Rudd may have been slow on boats

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd concedes he may have been slow to act in 2009 when the number of asylum seeker boat arrivals increased dramatically.

Mr Rudd defended his decision to dismantle the Howard government's Pacific Solution in 2008.

More than 45,000 asylum seekers have arrived by boat since those policies were scrapped.

The prime minister, in his first major interview since taking Labor leadership last week, said more people had arrived by boat in 2009 and 2010 due to wars in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

He admitted his government may have been too slow to change its policies in light of overseas conflicts.

Seven boats arrived in 2008 and 61 arrived in 2009.

"If we made a mistake, it was in perhaps not being quick enough to respond to the new change in external circumstances," Mr Rudd told ABC television's 7.30 Report on Wednesday.

Australian governments had always made changes to asylum seeker policies in response to global events, he said.

"There is nothing set in stone with immigration policy or asylum seeker policy," Mr Rudd said.

"I'm open to adjustments in the future."

He backed Foreign Minister Bob Carr's comments that more economic migrants were coming by boat, particularly from Iran.

"I can understand why people want to leave Iran," Mr Rudd said.

"But the bottom line is, it's not all about seeking freedom from persecution."

He dismissed Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's plan to reinstate the Howard era policy of towing asylum seeker boats back to Indonesia as just a slogan.

"Mr Abbott, how will you turn the boats back?

"If it sinks, what will you do? Let people drown?

"If you turn the boat back to Indonesia and the Indonesian navy says no ... what do you do then?"

Earlier, Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said Australia should consider expanding to other nationalities its policy of returning failed Sri Lankan refugees back to their homelands.

"The fear of death has not stopped people getting on leaky boats," Mr Clare told reporters in Sydney.

"The fear of going to Nauru or Manus Island has not stopped people getting onto boats.

"But I tell you what has: the fear of being flown home in a week - that's what works."

Australia could send Iranians "halfway" back to Malaysia instead of Iran, considering Tehran won't accept people who don't want to go back, he said.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said Mr Rudd dismantled coalition policies that worked.

He said the coalition would bring back temporary protection visas, give no benefit of the doubt to people arriving without documentation, open "genuine" offshore processing and turn back boats where it was safe to do so.

"If Kevin Rudd is elected, the people smugglers would not just have won the battle but won the war," Mr Morrison told reporters in Perth.

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Rudd appoints Treasury man as chief

SENIOR Treasury official Jim Murphy has become Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's new chief of staff.

Mr Murphy, the former Treasury deputy secretary, was a key backroom figure in dealing with the global financial crisis when Mr Rudd was prime minister between 2007 and 2010.

He was appointed on Wednesday.

Mr Rudd has also appointed experienced media adviser Fiona Sugden as communications director and former News Limited journalist Matthew Franklin as his senior media adviser.

Veteran Labor strategist Bruce Hawker has taken on the role of political adviser.

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Rudd reckons Abbott lacks 'ticker'

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd suspects Tony Abbott lacks the "ticker" to debate him on key policy areas.

Mr Abbott has been "lying" to the Australian people about the state of the economy, his ability to turn back asylum seeker boats and the impact of carbon pricing, Mr Rudd says in his first major television interview since retaking the leadership from Julia Gillard.

"So what I would say to Mr Abbott - you've been doing this for a long time, it's time we had a properly moderated debate ... on his chosen subjects," Mr Rudd said on the ABC's 730 program.

"Mr Abbott, I think it is time you demonstrated to the country you have a bit of ticker on this.

"He's the boxing blue. I'm the glasses-wearing kid in the library.

"Come on, let's have the Australian people form a view about whether his policies actually have substance, whether they actually work, or whether they are just slogans."

On his now-broken pledge never to return to the Labor leadership, Mr Rudd said Ms Gillard had vacated the spot and brought on the caucus ballot.

He said a second reason was the prospect of defeat at the 2013 election.

"The Australian Labor Party and the government was on track towards a catastrophic defeat and I wasn't about to stand idly by and see everything we worked for for the last five or six years go down the gurgler as Mr Abbott set about ripping it apart."

He said he was not motivated by revenge, but taking up the fight to Mr Abbott and coming up with a positive plan for the future.

Mr Rudd said he was working through policy changes but it would be an "orderly process".

He said he wanted to take the time to "think and take the best advice".

Asked whether Labor would be punished for its long leadership turmoil, Mr Rudd said he had faced four Liberal leaders over a period of four years after he took on the Labor leadership.

"In political parties these things happen from time to time," he said.

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New research boosts search for AIDS cure

FRESH data from several small trials presented at an AIDS conference on Wednesday provides encouraging news in the quest for a cure for HIV, scientists said.

Giving an update in an eagerly-followed trial, researchers said an HIV-positive infant in Mississippi who was put on a course of antiretroviral drugs within a few days of birth had remained free of the AIDS virus 15 months after treatment was stopped.

In Boston, two HIV-positive men who were given bone-marrow transplants for cancer also had no detectable virus 15 weeks and seven weeks respectively after stopping AIDS drugs, a separate team reported.

Both research projects are at an early stage and should not be taken as a sign that a cure for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is around the corner, researchers cautioned at a world forum of AIDS scientists in Kuala Lumpur.

Even so, they said it strengthens the motivation for pursuing the once-unthinkable goal of eradicating HIV or repressing it without daily drugs -- a condition referred to as a "functional cure" or "functional remission".

"I don't actually want to use the cure word in this situation," said Timothy Henrich, from the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, of the bone-marrow study he is co-leading.

"But what I can say is that if these patients are able to stay without detectable HIV for at least a year, maybe a year and a half, after we stop treatment, then the chances of the virus coming back are very small," he told an AFP correspondent in Paris.

Introduced in 1996, the famous cocktail of antiretroviral drugs is a lifeline to millions with HIV.

But if the drugs are stopped, the virus rebounds from "reservoirs" among old cells in the blood stream and body tissue. It then renews its attack on CD4 cells, part of the immune system's heavy weaponry.

Deborah Persaud, heading the so-called Mississippi Child investigation, said early treatment of newborns appears to offer the best hope of attacking the virus before it gets established in these reservoirs.

"Therapy in the first few days of life really curtailed the reservoir formation to the point that (it) was not established in this child and allowed treatment cessation without having the virus rebound," Persaud, an associate professor of paediatrics at Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore, Maryland, said by phone.

An estimated 34 million people are infected with HIV worldwide, and about 1.8 million die each year.

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Russian booster rocket crashes

A Russian rocket carrying three satellites has crashed in Kazakhstan shortly after takeoff. Source: AAP

A RUSSIAN booster rocket carrying three satellites has crashed at a Russia-leased cosmodrome in Kazakhstan shortly after the launch.

The Russian Space Agency said in a statement Tuesday that the Proton-M booster unexpectedly shut down the engine 17 seconds into the flight and crashed some 2 kilometres away from the Baikonur launch pad.

Russian officials said there were no casualties or damage immediately reported. Meanwhile, the Interfax news agency quoted Kazakh Emergency Situations Minister Vladimir Bozhkov as saying that the burning rocket fuel has blanketed the launch pad with a toxic cloud.

But he said authorities have yet to determine its potential danger to the environment.

Another Proton-M booster crashed in Baikonur in August 2012 when it failed to place two satellites into orbits.

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Girl thrown from car in NSW crash

A YOUNG girl thrown from a car after a collision on a Sydney freeway has escaped serious injury as have a four-year-old boy and a woman also in the vehicle.

The six-year-old girl from Engadine was taken to Westmead Hospital with non life threatening injuries, police say.

When she was found by emergency services after the collision on the F3 at Wahroonga on Tuesday morning she was still strapped into her booster seat.

At first doctors feared the worst and assessed the girl for head injuries.

But they soon discovered she had escaped with only bruising and cuts to her head.

The 27-year-old truck driver was taken to Hornsby Hospital for mandatory blood and urine testing.

Police are investigating the crash and have asked for anyone with information to come forward.

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50 hurt when quake hits Aceh

A STRONG 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia's north western province of Aceh on Tuesday, causing buildings to collapse and injuring at least 50 people.

The quake hit inland at 0737 GMT at a depth of just 10 kilometres, 55 kilometres south of Bireun and 72 kilometres south east of Reuleuet, the US Geological Survey said.

"We have received around 50 people with injuries suffered when the walls of their houses collapsed," Ema Suryani, a doctor at a health clinic in Lampahan city, Bener Meriah district, told AFP.

"The injuries vary from open wounds to broken bones."

Injured people had been transported from several affected villages in two trucks, she said.

People also ran out of buildings in panic in the provincial capital Banda Aceh as the quake shook houses for around one minute, an AFP journalist at the scene said.

A massive quake struck off Aceh in 2004, sparking a tsunami that killed 170,000 people in the province on Sumatra and tens of thousands more in countries around the Indian Ocean.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" where continental plates collide, causing frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

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Japan opens world court defense of whaling

Japan will tell the UN's top court that is whaling program is "carefully conceived and planned". Source: AAP

JAPAN is opening its defence of the country's controversial whaling program in the seas around Antarctica during hearings at the United Nations' highest court.

Based on their written pleadings, lawyers for Tokyo are expected to argue Tuesday that the International Court of Justice has no jurisdiction to hear the dispute with Australia and New Zealand over the annual hunt and slaughter of hundreds of minke and fin whales in the Southern Ocean.

Japan also will argue that its whaling is for scientific research and therefore permitted under the 1946 convention that regulates whaling.

Lawyers for Australia told the court last week that the whaling is a commercial hunt dressed up as science and should be stopped.

The 16-judge world court will take months to issue a judgment.

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Poor English 'saved Japan bankers' in GFC

JAPAN'S banks emerged from the 2008 global credit crisis largely unscathed because senior employees did not speak English well enough to have got them into trouble, the country's finance minister says.

Taro Aso, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said bankers in Japan had not been able to understand the complex financial instruments that were the undoing of major global players, so had not bought them.

"Many people fell prey to the dubious products, or so-called subprime loans. Japanese banks were not so much attracted to these products, compared with European banks," Aso told a seminar in Tokyo.

"There was an American who said Japanese banks are healthy, but that's not true at all.

"Managers of Japanese banks hardly understood English, that's why they didn't buy," he said.

Aso's comments are the latest in a line of pronouncements that have raised eyebrows.

The one-time prime minister said in January the elderly should be allowed to "hurry up and die" instead of costing the government money with expensive end-of-life medical care.

In 2007 he had to apologise for a quip about patients with Alzheimer's disease and for making light of flood damage in central Japan.

But the deputy prime minister, who is known as a dapper dresser and is often seen sporting a jauntily-angled hat, on Friday boasted he had managed to keep his foot out of his mouth since Shinzo Abe came to power as premier in December.

However, the boast was somewhat undermined when he initially got the name of the prime minister wrong.

"I have made no gaffes in the past half year even as newspapers said the Aso administration's... No, the Abe administration's biggest problem is Taro Aso's gaffes," he said.

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NSW public servant wages to pay for super

PUBLIC servants will have to pay for superannuation increases out of their own wage packets after the NSW government tinkered with a loophole in its wages policy.

The move circumvents a ruling by the industrial umpire, which earlier this week found the mandatory superannuation increases didn't have to be absorbed into basic wages.

Unions claimed the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) ruling was a victory for public sector workers, saying they were entitled to both their pay rise and the quarter per cent superannuation increase.

But in a statement on Tuesday, NSW Treasurer Mike Baird said the government had "clarified the regulation" informing its wages policy.

It also intends to appeal against the IRC decision.

"The NSW government makes no apologies for taking every effort to ensure fair and affordable wages are provided across the public sector," Mr Baird said.

This means the 0.25 percentage point increase in super due to begin on July 1 will now be absorbed into the 2.5 per cent cap on wage increases for public servants, effectively giving them a 2.25 per cent increase

Mr Baird said the move could prevent the loss of 8,000 public sector jobs.

He conceded the IRC had upheld a submission by unions, but said it had "simultaneously suggested ways the regulation could be reworded".

The IRC had also confirmed superannuation was an employee-related cost, he added.

"It is therefore within the 2.5 per cent wages policy".

Unions NSW Secretary Mark Lennon said the government had shown an appalling lack of good faith in overturning the IRC's decision.

"The government has lost its moral compass when it comes to its employees," he said.

"This is a highly cynical move, announced late on a Friday afternoon while the public attention is fixed on Canberra."

Mr Lennon accused the government of trashing proper process.

"How does this government think it is going to attract the nurses, teachers, police and firefighters this state needs when wages are effectively stagnating or going backwards?" he asked.

Health Services Union NSW secretary Gerard Hayes said the government was making a mockery of the state's industrial laws.

The union has written to Mr Baird to request the government reimburse some of the union's legal expenses.

"If the government does not intend to live by the decisions of the Industrial Relations Commission it ought to refund the tens of thousands of dollars we have to spend in legal fees fighting their odious decisions," Mr Hayes said.

Opposition industrial relations spokesman Adam Searle said this was typical of a government that can't accept the decision of the independent umpire.

"This is a mean and tricky manoeuvre which will see the O'Farrell government dip its hand into the pockets of every public servant in the state," Mr Searle said.

"Superannuation is a basic condition that should never be used to offset the guaranteed 2.5 per cent wage increase public sector workers were promised."

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