Perhaps Wilson Tuckey is right. In Canberra yesterday Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey aroused the Prime Ministerial ire for raising the possibility that boat people arriving in Australia might include the occasional terrorist. “To go out there and to smear asylum seekers in the way in which Mr Tuckey has done I say again is divisive. I think (it) is disgusting,” Mr Rudd said. Meanwhile, over the Pacific in Canada, the National Post newspaper was printing this story:

“One of the 76 migrants who arrived off the British Columbia coast in a cargo ship last weekend”, said the story, “is wanted in Sri Lanka for terrorism, according to two sources familiar with the investigation. The sources said the man was Kartheepan Manickavasagar, a 26-year-old who is the subject of an Interpol notice issued by Sri Lankan authorities. He is wanted for an unspecified terrorism offence.”

Sending them home the best deterrent. I can well understand why a Tamil living in Sri Lanka might want to emigrate somewhere else. Years of civil war would surely have led to a desire for a more peaceful existence but that desire does not a refugee make.

Refugees must be people under threat of persecution if they remain in their native land and I have seen no convincing evidence that that is the case for Tamils in Sri Lanka now that the Tamil Tiger terrorists have been defeated. I would expect that when claims for refugee status are investigated they will be dismissed and the economic migrants returned to Sri Lanka.

That should put a quick stop to the people smuggling trade.

Mapping predicted temperature changes. A map produced by the British Met Office of a world an average four degrees centigrade warmer than now shows that the area where most Australians live will suffer less than most parts of the world.

According to the Met’s computer modelling temperatures on land would rise by more than the average of global warming because land will heat up more quickly than the sea, and high latitudes, particularly the Arctic, will have larger temperature increases.

An overall rise of four degrees would see the average land temperature 5.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels yet in Australia the coastal fringes would go up by three degrees or less.

The interactive map is designed to show what areas of the world would be affected by such phenomena as drought, cyclones and bush fires with the greatest impact on Australia predicted to be more intense bush fires.

The Reserve Bank’s pay policy. With all the current concentration on ensuring that the pay policy of banks does not encourage risk taking behaviour by executives, it would be interesting to know how Australia’s Reserve Bank rewarded people in charge of its note printing operations.

Over recent months the Melbourne Age has been probing away at the methods used to obtain contracts for those uniquely Australian plastic notes with today’s instalment revealing that Nigeria’s National Assembly is to investigate the country’s former central bank governor over allegations he was bribed to award a contract to a company controlled by our Reserve Bank.

It is not a good look when your guardians 0f monetary integrity are under this kind of suspicion. Surely the Bank would not have encouraged some less than honourable conduct by paying bonuses based on short term profitability.

Rudd office invasion! Dramatic picture! From the Prime Ministerial website we bring you this latest news picture:

Who said that our boy Kevin and his staff have no sense of excitement.