Talk:Andrew Bolt

Improving fairness?
I feel the article on Andrew Bolt is unfair for several reasons.

The article portrays him as some right-wing nutter, like an Australian Alex Jones, when he's not even close. He is a mainstream conservative voice and hated by the left side of politics precisely because he is so good at calling out their stuff-ups. Several examples which should be mentioned:

1 - the building of an exorbitantly expensive desalination plant in Wonthaggi, Victoria, announced in 2007 by the Labor Bracks government. The cost was estimated at over $4 billion, while building another dam in central Victoria was estimated to cost $1.3 billion while producing three times as much water (http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/the-price-of-green-stupidity-just-went-up/news-story/8d7da86305be6e41d004d0f336e841b3). The end result is a cost about x10 higher than existing sources. The dam was announced during a drought in Victoria, and a period of hysteria when certain environmentalists (such as activist Tim Flannery) were warning that 'even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and river systems.' This prediction has proven completely false. By the time the plant was finished Melbourne's dams were back up to 80% and the plant has proven completely unnecessary since then (it has produced a small amount of water but this appears to have been ordered by the Labor government for political reasons - i.e. out of sheer embarrassment). Andrew Bolt was one of the few columnists to label this a huge waste of taxpayers money at the time and its hard to say that he wasn't proven right. Nearly 10 years later and Melbourne's dams are still over 60%, meanwhile we spend several hundred million dollars a year for this plant even when it sits idle (https://www.melbournewater.com.au/waterdata/waterstorages/pages/water-storages.aspx).

There are lots of other examples with regard to 'wasteful green spending' in Australia recently where electricity and water prices shoot up dramatically with really nothing to show for it, particularly in South Australia which keeps having blackouts because they shut down so many of their baseload powers plants in favor of unreliable wind farms. Even recent government reports confirm this (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-12/renewable-energy-mix-played-role-in-sa-blackout/8111184).

2 - tragically lethal policies with regard to asylum seekers. Under the conservative Howard government (1996-2007) asylum seeker boats were turned back rather than being allowed to enter Australia. This quickly shut down the people smuggling trade where hundreds of people had previously drowned trying to reach Australia. The new Labor Rudd-Gillard government (2007-2013) revoked this policy and boats started arriving again. Some 50,000 came in the next 6 years and at least 1200 are known to have drowned en-route or smashed up against the rocks at Christmas Island (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WprxHApvqq8). The Abbott government came back into power in 2013 and quickly reinstated the earlier policy and boats stopped arriving almost immediately. Australia has a set refugee intake regardless of which route people take, making the whole exercise entirely pointless (instead we pick refugees waiting in camps overseas and safely fly them here). The conservatives were able to make a huge amount of political capital because of this monumental policy failure and even the Labor party now widely admits it was a mistake, with Andrew Bolt having been one of the most prominent critics. This can be seen on the Labor party's website today (http://www.alp.org.au/asylumseekers - under 'preventing deaths at sea')

3 - the 'stolen generations' controversy. Left-wing activists have been trying to build capital lately on the idea that tens of thousands of Aboriginal children taken from their communities over the course of the 20th century constitute a 'stolen generation' and a black stain on Australia's history. What is often not mentioned is how those children typically were growing up in horrible conditions we would no doubt label as child abuse/neglect in any other community and they were typically removed for these reasons. Andrew Bolt has pointed out that it is very hard to find examples of children being removed for 'purely racist reasons' and that (with just one exception) cases brought on this basis keep being thrown out by the courts. Furthermore, because of fears of repeating another 'stolen generation' social workers are now even more reluctant to remove Aboriginal children from awful homes which appears to be leading to widespread cases of horrific abuse going unchecked (http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/we-must-listen-to-adam-giles-on-the-issues-of-the-northern-territory/news-story/b3bebb6d84bba74b2532eaf9649fb604).

Another thing that should be added - Andrew Bolt was attacked by a group of cowardly ANTIFA protestors in Melbourne earlier this year, who ran off after he started punching them back, and is just a recent example of unacceptable violence by left-wing activists in Australia trying to silence the opposition. Watch this footage and tell me you're not on Andrew Bolts' side (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN8Cb5kISio).

Happy to discuss this further in contributing to RationalWiki as I generally think its an excellent site.
 * Reverend Black Percy (talk) 14:44, 3 July 2017 (UTC)