This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Australian Politics, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog. Backups from previous months accessible here
29 February, 2024
Queensland Supreme Court finds some Covid vaccine orders unlawful
They were the three words of the week, if not of the year: ‘vaccine’, ‘mandates’ and ‘unlawful’. That was the key takeout from the decision handed down this week by the Queensland Supreme Court in a case largely financed by mining gazillionaire and political agitator Clive Palmer. Specifically, the Covid-19 vaccine mandates, implemented in the form of directions given to Queensland police and ambulance service workers, were made unlawfully, the court has ruled, partly because they didn’t take into account those workers’ ‘human rights’.
The news, of course, is to be welcomed. It is the first crack in the dam wall and will hopefully be followed by significant class actions and further court cases. Ideally, one might hope that certain senior politicians, senior bureaucrats, doctors and corporate heads will wind up in prison for their collective roles in the grotesque Covid abuse of power, following a royal commission. However, there is the chance that the Queensland case will be overturned on appeal, as the powers-that-be attempt to reassert their censorship and crushing authoritarianism over what remains the most disgraceful period in our history.
Alone – and we really do mean alone – among the Australian mainstream media, indeed in many instances the world media, The Spectator Australia fought from the very beginning against the vaccine mandates, the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the school closures, the banning of perfectly good (and cheap) alternative treatments for Covid and the fraudulent claims being made about the safety of the mRNA ‘vaccines’. Dismissed as conspiracy theorists, extreme right-wingers, anti-vaxxers and a whole list of other pejoratives, this magazine and its astonishing collection of writers can hold their heads high – Rebecca Weisser, Ramesh Thakur, Julie Sladden, Kara Thomas, Alexandra Marshall, David Flint, David Adler, James Allan, Rocco Loiacono, Robert Clancy, Rowan Dean and many others. Of course, there were a miserable handful of writers, and readers, who were appalled by our Covid scepticism and took their writing skills or subscriptions to other media outlets more in tune with their views. They are not missed.
On 22 May 2021, as powerful voices and commentators within the Australian media frantically urged the government to introduce vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, we wrote on this page:
So we will be blunt on this particular occasion: if Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt or any members of the federal or ‘national’ cabinets seek to impose a ‘vaccine passport’ that restricts the freedom of movement and liberties of Australians, they will potentially be guilty of human rights abuses and even crimes against humanity.
Any number of conventions and laws exist that make it a criminal offence for a government or its bureaucrats to coerce or make mandatory any form of medical treatment against the will of the individual. Such laws and conventions were brought in as a direct result of the atrocities of the second world war and the revolting medical experiments conducted by not only the Nazis but other totalitarian regimes against their own people.
Make no mistake; a ‘vaccine passport’ denying liberties and restricting the free movement of Australians within their own country will be the most sinister and disgraceful act by an Australian government against its own people in our history. This is for one simple reason: governments and bureaucracies have no right to enforce or to coerce an individual to take a medical treatment or drug against the individual’s better instincts or judgment.
In any free society, the government’s role is to persuade, not to coerce or to mandate.
It is a fine line between encouraging or incentivising vaccination and coercing it, but telling traumatised Australians that they can, for example, only visit their loved ones or carry on their normal business if they inject a certain drug is completely unacceptable and indeed reprehensible. Persuasion is all very well. Coercion and emotional or financial blackmail are not.
Then on 3 July 2021, we wrote:
It is on the coronavirus that an absence of any genuine political convictions on the part of the PM and his advisers is most apparent. Devoid of a bedrock of political philosophy to stand upon, the government makes it up as it goes along, reacting, presumably, to internal polling as much as to media hysteria. It is not a pretty sight.
Most depressing of all, as certain politicians urged people to report friends or neighbours who were flouting the rules, on 31 July 2021 we wrote:
Welcome to the new Australia of dobbers, scolds and snitches and the self-appointed virtuous.
Kudos to Queensland Judge Glenn Martin for having the courage and moral fortitude to put into law what was always self-evident to any self-respecting conservative. The vaccine mandates trashed every ethical, moral, medical and human rights principle in a free democracy.
To all those individuals, not only in Queensland but throughout Australia, who lost their careers, their dignity and even their families because they resisted the mandates, you are true heroes. Every Australian owes you a huge debt for your courage, and an apology for the medieval vilification so many suffered.
To the few brave politicians who dared to speak up against the madness, often at terrible personal or professional cost, we salute you. Craig Kelly, Alex Antic, George Christensen, Gerard Rennick, Malcolm Roberts, Pauline Hanson, Matt Canavan and others. Above all, we thank all our loyal readers who stayed the course.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/mandatory-vindication/
*********************************************Why we need more CEOs to speak up for profits
Coles’ Leah Weckert issued an important reminder to corporate Australia: Profit is not a dirty word.
Weckert’s comments have come right at the tail end of a resilient earnings season, and the newish Coles boss has cut through with a reminder about the purpose of her business: To look after shareholders through delivering the sharpest value to her customers.
Supermarkets and Woolworths boss Brad Banducci in particular, have been in the firing line around profits they make.
The big two retailers have become an easy target for claims around price gouging and anti-competitive behaviour while Australia is in the midst of an inflation bubble.
This has now spiralled into a Greens-led Senate inquiry and a year-long Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Review into the supermarkets. These will be highly distracting for management and, like the previous ACCC review into supermarket pricing a decade ago, will probably amount to little.
Everyone else is jumping on board with the ACTU and Queensland’s Steven Miles demanding their own probe. The claims are easy to make and always missing from the barbs is what should be the right level of profit for a business to make. No one is willing to go there and nor should they.
Still the attack on profit from all sides of the political spectrum is a worrying trend. Businesses exist to make profit and reward shareholders. In doing so they invest money into the economy and create jobs. The trick is in the balancing act to make sure the pursuit of profit is sustainable over the long run and businesses keep one eye on their social licence to operate.
Banducci, who this month announced his retirement, has struggled to cut through with a simple message on this point and his trainwreck interview on ABC TV only fanned the flames.
Banducci is the architect of Woolies much-needed cultural transformation and this month conceded to The Australian he was the first to get upset with himself when he doesn’t represent his company accurately.
In the middle of the anger, Woolworths triggered some big non-cash writedowns of its business, tipping the retailer into a heavy bottom-line loss.
Commonwealth Bank boss Matt Comyn is the only other boss who is prepared to issue a spirited defence of profits. Comyn regularly points out his bottom-line returns go to millions of shareholders as well as generate the crucial capital so funds can be lent back out to grow the economy.
Weckert, promoted to the top job in May last year, delivered her numbers on Tuesday which included a 3.9 per cent dip in December half net profit to $594m. The numbers show Coles is selling more, with revenue up nearly 7 per cent, but costs are crimping profit margins. Where Weckert draws the line is criticism of the windfall dollars.
“Profits are an essential thing for any business,” Weckert says. “They enable us to continue to operate and for us that means we get to employ 120,000 people. We get to support thousands of suppliers. We pay a very large tax bill every year.”
Coles has more than 460,000 shareholders and many of these are retail investors – the so-called mums and dads. There are millions more who benefit indirectly from the dividends through their super funds.
The simple message Weckert will take to next month’s Senate inquiry that begins in Hobart is that Coles generates $2.60 for every $100 spent by customers.
This is “less than 3c on the dollar,” she says, and points to her profit margins now being stable for at least the past five years, including through an inflation spike. Nor is food inflation unique to Australia, she adds, It’s are often driven by a surge in input costs such as fertilisers or wheat. Indeed, many developed economies, particularly the UK and in Europe, have seen food prices rise at a faster pace.
Weckert says Australian supermarkets are facing more intense competition than ever as offshore giants Aldi, Costco and Amazon make big inroads. Wesfarmers’ Bunnings and Priceline, along with Chemist Warehouse, are making inroads into the non-food sector.
Meanwhile, supermarket customers are trading convenience over value and are using local specialists from butchers to bakers.
The numbers show Coles now has the momentum in the sales race against its rival, Woolies. It can be argued Woolies is more distracted than it has been in years with problems from New Zealand, Big W and its looming leadership transition.
Coles’ supermarkets sale jumped 4.9 per cent in the first eight weeks of the calendar year, while Woolworths delivered 1.5 per cent growth over the first seven weeks. This helped back a near 6 per cent jump in Coles’ shares.
Coles says it is getting on top of the jump in theft rates it experienced last year as it invests more in checkout technology.
This could make a big difference to its earnings line in coming halves as it continues to get theft rates down further.
Australia’s housing and building shortage is now becoming a force on the ASX, although it has taken global players to recognise the value.
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Victorian blackout has lessons
When the lights went out last week for 500,000 Victorians, it wasn’t all bad. Most still had natural gas to turn to for cooking and some for hot water.
But gas connections to new homes are banned in Victoria from 2024. Clearly, the great fortune of being part of the Lucky Country, blessed with dual energy supplies, was too great a first-world burden for the socialist-left Allan state government to handle.
It means that for these new homes, the next time the lights go out, everything goes out.
However, Victoria’s diabolic blackout might be the best double-edged sword the state’s future could have ordered.
What happened last week may have been the first time many youngsters couldn’t charge their mobile phones, laptops, or other electronic gadgetry. Their lives and their lifelines also went flat.
Until then, they had been removed from reality. Until then, it was someone else’s problem…
Only now might they think about the importance of the essential service of electricity, and better still, the importance of cheap and reliable energy. One day they will have to pay the bills.
And so it is that there may be more power in a flat phone battery than we think.
Only now might the Net Zero zealots begin thinking about the real world, just as theirs shatters into texting and tweeting oblivion.
The blackouts, with the promise of more to come, might just be the real-life lesson in understanding the old saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Schooled in Net Zero nonsense, the younger generations and their educators have largely applauded the direction of phasing out coal and pursuing a renewables nirvana.
With eyes wide shut, they believe they are saving the world one poppycock plan at a time. They have skipped school and rallied for the cause. They have spent school hours making placards and writing letters to Ministers. Some have voted for the cause and more will follow.
Little might they think that their increasingly battery-led lifestyle, pumped up by power, is not the life that their childhood counterparts in the Congo are living.
Little might they think of the trees being pulled down in order to put up wind farms, or the interruption to whale migration at sea. Little might they think about what a romantic sunset could look like in years to come with industrial love on the horizon.
Little might they think of the increasing plethora of coal-driven power, mining, and industrial operations elsewhere in the world, while Australia’s decision-makers pull the plug on ours.
They are in the dark more than they might want to realise.
For first-time power blackout sufferers, it won’t be the temporary death of their fridge or freezer worrying them. These days, most order-in a solution to their food problems or go to a local supermarket – backed up by diesel generators – to get a tub of ice cream on demand.
No, it is only the absence of mobile phones, iPads, and the like that might make the younger generations understand what nobody else is telling them: reliable energy is really important.
When they can recharge their phones – and their lives – they should google the following: nuclear energy, reliable energy, low-cost energy, and underground powerlines.
Then they should google future job prospects in Australia.
But it’s a bit hard to find the buttons in the dark.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/switching-on-reality
**************************************************What Young Australians Should Know About the Green’s Housing Policy
How is it that the Greens are becoming the party of choice for anyone under 30, while also being the party most likely to destroy the future prospects of those under 30s?
Take housing for example.
The Greens yearn for the days when the state was the provider of miserable, cramped housing for Australians deemed too incompetent to organise their own.
This led to housing estates and stigma, and the “poor me” reminiscences of the current prime minister. No rational person would want to go back there.
When Liberal party founder Robert Menzies became prime minister in 1949 he began to sell off the Commonwealth’s public housing.
The states never went that far, but despite their rhetoric, zeal for public housing waned, and the rate of building new public housing went on a long trajectory towards zero.
Since then the market (private individuals and corporations seeing an opportunity to do a favour to someone else, and earn a living doing it) stepped in and developers provided almost all Australians with a place they could call home.
It turns out there are hardly any Australians so incompetent they can’t secure a place of their own either to rent or to own, and that just like every other service, individuals contracting freely with each other are better at arranging accommodation for themselves than the government is.
But this is not the world for the Greens with their retro-Marxist preferences and Che Guevara tees.
They want to boost the public sector rental market and marginalise the private ones, and have adopted a swag of policies to this end, including the abolition of negative gearing.
This is a serious problem for people who can’t afford to buy and who have to rent. Even with the Greens promise to build 50,000 rental homes a year, it would only represent 1.5 percent of the total rental market, which would be overwhelmingly still financed by private owners.
The Greens claim that negative gearing keeps homeowners out of the market, but this is wrong for a number of reasons.
Around a third of Australians rent. Some of these are permanent renters, but others are homeowners-in-waiting.
In either case, there should be no enmity between renters and owners. But policies that handicap investors who rent, also handicap people who will be first-home buyers because it limits their renting options while they save a deposit.
How Does It Work?
The principle of negative gearing is that if you are going to tax investment income, an investor must be able to deduct their expenses from their income.
If the investor owns a property in their own name, then that income includes what they earn from other sources, like their principal job.
Most plans to abolish negative gearing tacitly admit this. They may prevent investors from deducting expenses against their other income, but they still allow them to carry forward their losses until the property becomes cash flow positive.
This means that if the Greens were to abolish negative gearing, they don’t somehow save the whole of the deduction and bank it to government coffers. They save it, until they have to give it back in the future as deductions against future income.
In accounting jargon, the tax amounts to the interest value of the timing difference.
What they save is the interest they earn on the money that would have stayed with the taxpayer, if it had been allowed as a tax deduction.
This means the value to the government is much less than most of the models that are used to justify the policy, which magically assumes the government gets the benefit of the foregone deduction forever.
But it gets worse than that.
We are in a situation where we need drastically more properties than we have now, which means we need to encourage people to build more houses.
Negative gearing makes that possible.
How much longer would it take an investor to buy a property if they decided to wait until they had a deposit that would allow them to “positively” gear the property?
Positive gearing means that although you’ve borrowed, the property is returning enough income to give you a surplus.
When interest rates were around 2 percent, that probably wasn’t too much longer, but now they’re more like 6 percent. It’s quite a stretch.
So, by banning negative gearing it would mean that investors would be encouraged to take longer before they bought a house. This is the reverse of what you want when you have a housing shortage.
Everybody Benefits
The reason we gear most investments (and most investors and companies have some degree of gearing) is so we can do more with the same amount of capital, which is exactly what the country needs to do at the moment.
That’s a good thing for renters, who need more properties, and also for buyers, who also need more properties.
It’s also a good thing for the government. If investors can leverage their capital, there is more economic activity and the government gets to tax it.
There is GST on new buildings and on renovations, and there is payroll tax on building companies, and income tax from the companies and the tradies who do the work.
All models I have seen that favour abolishing negative gearing neglect this altogether.
And then there is the tax on borrowings. Again, most models advocating abolishing negative gearing don’t take into account the fact that the asset producing the income still produces the same income with gearing, it just splits it differently.
Without gearing it goes entirely to the owner, with gearing it goes to the owner and to the financier.
But both pay tax. The owner may pay less tax than if they owned the whole property, but the financier will pay an amount that is roughly similar to the difference.
Also, Homeowners Don’t Lose Out
The Greens’ myth is that negative gearing squeezes home buyers out of the market because it is a tax benefit that homeowners don’t get.
When you do the figures, it is actually homeowners who are tax-advantaged.
While investors pay capital gains tax, the homeowner doesn’t. When it comes to real estate investment it is actually capital gains that provide the majority of earnings, particularly when gearing is involved.
So, the homeowner is already ahead, but it doesn’t stop there.
Homeowners also receive a benefit in that they don’t pay any tax on the “rent” that accrues to them by owning the property.
This is an unfamiliar concept to most, but if you regard a homeowner as an investor who lives in their investment, then it makes sense to look at what rent it is they would pay to live there and see that as part of their investment return.
This is called “imputed rent” and some countries, like the Netherlands and Switzerland, tax this as income.
We don’t, and I’m happy about that, but it is another tax advantage that homeowners get over investors who do pay tax on the rent they receive.
All of which means that when it comes to a contest over who can afford to pay the most for a residence, it is the homeowner that comes with all the advantages.
The only advantage the investor generally has is that they normally already have assets they can use for a deposit, like the house they live in, and a first homeowner has to save for their deposit, but you can’t “fix” that disparity by abolishing negative gearing.
Another Green’s Party Idea That Is Not Feasible
The Greens also want to step beyond fiddling with the tax system to fiddling with the rental markets by imposing rent caps. We’ve been here before and they don’t work.
However, we don’t need to look at Australian history to see what a bad idea rent control is.
Argentina has just elected a classical liberal president Javier Milei, and he has abolished rental controls in the country.
Overnight rents dropped by 20 percent as the number of houses on the market doubled. When you fiddle with property rights, property owners make smart choices.
The Greens complain that 10 percent of Australia’s housing is vacant (a figure which is about what it should be, given holiday houses, temporary vacancies because of property sales or rental vacancies, or people away for work or otherwise absent on holidays).
That figure would be a lot higher under rent caps as owners make the rational decision that if they can’t make a living at the Greens “reasonable” rents, then they should hold the house off the market.
If our millennial Australians don’t wake up soon to the Greens’ destructive ignorance about housing, they will walk into their own nightmare if they vote Greens’ policies in.
Not just home ownership, but renting reasonable digs, will be outside their budgets.
In that case, they may even need public housing, and just like our prime minister, in the future, they’ll be able to regale their kids with stories of how tough it was growing up in a public housing estate
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28 February, 2024
Malcolm Turnbull eyes pumped hydro opportunity in the Upper Hunter
Pumped hydro requires TWO dams. What does Mal think the dam-hating Greens will say about that?
Acompany owned by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy has won a tender to develop plans for two pumped hydro projects in the Upper Hunter.
WaterNSW has awarded a development agreement to Upper Hunter Hydro (UHH) to explore the feasibility of the projects using WaterNSW land and reservoirs in the Hunter Valley.
The company was registered in early 2022 under the ownership of Wilcrow Pty Ltd - a Turnbull family entity that has traditionally held its pastoral properties in the Upper Hunter.
The pumped hydro projects, which would deliver long duration storage totalling more than 1.4 gigawatts for eight to 12 hours, could power a million homes.
Upper Hunter Hydro has been granted access to the Glenbawn Dam and Glennies Creek Dam as part of its investigation.
WaterNSW said the company would seek to secure all necessary approvals and consent for their projects.
Elsewhere in the region, AGL and Idemitsu are exploring the feasibility of establishing a $450 million pumped hydro project at the former Muswellbrook Coal site at Bells Mountain.
Mr Turnbull said pumped hydro projects would provide important support for industry and employment in the Hunter.
"Australia has abundant wind and solar generation, some of the best in the world. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Pumped hydro provides the long duration energy storage we need to make renewables available 24/7 and secure our clean energy future," he said.
"Renewables development is not for those wanting instant gratification .... but it is dawning on the market that we are going to need a lot more long duration storage than we thought."
Mr Turnbull said the Upper Hunter Pumped Hydro would proceed to a detailed design phase that incorporates "wide ranging community and stakeholder engagement" as well as "thorough environmental assessment," to secure planning approvals and backing from investors.
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Kudos To Mr. Nuzzo for Taking on the Feminist Status Quo
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call out the feminist claptrap throughout the academic world.
There’s a four-year gap in life expectancy in Australia between men and women. So how come our peak science funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), in 2022 allocated over six times more funding to research on women’s health compared to men’s?
This glaring bias in research funding attracted the critical gaze of a Perth-based academic with a keen interest in men’s health.
James Nuzzo is an exercise scientist, currently affiliated with Edith Cowan University, who has been busily churning out academic articles on topics like exercise neurophysiology and physical fitness testing.
But he’s become increasingly concerned to see his discipline infiltrated by gender ideologues whining about women missing out while totally ignoring the health outcomes of boys and men.
He’s calling out their bias and poor scholarship in a hard-hitting series of blogs on Substack (The Nuzzo Files) and podcasts.
For instance, Mr. Nuzzo points out that we hear constant allegations about the widespread exclusion of women in clinical trials.
In America, complaints about the neglect of women in health research led, in 1990, to the Office for Research on Women’s Health being established within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Since then, annual reports from the Office reveal that women constitute 55-60 percent of all participants in NIH-funded clinical trials each year. Thirty years later, the Office is flourishing, pouring out funding for women-only projects.
Similarly, Australian governments are falling over each other to prove their commitment to improving health outcomes for women and girls—and the NHMRC funding simply reflects that consistent anti-male bias.
This is simply one more example of the feminist claptrap now seeping throughout our academic world.
I hear regularly from principled researchers grinding their teeth at this blatant ideology and poor scholarship. Most don’t dare put their head above the parapet.
It is refreshing to find Mr. Nuzzo, a lone warrior willing to call it out, despite being well aware he is likely to implode his academic career in the process.
Another Small Victory In the Bag
Mr. Nuzzo’s most recent public skirmish in this territory involved an article in Sports Medicine written by mainly female exercise physiology students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) claiming that “gender-based violence is a blind spot for sports and exercise medical professionals.”
The UNSW scholars devoted their entire article presenting women as the only victims of interpersonal violence (IPV)—the single mention of men referred to their “socially determined privilege,” an alleged cause of violence against women.
No mention of young male victims of abuse by coaches or fellow athletes, of which there have been plenty, nor of lesbian perpetrators of abuse (lesbians top the chart of rates of IPV). And not one word about the decades of research showing men and women are victims of IPV at roughly equal rates.
Mr. Nuzzo set out to put them straight, seeking to get the true facts published in a response letter in Sports Medicine. And he succeeded, but only after nearly a year of back and forth with the journal. It helped that he combined forces with Deborah Powney, the University of Central Lancashire psychologist doing work on male victims of coercive control, and John Barry, from the Centre for Male Psychology in London.
Sports Medicine took the unusual step of submitting the letter to peer review, but the three reviewers all concurred with the critique by Nuzzo and his co-authors. Ultimately the letter was published—one small victory for proper scientific inquiry.
Their published comment proved it was the UNSW academics who had the blind spot, by providing a summary of some of the best research showing equal gender rates of IPV victimization, which also applied in sports environments.
Storm in a teacup, you might conclude. Perhaps. But it is a telling example of how the feminist take-over of our universities is playing out.
The Next Generation
We now have increasing numbers of radical young female academics and students, probably indoctrinated back in their school days, all keen on displaying their feminist credentials in their so-called scholarship.
Increasingly, they are forcing this sludge into diverse disciplines, right across all academia.
Worryingly, these are the teachers of the next generation, intent on convincing young women they are set for a life of persecution, abuse and discrimination.
They are teaching our future bureaucrats who’ll be setting key policies, the future lawyers, judges, social workers, and the politicians who will be deciding where the dollars are spent.
Their goals are transparent and the process is unfolding before our very eyes.
Kudos for James Nuzzo for having the courage to take them on, in published articles, blogs and podcasts. It’s infuriating to read his research and discover how much we’ve been hoodwinked.
The Big Two Globalist Agencies
Another of Mr. Nuzzo’s published articles concerned bias against men’s issues in the U.N. and WHO. He conducted a content analysis showing consistent promotion of women’s issues whilst men are ignored. The U.N.’s sustainable development goal on “gender equality” is exclusive to females.
The organisation observes nine International Days for women’s issues/achievements and one day for men. They operate 69 Twitter accounts dedicated to women’s issues and none for men. And so it goes on.
DAVIA (the Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance) has launched a petition that calls on groups to “suspend their funding of the United Nations until all U.N. agencies fulfill their pledge to respect the ‘dignity and worth’ of all persons and assure the ‘equal rights of men and women.’” That’s a worthy goal.
It’s also a pleasant change to find someone looking for the good in men.
Mr. Nuzzo recently wrote a blog on Men: The Martyrs of Medicine. He’d unearthed a 1929 medical journal article listing the names of male doctors and researchers who died as a result of acquiring the disease they were studying or medical technology they were developing.
Brave men who gave their lives trying to save others from yellow fever, typhus, bubonic plague, and other infectious diseases.
It was quite a story and a welcome change to see the risk-taking, now so often labelled as ’toxic,' being promoted as valuable, even inspiring.
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Gender pay gap zealots care nothing for facts or fairness
If we are in the business of publicly naming and shaming gender pay gap scoundrels, then the Workplace Gender Equality Agency ranks as the worst.
Each year, this agency tops the list as worst offender when it comes to analysing the so-called gender pay gap. Each year we taxpayers pay these bureaucrats to churn out work that consistently defies logic, fairness and choice.
WGEA’s latest report, released at midnight on Monday, has taken an underlying fraud to a higher level of wickedness. Why? Because if you are going to publicly humiliate companies, you had better have the right set of numbers to justify that exercise.
Instead, WGEA data is as hollow as a drum, but that doesn’t stop it beating said drum for ideological purposes.
One killer line brings down this house of cards: the data does not compare men and women doing the same job in a company.
Think about that glaring omission given WGEA has the temerity to shame companies such as Qantas, Virgin Australia, Telstra, Woodside and Santos for being the worst offenders when it comes to the gender pay gap.
Suffice it to say that not only would none of the companies on WGEA’s name and shame list not pay men and women differently for the same jobs even accidentally, most of them go to great lengths, through careful pay audits, to ensure men and women doing the same job are paid the same money. The gender pay gap actually has nothing to do with equity or fairness or any similar concept. It is simply a smokescreen to force social change.
I am not going to recount WGEA figures because if you start at the wrong place you end somewhere up the garden path. And those who are of a fair mind should not buy into this fraud.
To illustrate, WGEA’s chosen model doesn’t account for the fact more women than men prefer to work less hours, that women choose different jobs than men – in other words, that women make different choices to men.
In other words, WGEA’s chosen measurement for the gender pay gap is unadjusted for anything that happens in the real world to explain differences between women and men.
Indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to find any serious attempt by WGEA’s bureaucrats to mention, let alone thoughtfully analyse, the different choices men and women might make. WGEA is so obsessed with asserting there are iniquitous structural inequities in our society that it is happy to doctor the data by excluding the choices of women to get to its result. For WGEA a flawed means justifies the ideological end: screaming each year about the gender pay gap and ramping up those screams by producing a list of worst offenders.
One of the dumbest defences of its flawed model is the claim by WGEA boss Mary Wooldridge that their chosen measurement is replicated internationally. That apparently makes it just fine. “The gender pay gap is a widely used, internationally recognised measure for gender equality,” Wooldridge said.
Consider that logic carefully. Never mind that the data is hollow, inaccurate tosh; it becomes legitimate if the same hollow, inaccurate tosh is replicated on a global scale. What WGEA appears to be saying is that the bigger this flawed agenda gets, the more untouchable and incontestable it is. It’s just as well we don’t use the same reasoning to justify international drug cartels.
Let me put forward a different view: reproducing something rotten again and again, across countries, doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it worse. It means there is a grand fraud afoot.
So why is there global reliance on fake data? That’s the easy part.If WGEA and other similar activist agencies used more accurate measurements that factored in the different choices millions of women make, their agenda, activism and relevance would be in ruins. By excluding choices as relevant factors, WGEA is left with a gender pay gap caused by structural inequality. It gets to stay in business by claiming each year that the system is stacked against women and fairness.
Given that it has been illegal for more than 50 years to pay men and women different amounts for the same work, WGEA is clearly not interested in genuine pay equality. Its aim is to confect and cement an emotive-sounding cause to justify massive social change that suits its vision of a modern society.
But its dodgy numbers mean all it has done is create a straw man.
Those who lap up the naming and shaming WGEA data would do well to consider the massive, centralised, disempowering social change required to eliminate WGEA’s confected gender pay gap. There are two routes. Either we insist that women work more hours, do the same kind of work as men, regardless of their choices, or we need to pay women more for less work. Which one of these social “reforms” is genuinely equitable, let alone attractive?
Eliminating differences between men and women that contribute to different pay outcomes means effectively mandating that men and women must be 50-50 in all jobs (not just cushy jobs but garbos and gravediggers too), that men and women must be 50-50 in all university or training courses, that men and women must split 50-50 all domestic and childminding work, and must share all holidays or absences from work 50-50. We would need to eliminate differences in choices and attitudes to life, work and family between men and women.
At the moment, the gender pay gap – as defined by WGEA – exists mainly because many women choose to work in lower-paid jobs. Therefore, to “fix” this gender pay gap, we need a societal change to reduce the number of women in lower-paid jobs. Does that mean cleaning out women from the ranks of clerical and admin roles and any other lower-paid work? Does it mean getting rid of many women in HR departments too because only that will lead to a 50-50 gender equal workplace? Only through social engineering on this colossal scale can we make men and women statistically the same in an aggregate sense to satisfy WGEA’s agenda.
How about WGEA, with 30 female employees out of a workforce of 32 as at June last year, clean up its in-house gender inequality first before pointing the finger at others. Or has WGEA inadvertently discovered that there are some jobs that more women than men prefer to do?
There is another way to gender pay parity that the boffins at WGEA probably prefer – simply pay women more even if they work less, and regardless of what kind of work they do. That might be social utopia for the gender equity ideologues. Revenge is a long time coming, some will say.
I’m willing to bet that in the real world, women want to continue making their own choices, thank you very much, to work less, to work in different fields and in different roles.
Equally, it’s not hard to guess that men might come to resent employers who paid women more money than men for working fewer hours than men.
Either way, the change WGEA has in store for us to reach its version of gender pay parity is ugly in a free society. WGEA, noisy local accomplices such as Chief Executive Women and sister organisations globally use “gender parity” to demand equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. Their “data” is nothing more than politics, focusing on aggregate outcomes, not individual preferences.
It is, simultaneously, a laughable and depressing insight into the current state of the Western world that we countenance taxpayer-funded bureaucracies filled with a majority of senior female bureaucrats (so much for in-house gender equality) who behave like chorus girls on a global stage singing from the same song sheet of fraudulent numbers.
Like central planners from previous eras, the gender pay gap ideologues are the latest bunch of we-know-better-than-you emoters who sideline facts, fairness and individual choices.
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Anti-Israel activist Laura Allam has been accused of organising the kidnapping and torture of a man because he worked for a Jewish employer
Is there no limit to Muslim insanity
The 28-year-old from Fraser Rise in Melbourne’s northwest has been charged with kidnapping, armed robbery, false imprisonment, unlawful assault and assault by kicking over the alleged attack on a 31-year-old man in St Albans on February 16.
A Victoria Police spokesman said it was alleged the man was pulled from a car near the intersection of Gladstone and Cleveland streets about 9.30pm, the Herald Sun reported on Tuesday night.
“He was then allegedly placed in another car and assaulted and robbed before being released in Braybrook,” the spokesman said.
The police spokesman said detectives had charged two people in relation to the alleged kidnapping.
Police sources told the Herald Sun the man had required extensive treatment in hospital for his injuries, and that police believed Ms Allam, a well-known member of the Lebanese community, orchestrated the assault.
Ms Allam’s alleged accomplice was a 37-year-old Brunswick man, who police said would face a string of charges.
Ms Allam and her alleged accomplice were bailed to appear at Melbourne Magistrates Court on May 31.
The Herald Sun reported that a suppression order relating to Ms Allam’s case had prevented it from publishing her image and providing certain details about Ms Allam’s advocacy work.
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27 February, 2024
Spending Hundreds of Millions to Make a 0.1 Percent Difference to the Great Barrier Reef
Hard-working Aussie fishermen, and all the people who depend on them, are about to suffer severe restrictions on their production. And all based on dubious science.
The barramundi fishery mostly operates in the creeks and rivers, or very close to shore. Our out-of-touch government ministers have never explained how catching a barra in a creek somehow damages the Reef, which is far from shore—mostly 40 to 100 kilometers (25 to 62 miles).
But worse is to come as governments cast their net further afield.
As part of the UNESCO demands, the federal government has announced that it is now restricting fishing in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria to “save the Reef.”
That area of the Gulf is 700 kilometres from the Reef and on the wrong side (to the west) of Cape York Peninsula. How can catching a barra near Mornington Island affect the Reef? Was this really demanded by UNESCO or is it being used as a convenient tool by our government to further enforce extreme green environmental policies?
If killing the barra fishery seems like a scientific folly, the recent letter from Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to UNESCO asking that the Reef not be listed as endangered contains an even bigger indication that the government, and the science institutions upon which they base their dubious decisions, have lost the plot.
Ms. Plibersek’s letter proudly states that government schemes costing hundreds of millions of dollars have stopped 140,000 metric tonnes of sediment reaching the Reef from farms and cattle stations in the last decade.
That 140,000 figure sounds like a lot of mud. But in a decade, the rivers in question carry roughly 1,000 times more sediment than that out into the ocean.
So, they reduced the sediment to the Reef by a meagre 0.1 percent—and they made it a big deal!
Before I was fired by James Cook University after calling for better quality assurance of Reef science, my group worked extensively on the impact of sediment.
We invented some of the instrumentation for doing this work. We took more measurements than all the other groups combined. We showed that mud almost never reaches the Great Barrier Reef, which is far offshore. And even when it does, it is in minuscule quantities for only short periods of time. Even the inshore reefs, such as around Magnetic Island near Townsville, are barely influenced by mud coming directly from the rivers fed by tropical monsoon rains.
Government-funded scientists and managers have thus spent hundreds of millions to make 0.1 percent difference to a non-problem.
We must hope that they do not try to scale-up their effort and completely solve a problem that does not exist. At this rate, it would cost roughly 10 percent of Australia’s yearly GDP just to manage this one environmental factor.
Strangely, Ms. Plibersek conveniently forgot to mention that data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science show that, since records began, the reef has never had more coral than in the last two years. People might think that Ms. Plibersek was on UNESCO’s side and doing their bidding.
The time has come for a forensic audit of the science that is being used to smash the livelihood of hardworking Aussie farmers and fishers. The government is in effect picking off industries one at a time in a classic “salami” tactic.
The Australian Environment Foundation is organising a coalition of affected small industries to fight back, and top of the list is to audit the science.
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ABC health expert Dr Norman Swan admits some Covid vaccines had serious side effects after largest ever study released
See
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X24001270?via%3Dihub#s0090
ABC health expert Norman Swan has admitted the Covid vaccines produced unexpected side effects but considers them to be akin to 'winning the lotto three times in your lifetime'.Dr Swan was commenting on the largest ever study done into adverse reactions from Covid vaccines which was published last week.
'They uncovered side effects they hadn’t quite expected and they did show up as a signal there,' Dr Swan told ABC interviewer Jeremy Fernandez on Monday.
However, Dr Swan stressed that the side effects seen in the study's 99million subjects who received Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca shots were 'rare'.
He said Guillain-Barre syndrome was a side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine that received particular attention in the study.
He described it as a 'descending paralysis of the body that affects the nervous system'.
'Usually in most people it is a temporary phenomenon but it can be quite serious at the time,' Dr Swan said.
An unexpected side effect of the Moderna vaccine was acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.
'So, this is essentially a brain inflammation usually seen in children but in this case in older people, these are largely 20 to 60-year-olds,' Dr Swan said.
'He described the condition as 'self-limiting and quite nasty'.
Dr Swan said that this condition was still extremely rare with only seven cases seen out of 10million injections.
He likened the probability of getting it to 'winning the biggest lotto three times in your lifetime'.
Asked how applicable the study was to Australians, Dr Swan said it included Aussies and people from similar countries such as Canada.
Dr Swan has been a strong advocate for getting the Covid vaccines despite initially dismissing their likely efficacy and saying those who took them were 'guinea pigs'.
In July 2022 the Scottish-born medical commentator revealed he had caught Covid for the second time despite having four jabs.
The study Dr Swan was citing involved an international coalition of vaccine experts who looked for 13 medical conditions among 99million vaccine recipients across eight countries.
They confirmed that the shots made by Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are linked to significantly higher risk of five medical afflictions including Guillain-Barre syndrome.
But the study also warned of several other disorders that they said warranted further investigation, including the links between a brain-swelling condition and the Moderna shot.
However, the team says the absolute risk of developing any one of the conditions remains small.
They said 13billion doses of vaccines had been administered and there have only been 2,000 cases of all conditions.
Their research was published in the journal Vaccine.
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Fact checkers fall out
The ABC has ended its partnership with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) FactLab, with which it has operated the ABC RMIT Fact Check project for the past seven years.
On Tuesday afternoon ABC news director Justin Stevens notified staff via email that the national broadcaster would replace the partnership with an internal fact-checking team, known as “ABC News Verify”.
Stevens said Verify would be a “team of specialists with the ability to scale up to support our special coverage in times of crisis. It will be part of the Investigative Journalism and Current Affairs team led by Jo Puccini.”
“In parallel with our decision to establish our own specialist verification team we have also taken the decision to not extend our current participation in ABC RMIT Fact Check when our current agreement expires in the middle of the year,” he wrote.
Crikey understands RMIT management felt blindsided by the decision from the ABC, with sources saying it appeared that the ABC had concerns over pressure from fact-checking politicians.
One source told Crikey that the relationship between RMIT and the ABC had become one-sided in recent years, with the university taking a lot of criticism from conservative media over the Fact Check project.
It comes as the partnership and the ABC have come under significant pressure in recent months over accusations of bias following the Voice to Parliament referendum. In May, RMIT FactLab published a fact check of itself, refuting claims that the organisation was being “used” by proponents of the Yes campaign to “rig the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum”.
The organisation’s participation in Meta’s fact-checking program was briefly suspended last year after its accreditation with the International Fact-Checking Network lapsed.
The Australian reported last year that the ABC had spent $165,000 a year on the RMIT partnership since 2020, according to figures released in Senate estimates.
In budget estimates this year, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts asked ABC managing director David Anderson about the make-up of ABC RMIT Fact Check in relation to the Voice referendum.
Anderson responded on notice that of the 17 articles published between June 1 and September 29, RMIT ABC Fact Check published two articles focusing on claims made by the Yes campaign or proponents, 10 on the No campaign or proponents, and five on claims made by proponents of both sides.
Anderson said “checkable claims more frequently surfaced from proponents of No arguments than from proponents of Yes arguments” in the ABC’s media monitoring process.
“When a Yes claim surfaced which was checkable and important to the national debate, Fact Check made sure it was covered in a timely manner.”
A spokesperson for RMIT said in a statement that the university was “proud of the long-standing partnership” with the ABC.
“The partnership between RMIT and ABC will conclude at the end of the current agreement [on June 30, 2024]. RMIT is committed to upholding the integrity of public information and will continue to do this through a range of activities,” the spokesperson told Crikey.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/21/abc-rmit-fact-check-partnership-abc-news-verify/
*********************************************Australia on the brink as iron ore, nickel, lithium prices collapse
CBA Mining and Energy Commodities Research Director Vivek Dhar says the collapse of Chinese property developer Evergrande “underscores” the issue with China’s property sector.
Australia prides itself in being the world’s quarry. But China is its biggest buyer. Now the collapse of the nickel industry reveals a supermarket-style price manipulation scandal is being played out on a grand scale.
Competition is great. Until you get a winner. And that winner’s been taking performance enhancers …
Canberra is having to fork out billions of dollars in emergency corporate aid and surrender royalty income after a slump in global nickel prices. They have fallen more than two-thirds – from a high of $US50,000 per metric ton in 2022 to about $US16,500 this week.
Thousands of jobs are on the line as big multinational mining companies urgently review the viability of their operations across Australia.
Mining giant BHP reported an 86 per cent slump in half-year net profit on February 20, 2024, hit by a writedown of its nickel assets and costs related to a 2015 Brazilian mining disaster. Picture: William WEST / AFP
Mining giant BHP reported an 86 per cent slump in half-year net profit on February 20, 2024, hit by a writedown of its nickel assets and costs related to a 2015 Brazilian mining disaster. Picture: William WEST / AFP
But the nickel industry isn’t the only mineral facing massive market disruption.
Steel and iron ore prices have collapsed. As has lithium.
The cause is the same across the board: China’s dumping huge quantities on already depressed markets.
And that makes it unviable for competitors to continue competing.
“Far from a hypothetical, Beijing has already used its near-monopolistic global supply-chain control of (rare earth elements) to strategic advantage against the US and Japan,” warns the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
Nickel is not just any mineral. It’s critical for producing high-capacity batteries, stainless steel and many other advanced alloys.
It’s one of a host of difficult-to-mine and expensive-to-refine materials (generally classified as rare earth elements and critical minerals) that play central roles in modern electronics and high-performance technology.
These are central to the global race to combat climate change – and rebuild militaries in the face of the territorial ambitions of Russia and China.
But Beijing’s willingness to subsidise every step of production and bear the environmental fallout of chemical and energy-intensive processes means it’s now the source of about 80 per cent of the rare earths processed worldwide. That includes 90 per cent of lithium, 70 per cent of gallium, and 70 per cent of germanium.
China refines about 35 per cent of all nickel output. And last year, it took control of a further 15 per cent once new Chinese-owned-and-operated plants in Indonesia came online.
“Its incredibly low cost of processing and competitive labour market gives it an almost unassailable advantage, turning suppliers into price takers rather than price makers,” says Monash University critical minerals analyst Associate Professor Mohan Yellishetty.
‘Dig it and ship it’
Australia is notorious for selling off the farm and failing to value-add its food and mineral produce.
China, however, has for decades had a single-minded focus on building market dominance.
It’s invested heavily in building advanced industries, such as silicon chip and clean energy technologies.
As a result, it’s now the world leader in the entire lithium extraction, refining and production chain – among others.
“It has paid substantial environmental costs through trial-and-error innovation and has now developed dominant advantages in not just the scale of mass production, but also green technologies used in lithium processing,” Dr Marina Yue Zhang of the Australia-China Relations Institute argues in the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter. “It is debatable whether that cost should be repeated by other countries.”
Likewise, Indonesia moved to value-add its nickel production in 2014. It went so far as to restrict exports – triggering a global price spike – while comprehensive new Chinese-owned and operated facilities were being built.
“China also financed supporting infrastructure needed for nickel processing. Many coal-fired power plants, on which nickel smelting depends, were set up in Indonesia through China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI),” policy analyst Dr Teesta Prakash says in the Australian Institute of International Affairs’ Australian Outlook.
“Before the ban, Indonesia only supplied raw nickel ore, valued at US$6 billion in 2013. By 2022, this figure increased to US$30 billion due to refinement.”
Competitive chokehold
“We should strengthen the production and supply of food and strategic mineral resources, and build a strategic base to guarantee the supply of important primary products for the country,” Chairman Xi Jinping proclaimed shortly before restricting refined gallium and germanium exports in July last year.
Trade restrictions, embargoes and sanctions are nothing new on the world stage.
But China seems especially willing to use its new-found economic superpower status to coerce its customers.
Australian exports of coal, barley, wine and seafood were banned after Canberra suggested an international inquiry be conducted into the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In October last year, Beijing imposed export restrictions on graphite. And that followed similar restrictions on gallium and germanium earlier in the year.
It’s just part of an ongoing tit-for-tat trade war with the United States and the European Union. They’ve been steadily increasing restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductors – one last technological weakness China is determined to overcome.
“Together, these announcements have been met with alarm given the dominant role China plays in the production of these minerals, as well as the minerals’ important role in the semiconductor industry and the clean energy economy,” says Atlantic Council think-tank analyst Reed Blakemore.
Left in the dust
“Perhaps the most pressing of these challenges is the global crash in lithium value,” ASPI warns. “Prices of lithium — Australia’s second largest commodity in committed capital expenditure through to 2030, surpassing even iron ore — collapsed in the last 12 months.”
Australian governments have leapt at the prospect of becoming the Western world’s quarry in response to growing concerns over China’s reliability.
Last year, Canberra committed an additional $2 billion in subsidies for miners – and processors – of critical minerals to set up shop here.
The stated goal was to reduce reliance on China and support US attempts to revive its own neglected processing facilities.
But the unfolding metals market price collapse is casting a long shadow over the economic viability of this strategy – without further heavy subsidisation by Western governments.
“Judging from the supply side, Australia enjoys a powerful position in lithium,” adds Dr Zhang. “On the demand side, however, because power is concentrated in a single large buyer – China – this is a vulnerability for Australia.”
That vulnerability is being seen in regional Australia.
The Finniss lithium mine in the Northern Territory suspended operations in January. Other closures are expected to follow.
BHP has written off its Nickel West division in WA as worthless. It’s preparing to suspend operations.
Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest is also shutting down all his WA nickel mines.
Meanwhile, Australian lithium producers and steel refineries are also reviewing their economic viability.
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26 February, 2024
Stamp duty stops thousands from moving every year: PropTrack, e61 Institute report
Stamp duty is a really horrible tax that hits people when they can least afford it
The removal of stamp duties could instigate 100,000 more home sales each year in NSW alone, with new research revealing a single percentage point increase to the transaction tax significantly reduces a buyer’s appetite to purchase.
The findings from research firms e61 Institute and PropTrack revealed a 1 per cent increase in stamp duty can reduce property sales by 7.2 per cent each year as the burden of the “inefficient tax” creates an affordability hurdle.
The research analysed the impact of then-Queensland premier Anna Bligh’s 2011 decision to nearly double stamp duty for owner-occupiers. Despite a short-term boost in the six weeks between the announcement of the change and implementation, the 2011/ 2012 financial year recorded a 9 per cent drop in the number of people moving – the equivalent of 20,000 households – and a 14 per cent decrease in people moving to the Sunshine State.
The decision was reversed when the Newman Government won power in 2012.
Research Manager at e61 Institute, Nick Garvin, said the economic impacts of stamp duty on employment, productivity and housing availability aren't immediately obvious.
“Everybody knows that stamp duty is a big cost, but it’s fairly hidden because it gets charged to people at a point when they’re spending all their savings ,” Dr Garvin said.
“It’s important to understand that there are economic effects. There are pretty strong signs that the productivity of the economy would be lifted when it’s easier for people to move and change jobs. With slowing productivity and problems with housing availability, removing barriers to job and housing mobility is critical.”
Dr Garvin suggests that if NSW removed stamp duty, about 100,000 additional owner-occupiers would move home each year, up about 25 per cent on current levels.
“Queensland gives us a quantification of the sensitivity of purchases to stamp duty,” he said, with the economic modelling taking into account interest rates and other influencing factors on the market at the time.
“This is the best estimate we have – obviously different states, different points in time, the effects could vary – but we have no particular reason to think the effect in Sydney would be higher or lower.”
Since the mid-1990s, the average stamp duties collected nationally have tripled relative to incomes. To buy in Sydney and Melbourne, the average homebuyer would need a full six months of income to cover the tax bill, which is about six times more than it was a generation ago.
PropTrack senior economist Angus Moore said bracket creep has been an important driver of this increase in stamp duty as most states have the same tax brackets they had decades ago.
“That means that, as home prices have increased, these brackets now capture more homes at higher tax rates,” Mr Moore said.
“This process of bracket creep has seen us go from as few as 12 per cent of buyers paying a rate of stamp duty of 3 per cent or more in the early 1990s to 95 per cent today.”
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Nuclear, gas fuel Dutton’s tilt at green madness
In 2004, Australian electricity bills were the fourth-lowest in the OECD. The wind and solar caper had barely begun, and coal and gas supplied 91 per cent of the National Electricity Market.
Today, after 20 years of subsidy chasing by the renewable energy industry, Australia has slipped to 10th place in the OECD rankings of end-user power prices.
Of the nine countries where electricity is cheaper, six have nuclear power stations. They are Finland, Mexico, Switzerland, South Korea, Canada and the US. Of the remaining three, the wet and hilly ones, Norway and Iceland run mostly on hydropower because that’s the way God made them. Israel, somewhat unfashionably, has stuck with coal and gas but has other things to worry about.
So much for Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s claim that the opposition is using nuclear power as a culture-war distraction. His argument collapses at the first brush with reality.
Nuclear is the only baseload alternative to fossil fuel for the inhabitants of a wide and flat brown land unless we care to drill down 40km through the Earth’s crust to tap geothermal energy, which even Bowen must concede is impractical. The minister’s forlorn grab for supporting evidence in his article in The Weekend Australian suggests he knows he is losing the argument.
Until recently, conventional wisdom held that a pro-nuclear policy would be the kiss of death for the Coalition. Yet Bowen would know how quickly public opinion is changing, even within the green movement. When voters are asked if they favour nuclear power, the numbers are usually tight.
When the pollster asks if they would consider nuclear power, however, a clear majority say yes. The readiness to consider nuclear grows when they are asked about small modular reactors, notably among younger voters.
Bowen’s foolhardy use of statistics is unnerving, given his power to call upon the resources of a sizeable government department to stop him from embarrassing himself. He writes that “by early 2025, renewable energy will surpass coal as the planet’s largest source of energy”. As the Energy Minister should know, energy differs from electricity, which accounts for just 20 per cent of global energy use, according to the International Energy Market’s latest data.
Wind and solar accounted for 2.2 per cent of the world’s energy mix in 2019 if we assume it is what the IEA means by “other”. If we include hydropower in the renewables basket, it rises to 4.8 per cent.
Oil accounts for 31 per cent, down from 44 per cent in 1971, but the gap has been filled by gas (up from 16 to 23 per cent) and nuclear (0.5 per cent to 5 per cent). Coal has remained steady at 26 per cent.
The data does not exactly leap to Bowen’s defence, even if we assume he has conflated energy with electricity. In 2019, wind, solar and biofuels generated 10.8 per cent of the world’s electricity, and hydro 15.7 per cent. Fossil thermal fuel was by far the biggest contributor at 63 per cent.
Admittedly, the IEA’s reporting is somewhat tardy, but it would take a hockey stick curve of Michael Mann-ic proportions for renewables to overtake coal by this time next year, even if it were feasible.
Bowen’s suggestion that nuclear projects fall like skittles is equally hard to substantiate. The World Nuclear Association lists 62 nuclear plants under construction in 17 countries. They include 26 in China. Some 440 more are listed as either planned or proposed, of which 196 are in China, 25 in Russia and five in Iran.
Yet Peter Dutton would be foolish to assume the argument is as good as won, or that a nuclear policy is a substitute for a convincing energy policy.
Even on the most optimistic timetable, nuclear will not be part of our energy mix before the mid-2030s and investment won’t flow without a thorough reform of the energy market.
The short answer to almost every question is gas. The Opposition Leader will have little trouble persuading his own party room, where past battles have instilled a degree of energy literacy. He should prepare for considerable opposition from his own party at the state level, however, where many Coalition MPs have formed a unity ticket with Labor and the Greens in opposition to the imagined climate emergency.
Dutton should not underestimate the quantity of the venom in the hornet’s nest he has disturbed by challenging the orthodoxy that prevails in the media, universities and government departments. As Tony Abbott discovered, these people are not prepared to surrender their dogma in this policy debate without a fight.
An even more formidable opponent will be the energy industry, where a powerful combination of virtue signalling and naked self-interest has set in.
The energy industry with few exceptions is not campaigning for fossil fuel, as renewable advocates often claim. It is busy chasing subsidies and playing with the market. It has worked out easier ways to make money than supplying customers with affordable and reliable electricity. Renewable Energy Certificates have proved be a more dependable source of revenue than the energy itself.
Labor’s planned Capacity Investment Scheme, which is supposed to underwrite 32GW of renewal energy investment, has the added appeal of letting them make money without actually turning the generation plants on. It provides an even stronger incentive to stop nuclear before it eats their lunch.
Over the past 10 years, the renewable energy industrial complex has grown in strength and sophistication. It channels tens of millions of dollars into grassroots campaigns in Australia, creating an almost bottomless war chest to fund lawfare and buy influence in politics. Renewable energy interests almost entirely underwrote the teal campaign in 2022. Dutton shouldn’t expect any of these so-called independents to back nuclear anytime soon, despite their claim to be the heroes putting integrity back into politics.
Big renewables will fight almost as hard against gas, even though quick-start-up turbines are the quickest and cheapest way to firm the supply of the intermittent energy they fitfully supply. Gas threatens their investment in batteries for the same reason nuclear threatens renewables.
The cause of common sense is not just lost. Dutton has defeated the woke Goliath once and could do so again. Corporate support for the voice, however, was mainly motivated by virtue signalling rather than crude financial self-interest.
To use the words that turned boxing announcer Michael Buffer into a household name, “get ready to rumble”.
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Going to univrsity is not always the right choice
Students with poor grades in high school will be encouraged to go to university and set on a career path that is wrong for them, experts warn, under sweeping recommendations in the federal government’s higher education review that are coming under fire from vice-chancellors.
One higher education expert warned that students with ATARs as low as 45 could make it into university under the blueprint for the sector outlined in the Universities Accord review’s final report, released by Education Minister Jason Clare on Sunday.
The biggest review of tertiary education in 15 years has called on the Albanese government to double the number of university places in the next 25 years, reduce the high fees students pay in some subjects and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates.
The recommendations in the review will cost tens of billions of dollars over the next 25 years if fully implemented. They aim to create a highly educated workforce, with more than 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds having a bachelor degree or above by 2050.
The review recommends more government funding to dramatically increase the number of disadvantaged students from poor backgrounds and regional areas at university.
“At the moment almost half of young people in their 20s and 30s have a uni degree. But not … in the outer suburbs … not in our regions. And the accord is about changing that,” Mr Clare said. Although the report was welcomed by most universities, Australian National University higher education expert Andrew Norton warned the attendance target meant that students with an ATAR of only 45 would be going to university,
“Historically most students with ATARs below 50 don’t go,” Professor Norton writes in The Australian. “Those who do, face a high risk of dropping out, and if they finish a reduced chance of getting a well-paid job. Nobody should be encouraged to take courses that probably won’t leave them better off.”
While most of the recommendations are uncosted, Australia’s three wealthiest universities – Sydney, Melbourne and Monash – have slammed a key proposal to tax university income and redistribute resources from richer institutions to poorer ones.
The report calls for all universities to pay an impost on “untied” revenue they earn through their own efforts, including international student fees, unsubsidised domestic student fees, interest and investment income, and business earnings.
The tax, which will fall mainly on universities with high international student income, will contribute half of a $10bn investment in the Higher Education Future Fund, to pay for university infrastructure including campus buildings and student accommodation. The $5bn raised in tax would be matched by the government.
Monash University vice-chancellor Sharon Pickering said the future fund plan would interfere with universities’ ability to deliver on the accord review’s goals of increasing numbers of disadvantaged students and building the workforce skills needed in a modern economy.
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Duncan Maskell said he was concerned by the proposal. “A new tax on universities will weaken Australia’s current and future productivity, innovative potential and prosperity,” he said.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who is also chair of the Group of Eight universities which benefit most from international student fees, said the future fund tax plan “would hurt our reputation and our capacity to attract international students”.
The report made no recommendations on the level of the tax but said it should only commence once a new university funding system was in place and should cease when $5bn had been raised.
It would mainly affect five of the Group of Eight universities which have large numbers of high fee paying Chinese students – Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW and Queensland.
Western Sydney University vice-chancellor Barney Glover, a member of the accord review panel, said the fund was “important future proofing for the sector” but there was “work to do on design and timing”.
On Sunday Mr Clare said he had an open mind on the tax and the future fund, and would decide over the next weeks and months. “There are some universities who hate it, there are other universities who love it,” he told the ABC.
The review called on the government to reduce the high fees student pay in some subjects, and reform the HECS loan scheme to ease the financial impact on graduates. The review says high university fees of over $16,000 a year in some fields – including humanities, communications, and other society and culture subjects such as human movement – should be reduced.
It also urged reforms to HECS to ease the effect high inflation has on increasing the amount students owe and to reduce the financial impact on HECS debtors when their income first hits the loan repayment threshold.
The report says banks lending practices should be reviewed so people don’t have their home loan borrowing capacity unduly affected by HECS debt.
The review panel, headed by former NSW chief scientist Mary O’Kane, makes 47 recommendations for reforming tertiary education, aimed at dramatically increasing the number of Australians who continue education after finishing school.
The review recommends a goal of having 80 per cent of working age Australians with at least one tertiary qualification (vocational or higher education) by 2050 compared to 60 per cent at the moment.
It urges the government to set an achievement target of having 55 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds holding a bachelor degree or above by 2050, compared to 45 per cent now. This will require a doubling of commonwealth supported university places for domestic students from 860,000 in 2022 to 1.8 million in 2050.
The review says universities should get more government funding for educating students with higher needs, such as those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, from regional and remote areas, and Indigenous students.
The review also calls for more innovative types of courses such as micro-credentials and degree apprenticeships, payments to students for compulsory internships, free university preparatory courses, higher living allowances for needy students, better recognition of prior learning for people starting qualifications, and a “jobs broker” to help students find part-time jobs while they are studying in the area of their course.
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Why it’s a mistake to deny the science of sex
In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. For decades after her claim, feminists have championed the idea that social conditioning is what creates differences between the sexes.
As little girls we are encouraged by our parents to play with dolls. As we get older we are encouraged to be decorative. From the clothes we wear to the interests we pursue, thousands of tiny interactions with the world mould us into the women we are.
But advances in neuroscience are throwing at least some of this conventional wisdom into question. While we have known for a long time that sex may have some subtle influences on the brain (how could it not?), a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests such influences may be more expansive than previously thought.
The landmark study, conducted by Stanford professor Vinod Menon, and with Srikanth Ryali, PhD, and academic staff researcher Yuan Zhang, PhD, took a large sample of fMRI brain scans from 1500 young adults between 20 and 35, and then tested whether deep neural networks (AI models) could detect their sex. They could.
The AI models looked at many brain images from each person taken at different times (the brain scans were also taken from people in different regions). It found complex patterns that predicted if a brain was male or female with over 90 per cent accuracy.
The AI could not only tell if a brain was male or female, but the researchers also created explanatory models to predict cognitive abilities based on their images. Because male and female brains are so different, separate models were needed for each sex.
I contacted Professor Menon to ask what this meant. He told me “there were no gender differences (found) in the general intelligence factor, but response inhibition and reward sensitivity were higher in males than females”.
There are a multitude of implications in these findings. Male brains having higher reward sensitivity and variable response inhibition may explain why males tend to be more vulnerable to addiction and ADHD, for example.
The finding that males and females are different may strike many as intuitive and hardly worthy of journalistic attention, much like the observation that water is wet.
One might argue quite reasonably that anyone who spends any time around children knows girls and boys are different, and that these differences are not superficial. Nevertheless, in the world of academia, simple intuition does not go very far. In the scientific fields at least, empirical claims have to be proven with data.
Not only that, but there has been significant hostility from some quarters towards the idea that male and female brains differ at all. This hostility has been grounded in the fear that any discovery of differences will be used to reify gender stereotypes and justify discrimination against women – something female academics are naturally attuned to. Writing in Quillette in 2019, veteran neuroscientist Larry Cahill wrote: “Senior colleagues warned me as an untenured professor around the year 2000 that studying sex differences would be career suicide.”
But sexism does not need any scientific justification to exist. The odious Andrew Tate, for example, uses social media to spread his noxious misogyny and, as far as I am aware, is not relying on any findings from neuroscience in doing so.
Republicans in the United States are restricting women’s reproductive rights – including abortion and even IVF – on theological rather than scientific grounds. And I am not aware of the Taliban subscribing to Neuroscience News.
In truth, sexism flourishes wherever scientific progress is suppressed, not where it is advanced.
And ignorance about the influence of sex on the brain harms, rather than helps, women. For decades, basic research was only conducted on male cells, male animals and male clinical trial participants. Yet we know the incidence of many neurological conditions, from migraines to Parkinson’s disease, manifest differently according to sex. The failure to study how sex influences out of fear it will contribute to sexism means women miss out on having medical treatments tailored to their needs.
The fear of acknowledging sex differences has also, ironically, given rise to another form of anti-female prejudice. Today the denial of biology has metastasised into the denial of sex itself. Trans activists argue that one can literally change biological sex, and that biological males have no physiological advantage over women in sports.
Women are being denied the right to single-sex spaces such as bathrooms and change rooms, and new mothers are insultingly described in government-mandated protocols as “chestfeeders”. This is Simone de Beauvoir’s argument on steroids – this time used to erase womanhood altogether.
Refusal to grapple with biological realities has hampered progress in a way that has helped no one. Indeed, the denial of sex differences has not eradicated sexism but instead has led to the neglect of women’s health needs and the emergence of new forms of prejudice unimaginable just a decade ago.
While there may be some risks associated with new discoveries in neuroscience, these risks are outweighed by the potential benefits. As Larry Cahill has quipped: “The potential to misuse new knowledge has been around since we discovered fire and invented the wheel. It is not a valid argument for remaining ignorant.”
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25 February, 2024
Co-ed schools ‘healthy’ for teens asserts Anthony Albanese amid elite private schools’ battle of the sexes
This is an old, old debate but there is no denying that single sex schools have produced many notable graduates. There is some argument that single-sex schools are better for girls but not for boys. That would pose quite a policy conundrum
Mr Albanese praised his old boys’ high school, St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney, for its decision to admit girls from Years 1 to 7, from 2025. “It’s a good thing they’ve made that decision,’’ he said.
“I think there’s something healthy about boys and girls not being separated until they hit uni is my own personal view.
“My son went to a co-ed school, went through the entire system at Dully and what’s now known as Sydney Secondary College, but to me as Leichardt High and Glebe High.
“From my recollection, I remember that there would be a bit of craziness when we’d have school dances with St Bridget’s at Marrickville or Holy Cross at Woollahra, and that probably wasn’t the ideal.‘’
Mr Albanese’s comments came after two elite private schools began a war of the sexes, over plans for Newington College to become a coeducational school after a girls’ headmaster decreed his students would never play sport with girls from a rival college.
Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) Sydney principal Dr Paul Burgis has cautioned that girls in coeducational schools risk being distracted by boys showing off, or joining in popularity contests to impress male classmates.
In a note to PLC parents this month, Dr Burgis gave an assurance that their daughters would never take part in any sporting, public speaking or musical collaboration with the soon-to-be coeducational Newington College.
“Pubescent girls benefit from being able to practice (sic) and play hard and freely, without an awareness of watching eyes,’’ he wrote.
“No coeducational school is allowed to compete in the sport, speech or cultural programs with IGSA (Independent Girls’ Schools Association) schools.
“I note this because if Newington is to become a coeducational school, it will need to look much further afield than the IGSA schools for its sport, public speaking and musical collaboration.’’
The February 8 email refers parents to a link to a longer missive Dr Burgis wrote in 2022, when Newington College announced its divisive plan to become a coeducational school.
Plans by the 161-year-old Uniting Church boys’ school to admit girls has upset an influential “old boys’’ network.
Some “Old Newingtonians’’ have even withdrawn their bequests to the school in protest.
Dr Burgis’s original missive – which was circulated among Old Newingtonians yesterday – noted that a successful co-ed school “needs to have a majority female population’’.
“I hold this view because in your average group of boys, some will be likely to take on the role of gaining attention by acting counter to what it is the class is trying to achieve,’’ he wrote.
“This may be outwardly disruptive behaviour, or it may be attention-seeking behaviour.
“It could have the purpose of creating laughter or fun.
“Girls are more likely to support the cultural project of the classroom, and would prefer to settle quickly, to be able to listen well, and to talk through any difficulties they might have.
“The needs of girls can easily be set aside in a coeducational setting.’’
The principal of PLC – which charges $42,000 a year in tuition fees for senior students – wrote that “girls learn better in single sex schools’’.
He said the “toughest school for girls’’ is one with a “male-oriented culture’’.
“Is it ethically a good idea to introduce girls because it could benefit boys?’’ he wrote.
“Why … would a highly successful school for boys, with long waiting lists, choose to go coeducational?
“They must have arrived at the belief that something in the culture of the boys is better if girls are about.
“The change is being driven by a perception about boys, rather than the needs of girls.’’
Dr Burgis wrote that “having boys about is an opportunity for distraction’’. “Some girls will seek to be ‘popular’ with the boys. “Others will feel the need to respond to this.’’
Dr Burgis wrote that “it is easy for some of us males, when relaxing, to take up quite a bit of room on the lounge’’.
“On average, we will take up more lounge space more often than our sisters,’’ he wrote. “The effect is that they will have to accommodate us. “In a girls school, girls get a comfortable seat on the lounge without even having to ask.’’
Dr Burgis yesterday told The Australian that his memos to parents should not be mistaken for “us seeking to tell a different independent school what they should do’’.
“Of course as a school which believes wholeheartedly in the education of girls in a single sex environment, PLC Sydney will communicate strongly and positively about the advantages of a girls only education to our families and the broader community,’’ he said.
“We will also explain how girls only sporting programs work.’’
A Newington College spokeswoman declined to comment on the rival school’s critique.
The Newington College website shows that it never intended to join the girls’-only IGSA sporting contests, but plans for girls to compete in the Independent Sporting Association (ISA) contests with co-ed schools Barker, Redlands and St Andrews.
Newington College, which charges up to $42,000 a year, will admit the first girls to preparatory and Year 5 students in 2026, but will wait until 2028 to admit the first female high school students to Years 7 and 11 until 2028.
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Inquiry Ponders How Government Can Legislate Against Climate Change Health Risks
The government is hearing testimony on whether to require lawmakers to consider the ‘health and wellbeing of children in Australia’ when approving mines.
Questions remain over how exactly the federal Australian government can define, and legislate, a climate change risk to the “health and wellbeing” of children.
A Senate Committee is examining an amendment to the Albanese government’s Climate Change Act 2022 to require legislators to consider the health of children when making significant decisions.
The Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023 would also restrict approvals for mining activities related to coal, oil, and natural resources if they pose a “material risk of harm” to children.
While medical bodies like the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), as well as several climate change activist groups, shared their views on the health risks caused by climate change, the issue of how exactly the government would legislate against this, was largely left unanswered.
“How would you expect decision-makers to correctly identify a project-specific impact on health, in a context where the cumulative impact of emissions over many years is causing climate change? How would you see that point of identification?” said Labor Senator Karen Grogan on the morning of Feb. 22.
In response, Dr. Catherine Pendrey, chair of the Climate and Environmental Medicine Specific Interest Group at RACGP, said her organisation would not “specifically comment on the functions of the court.”
“I believe it’s the young people in Australia that have been taking these issues to court, rather than members of the medical profession,” she told the Senate Environment, Communications Legislation Committee.
Senator Grogan said that she had no argument with climate change science, but was concerned about the impact of how the law would operate on the ground.
“Will it have the intended impact? Or will it ... have unintended consequences, and limit the ability of the structures—that the Labor government’s put in place over the last 18 months—to try and ramp up action on climate change?”
She further added, “I’m asking how you would believe an administrative decision maker would make that assessment [on the health impact of climate change?]”
Dr. Michael Bonning, chair of the Public Health Committee at the Australian Medical Association, said there was evidence of legislators coming to conclusions based on available evidence and “utilising that going forward.”
“As for internal administrative procedures, we obviously aren’t able to comment on that.”
When asked the same question, Anjali Sharma, a young climate change activist, conceded it was difficult to quantify the impact of a fossil fuel project, but added that the “cumulative impact of all these decisions is what we young people will face down the road.”
“I know that 50 years down the road—in a world that potentially has seen warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius—we will not be able to look back and point to that one specific decision that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
‘Health Impact Assessments’ Mentioned
Dr. Kate Wylie, from Doctors for the Environment Australia, provided, what she termed “the beginning of an answer” to the senator’s question.
“We have Health Impact Assessments for various projects ... and they do not consider climate change impacts. We could broaden the scope of the Health Impact Assessments to include climate change, and how that impacts on children’s health.”
Heath Darrant, national coordinator of the Australian Medical Students’ Association, concurred, saying Australia could adopt the United Nation’s Child Rights Impact Assessment Model.
“And I know Wales used that in their [Wellbeing of Future Generation Act] that they implemented, which is a similar bill that’s being discussed here today. And New Zealand also uses the same model to come up with criteria on what constitutes an impact on health.”
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IR rule changes are about union power, not helping workers
In six months, on or around September 1 depending on the date the parliamentary-approved legislation receives royal assent, employing casuals in most Australian enterprises will be extremely hazardous.
There are currently around 2.6 million Australians who take up their entitlement to casual work usually as a second family income.
By Christmas this number will be slashed, resulting in a nightmare for family enterprises and a 25 per cent reduction in pay in the pocket for a vast number of Australians struggling with rent and mortgage stress.
Australian family businesses thrive on the flexibility of casual labour, and vast numbers of people under mortgage and rent stress use casual labour as a second job to help make ends meet.
In my view, this new legislation shows a callous disregard by the Prime Minister for this segment of his fellow Australians.
I emphasise casual labour has not been banned, but control over whether an enterprise is entitled to employ casual labour will be determined not by the employees or the enterprise but rather by the Fair Work Commission.
The Prime Minister may deny he is deliberately attacking family business and those struggling with mortgage and rent stress – so let me go through, step by step, how he and the relevant minister engineered the legislation and the looming chaos.
Remember, currently whether a person is to be employed as a casual, at least initially, is determined by the enterprise. Many employees love casual work because of the extra cash and the fact they can determine when they work, so work can be fitted into family and base job obligations.
There is no job security or holidays, but in a an economy where there is a labour shortage this is not seen as a problem by many Australians.
Family and other businesses can relate their labour requirements to the flexibility of customer demand. Casual labour is one of Australia’s greatest boosts to productivity and employee wellbeing. But Albanese, via his Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Tony Burke, and the loopholes in the so-called industrial relations legislation has set new rules.
Accordingly, from the start of spring 2024, an employee will be a casual employee of an employer only if “the employment relationship is characterised by an absence of a firm advanced commitment to continuing and indefinite work”.
What this means will be determined by Fair Work and involves looking into the minds of both the casual person and the employer.
It is complete parliamentary nonsense, with no regard to how business and ordinary Australians operate. But the Albanese legislation gets worse.
The above definition is then subject to further interpretation, and the ability to hire casuals must also be anchored on “the basis of the real substance, practical reality and true nature of the employment relationship … having regard to, but not limited to, the following considerations (which may indicate the presence, rather than an absence, of such a commitment):
(i) whether there is an inability of the employer to elect to offer, or not offer, work;
(ii) whether, having regard to the nature of the employer’s enterprise, it is reasonably likely that there will be future availability of continuing work …”
I invite Albanese to go down to the Stanmore fish and chip shop in his electorate to explain what this means.
But there is one chilling criteria in the Albanese legislation which actually has a clear meaning and will be used by the required union delegate, or delegates, in all enterprises to report to their union. That is: “whether there are full?time employees or part?time employees performing the same kind of work”.
My layperson interpretation of this sentence is if an enterprise has a part-time or full-time employees doing “the same kind of work” as a casual employee, then the casual must be forced to take a pay cut and be employed full or part time.
Under the legislation it seems the penalties for employing casuals do not apply until Fair Work has declared the enterprise is not entitled to employ casuals. If the enterprise continues to do so, the penalties are harsh and can total close to $100,000.
This leaves the enterprise being forced to employ permanent part-time employees, which usually requires the rigidity of a roster. And contacting the employee out of hours to change the roster may be hazardous.
It’s a totally different relationship, which robs both the family business and the employees of the flexibility which benefits both in the modern world.
Of course, in some situations the predictability of a roster may help an employee, which is why when the ACTU originally suggested after a designated period of casual employment, an employee should be able choose part-time employment.
It was a reasonable suggestion, but few would have changed because of the pay cut and lack of flexibility. Now they have no choice.
The ACTU is now suggesting the casual premium be increased from 25 to 35 per cent (the cost differential is about 20 per cent) to “mop up” any enterprise Fair Work allows to employ casuals.
The reason the ACTU and the unions want all people working in an enterprise to be full or part-time employees is it they are more likely to become union members, delivering the union more income plus a relationship with employees – which gives the union influence over the running of the business.
It’s all about money and power, not worker protection
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‘Good’ girls, ‘bad’ boys? That’s no way to make progress
Nikki Gemmell says boys in the West are angry. They want power and control, she says, pointing to a Gallup poll that apparently shows young men “flinching into conservatism” while young women are embracing and facilitating social reform.
The impetus for girls is fairness and equality, she says, a natural step for the educated. It’s why “the Taliban wants to stop females from being educated”, she wrote on the weekend.
The impetus for boys, says Gemmell, is to preserve what they had. She claims they are hurting, raging and lost.
Let’s put the Taliban to one side, given that in Australia girls are educated, they work, dress as they wish, vote, run companies, and become prime minister.
Lumping girls in the good column and boys in a bad one is not helpful. The world can’t be summed up so simply. Let’s dissect two claims – one about politics, the other about gender, at the centre of Gemmell’s thesis.
Having followed politics for a long time, I can safely say the world is more complicated than saying that conservative equals bad and progressive equals good.
If “progressive” meant only good things, we would do away with elections right now, and make Adam Bandt leader for life. In fact, the Greens are not genuinely progressive. For starters, they harbour anti-Semites.
This word, “progressive”, is often a crock. The progressive Greens are economic dunces; they’d wreck the economy overnight with their taxation and spending policies. We know from experience that being progressive on immigration – in other words, handing over control of our borders to people-smugglers – led to thousands of deaths at sea for desperate people.
So-called progressive policies can be wickedly regressive. When a bunch of elites thought that granting special rights to one group of Australians was such a good idea it should be enshrined in the Constitution, the response from Australians was an overwhelming “no”.
That No vote was the height of social and political equality: it was progressive and liberal.
When I hear claims that “progressive” is all sweetness and light, and comes in the shade of teal, it pains me to point out that most of the teals are frauds.
For all their kvetching about the need for more integrity in politics, and attacking low-hanging fruit such as pork-barrelling, they haven’t shown any interest, on behalf of taxpayers, in getting to the bottom of why the federal government handed over $2.4m to Brittany Higgins. Not a single injured veteran is able to secure that amount of money, no questions asked. How’s that for political integrity.
Nice-sounding words can’t hide poor outcomes. When diversity translates into discriminating against men, the result is neither fair nor equal.
Earlier this year, Caroline Overington reported on a bookshop owner in Melbourne who was concerned that while she had shelves of great women’s fiction writing, “positive stories with men and boys are almost missing from the mix”. We reported that women filled seven of the top 10 places in fiction writing last year. It was the same internationally.
Women coming out on top is great news, so long as it’s not manufactured by booting men out of the mix. Sadly, it’s seen as “progressive” to do precisely that.
Gender quotas are routinely used to fill board seats, sidelining merit. It’s easy to predict what flows: boards end up reflecting a political monoculture comprising people who think quotas make sense. That’s not genuine diversity.
When I wrote extensively many years ago about the importance of phonics when teaching young kids to read, I discovered phonics was described by its opponents as a conservative plot to entrench the political status quo. What on Earth? We’re talking about giving the kids the building blocks to read, a necessary step so they can learn, expand their horizons, think for themselves.
Back then, progressives believed kids learned to read by osmosis, by being exposed to words, and most schools bought their magic pudding. The steady stream of poor literacy results for Australian students reveals how regressive that progressive project has been for kids. Talk about being mugged by reality.
According to a piece in The Financial Times about the Gallop survey, the #MeToo movement is the trigger for women moving to the progressive side of politics. Gemmell repeated the claim. So, let’s look a little closer at this recent progressive movement.
The #MeToo movement has helped women feel empowered to report sexual assault and call out bad behaviour that falls short of assault. But not everything about #MeToo is positive. For example, the oft-repeated mantra that we must “believe all women” can only serve to undermine the presumption of innocence. That’s a dangerous path for a society committed to fairness, let alone fair trials.
There are other, less serious, but equally boneheaded responses to the #MeToo movement. One of Sydney’s most prestigious boys schools told boys in an assembly not to use the word “moist” because it offends girls. That school and others are going co-ed because apparently boys will become civilised human beings by sharing a classroom with girls.
The boys I know aren’t angry about sharing power, let alone classrooms. They’re not hurting, or raging, or lost, as Gemmell suggests. They weren’t born to be at the top of the tree. Nor are they hankering for cosy arrangements to continue. If I had to guess, what annoys both boys and girls – along with some of their parents – are evidence-free anti-male messages that go unchallenged.
Sky News contributor Daisy Cousens says the MeToo movement’s celebrity activists do not actually care about…
Young men and women in Gen Z are entering a world where labels and slogans are routinely used to dumb down society. Just as people are complex, so too are political philosophies.
For those interested in learning about conservatism as a political philosophy, there are plenty of books I could suggest. But let’s cut to the chase: being conservative means looking at what people did before us, holding on to what works and, yes, changing what doesn’t work.
Conservatism is rooted in lived experience, to coin a phrase from the progressive zeitgeist, not crossing your fingers, closing your eyes and saying a little prayer that good intentions will translate into good outcomes.
Now to another point about boys and girls. Gemmell claims Gen Z is “split” and living in “two separate worlds”. I looked at the Gallop results. In the US, Gallop’s news website says “a widening of the ideological gaps between men and women over time has been due to women becoming more liberal at a faster rate than men, rather than women and men moving in different ideological directions”. So, let’s take a breather.
I must live in a different part of Australia to my colleague. Having young men and women waft through our homes for many years, I can vouch for relationships forged above politics and social movements.
These young men and women befriend, work with, partner and marry people who have different views. The reason is simple: in most workplaces, pubs and homes, politics need not be a morality contest; ergo progressive doesn’t mean good, and conservative doesn’t mean bad. Or vice versa.
Perpetuating a myth that girls are progressive social reformers, while boys hanker for the good old days when men ruled the world, will only help to make the world more, not less, polarised.
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Warning over pipeline regulation review
APA Group has warned a review into the regulation of Australia’s gas pipelines threatens to delay much needed investment to boost capacity ahead of looming gas shortages on Australia’s east coast.
The industry was informed on Wednesday that the Australian Energy Regulator, under new powers over the regulation of Australia’s gas pipelines, would initiate the first in a series of reviews, starting with APA’s South West Queensland Pipeline (SWQP).
The pipeline, which links Wallumbilla in South East Queensland to Moomba in South Australia, is a key pipeline in the transmission network connecting Queensland with the southern states.
It is currently subject to light regulation, with an arbitration process in place to handle customer complaints, but the AER is considering whether to convert it to a “scheme pipeline”, which would subject it to full price regulation.
The AER on Wednesday said the SWQP was chosen as the first pipeline for review “due to its importance to the east coast gas system in transporting gas between northern and southern states”.
Speaking to The Australian after delivering the company’s half-year results on Thursday, APA Group chief executive Adam Watson criticised the “bizarre” timing of the review.
“They’ve actually called out the reason why they’re starting there is because of the significance of it in moving gas down, which is sort of bizarre and ironic that you’ve got a gas pipeline that is so critical to energy security, and pricing that’s functioning well,” he said. “We’ve never had a single customer complaint, it’s already lightly regulated so we’ve got full transparency of pricing and everything, and yet the government is giving the regulator power to look at that to see whether or not it should be heavily regulated.
“It is quite concerning that at a time where we need more flexibility in our energy supply, we need to be more nimble ... that they’re putting up barriers making it even harder for us to bring this transition to life.”
The AER was given the responsibility for determining the form of regulation of Australia’s gas pipelines last March as part of new National Gas Law rules introduced by the federal government at the time.
The review of the SWQP will be the first in a series of reviews the AER is planning to undertake over several years.
However with Australia facing a looming material shortfall of gas on Australia’s east coast from 2028, Mr Watson said the reviews undermined the need for further investment in new supplies and infrastructure.
“We’ve put about $700m of expansion capacity in that network at our own risk, ahead of market, to support energy security,” he said.
“If you go to a heavy form of regulation, that form of regulation is going to cause all sorts of problems in our energy transition.
“If we need to do an expansion, all of the decisions around that would be effectively determined by the regulator, and the regulatory processes are slow - it could take two, three, four, five years for them to determine whether or not we should bring an asset to market, by which time the problem’s already hit you in the face.
“You feel like the goal posts are being moved on you in the middle of a pretty important game, and we’ve got to be careful that we don’t have the umpires being the only ones left on the field trying to run the energy transition.”
APA’s underlying EBITDA grew by 5.8 per cent to $930m in the six months to December, underpinned by inflation-linked tariff increases, which resulted in a 3.4 per cent increase in revenue (excluding pass through revenue).
Recent acquisitions including the Basslink interconnector between Victoria and Tasmania, and the Pilbara Energy portfolio of renewable energy assets, lifted the result, and supports the company’s new full-year guidance for underlying EBITDA of $1.87bn to $1.91bn.
Statutory net profit after tax in the first half came in at $1.05bn.
The company reaffirmed full-year distribution guidance of 56c after declaring a 26.5c distribution for the first half.
Mr Watson described it a “solid” result, with the two recent acquisitions “in line with expectations and business cases”.
However he renewed concerns about the policy uncertainty surrounding the role of gas in the country’s energy transition, using last week’s blackouts in Victoria as an example of the important role gas will continue to play.
“Gas fired generation came on to save the day,” he said.
“We lost power to about half a million homes. By our high level estimates, we think that would have been more than a million homes without power if we didn’t have gas.
“We need to be able to bring more gas to market ... but the challenge we’ve got is when you look at things like excluding gas generation from capacity investment schemes, project approval processes, regulation.”
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22 February, 2024
CEOs take risks if they get involved in broader social issues
The everlasting Glenda Korporaal (below) is right in saying that Banducci was forced out by his political amateurism. I had some dealings with Banducci a little while back and found him to be a pretty decent bloke. Wooworths may well do less well without him
The sudden announcement of the departure of Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci has thrown a spotlight on the dangers of chief executives becoming involved in social issues.
While Banducci argued that the timing of his announcement on Wednesday had long been planned and had nothing to do with his disastrous interview this week on Four Corners, or his recent involvement in the controversy over not stocking Australia Day-themed goods, the timing of his announcement means he is exiting bruised by recent events.
While businesses have learned not to align themselves with any political party, given the real possibility of governments changing, high-profile business leaders have seen fit in recent years to become commentators on social issues of the day.
Issues such as same-sex marriage, the Indigenous voice to parliament, the merits of celebrating Australia Day and the war in the Middle East have become areas drawing in some business leaders.
But the pendulum may be swinging the other way, with the risks outweighing the perceived social halo – despite the prevailing corporate speak for having “purpose-led” organisations.
As Banducci found out, when his company tried to explain its reasons for not stocking Australia Day goods this year with a statement saying that not all staff supported the celebration of the day, taking a stand on social issues can be a high risk strategy.
The more he tried to explain the situation with full page advertisements and a media blitz, the worse it got, prompting Peter Dutton to call for a boycott of Woolworths stores.
While the same-sex marriage plebiscite was passed with a strong majority, with many business leaders who had supported it comforting themselves that they had been “on the right side of history”, the voice proved much more socially divisive issue.
While a majority of ASX top 20 companies publicly supported the voice, including Qantas, Wesfarmers, Coles, mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto, the big four banks and Telstra, in the end it could only garner support from about 40 per cent of voters.
Questions have been asked at shareholder meetings about the decision by company leaders to spend shareholders’ money supporting campaigns like the voice, with several large companies kicking in as much as $2m each.
Woolworths’ Big W was making public announcements in support of the voice during the campaign last year, but scrapped them after feedback from staff and customers.
While corporate support for the voice went down well with the Albanese government, it generated criticism from the opposition, with treasury spokesman Angus Taylor arguing that boards and senior executives should focus on their core business.
He said Australians had “never liked being told what to do by big business and big government”.
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Make no mistake, PM’s resolve is on the line over return of boat arrivals
PETA CREDLIN
The last time Australia confronted a resurgence of illegal boat arrivals I had a seat at the table, and two things have always stuck in my mind from that time.
The first was the general fear from officials that if the Abbott government didn’t stop the boats, as the Coalition had successfully done in the Howard era, we would never be able to stop them.
The second memory was walking out of a meeting of the national security committee of cabinet – after those same officials had congratulated themselves for a sustained period of no boat arrivals – and thinking to myself: you are all the same people who sat in there under Rudd and Gillard and couldn’t stop the boats.
The only difference between then and now was the change of politicians in the room and a prime minister with resolute determination that he would stop at nothing to defeat the people-smugglers and restore Australia’s sovereignty.
It was a profound lesson in the power of resolve. We had it then, and under this current government it has gone missing; that and basic ministerial competence.
Illegal migration is a scourge few countries seem able or willing to solve.
In 2013, after 50,000 people arrived by boat under Labor, the fear was the people-smuggling trade was more sophisticated than ever, the supply chain of vulnerable people ever increasing, and the use of technology made things more challenging for law enforcement.
As those who there at the time will attest, just rolling out the old Howard-era measures, such as turnbacks, temporary protection visas and offshore processing weren’t enough. The smuggler gangs were using new tactics deployed in other regions so new structures were put in place, including the unified command structure known as Operation Sovereign Borders and Australian-purchased orange lifeboats to take people back to Java after they’d scuttled their fishing boats.
And it worked: from early 2014 until 2022 there were almost no illegal boat arrivals.
That was then, though, and this is now. On top of 11 boats intercepted since the election, there have been at least two that made it undetected through to the Australian mainland: one last November, another larger vessel last week.
And that’s not really surprising given the head of the Australian Border Force told the Senate late last year that surveillance flights were down more than 20 per cent and maritime patrols were down more than 10 per cent under the current government.
It’s possible Indonesian people-smugglers have come up with new tactics, such as using military-style inflatables to speed boatpeople to our northern beaches, and for the smugglers to then escape back to what looks like an innocent fishing vessel.
The government is playing down the seriousness of these border breaches. Last Friday, Anthony Albanese avoided media questions, using the Kevin Rudd-esque tactic of claiming not to have been briefed.
I know how national security matters are handled. If the Prime Minister could not be directly contacted, his travelling team would have been, or the Australian Federal Police detail with him (their phones are always on). Either the Prime Minister was being dishonest with the media or the whole national security apparatus has gone to sleep.
Polling already shows the electorate isn’t happy about the return of people-smugglers; it’s even showing up in younger voting demographics. Hence, this week, from the Prime Minister down, the government has been at pains to emphasise that Operation Sovereign Borders remains in place and that funding has been increased (notwithstanding the ABF testimony last year).
This is because of the conflation we’re now being fed about onshore funding numbers versus offshore funding. And that has been borne out by the leaks that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil is racing to put in a submission for urgent extra funding in the May budget. We can but hope this extra funding materialises because the last thing we need, as the world’s security situation deteriorates, is the revival of something akin to a peaceful invasion.
Back in 2007 Rudd promised he’d be tough on borders, and we all know how that turned out. On Labor’s watch, there were almost 1000 illegal boats, more than 50,000 illegal arrivals and more than 1000 deaths at sea. Back then, at any one time there were an estimated 10,000 would-be illegal migrants to Australia who’d flown into Jakarta in the hope of picking up a people-smuggling boat to Christmas Island.
If anything, the number of people willing to try their luck crossing illegally into a rich country, in the hope of a better life or, occasionally, for more nefarious purposes has only increased. Several hundred thousand people are crossing into the US every month, often swimming the Rio Grande. Last year, 30,000 people crossed the English Channel to Britain on small boats. Last year, there were almost 400,000 irregular arrivals into the EU, mostly across the Mediterranean, with nearly 3000 thought to have drowned making the attempt.
The only way to stop people-smuggling is to make it clear their occupants will never gain permanent residency in their target country. Every people-smuggling venture that doesn’t end with boatpeople returned to their starting point is a chink in the armour. Even ending up in Nauru, as the latest arrivals have, for now, gives the smugglers something to sell – given that most boatpeople on Nauru eventually got permanent residency in a Western country.
There’s little doubt, as Peter Dutton suggests, smugglers are now testing the government’s resolve. They’d be watching the shambles of 149 released foreign criminals, now all but sure to stay forever in Australia, on welfare, and telling prospective customers that if even murderers and sex offenders can be given a new life in Australia, they too will get their chance.
And while the Prime Minister now talks a big game on borders, it must never be forgotten that as a senior frontbencher Albanese voted against turnbacks as Labor policy.
It’s telling that the only senior official from 2013 who believed that Labor’s influx of boats could be stopped, and should be stopped, was then customs head Mike Pezzullo. Last year the government sacked this former Labor staffer turned bureaucrat, on flimsy grounds. Again, this is why resolve matters – because, without it, you fall at the first sign of hardship.
The bleeding hearts who think we should just accept illegal migration as a fact of life need to be reminded that Australia is one of fewer than 30 countries in the world that permanently resettles migrants; 70 per cent of the rest of the world’s nations do not. In per capita terms, we are a world leader.
So, we should never be ashamed of demanding the right to determine who comes to this country or resile from the fact a sovereign nation is only sovereign when it controls its borders.
Back to resolve, do you credibly think the Prime Minister, at 60 years of age, has now rejected his lifelong convictions about illegal migration? I think we all know that middle-aged leopards don’t change their spots, but without his resolve our country is once again at the mercy of people-smugglers.
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Commonwealth to pay coal generators nearly $1bn
Crazy. They take with one hand and give with the other. Greenies will be livid
Anthony Albanese will pay coal generators nearly $1bn in rebates under his market intervention which capped the price of coal used for electricity at $125 a tonne, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Climate Change and Energy.
Labor’s energy market intervention was triggered in December 2022 by the need to shield Australians from rising electricity prices, which were forecast in the October budget that year to increase by about 20 per cent over 2022-23 followed by a further 36 per cent rise in 2023-24.
Retail gas prices were also forecast to increase by up to 20 per cent in both 2022-23 and 2023-24. The government responded by working with NSW and Queensland to set a price cap on coal used for electricity generation at $125 a tonne, while imposing a price ceiling on new domestic wholesale gas contracts for east coast producers at $12 per gigajoule.
Under the intervention, additional financial support is supplied in cases where the costs of production exceed the cost of supply under the cap. Mr Albanese initially dismissed suggestions that compensation for generators under the arrangements could rise into the hundreds of millions.
But initial estimates provided to parliament’s cost of living committee in early 2023 by the Department of Climate Change and Energy suggested that the combined fiscal cost of the coal generator rebates to the Commonwealth, NSW and Queensland governments would be in the order of $1.5bn to $2bn, with the Commonwealth paying a 50 per cent share.
In a letter sent on Tuesday, Department Secretary David Fredericks provided an updated estimate based on the decline in the market price of thermal coal over the past year. The new estimate was in line with the department’s initial analysis, but slightly lower than the upper figure of $2bn.
“DCCEEW’s revised estimate of the maximum total fiscal cost of the rebates associated with the coal price caps is $1.85bn, with the Commonwealth government committed to paying half under the arrangement reached with the New South Wales and Queensland governments,” he said.
Responding to a request for the updated figure from Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, Mr Fredericks said the new estimate was “less than the previous estimate provided to the Senate Cost of Living Inquiry in February 2023.”
The update from Mr Fredericks suggests the Commonwealth will still need to fork out $925m for coal generators – half the estimated $1.85bn total fiscal cost of the rebates under the price cap.
The latest update from the Australian Energy Regulator revealed the cost of producing electricity in 2023 had fallen by as much as 64 per cent in a year and that wholesale electricity prices were running closer to longer-term averages.
The AER said milder weather, fewer coal supply issues and an increase in cheap wind and solar energy had helped drive the reduction. But it also noted another factor – lower fuel costs partly driven by the government’s intervention.
However, Senator Canavan argued that “massive government subsidies don’t lower electricity prices to our economy. Subsidies just transfer the cost of our inept energy policies from consumers to taxpayers.”
“To lift real wages we have to focus on lowering the costs of production. The government’s clumsy interventions have clearly chilled investment in new energy supplies in Australia. The US is doubling its LNG capacity while we remain at a standstill,” he said. “Our lack of investment in reliable energy supplies will continue to increase electricity prices for all over time.”
Leading energy economists have recently suggested there is no longer a strong rationale to extend Labor’s coal price cap beyond the middle of 2024, given the moderation in short-term coal prices.
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Stop treating child criminals like ‘little angels’, says NT Labor MP Marion Scrymgour
Youth justice laws need to stop treating [Aboriginal] criminal minors as “little angels” and start applying “tough love” to lawless children, the [black] federal Labor MP representing Alice Springs has declared.
In an extraordinary intervention against her own party’s handling of the Northern Territory youth crime crisis, Marion Scrymgour says authorities need to stop “pussyfooting around” on juveniles, that the decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility is not working, and that it is time for parents to be held accountable for their children’s actions.
It came as NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler said in a “perfect world” she would not have children in detention facilities, and linked her opening of a new youth justice centre in Alice Spring on Wednesday to the British sending convicts to Australia in the 18th century.
After revelations in The Australian of children as young as 10 driving stolen cars around the streets of Alice Springs, Ms Lawler said that young people had been in criminal trouble for “the whole history of Australia” and that the nation’s history was built on the convict system.
The NT Police Association on Wednesday alleged crime statistics in the territory were “not being reported properly” and Alice Springs locals said children were getting more out of control.
Ms Scrymgour – the federal MP for Lingiari – had her own home broken into while she was sleeping last month, and said governments needed to make serious changes to NT youth justice laws.
“There’s got to be a rethink of how we deal (with youth crime) … a bit of tough love never hurt anyone and I think that’s what needs to come into this equation,” she told The Australian.
“We’ve got to stop thinking we’re dealing with little angels here … When you look at those photos they’re laughing and smiling, they think it’s a joke, and it’s not, because they could have an accident and one of them could get killed.
“We’ve got to stop pussyfooting around here and thinking that these kids are going and they’re being taken home to a responsible adult because in a lot of these cases there isn’t a responsible adult there and the reality is these kids don’t listen.”
Ms Scrymgour did not directly call on NT Labor to reverse its decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12 – the highest in the country – but said the policy was not working to bring down crime and that Alice Springs residents needed immediate action.
“At the moment, obviously lifting the age of criminal responsibility isn’t working,” she said.
“The government was saying they’d done this co-response team between police and territory families. Obviously, it’s not working, if we’ve got these kids out on the street and there’s still this issue; obviously, we’ve still got problems.
“Labor is talking about a review of the Youth Justice Act, there are some critical areas in the Youth Justice Act which can be done now … it doesn’t need to be put off for 12 months.
“I’m not left and I’m not woke, I just think we’ve got to hurry up and stop thinking that all of these measures are working, because they’re not.”
Ms Scrymgour’s comments come as Alice Springs locals say the rate of home invasions, incidents of violence on the streets and the theft of cars have “skyrocketed” rise despite Anthony Albanese’s visit to the area just over a year ago.
Locals say the children – who appear to be getting younger and younger – roam the streets late at night, when they breaking into the homes of residents and commit horrifying home invasions, stealing cars and ransacking for cash and jewellery.
Ms Lawler – who came to power only at the end of last year after her predecessor Natasha Fyles resigned, and faces an election in August – last Monday announced a review of youth justice laws as part of a public address into her priorities for 2024.
As she was opening a $32m detention centre for juvenile criminals on Wednesday, Ms Lawler conceded the crime crisis was a failure of government, but linked youth crime to colonial history.
“Overall, it would be the perfect world if we did not have a detention facility in the Northern Territory,” the Chief Minister said.
“Let’s not forget the history of Australia was built on us being colonised by a detention facility from England, so we have had young people, we’ve had people in trouble with the law for the whole history of Australia.”
NTPA president Nathan Finn on Wednesday morning claimed the Territory government was hiding crime statistics from the public as part of a “political campaign”, and that the work by police officers on the ground was “not being recorded” after the police force moved to a new $65m system.
“It’s a smoke-and-mirrors campaign as we lead into an election where crime is the biggest issue, policing is the biggest issue, safety and security of members in the public is a big issue … and the community and the police need to know this,” he told ABC radio.
Mr Finn said the new system was experiencing numerous glitches, including people being wrongly arrested, and that up to 200 domestic violence orders hadn’t been scheduled in court.
“That means possibly that there are 200 plus people out there who aren’t getting the protection they require right now.”
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‘A cross between a damp squib and a huge con job’
The Albanese government’s surface fleet plans are a dismal cross between a damp squib and a routine government defence con job.
As predicted, the announcement from Defence Minister Richard Marles offers almost no new money and no immediate acquisition of new capabilities, but abounds in grandiloquent promises for the unaccountable distant future.
Here are a few central facts. The government is dividing the surface fleet into tier 1 ships, tier 2 ships and others. The bottom line is we don’t get a new tier 1 surface combatant ship until the first of the Hunter-class frigates arrives at the now delayed date of 2034.
As everyone has commented, the Hunter frigates, with just 32 vertical launch system cells, are radically under-gunned for modern warfare. Then we build six of these under-gunned behemoths so we don’t actually get a new version of a destroyer with a lot of vertical launch cells until after the sixth Hunter frigate is built and deployed – in other words, well into the 2040s.
But, the government says, we are producing up to 11 general purpose frigates that will have lots of missiles. That, of course, is a good thing … as far as it goes.
The government is already classifying these as tier 2 vessels. In what it will market as an act of tremendous political bravery, the government says the first few of these can be built off shore by the nation that gets the contract.
In one sense, thank God for small mercies. But this is a very small mercy. These general purpose frigates do not yet exist, even in theory. They will have to be designed from scratch. We will no doubt add the usual crippling array of bespoke requirements. There will be a competitive tender. This will go over time. The whole process will take years.
But if this, uniquely in our recent defence history, all goes perfectly well, the government believes it could have four of these vessels in service by 2034.
Let’s remember, every other project we’ve done has seen massive cost blowouts and delays.
Only in Australia could a process like that be described as buying something off the shelf.
And let’s examine the empirical evidence for the delivery of grand defence visions.
In 2009, the Rudd government delivered a defence white paper which said that as a matter of extreme urgency Australia needed to acquire 12 regionally superior conventional submarines.
Here we are in 2024, 15 years later, still without a contract to build a single submarine, and only a fairly provisional and unsure agreement that we might buy one from the Americans in a decade.
Main points from the Australian Navy review
The independent review found a $25 billion funding hole in the Navy’s surface fleet program
The Albanese government will inject an additional $1.7 billion over the next Forward Estimates and $11.1 billion in additional funding over the next decade for the Navy’s surface combatant fleet and Australia’s shipbuilding industry.
The Albanese Government says it is committed to “continuous naval shipbuilding” in Australia with a promise of more than 3700 direct jobs in South Australia and Western Australia over the next decade.
Hunter class frigates and destroyers will continue to be built at Osborne Naval Shipyard in South Australia, and there is a plan for eight new general purpose frigates to be built at WA’s Henderson but the precinct is not currently configured for that.
The plan will see a doubling of the Navy’s major surface combatant fleet, from 11 warships to 20 by the mid to late 2040s in addition to six semi-autonomous Large Optionally Crewed Surface Vessels (LOSV).
The “larger and more lethal Australian Navy” will comprise of three upgraded Hobart class destroyers, six Hunter class frigates (rather than the initially planned nine), 11 new general purpose frigates (which will eventually replace Anzacs), six new Large Optionally Crewed Surface Vessels (LOSVs) and 25 minor war vessels.
The Albanese government will have gone an entire term in government without producing any significant increase in Australian naval capability. And indeed there will be no such increase, almost for sure, for the rest of this decade.
This is our response to the most dangerous strategic circumstances in 80 years?
The cost blowout in the Hunter frigates of $20bn, which might have moved a prudent government to scrap that program and actually buy some real frigates off the shelf, is mainly costs that have arisen over the past two years.
Who can imagine that the piddling bits of money the government has announced over the forward estimates will be enough to produce the entirely notional general purpose frigates?
As for the government’s bigger funding commitments over 10 years, that’s all meaningless. Neither Anthony Albanese nor Marles will be in their current positions in 10 years.
It’s an old, old trick for governments to announce fantastic defence capabilities in a decade or more into the future and seek to give themselves massive political rewards in the mean time. It’s still a con job.
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21 February, 2024
ABC’s Media Watch host Paul Barry slammed by Jewish leaders over war coverage ‘analysis’
That squinty "host" above is a Leftist, has always been a Leftist and will always be a Leftist. And Leftists are feline predators that do not change their spots. And from Karl Marx on, Leftists have always despised Jews
Jewish leaders have expressed outrage at claims made by the ABC’s Media Watch program that the public broadcaster has been the only news outlet to “give equal coverage to both sides” in the Israel-Hamas war.
On Monday night’s episode of Media Watch, host Paul Barry referenced “preliminary analysis” by the Islamophobia Register that showed the ABC was the only news organisation to have provided impartial coverage of the conflict.
The analysis, by academic Susan Carland for the Islamophobia Register, was based on an undisclosed number of Instagram posts by media outlets.
The research found that the social media posts by The Australian and 9News “all humanised Israeli victims but not Palestinians”, according to Media Watch’s interpretation of Dr Carland’s report.
“So, what do we conclude from all this? Well, simple, really,” Barry told viewers.
“The big Australian newspapers we looked at have failed to cover the Gaza conflict fairly, in terms of giving equal weight to the victims on each side, with the Nine papers (The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age) not too bad, but The Australian failing in spectacular fashion.”
The Media Watch host praised other news sources, including Al Jazeera (which is funded by the Qatari royal family), for covering “human stories of Palestinian suffering”.
But when contacted by The Australian, Dr Carland said her report clearly stated the research “should not be taken as, a definitive analysis of Australian media bias against Palestinians”.
“As this research is limited to the Instagram posts of the six outlets, this report is also not a definitive account of the outlets’ reporting on the Israel-Gaza war, and does not comment on fairness or equality found in any of their other stories on the Israel-Gaza war on their other platforms,” the report says.
Asked if she felt that Media Watch had misrepresented her research, Dr Carland told The Australian: “I cannot comment on the intentions of Media Watch. That would be a question best posed to them.”
NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip told The Australian that the Media Watch story was “a joke”.
“If the subject matter wasn’t so serious, Media Watch’s report would have simply been parody,” Mr Ossip said. “Relying on sources such as the rabidly anti-Israel Al Jazeera and other highly partisan publications as evidence of the purported bias of legitimate news publications doesn’t pass the sniff test.”
Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, said: “It’s no surprise that an ABC program like Media Watch finds The Australian’s coverage of the Israel/Hamas war to be appalling, given that much of the ABC seems to think the story of the war should be told overwhelmingly from a Palestinian perspective.
“It’s also predictable that Media Watch neglected to mention failings by much of the Australian media to the detriment of Israel, such as the failures to cover the links between journalists and Hamas, or UNRWA and Hamas, (stories) that were highlighted by The Australian, which was typical of its overall balanced, comprehensive and factually accurate coverage.”
Media Watch’s executive producer Tim Latham said in a statement: “We stand by our story and what we put to air.”
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‘We made the wrong decisions’: COVID-era mass school closures condemned
Mass school closures that stretched for months during the pandemic were unnecessary and led to a cascade of social and educational problems that threaten a generation of Australian children, top education experts say.
Governments have failed to examine the fallout from one of the most far-reaching decisions prompted by COVID-19, which disrupted the schooling of millions of students and resulted in an attendance crisis and persistent behavioural issues.
A panel of pre-eminent Australian education experts has flagged the profound impacts that school closures during COVID-19 have had on students’ education and wellbeing.
They called for a plan for future closures that puts the long and short-term needs of children at the centre of policy decision-making.
The Sydney Morning Herald convened experts on education and child social development to assess the impact of COVID on students after the federal government failed to include the decision to close schools in its independent inquiry into how the nation managed the pandemic.
They included the chair of the NSW education regulator, Peter Shergold, and the National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.
Schools in NSW switched to remote learning in 2020 and 2021. Strict infection controls continued to interrupt learning and social interaction for months on end.
The COVID fallout: Education
This month marks four years since China’s COVID-19 outbreak was deemed a public health emergency of international concern, heralding the start of a traumatic period many of us would prefer to forget. While a federal government inquiry is examining some national responses to the crisis, key decisions made by states will not be properly scrutinised.
The Herald is concerned our political leaders have not adequately studied the lessons – good and bad – of our most recent experience, and we plan to ask tough questions over the coming months about the pandemic’s impact on education, health, border closures and lockdowns and policing. This is the first of our three-part series looking at the impact of COVID on education. The forum discussions with nine expert panellists were broken up into two sessions: one examining the wellbeing and behaviour of students, the second on academic and learning disruption.
The panellists warned the aftershocks of the decision to close schools are still being felt in classrooms, playgrounds and homes. Some of the worst aspects were the skyrocketing truancy rate, school refusal and significant issues with student discipline and distraction in the classroom, and self-regulation in the playground.
Shergold, a former top public servant who led an independent review into the pandemic in 2022, said the lingering effects of school shutdowns on students, teachers and parents underscored the importance of scrutinising unilateral decisions by state governments to mandate remote learning.
In September, the federal government announced a long-awaited inquiry into the pandemic response, but school closures are not included in the terms of reference. Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has previously joined health experts in urging the inquiry to examine the social damage and repercussions of long periods of remote learning.
“The danger of school closures, which we always knew, was that it was going to accentuate disadvantage,” said Shergold. “After the closures in early 2020, we made the wrong policy decisions about closing school systems.”
In NSW, more than 1.2 million students either learned remotely or had minimal supervision in schools for more than five months. Schools were shut down between March and May in 2020, and then again in 2021 from July to the end of October. Hundreds of schools and childcare centres were closed again in the following months.
Unlike in Victoria, there was minimal supervision at schools for students, but attendance was discouraged. Shergold said the unity of national cabinet fractured as state governments forged ahead with decisions to shut schools, despite the federal government urging parents to send their children to classes.
State decisions were often politically driven, some panellists said, ignoring the risk of long-lasting impacts on young children and teenagers, especially the most disadvantaged students who were most affected by the closures.
“It was clearly the Commonwealth position to keep school systems open,” Shergold said. “It was states that were unpersuaded, and that’s why this present inquiry seems so bizarre that we’re not going to address their policy responses. It’s a crucial part of the story and ensuring that we’re better prepared for the next pandemic.”
He said early in 2020 there “was a fog of war, and there was ill preparation – in Australia between federal and state governments – for a pandemic”, noting it was understandable schools closed in the first months.
But after evidence emerged that children were less likely to spread the virus, and schools were not transmission hotspots, the system-wide closures were unwarranted, he said.
“We had Treasury pleading with us not to shut school systems. Part of the issue was that parents started to voluntarily withdraw their children from schools, and they were voting with their feet ... I think NSW reacted to that,” he said.
The state government also faced persistent pressure from the NSW Teachers Federation to shut down in-person classes, leaving minimal staffing to support essential frontline services workers. Some of Sydney’s private schools began to defy official advice and close, putting pressure on other systems to follow suit.
The advice provided by chief health officers was that attending school represented a low health risk to students, and studies in 2021 reaffirmed transmission between children in schools was minimal.
Hollonds agreed the first closure early in the pandemic, which lasted seven weeks, was unavoidable, but the longer closure of 2021 was unnecessary.
“Maybe they should have only been short term, where there was a ‘hot-spot’, not the 15 weeks we saw across all of NSW,” she said.
She said the public debate over school closures not only ignored the needs of children, but demonised them as “germy super-spreaders”. “It felt Dickensian, some of that discourse,” she said.
Shergold noted that the shift to online learning was implemented well across systems and schools, and effort was made to address the digital divide. But he emphasised that after the first mass closures a more targeted approach should have been taken to only close individual schools when needed.
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Universities attack Labor’s new industrial relations law
Universities have come out strongly against Labor’s new “intractable bargaining” provision, which prevents industrial relations umpire the Fair Work Commission from reducing workers’ conditions when it resolves a bargaining impasse.
The provision – part of the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No.2) Bill 2023, which has been passed by both houses and is awaiting royal assent – allows the Fair Work Commission to arbitrate if an enterprise agreement has not been reached after at least nine months of negotiation and there is no prospect of agreement.
An amendment, driven by the Greens and accepted by Labor, means the commission cannot make a ruling about any disputed matter that would reduce an existing employee condition.
The Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, which is the employer association for 33 universities, says the amendment means unions will be able to effectively “grandfather” parts of an enterprise agreement that are no longer fit for purpose and that inhibit productivity gains.
“The new law effectively strips the Fair Work Commission of the ability to genuinely address productivity-related issues,” AHEIA executive director Craig Laughton said.
“The change to the law will result in a ‘term by term’ focus, resulting in antiquated and unproductive provisions being retained to the detriment of staff and employers.”
Mr Laughton said all negotiation involved compromise and trade-offs.
“From now on, this will be limited by law in Australia, with one side calling the shots and an umpire without a whistle,” he said.
“If the independent umpire can’t run community standards across the sector, which is effectively what this prohibition does, how do you get the union to the table to bargain?”
Mr Laughton called for the law to be reconsidered.
However, National Tertiary Education Union general secretary Damien Cahill welcomed the amendment and said it was a major win for workers.
“Now workers will have a guarantee that any final call the workplace umpire makes when arbitrating bargaining disputes will leave no one worse off,” Mr Cahill said. “These changes will make it harder for vice-chancellors and senior executives to game workplace laws in attempts to drive down pay and conditions.
“Unfortunately, we were seeing some universities stalling negotiations in an attempt to push for arbitration.
“The NTEU exposed this agenda last year and it is good to see the government has responded with much-needed changes.
“Now workers will have a guarantee that any final call the workplace umpire makes when arbitrating bargaining disputes will leave no one worse off.”
But Mr Laughton said the new law would allow unions to hold up negotiations in the knowledge they had nothing to lose if the matter went to arbitration.
The new provision will be tested when the next round of university enterprise bargaining starts next year.
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Chris Bowen is way off track on drive for new fuel standards
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is not someone who allows the grass to grow under his feet, or under the industrial-sized solar panels he is so keen to promote, for that matter.
Early this month, he announced the government’s intention to introduce a New Vehicle Efficiency Standard for Australia. At the time, he told us Australia and Russia are the only advanced economies in the world not to have such a policy.
After the standard is implemented here, Russia will be on its own – something that’s not likely to worry the Russian government unduly. Bowen is targeting a start date of next year.
As is the case with many policy settings, the devil is always in the detail. It’s not just about having or not having an efficiency standard; it’s also about the parameters of the policy, other related measures and timing. Bowen plans to accelerate the implementation of the standard here by insisting we catch up to the US by 2028. This is the first problem with Bowen’s announcement.
How these schemes work is that an overall efficiency standard (typically set in terms of CO2 grams per kilometre) applies across a manufacturer’s entire fleet for sale. On average, the standard must be met, with some vehicles above the standard and others below. Credits are generated if the standard is more than met and these are tradable. For those who cannot meet the standard, these credits can be bought.
The expectation is that manufactures will seek to impose higher prices on vehicles that are above the standard and lower prices for those below it.
In other words, the standard induces price cross-subsidisation so the overall standard can be met and penalties won’t be payable. Electric vehicles are highly prized in this setting. But for those models of cars with above-standard efficiency, prices will inevitably rise.
Now if you think this is suppressing consumer sovereignty, you wouldn’t be wrong. Instead of allowing car buyers to take into account fuel efficiency as well as other characteristics, this policy deliberately restricts consumer choice to meet the government’s target. Bear in mind here that the most popular vehicles in Australia – the Ford Ranger ute and the Toyota HiLux – will massively exceed the new standard. There is speculation of price increases of between $10,000 and $25,000 for some models.
Bowen claims everyone will still be able to buy their preferred car; indeed he expects the choice of vehicles to expand even though Australia is known to be one of the best catered-for markets for right-hand-drive cars in the world.
The fact that there is little demand for some very small, fuel-efficient vehicles – those that are common in Europe and the UK – is mainly due to their unsuitability for families as well as being underpowered for Australian conditions. Bear in mind here that in Europe and the UK, petrol/diesel is highly taxed. The high price of petrol/diesel has been a driving force for many years determining the kinds of cars these citizens purchase. And, of course, many of these countries are the size of a handkerchief compared with Australia.
Using his department’s assumption-driven modelling, Bowen is predicting Australians stand to save about $1000 per vehicle per year by 2028. If that sounds unconvincing, it’s because it is. For starters, most people only buy new cars occasionally.
There are also some large leaps of faith about the take-up of electric vehicles – the real heart of this new policy – and the fact that it should be cheaper to charge a vehicle at home and drive a certain distance compared with filling up an internal combustion engine vehicle. Recent data point to it now being more expensive to use paid-for fast chargers between Melbourne and Sydney than driving a petrol-fuelled car.
(A complication that Bowen chooses to ignore about this policy is the fact that EVs use electricity generated still mainly from coal. The modelling doesn’t take into account this second-round effect.)
Had his department been closely watching overseas developments, he would also have been aware of significant problems emerging in a number of countries in relation to vehicle emissions standards, particularly the US.
Notwithstanding the extremely generous subsidies available to EV purchasers and the fact that a number of the car manufacturers have aggressively switched to EVs – think here Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen – EV sales have stalled. There are said to be row upon row of unsold EVs in dealers’ premises in the US and the dealers are now loudly complaining. The Biden administration is now considering watering down its emissions standards.
It turns out early adopters were keen to buy EVs – many had another vehicle in their garage – but demand has since slowed. The combination of high purchase prices, costly insurance and poor resale values, as well as ongoing issues with charging, has contributed to this outcome. (In the UK, this trend is, unbelievably, being blamed on an article written by Rowan Atkinson.)
Some of the car companies are now scrambling to change direction, with GM reintroducing a plug-in hybrid model to kickstart sales as well as deal with the efficiency standard. Toyota has emerged a winner in this race, with its chief always sceptical about rapid consumer acceptance of EVs. Toyota has been a substantial investor in hybrid technology and its hybrid vehicles have emerged as commercial winners in a number of countries.
Another clear trend in the motoring world is the increasing dominance of Chinese car manufacturers, particularly in the EV space. Their factories are churning out reasonable quality cars at much lower prices than the car companies that have dominated world sales for decades. Volkswagen, in particular, is under pressure as its strategic tilt to EV production fails to meet commercial expectations. (The fact that Chinese vehicles are constructed using cheap coal-fired electricity is again something that policymakers such as Bowen chose to ignore.)
So what is really driving Bowen’s decision to run with this new vehicle efficiency standard with its accelerated timetable? There are number of factors at work. The first is that some of the car companies and activists have been strongly pushing this standard. Volkswagen, which was caught up in a significant emissions misreporting incident, is very keen to see the new standard implemented.
Secondly, Bowen now realises the government’s stated emissions reduction target of a 43 per cent cut by 2030 won’t be met with current policy settings and the delayed rollout of renewable energy and new transmission lines. He is seeking some quick abatement from road transport to get closer to the target.
As for the conclusion that the policy will return $3 for every $1 spent, pull the other one. I can come up with an equally plausible set of assumptions that leads to a negative net return. When the government report makes the fatuous claim that “the projected impact of (car) emissions on Australian’s climate outlook cannot be ignored”, you know the bureaucrats are talking through their hat. (Hint: it’s about global emissions.)
Bowen might also be well-advised to admit that Australians love their cars.
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20 February, 2024
Young menaces, helpless police and no solution
What is not said below is the the offenders are Aboriginal. Taking any measures against them would lead to cries of "racism"
It’s 8pm and the dust is settling across the ranges of Alice Springs when inside the town’s industrial area a group of kids arrive at the Pickles Auctions car yard.
They’re about to steal a car and lead police on a dangerous chase – an all-too-familiar scene here, where children as young as 10 are caught behind the wheel and immediately returned to a “responsible adult” – only to continue to reoffend.
Dozens of cars in the yard are protected by a 2m-high fence topped with razor wire, but the kids have their eyes on one in particular. It’s a Toyota Rav 4 they’ve stolen once before.
The first time ended badly – the car smashed up and ultimately hauled into the car yard, where it was written off by the insurance company.
But the car is drivable – and the kids still have the keys.
Jumping the razor wire fence, they climb into the SUV and drive it headlong into the heavy metal gate. It takes seven attempts to get through.
Soon the car is heading towards the centre of town.
It’s a pattern the residents of Alice Springs are well and truly used to. On one night last December, eight vehicles were being driven around town by out of control children and teenagers.
It’s just over 12 months since this city became the focus of national attention over out-of-control crime, but on the ground, locals say it’s never been worse.
In the early hours of Wednesday last week, there are four boys in the car: one aged 13, two aged 11, and the youngest just 10.
The boys are yelling and screaming from the vehicle, as they speed through town.
The driver can barely see over the steering wheel, the car mounting roundabouts, careening through red lights and on the wrong side of the road as the passengers hang out the windows.
Helpless police sit in their cars and watch as the kids perform donuts on the council lawns.
“You’re going to kill someone, stop,” one officer yells from his car as he flashes his torch at them.
Eventually police try to contain the vehicle with spike strips, but report that nearby youths on foot are tipping off the occupants about the spiking locations.
The vehicle is so badly damaged it struggles to reach its maximum speed, but on other occasions, cars have been clocked at more than 100km/h in some parts of town.
Just before 11pm, the boys abandon the vehicle outside K-Mart.
“With precision and skill, police located and apprehended four youths, aged between 10 and 13,” police say in a statement the following day.
The two 11-year-olds and the 10-year-old are conveyed to their homes and “handed over to a responsible adult”.
The 13-year-old, who was charged with theft, driving a motor vehicle without consent and damage to property, appears before a court the following afternoon. It’s his first time before the court. He sits there, apparently bored, running his hands through his hair. He does his best to avoid eye contact with anyone in the room as a police officer stands beside him.
In applying for bail, the court hears there have been three domestic disturbances at his proposed bail address within the last month.
His family and another family are also having a dispute.
The following day, he withdraws his bail application. He’d rather stay in jail than live at an alternative bail address in a remote community far removed from Alice Springs.
On average, there were 39 vehicles stolen every month in Alice Springs last year. Many of these vehicles ended up abandoned in the desert after they had been taken for a joyride or used in a ram-raid – often at a liquor store.
Northern Territory Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says entire communities are being left to suffer and Aboriginal children are “fast-tracked into a life of crime and incarceration”.
“This is what happens when children are left neglected, in dysfunction, without the care and supervision they deserve,” Senator Price says.
“This is the result of division, of a new apartheid driven by Labor and their progressive Green allies so they force their agenda onto guilt-ridden Australians.
“If you really want to close the gap, we need less grandstanding in Canberra, and more action on the ground.
“To get real solutions, we need to hold people responsible and enforce consequences.”
A month ago a child care centre was placed into lockdown due to “unsettled protests and riots” in the CBD, with some people armed with weapons.
One late-night CBD proprietor – who asked for his name to be withheld for fear of reprisal – says the situation on the street is “getting worse day by day”.
“They want to kill people, there are public beatings and fights almost every night,” the business owner says.
“They need to do something, the government, otherwise everyone will be leaving here.
“It’s worse than last year, it’s getting worse day by day, they have to do something for the kids.
“This year I lost a lot of friends (who moved away), even my family is worried, they say ‘what am I doing here?’,” the person says.
In April last year, this journalist befriended a group of youths in the early hours of the morning on the streets of Alice Springs.
Soon after, the topic of conversation turned to stolen cars.
They surrounded my car, and joked about stealing it and taking it for a joyride. They took a great interest in my cameras, too, while keeping a watchful eye out for police.
“I don’t give a f..k, I can do anything before I become a man,” one very young boy said.
“Mister, mister, look here, can you see it?” another asked, as he showed me footage from inside a stolen car. “That’s me at the front, brother.”
“F..k the police, FTP, motherf..ker,” another said as they started playing American rap music.
They continued to gloat about breaking into homes and businesses, using tools such as screwdrivers and angle grinders, and claiming they’ve been to “juvie” for months at a time,
They started begging for a lift, pleading that it was cold. “We’ll go try steal a car,” one said.
When we parted company it was 4am – and their search for trouble seemed as if it still had a long way to go.
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Eating green ideology: official diet advice to warn of climate impact
The federal government’s official advice on diets will now incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change, sparking outrage from farmers who fear it is driven by an “ideological agenda” against red meat.
It could lead to consumers being told to reduce steak and lamb chop intakes in favour of alternatives like chicken, which some scientists say has a lower carbon footprint.
Red meat producers are concerned that the move by the National Health and Medical Research Council to incorporate environmental sustainability into Australian Dietary Guidelines will be based on “misinformation” and present an incomplete picture about the industry’s effect on the environment. They have called for it to be scrapped.
The statutory authority’s dietary guidelines expert committee says the change is based on “stakeholder feedback” and has already started setting up a sustainability working group to help its review of the 2013 guidelines, due by the end of 2026.
Red Meat Advisory Council chair John McKillop accused the NHMRC, which is responsible for funding medical research and providing health and nutrition recommendations to the government, of straying beyond its remit. “These developments are an overreach by the dietary guidelines expert committee that go well beyond the policy intent of the Australian Dietary Guidelines to provide recommendations on healthy foods and dietary patterns,” he said.
“The red meat industry has a strong story about sustainability, so our concerns are not because we believe it’s a weakness but because it’s not the role of the dietary guidelines nor is it the expertise of the dietary guidelines expert committee. The nation’s dietary guidelines should be focused on promoting public health, preventing chronic diseases and ensuring that all Australian have access to accurate and reliable information about their basic nutritional requirements.”
Sustainability was included in an appendix of the previous guidelines, but the expert committee says “sustainability messaging should be incorporated within the revised dietary guidelines, and not included as a separate section within the appendices”.
Mr McKillop said expanding the scope of the dietary guidelines into other non-nutritional topics would undermine their purpose and the public’s confidence in them. “This is going to make clear and simple nutritional messaging even more difficult,” he said.
RMAC will ask the NHMRC committee to reconsider the change to the guidelines. “If they refuse, we’ll be asking the federal government to intervene as it’s starting to look like the process is running off the rails,” he said.
“The dietary guidelines review process must not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to drive ideological agendas at the expense of the latest nutritional science.”
The dietary guidelines expert committee has defined sustainable diets as being “accessible, affordable and equitable diets with low environmental impacts”.
In a statement, the NHMRC said including sustainability followed a “stakeholder survey” in which one in three people surveyed listed it as a priority.
“While the 2013 guidelines included messages about the environmental impact of food choices, the placement of the messages in an appendix has made them easy to overlook,” a spokesman said.
“Stakeholder feedback suggests there is low awareness of their existence. The revision of the guidelines provides an opportunity to improve integration of messages about food sustainability into the guidelines.”
The organisation rejected the suggestion that incorporating sustainability messaging would undermine public confidence.
“Developing or updating NHMRC guidelines involves a thorough review of the evidence, methodological advice on the quality of these reviews, drafting of the guidelines, public consultation and independent expert review of the final guidelines,” the spokesman said.
“The dietary guidelines expert committee advised that recommendations for dietary patterns and food groups should firstly consider health impacts in the Australian context, followed by consideration of sustainability and other contextual factors,” the spokesman said. “This is consistent with how sustainability has been incorporated into dietary guidelines in other countries.”
Central Queensland cattle farmer Mark Davie said industry concerns were heightened by perceived misinformation about the health impacts and sustainability of red meat production permeating media, public policy and nutritional advice.
Mr Davie, who chairs the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, questioned how the NHMRC could measure one food source against another while still accounting for benefits to things like soil or biodiversity.
Meat producers are concerned that an updated version could follow rhetoric from organisations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which advocates for reduced livestock grazing.
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Unaffordable green dream blacked out by reality
When Craig Emerson has finished working out how much Woolies is gouging us for a litre of milk, perhaps he might turn his attention to the exorbitant price of electricity.
The Prime Minister’s price-gouging tsar might ask why energy companies were cashing in on the misery of Victorians last Tuesday by charging up to $2225.50 for a MWh of electricity.
Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria joined a conference of investors last week to announce underlying profits of $747m for the first half of the year, up from $44m a year earlier. Origin had grabbed a share of Tuesday afternoon’s bonanza by cranking up its gas-peaking plant at Mortlake.
Profiteering, raising prices at times of scarcity or emergency, would be frowned upon in other circumstances. Not in the National Electricity Market, however, where the fluctuating five-minute spot price balances supply and demand 24 hours a day.
Without it, we could expect many more unserved energy events, as the Australian Energy Market Operator initially described the collapse of half of Victoria’s electricity grid, leaving 540,000 customers powerless, many of them for days.
Like soldiers, doctors and others who run a daily risk of messing up people’s lives, the energy business has its dehumanising euphemisms to describe the things that cause collateral damage or adverse events.
On Tuesday, 90,000 customers were caught in friendly fire when the energy operator deliberately cut their power. The load shedding was vital to cover the drop in supply caused when six giant transmission towers on the state’s main 500kV transmission line buckled in high winds, knocking Victoria’s largest generating plant offline.
Why a break in the line near Geelong would cause the safety switches to trip at Loy Yang, 230km away, is one of life’s mysteries. It’s like asking how a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can start a tornado in Texas.
Weather and energy grids are chaotic systems where fixed laws govern complex interactions and feedback loops but lead to seemingly random outcomes. As the late Australian scientist Robert May once said: “Simple models can help us understand complex systems, but they are not a substitute for understanding.”
That’s why a prediction that the average household energy bill will fall by $275 over three years by installing more renewable energy should have been treated with a bucket of salt, even if, as Anthony Albanese claims, it was based on the most ambitious modelling on anything by any opposition party in the 120-year history of the commonwealth.
It is why you can’t draw up a grand plan for a carbon-free electricity grid on a whiteboard in Sydney and expect it to work.
The task of grid engineers is not to design the perfect system but to manage risk. Their task does not stop when they’ve linked enough generators to supply the expected demand. They should follow the example of John Bradfield, who over-engineered the bejesus out of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which today supports a load he might not have imagined.
The collapse of the steel towers on Victoria’s main transmission line is irrefutable evidence our current transmission network needs upgrading. We should be patient before rushing to build another 10,000km of transmission lines before we’ve found the money to give the 45,000km of lines in operation the Bradfield treatment.
We should review the costings and technical specifications of the ones we plan to build. If we want them to last at least 50 years, underground cables may be cheaper in the long run.
The over-engineering imperative also applies to generation. The relatively stable East Coast Grid that operated reliably before renewables came along had abundant excess capacity from coal generation.
There was no need to synchronise DC power from wind and solar plants so fewer things could go wrong. Transmission line runs were shorter and easier to manage. Inter-connectors played an ancillary role, keeping prices low by increasing competition and balancing supply between states. They were never designed to run at full bore, as the interconnectors do now for growing periods. The 2016 blackout in South Australia occurred after storms damaged transmission lines, and the Heywood interconnector with Victoria became overloaded.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen thinks the answer is to add more intermittent generation and hope we’ll have enough batteries installed in time to save our bacon when the sun fades, and the wind drops. Yet battery boosters should take a reality check. The NEM supplied 3.2TWh of electricity to customers in the last seven days. A mere 7.7GWh, or 0.24 per cent, was supplied from batteries. A little over two-thirds (64.4 per cent) came from coal.
This raises the question: How will the grid be managed if Australia’s largest generator, Origin’s coal-fired plant at Eraring, NSW, closes next August as the company says it will?
“Running baseload these days is just getting more and more difficult,” Calabria said last week, noting low prices particularly in the middle of the day, when wind and solar are eating coal’s lunch.
No problem, say the boosters. “Analysts have said that there is no need for Eraring to stay open, given the number of new renewable and battery storage projects currently under construction,” wrote the editor of Renew Economy last week.
Really? What analysts? When? Would they like to show us their modelling? Any government that bases its decisions on that kind of advice should be prepared for a very wild ride. Which is why NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns will do almost anything to keep Eraring open.
The NSW government has gone to drastic lengths to ensure the state’s remaining coal-fired power stations remain supplied with coal. Coalminers are obliged by law to reserve 10 per cent of their output for domestic generators and are forbidden from charging more than $125 per tonne.
On the one hand, the government gears policy to shut the coal generators out by privileging renewables in the NEM, pushing spot prices negative in the middle of the day. It subsidises unreliable, intermittent generators by allowing them to sell renewable energy certificates, so they can operate profitably even if spot prices fall below zero.
On the other hand, governments are using a mixture of pleading and coercion to keep coal-power stations open because even the starry-eyed people at AEMO know the chance of blackouts will increase in NSW if Eraring closes.
One hates to be the bearer of bad news to the Tesla drivers of Mosman, but around 80 per cent of your electricity on Saturday night was produced from black coal, more than a third of it from Eraring.
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SEQ youth crime: Chilling warning as ex-Army security guard patrols blue-chip Brisbane suburbs
Desperate residents in the blue-chip Brisbane suburb of Chelmer and nearby Graceville and Sherwood are paying thousands of dollars a week for a private security guard and highly trained dogs to deter youth criminals, accusing the government of doing “jack shit”.
Since taking neighbourhood safety into their own hands from mid-November 2023, they say the incidence of crime has dropped by up to 80 per cent.
A young father – who said he set-up the community effort after a Sherwood mother of three had her house broken into allegedly by juveniles wielding machetes – said the government and the courts’ response to youth crime was an “absolute joke”.
“The government is doing jack shit and people are fed up and scared,” he said.
“Once we started this and saw how much was going on, it was like, ‘holy shit, this is out of control’.
It comes as Premier Steven Miles said he wasn’t surprised by alarming findings in a poll commissioned by The Courier-Mail showing 45 per cent of Queenslanders don’t feel safe in their home or community.
“I know what that poll was telling us because I talk to Queenslanders and they have been saying the same thing to me,” Mr Miles said.
But the Sherwood father said it was clear the Premier wasn’t listening.
“The problem is getting worse but it is falling on deaf ears,” he said.
“It’s not the police’s fault, but we are refusing to stick our heads in the sand – only fools believe they won’t eventually become a target of youth crime.
“Every single night and early morning there is something happening, whether it’s groups of kids in dark clothing on foot or cars with lights dimmed and driving slowly scoping places out.”
The man, who has joined some patrols, receives daily reports from Walker Security, run by ex-army reservist Dan Walker, then passes updates to among 30 families each paying up to $100 per week for the service.
Mr Walker travels in a vehicle painted camo-style and with high-vis reflective white signage and spotlights – accompanied by one of three trained protection dogs, Dutch shepherd Xee or Belgian Malinois Mercy and Captain.
His texts include times and sightings such as this, on February 19: 0200: 5 x males in their teens, headed into park after seeing me; and this, on February 18: 2310: sedan turned around and left after seeing me on Laurel Ave.
Mr Walker said the crime statistics didn’t lie. “Houses were getting broken into left, right and centre but this is now becoming almost non-existent when I’m on duty,” he said.
“My high-vis vehicle lights up the whole countryside and as soon as the teens see it they bugger off – we don’t want to go hands on, we aim to be preventive, but I am more than willing to deal with a situation if it presents itself.
“Hence why I have the dogs, they will bite and hold if they have to.”
In Chelmer, where the median price for a four-bedroom home is $1.95m, figures from the Queensland Police Service online crime map show the number of offences reported in January and February are the lowest since November 2023.
In Graceville and Sherwood, February figures are the lowest compared with any month last year.
The Premier met with his Cabinet in Ipswich on Monday as community calls grow for increased police presence at the Redbank Plains Town Square shopping centre where grandmother Vyleen White was allegedly murdered.
“They have been concerned about community safety, especially concerned in the wake of that awful murder we saw at Redbank Plains just a couple of weeks ago,” Mr Miles said.
“I don’t think those survey results (of The Courier-Mail poll) are surprising.
“You’ll know that we’ve heard that message just by how much we’ve been focused on community safety, how much we’ve been talking about community safety.
“It’s my job to work with the police to rebuild that sense of community safety and that’s absolutely what we’re focused on.”
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19 February, 2024
Move to rename Magnetic Island National Park to Indigenous name, Yunbenun
Why are our names not good enough? Why must they be renamed to please a tiny minority? Does it in fact please anybody? Our names are easier to remember, for a start. All the change achieves is for Leftists to look good in their own eyes. It also deflects attention from history and its lessons. History tends to discredit what passes for ideas among the Left so they avoid it like the plague
A push by the Queensland Government to rename Magnetic Island’s iconic national park to an Indigenous name has been slammed as a ‘meaningless gesture’ by angry residents.
The Department of Environment, Science and Innovation (DESI) is proposing to change the name of Magnetic Island National Park to Yunbenun in a nod to traditional owners.
Yunbenun — pronounced Yuhn-beh-nin — is the preferred name for the island by the Wulgurukaba, or the ‘canoe people.’
It’s understood the proposed renaming relates to the national park only, not the name of the island itself, but many residents fear it’s only a matter of time before that changes too.
It comes after the state government reinstated Fraser Island’s Indigenous name, K’gari, in 2023.
Magnetic Island resident and writer Mary Vernon anticipates a massive local backlash to the renaming. “A lot of people are concerned about it because it’s just a meaningless gesture really,” she said.
“I think people are also worried about where it might lead and the possibility of renaming the entire island.
“I know there’s a group of people on the island who are very keen for it to be renamed, but they don’t represent the majority.”
In a statement, DESI said the proposed change to the name of the national park “recognises the rich cultural history of the area and the ongoing, deep connection to the island for the Wulgurukaba people.”
“DESI has recently unveiled an updated management statement for the national park, which outlines strategic directions for conserving key natural social and cultural values of the World Heritage Area,” it said.
“This includes Wulgurukaba cultural sites and places as well as the heritage-listed World War II fort complex, significant vine thickets and the iconic hoop pine of Magnetic Island.”
The public is invited to have their say on the proposed renaming of the national park between now and 5pm on April 19.
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#MeToo has driven young men into an opposing stance of bullish conservatism
Feminism has driven men and women apart -- a loss for both
We have a problem. As a species. Particularly in the western world. An ideological divide is opening up in many countries that goes to the heart of the human race, the future of us. It is a problematic divide between girls and boys, a widening philosophical gap in terms of aspiration/outlook that’s having impacts in many arenas. Not least in our high schools.
Recent research shows that girls are becoming more progressive; boys, more conservative. The rift is demonstrated in a study from the Gallup Poll Social Series, which shows that political ideology for females aged 18-29 in countries such as the US, Germany, the UK and South Korea is veering towards a small-l liberal ideology, but boys, in opposition, are cleaving to conservatism.
So, Gen Z is split. Two separate worlds. Of increasingly aware girls not afraid to call it out, and frustrated boys trying to deal with the new voices roaring at them. What will the future be, for all of them, together? How will these findings affect marriage rates, birth trends, the politics of the schoolyard, workplace relations, societal harmony? The new dynamic is already being demonstrated in elections here – the rise of the Teals was thanks in large part to women. The trend will continue as females search for representatives who understand them, listen.
And ahead, an even more dramatically cleaved society. I watch, perturbed, feeling for both sides. The impetus for the girls is towards fairness and equality; a move away from subservience. A natural step for the educated, and why the Taliban wants to stop females from being educated at all. Ignorance keeps the female subjugated, in servitude to the male; it removes the threat of women with a voice.
The impetus for boys, understandably, is to preserve what they had. Which was power and control, for millennia. My heart goes out to males because so many are hurting, raging, lost. Imagine it. A person born to be at the top of the tree, who has expected this all their childhood, and who steps into adulthood wanting this cosy arrangement to continue. But girls are now digging in their heels, saying enough, we want those chances too. Life’s been unfair for usfor a very long time, and we’re just as competent.
Why all this now, so fractiously? A theory. The very loud #MeToo movement, which galvanised young women, has driven young men into an opposing stance of bullish conservatism. We all have to work through it, with compassion and sensitivity, until equality is normalised and young males don’t see this new way of being as a threat. But it will take many years. Generations.
What we have now is the fulcrum, the tipping point. Boys flinching into conservatism, into what’s been comfortable and known throughout history; conservatism by nature means a cleaving to traditional models, the status quo. Progressivism is about social reform. Embracing it, facilitating it. Which is where a lot of educated young women are now and there’s no going back from it. #MeToo and the first and second wave feminist movements before it are exploding the parameters that kept females in their place.
Meanwhile boys and girls retreat into their siloed worlds online, with little crossover. There’s a lack of tolerance for the “other” on both sides, a scorning and sneering at these divergent environments. Some boys find their Andrew Tates to cling to, while for girls the messaging all around them is that they can now be anything, do anything, and as well as the boys. Female teens are unstoppable and school boys have to concede some of their traditional power. But it’s messy. I feel for teachers in co-ed high schools right now, the cauldrons of this vast societal shift. What’s needed, urgently, is empathy and understanding. From both sides.
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Company has a $2bn pipeline of retirement living projects, but says it’s being stymied by red tape
The boss of EQT-backed retirement living provider Levande says the sector can play a central role in easing the country’s housing shortage, but onerous planning regimes in some states and hefty foreign investment charges in others are delaying much-needed investment in new developments.
Kevin McCoy, who took over as Levande chief executive a year ago, said the retirement sector itself was facing a ballooning shortage of units, and fast-tracking development would help to ease that shortage, while also releasing more homes into the general housing supply.
The Levande brand was created by Sweden-based investment firm EQT after it acquired Stockland’s retirement living business for $987m in 2022.
Mr McCoy said EQT was looking to spend up to $2bn on new developments and redevelopments of existing sites over the next five to 10 years as it looked to cater to the rising number of Australian baby boomers reaching retirement.
He said EQT would ramp up its investment in Australia over the next five years, by which time it hoped to deliver up to 800 new retirement units annually.
But several obstacles currently stood in the way, he said, including lengthy development approval processes in some states and foreign investment surcharges in states including South Australia and NSW.
“We think retirement living is perfectly placed as a product to tackle both availability and affordability,” he said.
“One of the biggest challenges is the amount of time it takes to get through development planning, getting bogged down in councils – in the construction of a village the longest period of time is spent on getting the planning permission.
“This is a system-wide problem and so I think we should look at solutions where all housing development can get a bit more nimble.”
Levande has a target of acquiring 20 new development sites within the next three years, following its first land acquisition earlier this month, when it snapped up a 1.75ha site in Bentleigh East, in Melbourne’s southeast, where it plans to build a new retirement community for around 400 residents.
Mr McCoy, who spent 10 years at Australian Unity before joining Levande, said a mix of infill and greenfield developments formed part of Levande’s aggressive expansion plan, as well as redevelopments of some of the 58 villages in its portfolio, which currently had an occupancy rate of about 95 per cent.
“Pretty central to it (strategy) is development, and in five to six years time we’d want to be bringing 500 to 800 units onto the market every year,” he said.
“The demographics are going the industry’s way. If you think of market penetration in Australia – about 8 or 9 per cent of people turning 75 are likely to choose retirement living as the setting for their next 10, 15, 20 years.
“If you think of the people turning 75 every week as the baby boomers come through, that’s growing exponentially, and so even if market penetration holds, that demand is going to go increasingly higher.
“And because there’s been a lag in construction for quite a few years, particularly around that Covid time, there’s a shortage of product.
“EQT has looked at the theme of ageing, and looked at the opportunity to invest, looked at the demographics in Australia, the product of retirement living, quite a big market take-up and that’s what they’ve invested in.”
Other projects in Levande’s pipeline include a $200m, 28-storey vertical retirement village and aged care facility currently under construction in Epping, in Sydney’s northwest.
Redevelopments of existing sites are also part of the expansion plan, while 10 villages have been earmarked for a complete knock down and rebuild, including three projects in Melbourne and Sydney that are in advanced stages of planning.
In Adelaide, Levande is considering investing up to $100m to convert a disused six-storey aged care facility at its Somerton Park site into retirement apartments.
Levande owns 11 retirement villages in South Australia, and is currently running the rule over three additional development sites in the state.
However, Mr McCoy said foreign investor surcharges on residential land and property purchases in SA and NSW made projects in those two states a little harder to stack up.
“Because we’re foreign owned we have to effectively pay double stamp duty on anything,” he said.
“We’re trying to work with policy makers and governments and treasuries on that.”
Recent figures released by the Retirement Living council suggest the sector is heading towards a 49,000 shortage of units by 2030.
Retirement Living Council executive director Daniel Gannon said it was important the federal government recognised the role retirement living could play in its ambitious housing plan, given Housing Industry Association forecasts that suggest the government’s promise to build 1.2 million new homes in five years is on track to fall short by 200,000 without radical policy reforms.
“Between now and 2030 the retirement industry requires 67,000 homes to be built to meet existing levels of demand from older Australians, with only 18,000 currently in the planning pipeline,” he said.
“These 67,000 homes would represent 34 per cent of the gap identified by the HIA, meaning retirement communities can help the government solve Australia’s housing supply problem.
“There are currently 2 million Australians over the age of 75, a cohort which is set to increase to 3.4 million by 2024. This demographic shift will cause further pressure on housing supply, healthcare systems and an already struggling aged care sector.”
The Retirement Living Council is also calling on state governments to set minimum land allocations for retirement communities in greenfield and master-planned developments, in a similar way to social and affordable housing targets.
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Doctors fearful as rising psychosis cases linked to medical cannabis
Years ago I knew some people who used pot a lot. Eventually they seemed switched off most of the time
A shocking numbers of patients who have never had a mental health problem in their lives are turning up to hospitals with psychosis after being prescribed popular “cure all” medical cannabis, psychiatrists warn.
And half of those patients are at risk of ending up with serious, lifelong conditions like schizophrenia.
In an extraordinary move, a Brisbane public hospital doctor has broken the silence on a disturbing trend showing an upswing in patients presenting with psychosis after recently being prescribed medical cannabis.
Research from Associate Professor Stephen Parker, psychiatrist and clinical lead at the Metro North Hospital and Health Service’s early psychosis service shows one in 10 people referred to his services at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital and Prince Charles Hospital for support had been prescribed medical cannabis in the three months prior, for issues like anxiety.
The doctor said that the public perception of medical cannabis production as a harmless panacea is understandable due to extensive marketing but the risks are under-recognised.
“Over the last 18 months I have seen more and more young people on a great life trajectory suddenly finding that their lives are falling apart after being prescribed high-dose cannabis,” he said.
The most common cannabinoids found in the cannabis plant are tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). THC is psychoactive, while CBD interacts with the immune and nervous systems.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Queensland Chair Professor Brett Emmerson is so concerned by emerging surges in psychosis cases he is calling for a ban on products that contain tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which can lead to psychosis.
And the Australian Medical Association Queensland is demanding that the Therapeutic Goods Administration launches an urgent review into all medical cannabis products.
Professor Emmerson told The Sunday Mail that the problem is statewide and the college has waved the red flag “to every possible medical board”.
“When medical cannabis was first available it was for childhood epilepsy or pain from cancer now it’s regularly used for insomnia or anxiety when there are much better ways to treat these conditions. Now there are a large number of products available that have high levels of THC,” he said.
“I believe that a number of GP prescribers are being investigated by the Health Ombudsman,” Prof Emmerson said.
Medical cannabis dispensaries have become increasingly accessible via brief web consultations or via self-assessment of pre-existing conditions
AMAQ chief Maria Boulton said that members have been worried about the regulatory controls over the medical cannabis market for some time and have raised the issue with the chief health officer.
Medical cannabis was legalised in the state in 2016 and demand has soared. There are over 700 different products on the market with oils, tablets, lozenges and creams.
Dr Boulton said that there’s no evidence that medical cannabis is effective for some of the conditions it is being prescribed for and the effect on patients with some psychotic illnesses can be severe.
“We need the federal and state governments to work together, as the current controls do not appear to be working to prevent harm. We need federal action from the TGA to review these products,” she said.
A TGA spokesperson warned “the majority of medicinal cannabis products supplied in Australia are ‘unapproved’ medicines”.
“It is important to note that the nature of unapproved medicines is that the TGA has not evaluated them for safety, quality or effectiveness,” the spokesperson said.
Dr Laurence Kemp, Medical Lead for medical cannabis clinic Cann I Help said that there is a risk with medical cannabis with high levels of THC but it was the duty of the prescribing doctor to properly assess the correct levels for patients and also assess patients who may be susceptible to psychosis.
“Patient selection for medical cannabis is very important and there must be robust follow up arrangements. Some people do better with the CBD element in the cannabis. It is not something that is the same across the board for everyone,” he said.
The expert said that the black market for medical cannabis was bigger than the medical market and that was a real concern.
“We mostly prescribe for conditions like muscular pain, anxiety and insomnia and people can get some great results,” he said.
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18 February, 2024
Hundreds more immigration detainees could be released in sequel to NZYQ high court ruling
The Albanese government has asked the high court to rule on a major case that could extend the NZYQ ruling on indefinite detention to release hundreds more long-term detainees, including refugees and asylum seekers.
At stake is whether people in immigration detention must be released if their refusal to cooperate has prevented them being deported.
The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has applied to remove a federal court appeal and have it heard by the high court to settle the legal uncertainty. The commonwealth will argue for the right to continue detaining those who refuse to cooperate.
In November, the high court unanimously ruled that immigration detention is unlawful where there is “no real prospect” of it becoming practical to deport the person “in the reasonably foreseeable future”.
In that case the solicitor general, Stephen Donaghue, had warned that up to 340 people in long-term detention may have to be released as a result. So far 149 people have been released.
Many of the remainder have been kept in detention because the government’s legal advice states the NZYQ decision does not require their release if deportation is being frustrated by a lack of cooperation, such as refusing to meet government officials from their country of origin or obtaining a travel document.
The federal court has issued contradictory judgments on that point, ordering the release of Ned Kelly Emeralds on 30 November but refusing release in the case of a plaintiff known by the pseudonym ASF17.
In both cases the government argued deportation had been frustrated – in ASF17’s case because he refused to meet with Iranian authorities to get travel documents.
According to the judgment of Justice Craig Colvin on 11 January, ASF17 submitted that he had “no obligation to cooperate and that he has good reasons for not” doing so.
ASF17 had said he “fears for his life if he is removed to Iran” because he is bisexual, Christian, a Faili Kurd and because he had opposed “the mistreatment of women by the government in Iran”.
Colvin ruled that ASF17’s continued detention was lawful, refusing his application to be released.
“Where ongoing detention is to arrange removal from Australia as soon as practicable, that lawful purpose is served for so long as there is a practicable way that the person may be removed, even if it requires cooperation from the detainee for it to be achieved,” he said.
ASF17’s lawyers signalled an intention to appeal to the full federal court, prompting Dreyfus to apply on Thursday to have the matter removed to the high court for final determination.
On Thursday the Coalition targeted the immigration minister, Andrew Giles, for a fourth straight day in question time over the handling of the NZYQ court case and subsequent releases from immigration detention.
The Coalition’s attacks have been fuelled by documents tabled in Senate estimates detailing the criminal offending of those released, and the fact that seven have been charged with breach of visa conditions and 18 with breach of state or territory offences since release.
In an unsuccessful motion to suspend standing orders on Wednesday, the opposition leader Peter Dutton accused Giles of “failing to know where released detainee criminals are”.
In question time on Wednesday and Thursday, Giles said that “the location of every individual in this cohort is known” because they are “continuously monitored” through conditions including ankle bracelets or a requirement to report their address to authorities.
He cited evidence from the Australian federal police at Senate estimates that there wasn’t “any difficulty knowing where they are”.
Dutton’s motion called on “the prime minister to dismiss this incompetent minister who has proven entirely inadequate to the task of keeping Australians safe” – reiterating a demand he made in November. The motion was defeated 87 to 53.
Earlier on Wednesday the leader of the house, Tony Burke, said the Coalition’s question time tactics were designed to avoid talking about the fact the “the government is making sure that people earn more and keep more of what they earn in tax reform”.
Burke said “of course” Giles retains his and the prime minister’s confidence, describing Giles “a serious immigration lawyer looking after these issues”.
In response to the motion, the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, noted Dutton had lifted a bar to allow NZYQ, the original high court plaintiff, to apply for a visa and had failed to deport him.
On Thursday Dutton continued to call for Giles’ resignation over his handling of the NZYQ case.
“You need somebody who can make tough decisions and can act in our national interest and keep Australians safe,” Dutton told 2GB Radio.
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The lost presunption of innocence
In a sweltering, steamy Queensland summer, strange things happen when it gets too hot to handle. Violent crime was the front page of the Brisbane Courier Mail as the city was rocked by the senseless murder of a grandmother, allegedly by a 16-year-old on bail for a number of alleged offences. Several members of the Queensland Police were calling for tougher measures:
‘Legislation must be introduced to remove the offenders from society in the interests of community safety. It can’t go on…’
Yet the main headline could not have been more revealing in terms of the corollary to the Queensland Police position.
In one example, a woman was held in detention for 6 years without trial or conviction, while the Crown alleged she had overdosed her child with drugs in a smoothie. The Judge took the unusual step to instruct the jury that the prosecution case relied on the evidence of another child who was ‘mentally compromised’, allegedly had a motivation to lie about her mother, and had given inconsistent testimony.
When your only tool is a hammer, everything starts looks like a nail. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 15,182 prisoners are held in Australian jails were on remand, held without trial or a conviction. That’s an annual increase of 16 per cent and represents 37 per cent of the entire prison population. In this respect Australia is following a trend in the USA where in some counties up to 90 per cent of prisoners are pretrial detainees, often unable to afford their bail.
Australia has imported and implemented American-style tribunals, where the normal rules of evidence don’t apply and power is ultimately left in the hands of the judge or magistrate to make a determination, based on the ‘balance of probabilities’. Often this leads to a reversal in the onus of proof, where the accused has to prove his or her innocence, rather than the prosecution proving guilt.
According to the Australian Attorney-General’s Department:
‘Some laws, commonly called reverse onus provisions, shift the burden of proof to the accused or apply a presumption of fact or law operating against the accused. Under international human rights law, a reverse onus provision will not necessarily violate the presumption of innocence provided that the law is not unreasonable in the circumstances and maintains the rights of the accused. The purpose of the reverse onus provision would be important in determining its justification. Such a provision may be justified if the nature of the offence makes it very difficult for the prosecution to prove each element, or if it is clearly more practical for the accused to prove a fact than for the prosecution to disprove it.’
In 2023 there were 193 homicides in Australia, meaning 79 individuals were held in detention without trial or conviction for every 1 murder. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, 50 per cent of suicide victims were on remand at the time of their suicide. Suicide is the leading cause of death in Australia under the age of 45 and in 2023 there were 798 deaths from suicide according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
This means of the 15,000 or more individuals held in Australian jails without trial or conviction, 400 are likely to die from suicide. Twice as many individuals held in remand will die from suicide as a result of their experience as there are murders in the entirety of Australia. A person is 41 times more likely to die from his or her own hand than from an intimate partner. Sometimes we have to ask whether the cure is worse than the disease? Sometimes a bigger hammer is not the answer.
In Australia, over 90 per cent of prisoners are male and evidence shows that children with absentee fathers are 3 times more likely to commit crime and to spend time in jail themselves. In Queensland every year there are twice as many Domestic Violence Orders (DVO) issued than there are male births. There are also more than twice as many DVOs issued than there are marriages. Since the introduction of the new legislation in 2012 the number of DVO violations has increased from around 65 per cent to over 95 per cent. A DVO violation potentially constitutes a criminal act and often fathers desperate to see their children unwittingly end up with a criminal conviction through such a violation. Even an innocuous inquiry about whether a rates bill has been paid may constitute a criminal act under the legislation. Normal behaviour is becoming increasingly criminalised.
Queensland has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, with many prisoners being held in private jails owned by large multinational corporations from the UK and the USA returning multi-billion dollar returns. Young men are voting with their feet with almost a third choosing to remain single. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how the institution of marriage, our cultural bedrock for more than 2,000 years, can survive such weight of legislative scrutiny. The exercise of coercive control is ubiquitous in our increasingly bureaucratised society, yet it is in only in coupled relationships that it is deemed to be a criminal offence requiring extensive jail time.
Whilst the principle of the presumption has been sacrificed on the altar of ‘absolute safetyism’, there has been no reduction in intimate partner homicide in Queensland, no change in the incidence domestic violence, but a surge in prisoners held on remand without conviction and an unprecedented surge in youth crime throughout the state. There is a sense that the current system is exacerbating crime, if not entrenching the problem. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that individuals held in remand become increasingly likely to commit crimes, particularly sexual offences.
The corrosive abrogation of the principle of the presumption of innocence has been relentless so that today it effectively only applies at criminal trial. The consequence for society is the erosion of our democratic rights and freedoms. Where we once believed we elected government to serve its people, it is clear that government regards its entire people as potential criminals. Just as the onus of guilt has reversed, so too has the position of government to its people.
The vast majority of detainees accept criminal charges simply to get out of the system. Most buckle despite their innocence and accept a charge in return for ‘leniency’. In the current system it serves no purpose to expedite or resolve matters until the 11th hour because there are no pressures on the police to do so. Quite the contrary, exoneration poses a media hazard. Recently in New South Wales an innocent individual was awarded $150,000 costs by a judge after he had been held in pretrial detention for 18 months without bail.
In a rapidly changing world, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand what actually constitutes a crime. As in medicine the number of diagnosis in the DSM catalogue of disease has increased inexorably over the years, so too the legislative burden expands relentlessly so that the space that remains in which to retain a normal life is becoming increasingly confined. To quote Martin Luther King:
‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-presumption-of-guilt/
******************************************************University chiefs lecture schools on maths and science teaching
University chiefs have caned schools for failing to prepare “Zoomers” for tertiary education, with domestic enrolments diving 10 per cent as Gen Z teenagers shun study for gap years, jobs and travel.
As the Albanese government prepares to launch its landmark Universities Accord reforms, cash-strapped universities are demanding more financial assistance for students struggling to pay the rent during a cost of living crisis that is pushing poorer teenagers straight from school into the workforce.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott – a former teacher and director-general of the NSW Education Department – said schools were struggling with a shortage of maths and science teachers to prepare teenagers for university.
“Students at some schools are being discouraged from attempting that more demanding maths, perhaps not linked to the ability of the student, but more the availability of staff,’’ he said.
“There’s a chronic, entrenched shortage of mathematics teachers around the country now. I think the true shortage is often concealed because … there are plenty of PE (physical education) teachers who are being retrained in maths to just try and get a qualified teacher in front of the class.’’
Professor Scott said universities might need to offer more summer schools and intensive tutoring to get school leavers “up to speed’’ for university degrees.
“We are increasingly concerned, as we target students from low SES (socio-economic) backgrounds, that they are not getting the opportunity to study maths at a level that has been an important prerequisite for entry to some of our courses,’’ he said.
“There are a range of courses, from economics and business to science and engineering, that have required maths prerequisites, that we can see fewer and fewer students reaching because fewer students are doing maths at that advanced level.’’
Australian National University deputy vice-chancellor Grady Venville, a former high school teacher, said schools must ensure more students were taught maths and science at the highest level.
“We’ve got kids coming right through from primary school and falling behind, and when they get to high school … they’re often not encouraged or supported to do the higher level mathematics,’’ Professor Venville said.
“We don’t have enough highly qualified maths teaching staff (in schools), so that means it’s easier for the school to encourage the students to do an easier maths. What that does is narrow down the pipeline of students who can go into things like physics or engineering, pure mathematics and even our science subjects.’’
Professor Scott said his sandstone university – renowned for its medicine and engineering faculties – was considering removing the prerequisite for advanced high school mathematics for some degrees. “We wouldn’t be decreasing the standards for our programs, but providing more help for students … without watering down our courses,’’ he said.
“Perhaps more summer programs, more introductory programs, where the university takes on a greater responsibility to get students up to speed.’’
Professor Scott said the high cost of living was discouraging students from enrolling at university, or studying full-time.
He said the University of Sydney was lobbying the NSW government to grant it social housing development concessions to build more student accommodation.
“When I was a student here in the 1980s, some of the cheapest accommodation anywhere in the Greater Sydney area was surrounding the university,’’ he said.
“You could live cheaply in Glebe and Redfern and Newtown in a way that is often not possible now at all. We’re talking to our alumni about making more scholarships available that provide accommodation support.’’
Professor Venville said university students were taking longer to finish degrees as they juggle study with part-time work or travel. She said Gen-Zs, known as “Zoomers’’, seemed less mature than previous generations of university students and were keen to take a “gap year’’ after school.
In Brisbane, Griffith University vice-chancellor Carolyn Evans said schools were encouraging too many students to take vocational subjects, rather than the more difficult academic subjects.
“(This) means perhaps not as many people are as well prepared for university as they used to be,’’ Professor Evans said. “We’re quite concerned about the decline in the number of students taking high-level maths and some of the harder science subjects. There are a lot of applied subjects being done at school level, which are appropriate for some students. But they don’t necessarily get a really strong foundation to go on and do some of the things that we critically need in this country … like engineering, medicine and some of the health disciplines.”
Professor Scott noted that teenagers were dropping out of high school at the highest rate in 30 years. In public schools, 26.4 per cent of high school students had left before finishing Year 12 last year – up from 17 per cent in 2018, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed this week.
The latest federal Education Department data shows the number of students starting a degree fell 10.4 per cent last year to a nine-year low. First-year enrolments by domestic students fell 5.5 per cent between 2018 and 2022 – a trend that is sabotaging the federal government’s ambition to increase student numbers by one-third, to 1.2 million, over the next decade.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said skilling school-leavers for work was “not just the job of universities’’. “We need more people to finish school,’’ he said. “We need to fully fund all schools and tie that money to the reforms that will help kids who fall behind to catch up, keep up and finish school and then be able to go to TAFE or university.’’
Mr Clare said that “going to university opened up opportunities and makes you money’’.
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Nickel isn’t worth a brass razoo without fossil fuel
There is an under-reported and avoidable economic tragedy occurring in our nation’s west.
Already 1000 nickel miners have lost their jobs and another 3000 face the same sad fate after BHP announced this week it may mothball its entire Nickel West operations. Many more small businesses and workers in the town of Kambalda (600km east of Perth) face economic ruin too.
These hardworking Australians should not be losing their jobs or businesses. But thanks to the ineptitude, naivety and cowardice of our mining and political leaders we risk losing an entire Australian industry to Indonesia.
Nickel West is one of the crowning achievements of our nation’s pioneers. In the 1960s, an Estonian migrant to Australia, Sir Arvi Parbo, achieved a superhuman feat. In just 18 months he and his team at the Western Mining Corporation built a mine, a refinery, a rail line and a town, and delivered nickel concentrate to Japan. Parbo’s team had to work fast because the ’60s boom in nickel prices was short-lived as nickel supplies from around the world competed to meet booming demand for stainless steel.
Under our Byzantine mining regulations we would not have finished counting the trees for the compulsory environmental survey in 18 months. Indeed, in later life Parbo said he would never have built his nickel mine under today’s regulatory conditions.
As in the ’60s, there has been a boom in nickel prices in the past few years, this time driven by electric vehicles (nickel is used in the batteries). BHP chief executive Mike Henry told the Financial Times in 2021 he wanted to weight “the portfolio towards future-facing commodities like potash, copper and nickel”.
Australia and Indonesia have the largest nickel reserves. BHP backed Australian nickel because Indonesia’s laterite reserves have lower nickel content and hence take more energy to extract. In BHP’s imagined brave new green world, climate-conscious customers were going to prefer to drive an EV – filled with Australian clean, green nickel – to their next Extinction Rebellion protest. BHP’s assessment looked safe when Indonesia signed up to net-zero emissions at the Glasgow climate conference in late 2021.
Indonesia then increased its use of coal by an astounding 32 per cent the year after Glasgow, enough coal to power five large coal-fired power stations. The International Energy Agency recently noted Indonesian “nickel production has become an important driver of coal demand”. Indonesia increased nickel production at an annual rate of more than 50 per cent last year. Prabowo Subianto, who claimed victory in Indonesia’s presidential election this week, has promised to continue the nickel policies of Joko Widodo’s government, and even expand them to bauxite and copper.
It is embarrassing that our corporate leaders could be so hoodwinked by the cheap talk at a climate conference. Thousands of Australians will lose their jobs because Indonesia builds coal-fired power stations and we do not.
That makes our political leaders complicit in this shambles too. Our state and federal governments sit back and let other countries take us for mugs. Other countries go nowhere near meeting their climate commitments while we honour them to the letter. We are losing our manufacturing industry thanks to the net-zero mind virus that deludes people into acting as if Australia alone can change the globe’s temperature.
To rub salt into this wound, the Labor government imposed a carbon tax on Australian nickel in July last year (the so-called safeguard mechanism). It may be too late to save Australian nickel jobs but the least Labor could do would be to belatedly exempt the Australian nickel industry from its carbon tax. I, and some of my Liberal and Nationals colleagues, have written to the Resources Minister asking her to do this immediately.
On coming to government, the Labor Party focused its mining policy on so-called critical (or strategic) minerals, which includes nickel. Labor has done nothing to attract new coal, oil or gas investment (even though these make up more than half of our mining exports). The (now broken) Labor promise to workers in fossil fuel industries was that it was OK if you lost your jobs because there would be lots of other jobs in nickel and other critical mineral industries.
As resources minister in 2019, I developed the nation’s first critical minerals strategy and signed the first agreement with the US on critical minerals. We should develop these industries, but we should not develop them at the expense of our coal, oil and gas sectors. And we won’t develop critical minerals, in any case, if we do not have affordable and reliable energy supplies. Mining (especially critical minerals mining) requires a lot of energy.
There is a reason BHP is not proposing to keep Nickel West open by converting all of its power needs to wind, solar and batteries. That is because renewable energy is not cheaper than coal-fired power. All the spin that “renewable energy is the cheapest form of power” just had a real-world test and it failed miserably.
The Labor government’s “all eggs in one basket” mining policy has been an abject failure. Even the Biden administration ignores its climate promises. Last year the US hit a record level of oil production and it is doubling its liquefied natural gas capacity across the next five years. Last year the US overtook Australia as the largest LNG exporter. The US was smart enough to take advantage of high oil and gas prices post the Ukraine war to attract investment. This Labor government has pushed away gas investors by imposing draconian price controls and red tape.
If the Australian government instead had rolled out the red carpet for gas, at least the retrenched nickel miners might have some other jobs to go to in Western Australia. Unfortunately, as gas prices fall we have missed the (LNG) boat. Lithium, the other great critical minerals hope, is also facing a slump in prices.
The worst sin that has caused this mess is cowardice. Many of our corporate and political elite know how mad our net-zero goal is. But few will say so publicly. They are worried they will lose their jobs, even though their cowardice will cost the jobs of many others.
The least the bosses could do would be to go at the same time as they lay off thousands of their workers. That would be the honourable thing to do rather than making their own workers pay the price for their errors. That would also deliver some accountability to ensure that our next leaders are more Arvi Parbo than Anthony Albanese.
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15 February, 2024
Finance guru Mark Bouris’s radical solution to housing crisis
This is a reasonable proposal but will not address the supply/demand imbalance. It would probably send prices higher
Don’t expect the housing situation to get better any time soon. We have massive demand – fuelled by record population growth. We have low supply.
The latest figures show that housing approvals have fallen to a decade low. The number of loans to build or buy a new home have crashed to record lows. Construction companies are going broke practically daily.
I don’t see any genuine solutions being tabled.
In fact, the only thing our politicians seem capable of doing is spruiking pie-in-the-sky housing targets … that I suspect even they know we’ll never meet.
What we need are practical solutions.
Reducing immigration to 100,000 people a year (instead of 500,000 a year) should be step one. But I think we keep international students. They are a huge export for us in the education area. This is obvious.
Reduce demand overall, rents go down. It’s as simple as that.
But that doesn’t help mortgage holders. They still have massive mortgages.
They’re now paying off their mortgages at much higher interest rates. As a result, they’ve shut their wallets. And this is hurting the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on them to spend.
So here’s a proposal: make interest payments on mortgages tax deductible.
Hear me out.
Let’s say you owe $500,000 on your mortgage. Let’s also say your interest rate is 7.0 per cent. That means each month you’d be paying just over $2900 in interest alone.
Now imagine you’re in the United States.
Over there, this $2900 monthly interest payment would be tax deductible.
Yes, you read that correctly.
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, mortgage holders get a “home mortgage interest deduction” that allows them to deduct interest paid on up to US$750,000 of their home loan principal.
The deduction only applies to home loans on a primary place of residence. Fair enough.
So why don’t Australians get the same benefit?
If it’s good enough for the Americans, surely it’s good enough for us too?
The PM could pass legislation on this next week.
Sure, you’d have the boffins at Treasury lose their minds over this proposal.
They’d say the tax offset would take too much money out of Canberra’s coffers.
But I’d rather the money be in the hands of mortgage holders who can spend it at local businesses, invest it in good companies and save for a rainy day … instead of having it in under the control of Canberra-based politicians and bureaucrats.
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More Sydney parents than ever opt for private schools
Many government schools are so dire that you can't blame them
The state’s private schools are enrolling more students than at any time on record despite soaring cost-of-living pressures and fee hikes that have pushed tuition costs above $40,000 a year at numerous Sydney private schools.
Official data released on Wednesday shows the proportion of students enrolled in NSW public schools has fallen for the fifth year running, dropping to 62.9 per cent in 2023. It is the lowest share of students attending state schools in the past two decades of reporting.
The exodus from public schools in NSW is being driven in part by the establishment of low-fee private schools in Sydney’s north- and south-west growth corridors, where the construction of new public schools over the past decade has failed to keep pace with population growth.
Most other states and territories have experienced a similar trend, the figures released by Australian Bureau of Statistics show.
In NSW, 785,847 students were enrolled in public schools last year, 267,253 in Catholic schools and 195,356 in private schools. The proportion attending private and Catholic high schools is approaching half of all secondary students, rising to 43 per cent last year.
University of Sydney education researcher Helen Proctor said the issues public schools faced were widely publicised, such as teacher shortages, which could be contributing to parents considering private options.
“There has been a long-term disparagement of public schools, there’s been many people talking them down,” Proctor said. “It is very hard for public school leaders. If they don’t talk about the crisis and the resources, how are they going to get anything done? On the other hand, if parents hear about teacher shortages, they’re naturally going to get very worried.”
A separate snapshot of data provided by the Association of Independent Schools of NSW shows 65,000 students, or 28 per cent of those enrolled in the private system, are attending a school that charges $20,000 or more.
About 60,000 pupils, or a quarter of all those enrolled in the private system, attend a school with fees below $5000 a year. Another 72,000 pupils attend a school that charges between $5000 and $10,000.
Between April 2022 and March last year, repayments on a million-dollar mortgage increased by more than $2000 a month. A survey conducted by National Australia Bank in 2022 found one in 10 parents were relying on family members, including grandparents, to pay tuition costs.
Catholic Schools NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney said systemic schools have grown at the fastest rate since 2013. They typically charge up to $3000 a year, with substantial sibling discounts.
“These numbers are a huge vote of confidence from parents because parents know they get quality and affordable education, and that their children thrive in our schools,” McInerney said.
“We provide high job prospects, further study pathways and create great citizens. It’s a massive contribution to society.”
Association of Independent Schools of NSW chief executive Margery Evans said the bulk of the growth in independent schools was in the lower and mid-fee bands under $10,000.
“The main growth has been low and mid-fee schools, many in Sydney’s north-west and south-west growth areas. We’ve also seen increasing numbers in regional schools including in Tweed Heads. These schools are affordable for parents paying off mortgages, and appealing because they are kindergarten to year 12 campuses,” she said.
“There are also almost 20 faiths represented in the independent sector across 350 schools, including Christian, Buddhist, Islamic and Jewish schools. These schools provide an education that reflects parents’ values and beliefs. Forty years ago, there weren’t any Islamic schools. There are (now) 29, with 22,000 students.”
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said over the past five years, NSW has seen the biggest drop in the country when it comes to the share of students in government schools.
“It is no coincidence that we have had 24,000 students leave the public system at the same time the previous Government oversaw a teacher shortage crisis,” she said. “The government is undertaking urgent work to repair the states’ education system, by investing in our teaching workforce and addressing the chronic teacher shortage facing our state.”
Mother Jasmine De Leon chose to send her youngest two children to a local private school, Norwest Christian College, near her home in Quakers Hill, partly because it was a co-educational pre-school to year 12 campus.
“My kids have been going to the same school since they were four years old, and having that pre-kindergarten year was what really interested us,” De Leon said.
“There is also a big sense of community and a structured environment. They also offer smaller classes and a variety of extracurricular subjects.”
She considered having her two children sit the public selective high school test, but after five years at their current school they “had become comfortable and had established strong friendship groups.”
“It’s also at the lower end for private school fees, and it was affordable for us and worth it when considering what the school could offer”.
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Drop Makarrata Commission to avoid further antagonism, says Ken Wyatt
Former Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt has warned Labor against pursuing a Makarrata Commission to oversee truth telling because this would further “antagonise” Australians and stoke division, following the failure of the voice referendum.
The first federal Aboriginal cabinet minister said embedding truth telling in school curriculums – as Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney suggested on Wednesday – would not work in isolation as a means of helping all citizens understand the nation’s history before and since settlement.
“School curriculums alone will not do it,” Mr Wyatt said.
“I wouldn’t go with a Makarrata Commission, not based on the African model. Because in the face of the No vote you don’t want to antagonise. I think the Prime Minister has lost a lot of kudos and ground on the voice failing. His leadership has to have a question mark over it.”
Mr Wyatt has been a long supporter of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart’s call for an Indigenous voice enshrined in the Constitution – followed by treaty and truth telling. He quit the Liberal Party over its position on the referendum.
Ms Burney said on Wednesday she was still talking with communities about the outcomes of the referendum and “what the next steps would be”, but would not put a timeline on truth telling and what that could look like.
“I’m having discussions with the cabinet about that … the issue of truth telling is incredibly important,” she told the ABC.
“There are many, many ways in which that can happen including the school curriculum.
“There’s not a particular model that I’m favouring at the moment … I am very open, as the government is very open, to what it might look like.”
The Australian understands there are no discussions between federal and state governments on implementing truth-telling into curriculums, with the national curriculum not due to be reviewed until 2026-27.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures were already key priorities in the curriculum.
“The Australian curriculum version 9.0 includes a range of additional content that recognises the experiences and perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” a spokesman said. “The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority aims to deepen all students’ understanding of the histories and cultures of First Nations Australians and their knowledge of important aspects of our national history.”
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership acting chief executive Edmund Misson pointed to professional standards that required teachers to demonstrate how they promoted reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the classroom.
Australian Primary Principals’ Association president Angela Falkenberg said enormous strides had been taken in the curriculum over years to embed Indigenous history and culture into teaching and argued truth-telling efforts should be focused on adults.
Kevin Donnelly, who reviewed the curriculum under the Abbott government, said he believed the pendulum had swung too far away from teaching children about Western history and values, detracting from their “national pride” as part of a left-leaning agenda.
Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson echoed Dr Donnelly’s comments, saying: “Classrooms should remain a place for education, not a forum to foster division and activism.”
While Mr Wyatt was a supporter of a constitutionally enshrined voice, as minister he toed the Morrison government’s line and did not pursue the measure. Instead he oversaw work on a legislated voice, resisted calls for a truth commissioner and believed in “organic and evolving truth telling” rather than formal hearings such as take place in the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa.
Mr Wyatt said Labor should commission a series of documentaries through the ABC on Indigenous history and repurpose the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for a couple of years to develop “historical monologues”. He believed the arts, the media, schools and universities all had a role in helping Australians learn the stories of where they live.
“We did a fair bit of work on (truth-telling),” he said. “What I was in the process of bringing together is all of the national bodies that hold records of Indigenous Australians, seeing what they had in their collections including the film archives. I was looking at some of the work out of the frontier wars by Rachel Perkins. And then I was looking at how do we translate that into … not a catalogue, but an understanding of what history we have.”
Mr Wyatt said all of the work he had progressed for truth telling would be available to Ms Burney.
“The National Indigenous Australians Agency would have all of that and I’m surprised they haven’t come forward and said ‘Minister (Burney) the previous minister had us working on this stuff’,” he said.
Voice campaigner Sean Gordon said truth telling could not occur effectively without a regional and local voice model first being set up.
The Greens and independent Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe called on the government not to walk away from Makarrata, treaty and truth telling.
However key architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart did not pushed for national truth-telling hearings during the voice campaign last year.
Instead, Uluru Dialogue co-chair Megan Davis warned against “performative story-telling” led by government.
Professor Davis advocated for local truth telling projects such as the Carrolup Elders Reference Group and its Centre for Truth-telling.
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Diversity must be irrelevant when selecting judges
Right now, nobody knows the religious or racial breakdown of the federal judiciary. And in the age of doxxing, that is how it should stay.
As the Jewish community has learned, there is no shortage of racist ratbags in this country who are prepared to single out people for malicious mischief based on their race or religion.
This is why the federal government needs to be very careful about its proposal to start collecting statistics on the “diversity” of the judiciary.
The only possible reason for collecting data on the ethnic or religious background of judges would be to use it as a benchmark for future race-based judicial appointments.
Collecting this data might seem well meaning, but it misconstrues the role of the judiciary, would feed racial division and would inevitably hurt the standing of the very people it is intended to benefit.
At the moment, the community knows that all judicial officers are selected based on their ability to do the job. They are not selected because of their race, religion, sexual orientation or disability.
They are there to do a job of critical importance. They are not there to represent anyone or provide special treatment for those of the same race or religion.
Inherent characteristics such as ethnic background are simply irrelevant to the question of whether candidates for the bench are fit for office.
But it is easy to see how that would change if statistics on judicial diversity were ever introduced.
Politicians would inevitably brag about their successes on this measure, while criticising their opponents who fall short.
Merit might remain the formal criterion for appointment – but in name only.
The commitment to measure judicial diversity was made by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in September 2022 when he accepted in principle a series of recommendations from the Australian Law Reform Commission.
He committed the government to promoting diversity on the bench and introducing what he described as a more transparent process of appointing judges.
This forms the context for this week’s push by the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration to promote diversity and cultural awareness as key considerations in selecting judges.
So with the push for diversity on the bench gathering strength, it is worth considering what sort of selection system would achieve this outcome.
In its 2022 report on judicial impartiality, the Law Reform Commission did not recommend any particular method of selecting new judges.
But that report does single out one proposal which, if enacted, would restrict the discretion of the attorney-general and hand real influence to an advisory panel.
This system would have the effect of imposing a political penalty on any attorney-general who departed from a list of candidates drawn up by an advisory panel.
The composition of the proposed advisory panels would be diversified – “potentially including lay members”.
And if an attorney-general departed from the panel’s short list, a public explanation would be required by law.
Instead of allowing each federal government to choose its own method of selecting judges, the method outlined in the commission’s report would be entrenched by statute.
Compare this to the view of Marilyn Warren, a former chief justice of Victoria. In 2007 she told a conference hosted by the National Judicial College that the predominant experience was that the current appointment system had worked well.
She warned against removing the judgment of the executive branch of government – whose core is the ministry and the Governor-General – and “imposing a mandatory community-based selection model”.
“Transparency for the sake of satisfying modern pursuit of accessibility of process will make the process more open and public but political and, inevitably, controversial. Look at the American experience,” Warren said.
The selection system outlined by the Law Reform Commission seems to come very close to the sort of “bureaucratisation” that has been opposed by Robert French, a former chief justice of the High Court.
In 2017, when French retired from the court, he made it clear he supported the current system in which judicial selection is a matter for the executive.
“The question is, first of all, should that selection process be constrained by a limitation to a number of names put up by some sort of panel? Or should the executive simply have a process by which it receives the best possible advice?” French said.
“I am inclined personally, although there are others who would debate this, not to favour bureaucratisation of the selection process.”
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14 February, 2024
Labor is gearing up to go negative on housing investors
"Negative gearing" enables well-off people to transform more income into capital than might otherwise have been possible. And anything that rich people do is automtically suspect to Leftists.
I used negtive gearing in my time so I know exactly what it is and does. And a major effect of it is to REDUCE rents. By using other income to subsidize my property investments, I was able to accept rents that were too low to cover my mortgages and other debts.
But lower rents seem to be bad if a landlord gets some benefit out of that apparently
It’s a matter of when, and not if, Labor goes after negative gearing.
And it is the “why” that informs this view.
Labor has been historically hostile to negative gearing, and there is no evidence it has collectively changed this view.
On the contrary, the caucus is pushing hard for it.
Voters may have rejected it twice – in 2016 and 2019 when Labor first put its abolition on the table – but that hasn’t softened the party’s devotion to the principle.
Politics has remained the obstacle.
What has changed is the pressure union-dominated industry super funds have been recently applying. The industry super funds are desperate to get their claws into rental stock as a private asset class.
The best way to do that is to get mum and dad investors out of the picture.
If anything, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers’ weasel words over the past week have strengthened the view that Labor is tilling the soil again to have another crack at it, at some point.
The Treasurer’s view on it is implicit in his thesis for the remaking of capitalism. He has made it his mission to leverage the wealth of superannuation to deliver on his remodelling of the economy and its institutions.
Housing is a key part of it. And having union-dominated super funds control the rental stock of the nation – which is 30 per cent of the market – fits neatly into this ideological model.
Industry funds are salivating over it because of the low-risk high-yield equation. As a private asset class, the valuations can also be manipulated.
Corporatising rental stock – quasi-nationalisation – has an obvious political attraction for Labor. The party has held a long-term aversion to mum and dad property investors, a lot of whom wouldn’t vote Labor.
The Greens understand the significance of this. It is less clear, however, why some teal independents – whose constituents are over-represented as wealthy property investors – are supportive.
Either way, this is an issue that will be revisited by Labor at some stage. This is almost a certainty.
Little that has been said over the past week should offer anyone any confidence that Albanese and Chalmers haven’t been working up options.
A question is whether it would be grandfathered – as was Bill Shorten’s model.
It is impossible to see how it could be done otherwise without forced divestiture. This would be insanity.
Grandfathering, however, produces questionable revenue gains for the government.
The motivation runs far deeper and is inherently more ideological. Labor’s inspiration is for a new class of public housing for renters. Under its model, the industry super funds would own the housing stock.
Why the Albanese government would be considering negative gearing changes in the middle of a supply crisis is confounding to industry experts.
The Henry tax review – commissioned by Wayne Swan as treasurer when Chalmers was working for him – was clear about this. It warned against any changes to taxes on housing until the supply issue was solved.
Abolishing or curbing negative gearing is an effective increase in housing tax. And if you tax something, you get less of it.
If Albanese’s aim is to not see a further two promises broken, its difficult to understand why Labor would be contemplating negative gearing changes as it seeks to build 1.2 million homes in five years.
The retail politics of negative gearing are simultaneously crude and complex. Labor seeks to sympathise with first-home buyers, using the argument that young families shouldn’t have to compete at an auction with a foreign investor or a plumber seeking to buy a 10th property.
This argument becomes impossible to sustain if the alternative is that a first-home buyer instead must compete with a pension fund seeking to buy its 10,000th home.
In the context that government on Monday reduced tax on foreign investors to help facilitate Labor’s build to rent model, which has produced close to zero new homes, it would be inconceivable they would be seeking to increase taxes on mum and dad investors.
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Frontline workers will be long-term losers under Labor’s tax cuts
Sparkies, paramedics, police officers and accountants will be long-term losers under Labor’s stage three tax changes, as a major credit rating agency says Anthony Albanese’s revamped tax cuts will likely be more inflationary than Scott Morrison’s original plan.
Under Labor’s tax changes, electricians, school principals, cops, train drivers and others will pay more tax under the proposed legislation in a decade, analysis by The Australian has revealed.
Bigger tax cuts for middle-income earners promoted by the Prime Minister and Jim Chalmers are projected to erode over time as bracket creep captures more Australians under a higher 37c tax rate. In 10 years, Australians earning the equivalent of more than $104,000 today will be worse off under Labor’s redistribution of the tax relief.
That leaves a wide pool of Australians, including essential workers, winning in the short term but having less money in their pockets in the future as their average tax rates push higher.
Ahead of Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy being grilled at Senate estimates on Wednesday, an S&P Global report said while Labor’s tax cuts would have a “broadly neutral” impact on the budget, they could be more inflationary than the Morrison government’s stage three.
“They may … be marginally more inflationary than the original tax cuts since they will provide additional funds to low- and middle-income earners,” the report, which provided an annual review of Australia’s economy and budget position, said.
The Australian can reveal school principals will be among the first to begin paying more under Labor’s plan.
A year after the introduction of the modified stage three, principals’ average incomes are expected to creep above the $146,486 annual salary threshold separating winners and losers.
By 2033-34, those earning more than $104,000 today – assuming 3.5pc annual wage growth – will leave a much wider pool of Australians, including essential workers, with less money in their pocket.
In the middle of 2027, electrical engineers, tram and train drivers will be left out of pocket as they become what Labor believes are high earners. By the end of this decade construction managers are among the occupations who will earn too much to be beneficiaries of the tax changes.
Two years later, police and crane operators will be worse off as their average taxable incomes push towards $150,000 a year. That will be followed by accountants and vets from 2032, while fire or emergency service workers, paramedics, and electricians will be worse off from mid-2033.
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Pacific Islands Push for More University Students in Australia
Going to university in Australia could become simpler for Pacific Islanders if they are considered domestic students.
The high commissioner for Samoa, Hinauri Petana, told federal politicians the crippling cost of international student fees in Australia was curbing educational outcomes in her nation.
“Our appeal is that, by all means, international rates should stay for who can afford it, but for the Pacific we'd like to see our own private citizens to send their children here at the same rates,” she told a public hearing into education and tourism in the Pacific this week.
“Australia has been one of the leading countries in the world in terms of education.”
Greater investment and assistance would help her nation in developing its own education sector, Ms. Petana said.
Australia hosts nearly one million international students each year with most hailing from China, India, and Nepal.
Pacific Islanders make up less than one percent, with 7000 to 8000 people on student visas.
Yves Lafoy, representing New Caledonia, floated the idea of a set number of people that could be considered domestic students.
“We back the concept of a quota of Pacific students to benefit from Australian fees,” Dr. Lafoy told the hearing.
A ballot visa for Pacific Islander nations was established by the Labor government in 2023 and from late 2024 will allow 3000 people per year to receive permanent residency if they’ve been offered an ongoing job in Australia.
People studying on the Pacific Engagement Visa will pay domestic fees and will be able to access Commonwealth student loans as well as Youth Allowance and other benefits.
Luke Sheehy, chief executive of Universities Australia, said scholarships from individual universities and other educational programs were all options for students from the Pacific to come to Australia.
“These are terrific and often transformative initiatives, and further consideration given to encouraging and supporting more students abroad to receive an Australian education would be welcome,” Mr. Sheehy said.
Long wait times and exorbitant visa costs for Pacific Islanders wanting to visit Australia were also holding back integration in the region, the committee heard.
‘It is very difficult, even to come be a tourist in Australia,” Ms. Petana said.
‘You have to show your sponsorships, you have to show your bank account, all kinds of things.”
Samson Vilvil Fare, the high commissioner for Vanuatu, also spoke in support of easing Australia’s visa requirements on Pacific Island visitors.
Complicated paperwork and frustrating wait times meant people were often delayed or may not end up coming to Australia, he said.
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More Groucho Marx than Karl Marx: Anthony Albanese fixing the economy
Anthony Albanese clearly believes that his turn back to the left – smashing high income earners with Stage 3 tax changes and smashing employers with new industrial relations rules – is in tune with a fundamental shift in Australian politics.
On the face of it, the polls seem to back him in.
The Prime Minister hasn’t paid any real price for the income tax flip flop, daring Peter Dutton to vote against a tax cut “for every single Australian taxpayer” even as he snatches back thousands from anyone on more than $146,000 a year.
At the same time, new French-style right to disconnect rules have also landed well with, tellingly, Greens MPs sending out media releases touting their popularity on Tuesday.
The man who in 2022 portrayed himself as a safe and moderate economic manager has gone all-in bashing bosses and the big end of town.
In doing so, the Prime Minister has revealed himself as more Groucho Marx than Karl: “Those are my principles and, if you don’t like them, well, I have others.”
This has the potential to be a massive mistake, both politically and for Australia.
Time and time again, commentators have declared the end of Australia’s fundamentally centre-right politics only to be caught out, most recently in the wake of the failed Voice campaign.
And while Albanese’s political bet has, for the moment, paid off, it is also putting the rest of the Australian economy at grave risk of serious long-term damage.
Sure, we may not be in a technical recession, inflation is moderating and employment remains strong.
The threat of multiple interest rate rises has, for the moment, passed.
But household income, real wages and productivity are all going backwards, while failure to do anything about the tax system means an increasingly bloated government will continue to rely on the lazy tide of bracket creep.
Instead of moving to reform and actually grow the economy in the tradition of Hawke and Keating, the government is pushing Whitlam-era bash-the-boss rhetoric and putting handbrakes on business.
But the government, and many of its media enablers, are misreading the room if they think that Labor and its effective junior partners in the Greens are on to a winner with this new class warfare.
People are anxious, absolutely. Particularly in already crowded cities like Sydney, people are looking to blame others for traffic and expensive housing and a million other houses.
This explains the regular two-minute hates on Twitter (or X, if you will) against Balmain and Fitzroy “boomers” and NIMBY councils who are supposedly preventing benevolent developers from throwing up tons of affordable housing.
But deeper down, people sense that a country – their country – that has more or less dodged recessions for 30 years is suddenly faced with the prospect of not just a few quarters of backwards growth but a sustained fall in living standards.
People who grew up with the expectation of a quarter acre block (or California bungalow or inner city terrace) are now being told they will have to leverage themselves to the hilt for a train-line apartment that may or may not come with bankruptcy-inducing defects.
And while no one ever voted for it (now there would be a referendum) both sides of politics have long adhered, more or less, to a Big Australia immigration policy.
Huge arrivals keep overall GDP in the black, depress wages and push up property prices – though whether these are good or bad things depends on whether you’re a suburban commuter on the one hand or a politician or property developer on the other.
Those big numbers will also impact social cohesion in ways we cannot even begin to predict, though it surely sends an odd message to those who came here seeking a better life to have their children go to school and learn how awful Australia Day is.
Meanwhile, we don’t yet know the full details of the Albanese Government’s IR deal but we do know that unions and troublemakers are about to have a whole new set of ways to turn the screws on productive enterprises, particularly small and medium-sized ones.
And this is before we get to the nightmare of the rushed renewables transition, which promises lower energy prices but never seems to deliver, and which in the process is forcing the country to deindustrialise.
A devastating report out of Victoria in The Australian on Tuesday showed the direction this is heading.
There, the Government’s anti-gas policies, taxes, regulation and the cost of doing business generally led to a net decrease of more than 7600 businesses in the last financial year in that state. This, rather than real reform, is what the Albanese Government’s new policy settings will replicate nationally, making them so dangerous.
To return to Keating, then as now Australia is in danger of becoming what he called a banana republic.
“If this government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for,” Keating told John Laws in 1986.
“We will end up being a third-rate economy ... a banana republic.”
Hard choices and real reform made sure that didn’t happen then.
Now, though, it’s looking like back to the future.
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13 February, 2024
Was the Covid cure worse than the disease?
A lot of Australians are dying. Many politely say: We need to know why. …but really now, how long must polite company continue this faux naivety?
The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), is the only body in Australia that undertook the task to investigate why Australian Excess Deaths continue to equate to about two jumbo jet crashes each week, and every week, since early 2021. That is two jumbo jets of dead Australians a week.
Why did AMPS step up thus?
Because the Australian Senate voted down a motion last year to hold hearings into why Australia has been experiencing this surge in Excess Deaths. Again this week, Labor and the Greens voted against investigating why Australia is experiencing continued excess mortality that began early 2021. Our elected officials turned their backs on us.
You see, the two major federal political parties were instrumental in motivating state governments to lock down Australians, confining essentially millions of people to their homes, with the only hope of release back into the general community being dependent on receiving a Covid vaccine, all to be recorded, of course, on vaccine passports. Millions of others had no choice – no jab meant no job. With bills to pay, mortgages to service, and kids to feed, many surrendered to this State-sponsored coercion.
With no equivalent Bill of Rights to protect the Australian people, and the almost complete abolition of human rights, many among the millions desperate to regain their fundamental freedoms succumbed to this disgusting and brutal authoritarianism. Australia’s political overlords had successfully revived our early penal colony history, where throughout 2020, 2021, and 2022, we became ruled by physical force and rubber bullets.
And it worked – by the end of 2021, somewhere between 85-95 per cent of Australians had fallen victim to the many tactics employed by our federal and state governments, to receive the ‘safe and effective’ gene-based injections.
Now, a lot of Australians are dying. People are asking, why?
To be clear, in 2020 Australia experienced below average All-Cause Mortality, despite apparently the presence of a highly infectious and deadly virus said to be circulating amongst us. In fact, deaths due to respiratory disease were 16.2 per cent lower, while influenza and pneumonia deaths were 36 per cent lower. Does that read like a pandemic to you? Covid deaths didn’t even break into our top 10 leading causes of death, and were at 832, far below the more than 3,000 suicides. So low were Covid deaths that Australia did not appear to have data to support the urgent cries from politicians, here and globally, to the effect that we all were facing imminent death from SARS-CoV-2. In truth, we faced and experienced a political theatre.
It is our opinion that this is why the Australian Senate continues to look the other way, now that it finds itself confronted by the fallout from a theatre of the absurd, the violent, and the dishonest.
In October 2023, AMPS released the investigative findings of over 30 science and medical authors into Australia’s Excess Deaths. In brief, we suspect that Australia may be suffering from an iatrogenic disaster potentially caused by the uptake of Covid vaccines.
The book is simply titled out of respect for the dead – Too Many Dead: An Inquiry into Australia’s Excess Mortality.
Some of the generous co-authors include Associate Professor Peter Doshi, Edward Dowd, Phillip Altman PhD, Andrew Madry PhD, Geoff Pain PhD, Wilson Sy PhD, Dr Monique O’Connor, Conni Turni PhD and Astrid Lefringhausen PhD, Jessica Rose PhD, Dr Tess Lawrie, Professor Norman Fenton, Dr Clare Pain, and Dr Aseem Malhotra, together with another 21 science and medical doctors of great distinction.
To say no stone was left unturned by such an esteemed ensemble of scientific and medical expertise would be an understatement. As the book notes:
This book has been assembled by an aggregation of highly-qualified and experienced doctors and researchers who take their ethics seriously. Here, information has not been withheld, or, worse, blocked.
AMPS did also fairly invite Australian medical regulators to contribute their analysis and synthesis of the Australian data, where it was hoped they would call upon the over 3,500 international case studies casting extreme doubt over the integrity of the Covid vaccines. Instead of a comprehensive contribution, there was silence; no response was provided. In correspondence to a previous letter, former head of the Department of Health, Mr Brendan Murphy, sent a rather brief letter, which read in part:
Regarding excess mortality statistics, there is no credible evidence to suggest that excess mortality is related to Covid vaccination either in Australia or internationally.
‘No credible evidence’?
In pondering these words from Australia’s (former) chief health bureaucrat, Too Many Dead observes:
For three years Australia succumbed to the will of corporate ideologues in big pharma, big media, big finance, and big government who seem to prioritise profit over people. This enslavement, and it is nothing less, may help to explain these high excess death rates being witnessed now at more than 15 per cent above baseline mortality. Put another way, AMPS and all ethical and informed doctors are horrified at the ten or twenty or thirty thousand excess deaths in this country in the time since March, 2021. Australian and other Western data show a mass casualty event; peculiarly, the higher figures are occurring in the countries that are highly injected, but our political and medical authorities seem to think there is nothing worth scrutiny. Now, with this book, it has been probed. This investigation has had to cut straight across the lockstep media messaging, the medical misinformation and the censorship.
Too Many Dead shall be seen through the years as a book of the age of Covid, a historic document gathering together meticulous facts that cause governments everywhere fear for what they have wrought and brought upon their people, death, and the pestilence of a thousand forms of injury brought and wrought by their ‘safe and effective’ solution to a non-pandemic.
I commend the authors of Too Many Dead for bravely stepping into the pages of history bearing the torch of Truth.
And to you good readers on far away shores I commend Too Many Dead as a systematic and disciplined account, and blueprint, for beginning the same journey into your Truth, for what has befallen every nation that opted to secure benefits for big pharma first, before the peace and health of their people … their mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, and our innocent infants.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-dying-of-down-under/
************************************************International students turned away in record numbers
Australia is on track for a steep fall in net migration after federal officials turned away thousands of overseas students who applied to start courses this month, bringing student visa grants down by 20 per cent in the biggest shift in two decades.
The cut to the education program is the biggest single factor in driving the total migrant intake down to 375,000 this financial year and putting it on course for 250,000 the following year.
The government’s migration strategy unveiled last year has imposed stronger English-language tests on students and requires them to prove they are genuine students before they enter the country, while making it harder for them to stay if they do not find jobs that help fill a skills shortage.
The government remains open to more controversial measures, such as a cap on student numbers or higher fees on their visa applications.
The cuts to student visas are not being felt across all universities. The biggest impact is at private colleges with low ratings for visa approvals and some universities are also writing to overseas applicants to cancel their applications because they will fail a tougher visa test put in place last year.
Most of the country’s leading universities are not seeing any big fall in overseas student numbers, the latest results show, because they have not fallen foul of the stricter tests within the department.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil sent a formal instruction to the Department of Home Affairs last year, known as Ministerial Direction 107, to tell officials to put a priority on student visa applications for universities with a good track record and to give the lowest priority to those for institutions with a history of problems.
This means the priority takes into account the track record of all overseas students at each institution so they are given a low ranking if they have had a large number of visa refusals, fraudulent applications or students who overstay their visas.
All the Group of Eight universities are in the “tier one” category in this new system, while the “tier three” group at the lowest level of the system is mainly made up of private vocational education colleges.
Australia has more than 650,000 overseas students and an increasing number of them are prolonging their stay by applying to do a second course, with 150,000 of the total being on their second student visa.
The results from the department show that overseas students are being turned away in record numbers because the visa grant rate has been driven down to 80 per cent, the lowest since records began in 2005.
In a rare fall, the student visa grants in December were lower than in November – a sign of fewer arrivals for the coming academic year – and are 20 per cent below the same period last year.
The outcome shows the department is bringing international student visa grants down from 370,000 last financial year to 290,000 this year and believes there is a reasonable chance the outcome will be slightly lower.
The new migration figures provide the first outcomes from the dramatic shift last year when the Coalition accused Labor of planning a “big Australia by stealth” and the government vowed to lower the intake and crack down on dubious visa claims.
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan criticised O’Neil for presiding over the biggest influx of overseas students as well as a record migrant intake last year.
“Labor says they don’t want a Big Australia but under the Albanese Government 900,000 people will arrive over two years and 1.625 million will arrive over five.”
O’Neil said the country could not sustain the big increase in migration after the borders were opened at the end of the pandemic. “Migration is too high and our government has taken action to bring it back to normal levels,” she said.
“The early signs are that these changes are working. We are seeing sharp decreases in numbers. This is led by deep cuts in the areas of higher education, where we have unfortunately seen widespread integrity issues.”
Another key factor in driving the migration intake down is a special program called the Pandemic Event Visa, which was introduced by the previous government with no fees and no skills test and attracted more than 100,000 people.
Labor closed the pandemic program to new applicants last year and expects 60 per cent to leave the country and the remainder to shift to other visas because they have skills that are in demand and jobs that pay above the $70,000 salary threshold for approval.
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How the radical minority tail is wagging the Labor dog
Whether it is the union movement, the vicious Green-Left, Palestinian migrants who support Hamas, or just run-of-the-mill fringe dwellers, the Albanese government is at their service.
Forget the views of most Australians as demonstrated by the Voice referendum, small businesses struggling to survive, pensioners and people on fixed incomes who can’t afford to turn on the airconditioning. Labor just isn’t listening.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s preferred option is to pander to minority activists.
Voters who thought they cast their ballot for a local Labor candidate are now finding that their representatives put unions first, nutty environmentalists second, and mardi gras and transsexual enthusiasts third.
Middle of the road Australians who show common sense and not-so radical opinions don’t get a look in at federal or state levels.
In the UK, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has backtracked on his promised $54 billion Green Prosperity Plan which included a government-owned green-energy power company.
Here, Energy and Climate Change minister Chris Bowen hysterically promotes a renewable Net Zero fantasy currently estimated to cost at least $1.5 trillion by the end of the decade and $7 trillion to $9 trillion by 2060.
Further, his narcissistic delusion denies any role for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest and least environmentally destructive source of energy. Hard Left ideology, not science, drives Labor.
Labor’s new IR Bill supported by hard-Left ACT Senator David Pocock, the erratic senators Lydia Thorpe and Jacqui Lambie, cripple productivity.
The biggest business in Canberra is the public service, why should Pocock or Labor worry about the nation?
With less than 10 per cent of the private sector workforce in the union movement, Labor is doing everything it can to pump up the tyres of an institution which should be irrelevant in the modern economy.
The big superannuation funds, controlled by former Labor politicians and union heavies, are in on the joke splashing cash on unions which in turn push their government to lift the rate of super contributions to go into the funds which swell Labor’s election coffers, and round and round the money goes.
The same with the manner in which Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Victorian and NSW premiers bow to the plainly genocidal Islamist thinking to appease Muslims in a handful of electorates.
Meanwhile, our “handsome boy” PM sucks up to Chinese supreme leader Xi while his Communist Party runs a legal system which takes our citizens hostage to influence our foreign policy.
George Orwell, or his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy (who worked for the UK Ministry of Information’s Censorship division in WWII), invented the word “doublethink” to describe the acceptance of two contradictory beliefs as a result of indoctrination.
The Left’s domination of our education system from kindergarten to university has made many Australians doublethinkers.
No thinking homosexual could possibly support a regime which criminalises gays and punishes them with whippings, imprisonment or summary execution by hanging, throwing them off rooftops or bashing them to death, while Israel offers them sanctuary as refugees from such torture.
Why we should reject blind loathing of ignorant minorities
Labor’s acolytes in the law may wring their hands about social justice and diversity but, to the punters, the housing shortage needs to be addressed, crime rates need action (particularly those involving teens and younger), and there are the perennial problems faced by those Aboriginal Australians who remain living in remote communities which have no economic foundation.
Faced with an awful axis of evil in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, our government has run down our defences and is now intent on ensuring we are economically uncompetitive internationally and divided domestically.
Politics drives Labor, not the national interest, and we all suffer because of this short-term power grab.
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2.5m Qld workers to lose workplace health and safety protections
A Parliamentary hearing has been told that 2.5 million Queensland workers are about to lose their workplace health and safety protections in a move to strengthen registered Labor unions that fund the ALP.
A Bill before Parliament seeks to tweak laws that I believe will rob workplace health and safety representatives in independent unions of the powers to represent workers in health and safety matters.
In my opinion it is a terrible attack on workers who face financial hardship if they find themselves ensnared in health or safety matters.
It means 87 per cent of Queensland’s workforce will have to pay thousands of dollars for a lawyer for representation should they become embroiled in a health or safety issue. In my view, workers who choose to belong to an independent union are being discriminated against. So, too, are tens of thousands who choose not to be in any union.
It’s bizarre. It appears the Miles government is seeking to turn the workforce into a union collective, and to hell with those who object.
Is it not a basic human right to be treated equally before the law, irrespective of whether you’re in a registered or independent union?
The move is shrouded in secrecy. The Bill was slipped quietly into the House in the dying days of Parliament late last year and follows recommendations from an expert panel that withheld the names of people who made submissions and what they said. Worryingly, the new laws also seek to expand the powers of the unions in demanding work stoppages for alleged safety breaches.
Industrial Relations Minister Grace Grace told Parliament the Work Health and Safety Act review was conducted by three independent reviewers: Craig Allen, former deputy director-general of the Office of Industrial Relations; Charles Massy, a barrister specialising in industrial relations and employment law; and Deirdre Swan, former deputy president of the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.
“A total of 51 written submissions were received,” the trio wrote in their report. “Stakeholders who provided submissions included employer and industry representatives, registered unions, legal representative associations, government departments, businesses and individuals.
“All submissions were treated as confidential. Where the content of a particular submission is referenced in this report, the authors have not been identified.” Why?
Grace told the House the review panel recommended changes to strengthen the operation of the health and safety representative framework. “It does this by clarifying and better integrating the role of the health and safety representative in the workplace,” she said. “The bill requires employers to be proactive in supporting the formation of work groups and the election of health and safety representatives.’’
Explanatory notes tabled in Parliament made it appear the aim was to crush the independents.
“To achieve its policy objectives, the Bill will amend the Workplace Health and Safety Act (in) excluding other entities such as: associations of employees or independent contractors; other entities that represent or are purporting to represent the industrial interests of the worker; entities that demand or receive a fee from such bodies; and individuals connected with excluded bodies. Excluding associations of employees or independent contractors which are not registered unions …”
Member for Southern Downs James Lister says the ALP will leave workers in a precarious place.
“This Bill is another naked move by the Labor Party to reward their financial and political benefactors in the old trade union movement,” Lister told me, speaking as an MP, and not as an Education, Employment and Training committee member.
“It also seeks to disadvantage members of the likes of the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland, and the Teachers’ Professional Association of Queensland, and other independent unions, whose better service and cheaper fees have seen thousands of members ditch the ALP-affiliated unions.’’
Lister said Queensland workers were happier being represented by independent unions and associations “without seeing their hard-earned dollars being handed to Labor by traditional ALP-affiliated unions”.
He added: “I think this bill will disadvantage millions of Queensland workers, whose workplace health and safety would be entrusted to a monopoly of union bosses, instead of as now where employees have freedom of choice.’’
Graeme Haycroft, the creator of the key independent unions that won’t align with the ALP, said the new law especially disadvantaged nurses and teachers.
“The Bill seeks specifically to deny representation to all workers on workplace health and safety matters except those who are current or existing members of a registered trade union,” he said in evidence to the Parliamentary hearing.
“It is really about the denial of equal access to justice.
“Those who contribute to the ALP supporting unions get it; those who do not in practice cannot access it.’’
Haycroft is chief of the Red Union Support Hub, the umbrella organisation for independent unions.
“This bill seeks to deny equal access to the law,” he said.
“There were 2,879,746 employed workers in Queensland as at last December. There were 371,815 members of registered unions.
“This Bill effectively says that the only way you can access workplace health and safety legislation protections is by being an existing member of a registered trade union.
“This means that those 2.5 million workers who are not members of these registered trade unions cannot access the workplace health and safety legislation.
He added: “What happened to the ALP being the political party of the worker, and 2.5 million of the workers in Queensland are now going to be denied access to the full protection?
“The only workers the ALP seem to want are those who are prepared to fund the ALP.’’
Haycroft also questioned the higher fees charged by the Labor-linked Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union and the Queensland Teachers’ Union. The members of his independent unions paid $450. “By comparison, the QNMU charges $762. ”
“We believe that if the Red Union had 60,000 nurses, we would be able to deliver the service profitably for about $200 per annum … “Yet the QNMU charges $762.’’
He sees the new laws as “an attempt to punish the nearly 15,000 nurses and teachers who have already left a registered union because they did not want to contribute their membership money to the ALP.”
He added: “It should be a free choice. Let the worker decide who represents them. “If they want to pay more and have money go to the ALP, great. If they do not, they can join something else or not join anything.”
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12 February, 2024
One third of Australian children can't read properly as teaching methods cause 'preventable tragedy', Grattan Institute says
The failed "whole word" method of teaching beloved by Leftist teachers goes back to some work by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 19th century. And they call themselves "progressive"! "destructive" would be more like it
One third of Australian students are failing to learn to read proficiently, at an estimated cost to the economy of $40 billion, according to a new report.
The Grattan Institute's Reading Guarantee report calls this a "preventable tragedy" caused by persisting with teaching styles popular at universities, but "contrary to science" and discredited by inquiries in all major English-speaking countries.
"In a typical Australian school classroom of 24 students, eight can't read well," said report lead author and Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter. "Australia is failing these children."
The estimated cost of this "failure" was profound both personally and economy-wide, with students unable to read proficiently more likely to become disruptive at school and unemployed or even jailed later in life, the report concluded.
Dr Hunter said the "conservative" financial estimate amounted to a "really significant cost" that did not include productivity benefits from increased reading.
Students left to 'guess' meaning of words
The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.
It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.
Proponents say it empowers young people by giving them autonomy.
However Grattan said it left students to "guess" the meaning of words and was saddling parents with expensive tuition costs to help their children catch up.
What are the reading wars?
Phonics, or sounding out words, is part of the "structured literacy" approach, which says reading should be broken down and the elements taught explicitly
After decades of the so-called reading wars, "whole language" has incorporated elements of other approaches such as phonics, but Grattan said it remained "light touch" and "contrary to scientific recommendations".
"What we need to do is set our expectations higher. We need to stop accepting failure," Dr Hunter said. "It's not good enough that one in three students are not where they need to be in reading."
The Grattan Institute said evidence showed a much greater number of students learned to read successfully using the alternative "structured literacy" approach, and at least 90 per cent of students would be proficient using this model.
"Structured literacy" includes phonics, but also teacher-led "explicit instruction" backed by the latest science on how children's brains learn new concepts.
"The quality of teaching is the thing that will shift the dial for our young people," Dr Hunter said. "We need to make the most of every single minute we have with our young people."
Why are some schools still not using phonics?
Despite major inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom and United States settling the argument that structured literacy teaching is superior, that hasn't flowed to all classrooms, the Grattan Institute said.
It said where school systems have embraced it, students have reaped the rewards.
Australia's 10,000 schools have a high degree of autonomy, and even in states where education departments advocate for the structured literacy approach, the report said there needed to be more support for teachers to re-train and be provided with ready-made lessons.
"The real issue here is, are governments doing enough to set teachers up for success?'" Dr Hunter said. "The challenge is making sure best practice is common practice in every single classroom."
Western Sydney University's Katina Zammit, president of the Australian Literary Educators Association, said the whole language method should not end up in history's trash can.
She said that in school systems that moved to the teaching methods championed by the Grattan Institute, some teachers found it too prescriptive.
"The teachers that I have had contact with, some of the children who are being taught this way, have either lost interest in reading because it's a whole class approach or they are not retaining the instruction," Dr Zammit said.
Dr Zammit agreed whole learning did not work for all students but said it could still be useful in the classroom. "One size doesn't fit all students," she said. "Yes, the majority it might, but we do have to look at engagement and motivation as well."
However in a statement to the ABC, Education Minister Jason Clare said the science on teaching reading had been settled. He also foreshadowed mandating teaching styles in the upcoming school funding agreement.
"The reading wars are over. We know what works. The current National School Reform Agreement doesn't include the sort of targets or reforms to move the needle here," he said.
"The new Agreement we strike this year needs to properly fund schools and tie that funding to the sort of things that work. The sort of things that will help children keep up, catch up and finish school."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/grattan-institute-reading-report/103446606
**************************************************Cross-party MPs back Jewish community push to outlaw doxxing
A cross-party group of federal MPs is backing a push from the Jewish community to criminalise doxxing – the publication of people’s identifying information to shame, harass or intimidate them – in response to the mass outing of Jewish writers, artists and academics who belonged to a private chat group.
Liberal MP Julian Leeser and independent Allegra Spender, who have previously condemned the targeting of Jewish people and businesses since Hamas’ October 7 atrocities and Israel’s war in Gaza, gave their support to the idea of anti-doxxing laws, while Labor MP Josh Burns declared social media the “new frontier” for antisemitism.
The support came as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese condemned last week’s co-ordinated doxxing of 600 members of the J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and academics WhatsApp group by pro-Palestinian activists.
“The targeting of people because they happen to be Jewish is just completely unacceptable,” Albanese said. “It has got to stop. It must stop.”
The push for anti-doxxing law reform is being led by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation Commission. Under a proposal from the council, a provision explicitly prohibiting the practice would be added to the section of the federal Criminal Code which covers telecommunication offences.
Leeser, a Liberal MP who relinquished his position on the opposition frontbench to campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament, urged Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to move quickly to ban doxxing.
“Whilst this attack is aimed at Jewish Australians, the tactic of doxxing can hurt anyone perceived to be involved in Australian public life, from the home addresses of public servants and police to local branch members of a political party, or the details of family members of a public official,” he said.
Spender, whose Sydney electorate of Wentworth takes in one of Australia’s largest Jewish populations, said she supported an ongoing Victoria Police investigation into last week’s doxxing and consideration of whether further legal protections were necessary.
“We are all deeply concerned by the tragic and horrifying events in Israel and Gaza, but recklessly publishing details of fellow Australians to provoke division will not have any positive impact on peace in the Middle East,” she said. “It simply tears at our social fabric and brings enormous distress to fellow Australians.”
Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the Melbourne suburbs of Balaclava, Caulfield and Elsternwick, which have large Jewish communities, said the doxxing of Jews had led to death threats and vilification and, in extreme cases, forced people into hiding.
“Social media is the new frontier for antisemitism and attacking Jewish people,” he said.
“I completely understand that people are distressed about the conflict in the Middle East, but this is no excuse to target Jewish Australians at home. This activism is misdirected and dangerous.”
There is already a provision within the Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence, with penalties of up to five years’ jail, for someone who uses a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence.
The proposed anti-doxxing provision would take the law one step further and make it possible to prosecute not just those who harass people online, but those who facilitate and encourage the harassment by disseminating the names, workplaces, contact details and social media accounts of those being targeted.
Doxxing emerged in the 1990s as a form of online attack by computer hackers, where documents or “docs” containing people’s private information were uploaded and disseminated. It became a potent weapon within the anti-fascist movement, which has used doxxing to expose the identities of neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists.
‘The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.’
In the US, the state of Washington last year passed an anti-doxxing law with bipartisan support. However, that law makes it a civil offence, rather than a criminal one. Washington is the most recent of a dozen US states to prohibit doxxing to varying degrees, but there are no federal laws in place.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, KC, said that since Israel’s war against Hamas began, Jewish people living in Australia have felt unprecedented levels of fear and anxiety about their physical safety and livelihoods.
“In the last few days this has been caused by the publication of lists containing the names, faces and other personal information of hundreds of individuals, whose only common trait is that they are Jewish,” Aghion said.
“This has been done with co-ordination and with malice, in many cases resulting in harassment, death threats directed to named individuals and their children, professional and financial loss, vandalism of premises, and extensive psychological harm.”
Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said pro-Palestinian activists had declared “open season on our community” in publishing a “hit list” identifying all members of the WhatsApp group. “We know that people are often inspired to do crazy things when they are radicalised online and this doxxing is dangerous and will have real-world consequences,” he said.
“The deliberate online targeting and harassment of Australian Jews, akin to digital terrorism, has now reached fever pitch.”
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network president Nasser Mashni said that rather than worry about doxxing, the Australian government should respond to the escalating crisis in Rafah, in southern Gaza, where the Israeli government has issued its latest evacuation order.
“We implore the Australian government to immediately end its ‘friendship’ with genocidal Israel, cut ties with the regime and to do all it can to stop the slaughter,” Mashni said.
This masthead last week reported that pro-Palestinian activists had published links to a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations and social media accounts of hundreds of members of the J.E.W.I.S.H WhatsApp group and separate documents containing their images and a leaked transcript of their group chat.
The transcript revealed that some members of the WhatsApp group wrote letters to broadcasters, media companies and publishing houses raising concerns about pro-Palestinian writers, journalists and presenters.
One of the presenters targeted by the group, Antoinette Lattouf, was stood down by the ABC for breaching the broadcaster’s social media policy after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on the Gaza conflict. She is suing the national broadcaster for unlawful dismissal.
Victoria Police confirmed it was examining whether charges could be brought against people who had doxxed Jewish people and businesses in Melbourne.
“Police are investigating following reports that a number of people who belong to a private social media chat group appear to have been released online,” a spokesperson said.
The mass doxxing prompted Liberal senator David Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel, to write to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus urging him to request a federal police investigation.
“We would not accept such silencing or intimidation of any other group of Australians, and nor should we accept or condone it for Jewish Australians, no matter how strongly people may differ in their political opinions over this conflict,” Sharma wrote in his letter.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton last week called for greater leadership from the federal government to tackle antisemitism and said he would support any changes needed to “beef up” the current laws.
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Property Investors Won’t Lose Tax Deductions: Treasurer
And his word is his bond, no doubt
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has ruled out changes to negative gearing and capital gains.
Property investors are under the spotlight as the tax reform debate shifts to wealthier Australians.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton are both under mounting pressure to revisit tax breaks on investment properties.
The Greens are proposing limiting negative gearing rules to a single investment property.
But Mr. Chalmers says any changes are off the table.
“That’s not something that we’re proposing, not something that we are considering, not something that we are working up,” he told Sky News on Sunday.
Negative gearing allows investors to claim deductions on losses, while the capital gains tax discount halves the amount of excise paid by people who sell assets that have been owned for 12 months or more.
Asked if he had ever sought advice on changing the tax breaks, Mr. Chalmers said he had discussed all aspects of the tax system with the treasury department.
He agreed a person earning $160,000 a year was in “middle Australia.” “I think of middle Australia as the people who get up and work hard to provide for their loved ones and get ahead,” Mr. Chalmers said.
Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has called for negative gearing reforms to be considered as part of a wider debate about how tax changes could address housing affordability.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/property-investors-wont-lose-tax-deductions-treasurer-5584776
***********************************************Ethnicity and crime
The internet is currently awash with the video of four youths of Somali/Sudanese appearance leaving a car. Police want to talk to them in connection with the alleged murder of a 71-year-old woman in Brisbane. At the time of writing, three of the group have been arrested. While the police and the ABC are making no comment on the ethnicity of the group, keyboard warriors are certain that the four youths should be ‘sent back’ to East Africa. How the police and the press discuss the ethnic identity of criminals is fraught with Woke obstacles.
In London six years ago, a car ploughed into a group of people outside a museum. One journalist, Katie Hopkins, leapt to the conclusion that the attack was Jihadi terrorism and published a statement to that effect. The police refused to release the name of the driver of the car, and initially declined to provide an opinion as to whether or not it was a terrorist incident. The driver of the car was arrested and subsequently released as the police did not believe the incident was terror-related. The left-wing British press jumped on Ms Hopkins, accusing her of racism.
With characteristic delicacy, Rod Liddle weighed into the controversy, noting that the police had not released the name of the driver. If, Rod argued, the name of the driver ‘turns out to be John Christian Whitechap’ one can accept the police’s interpretation of the cause of the crash. However, if the name of the driver ‘was something more like Muhammed al Kafarkilla’ then Rod would be inclined to accept Ms Hopkins’ interpretation of the incident. He also noted that if the driver does have an Arabic name, and, if the BBC reports the story, ‘they will almost certainly describe the man as “Norwegian” because he spent a few months in Bergen’. Rod argued that ‘the BBC and the filth do not quite tell us the truth and instead feed us soma’. (Blame the grownups for the safe-space tribe.)
More recently Lionel Shriver made a similar claim when discussing the recent riots in Dublin following the refusal of the Garda to release the name and nationality of a man who had stabbed a woman and three children. ‘The Garda Siochana’s refusal to release the nationality of the man who triggered the unrest … has been worse than coy: try contemptuous. Were the culprit a native-born Irishman, his nationality would have been released in a heartbeat.’ (Fatalism is a bad way to run immigration policy.)
The same strange cosy alliance between the Police, ABC, and the left-wing press exists in Australia. Recently the Sydney ‘Snoring’ Herald published an article about human trafficking in Australia by Clare Sibthorpe and Perry Duffin (Human Trafficking on Rise and ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’.)
Clare and Perry claimed that, ‘Child trafficking, sexual servitude, forced labour, and exit trafficking – when a person is forced to leave Australia against their will – all marked significant increases in reporting since 2018-19. Forced marriage is consistently the most common type of human trafficking, making up 90 of the 340 reports of 2022-23.’
They told the story of ‘Ayra’ who ‘was one of an unknown number of mostly young women taken from Australia by their own family to be married off against their will’. We were not told where Ayra was taken nor the ethnicity of her parents. I wrote to the authors to ask why, in an article trying to educate the public about human trafficking, sexual slavery, and forced marriages, they could not mention the details of which countries are involved in this activity. There was no reply.
Apparently an ‘increase in public awareness’ cannot extend to identifying the countries involved in human trafficking and forced marriage. Thus the public has no way of knowing whether we should be watching out for concupiscent Scandinavians trying to abduct innocent Aussie sheilas, or peace-loving Islamic fathers trying to ensure that their daughters don’t marry infidels.
We see the same tendency towards obfuscation when the authorities release data discussing social problems within Aboriginal communities. Recently the ABC published a story stating that ‘Alcohol-related instances of family violence were 49.8 times higher outside metropolitan areas in Western Australia and there were 18.8 times as many calls for police assistance’. (Derby Wiluna top list of WA towns where police want hard-line liquor restrictions to fight alcohol-fuelled violence.) It failed to mention that the violence was mainly in Wiluna’s Aboriginal community.
Wiluna sits on the edge of the Western Deserts which were the home of the Martu people who, in the 1960s, who were among the last Aboriginal groups living a traditional way of life and had never seen a white person. In 1964, travelling in ‘rocks that moved’, white patrol officers began contacting the remnants of Martu people and moving them to settlements in places like Wiluna. The inevitable result was complete societal collapse from which the Martu culture, like all other Aboriginal cultures, will never recover. With the best will in the world Aboriginal social structures, cultural traditions, and beliefs, the initiation ceremonies, and above all, traditional law, cannot survive in the face of the fatal impact of Western Civilisation.
A similar reserve is evident in the ABC’s coverage of criminal activities among the young in rural areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory. We are told there is an epidemic of break and enter, car theft, and vandalism but when reporting these daily events we are never told the ethnicity of the criminals. They are simply referred to as ‘youths’. Should an Aboriginal be a victim of a crime or an assault we can be sure that the headline will be ‘Aboriginal boy/man/girl assaulted/robbed’.
We know that there are massive problems within Aboriginal communities due to the complete destruction of traditional culture. I happen to believe that there are no solutions at the present time. For the foreseeable future drunken Aboriginal men will continue to beat up their wives and put them in hospital. Aboriginal kids will continue to steal cars and anything else they can get their hands on. Above all, alcohol will continue to create chaos and ensure the continuance of poverty within Aboriginal communities.
And, also for the foreseeable future, the ABC will continue to present a hopelessly shallow, dishonest account of the causes and consequences of the destruction of Aboriginal culture. Presenting such inadequate accounts of problems in minority communities helps no one.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/ethnicity-and-crime
************************************11 February, 2024
Wife’s battle for Redland Hospital MRI after husband put on six-day wait list for crucial scan
This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense you have got to expect of Qld Health. Note that non-urgent MRI scans were routinely and promptly referred to Cleveland X-Ray, just across the road from where the guy was, but because he was classed as urgent he couldn't be sent there. So he had to wait days for a scan. Being classed as urgent DELAYED his care. That's bureaucratic logic for you
I am fortunate to be able to go private for all my medical care so I get scans as quickly as the day I ask for one. Note that what priviliges me is NOT the availability of better facilities. The guy below could also have had prompt treatment except for the rigidy and buck-passing of the public health bureaucracy. What gives me better care is that I bypass the wooden heads of an uncaring government bureaucracy
A bayside woman has started an online crusade to get an MRI machine for a busy regional hospital after her husband spent an agonising week waiting for a crucial scan.
Capalaba’s Kirra Conlon started a petition calling for the scanner for Redland Hospital where her husband Matthew, 38, was bedridden after a catastrophic migraine left him unable to walk, speak or function properly.
Mr Conlon spent six days lying in a ward before his distressed family took action and invoked a Queensland law known as Ryan’s Rule to get him a scan appointment at another hospital.
Mr Conlon was initially rushed to Princess Alexandra Hospital on January 30 after suffering a debilitating headache, stroke-like symptoms including being unable to speak or move his arms and legs.
However, after a night in the emergency ward without seeing a doctor, Ms Conlon decided to move her husband closer to home and took him to Redland Hospital.
Mr Conlon was admitted to the hospital’s four-bed stroke ward where his paralysis and headache were treated as the side effects of a suspected stroke.
But after six days and partly regaining some mobility in his arms, he was still unable to speak.
Ms Conlon claimed the week-long delay was due to a range of reasons including that the MRI at the Princess Alexandra Hospital was fully booked.
Her husband was also denied admission to PA hospital because its inpatients got preferential treatment, she claimed.
She said a lack of ambulances to transport her husband from Redland to PA or Logan hospitals also delayed his scan.
“My husband’s GP sent out an urgent referral for an MRI to all hospitals and clinics in the region, but that request went nowhere because my husband needed a nurse to go with him because he was incapacitated,” she said.
“Incapacitated patients on the southside are limited to only using MRIs at Logan and PA Hospitals, where there are always line-ups.”
Non-urgent MRI scans were referred to Cleveland X-Ray, across the road.
Under Queensland Health guidelines, MRI scans were scheduled according to clinical need.
A QH spokesman said that could result in varied waiting times.
But doctors were not able to offer Mr Conlon a diagnosis until after he had an MRI scan, Ms Conlon claimed.
She said she started a petition after a week of “sheer hell”.
“There is no MRI machine at Redland, which is a disgrace for a hospital which is supposedly undergoing a $62 million upgrade so it can treat more critically-ill patients,” she said.
“My husband was left lying in a hospital bed for six days and could not access the appropriate treatment from a neurologist or psychologist until he had an MRI.
“It was only after the MRI (which Mr Conlon eventually had at Logan Hospital) that the specialist doctors were then able to give a correct diagnosis and start the proper treatment – which we hope was not too late.
“Even staff at Redland Hospital are going to sign the petition because they also believe that not having an MRI machine on hand is a barrier to providing proper care.”
Ms Conlon said hospital staff had reassured her of an MRI scan at Logan Hospital on Friday, February 2.
However, Mr Conlon was still waiting on Saturday, February 3 when doctors told the couple that the head neurologist had agreed to an MRI and consultation for Monday, February 5.
But the devastated couple were told on Monday, February 5, that the PA MRI was unavailable.
Mr Conlon was finally taken in an ambulance to Logan Hospital on Tuesday, February 6.
A day after having the MRI scan, Mr Conlon was diagnosed with a functional neurological disorder and treatment tailored for his condition began.
Ms Conlon said she was told another patient in the ward was taken to her scan appointment at Logan by taxi under the supervision of a nurse.
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Young, woke left hateful new face of anti-Semitism
For years the right-on have been warning about the rise of racism. Beware red-faced white men who moan about mass immigration, they say. Watch out for populist politicians and their witless supporters in the masses, they cry. For it is from within these ranks, from within this army of the unwoke, that fascism is likely to emerge.
Watch out, the 1930s are coming back – that’s been the constant cry of the politically correct these past few years.
And yet when fascist-like language really did re-emerge, it came not from some old white bloke but from a youngish and very left-wing woman. When 1930s-style talk really did rear its ugly head, it wasn’t courtesy of an ageing conservative with a chip on his shoulder about illegal immigration, but a hip politico beloved of the smart set.
I am referring, of course, to Jenny Leong, the Greens MP for the state seat of Newtown in Sydney’s inner west.
This week a video emerged showing Leong speaking at a “pro-Palestine” forum in Sydney in December. What she said at that meeting was genuinely chilling. She raged against the “Jewish lobby”. These people, she said, “rock up to every community event and meeting” to try to make a “connection”.
Then came her killer line, a line that will have sickened everyone who has even the faintest acquaintance with the bleak history of anti-Semitism. They meddle in everything, she said, because they want their “tentacles” to reach into every nook of society in order that they might “influence power”.
There it was. “Tentacles”. The old, obscene vision of the Jewish people as an octopus-like monstrosity straddling the world, interfering everywhere. This is the most racist thing I have heard a mainstream politician say.
Yes, it’s good that Leong has walked back her comments. She now admits the word “tentacles” was “inappropriate”. That’s one way of putting it. I prefer “disgusting”. It has direct echoes of Nazi-era cartoons that likewise showed the Jews with “tentacles” encircling the globe.
Leong’s expression of (half-hearted) regret for her remarks should not detract from what a serious situation this is.
To my mind, for a public figure to speak ominously of Jewish “tentacles” is no better than if a public figure compared black people to monkeys or branded Chinese-heritage people a “yellow peril”. Just imagine if an Aussie politician uttered such vile slurs. There would be uproar from the right-on. That politician would be cancelled into oblivion.
This hasn’t happened for Leong. That the self-styled anti-racists of the woke left just carried on sipping their macchiatos is so revealing. It confirms their staggering double standards. They’ll hit the streets over certain kinds of racism, but turn a blind eye to the world’s oldest racism.
“Jewish tentacles” were a key motif in Nazi propaganda. As Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre says: “The nefarious Jew/octopus was a caricature deployed by Nazis as a staple in their hateful campaign.”
The rehabilitation of this vile image should horrify everyone. And strikingly, it was rehabilitated not by some hard-right loudmouth, but by a self-described anti-racist. Leong is a loud and proud critic of racism. She supports Black Lives Matter. “If you’re sick of us talking about racism, imagine how sick we are of being subjected to it,” she once said.
What is going on here? How do we explain this bizarre phenomenon – what we might call “anti-racist anti-Semitism”?
Leong is not the only “anti-racist” who seems to have a colossal blind spot when it comes to anti-Jewish racism. We’ve seen Black Lives Matter praise Hamas. BLM Chicago even tweeted an image of a Hamas paraglider, celebrating those who flew into Israel on October 7 to carry out the worst slaughter of Jewish men, women and children since the Holocaust.
This week it was revealed an “anti-racist” member of staff at the BBC once tweeted about Jews being “Nazi parasites”. At demonstrations across the West, we’ve seen supposed anti-racists march alongside radical Islamists who holler for “jihad” against the Jewish state. Here in London, posh leftists have chanted in support of the Houthis, the Yemeni movement whose flag literally has the words “Curse the Jews” on it.
And, as violent anti-Semitism has soared, anti-racists have looked the other way. The kind of people who scream at white men with dreadlocks (that’s “cultural appropriation”) and damn those who ask ethnic-minority people where they are from (that’s a “racial microaggression”) have been schtum as synagogues in Europe have been firebombed and even when a man with a knife threatened Jews outside a kosher shop in London recently.
Anti-racists flirting with racism – it feels surreal. But here’s the most troubling thing: it’s more than a blind spot. It’s more than hypocrisy. Rather, the strange spectacle of “anti-racist anti-Semitism” speaks to how rotten the politics of identity has become.
This left-wing ideology dolls itself up as “anti-racist”, but it is the opposite. It doesn’t seek to deliver us into a post-racial world, a la Martin Luther King, where true equality reigns. No, it divides us by our ethnic heritage, separating us into boxes marked “oppressed” or “privileged”.
The “oppressed” get the left’s love, while the “privileged” get their hate. And who’s in the “privileged” box? White men, naturally. Heterosexual men. “Cis” people. And, you guessed it, Jews.
Indeed, in the warped worldview of these racial authoritarians who masquerade as progressive, Jews are the most privileged of all.
A recent Harvard/Harris poll in the US found that 67 per cent of 18-24-year-olds – the woke young – view Jews as an “oppressor class”. This, too, echoes a feverish belief of the 1930s – namely, that Jews love to stomp their oppressive boot on the peoples of the world.
Today, entire ethnic groups are demonised, not by the ranting far right, but by a mainstream left that ruthlessly sorts us into the categories of “good” or “bad”.
Identity politics is the enemy of equality. It is the new means through which Jews in particular are singled out as suspect, branded as wicked. Tackling this bigoted left creed should be the top task of everyone who opposes racism, in all its devious guises.
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Vaping out of control in schools, warn principals
School principals are calling for an immediate crackdown on vape sales in shops and online, as the Coalition refuses to back the Albanese government’s plan to confine sales to pharmacies.
At least one in three Australian teenagers has tried vaping, the Cancer Council revealed on Friday when it released a survey showing 93 per cent of parents want vapes banned without a valid prescription.
Australian Secondary Principals Association president Andy Mison called on both sides of politics to back a ban on vape sales.
He said teenage students had sworn at him and threatened to bash him when he confiscated their vapes.
“They’re fixated on getting their next hit, are very disruptive and distracted from learning,’’ he said. “We see the behavioural effects of withdrawal, as kids disappear from the classroom so they can get nicotine hits.
“When you confiscate them, some kids act angrily. I’ve been sworn at, I’ve been threatened with bashings.’’
Mr Mison said manufacturers were targeting children with brightly coloured vapes made to look like highlighter pens.
“The vapes are bright and colourful and clearly designed to attract kids,’’ he said. “They have sweet combinations of flavours like mango and pineapple, and they’re so addictive.
“Kids will be more likely to be using vapes much more frequently than they might have smoked cigarettes.’’
A Senate inquiry into classroom disruption this week identified “strong links between vaping, nicotine withdrawal and classroom disruption’’.
The NSW Primary Principals Association told the inquiry of “increasing evidence of vaping being a problem in primary schools’’. “Vaping should be urgently addressed as a health problem, not a school discipline problem to solve,’’ it said.
Cancer Council chief executive Tanya Buchanan said vapes often contained nicotine and carcinogens such as formaldehyde and metals, which are not declared on the label.
Professor Buchanan said nicotine harms children’s developing brains, affecting the part of the brain that controls attention, learning, moods and impulse control.
“Retailers are still knowingly selling nicotine-containing vapes in local shops near schools, with enticing displays of lollies lining the entrance, attracting the attention of young people,’’ she said.
“Without the Parliament’s support for the federal government’s upcoming reforms, purchasing e-cigarettes will remain alarmingly common and easy for young people.’’
Retailers are banned from selling vapes to children, but enforcement is lax.
The Albanese government banned the importation of single-use vapes on January 1, but retailers are allowed to sell any vapes they have in stock to adults.
The government plans to introduce legislation this month to limit the sale of vapes to pharmacies, with a prescription, for use by smokers trying to quit.
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler called on the opposition to back Australia’s “world-leading vaping reforms’’.
“Once the legislation passes the parliament later this year the only legal way to buy vapes will be therapeutically, through a pharmacy,’’ he said.
The federal opposition refused to commit to the reform, with Nationals leader David Littleproud insisting that retailers be allowed to sell vapes to adults without a prescription.
Mr Littleproud – whose party has received donations from tobacco companies – refused to say if he would support the ban on vape sales in shops.
“We need to protect children from vaping and crack down on the uncontrolled black market,’’ he said.
“The Nationals support a process to develop a comprehensive regulatory framework for e-cigarettes to keep them out of the hands of children.
“We believe that regulating e-cigarettes is also crucial to weakening the illicit black market.’’
The federal Opposition’s education spokeswoman, Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson, said that vaping in schools was “rampant and educators need every possible support to combat this scourge’’.
“With over a quarter of young people aged 14 to 17 admitting to having tried or regularly use vapes, Australian schools need tough action from this government to prevent vaping spiralling out of control,’’ she said.
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NSW to Introduce Legislation to Ban OFFSHORE Oil and Gas Exploration
One wonders why offshore drilling is singled out and why both parties support that. I guess the oceans have an image as pristine. They are more accurately seen as a biological soup. They teem with both life and pollution
On Feb. 6, the state Labor government announced that it would introduce a new piece of legislation to amend the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
Under the changes, all sea bed petroleum and mineral exploration and recovery activities in the state’s coastal waters will be banned.
In addition, the bill will make it impossible for energy companies to carry out other developments related to offshore oil and gas exploration (such as pipelines) within the state.
The NSW government cited the risks of “major environmental disasters” such as oil spills, as well as greenhouse gas emissions associated with petroleum extraction as the main reasons for introducing the legislation.
“The NSW government’s bill is designed to prevent the severe environmental impacts that can result from offshore exploration and recovery of petroleum and minerals,” it said.
Nevertheless, the exploration ban will not apply to activities that the state government deems beneficial to the environment, including the recovery of sand for beach nourishment or beach scraping to help protect against erosion.
Similarly, dredging activities for purposes such as removing sediments or pollutants, and laying pipelines or submarine cables will also not be subject to the ban.
NSW Climate Change and Environment Minister Penny Sharpe believed the new legislation was the right move by the government.
“We know an overwhelming majority of people in NSW do not support offshore mining. The passage of this bill will give certainty that our government is prioritising environmental protection and our own local interests,” she said.
“This bill is a sensible amendment to our legislation to protect NSW against the risks of offshore mining.”
Echoing the sentiment, NSW Central Coast Minister David Harris said local communities would be better off under the new bill.
“This is about providing communities with certainty that is in the best interest of NSW as well as protecting the NSW coastal waters and marine environments,” he said.
State Opposition to Support the Bill
It is expected that the bill will receive support from the state opposition, which introduced a similar bill in June 2023.
While Shadow Environment Minister Kellie Sloane welcomed the announcement, she questioned why the state Labor government did not take action earlier.
“Pleased to see that Labor has finally seen the light when it comes to protecting NSW coastal waters—and has agreed to legislate Liberals and Nationals policy to stop offshore drilling of oil and gas,” she said on social media.
“I’m not sure why they didn’t just do this 7 months ago when the Coalition introduced.”
Despite the looming prospect of a total ban, some energy producers have expressed the intention to continue their exploration activities.
On Feb. 6, Advent Energy Executive Director David Breeze stated that his company would maintain its commitment to exploring and securing gas resources in the Commonwealth waters under the Petroleum Exploration Permit 11 (PEP-11).
“Numerous reports show that NSW faces a gas supply shortfall within the next four years,” he said, as reported by ABC News.
“PEP-11 has the possibility of supplying NSW with the bulk of its gas needs for 20 years.”
Meanwhile, Samantha McCulloch, the CEO of the Australian Energy Producers, a peak industry body, criticised the new legislation, saying it ignored the critical role of gas under the net zero transition and the importance of new gas supply in ensuring energy security and reducing pressures on prices.
“Report after report from independent agencies such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator have warned of approaching supply shortfalls and identified the need for new east coast gas supply–especially in NSW and Victoria,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Blanket bans unnecessarily limit sources of gas when existing regulations provide an appropriate framework to determine conditions for exploration and development.”
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8 February, 2024
Classroom chaos linked to Aussie teaching styles
Teachers should instruct rowdy students in good behaviour and use back-to-basic teaching methods, a senate inquiry into chaotic classrooms will recommend on Wednesday.
Schools need closer ties with health services to give students faster access to psychologists, social workers and behaviour specialists, the Senate Standing Committee on Education has concluded after a 15-month inquiry into the issue of increasing disruption in classrooms.
The committee will recommend that the Senate begin a follow-up inquiry, to investigate Australia’s declining academic standards, focusing on literacy and numeracy.
Its final report contains fresh data from student surveys in the latest global testing of 15-year-old students in maths and science, the 2021 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
A startling 83 per cent of students responded that “students do not listen to what the teacher said’’ in mathematics lessons.
Ten per cent said students failed to listen in “every lesson’’, one in four said classmates did not listen to the teacher “most lessons’’, and half said students failed to listen during “some lessons’’.
In contrast, just 1 per cent of students in Japan – one of the highest-performing countries – said students failed to listen in every lesson. Only one in 20 Japanese students said classmates ignored the teacher in most lessons, and one-third said students failed to listen in some lessons.
An analysis prepared for the senate committee found that the “disciplinary climate’’ in Australian schools was the fifth-lowest among 37 nations in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).
The senate inquiry, chaired by Liberal Party Senator Matt O’Sullivan, will recommend the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) devise a “behaviour curriculum’’ to teach students how to behave in class.
It calls on teachers to use evidence-based teaching methods, including “explicit instruction’’ with step-by-step explanations, and practice and testing to ensure all children mastered each lesson.
The committee has called for an end to open-plan classrooms, which can be noisy and distracting for teachers and students.
Teachers told the inquiry that out-of-control students had sexually assaulted and threatened to kill them, punched classmates, and dealt drugs in the playground.
The National Catholic Education Commission said principals were the victims of physical violence at 11 times the rate of average Australians. The Australian Psychological Society said disruptive behaviour could be linked to low levels of literacy.
Children and Media Australia said violent videos and games were a risk factor for aggression among children and teenager.
Vaping was singled out by the NSW Primary Principals’ Association.
The Australian Secondary Principals’ Association said many teachers were at “breaking point and the addition of disruptive youth adds to this load’’.
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Olympic supremo John Coates calls for $2.7bn Gabba rebuild to be axed
A plan to demolish and redevelop the Gabba as Brisbane’s main Olympics venue is being probed by an infrastructure review led by former Liberal National lord mayor Graham Quirk.
Mr Coates, vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and who has been involved in every summer games since 1976, met with Mr Quirk this week and recommended the Gabba rebuild be scrapped.
Costs to rebuild the Gabba – which was set to hold the athletics as well as the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2032 Games – have already blown out by 170 per cent on preliminary costings to $2.7bn.
Mr Coates has suggested the opening and closing ceremonies for the Games instead be held at Suncorp Stadium and the athletics moved to the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, formerly known as QEII Stadium.
“We’ve put it to the review committee we should abandon the Gabba and we should look for another site for the athletics,” Mr Coates told The Courier-Mail.
“The Olympic movement … was something that did have community support and was going to leave a great legacy for community and sport … now suddenly we’re on the nose in Brisbane.”
Mr Coates acknowledged his recommendation to dump the Gabba rebuild meant the project was almost certainly dead.
“I’m sure it is, it just does not stack up,” he told The Courier Mail.
Earlier this week Premier Steven Miles who championed the redevelopment as Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Olympics infrastructure minister, said he had believed the Gabba was the best option with legacy benefits for Brisbane, but acknowledged he had failed to sell the plan to taxpayers.
“I don’t think I’d succeeded at convincing Queenslanders,” Mr Miles said.
“Queenslanders were saying to me everywhere I went that they thought there should be an alternative, they didn’t think that was a good use of money in the context of housing shortages, cost of living, all of the other challenges.
“I think in the face of changed circumstances and feedback from the community, it’s entirely appropriate for a leader to change their mind.”
Mr Miles said that as Olympics infrastructure minister he had asked his department to provide alternatives to the Gabba rebuild but “none were very good”.
“So it’s entirely possible this review comes back and says that we have to go with that original plan, and if that is the outcome, I hope that puts the division and bitterness and politics to one side and we can get on with building,” he said.
“But if there is an alternative, well, that’s great news too.”
Mr Quirk, Brisbane lord mayor from 2011-19 and central to the city’s original Olympics push, will deliver the findings of his review to the government on March 18.
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Labor’s House of Lords: ALP’s super-sized power grab
By PETA CREDLIN
Have you ever wondered why big business was so totally behind the failed voice campaign and, before that, in favour of same-sex marriage? Has it ever puzzled you that the green-left now consistently outspends the conservative side of politics in election campaigns, even though it’s the Coalition that was always thought to represent the “big end of town”?
There are a number of factors at work here: the sustained leftist indoctrination of the bright students (once just at uni but now in schools too) who eventually go on to dominate the commanding heights of our society and economy; plus the “long march of the left” more generally through our institutions.
But a key element in the radicalisation of big business and in the avalanche of money to support leftist causes has been the mobilisation of our savings into union-dominated superannuation funds that are staffed by Labor activists and largely run by former Labor politicians.
Arguably, thanks to the union-dominated super funds which now manage well over a trillion dollars of retirement savings for about 10 million Australian workers, there’s a giant green-left octopus with tentacles into every corner of the economy that’s reorienting big business towards social, rather than market, objectives.
Maybe socialising capitalism wasn’t the explicit objective when Paul Keating and then ACTU secretary Bill Kelty (and Garry Weaven) set up the compulsory super system, more than three decades back, but that’s been the outcome; especially as the savings taken out of workers’ pockets and given to the union-dominated funds have multiplied, with compulsory contributions climbing from an initial 3 per cent of wages to over 10 per cent now, and legislated for 12 per cent, with Labor wanting 15 per cent as its goal.
It was dressed up as helping people have a better retirement, but the main purpose was always to revive declining union influence (now less than 10 per cent of the private sector workforce) and, in the process, to turn big businesses into social enterprises.
Now, the move towards a green-leftist corporatist state is set to be turbocharged with the Albanese government’s recent announcement that former ACTU boss and Labor minister Greg Combet would succeed Peter Costello as chair of the Future Fund. Since leaving parliament in 2013, Combet has been chair of Industry Super Australia, an umbrella organisation owned by a number of large industry super funds, that in turn provided services back to them, such as investment advice, wealth management, government relations and campaigning.
As part of the closed shop operating in this sector, he’s also been deputy chair of the largest single union-dominated fund, AustralianSuper. More recently, he’s been the head of the Net Zero Economy Agency.
In that capacity, he has called for the mobilisation of workers’ savings towards “nation-building” projects such as welfare housing and green energy, that would not attract investment on a normal cost-return basis.
As Future Fund chair, he’ll now have the chance to redirect the $200-plus billion that’s been accumulated to help fund the pensions of public servants and military personnel, and that under Costello had generated returns of 9 per cent a year, into less prospective ventures that better accord with the left’s agenda.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the Labor Inc that Keating and Kelty set up and that successive Coalition governments have largely failed to rein in. The biggest of the union-dominated super entities, AustralianSuper, is chaired by Don Russell, a former Keating staffer.
Other large industry funds include HESTA, chaired by former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon; Cbus, chaired by former Labor Treasurer and current Labor national president Wayne Swan (before that, Steve Bracks); TWU Super, chaired by former Labor minister Nick Sherry; and Industry Super Holdings (the latest umbrella entity for the bodies providing services to many of the union-dominated funds), chaired by former Labor candidate and ACTU official Cath Bowtell.
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John Howard has described the governance of these super entities as “almost like a House of Lords for Labor politicians”. And these are the funds that are growing strongly because they’re mostly the default superannuation choices for workers who fail to nominate a fund when they join a business and because the alternative for workers who don’t want to self-manage their superannuation – the retail funds that were generally owned by banks – have been discredited by the banking royal commission which Labor pressured the Coalition into setting up.
To put the economic clout of these funds into perspective, with nearly $300bn under management, the wealth controlled by AustralianSuper is twice the market capitalisation of BHP, our biggest public company.
What’s more, these union-dominated funds are starting to throw their weight around: whether that’s insisting that the public companies, where they have a large shareholding, disinvest in fossil fuels as part of the “ESG” (environmental, social, governance) push; or by taking direct control of important national assets.
For instance, an industry super fund consortium has bid to own Sydney Airport; super funds have lobbied against the reappointment of public company directors that don’t share their goals; and AustralianSuper has reportedly blocked a Canadian takeover of Origin Energy, partly on environmental grounds.
Meanwhile, unions have demanded super funds review their investments in CSL after Australia’s third-largest company (by market capitalisation) supposedly had a strategy to scale back highly paid workers’ conditions.
Then there’s the issue of super funds channelling money into unions that can then be recycled into the Labor Party.
In 2022, while unions gave some $17m to the ALP, super funds gave some $9m to unions. And if you want to know why sporting organisations were so quick to line up behind the voice, part of the explanation is another one of the big union funds, Hostplus, that reportedly gave nearly $2m in sponsorship to the AFL plus further large sponsorships to other big sports bodies.
Then there’s the issue of the training bodies which super funds sometimes sponsor and that unions often run.
In one recent notorious case, the electrical trades union tried to include in an award a provision that, in order to access pay increases, workers had to undertake a training course. This course was free to union members but cost twice the union fee to non-members. And the only entity reportedly running this course was the union itself.
None of this is going to improve while the Albanese government is in office. The question, though, is whether this giant union-corporate conglomerate is now too powerful for any Coalition government to touch. A reason for the then-Morrison government delaying its signature “super for homes” policy till the last week of the 2022 campaign was fear of the union-super response.
These days, opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor keeps stressing that super balances belong to individuals, not to the funds or to the government. But if it really is our money, and not a government piggy bank, why not make compulsory super contributions optional? Because it’s still tax-advantaged, many would keep paying in.
But especially during a cost of living crisis, why wouldn’t the Coalition consider letting people take the nearly 12 per cent of wages that their employers put into super on their behalf as a pay rise instead?
It’s not as if compulsory super has reduced pension dependency for retirees, which is down just 2 per cent over three decades.
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Business leaders slam IR reform move as an `overkill’
Business leaders have slammed potential changes to industrial relations laws including making it simpler to convert casual employees to permanent and enshrining the right for staff to “disconnect” if they feel work is creeping into their home life.
Harvey Norman Holdings executive chairman Gerry Harvey said he “can’t see the logic” in the IR changes
Taking aim at the push to make is easier for casual workers to become permanent, he said Australia was currently at or near full employment
“We don’t have an unemployment problem and businesses are looking for people but they can’t find them,” Mr Harvey said. “I don’t know why it’s an issue. I don’t get it.
“I think if you’re a business you should be able to employ permanent people and you should be able to employ casual people. But I don’t see how you can make a ruling that because you employed a casual person that after a certain period of time they have to become permanent. You may not have a position for them.”
Mr Harvey labelled the complexity of the labour laws “a joke”.
“There are too many labour laws and so many different categories. You need an army of people to go through it and try and make sense of it,” he said.
Looking at the disconnect issue Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner described it as “overkill”.
“From our point of view I can’t see why people can’t disconnect if they want to anyway. All they have to do is switch your phone off or switch your laptop off,” he said.
“It’s overkill from what I see. I can’t see the rationale behind this.
“I suppose it depends on what your position is. If you’re a senior executive you have to accept calls and you certainly would not get a promotion to that sort of level if you didn’t.
“My gut feeling is that it’s a total over-reaction on something that’s not an issue.”
Mr Turner said most people who work casually do so because they want to.
“I can’t see the rationale of making casuals who want to be casual, permanent,” he said.
“Most employers who have a good casual would want to make the permanent if they could. They seem to want to solve problems that don’t exists.
Right-wing think tank the HR Nicholls Society described the proposed amendments as “absurd” which seek to add further confusion and anxiety by altering definitions of what is a casual employee.
“It will be medium and small employers and their employees that will most suffer. Squeezing out small business in the market, will only lead to less competition and accountability for larger businesses. It will also impact upon opportunities for employment whether casual or not.,” it said.
The Society said the federal government has taking on board the “right to disconnect” to secure the Greens support, with little to no consultation with business leaders.
“In going down this path there has been little consideration how these changes affect employers and damaging effects it will have on interstate business.
“The amendments are victim of political back dealings that does not put the Australian economy and productivity at the forefront.”
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7 February, 2024
Delenda est Australia
The two law academics writing below do slightly misuse the Latin. It is true that "Delenda est Cartago" literally means that "Carthage is destroyed" but it was used with imperative force -- meaning that Carthage MUST BE destroyed. One hopes that the writers below did not mean that Australia MUST BE destroyed. Though perhps they were summaizing the attitudes of our elites
Gabriël A Moens AM and Augusto Zimmermann
Cato the Elder’s rhetorical phrase comes to mind when reflecting on the present sorry state of Australia. The left’s propaganda against our country seems to proceed relentlessly according to their schedule. Every day more and more Australians are feeling embarrassed to celebrate their own history and achievements. We are becoming a nation with no practical sense of patriotism and pride in our history.
Australians have become a people with only a distorted memory of the past. Arguably, a people without a clear understanding of the past can be much more easily manipulated. The indoctrination of our children by the illiberal ‘elites’ serves this purpose of not only erasing our history, but also vilifying and degrading it.
In fact, the intention of the ruling classes is precisely to turn everyone into haters of their nation and haters of their neighbours, as well as into complacent and submissive slaves of the oppressive ruling classes.
In this context, the week leading up to Australia Day has become a distasteful concoction of constant whining, recriminations, and accusations. It results in the excoriation of those who want to proudly express their Australian nationality.
This year, we have again witnessed the protracted and unrelenting denunciation of Australia Day – a day which supposedly should bring Australians together to celebrate our democratic system of government, the ‘fair go’ attitude of Australia’s people, and the personal freedom enjoyed by its citizens. However, this idyllic view of Australia Day has been brutally disrupted by those who regard Australia’s national day as ‘Invasion Day’, a day of mourning to lament the arrival, on January 26, 1788, of Captain Arthur Phillip in Sydney Cove.
Considering the unabated racial hectoring it is not so surprising that big corporations have waded into the political debate by shadow-banning Australia Day as if it were a toxic product. In unashamedly promoting the politics of the Indigenous lobby, these corporations disregard the real function for which they were established and misuse the financial resources of their shareholders.
For example, supermarkets decided not to stock Australia Day products ahead of January 26, ostensibly for commercial reasons, but also because the celebration of our national day was deemed insensitive to the Aboriginal industry.
Likewise, just a few weeks ago, Australia’s High Commissioner in London cancelled the traditional Australia Day celebration because it was too ‘sensitive’. Surely, this cancellation is as imprudent as it is unhelpful because it effectively prevents people from celebrating Australia Day with pride and enthusiasm…
Last week, it was also rumoured, if not argued openly, that the next Governor-General should be Aboriginal. If the rumours are correct, then they would further provide evidence that ‘race’ – a characteristic over which people have no control – largely decides what opportunities are available to Australians.
These racial considerations represent a retrograde step that makes the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 – a federal law aimed at making ‘race’ irrelevant in the distribution of burdens and benefits – an embarrassing remnant of a saner past. The intrepid Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jacinta Price, commenting on this rumour, has already said that race should not be considered in the selection of the next Governor-General.
Of course, the nation’s ruling classes have a vested interest in fomenting a divisive racialist agenda that seriously undermines political equality. Their primary goal is not social amelioration but, as Senator Price puts it, to divide Australia along ethnic and cultural lines by entrenching racial separatism and legally enshrining ‘the idea that Aboriginal people are perpetual victims forever in the need of special measures’.
Consequently, as the protests on Australia Day indicated, Australia has gradually become a racist county, where a person’s opportunities no longer depend on merit, but on the colour of their skin. Talking about race all the time is itself a sign of cataleptic racism and indicates that Australia is inexorably becoming a racist country. The racialist bureaucracy needs to promote racial hatred and discord as a Machiavellian mechanism for gaining more power and control over society.
However, if you dare to criticise the ubiquitous Welcome to Country ceremonies, you are likely to be labelled a racist. There are professional people who refuse to take the top job in their organisations because they do not want to demean themselves by repeating these meaningless references to ‘past and present (and sometimes even emerging) leaders’ because, in addition to compromising free speech, it would entrench the policies and philosophy of victimisation in the Australian psyche, and make all Indigenous Australians into perpetual victims of discrimination.
In continuing the victimisation narrative, reconciliation becomes impossible because there will always be new reasons for maintaining, even nurturing, the victimisation story. The stranglehold that Aboriginal politics is exerting on Australian society has caused these Woke actions, so prominent in the week leading up to Australia Day.
An analogy is helpful here to elucidate this point. There was a time, not so long ago, when females, simply on the basis of their sex, were effectively denied an opportunity to serve in the Parliament. David Furse-Roberts’s book Menzies: The Forgotten Speeches has an entire chapter on the ‘Status and Role of Women’. The first section in the chapter, entitled ‘Women for Canberra’, is based on a broadcast delivered by Menzies on 20 January 1943. There, Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister said:
Of course, women are at least the equals of men. Of course, there is no reason why a qualified woman should not sit in Parliament, or on the bench, or in a professional chair, or preach from the pulpit, or, if you like, command an army in the field. No educated man today denies a place or a career to a woman because she is a woman.
But there is a converse proposition which I state with all respect but with proper firmness. No woman can demand a place or a career just because she is a woman. If it is outmoded and absurd to treat a woman’s sex as a political disqualification; it seems to me equally absurd to claim it as a qualification in itself…
Menzies’ argument could equally be applied to the current ‘race’ debate. Indeed, following his argument, people should not be preferred simply because they are Indigenous, or because of the colour of their skin.
It appears that the overwhelming majority of Australians support Menzies’ view. The lobby group, ADVANCE, recently released the results of an exclusive national polling that shows 69.5 per cent of Australians support laws that would stop politicians from changing the date of Australia Day. It noted that this is: ‘…a massive majority of Australians who support enshrining January 26 in law, and guaranteeing it can only be changed after a vote of the Australian people.’
Subject to the correctness of the poll’s results, Australians may well be interested in ensuring that Australia remains (or rather ‘becomes’) a colour-blind society. Such a result might be achieved if Australia were to repeal section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution, which confers legislative power on the Parliament to make laws for the ‘people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’.
In this context, the proposal of Liberal Senator, James Paterson, to amend the Constitution to remove the race power altogether is a sensible, even a most urgent task, to make this country colour-blind and unite all Australians. But the implementation of his proposal would require a referendum – not precisely the most exciting prospect right now.
Why not call the week in which Australia Day falls ‘Australia Woke Week’? During that week, Australia’s Wokerati ‘elites’ would then be able to celebrate and propagate their race-based policies. Provided they restrain themselves for the remainder of the year, the recognition of Woke Week would be a welcome development, which might free Australia from the racialist bureaucracy for the rest of the year!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/delenda-est-australia
**********************************************************Australian Surf Brand’s Wipeout Over Transgender Surfer Shows Fed-Up Americans Are Winning
It’s been a week to forget for surf company Rip Curl, the latest brand to risk consumers’ wrath with a pro-transgender marketing campaign.
Its January post urging people to meet “waterwoman” Sasha Lowerson, a biological man in a bikini, lit a literal fire under fans, who took to the internet to burn everything from surf booties to boards. Days after deleting the reel, with international outrage at a peak, headquarters decided to do something that Bud Light still hasn’t: apologize.
In a revealing move, management issued a mea culpa late Wednesday night, just five days into the dust-up. “Our recent post has landed us in the divisive space around transgender participation in competitive sport,” a spokesman told Shop-Eat-Surf late Wednesday night. “We want to promote surfing for everyone in a respectful way, but recognize we upset a lot of people with our post and for that, we are sorry. To clarify, the surfer featured has not replaced anyone on the Rip Curl team and is not a sponsored athlete.”
If Americans want to know who’s winning the war with corporate bullies, look no further.
A reversal like this is majorly significant—not only because of how intense the backlash was, but how quickly executives responded. If anything, the wave of corporate pushback that was sparked by Bud Light has only intensified over time. In fact, it’s so powerful that even the media is starting to admit that the grassroots may actually be winning this fight. “Big corporates may finally be learning that ‘Go woke, go broke’ is real,” commentator Nicolle Flint pointed out.
“ … [T]he once iconic Australian surf brand is living proof that women are finally fighting back against companies using transgender women to promote products for women and girls,” she wrote. “What is most significant about the Rip Curl campaign featuring Sasha Lowerson that was removed from Instagram just five days after being posted, is that this is the first time a major brand has responded to female backlash. … Whether the company ‘woke up’ soon enough to the fact that the backlash from women was serious and potentially financially damaging remains to be seen.”
That’s a blow to the company’s relatively new CEO, who, pre-Bud Light, told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia when she was hired in 2021 that her goal was to drift left. “You still want to be cool enough to recruit that next generation,” Brooke Farris said, “but I think by approaching it from a place of inclusivity, people will be attracted to that.”
Turns out, people were not attracted to that—and willing to sink her brand to prove it.
Meanwhile, Bethany Hamilton, the courageous face of Rip Curl from 1999 to 2023, is surely looking on with satisfaction. A year into her renewed contract with the company, the two sides abruptly parted ways last year, almost certainly because of Hamilton’s opposition to the new rules allowing biological men to compete in women’s surfing. The devoted Christian and shark-attack survivor, whose comeback story inspired the world, reiterated her stand at the height of the Rip Curl controversy, posting, “Male bodied athletes should not be competing in women’s sports. Period.”
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Workplace law changes allow union ‘thugs and criminals’ on to job sites
Labor has been accused of sneaking in a loophole to its controversial workplace laws that would allow “thugs and criminals” on to job sites under the guise of health and safety.
Under a last-minute change to the proposed laws made on the final sitting day of parliament last year, the government “disapplied” a rule that required union officials to have an “entry permit” to enter work sites to assist workplace health and safety representatives.
Entry permits, granted under the Fair Work Act, are normally required of union officials to ensure they meet various tests including that of being a “fit and proper person”.
However, these are often revoked by courts in the wake of bad behaviour.
In 2022, a former CFMMEU official was fined and had his permit revoked after saying words to the effect of “shut up” and “f--k off” to two managers at a WestConnex project site before blowing cigarette smoke in a third manager’s face.
That same year, another CFMMEU official had his entry permit stripped after blocking concrete trucks and abusing and intimidating workers at a Gold Coast building site.
Current laws allow health and safety representatives, who are workers on a site chosen by fellow union members, to request an “assistant” from the union provided they hold a permit.
Industry leaders worry that, without the requirement for an entry permit, “thugs” could be sent on to work sites to intimidate managers and staff.
Minerals Council of Australia CEO Tania Constable said: “Under these changes, there will be nothing stopping union officials with criminal records or history of abuse, harassment or intimidation, from being given access to a worksite, despite not holding a right of entry permit.
“This loophole, snuck into the government’s legislation under the cover of Christmas, will put both employers and workers in danger, given the history of union thuggery and intimidation in certain industries.”
Master Builders Association CEO Denita Wawn said: “These changes are simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing, opening the door even further for unions to exploit safety as grounds to circumvent the normal right of entry obligations.
“Exploiting safety to pursue other industrial purposes has been commonplace in the sector, and this is only going to make that worse.”
Opposition workplace relations spokeswoman Michaelia Cash said: “The fact this government has implemented a law that will potentially allow union thugs and convicted criminals into workplaces is an absolute disgrace.”
A spokesman for Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said the change had been recommended by a review commissioned by the Coalition.
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Why I’m tempted to stop building in Sydney amid building woes
HARRY TRIGUBOFF
Councils and planning authorities must listen to developers in order to address the housing crisis, as prices will keep increasing unless they act to fix problems plaguing NSW.
I am the state’s largest apartment builder but if I have to waste years building in Sydney, and not in other places, I will not build here except to finish on my empty blocks of land.
The problem is that there is not enough action to back up the official sentiments on housing. I see that our authorities in NSW are promising that production of units will increase, but for this to happen blocks of land for many hundreds of units must be sold.
At the moment, developers don’t have enough money to buy sites, so I believe that governments can rezone whatever they like, but there won’t be action. When authorities rezone land, they must ensure that profit can be made. The basic problem is that they don’t know how to do it, nor do they care. They think they know the answer. That is why we have too many offices and not enough apartments.
Authorities must stop being arrogant and must understand the market. If developers come with problems, they must be helped – not told what the law says. Laws have to be changed very often because conditions change. When making rules and deciding on density, profits must be protected.
Our developers are going broke more than anyone else. They can’t all be dumb. So I believe authorities must consult with developers, otherwise, we will never catch up with demand.
And investors are still quiet. At present, the income for an investor if he buys a unit is 2.5 per cent net. And this is not exciting. We sell very few units to investors – they are only about 25 per cent of the market.
For units to be taken by investors, council costs have to be brought down. But the councils have no intention to do that either. So, there will not be much sold for rent. Besides, the banks are refusing to provide finance for builders.
So, nobody cares about all these added costs. Everyone wants units to be built, but few will be. Thus, rents will keep going up. The price of units will also go up because there is no supply.
What of the big solution?
We’ve all heard of build-to-rent, but we can’t see it. And we won’t until everyone concerned ensures that costs will be reduced. Unfortunately, both political parties are very happy with this situation. Their advisers give them the same advice. So, people are struggling and employment and spending are down.
This apathy has to stop. I am building more than 2000 a year and could build 4000. But councils fabricate problems for which I would gladly take them to court, but our present rules don’t allow me to do so.
And the planning department is not at all helpful. I have almost stopped buying in Sydney, and I am just using up my empty land.
Of course, we have some councils that are better, but many rules applied to them are awful.
Because I can’t get approvals, I now provide finance to people who are not accepted by the banks, even though I may not be the builder. The result now is that the banks don’t earn much, and neither can the government earn much from housing.
In the last quarter, I completed three blocks of serviced apartments, and I am active in Brisbane and Surfers Paradise. But we need more approvals.
It is most interesting to try and understand how much longer they will allow production to drop and for supply to fall further and further behind in NSW.
And prices are rising and rents are going up.
All the planners here (in Sydney) have to do is act normally and I will be back.
But I don’t like my chances.
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6 February, 2024
Cadbury boss defends supermarkets against price gouging allegations
What people overlook is that the cost of putting fruit and vegetables on shelves is influenced by many costs other than what the farmer is paid: Broadly, distribution costs, including transport costs. And the supermarket staff have to be paid
The local boss of one of the world’s largest supermarket suppliers, Cadbury owner Mondelez, has dismissed claims Woolworths and Coles are price gouging shoppers, arguing much of the negative commentary engulfing the chains was based on “emotion” with no evidence of an uncompetitive or dysfunctional supermarket sector in Australia.
Amid a growing political firestorm that has seen six separate inquiries launched to inspect the supermarket industry, including a Senate inquiry pushed by the Greens into pricing and market power, Mondelez Australia chief executive Darren O’Brien said competition was as intense as it has been for a decade, and shoppers were treated to a wealth of choice.
“I don’t see evidence of what I would consider (price) gouging. I don’t know how you measure gouging,” Mr O’Brien told The Weekend Australian.
“Comments around there not being competition, comments around things needing to be broken up, I think these are comments that are made without people putting forward evidence.
“What is the evidence of dysfunction? I’ve seen a lot of emotion. I haven’t seen a lot of evidence presented. I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that there is a dysfunction in the market.”
The comments from the Mondelez CEO are all the more powerful given he is also chair of the Australian Food and Grocery Council, the peak body for the nation’s $150bn food manufacturing sector.
Supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles have faced a political pile-on over the last few months as the cost-of-living crisis and the Albanese government’s unpopularity – driven by a sense the government was not focused enough on household financial stress – has seen the chains and perceptions of their misuse of market power put under the spotlight.
But Mr O’Brien, whose portfolio of brands includes Cadbury, Toblerone, Ritz crackers and Philadelphia cream cheese, warned against intervention, such as breaking up Woolworths and Coles, saying the competitive landscape was bolstered by their efficient operations.
He said the inquiries in train, ranging from a Senate probe into pricing, an inquiry called by the government to be run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and another inquiry commissioned by the ACTU, needed to be accompanied by balance and the facts.
But they would also probably come up with the same conclusions other inquiries had found, that the Australian supermarket sector was highly competitive.
“There seems to be a lot of inquiries going on,” Mr O’Brien said. “We will have to see what those findings are. From what I’ve read, some of these inquiries have been held in the past and the outcomes of those found similar to what I’ve said, that we have a well functioning and competitive retail environment in this country.
“Having inquiries per se is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think the commentary around them needs to be balanced. And I certainly have not agreed with a number of things that I’ve read because I think they’re factually incorrect. Perhaps an inquiry will help to put some factual information on the table that people can look at with a balanced view.”
Mr O’Brien conceded that the supermarket industry could be viewed as concentrated, and that at times Mondelez has had “robust” interactions with the major chains, but competition between Woolworths, Coles, the independents and new entrants like Aldi and Costco ensured a highly competitive market for shoppers.
“We have enjoyed a constructive and at times quite robust relationship or interactions with our retail partners, but they are a critical part of our ability to get products that people want to enjoy in locations that they want to be able to get them from,” he said.
“There’s some 2500 or more supermarkets out there spread right across Australia. They are critical partners to us. And at times, we may have robust commercial negotiations, but overall our ability to work with them … is strong.
“Even though it is a concentrated retail market in Australia, it’s a very competitive one. And consumers have choice. And if they don’t like particular prices or promotions at one supermarket, they have significant choices to go to others, whether they be discounters or direct competitors of one or the other supermarkets or an independent. That is proven to be a dynamic environment for consumers. And it’s one that I think works quite well.”
Some of the criticisms over the supermarkets first emerged late last year, when farmgate prices for key products such as lamb and beef began to fall sharply but there was no proportionate fall in meat prices on the shelves.
Mr O’Brien said those criticising the supermarkets needed to be mindful of the complexities of supply deals, contracts and the costs involved in getting products from the farmgate to the shelves.
“If you have a look over the last 10 years or so, consumers have certainly seen the benefit of that intense competition between the various retailers,” he said. “And I certainly haven’t had a sense that competition has changed in any way in the last 10 years.”
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Why some Australians still need convincing the future lies in renewable energy
Last year, the Energy Minister asked the Energy Infrastructure Commissioner to investigate regional pockets of stubborn resistance and recommend ways of getting the doubters onside.
Andrew Dyer’s Community Engagement Review Report makes the bold assumption that Chris Bowen’s renewable energy plan can be put back on track, that his target of installing a 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours and 22,000 solar panels a day until 2030 is not as fanciful as it sounds. Opposition in the regions can be overcome by “ongoing excellence in community engagement and, more broadly, excellence in the execution of the energy transition”.
Engagement is a weasel word much loved by technocrats. It implies a two-way conversation, an exercise in exchanging information on the assumption that those in charge don’t possess the perfect knowledge needed to make perfect decisions.
In the minds of those who write these kinds of reports, however, engagement means no such thing. Engagement is the dissemination of a top-down plan, designed by people in the know.
Dyer says the government should develop a narrative “articulating why there is an urgent need for new renewable energy and transmission infrastructure”. He says opposition is often driven by “misinformation” and recommends the government establish one-stop information shops to help opponents get their facts straight.
He cites previous campaigns for efficient water use, cancer awareness and drink-driving as models of what could be achieved by appointing “an eminent, respected and independent spokesperson to engage the nation and be the ongoing champion of the energy transition”. Wisely, he steers clear of putting names to his proposal. The authority of most of those once considered national living treasures has been eroded by their endorsement of the voice referendum.
Dyer reflects on the role played by Sir John Monash in championing Victoria’s energy transition in the 1920s. This begs the question: Would Monash, the engineer who developed Victoria’s brown coal as a source of cheap and abundant energy, be prepared to champion wind and solar power today? Will wind and solar be powering the nation in a century’s time, the lifespan Monash anticipated for lignite?
The transition to renewable energy will reverse the progress made by Australia between the wars. Cheap energy attracted productive capital from Britain and the US. The increase in domestic manufacturing was driven by the perceived need for power and industrial self-sufficiency after the experience of WWI. Expensive and unreliable energy is driving companies offshore. It is barely 10 months since the Albanese government announced a $15bn scheme to attract manufacturing jobs and avoid a repeat of the shortages of essential goods experienced during the Covid-19 panic. The fund has yet to accept a single application, and Australia has fallen to 93rd in the Harvard Growth Lab’s rankings for economic complexity, sandwiched between Uganda and Pakistan.
Nowhere is the cost of the renewable energy transition more keenly felt than in the regions. They know first-hand the pressures on small and medium businesses from rising energy prices. They have discovered the dirty secrets the inner city prefers to ignore. They have experienced the rapacious demand for land required to generate a moderately respectable amount of power from wind and solar. They have seen and heard the scale of the civil engineering works required to build endless access roads and level platforms for turbines and cranes, often in remote and rugged terrain. They have been disturbed by the aviation warning lights on top of the turbines that compete with the natural beauty of a night sky away from the city lights.
Their roads have been churned by hundreds of truck movements transporting blades, steel and concrete. They know what it is like to be patronised by know-nothing community relations agents with newly minted degrees in strategic communication from UTS.
A community survey conducted for the commissioner’s review shows the extent of their unease. Nine out of 10 (92 per cent) were dissatisfied with the standard of community engagement by developers. Explanations in response to questions were considered unsatisfactory by 85 per cent. Only 11 per cent considered explanations relevant to their questions, and 85 per cent thought their explanations were not addressed promptly.
The conclusion the commissioner painfully avoids presenting to the Energy Minister is that any chance of gaining the social licence he desires has long since been lost. The haughtiness, equivocation and condescension of some developers have trashed the industry’s reputation. Governments that are supposed to control the excesses of the free market have instead acted as their facilitators. MPs, supposed to stand up for their constituents, have been nervous about taking up their concerns, fearing being labelled as climate deniers.
The idea an official information campaign will put these people straight is fanciful. The arrival of broadband means rural Australians have abundant information about the limits of renewable energy. They can follow the news from the US and Europe, where appetite and investment for wind and solar are diminishing and governments are reaching for other ways to reduce emissions, such as nuclear.
The internet has brought together communities blighted by renewable development from Tasmania to the edge of Cape York. In the past year, individuals overwhelmed by fighting their own lonely battle against cashed-up corporations have coalesced into a fledging national movement, Reckless Renewables; remarkably, without professional support or funding.
On Tuesday, the protest goes to Canberra with a rally at Parliament House. The renewable energy lobby has already fired warning shots. GetUp, which received $80,000 in donations last year from Mike Cannon-Brookes, is promising to pepper Canberra with posters. Renew Economy, the renewable sector’s version of Pravda, has tried to belittle the participants, mocking the support they have received from MPs Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson.
Bowen is unlikely to break his habit of entering parliament through the basement ministerial carpark and instead turn up at the front door. Put that down as a lost opportunity. His reception would have told him more about the country’s mood than any number of engagement reviews.
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Antisemites fall out
Anti-Israel activists have fallen out bitterly over claims there are too many white people advocating for Gaza in a peak lobby group and that the use of a former Israeli soldier to back the Palestinian cause is wrong.
Block the Dock Melbourne, which targets Israeli shipping interests, has savaged Free Palestine Melbourne, claiming the umbrella campaigning group has been overrun by white people who do not speak for the people directly affected by the Middle East conflict.
The groups are two of the highest profile pro-Palestinian groups in Australia, often campaigning together to highlight their opposition to Israel’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel last October.
But the groups are at odds, with Block the Dock declaring publicly it was opposed to the lack of Palestinian people involved in FPM’s campaigning and against using a former Israeli soldier to promote their cause on behalf of those opposed to the Jewish state.
“What an embarrassment to the Palestinian community,’’ Block the Dock posted on social media. “We don’t need Palestinian killers in our community.
“90% of FPM is run by white people. White people do not speak for all Palestinians.’’
The weekend post by Block the Dock provoked a strong response across the anti-Israel lobbying sector, with some calling for it to be taken down and others stridently backing it.
The division came as Greens leader Adam Bandt declared at a Melbourne rally that the Albanese government should change course on its position on Israel, flagging his party would move a motion for such a change.
He said it was beyond doubt that the “far right-wing cabinet of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu’s is intent on slaughter and dispossession’’.
“And it is time for Labor to change course,’’ he said.
Block the Dock is a radical left-wing group that has been camped at the Melbourne port, an engine room of the national economy, to try to disrupt Israeli-owned boats.
Israel’s ZIM is a global shipping line that activists accuse of helping the pro-Israel military cause.
The group has had only scattered success, but has received favourable coverage in some foreign media backing Gazans.
The entry to the dock has been defaced with anti-Semitic stickers, one declaring a picture of a Jew saying: “If I don’t steal it someone else will.’’
It was printed by the anti-Israel group @freepalestineprinting, which also has played a key role in the campaign against Israel and Jewish interests in Australia.
The anti-Israel groups have relied heavily on social media to further their cause, with Sunday’s rally in Melbourne live-streamed.
The Block the Dock post provoked a mixed reaction, with one woman saying the campaigns should be run by Palestinians.
‘’I think it’s only a problem if whites are running the organisations, we can be involved as allies,’’ she wrote.
“Palestinians should be the main people running the cause, with other groups as allies – especially First Nations as they’ve suffered similar.’’
Another respondent defended FPM: “They do have Palestinians in their organisation. I know them. And like all good and decent organisations in Australia it is an inclusive and multicultural space for activist who support Palestine. It is not closed to anyone.’’
Melbourne’s pro-Palestinian rallies are heavily backing First Nations causes, with Aboriginal activist Robbie Thorpe a lead speaker at the Melbourne rally.
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New vehicle efficiency standard set to be introduced next year
Too bad if somebody would liketo spend their money on a large and powerful car. NO! say our authoritarian Leftists. You only have the choices that WE allow. You must want the RIGHT things
The federal government will introduce laws that will set fuel efficiency standards on new cars being sold in Australia.
Under new vehicle efficiency standards, car companies will be required to supply more fuel efficient vehicles to consumers by targets set on the average emissions per kilometre for new cars sold.
Australia has been dubbed a dumping ground for inefficient vehicles because it hasn't had fuel standards like China, the United States, New Zealand and the European Union.
The standard only applies to new passenger vehicles and light commercial vehicles.
The Albanese government said it would consult on its preferred model for a month, but was looking to introduce the legislation in the first half of 2024.
The new standard was expected to come into effect on January 1, 2025.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said consumers were currently spending more on petrol than they should and the standard would lead to savings.
"It means Australians are paying more at the bowser than they should compared to people in other countries because they’re using more petrol and diesel," he told a press conference in Melbourne today.
Mr Bowen said the standard was a "win-win" for consumers as it offered more choice of vehicles to buy. Modelling predicted that by 2028, drivers would save up to $1000 per vehicle on fuel.
"It's a win for cost of living and a win for consumers," he said.
Mr Bowen said the standard wouldn't dictate which cars Australians could buy and he expected car manufacturers to comply with the legislation, which would include fines for those unable to meet the standard.
Transport Minister Catherine King said she anticipated consumers would hear “all sorts of nonsense” about the standard from the federal opposition and "a range of stakeholders".
“We’re going to hear that utes are banned – that is not true. We’re going to hear that somehow second-hand vehicles (are) affected – that is not true. It is about new vehicles,” Ms King said.
“We’re going to hear about price (of a new vehicle) – none of the evidence, there is just no evidence to say that it will affect price at all of SUVs, or utes or any other vehicle."
Vehicle efficiency standard 'should start this year'
Independent Senator David Pocock welcomed the announcement, but said it needs to be more ambitious.
"I want to see these new standards implemented as soon as possible and call on the government to bring forward the slated commencement date of 1 January 2025 to 1 July 2024, with a six month test period during which penalties do not apply," he said in a statement.
“Anything less ambitious than what is being proposed will increase the cost of transport and do further damage to our climate."
The Electric Vehicle Council of Australia has welcomed the move and said it would stop the country being a dumping ground for inefficient cars.
"Australia has always been at the back of the queue when it comes to the best and cheapest electric vehicles, because car makers have been incentivised to offer them elsewhere first," the council said in a statement.
"That should end now with this policy, and Australian car buyers should notice the change very quickly."
Climate Council chief executive officer Amanda McKenzie said the move would assist Australians struggling with cost of living pressures.
"Many Australians are doing it tough right now, with petrol one of the expenses causing the most financial stress for households," Ms McKenzie said in statement.
"At the same time, pollution from inefficient petrol-guzzling cars is fuelling harmful climate change.
"By giving Australians better choice of cleaner, cheaper-to-run cars, a strong fuel efficiency standard will cut household costs and clean up our air."
Targets are 'ambitious and will be a challenge'
Last year 1,216,780 new vehicles were sold in Australia, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries.
FCAI chief executive officer Tony Weber said it would take time to study the impact on consumers and the industry, but the targets were ambitious.
“On the surface, the targets seeking a 60 per cent improvement in emissions are very ambitious, and it will be a challenge to see if they are achievable taking into account the total cost of ownership," Mr Weber said.
“The preferred option suggests that Australia considers adopting the type of targets that are currently in place in the United States. The targets in that country are supported by significant financial incentives yet the discussion paper makes no reference to any additional incentives to support the uptake of low emission vehicles."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/new-vehicle-efficiency-standard-for-new-cars/103425022
************************************5 February, 2024
State government announces $160m Renters Relief Package to help battling tenants
This is a fantasy. Landlords already distrust bonds provided by the government rather than the tenant. So this "relief" will be no relief at all
The Miles government will provide bridging loans for rental bonds as part of a $160m package to help battling tenants amid the state’s housing crisis.
Bonds will also be able to be transferred between rental properties and the government will crack down on dodgy practices such as rent bidding under the initiative to be announced on Sunday.
The Sunday Mail has obtained exclusive details of the “Renters Relief Package” which Mr Miles said would help ease the burden on Queensland’s 1.8 million renters.
Bonds for rentals in Queensland are typically four weeks and often amount to thousands of dollars. The Department of Housing already provides bond loans and rental grants to struggling renters.
Under the relief package, the government will establish a portable bond scheme allowing tenants to transfer bonds when relocating from one rental property to another.
“While this scheme is being established, a Bridging Bond Loan product will be introduced to assist households to afford the upfront cost of a new bond, pending release of their old bond,” a government spokesperson said.
“A new rental sector Code of Conduct will be explored with all parties to crack down on dodgy and unprofessional practices and ensure better protections for renters.
“Rent bidding (where prospective tenants are encouraged to outbid each other for properties) will be banned and penalties will be enforced against agents who engage or encourage these practices.”
The package will also involve additional funding for the government’s more than 20 private rental products and services, with eligibility criteria for renters to be widened.
The government will also double the number of specialist customer service staff in the state’s 21 Housing Service Centres by hiring an additional 42 RentConnect officers.
“These vital frontline workers will help connect renters with the support and services they need to get and keep a rental home,” the spokesperson said.
Mr Miles said the scheme – part of the government’s much-vaunted Homes for Queenslanders initiative to tackle the housing crisis – would help the more than one in three Queenslanders who rented their homes.
“Our plan makes sure Queensland renters get a fair go and have the supports they need to ease the cost of keeping a roof over their head,” he said.
“Through this package, we hope to ease the cost of getting into a home and help renters to save the money they need for a house deposit.
“And, we are putting tough new laws in place to stop rent bidding and crackdown on dodgy practices.
“Queenslanders can trust that my government will be behind them at every step of their housing journey.”
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Australian Employer Ordered to Pay Compensation for Vaccine Injured in ‘Significant Precedent’
An Australian court has ordered an employer to pay weekly compensation and medical expenses to an employee after ruling that a vaccine injury that occurred from a workplace directive is compensable under the law.
Daniel Shepherd, 44, worked as a child and youth support worker with South Australia’s Department of Child Protection when he developed pericarditis after receiving his third Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in February 2022.
Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium, a thin sac that surrounds the heart. The condition is reported to be more common in males aged 18 to 49, with an estimated 27 cases per 100,000 doses.
Mr. Shepherd was told by his employer that his employment would be terminated if he did not receive the third dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. The directions for the mandate were made under Section 25 of South Australia’s Emergency Management Act in January 2022, which required support and healthcare workers to receive a third dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to continue working.
Mr. Shepherd received two COVID-19 vaccinations on Aug. 19, 2021, and Sept. 9, 2021, respectively, according to documents submitted to the South Australian Employment Tribunal.
On the first dose, Mr. Shepherd experienced aching joints, cold, and flu symptoms, and minor chest pain for one to two weeks. He experienced similar symptoms on his second dose.
Mr. Shepherd then received his third booster dose on Feb. 24, 2022, after receiving a message from his employer saying that employees needed to have a third dose of vaccine within four months of having a second vaccine.
The following day, Mr. Shepherd experienced severe chest pain, which worsened over the next two weeks.
On March 11, 2022, the chest pain was so unbearable that he felt “like someone was kneeling on his chest.” Having thought he was experiencing a heart attack, Mr. Shepherd was taken by ambulance to the Ashford Hospital, where cardiologists diagnosed him with pericarditis.
The 44-year-old husband and father of a 5-year-old boy noted some improvement four to five months after the chest pain; however, further episodes of severe chest pain followed and symptoms returned.
Mr. Shepherd has not worked since March 2022, except for two months when he worked part-time in an administrative role.
Vaccine-Injured Files Claim Against the State
Mr. Shepherd filed a claim for compensation against his employer, the State of South Australia, which was initially rejected.
The state had initially contested the connection between the vaccine and the injury but later acknowledged that the third dose caused Mr. Shepherd’s pericarditis and subsequent incapacity to work.
Despite that, the state argued that the injury didn’t arise from his employment under the Return to Work Act, and that the injury was linked to the Emergency Management Act.
The state argued that if criteria under the Return to Work Act are met, they are exempt from liability in relation to the broader management of the pandemic under the Emergency Management Act.
But Tribunal deputy president Judge Mark Calligeros rejected those arguments.
“The injury was a direct consequence of an Emergency Management Act vaccination direction and of Mr. Shepherd’s employment,” Judge Calligeros said.
“The connection between employment and the injury is a strong one, given I have found that Mr. Shepherd would not have had a third dose of the vaccine if he had not been required to in order to continue working.
“The state required Mr. Shepherd to be vaccinated to continue working in a healthcare setting because it sought to protect and reduce the risk of infection to the public and general and those members of the public receiving healthcare services in particular.
“It would be ironic and unjust if Mr. Shepherd was denied financial and medical support by complying with the state’s desire to preserve public health.
“The rejection of Mr. Shepherd’s claim should be set aside, and it should be ordered instead that he receive weekly payments of income support and payment of medical expenses.”
Ongoing Pain
Currently, Mr. Shepherd tires easily, and becomes tired after walking his son to school, some 400 metres (437 yards) from his home. Prior to the injury, he was able to hike up and down Mount Lofty, walk, and do Chinese boxing, which he is now unable to do.
In an interview with 9News, Mr. Shepherd said he now has the heart of a 90-year-old. “Even today with just mild exertion [I get] chest pains and then it’s followed by fatigue, like severe fatigue,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to have to say, ‘Sorry buddy, daddy’s tired’.”
In a social media post, Senator Gerard Rennick said the ruling is a “significant precedent.”
“[E]mployers are now going to think twice about forcing people to get a vaccine if they have to fork out for potentially significant medical costs if the employee then incurs a vaccine injury,” Mr. Rennick said.
“This is only one case, and I suspect it will be appealed.
“I hope the decision is upheld because it will then open up the option of employers suing governments who mandate vaccines or pharmaceutical companies for unsafe or ineffective vaccines.”
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The real Stolen Generation: Give us back our kids
The people who wail about Australian government agents maliciously stealing kids from their parents as part of a program of ‘cultural genocide’ are half right.
They are just wrong about which kids were actually stolen, and by whom.
Let’s start with the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’, which were the subject of a comprehensive report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, published in 1997.
The report, deliberately or not, misinterpreted a historically rare dilemma: what to do with kids trapped between the hunter-gatherer culture of their often drunk parents and the liberal democracy into which they’d been born as citizens. It claimed ‘many thousands’ were forcibly removed from their parents and placed in institutions or, if they were lucky, a loving foster home.
In truth, few were forcibly removed, and the number of kids totalled, according to historian Keith Windschuttle, about 8,250 – all of them in desperate in need of rescuing.
Most people with part-Aboriginal ancestry are now happily part of modern Australia. It is those who, for whatever reason, never escaped their remote ‘communities’ who continue to suffer misery and deprivation.
Nevertheless, leftists have been able to twist the Stolen Generations report into proof of the genocidal intent of ‘colonialism’. Politicians across the nation have ever since been cowed into avoiding policies that could in any way be construed as a repeat of last century’s ideas.
Which is ironic because, despite widespread fervent opposition to the idea of stealing kids from their parents, the practice has only since increased on an industrial scale. Only now the victims are mostly white, and they number in their millions.
Ask any parent or grandparent aged over, say, 50 and you will hear the same story –they have all lost at least one child to the state. I’m only mildly exaggerating here; almost every parent I know in this cohort has been affected by this.
The story never varies: a beloved child of devoted parents diverted from a happy, conventional life towards a future defined by victimhood, intersectionality, gender fluidity, nihilism, contempt for tradition, state dependency and (spoiler alert) depression.
The story is invariably delivered with the same mix of profound sadness and bewilderment that a child could turn his or her back on loving parents and a bright future.
But, as anybody who has passed even a cursory glance over our education system, this shouldn’t be bewildering at all. While we parents were at work earning money to pay for the state-designed education of our kids, that education system was busily stealing our kids away from us.
For most of us older parents, this happened when the child was sent off to university.
What should have been a rite of passage into a world of intellectual wonder and opportunity turned out to be an indoctrination into useless knowledge about environmental catastrophism and colonial guilt.
But now it’s worse. Not only are secondary and primary teachers stealing kids (by encouraging kids to change gender without telling their parents, for example), pre-school teachers are also getting in on the act.
‘Meaningful engagement with philosophies and pedagogies for social justice… opens up space to explore issues of profound importance, such as gender equity, LGBTQI+ rights, trauma and its impacts, and the climate crisis,’ says a report about education of 0 to 5-year-olds by the New South Wales government from last year.
‘While these are key examples, there are many other issues and ideas to explore, and a multitude of perspectives that children can bring to these important conversations as we continue working to honour children’s rights and social justice in early childhood education.’
And you thought pre-school was about playing in the sandpit followed by an afternoon nap.
Every time you hear a politician boast about increasing subsidies for childcare, remember this: they aren’t doing it to ‘help working families’, they are doing it to enable their apparatchiks in the education industry to convert children into brain-dead, pliable cogs to be fed into the government’s increasingly ubiquitous ideology-machine.
There is now no part of the entire education system where it is safe to send children. How the parents of toddlers today will cope is beyond me.
My generation of parents (late boomer/Gen X) are partly to blame.
I remember hearing the term ‘Participation Award’ for the first time, twenty years ago. My kids were playing Auskick at the time, where end-of-season participation awards were obligatory for even the least physically gifted child.
Some newspaper commentators said this was wrong because it shielded kids from a harsh reality, that not everyone gets a trophy in life, and that merely turning up and performing badly is not a cause for celebration.
Perhaps, I thought. But can you really dismiss the joy these kids felt from being part of something?
I now realise I was wrong. Those ridiculous participation awards encouraged kids to celebrate failure in a field to which they were never suited. I imagine that if some of them had been harshly but fairly discouraged from playing football, they might instead be playing violin in a symphony orchestra by now.
My generation was also mostly preoccupied with raising kids with love, and not much else.
In hindsight, a bit of discipline, not to mention religious spirituality, might not have gone astray. It was a bit presumptuous of us to think we could dispense with these ancient parental traits without consequences.
Our shortcomings as parents have made our kids sitting ducks for the faceless generals who are now recruiting them as woke foot soldiers in the culture wars.
This has happened before. Mao taught his young Red Guards to dob in their parents if they showed signs of being counter-revolutionary. Some did, sending their parents to the firing squad.
In his history of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh says the Hitler Youth of the 1930s ‘became strangers’ to their parents, ‘perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors’.
In both these cases, things did not end well.
Australian parents who feel victims of a similarly malign and overwhelming force are loath to imagine things panning out quite so badly. They just want their kids back.
Perhaps the Human Rights Commission could hold a similar inquiry to the one it held in 1997. After all, this Stolen Generation is infinitely bigger, and the people doing the stealing are far more sinister. Worse, this time cultural genocide is a distinct possibility. I’m not holding my breath for it, though.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-real-stolen-generation/
****************************************************Go woke, go broke
The furore over certain organisations trying to ignore Australia Day is just part of a major trend in developed countries where time and again very smart, driven executives of major companies have fallen for the trap of thinking that the vast bulk of consumers of their company’s products share the concerns of tiny but extremely noisy groups with woke agendas.
Perhaps the least costly of these many errors is that of senior executives at bodies as diverse as Woolworths, Cricket Australia and the Australian Open trying to avoid mentioning Australia Day or acknowledge the national holiday celebrations, only to be forcefully reminded that the vast bulk of consumers and sports-watchers are quite happy with the day as it is. They do not want it ignored or re-labelled ‘invasion day’ or ‘oppression day’ as activists have demanded.
After receiving three thousand emails and having opposition leader Peter Dutton call for a boycott against his supermarket chain, Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci admitted he had misread the political climate over his decision to drop Australia Day merchandise. He also insisted that his decision was due only to last year’s poor sales of such merchandise and that he would celebrate the day himself.
The Australia Day furore, however, is just a bad day at the barbecue compared to the errors costing billions committed by executives of major companies overseas, including those in charge of the iconic US magazine Sports Illustrated. Like all magazines, Sports Illustrated has been struggling to find its place in the digital age, with online sites eating into its core readership, but attempts to reverse this by applying woke obsessions made things far worse.
Sports Illustrated featured articles on subjects such as the lack of ethnic diversity in major sports – an issue in which the vast bulk of its readers had no interest – and even attempted to block advertisers who did not demonstrate a commitment to female equality. But most ludicrous of all was a woke revamp of the magazine’s annual swimsuit issue, a major seller with the publication’s overwhelmingly hetero, male readership.
Instead of using the mainstays of previous years such as a busty Kate Upton, svelte Canadian model Kate Bock or the full-figured girl-next-door-type Myla Dalbesio with a strategically cut t-shirt, the magazine featured transgender men in bikinis and fat women. To the surprise of no one but hard core activists this did not work and the company producing the magazine has all but closed the title, laying off the bulk of the staff. As the magazine rights are owned by another company, Sport Illustrated may yet reappear in another form but at the time of writing nothing has been announced.
The layoffs at Sports Illustrated are, in turn, part of a string of mass sackings at other iconic publications. In January the Los Angeles Times newsrooms announced that it would layoff at least 115 people or about one-quarter of its journalist staff less than a year after a round of major redundancies. Billionaire owner Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong declared that the paper could not continue to lose $US30-40 million ($A46-61 million) a year without increasing revenue and readership. The New York Times and the Washington Post have also announced major lay-offs.
All sorts of reasons can be found for the shake-out at these major newspapers, with the Covid pandemic and the long-running actors strike undoubtedly affecting the LA Times. But online media commentators, openly gloating over the problems of their print competitors, also pointed to the apparent obsession the traditional media has with subjects such as gender and identity politics and climate, as well as its marked cheer-leading for the left. The journalists on those publications, commentators say, have completely lost touch with the concerns of the bulk of their readers.
Even the Disney Corporation usually closely attuned to what its consumers want has been fooled by woke concerns into making what can only be described as strange decisions, notably over the Star Wars franchise which the corporation acquired along with Lucas Films more than a decade ago. Films in this franchise regularly earn more than $US1 billion in ticket sales. But after producing a series of other films that flopped at the box office, Disney decided to revamp the corny space opera and adventure brand by introducing woke themes such as female empowerment.
However, the corporation’s decision to hire a Canadian-Pakistani director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy to direct the next Star Wars film, a political activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality, resulted in an enormous backlash from fans.
The fans were, in part, reacting to a comment made by Obaid-Chinoy many years ago that she ‘liked to make men feel uncomfortable’ that resurfaced around the beginning of the year. However, online comments indicate those fans see Obaid-Chinoy’s appointment as further evidence of the general decline in the brand since Disney took it over, and that they anticipate that the new film scheduled for release in 2025 will be a ‘woke disaster’. They also point out that Princess Leia was taking on bad guys and fending off Hans Solo back in the 1970s, so why does the brand have to be made more female now?
Another woke disaster was an attempt by fashion brand Victoria’s Secret to atone for past sins, including an unfortunate connection with serial abuser Geoffrey Epstein, by dumping its usual catwalk show of supermodels parading in the brand’s signature Angel’s Wings, including South African Candice Swanepoel and Australia’s own Miranda Kerr, for models who were plus- sized, transgender and disabled.
The result was a £1.1 billion (A$2.13 billion) fall in sales between 2020 and 2023, with the fashion brand announcing at the end of 2023 that it would, as various commentators noted, ‘bring sexy back’.
Fashion is, well, subject to changing fashions, but even hard-headed car industry executives have swallowed woke/climate nonsense, including activist assurances that electric cars will dominate the car market. As noted in this publication (‘EV Speed Bump’, 2 December) car makers such as General Motors and Ford are discovering for themselves after spending billions what non-activist commentators have been telling them all along, that the broad middle class of consumers owning just one cheap car that they need to get to work or take the kids to school have little interest in expensive electric vehicles.
Every week there’s a fresh disaster. This week, Aussie surf brand Rip Curl was forced into damage control after using a transgender surfer to replace a woman. But the real question is why smart, experienced executives let themselves be fooled into spending billions to please perhaps one per cent of the public, who might not even buy their company’s products, while ignoring or alienating almost all their customer base.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/model-business
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Political activists exploit Indigenous Australians for their own ends
JACINTA NAMPIJINPA PRICE
There may have been some people surprised to hear a Federal Court judge describe a “cultural mapping” exercise and other key components of the Environmental Defenders Office case against the Santos Barossa gas project as “so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them” and tainted by “confection” and “construction” of evidence. But I wasn’t one of them. Using Indigenous Australians and our history to push a particular agenda is nothing new; indeed, the whole country witnessed the practice on its biggest scale yet during the 2023 voice referendum.
The euphemistically named Environmental Defenders Office, which has received more than $8m from the Albanese government, knew exactly what it was doing when it was, in the words of Federal Court judge Natalie Charlesworth, “distorting and misrepresenting” the words of traditional owners. The “subtle coaching” of Indigenous Australians, and the attempts to “encourage and hint” to come to particular conclusions, are common examples of activists trying to manipulate and use Indigenous Australians to pursue their own agendas, regardless of the best interests of those they are using.
This is all too common in Indigenous Australia: activists, academics and bureaucrats, with good education, opportunity and financial security, pursuing their own agendas, with complete disregard for and indifference to the genuine challenges being faced by Indigenous Australians in remote and rural Australia. Organisations such as the EDO, and the individuals who run them, are only too happy to use the plight of some of our most marginalised Australians to further their own ideological or political agenda.
It’s difficult to say what the most damaging part of this sort of behaviour is: the legal damage, the economic deprivation or the division and hurt it causes among all Australians. In the case of the EDO against Santos, distortion and misrepresentation were used, as Tasmanian senator Jonno Duniam put it, as a form of “environmental lawfare’’ that frustrates the courts, brings important projects to a standstill, and puts vital industries – and the thousands of Aussie jobs they create – at real risk. As even a former Labor MP, Joel Fitzgibbon, said following the Santos decision: “Hopefully the broader community is beginning to see activist lawfare for what it is, ideological and a threat to our living standard.”
The absurdity of the Albanese government funding an organisation hellbent on undermining government processes beggars belief and points to a government that is both out of touch and out of its depth. The claims that these activists are working for Indigenous communities while pushing their radical environmental agenda is likewise absurd. We know the quickest and most effective way to permanently improve the lives of our most marginalised is to encourage and facilitate economic advancement. However, as West Australian Labor Premier Roger Cook said: “We now see environmental groups undertaking that same strategy that we all condemned in the early 2000s, where they pull people away from the group and use that to undermine their own self-determination in relation to projects.”
The Northern Territory government will review its funding of the Environmental Defenders Office over its conduct… during a Federal Court challenge to the Barossa gas project. Santos won the case, and work has now resumed on laying the pipeline from the Barossa field to Darwin, with the first gas More
Indeed, far from wanting to help, activists attacking mining and energy companies – attempting to stymie new development and trying to revisit and change past decisions – are actually hurting investment and depriving Indigenous Australians of those economic opportunities. We now find ourselves in the incredible situation where the federal government is actually funding organisations pursuing the deprivation of Indigenous economic participation, while simultaneously spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to implement ill-conceived, silver-bullet policy solutions to Indigenous disadvantage.
Is it any wonder Indigenous disadvantage is so entrenched, when the rich and powerful see something like the Barossa gas project as a greater environmental threat than an opportunity for Indigenous economic advancement. I believe we must also consider the damage these acts do to the goodwill of so many Australians towards Indigenous issues. A recurring theme of the 2023 referendum was the amount of taxpayer money being spent, both directly and indirectly, on Indigenous issues, and its efficacy.
At a time when Australians are struggling with a cost-of-living crisis, finding out millions of dollars in taxpayer money is going to an organisation filled with radical environmentalists, which seeks to obstruct progress and opportunity, and exploits Indigenous Australians to do it, only damages that goodwill and stokes more division.
The Coalition has repeatedly called for an audit into spending to understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where the waste is – calls routinely rejected by the Albanese government. That Anthony Albanese and Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek would continue to allow taxpayer money to be wasted like this is simply astonishing. It begs the question: is this all just a thinly veiled attempt to, as Queensland senator Susan McDonald puts it, “secure votes in inner-city seats under threat from the Greens”? This was on display on Wednesday when Solomon MP Luke Gosling fell into line, saying he “still sees a role for the EDO”.
The truth is that what was uncovered by the Federal Court is not uncommon. Instances such as Santos’ Barossa gas project and the “white hands on black art” exercise are just the tip of the iceberg. The EDO needs to be defunded not just because it is a proven bad actor, but also to send a clear message that the age of exploiting Indigenous Australians to achieve political goals is at an end. This is what Peter Dutton and the LNP are ready to do, and what Albanese and the Labor government are incapable of doing.
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Steal from the rich. Steal from the poor. Steal from them all!
What does our Prime Minister really think about money? Does he see himself as the ‘Robin Hood’ of Australian democracy?
Absent any systematic treatise, it seems we have to guess how his thinking works based on his words and actions. Over the last week, his words have changed. The Prime Minister’s reasoning for this change, as reported by him, is because he was driven by a sense of ‘fairness’ to deliver more tax relief to more people.
But is our Prime Minister’s ‘fairness’ actually ‘just’? That depends on our view on the role of taxation. For example, if taxation is primarily about providing minimum care for those who cannot provide for themselves, that is very different to if we view taxation as a means of ensuring everyone receives the same benefits regardless of individual context.
It seems that our Prime Minister has confirmed that he is in the latter camp. He has demonstrated a tone deafness to the nuances of taxation changes and changed his mind, dramatically, under the cover of his plaintiff cry, ‘But this is fairer!’
The irony is that his drastic turn-around is purported to fix a problem of his own government’s making. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is driven, amongst other things, by the rising price of energy. The unnecessary and ineffective rush to so-called renewables, and the banning of alternatives, is central to the difficulties being experienced by families and businesses.
Does it make sense to give more money to those with less, regardless of the cause? Drs Laffer and Domitrovic have suggested that this is not necessarily helpful. Indeed, they have identified that beyond a certain point (perhaps 20 per cent of GDP), more taxation is counter-productive, regardless of the distribution pattern. According to their ‘transfer theorem’, when you take money from those who are involved in increasing goods and services, they have less to invest in their productivity. And when you give that money to those who have a little less, this alternative source of income detracts from their incentive to be productive (and earn more on their own).
As Dr Laffer explained in an interview: ‘Whenever you transfer resources you always reduce total production in the system. Always. You take from those who have a little bit more, reduce their incentives to produce, and they’ll produce less. You give to those who have a little bit less, provide them with an alternative source of income, and they, too, will produce a little bit less. Whenever you redistribute income you always reduce total income, period.’
Here is why our Prime Minister’s Robin Hood act of fairness is more than a broken promise. He is, long term, aggravating the very dynamic he pretends he is fixing! He claims this is good economics. He is wrong. Why? Because he is, again, creating options that decrease productivity. It is unjust. It is against the principles of respect for individuals within a community. It is against the principles of choice within the community itself. We can call it ‘big government’ or ‘socialism writ large’, but at a deeper level, it is an attack on our humanity.
Why? We humans are choice-makers towards meaning and truth. Existential questions of life are important to us. For example, we recoil against the horror of any war. We should throw ourselves into protecting others from the evil of those who rejoice in the horror of war.
In leadership, our choices should be made in a manner that demonstrates a transparent relationship between responsibility and authority. But when the government takes too much of our money, it is taking authority which is not its to use. This is why allowing taxation bracket creep to flourish is unjust. It separates the responsibility of productivity from the authority to make decisions about our productive efforts. Again, Laffer puts it bluntly:
‘Whenever you redistribute income, you never actually redistribute income. You destroy total income completely. Every revolution on planet Earth has been fought in order to change the distribution of income. Not one of those revolutions has ever succeeded in redistributing income, but all of them have succeeded in destroying the entire quality and quantity of total income. All of these attempts at high tax rates have been attempts to redistribute income, taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Robin Hood. And none of them have succeeded. But what they have succeeded in doing is destroying total income and the quality of life in our country.’
That is what the Prime Minister is doing when he claims he is being ‘fairer’. He is continuing to reduce the quality of life in our nation. Is this why he shied away from what he was intending to do (or at least thinking about doing) with blatantly misleading responses to questions about the already legislated Stage 3 tax cuts.
There is an old saying that explains that what comes out of our mouths demonstrates the state of our heart – where our heart is the total of who we are. What does this say of our Prime Minister?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/steal-from-the-rich-steal-from-the-poor-steal-from-them-all
***************************************************Stop wasting water
Almost every river in Eastern Australia is pouring surplus water into the sea.
Despite this, only two dams have been built in Queensland in the last 20 years – the Wyaralong Dam (built 13 years ago), and Paradise Dam (built 19 years ago).
Droughts will come again and we will wish for another dam builder like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose government built at least eight dams in Queensland – the Burdekin, Wivenhoe, Hinze, Beardmore, Haig, Fairbairn, Bjelke-Petersen, and Eungella dams.
All that dam-building came to a halt in 1988 when the plans to build the Wolffdene Dam were scuttled by the usual suspects.
Taxpayers also spent some $460 million on preliminaries for the Traverston Dam, but then cancelled it when the infamous Peter Garrett rejected the project. And recently it was revealed that the Paradise Dam in the Bundaberg Region had faults in the wall and a new wall would have to be built.
So, while our water storages are stagnant or declining, our politicians support dangerously high levels of immigration as well as promoting tourism, games, and circuses, all of which add to the demand for water. The population clock managed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that Australia’s population increases by one person every 50 seconds. They all need water.
And some fools want to use more of our precious stored fresh water to produce hydrogen fuels (every tonne of hydrogen produced by electrolysis consumes at least nine tonnes of fresh water). The ‘green hydrogen’ cycle needs lots of water and will always be a net consumer of electricity.
Climate alarmism of the it’ll never rain again variety resulted in the rash approval and construction of artificial desalination plants in Australia about 15 years ago. Recently, Hunter Water announced that it was going to spend $500 million on a desalination plant south of Newcastle. All desalination plants are costly to build and operate, and many stand idle most of the time. And of course, green politicians want the power to be supplied from wind-solar adding greatly to the costs and environmental destruction.
To let surplus fresh water escape to the oceans and then try to recover it using artificial desalination plants is the ultimate water stupidity.
Right now, Cyclone Kirrily is demonstrating nature’s power of desalination – sucking moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumping it on land. This is free fresh water with no costs to taxpayers.
Sensible people have their water storage facilities ready – new dams and weirs built, silt cleaned out, dam walls and overflows checked, and no leaves clogging the tank strainers etc.
Australia must build more dams for flood mitigation, urban water supply, and irrigation. Most East Coast Rivers have surplus water that races to the sea during floods. It could be conserved.
And it is time to apply our engineering skills to building the Bradfield water scheme – it will certainly provide better returns to Australians than green energy dreams like Snowy 2 or powerlines from the Northern Territory to Singapore.
A sensible society would identify the best dam sites and have a long-term plan for acquiring and preserving the land rights needed for them. We do the reverse. Decisions are postponed until the need is critical. Then landowners with vested interests, green busybodies, and media stirrers manage to scare the politicians, and the water conservation proposal is killed.
Then the ‘No Dams Ever’ Mafia takes over, trying to sterilise the site for all future dams by quietly changing land-use or vegetation classifications. They search for (or manufacture) evidence of native title or endangered species, and declare national parks over critical areas.
Green destroyers have also grossly mismanaged stored water by insisting on excessive and ill-timed ‘environmental’ flows. This is a scheme where you build a dam to catch water and then try to manage the water as if the dam did not exist. It is very slow and expensive to get this lost water back from the sea using desalination plants.
Existing dams have two great enemies – silting which gradually steals their water capacity, and evaporation which continually steals the water itself. Our engineers can manage ‘desilting’ and the CSIRO could divert some resources from climate alarmism to reducing evaporation from water supply dams.
But most of all we need more stored water. The wet La Niña will inevitably be followed by a droughty El Niño.
Let’s find a new Joh who will build more dams.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/stop-wasting-water/ ?
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Death sentence by capital starvation
Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones is planning a devastating attack on around 1400 listed Australian companies – around 60 per cent the companies listed on the ASX.
And he is following that up with a similar attack on thousands of smaller high technology private companies delivering equally savage blows to our embryonic venture capital market.
When I understood the pending disasters my first reaction was that Jones was “doing his bit” by joining in the ruthless Anthony Albanese attack on family businesses which I have documented many times.
That initial conclusion might be right, but I now think it more likely that in this case Jones actually had good intentions but consulted the wrong people — the big end of town — who simply didn’t understand what would happen if the nation made it much harder to be classed as a “wholesale” investor.
Jones’ plan that Australia should have the toughest definition of “wholesale” investor in the developed world (outside Hong Kong) will result in the vast majority of the 1450 ASX-listed companies with a market capitalisation under $100m being starved of capital slowly squeezing them to death.
The same death sentence by capital starvation will apply to most small enterprises being backed by Australian venture capitalists.
Very few major stock exchanges provide a market for small enterprises like the ASX and because I am partly responsible for this unique Australian situation I should have realised the pending disaster much earlier.
Back in the early days of the internet (around 1997) I was in charge of BRW Media group. BRW had a unique Australian advantage because our large readership base had a huge number of medium to smaller enterprises and we knew the opportunities the internet would create.
So on a tentative basis, myself and Amanda Gome (congratulations Amanda on your AM on Australia Day along with along with another former colleague David Koch), started exploring whether we could create a “BRW market” for equity in smaller enterprises.
Our early feasibility work had not gone as far as telling the Fairfax top management and board but it reached the ASX who may have thought we were further advanced than we actually were.
They reacted swiftly to cut us off by opening their listing doors to much smaller enterprises. They were rushed and the numbers kept growing as the years passed. We were correct in seeing that there was a national need but there were also a lot of hazards to be explored before BRW entered such a field. We smiled because our objective was achieved.
What made the market so large was the development of a remarkable capital raising industry dominated by wholesale investors.
Non “wholesale” investors are called retail investors and they can buy and sell the small company shares on the ASX market every day, but when it comes to raising capital there are severe restrictions on their ability to subscribe — that’s why the money to keep the 1400 companies alive must come from “wholesale” investors.
It’s crazy that retail investors can buy any quantity of shares on the ASX without restrictions but are restricted in subscribing to essential new raisings. But that’s the way it is and companies are able to finance their activities because the wholesale investor market is strong, led by many enterprises like InvestorHub.
Naturally there have been failures and some of the listed companies are dormant but the ASX rules have protected investors
In the non-listed market, Startmate is one of a number of organisations that mobilise funds to invest in venture capital start-ups.
Startmate chief executive Michael Batko says his group has one pool of 441 investors and he believes 98 per cent of them would be knocked out by Jones’ proposed criteria.
Under the current rules, a person can be a wholesale investor if they have net assets of more than $2.5m including the family home or an income for two years at or above $250,000. That figure has not changed for many years and the rise in the value of the family home has greatly expanded the number of people who are eligible “wholesale” investors.
Accordingly, Jones asked the Financial Services Council, ASIC and Treasury to make recommendations. Clearly none of them had any idea of the extent and sophistication of the role of wholesale investors in capital raising for listed companies with capitalisations under $100m.
Given the absence of major scandals, the investigators were forced to go back six years to find what they thought was a good example where something went wrong.
It was actually a bad example but it illustrated how well this market is operating.
Australia’s corporate failures are currently dominated be the impact of inflation on building and Covid and not the operation of the wholesale investor.
But on the Assistant Treasurer's table is a recommendation to double the required assets, including the family home, to $5m and set up a $2.5m net assets trigger point without the family home. The alterative income test proposal is $450,000 annually for two consecutive years.
That takes us way out of line with the rest of the world. The Londoners recently looked at an appropriate level and decided on $A850,000 as the net assets minimum requirement. Williamson thinks $850,000 excluding the family home is workable but given that the rise in the value of the family home has substantially boosted the numbers of qualified wholesale investors there is no detailed data.
And I would add that it makes no sense to have any limit on a capital raising in a listed security where retail traders can buy the same security on the ASX without a limit on their finances.
I plead with the Assistant Treasurer to hold back and speak with Williamson and Batko and others who are leading this market and confirm for himself that making the proposed changes will cause havoc to an essential part of Australia’s future.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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