate, especially with the ALP minority status. The ALP did not win a majority of the seats, in fact the Coalition had that extra seat but also did not have a majority after the 2010 election.

As a result of this extraordinary situation of a hung Parliament, when Dullard managed to hang on, no matter what the cost, especially to the electorate, Australia has been spiralling downwards into economic decline. Dullard made an agreement with the Devil aka Bob Brown and the Watermelon Party. She has given in to all of the Watermelon demands that are designed to kill the Australian economy.

The electorate is giving the thumbs down to this imposed carbon tax. We do not want it. We are able to see through the global warming/climate change/ or whatever they are calling it this year, scam. Yes, climate does change because it goes in cycles – duh!!  However, what is not proved is the garbage that comes from those computer models, which is in reality not legitimate science at all. The computer models are in fact based upon manipulated data, and some of the data has been retrieved from collection points designed to give a reading that inflates the world temperatures.

The world temperature is not climbing by any statistically significant amount. The air that we breathe out makes no difference to the climate. Man does not influence to frequency and intensity of tornadoes, hurricanes or cyclones. Man does not influence the Richter scale intensity of an earth tremor. Man has no impact upon temperatures in the ocean.

The most often repeated of the mushroom fodder relates to glaciers and icebergs. The scaremongering is itself alarming. A glacier does not disappear when the temperature hits 100F, but it will melt just a little, as it does every spring and summer. I visited a glacier in Canada when we were experiencing more than 90F heat. Yes it is true that in that part of the glacier the ground was a little bit mushy, but you can bet that as winter came on the situation was different. The truth is that the glacier simply did not melt out of existence. That being said, glaciers do in fact have a limited life. It is no big deal, because other glaciers will take their place.  The Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves are not about to disappear. Again, in summer there will be some melting. It is a no brainer.

The weather during and after the Copenhagen wank-fest should have been sufficient to alert people to the fact that the whole man-made climate change scenario is nothing more than a scam. It snowed during the wank-fest and for weeks afterwards Europe had its biggest snowfall in a long time. It was the Al Gore effect.

Likewise here in Australia we are experiencing cold winters, and yet the wankers in Canberra continue with their crazy nonsense which in fact has nothing to do with climate or environment but is one big massive attempt to redistribute wealth.

Let’s go to the polls, and then we can see if the Dullard really has any kind of mandate.

Trade Tools

This has to be the funniest ad that I have ever seen. Trade Tools have done a magnificient job of explaining the economic results of Juliar’s meddling in our affairs. I consider each of their scenarios to be pretty much spot on as far as what is going to happen in Australia thanks to the stupidity of Juliar-the Marxist bitch – Dullard (Gillard) and her cohort of fairies at the bottom of the garden, the Watermelon Party.

Like I have said so many times, these people have absolutely no clue because they have no business sense at all. They have an ideology that is the opposite of free enterprise. I would be happy to call their ideology Fascism or even Nazism, because the truth is that their approach contains the same elements, economic wise as one finds in a country where the leader is best described as a Fascist.

It should be clear that Fascism or Nazism is more than just rounding up people and putting them in gas ovens declaring such acts as the final solution. The former Spanish dictator General Franco was a Fascist. He was backed by both Germany and Italy in the Spanish Civil War. General Franco imposed a socialist state (which is not surprising since Fascism is still socialism and only slightly different to communism) but he did not kill millions of people at the same time, where as Stalin, Lenin, and Hitler were guilty of the same crimes. So what we look at is not the crimes of Hitler, but we look at the government of Mussolini as well as that of Franco, and we look at the economic system that they imposed.

You can call it using a little bit of sunlight on a very dark subject, and that the dark subject is the extreme communism of Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Lee Rhiannon, as well as of Juliar Dullard (the Marxist) and her cohort such as Wayne the Goose Swan.

Why the stupid Green Party aka the Watermelons have it so wrong

It seems to me that education in Australia must be an absolute mess, because there are just so many ill-informed younger people who cannot discern for themselves when they are being punked, especially over climate.

The whole carbon emissions debate is an absolute joke, and even T.V. advertising is getting really weird, like the ad for timber patio furniture that has been seen recently.

Carbon is a wonderful resource. We breathe in oxygen and we breathe out carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide that we breathe out is taken up by plants and trees, and it helps them to grow. The trees and plants in turn pump out oxygen that we breathe in – I believe they used to call that something like the life cycle. It goes around and around, and around.

However, let’s look a little more closely at those trees because the ancient trees are what have formed:

1. Diamonds

2. Coal

3. Oil

4. Gas

Yes, that is correct, diamonds are in fact produced from carbon. Coal is formed from carbon, and yes oil and gas (especially when found together) are formed from carbon. All of it comes from trees, ancient trees that have broken down over time to actually form the carbon deposits – the same carbon deposits that are despised so much by the Watermelons.

What is so amazing is that when you look at carbon dioxide in this way, it is very much a part of the thriving life cycle, not just for us, but also for the plants and the trees, and it actually helps form the forests. What is more amazing is that carbon, hence coal, oil and gas, are in essence a renewable resource. It is a resource that takes millions of years to form, but it is still a renewable resource.

However, I want to look a little more closely at the forests and trees. There are some people, who have absolutely no forestry experience who crap on about retaining old growth forests and how these should never be logged. These people are extremely ignorant because good forestry management requires some logging over time. Without the logging the trees would indeed wither and die, or like what happened in Victoria, and also in the USA (California I think was the locale), there will be spontaneous combustion caused by the failure to clear the undergrowth. That kind of spontaneous combustion is not in fact caused by Climate Change.. but quiet now, do not let the Watermelons know that their ignorance is showing again. Most bushfires are not caused by spontaneous combustion. It is more usual that there is some other cause such as:

1. a spark from a power tool;

2. a cigarette butt flicked out of a car;

3. embers from a fire that has not been properly extinguished;

4. deliberately lit by persons known and unknown.

What we have to realise is that forest fires are also a necessary part of the life cycle. Yes, it is true. Many trees and plants actually need fire so that they can be renewed. At the same time fire is one of the ways of getting rid of pests such as the pine beetle. The other way is for the temperature to reach a certain low in winter, and if that does not happen then the beetle with thrive.

Some of the information that I gathered from a trip to the Rocky Mountains in Canada included information on the larch pine trees, and the other pines that are found everywhere, especially around Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise. When we were there, we saw the devastation to the pine trees that came from an infestation of the pine beetle. The previous winters had not been quite cold enough to freeze the little pest out. We were informed of two things – that the larch pine trees required fire so that they could regenerate. The pine cones that dropped to the forest floor required a high temperature to force them to open and release the seed. This was the other way of getting rid of the pine beetle.

Of course, the result of any forest fire is burned out trees that have produced… tada!! … carbon….

When Margaret Thatcher involved the UK in doing something about “the climate” it was more or less about pollution caused by carbon monoxide that was emitted from car exhausts at the time. This was before the invention of the catalyctic converter. At that time it was common to see the smog hanging over the city. In 1985 when I visited Manhatten Island for the very first time, the smog was so bad that I ended up with a very bad sinus headache. During the 1970s, when I lived in South Windsor NSW, I used to get a headache every time we went near Sydney because of the smog. However, when I visited New York City, on Manhatten Island in 2009 I did not suffer from that headache because the air itself was a lot cleaner. At the same time I lived for 10 years in Sydney and without the same ill effects as in the 1970s. This is evidence that those small steps had indeed made a difference to the air that we were breathing.

Coal-fired power stations belch out smoke, but is it clean or dirty? In other words did the power-station emit anything other than steam? The Watermelons like to pretend that what is emitted is somehow harmful, but is it? Also why do Watermelons hate the very idea of something like the Snowy River Hydro-eletric scheme which is way more efficient than their renewables alternatives?

The point to be made is that the young Australians, and even some of the older Australians who have been clamouring for this crap called a carbon tax are in fact very ill-informed, about carbon, about forests, and yes even about “emissions”. Why are we so concerned about carbon dioxide, when in fact it is carbon monoxide that is the real pollutant? How did we get so far off the track? How on earth did this crap ever gain traction?

 

 

Thanks for nothing Bitch Gillard

Yes, I am feeling very angry, and yes I consider the lying cat a real bitch, who is the most incompetent Prime Minister ever, in Australia.

Families earning more than $65,000 a year will feel the full measure of the incompetent tax that the bitch is intent upon introducing into Australia. These days $65,000 does not make a wager earner wealthy. Families between $65,000 – $300,000 continue to struggle. They have to cope with the increasing cost of having a mortgage as well as increases in doctor fees, utility bills and increases in the cost of fuel.

These are the families that struggle when there are “disabled” people, or those with chronic illness in the family because they are not entitled to get any form of help. It means that they pay the high cost of drugs, physiotherapy, plus high medical fees. It is one of my beefs that the medical reforms introduced by the Whitlam government hurt most families because it meant that government was setting rebates for medical fees, rather than allowing for market adjustments. It also meant an increase in medical fraud on both sides of the coin, which has also hit families very hard. It means that quite often families in this particular category get stuck with very high medical bills, especially when they live in an area where the doctors do not accept medicare on the spot, meaning that the family has to fork over at least $60 per person on the spot, and that is just for the general practitioner. Go to a specialist and the amount of fees is in the hundreds of dollars at a time, especially when going to a skin specialist. Then there is the high cost of the medications. The safety net does not help because that goes up every year, and so does the price of the medication, which often means that once the price on the NHS is equal to the price for the medication, it gets dropped from the list which means it does not count towards the safety net, which means it is more difficult to get to the point of getting some respite from those high costs.

These same families were hit by the Qld flood levy. Oh yes, these middle income earners also get to pay for the incompetence of the Qld Government, through the addition of an extra tax. How kind of that bitch Julia Gillard to slug the middle income earners in this way.

Now we get to the stupidity of the carbon tax, which is something that is unnecessary. The climate scaremongers keep putting out their propaganda and there are so many people who are just too lazy to research all of the facts. They never even bothered to find out about Climategate and the fact that those emails revealed the nature of the scam and fraud being perpetrated upon the world at large. What is worse, by doing a deal with the fairies at the bottom of the garden, that is the Watermelon Party of incompetence and pot smokers, we have a situation where the extremely slimey Bob Brown and that dopey hypocritical Christine Milne get to have a say about what we should be doing. They want the cost of electricity to skyrocket. They want the price of petrol to go up to the point where it is not affordable for even the mid-range family. They expect that if this happens we will, like sheep jump onto a public transport system that is so bad that it does not meet the standard of efficiency. They also have no clue about why roads need to be built, or the needs of the average Australian family . Why should we be forced to freeze because of their scaremongering, and their stupid ideas.

The oceans are not rising. The seaside resorts are not about to be wiped out, and not even by 2100 will the sea-level rise to the point where it will impact upon those luxury homes that are built by the sea. Did I mention that many of those homes are actually owned by the incompetents that go around screaming this green religion? The Great Barrier Reef is not in danger from any warming. It is in fine shape. In fact rather than warming we are going through a cooling phase. So how come so many people are just so stupid that they continue to believe the hype and they chant the mantra “It is for the future”? What utter bullshit!! 

Our responsibility on this earth is for good animal husbandry. We are supposed to be able to sow our own crops, to consume what we need, and to sell or exchange the rest. We are also meant to look after the animals given over to our care, and to use what we require for food. We are supposed to look after the land in other ways. We can do it by making sure that we plant more trees, and that we keep our waterways clear. There are many things that we, as individuals can do to make the planet a better palce to live. However, we cannot impact upon the weather.

As a Christian, I consider that those who promote this idea that somehow imposing a carbon tax is going to affect climate, are just outright arrogant. When I think about it, I am always reminded of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. In that story, it was the arrogance of the people in thinking that they could somehow be the equal of God that caused the anger, and then caused the scattering of the people and the changes in language so that they could not understand each other. Well, it is the same right now, because it is outright arrogance to think that we could in any way control nature.

Global Warming or climate change does not cause earthquakes or earth tremors. It did not cause the devastating earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Fukishima in Japan. It did not cause the tsunami that followed the earthquake in Fukushima. It did not cause the recent earth tremors in Victoria, Australia. Global Warming did not cause the Brisbane River to flood, which then caused the district of Brisbane to end up being flooded – that was incompetence due to the timing of the release of water from the Wivenhoe Dam. Global Warming did not cause the deadly twisters in the USA. All of it has been Mother Nature at work. We did nothing to cause those events. We can do nothing to prevent such events in the future.

The carbon tax is nothing more than a Marxist wealth redistribution scheme, and as usual it is the Middle Income earners who are being squeezed. The compensation package that has been announced is nothing more than an attempt to buy the electorate. The scheme shows that the Dullard government is not just incompetent, it is illegitimate. We did not vote to put Dullard into power. It was a hung parliament. We should be allowed to go back to the polls to vote again.

Even the Age has a few things to say about Dullard

I have already highlighted two articles written about the worst Prime Minister Australia has ever had, outside of Gough Whitlam, and I note that even the Age (normally a Juliar-theMarxist-Gillard) supporter, has a not so rosy report, indicating that even they are turning their backs on her government. This is astounding, especially when these little lapdogs were slobbering all over the dullard during the last election campaign.

Here are a few excerpts:

FEWER than 48 hours separated the two extremes of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership

The information campaign is a small step in the right direction if Gillard is to do anything other than lead her government to its doom at the next election

But for the Gillard government, for every step forward, there is a step back. And unfortunately for the ALP, on television on Sunday night Gillard did exactly what she shouldn’t be doing.

Structurally, the ALP is barely functional. An incredibly tiny proportion of the electorate chooses to belong to it.

Its sense of direction is unclear, as is its sense of purpose. Incredibly, the longer it holds office nationally, the fuzzier its mission appears. Gillard has been at the helm of the government one week short of a year.

The set of afflictions that was harming the Rudd government this time 12 months ago, deterring people who had supported it in 2007 to vote for it again, has not been obviated by the replacing of Kevin Rudd with Gillard; the malaise has, if anything, intensified.

That this has happened under Gillard, the ministerial star of the Rudd government, long considered outstanding leadership material, renders the situation all the more remarkable. In a year, Gillard has gone from being highly popular to being unpopular, from trusted to not trusted.

The carbon tax issue – her reversal on her pre-election pledge ruling out such a tax – is obviously a substantial reason for this. But there are other fundamental causes, too.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/the-longer-labor-holds-office-the-fuzzier-its-mission-appears-20110614-1g1qe.html#ixzz1PJYcVF5Y

 

With regard to those fact sheets, if they are like most facts sheets, they will do nothing more than bamboozle people with figures and statistics that are easily manipulated to come up with the desired outcome. In other words, for many of us, such facts sheets are not going to change our point of view.

 

Juliar-theMarxist-Gillard, the dullard stinks as a leader. She never really had the popularity with the public. We see her as nothing more than a husband stealer, and as someone who cannot be trusted.  Her record with regard to fiscal responsibility totally stinks and is even worse than that of Gough Whitlam, and up until now the Whitlam government had been pretty much unbeatable as far as being bad for the Australian economy.

 

The legacy of the Whitlam government had been the prolongation of stagflation that had begun to take hold by the late 1960s/ early 1970s. This was due to the rash spending spree that occurred as soon as Whitlam was elected to power. It was also due to other factors which are interrelated – high interest rates, high inflation, high unemployment. The only factor that was outside of the government’s control was the first oil shock. 

 

History is repeating itself with an out of touch, high spending government wasting money of unnecessary programs, including the BER and the insulation program as well as the other “incentive” schemes. Then of course there is the obvious pork barrelling that was meant to bolster the ALP in certain electorates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The incredible shrinking Prime Minister

Juliar-the Marxist-Gillard has been Prime Minister for roughly one year. She has brought a new disrepute and disrespect to Australia, especially on the world scene (these are my thoughts). Who can respect someone who flip flops all over the place like this woman? Who can respect someone who, for the sake of power did a deal with the devil, in the form of the Watermelons aka the Green Party?

Janet Albrechtson, writing in the Australian has an even harsher critique than the one given by Paul Kelly:

Julia Gillard is our very own incredible shrinking PM. Except her problem is the other way around. Gillard’s failure to garner respect is causing her to shrink in stature. And the PM can blame only a small part of her rapidly diminishing political character on external forces of minority government, taming the Greens and satisfying the eclectic demands of limelight-loving independents. In fact, Gillard’s lack of credibility and legitimacy as PM is due to her rank political opportunism.

Yet their opportunistic decision to use a 60 Minutes puff piece on Sunday night to try to turn the media cycle Gillard’s way only reminds us of the PM’s nagging political problems. The fact so many people are still asking “Who is the real Julia Gillard?”, and the fact the PM had to articulate the arrival of the real Julia during the last election campaign, and then, on Sunday night, Gillard had to tell us that “there is only one Julia”, betrays her inherent lack of authority and authenticity.

The best political leaders grow in the job. Consider Bob Hawke and John Howard. Or Gough Whitlam and Robert Menzies. Love them or loathe them, these prime ministers commanded respect. They had convictions. Politicians being politicians, they sometimes strayed. But mostly you knew what they stood for. Importantly, you could track a path of beliefs almost as long as their careers. Again, the path was not perfectly straight. As Howard told the Mont Pelerin Society annual conference last year, when he first became federal treasurer under Malcolm Fraser, he was far from being a committed economic rationalist. His experience helped convince him that freeing up the labour market was critical to Australia’s prosperity.

Even then, no one had to ask: “Who is the real John Howard?” Or who was the real Hawke or Whitlam or Menzies. Similarly, senior political leaders such as Peter Costello and Paul Keating grew in the job as treasurer. Alexander Downer did the same as foreign minister. They commanded respect, even if it was begrudging respect.

Yes, Janet, it is all about respect. You are right to some extent, because I cannot respect Gough Whitlam, but you are right that we at least knew what he was standing for, which is something that is impossible to know about Julia-theMarxist-Gillard, because she is hiding her authentic self from the public – or at least she thinks that she is hiding her real positions. As a Marxist it is in fact not hard to find out about her positions – she wants power, and she wants the redistribution of income. She also has no positions on most subjects because she has no real understanding of those issues. She knows how to spend and waste money, just like Whitlam spent and wasted money.

 

Paul Kelly writes a critique

Paul Kelly is a very seasoned journalist, and not one that I would consider as a conservative. However, when he writes on a subject, he does a fairly decent job. This time his critique is on why the ALP tend to crash and burn. I could give a number of other reasons, such as Marxism does not work, and the spend and burn behaviour always ends up with people being disaffected until they forget, put the bastards back in again, and it happens all over again… but that is me… !!

Kelly states:

Put brutally, Labor has got the worst of both worlds. As its grassroots energy has been strangled, its leadership, bequeathed more authority by this “top-down” power, has failed to display the necessary policy judgment or administrative ability.

The collapse of electoral support for Labor following Kevin Rudd’s defeat of John Howard at the 2007 election remains one of the astonishing events of post-World War II politics. That Julia Gillard, installed a year ago as Labor’s saviour, has suffered a similar decline only accentuates the crisis of Labor governance. On the evidence, it was not merely Rudd-specific, the assumption at the time. The defect seems embedded in Labor’s DNA.

Gillard’s tragedy as PM is that she knows the problem but seems unable to resolve it.

She knows where Rudd went wrong: too many premature announcements in deference to media spin; too many expectations without the follow-up delivery; too many switches of positions leaving the public confused about the beliefs and identity of their Prime Minister.

These were Rudd’s mistakes but Gillard now repeats them. Consider the list. Gillard opposed a carbon tax before the election and embraced a carbon tax post-election. She chose a formal alliance with the Greens but later denigrated the Greens as extremists. She pledged to “fix” the mining tax but has finished with a model incompatible with state royalty systems.

She offered an asylum-seeker deal with East Timor when it was never in prospect. Then she repeated the blunder by premature announcement of the intended agreement with Malaysia igniting an assault on her policy before it was unveiled.

Above all, by foreshadowing the carbon tax in February without her broader ETS policy, Gillard has seriously jeopardised her electoral standing as PM. More recently, her government declined to act on abuses in the live cattle trade with Indonesia and then reacted to a television program without thinking through almost any of the consequences. These are the mistakes of a minority PM constantly on the run.

The crisis of governance that Labor faces is multi-dimensional: it penetrates to ideology, policy, organisation and politics.

Modern Labor, originating with Rudd, has chosen to define itself by pricing carbon and Gillard, because of Rudd’s retreat, is trapped with no option but to press ahead with a policy that may yet destroy Labor at the polls. The reason is that retreat would bring its own form of political destruction by stamping a second Labor PM and a second Labor government as without conviction, a result utterly untenable for Gillard and for Labor. The nature of this trap is exquisite.

On another level, however, Labor has succumbed to its default instinct of faith in government intervention. This worked in macro terms to combat the 2008 global financial crisis but now constitutes a series of political landmines that Labor seems unable to resist.

The most dramatic, so far, has been the disastrous roof insulation scheme. But the big cannons are lined up: the re-regulation of the labour market, the gamble on the government-owned National Broadband Network rollout and a vast defence procurement agenda based on Australian industry, a fiscal and defence crisis in the making. Each testifies to Labor’s revived faith in regulation and de facto protectionism.

This is an extremely harsh critique of Gillard, which she deserves by the way. She has been for populism, and she has tried to hide her real ideology of Marxism. Gillard’s ambition to be Prime Minister has shown a woman who is not in the slightest big honest, but she is a person who will sway with the wind; if the wind blows one way she will go in that direction. Her deal with the Greens is an example of her over-ambitious machinations. It was a deal with the devil. Did Gillard care? No, because it was more important to her to have the top spot as Prime Minister. She has failed to understand the Peter Principle and she well and truly fits that description. She has gone well beyond her own competency because of her ambition.

 

Senator Faulkner speaks out

I am not a supporter of the ALP and I do not believe in either left wing or right wing ratbaggery. However, I agree with most of the points being made by Senator Faulkner on this occasion. His assessment is probably one of the best that I have seen in regard to what is wrong with the current situation. In a nutshell dissent is discouraged. I agree with the assessment that was made, but do not necessarily agree with his suggested solutions.

Senator Faulkner condemned the “careerist party managers” who, for the appearance of unity, had eliminated passionate public debate and produced conferences without differences of opinion.

Instead there were “factional fixes, log-rolling and back-room deals”.

His frank appraisal is likely to be taken up by an increasing number of ALP figures frustrated by the battering Labor has received since the 2007 election, the low standing of the current federal government, and the huge ALP loss in New South Wales.

“We have lost a generation of activists from Labor and, if we do not face the challenges and opportunities of reform in both structure and culture, we will risk losing a generation of voters as well,” Senator Faulkner said.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/national/john-faulkner-delivers-assessment-of-labor-party/story-e6frfkvr-1226072521722#ixzz1OozUr5Jp

 

 

Airport and ship Security–my own experience

Over the past two weeks I have been on a cruise from Sydney Australia to various New Zealand ports and then home again. This gave me an opportunity to experience first hand security within an airport here in Australia, as well as security on board a ship.

I am a person who likes to remain busy when I am travelling (and not being seasick), and I was determined to take some knitting with me on our cruise to New Zealand. The rules on bringing knitting needles on board of an aircraft have now being relaxed… oh boy that means that we little old ladies who like to knit will now be able to use those blunt end needles again… but the rules relating to embroidery scissors have not been relaxed.

My saga begins at Canberra airport because I made the mistake of packing my little kits with crochet hooks and embroidery scissors in the wrong bag. As I walked through the security my bag that I was carrying as hand luggage failed the test when it went through x-ray.  They also queried a crochet hook that was not quite ordinary and some other items. In my view none of the items should have been considered as dangerous. Anyhow my argument is not with the Canberra Airport security people, but is with the silliness of the rules. I believe that these rules should be relaxed.

First of all, I have to praise the security staff at Canberra Airport. They were very polite and I was not stressed over the little incident. In fact they were quite helpful, and I am glad that they are not like the TSA. Our Australian security staff are the best when it comes to fairly applying these silly rules.

When my bag failed I had to go through the bag and extract the offending items. I actually had a bag within a bag and in the end I was allowed to take that bag with the offending items and request  that the bag be placed with our checked luggage. I think that this was a very fair outcome… but they also told me that they do confiscate the nail and embroidery scissors. I suspect that they would prefer to not have to confiscate them and that they do think the rules are quite silly.  All was well, and I finally got through security.

What is really hysterical about such a saga is that we can go through security and not be allowed to have such items as cigarette lighters etc. yet just around the corner, and on the way to the gate is a shop that sells cigarette lighters. In other words a smoker might have his lighter confiscated at the security gate, but as soon as he is through the gate he can purchase a new one. I was not able to check to see if the shop also sold small scissors, yet I was amused over the irony of the situation.

After we arrived in Sydney and picked up our checked baggage we boarded a bus that took us to the terminal for our P&O cruise on the Pacific Jewel. Boarding commenced near midday and was uneventful, but we had to go through another security check. We got through that one with flying colours. I had checked all of my baggage and so I did not bring any bags on board with me. What I noticed is that a few passengers failed when they went through the metal detector.

The security for P&O is handled by their own security employees. These employees were not necessarily Australian, and many of them appeared to be Indian. They were thoroughly professional in their approach with passengers. Not once did I see a passenger who had failed the metal detector test being hand searched. Instead they always used the wand and it was usually a thorough yet quick check of the person. 

Whilst we were on the cruise we had to wear a passenger tag. The tag was scanned each time we left the ship at a port in New Zealand and it was tagged again when we embarked again. The bar code was accompanied by a picture of the passenger, thus it would have been difficult for a non-paying person to board the ship pretending to be another passenger.  Also, every time we embarked at each port at the end of our sightseeing day, our packages were sent through the x-ray machine.

My only comment on this process is the silliness of one individual security officer who got a bit high-handed because I took my embroidery scissors off the ship and had them in my bag that I took with me. Since we were not boarding an aircraft, and as far as I knew there is no such restriction relating to being on a ship, I found his attitude to be stupid. However, he is just one person out of a number of staff who had always been quite professional in their handling of the passengers. When this incident happened I just shrugged my shoulders, and since we were travelling in a bus most days (except for the two train trips) I was not too concerned over the situation because I was not going to need those scissors to cut yarn!!