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
31 July, 2023
Andrew Bolt: ‘This Aboriginal identity craze is too much’
Brittany Higgins is now Aboriginal, too? And even got a job from Victoria’s version of Labor’s Aboriginal-only Voice?
Dear God. This Aboriginal identity craze is just too much.
And wait until I tell you about the latest very senior “Aboriginal” academic.
But let’s start with Higgins, whose story helps to explain why so many academics in particular say they’re Aboriginal when they’re not.
Higgins, you’ll know, controversially claimed she’d been raped in Parliament House by a Liberal colleague. He denied it, but she still won up to $3 million in compensation.
It was extraordinary. Higgins didn’t have to prove either the rape or the nasty treatment she claimed she’d got from the Morrison Liberal Government before the Albanese Labor Government gave this fortune to the woman who’d help them to smash the Liberals.
But Higgins had meanwhile hit a problem. Where could she find another job?
No problem! A friend working at Victoria’s First Peoples Assembly told her to apply there to be a media adviser, and apparently told her bosses Higgins had Aboriginal ancestry.
Text messages uncovered by the Daily Mail show that friend, Emma Webster, then asking Higgins what “mob” she was, adding the Assembly’s “co-chair and CEO are curious”.
Higgins replied that her grandfather was connected “to either the Nyawigi or Gugu Badhun people”. But “we’re not entirely sure which one” and her grandfather “didn’t want to progress any further” with inquiries after reconnecting with his “siblings from the orphanage”.
Higgins added: “We’ve all collectively as a family respected his wishes”, but “my grandma has all the documentation if you’d like”.
Be clear: I’m NOT calling Higgins a fake. Her grandfather may indeed have Aboriginal ancestry, but I wonder how anyone could claim Higgins is in any meaningful way Aboriginal herself, based on such uncertain connections.
Higgins got the job, but many other Australians who get jobs after claiming to be Aboriginal can’t even wave at any documents to supposedly prove it.
I’ve given examples before: author Bruce Pascoe, of course, now Professor of “Indigenous Agriculture” at Melbourne University; and Professor Kerrie Doyle of the non-existent “Winninninii” tribe. Both won’t explain why their genealogies show no Aboriginal ancestors.
But let me now introduce you to yet another academic who has longed claimed to be Aboriginal.
Margo Neale is an Australian National University adjunct professor, and head of the Centre for Indigenous Knowledges at the National Museum of Australia.
She’s been one of the gatekeepers of Aboriginal culture, organising exhibitions of Aboriginal art and working at the National Gallery of Australia and the state galleries of NSW and Queensland.
She’s big. She’s shared in seven Australian Research Council grants, and her many books include the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture.
Part of Neale’s influence comes from claiming she’s Aboriginal herself – descended on her mother’s side from the “Mirning-language speakers of the Albany region, Western Australia”.
She’s also claimed she’s “Aboriginal descent, from Kulin nation with Gumbayngirr clan connections”, and even “clan-affiliated” with the Wiradjuri of NSW.
The trouble is that Neale’s family tree – now assembled by professional genealogists at dark-emu-exposed.org – suggests she’s actually 100 per cent of Irish, Welsh and English stock.
The researchers couldn’t find a single Aborigine among Neale’s ancestors, after consulting birth records, death records, newspaper clippings of family events, and the family trees and photographs posted on ancestry.com by two of Neale’s very close relatives.
Dark-emu-exposed.org wrote to Neale asking her if they’d overlooked something, but got no answer.
Then I wrote, asking Neale to identify her Aboriginal ancestor. I eventually received a response offering no name or evidence: “Aboriginal histories, as you know, can indeed be tricky particularly if one relies on western records during the long period of disruption and displacement …
“Aboriginal births, deaths and marriages were largely unrecorded outside missions and pastoral properties in earlier days at least, or inaccurately recorded for spurious purposes or surnames changed for legitimacy reasons.”
I’ve since asked Neale again which ancestor was Aboriginal and had their birth record inaccurately recorded.
I’m still waiting, but someone did meanwhile send me one university document which helps to explain why so many academics are now Aborigines about as pale as Higgins.
It was a Queensland University advertisement, seeking a lecturer in maths and physics, but insisting “the occupant must be of Aboriginal and / or Torres Strait Islander descent”. I’ve since found many more such racist ads.
How mad. No wonder a great race circus overwhelms even our universities and all common sense
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Queensland Government Slashes Fishing Quotas, Fish Prices Set to Rise
On July 1, Fisheries Queensland cut the amount of Spanish mackerel allowed to be caught.
For professional anglers, the amount dipped by approximately two-thirds from 578 tonnes to 165 tonnes.
Recreational fishers’ possession limits have also changed from three to one fish per person or from six to two fish per boat with two or more recreational fishers on board. Further, the extended charter limit has been removed, stopping recreational fishers from taking twice the in-possession limit for trips over 48 hours.
These changes were made based on fish stock modelling. The government’s stock assessment estimated that Spanish mackerel could be down to 17 percent of its unfished biomass which has an accepted sustainable level of 60 percent or more.
However, Allan Bobbermen, Chief Executive of the Queensland Seafood Industries Association (QSIA) said this data must be re-examined.
He told the ABC that the modelling did not match what fishing businesses were experiencing in the field.
“If there was less to catch, we’d be catching less, but we’re not catching less,” Mr. Bobbermen said.
Simon Hoyle and Alistair Dunn, experienced fisheries scientists with expertise in mackerel management, are also concerned after they conducted an independent report on the government’s modelling.
They said that the model showed “signs of misspecification, with bias apparent in the estimated growth curve, and instability in model fits.” They argued that before this model was used to recommend any management advice, it needed to be fixed.
“What Fisheries Queensland has relied upon in reaching decisions about future Spanish mackerel catches simply should not be used in its current form for management of the fishery,” said Mr. Bobbermen.
He has asked Fisheries Minister, Mark Furner, to withdraw the new East Coast Spanish mackerel Total Allowable Commercial Catch (TACC) because of the information being questioned in the independent report.
According to Bobbermen, the TACC could lead to severe economic hardship for many coastal Queensland communities such as Ingham, Halifax, Lucinda, and Cardwell. It will also affect more than 200 commercial fishermen.
He said, “We did not get any warning, and in fact, we’re quite dismayed at the lack of due process and the lack of engagement by governments in relation to this whole matter.”
No Heads Up
This is not the only issue the fishing industry is facing in Queensland. Commercial fishers have said that Queensland’s wild-caught industry will be crippled by a surprise reform to ban gillnets from the Great Barrier Reef by 2027.
Gillnets are used to catch fish in a moving tide and have been shown to be a threat to much sea life, including dolphins.
The government has allocated $160 million (US$107 million) to reduce net fishing and other fishing activities affecting the reef.
Licences (N2 and N4) that cover Thursday Island to Maryborough will be bought out by the end of 2023. While Cape Bedford to the tip of Cape York will also become net-free, with N1 licences phased out by June 30, 2027.
Additionally, there are around 240 gillnet licences that will eventually be cancelled, and the government will also mandate the use of independent data validation on commercial fishing vessels.
Dermot O’Gorman, CEO of WWF-Australia, said that the decision was a significant moment for ocean conservation.
“This announcement is shaping up as a globally significant moment for ocean conservation, fisheries management and the Great Barrier Reef—one of the natural wonders of the world,” he said.
“The commitment to mandate the use of independent data validation on commercial fishing vessels is also welcome and long overdue.
“It means we’ll have a much better understanding of what’s happening out on the water, including how many threatened species are being accidentally caught.”
Federal Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek said in a media release that the removal of the gillnets will help boost populations.
“The removal of gillnets in net-free zones on the reef has already helped boost local fish populations. We want to see this happen right across the reef,” Ms. Plibersek said.
According to Mr. Bobbermen, these bans were made without any consultation or discussion with the fishing industry.
“We are shocked by these unnecessary bans and the lack of empathy shown to fishers, their families, and the communities that rely on the commercial fishing industry in the joint announcement by the state and federal governments,” Mr. Bobbermen.
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Why our energy transition needs a price tag
On the ABC’s 7.30 earlier this month, presenter Sarah Ferguson asked Energy Minister Chris Bowen to forecast a time when power prices would come down.
After name-checking the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bowen answered: “very clearly, the policy agenda indicates getting more renewables into the system, backed up by storage and by firming … (that) is the best way of seeing the cheapest possible energy prices”.
But is it? This is the multibillion-dollar question Australia’s future hinges on.
Bowen’s view that an ever-increasing share of renewables will lead to a reduction in power prices largely rests on one document: the CSIRO’s GenCost report. Updated on a yearly basis, this document is produced by a small team led by energy economist Paul Graham.
Although the document is treated as gospel by many, it has received surprisingly little scrutiny in the public arena. Given it is the most important document in Australia’s energy transition this lack of scrutiny may lead to policy disaster. One problem is that describing the problems with the report in accessible terms is no easy task.
Understanding the report requires a technical nous, and even those with industry expertise have found parts of it confounding.
Nevertheless, some experts do not hold back in their criticism. Stephen Wilson, from the School of Mechanical & Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland, told me in an email that the GenCost report is “inaccurate and misleading on total system costs”.
In a submission to Treasury earlier this year, energy economist David Carland points out that the report says nothing about the cost of “firming” of renewables and instead estimates the cost of “integrated” renewables from 2030 onwards – relying on the flawed assumption that firming has already taken place. But the most pointed criticism of GenCost has emerged this week from a Sydney-based data scientist.
Writing in the Fresh Economic Thinking publication, Aidan Morrison points out that the CSIRO’s claim that renewables are the “cheapest” form of energy rests almost entirely on a misapplication of the “sunk cost” assumption.
A “sunk cost” is economics jargon for money already spent. The sunk cost fallacy applies when you have already spent dollars and you try to recover them after they are gone. Say you buy a cake and put it in the fridge. You come to it later in the week but it has gone stale. You tell yourself you should eat it because you have spent money on it. In that situation – if you ate it – you would be committing the sunk cost fallacy. It would be better to just chuck it in the bin and reach for an apple.
In many situations, it makes sense to account for sunk costs. But the concept should always apply to money spent in the past, not in the future. By definition, costs that have not been incurred yet are avoidable, and are not yet sunk. This is common sense but, in the GenCost report, the CSIRO treats future spending on renewables as sunk – even before the spending has occurred – allowing the analysis to exclude this expenditure from the total cost of renewables.
This creative accounting method is how the GenCost report arrives at the conclusion that “integrated renewables” are the cheapest form of energy by 2030 onwards.
“By use of a bizarre ‘sunk-cost’ assumption in their modelling, CSIRO cleaves the cost of infrastructure built prior to 2030 (when we would supposedly already have reached over 50 per cent renewable penetration) from any solar and wind generators built thereafter that might depend on that infrastructure,” Morrison writes in Fresh Economic Thinking.
The CSIRO lists the projects that are written off as sunk: “Snowy 2.0 and the battery of the nation pumped hydro projects … various transmission expansion projects … New South Wales gas peaking plants at Kurri Kurri and Illawarra … The NSW target for an additional 2GW of at least eight hours duration storage is assumed to be met by 2030.” In response to this list, Morrison quips: “I’m losing count of the billions.”
“Every economist, politician, and policymaker relying on this report simply must hear about this,” he writes.
Morrison argues that a circular logic has taken root: “Politicians build transmission and storage because they think solar and wind are cheap because science says so. Science (ie, CSIRO) says solar and wind are cheap because high transmission and storage costs required to facilitate these renewable generators are an already built ‘sunk cost’ and ignored in their calculations.”
Of course, there may be good reasons why the CSIRO uses the sunk cost assumption for future and not past spending, and Morrison’s critique itself is worthy of scrutiny. But the problem is that we do not have a balanced conversation in this country about the true cost of our energy transition, and engineers who have expertise in alternative clean energy sources – such as nuclear – are frozen out of the conversation.
There is also a growing awareness internationally that when the full cost of firming renewables is incorporated into cost-of-generation metrics, the analysis looks rather different from what the CSIRO produces.
In a paper published in the journal Energy, German-American energy economist Robert Idel finds that when taking into account the full cost of renewables to an energy system, solar is 14 times more costly than nuclear energy, and wind is 4.7 times more costly.
In Texas, his methodology calculates that solar is 3.3 times more costly than nuclear, and wind is 2.3 times more costly. Such information is crucial for a balanced conversation about Australia’s energy transition. Especially in the context of power prices that just keep on rising.
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Australia's easing inflation has given the government hope – but there's a long way to go until victory can be declared
"Pleasing" and "welcome". It's a long while since the treasurer has been able to use those words when talking about inflation. Yesterday they were his go-to descriptors.
The slightly better than expected fall in inflation from 7 per cent to 6 per cent in the June quarter was certainly a big relief for the government. "There's still a long way to go," Jim Chalmers acknowledged, but "we're heading in the right direction."
Inflation falls faster than expected. Has the Reserve Bank already increased interest rates too far?
Inflation has slowed down again, with consumer prices up 6 per cent over the year to June, below most economists' forecasts.
Recent opinion polls have shown some softening in Labor's (still dominant) levels of support. And the LNP's win in the Fadden by-election, while downplayed by Labor, suggested Peter Dutton is gaining more traction on cost-of-living issues than he was a few months ago.
The great fear within the government has been "sticky" inflation persisting in the economy, overwhelming its agenda for the remainder of this term, and dragging down its political fortunes and re-election prospects.
The June quarter figure gives Labor hope the cost-of-living crisis will be in the rear-view mirror by the time voters go to the polls in 2025.
There's still a risk of stickiness, however. The more problematic "services inflation" is now broad based in the economy, according to the Bureau of Statistics, and overtaking "goods inflation" for the first time since the end of COVID lockdowns.
The best news in this week's figures
Over the 12 months to the end of June, while goods inflation fell, services inflation rose faster than at any time since the introduction of the GST more than 20 years ago. Those services include both the discretionary and the unavoidable, which both present political challenges for the government.
Insurance premiums, for example, are through the roof, up more than 14 per cent over the year, raising fears households might drop their cover, leaving them exposed heading into a potentially difficult summer. Jim Chalmers says the government is looking at what it can do to help but admits there's no simple solution.
Who should pay for an increase in home insurance claims?
One in 25 Australians have lodged an insurance claim because of extreme weather since 2020, but should the remaining policyholders be responsible for sharing the cost of increased premiums?
Rents are an unavoidable expense for many. They've risen 6.7 per cent over the year, the largest annual rise since 2009. The treasurer points to the increase in Commonwealth Rent Assistance announced in the budget and the government's battle in the Senate to establish a new housing fund, but the pressure for more help, stirred on by the Greens, will only grow.
The best news in yesterday's figures was the fall in goods inflation. No one will be cheering at the checkout just yet but the rate of inflation for a range of basic food, clothing and furniture goods has eased considerably.
While economists will debate what all this means for next week's interest rate decision, it's also worth considering what the June quarter result tells us about the decisions made to date by both the Reserve Bank and the government.
For all the criticism of Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe and the blunt tool of hiking interest rates, the 12 increases to date have clearly had an impact in gradually lowering inflation without destroying the jobs market.
There's been undeniable pain along the way for all those hit by higher rates, but the unemployment rate, remarkably, remains at near record lows of 3.5 per cent.
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30 July, 2023
Who Wears the Cost of Taking Down Wind Turbines Once They Expire?
Well in Australia, it could be the landholder or farmer.
Andrew Dyer, the country’s energy infrastructure commissioner says he has seen several “questionable agreements” between renewable companies and landholders that could leave the latter saddled with millions of dollars in decommissioning bills.
“Under the law, it will default to the landlord,” Mr. Dyer told a Senate Estimates hearing on May 23. “It’s up to the landlord to make sure that they have … a really good contract in place and you get the appropriate bond set-ups to cover the costs.
“It costs more money to pull a turbine down than it does to put it up, and that probably makes sense when you think about it. The costs of pulling down a turbine may exceed the revenue you get for 25 years. That’s not a good outcome.
“In the case of a turbine in Queensland where the bed plate cracked and you couldn’t go near the turbine because it could fall on your head, that cost millions of dollars to take down with robots and explosives. You could be stuck with some big bills.”
How Hard is it to Remove a Wind Turbine?
The average wind turbine has a lifespan of 25 years before it must be decommissioned and taken apart.
Yet the process of deconstructing and disposing of wind turbines is no simple feat.
“They have an in-ground lump of concrete that can be as much as 800 tons [to support a 200-metre high turbine] and could be left to the landowner or a farmer … to deconstruct what is effectively a giant Meccano [similar to Lego] set,” said federal Nationals MP Keith Pitt in an interview with The Epoch Times on July 28.
“This [net zero movement] is moving so fast that no one has the necessary regulations in place to protect the owners of the land, and potentially the future costs to the Australian taxpayer,” he added.
Mr. Pitt called for financial security or bonds to be made available, like how mining activity features similar arrangements for land rehabilitation once a project concludes.
“That should absolutely happen for intermittent wind and solar. Solar panels that will cover literally millions of hectares, and wind turbines that will dominate the skyline,” he said.
The energy infrastructure commissioner said some renewable energy providers would try to avoid a bond “because the landholder was ignorant to the risk.”
“We put out an updated guideline [pdf] in January this year to help landholders ask the right questions before they sign a document,” Mr. Dyer said.
“There are some questionable agreements out there that were not balanced, in our view, and so we’ve given the community and the landholders a helping hand.”
Mr. Dyer also suggested making bond provisions part of the licensing that goes into building renewable projects.
The march towards net zero has spurred a swathe of logistic, financial, engineering, and even security challenges.
According to the commissioner’s Energy Charter 2023, farmers have said the building of new infrastructure to support renewable energy could come at the cost of farmland.
“[About] 58 percent of surveyed landholders said that transmission infrastructure will result in a direct loss of farmable land or disruption to their land productivity,” the document states.
“Sixty percent also believe transmission infrastructure will impact their use of machinery or equipment. Some landholders also noted biodiversity impacts, which may diminish the natural features valued by the local community and aesthetics of the area.”
Federal MP Pitt said new transmission lines required easements, which need to be kept clear of regrowth to prevent future interference.
“That land generally can’t be farmed and can’t be utilised,” he said. “And it gets in the way of moving around your own property. Generally, no one wants a 200-metre strip of unusable land through the middle of prime agricultural land that impacts not only their operations but the value of their property.”
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Farmers’ revolt threatens to stifle the Indigenous voice to parliament
The nation’s peak agricultural lobby says West Australian farmers are “paralysed with fear” and uncertain “what they can do on their own land” because of new Aboriginal cultural heritage laws that loom as a key threat to the voice referendum and Labor’s political dominance in the state.
The National Farmers Federation has sounded an alarm over Anthony Albanese’s plan to legislate a stand-alone national framework for Indigenous cultural heritage protections, saying the rollout of separate federal rules could “intensify the confusion in WA with overlapping federal laws”.
NFF chief executive Tony Mahar said “the (federal) government needs to learn from the mistakes of WA” following a fierce backlash to the introduction of the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act in the state on July 1. “Nobody wants to damage cultural heritage, but at the moment the (state) laws are too open to interpretation. We’re hearing from farmers who are paralysed with fear, not certain what they can now do on their own land,” he said. “That shouldn’t be the case – it should be clear cut.”
WA Pastoralists and Graziers Association president Tony Seabrook said the shake-up to heritage laws in WA represented the “greatest attack on private property rights since federation”.
He urged the government to scrap them, saying the new cultural heritage laws had eroded support for Labor under Premier Roger Cook and would result in the state voting No in the voice referendum.
“They’ve rewritten the book on how to do the maximum amount of harm in the shortest amount of time,” Mr Seabrook said. “The voice is dead over here. The Premier has absolutely cooked it. If this can be imposed upon us without a Yes vote in the referendum, God save us if the voice gets up.”
Speaking in parliament on November 24 last year, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek linked the government’s plan for a national rollout of cultural heritage protections to the voice – a connection that some Labor figures now believe could undermine the chances of a successful Yes vote.
“We’re protecting Indigenous cultural heritage for the same reason we’re supporting the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the voice to parliament,” she said.
“We are always a better country … when we give everyone a seat at the table.”
One senior WA Labor source told The Weekend Australian that “the voice has dominated the last three months and then that’s been conflated here with Aboriginal cultural heritage”.
“It’s looked like Labor is only focused on those issues which, for most people, are completely niche,” the source said.
“I’ve always thought that the voice was going to go down over here … people still don’t understand what the voice is and why we need to do it. I think the Yes camp and the government has failed to mount a retail argument for how this is going to help anybody.”
The WA state laws establish a complex three-tiered system requiring landholders to organise potentially costly heritage assessments through local Indigenous corporations before undertaking basic work on properties larger than 1100sq m.
Permits could be required for ground excavations of up to a depth of 1m, with Mr Seabrook saying this could include anything from “putting up a fence, laying a pipe underground to a water-point, putting up some sheep-yards or putting up a shed.”
The Albanese government agreed to legislate a national cultural heritage framework as recommended by a 2021 parliamentary inquiry into the destruction of the caves at Juukan Gorge containing evidence of human life dating back 46,000 years.
The framework would be developed through a process of “co-design with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” and set a series of minimum standards for state and territory protections.
Speculation has grown the government will wait until after the voice referendum before advancing any legislation, with a spokeswoman for Ms Plibersek saying: “We want to make sure we take the time necessary to get this right. We are committed to improving protections for First Nations cultural heritage and to provide clarity … for business.”
Opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Price said it would be “absolutely within the scope of the voice” to demand a national rollout of the WA laws while WA Liberal MP Andrew Hastie said the backlash to the new state laws from landholders was a just a “foretaste of what is to come from the voice”.
Yes supporters said WA cultural heritage laws were being exploited by the No campaign.
WA teal independent Kate Chaney said the “confused rollout of this updated law has been weaponised against the much bigger issue of the proposed voice”.
Former Coalition Indigenous Australians spokesman Julian Leeser said “the focus on the WA law is a clever scare tactic of the No campaign, but that law has absolutely nothing to do with the voice. It was created without a voice. The voice is about advice. It doesn’t make decisions.”
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Andrews government’s gas ban to increase emissions
The move to phase out gas in new Victorian homes will initially increase the state’s carbon dioxide emissions, with the shift from mains gas likely to increase bills for those who remain on the network.
Industry figures have warned the Andrews government’s decision will move consumers onto an already strained coal-based electricity grid, with those who remain on mains gas longest – who are likely to include the state’s poorest and most vulnerable – set to face an escalation in network costs.
While Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood – who recently co-authored a paper urging governments to assist Australians to move to all-electric homes – welcomed the announcement, he conceded it would lead to a temporary increase in emissions, and warned governments must find ways to address the “real problem” of rising costs which will be faced by consumers and businesses that stay connected to gas.
Energy and Resources Minister Lily D’Ambrosio announced on Friday that from January 1, no new homes or residential subdivisions requiring a planning permit will be connected to mains gas – a measure the government claims will save households $1000 a year, or up to $2200 if they have solar electricity installed.
The all-electric requirement will also apply to all new government buildings which have not yet reached design stage, including schools, hospitals, police stations and public housing.
Victoria has the highest use of residential gas in Australia, with around 80 per cent of homes connected.
Ms D’Ambrosio said the gas sector contributed about 17 per cent of the state’s emissions.
“The move to electric systems is a key element of meeting Victoria’s nation-leading emissions reduction targets of 75–80 per cent by 2035 and net zero by 2045,” the minister said.
Mr Wood said Victoria’s current reliance on coal to generate electricity meant emissions would in fact increase in the short term.
“However, because the coal-fired power stations are going to be closing over the next 10 years, if you converted from gas to electricity today, emissions over the next 10 years would be lower as a result of that decision.”
Mr Wood said the two million Victorian households currently connected to mains gas would need to transition to electricity in coming years, but that this would increase network costs for remaining gas users, who would “absolutely” include poorer and more vulnerable households.
“The network problem is a real problem, and the government and the companies have to come up with a solution, because either the businesses will go broke or the consumers left will be paying a lot of money for gas,” he said. “That’s not a reason not to do it, but it’s not an easy problem to solve.”
Industry bodies including the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, Ai Group, Australian Pipelines and Gas Association, Australian Gas Infrastructure Group and Energy Networks Australia expressed concern about the announcement, while the managing director of Australia’s largest airconditioning and gas heating appliance manufacturer accused the Andrews government of denying Victorians choice, even in their own homes.
“This dangerous ideology is not only blind to logic and commonsense, it defies trends in Europe and North America where gas, far from being banned by zealots, is being embraced with a transition to renewable gas,” said Seeley International boss Jon Seeley.
An Andrews government spokesperson said phasing out gas in new builds would in fact save remaining gas consumers and taxpayers money, which would otherwise have to be spent expanding distribution networks.
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Andrew Bolt tells Malcolm Turnbull to ‘suck that up’ as he dumps retirement plans
It’s not often that an ex-prime minister plays a direct role in influencing contract negotiations for big-name media personalities.
But that’s exactly what happened last week with star Sky News presenter Andrew Bolt, when Malcolm Turnbull published a scathing article – co-authored with former ACTU president Sharan Burrow – in online news site The Guardian about Sky.
Turnbull claimed in the piece on Tuesday that Sky presenters were specialising in “angertainment” in relation to the voice, and that a new channel launched last week on Sky risked becoming a “factory for misinformation” about the upcoming referendum’s ‘yes’ case.
The former Liberal PM repeated his allegations in an interview with Patricia Karvelas the next morning, on Radio National’s breakfast program.
Turnbull’s comments on radio were the final straw to motivate Bolt into making an extraordinary move on his eponymous nightly show on Wednesday night: live texting his acceptance of a new two-year deal to his bosses at Sky.
Bolt revealed live-to-air that he had been “agonising” for a fortnight over whether to accept a new contract with Sky. “It’s an old story: I wanted to retire years ago, and every year it’s the same old stupid agonising, the Nellie Melba kind of thing. And I haven’t known my mind.”
But Bolt noted that Turnbull’s words to Karvelas that morning had a magical effect on his powers of decision making.
“Now that Turnbull’s done this, I’ll tell you what: you’ve inspired me – and I’m going to send Boris (Sky News CEO Paul Whittaker), my boss, a text,” Bolt said live-to-air as he turned to his phone. “Make it one year more. No, no – make it two years, just to get Turnbull really upset, make it two years. And send.”
Before Bolt let the subject of his contract renewal go, he had one more message for the former PM. “There you go Malcolm – you’ve got two more years of me to complain about. Suck that up!”
Bolt has since shared with Diary proof that he did indeed send his job acceptance message to the Sky CEO while he was on-air that night, just under 10 minutes into his show at 7:09PM.
His message to Whittaker was unequivocal: “I am sorry to have agonised for so long. Make it two years
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28 July, 2023
Commonwealth Bank rules that will stop you from accessing your money
I recently went through an elaborate auhentication process that the CBA required of me. Like anying over the net, it was difficult but I eventually got an approval mark. So I may be in the clear.
But I am going to keep a fair bit of cash on hand from now on. I do mostly pay by cash these days. Tyrannical bank behaviour has become another good reason to stick with cash. Nobody has ever rejected one of my $50 notes
Many Australians are unaware that they can be denied access to their money if they break rules buried in the fine print of opening an account.
The Commonwealth Bank states a customer may not use their banking services if they engage in conduct 'that in our opinion' is 'offensive, harassing or threatening to any person' or 'promotes or encourages physical or mental harm of any person'.
Professional poker player and author Crispin Rovere, who is in dispute with Westpac after they froze his account, highlighted the Commonwealth Bank's terms and conditions in a tweet last week.
A Commonwealth Bank spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the terms were to prevent 'to address the issue of financial abuse in the context of domestic and family violence'.
'In 2020, we updated our Acceptable Use Policy to address technology-facilitated abuse and to provide a safer banking experience for customers,' the spokesperson said.
'Any customer found to be using NetBank or the CommBank app to engage in unlawful, defamatory, harassing or threatening conduct, promoting or encouraging physical or mental harm or violence against any person may have their transactions refused or access to digital banking services suspended or discontinued'.
But some Aussies said the rules were too vague.
'Since when are banks the arbiters of moral and legal conduct? Especially the Commonwealth Bank? Do they even remember The Royal Commission findings????' one said.
'Setting themselves up to freeze people's bank accounts for wrong speak,' another added.
Others said the rules were justified.
'Classic example is abusive ex's harassing their ex-partners with 1c transfers that include threats in the description. In support services you see this all the time as a modus operandi. In the normal world, most don't even know it happens.'
In July, Mr Rovere slammed Westpac as 'totalitarian', claiming the bank froze his accounts after he made a 'modest' cash deposit following a poker win.
The bank demanded to know where Crispin Rovere's funds came from, which were 'way, way under' $10,000 and refused to unblock his account until he told them.
Last Wednesday the Commonwealth Bank came under fire after it announced it had opened a cashless 'specialist branches', where customers would no longer able to access their money over-the-counter a trend also happening with NAB branches.
'The specialist centre branches focus more on business customers and loan products and are located nearby to traditional branches,' a spokesperson said.
'We continue to maintain Australia's largest branch network for customers.'
However, the news did draw favourable responses on social media.
'Bank branches without money? WTF! That's like having a petrol station with no fuel! Do they expect people to call into the branch just to say hi and have a chat,' one said.
Another joked: 'A bank without cash, that makes real sense.'
'I suggest everyone to change their bank where this is happening,' a third said.
Mr Rovere told Daily Mail Australia he only realised there was a problem when he tried to make a card payment at a hotel he was staying in, but the bank rejected it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12330529/Commonwealth-Bank-rules-stop-accessing-money.html
********************************************Victoria to ban all new homes from having a gas connectionRent controls could be the last straw for property investors
Australian property investors have walked a tightrope for years. The Covid-19 price slump, 12 consecutive interest rate rises and a blizzard of state-based regulations. But “rent controls” have never been an issue until now.
In our second biggest residential market of Victoria, Premier Dan Andrews has confirmed the state is considering rent controls and related caps in the property market.
On the table is a specific plan to ban all rent increases for two years.
Andrews may be listening to political factions who have been calling for rent controls but he certainly has not been paying attention to the rest of the world on this issue.
He has definitely not been paying attention to the UK where landlords have fled the real estate market to the point the opposition Labour party – which has campaigned for years for rent controls – has just announced a dramatic U-turn and dropped the policy.
And he most definitely has not had a look at the situation in Ireland where rent controls pushed mum-and-dad property owners out of the market only to be replaced by US-based “vulture funds”. Once those funds went bargain hunting in housing estates, the issue had people marching in the streets.
In Australia about 90 per cent of all residential rental property is owned by mum-and-dad investors. We can debate endlessly whether the property owners are rich or not but the evidence is that a lot of them are ordinary working Australians. Tax office data shows that among the top five occupations of landlords are teachers and nurses.
As Ray White chief economist Nerida Conisbee said in this week’s Money Puzzle podcast, “putting rental controls into this situation would be disastrous”.
You might reasonably expect an economist from a real estate agency to say something like that.
But the thing is her views are shared well beyond the confines of the real estate industry. Saul Eslake, a pragmatic independent economist, has forecast rent controls will reduce the amount of buildings for rent and ensure the quality of those buildings will go downhill.
“It will probably act as a deterrent of investment in residential property … It will also probably discourage landlords from undertaking repairs and maintenance,” he told The Australian this week.
Nobody wins
Victoria is not alone. The regulation risk for investors has been building all year. The Greens kicked off the notion and it looked like it would remain on the fringe until the Queensland government triggered market interventions this year, topped with a once-a-year rent increase rule introduced in April.
As the perception grows that state governments are aiming policies squarely at property owners, investors are not waiting to see what will happen next.
A report from the Jarden investment bank has detailed how landlords have risen as a percentage of sellers in recent months – especially in the larger cities. Lending data also suggests that investors are not returning to the market even if rental growth is improving and prices are recovering.
The danger is that we have only seen the start of an investor exodus – Rent controls might just be the last straw for many investors.
In Victoria the issue is acute. Melbourne has been among the weaker markets. As Sydney residential prices rebounded by 6 per cent so far this year and the combined capitals moved higher by 3.8 per cent, Melbourne barely inched higher by just 1.1 per cent.
Victorian investors are not seeing a price rebound and now they are set to have any income rebound outlawed.
Worse still, the conditions for property investment in the state are increasingly gloomy and the Andrews government does not even pretend to see both sides of the issue. Asked whether property owners would sell up if rent controls were introduced Andrews said: “They bought the place without my advice, they can manage it without my advice.”
Market about to ease
After a long period where prices moved higher but rents barely changed, the combination of 1 per cent vacancy rates and rapidly rising interest rates triggered widespread double-digit rent rises in 2022.
Yet even with those rental increases, rental yields remain paltry at around 3 per cent in the major cities. For the first time in many years investors could get the same income from a risk free government-guaranteed bank deposit as running an investment property.
Moreover, rent increases have been keeping up with interest rate increases by any measure.
It may be little consolation for a tenant where the rent has just been pushed higher. But inside residential property, on average rents went up $266 a month, while on average interest rates increased $976. In other words tenants and property owners have both been struggling.
Ironically, while the market is at breaking point the reality is that rent controls are on the agenda just as the worst may be over.
There is every sign the rent increases are about to slow down. In regional Australia rents rises have already been reduced by half.
At CoreLogic, economist Eliza Owen says rent growth is likely to continue to moderate. Annual growth in regional rents has already slowed to 4.9 per cent in the year to June, down from a peak of 12.5 per cent in the year to November
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ABC v Heston Russell defamation case: commando’s lawyer deems reporting ‘shoddy, uncorroborated’
Like Leftists generally, the ABC has scant regard for the truth
The ABC’s star source in a story accusing former commando Heston Russell of killing an Afghan soldier repeatedly described his memory as “fuzzy” and asserted he may not be a credible informant, a court has heard.
Journalist Mark Willacy also inaccurately recalled the evidence of the source to write a more compelling story that was “new and different”, Mr Russell’s barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC claims, slamming the reporter’s “shoddy” reporting.
The revelations emerged on the first day of a defamation trial between Heston Russell and the national broadcaster, where the former soldier has alleged two ABC articles, through the use of links and his photograph, implied he was complicit in the execution of an Afghan prisoner who was captured during a joint drug enforcement operation between Australia and the US.
The stories, written and produced by ABC journalists Mr Willacy and Josh Robertson, who are also respondents in the matter, aired on television, radio and online in late 2021.
The articles contained allegations from a US soldier under the pseudonym ‘Josh’ that he witnessed Australian forces shoot the prisoner in a “deliberate decision to break the rules of war” because there were too many of them to fit into the aircraft.
But on Friday, Mr Russell’s barrister Ms Chrysanthou read aloud correspondence between Mr Willacy and Josh, in which Josh claimed his memory was “hazy” and he would be unable to share “actionable information” with the journalist.
“My memory is pretty hazy, so I can‘t really give you anything specific enough to follow up with, but I wanted to reinforce the narrative that you’re writing about based on my own experiences,” Josh wrote in an email to Mr Willacy, according to Ms Chrysanthou.
“I‘m definitely open to speaking about things through email or otherwise, with the obvious caveat being that this all happened a long time ago, in the midst of constant combat operations, where I had very little sleep, and was constantly working with people from different units and countries.
“I likely won‘t be able to provide you with actionable information that could go anywhere useful in any specific investigations, only the bits and pieces I remember.”
Ms Chrysanthou accused Mr Willacy of falsely claiming Josh had referred to the soldiers as commandos, in order to make his story “different” and not simply about the SAS.
“(Josh) didn‘t say the commandos. He didn‘t say the commandos,” Ms Chrysanthou said.
“Had Mr. Willacy use different language, like ‘the ABC believes Josh was working with the commandos given the timing of his mission’ ... it wouldn’t have been as great a story, because what it comes down to is there were lots of stories about the SAS ... but Mr Willacy wanted a story about the commandos, because that was new and different.”
In her opening statement of the landmark defamation hearing, Ms Chrysanthou slammed the “shoddy uncorroborated and reckless reporting” of the ABC journalists.
“Freedom of speech does not include the publication of lies,” she said. “Frankly, when a serious allegation is made to a journalist by a source it should be critically assessed. It should be checked. It should be tested and corroborated before it is published.”
The ABC, Mr Robertson and Mr Willacy rely upon the defence of public interest, which was introduced in NSW in July 2021 and remains largely untested. Ms Chrysanthou asserted the broadcaster’s defence was “doomed”.
In order to win the case, the ABC will need to persuade the court its journalists genuinely believed the publication of the articles were in the public interest.
The Australian understands the costs associated with the case have so far exceeded $1 million.
Earlier this year, Justice Michael Lee found ten defamatory imputations put forward by the national broadcaster were carried following a preliminary hearing in November 2022.
The trial will last for five days, and began just two weeks after the ABC called an emergency hearing in the Federal Court where they declared they would be “withdrawing the public interest defence” before sensationally backflipping on the decision.
The ABC made the announcement to withdraw its public interest defence claiming it did not want to comply with court orders to reveal Josh’s identity to Mr Russell’s lawyers.
Ms Chrysanthou argued she wanted the information to make witness inquiries, but the broadcaster said it would rather pull out of the fight than hand over a source. The ABC conceded Mr Russell was entitled to judgment in his favour.
But less than 48 hours later the ABC reinstated its defence after Ms Chrysanthou revealed her team had discovered the identity of Josh from some Google searches, referencing the mountain of information the ABC made available about him in the articles.
Mr Russell is expected to take the stand for cross-examination later on Friday.
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27 July, 2023
Here's fun! Power Companies Could Remotely Switch Off EV Chargers to Reduce Grid Stress
Energy providers could have the option to switch off home EV charging stations remotely to reduce pressure on Queensland’s electricity grid.
The proposal is part of the Australian state’s Queensland Electricity Connection Manual (QECM), which provides a framework for the grid’s operation.
Section 8 of the QECM proposes that EV charging equipment may be limited or switched off by operators Ergon Energy and Energex (distributed network service providers or DNSPs) if it has an output of more than 20 amps—a standard domestic single-phase EV charger uses 32 amps.
The use of such “demand management” schemes is largely unique to Queensland and is also used on residential pool cleaning machines, hot water systems, and air conditioning units under the Peaksmart program.
Peaksmart gives households a cash rebate; in return, the operator can turn off air conditioners remotely during peak operating times (summer) to reduce pressure on the energy grid.
The large-scale roll-out of such programs has been earmarked as a potential catalyst to close down coal-fired power stations faster—amid the net zero push—and to, instead, adopt more intermittent renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and battery.
Federal Nationals MP Keith Pitt, himself an electrical engineer, says a proposal to use demand management on EV charging reveals that operators have little confidence the grid can handle the uptake of electric cars expected in the push towards net zero.
“EV take-up could increase peak demand by as much as 60 percent right across the National Electricity Market,” Mr. Pitt told The Epoch Times.
“That would mean you need a 60 percent increase in generating electricity capacity, transmission, and distribution. So that’s every substation, every cable, every supply point, every house—it will cost an absolute fortune.”
The federal Labor government has set a lofty goal of having 3.8 million EVs on the road by 2030—there are currently 83,000 in use.
Further, the government is also pushing to expand the charging network, aiming for 100,000 for businesses, 3.8 million chargers in households, and 1,800 publicly available fast chargers.
The initiative comes as part of a wider push towards net zero by 2050 and to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030. Further, the Labor government hopes to have 82 percent of the National Electricity Market powered by renewables.
Advocacy groups have argued against a demand management system saying it will dampen enthusiasm for EVs. “We know from surveys that average consumers aren’t particularly keen on mandated orchestration of their appliances,” says the Electric Vehicle Council in its submission on the QECM (pdf).
“The Peaksmart program enlists between 10,000 and 15,000 air conditioning units for orchestration each year … out of a total of about 300,000 that get installed. About 95 percent of consumers prefer retaining control of their air conditioning, overtaking the financial incentives on offer.”
Meanwhile, Melissa McAuliffe, acting director of energy services at Energy Consumers Australia, says it would erode consumer trust that the “energy system is working for them.”
“Our 2023 Energy Consumer Sentiment Survey finds that only 35 percent of households are confident that the energy industry and regulators are working in their long-term interests now,” she wrote in a submission (pdf).
“Further, such measures are unlikely to be completely effective for consumers or the system, as consumers may look to workarounds that circumvent giving DNSPs control. For example, through disincentivising the use of EV chargers, consumers may just use regular power points.”
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WA Labor Government Popularity Crashes as Controversial New Law Causes Concern
The West Australian Labor government’s popularity with the voters has plunged, according to a new poll, following the passage of controversial new laws which have seen farmers and landowners across the state concerned about their rights.
The Utting Research poll of 1,000 voters, which was conducted between July 18-20, shows a resurgence of support for the Liberal party, which now has a 54 percent to 46 percent two-party preferred lead over Labor.
The last poll conducted in May, after leader Mark McGowan stepped down at the end of May and was replaced by Roger Cook as premier, had Labor ahead at 61-39, The West Australian reported on Monday.
The Utting poll also shows the Nationals are carrying six percent of the primary vote, with the Greens at 10 percent and other parties were at 15 percent.
Labor’s primary vote has also fallen to 32 percent, from 52 percent previously recorded in May.
After the 2021 state election, the Liberal and National parties banded together to form the opposition, with the Liberals as the junior partner.
The Liberals hold two parliamentary seats in the Legislative Assembly, while the Nationals hold four.
Western Australian Government Under Pressure
The drop in popularity comes as Western Australians become increasingly anxious about the state’s updated Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which has already seen Indigenous advocacy groups make million-dollar demands on councils and environmental groups over issues like reforestation.
The Act was designed to protect culturally significant landmarks in the state from potential “harm” and was updated following the destruction of the Indigenous heritage site Juukan Gorge by mining giant Rio Tinto. It establishes the Local Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Services (LACHS), which is responsible for ensuring areas of significance are not harmed.
Yet, farmers, landowners and councils are worried they could be easily caught up in red tape or face heavy penalties under the new laws.
Under the system, a landowner with over 1,100 square metres of land (11,840.3 square feet) must first apply with LACHS if they wish to carry out work that could disturb over 50 centimetres of soil—encompassing activities like land clearing, drainage work, and even building a fence. LACHS will then send out a consultant—at the landowner’s expense at around $160 (US$108) per hour—to determine if the site has any cultural significance.
Stephen Johnston of the South East Regional Centre for Urban Landcare said the two revegetation events run by Landcare, which were scheduled to plant 5,500 seedlings, were cancelled because of the lack of clarity in the laws.
“I’ve been poring over the websites and the act, the 255-page act, the 47 pages of guidelines and the printouts, which are all available on the state government website,” he told ABC Radio Perth.
“So there’s a lot of information there, but there’s information that begs questions,” Mr. Johnston added, noting that it was unclear whether Landcare activities were exempt from the new requirements.
Around 30,000 people signed a petition calling on the West Australian government to delay the rollout of the state’s Indigenous heritage protection laws just days prior to the implementation.
The Liberal and Nationals alliance said the government needed to provide more information to those affected by the laws about their rights and obligations, with Liberal spokesman for planning and environment Neil Thomson declaring the Labor government needed to make the laws clearer.
“Farmers, pastoralists, and companies that provide services such as plumbing and civil contracting are all trying to work out the implications, as are hobby farmers around the metropolitan area that are deeply concerned about what they will be allowed to do on their land without a permit,” Thomson said.
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Teachers cannot teach what they do not know
Well, here we are with another review of teaching. Australia has itself a bit of déjà vu with a well-meaning Education Minister who wants to do his bit to fix the problems in our schools – this time by focusing on how we train our teachers.
To be fair, the Minister seems to be asking some of the right questions. Given the money we spend on education, why don’t we do better as a nation? Looking at how teachers are trained is important – they cannot teach what they do not know.
Here is a practical example. After recently marking the first essays of first year teacher trainees, I saw the need to do some revision of grammar. I asked the group a simple question: ‘What is a sentence?’ One of the young students, who was embedded in a school while doing her degree, said, ‘I don’t know, but my teacher is doing that with her year 5 students – I’ll look it up.’ The answer she found from her mentor teacher was: ‘A sentence is a clump of words that makes sense.’ Really…
So, my experiences would agree that there is core content that we simply do not consider important to teacher training, so a review might help there.
But it may not. There are complexities that go much deeper than simply adding ‘what the latest science says we need to do while we get back to basics’ (which is the reported framework through which the Minister is thinking).
I wonder if Minister Clare has done his homework in order to understand just how complex this apparently simple problem is? My suggestion is that The Minister should start his homework by reading Chapter 1 of the 2014 Donnelly and Wiltshire review of the National Curriculum, as commissioned by former Prime Minster Tony Abbott. These two reviewers fairly note improvements nationally with the introduction of ACARA – for we now have a curriculum that can translate across borders, to an extent.
But a decade ago these reviewers highlighted two deep areas of structural difficulty within the education system. Each of these aspects bring with them assumptions about the purpose of teaching, and therefore which ways of teaching are privileged over others. As Donnelly summarised later in his book How Political Correctness is Destroying Education:
As noted by the late Ken Rowe in the Commonwealth inquiry into the teaching of literacy, the prevailing orthodoxy in teacher education is based on constructivism; an approach to teaching that emphasises child-centred, inquiry-based learning and less explicit forms of teaching.
Such ‘child-centred’ approaches do not simply imply knowing your students well so that you can teach them better. It implies that teachers cannot impose sequential core knowledge into their lessons. Why? Because, according to the constructionists, all we need to do is to help our students think, and they can find the rest on the internet.
So, when the terms of this review suggest getting back to the old fashioned teaching core of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, it begs the questions, ‘to what end’, ‘in what way’, and ‘with what content?’
For example, is the purpose of our education simply utilitarian – aimed at getting everyone to work in the government’s priority areas, which include environmental alarmism, anti-family identity theory, and victim-blaming anti-Judeo-Christian history?
To help the Minister understand these dynamics better, he might also do another piece of homework that involves reading Professor John Sweller’s work. His theory flies in the face of the popular notion, supported by pseudo-science, that students do not need to learn anything off by heart because it is on the internet. The fact that the internet is also littered with conceptual rubbish seems to escape proponents of ‘21st Century education’. The constructivist process of education is given so much privilege that we have students who simply do not know enough (like, ‘What is a sentence?’).
But neither do the teachers of these trainees know good content, because they have not learnt about it – the problem is generational. After reading Sweller’s work, the Minister could then graduate to E.D. Hirsch’s Why Knowledge Matters, and the report by the John Hopkins Institute, What We Teach Matters. Or he could read the case study about Sweden’s decline in standards by Henrekson and Wennstrom.
So, does the Minister understand that the methods by which teachers teach reflect their deeper assumptions, or what we used to call ‘philosophy of education’? And similarly, does he understand that these presuppositions which we bring to our teaching also have an impact on what we consider is good content? This is where Minister Clare needs to do even more homework. An ideology is the belief system in which we put our faith. Such deep beliefs steer what we believe is essential content for education. That is why the IPA report that came out earlier this year by Bella D’Abera and Collen Harken would be the next homework piece for the Minister.
This report revealed afresh the depth of distortion in the content of the ninth iteration of the National Curriculum. This national document is what the teacher trainers will still be expected to work too. But as the authors summarised:
As this report reveals, where the National Curriculum is failing in one area, it is succeeding in another. Instead of teaching children how to read and write, it is indoctrinating them with identity politics, radical race theory, and radical green ideology.
These emphases reflect the priorities of the current political elites. The authors note ‘… as this report demonstrates, Version 9 of the National Curriculum is a highly politicised document; it reflects the current ideologies held by bureaucrats who have control over what is in the curriculum.’
These privileged emphases are in line with the ideologies of the Labor Party. Will the Minister really reject his party’s ideology to release teacher trainers to revise the content away from environmental and pantheistic alarmism, the racially biased critical race theories, and the emphasis on history that downplays the constructive aspects of Western heritage?
I doubt it – we have been plagued by Ministers who seem to lack experience with these educational philosophical assumptions, knowledge of the National Curriculum, and an understanding about the teaching of teachers. Yet here we are, with another Minister trying to evaluate whether teachers and their trainers know enough about going back to the basics in schooling…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/teachers-cannot-teach-what-they-do-not-know/
******************************************************COVID Vaccines Show 24 Times More Adverse Reactions Than Others
The latest report on adverse reactions to vaccines in Western Australia has revealed that COVID-19 vaccinations have 24 times the rate of adverse reactions in the state compared to all other vaccines.
According to the state’s vaccine safety surveillance report (pdf), COVID-19 vaccines showed that for every 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines administered, 264 adverse events following immunisations (AEFIs) were recorded.
For all other vaccinations, 11.1 AEFIs were recorded, making the COVID-19 vaccines 23.8 times more likely than non-COVID-19 vaccines to result in adverse events.
The rate of adverse events varied among different types of COVID-19 vaccines.
The Spikevax (Moderna) vaccine recorded 281.4 AEFIs per 100,000 doses, Comirnaty (Pfizer) recorded 244.8, and the Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) vaccine, which was removed from the vaccine program after reports emerged of blood clotting in younger people, recorded 306.
Adverse events following vaccination can range from mild, such as a sore arm, to serious conditions, such as anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopaenia syndrome (TTS), Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), myocarditis, and pericarditis.
Collaboration Continues With 3-in-1 Super Jab
Meanwhile, despite these concerns, the Australian government’s partnership with Moderna to produce vaccines using experimental messenger RNA technology to prepare for the next pandemic means these vaccines are here to stay.
The company has been forming a trifecta jab to address the main respiratory viruses—influenza, COVID-19, and RSV to maintain its market share amid the falling revenue of vaccine companies as the health crisis subsides.
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine sales of US$18.4 billion in 2022 are expected to dive to $5 billion this year.
Recently, it was granted expedited approval by Australia’s authority for medicines for its mRNA-1345 (RSV vaccine), meaning that the company will be able to launch the vaccines in Australia before any other country in the world.
A spokesperson from Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration told the Epoch Times that Moderna was granted an accelerated approval process on March 30 after satisfying all of the following criteria:
the medicine is new
the medicine is for the treatment, prevention, or diagnosis of a life-threatening condition
no other medicines that are intended to treat, prevent or diagnose the condition are included in the Australian drug register or there is substantial evidence that this medicine provides a significant improvement in efficacy or safety of the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of the condition compared to those goods already included in the register
there is substantial evidence that the medicine provides a major therapeutic advance.
However, phase 3 clinical trials for Moderna’s mRNA version of the seasonal influenza vaccine have been underwhelming, showing a high rate of side effects.
Although the vaccine generates a strong immune response against the A strains of the flu, its efficacy against B strains is not better than existing approved vaccines.
Additionally, 70 percent of trial participants who received the shot reported adverse reactions such as headaches, swelling, and fatigue compared to 48 percent for the conventional flu vaccine.
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26 July, 2023
Home Building Set to Grind to a Halt under new regulations
The new National Construction Code takes no account of costs. Yet another example of how government creates housing shortages
No one wants anyone to be living in substandard conditions, and we all want the disabled to live full lives, but how far can we go in making this possible?
The National Construction Code (NCC) has taken it one step too far. It will result in less affordable houses, and insoluble design issues, even making certain types of housing extinct.
It is socialistic bureaucratic overreach, robbing homeowners of individual choice and making it harder for first-home buyers to get into the market.
I grew up in a two-bedroom worker’s cottage on a 400 square metre allotment—10 metres (33 feet) by 40 metres. Raised on stumps, it had storage underneath and was built to one side of the allotment to allow a car to run down the other side.
Mum and Dad raised three children there. A third bedroom had been added to the rear of the house, and when my younger sister arrived, Dad enclosed the front veranda to make a bedroom for her.
Some of the rooms had a tongue and groove lining, and some had nothing. Nowhere in the house was there anything that you could call insulation.
Brisbane was full of houses like this. Stumped houses suit hilly terrain as they minimise the need for terracing and retaining. In flood areas, they also provide a buffer against rising water.
The construction was cheap but sturdy, and you didn’t have to be too handy to add an extension or modify something in line with need or increasing income.
Sure, it was a bit cold in winter and hot in summer, but this is Brisbane, where extremes are moderate. We coped using sweaters in winter and sweat in summer.
Most importantly, these houses were affordable for working-class people, like the children of labourers, tradesmen, and newly arrived immigrants I went to school with in East Brisbane.
You can still enjoy this style of house, ours is well over 100 years old, structurally sound and is still standing. But under the new NCC, not only couldn’t you build a house like this anymore, but not even the modern versions will pass muster.
First Issue With the New NCC
The new accessibility conditions present the biggest problem, and here you have to bear in mind that most of these requirements are specifically to allow for wheelchairs.
Only 193,600 people use wheelchairs in Australia, and if you generously assume that there is only one of them per household and none are in nursing homes and retirement villages, then that represents 1.78 percent of the total housing stock.
But to accommodate these people we are being told we need to change how we build the other 98.22 percent of our housing.
This is nuts.
By making housing more expensive it will push more people into homelessness, and there is not a lot of accessibility in a tent, car or caravan.
At the same time, it makes life more difficult for all home buyers. And for what?
If you’re afflicted by misfortune, you can either modify an existing house or move to one that fits your changed circumstances.
We do all of these things now for work, lifestyle, children or old age, so why not for disability?
Amongst the changes that will need to be made are ramps to handle slope and lifts to handle height and slope. Bathrooms will need to be made larger and corridors wider.
This will multiply costs on small lot subdivisions—themselves a device for lower housing costs—and in places with steep terrain, like Brisbane and Sydney.
The house I live in now would be non-compliant—26 steps to the front door over 6 metres, and nowhere to site a ramp. But it suits our needs at the moment.
The two-story walk-up unit, which underpins Brisbane’s affordable housing market, would also appear to be at risk unless it incorporates a lift. But lifts add not just capital but maintenance costs, which is one of the reasons this style of unit is often favoured over higher-rise ones with lifts.
Then there are the larger bathrooms and wider corridors. Not only will these squeeze some other rooms out, but they will make it difficult to build a house on the 10-metre frontage common in old Brisbane and in small lot subdivisions.
Once you’ve set your side walls back 1.5 metres each, you have only seven metres to play with. Wider corridors make that even harder.
What Else?
Then there is the requirement to raise energy efficiency to seven stars. Not only will this require a lot of insulation, but it will make it mandatory to have concrete slabs in the higher stories of any multi-level residence instead of more economical lightweight systems, like timber.
Seven stars are also difficult to attain without good solar orientation, yet even the best-designed subdivision has a number of non-optimal blocks. Not everything can be north-south.
But what is the problem with a less energy-efficient house? We’re planning to be CO2 neutral in our electricity generation by 2032, so if a house uses slightly more power, it will all be renewable power. Why should a building authority care how much of it is used?
And why shouldn’t householders be able to trade off heating and cooling costs against capital costs and other forms of adaptation?
Gabriel Poole was a Queensland architect renowned for his innovative lightweight structures. It’s doubtful many of them would be seven stars efficient.
And this must surely be the greatest objection to these new building code rules—that they rub out innovation.
How can a national authority think it is so all-knowing that it can guess the needs, preferences, and budgets of builders and consumers, as well as the ability of the industry to adapt and innovate?
The job of the Australian Building Codes Board should surely be to ensure that buildings are structurally sound and not much more.
The housing industry is fearsomely innovative and competitive, with designers, builders and suppliers looking for edges to make their products better designed and better priced. An overly regulated market destroys this innovation by removing the ability to make trade-offs.
Queensland decided to adopt all of these changes before the other states. They’ve now pulled back and made some exemptions because of the uproar from the industry.
Let’s hope for the sake of future buyers and owners and for innovation and progress, that this moves from pullback to abandonment and that the other states pay attention. If Victoria can ditch the Commonwealth Games, Australia should easily be able to ditch the changes to its building code.
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A journalist records Covidian Australia's pandemic over-reach
Medically idiotic, economically ruinous, socially disruptive and embittering, culturally dystopian, politically despotic: what was there to like in the Covid era? Billions, if you were Big Pharma. Unchecked power, if you were Big State. More money and power over the world’s governments and people, for the WHO. Template for action for climate zealots. Dreamtime for cops given free rein to indulge their inner bully. Anguished despair, if you were a caring, inquisitive reporter.
In Australia Breaks Apart, John Stapleton, a retired journalist with over 25 years’ experience with the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian, chronicles the collective madness that suffocated Covidian Australia, but also the resistance movement that began hesitantly and grew organically. It is a tale of the many villains complicit in tyranny and the few heroes of resistance. ‘What will you tell UR kids? Did you rise up or comply’, asked a sign during the Canberra protests. It’s a story of venal, incompetent politicians and brutish police – thugs in uniform – acting at the behest of ‘power drunk apparatchiks’.
If you want to know or recall what happened, read the book. If you questioned and resisted from the start, take heart at the documentation for the record. If you belong to the Covid class in slow retreat from the wastelands you created and now leave behind, take evasive action. An extract was published in the Weekend Australian. Among more than 900 online commentators, one quoted Tony Abbott that in two world wars, many risked their lives to protect our freedoms, but in the last three years, so many gave up freedoms to prolong lives. Some took Stapleton to task for failing to thank our great and good leaders and public health authorities for keeping us safe through the terrifying ordeal of the ‘rona wars. The persistence of the last attitude justifies the book’s publication. It’s an effort to chronicle and, if possible, come to terms with how an entire population was terrorised into fearing a virus and complying with arbitrary and draconian rules. Stapleton laments this is not the Australia he knew and loved. There evolved a co-dependency between the uber surveillance state and a Stasi-like snitch society in which ‘we are all guilty until proven uninfected’.
The unleashing of state violence on peaceful protestors included militarised responses on the streets and in the air that drew gasps of disbelief from around the world. State over-reach included ‘an insane level of micromanagement’. All was done without providing any evidence and cost-benefit analyses in support. It’s all here in grim detail, possibly with generous dollops of hyperbole. But who can blame Stapleton, writing amidst the ‘height of totalitarian derangement’ syndrome.?
Stapleton uses the narrative device of a fictional character called Old Alex who watches what is happening with detachment and growing disenchantment. In 444 pages divided into 19 chapters, he provides a comprehensive catalogue of the milestones, lies, and obfuscations on the relentless march to medical tyranny and vaccine apartheid. He puzzles over the left’s embrace of the Pharma-state’s over-reach. Struggles for words strong enough to convey the depth of contempt for the ‘shameless’, ‘odious’ and ‘loathed’ Scott Morrison, whose name became synonymous for some with the act of defecation as shouts were heard from inside a lavatory: ‘I’m doing a ScoMo, I’m doing a ScoMo’. Readers will encounter many writers from the Spectator Australia and Brownstone stables, which clearly sustained Stapleton through the dark Covid years with emotional connections to many of the world’s leading fellow-dissidents. They will be reminded of many characters whose horror stories were illuminated briefly during the long darkness, such as Anthony and Natalie Reale who run the Village Fix café in Shellharbour, NSW. I wrote about them in the Speccie on 15 January 2022. We encountered the big-hearted and generous family on the drive up from Canberra to our new home in the Northern Rivers in December 2021.
Australia broke apart most obviously in the way in which the Morrison government was complicit in the fracturing of the federation into mini-fiefdoms run by wannabe warlords aka Premiers and their palace courtiers of CHOs and Police Commissioners, some of whom have since been pushed upwards into Governors’ mansions. But it was more. Trust was also broken, perhaps irreparably, with respect to parliaments, the judiciary, human rights machinery, police, medical establishment, experts, and the media. The significant switch to independent media reflects disillusionment as much with social media’s Big Tech platforms that turned into narrative enforcers as with the legacy media that turned into fear-mongering Big State mouthpieces and Big Pharma shills.
It was important for someone to write this instant history under time pressure, an accessible work of record, lest we forget. Or rather, lest they be allowed to forget and move on. This is neither a book by nor for academics. Therein lies some of its failings and much of its strength. ‘The Government is my enemy’, laments a disillusioned citizen. Do not trust politicians and bureaucrats. ‘They lie for a living’, says the cynical reporter. In the years to come a flood of scholarly tomes can be expected, analysing in excruciating detail the excesses of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines and systematic assessments of their successes and failures. Given the paucity of critical journalism, it’s useful to have a record of contemporaneous events before memories fade and stories are conveniently rewritten. The journalistic strengths include on-the-ground reporting from protests like the Canberra Convoy, observation skills, an eye for the human interest story, jargon-free writing, and analysis uncluttered by theoretical explorations. His stories of the personalities encountered during the massive Canberra protests in early 2022 bring out vividly the electric atmosphere, energy, and camaraderie of what became a festive, exultant celebration of shared emotions and commitments to securing the freedoms of future generations of Australians.
This is a book to read, display prominently on the coffee table or discreetly on the bookshelf, recommend for purchase to the public library, and spread awareness by word of mouth. It contains many literary quotations and allusions. It’s appropriate therefore that I am left at the end recalling these lines from Dylan Thomas that apply very much to ‘Old Alex’: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rage at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-government-my-enemy/ ?
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‘Far Right’ or Traditional Liberal?
Alex Antic
When it comes to avoiding the intellectual rigour of constructing and prosecuting a cogent argument, those who occupy the left of the political spectrum are often shamelessly ill-equipped. It is much easier to latch onto the latest leftist buzzword of the day than to give an issue due consideration.
In this superficial world, a person who stands against vaccine mandates is an ‘anti vaxxer’, a person who believes in the free market is ‘anti worker’, and a person who is appalled by the concept of terminating a baby at 39 weeks is ‘far right’.
Luckily, the nuances of such political fairy floss often fails to escape the smug beltway world of the political elites. The man on the street couldn’t care less about the latest political epithet of the day.
It would be impossible for me to recount the number of times that salt-of-the-earth people running small businesses, volunteering in their communities, and raising families have thanked me for defending traditional Liberal values.
I don’t say this to signal virtue, but to highlight my experience since becoming a Senator – a position I am grateful to hold.
The Forgotten People, to borrow Sir Robert Menzies’ famous phrase, are tired of being overlooked and want to see politics that invests in the next generation of Australians and fights the reckless policies of the left which are driving this nation into the ground.
I firmly believe there is no universe in which mandatory vaccinations, especially with treatments lacking long-term safety data, are consistent with Liberal values. But it isn’t just vaccine mandates that have hurt Australians. People are fed up with the drift of politics in general. They are tired of alarmist rhetoric about climate change and its endless failed predictions, not to mention the way that Net Zero policies are accelerating the current cost of living crisis. They are tired of the suggestion that Australia’s history is entirely negative and that they are not allowed to be grateful for their heritage. They are tired of their children being exposed to highly sexualised material and of the undermining of the traditional nuclear family, without which society cannot function, let alone flourish.
Dissenting from the identity-politics narrative of the political and cultural elites gets one labelled all kinds of ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’, and this has kept normal people, who hardly have time for such nonsense, politically disengaged.
Much like these ‘isms’ and ‘phobias’, the label ‘far right’ is one that leftists use to denigrate their opponents to avoid the hard work of formulating an argument and engaging in reasonable, respectful debate. You don’t support the Voice? You must be a racist. You don’t support Net Zero? You must be a ‘climate denier’.
Well, the Forgotten People, who know that the insults of the left are the last resort of those who lack good arguments, have had enough. Those who hold the genuine Liberal values of defending the nuclear family, minimising bureaucracy, incentivising private innovation, and upholding freedom of speech are getting involved in the machinery of politics, as is their right in a liberal democracy.
Over the past few weeks, the term ‘far right’ has been bandied around here in South Australia. Those who use it show zero insight, zero understanding, and zero ability to mount a cogent argument.
Those of us who do believe in Liberal principles will continue to strive for a better future for our nation, while Labor and the Greens enrich themselves and disempower hard-working Australians with their senseless Net Zero and identity-politics agendas.
Far from being ‘far right’, my beliefs are reflected in the fundamental principles of the party Menzies founded. That is why I joined the party and that is why I am a Liberal. There is nothing ‘far right’ about that.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/far-right-or-traditional-liberal/
************************************************Workers threatened by Tony Burke’s terrible tango with unions
Employment Minister Tony Burke and his close union associates are getting themselves into a terrible tangle as they pursue left-wing industrial relations agendas in a commercial society that needs productivity increases to lift the level of wages.
Sometimes the outcomes are bizarre.
For example, unions want casual labour curbed because full-time employees are easy to organise, but it has suddenly becoming apparent that what they are really advocating for is a reduction in take-home pay for the hundreds of thousands of people currently on casual employment.
I will detail how this works later, but one of the reasons why casual work is very popular among those with big mortgages is that they end up with more cash in their pocket to meet mortgage payments.
A second agenda is the popular concept that everyone should receive the same pay for the same work.
In the public service there is an attempt achieve this by slotting everyone into grades and it is one of the reasons why productivity in the public service has been held back.
In the private sector, if enterprises do not pay experienced people with great skills at market levels then they will lose that person.
Another person might be doing the same job but without the same skills and experience, and so simply does not receive the same pay rate.
Trying to turn the private sector into a massive public service system would absolutely kill private sector productivity in Australia.
But there is one area where the unions are particularly anxious to attack – labour hire companies in mining projects.
Labour hire companies usually have different enterprise agreements to mining companies.
Some miners have their own labour hire company with a different enterprise agreement to the base miner.
It would be a disaster for the nation if in targeting this activity, the legislation expanded public service labour classification practices into the whole of the private sector.
Perhaps the most dangerous of the proposed industrial relations changes stem from proposals that envisage labour laws should conflict with the commercial contract laws of the nation.
Australia has some of the most advanced and clearest rules in the world to determine whether a person operating under contract, and so is subject to commercial law, or whether a person has an employment relationship so is part of the labour laws.
In the past the Australian Taxation Office tried to classify genuine contractors as employees and were made to obey the law by the courts and community pressure.
Nevertheless sometimes people claim to be the operating under contract but are clearly employees but the clarity of our rules, which have been backed by High Court determinations, is reducing such incidents.
The vast majority of self employed people who work under contracts know the commercial law rules and make sure they obey them.
Their activities are governed by the laws of contract and that includes regulation by the ACCC; unfair contracts; provisions fast payment and so on.
The relationship covers the whole ambit of long-established commercial law and is totally different from the rules that cover employment relationships.
We have not seen the legislation but the government seems to thinks self-employed people are selling themselves short and their commercial law contracts should be controlled by Fair Work Australia and be part of labour law.
If that is put into legislation it will be a total disaster for the nation because these are two very separate ways of generating commercial activity.
Australians understand the difference very well and when they hire a tradesperson they first obtain a tender price and the payment is made under the terms of the contract.
Australians entering into contracts don’t want to be trying to look after superannuation and holiday pay, which is part of an employment relationship.
The contractor incorporates those rewards into the tender price and it’s a system that generates great productivity because the contractor is always looking for better to perform the task.
In many ways it’s the essence of the nation.
The independent senators have an incredible responsibility to make sure that the governments embrace of union agendas does not throw into chaos the nation’s commercial contracting system.
And this is also important in the casual area because the casual pay rate is 25 per cent above the permanent employment level.
That effectively means casuals receive cash instead of holiday, long service leave and other full-time employment entitlements.
Casuals receive superannuation entitlements usually calculated on the higher casual rate.
Employment entitlements usually add about 20 per cent to the cost of a standard before tax wage so the casual is receiving an extra payment.
Employers are prepared to pay the extra money for the flexibility that casual employment delivers.
And many casuals prefer to have cash in their pocket rather than entitlements.
The great danger in messing with these laws is that casuals will receive employment entitlements and still receive their higher cash rewards – an effective double dip.
That would destroy casual employment in the nation.
Without seeing the legislation, if a person who has been working as a casual for six months and has been receiving very regular hours and wants to take a pay cut and become classed as permanent then they should be allowed to do so, especially as ending a casual arrangement is nearly as hard as a so-called “permanent” relationship.
Remember there is no job in the country that is permanent unless backed by specific legislation.
As public servants in debt-ridden Victoria are discovering, they too can be retrenched if a government borrows too much money.
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25 July, 2023
Fix the schools first
Labor knows that better educational outcomes do all manner of good, for the national economy and social cohesion. It also fits neatly within the party’s ethos, which is why if the Albanese government does become a long-term one, education reform could be one of its central achievements – if it sees this reform process through.
But we do need to ask hard questions. How well qualified are prospective university students for the studies they are about to embark on? Sadly, the answer too often is that many simply are not. Not in terms of basic literacy and numeracy, just for starters.
This points to the need to prioritise improving standards within the primary and secondary schooling sectors, but that doesn’t have to come before embarking on higher-education reforms.
The Australian Universities Accord interim report points out that the expected uplift in university students needed to fill the jobs of the future will largely happen in the 2030s and 40s, not this decade.
That leaves a small window to fix primary and secondary education in time to get prospective university students to where they need to be. It also allows time for university reforms to be carefully crafted and implemented.
The most alarming revelation attached to this week’s release of the interim report was Clare’s observation at the press club that during the past six years there had been a decline in the percentage of high school students completing year 12. How that escaped greater attention during the life cycle of the last Coalition government is perplexing.
The public school system, outside of selective schools, is underfunded and underperforms compared with the private sector. This affects the disadvantaged students the minister wants to increasingly usher into the university system. He’ll be setting them up to fail or lowering tertiary standards if they get that opportunity without the groundwork of first lifting standards at school. So we need to watch closely what happens there.
Once at university, what’s the purpose of obtaining a higher education? Like it or not, learning for the sake of intellectual advancement ceased to be a national priority long ago. The state simply sees universities as an extension of the school education system and a prerequisite to getting a job. Or, put differently, as degree factories with the purpose of giving the workforce the skilled applicants it needs and wants.
I don’t want to be too negative in making this point. It’s a global reality that is a consequence of the sector having been opened up; had it not happened most of us never would have received the benefit of access to higher education in the first place. And there are still areas of study offering classical learning.
Indeed as we survey recent ethical breaches across the business sector it’s not a stretch to see vocational benefits of learning philosophical principles at university, perhaps even the need to embed such units into courses not automatically linked with such study.
The interim report is light on when it comes to the important role of universities as institutions of higher research. We are told there is more to come on this front. It is the research that goes on in these so-called ivory towers that accounts for not only all manner of innovative advancement to benefit the modern world but also dictates the global university rankings of our institutions.
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Beijing scores an own goal in brutal trade assault
Beijing’s brutish lunge at economic coercion may have harmed some of our primary producers, but it had an infinitesimal impact on exports and the broader economy.
If anything, it’s been an inglorious own goal for our largest trading partner – denying Chinese consumers our wine, lobsters and beef, and factories raw materials, while galvanising Australia and other free nations not to be intimidated by Sino trade aggression.
Coercive actions impose a cost, one some nations are prepared to bear if they get tangible benefits. We’re still standing and have cracked new export markets, while China has lost incalculable global prestige for this and other clumsy moves in the “wolf warrior” era.
In the first year of the pandemic, Beijing slapped punitive tariffs on Australian barley and wine; banned beef from some local abattoirs; put wheat and lobsters through more inspection hoops; ordered mills to stop buying our cotton; banned timber from certain regions; and banned some coal imports on environmental grounds.
Now in an economy-wide simulation, the Productivity Commission estimates China’s punitive actions reduced our gross domestic product by 0.009 per cent, less than one-hundredth of 1 per cent or about $225m in today’s dollars.
Sounds hefty, but Australia’s GDP is about $2.5 trillion. So the loss of output from China’s trade assault was like shutting down our economy for 48 minutes, or one-half of a Matildas’ game (with injury time).
There’s a 0.4 per cent loss in national purchasing power – known as “terms of trade” – but since early 2020 the world has given us a 25 per cent pay rise on this score.
In global trade, when a shock occurs and one door closes, others open, relative prices change, and consumers, government and the owners of capital adjust to the brave new world.
In its model, the commission explains in its recently released Trade and Assistance Review, China’s prohibitive tariffs reduce the prices Australian producers receive and leads Australian exporters to reallocate production to domestic and foreign markets.
Of course, the value of Australian exports of the five affected goods modelled – cotton, seafood, coal, wine and wood – declines.
This leads to a reduction in outputs and a reallocation of resources away from the production of these goods.
In the simulation, the prohibitive tariff reduces the value of Australia’s total exports to China by 6.7 per cent.
As China’s demand for Australian exports declines, prices decline. This makes the targeted exports more attractive to other trading partners, who increase demand for Australian exports by 2.2 per cent.
This trade diversion results in a tiny decline in the value of Australia’s total exports. Globally, there is no appreciable net effect on trade, but China’s imports from other sources increases.
The reduction of China’s demand for the affected Australian products reduces the demand for inputs to these products, which in turn reduces their price, and therefore the cost of production in Australia.
“This makes Australian products cheaper in world markets: lower production of exports to China is offset by higher production of exports to other destinations,” the review said.
“Increased production attracts foreign capital. The inflow of foreign capital offsets the decline in GDP that would have occurred, had there been no reallocation to other destinations.”
This small inflow of foreign capital means Australia’s real GDP remains stable although some of that income goes to foreigners, so our gross national product falls by one-hundredth of 1 per cent.
The commission’s review found Australian exports proved to be mostly resilient against China’s onslaught: barley and coal exporters were successful in finding other markets, for example. The value of beef and wheat exports to China did not see significant falls – likely due to the partial nature of the measures.
Some businesses paid a heavy price. There were big falls for lobsters and wine for Australian producers whose exports were centred on the Chinese market.
“That said, after initially increasing exports to their original markets, wine exporters developed new markets,” the review said. “In the case of products with limited perishability, like wine, the costs to exporters might be from deferred sales rather than not being able to sell the good at all. And some exporters may have even enjoyed an increase in the value of stock that ages well.”
Now you can take issue with the free-trade boosterism of the commission’s approach but it accords with developments in the real world.
The pain is concentrated in the targeted sectors. An important caveat is the analysis “does not take into account the costs to those directly targeted businesses of seeking new markets”.
Within Australia, the most noticeable effects are that resources are reallocated from affected producers in the primary sector to the rest of the economy. In the model, manufacturing is a beneficiary, with increased output.
That said, the simulation shows (surprise, surprise) a flexible international trading system is important in facilitating adjustments needed to minimise the effects of the trade sanctions.
“Despite short-term costs, there are often long-term gains from diversification, which supports supply chain resilience and risk management,” the commission said. “Overall, reducing Australia’s exports of the affected products results in a reorganisation of economic activity globally and within Australia.
“Although there are some costs, they’re relatively small once all economies have adjusted.”
As they say in diplomacy, looks like China may have to use honey rather than vinegar to get a win.
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No campaign stands by Gary Johns amid controversy
Some overdue straight talking from Gary
The No campaign against an Indigenous voice to parliament is standing by Gary Johns despite growing calls for him to resign or be sacked over a series of comments and proposals that include blood tests for Aboriginal welfare recipients and a public holiday celebrating intermarriage between black and white Australians.
Liberals for Yes co-convener Kate Carnell and NSW opposition health spokesman Matt Kean, also a Liberal, said Mr Johns should quit or be forced out of his role as president of leading No organisation Recognise a Better Way because of his “repugnant” views.
It comes as a video emerges of Mr Johns, a former Labor minister in the Keating government, speaking at the Mannkal Economic Education Foundation’s Christmas party last year, in which he said: “As I have said at some places in Sydney, looking out over Sydney Harbour, words to the effect of – if this was an invasion, it was a bloody good one.
“Because we have built a wonderful liberal society which would never have been built but for a civilisation arriving here, overtaking people who were our forebears. We all were hunter gatherers but we moved on.”
In his 2022 book, The Burden of Culture: How to Dismantle the Aboriginal Industry and Give Hope to its Victims, Mr Johns sets out “16 ways to save lives and overcome Aboriginal colonisation”.
They include abolishing all annual Indigenous celebrations, including NAIDOC week, in favour of a single day commemorating the 1967 election; starting an annual event celebrating intermarriage as it is “the most common form of relations between black and white Australia”; and making all benefits and programs that are specific to Indigenous people conditional on a blood test for Indigenous heritage.
READ MORE: Settlement by whites ‘a gift to Aborigines’ | The Indigenous voice to parliament is a bad idea on so many levels
Mr Johns defended the comments on Sky News on Monday night and said he had nothing to apologise for, adding he’d prefer not to have a race-based system but if one was in place then blood tests were needed.
Leading No campaigner Warren Mundine said Mr Johns was an important part of the No campaign and he was comfortable with him remaining on the No side, despite disagreeing with some of his views.
“Gary Johns is like any other Australian. He’s entitled to his viewpoints and I’m a great believer in free speech. Now me and him, we will have discussions about that and we disagree on different angles of it but there’s no way I’m going to be calling for him to step down,” Mr Mundine told Sky News.
“Just because people complain about him and that, at least he’s honest about his approach to these things and I’m very pleased to have him on our committee and to have him as an adviser to us.”
Ms Carnell said the voice referendum was not about these sorts of things.
“We do think that the leaders of the No campaign should really publicly say to Mr Johns that this is simply unacceptable and possibly he should resign as a board member of the No campaign,” she told Sky News.
In an earlier statement, Ms Carnell said: “The statements made by Mr Gary Johns last night calling for all recipients of Indigenous benefits to be blood tested, and for the introduction of a national public holiday celebrating intermarriage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, are deeply disturbing comments that should have no place in Australian political debate.
“there should be no room in this important debate for statements that evoke deeply discredited and racially discriminatory policies and practices that have been left in the dustbin of history.”
Mr Kean and NSW opposition multiculturalism spokesman Matt Coure said Mr Johns’ remarks, including a 2007 comment that Aboriginal people would “find acceptable a period in jail as a respite from a distraught life”, had no place in the national conversation.
“His views are repugnant to everything this country stands for - fairness, decency, and respect for our fellow Australians. If Mr Johns refuses to resign from the board of the official No campaign today, the No campaign should do the decent and honourable thing and fire him,” they said.
Victorian Labor senator Jana Stewart, a Mutthi Mutthi and Wamba Wamba woman, has also called on the No campaign to explain whether it thinks Mr Johns’ views “are acceptable and, if not, why does he remain on their campaign committee.”
The Australian revealed last week that Mr Johns said in June that most Aboriginal people were “grateful for that gift” of modernisation and defended the work of churches and their involvement with the Stolen Generations, in comments made while campaigning against the voice.
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Manjimup truffle season 'outstanding' with global demand 'off the charts'
Another truffle season in southern Western Australia has peaked, with producers saying demand for the lucrative fungus from international buyers is continuing to grow.
In the small timber town of Manjimup, 300 kilometres south of Perth, Al Blakers has been shipping his truffles to restaurants, chefs and suppliers as far as France, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Germany, Canada, the US and South Africa.
The retail prices for the fungi can range from $2,500 to $3,000, and are sought after by high-end restaurants worldwide.
As well as harvesting his black truffles, Mr Blakers Manjimup Truffles distributes product for other truffieres across the region.
"We've had a very good season so far ... quality has just been outstanding," he said.
"Everybody's having pretty bumper crops, and while we're exceeding what I was expecting, the good thing is we've found other markets to move it into and we haven't had a problem shipping it all.
"Demand is just off the charts overseas. It has been since the start of the season."
Down the road at Stonebarn Truffiere, owner Dion Range has also been experiencing a successful harvest.
"It's looking very good so far … I have no doubt that we'll be comfortably up on last year's figures," he said.
"People are loving the aroma, and the quality is probably better than we've ever seen, despite a large amount of rain we've had this season so far."
"The demand is probably stronger than it's been," he said.
"We've taken on a few more customers that we wholesale truffles to overseas and I can only see the demand increasing.
"More people are learning about truffles and more people are buying truffles, which supports the price, so there's no price pressure."
Mr Range calls Manjimup a "hidden bit of heaven" and said the conditions in the region are perfect for black truffle production.
"The microclimates, the soil types, the temperature ranges, and the rainfall time and quantity here really suit the black Perigord truffle very well," he said.
"Nobody knew when the first truffle trees were planted in the area whether it would work, but it's turned out to be very successful here.
"The averages in terms of mature truffle production in the Manjimup Shire are substantially higher per number of trees than the French and the Spanish Truffle.
"We are onto something and we're very lucky."
Mr Blakers believes demand for truffles from his part of the world stems from the quality and also recent tough seasons for the French-grown product.
"I think our big boost this year is that they had such a bad season in France last year with the drought and because they don't irrigate like we do," he said. "I'd say they're in big trouble again with the temperatures they are copping now."
The unpredictable nature of harvesting a product like truffle does make things difficult for producers to plan ahead.
"Are we going to finish early? Are we're going to see another rush period? You just don't know because you've never seen it before," Mr Blakers said.
"But the quantity this season has been quite unbelievable.
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24 July, 2023
Reforms needed for Australian universities -- but what reforms?
There seems to be an underlying goal in the article below to get more young people into universities. But it coud be argued that FEWER students should go to universities. There is much more demand for tradesmen than there is for (say) social science graduates. And the tradesmen often end up paid more.
Additionally, the emphasis on getting students from poorer backgrouds into university may well be a waste in many cases. Such students will often drop out, having achieved nothing.
Admission should be based solely on ability criteria, from senior exam results to IQ scores. The "equity" goals can be achieved by giving financial support to able students from poor backgrounds. But the demonstrated ability must be there or there is no point.
What I am suggesting is not blue sky. It is exactly what the old Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme introduced by Bob Menzies in 1951 did. I benefited from it in the '60s. I was a smart kid from a poor background and sailed through my tertiary studies with that assistance. Of the seven justices of the High Court of Australia, none was the child of a university graduate. All but one were Commonwealth scholars.
Universities are engines of the economy, producing the research and workforce that help grow GDP. But the idea of who universities are for needs to change, says federal Education Minister Jason Clare. More than half of all jobs in Australia will need higher education qualifications by 2050, compared with 36 per cent today, according to analysis released this week in the interim report of the landmark accord review of universities. That means about twice as many people will need to go to university – including students from low socioeconomic backgrounds and the regions who typically haven’t considered tertiary education as an option.
Yet the higher education sector itself is in crisis, propped up by international student fees after decades of government funding cuts, with a heavily casualised workforce and, increasingly, experts say, an excessively corporatised executive. Some warn Australian universities have lost sight of students in their scramble to stay competitive with elite institutions around the world.
To succeed, they’ve had to get bigger. The rise of the homogenous mega-university means institutions are becoming more like “supermarkets for credentials” at the cost of specialisation, according to RMIT University’s principal adviser in institutional research, Angel Calderon.
The days of university as a transformational experience are fading, says Xavier Dupe of the National Student Union. “And it started before COVID. Universities are pushing students through a degree factory and increasingly gearing study around the priorities of big business.”
What’s needed, everyone agrees, is a complete overhaul.
Big ‘spiky’ change
The accord’s interim report lays out five priority moves to jumpstart reforms: all Indigenous students will be guaranteed a Commonwealth-supported university place when they are accepted for study; 34 new study hubs will be established in outer suburbs and regional areas; and university governing boards will be overhauled to install more people with higher education experience. A key part of the former Coalition government’s controversial Job Ready Graduates Package – which was lashed by the accord panel as disadvantaging poorer students – will be dismantled, meaning students who fail more than 50 per cent of subjects will no longer lose their Commonwealth place. And government funding agreements, which had only been guaranteed until the end of this year, will be extended into 2025.
But radical reform calls for radical ideas, says Clare, and the accord panel has also laid out a raft of “big spiky” ones that could shape the sector’s next steps ahead of its final report in December. “That’s why there’s an echidna on the front cover,” Clare quipped as the report was handed down.
The review comes at a time when NSW and Victorian universities are almost universally in deficit. The exception is the University of Sydney, which has reported an operating surplus of $1.3 billion over the past two years.
The next six months, says higher education expert Andrew Norton, is where the debate could get divisive. Some ideas flagged are especially spiky, including a proposed levy on the almost $10 billion universities make annually from international student fees, that could be used to cover gaps elsewhere such as research funding and student housing. Group of Eight universities that earn the most from international students have already slammed the idea as a tax on high-achieving institutions, even as many regional institutions voice interest.
University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell questions how such a levy could be fairly applied. “It costs us a lot of money to attract international students, we then use a big chunk of their fees on teaching them or building infrastructure for them,” he says. “By the time you factor all that in, there wouldn’t be much left to tax.”
Still, La Trobe University vice-chancellor Professor John Dewar says the levy idea has “a lot of merit”. The sheer scale of the changes needed demands bold moves, he says, welcoming the accord panel’s willingness to “pressure test and wargame” such ideas now to avoid unintended consequences later. For example, “a levy could lead to the cost being passed onto the students and that’d be a shame”, he says. “It already costs a lot to come here and study.”
Norton says the levy could reinforce the perception of international students as cash cows and potentially drive away a key source of revenue for the sector. What’s clear though is that there is a resource divide between many universities and, according to the accord, universities are incentivised to maximise their international student cohort, blowing out class sizes. “This can be detrimental to the student experience,” the report says.
Rich university, poor university
Reforms down the years have tried to close the equity gap and failed. Now, the accord panel says, reaching parity requires 60 per cent more students from low socio-economic backgrounds going to university, 53 per cent more from regional areas and about 11 per cent more First Nations students.
If we’re going to get there, Dewar says, “we need to pull every lever. We haven’t really had a plan for higher education in this country. We need targets.”
Clare, who is also plotting big reforms in early education and schools, says students are being failed before they reach university. Those from poorer backgrounds are three times more likely to fall behind in school and only 15 per cent go on to get degrees. “Six years ago, 83 per cent of students in public schools finished year 12,” he told the Press Club this week. “Last year it was 76 per cent. And all of this is happening at a time when finishing school is so much more important than it was in my mum and dad’s day, or mine ... If you’re a young Indigenous bloke today, you’re more likely to go to jail than university.”
These grim figures are why Norton still sees reaching equal university participation as a “pipedream” until school results and year 12 completion rates go up. In NSW, one in three public school students are now dropping out of school. “We should be realistic about what’s achievable,” says Norton.
Equity targets have been missed before, concedes Dewar, but he senses a real momentum in the sector this time, something he hopes is matched by more serious funding and policy. An independent tertiary commission to guide the reform, another spiky idea flagged by the accord, may well be needed given the amount of taxpayer money involved. “They need to hold universities accountable for targets,” says Dewar. “They need to assure the taxpayer that the results are worth it. In a busy world, no matter how much appetite the sector might have to do something, and it does have the appetite, if you’re not actually going to have your feet held to the fire over it, then it may slip.”
A second national university, this time focusing on the regions and based on the University of California model, is another idea flagged worth a discussion, Dewar says. “Under the UC model, their campuses all have a degree of autonomy, and are big unis in their own right, but they benefit from some aggregation of function that are expensive for each university to run separately.” Others question whether a federated model is needed.
Clare has said Australia would likely need more universities and new kinds of institutions, including more specialised models, to cater to the coming demand.
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Lesbian domestic violence proves it’s not just a male problem
You may recall the campaign running on national television a few years ago. The ads were part of the Australian government’s campaign designed ‘to help break the cycle of violence against women and their children’.
It suggested that all of the perpetrators of domestic violence were strictly male. For example, the Albanese Labor government is presently funding a range of new initiatives through this budget to help deliver the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022-32.
But what about domestic violence against men?
I have no intention of minimising the problem of domestic violence against women and children. One must speak out loud and clear about violence against anyone regardless of age, gender, and sexual orientation.
However, it is a myth that domestic violence is all about men hurting women in heterosexual relationships. Domestic violence is also a ‘silent epidemic’ in lesbian relationships.
As the studies of lesbian violence demonstrate, women are capable of being as violent as men in intimate relationships. Violence among same-sex couples is apparently two to three times more common than among married heterosexual couples.
For example, about a decade ago the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey reported on the lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, focusing for the first time on victimisation by sexual orientation.
It found a victimisation prevalence of 43.8 per cent for lesbians, making it the second most affected group after bisexual women (61.1 per cent), ahead of bisexual men (37.3 per cent), heterosexual women (35 per cent), heterosexual men (29 per cent) and homosexual men (26 per cent).
A new study from Rutgers University has found a significant increase in domestic violence in lesbian relationships. The study is entitled, Sociodemographic characteristics, depressive symptoms, and increased frequency of intimate partner violence among LGBTQ people in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. It appears in the April 2023 (Volume 35, Issue 2) of the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services.
The above study used a survey of 1,090 LGBTQ+ individuals. It found that bisexual women, followed by lesbians, are the most likely to suffer from all forms of intimate partner abuse. The same study also found that, in cases of severe violence, the numbers are 49 per cent of bisexual women, 29.4 per cent of lesbian women, and 16.4 per cent of homosexual men compared to 23.6 per cent of heterosexual women and 13.9 per cent of heterosexual men.
That violence comes out more frequently in lesbian relationships both as resistance and as aggression should put aside our preconceptions of gender socialisation and roles.
Erin Pizzey set up the first refuge for battered women, in 1971. Her own experience is that women are just as capable of intimate partner abuse, in both the physical and emotional sense, as men. When she opened her refuge for battered women, 62 of the first 100 women to come through the door were as abusive as the men they had left. And when the feminists started demonizing fathers in the early 1970s, she felt morally obliged to state:
‘Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty. … We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women. This insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it’s our children who will suffer.’
Pizzey is part of a growing number of brave experts and scholars trying to set the record straight. Professor Linda Mills, the Ellen Goldberg Professor at New York University, said:
‘Years of research, which mainstream feminism has glossed over or ignored, shows that when it comes to intimate abuse, women are far from powerless and seldom, if ever, just victims. Women are not merely passive prisoners of violent intimate dynamics. Like men, women are frequently aggressive in intimate settings and therefore may be more accurately referred to as “women in abusive relationships” … The studies show not only that women stay in abusive relationships but also that they are intimately engaged in and part of the dynamic of abuse.’
The official figures, however, grossly underestimate the number of female perpetrators of domestic violence. Male victims are reluctant to disclose when they have been abused by women. Culturally, it is still difficult for men to bring these incidents to the attention of the authorities. It does not fit the official narrative.
Frequently men do not conceptualise the physical violence they sustain from their female partners as a crime. As noted by one worker at the charity Abused Men in Scotland (AMIS):
‘The gender role men are given in society means they find it hard to understand and recognise what is happening to them and when they do it is very difficult for them to talk about it. Regularly they begin with: “I am not an abused man” but then go on to tell the most horrendous stories of domestic abuse. Once men go into that downward spiral of control they are robbed of everything – their home, their job, their self-determination.’
Elizabeth Bates, a psychology professor at the Cumbria University (UK), explains that ‘there are a lot of men who have experienced domestic violence and don’t even report it and often don’t tell anybody’.
According to a senior research fellow at the University of South Wales (USW), male victims of domestic violence ‘fear appearing unmanly … and a failure to live up to masculine ideals’. This was the experience of the abused men she has interviewed, ‘who felt that they needed help to get to the root of these feelings’.
Due to the prevailing narrative, men who sustain intimate partner abuse face numerous obstacles. They struggle to locate anti-DV services to assist them. Help lines or shelters are often targeted towards female victims only. The male victim suffers from a complete lack of support.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/lesbian-domestic-violence-proves-its-not-just-a-male-problem
******************************************************Billionaires’ Qld gas deal hinges on controversial price cap, approvals
Surely the Qld government would not be so moronic as to block this
A $1 billion gas field expansion will power a major Queensland manufacturer, in a gas supply deal hailed as securing “long-term local manufacturing” jobs, but it hangs on environmental approvals and the Albanese Government’s controversial gas price cap.
It is part of a deal inked between companies linked to two of Australia’s wealthiest and most influential billionaires, Gina Rinehart’s Senex and Anthony Pratt’s Visy.
Under the deal, Senex’s Atlas gas field expansion in the Surat Basin will supply Visy’s packaging and recycling manufacturing operations in Queensland for 10 years from January 2026.
But, Senex paused its Atlas expansion in December 2022 in the wake of the government’s then temporary gas price cap – which has now been extended until 2025.
It is understood the expansion remains on hold while the company considers the details of the Federal Government mandatory code of conduct, which was released earlier this month.
It is also dependent on its final approvals under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Senex CEO Ian Davies said manufacturers were facing difficulties securing gas, but the Atlas would bring new supply to the market and put downward pressure on prices.
“Having gas for the manufacturing industry is absolutely paramount, and the only way that’s going to stay reliable is for there to be more investment, not less” Mr Davies said.
“More secure and reliable gas supply will help to keep Australian manufacturers in business and tens-of thousands of people in secure, well-paying jobs.”
Visy CEO Mark de Wit said the agreement would underpin the company’s investments in the state. “Visy is proud to be investing $700 million in Queensland and this agreement means we can continue to grow our manufacturing operations,” he said.
Visy is spending about $700 million to upgrade its recycling facility on Gibson Island, which is expected to remove 39,000 tonnes per year of paper and cardboard from landfill.
The value of the deal remains commercial-in-confidence.
Under the mandatory gas code of conduct, the domestic gas prices cap of $12/GJ was extended until at least July 2025, at which point it will be reviewed.
The current end point for the cap is six months before the contract is due to start.
The cap applies to domestically sold gas, not exports, but the government made a concession to industry by allowing gas companies to negotiate exemptions if they commit to increasing domestic supply.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen has said capping coal and gas prices has “shielded Australians” from higher power bills and that the code struck the right balance between cost of supply.
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Rent controls will force mum and dad investors to exit
Rent controls are poised to become a major threat to investors as the Victorian government is set to overhaul the state’s property rules.
The spectre of looming rent controls or ‘caps’ has already spooked potential investors nationwide. The Queensland state government introduced new tighter laws for property owners in April.
Property industry groups have warned that any move towards rent control will worsen the national rental crisis as it reduces the supply of available rental stock.
At the same time, a steady exit of property investors from the residential market in recent months could accelerate dramatically if government intervention is added to the mix.
Queensland recently introduced a once a year rule on rent increases while the Victorian government is reportedly looking at rules that will only allow a rental increase once every two years along with further potential caps.
Private investors own the vast majority of Australian rental property. But ‘mum and dad’ owners have been shifting out of the market as rates run higher and long-term returns continue to weaken.
For decades investors operated on the basis their would double their money every seven to ten years, but this rule of thumb was contradicted by a Proptrack report this year which showed it has taken 15 years for prices to double.
Meanwhile rental returns – despite the rental crisis – remain weak in terms of ongoing earnings with yields on term deposit accounts now competing with property income.
Investors who thought they were buying into a ‘market’ were rudely awakened by the rental mortarium that was rushed through during the Covid-19 period.
Having recovered from that period, investors now face a potential new wave of re-regulation.
A newly released report from investment bank Jarden has shown firm evidence that private investors have already been exiting the market.
Against a long-term average figure of 30 per cent, the portion of investors behind new listings has risen to 36 per cent in Melbourne and 40 per cent in Sydney.
Separately, this week the real estate group, Ray White reported a doubling of investor auctions sales.
The exit of a property investors from the market can reduce the amount available to rent as properties revert to owner occupiers.
The immediate effect will be to reduce rental vacancy rates which remain at a severely low level of less than 2 per cent across the major urban centres.
In Brisbane, where there was an exceptionally large volume of interstate landlord sales at the top of the recent cycle in 2021, the city later become the market with the worst vacancy rates in the nation.
A nationwide repeat of the Queensland experience is now on the cards as a range of state governments stand ready to move on the property market in a way that will not improve the terms for investors.
However, in Victoria where Premier Dan Andrews has indicated ‘everything is on the table’ in relation to a plan to overhaul the state’s property system, the issue is set to become acute.
Private property holders in Melbourne endured a price downturn along with Sydney investors in but they have not had the same price bounce back this year – Sydney prices moved more than six cent higher over the year to date while Melbourne prices barely inched higher at 1.1 per cent year to date.
Though renters who have faced double-digit rent increases will be sceptical over the reportedly poor returns in property.
The changing numbers in the rental market means that investors will keep pushing rents higher as their own costs – largely dominated by higher interest rates – continue to escalate.
As the Oxford Economics group reports, “higher interest rates have significantly lifted the mortgage costs for landlords who are keen to balance their cash flow through higher rental incomings – we expect rents to increase 11 per cent in 2023 and 4 per cent in 2024”.
The experience overseas especially in the UK in recent years has been that government intervention coupled with high rates has mean large numbers of mum and dad property investors have thrown in the towel – the same risk is now clearly present in the Australian market.
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23 July, 2023
Man charged over alleged online threats of Yumi Stynes following Welcome to Sex controversy
There may be more to the abuse of Stynes than is mentioned below. She is a very unpleasant person. She once called the popular Kerri-Anne Kennerley a cockroach and implied that physically fit men are brainless. And Australia is full of "racists" to her. She is half Japanese but Japanese politeness seems to have passed her by. She comes across as a basically hostile person, not someone we would want writing books for children
A 23-year-old man has been charged by police over the alleged online harassment of TV and radio personality Yumi Stynes, co-author of Welcome to Sex, in the latest development in a week-long saga surrounding the teenage-focused book on sex and sexuality.
Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it all out, was published by Stynes and Sydney doctor Melissa Kang in May, but was this week slammed by Rachael Wong, chief executive of conservative organisation Women’s Forum Australia, who labelled it a “graphic sex guide for children”.
“For those saying the book is sex education, there is a huge difference between giving children age-appropriate information, and prematurely exposing them to graphic, highly sexualised material,” Wong told this masthead this week.
Big W this week pulled the book from its physical stores after its staff reportedly received abuse from members of the public. However, it is still selling the book online.
On Instagram on Friday, Stynes posted multiple screenshots purporting to show death and rape threats directed toward her since the book’s release. They are too graphic to be reported.
On the same day, a 23-year-old man was arrested and charged over alleged threats made to Stynes online.
“Officers from Leichhardt Police Area Command commenced an investigation over the alleged online threats to a 48-year-old woman,” a NSW Police spokesperson said.
“Following inquiries, a 23-year-old man was arrested at Balmain Police Station [on Friday].
“He was then taken to Newtown Police Station, where he was charged with one count of use carriage service to menace/harass/offend.”
Stynes has rigorously defended the book – which has been immensely popular, reaching the top of the Amazon charts this week, and temporarily selling out on the platform – saying the book needed to be written.
“We really have a lot of credentials [to write the book],” said Stynes, who hosts the ABC podcast Ladies, We Need to Talk. “We’ve got an army of professors, who fact-checked and contributed to the book. So for people to try and shame us or make us feel like we haven’t done the work, it’s just really misguided. It does make me think that they’re taking a leaf out of the book of Trumpism and fearmongering there.”
The book is the fourth in a series of guides for teens, with earlier publications titled Welcome to Your Period, Welcome to Consent, and Welcome to Your Boobs.
Speaking to 2GB this week, Women’s Forum Australia’s Wong said the book’s contents was “so, so disturbing”.
“Material likes this tends to destroy [children’s innocence about sex],” she said. “[Stores] need to take this book off their shelves.
“I say [to] Big W: take this book down; otherwise we’re not going to shop at your store.”
The man was granted bail and will appear at Downing Centre Local Court on Friday August 11.
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Why Labor’s threat to free speech must be rejected
The right to be wrong is both the most vital of freedoms and the most constantly threatened. Vital, because the freedom of expression is the guardian of every other liberty, alerting the public to the abuse of power; and constantly threatened because few temptations come more readily to governments than that of suppressing views they regard as irksome, dangerous or simply incorrect.
That is why John Stuart Mill called the freedom of thought and discussion “the most fundamental doctrine” of a free society. And it is why the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 poses so serious a threat to our democracy.
Extraordinarily open-ended, the proposed legislation’s stated purpose is to protect Australians from misinformation and disinformation that is likely to cause “serious harm” – that is, “harm that affects a significant portion of the Australian population, economy or environment, or undermines the integrity of an Australian democratic process” – where misinformation is “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive”, while disinformation is misinformation that is “intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm”.
To that end, the legislation empowers the Australian Communications and Media Authority to require digital platforms to implement systems that identify and suppress any offending information.
The government’s Guidance Note suggests the legislation is comparable to the European Union’s Digital Services Act (2022); what it does not say is that the relevant provisions of the DSA apply only to “very large” online service providers. In contrast, the legislation would apply to “social media, search engines, instant messaging services, news aggregators and podcasting services”, regardless of their size and reach.
Indeed, few websites would fall outside the legislation’s ambit, giving ACMA powers whose scope has no equivalent in a liberal democracy.
Virtually none of the legislation’s crucial terms is tightly defined, nor does the legislation even attempt to distinguish questions of fact from those of opinion, creating uncertainty that can only chill the expression of controversial views. And the examples the Guidance Note gives of information it might seek to suppress – such as content that “falsely claims that specific community groups in Australia are responsible for a range of social issues” – so obviously involve matters of opinion as to simply heighten the resulting concerns.
The government has attempted to calm those concerns by claiming that “ACMA would have no role in determining truthfulness”; but that contention is plainly incorrect.
That is because the legislation effectively requires ACMA to audit whether the systems regulated entities have implemented adequately curb misinformation or disinformation. But it is impossible to see how such an audit could be undertaken without assessing the truth or falsity of the content those entities have posted.
And it is inconceivable that ACMA could evaluate complaints about false or misleading content without determining whether the content they refer to is or is not false or misleading.
The legislation does provide a number of exemptions, including for “professional news content” (but not for comments on that content) and for content produced by “accredited educational providers”. However, those exemptions merely highlight the legislation’s underlying lack of logic.
After all, if content is so manifestly odious that it should be suppressed, why would the fact that it appears on (say) a university’s website reduce the danger it poses to the community? One would, on the contrary, expect vesting the content with academic authority to increase its credibility and so aggravate the resulting harm, making the case for its suppression all the stronger.
But reliance on arbitrary distinctions is hardly the legislation’s worst flaw. In effect, the legislation gives ACMA the power to impose vast penalties on regulated entities if their systems are ineffective at eliminating what it considers mis- or disinformation. There are, however, no penalties whatsoever if regulated entities suppress information that is neither false nor harmful.
Given that asymmetry in rewards and penalties, content providers will inevitably prefer to make the error of removing information that does not merit removal to that of not removing information that does merit removal: they will, in other words, convict more “innocent” content so long as that reduces, even marginally, the likelihood of any potentially “guilty” content slipping through their net.
Yet it is hard to conceive of an outcome more starkly at odds with the public interest. In an open society, falsehoods can be – and usually are – corrected by truths; but no number of falsehoods can replace a censored truth. It is therefore far better to allow ten falsehoods to run loose than to rob the public of a single truth: which is the exact opposite of this legislation’s design and likely effect.
None of that means the issues the legislation is seeking to address should be ignored.
Even as unflinching an advocate of freedom of expression as John Stuart Mill recognised the harm certain forms of speech could inflict – and there are, of course, already laws in place that deal, for example, with incitement to violence, online harassment and vilification.
But as Mill rightly pointed out, the harm “caused by an opinion is itself a matter of opinion”. And he warned that deterring the expression of the “opinions and sentiments which happen to be in a minority” necessarily encouraged the oppressive conformism, enforced by vindictive and intolerant majorities, and the resulting intellectual “stagnation and immobility”, which Mill considered “the real danger in democracy, the real evil to be struggled against”.
That danger would, for sure, disappear were the regulator “an infallible judge of opinions”, as well placed “to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to decide it to be false” – but infallibility is not of this world.
Mill therefore argued that any restraints on speech should meet three conditions: parliament should precisely set out the nature of the offending speech and take political responsibility for doing so; there should be no prior censorship of that speech, but only its ex post prosecution; and every alleged breach should be dealt with individually by the courts, giving the impugned content a chance to be defended and allowing any possible harm to be assessed within the context in which it occurred.
Applying those principles to an online environment is undoubtedly challenging. But this legislation simply ignores them altogether. Vague to the point of inviting administrative arbitrariness, it involves parliament delegating legislative authority to a regulatory agency; in turn, that agency can compel regulated entities to exercise prior censorship of speech; and what review mechanisms the legislation provides are hardly capable of identifying, correcting and penalising the suppression of inconvenient truths.
Should it pass, our credibility, when we criticise dictatorships for attacking the freedom of expression, will be severely compromised. However, the greatest harm will be to the fabric and vigour of our democratic life.
“Whatever you do, keep, at all risks, your mind open,” an ageing but still passionate Mill urged his country’s youth, “do not barter away your freedom of thought” and “the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions which is practically inseparable from it”. At a time when the right to take unpopular stances is more threatened than ever, his call should ring in our ears.
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More prosecutorial abuse
And there is no effective recourse against it. A rogue Federal prosecutor made a public announcement that ruined the lives of an innocent couple but because he interlarded everything he said with the word "allegedly" he could not be legally faulted
In the space of a few days, the couple's home was raided and they were arrested by police, close friends turned on them, and they were subjected to a barrage of vile and racist abuse from strangers.
While the online trolling came as a shock, the most frightening incident was when Mr Shehada checked his letterbox and found a Christmas card with human faeces inside.
"I was still outside the front door of my property … I found myself on my knees and I vomited," he said.
The public pile-on came after newspaper stories and a press conference organised by the Australian Federal Police (AFP), where journalists were told about childcare educators who had been charged over an alleged fraud in excess of $15 million.
Police said those involved registered fake kids — or so-called phantom children — to trick the Commonwealth into paying out large subsidies.
"This is money that belongs in the hands of our community to help care for some of our most vulnerable persons," Commander Todd Hunter told journalists on November 28, 2020.
"We allege that out of greed it has instead been used to foot the bill for extensive real estate portfolios, overseas travel and other luxury items."
The couple's faces were plastered all over the television news that night, including on the ABC. Stories showed photos of Ms Ouda sitting on a motorbike and posing in front of a Maserati.
During the press conference, Mr Hunter never explicitly said the couple were guilty of criminal offences. The veteran officer used the words "allege", "alleged" and "allegation" 15 times in his opening seven-minute address to the cameras.
Mr Hunter did not specifically name Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada either, instead saying that the "alleged syndicate leader" was a 42-year-old woman who owned a "large Victorian family day care provider". Mr Hunter also claimed a restaurant owned by the couple was allegedly being used to rort COVID-19 JobKeeper payments.
Behind the scenes, the AFP sent Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada's surnames to the media so that the details could be used to track their future court hearings.
'We did absolutely nothing wrong'
Ten months later, the AFP quietly dropped the charges against Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada.
This month, Mr Shehada told the Victorian Supreme Court the couple "knew from day one we did absolutely nothing wrong". He said he was never told why the case was discontinued by the AFP.
"Our lives were destroyed by this press conference," added Ms Ouda. "We were defamed, the entire community was turned on us and there was absolutely no foundation."
This week, the ABC also sent questions to the AFP, inquiring why the case against the pair had been abandoned. "The AFP has no comment," a spokesperson said.
Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada's frustrations were amplified because the AFP did not contact the media companies to provide the important update that the charges had been dropped. Through their lawyers, the couple sent letters to the publications asking them to take down the original stories.
By early 2023, they had commenced a new legal battle. This time it wasn't the AFP coming after Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada — the pair were seeking to turn the tables and were now suing former commander Todd Hunter and the Commonwealth for defamation, seeking a payout for damages.
Commander grilled on the stand
This month, a Supreme Court civil jury was asked to determine whether Mr Hunter's words at the press conference conveyed seven specific meanings to an "ordinary reasonable person".
The defamation lawsuit came down to a relatively simple question. From Mr Hunter's public comments alone, could a reasonable person conclude that Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada were dishonest and stole from taxpayers?
Mr Hunter, who has since retired from the AFP, rejected that suggestion. He told the jury the press conference was held to highlight the work of police, to "allay any fears" people may have had from seeing homes being raided, and to call for additional information to assist the fraud investigation.
David Gilbertson KC, acting for the couple, put a different theory to Mr Hunter. "You were by nods and winks inviting members of the media who attended the press conference to find out the names of Ola Ouda and Amjad Shehada, isn't that right?" he asked.
"I don't believe I nodded or winked at anybody," Mr Hunter replied.
Mr Hunter — whose policing career included overseas postings and coordinating major operations over four decades — was asked whether he used the press conference "to go out from the AFP on a high note".
"No," he replied flatly.
If the jury believed Mr Hunter had defamed the couple, his lawyers said they would rely on a legal defence known as qualified privilege. If required, they would argue that the press conference was an occasion where Mr Hunter was entitled to a degree of protection to speak openly, provided he was not acting with malice.
Negative publicity leaves couple 'scarred for life'
In court, Mr Shehada and Ms Ouda described the public humiliation that followed the AFP's press conference.
Mr Shehada's best friend scolded him on social media, and others made sexually-explicit comments about Ms Ouda. Their kids were bullied at school. Negative reviews were posted on Google about their Lebanese restaurant, which they later sold for a loss. Even their bank accounts were closed by ANZ and Westpac.
Mr Shehada said Ms Ouda's approval to run a childcare business was cancelled and had not been reinstated. The negative publicity meant both were still struggling to find work, he said.
During a tense cross-examination by Mr Hunter's lawyer Lisa De Ferrari SC, Ms Ouda said the ordeal had left her "scarred for life".
"We were defamed, the defamation was intentional, the defamation destroyed my life, our lives, our businesses, and that's it," she said.
When the jury retired to consider their decision, Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada stood in the sun-drenched courtyard of the historic Supreme Court precinct to ponder their futures.
A win might have resulted in a multi-million dollar payout for the couple, and potentially had a major impact on how police conducted public relations and their dealings with the media in future. A loss for Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada would pile on more misery from the previous two-and-a-half years.
At one point, Ms Ouda burst into tears and was hugged by her partner, who also broke down.
A question of meaning
On Tuesday afternoon, they were soon back in the courtroom. A verdict was in, perhaps quicker than had been anticipated.
Seven key questions were put to the jury foreperson.
Could a reasonable person conclude that Mr Hunter had identified Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada at the press conference, and made out that they were guilty of a childcare fraud? Had he outed them as criminal syndicate leaders? Did he convey that they registered phantom children and falsely claimed benefits? That they stole from taxpayers? That they committed fraud and lived a life of luxury? That their restaurant was used for further frauds? And finally, that Ola Ouda and Amjad Shehada were dishonest and unable to be trusted?
To each query, the jury's answer was "no".
It meant Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada's bid to take down Mr Hunter and the Commonwealth had fallen at the first hurdle.
The couple appeared crestfallen as they learned the defamation case would be dismissed and there would be no payment for damages. Worse still, having lost the case, Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada were ordered to pay the legal costs for the defendants.
Despite the outcome, Ms Ouda and Mr Shehada strode out of the Supreme Court defiantly, hand-in-hand.
This time, they weren't in the headlines. The story failed to make the nightly news.
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Power bills are up but Labor is going to do more damage the energy sector
Say what you like about a Labor government but, good or bad, they don’t normally waste their time in office. Unlike the Coalition, they’ve got a bevy of friendlies in the public service to help get things done, plus an increasing number of virtue signalling corporates to sell their message, campaigning millions from their union mates and a largely compliant media that gives them the sort of positive coverage rarely afforded their Liberal counterparts.
And nowhere is this more evident than in dealing with the so-called climate emergency. The front line in the war against emissions thus far has been energy. For almost two decades, we’ve been fed an official line that renewables would make our power bills cheaper. At the election last year, the now Prime Minister even put a figure on the savings – $275 per household per year. How’s that going? Because if you’re paying the same bills that I am, they’re only going up.
But if you think the climate attacks on energy are bad, just wait for what’s coming next as the Albanese government prepares to inflict the same transformations on other parts of our economy that have already been wreaked on the energy sector.
And you will pay the price, either as taxpayers, consumers or both – that’s been estimated to cost Australia $1.5 trillion by 2030, says expert group Net Zero Australia comprised of energy specialists at the Universities of Melbourne, Queensland and the USA’s Princeton.
Last week, with all the fervour of a TV evangelist, Energy Minister Chris Bowen announced that the Climate Change Authority was now working on “sectoral net zero plans”, for the manufacturing industry, the built environment, agriculture and land, transport, and resources. These will be part of what he declared would be Labor’s “strong” 2035 emissions reductions targets, on top of the already legislated 2030 targets most energy engineers think can’t be met.
Naturally enough, this was rapturously received by the Clean Energy Council whose climate zeal happily coincides with the multibillion-dollar subsidies they’ve received for the past 15 years. Just as in energy, in these further sectors, there will soon be small armies of regulators to impose this climate socialism, plus plenty of businesses already trying to work out how they can pass the costs onto consumers.
So far, the brunt of the climate pain has been felt via power bills. It’s only now, with the coal-fired power stations that still provide more than 60 per cent of our electricity coming to the end of their lives, and with their zero-emissions replacements still largely a pipe dream, that the extent of the climate con is becoming apparent. The question is, will Australians wake up before it’s too late or will we allow government to do to agriculture, transport, mining and everything else what they have done to our energy sector and power bills?
And for what? Even if we did dramatically wind back our standard of living to save the planet, has Canberra forgotten that Australia emits less than 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions and let’s not also forget, that China, our main strategic competitor, has emitted more CO2 in the past decade than Britain has since the Industrial Revolution.
So what’s ahead of us as the Albanese government pushes ahead with its plans to reduce our animal herds because of their methane gasses, move us all into electric cars or onto public transport, scrap manufacturing jobs, even tell us what sort of stoves we can have?
In Britain, trying to accelerate decarbonisation has led a nominally Conservative government to ban all petrol and diesel car sales from 2030 and to decree that future domestic heating must be provided through less effective heat pumps rather than gas boilers. Here in Australia, the Victorian government is considering a ban on all gas cooktops and heaters.
Some years ago, Barnaby Joyce was ridiculed for talking about the $100 Sunday roast; and my former boss Tony Abbott for predicting the demise of Whyalla as a steel town. Yet this is precisely where we’re headed if agriculture and manufacturing must be “net zero” by 2035, given that most agricultural emissions come from herd animals and, thus far, it’s simply impossible to make “green steel” at a price anyone would pay. And no one should underestimate the quasi-religious zeal that Minister Bowen and the green acolytes who now populate so many of our institutions bring to their climate goals. Just have a look at the Voice where the Yes push is driven by so many corporates and governments despite more and more voters saying they reject it.
So far, the Albanese government’s climate convictions have been quite impervious to the reality that we still rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on. But that same climate evangelism will lead to herd limits, car bans, manufacturing shutdowns, and mandatory changes in your home unless someone in authority is prepared to shout “stop this madness” while we still can.
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22 July, 2023
The anguish and anger behind Australia’s clean energy plan
It’s known as the “energy superhighway”, a catchy slogan that holds the promise of a country on the move, speeding towards a clean energy world.
Fourth-generation Snowy Valleys landholder Dave Purcell pulls up a map of the transmission line superhighway and tries to picture what this vision of the future means for his family farm in this picturesque corner of southern NSW.
This is what he sees: eight to 14 steel towers, up to 76m-high, carrying cables that crisscross the sky above the cattle property like high-voltage cobwebs. Not just on this farm, but a line of steel on 70m easements marching up the hills and down the green valleys that surround it.
“We’ll be massively impacted,’’ Purcell says, ticking off the pitfalls as his mother Louise gazes out the window of the family home near the orchard town of Batlow.
Intrusion on prime agricultural pastures, disruption to farming practices, devaluing of their land by at least 30 per cent, hindrance to firefighting activities – that’s a big one for a family who suffered so much in the 2019-20 fires that took every blade of grass, about 70 cattle and, worst of all, the life of a family friend who was helping to save the property.
Neighbours tell similar stories, of trying to rebuild their blackened farms or razed homes while opening letters informing them that the HumeLink transmission project was coming, a more permanent alteration to their landscape.
“The timing was terrible. We were still coping with all of this when they started hounding us with phone calls day and night,’’ Purcell says. “We had to get solicitors involved. We were so devastated from the fires we couldn’t deal with them.’’
And so, like other landholders along Transgrid’s proposed HumeLink route, the Purcells simply shut their gates.
Feel-good buzzwords and superhighway slogans generated in city offices don’t mean much here in the western foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Stakeholder engagement teams with their bright smiles, soothing assurances and veiled threats of compulsory acquisition come and go, impeded by fences emblazoned with Stop signs barring access to the network operator, Transgrid.
Joe McGirr, the local NSW independent MP, says early consultation in the aftermath of the fires was unnecessarily adversarial. A bad start for a project requiring the agreement of hundreds of landowners.
The resistance runs deep. Snowy Valleys locals talk of motels and petrol stations turning away Transgrid workers; of organisations refusing the company’s offer of $5000 community grants even though they could do with the money to paint a clubhouse or buy new gear.
Behind many a “Stop HumeLink” sign there’s genuine anguish and anger. Impacted landholders will be compensated – $200,000 per kilometre of powerlines on their property, paid out over 20 years – but neighbours who have a giant tower built outside their home or business won’t.
Farmers who successfully agitated to have the route moved off their land have inadvertently pushed the 500kV lines onto outraged neighbours.
Longstanding friendships have been extinguished and neighbours divided as the winners and losers work out what has been gained and what will be lost.
There’s bewilderment that the race towards green energy will see further land-clearing and destruction of wildlife habitats, and it has widened the city and country divide. Nationals MP Wes Fang says his community is bearing the burden of “this overhead monstrosity’’ so city dwellers can have cheaper power.
“No one should minimise the consequences of ‘industrialising’ Australia’s iconic locations – would we build power lines above Bondi Beach?’’ the Snowy Valleys Council asked in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry.
Instead of speeding towards the future, HumeLink, one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects and a critical link to connect renewable projects such as the beleaguered Snowy Hydro 2.0 to the electricity grid, has stalled in the face of community opposition along the length of the proposed 360km line from Wagga Wagga to Maragle to the south and Bannaby to the north.
Opponents have been accused of holding the country to ransom, delaying the race to build sufficient renewable electricity to replace coal-fired power stations as they close.
Transgrid says HumeLink is critical to the release of more affordable, reliable and renewable energy, but CEO Brett Redman has foreshadowed that the original $3.3bn budget has already blown out to nearly $5bn.
The federal government’s $20bn Rewiring the Nation plan requires 10,000km of new high-voltage power lines across the country’s east coast, but local communities from Tasmania to Queensland aren’t copping new overhead lines without a fight, and they’re emboldened by the HumeLink protest and the equally fierce resistance in Victoria to the VNI West project (Victoria to NSW Interconnector West).
Environmentalist Bob Brown is leading the protest against the $3.5bn Marinus Link undersea cable between Victoria and Tasmania, saying it will enable environmentally destructive projects in his state.
In the Sunshine Coast hinterland near Gympie, locals are up in arms over Powerlink’s plans for transmission lines to connect pumped hydro to the grid.
Of the country’s major transmission projects, the 900km EnergyConnect project west from Wagga Wagga to Robertstown in South Australia, connecting to Red Cliffs in Victoria, is under construction.
The gridlock threatens to derail the federal government’s clean energy transition and has forced Energy Minister Chris Bowen to establish a “community engagement review” to ensure better consultation with communities and proper handling of complaints. “It would be easy, but wrong, to dismiss those concerns as just NIMBY-ism,’’ he said in a speech last May. “In my experience, most concerned community members are not anti-renewables, anti-transmission or anti-progress. Nor, in most cases, are they opposed to the projects going ahead if their concerns are addressed.”
The HumeLink landholders who spoke to The Weekend Australian aren’t against renewables. They’re not anti-progress or rednecks. Many have spent time and money researching the options, hiring experts, looking for ways to make this work.
They know that transmission is necessary and that their properties are in the firing line, and so they have come up with an alternative plan: bury the cables.
The NSW government has responded to their concerns by holding a parliamentary inquiry into the feasibility of undergrounding the lines. More than three years into the battle, it’s given the landholders hope.
“Everyone is happy to work with them if they put it underground,’’ Dave Purcell says. “They could come on to the property and start working tomorrow if that was the option.’’
Communities divided
Mary-Jane Betts is driving across her sheep property just west of Yass, pointing out the lines of trees planted by her late dad John Betts, an early and enthusiastic Landcare member who understood the need for sustainable farming practices and regeneration.
This very afternoon her mum Nan, an active 84-year-old, is down by the creek digging up river red gum seedlings that she’ll nurture and replant elsewhere on the property. Rainbows of parrots erupt from the trees as we survey a deep gully with a generous waterfall spilling from the rocks.
A wedge-tailed eagle is disturbed from its twiggy nest and soars overhead as Mary-Jane talks about the history of this part of Derringullen Creek and its significance as a women’s area for the original Ngunnawal people.
Eight towers, each as high as the pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, over of distance of 3.1km are slated for this property.
She shakes her head in disbelief that the route will cross this very gully, away from the women’s area but most likely skirting the eagle’s nest, and taking out ancient trees and newer plantings and wildlife corridors nurtured by her family.
The route, including a 70m easement, will most likely go up through the best lambing paddocks and the helicopter landing pad needed for aerial land management in the steeper, more inaccessible country.
Unlike farmers further south she has asked Transgrid’s mapping team to come onto the property, to see from the ground what can’t be spotted from satellite maps.
These generational farmers know the contours of their land as well as the features on their face. “This place is deep in our bones,’’ Mary-Jane says. “It is absolutely soul-destroying and it hurts us deeply to see what they’re planning to do and at the way we are being treated.
“I hate that this has made me so angry because we are not angry people.”
If the lines must go above ground she has come up with an alternative route within Transgrid’s 200m corridor, but it’s all up in the air, along with her plans to build a conservation trail and eco lodge down at the waterfall.
“We can’t plan anything until we know where these lines are going. We’ve had to put everything on hold while we try to fight this. I can’t tell you how bad it’s been for our health,’’ she says.
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Many censored social media posts did not contain Covid-19 misinformation
Many of 4000 social media posts secretly censored by government during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic contained factual information and reasonable arguments rather than misinformation, new documents reveal.
Digital posts released after Freedom of Information applications show the censored information shared facts such as the ineffectiveness of vaccines in preventing Covid-19 infection and transmission or argued against measures such as mask mandates and lockdowns.
For instance, the then Coalition government sought the removal of an Instagram post in April 2021 that claimed “Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission”.
That statement clearly was accurate yet the official intervention via the Home Affairs Department claimed it breached Instagram’s community guidelines because it was “potentially harmful information” that was “explicitly prohibited” by the platform.
A large proportion of posts the government targeted for removal by the digital platforms promoted wild conspiracy theories and misinformation but many others simply questioned the effectiveness of lockdowns and masks, shared information now accepted as accurate, and urged people to protest against pandemic measures.
An April 2021 tweet was challenged because it claimed “Covid-19 was released or escaped from Wuhan laboratory in China and that it was funded by the US government”.
The Home Affairs Department claimed this was “explicitly prohibited” under Twitter’s rules because it might “invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces”, yet American intelligence agencies have found the most likely source of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it has been revealed that some work at the laboratory was funded by the US.
Over three years up until last month, the federal government paid World Services Australia, an arm of London-based global communications firm M&C Saatchi, more than $1m to monitor Covid-19 posts online and alert it to controversial material.
The Weekend Australian previously revealed how the federal government, under the Coalition and later Labor, intervened more than 4000 times seeking the removal of social media posts by digital giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, using the companies own community standards as the trigger.
The information came to light as a result of FOI applications by Liberal senator Alex Antic.
Questions on notice from Senator Antic have now produced details of these interventions, revealing extensive efforts to suppress even factual information.
Senator Antic said this had confirmed his worst fears. “During the Covid period, Home Affairs actively sought censorship of true statements such as ‘lockdowns are ineffective’ and compelled social media companies to penalise dissent from the government’s position,” Senator Antic said.
“This is gravely concerning for all Australians who care about freedom of speech.”
One Facebook video post in January 2021 was targeted for removal because it encouraged “civil disobedience”.
It depicted a “recognised misinformation influencer” in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens “blatantly walking up to signs that ask people to maintain physical distancing and hiding them from view”.
Many other social media posts were censored for opposing mask mandates and questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns and vaccines.
This was censorship on an industrial scale, with the private contractor tasked to trawl through social media posts 24/7.
Senator Antic said the revelations were “gravely concerning” to all Australians who cared about freedom of speech.
He said this amounted to a “censorship industrial complex” and raised fears about this type of intervention being expanded under the proposed Misinformation Bill that would allow for the issuing of multimillion-dollar fines against platforms found to be hosting “misinformation or disinformation”.
“It’s never been more imperative that we protect freedom of speech in Australia and reject this bill,” Senator Antic said.
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The great green backlash: is Labor next?
Net Zero is the politics of poverty. This dim economic reality lurking beneath all the feel-good social media propaganda about saving a planet that doesn’t need rescuing is manifesting as a serious voter backlash poised to slap left-wing parties across the backside sooner rather than later.
As the loudest champions of ‘green at any cost’, the aptly named Greens are likely to be the first party to feel the sting of public outrage. This will trickle through to the ‘wind turbines and solar panels are our God’ Teals until the mess finishes up in Labor’s lap, where it belongs. They were the chief architects of climate politics when, decades ago, it was all too easy to nominate a distant apocalypse and use its scary vista as an election boost.
‘Give us money and we’ll save the world!’
The masses lined up, wallets open and eyes closed. Everyone loves a saviour, but politicians are not deities with magical powers. Your tax dollars have about as much chance of changing the weather as New Zealand does keeping its volcanoes quiet by giving them gender-neutral pronouns.
The cost of living crisis is walking away from the Net Zero wreckage with a sober view. The existential fear in the public mind no longer relates to the stubbornly stable sea levels, or the faux colour weather maps dipped in red and orange. Too many people remember this as ‘summer’, not a disaster. When Rowan Dean’s Ice Age Watch offers a better quality weather report than the ABC, you know ‘climate change’ has run its course.
Western economies are in a mess because their leaders evoked a ‘war economy’ to handle a crisis that didn’t exist. The initial panic rustled the public purse. It was enough to force people to politely comply with restrictions on freedom while watching, without complaint, the sabotage of public assets. Yet this same citizen body has very little patience for charlatans that use perfect beach weather as an excuse to swindle hundreds of billions in public money.
How many fractions of a degree have Australian taxpayers bought themselves? Is it ‘zero’?
It’s no wonder a backlash has begun. We saw flickers of it arise during Queensland’s recent Fadden by-election in mid-July where the Liberals increased their hold amid sulking Newspolls for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The Greens sank by 4.5 per cent – which is quite extraordinary during a ‘climate change frenzy’.
Situated on the Gold Coast, Fadden would surely notice a catastrophic sea level rise. No doubt residents are watching the tide line hold steady, as it has always done.
The Coalition needed the Fadden win to stem the blood loss from repeated electoral losses up and down the country – although it would be generous to give them credit for the victory. Labor and the Greens are creating an expensive, untenable existence for Australians and as the cost of living crisis escalates the vote will flow away from left-leaning parties.
It’s a shame to see it pour into the pockets of the Liberals, who have spent the last two decades quietly cheering on the same Net Zero policies as Labor and the Greens. They had their chance to protect the Australian public from ruinous and greedy, green-tinted international socialism and instead they leaned heavily into the global prestige of being another ‘yes man’ in the UN crowd.
One Nation has stood against this eco-fascist nonsense from the beginning. We recognised immediately that global corporations and busy-body bureaucracies are misusing scary end-times propaganda for the purpose of acquiring power and gaining riches. Picking carbon dioxide – the foundation of life – as a poison worth controlling and eradicating was always suspect. Frightened citizens in the West, who took the claims of authoritative bureaucracies at face value, are starting to understand that they were duped.
No doubt the Coalition will try to bury their former life as chief propagandists for Net Zero. History will revisit the wets of the party – the Sharmas, Turnbulls, Wilsons, Zimmermans, Keans, and anyone else who empowered the Teals’ apocalyptic message – as either naive or fools. The virtue that green ideology once held is festering into a curse revealing that the darlings of the broad church were always an embarrassment to common sense and economic stability. A moderate Liberal is nothing more than another shade of Teal.
The minor win of a single seat in a by-election result consistent with trends against state and federal governments has reinvigorated Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, yet one wonders if he can see the larger picture.
Australia sits on a turn-tide. The relentless rips of Net Zero and panicky environmentalism have stilled. A grim surge of economic terror waits offshore. This time, it’s a real problem – not some fantastical delusion of a zealous school-skipping teenager. Australians can feel the change in the air and while they punished the Greens at Fadden, they’ll soon unleash hell upon Albanese’s delusional climate posturing.
Young families want to know why renewable energy companies are being given billions of dollars of support in grants while their power bills double. What happened to cheap energy?
Green energy is not cheap energy, and Australians have the power bills to prove it.
So-called green energy is a parasitic malinvestment with each claimed green-job costing at least 2.3 real jobs in the productive economy.
Voters from all walks of life are abandoning ‘green’. Traditionally environmentally-minded surfers never signed up for lines of wind turbines trashing thousands of kilometres of pristine beaches with each turbine anchored to the seafloor where their steel and concrete bodies destroy wave creation. Even the most devout among them find it difficult to look at these aquatic monstrosities with anything other than disgust.
While wind firms and desperate governments keep insisting there’s ‘no evidence’ offshore wind farms are killing whales – whale corpses are piling up. Correlation does not equal causation, yet repeated ‘co-incidence’ makes a strong case for some sort of connection either in construction or operation. Internationally, ocean groups holding ‘Whale Lives Matter’ signs are raising their voices against offshore wind – particularly in America which has seen an increase in beached whales in areas surrounding wind farm activity.
Meanwhile, Tasmania requires wind farms to shut down for five months in the year to protect the migration of parrots. It is an admission that wind turbines present a clear physical threat to migratory birds who get caught in the blades and killed. The irony of ‘environmentally friendly’ energy generation butchering wildlife is as depressing as it is typical of this current era. If coal-fired plants had a habit of slicing-and-dicing nearby wildlife, they’d be banned outright, yet ‘green’ energy is given a free pass on even the most horrific destruction.
If we delivered the broken, bloodied bodies of our birds to Adam Bandt, Chris Bowen, and Anthony Albanese’s offices, would they start caring, or is the machine of renewable energy worth too much to their mates in Beijing? Corporations fattening themselves solar and wind subsidies are unlikely to give up this position of privilege without a fight.
Australia has all the natural gifts to be a standalone energy superpower. Our energy problems are political mistakes driven by greed. That’s all green energy is – public exploitation and the belief that the green money tree will keep refreshing like the Tim Tam genie.
Public money is not infinite and public patience has run dry.
The Netherlands pushed the green delusion harder and faster than Australia, and their catastrophic collision with reality should serve as a lesson to Australia. Their government collapsed in July after farmer movements holding pitchforks destabilised the tyranny of Net Zero policy. Farmers are not giving up their land and livelihoods without a fight. Like the revolutions of old, the public can feel the grip of elitism.
In Europe, the great green backlash has begun. Australia has been put on notice as farmers, rural and regional villagers, and lovers of rainforests come out in force to protect vital natural and human habitats. These vigilantes stand against bulldozers levelling trees and despoiling homes for the scattered blights of wind turbines, vast carpets of solar panels, and dispersed swathes of transmission lines.
Those who continue to attach themselves to this failed policy will find themselves on the wrong side of history.
Australians want a secure economic future. They want a prosperous, energy-rich nation. It’s what the blessing of their birth in this wonderful country promised. It is what we are entitled to.
Once we scrape the gangrenous veneer off our political system, Australia will finally be free.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-great-green-backlash-is-labor-next
************************************************The Woke art of debanking men
Bettina Arndt
Last week, the National Australia Bank (NAB) announced a plan to ‘cut off’ customers found to be financial abusers, spelling out this means suspending, cancelling, or denying such people access to their accounts.
They call this ‘debanking’ – cutting off the accounts of anyone who is accused of being a financial abuser.
But how will the banks prove they are dealing with actual perpetrators of this abuse? No problem. It seems to be a case of believe women! Here’s the Australian Banking Association (ABA) explaining that their guidelines on financial abuse specify no evidence is required if a woman claims her partner is an abuser:
‘The guideline recognises that banks don’t need legal evidence of domestic violence, such as an Apprehended Violence Order, to be able to offer assistance to customers,’ said the ABA Executive.
What guarantees are there in place that this new power will not be abused or lead to the damage of, for example, an ex-hubby’s credit rating at the hands of an angry spouse? We know that messy domestic situations can be abused by both sides. This banking ploy is not yet implemented, but rather simply recommended by the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety report, Designed to Disrupt, which maps out plans to use banks as a means to tackle suspected financial abuse. No doubt feminists see this as a great idea. Others remain less enthusiastic.
‘Consider the potential to develop a process to make an adverse credit report for a perpetrator of financial abuse which can be made concurrent to correction for victim-survivor, so that there is a material consequence that impacts on the ability to get future credit,’ writes the author, a UNSW Social Science professor.
Let that sink in. What we are talking about here is banks deliberately trashing what is likely to be a man’s credit rating as punishment when that person has not been convicted, charged, and perhaps not even notified of the accusations. Doesn’t that take the cake? It provides a lot of scope for misuse.
That example is for the future, but right now we have one major Australian bank already cutting off men’s accounts and others lining up to do so. These institutions never actually admit that the new apparatus is primarily targeting men, although it is hinted at through the general wording of the proposal which leans heavily on the assumption that women are the main victims of the domestic and financial abuse this system attempts to address. By extension, men will primarily be on the receiving end of the debanking.
The carefully orchestrated campaign enlisting our banks to tackle financial abuse has been promoted by the key organisations within the domestic violence industry which are, in my opinion, shameless in their anti-male rhetoric. Major banks are also known to finance some of these organisations with large donations. Supporting domestic violence networks is one thing, employing real-world financial action against unproven accusations is quite another.
‘This kind of behaviour is a form of domestic violence. It can be an enabler for partners to keep women trapped in abusive and often dangerous relationships,’ said the CEO of the Australian Banking Association and a supporter of the venture.
Women, women, women… Bank promotions on this subject never seem to feature any male victims of financial violence, but tend to include numerous photographs of miserable, downtrodden women. A bit of equality might be nice. Given the competing sensitivities of identity, virtue signalling in this territory demands a very careful tightrope walk.
So, are men being targeted already? It’s hard to tell, but Andrew, one of my key researchers, reports an intriguing interrogation that took place after his partner transferred a significant amount of money into his transaction account, which they’d planned to shift into a share trading account. Since the amount was beyond his normal transaction limit, Andrew called the bank to arrange it. The operator put him on hold and then transferred him to her supervisor.
To his surprise, the supervisor quickly started grilling him about his partner’s transaction, asking about the nature of their relationship, how close they were, whether they had just broken up and other personal questions. Andrew explained they were friends and declined to answer further questions on the topic. He was then threatened with the possibility that both his accounts might be frozen. He passed the phone to his partner and asked her to try to sort it out. After an intense conversation, his partner convinced the supervisor not to freeze his accounts. Andrew then took the phone back and said he wished to lodge an official complaint. It was some months later that Andrew received a call from his bank saying that, after investigation, the bank wished to apologise for what had happened.
There’s no telling what was really going on here. Perhaps the bank suspected Andrew of being a money mule or involved in some sort of scam…? But the intrusive personal questions focussed on the relationship which implies this zealous bank official might have been following the official industry guidelines recommending banks be on the alert for signs they might be dealing with a perpetrator of financial abuse.
Normally, restricting a customer’s access to bank accounts would require a very high bar, such as evidence of criminality. But as this legal analysis from the Centre for Women’s Economic Safety points out, this may no longer be the case. ‘In NSW, recent legislation provides for a new coercive control offence. The NSW legislation criminalises abusive behaviour, including economic abuse, towards current and former intimate partners.’
That might just give the banks the muscle they need to justify their actions, which are certainly pushing the envelope when it comes to appropriate behaviour for a financial institution.
Clearly the banks’ lawyers believe they have found a way through any regulatory or legal hurdles. When I asked a former senior banking lawyer to examine what the banks are doing, he raised a concerning issue: ‘How do these banks defend themselves from charges that these are unfair contract terms in relation to financial products which are banned by the ASIC Act? Under recent amendments to unfair contract terms legislation to take effect in November 2023, a person such as a bank cannot include an unfair term in a standard form contract or rely on one that is already in place. Significantly increased penalties will apply for breach. One would have thought that these unilaterally imposed new terms which impose draconian consequences on affected consumers based solely on the bank’s view of the facts, with no apparent rights to appeal or prevent the action, are the very definition of unfair contract terms.’
You may like to include this vital question in letters of complaint to the big banks, particularly if you are a customer. And to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA).
Please get back to me if you know of anyone who has been debanked. We are very keen to challenge the bank’s activities and need actual cases.
Note, there is an important real issue buried in the bank’s financial abuse initiatives, and that is elder abuse. Financial abuse is the most common form of elder abuse – Australian Institute of Family Studies research shows 2 per cent of elders have suffered financial abuse in the last 12 months, which compares to 1.6 per cent of people suffering this abuse from a cohabiting partner, as found in the ABS’s Personal Safety survey. But most of the banks have other priorities.
When it comes to these new banking guidelines and powers, customers are right to be concerned. Psychologists at the University of Central Lancashire, who carried out the major research available on male victims of coercive control, report financial abuse was a major issue for many of these men: ‘Half of male victims had their earnings controlled as a pattern of abuse which in some cases led to men not being able to purchase food or clothing. Men were also expected to take on the burden of all household finances as almost two-thirds of the female perpetrators refused to contribute to household bills and over half refused to work even if able to. Similar to women, some male victims were prevented from going to work, whereas almost one in three male victims were forced to go to work even when unwell.’
Hmm, can you imagine the banks cutting off the accounts of women who refuse to work or contribute to household bills? That’s clearly not going to happen. This initiative has been introduced without government oversight, parliamentary scrutiny, and community consultation. It must be stopped.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-woke-art-of-debanking-men/
************************************21 July, 2023
Telstra 'unnecessarily harasses' woman about dead husband's account for nine years
I too have had experience of the concrete brains at Telstra -- and Optus is even worse
Jenny Moncur begged Telstra to stop contacting her about her dead husband for almost a decade. But despite Ms Moncur's best efforts, it kept coming.
Each time was a painful reminder her "special fella", her husband Royce, was gone. "Unnecessarily harassed, that's how I felt," Ms Moncur said.
"It was so distressing. Every time I spoke to somebody I had to continually reiterate, 'my husband has died, he's dead — what don't you understand?'"
One email she found particularly upsetting declared in large font: "Good news, your account is in credit". "It was awful, because it wasn't good news," Ms Moncur said. "It was a reminder he was never going to use that credit."
Ms Moncur was married to Royce for 37 years before he died in 2014.
He was a primary school teacher who travelled Australia educating kids about the wonders of modern science.
Royce died inside the house he built in a small Gippsland town in regional Victoria after being diagnosed with advanced late-stage kidney cancer.
"It was shattering," Ms Moncur said. "We had so many plans to grow old together."
'An absolute failure'
As Ms Moncur grappled with her grief, she tried to cancel Royce's Telstra account, but she said phone operators insisted on speaking with the account holder.
She persisted, supplying a death certificate and attending a shop with further evidence, but the contact still didn't stop.
Ms Moncur estimates receiving 30 to 40 pieces of correspondence in total over the past nine years and having made the same number of calls to the telco giant.
She made complaints directly to Telstra and in 2019 escalated her dispute to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.
Even that didn't work. "It was like ... the Monty Python skit, the Dead Parrot," Ms Moncur said.
Ms Moncur was left in disbelief in January this year when Telstra emailed her again asking her to confirm Royce as an authority on an account. Fed up, she complained directly to the office of Telstra CEO Vicki Brady.
The company wrote back, apologising "for the grief and anxiety" it had caused.
Telstra "did not follow the appropriate processes" in managing the situation, according to the letter, seen by the ABC. "We must and will do better," it said.
Ms Moncur said the ordeal was "an absolute failure", and showed phone and internet providers need to do better so more grieving families don't go through the same experience.
An internal Telstra investigation found a mistake was made shortly after Royce's death that was never rectified, customer service executive Kate Cotter told the ABC.
"When she first contacted us, she should have been transferred to the compassionate care team and that didn't happen," she said.
Ms Cotter apologised again and said Telstra last year overhauled its operations for customers in bereavement. "We are investigating our processes again as a result of Ms Moncur's case."
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What the Voice will do
One of the many issues that people have difficulty understanding about the Aboriginal Voice is whether it will lead to an avalanche of litigation. It is a serious question because, if the Voice generates litigation, it will stymie government decision-making until the lawsuits make their leisurely way through the labyrinthine processes of the courts. Effective government will grind to a halt for years.
Naturally, the government uses the same tactic on this issue as it does on the many other objections that have been raised to the Voice: it denies that it is a valid objection and, until the referendum is over, it is doing its best to keep the people in the dark and trick them into accepting that all will be revealed in due course and that, in any event, there is nothing to be worried about. It reminds me of that statesmanlike electoral reform introduced in the Central African Republic a few years ago: count the votes before, rather than after, the election. It produces a better result.
One of the reasons why people have trouble resolving the litigation question is that it can be complicated, and that is why I may be able to help by simplifying things. Here then is Brown’s Simplified Guide to The Voice and Litigation. You might like to send it to the Attorney-General, Mr. Dreyfus, and ask him if it is correct, and, if not, exactly where and why it is not correct. But don’t wait with bated breath for a reply.
Before we start, let us remember two things. First, let us assume that the referendum is passed and the Voice is established. The Voice, therefore, is now in the Constitution. That means it is not just a law that can be changed with a change of government; it is in the Constitution and, for all practical purposes, it will be there forever. Second, to be valid, all laws have to be consistent with the Constitution as determined by the High Court. Therefore, any law that tries to restrict or change the constitutional clause on the Voice will have no effect. Remember: the referendum is not a smorgasbord where you can take only the bits that you like; if you go for the Voice, as prescribed, that is what you get.
Will the Voice be able to sue? Yes, it is a legal person and has the same rights as any person or entity and one of them is to sue to enforce whatever rights it has.
What rights will the Voice have? It is created by the Constitution and is given the right to make representations or give advice to the parliament and the executive government (the public service). That right cannot be taken away because it is in the Constitution and constitution is king.
Is this a limited right or is it more? It is much more because it is the right to make representations on “matters relating to” Aboriginals. This obviously means having a connection with Aboriginals, but it does not mean, as Mr Albanese likes to say, only matters that are directly, mainly, or solely connected with Aboriginals. Nor does it mean only the big-ticket items that Ms Burney says she will ask the Voice to tackle. It means connected with Aboriginals, which is virtually everything.
What could the Voice sue about? If there is a matter coming up for decision by the government, about land, sea, mining, health, transport, education, or anything else “relating to” Aboriginals, the Voice has been given the constitutional right to make representations to the government and parliament about it and no-one can stop it. It must therefore have the right to sue to enforce that right because if you have a right, you can enforce it and you do this by going to court. Thus, any project can be stopped until the Voice exercises its right to give advice.
Won’t that right expire in time? No. It is a permanent right with no limit on how many times it can be used, or when. The Voice has the right to make representations and repeat them multiple times, if and when it wants to.
What could be the result? There is already in the Constitution a power for the High Court to issue orders to stop the government from doing things and to order it to do other things. So, the right being enforced by the Voice is a real one that will be enforced by court orders. These orders can affect the operation of mining laws, fishing rights, electoral laws, bail and probation, Australia Day, or anything else that the Commonwealth can do until the Voice exercises its constitutional right to make representations and have its say.
What about the Parliament? The right of the Voice includes even giving advice to the Parliament.
Can the Voice complain that its advice was ignored? Yes. If the Voice has the right to make representations, it must have the right to have them considered and to be given reasons if they are rejected. Otherwise, it is being denied the full extent of its right to give advice, written into the Constitution. It is therefore open to the Voice to sue if it has not been given reasons for the rejection of its advice or if it can say that the reasons given were unreasonable or wrong.
Is it only the Voice that can sue? No. It may even be open to a third party like the environment or climate change lobby to argue that as mining is clearly a matter relating to Aboriginals, the development of a new mine should be stopped until the Voice gives its opinion on whether the project should go ahead.
Conclusion: there will be litigation and a lot of it, from the Voice itself and third parties who will use it to push their own barrows. And a big thank-you from we lawyers for the years of work ahead, and especially to the taxpayers who will pay for it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/brown-study-273/
***********************************************Another murderous Muslim
A terrorism expert has told an inquest a Muslim man who killed a Brisbane couple, before being shot dead by police, was "absolutely radicalised" but he could not definitively determine the murders were motivated by extremist views.
The Deputy State Coroner is examining the deaths of Zoe and Maurice Antill and Raghe Mohamed Abdi in December 2020.
Mr Abdi, 22, was fatally shot by officers on the side of the Logan Motorway at Drewvale after he came toward them holding a knife.
Mr and Mrs Antill, who were both aged in their late 80s, had been stabbed to death at their Parkinson home the night before but their bodies were not discovered until after the shooting.
It was alleged Mr Abdi had earlier murdered the couple in their backyard and investigators at the time declared the two incidents to be a linked "terrorism event".
Tracking device removed before shooting
The inquest has already heard Mr Abdi was on bail at the time and was being monitored by police and counter terrorism officers.
It heard he had been required to wear a GPS tracking device but had removed it several hours before he was shot.
On Thursday, lecturer in Terrorism and National Security, Levi West, was called to give evidence about his assessment of Mr Abdi's ideological motivations.
Mr West told the court he determined Mr Abdi was "absolutely radicalised" at the time of his death, and some of his actions were "likely motivated at least in part" by extremist religious views.
"There was relatively little doubt he had come to hold [extremist] Jihadist beliefs," he said.
Mr West explained to the court the term Jihad in its "mainstream and common use" was a reasonably uncontroversial set of ideas but terrorist organisations held an extremist interpretation of it.
Exposed to extremist views
Mr West told the court he believed Mr Abdi had been exposed to these extremist views through people he knew, and there was a particularly "strong influence" from a man from a south-east Queensland mosque who had been charged with terrorism offences.
Mr West accepted it was "impossible to know what [Mr Abdi's] state of mind" was but told the court there was a "high likelihood" his actions on the motorway were ideologically motivated.
Police officers huddle around the car on the Logan Motorway.
Mr Abdi was shot on the Logan Motorway. (ABC News)
He said this was due to him repeatedly shouting the words "Allahu Akbar" at the officers, which he described as another term used "all day every day, all over the Arabic speaking world" but had been "hijacked" and used by extremists "to signify they are committing an act of Jihadist terrorism".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-20/qld-raghe-mohamed-abdi-killings-inquest/102626094
************************************************Destruction of rainforest by Greenies
Four decades after the battle for the Franklin Dam, a contest between nature and industry is underway in the high tropical forests of Far North Queensland that is equally as pivotal.
If the battle to save Chalumbin tropical forests from the bulldozers is lost, a rapacious, environmentally-destructive industry will have open slather to rip the heart out of other areas of unique natural beauty from Cape York to Tasmania.
The battle for the Franklin was the coming of age battle for Dr Bob Brown, who went on to create the Greens as a political party.
This time round there isn’t a Green in sight because the environmental vandal claims to be the Green movement’s best friend: Big Wind. If the proposed development at Chalumbin was a coal mine, its backers could kiss their chances goodbye. Yet Ark Energy’s proposal to bulldoze native tropical forest across an area of 10.7 square kilometres adjacent to a World Heritage-listed area is just one step away from approval.
If Environment Minister Tania Plibersek says ‘Yes’, 146 km of access roads, some 70 metres wide, will be cut across the landscape to install 94 turbines. At 250 metres, these will be some of the largest turbines in Australia.
The tragedy is that Chalumbin is a highly biodiverse old-growth forest that is hundreds if not thousands of years old. It is home to 535 native animals and 28 rare and threatened species such as the globally threatened Sarus Crane and the endangered Spectacled Flying Fox. The turbines will strike the Masked and the Barking Owl.
Chalumbin borders the globally significant Wet Tropic World Heritage Area and Bush Heritage’s York Reserve. It should be protected as a National Park not turned into turbine trash in pursuit of a flawed decarbonisation strategy. The Labor/Greens policy of cutting emissions through wind and solar is inevitably forced to rely on gas as a backup as has been acknowledged by the Net Zero Australia report prepared by Australia’s former chief scientist Professor Robin Batterham.
Yet, it is completely unnecessary to destroy environmentally unique places such as Chalumbin. To cut emissions and save the environment the obvious solution is to go nuclear which is cheaper than Labor’s renewables plan that has been estimated to cost an eye-watering $9 trillion by 2060. There are plenty of supporters of nuclear in Labor and in the union movement who have been forced to bite their tongues up to now including South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.
The Greens need to take a look at Finland’s Green Party which in May last year made a historic shift to adopt a fully pro-nuclear stance. As Tea Tormanen, who visited Australia in April to talk about Finland’s experience said, ‘The Australian approach of cutting emissions solely by relying on renewables is not realistic. It hasn’t worked anywhere (except) countries that have huge reserves of hydro.’
The Chalumbin Wind Turbine industrial plant is being fiercely opposed by the three Aboriginal tribes for whom it is their ancestral home. Their opposition has been ignored. So much for Labor’s Voice to Parliament. They are working together with the broader community to stop the development.
Ms Plibersek is due to announce her decision in September. With Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s madcap renewal rollout way behind schedule, she’ll be under pressure to turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the community and green light the bulldozers to woo inner-city environmentalists who don’t realise that they are inadvertently destroying the thing they love. Labor’s turf war with the Greens in those seats adds further pressure.
As Minister for the Environment, Graham Richardson inscribed the Daintree Rainforest and surrounding areas on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988.
Ms Plibersek must follow in his footsteps and visit Chalumbin before she makes this crucial decision. She should stand atop the ridge and watch the wedge-tailed eagles soar above forests stretching as far as the eye can see. She should sit with the elders and hear their stories of the Dreamtime. Then she should carve out a place for herself in history by saving Chalumbin and persuading her party to change course and go nuclear.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/chalumbin-the-new-franklin/
************************************20 July, 2023
PM confirms his department suspended robo-debt bureaucrat from $900k job
A bureaucrat made accountable! How refreshing
Former top public servant Kathryn Campbell has been suspended without pay from her $900,000-a-year job with the Defence Department less than a fortnight after the robo-debt royal commission made damning findings against her.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed on ABC radio in Melbourne the decision was made by his department to suspend Campbell following commissioner Catherine Holmes’ findings against the senior bureaucrat, who played a key role in the unlawful debt recovery scheme championed by the Coalition.
“This was a decision made by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and appropriate bodies. It’s not appropriate, given the potential legal matters that are involved, to go through all of the detail here, but certainly there’s been an appropriate response from my department and from the public service to the Royal Commission findings,” Albanese said.
Asked by host Virginia Trioli how long Campbell was suspended for, and whether it would progress to a dismissal, Albanese declined to disclose further details, “because individuals do have rights as well, and we’ll go through appropriate processes.”
“One of the things the royal commission was about was making sure we get proper processes so we don’t have the sort of governance arrangements, whether it be some of the actions of the public service, but more particularly as well, the actions of government ministers from the time that robo-debt was introduced and then kept going for four-and-a -half years in spite of the fact that it was an illegal scheme.”
Campbell went on leave shortly before the royal commission made a range of scathing findings, including that she repeatedly failed to act when the scheme’s flaws and illegality became apparent. Campbell has yet to comment on the findings of the royal commission. She is being contacted for comment.
Senior government sources who cannot be named because they are not authorised to speak publicly said Campbell had been suspended without pay on July 10, three days after the royal commission delivered its findings.
Campbell served as secretary of the Department of Human Services between 2011 and 2017, the period in which the illegal income averaging scheme was introduced.
The royal commission found that Campbell kept the true nature of the income-averaging scheme secret when advising cabinet because she knew then-social services minister Scott Morrison wanted to pursue the program.
It also found Campbell deliberately instructed her own legal team to discontinue a request for legal advice on the scheme and that she shelved a damning $1 million audit by PwC into the welfare crackdown just as it was about to finish because she feared its contents would be damaging.
The Albanese government technically demoted Campbell last year from the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to a senior role within Defence advising on the AUKUS agreement.
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End of ‘a 40-year-old fad’ as NSW shuts door on open-plan classrooms
The construction of open learning classrooms in NSW public schools will cease after repeated complaints from students, parents and teachers about a “40-year-old fad” they say created noisy environments unsuitable for learning.
Some new public schools built over the past decade were designed with flexible or open-plan classrooms. The large spaces intended to combine multiple classes in one room to facilitate collaboration and group work, while students were supervised by numerous teachers.
Research published this year found children who learn in open-plan classrooms have slower reading development and spend more time disengaged from educational activities because higher noise levels mean students find it difficult to focus.
The department wrote to the NSW Teachers Federation in May saying the classrooms would no longer be built.
“Current and future new and upgraded school projects will not include the construction of open-plan classrooms that cannot function as an individual space for a single class group,” the letter to the union said.
NSW Teachers Federation vice president Henry Rajendra said they had been fielding complaints about the unsuitability of the classrooms since about 2018.
“The department at the time did not engage with the profession [and] the union about its usefulness, that it would lead to lower student engagement in the classroom,” he said.
“We had a lot of complaints from teachers and parents and students that it was a very difficult environment to learn.”
Rajendra said it was a misnomer to describe many open-plan learning classrooms as “flexible learning spaces” because they had not been built with sound-absorbent walls which could be moved to create smaller spaces.
“The layout of our schools was in the hands of architects, and not teachers, and the result of that for many was that it didn’t work ... it is a 40-year-old fad, they introduced it as something new and innovative,” he said.
Open-plan classrooms originally proliferated when “team teaching” became fashionable in the 1970s. That practice of two teachers working together with a larger group of students dwindled in popularity over the following decades.
The rise of “student-led” and “21st-century learning” put an increased emphasis on doing work in groups, collaborative projects and fewer lecture-style lessons.
Education academics from Latrobe University in 2013 noted flexible learning spaces promoted flexibility, visibility and scrutiny and were a reaction against the “industrial-era enclosed and authoritarian classroom”.
By 2016, the Department of Education had established its Futures Learning Unit which was focused on rethinking and redesigning the way teaching and learning was conducted.
It said flexible learning spaces reflected the environments students may encounter in the workforce where there is an enhanced focus on self-direction, self-reflection, evaluation and collaboration.
A University of Melbourne study published this year said students found it more difficult to learn in open-plan classrooms because of the high noise levels.
“This increased cognitive effort to suppress the distraction, in turn, creates additional working memory load and thereby impacts on the learning occurring,” it said.
Students with poorer attention skills were also “found to be at increased risk of either spending more time disengaged from educational activities in the open-plan environment or requiring more cognitive resources to maintain attention, leaving fewer to facilitate their learning”.
Plans for new public schools use “learning hub layouts”, which are used as a starting point for school designs. They include learning spaces which allow for movement and collaboration across classes.
A Department of Education spokeswoman could not say how many open-plan classrooms had been built over the past decade, but work was being done to identify them in schools.
“The vast majority of recently completed new and upgraded schools have traditional classroom spaces that include breakout areas,” she said.
“The department is identifying the number of schools with open-plan classrooms. If schools have concerns that these spaces are impacting student learning, the department will work with each school.”
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Surging global steel demand puts focus on metallurgical coal
While the energy coal sector is out of favour with many major investors, the outlook for coking coal is as robust as ever as global steel demand recovers post-pandemic.
With its burgeoning economy, India is expected to play a leading role in demand for the crucial steel-making ingredient. And as the dominant supplier of the critical material, Australia is expected to benefit from strong export earnings for years to come.
The respected resource consultancy Wood Mackenzie forecasts global steel output to increase from 1.8 billion tonnes in 2022, to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2050.
Coking coal demand is expected to rise at a sharper pace: AME Research forecasts global export demand of 548 million tonnes (mt) in 2040, compared with 327mt in 2022, a 68 per cent increase.
Every electric vehicle requires 900 kilograms of steel, which requires 690kg of met coal to make, according to the World Steel Association. The average wind turbine requires 285 tonnes of steel, and 220 tonnes of met coal.
Of the 2040 number, India is forecast to account for 228 million tonnes. This is 42 per cent of forecast total export demand and reflects a 226 per cent increase from 2022 demand levels of 70mt.
In the shorter term, Wood Mackenzie expects global steel production to grow by 2.9 per cent in 2023. Last year, output retreated 3.7 per cent, the result of China’s prolonged pandemic lockdowns and raw material shortages stemming from the war in Ukraine.
But overall steel output does not tell the whole story of coking coal, which is ultimately used in traditional blast furnaces.
As its name suggests, coking coal is converted into coke, the key source of carbon that is vital for the process of converting iron ore into steel.
Electric arc furnaces – which produce steel mainly from scrap – are increasingly popular. But as Wood Mackenzie notes, blast furnaces are likely still to account for more than 50 per cent of production by 2050 – underpinning demand for high quality metallurgical coal.
An Australian lens
In 2022, Australian ‘met’ coal producers have been affected by wet weather-related disruptions. But they have also strongly benefited from record prices that saw premium hard coking coal briefly soar above $US600 a tonne in March 2022.
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‘Recklessly indifferent to truth’: Linda Reynolds blasts DPP Shane Drumgold over Brittany Higgins case
Drumgold is gutless slime
Former Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has launched a blistering attack on ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold, accusing him of making “baseless and unsubstantiated allegations” that she was motivated by political forces to suppress Brittany Higgins’ rape complaint.
In a submission to the Sofronoff inquiry obtained by The Australian Senator Reynolds asks chairman Walter Sofronoff KC to find that Mr Drumgold “was recklessly indifferent to the truth of this mistaken belief, and was otherwise prepared to assert a position that had no evidentiary basis despite being an officer of the Court with ethical and prosecutorial duties that attach.”
Senator Reynolds alleges multiple breaches by Mr Drumgold of the Barristers Rules, the Legal Profession Act, the Director of Public Prosecutions Policy, the Freedom of Information Act and the Human Rights Act over the trial of Bruce Lehrmann.
The allegation that she had tried to pervert the course of justice would have remained unchallenged, she submitted, but for the intervention of Mr Sofronoff, who elicited from Mr Drumgold the startling admission during the inquiry that he no longer believed his own claims.
“The evidence of the DPP at the Inquiry demonstrated that there was no basis to make such a serious allegation during the trial or at any time before or after the trial. It was a baseless and unsubstantiated allegation made irresponsibly and has damaged the reputation of Senator Reynolds irreparably,” her submission states.
The Liberal MP reveals her shock at being declared a hostile (or “unfavourable”) witness in the trial by the DPP who, without warning, suddenly cross-examined her on her credibility.
That included questioning about the presence of her partner, Robert Reid, sitting in the courtroom, even though no one had suggested there was anything wrong with this, including the DPP, who had met and was aware that Mr Reid was her partner. An ODPP solicitor had even approached Mr Reid in the court to ask if Senator Reynolds could appear sooner than previously scheduled.
Senator Reynolds was also cross examined over a text message she sent to Bruce Lehrmann’s defence counsel, Steve Whybrow, requesting a transcript of the trial. She said she had not been aware this was not permitted.
She says Mr Drumgold “ambushed” her in the trial and had given her no indication beforehand in discussions that he intended to do this, even though he was already well aware that Ms Higgins’ was claiming political interference to suppress her complaint.
“I was shocked and frustrated at this approach as it appeared the DPP was seeking to undermine my credibility (and that of Senator Cash) in an effort to re-assert the credibility of Ms Higgins and increase his prospect of securing a conviction. Alleging that a politician was motivated by ‘political forces’ was an easy line to run.”
The DPP repeatedly asked questions which alleged Senator Reynolds was motivated by “political forces,” she said, even though he was well aware from her statement that it was she who had suggested to Ms Higgins she should talk to the police and assured her the AFP had expertise in handling sensitive personal matters.
In his summing up Mr Drumgold told the jury that “it is abundantly clear from the evidence and actions of Senator Reynolds during this trial that those political forces were still a factor.”
Senator Reynolds alleges Mr Drumgold had breached the Barristers Rules as his allegations were made “principally in order to discredit or embarrass” her and requested that Mr Sofronoff recommend the DPP’s conduct be investigated by the ACT Bar Council.
Senator Reynolds said that contrary to the requirements of the FOI Act she was not consulted before Mr Drumgold released a copy of his letter to ACT police chief Neil Gaughan complaining about the conduct of police in the Lehrmann investigation and trial.
In the letter Mr Drumgold had presented his personal characterisation of Senator Reynolds’ actions as statements of fact, she said, including allegations she had solicited trial transcripts “to tailor her evidence” and had “engaged in direct coaching of defence cross-examination of the complainant”.
Senator Reynolds asked the Inquiry to find that the DPP breached Barrister Rules by “knowingly making a misleading statement to the court” when he suggested that Senator Reynolds was not co-operating in accordance with a subpoena served on her to give evidence.
Senator Reynolds also submitted that the ACT Crimes Act should be amended to deter individuals from using the media and/or Parliamentary forums in relation to an alleged criminal offence that ought properly be the subject of the criminal justice processes.
She pointed to a section of the NSW Crimes Act that makes it an offence for anyone who knows or believes that a serious indictable offence has been committed and fails to report it to police.
Senator Reynolds said Labor Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus had declined to approve her applications for legal assistance at the Inquiry, meaning she had been unrepresented despite volumes of evidence that concerned her, including some taken in closed session, to which she still had no access.
Mr Sofronoff is due to hand down his report on potential misconduct by the DPP and the AFP by 31 July.
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19 July, 2023
Australian Left announces racist plan for Indigenous Australians, help for failing students and push for more Aussies to get degrees
Anthony Albanese's Government today announced a massive shake-up of the higher education sector, unveiling an affirmative action plan to double the number of Indigenous students at university over the next decade.
A raft of recommendations the Government will adopt includes universities guaranteeing funding for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who achieve the grades required, help for failing students and a push for more young people to get degrees.
'More and more jobs require a university degree,' said Education Minister Jason Clare.
'That means we will need more people with university qualifications in the years ahead.'
At the moment, only Indigenous students in rural and remote areas are guaranteed funded spots, which the Government says disadvantages those living in urban areas.
Mr Clare estimated the measure will cost $34 million over the next four years, representing a 'pretty good investment'.
'If you're a young Indigenous person today you are more likely to go to jail than you are to university,' Mr Clare told ABC Radio.
'The cost of having somebody in jail every year is about $120,000. The cost of a university place is $11,000.'
He added: 'This is not about lowering standards: you need to get the marks and qualify for the course.
'If you do qualify for the course, you're guaranteed to get access to a Commonwealth-supported place.'
Nearly 50 per cent of people under 25 are enrolled in a bachelor degree in Australia, while only about seven per cent of Indigenous people in their 20s and 30s have a university degree, according to Productivity Commission data.
The new affirmative action scheme could double the number of Indigenous students entering university by 2034 – from 5,000 to 10,000.
The Universities Accord, which will make more than 70 interim recommendations later on Wednesday, will also see the Albanese Government invest $66.9 million to double the number of university study hubs across the country.
This is designed to tackle a major barrier to study for many young Australians: the cost of moving closer to a campus or a long and expensive commute.
The report calls for greater certainty in university funding by extending the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, guaranteed to December 2023, into 2024.
It will also extend tertiary education access to rural and regional students and abolish the 50 per cent pass funding rule, which sees students lose government funding if they failed more than half of their subjects.
The rule was introduced as part of the Morrison government's job-ready graduates scheme and requires students to pass at least 50 per cent of total attempted units to remain eligible for fee assistance.
It's estimated more than 13,000 students had been forced to quit due to the rule - the majority of whom were from poorer backgrounds.
Mr Clare said he would look to introduce legislation to abolish the 50 per cent pass rate rule when parliament resumes.
'We shouldn't be forcing students to quit we should be helping them to pass and universities should be putting those supports in to help students who need that assistance,' he said.
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Covid: Gambling with Australian lives
At the beginning of the Covid vaccination rollout in Australia on 21 February 2021, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared the vaccines to be ‘safe and important’. The official narrative is that the vaccines are safe and efficacious. Yet there is compelling evidence that the official narrative, fanatically promoted by politicians and health bureaucracies, and ruthlessly enforced by politicised police forces, is misleading and neglectful in the light of the side effects.
Freedom of information documents acquired by Senator Alex Antic show that the former Morrison Government, under domestic terrorism response protocols, colluded with social media companies to censor people who dared to question the safety of vaccines, the utility of lockdowns and vaccine mandates including doctors who disagreed with official public health information. Deregistering doctors who provided vaccine exemptions and/or prescribed ivermectin to treat COVID was especially egregious. According to Emeritus Professor Robert Clancy AM, the nation’s leading clinical immunologist:
As patients were being treated in Sydney and Melbourne with impressive results … the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia made the extraordinary move to shut down the prescription of IVM by front-line doctors for the treatment and prevention of Covid-19. The TGA had form, as they made a similar ruling for hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), the other re-purposed off-patent drug shown to be effective in treating Covid-19.
The UK government admits that the vaccines damaged the natural immune system of those who were vaccinated. In its ‘COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report’ for Week 42 the UK Department of Health Security states, on page 23, that ’N antibody levels appear to be lower in people who become infected after two doses of vaccination’ and the reduction in antibodies is essentially permanent.
It was evident within months of vaccination that the vaccinated can still catch and transmit the virus. A study conducted by the Upper Midwest Regional Accelerator for Genomic Surveillance, which is founded by the Rockefeller Foundation, confirmed that they are as likely to infect others as the unvaccinated.
Writing in The Lancet, Carlos Franco-Paredes, an American professor of infectious diseases, comments:
There is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals… [R]esearchers in California observed no major differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals in terms of SARS-CoV-2 viral loads in the nasopharynx, even in those with proven asymptomatic infection.
A member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisations (ATAGI) has acknowledged that ‘the more doses you get, the less benefit you derive from them, and then we start to worry about causing side effects’.
It’s not just that you get less benefit, according to a study by Cleveland Clinic researchers of 48,344 Cleveland Clinic employees, people who received two or more doses of the mRNA vaccine are more likely to get Covid and those not up-to-date on vaccination had a lower risk of infection.
This makes vaccine mandates incomprehensible and immoral. As Dr Jayanta Bhattcharya, a professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University put it, ‘If a vaccine fails to stop disease transmission, then the idea that you need to vaccinate other people so that I’m protected is just false.’
It gets worse. There has been a surge of sudden and unexpected age-inappropriate deaths in at least 30 countries in the industrialised world. In his book Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths, Ed Dowd argues that ‘The sudden deaths in young people in industrialised countries are due to mRNA vaccines.’
The suspicion that official claims of safety and efficacy are false has been strengthened by the discontinuation of official reporting on unvaccinated and vaccinated populations. For example, New South Wales ceased to publish weekly surveillance reports about the vaccination status of those who were hospitalised at the end of 2022. The data in the last two weeks showed that of the 1,779 patients admitted to hospitals with a COVID-19 diagnosis, none of those who died were unvaccinated. In addition, mathematician and Covid commentator Igor Chudov calculated that the risk of hospitalisation increased dramatically with each dose and was highest for those who had received four or more doses and had a 217 per cent relative risk of death compared with the unvaccinated.
A cost-benefit analysis by a senior research scientist at MIT looked at publicly available official data from the UK and the US for all age groups to determine all the factors leading to the risk of dying from COVID-19. She writes,
All age groups under 50 years old are at greater risk of fatality after receiving a COVID vaccination than an unvaccinated person is at risk of a COVID death…. (And ) all age groups under 80 years old have virtually not benefited from receiving a COVID vaccine, and the younger ages incur significant risks.
Yet the Australian government continues to listen to ATAGI which recommends COVID-19 vaccination for everyone starting with babies aged 6 months and advises parents to tell their children that, ‘The COVID-19 vaccine is a safe way to protect you, your family, and your friends from getting sick,’ and that parents would allow their children to be injected if the vaccines ‘were not safe’. This is deeply disturbing because some children have died directly after vaccination.
On 19 July 2021, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) advised the UK Department of Health Security against the mass rollout of vaccines to children under the age of 18 warning that,
JCVI is of the view that the health benefits of universal vaccination in children and young people below the age of 18 years do not outweigh the potential risks.
One serious risk is myocarditis – inflammation of the heart. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledges that mRNA vaccines have caused many types of heart conditions, including myocarditis. Even Pfizer scientists acknowledge that there have been increased cases of myocarditis after vaccination. On 24 November 2022, Dr Ross Walker, a practicing cardiologist with 40 years of clinical experience said:
I don’t think we should be having the mRNA vaccines. I’ve seen in my own practice as a private cardiologist 60-70 patients over the past 12 months who have had similar reactions to this. Whether it’s pericarditis or the more serious myocarditis. I’ve seen a lot of people get chest pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations.
Given the already known potential harms of the Covid vaccines, of which myocarditis is just one, and their entirely unknown long-term adverse effects, the decision of the Australian Government to continue to vaccinate everyone, regardless of age or health conditions, is wrong. As Gareth Iacobucci wrote in relation to the vaccination of teens aged 12-15 in September 2021 in the British Medical Journal:
From a public health standpoint, it makes poor sense to impose vaccine side effects on people at minimal risk of severe COVID-19. The argument that it protects others is weak or contrary to the evidence.
Yet about half of all Australian children aged 5 to 15 are now vaccinated. This might explain why the TGA has been ‘slow to update‘ the country’s Database of Advance Event Notifications (DAEN) despite the deaths of children aged as young as 7 and 9 being reported to the TGA as being suspected of being caused by the vaccine. As Professor Clancy noted:
There is a push to vaccinate children under 12 who neither get severe disease nor significantly spread it. The cost/benefit of immunising children has been widely criticised, while misinformation continues to be delivered through the press.
According to Dr John Ionnidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University, the fatality rate for Covid for most of the population could be as low as that of influenza when adjusted for age and the fact that more than 80 per cent of those who get the virus have mild or no symptoms.
With such low risks for most people, why has the entire population of Australia been coerced into getting vaccinated with experimental vaccines? This question is important given the potential for side effects that can lead to death.
Australia closely followed the WHO guidelines during the pandemic and, by the end of 2021, 80 per cent of the population was vaccinated. Yet last year, there were 190,775 deaths according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which was 25,235, and 15.3 per cent more than the historical average. This represents the highest number of excess deaths on record since the end of the Second World War.
So why does the website of the Department of Health and Aged Care tell all Australian adults they should get a booster for ‘additional protection against severe illness from COVID’ and why parents are advised that their children aged 5 to 17 years should get a booster dose ‘if it has been 6 months since their last dose or COVID-19 infection’.
The official government narrative which placates people’s concern about the safety of the vaccines is based on research conducted by the pharmaceutical companies selling the vaccines. Unsurprisingly, it has financially benefited the pharmaceutical companies, with the stock price of Pfizer and Moderna soaring. The question which should be asked however is why this pharmaceutical research has been accepted unquestioningly by the government, academia, and the media. Professor Clancy writes:
The media has a concerning role in the propagation of misinformation, preferring to support an ideological narrative, rather than to engage in responsible journalism. Misinformation driven by pharmaceutical companies to protect their vaccines, and strongly reinforced by academic, government, and health authorities leads to many unnecessary hospital admissions and deaths.
It is difficult to know how many Australians have died from these vaccines. The many accounts of the tragic consequences of Covid vaccination, mandatory or voluntary, are entirely credible. Those responsible must be held fully accountable for the loss of Australian lives and livelihoods.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/gambling-with-australian-lives/
*******************************************************When there is a Presumption of evil not innocence
Gross injustice in Australia
How can it be that a man of impeccable character in his late 70s is convicted of 28 nasty sexual and physical abuse offences between 1964 – 1973, simply on the say-so of half a dozen late middle-aged women who were juvenile delinquent inmates at an institution?
Because if you are named in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, you are guilty, right? The legal process is just a formality. From the start you are referred to as an abuser and the complainants as victims.
From being so named in the Royal Commission to being charged, tried and found guilty by a jury, the process is guilt by accusation. It replaces the presumption of innocence with the presumption of evil.
The law relating to sexual abuse allegations is now so deformed as to allow such miscarriages of justice to occur with ease. The innocent get shoved in with the guilty.
That is what happened to Noel Greenaway, now in his mid-80s, sentenced (in 2020) to 20 years in jail. Attracted by the promise to be believed, some unscrupulous women joined the thousands of genuine abuse victims to claim rewards (tangible or otherwise) on offer.
On 8 February 2018, Malcolm Turnbull made a short statement to Parliament about the Royal Commission’s work. ‘Reading some of the witness statements, it’s clear that being heard and being believed means so much to the survivors, so much more than many of us would imagine. Three words: “I believe you,” coming after years, often decades of authorities’ denial of responsibility.’
On 23 October 2018, Scott Morrison apologised to victims of child sexual abuse in a speech in Parliament. ‘I simply say, I believe you, we believe you, your country believes you,’ he said.
On 22 October 2020, Anthony Albanese echoed that sentiment in Parliament: ‘We will always hold in our hearts those who didn’t live to hear the words, ‘We hear you. We believe you.”’
Bill Shorten added his voice to the chorus of shame: ‘But know that today Australia says sorry. Australia says we believe you,’ he said.
The sentiment is right and commendable, but the application of it has led to other injustices.
Notorious Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s undoing as a serial abuser of women set off the rush to ‘believe all women’, with society licensing the courts to reverse the onus of proof from the accuser to the defender. But there was an important element in the Weinstein case that has been abandoned by the courts in recent years, notably in Noel’s case.
That was the testimony from supporting witnesses. The purpose of such witness testimony was ‘to show when the disclosure was made to someone, that a disclosure was made, and that it was made against the defendant,’ as the Weinstein prosecution argued. There was no such testimony in Noel Greenaway’s case. On the contrary, the claimants all said they never told anyone at the time in the 1960s, when they were youngsters, or since. Until the Royal Commission.
Greenaway’s life began to unravel on the eve of ructions that would catapult sexual abuse to the top of the world’s consciousness. What the Royal Commission started, the #MeToo movement turbocharged. Like a volcano building up its explosive load, the topic engulfed corporations as well as institutions and the Catholic church, until it blew its top in 2017, ejaculating Harvey Weinstein.
Under current rules in Australia, when it comes to sexual abuse, it is innocence that must be proved, not guilt. Innocent men have become collateral damage. Teen Vogue columnist and outspoken feminist Emily Lindin came under fire on social media in November 2017 after tweeting that she was ‘not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs’ over false allegations of sexual assault or harassment.
In his summing up to the jury, the judge at Greenaway’s trial explained: ‘The evidence comprises the answers that witnesses gave to questions asked of them. So the evidence then is the answers that the witness gives in the course of their evidence and the exhibits that you will have with you in the jury room. On that material, and on that material alone, you arrive at your verdicts.’
Greenaway writes from his prison cell, notepad on his knees: ‘The prosecution of individuals was also designed to appease those in the community who were naïve enough to believe the fabrications, lies and general criticism which was designed by ex-inmates and their supporters to name individuals out of revenge and to enhance their chances of claiming redress for concocted crimes committed against them.’
The Board of Inquiry into the Justice System in the ACT, chaired by Walter Sofronoff KC, was established in the wake of the abandoned prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann, accused of rape by Brittany Higgins. Chief Justice Lucy McCallum was critical of the intense media response and that much of the material had ‘obliterated the distinction between an allegation and guilt’. Police told the inquiry that they have been operating under ‘victim-centric’ guidelines for some time. Perhaps it’s time to amend those guidelines to urge investigations to be ‘evidence-centric’.
It was lack of evidence that has kept the fires of outrage burning against the conviction of then 56-year-old Sue Neill-Fraser, charged with the murder of her then 65-year-old partner Bob Chappell. She was arrested 14 years ago this August, sentenced to 23 years, and released on parole in October last year.
Long story short, their brand new yacht was found without Bob on board on the Derwent River in Hobart on Australia Day 2009. His body has never been found – yet at trial, the prosecutor speculated about what sort of injuries might have been found on him.
The prosecution could not establish a credible motive. The prosecution speculated how Bob might have been killed with a wrench. No wrench was produced in evidence. The prosecution could not place her on the yacht at the relevant time – because it had no evidence as to when Bob Chappell was murdered – or even if he was dead. The prosecution speculated how Neill-Fraser would have dragged the body up from down below deck (where she had left him at work before she went ashore for lunch with his sister), bundled him into the dinghy, and then dumped him in the water. Somewhere. On her own. The trial judge went along with the prosecution’s case. (He mentioned the imaginary wrench six times in his summing up to the jury.)
There was DNA found on the deck, traced to a then homeless 15-year-old girl. Clinging to the Crown’s case theory and fearing the DNA would upend its case, the prosecution dismissed the DNA as a red herring. They had their suspect. The only suspect.
She was characterised as cold and scheming because the prosecution case demanded it. But the prosecution’s presumption of evil doesn’t comfortably fit Neill-Fraser. Like Noel Greenaway, she has impeccable character references and lived an average, middle-class life free of blemish.
Lawyers have challenged the conviction – and the judges’ 2:1 decision to dismiss her appeal. A former Hobart prosecutor felt obliged to challenge his ‘legal family’ to correct ‘this injustice’. It hasn’t gone down well with his ‘legal family’.
A report co-authored by a lawyer and a barrister about the police investigation tabled in Parliament in 2021 reveals incompetence and withholding of evidence.
To add insult to injury, Tasmania’s Attorney-General has resisted many calls for a review of the case – preferably a Commission of Inquiry – making excuses that don’t hold water.
Greenaway and Neill-Fraser are but two sorry examples of a criminal justice system trampling the rule of law. There are plenty more. The criminal justice system spends little effort to repair the damage caused by wrongful convictions. In many cases, the appeal system actively hinders efforts to correct mistakes.
As someone once said, ‘Justice won’t be served until those not affected are as outraged as those who are.’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/presumption-of-evil-displaces-presumption-of-innocence/
**************************************************Coal-fired Power Station's life set to be extended
Delta Electricity could extend the closure of Vales Point Power Station from 2029 to 2033, amid concerns about delays with renewable energy projects and the "early closure" of other coal-fired plants.
The company said it had advised the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) of "a 2033 technical life assessment" for the power plant on the southern shore of Lake Macquarie.
Delta's interim chief executive David Morris said Vales Point "continues to provide high levels of availability to the system and is expected to continue to do so through to 2033".
Nature Conservation Council of NSW CEO Jacqui Mumford said a 2033 closure for Vales Point would "make it almost impossible for NSW to reach its emission reduction targets".
"If this extension goes ahead, Vales Point would therefore account for 70 per cent of NSW's electricity emissions," Ms Mumford said.
Greens MP and spokesperson for climate change Sue Higginson said extending Vales Point would be "reckless, dangerous and foul play".
"Have we forgotten the climate induced fires and floods? We are in a climate emergency, young people are suffering from climate anxiety and many across the country are doing all that they can to ensure we have a liveable planet in the years ahead," she said.
Delta said the purpose of the plant's assessment was to examine the condition of "the existing generation equipment, ash dam capacity and general condition of the facility".
The previous closure date had been set for 2029, based on "a nominal 50-year asset life".
A Delta statement noted the "delays being experienced by new generation and transmission projects, along with earlier closure dates being announced by owners of other coal-fired generators".
"Given the uncertainties surrounding the capacity of electricity resources over the next 10 years and the urgent need to maintain system security throughout this period, Delta considers it a responsible step to advise AEMO of the availability of Vales Point Power Station's capacity."
Ms Mumford said it was "incredibly disappointing that the community hasn't even been asked if they want such an extension".
Billionaires Trevor St Baker and Brian Flannery sold the Vales Point plant in December last year to Sev.en Energy, a company owned by Czech billionaire Pavel Tykac.
"We know that Sev.en has been lobbying the government to extend the life of this plant since they acquired it earlier this year," Ms Mumford said.
"And why wouldn't they - the exemptions granted to this power plant are a bonanza for a company willing to profit from causing serious harm to our climate and human health."
Ms Mumford urged the NSW government to "rule out any support to keep Vales Point operating longer than 2029".
"In an era of increasing climate catastrophe, we cannot allow such reckless disregard for our future."
Delta's statement said its announcement "does not denote a commercial commitment to operate the facility".
"The energy system is in transformation, and this brings higher levels of uncertainty when forecasting market conditions for the longer term," Mr Morris said.
Delta said the Vales Point plant "continues to be a key asset in the transitioning energy market".
It provided "essential firming capacity" to support the "growing integration of renewable energy" and ensured "a reliable and secure source of electricity".
"Currently the Vales Point Power Station generates approximately 10 per cent of NSW electricity needs," the company said.
Ms Higginson said there was also speculation about Eraring Power Station remaining open beyond 2025.
"If we let Eraring and Vales Point coal fired power stations continue beyond their planned closures, we lose hope of reducing our emissions and meeting our net zero targets. We need to make big, bold changes and we need to make them now," she said.
The Newcastle Herald reported on Wednesday that the federal government had declared the nation's second offshore wind zone off the Hunter coast.
Power-generating wind turbines will cover 1800 square kilometres from Port Stephens to Swansea, 1000 square kilometres smaller than the zone proposed in February.
The declared area will start 20 kilometres from the coast at Port Stephens, about 9km further offshore than first proposed, and more than 35km from the coast at Swansea.
The Hunter Community Environment Centre released a report in May, titled Delta's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.
The report said Vales Point was responsible for the loss and degradation of vast areas of seagrass and marine life, but Delta dismissed it as misleading
https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8270648/vales-point-power-station-life-set-to-be-extended/
************************************18 July, 2023
Federal prosecutors knew that key witness in prosecution of journalist Steve Barrett was a serial liar
Why are these hostile and destructive prosecutors suffering no penalty for the damage they did? They should at least be demoted
Commonwealth prosecutors pursued extortion charges against crime reporter Steve Barrett despite warnings from the Australian Federal Police that the principal witness against him was such a serial liar and fabricator of evidence that investigators had refused to continue taking statements from him.
Emails obtained by The Australian reveal senior police officers recommended that the AFP reject a request by prosecutors to obtain a statement from their star witness, property developer Daniel Hausman, because he was not considered “a witness of truth”.
All charges against Mr Barrett were sensationally dropped by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) on Friday after revelations about the extraordinary web of lies spun by Mr Hausman.
Mr Barrett had been accused of blackmailing the Plutus tax fraud syndicate in a joint effort to extort $5m from the scam’s mastermind Adam Cranston but his trial ended in a hung jury in May 2021.
In one email sent on 28 August 2020, eight months before Mr Barrett’s trial, AFP Detective Sergeant Morgen Blunden said his team had already discontinued taking a statement from Mr Hausman because he was “untruthful”, “unreliable”and at times “incoherent”.
Sergeant Blunden said that taking the statement “would compromise the credibility and reputation of the AFP”, and noted that Mr Hausman’s own lawyer had acknowledged his lack of credibility as a witness.
“The team feels taking a statement and calling Hausman as a witness is a significant risk to the prosecution,” Sergeant Blunden said.
But jurors in Mr Barrett’s trial were never shown the AFP’s assessment of Mr Hausman’s credibility because the reports were ruled to be inadmissable.
Since Mr Barrett’s trial, Mr Hausman has been found to have lied repeatedly in other proceedings, including at the trial of Plutus conspirator Sevag Chalabian in February last year, and in a compulsory Proceeds of Crime examination in May last year.
The Plutus syndicate defrauded the tax office of more than $100m from 2014 to 2017 through a free payroll service that shifted tax liabilities to a network of second-tier companies. But the conspirators were being blackmailed by Hausman and others with the threat of exposure.
Mr Barrett was alleged to have made threats on behalf of the blackmailers but on Friday NSW Supreme Court judge Natalie Adams ordered that Mr Barrett’s proposed retrial be dropped after a direction from the CDPP.
In his submission for an end to proceedings, top silk Greg Woods KC, who represented Mr Barrett pro bono, argued that allowing Mr Hausman to give evidence would be “an affront to justice and would bring the administration of the legal system into disrepute”.
Following Mr Barrett’s trial in 2021, Mr Hausman gave evidence in the trial of Mr Chalabian in early 2022, admitting to numerous lies about his contact with Mr Barrett.
Dr Wood said Mr Hausman “appears to have lied wherever it suited his purpose of the moment”, pointing out that the property developer had received a 25 per cent reduction in his jail sentence for giving evidence.
“In reality, it was only after Hausman realised that the evidence against him personally was overwhelming that he did his deal with the authorities to obtain a reduced sentence,” Dr Wood said.
There were more lies at a compulsory Proceeds of Crime examination into the whereabouts of the missing money from the extortion attempt. That hearing revealed Mr Hausman had breached restraining orders by dealing with his supposedly frozen assets, including cash and property, a criminal enterprise concealed from the court during Mr Barrett’s trial.
Outside the court, Mr Barrett’s solicitor Andrew O’Brien hailed the move to drop the charges as an important decision for the freedom of press in Australia, but was critical of the actions of police and prosecutors.
Mr O’Brien said Mr Barrett was acting in his role as a journalist when, before the Plutus fraud came to the attention of authorities, he became aware that there could be a big story in the offing, but before he could break the story was himself arrested by police.
“Thirteen months after this the authorities decided to charge Steve Barrett, even though they knew that he was a working journalist and has been seen on TV screens around Australia for decades breaking stories of crime and corruption.
“The prosecution of this journalist has caused much pain and suffering by way of a severe impact on his mental and physical health, and his financial position. The prosecution (now correctly but belatedly abandoned) has badly damaged his good reputation,” he said.
The CDPP did not respond to questions put by The Australian.
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Australian universities are failing: James Allan, in conversation with Will Kingston
James Allan is an academic unicorn – an openly conservative professor at a prestigious Australian university. In this wide-ranging conversation, James paints a picture of a tertiary sector that simply isn’t making the grade.
Will Kingston: James, imagine a bright kid has just finished high school and comes to you for advice. He doesn’t want to do anything that legally requires him to get a university degree. Would you nonetheless recommend that he goes to university?
James Allan: It’s a hard question. We live in a world of credentials and Australia is about the worst of the ‘credentialed places’ so, in a sense, going to university is providing you with a credential that opens doors. But I do think people who went to university 20 years ago have no clue what they are like today. Whilst it’s very difficult to get to the top of any career without going to university (entrepreneurs being a notable exception), you must go in with your eyes open.
WK: What exactly should that student have his or her eyes open for?
JA: Viewpoint diversity, or the number of conservative academics in universities, is collapsing. We know this from looking at the donations to political parties – it’s public information in the US. Just look at places like Yale Law School or Harvard, and the numbers are getting more and more skewed. Outside of the Ivy League it’s even worse.
And it’s just as bad in Australia. There are whole departments [that are exclusively left-leaning]! Do you think there are many supporters of Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton or the Coalition more generally in a Women’s Studies department, or an Aboriginal Studies department, or a Sociology department? Even Law is massively skewed. You’ll find the odd tax lawyer who sits in the closet and votes Coalition, and that’s largely it. Heck, you can count the number of law professors in this country who teach constitutional law and are against the Voice on one machine operator’s hand. And we have over three dozen universities.
WK: Is this really a problem? What’s the ‘first principles’ argument ideological diversity amongst academics?
JA: The old-fashioned idea was, you go to university and you get exposed to ideas that you don’t agree with and that you’ve never encountered before. This is the John Stuart Mill view of free speech – you get closer to the truth via a cauldron of competing ideas. Today, many people on the left just do not accept that. They think some views have to be ruled out because people are weak and stupid, and if they hear those ideas they’ll inevitably be seduced by them. Mill thought that through hearing views you don’t agree with, you will strengthen your own arguments even when you conclude you were correct all along.
The other reason is that the so-called ‘expert-class’ has shown itself to be completely useless of late. They’re getting everything wrong. I was a huge ‘lockdown-skeptic’, and the results coming out of Sweden have demonstrated that the expert doctors were to a large extent useless. But even worse, whilst they were being useless, they were simultaneously trying to shut down the views of genuinely credible people like Sunetra Gupta or Jay Bhattacharya. Just look at Sweden’s cumulative excess death tally since the start of the pandemic till now. Better than ours and the gap is widening by the day. And Sweden did not close any small businesses or schools or weaponise the police or censor unfashionable sceptical views.
WK: Does the grants process exacerbate this problem?
JA: Absolutely. You have this big machinery in universities. If you’re a historian or if you’re a political scientist, you are judged by grants. Now think about how crazy this is! You wouldn’t buy a car based on which car manufacturer got the most government money. You would think, ‘My God this car manufacturer needs huge dollops of taxpayer aid!’
And the only people who get promoted are people who are good at getting grants. So if you want to write in favour of traditional marriage, say, or in any sort of conservatively leaning way, you have virtually zero chance of getting a grant. This allows universities to say to a conservative that they’re not promoting you because you aren’t being awarded grants, not because you are conservative. The roadblock is indirect, not direct. One of the things we need to do outside of the ‘hard sciences’ is just end all grants. They are inefficient, deliver near-worthless results and hurt only one side of the political divide. You could save a fortune and it wouldn’t affect the quality of universities at all.
WK: A further problem appears to be that most universities aren’t just ambivalent towards hiring lecturers who have had ‘real world experience’, they are actively hostile to the practice. Fair?
JA: In law, I’ve always thought you want some people with ‘practitioner experience’ and that’s what law schools used to be like. They’re still like that in a lot of the top US and Canadian schools. The problem here is the ‘one-size-fits-all’ on steroids approach. Australia is terrible in this regard. Everything has to run on the ‘science model’, and in the science model, all the people who are at the top have doctorates. It doesn’t matter to university administrators that law is different and that you have the smartest law students going off to clerk at the High Court or become top barristers or win Rhodes Scholarships. If any of these people want to come back and teach law they still have to get a doctorate. Not true in North America. True here. This is credentialism gone mad. Australia is crazy in this way in how they expect a law school to run the way a physics department does.
WK: This ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach is driven by administrators, so let’s examine them. You once said that a moderately numerate Year 11 student could do the job almost as well as most of Australia’s Vice-Chancellors. Expand.
JA: I stand by that! Australia has the highest-paid university Vice-Chancellors in the world. VCs at the top-eight Australian Unis are making upwards of $1.4 or $1.5 million. The army of DVCs make over half of that again. Don’t you think it’s weird that our VCs are making double or triple what the President of Harvard is making? We have these enormous bureaucracies that are incredibly highly paid and they enforce this rigid bureaucratic and for that matter political orthodoxy. For example, I think ‘welcome to and acknowledgement of country’ rituals are patronising, condescending virtue-signalling. Full stop! No one ever says, ‘I stole your land so come and take my house!’ But, you simply couldn’t get a uni administration job unless you’re prepared to mouth those words on a daily basis. But hey, if you don’t stand up for the national anthem, you’ll probably be applauded for taking a stand… Well not literally. You get my point!
WK: You’ve been teaching university students since 1989. How have they changed over that time?
JA: I’ve taught all over the world, and something which we often forget is how different university life in Australia is compared to other parts of the Anglosphere. In the US, Britain, Canada, and even New Zealand, the vast majority of people send their kids to a university away from their home. In Canada, if you grow up in Toronto, odds are you go to university somewhere else. In Britain, you leave high school and you move into residence somewhere and receive the benefit of learning what it’s like to be an independent person. In Australia, if you’re from Sydney and you’re a top student, you go to a certain university, and if you’re not quite top you go to another, and then work your way down the hierarchy from there.
So, in addition to not giving students that broader life experience, it means there’s no competition between say, the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland for the best students. That’s a real problem.
However, an indirect benefit of this is that the sort of radicalisation of the student body that has taken place overseas is not nearly as bad in Australia because all the students are living at home and just commuting in and out. They commute in for a couple of hours each day and then go home. It’s just harder to radicalise students who are rarely on campus! But by and large, I think it’s a shame. There is no campus life. If any of my students go on exchange for six months to North America or Britain they come back and say how much fun they had, and how different that it was to Australia. It doesn’t need to be this way.
WK: And I imagine Covid has just made this phenomenon even worse?
JA: Well, yes, the thuggish and illiberal governmental response to Covid made near on everything worse, including life on universities. It’s very clear from studies and surveys that students don’t like online learning and they don’t learn anything. They won’t turn their microphones on half the time. Zoom is a disaster for universities. It’s accelerated grade inflation, cheating, and lot more negative trends. And a separate but related point is students are no longer interested in learning, they are interested in the marks. And in a way, I don’t blame them. We put a lot more pressure on kids regarding jobs, and specifically the need for a job or internship whilst they are still studying.
I speak to kids on their first day of university who are already worried about what internship to get, or what grad role to get. It’s a prerequisite to a lot of the grad schemes now [an internship], but I think it would be better for students if we encouraged them to put less time into outside jobs and work and put more time into their studies. But that’s a hard message to sell when law firms are hiring students in their first year of university. And the funny thing is that a lot of the time these firms are getting students who aren’t terribly well-educated – in Australia (not Canada or Britain or the US) we cover noticeably less content because so many students have near-on full-time jobs on the side and so expectations of what they can read have to go down. And then the law firms complain about the quality of graduates. Look, it’s partly their fault!
WK: How would you fix the tertiary sector in Australia?
JA: Well the first thing I would do is get rid of grants for everything but the hard sciences. Do this and you completely defund research exercises that cost tens and tens of millions of dollars and just produce often meaningless information. A grant is an input. It’s money you get to produce something. What matters is the output! In Australia, we measure the input, not the output. Then I’d eliminate or defund the entire ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ bureaucracies from universities as some US States now are. These are ‘bullsh*t’ jobs that make universities worse, not better, and that deal in group rights and equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
Once I had sorted out that ‘low hanging fruit’, I’d send my entire fictional Liberal party room to Florida and tell them to copy what Ron DeSantis is doing in terms of standing up in the battle of ideas against illiberal Woke types. We need more courageous leaders like that in Australia, both inside and outside of universities.
WK: James, thanks for speaking to The Spectator Australia.
JA: Thanks Will.
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Greens slammed for ‘confusing’ stance on housing amid crisis
Greens politicians are opposing thousands of new homes across Queensland electorates – and encouraging their constituents to do the same – despite campaigning for more development to ease the state’s housing crisis.
The federal Greens’ opposition to the housing projects sparked accusations from Labor that the party is confusing its electorate by saying one thing and doing another.
But Greens Housing spokesman Max Chandler-Mather accused Labor of becoming “a lobby group for property developers” who did not want to provide affordable homes.
It is part of the ongoing impasse over the Albanese government’s Housing Australia Future Fund, which Labor says will create 30,000 new homes a year but the Greens say does not do enough and it will not support without rental caps.
Greens Griffith MP Mr Chandler-Mather has petitions on his website opposing a 220 unit retirement village at Birdwood Rd, Holland Park, two 24-level high-rises at 297 and 281 Montague Rd, West End, which would create 470 apartments, and the Bulimba barracks redevelopment which would create 855 new homes.
Ryan MP Elizabeth Watson-Brown is opposing a development at Kooya Rd, Mitchelton, which would turn a chicken farm into 91 housing lots. Brisbane MP Stephen Bates has raised issue with a 24-level building in McDougall St, Milton, intended to create 50 apartments, and two towers of 16 and 19 storeys at 310 Macarthur Ave, Hamilton Reach, which would create a 217 apartments and 11 townhouses.
It adds up to a potential of about 1900 homes.
Labor Queensland Senator Murray Watt said in the middle of the housing crisis the Greens were calling for more housing but also campaigning against just that.
“Communities must feel confused that the Greens political party are knocking on their door calling for more housing investment at the same time as they are actively campaigning against new housing developments,” he said.
Mr Chandler-Mather said he had written to the state Planning Minister Steven Miles suggesting 15 locations in Griffith which could be suitable for public housing but had not heard back.
“Every piece of land lost to luxury apartment towers no one can afford is another piece of land we can’t build good medium-density public and affordable housing for teachers, nurses and other workers who otherwise couldn’t afford to live in the inner city,” he said.
“Labor are resorting to these pathetic attacks because they know that their plan to spend just $500m on social housing while they’re spending over $30bn a year on the Stage 3 tax cuts is indefensible.
“The Greens have secured a one-off $2bn for public housing going out the door right now, and now we are trying to negotiate with Labor to lock in $2.5bn every year for public and affordable housing and a cap and freeze on rents.”
State Greens housing spokeswoman Amy McMahon said the Greens wanted high-quality, centrally located public housing builds.
“Labor’s just trying to let developers build high-end towers in flood plains. Queensland, just like the rest of Australia, desperately needs a mass build of public and genuinely affordable housing, and that’s exactly what we’re fighting for,” she said.
Meanwhile, Greens councillor Trina Massey emailed residents urging opposition to the Kurilpa temporary local planning instrument proposed by the LNP council. The council has said the TLPI will increase housing in the Kurilpa region with a two-year suspension of usual regulations to allow residential buildings in some parts of that area to reach the 274m aviation height limit.
Ms Massey said in the newsletter it would add to the housing crisis as 90-storey towers would take three times as long to build as the 30-storey current limit, while inflating rent due to property speculators.
She said she supported medium and high-density development that would create “liveable and healthy habitats with sufficient green space and public infrastructure”.
“The TLPI isn’t a development, it’s an undemocratic tool that throws out current development plans and will deliver no affordable or public housing,” she said.
Federal Housing Minister Julie Collins has urged Greens MPs and senators to “get out of the way” of the Housing Australia Future Fund so more affordable and social housing can be built.
“We want to be seeing a lot more of these. If our Housing Australia Future Fund gets through the Senate, we’ll be able to invest half a billion dollars each and every year in perpetuity in more of these projects right around the country,” she said.
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Peta Credlin: Labor’s net zero fantasy will wreck our future
When it comes to energy costs and climate change, too many Australians have come to believe the lies peddled for the best part of two decades by both sides of politics. We’ve been told that there’s a climate emergency so therefore the economy must be decarbonised at breakneck speed.
But that there’s no need for worry because doing so will actually save us money, as wind and solar (supposedly) are now the cheapest way to generate electricity.
Peak deception was Labor’s pre-election modelling purporting to show that meeting its emissions reduction targets would create 604,000 jobs by 2050, and spur $76 billion in investment, as well as reduce household power bills by $275 a year by 2025.
Last week, it was revealed that some customers’ power bills had soared by 45 per cent from July 1, to cover the costs of building new generation and infrastructure, plus the rising cost of gas.
The reality in NSW is that all the big three electricity retailers have just increased their average charges by over 20 per cent, or about $500 per household per year.
This is what happens when our power grid is run to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable electricity.
Also last week, it was revealed that the cost of meeting the Albanese government’s net zero target, including 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 with 82 per cent of electricity from renewable sources, would be $1.5 trillion – that’s TRILLION – within the current decade, rising to $9 trillion by 2060.
To put these truly gargantuan figures into perspective, Australia’s annual GDP is currently about $2 trillion. So achieving the 2050 emissions reduction – which both sides of politics have signed up to – will cost about four years of our total economic production. And achieving Labor’s 2030 target will cost almost one year of production within the current decade.
What’s more, these cost estimates aren’t from sceptics trying to scare Australians out of the policies supposedly needed to combat climate change.
They were published this week by an expert climate advocacy group, Net Zero Australia, a collaboration of interdisciplinary teams from the universities of Melbourne and Queensland, plus Princeton University in the US, led by Professor Robin Batterham, a former chief scientist.
He says that the magnitude of what’s necessary and desirable (at least in his mind) would be “in line with the US-led Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II”.
Labor has now legislated to enshrine its 2030 target in law, but making something legally mandatory doesn’t mean that it will happen in practice.
As the former boss of Snowy Hydro, Paul Broad, said recently, achieving Labor’s emissions goals “is not just looking impossible, it IS impossible, it cannot be done”.
He said that we are “blindly charging on, simply because of political ideology” and that “to suggest that all of this is going to be at a price point that reflects past prices is absolutely false”.
Other experts, such as former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott, Engie Australia boss Rik De Buyserie, and Origin Energy boss Frank Calabria essentially agreed with Broad, only in more restrained language, doubtless due to the fear of retribution from a minister and a government that’s still insisting that the impossible is achievable.
Meanwhile, an Ipsos poll, showing that cost of living should trump climate, highlights the government’s political quandary.
Concern about cost of living is now at the highest level in the past decade.
Yet even though it’s the cost of power that’s rising fastest, largely driven by climate policy, Ipsos found that 65 per cent believe Australia should be “doing more to address climate change” and 61 per cent say that Australia should be “a global leader in emissions reduction”.
Go figure.
When reality collides with the myth assiduously created by weak or fearmongering politicians over decades, sooner or later a crisis ensues. Even people inclined to subscribe to the “need to do something about climate” view now think we face a slow-motion train wreck – a power system that is neither affordable nor reliable but that is inevitable under current government policy.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is slowly trying to draw attention to the looming disaster but is still not prepared clearly to state the obvious, at least not yet: namely; that no more coal-fired power stations can close until there’s a reliable alternative, that new gas fields need to be developed as a matter of extreme urgency, and that – if achieving net zero really is necessary – the only way to get there without wrecking our prosperity is via nuclear energy.
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17 July, 2023
Nazi salutes, memes and assaults: Jewish students say state schools unsafe
The article below is careful not to mention it but this would almost certainly be the Muslim influence at work. "Mein Kampf" still sells well in Turkey and such places. The problem is exacerbated in Melbourbne because Melbourne has a substantial Jewish population. Unlike Europe, Antisemitism is not a part of traditional Australian culture
Every day for five weeks at school, a 13-year-old boy says he was greeted with abuse, including heil Hitlers and being called a “dirty Jew” – a reminder that members of his family were murdered by Nazis.
He’s one of three students at three separate Melbourne public schools who say they have experienced antisemitic bullying that was so extreme their parents are pulling them out. They encountered swastikas, Nazi salutes and even physical assaults and were called “Jewboy” or “dirty Jew” and sent memes involving Hitler.
Two of the students became withdrawn, refused to go to school and couldn’t get out of bed. Another said he no longer told people about his Jewish background.
Their families say the response from both the schools and Education Department did not go far enough to stamp out the behaviour, or treat the matters as seriously as they should have. One family decided to go to the police because they felt the school was not responding quickly enough.
Adi Rozen, the mother of 14-year-old Jewish student Jackie, who went to Brighton Secondary College and was in its Select Entry Accelerated Learning program, said the bullying was so bad her daughter sometimes would not get out of bed.
Jackie was in a STEM class with five girls and 15 boys and had planned to do the International Baccalaureate program earlier this year.
Rozen said Jackie had a swastika drawn on her desk, had a note thrown at her that said “Jewish Rat” and was sent memes showing Hitler as the shark in Jaws.
A copy of Anne Frank’s novel, The Diary of a Young Girl, which documents the life of a young Jewish girl in hiding under Nazi persecution, was held aloft in the school library by a girl asking when the Nazis were comings.
Rozen was also concerned that other students were passive bystanders and wanted the school to show a zero tolerance to antisemitism.
“ I wanted the kids to know it happened, not names, but something that happened to the point a child has felt compelled to leave the school and seriously and emotionally damaged.”
When contacted for a response, the three schools referred The Sunday Age to the Education Department, which was sent a list of questions about its responses, including what policies were in place to combat antisemitism and what support was in place for the targets of such bullying.
A Department of Education spokesperson said any antisemitic behaviour in schools was “distressing and disturbing and taken extremely seriously”.
“We work closely with the Victorian Jewish community to strengthen our zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism,” he said.
Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abromovich said he heard concerns “almost daily” about incidents of antisemitic harassment and abuse in Victorian schools.
“These cases are just the tip of the iceberg and are symptomatic of something very troubling that is taking place in Victoria,” he said.
“For too many Jewish students, attending a public school is nothing short of a nightmare, as lives have been ruined because schools have failed us all.”
In unrelated incidents, Brighton Secondary College and the Education Department are awaiting a Federal Court judgment on a case against the state in which five former students alleged the school did not protect them from antisemitic discrimination and bullying.
A former Brunswick Secondary College student, 13, who asked not to be identified to avoid further harassment, claims he was subject to a five-week “campaign” of antisemitic bullying.
The year 7 student said the bullying began just three weeks into the first term this year after a group discussion about cultural backgrounds during which he said he had Jewish heritage.
He said he was confronted with heil Hitlers, a student drawing swastikas on a desk and at one point was held down, hit and kicked while another student tried to draw a swastika on his leg. The boy, who can speak German, said a student used Google to translate “all Jews should be exterminated” and “go back to the camps” into that language.
Most of it happened in the classroom, he said, but he would also get “sly tackled” on the sports field.
“It was constant every day, he was drawing the same thing [swastikas] on the table ... saluting me [the heil Hitler] the entire time,” he said.
“They never said my normal name. My nickname was ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewboy’. ”
The student was worried that going to the teachers about the bullying would make him a stronger target, but after five weeks his parents found out.
The boy’s father John, who asked not to include his surname to avoid his son being bullied again, said the boy’s great-grandmother and great-grandfather were murdered by Nazis during World War II. John’s own father escaped the Holocaust in 1938. He still has his father’s star-shaped Jewish badge.
After contacting the school and not getting a response for 24 hours, John decided to go to the police.
“Then the dialogue with the school just started after we sort of had to approach the police. It wasn’t just verbal or punchy and so on. It was physical. And it was abusive.”
The school set up a safety plan, but John said it was too late.
John decided not to go through with police charges to spare his son the trauma of the process.
“I did actually say to them in 35 years of experiencing schools in three different countries, this is the worst case of antisemitism I’ve come across,” he said.
Another student, 12, who attends Rowville Secondary Sports Academy, said antisemitic attacks began on the third week of February this year.
The boy’s father, who asked not to be named to protect his son’s identity – said his son was called a “filthy Jew” and told “all of you were supposed to die standing in a line and raising your hands up” and saw students doing the heil Hitler.
“It’s almost every day, every day it would have been something else,” he said.
The boy’s father said one teacher was aware of it from the first week and told the students to stop, which he believes had no impact. He claims he called the school for weeks before he had a response and felt the consequences and educative responses were not strong enough.
“Look this is racism. This is the worst. It’s not bullying,” he said.
“One time is one time too many. I don’t want other students to have deal with this the way my son did.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive officer Peter Wertheim said he did not think there were strong enough policies in Victorian state schools to support Jewish students. The number of antisemitic incidents reported across Australia in 2022 was the highest in a decade, with 478 incidents – a 6.9 per cent increase from 2021.
In June last year, Victoria became the first state to ban the public display of the Nazi symbol. Under proposed federal laws, people who display or trade Nazi hate symbols would also face up to 12 months in jail.
It is mandatory for Victorian government schools to teach students about the Holocaust as part of the level 9/10 history curriculum.
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Fiona Martin is a typical landlord – but she’s not what you expect
Fiona Martin and her children live in a rented home that she can’t afford to buy. Luckily, her rent is subsidised by income from a modest investment property she is paying off.
Martin, whose investment property is in Kew, Melbourne, works as a real estate vendor advocate, helping people sell property all over Victoria. But many of her clients are now selling their investment properties because they are no longer financially worthwhile due to rising interest rates and the time it takes to manage them is “just a pain”.
While Australian landlords are often portrayed as affluent aristocrats, Martin is more typical of the more than 80 per cent of the rental market owned by individuals, or “mum and dad investors”, says Australian Landlords Association president Andrew Kent.
Most landlords report a taxable income of less than $100,000 and there are more landlords in the $18,200 to $45,000 income bracket than the $120,000 to $180,000 range, recent tax data shows. More than 300,000 people who own rental property reported a taxable income below $18,200 in 2021.
“There’s an assumption that landlords are bad and tenants deserve more because they’re poorer, because they can’t afford to buy,” Martin says. “But the majority of landlords have single investment properties and they’re families.”
Her view is borne out by the data. Landlords are likely to be households with children: about four in 10 fit the family category and two-thirds have two incomes.
The top five landlord occupations by raw numbers are: general manager, school teacher, chief executive or managing director, registered nurse and accountant. Hospitality workers – including bartenders, baristas, waiters and fast-food cooks – are the least likely landlords at about 2 per cent.
The fact that most of Australia’s landlords are working families, or middle-income earners doesn’t fit the political narrative that the “top end of town” runs most of the rental market.
However, some professions do come closer to fitting the stereotype. Surgeons, school principals and mining engineers own rental properties at some of the highest rates in Australia. More than one in three people in these fields reported rental income in 2021.
Tax Office data back to 2012 shows a consistent pattern of people who work in jobs that pay close to an average income dominating the rental property landscape.
For example, the top 40 occupations of people who own rental properties include workers in childcare, the disability sector and aged care, motor mechanics, truck drivers, receptionists, sales assistants and police officers.
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Tasmanian court sentences environmental activist to jail for first time in more than a decade
An environmental activist has been sent to jail in Tasmania for the first time in more than a decade after protesting at logging and mining sites.
Colette Joan Harmsen, a 47-year-old veterinarian and seasoned “peaceful forest protester” with the Bob Brown Foundation, was sentenced to three months in prison for breaching a suspended sentence for protesting against a mine on the west coast of Tasmania.
Harmsen appeared in Hobart magistrates court on Friday after pleading guilty to four counts of trespassing, as well as other related offences.
It comes just a year after the Tasmanian government passed anti-protest legislation that was aimed at the Bob Brown Foundation and its blockades. Under the laws protesters can be fined up to $12,975 or jailed for 18 months for a first offence. Organisations can be fined up to $103,800 if they are judged to have obstructed workers or caused “a serious risk”.
The Bob Brown Foundation campaign manager, Jenny Weber, said police prosecutors had attempted to prosecute Harmsen under the anti-protest laws.
“We are grateful today that the judge threw out an appalling attempt by the police prosecutors to bring in the anti-protest laws,” she said from the courthouse steps.
Weber said it was the first time a woman in Tasmania had been sentenced to prison for environmental protesting.
In 2011, the protester Ali Alishah served five months in a Tasmanian prison after he breached a suspended sentence by continuing to protest against logging.
Harmsen’s charges relate to her involvement in a protest in 2021 where she locked herself on to an excavator at MMG’s mine on the state’s west coast and refused to leave when asked by police.
She was also charged with trespassing during a protest at a forestry site and Venture Minerals’ mine in the north-west, on three separate occasions from 2021 to 23.
In his sentencing remarks, Magistrate Chris Webster noted Harmsen had a long history of trespassing, dating back to 2010.
“The original penalty was to encourage [her] to stop her illegal protest activities,” he said.
“No doubt she will learn a lesson from her imprisonment.”
Speaking to her supporters on the courthouse steps prior to her conviction, Harmsen called out the Tasmanian premier, Jeremy Rockliff, for sanctioning “the destruction of the environment rather than protecting it”.
“The reason I commit these offences is because I am terrified of the worsening climate crisis. I am not a menace to society yet here I am facing a jail term,” she said.
“I am not giving a finger to the entire judicial system, I am standing up for the forests, for takayna, a safer planet and if that makes me a dangerous criminal then I think we are going to need bigger prisons.”
States introducing anti-protest laws to curtail environmental protesting has become a national trend, with Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, and most recently South Australia introducing the laws.
The laws have been widely criticised as an affront to the core democratic right to protest.
In March, New South Wales climate protester, Deanna “Violet” Coco, was issued with a 12-month conditional release from jail after she was sentenced to 15 months in jail under the state’s anti-protest laws.
The district court judge Mark Williams, who issued the conditional release, said police had included a “false fact” and a “false assertion” in their case against Coco.
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Offshore wind: A perfect storm of costs
In the renewable energy industry hope ever springs eternal, with Australia and the US forging ahead with plans to build a host of offshore wind turbines just as the UK is realising its large offshore wind sector is only adding to its power woes.
After years of assurances from renewable energy advocates that the UK’s offshore wind farm sector will deliver cheap and plentiful power, with the equivalent of more than 15 gigawatts of capacity now installed, the country’s power prices are amongst the highest in all Europe.
A major reason for the increase is the price of gas, with wholesale power from gas plants three times more expensive than before the crisis, according to the UK media, but wind power is simply adding to the problem. By some estimates power from the offshore turbines is even more expensive than gas power during the crisis.
The costs of building wind turbines capable of surviving major storms well out to sea are immense and increasing, as are the costs of maintaining generators mounted at the top of 200-metre poles far from land. Despite subsidies and a system for allocating power contracts which greatly favours the industry, UK wind lobby groups have written to the government asking for a vast increase in assistance, including tilting the auction system for power contracts further in their favour.
However, Australia and the US seem determined to repeat all the mistakes of their UK cousins and add a few of their own. In Australia, plans for offshore wind are still in the early stages. A wind farm zone has been designated in the relatively shallow waters off Victoria’s southern coast east of Melbourne which also happens to be within easy range of major transmission lines. Although considerable interest in building 300-metre tall towers (the same height as the Eiffel tower in Paris) has been reported, the project is not expected to deliver power until 2032. Other wind zones are still being discussed.
In the US, the country’s third offshore wind farm was given federal government permission in early July, with several more in the approvals pipeline. However, the latest project, including 100 turbines to be built within sight of the tourist havens of Atlantic City and Ocean City, has generated considerable opposition from community groups objecting to the beach view being spoiled.
All these proposals come with the usual blather about how cheap such power will be, despite the fact that in the UK the cost of the ruling Tory government’s obsession with wind farms is now becoming apparent.
As an example, the UK Telegraph states that the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of about £2.75 billion ($A5.28 billion) per GW, or more than four times the cost of closed cycle gas turbine capacity. Estimates of maintenance costs, according to the Telegraph, are as high as £200 million per GW installed, per annum. That adds up to a nominal cost of offshore wind generation of £170/MWh, or about the same or somewhat higher than for gas turbines, even in these dire times of high gas prices.
On top of that figure must be added the costs of accommodating the variable output of such turbines. This includes keeping conventional, that is fossil-fuel, capacity on standby to fill the power gap when wind dies. In addition, in the UK, a large, and growing, contribution to these balancing costs involves paying a wind farm not to put power onto the grid when there is an excess, say when it is windy in the middle of the night. (In Australia, wind farms over a certain size are simply required to stay off the grid when directed by power grid managers.)
According to the energy news website Energy Live, in 2022 the UK grid spent more than £4 billion on balancing costs, or many times the costs of balancing the grid in the pre-wind era.
In addition to balancing costs the UK has a contracts for difference system which, details aside, guarantees prices paid to wind farms for power delivered. The subsidies required for this system are raised through a statutory levy on electricity suppliers and ultimately passed onto power consumers.
The wind industry is now saying that despite all that assistance offshore wind farms are not making enough to keep their own lights on. RenewableUK, the country’s trade association for renewable energy, announced in early July that the leading wind energy lobby groups have collectively written to the government saying that various projects are under threat unless they get more money, and the tendering system for contracts is changed.
The letter itself does not seem to be available and the mainstream media have largely ignored the story. But from RenewableUK statements and available commentary, it is apparent the wind industry is saying the budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind alone has to be at least two-and-a-half times higher than its current level. That means the industry has it’s hand out for more than £165 million.
In addition, the sub-sector of floating wind generators should be given its own budget pot and the auction rules changed. Winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their ‘value’ in contributing towards the net-zero targets.
To justify all of this the wind industry points to a surge in supply chain costs pushing up the price of wind turbines, while increases in global interest rates have raised refinancing costs substantially. Those cost pressures have pushed several projects into the red just a year after they won government contracts. A widely reported winning bid in that round of contracts was for about £75 per MWh, as opposed to the Guardian newspaper’s estimated cost of £175 per MWh
Then there are the problems at Siemens Energy’s wind turbines division, Siemens Gamesa, which bills itself as a leader in renewable energy, particularly in offshore wind in which it holds 44GW worth of projects.
According to the latest quarterly report for Siemens Energy the division managed to lose £386 million on revenue of £2.44 billion for just the three months to the end of March, with the parent company warning of ‘deeper quality problems’. The quarter’s loss was blamed on inflation, supply chain challenges, the ramp-up of offshore activities and the effects of ‘onerous projects’.
Offshore wind, it seems, is not a solution to anything but a perfect storm of costs which governments in the US and Australia are doing their best to replicate.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/gone-with-the-wind
************************************16 July, 2023
In praise of NIMBYism
I am not sure that I completely agree with Judith Sloan (below). We have to put new settlers somewhere and the alternative to increased urban density is urban spawl. And urban sprawl means subjecting millions of people to hours in traffic every week day. There are surely better uses of people's time.
I heartily agree however that a house with a back yard is the ideal place to raise a family. I grew up in such places as did my son. But is a back yard two hours drive from your place of work worth it? The work from home movement may be the solution for some
A possible compromise might be to allow upward expansion in the more recently developed suburbs, which already have some taller buildings
NIMBYism is a term of unclear origin. The phrase ‘not in my backyard’ apparently first appeared in print in the Christian Science Monitor, a fact I just love. Initially, it had a narrow meaning, referring to a community’s understandable reluctance to have dangerous facilities located near their dwellings – think toxic waste dumps, in particular.
But it quickly morphed into a term of derision used by progressives to ram unwelcome and unsightly developments down the throats of those who have the temerity to prefer their neighbourhoods to retain their core features and character.
The uncontested argument is that well-heeled residents in leafy suburbs who object to the construction of multi-storey, dogbox apartment buildings located on every corner of their neighbourhood should be ignored. Their complaints can just be filed away; compulsory acquisitions can be used if required.
These left-wing types have even dreamt up a new term – YIMBism – yes, in my backyard. Oh, please! Mind you, I’m yet to see too many examples of YIMBism, with protestors out on the street passionately chanting away: what to do want? more high-rises/ when do we want them? now.
Let me put another spin on NIMBYism and suggest that protecting the nature of your local neighbourhood is a perfectly legitimate reaction to maniacal town-planners and lefty zealots. When you buy a property, it’s not just the actual dwelling you are purchasing, it’s also its location and the character of the precinct in which it is located. In other words, the property rights extend beyond the boundaries of the residence.
Of course, no one expects a neighbourhood to remain unchanged. There will always be changes, improvements even. But there is a completely reasonable expectation on the part of residents that the neighbourhood will alter only at the margin and its essential character – be it large family homes, cheek-by-jowl terrace houses or mixed accommodation – will stay relatively unchanged.
In the past, these broader property rights were supported by legally binding restrictive covenants that limited the type and number of developments that could occur in a neighbourhood. While these are no longer common, there are still plenty of examples of planning restrictions that meet the preferences of most residents.
In the Noosa region, for example, there are strict limits on apartment developments, with high-rise buildings not allowed. In nearby Peregian Beach, no apartments developments are permitted, with the rule being one dwelling per lot. In many parts of the Mornington Peninsular in Victoria, there are restrictions on the type of dwellings that can be constructed. Indeed, there are many, many examples of these restrictions right across the country.
The real problems arise in the big cities where newly arrived migrants tend to settle and there is clearly insufficient housing to accommodate the surge. Of course, an obvious solution is for governments to restrict the annual migrant intakes to ensure that there is some balance between demand for new housing and supply.
The point is often made that it’s the federal government that sets migrant numbers and the rules by which they enter. But it’s the state governments – and, it has to be admitted, local governments – that are responsible for planning and other housing-related regulations.
Having said this, in recent times, state governments have been wholly supportive of the migration policies of the federal government. There is scope for state governments to influence this policy, but the reality has been most have sought additional numbers under state-based visas. Any practical problems associated with massive numbers of migrants arriving at the same time are largely ignored. The lure of more voters and unskilled/semi-skilled workers is particularly strong for most state governments.
The induced housing shortage is fertile ground for illiberal types to trammel on the property rights of existing residents by claiming that any planning restrictions are simply selfish and unjustified. The good folk down at the Grattan Institute are noisy advocates of this approach. They want all planning restrictions in the desirable middle suburbs in the big cities lifted so high-rise buildings can be erected to accommodate the masses.
It’s only fair, they say. Everyone – OK, not quite everyone – should be able to live in these suburbs with their amenities and proximity to the CBD and good transport links.We can be like New York or Hong Kong. Even London would do. Of course, had large numbers of residents of Melbourne or Sydney wanted to live like New Yorkers, they could have always relocated to New York.
Our local council in Melbourne actually does a reasonable job at defending these broader property rights, but the state government has assumed all planning rights in respect of properties located on arterial roads as defined by the state government. (Cute, hey?)
The result has been that many of the larger homes on these arterial roads have been torn down and replaced by apartment buildings, admittedly with only two or three storeys. The developers just love it.
But here’s the thing: where the block of land once accommodated four or six people, it now accommodates at least twenty. Everything else has essentially stayed the same – roads, parking, services, schools and the like – but there are now many more people using the infrastructure. And just in case you think this policy offers up affordable housing, these newly constructed apartments cost a pretty penny. It’s hard to know what the point is.
Talking of developers getting their own way, you just have to take a look at what is happening in Sydney under the newly elected Minns Labor government. The Premier can’t get enough of high-rise building towers. In what is an unworkable approach, developers promise that a certain percentage of dwellings will be ‘affordable’, at which point the sky’s the limit (geddit?).
Whether or not people, particularly those with young families, want to live in these towers is another matter. But, of course, if that’s all that is available, they will take it.
This brings me to the other item I want to praise: the backyard. Given our temperate climate, there really is no better model for child-rearing than time spent in the backyard. Out the backdoor, playing with siblings and neighbours, a dash indoors for a drink and snack, back for more play. It’s the ideal life for young’uns.
But for those cooped up in apartments, mum or dad will need to accompany the kids to a nearby park (if there is one), even though they are very busy. The alternative is to bring out the screens and allow the children to play mindless (and potentially dangerous) virtual games all day. I vote for the backyard (along with the Hills Hoist) any day.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/in-praise-of-nimbyism/
*********************************************How to fix our schools: A new report identifies what needs to be cut
In 1992, during one of my early book launches in Melbourne, a chance comment made me question the state of Australia’s education systems. The book, titled So I Headed West, was a collection of written material left by my grandfather, W.G. Manners, whom I never had the chance to know. A reader who had delved into the book remarked that my grandfather appeared to be a well-educated person. Before I could respond, Professor Geoffrey Blainey AC interjected, stating, ‘They were all better educated in those days.’
It is a vice of the old to look back on their upbringing with rose-coloured glasses. Criticising younger generations is a recreational sport more popular than golf or bingo among older demographics. However, that event which took place 31 years ago, has never left me, and it sparked a growing concern within me regarding Australia’s educational standards.
In recent times I’ve noticed a dramatic escalation of this worrying trend. The Covid lockdowns shed light on the materials being served to students, as parents had the opportunity to witness first-hand what was being taught. Many would likely agree that much of this curriculum seemed far removed from what could be considered core educational material.
I am not alone in expressing concern over our education system and seeking ways to improve what transpires in our classrooms. At this year’s Sir John Downer oration in April held in Adelaide, Opposition leader Peter Dutton also highlighted Australia’s failing education system. He argued that,
ideologically driven advocates have too much influence over what is being taught to our children. We want our children to be educated, not indoctrinated. Our kids are being taught ‘what to think,’ not ‘how to think’.
Over the years, I have accumulated a vast collection of articles addressing the slipping educational standards in our country. Faced with this mountain of material, I realised that I would never be able to tackle this task alone. Thus I sought the assistance of two esteemed academics from Perth, who have fearlessly waded through this material and provided their insightful observations for a recently published discussion paper, ‘The Education Crisis in Australia’.
Dr. Rocco Loiacono, one of the authors of the paper, said,
We need to acknowledge the negative impact of an overloaded curriculum on teachers’ well-being and the overall education system. To improve academic standards, we must focus on teaching fewer topics with greater depth and curriculum integrity.
Furthermore, the research paper reveals the overwhelming administrative burden placed on teachers, hindering their ability to focus on lesson planning and effective teaching. Excessive documentation requirements and unnecessary reporting divert valuable teaching time, contributing to the rising costs of education while academic standards continue to decline.
Co-author of the discussion paper, Professor Matthew Ogilvie, writes of this administrative bloat in the university system,
If we look to the United Kingdom as an example that Australia seems to be following, most universities employ more administrative and professional staff than academic staff.
Let us collectively address the pressing issue of declining educational standards in Australia. By acknowledging the problem and engaging in constructive dialogue, we can work towards ensuring a brighter future for our children and the generations to come.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/how-to-fix-our-schools-without-spending-more/
**************************************************Protecting children takes courage: Just ask Dr Jillian Spencer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist
Julie Sladden
The announcement of the Labor Government’s proposed ‘misinformation’ Bill, while alarming, is not surprising. Anyone paying attention in recent years, especially the last three, will have noticed that our ‘freedom of speech’ has already been significantly curtailed through online censorship, government censorship (thank you, Department of Home Affairs), and self-censorship.
Nowhere has this been more palpable or alarming than the censorship of freedom of inquiry in science and medicine. During the Covid years, we discovered just how captured the medical profession is. Like lifting the lid on Pandora’s box, anyone who spoke out soon discovered the evil treasures in store for those who dared to question the narrative. The result was spectacular and tragic. Doctors who wanted to keep their jobs had to shut up, roll up their sleeves, and work on it. Those who spoke up or questioned the forced jab were marginalised, censored, sacked, or suspended. The message was clear, speak out at your peril. Despite the messaging, I was still shocked at how many capitulated. Surely this was the time we were meant to speak up and ask questions? Especially the hard ones. Isn’t this what we trained for?
Every so often, I meet someone who helps restore my hope in the medical profession. Last week that person was Dr Jillian Spencer, a senior staff Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who was recently suspended from clinical practice at the Queensland Children’s Hospital. She now faces serious threats to her position, professional career, and livelihood, including potential regulatory action. Her crime, it seems, is to question out loud the affirmation model of transgender care.
Spencer says she is not alone in her concerns, ‘I would say that the vast majority of Child and Adolescent psychiatrists hold very serious concerns about the affirmation model, but to speak up in the current climate or even to take a more cautious clinical approach puts their employment at risk,’ she shared at a recent forum.
If there is any doubt that questioning ‘the narrative’ is dangerous for medical professionals, Spencer can set the record straight. Her experience of raising concerns within the organisation through the ‘proper channels’ has not gone well.
‘The process is to raise concerns internally (within an organisation) so that you’re doing it professionally and appropriately, rather than having to speak out. But when I pushed that to the maximum internally, it went very badly. So now I’m in the position of speaking out (publicly). The majority of child psychiatrists (are silent) for good reasons and self-preservation. The good reasons being wanting to be available to help people and to not be perceived as biased. But also, a lot of it is fear. And I don’t think my case has helped either, as I’m at risk for my employment and my (registration). It’s very serious. And so, I can’t blame them.’
But the costs of speaking out extend beyond the doctor involved. Patient care and service delivery stand to suffer too.
‘The danger of speaking out is that you lose the capacity to help more people,’ Spencer shares. ‘For example, a gender-questioning young person might be reluctant to see me now that I’ve spoken out, and that’s not something I want because I want young people to feel comfortable with me. My job is to listen and understand and to do what I can to help them.’
Now, this job is on hold indefinitely. However, Spencer is undeterred. Rather than quietly waiting for the ‘powers that be’ to hand down judgment, she demonstrates a commitment to her convictions by continuing to speak out. Loudly and often. To an outsider, it would appear Spencer has reached a point of reluctant acceptance of her situation and that she might as well go ‘all in’. Arriving at this point has come through painful reflection, ‘dark times’, and the realisation that the organisation Spencer has served faithfully for decades has apparently abandoned her.
‘It’s a really difficult employment situation,’ says Spencer. ‘Some people say, “Well, if your organisation is doing something that you disagree with, then the appropriate pathway is to resign.” But if you’ve been with an organisation for 20 years, you feel a part of that organisation. I feel like part of the family and part of changing the culture internally. It’s part of my job.’
‘People say “You need to resign or accept it.” But it’s also a responsibility to try and help your organisation do the right thing and… ‘speak up for safety.’
Listening to her speeches, presentations, and interviews, it is hard to argue that Spencer is motivated by anything other than safety. Child safety appears at the core of her message time and again.
‘It’s a really hard situation for child and adolescent psychiatrists… and for any mental health clinicians who work with children. Because there’s a lot of organisational and social pressure to affirm children,’ Spencer shares. ‘But when we start to look at the evidence base behind the affirmation model, we find the studies have major flaws, and they don’t show sufficient benefit to outweigh the risks and the harms.’
‘Previously, our discipline always took a developmental approach, which means that the years of childhood and adolescence were understood to be a period of incredible growth and change. We didn’t label children with long-term conditions, such as personality disorders, because we knew that a lot of conditions would ease with maturity, and indeed, the eleven studies that were conducted before the affirmation model was in use when they used a watchful waiting approach found that 60 to 90 per cent of children with gender dysphoria became comfortable in their own bodies with maturity.’
‘I assure you that this is not part of a culture war. This is a really serious child protection issue. We entered our field to try to assist children to thrive, but the gender clinics have been set up, and psychiatrists are being forced to affirm the social transition of all children and go along with the idea that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will lead to benefit.’
Spencer’s words highlight the dangerous waters our children are in. Treatment pathways and models of care are being imposed while the evidence is unclear, pathways that have modalities with irreversible and devastating consequences for children in terms of fertility, sexual and long-term health. Anyone who would step into these waters without a cautious approach does not understand the potential ramifications.
One of the arguments used to justify support for the use of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers is mental distress and the risk of suicide in those experiencing gender dysphoria, as highlighted in a recent Four Corners report. However, Spencer paints a broader picture. ‘There’s no evidence to show that the social transition or the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones reduces the death rate or improves psychological functioning.’
‘What we know from the eleven studies that were conducted before the affirmation model was in use – so that’s when they didn’t use puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones – is that the vast majority of (children with gender dysphoria) grew up to become comfortable with their body if they’re allowed to go through the full course of adolescence.’
‘My personal opinion is that we could disallow the prescription of puberty blockers… (and)… Australia aligned itself with all the European countries that have conducted systematic reviews of the evidence behind puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. From those systematic reviews, they realised that no child should be prescribed puberty blockers outside of a clinical research trial or in exceptional circumstances. And in the UK, they’ve even gone further in recommending caution around social transition.’
In voicing concerns at a recent rally, Spencer stumbled on another issue facing doctors who dare speak out. Soon after, the hospital told Spencer she allegedly broke the Queensland public services Code of Conduct through her public statements. It’s an allegation Spencer contests, saying she was speaking as a private citizen. In the speech, Spencer neither identifies herself as a doctor nor makes mention of her role or employer. The question is, where does a doctor’s autonomy begin and the employer’s jurisdiction end?
Have we already entered the era where the reach of our employers and regulatory authorities extends fully into our capacity to speak publicly anywhere?
The AHPRA Code of Conduct for medical professionals outlines several expectations of health professionals to question, examine and discuss the potential risks and benefits of treatment in addition to advocating for vulnerable communities, including children. It would seem, therefore, that Dr Spencer is simply doing her job.
‘We are not being allowed any professional discretion,’ she argues. ‘It is incredibly distressing to be forced into harming other people’s children, or otherwise face the potential loss of one’s career, livelihood or to be cast out of the workplace as has happened to me. But this is too important, so I will not be silenced.’
Dr Spencer is calling for an urgent Federal inquiry into the model of care for the treatment of children with gender dysphoria.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/protecting-children-takes-courage/
***************************************************Why Qld construction code change will jack house prices up another $70k
Cost of living concern? The Leftist government is much more interested in telling people what to do than they are in controlling the cost of living. They are authoritarians, not compassionate
Building industry leaders are fuming following the government’s announcement that Queensland’s adoption of the National Construction Code changes will only add 2 per cent onto the price of new home builds, saying their own calculations put prices up as far as $70,000.
The Courier-Mail on Monday revealed the price of building an average Queensland home would go up roughly $20,000, which Public Works Minister Mick de Brenni quickly refuted, claiming prices would only increase about 2 per cent.
But after speaking with various builders including Metricon, Brighton Homes and Plantation Homes, as well as Master Builders Australia and the Housing Industry Australia, The Courier-Mail can confirm house price will actually increase between $10,000 and $70,000.
Plans which show material changes to meet higher energy efficiency standards and spatial modifications to increase accessibility indicate costs to make homes more accessible will sit far higher than government estimates.
Builders say insulation alone would add thousands onto home designs, with further money spent on things like window glazing, window framing and fans to bring homes up to the seven star energy rating.
Industry stakeholders have argued accessibility and liveability measures should go ahead on October 1, but energy efficiency measures should be delayed until next year to give builders time to prepare, but also to allow energy efficient products to be manufactured in high volumes, allowing them to be purchased cheaply in bulk.
Here is a breakdown explanation of exactly how the two significant changes coming in on October 1 will affect both builders and future homeowner builders - including what exactly will cost more, and how long Queenslanders have to buy old home designs before prices skyrocket or they disappear altogether.
Examples of modifications made to Metricon’s single storey Freedom home include:
-Increase passage ways to accommodate wider doorways
-Raising floors for flush transition, levelling the home throughout
-Accessible bathrooms and toilets large enough for circulation space
-Hinged doors replaced by cavity sliding doors, including pockets and gliders
-Reducing window sizes, while also maintaining light efficiency and safety, for example, having four protection screens in second storey windows allowing them to be opened fully
-Using better performing glass
-Window frames with less aluminium
-Loose fill insulation
-Ventilation and air movement strategies like additional ceiling fans
Price breakdown:
Brighton Homes chief executive Brad Collins said high costs in Queensland were coming from insulation, tinted glazing and “fans in every room”.
“Some homes depending on block orientation will require further enhancements and, in some cases will not be able to be built, as the home will be unable to meet energy requirements,” he said.
“As a guide we would expect single storey to start around $20,000 and doubles up to $40,000 or more.
Mr Collins argued that energy efficiency measures alone would add a “minimum cost” of $20,000 onto a new home build
“The costs come from increased cost of glazing windows and increased use of insulation for walls and ceiling,” he said.
“(It) will far outweigh the claimed energy efficiency the home will produce. When you look at interest rates alone on extra borrowings to meet the requirements the customer is further behind.”
Metricon design director, Adrian Popple said the additional costs for Metricon were averaging $20,000 with their luxury homes expected to increase by $35-$40,000.
He said costings were due to the finer details, which all homes needed, but some more than others depending on size
“For us to redesign our homes to accommodate those larger areas takes a lot of time and cost to us,” Mr Popple said.
“It’s massive and they don’t talk about this but this is where the cost comes from.
“A 50mm difference between door sizes doesn’t sound like a lot but it means new doors will have to be manufactured, and they will add costs until they become the new standard.
“Giving the industry time to adapt and get their heads around it and procure these materials in a high volume will help reduce costs.”
Metricon has been busy redesigning their national portfolio for two years, splitting up which homes would remain available in each state and territory based on individual climate cost efficiency to keep them there.
“We build thousands of homes around Australia every year and are probably better positioned than most but the cost is the cost - it’s the same for any other builder,” Mr Popple said.
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13 July, 2023
Aged care homes being regulated out of existence
Leftists think you can make good things happen just by passing a law
A growing number of aged-care facilities are closing due to workforce shortages, as regional providers warn they are being left in limbo waiting for exemptions under Labor’s 24/7 nursing targets.
At least two aged-care facilities have this week told residents they will shut down citing difficulties meeting the federal government’s new nursing rules introduced on July 1.
The closure of both regional Queensland facilities – Carinity Summit Cottages in Mount Morgan and Petrie Gardens Aged Care Service in Tiaro – will displace 33 elderly residents from their homes.
Carinity owns 12 homes across Queensland while Petrie Gardens is owned by the Churches of Christ, which runs 28 facilities across Queensland and Victoria.
The closures come as regional NSW aged care facilities warn they are being left in limbo waiting for exemptions to be granted for Labor’s 24/7 nursing targets nearly two weeks after they became law, sparking concern they are operating in breach of new rules.
Ahead of the last election, Anthony Albanese unveiled a policy requiring aged care facilities to have at least one nurse working at all times by July 1 – a year earlier than the aged-care royal commission had recommended.
While the government has vowed to give exemptions for some regional providers, aged care operators say the government has not responded to their applications.
NSW provider Whiddon applied for exemptions over six weeks ago but is still waiting to hear whether two of its homes – in Bourke and Wee Waa – will qualify to be exempt from the new policy.
The two homes are located in rural NSW and have been unable to source registered nurses required to be compliant for the law, triggering the provider to apply for exemptions in May.
Whiddon chief executive Chris Marmarelis said sourcing workers in rural NSW was “extremely challenging” and he was yet to receive an exemption from the 24/7 nursing target.
Mr Marmarelis said the Wee Waa Health service had also recently shut its emergency department after hours due to struggles to attract staff.
“In terms of our position, these are extremely challenging locations to attract and retain suitably qualified people to and we must therefore rely on the exemption process in order to continue to serve our communities,” Mr Marmarelis said.
“We would love nothing more than to meet the nursing requirements, however the workforce is simply not there in these locations and even attempts to bring in skilled workers from overseas is extremely challenging.
“It’s an unusual position we find ourselves in, having to comply with the new reforms without a clear understanding of whether an exemption has been granted.”
Australian College of Nursing chief executive Kylie Ward urged the government to provide clarity to providers on whether they would receive an exemption.
She said the government should allow providers an extra six to 12 months to meet the target and questioned the government’s calculations that just 5 per cent of residential services would need exemptions.
“I don’t think it‘s only 5 per cent that’s non-compliant, it’s very hard to see that could be true. Everybody is doing the best they can but people need to know,” Ms Ward said.
The closures in Queensland this week follow 23 facilities shutting down since September last year, according to figures from the Department of Health and Aged care.
Carinity Summit Cottages said a nationwide shortage of aged care staff meant staying open was “not a viable-long term solution” given increases in expectations from the community and regulators on staffing levels in residential facilities.
“A nationwide shortage of aged care staff, combined with Mount Morgan’s regional location, has made maintaining the required staffing levels at Summit Cottages increasingly difficult. The situation has worsened in recent months,” Carinity Summit Cottages said.
“Given the low likelihood that the lack of suitably qualified staff can be overcome, and the increase in expectations from the community and regulators regarding staffing levels in aged care communities, Carinity has no option but to conduct a staged closure of Summit Cottages.”
Petrie Gardens management said its 10 residents will be transferred to a site at Fair Haven.
“In light of the federal government’s changes to age care compliance regulations, including the 24/7 nursing requirement which came into effect on July 1, and the minimum care minutes which will come into effect on October 1, we have made the decision to close our Petrie Gardens residential aged care service by the end of the month,” it said.
Another home, Lyndoch Living in southwest Victoria, last month announced it would close its residential aged facility in Terang blaming “long-term skills shortage which is further impacted by the 24/7 registered nurse requirement”.
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Medical insurer drops cover for private doctors who initiate hormone treatments in adolescents with gender dysphoria
They are foreseeing how the winds might change
One of Australia's leading medical insurers has dumped cover for private practising doctors who initiate hormone treatment in adolescents with gender dysphoria, a decision that may put even more pressure on public hospital waiting lists.
MDA National said it will also no longer insure private doctors, such as general practitioners, from legal claims arising from the assessment of patients under 18 as suitable for gender transition treatments, such as cross-sex hormones and gender affirmation surgeries.
The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), representing hundreds of health professionals who provide care to transgender people, is aware of some GPs who have already stopped gender-affirming care — a model that supports the child's choices and can lead to medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormone treatment.
AusPATH is concerned the MDA National decision will particularly affect trans youth living outside major cities, who struggle to access public gender services.
"It's going to stop a number of children ever being able to access gender affirming care before they turn 18," AusPATH president Professor Ashleigh Lin said.
The MDA National decision, effective from July 1, comes after the insurer reviewed the medico-legal risks amid what it described as "growing criticism globally of the research that underpins medical and surgical transition of children in response to gender dysphoria".
It was made in response to "the risk of potentially high-value claims arising from irreversible treatments" provided to children and adolescents.
Gender-affirming hormonal therapies with testosterone or oestrogen may cause temporary or permanent infertility.
MDA continues to allow doctors to prescribe puberty blockers to treat trans youth.
While there is evidence of long-term side effect for puberty blockers such as reduced bone density, the effects on puberty are reversible.
"Children are not able to transition without relying on the assessments of medical professionals," MDA National said in a statement to the ABC.
"This places doctors in a uniquely vulnerable position with respect to future litigation – particularly so, if courts take the view that the practitioner has influenced a child's decision to medically or surgically transition and that there are limits to a child's understanding and what they effectively consent to.
"This has led to our view that medical practitioners who assess children as being suitable for transition and/or who initially prescribe cross-sex hormones are at a heightened risk of receiving claims, irrespective of the strength of the consent process and the standard of care or the model of healthcare."
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Caged egg ban may hurt the poor more than help the hens
First, a reminder: a chicken is just a chicken. Chooks don’t think and feel like humans.
And a tip: dumb green ideas already cost you plenty and now could double or even triple the price of eggs, making them too expensive for the poor.
That’s because Australia’s agricultural ministers meet this Thursday to discuss banning caged eggs by 2036, 12 years earlier than planned.
They know we’ve been coached by animal rights campaigners into thinking hens in battery cages producing a third of our eggs are sad, but free-range hens out in the paddock couldn’t be happier.
But setting caged hens free will cost many egg farmers millions.
They’ll need much more land to convert to free range, and face extra costs in making sure their hens stay healthy and get their fair share of food in the new free-for-all.
Those extra costs will of course be passed on.
Just compare. A dozen caged eggs here costs under $5. But the price of eggs in New Zealand, which banned battery hens this year, has rocketed to more than double that, and for just 10 eggs in a carton.
That means New Zealand now has the second-most expensive eggs in the world, after Switzerland, which also bans caged eggs.
But are these bans based on emotion, not facts? Does a chicken in a cage really feel like Jean Valjean in a cell?
Sydney University’s Dr Jeff Downing a decade ago tested stress levels of caged chickens and free-range ones, measuring the quantity of stress hormones, corticosterone, in their eggs.
Surprise. Virtually no difference.
“Once you get into very large group sizes, there is so much social interaction that this can be quite stressful for some hens,” said Downing. “There is far more potential in these big group sizes for social stress.”
Indeed, it’s chickens-against-chickens that taught us “hen-pecked”.
Dr Charles Milne, Victoria’s former chief vet, also warned that a chicken in a paddock might not be happier.
“Chickens are related to forest-dwelling birds. They don’t like open spaces. Free-range can deliver huge welfare problems.”
No wonder the birds are anxious, not just figuring their place in the pecking order but worrying about hawks and foxes. Diseases also spread more easily, and food shared less fairly.
Yet it’s for this that eggs could become another luxury, hurting the poor more than helping the hens.
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Australian trial of seaweed cow feed fails to achieve hoped-for methane cuts
One of the world’s longest commercial trials of a seaweed supplement that the global meat industry hopes could slash methane from beef cattle has recorded much lower reductions in the potent greenhouse gas than previous studies.
Putting the supplement into the diets of 40 wagyu cattle in an Australian feedlot for 300 days cut the methane they produced by 28%.
The supplement was derived from the red seaweed species Asparagopsis, which has been widely promoted as being able to cut methane by more than 80%, with some experiments suggesting reductions as high as 96%.
Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, methane from burping cattle – known as enteric emissions – releases about 2.1bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, compared with the 37.5bn tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
But because methane is about 80 times more potent than CO2 at warming the planet over a 20-year period, cutting methane is seen as a way to slow global heating faster.
The trial, reported by the red meat industry’s marketing and research group Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), also found animals given the supplement ate less food and weighed 15kg less by the time they were sent for slaughter.
Dr Fran Cowley, a livestock scientist at the University of New England who led the trial, said it was the longest run so far using the red seaweed.
She said more research was needed to understand why the wagyu in the trial had not delivered the same level of emissions reductions as other experiments.
One factor could be the way the methane was measured in the trial, which used an open-air system in a feedlot compared with animals measured in dedicated indoor chambers.
But the trial report noted that other experiments over shorter timeframes using the same open-air measurement technique had recorded higher methane reductions.
“This was the biggest and longest trial so far and [the supplement] has not performed to the levels seen in the headlines people might have picked up. But that doesn’t mean it can’t,” Cowley said.
Cowley said she thought cuts of 90% “in the real world” were possible but there would also be economic factors that commercial producers would have to take, such as factoring in the cost of the supplement against the market benefits of methane reductions.
The seaweed was mixed in canola oil and added to the animals’ feed. In this trial it was given to the animals at slightly lower concentrations than other experiments that showed much higher methane reductions.
Cowley said it was also not clear why the animals on the supplement ate less food and put on weight more slowly.
Accounting for the extra 35 days the animals would have taken to reach the same weight would have theoretically meant the emissions savings were cut from 28% to 19% as they would have been alive for longer, all the time emitting methane.
Wagyu is considered a higher-end and more expensive beef. The trial found the seaweed supplement had no effect on the meat’s properties, including flavour.
Dr Rob Kinley is a pioneer of the Asparagopsis supplement and the chief scientist at FutureFeed – the Australian company that holds the intellectual property for its use globally as a livestock feed supplement.
He said it was not surprising the trial had seen lower results given the differences across breeds, measuring techniques, diets of the animals and the amount of supplement given to the animals.
But Kinley said it should be celebrated that the supplement was able to cut methane over such a long period and is confident other trials would deliver far higher reductions.
“The golden lining is even though it was just under 30% emissions reduction, it stayed that way for 275 days – it hardly faltered at all and I was impressed by that,” he said.
The Australian government funds a $29m research program to test different methane-reducing livestock supplements, including red seaweed.
The latest trial was financially backed by the country’s biggest beef producer, the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), which helped run the trial and provided the animals.
The AACo chief executive, David Harris, said the company had anticipated bigger methane cuts but “reducing emissions by almost 30% is still significant”.
“There is no silver bullet to eliminating enteric methane emissions, but we’ll keep trying and we’ll discover how to make it work in our environment,” he said. “The important thing is that we are determined to get there.”
Most trials of methane-reducing supplements report emissions reductions only while animals are in the feedlot. Only 12%-15% of AACo’s emissions occur while the animals are in a feedlot.
An MLA spokesperson said: “Each time a new research project concludes, it places another piece into the puzzle, helping us understand the various products that might incorporate Asparagopsis and also helps us to understand further questions that need to be answered.”
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12 July, 2023
Climate change threatens to cause 'synchronised harvest failures' across the globe, with implications for Australia's food security
What rubbish! Crops are positively influenced both by warming and high levels of CO2. Global warming would produce MORE food worldwide
New research shows scientists have underestimated the climate risk to agriculture and global food production. Blind spots in climate models meant “high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards” were ignored. But now that the threat of “synchronised harvest failures” has been revealed, we cannot ignore the prospect of global famine.
Climate change models for North America and Europe had previously suggested global warming would increase crop yields in the short term. Those regional increases were expected to buffer losses elsewhere in global food supply.
But new evidence suggests climate-related changes to fast flowing winds in the upper atmosphere (the jet stream) could trigger simultaneous extreme weather events in multiple locations, with serious implications for global food security.
I have been examining opportunities to manage agricultural risk for 25 years. Much of that work involves learning how agricultural systems can be made more resilient, not only to climate change but to all shocks. This involves understanding the latest science as well as working with farmers and decision-makers to make appropriate adjustments. As the evidence on climate risk mounts, it’s clear Australia must urgently adapt and rethink our approach to global trade and food security.
Building resilience to shocks
Unfortunately, the global food system is not resilient to shocks at the moment. Only a few countries such as Australia, the US, Canada, Russia and those in the European Union produce large food surpluses for international trade. Many other countries are dependent on imports for food security.
So, if production declines rapidly and simultaneously across big exporting countries, supply will decrease and prices will increase. Many more people will struggle to afford food.
The prospect of such synchronised harvest failures across major crop-producing regions emerges during northern hemisphere summers featuring “meandering” jet streams. When the path of these fast flowing winds in the upper atmosphere shifts in a certain way, the likelihood of extreme events such as droughts or floods increases.
The researchers studied five key crop regions that account for a large part of global maize and wheat production. They compared historical events and weather to modelling. Yield losses were mostly underestimated in standard climate models, exposing “high-impact blind spots”. They conclude that their research “manifests the urgency of rapid emission reductions, lest climate extremes and their complex interactions […] become unmanageable”.
Free trade or food sovereignty
Australia has been a big advocate for free trade, reducing barriers to trade such as tariffs and quotas. But the new research revealing the climate risk to food security should trigger a change in policy.
We have already experienced the limitations of an over-reliance on trade to access food. The system has wobbled during the COVID pandemic and the global financial crisis of 2008, when millions of people were thrown back into food insecurity and poverty.
Encouraging free trade in agriculture has not significantly improved global food security. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation implemented the Agreement on Agriculture to liberalise agricultural trade. That agreement constrained the ability of national governments to protect their agricultural industries, and many more people have become food insecure since its introduction.
Australia needs to reconsider its short-term focus on the advantages of selling goods internationally. Conceptualising food more as a human right than a commodity might initiate such a shift.
The global poor do not have the buying power to influence market demand and increase food supply for their benefit. As they face hardship, many are becoming angry, sparking conflict and undermining food security further.
The long-term goal needs to be a global food system that will be resilient to shocks, including climate change. Trade policy may need to respond by allowing governments to prioritise sovereign food security in a world dominated by risk.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics was spruiking the nation’s food security. But it isn’t that simple. Even though there has been a lot of food available across Australia since early 2020, access has declined. Local food insecurity increased as the pandemic disrupted supply chains, with rising poverty on one hand and inflation on the other.
Climate change risks are likely to dwarf the impacts of COVID on Australian food systems.
Australian agriculture is highly exposed to climate change because rainfall and temperatures are so strongly influenced by El Niño. The drying phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation is expected to strengthen with climate change.
As atmospheric circulation changes, global weather patterns are shifting towards the poles. This is partly why early modelling of climate change in the cold-constrained agricultural systems of North America projected production would increase with global warming. But not anymore.
In Australia, modelling has rarely suggested the country would benefit from climate change. The Murray-Darling Basin, the heart of the nation’s food bowl, is expected to suffer warming, drying, reduced streamflow and more extreme events.
Australian agriculture is also highly sensitive to climate shocks because it is mostly rainfed – literally dependent on water that falls from the sky. Projected increases in droughts, evaporation and reduced average rainfall are going to challenge production systems.
Recent floods have also had shown how extreme weather events can have widespread impacts on agriculture and food prices. La Niña “rain bombs” (flash flooding from short duration, heavy rainfall events) damaged oranges and mandarin crops in 2022, downgrading produce.
To reduce the risk we need to adapt. Until recently, it was only rising land prices that enabled many Australian agribusinesses to remain viable for long periods of poor terms of trade.
Australian agriculture’s ability to withstand shocks relies on a range of structural factors that need more recognition, including:
our research and development capacity, which has been eroding with stagnant public investment
the sustainable management of key resources, such as the waters of the Murray-Darling and high-quality agricultural land, both of which we have struggled to protect
the resilience of farming communities, even though many are lacking key services and support.
Australia is fortunate to be one of the few countries that produces more food than it needs, but it has other responsibilities towards global food security. Policy will need to respond to the new understanding of how food security will be affected by climate change.
There are a number of ways Australia could respond to the new evidence. To drive that change, there needs to be a new level of awareness of the true extent of the risks to agriculture.
On a global scale, governments may need to rethink their strong advocacy for food trade liberalisation.
Locally, Australia will need to invest in adaptation to ensure that agriculture, and our food systems more broadly, are resilient to the gathering storm, because this one will be like nothing we have ever seen.
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‘You’re not allowed to just talk about women any more’
Honi Soit records that in June 1973 a small group of feminists and leftist activists kicked off a historic battle to offer students the first women’s studies course at the University of Sydney – and only the second in the country. Two PhD students, Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka, wanted to teach a course called Philosophical Aspects of Feminist Thought.
The university professorial board’s rejection of the course led to a month-long strike by staff and students, supported by the Builders Labourers Federation and other unions. The Philosophy Strike, as it came to be called, was the precursor to the arrival of intellectual feminism on campus.
Fifty years later, philosopher and feminist academic Holly Lawford-Smith has had a security guard stationed outside her tutorial room at the University of Melbourne to protect students from disruption during her feminism course. At times the guard also has escorted Lawford-Smith as she walks the short distance from the Old Arts building, across a path called the Professors Walk, back to her office in the Arts West building. Feminism is not so welcome these days on campus.
What has gone wrong? Before women had rights, imparting feminist thoughts may have been dangerous. But now? In 2023? This is nuts. Ferret around the wondrous English language all you want. There is no other word. Has feminist philosophy so lost its way that it no longer deserves a place on campus? Or is there something seriously wrong with those forces that have led to a security guard being posted outside a feminism tutorial room?
To answer these questions, we should start with what Lawford-Smith teaches. Her intensive course of 24 online lectures and 12 in-person tutorials for PHIL20046: Feminism covers topics one would expect: “Are women oppressed?” and “Patriarchy”, “The sex industry” and “Beauty norms and women’s revolution”. Given the security guard stationed outside Lawford-Smith’s tute room, maybe the trouble stems from lectures 21 and 22 on “sex/gender identity”.
Yet it would be remiss of an associate professor in political philosophy not to discuss in a feminism course the difference between sex – a woman’s biology – on the one hand, and gender, where a man self-identifies as a woman. And it would be entirely ridiculous to expect all academics to agree that gender identity is a sufficient reason to up-end feminist teaching about issues confronting women that are rooted in women’s biology.
In an interview with Inquirer this week, Lawford-Smith describes the first time she faced intense hostility for believing that a woman’s biology is central to the teaching of feminist philosophy.
In March 2019, the philosopher was interviewed for cultish literary and philosophy magazine 3:AM. After discussing mostly ethical and collective responsibilities about climate issues, she was asked about the trans issue and her gender-critical beliefs.
“It really has become toxic,” Lawford-Smith told interviewer Richard Marshall. “I’ve been surprised by the levels of vitriol that have been directed at me and other radical and gender-critical feminists within the profession. My stance is that a person can’t change sex (not even with sex reassignment surgery), that ‘gender identity’ has no bearing on sex, and that with very few exceptions gender identity should have no bearing on a person’s sex-based rights.”
“Some trans women inside the magazine complained to the editor to get the piece taken down,” Lawford-Smith tells Inquirer. Her interview was pulled. Marshall quit the magazine in protest against the censorship.
It started escalating from there. There were threats of protests and attempts to deplatform Lawford-Smith and another gender-critical academic at the University of Reading in Britain a few months later. “But they (university administrators) stood their ground and let the public event go ahead rather than give in to the protesters.”
Lawford-Smith mentions the Australian Association of Philosophy conference in Sydney in July 2019. Her conference abstract about women-only spaces led student organisations and other groups to organise protests. “I walked into this big conference, maybe 300 or 500 people go, and there was security everywhere and I was thinking, ‘Oh, did something happen?’ And then I realised that they were there for me,” Lawford-Smith says, matter of factly.
“I just remember it so vividly. My heart was racing. I felt like, ‘Oh god, everyone must be staring at me. I’ve caused all this fuss.’ ”
Though the online threats were extreme, protests didn’t eventuate that day. In June 2019, Lawford-Smith’s Twitter account was permanently suspended – it was pre-Elon Musk.
In September 2019, student activists tried to cancel her talk called Deplatforming is a Feminist Issue at RMIT.
“I’m sure the irony was lost on them,” she writes on her online Censorship timeline.
That the philosopher can fill five pages about censorship attempts against her is evidence of the level of abuse and hatred she has endured. “It felt really intense being a person who was hated that much by a small sector of society,” she says.
After a few more extreme online hate fests against her failed to translate into physical protests, Lawford-Smith says she realised that the numbers were small.
“That just took some experience to learn that the numbers (of trans activists) are puny,” she says.
I come back to why is there a security guard being posted outside a Melbourne Uni tute room to protect students who want to learn about Lawford-Smith’s feminism? The university, she says, has overreacted on many fronts, bestowing more power on a small group of trans extremists than they deserve.
Lawford-Smith is known as a “radical” feminist because her focus is on women and their biology. Radical? How times change. Her new book, Sex Matters: Essays in Gender-Critical Philosophy, was not an easy project, either.
Publication was halted by Oxford University Press last year. Matters were resolved and the book is out this week. Originally classified as a book for a general retail audience, it has been reclassified by OUP as an academic book.
Nothing is easy if you believe feminism is for women. Does that make Lawford-Smith a TERF? The term trans-exclusionary radical feminist is thrown around a lot these days.
“TERF is a slur. I’m trans women exclusionary from feminism,” Lawford-Smith explains. Not from society, note. From feminism. “It is indispensable to our form of feminism to have the concept of femaleness because women are the people to whom subordination, marginalisation has been done over centuries.”
Can’t feminism include trans women?
“It’s hard to see how it would be coherent. You could say we have this constituency of female people who, by their biology, have been mistreated over the centuries. Oh. And there are also trans women.”
But she says these two groups – biological women and trans women – “have nothing in common; there’s not a shared constituency. There’s not much at all of an overlap between the groups.”
Lawford-Smith says including trans issues in feminism has changed the focus, away from issues facing women and feminist politics to those facing trans women who claim to be the most marginalised.
Is the trans movement trying to take over feminist politics?
“Absolutely. That’s my impression,” she says. “Somehow – and I can’t fully account for the hostility and aggression of it – but somehow you’re not allowed to just talk about women any more.
“There’s a sense now that feminism has kind of accomplished its goals and there isn’t really a problem any more. So why would you want to talk about women when you could be talking about trans people? The gender studies approach has assumed cultural dominance. That’s the big project that cares about everyone and everything. And it’s wrong to take the women’s studies approach, which is the approach that I’m taking.”
If issues facing women and trans women differ historically and intellectually, why not a separate university course for students who want to explore trans issues?
“I ask myself that question all the time.” Instead, “feminism is being devalued”, Lawford-Smith says.
This is not just an intellectual debate. It’s about women-only spaces, and sport, and our language where a woman’s essential biology is being erased. Tampons are for “people who menstruate”, breastfeeding has become “chest-feeding”, untethered from a woman’s biology, and new laws allow gender self-identification.
In short, modernity’s diversity- and-inclusion project is excluding large parts of what it means to be a woman, and necessarily undermining women’s rights, to accommodate a tiny group of biological men who identify, in gender terms, as women.
The irony of an inclusion movement excluding women and their biology is not lost on Lawford-Smith, let alone millions of people off-campus who wonder whether trans extremism has peaked.
Certainly, in some sports there is a reckoning with reality about male physiology up-ending an equal playing field. Business is not immune either, with the manufacturer of Bud Light beer in the US learning that tagging on to the trans issues was a dumb idea for business. Former Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon learned the hard way about overreaching on gender self-identification laws and what that meant for female prisons.
Meanwhile, in Britain last week, tax expert and feminist campaigner Maya Forstater was awarded more than £100,000 ($190,600) after she was discriminated against, losing her work contract, because she expressed her view that “male people are not women”.
Though there are signs of trans extremism causing the first major chink in the woke movement’s armour, academia is proving to be more obscurant.
Lawford-Smith says it drives her crazy that the university has had ample opportunity to see that this is not actually a sizeable threat yet they keep pandering. She points to policies that have turned university bathrooms into shared spaces.
“The policy has invited (into female-only bathrooms) any male who decides that he would prefer to use them,” she says. “This tiny proportion of trans students is prioritised over the interests that any female students of any religion or culture might have to having single-sex bathrooms.”
The university’s new LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Action Plan allows students to lodge grievances against course curriculum, putting Lawford-Smith’s course in the direct line of fire from trans activists. She notes that none of her students has complained about her course; complaints have come from students who have not done her course. But this could change, she says, if trans activists take her course simply to try to shut it down.
More broadly, the philosopher feminist is concerned that policies about the “safety and wellbeing” of students could be weaponised to stop important debates.
Whereas once it was about hurt feelings, the new battleground is over “wellbeing”. It’s easy to see how this equally slippery term could be exploited by trans activists to censor a feminism course that focuses on women and their biology.
Lawford-Smith, who has lodged a complaint against her employer for not protecting her from spurious attacks, is disappointed at the lack of support.
“I don’t think the (university) leadership have shown that they understand that you cannot serve two masters,” she says. “They constantly make statements that they’re trying to balance academic freedom against diversity and inclusion. I just think that’s not true.
“These two objectives pull in really different directions.”
The contemporary corporate diversity and inclusion mantra on campus of creating a safe place where everyone’s comfortable, where everyone feels celebrated, is not consistent with rigorously challenging orthodoxies, she says.
Some discussions that prise open our minds to new ideas may be uncomfortable and potentially even distressing.
“A lot of students today just uncritically swallow gender identity ideology and don’t see any kind of conflict with feminism. I can perfectly imagine going into a first-year subject and trying to teach something slightly critical about reifying gender as identity and having most of the class against me and think I’m transphobic.
“We want to be able to challenge orthodoxies. That’s the really important thing. If there’s something where that’s just what we progressives do now, you want to be able to challenge that and make sure it’s a view held for good reason.
“How do you gain new knowledge? How do you overthrow old paradigms? How do you really pursue the truth at all costs and also keep everyone really comfortable?”
We have no law of physics to help a cultural pendulum settle somewhere more sensible. Only a healthy marketplace of ideas can do that. And that requires people such as Lawford-Smith to keep teaching what is now deemed “radical” feminism.
But back to that security guard. Is there room for feminism on campus? The philosopher pauses. She’s not sure.
“It seems nuts if the answer is no, right? It’s absolutely nuts.”
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Long march of the Marxists
Instead of 'I think therefore I am', the credo is ‘I feel therefore I’m right’
‘The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,’ wrote L P Hartley. What schools and universities teach and don’t teach about Western civilisation and Australia’s development as a nation illustrates the truth of Hartley’s observation.
Remember when government schools had a picture of the Queen in the foyer outside the principal’s office, and Monday morning assembly began with raising the flag and taking the oath of allegiance: ‘I love God and my country, I will honour the flag, I will serve the Queen and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.’
The history curriculum adopted a grand narrative centred on Western civilisation, starting in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving on to Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia from the time of the First Fleet. Students were taught to acknowledge the debt owed to a Westminster government and a common law system inherited from the United Kingdom.
Fast forward, and it’s obvious how much has changed. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ has replaced ‘God Save the Queen’, and ‘Welcome to Country’ has replaced the ‘Oath of Allegiance’. The national curriculum has jettisoned a balanced approach to history, civics, and citizenship. It embraces the ‘black armband’ view of history. The arrival of the First Fleet is described as an invasion leading to genocide. It ignores the arrival of the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that arrived with Captain Phillip and underpins our freedoms and liberty.
The way civics and citizenship is taught highlights the success of the cultural left in its long march through the institutions. Students learn that: ‘Citizenship means different things to people at different times depending on personal perspectives, their social situation, and where they live’. Based on postmodern relativism, they are taught citizenship involves multiple perspectives that ‘reflect personal, social, spatial and temporal dimensions of citizenship’.
Instead of acknowledging our British heritage, Australia is described as a ‘secular democracy and pluralist, multi-faith society (that) draws upon diverse cultural origins’. Forget about nation-building. The focus is on diversity and difference instead of promoting social cohesion and stability.
Under both Labor and Coalition governments in Canberra, the curriculum undermines a sense of pride in Australia. So, it’s hardly surprising that when millennials were asked in a poll commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs whether they would defend Australia if it was invaded, 38 per cent answered ‘No’.
Although the most recent iteration of the curriculum mentions Magna Carta, Westminster government, common law, and our constitutional monarchy, it is not compulsory to teach students about them. Indeed, it is more than likely that schools will continue to teach the ’Black armband’ view of the nation’s political and legal systems because the cultural left dominates tertiary education and teacher training.
In her chapter on universities in Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, Jennifer Oriel writes that universities have long since forsaken the concept of a liberal education defined by Matthew Arnold as the ‘best that has been thought and said’. Instead of the pursuit of what T S Eliot called wisdom and truth, universities are dominated by a rainbow alliance of nihilistic theories, including radical feminism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, post-colonialism, and LGBTQI+ gender and sexuality. In line with the Black Lives Matter movement and post-colonial theory, students are taught that Western societies are structurally racist, Eurocentric, and riven with white supremacism.
And it’s not just happening in Australian universities, across the Anglosphere, academics are purging curricula of ‘whiteness’, and even science and mathematics are not immune. In the UK, students and academics associate Enlightenment thinking with capitalism and imperialism. Such oppressive thinking is condemned as ‘the knowledge and standpoint of wealthy white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men occupying positions of objective superiority. Dismantling the white curriculum thus requires the dismantling of the multiple spheres of power that reproduce the dominant system of thought.’
The origins of Woke ideology and cancel culture can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s. In Celsius 7/7, British conservative Michael Gove argues this was a time when the Left concluded that the most effective way to overthrow capitalism was to take a long march through the institutions. Instead of inciting a revolution as occurred in Russia and China, leftists infiltrated and took control of schools, universities, and churches, and undermined the family. The cultural revolution of the 60s, epitomised by the student riots at the Sorbonne and the rise of postmodernism and deconstructionism, has also had a profound effect on education.
As a result of the dominance of cultural Marxism, we live in a world where identity politics prevails, and disadvantaged individuals and groups are presented as powerless victims of an oppressive, Eurocentric, capitalist system while Eurocentric, heteronormative men are guilty of being male, pale and stale. Rather than relying on reason and rationality, arguments are subjective and emotional, leading, in the end, to either epistemological suicide or violence. Instead of the Enlightenment’s focus on rationality and reason, generations of young people espouse the belief ‘I feel therefore I’m right’. Free and open discussion and debate are replaced by what Camille Paglia calls, ‘An ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance, and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.’
What is to be done?
Conservatives and those committed to rationality and reason must be willing to call out the true nature of cultural left ideology and have the courage to be true to their beliefs and convictions. Cultural warriors must reassert the importance of the Anglosphere and the debt we owe to the UK and Western civilisation that can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. As Augusto Zimmermann argues, ‘Our political and legal systems are underpinned by the New Testament and the admonition to ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’, and the importance of Christianity must be asserted. Like the cultural left, we must call on like-minded individuals and associations to be active in the public sphere and take a medium to long-term view of the struggle against nihilism and neo-Marxist ideology.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-long-march-of-the-left
**********************************************Anti-gay defrocked minister not unfairly dismissed, ‘not employee’
The Uniting Church as gone so far Left that it is now effectively post-Christian
A defrocked church minister has failed in his bid to claim protection for unfair dismissal under employment laws after he was sacked for his anti same-sex marriage views, when members of his congregation dobbed on him to the church hierarchy.
Reverend Hedley Wycliff Atunasia Fihaki applied to the Fair Work Commission for unfair dismissal after he was defrocked by the Uniting Church of Australia, Queensland Synod.
It is the second time he has been sacked by the church then mounted a legal challenge against the Queensland synod’s decision to dismiss him, having taken action 11 years ago when he was sacked from the Emmanuel Church in Cairns.
According to the decision handed down by Commissioner Paula Spencer on July 7, Rev Fihaki is barred from claiming protection from unfair dismissal because he is “not an employee” under the Fair Work Act.
“The Letter of Call cannot be construed as an employment contract,” she said of his agreement to a May 2013 letter of call for congregational placement.
“I find that Reverend Fihaki is not an employee or an independent contractor and is in a separate category of spiritual or covenantal relationship,” Commissioner Spencer ruled.
She also ruled that even if Rev Fihaki was determined to be an employee of the Uniting Church “a valid reason … existed for the dismissal.”
Rev Fihaki was sacked from his role as a Minister at Mooloolaba Christian Church and lost his ministerial credentials after he “publicly departed from and significantly recanted the teachings of the Uniting Church of Australia in his statements to the media”, the FWC heard.
He made a number of statements to and on both mainstream and social media between January 2019 and August 2021, and his views were contrary to the church’s position permitting same-sex marriage under certain circumstances, the FWC heard.
His congregation made “multiple complaints” to the church synod committees about his anti same-sex comments which “significantly recanted the teachings of the UCA in his statements to the media”, and the synod committee “made out” 23 breaches of the church’s code of ethics.
Rev Fihaki “did not refute that he made those statements as part of the disciplinary investigation undertaken by the” church.
One of the complaints was about his conduct at a Sunnybank Uniting Church Council meeting on December 22, 2020, and a formal complaint to the church hierarchy was made on January 11, 2021.
Rev Fihaki has been minister at the Mooloolaba Christian Church since 2013, and this church was dissolved on March 18 this year by a regional committee of the church due to their opposition to same-sex marriage.
A day later, he became pastor of the church congregation rebranded as Faith Church (Sunshine Coast) Limited.
Rev Fihaki holds the position of national chair of a breakaway organisation called the Assembly of Confessing Congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia, which is not a recognised council within the church.
Rev Fihaki unsuccessfully argued he should be regarded as a church employee under the Fair Work Act because he is paid at a rate of $28.32 per hour for work, he gets a monthly pay slip from the church, and receives superannuation and holiday and housing allowances and that the government declared “religious practitioners” as ‘employees’ so they could get JobKeeper payments during the pandemic.
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11 July, 2023
While Australian banks refuse most scam victims refunds, the UK is making them mandatory
This is probably going to happen in some form but there will be downsides to it. Money transfer these days is pretty instantaneous, which is a long way from the old practice of requiring a 3 day wait before funds become available to the transferee. It would be an easy way for banks to protect themselves to bring back such waits universally, which could be a serious inconvenience to many payees
The United Kingdom will force banks to compensate scam victims under a world-first scheme that kicks off next year — and Australia could follow suit.
New laws in the UK represent a bold experiment to see if making the banking industry liable will drive down enormous losses, by incentivising banks to invest in detection and prevention.
In Australia, there has been strong resistance from the banking sector to compensate scam victims despite losses reaching a record of more than $3 billion last year.
But Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones today gave his strongest indication yet that Australia may bring in similar laws.
"[We're] definitely going to lift the bar and we're definitely going to ensure the banks are accountable for much more," he told ABC Radio Brisbane.
"When you look at what the UK does, we'll probably look at something which travels in the same direction."
Chris Hemsley, from the regulator behind the change in the UK, said it was needed to better protect people from serious harm and give them confidence in the financial system.
"What we're trying to do here is to design this fraud out of the system," said Mr Hemsley, the managing director of the UK's Payment Systems Regulator (PSR).
"Otherwise, in the longer term, it will start to undermine all the things that we actually rely on our payment systems to do."
Do you know more about how banks detect and prevent scams? Contact [email protected]
Under the UK scheme, customers will be paid back within five days. They will only be knocked back if they have acted fraudulently or with gross negligence.
British bank gets ahead of laws, sees fraud fall
Some banks support the move, including TSB Bank, which has already adopted similar measures.
About four years ago, TSB started reimbursing almost all customers who fell victim to scams, including clients who were tricked into making payments.
The bank has seen a reduction in fraud, despite refunding 97 per cent of fraud claims since the scheme began, TSB's fraud prevention director Paul Davis said.
"I've seen firsthand the incentive it places on us to stop fraud happening, because when it does happen, the cost sits directly with TSB," he said.
"Our share of losses is well below what we would expect for a bank of our size, and I'm really confident that when the payments regulator mandates this action across the industry, other firms will see exactly the same things that we've seen."
Mr Davis said the bank had also banned its customers from sending money to cryptocurrency exchanges after finding one in five such transactions were later reported as fraud.
"It's quite an unprecedented decision … but we couldn't walk past that fraud rate and we couldn't overlook the fact that because of our refund guarantee, we'd be on the hook for reimbursing all those customers," he said.
Australian laws are 'weak', advocates argue
Australia's main financial industry group, the Australian Banking Association, has argued against reimbursing scam victims, saying it would create a "honeypot" effect and entice criminals to target Australians more often.
The big four banks reimburse less than 5 per cent of scam victims, according a recent report.
Mr Hemsley said the ABA recently met with the UK regulator and discussed the UK's decision to reimburse fraud victims.
"I think we had a conversation with them about a whole range of topics, but of course we did talk to them a lot about our approach to fraud, just to share what we're doing and why, and explaining how we're implementing that process," he said.
The ABA said: "The key takeaway from discussions with UK stakeholders was that a mandatory reimbursement model on banks alone does not create the most effective incentives for all organisations to work together to disrupt scams."
Scam victims and consumer groups have seized on the UK move, arguing Australia should immediately look to adopt a similar reimbursement scheme.
"I think there's been a market failure in Australia," the Consumer Action Law Centre's acting chief executive Tania Clarke said.
"The laws are weak and it's time for the government to actually step in and introduce the tough new codes so that we can actually get some real action in Australia."
'They've done nothing wrong'
Just like in Australia, scams are fleecing more people in the UK out of massive amounts of money, which is what prompted this new approach.
Last year, there were more than 200,000 reported cases for what the UK calls "push payment fraud" — which is when a fraudster tricks someone into sending a payment to an account outside their control — with losses totalling 485 million pounds ($930 million).
These figures represent an increase of 6 per cent in the number of victims from 2021, though the amount of money lost actually went down by 17 per cent.
UK banks WILL NOT have to pay if:
The customer has acted fraudulently
The customer has acted with gross negligence
The transaction involved cryptocurrency and international payments
UK banks WILL have to pay if:
The customer was tricked into transferring money
The customer clicked on a fake advertisement on social media
The customer was phished or hacked despite precautions
The customer was groomed over time (ie romance scams)
In Australia, if a customer transfers funds to the wrong account, the bank that sent the money is largely responsible for dealing with the complaint, rather than the bank that received it.
They also have no obligation to repay scam victims.
Under the new UK laws, both the sending and receiving bank will be responsible for repaying half the loss each.
Mr Hemsley said the bank whose customer transferred the money out had a responsibility to protect that person.
"They know more about their customer and have a better chance of spotting whether that transaction is unusual for that customer," he said.
On the other side, the bank which received the funds – and may have allowed scammers to open or misuse an account with them — must also take some responsibility, he said.
Making the receiving bank responsible for losses is part of the regulator's attempt to crack down on "money mule" accounts, which are used to transfer illegally-acquired funds through the system and out of the reach of law enforcement.
How 'money mules' dominate scams
Money mule accounts are used in the majority of scams reported to the consumer watchdog. The ABC talked to a victim who lost $300,000.
"Have they done the right checks? Have they checked that this business [opening an account] is a legitimate business?" Mr Hemsley said.
"By creating incentive on both sides of [a scam transaction], it gives both of the firms an incentive to actually prevent these frauds in the first place."
There are still contentious issues to sort out. One of the most pressing is the maximum amount a person can be refunded.
'They're all on board' in the UK
Consumer groups say Australia is lagging behind the UK, and the federal government agrees.
Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones said a tough new code of practice for banks was being developed, with public consultation to begin soon.
He said he expected the code would make compensation payable to victims when banks did not meet their obligations.
The upcoming changes in the UK follow other measures introduced to try and tackle scams.
A voluntary reimbursement model was introduced in 2019. Last year, it resulted in banks paying back about 66 per cent of losses to scam victims.
The regulator argues that has driven change, pointing to UK building society Nationwide's unique scam checker service where customers who are uncertain about a payment can check it with a staff member before making it.
The widespread adoption of confirmation of payee, where customers can use a name-checking service before sending out money, has also helped reduce misdirected payments and some scams.
However, some in the banking sector do have reservations with the new scheme, warning of negative consequences.
In particular, some believe more customers should be excluded from reimbursement because gross negligence is too high a bar and more caution should be required.
And there are fears scams could increase as customers take less care and make the UK a greater target for criminals.
Institutions are also worried about being forced to slow down many types of legitimate payments, which would lead to widespread frustration.
Finally, some said the new costs could lead to some firms leaving the UK.
But Paul Davis from TSB disagreed with many of those concerns.
"There's worries about fraudulent claims being raised by their customers," he said.
"But all I can say is that from our experience, we've not seen those things and the fraud refund guarantee that we've offered has been incredibly positive, both for our customers in terms of giving them protection and it's the right thing for our business."
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Is Australia taking a different path to US on free speech?
Whether the US court ruling survives remains to be seen: the Biden administration has appealed amid widespread indignation – based on its censorship-industrial complex – that a court has dared stop the government from “keeping people safe”.
The outlook for free speech is even less certain in Australia, where the government is set on passing the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which can only be described as a shameful, Orwellian piece of legislation that would empower the government to censor just about anyone for anything.
It’s a step on the path towards the style of governance we see in China, where the Chinese Communist Party works hand-in-hand with social media platforms to silence views it doesn’t like and control “the narrative”.
Under pain of financial penalty, the bill would compel social media companies to remove any speech that caused “harm” to Australians’ “health”, to “the environment”, or any “economic or financial harm”. Of course, this also includes the usual prohibition of undefined “hate speech”. These definitions are ridiculously broad, giving the green light to censorship of posts critical of the government’s 2050 “net-zero” carbon emissions goals, for instance, or criticism of compulsory superannuation (which, ironically, is a cause of economic harm).
The collective shrug when it emerged in May that the Australian government had been urging Twitter and other social media platforms to take down posts it didn’t like during the pandemic – including those poking fun at Dan Andrews – foreshadows a worrying deterioration of our freedom.
At the very time when our population is arguable more educated than ever (at least on paper), governments have decided to take a greater role in limiting what we can say, read and hear.
The response to the pandemic, far from justifying such a shift, should highlight the absurdity of allowing governments the right to be arbiters of truth.
It’s naive to think the motivation for government censorship is genuine concern for people’s welfare. It’s more likely an ideological power grab from individuals who don’t like freedom of speech and yearn for a more powerful role for government in policing truth – especially now the technological tools have emerged to achieve information domination.
Even if it were the motivation, and even if censorship could “save lives”, it’s not worth it.
To quote Franklin again: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither.” Free speech is the bedrock of all other rights. Australia and the US appear to be parting ways on the role of race in public life, as evidenced by the looming voice proposal on the one hand and the US Supreme Court’s quashing of race-based affirmative action at universities in a landmark ruling last month.
We appear to be taking different tracks on free speech, too, which is more ominous: the government’s misinformation bill would also outlaw speech that “harms the integrity of government institutions”. We should resist this while we still can.
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UK, EU attempt to kill our major industry
Australia’s $4bn dairy industry shuddered on learning that Trade Minister Don Farrell had broken his holiday to travel to Europe to ‘save’ the European free trade negotiation and complete an Australian defence equipment export deal with Germany.
In such a euphoric environment, Australian dairy farmers could be easily classified as collateral damage in any EU-Australian trade deal.
Already the celebrations that the recently negotiated UK-Australia trade deal would deliver major gains for the Australian beef industry are being tempered by reality – perhaps in the light of the Australian unpopularity that arose out of the Lord’s test.
Australia does not export any significant quantities of cheese to Europe and the Europeans not only want to keep it that way, but seek to damage Australian dairy exports to other countries while lowering the productivity of the whole Australian dairy industry.
They have found a way to do it, and also have our beef industry in their sights.
Former trade minister Andrew Robb triggered trade deals around Asia, but he believed that the power of European and UK farmers was too great and that Australia that would never make inroads in that area and might, in the process, damage prospects of exporting agricultural products to other countries.
Australians find it hard to understand why Europeans don’t want to buy our low cost and efficiently produced agricultural products. Instead they prefer to subsidise their high cost farmers.
On the surface it might make no sense, but for UK and European residents this strategy evolved from historic experience.
In the 19th century the English set up a global low cost food sourcing network in the belief that its powerful navy could protect ships carrying food from Australia, India and other countries in the empire.
In the First World War, German submarines ravaged that supply chain and the British had to reignite their farming industry.
In the Second World War, the UK’s ability to grow food prevented starvation. Mainland Europe had not developed its food production sufficiently and starvation became widespread.
After the war the European farming lobby became very powerful with strong community support.
Accordingly, Andrew Robb has refused to take them on. When he stepped down and the Asian deals were completed, there remained in Canberra an entrenched public service free trade negotiating skills base who almost saw a European trade deal as akin to climbing Mt Everest.
Meanwhile, the Europeans have a much wider agenda than simply damaging Australian dairy and agriculture.
Step by step they are exporting the European regulatory system around the world. Any free trade deal with Australia will inevitably become part of that thrust.
In the 20th century migration boom many European farmers came to Australia to develop dairy and make cheeses using European names like feta, parmesan, haloumi and many others.
They also developed the Australian wine industry using the European names of grapes.
The great danger for Australia is that the negotiators will see the likely destruction of smaller enterprises making these cheeses as not all that important in the wider scheme.
But they have become a vital part of making the Australian dairy supply chain efficient.
The Australian industry is becoming widely respected in Asia and any attempt inflict blows on our manufacturing base so as to boost European dairy exports to Asia is not in the national interest.
But that’s just the start of the European regulation export campaign.
When it came to the UK free trade deal there was great celebrations in the beef industry when we secured an increased quota for Australian beef exports that would rise sharply over the coming decade.
Farmers saw a potential return to the glory days of exports to Britain.
Many countries, including China, do not want beef where hormones have been used to stimulate growth.
In our exports of beef to China we provide an industry declaration and testing system that involves farmers and meat processors.
The Europeans take that one step further and require every farm to be registered.
In the UK free trade agreement we did not complete the negotiation as to which system would be used and it’s no surprise that, to date, the British are using the European system.
The negotiations are proceeding.
Meanwhile, another European regulatory front is opening to hit non-European agriculture.
At this stage the details have not been hammered out but if agricultural products are grown in areas that were once forested they will be subject to restrictions.
Depending when the cut off point is declared large areas of Australian agriculture will be impacted.
We might find that this will creep into other trade deals we have done.
Australia’s problem is that we see free trade deals as boosting the areas of the Australian economy where we are very low-cost producers and we see ourselves is benefiting the world.
But other countries don’t always see it that way and we have to understand that Europeans have a much wider area of ambition.
I suspect Andrew Robb was right.
But meanwhile, the detail in any European free trade agreement becomes vital.
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Communistic workplace laws: Seeley
One of Australia’s major manufactures has launched a scathing attack on the Albanese government’s industrial reforms, warning the company would have to sack and rehire its casual workforce every three months to comply, dealing a “class war” death blow to productivity.
Claiming same job, same pay laws being drafted by Workplace Minister Tony Burke were “communistic”, the head of Seeley International, the largest airconditioner manufacturer in the country, says it had received advice that companies that hired seasonal and casual workforces would be forced to lay off staff or become unviable.
The government has yet to release its proposed draft laws, claiming it was still consulting. But it has flagged exemptions for labour hire, short-term and seasonal work to be defined as three months or less. Workers employed beyond that would need to be paid on a full-time basis.
Jon Seeley, managing director of Seeley International, said his company would be forced to sack its seasonal workforce after three months, and hire them again to be in compliance. He described the proposal from the government as “draconian” and a “fantasy of Chalmer-nomics”.
“We are one of the last remaining Australian airconditioning manufacturers, with a strong seasonal element to our business,” Mr Seeley told The Australian.
“We hire as many permanent positions as we can keep busy throughout the year, but there is always a significant requirement for additional workers during the summer and winter peaks.
“We have many casual staff who find this arrangement suits them perfectly, coming back year after year to work hard for three or four months, earning good wages including their 25 per cent casual loading, then heading off to do other things for the rest of the year. The advice we are receiving is that the draconian industrial relations changes being rammed through will force us to offer these team members permanent roles, with no leave loading, then sack them three months later.
“Everyone will be worse off – workers, employers and the economy more broadly.
“The only upside I can see is that the Labor government will have delivered on its commitment to militant unions, forcing the perverse worldview of the minority on to the 90 per cent of private sector workers who choose not to be union members.”
Mr Burke attacked Mr Seeley’s claims as “wildly misinformed”.
“These claims are wildly misinformed and have nothing to do with anything the government has put forward. But I suspect they already know that,” he said.
“I’m relieved that none of the reputable business organisations involved in the consultations have made any claims as breathlessly stupid as that one.”
Mr Seeley accused the government of being locked into a fictional “class warfare” worldview that portrayed employers as exploiters of workers. “These massive changes … run a sword through reward for effort and experience.
“The result of this communistic view of the workplace is the death of productivity. What is the incentive to work hard when your peers, no matter their experience, age or work ethic, get paid the same? Like the physical laws of gravity, the basic laws of economics cannot simply be “magic-ed away” by the fantasy of “Chalmer-nomics.”
The government’s IR proposal has also been criticised by the Minerals Council of Australia, Business Council of Australia, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Australian Petroleum & Exploration Association, Master Builders Australia, National Farmers Federation, Council of Small Business Organisations Australia and the Recruitment, Consulting and Staffing Association.
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10 July, 2023
"No" leaders slam ABC Indigenous ‘genocide’ comment
The "No" campaign’s Indigenous leaders have criticised comments made on the ABC’s flagship weekend politics program, Insiders, about “ongoing genocide” of Indigenous Australians.
Dana Morse, a federal politics reporter for the national broadcaster, made the comments on Sunday’s program, while speaking about the Indigenous voice to parliament and its proposed powers.
“But to speak to the issue of January 26, what are people protesting about on January 26?” she said. “They are protesting about the invasion, they are protesting about the genocide of Aboriginal people that is ongoing today.”
Opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Price called on the national broadcaster to “rein in their activist employees”.
“There is no genocide being perpetrated today, and comments saying there is have no place on public airwaves,” Senator Price said.
“I’ve called on the ABC previously to control their staff and ensure balanced and impartial voice commentary, but once again an ABC so-called reporter has been allowed to spew divisive and false information without being pulled up by the host.
“The No campaign has tried to work with the ABC to ensure balance. I personally have done six ABC appearances on TV and radio in less than a week, but their bias in this referendum is still on full display and the ABC bosses must do more to rein in their activist employees.”
Fellow No campaign leader Warren Mundine called the comments “rubbish”.
“There’s no genocide happening. In fact, the last 56 years since the ’67 referendum, the improvement for Aboriginal people and the opportunities and equality … is just something my parents and grandparents dreamt of,” he said.
“There’s no genocide happening today. And if she’s got evidence of that, then let her … point it out … they should call her in, because it’s just a whole pack of lies and nonsense.”
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Plastic surgeons call for age limit as young teenagers line up for ‘top surgery’
Leading surgeons are calling for the national medical regulator to step in to set “clear and specific guidelines” on gender-affirming surgery, including consideration of whether the age at which transgender adolescents are legally allowed to go under the knife should be raised to 18.
Australia is one of the most liberal countries in the world in sanctioning children under 18 to get double mastectomies, a practice that is rare but appears to be increasing despite only a handful of surgeons around the country being willing to perform such procedures.
The case of a 15-year old child in Queensland having “top surgery” has prompted Mark Ashton, a plastic surgery specialty elected counsellor to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and Melbourne University professor of surgery, to question the lack of regulations.
“There is no doubt gender affirming surgery is becoming significantly more mainstream surgery, with increasing demand, and the regulation hasn’t kept up,” said Professor Ashton, who serves on the Board of Training and the Council for the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons.
“I can’t think of any circumstances in which a 15-year-old person should be electively having a double mastectomy. This is irreversible and is major surgery.
“In my opinion, because of its permanency, the surgical procedure needs to be delayed, at least until the person is 18.”
The federal government’s national virtual public health information service Healthdirect says top surgery can be performed, with parental consent, on minors over the age of 16, but “some surgeons will provide surgery to younger people in very specific situations”.
The case of the 15-year-old, which The Australian has independently confirmed, is complex and unusual. The child, whose parents both supported the surgery despite the child identifying as transgender for only about a year, posted on social media describing how they had the surgery in a day hospital after one consultation with a psychiatrist who approved the procedure.
“Fifteen in my personal opinion is too young, unless you can clearly identify and clearly document a well-considered psychiatric and medical assessment and specific recommendation over a prolonged period of time,” Professor Ashton said
“As adults looking back on our youth, those ages of between 12 and 18 were accompanied by a whole series of emotional turmoil, self-reflection and-self doubt. This is permanent, irreversible surgery that cannot be undone.
“I don’t believe there is adequate and due consideration in some of these cases as to whether this is a transient, emotional, psychological feeling, or is this indeed a permanent feeling, that is, the person truly is transgender.
“Any decision to embark on gender affirming surgery must be established over time, by a multidisciplinary team comprising a diversity of medical experts.
“It is really incumbent upon the federal health minister, state ministers and the national regulatory body, AHPRA, to ensure that these patients, our children, are protected from less scrupulous unethical practitioners who see transgender surgery as yet another opportunity to make money.
“We need clear and specific guidelines as to how the decision to proceed to gender affirming surgery is made, and by whom.”
Medical Board of Australia chairwoman Anne Tonkin said issues around gender affirming surgery were “complex and polarising”, especially when they involved children. “We are closely monitoring ongoing community discussion of these sensitive and complex issues,” she said. “As always, we will take our lead from the voice of the people, through parliament and legislation.”
Dr Tonkin said all doctors were bound by a medical practice code of conduct that makes explicit the standards of ethical and professional conduct expected of them.
Professor Ashton is one of three breast reconstruction surgeons to whom The Australian has spoken to confirm that as the medical transition of young people has grown more common in recent years, surgeons are now being approached by people who want to reverse surgical procedures. This appears to be a manifestation of the concerns of cautious doctors such as those at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead’s gender clinic that a proportion of teenagers who present wanting to transition gender will later desist or detransition.
Trans advocates, who claim double mastectomies on minors almost never happen, say detransition rates are minuscule.
“If you’re banning Botox or fillers fundraisings but saying gender reassignment surgeries are OK, I think we’ve got a problem,” said one surgeon.
“I would certainly think this incredibly invasive and life-changing surgery needs to have decisions made by adults. This surgery is very disfiguring, it’s irreversible and it needs to be put into that context – it’s a major, major, major change, and it shouldn’t be being offered to children.”
There is no public data on how many people are getting gender reassignment surgery, with double mastectomies being performed under the same Medicare item number as cancer surgery.
Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons president Nicola Dean said doctors in the field were pushing for a separate Medicare item number for the procedure. Associate Professor Dean said the age issue for getting surgery was the subject of significant active debate around the world among plastic surgeons. “I think the real issue here is that there are many people in Australia with gender incongruence who are currently left outside of the healthcare system and who have difficulty accessing the care they need,” Professor Dean said.
“In medicine there are often complex factors to consider to decide when a patient has developed capacity to consent to procedures.
“I think it is wrong to use the very private matter of the medical treatment of a child as a vehicle for very public debate. In all areas of surgery, we come across cases where there are exceptional circumstances.”
Professor Dean said she agreed with Professor Ashton that evidence-based protocols of care were critically important.
“It is clear from clinical research, both in Australia and all around the world, that people with gender incongruence have a high risk of problems with mental health and gender dysphoria,” Professor Dean said.
“It is also clear from the literature that medical and surgical treatment can be very effective in improving the health of these individuals.
“Not everyone with gender incongruence needs medical treatment. But some do. Some countries have very developed protocols of care, whereas Australia’s are still developing.
“The WPATH guidelines are a good starting point, but more Australia-specific protocols on surgical treatment will evolve and be helpful for health professionals and patients. It is important that these are patient-centred and based on the medical evidence.
“I think what is important is that for people to gain a diagnosis of gender incongruence, it has to be marked and persistent. There are clear diagnostic criteria.”
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Recent housing investors face negative cash flow challenge
More than four in five investors in Sydney and Melbourne who bought property since the start of the pandemic are negatively geared as a result of soaring interest rates and rent rises being unable to cover repayment costs.
Data from PropTrack for The Australian reveals 66.4 per cent of recent investors nationally are operating with negative cashflows.
Senior economist at the data firm Paul Ryan said the ultra-low rates on offer through the pandemic created an unusual predicament, allowing some investors to be cashflow positive from day one of ownership.
PropTrack analysed homes that changed hands between February 2020 and June 2023 that were then listed on rental markets via Realestate.com.au and assumed they were purchased with a standard 20 per cent deposit.
The highest rates of negative gearing were in Sydney and Melbourne, where 87.5 per cent and 83.3 per cent of rental properties respectively required out-of-pocket spending to cover costs.
Instances were also high in Tasmania and Canberra, with negative cashflow affecting 73.7 per cent and 67.1 per cent of rentals
“We’re always likely to see more cases of negatively gearing at the moment (in Sydney and Melbourne) because prices are higher and rental yields are lower,” Mr Ryan said.
“The balance there has been more capital gains.”
Positive gearing was most prevalent in Darwin (34.1 per cent) and Perth (39.6 per cent), while some three in five properties were in negative positions in Brisbane (60.3 per cent) and in Adelaide (58.7 per cent).
The founder of investor buyers agency Propertyology, Simon Pressley, estimates the average investor with a property in one of Australia’s two largest cities will be out of pocket by $40,000 each year.
It’s not just rates that have gone up, he said, but other typical costs, such as property management fees, council rates, repairs, maintenance and insurance.
“All the commentary today has been around the tenant not being able to afford rising rent, and then the blame has been pointed at the people charging the rent,” Mr Pressley said
“The facts are the facts – for the people providing the accommodation, expenses have blown out by a heap more than for the person living in the accommodation.”
While repayments are rising on the back of a dozen rate rises, the number of investors selling their properties has begun to show signs of slowing from Covid-highs.
The value of investor lending rose through May but still sits well below 2022 peaks in activity.
Mr Pressley said he believed investors needed greater rate stability to re-enter the market in larger numbers.
“If we get a sustained period of time of interest rates being left on hold, over time you gain confidence,” he said.
“It says from a cash flow point of view, I can budget now with a greater degree of confidence.”
Mr Ryan also highlighted the political war of which investors had become the centre, with the looming threat of rental freezes and caps.
“I think that uncertainty will weigh on investor activity,” he said.
For the first time in a decade, renters are better off than homeowners, according to data from Investment Bank Jarden, with home loan repayments doubling from 24 per cent to 44 per cent as a portion of net income.
PropTrack expects the trajectory of rental growth to slow in the short to medium term.
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Employers fight ‘new wave’ of industrial relations war
New laws enshrining rights for union delegates and enhancing the ability of unions to conduct snap inspections of pay records are being proposed by the Albanese government, sparking employer claims that companies will be forced to fund a “new wave of industrial activism”.
The Australian can reveal the two proposals, which employers argue exceed Labor’s electoral mandate, were disclosed during confidential briefings given to employers and unions by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations about the government’s proposed second wave of workplace changes.
While attendees signed non-disclosure agreements preventing them from commenting on the proposals, The Australian has confirmed the government wants to legislate to advance the rights of union delegates and clarify the ability of unionists to conduct payroll inspections without notice where they suspect workers have been underpaid.
Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said employers would be “outraged” if the government proposal resulted in companies having to provide additional paid leave or other entitlements to union delegates, given that just 8 per cent of private sector workers were now union members.
Australian Resources and Energy Employer Association chief executive Steve Knott accused the government of seeking to turn union delegates into union officials, and engaging in a “ruse to have employers saddle the cost for a new wave of industrial activism”.
In a previously unreported address last week to the Health Services Union, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke said the government was looking at “how we can make sure that we advance the rights of delegates at the workplace”.
“We don’t put laws through the parliament for the thrill of seeing words on a page,” Mr Burke, a one-time delegate with the shop assistants union, said.
“We put them through because we want to have an impact on people’s lives, and we know, I know from my days as an organiser as well, and my days as a union delegate … I know how many issues just go through to the keeper.
“You can’t expect somebody who’s flat out with their personal life and keeping their head above water with their job to also be an expert on all their workplace rights.
“It’s never going to happen.
“But to have people at a workplace who are trained, who have the rights to be able to look at, to be able to talk to you and let you know what your rights are, those concepts aren’t some, you know, radical agenda or anything like that, it’s about making sure that the laws we pass reach every workplace in Australia. So you’ll hear more, you will hear me saying more about that.”
“Because they believe the only good job is a job More
Workers who are union members will usually be represented at the workplace by a colleague who is a union delegate.
The delegate is an employee of the company and not a full-time paid official of the union.
Mr Knott said employers “should not have to fund and facilitate de facto union officials among their workforces”.
Under the changes, the government is proposing to amend the Fair Work Act to provide delegates with a general protection from employers who refuse to deal with them, mislead them or hinder or obstruct the exercise of their rights as a delegate.
A mandatory term would be included in awards or enterprise agreements giving effect to primary and ancillary delegates’ rights, and the Fair Work Commission would make the model term for enterprise agreements.
The proposed primary rights include representing the industrial interests of members, and potential members, to the employer, and representing one or more union members, and potential members, in disputes with their employer.
The proposed ancillary rights include reasonable access to communicate with members and potential members about matters of industrial concern, workplace facilities, paid time and training as well as delegates having paid time to undertake these functions.
The government also wants to amend the Fair Work Act to clarify the ability for a right of entry permit holder to enter a workplace to investigate suspected wage underpayments without the required 24-hour notice.
If satisfied a contravention involves wage under-payments, the Fair Work Commission will be required to issue an exemption certificate to a permit holder that allows them to enter premises without 24 hours’ notice, and conducting the discussions in a room or area that a permit holder considers appropriate.
Workplace lawyers questioned the need for the amendment, saying existing provisions allowed for entry without notice when certain conditions were met.
In its briefing to employers and unions, the department said the change to enable permit holders to exercise entry rights without providing 24 hours’ notice would reduce the capacity for the “concealment of underpayments”.
Under the amendment, the commission must be satisfied there was a reasonable prospect of wage underpayments before grating the application.
Mr Burke declined to comment on the proposals when approached by The Australian. They will be subject to further consultation ahead of the government introducing the second wave legislation in September.
In a statement on Sunday, the ACTU said the “government was elected with a mandate to improve and update the work laws in light of a decade of wage suppression”.
“It is great that we have a government that cares about supporting working people in the face of a cost-of-living crisis,” an ACTU spokesman said
“We have advocated to modernise our work laws to stop wage theft, to improve protections for casual and insecure workers and to close loopholes that allow big companies to drive down wages using outsourcing.”
Mr Willox said “any changes to require employers to provide additional pay for the performance of union training or activities would be viewed as a shameless and shockingly inappropriate gift to the unions”.
“The government never foreshadowed this as part of their pre-election commitments and shouldn’t seek to now slip it through among a wave of other radical changes to workplace laws,” he said.
Mr Willox said many enterprise agreements already provided union delegates with various rights at workplace levels.
Mr Knott said workplaces in the resources sector were not in a position to respond to unnotified union right of entry requests.
“These are major industrial sites,” he said. “Visitors can’t just roam around the site; 24 hours’ notice works well and helps with right of entry being facilitated in an orderly fashion.
“Records will still be there when union officials arrive after appropriate notification.”
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9 July, 2023
ICAC got it wrong on Gladys: NOT corrupt
Read what she said in full:
The responses to ICAC’s finding of ‘serious corrupt conduct’ against former NSW Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian seem to be binary: some ridicule ICAC, others deride Gladys. But in all the argy-bargy, there is one aspect that is not addressed in the aftermath of the ICAC’s televised delivery (why?) of its report, gestated for over 18 months. It’s the abject ignorance of ICAC of the political process, the context in which Berejiklian operated. Counsel assisting was out of his depth, which can be seen in the following extract to contribute to what is commonly known as barking up the wrong tree.
The transcript below is reproduced from the ICAC records.
Mr Scott Robertson: Just have a look on the second thing attributed to you after the second dash. It says, ‘I’ve got you now, got you the 170 million in five minutes.’ Do you see that there?
Ms Gladys Berejiklian: Yep, ah hmm.
Robertson: Now, having been refreshed with at least some of the context, the fact that a reference to the Wagga Wagga Base Hospital Stage 3 was in the preceding budget papers before this conversation with Mr Maguire, are you able to assist as to what you were saying when you were telling Mr Maguire on 16 May, 2018, that you had got him $170 million in five minutes?
Berejiklian: I can only make this assumption and that is that the money was already allocated in the budget but the issue is that members of parliament like to see it as a separate line item because it was a separate stage. He needs to explain to his community that that particular stage was being funded. So the money was already there. It’s how it’s presented. And many colleagues often have those issues where a commitment is made or money is allocated and it’s put up as a general line item, but they want to be able to explain to their communities that the allocation is actually there. So the money had already been agreed to by government, it had gone through the proper process, the relevant minister would have had to have made that recommendation, and my assumption would have been that it’s how it was presented in the budget papers so that any member, including him was able to explain to his community that the Stage 3 funding had commenced.
And in fact I see from the budget paper there, the end date was 2022 and often the allocations are less in the first instance and then the balance of the sums are, are heavier in the, towards the end of the project, when most of the capital works are undertaken.
So I see from there absolutely nothing unusual. If anything, I may have, and I have no recollection of this, spoken to the Treasurer to make sure that it was presented in a way in the budget where the local member was able to confirm to the community that the commitment was being made.
But as to the dollars, they were already in the budget. Nobody on this planet can get that amount of money overnight and I certainly would never have done that. I am a stickler for going through the processes, I am a stickler for making sure everything is done by the book and I would never have been able to pluck that money out of thin air in five minutes. That’s just absurd, absolutely absurd.
Robertson: So at least a possibility is that when you said to Mr Maguire that you had got him the $170 million in five minutes, what you in fact got him is not actual new money but a reference in the budget papers to money that had been committed in previous budget years. Is that right?
Berejiklian: That could very well have been the case, yeah.
Robertson: But do you at least agree that the intervention that you apparently engaged in on 16 May, 2018, getting $170 million in five minutes, perhaps simply getting it in the budget papers as opposed to getting new money, that’s not the kind of intervention that you would have made for any other member of parliament?
Berejiklian: That’s incorrect. It would have been. I’ve had many instances where members of parliament are upset because we’ve made a commitment and sometimes in some portfolios a minister, or the line item might be planning money and in that planning money there may be several projects that are bundled up in that and members get anxious when they can’t go back to their community and show the line item. So in subsequent years, and certainly when I was Treasurer, you often have a separate sheet of election commitments so that the general line items can be determined and demonstrated to the community. So, it, that’s a question of presentation and I would have absolutely done that for other colleagues, absolutely explained to them. In fact we even had supplements to the budget to satisfy colleagues’ concerns that if a commitment had been made but money hadn’t been spent yet, but the money had been allocated, that we made that transparent to the community. Of course I would have done that for other colleagues, in fact I have. And I’m very comfortable if you go and ask some of them
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/icac-got-it-wrong-on-gladys
**************************************************Whitehaven coal scores legal victory for expansion
Whitehaven Coal has scored a legal victory after a NSW court dismissed a legal challenge to the company’s plan to expand its Narrabri underground coal mine.
The energy group secured NSW independent Planning Commission permission in 2022 for the project that will extend Narrabri’s lifespan by 13 years to 2044, infuriating environmental advocates which had mounted an aggressive campaign against the project that they said would exacerbate climate change.
Opponents were able to block development albeit temporarily when Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, a community activist group, sought a judicial review of the IPC’s ruling as they sought to argue whether the commission gave sufficient credence to the impact of the expansion on the climate.
In a victory for Whitehaven, however, a NSW court on Wednesday dismissed the challenge from Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.
“Our consistent position has been that this legal claim was without merit. Comprehensive assessment and evaluation of the Narrabri Stage 3 Extension Project was undertaken by the IPC, including in relation to climate change related matters,” Whitehaven said in a statement.
“High quality thermal coal has an important role to play in providing energy security during the decarbonisation transition.”
Fiona Lee, a spokeswoman for the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, said the organisation was disappointed by the ruling.
“Sadly, this shows that planning decisions today are out of step with community expectations because approving high-emitting projects is exposing communities to more extreme impacts from climate change,” said Ms Lee.
“We believe it is unreasonable for planning authorities to approve projects with such a massive climate footprint at a time when greenhouse gas emissions must be rapidly reduced to limit the devastating impacts of global warming.”
While the ruling is a boost for Whitehaven, it does not completely clear all legal challenges to Narrabri.
Whitehaven still requires approval from the federal environment minister.
The Environment Council of Central Queensland Inc, a Green advocacy group, has challenged an assessment from environmental Minister Tanya Plibersek that the third stage expansion of Narrabri would not be a substantial cause of the physical effects of climate change on World Heritage properties and other matters of national environmental significance.
The challenge is expected to be heard in federal court in September.
Should Whitehaven overcome that challenge, Ms Plibersek would then be able to rule on whether to issue the federal green light.
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Housing crisis: $8b of Qld homes lost as developers pull the pin
BILLIONS of dollars worth of housing stock has been shelved or abandoned, as some of Queensland’s biggest developers declare they can not afford to build anything new in the next year.
State government red tape, construction union interference, and rising building and labour costs are among the factors forcing local developers to flee the market at a time when new stock is desperately needed.
New figures from property research firm PRD show 30 per cent or $8.3 billion worth of housing stock — units, townhouses, and houses — due to be built in Greater Brisbane this year has been deferred or abandoned.
Developers are also blaming the CFMMEU for interfering with construction on certain development sites across Brisbane.
In recent months, a group of up to 20 people have been blockading at a development site owned by Pradella in West End, wearing balaclavas and reportedly using intimidation tactics to try to block the company from using a non-unionised crane.
Construction is now underway on stage one of ‘The Lanes’, which is the final development within Pradella’s $1.3b Riverside West End project.
Association of Professional Builders co-founder Russ Stephens said union interference was adding to building costs and delays.
“This kind of behaviour applies to all major construction sites in Australia,” Mr Stephens said. “The smaller developments sit under the radar, but the unions are running the show. The Queensland Labor government has pulled back the powers to bring control and order to construction.
“The builder has to have a good relationship with the unions otherwise nothing would get done.”
Mr Stephens said some builders were deliberately avoiding taking on larger projects because they did not want to attract the attention of the CFMEU.
“It goes as far as organised crime basically running things,” Mr Stephens. “They’re controlling access to sites through thugs who use workplace health and safety to allow them access and we see a lot of builders not want to go near them.
“It’s adding to the cost of apartments for all of us — we’re all paying for it.”
Aria Property Group development director Michael Hurley said conditions had become so challenging, it was unlikely the developer would start any new projects in the next 12 months.
Mr Hurley said while construction costs had increased 60 to 80 per cent, it was also difficult to obtain builders and workers, with many walking off job sites to accept better pay rates at other projects.
“In the Tier 1 and Tier 2 space, it’s incredibly challenging to get a builder,” Mr Hurley said.
“Most are preferring to focus on government projects such as new hospitals, defence, Olympic and infrastructure works.”
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Why Dutton needs coal not renewables or nuclear
Yesterday, Opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to embrace nuclear power to secure a clean, cost-effective, consistent electricity supply.
Dutton is right to be concerned that the government’s policy of replacing coal-fired plants with renewables will end in a disastrous shortage of power.
Dutton’s proposal is to replace coal-fired plants with small modular reactors that are on the drawing board in the US, UK, and elsewhere. By locating the new nuclear reactors in existing coal-fired plants, they can tap into existing transmission lines.
There are a number of problems with this, but first, it is important to note that nuclear power is cheaper than renewables because this goes against conventional wisdom.
A branch of CSIRO regularly compiles cost estimates of different sources of power which spuriously claim wind and solar power are the cheapest sources of electricity. But wind and solar are only cheap for power that customers will take when it is produced and not when it is needed. That’s why although wind is the cheapest method of propelling ships, it has no role in commercial shipping due to its low density and irregularity.
Even on a superficial assessment, CSIRO’s estimates fall apart. If wind and solar were the cheapest forms of energy, there would be no need to subsidise them. Yet virtually all countries do subsidise them. In Australia, this is done using regulatory mechanisms like Renewable Energy Certificates, soft loans through the government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and government requirements for consumers to fund the additional transmission lines these intermittent, highly dispersed, and low-density sources of power required. That direct support is worth around $7 billion a year.
CSIRO also amplifies the costs of coal and gas-generated electricity by overstating their construction costs and understating their capacity factors, the hours per year they can operate. This criticism also applies to CSIRO’s estimates of nuclear costs.
As a highly dense source of energy, nuclear reactors can tap into existing transmission lines, whereas wind and solar need to be dispersed over vast areas and will require vast transmission grids to be constructed.
Renewables also need to be backed up by dispatchable power. In other words, you can save a massive amount of money by simply building dispatchable power sources and not building renewables at all.
Wind and solar also need to be replaced around three times as often as dispatchable sources of power such as coal, gas, or nuclear.
The problem with nuclear, then, is not in comparison with renewables but in comparison with coal. There is no doubt that conventional large-scale nuclear power plants are much more expensive than coal-fired plants.
For example, in China, conventional nuclear power costs more than twice as much as a coal-fired power plant, around $US2,800-3,500 per kilowatt for nuclear compared to $US1,000-2000 for a modern, efficient, and hence low emissions US coal plant. Sadly, even with swift regulatory approvals, the CFMEU factor would increase costs by 25 per cent in Australia.
Dutton is proposing to build fourth-generation, small modular nuclear reactors. Will these planned 200 MW reactors be less costly than conventional 1000 MW units? Estimates vary, and costs are speculative, but they will not be cheaper than coal, where, as in Australia, the fuel is located close to the power station.
The reality is that the cost of generating power depends to a great degree on the natural resource endowment of a country. Nuclear energy is relatively cheap in countries such as France or Sweden because neither has access to vast deposits of coal. In Australia, coal is far cheaper than nuclear because of our resource endowments,
The fact is that civilisation has advanced by using increasingly dense inputs of energy, allowing for progressively lower costs. Per cubic metre, petrol is one billion times denser than wind power. Uranium has 100,000 times the energy density of petrol. As a result, 60 years ago, nuclear fission and fusion were seen as the energy fuel of the future, but it hasn’t turned out that way.
Nuclear power supplies only nine per cent of global electricity, a little more than half its share of the 1990s. Coal and gas provide over 50 percent, down from 60 per cent two decades ago. Hydro provides 15 per cent. Wind and solar provide 12 per cent but have been growing rapidly only thanks to government subsidies.
So why has nuclear failed to fulfil its manifest destiny? Cost and political vilification are both important factors. Political vilification remains in place notwithstanding nuclear’s enviable safety record, which in spite of Chernobyl, has made it the safest source of power in the world. As regards cost, it is the very high safety requirements rather than the price of uranium that makes nuclear power expensive.
Dutton’s plan has other problems. He envisages using small modular reactors as a backup for a system dominated by intermittent wind and solar power but nuclear power, like coal, with its high capital costs and low operating costs, is not well suited to that ancillary role.
Finally, the adoption of nuclear under the terms Dutton proposes raises the whlte flag to the spreaders of climate alarmism. It is based on the specious claim that burning fossil fuels is causing adverse climate change. And caving into the anti-coal and gas lobby sacrifices Australia’s priceless comparative advantage with its fabulous coal and gas resources.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/why-dutton-needs-coal-not-renewables-or-nuclear/
************************************7 July, 2023
Old-school skills for new teachers as education ministers take control
Good if it happens
Ministers from every state and territory have signed off on 14 old-school reforms, championed by federal Education Minister Jason Clare, to ensure that new teachers are taught how to be “confident and capable’’ in classrooms.
Imposing a tight six-month deadline, ministers agreed to develop practical teaching guidelines and amend accreditation standards for university teaching degrees by the end of this year.
From 2025, pre-service teachers will be banned from graduating until they have mastered the core teaching skills mandated by education ministers.
A new watchdog for teaching standards will check that universities have provided practical training for all graduates to teach reading and mathematics, regardless of whether they plan to teach in primary or high school.
Mr Clare said the reforms would make new teachers “better prepared from day one’’.
“A lot of teachers tell me they did not feel like they were prepared for the classroom when they finished university,’’ he said after his state and federal counterparts endorsed the teaching reforms on Thursday.
“Their university course didn’t prepare them well enough to teach things like literacy and numeracy and manage classroom behaviour, and that prac (practical placements in schools) wasn’t up to scratch.
“If we get this right, more student teachers will complete their degrees and more teachers will stay in the profession.’’
All ministers endorsed every recommendation from their Teacher Education Expert Panel, chaired by University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who began his career as a teacher.
South Australia's Education Minister Blair Boyer says workload issues are “number one” for teachers in Australian…
One in three final-year teaching undergraduates surveyed for the Scott Report complained that their degree had been “too theoretical and focused on teaching philosophies’’.
Some 60 per cent of trainee primary school teachers said they had not been given many opportunities to practise the explicit teaching of phonics in classrooms – essential for children to learn to read and write.
Only half said their degree had given them opportunities to evaluate students’ progress, adjust instruction and provide targeted feedback.
One graduate called for “less information on learning philosophers and more information on practical activities/lessons to teach curriculum areas”.
“More hands-on experience would have been more beneficial than constantly writing essays,’’ another trainee teacher said.
“I would have liked more instruction on behaviour management and how to build my skill set when dealing with children with defiant or destructive behaviours,” they added.
Universities will be given until the end of 2025 to rewrite their 300 existing teaching courses to include the core content mandated by the ministers.
The reforms will also force universities to reveal publicly the proportion of graduates with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank above 80 – in the top 20 per cent of academic achievement.
Core content, to be compulsory for all teaching degrees, will include detailed explanations of how children learn; lesson planning; step-by-step “explicit instruction”; student assessment; and the provision of “specific, honest, constructive and clear’’ feedback to students and parents.
Phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension will be the basis of reading instruction. And all teachers must learn the six strands of mathematics – numbers, algebra, geometry, measurement, statistics, and probability.
Universities will have to teach graduates to identify “common neuromyths’’, which the Scott Report cites as the theories that there are multiple types of intelligence, and that children’s learning can be influenced by the left or right side of the brain.
Education degrees will teach how a student’s brain develops from early childhood through to adulthood, and the limits of working memory and “cognitive overload’’ for children.
Young teachers will learn the old-school skill of explicit instruction” by clearly explaining to children what they are expected to learn, chunked into small and manageable tasks.
Teachers will be taught to plan a sequence of lessons that include repetition and practice, so that children can retrieve their past learning and consolidate it into long-term memory.
Universities must ensure that teachers can provide worked examples for lessons, and wait until children are proficient before expecting them to solve problems on their own.
“Practices should include the use of structured lessons, clear and explicit instruction, effective questioning that encourages participation, reducing cognitive load and use of specific and positive feedback that acknowledges student effort,’’ the new standards state.
To be able to keep classes under control, teachers must be taught to “effectively model desired behaviour, such as respectful interactions, being organised, and being on time, to prompt positive behaviour by setting and reinforcing expectations”.
Acknowledging the increasing complexity of modern classrooms, all teaching degrees must include Aboriginal and Torres Strait history and culture, cultural diversity, and teaching methods tailored to children with common disabilities, such as autism.
The education ministers also agreed to establish an Initial Teacher Education Quality Assurance board that will report back to them every year on the quality and consistency of every teaching degree.
Each university will have to report publicly on the proportion students in teaching degrees from First Nations, remote area, migrant or low-income backgrounds – as well as course drop-out rates and employment outcomes for graduates.
State governments will be able to slap conditions on the accreditation of university courses that fail to comply with the guidelines – a move that could render graduates unemployable.
But universities will be able to apply for $5m in grants to get their teaching degrees up to scratch, with a $2.5m bonus for top-performing institutions to share their expertise.
The ministers agreed to provide more classroom training for undergraduates, to be mentored by experienced teachers who could count the time spent supervising towards their hours of professional development.
They also agreed to a national ban on mobile phones in class.
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Gender-sceptic doctor launches human rights challenge to ‘cheerleading’ pronouns policy
A doctor’s right to object on medical grounds to the unquestioning affirmation of children as the opposite gender faces a human rights test in Queensland, with a suspended psychiatrist filing a complaint against the state’s children’s hospital over transgender health policies.
Jillian Spencer alleges she was prevented from adopting a neutral therapeutic approach and instead forced to comply with gender-affirming polices that risked causing substantial harm to young people, during the course of her employment as a senior staff specialist in the consultation liaison psychiatry team at the Queensland Children’s Hospital.
In a complaint lodged with the Queensland Human Rights Commission, Dr Spencer, who is openly critical of gender-affirming policies, reveals that she was subject to lawful employment directions that required her to use gender-affirming pronouns at all times in her practise of medicine and refrain from dissuading any child and their family from seeking a referral to the hospital’s children’s gender clinic, which frequently prescribes puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to young teenagers.
“I was concerned about the increasing number of children and adolescents – especially biological females – presenting with gender dysphoria in the context of comorbid mental health diagnoses and complex psychological issues, including trauma,” Dr Spencer writes in her complaint.
“I became very concerned about the potential harm our hospital was doing in immediately using preferred pronouns, that unquestioningly affirms a child’s perceived identity and sets them on a treatment pathway of medical intervention that purports to transition a young person into an identity that they are likely to outgrow if interventions of this kind are not applied.”
Dr Spencer, who was stood down from clinical duties at QCH three months ago following a patient complaint, is seeking amendments to health policy pursuant to the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act that “no health worker may be required to use a patient’s preferred pronouns” and that “affirmation of a child’s gender identity cannot be imposed on health professionals”.
She also requests acknowledgment by the QCH that a rejection of the affirmation model of gender dysphoria treatment is a protected political belief and a reasonable professional judgment that is to be respected.
Dr Spencer said the gender-affirmative pathway adopted by QCH in her professional opinion “seemed inconsistent with best medical practice of taking an evidence-led holistic approach to child and adolescent psychiatry”.
Staff were warned at education sessions there was a “grave risk of patient suicidality” if gender-affirming interventions were not applied.
Tension within the hospital over transgender healthcare policies boiled over when management hung a large trans pride flag in the youth mental health unit waiting room, which Dr Spencer took down on the basis the area needed to be a neutral space.
Dr Spencer says she took the action some time after becoming extremely disturbed at the hospital’s policies when the psychiatry team was given an education session conducted by a nurse from the children’s gender clinic on chest binding for young female patients.
Dr Spencer later began using the pronoun “adult human female” in her email signature in protest at the pronouns and was reprimanded.
A spokesperson for Children’s Health Queensland said the organisation adopted a “universal person-centred care approach”.
“We respect the individual needs and preferences of every child and young person and their right to feel safe and supported while receiving clinical care through our service,” the CHQ statement said.
“This aligns with our responsibility as a Queensland government agency – where everyone employed is bound by public sector workplace policies and a code of conduct.
“Similarly, CHQ is committed to upholding the human rights of all people who connect with, or work within, our services.
“This reflects our obligations under the Human Rights Act 2019 to act and make decisions in a manner which supports and does not limit the human rights of patients, families and staff, unless such limitation is reasonable and demonstrably justifiable.”
Dr Spencer’s complaint was lodged with the QHRC late last month but CHQ said it hadn’t yet been notified.
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Wake up, lefties, and reject wokeness -- says lomg-time Leftist, Clive Hamilton
It’s time the left pushed back against woke. Afraid of being branded a racist, misogynist or transphobe, the left has been browbeaten into silence by woke activists, even though the left enabled the modern movements for black rights, gay rights and feminism.
Left politics are about capitalism’s structural inequalities – corporate power, state capture, exploitation, consumerism and the brutalisation of everyday life for those at the bottom. It was committed to ending discrimination against marginalised groups before woke came along. But it knows that succeeding would still leave a society based on material inequality and power disparities.
Woke is neither progressive nor left when it reduces politics to individual self-expression and identity. And woke politics is anti-democratic when its call-out tactics and cancel culture create a punitive and exclusionary environment. Fear of being publicly shamed, bullied, cancelled or even fired is stifling sincere dialogue, not least among academics.
Bigots should be called out, but anathemising those with a progressive but different view is divisive and unfair. Opinions that are annoying, upsetting or infuriating are not necessarily intolerant or harmful, let alone “hateful”. They are an everyday part of living in a democratic society.
The only way to understand and effectively respond to opinions you don’t like is to first listen to them. Yet balaclava-clad woke agitators have threatened gender-critical feminists such as Holly Lawford-Smith, an associate professor in political philosophy at the University of Melbourne, so that now she needs security guards on campus. It’s unforgiveable. They want to silence her, going so far as to denounce students taking her feminism course as “fascists”. So, studying different views should be forbidden?
Despite its radical style, woke politics is perfect for the neoliberal era of individualism and identity-making. Woke politics is easily co-opted by corporations. They borrow woke’s language and symbols as marketing tools while continuing to exploit their workers.
Take Qantas, praised for its prominent role in the equal-marriage campaign, yet at the same time squeezing its workers for all they are worth. Gay CEOs of rainbow companies are just as capable of playing hardball with their workers as straight ones.
The sometimes-feverish performance of wokeness plays perfectly to the right’s love of a war over “political correctness gone mad”, enabling those on the right to present themselves as the champions of free speech. Because woke agitators have a hair-trigger for any sign of “oppression” of those marginalised by their race or gender, they appear to be left-wing, allowing the right to use their anti-democratic actions to tar everyone on the left with the same extremist brush.
When wokeness sidelines capitalism’s structural inequalities, wrote Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, it empowers the liberal elite to pose as defenders of the marginalised (think teals and woke-washed corporations). And it allows alt-right populists to become the champions of the “real people” against corporate and “deep state” elites (think Donald Trump).
Woke defines everyone by the identity that woke imposes on them. The marginalised become their trauma, and their trauma entitles them alone to speak. Of course, they should have a voice in matters that affect them. They’ve been silenced or drowned out for too long.
But when woke activists insist that “lived experience” is the only qualification for being heard, the restriction rules out broader political conversations. And it rules out dialogue with other marginalised groups with their own “truths”.
Woke rejects the Enlightenment’s primacy of reason. “Cries of pain deserve a hearing and a response,” writes leftist philosopher Susan Neiman, “but they are no more privileged a source of authority than careful arguments.”
When the marginalised are reduced to their trauma, they are trapped there. But a person of colour is more than their colour; a transgender person is more than their gender. We are all householders, workers, lovers, sons or daughters and citizens with an interest in our societies.
Indigenous people I have spoken with regard with wry amusement the awe in which they are held by woke activists. In the Greens, the worship of victimhood is rife, giving rise to some woeful decisions. And intolerance in the trans “debate” borders on the extreme with calls to punish those who do not toe the wokest of woke lines.
The youth climate movement that sprang from Greta Thunberg’s lone protest has been taken over by wokeness so that now it’s illegitimate to campaign for climate protection unless you campaign for social justice at the same time. Fixing the climate crisis is too urgent to wait for other problems to be solved first. Apart from diluting the energy put into climate campaigning, woke ideology is driving more conservative young people away.
There is more than one progressive view of Indigenous questions (ask Indigenous people themselves). There is more than one progressive view of equal marriage (assimilation into mainstream institutions means erasure of unique LGBTQ identities). And there is more than one left-wing view on sex and gender (there’s more to it than self-definition).
The left will always oppose discrimination and vilification of marginalised people and support their right to live in peace and dignity. But when woke activists demand that everyone speaks with a single voice – theirs – they do the marginalised and progressive politics no favours.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/wake-up-lefties-and-reject-wokeness-20230705-p5dltn.html
*********************************************Albonomics
Judith Sloan
While many Speccie readers will know that our Prime Minister has an economics degree from Sydney University, fewer will appreciate that he doesn’t have a real economics degree. I’m not being pompous or condescending here; it’s just that he opted for the nascent political economy stream which is essentially Marxism broken into different subjects. He also managed to squeeze three years of study into four.
For many years, the Economics Department at Sydney University was rent asunder, with some key left-wing figures fighting the standard curriculum that had been offered to students studying economics at the university. The neo-classical framework, plus lashings of Keynesian stuff and some econometrics (empirical estimation), just didn’t cut it for them.
For some years, the leader of the political economy wing, Ted Wheelwright, did battle with conventional economist and department head, Warren Hogan. Believe me, it was a bitter fight and some students became deeply involved, including our very own Anthony Albanese. There were demos and sit-ins – it all became quite willing.
There are no prizes for guessing which side Albo was on. There is even a photo floating around of him on a rooftop declaring his support for political economy. In later years, he named Wheelwright as the economist who has most influenced him.
Note here Red Ted was obsessively hostile to capitalism, in general, and multinational companies, in particular. He even set up a research centre to look into the evils of multinational companies. For a while, he was on the board of the Commonwealth Bank before it was privatised, which beggars belief. He was a Labor appointee, needless to say.
Eventually, things settled down at Sydney University, with the political economy stream completely separating from the conventional economics degree. Students could choose one or the other and peace finally prevailed. But it’s not clear the Economics Department at the university ever fully recovered.
Fast forward those decades, it’s clear that all that rabble-rousing, left-wing talk had a lasting impact on our Prime Minister. It involves a deep suspicion of business, in general, but of big business especially. Society would be so much better off if the means of production were largely held by the government and, in this way, the needs of the citizens could be met on an equitable basis. (Pause for laughter here.) That was the clear messaging the youthful Albo was being served up during his university days.
The real tragedy is he seems to have failed to grasp the basics of economics, including the reliable supply and demand curves, the concept of opportunity cost, the importance of incentives and the mutual benefits of free exchange between buyers and sellers.
It’s actually not rocket science and plenty of people without economics degrees seriously get it – treasurer Paul Keating is a good example. Sadly, our Prime Minister doesn’t get it. He is a firm believer in a sort of voodoo economics in which magic puddings miraculously appear, as long as it’s Labor policy. Shall we call it Albonomics?
His curious way of analysing things is most apparent when he talks about the care economy. Let’s be clear here, there is no such thing as the care economy. Thankfully, most caring that goes on is completely outside the control of governments: it is about love, assuming responsibility and mutual obligation.
But when care involves distinct transactions, the government is often deeply involved, directly subsiding the transaction as well as regulating its nature – the required qualifications of the carer, the way in which the transaction must occur, etc.
A classic example is childcare. Leaving aside parents caring for their children which is to be discouraged, the government has only one model in mind when it comes to childcare – regulated centres with specified staff-child ratios and required qualifications of staff. Now according to Albo, there are great economic benefits from taxpayers throwing close to $13 billion per year at subsidising childcare fees.
But this is where his ignorance on economics really shows up. Most people would understand that when supply is essentially fixed, at least in the short term, any measure to increase demand will lead to higher prices.
Given that places at childcare centres are currently hard to come by, the recent cranking up of the fee subsidy rates will inevitably lead to higher fees. It already has. But Albo thinks that he can get the ACCC onto the case and this will somehow limit the rate of fee increases. No, Albo, it’s just supply and demand, something you would have learned about if you had done a proper economics course.
He also doesn’t seem to understand the difference between production and productivity. To his way of thinking, the greater subsidisation of childcare will lead to higher female workforce participation and higher productivity. Not so fast.
All the estimates of what economists call the supply elasticity – that would probably be a new term for Albo, one that Wheelwright probably never used – indicate that the boost to female participation is trivial. Work by both the Productivity Commission and Ben Phillips of the ANU indicates that there is a very meagre supply response to higher subsidy rates.
And here’s another tip: production and productivity are not the same thing. Assuming that there is some supply response to the new subsidy rates, that will be an increase in production. But what happens to productivity is a different matter.
If it is the case that most high-productivity/highly paid women are already participating to their preferred extent prior to the change, then the likely impact on productivity is negative as lower-quality workers are drawn into the workforce or work more hours. (Note to Albo: [labour] productivity is output per hour worked.)
There’s another area that really has me, an economist, baffled – that’s Albo’s assertion that higher wages lead to higher productivity. He has discovered a new law of economics – OK, he has just made it up. But the best thing about Albo’s new law of economics is that it enables him to ‘give respect’ to the workers, or should that be ‘the wukkers’?
Now all sensible economists know that simply mandating higher wages does nothing for productivity and seriously runs the risk that employers will lay off workers or reduce their hours. To be sure, in the long run, higher wages may induce automation and other labour-saving initiatives which will increase productivity, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what Albo has in mind. It results in lower employment – fewer workers, fewer union members.
Sadly for Albo, there are actually no new laws of economics, even if Ted told him otherwise. We can only watch now as things unravel.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/albonomics/ ?
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
6 July, 2023
A much acclaimed speech about Covid
Newly-elected Member of the NSW Legislative Council, the Hon. John Ruddick, has given his maiden speech. It has been censored by YouTube but is widely available elsewhere, e.g. on Bitchute. Transcript below:
Mr President, there was another occasion I was to speak … and the strict convention then (as now) was I be heard without interjection. That was my inaugural speech at the Young Liberal Council, a few blocks from here, in 1994. This was just before your time at that forum Mr President … but despite being a newbie, I launched into the most bitterly contentious factional brawl of the day. That ‘no interjection thing’ was wantonly discarded.
Thus began … 27 years of a highly dysfunctional relationship between the NSW Liberal Party and John Ruddick. This involved:
Multiple candidacies for the Young Liberal presidency.
Multiple candidacies for state and federal party president.
Endless violations of that party’s prohibition against talking to the media
Dozens of unsolicited emails to the entire membership about one righteous cause after another.
Multiple expulsion attempts (all deftly dodged).
Two constitutional reform crusades that went on for years … climaxing in apparent triumph … only to see the factions soon devise ways to skirt the new rules.
And to top it all off Mr President, in 2018 I wrote a book explaining how everything the Liberal Party organisation did was completely wrong.
But I do sincerely thank colleagues here … from my former party … for their warm welcome to this place … there is no surer way to mend years of factional strife than … quitting for good and joining a better party! I feel like Switzerland – peace with all.
I first heard of the Liberal Democrats in 2012 when Clinton Mead (here tonight) was elected mayor. I devoured the website … and said ‘Hallelujah!’ I was tempted to defect a few times but didn’t quite bite the bullet … still betting, the best bet for small government was reform of the Liberal Party.
Mid-2021 was the final straw. State and federal Liberal governments did four things that made me throw in the towel:
The authoritarian Covid police state … all over a bad flu. Bad flus are bad. Bad flus happen from time to time … but we treated Covid as though it was Ebola. The Covid fatality rate in NSW was 0.13 per cent … at the upper end of what we expect each winter, maybe a little bit more … but to call Covid a pandemic is an insult to pandemics. The average age of a Covid fatality in Australia is higher than average life expectancy. The NSW government locked citizens in quarantine just for being near a Covid positive person.
Many want to move on from Covid … I don’t. Elements in the media tell us, ‘There is another pandemic around the corner – it’ll be worse than Covid!’ I’m sceptical but if true … surely we need a Royal Commission into the last time a pandemic was declared … so we can learn.
Sweden alone resisted the hysteria … masks, lockdowns, and vaccines were recommended but not compelled … Sweden trusted its citizens … and Sweden has had Europe’s lowest increase in excess deaths over the past three years. I have respected Peter Costello and Tony Abbott most of my life – both have now spoken out forcefully about the madness of Covid … but the Liberal Party’s best … only found the courage to do so after the crisis had passed.
The police … and even the army and helicopters… forbade us to leave our homes to get sunshine, fresh air, and exercise … but that radical right-wing newspaper, the New York Times told us in July 2021 that not one person in the world has caught Covid in outdoor environment.
The second disappointment was … vaccine extremism. On June 26, 2021 the Liberal Premier of NSW announced a ‘two-week lockdown’… Two weeks morphed into many months and a diabolical catch was added – ‘we won’t let you out until you take multiple injections of not only a rushed vaccine but of an entirely new class of vaccine’.
Most relented … but everyone got Covid anyway. Last year, the NSW Health published weekly data showing, the fewer vaccines you had, the less likely you went to hospital or ICU. The fatality rate was similar for the vaxxed and the unvaxxed.
Since the vaccine rollout there has been a 15-20 per cent increase in excess deaths in nations like Australia that had mass mRNA injections. Is it the vaccine or is it the bitter hangover from locking people up for so long? We don’t know … but either way, it’s almost certainly the result of poor governance … yet another reason for a Royal Commission.
Much more here:
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/make-australian-politics-great-again/
***************************************************Woman’s $50 note rant resonates with thousands as cash rebellion grows
Putting all transactions online would enable more government surveillance of us all. Given the many failures and follies of government, that is a concern
Thousands of Australians have praised a woman who penned a letter to her local newspaper warning about the dangers of moving towards a cashless society.
In a letter to The Age in mid-June titled ‘Note the logic’, a Melbourne woman named Julie Christensen revealed why she preferred to use banknotes.
“If some people want to rely solely on digital financial transactions, let them. But don’t take away cash for the rest of us,” she wrote.
“My $50 note can’t be hacked. If I’m robbed, I lose $50, not my entire life savings. If my $50 note is accidentally immersed in water, it still works.”
Her letter then took aim at the faults or perceived impracticalities of digital banking by phone.
“My $50 note doesn’t need batteries, it can’t be “out of range”, and it won’t break if it’s dropped. If the system is down, I can still use my note,” Ms Christensen continued.
“My $50 note can be put into a charity box or given to a homeless person.
“Sure I use a card sometimes for large purchases, but for everything else, please leave me the option of cash. It simplifies life.”
The letter resonated with tens of thousands and was splashed across social media where it quickly went viral.
Almost 10,000 people shared the photo on Facebook, with hundreds writing “well said” and “totally agree” in the comments section.
In another act of defiance, “Pay Cash Only” flyers have circulated among tens of thousands on Twitter and Facebook, which call for no digital or card payments between July 3 and 10.
The letter and cash campaign come as banks, business and even local councils posture towards a move away from cash.
Earlier this week, a Queensland mum claimed to have cut ties with her bank after being told she couldn’t withdraw cash from her local branch.
Brisbane woman Taryn Comptyn revealed she had visited her local branch to withdraw $3,500 to pay for renovations on her home.
When she arrived, she realised she had forgotten her bank card, so she went inside in a bid to withdraw the lump sum using a teller.
But she was shocked to learn that tellers had no access to cash whatsoever and that the only way to withdraw funds was via the ATM.
“If you can’t get your own money from a branch, what’s the point of a bank?” she told Today.
Efforts to promote a cashless society have recently increased by Australian banks forging partnerships with fintech (financial technology) start-ups and encouraging regional communities to embrace cashless events.
Bank bosses stated their positions on the trend at the Australian Financial Review Editors Forum in April.
The National Australia Bank and the Commonwealth Bank are in favour of keeping their branches open. At the same time, ANZ Bank and Westpac prefer digital banking services as alternatives to in-person banking.
A controversial cashless policy was implemented without community consultation in Far North Queensland’s Cassowary Coast region, which was ill-received across the last year.
The policy, which came into effect on July 1, 2022, prevents residents from using cash for payments, including at council facilities, events, and services.
But over 3,000 locals believe this policy harms the community, with critics arguing the policy disregards the needs of elderly residents who rely on cash for budgeting and parents of children who are too young for bank cards but require access to council amenities.
The council offered multiple payment options, including EFTPOS, online portals, telephone banking, and Australia Post outlets.
“There was huge backlash, but the comments were ignored, and there was no consideration for the people who still rely on cash,” said Tara Garozzo, event organiser for the Cassowary Coast Action Network
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Universities on notice for poorly trained teachers
This sounds like buck-passing. Governments that make effective classroom discipline difficult are the real problem
Universities will face sanctions over teaching degrees that produce graduates who cannot control rowdy classrooms or instruct children to read and write, in a national push to improve teaching standards.
A teacher training fix, a national ban on smartphones in classrooms and rules on the use of artificial intelligence in schools will be revealed after a marathon meeting of federal, state and territory education ministers in Canberra on Thursday and Friday.
State and territory ministers, who control teacher registration, will finalise plans to force universities to improve the quality of teacher education degrees.
Ministers will consider the final report of a teacher training review chaired by University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott, who began his career as a high school teacher before heading the NSW Department of Education.
Professor Scott has recommended that the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership draw up new national “performance measures’’ for teaching degrees.
Universities would have to focus on training teachers in the science of learning, teaching children literacy and numeracy, and keeping classrooms under control.
Each university’s performance would be made public, and those that fail to meet the new standards could risk losing funding or full accreditation for their courses.
School students have expressed their desire for calmer classrooms, in a federal government survey of 2790 students that found 40 per cent wanted schools to do more to “manage classroom disruption’’.
The survey, to be discussed by ministers on Thursday, shows that more than half of the 8494 parents surveyed wanted small-group tutoring to help their children at school.
And three-quarters of nearly 14,000 teachers said “reducing workload’’ must be a priority, by reducing administration tasks and hiring extra support staff.
The impact of classroom disruption on student learning is also detailed in a consultation paper released by federal Education Minister Jason Clare on Wednesday.
“Students who do not engage with classroom learning or who are disruptive in class are more likely to perform poorly in reading and numeracy than their more productive peers,’’ it states.
“Analysis of NAPLAN (the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy) has shown that a year 7 student who is attentive in class could be six months ahead in their learning by year 9, compared to a student who is disruptive or breaks school rules.’’
The document also raises concerns about university degrees for teachers, noting that 37 per cent of would-be teachers who started an education degree in 2016 had failed to complete their studies six years later.
Education ministers will deliberate on a long list of reforms that include controls over the use of AI in schools, a national ban on smartphones in class to reduce cyber bullying and distraction, and strategies to turn around record rates of truancy.
Mr Clare will also chair the first meeting of his newly appointed advisory group of 54 education leaders, researchers, charity and union representatives – as well as eight school teachers and eight high school students.
The group will be a “sounding board’’ for the next School Reform Agreement, which will set priorities for taxpayer spending on education from 2025.
Mr Clare said he was committed to working with state and territory governments to increase funding for schools that are still not receiving 100 per cent of the money deemed necessary for a basic education.
“Funding is critical, but so is what it does,’’ he said. “That’s why we want to hear what practical reforms are needed to help students who fall behind, and help more students finish high school.’’
The consultation paper proposes that student wellbeing – including physical and mental health and happiness – be as much of a priority for schools as academic achievement.
It cites data that students with mental health problems miss twice as much school as other students, and are on average 1.5 to two years behind classmates in literacy and numeracy outcomes by year 9.
“Wellbeing and learning cannot be decoupled,’’ the paper states. “Schools that support good mental health and wellbeing are not only meeting their duty of care requirements but also delivering the environment required for students to learn.’’
The paper says many aspects of student health and wellbeing “need to be addressed outside the school gates’’.
Australian Education Union deputy federal president Meredith Peace said Australia has one of the most segregated education systems in the world. “Resources delayed are resources denied. Public schools need smaller class sizes (and) real improvements in one-on-one support.’’
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Free speech dying in Australia
In many ways the federal government’s proposal for Acma to regulate the content of social media platforms – via the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation bill – is simply another attempt to restrict freedom of speech by limiting expressions of political opinion. There is nothing new in this.
There are various terms used by critics and regulators to describe the kind of material that they would like to see prohibited on social media and in more traditional forms of publication, including: ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘malinformation’, ‘fake news’ and ‘hate speech’.
Largely, however, these terms do no more than reflect disagreement by politically correct critics and regulators with the view being expressed. And it should be noted at the outset that there has never been any issue about imposing penalties on incitements to violence against individual or groups in the community. This has always been a criminal offence under the common law and an offence under various state statutes. But this kind of conduct is different from expressions of opinion that may be offensive to many, sometimes to almost all, members of the community but that do not advocate any form of action in reliance on those opinions.
In addition to their distaste from all opinions contrary to their own, those who propose restrictions on freedom of speech have a basic distrust of members of the general community because they fear that some of those members might be influenced by those contrary opinions. This fear was reflected in the 2012 report, commissioned by the Gillard government, into the subject of media regulation by former Federal Court judge, Ray Finkelstein.
The report recommended that a government body be established to supervise the news media. The report noted the observation that ‘citizens must have the capacity to engage in debate, in the form of the relevant critical reasoning and speaking skills’ but added that there is ‘real doubt as to whether these capacities are present for all, or even most, citizens’.
It also suggested that ‘even armed with full information, people do not necessarily have the means for weighing and evaluating that information’. Ultimately the report was not implemented at that time but the view that members of the community cannot be left to form their own judgments when confronted with conflicting opinions is still widely held in some quarters.
It is when views that are abhorrent to most members of the community are publicised that the sternest test for freedom of speech occurs. The use of Nazi salutes would fall into this category, being offensive to an overwhelming majority of the community and, of course, particularly to Jews. But, as the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said in a judgment of the US Supreme Court in 1919: ‘All life is an experiment…. While that experiment is part of our system I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe’.
Where does banning stop in the case of discredited regimes? What of the hammer and sickle under which millions in the Soviet Union were killed or sent to gulags? Or the Confederate flag under which the Old South fought a war to preserve the institution of slavery? 600,000 lost their lives.
Hate speech and misinformation have often been suggested as targets of section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to do an act that is reasonably likely to, amongst other things, offend or insult another person or group of persons because of their race, colour or ethnic origin. It is important to note that this kind of legislation is a significant restriction on freedom of speech because it is aimed at expressions of opinion on political and social issues.
It is very different from the law of defamation which allows proceedings to be brought where there has been an allegation of specific misconduct but there is a complete defence to the proceedings if the allegation can be proved to be true. Section 18C does not deal in facts but with opinions and it makes the expression of those opinions unlawful if they fall within its terms.
Those who complain of ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ are essentially saying that they want opinions contrary to their own to be supressed. As already observed, there is nothing new in this and in the days of the Inquisition people were burnt at the stake because they held dissenting opinions. Those who lit the fires felt entirely justified because, in their view, their own beliefs were the truth and error – or heresy as it was called in the religious context of that time – had no right to exist.
This is the same view of the modern inquisitors. They are no longer able to have dissenters burnt – however much they might like to – but they can subject them to all manner of legal penalties, as well as portraying them as dangers to the well-being of the community.
There was a time when a robust defence of freedom of speech might have been expected from academics and administrators in universities but these bodies are now bastions of political correctness. Currently an associate professor at Melbourne University has to be escorted to and from her lectures by a security guard to avoid harassment by hostile students.
Universities were originally established as places where ideas could be exchanged and challenged. What has been the response of Melbourne University? It has been to set up a procedure for students to complain about courses of which they do not approve. It is not enough that they do not have to attend those courses but in the spirit of the Inquisition, their very existence remains an affront.
Freedom of speech is the starting point for all other political liberties but it is an endangered species here in Australia where it once had a long-established history.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/free-speech-dying/ ?
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5 July, 2023
What Berejiklian and Maguire tell us about the state of modern love
As one expects of a Leftist, Jenna Price (below) has a simplistic view of the matter she discusses. She overlooks a very common arrrangement between partners, where the man defers to the woman on most issues on the understanding that he will have the biggest say on things that are particularly important to him. It is a perfectly reasonable trade that works well for many couples but Price would probably see it as male dominance
I defer to my partner on most things but where the matter is important to me I do put my foot down. And my partner accepts that and respects my wishes on such occasions -- with no hard feelings. She is actually quite a tyrant but we both have sufficient flexibility and appreciation of one another not to make that an obstacle between us. She gets her way on most things so is not hardly done by -- and I love my little tyrant
I should perhaps make it clear that nothing I have said is any defence of the pathetic Daryl Maguire. Gladys Berejiklian is a fine woman who treated him far better than he deserved
The big reveal in the Berejiklian ICAC report last week was that in the romantic relationship between a premier and a backblocks MP, Wagga Wagga’s Daryl Maguire was boss. But the bigger reveal is that the relationship between Berejiklian and Maguire is a model which is surprisingly common – a sizeable number of Australians agree relationships should have bosses – and that boss should be a man.
It’s been made very clear to our politicians what we want from them – much of the pressure for the National Anti-Corruption Commission came from us, voters, folks who were sick of seeing pork-barrellers do for their own.
But do we really know what we want from ourselves? Do we need bosses in our relationships? Shouldn’t it be more like a see-saw, a constant thoughtful negotiation, where we balance the needs and wants of our partners and our families, of ourselves?
I called Queensland University of Technology’s resident expert on men Michael Flood to ask him what he thought about the state of modern love. I assumed he would say the Berejiklian-Maguire relationship was outdated. I assumed he would say, nobody thinks like that any more or if they do, they belong to minority groups such as the Sydney Anglican Church (Brian Douglas from the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture tells me most Anglicans do not have such a literal view of the scriptures).
But no. Here we had a deliberately-kept-secret relationship between the most senior politician in the state and one of the more junior and less able.
According to volume two of the ICAC report, a conversation revealed Maguire accused Berejiklian of being “mean”. She replied:
Because you know what I tell you why because normally you’re the boss and it’s hard when we have to switch it around that’s the truth.
Maguire: Yeh but I am the boss, even when you’re the premier.
Berejiklian: I know. So therefore it’s hard when I had to switch it around.
Maguire: Glad, even when you are the premier I am the boss alright.
Berejiklian: Yes I know.
Heartbreaking really. Yes, she’s a corrupt politician but no one should be consigned to taking instructions from a nebbish.
Flood’s explanation of the state of relationships killed me. In Australia, he said, a 2017 national community attitudes survey revealed a substantial minority of people, and especially men, believe men should dominate relationships and families. One in four Australians believe “women prefer a man to be in charge of the relationship”. About one in six agree “men should take control in relationships and be the head of the household”.
In a society where we often chat about how important merit is, wouldn’t you argue that the person appointed to be in charge should be the best person for the job? And wouldn’t you say to yourself, I don’t want to be in a relationship where someone wants to be the boss of me? And wouldn’t you also say to yourself, the best decision maker depends on what the bloody decision is?
And who drives those beliefs? Flood tells me it’s men. One in three men agree that “women prefer a man to be in charge of the relationship” compared with only one in five women. Twice as many men (21 per cent, or one in five) agree that “men should take control in relationships and be the head of the household”, as compared with one in 10 women.
Look, I get the concept of bosses in the workplace (designed to maintain the power structures of capitalism and keep workers downtrodden) but a boss at home designed to maintain the power structures of patriarchy? No. Thank. You.
Is it about men earning more? Thinking that because they earn the big bucks, they get to take charge? And what would happen if women started charging out for the mental load? For the cognitive work they do in keeping relationships and connections alive? Money’s good but love matters more.
CEO of Relationships Australia (NSW) Elisabeth Shaw says the entire “man is boss” narrative is still very compelling for some women and that’s reflected in the success of the 2011 bestselling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. And we can’t know for sure from the ICAC transcripts whether these conversations were just teasing, maybe even throwing down the gauntlet, maybe a kind of relationship joke. But that’s not how it reads. It reads like humiliation in spades.
Shaw, who’s worked in the fraught area of family stress for years, says that in successful relationships, people can have different areas of strength. But that doesn’t mean there is never any discussion of alternatives. The sign of a successful relationship is that other comments, other ideas, are in the mix. That’s what tells you it’s not an entrenched, fixed or abusive dynamic.
“Not everything has to be a debate, but there are ebbs and flows in strong relationships,” she says.
And no, I’m not giving Berejiklian any leeway. She is corrupt. But if it can happen to the most powerful woman in the state, it can happen to anyone. Let’s start the relationship revolution right now. Ask me how.
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Australia dominates Decanter World Wine Awards as producers celebrate 'golden period' of local winemaking
Australian wines have been labelled "the best in the world" after dominating a prestigious international wine awards.
Wines from Australia accounted for a fifth of those awarded "Best in Show" — more than any other country — at the 2023 Decanter World Wine Awards, held this week in London.
Margaret River was particularly celebrated, with three of the top 50 wines from the lush South West WA wine-growing region.
"If there is a 'winning region' in this year's Top 50 Best in Show selection, it has to be Western Australia's Margaret River," the Decanter World Wine Awards declared.
A vineyard at sunset with rows of vines with two large trees and a silver cellar door building in the distance
Domaine Naturaliste in South West WA's Margaret River wine growing region. (Supplied: Domaine Naturaliste)
Bruce Dukes received a coveted 'Best in Show' for his 2020 Domaine Naturaliste Rebus cabernet sauvignon, grown in Wilyabrup, just shy of three hours south of Perth.
"It was just an incredible surprise," Mr Dukes said.
"It is exciting because Decanter is simply the pinnacle of it all."
15 days, 18,250 wines
Now in its 20th year and self-described as "assuredly the world's largest wine competition," this year's Decanter World Wine Awards saw more than 72,000 bottles of wine flown into London.
Over 15 days, several hundred wine experts and sommeliers conducted blind tastings of 18,250 wines, with entrants required to submit four bottles of each wine.
Australian wines were represented across the Best Show, Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze awards, prompting US news outlet CNN to declare Australia as the "home of the best wines in the world for 2023."
While there is often industry cynicism toward wine awards, educator, judge and award-winning sommelier, Leanne Altmann said Decanter's awards carried international credibility, and the results were significant for Australia's growing wine identity.
"In an international context, where you've got the world's best tasters awarding some of these wines so highly, I hope it causes people to say, 'Why did they get such a great score?'" Ms Altmann said.
"Maybe people will take the opportunity to taste those wines that won the awards, or maybe they'll explore a little bit further — it might just open that door to people trying Australian wines and better understanding them."
'Golden period' for local winemaking
Riesling and grenache from South Australia's McLaren Vale, semillon from NSW's Hunter Valley and a fortified grand muscat from Rutherglen in Victoria were all among the top-rated wines.
The recognition comes at a time when the local industry continues to grapple with the collapse of the once-lucrative Chinese export market.
Ms Altmann, who, as beverage director for the Trader House group, selects wines for some of Melbourne's best restaurants, said the awards help to emphasise the regionality of Australian wines.
Where once the industry might have suffered from a flattened international reputation for big-bodied shiraz, she said there was now an increasing appreciation for the specific terroir of growing regions like Margaret River or McLaren Vale.
"For a long time we were making the wines that we thought that market wanted to drink.
"When I first started out in wine, people would sell things to me saying, 'this is a Burgundian-style chardonnay, or I'm looking to make the best example of Chianti, but from Australia,'" she said.
"Now, the best producers are saying things like, 'This is from our place in McLaren Vale, and you can feel where the wind comes across the hills, and this is why the fruit from this place tastes like this.'
"That's widely seen in Europe, but it's getting more common in Australia, which I find particularly exciting."
It's an ethos echoed by Bruce Dukes at Domaine Naturaliste.
"For so many years, Australia had a message of entry-level wines and effectively 'bottled sunshine,' and that message didn't really suit the vast majority of small producers — it just suited a couple of larger producers," Mr Dukes said.
"The only way I can see my business working is to focus on the quality.
"Australia is now going through this golden period with so many smaller producers making the most amazing wines.
"It's just something that takes a while to communicate to the world."
The 'Best in Show' cabernet sauvignon from Domaine Naturaliste retails for $39 a bottle.
Despite a likely uptick in popularity, Mr Dukes said he had no plans to change the price or place an 'award-winning' sticker on the label.
Instead, he believes the success of Australian wines at this year's Decanter awards should serve as encouragement that a more regionally-specific focus is being valued on the world stage.
"I think it's the reinforcement around having the right soils, the right varieties in the right climate.
"There is a pride [about winning], but it's also motivation to keep refining the details and just working on the very basics of the grape growing and the winemaking to continue to fine-tune and improve style and quality.
"It is exciting and motivating at the same time."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-09/australian-wine-wins-decanter-world-wine-awards/102454142
*************************************More than 1000 qualified nurses ready to return to the wards
Covid vaccine mandates for Queensland healthcare workers are under review as more than 1000 “stood down” nurses and midwives are keen to get back in the wards to help ease the workforce crisis.
Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has revealed to The Courier-Mail that the review is being led by the Department of Health and will determine ongoing or future vaccine requirements for Queensland Health staff.
The announcement comes following months of government recruitment drives to attract medics to a health system struggling with understaffing.
“We are currently reviewing the Covid vaccination requirements for Queensland Health employees, following the advice from The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) earlier this year,” Ms Fentiman said.
“A number of strategies are in place to actively manage healthcare workers who are not vaccinated against Covid, including time limited exemptions, return to work options and alternative duties,” she said.
Last month, chief health officer John Gerrard announced that “as the Covid pandemic evolves so does our response here in Queensland”. He said that Covid is now part of reality much like other respiratory illnesses.
The Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland (NPAQ) which has 10,000 nurses as members, urges immediate action from the Health Minister to return to work highly qualified nurses, some with 20 years experience.
“The dismissal of such a significant number of healthcare professionals has exacerbated the existing staffing crisis, placing an immense burden on the remaining workforce. Junior nurses are finding themselves responsible for team leading on wards without the appropriate experience,” NPAQ state secretary Ella Leach said.
A Right to Information document reveals that over 2000 Queensland Health staff applied for a vaccination exemption in late 2021 and early 2022. Some of these were terminated straight away, while many pursued a public service appeal or human rights claims.
There are now well over 1000 healthcare workers that are still not working in healthcare due to vaccine mandates either because they have been or are about to be terminated.
“How many lives could be saved by the reinstatement of these thousand nurses? These nurses can go and work in other Australian States that have dropped all Covid vaccine requirements but they can’t work in their own state, NPAQ president Marg Gilbert said.
Western Australia and Tasmania no longer have the vaccine requirements.
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Road to net zero paved with coal
Professor Alan Finkel launched his new book Powering Up this month, describing global and Australian pathways to net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions via renewable energy technologies (solar, wind, hydropower, and battery storage).
In describing our clean energy future Professor Finkel says, ‘Think forests of wind farms … and endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert.’ We may or may not like his vision, but there is some arithmetic we have to consider along the way.
Finkel endorses Australia’s goal of a 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, with 82 per cent of electricity generated by renewable energy (wind, solar, and batteries).
A sobering counter-claim by Paul Broad, former chief executive of Snowy Hydro, suggests that it will take 80 years, not eight, to generate 82 per cent of Australian electricity from renewables.
Given that the Snowy 2.0 pumped storage project including its connection to electricity grids has seen a time blowout of six or more years and a cost blowout from $2 billion to a likely $20 billion, maybe Broad knows a fairy-tale when he reads it.
The Hunter Coast near Newcastle in New South Wales, and the Gippsland Coast in Victoria are two of six Australian regions under evaluation for offshore wind-energy farms.
To get an idea of the potential cost we can look at recently completed Hornsea 2 project which sited 165 turbines off the coast of Yorkshire, England. The construction cost was A$5.2 billion per GW of electric power. This is double the estimated cost of a modern coal-fired power station.
Australia generates over half of its electricity from coal-fired plants, according to Australian Energy Regulator figures for 2023. These plants for the most part use obsolete technology and receive minimal maintenance because they are being shut down progressively.
New technology where boilers run at higher temperatures and pressure are vastly more efficient with lower CO2 emissions. The tragedy is that our clever country has not adopted these ultra-supercritical (USC) or high-efficiency low emission (HELE) plants.
Many countries in the West have these plants as well as ten countries in Asia from India and Bangladesh in the west to Vietnam, China, and Japan in the east which have USC technology installed and have additional plants under construction.
What might such technology achieve in Australia? Large coal-fired power plants (think Loy Yang A in Victoria or Eraring in NSW) have output capacities of about 2 to 3GW. A detailed study by engineering group GHD in 2017 found that a USC plant would cost $2.5 billion per GW in today’s dollars or about $5 billion for a 2GW plant. International Energy Agency estimates and Korean experience suggest an average construction time of four to six years for a USC power plant.
Australia has about 20 GW of conventional coal-fired power plants spread over the eastern states which generate the larger part of the nation’s baseload electricity. These obsolete plants could be replaced with state-of-the-art USC plants for about $50 billion.
If we include Western Australia’s coal-fired generators, and allow additional costs for Victoria’s generators which use brown coal, the national cost may be in the order of $60 billion, with no additional costs for transmission lines since the existing infrastructure already serves these plants. The benefits? A 30 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions using available technology that provides baseload power, removing the threat of blackouts on cloudy or low-wind days.
Finding $60 billion to finance this conversion is challenging, but as a nation, we face bigger demands. Our Aukus nuclear submarines are estimated to cost up to $368 billion over three decades which is justified on national security grounds. Providing energy security for the nation’s industry and its citizens over the next decade is surely deserving of similar serious consideration.
The federal budget last year allocated $20 billion over four years to Rewiring the Nation, a project which is designed to ‘upgrade, expand and modernise Australia’s electricity grid’. How much more secure we would be if we put a similar amount of money into modernising our generators rather than our transmission lines?
The coal-fired plants envisaged in this discussion will not be the forever solution for our power needs. Over two to three decades, aided by our Aukus nuclear submarine development, small modular nuclear plants will become available. Such plants, like USC coal plants, can be sited at existing power stations.
Finkel is confident that the availability of nuclear plants by 2040 will be too late due to the growth of renewable energy sources however, the growth of nuclear power stations overseas (planned, new, or re-commissioned from mothballed plants) suggests his view is likely too pessimistic.
The US Westinghouse Electric Company, with an established record of manufacturing nuclear power plants, has announced the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) for civilian power generation, targeting operation on the electricity grids by 2033.
The estimated cost of these nuclear plants is equivalent to A$5 billion per GW which is twice the cost of established USC coal technology and may well be subject to cost and time blow-outs. But the crucial point is that over the next decade, USC coal-fired power is the efficient, secure, and achievable option and replacement with nuclear and/or renewable energy should follow as alternative sources become proven, stable, and fit for purpose. We also note that the SMR option is comparable in estimated cost with the actual cost of the Yorkshire offshore wind farm discussed above.
If Australia wishes to pursue the goal of net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 without nuclear technology the costs may be far greater than the proponents of green energy admit. Former Chief Scientist Professor Robin Batterham led an international consortium which which released their Net Zero Australia report in April. It was written by a team of over 40 collaborators drawn from two Australian universities and two international groups who conducted two years of detailed study and modelling. It covers more than just net-zero power generation detailing the steps needed to create a true net-zero economy covering power, mining, agriculture and exports.
The numbers are sobering. It estimates a cost of between $7,000 billion and $9,000 billion by 2060 covering five different scenarios. The fraction attributable to net-zero electric power generation is not explicitly identified but is likely to be in the range of 25 per cent to 50 per cent of the total cost depending on the pathway chosen.
The analysis incorporates coal-fired power generation as a necessity until 2040 and envisages a continuing need for gas-fired peak power plants through to 2060 with carbon capture and storage technologies designed to remove CO2 to provide a net-zero outcome.
As we contemplate a lower-end estimate of $2,000 billion for Australia to deliver net-zero electricity by 2060, with coal-fired plants operating until 2040, we may well conclude that spending $60 billion over the next decade on efficient, low emissions USC coal-fired power plants is a small price to pay for near-term energy security while we evaluate and implement newer zero-emission technologies such as nuclear and green hydrogen over the next half century.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/road-to-net-zero-paved-with-coal/
************************************4 July, 2023
Islamic State flag should be cut from ban list, Canberra group argues
On their logic, the Swastika should not be banned because it had an honourable history before the Nazis adopted it -- and it is still widely displayed in Asia
A decision to include the Islamic State flag alongside Nazi symbols in a nationwide ban has been criticised by the Canberra Islamic Centre because it is seen to unfairly target the Muslim faith and symbols.
The federal government has introduced into Parliament new legislation banning the public display of "prohibited symbols". The legislation says there are three kinds of prohibited symbols: two Nazi symbols, and the flag of the Islamic State terrorist group.
Under the legislation the swastika will be allowed for religious Hindu and Buddhist purposes but the Islamic State flag, which includes words of faith to Muslims, would not be covered by similar exemptions.
Canberra Islamic Centre president Ilyas Rahaman said the words inscribed on the Islamic flag were sacred and written by Muslims on a daily basis.
"To ban those words is to prohibit the free exercise of Islamic religion in Australia, which is contrary to section 116 of the Australian constitution," Mr Rahaman said.
The flag in question bears the declaration "There is no God but Allah" and "Muhammad is the messenger of Allah". These words form the shahada (Arabic), meaning the profession of faith, are one of the five pillars of Islam.
Mr Rahaman said the words on the Islamic flag predated the terrorist group IS and had been used by early Muslims.
The Canberra Islamic Centre said it deplored the Islamic State and what it stood for but it disagreed with point five of the legislation which said the Islamic State flag "is widely recognised as representing and conveying ideologies of hatred, violence, and racism that are incompatible with Australia's multicultural and democratic society".
Similar to the swastika being misappropriated for use by the Nazi regime, Mr Rahaman said the Islamic State flag was hijacked by the terrorist organisation.
"Islamic State did not design the flag; the flag has existed since the time of the Prophet Muhammad," he said.
He was disappointed consultations were not held with the Islamic community, which would have explained the misappropriation of the flag by the Islamic State.
"It's disappointing. The bill was widely discussed to stop the trade of Nazi items; not once was their mention from the government that they were intending to ban the Islamic flag," Mr Rahaman said.
ANU Professor Greg Fealy, who specialises in Islam and Southeast Asian Jihadist groups, said the tightly worded legislation regarding the ban of the IS flag would cause obstructions in research.
He noted the original 2005 anti-terrorism law which prohibited direct contact with convicted terrorists which he said caused many difficulties for researchers and journalists who sought information directly from such people.
"I think the aim of that law had been to target those consorting with terrorists, but in the end, legitimate research was obstructed," Prof Fealy said.
Historically there have been many flags that have used the monochrome black-on-white format, but Mr Fealy said the IS flag, with its white circle, was more distinctive and far less widely used.
"The design of the flag was inspired by historical accounts that the Prophet Muhammad addressed his community with black flags behind him. This is the reason many jihadist movements have adopted variations of the black flag," he said.
Prof Fealy said the use of the IS flag in Australia by members of the public has been rare, unlike the provocative use of the swastika by neo-Nazi groups.
"I think we should question whether the attempt to ban the ISIS flag with its attendant risk of ensnaring entirely peaceful Muslims who are innocently using a flag containing the shahada is worth the desired outcome of stopping the occasional use of a terrorist symbol. I have my doubts about this," he said
Islamic Studies lecturer at Charles Sturt University, Zuleyha Keskin, said banning the IS flag would create problems and confusion,
"It is like banning something good because someone evil has used that good. It is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater," Prof Keskin said.
She said confusion would come about if the proposed ban comes into effect because many Muslim Australians display the words on the IS flag in their homes, as stickers on their cars, in mosques, or as artwork in various forms.
"A law enforcer or politician is unlikely to know the nuanced differences between an IS flag and the use of the creed by a member of the Muslim community in their personal lives. This may result in unnecessary suspicion at the minimum or an arrest at its worst," Prof Keskin said.
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has commenced a review of the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment Bill and is accepting submissions from the community.
The Canberra Islamic Centre will make a submission calling for the removal of the Islamic State flag from the legislation.
Committee chairman Peter Khalil said: "The committee will consider all submissions made to the inquiry and report its findings and recommendations to the government."
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Pay hike for foreign workers to fuel pain in regions
Farmers, clubs, beekeepers, early educators and small businesses are warning that lifting the minimum pay for temporary skilled migrant workers to $70,000 could smash regional economies and fuel the jobs crisis.
Employers fear the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold hike – rising from $53,900 to $70,000 on Saturday – will threaten access to foreign workers and impact thousands of jobs across the country.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil announced the TSMIT change in April as a “down payment on the type of migration system” the government is building. Unions have endorsed a suite of Labor migration policies aimed at cracking down on temporary foreign workers.
National Farmers Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said “this is just one of many migration issues hurting farmers” and while the group backed a TSMIT rise, the new level would likely put the skilled migration program out of reach. “The cost to a farmer is far more than just the salary – it costs about $30,000 just to get a skilled worker into the country,” he said. “This is backed by Grattan Institute research showing we will lose 84 per cent of skilled visa workers if TSMIT lifts to $70,000. What farmers need is a visa designed for agriculture, rather than Frankensteining other schemes.”
The Australian on Tuesday revealed that farms and tourist towns are fearing a backpacker exodus, with visa costs soaring to $640 on Saturday and the government considering a migration review recommendation limiting permits for working holiday-makers to one year.
Duxton Bees general manager Keegan Blignaut, who operates one of Australia’s biggest beekeeping operations with 4500 hives across the Murray-Darling region, said the increase would have a significant impact on his bottom line as he employs mostly overseas workers.
“Moving the TSMIT to $70,000 means that our business will have at the minimum an 8 to 10 per cent wage impact because we have to move every current visa holder up,” Mr Blignaut said.
“Plus existing staff who’ve been here longer, who say have been on earnings of $65,000 – which is already $10,000 above the TSMIT – now they require to be on $70,000, but they are an experienced team member, are they are going to be put in the same bucket as somebody who newly arrives in Australia?”
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said: “Any worker earning less than $70,000 after July 1 will have to get a pay rise, find a higher paying sponsored job or leave the country when their current visa expires. Businesses sponsoring temporary workers will have to pay the new increased wage.”
The government says the new TSMIT level is where it should have been if it had been indexed over the previous 10 years.
Restaurant and Catering Australia chief executive Suresh Manickam said: “From almost overnight, the cost of labour goes up, so it affects the sector from that point of view.”
In a submission to the migration review, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA supported a TSMIT rise to $60,000 because any level higher “would further restrict” employers in low-wage sectors from securing workers. “Raising the TSMIT, for example, to $70,000, would exclude around 23,000 workers in the hospitality and retail,” the submission said.
The Early Learning and Care Council said the current threshold allowed early learning educators to be sponsored, with average wages sitting between $51,850 and $55,250: “A significant increase ... would result in a large proportion of the early learning workforce ... being locked out.”
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What genocide, ABC?
For those who don’t watch the national broadcaster, it came as a surprise to discover that the federal government is apparently engaged in a campaign of ‘genocide’ to eradicate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The news was delivered by Dana Morse, an ABC reporter on the Insiders program last Sunday 25 June who identifies as ‘plangermaireener palawa’, that is a woman of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent. She said that what people were protesting about on Australia Day is the invasion of Australia and ‘the genocide of Aboriginal people that is ongoing today’.
The statement was immediately condemned as false by the opposition spokeswoman on Indigenous Affairs Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and fellow No campaigner Warren Mundine but not by anyone on Insiders or anywhere else at the ABC. ABC Fact Check hasn’t bothered to fact-check it perhaps because they think it is self-evidently true. An ABC spokesperson told the Speccie, ‘The comments were intended to summarise the perspectives and reasoning of people protesting against the Australia Day date rather than expressing a position by the ABC’. Elsewhere amongst progressives, there was a stony silence. There was no comment from Prime Minister Albanese or the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney.
So is there an ongoing genocide in Australia? Morse’s most recent article on the living conditions of Indigenous Australians looks at updated data on ‘Closing the Gap’ produced by the Productivity Commission (PC) released a fortnight ago on 15 June. She writes that ‘the latest figures show a number of incremental improvements across the socio-economic indicators, but overall, the gap is not closing’. That doesn’t sound like evidence of an ‘ongoing genocide’. And the good news is that the latest ABS data states that 812,000 people identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander in the 2021 census, which amounts to 3.2 per cent of the population. This was up from 2.8 per cent in 2016, and 2.5 per cent in 2011.
So if the Albanese government is conducting a genocide against Aboriginal Australians (and I sincerely hope and believe it is not) it is not doing it any better than it is doing anything else such as bringing down electricity prices.
The PC data paints a revealing picture. There are 17 targets which are motherhood statements couched in the peculiar language of Australian bureaucrats. Target 1 is: ‘Everyone enjoys long and healthy lives’. Mysteriously, the data that might explain the gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous people is still ‘under development’ including rates of smoking, alcohol and drug use, obesity, dietary factors, and physical activity.
Yet this data is readily available elsewhere. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2018-19, 43 per cent of indigenous Australians smoked compared with 15 per cent of non-indigenous Australians who smoked in 2017-18. The death rate from lung cancer is more than double in indigenous populations (66 per 100,000) compared with non-indigenous populations (25 per 100,000). Obviously, the sooner indigenous people stop smoking the quicker the gap will be closed. This is not evidence of genocide. It is evidence of the fact that it is difficult to give up smoking.
Most of the data presented for Target 1 focuses on infant and child mortality. It shows that in 2017-2021, the leading cause of death for indigenous children aged 1 to 14 years was land transport accidents. They died at a rate of 3.7 per 100,000 children, a slight increase compared with 2014-2018. It’s a sad reflection on the fact that in many remote communities, royalties from mining are used to buy cars that are frequently crashed and replaced when the next lot of royalties are paid. Many crashes involve dangerous driving and unlicensed drivers including underage drivers.
If you work through the targets there is a failure to document the most obvious contributors to disadvantage. For example, Target 2 is ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are born healthy and strong’ but the proportion of mothers who smoke or consume alcohol during pregnancy is ‘under development’.
Target 10 is ‘Adults are not overrepresented in the criminal justice system’ which it seeks to achieve not by reducing criminal behaviour but by reducing the rate of incarceration by at least 15 per cent.
Target 13 is that ‘By 2031, the rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50 per cent, as progress towards zero’ but no data has been added since the baseline year of 2018-19 when 8.4 per cent of indigenous females aged 15 years and over experienced domestic physical or threatened physical harm.
The Closing the Gap Agreement is between all Australian governments and the Coalition of Peaks, which includes all the national, state and territory non-government Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak bodies and statutory authorities responsible for Closing the Gap.
They are not starved of funding. In 2015?16, the most recent report from the PC, the estimated expenditure per person was $44,886 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, around twice the rate for non?indigenous Australians ($22,356).
The government’s claim that somehow an unelected indigenous Voice to parliament will stop people smoking or crashing cars seems unlikely.
One area where the gap is growing rapidly is in land rights. This is covered in Target 15 which states innocuously, ‘People maintain a distinctive cultural, spiritual, physical and economic relationship with their land and waters’. What that turns out to mean is that there is a commitment that between 2020 and 2030 there will be a 15 per cent increase in the land and sea controlled by Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders under Native Title. Why 15 per cent? There is no explanation. The PC simply states that, ‘A high or increasing area is desirable’. No doubt.
In 2022, Native Title already covered 4,138,356 square kms of Australia and 91,111 square kms of sea country. By 2030, it is intended to rise to 4,498,431 square kms of land and 103,790 square kms of sea country. That’s an area of land bigger than India or Argentina. So 3.2 per cent of the population of Australia will control more than 58 per cent of its landmass and more than 1 per cent of its exclusive economic zone. Not bad. But do those Native Title holders want to be dictated to by an unelected Voice? That seems unlikely.
The reality is that nothing in the Closing the Gap data shows the slightest evidence of genocide. It is despicable that the ABC allows its journalist to make this statement without correction or clarification. But it’s their ABC. They do what they want. We just pay for it.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/what-genocide-abc/
****************************************************Home after seven weeks of overseas travel
Mike O'Connor
Fifty-one days without sitting through a welcome to country message or acknowledgment of traditional owners past and present.
Fifty-one days without being harangued about the Voice, or being branded an entitled white male for having worked all my life to make a living and being accused of racism for daring to air the belief that I am convinced that the Voice will be bad for my country.
Fifty-one days. What bliss.
Then we arrive home and I immediately hear the demands for special treatment, the cries of victimhood, the insistence on truth-telling or rather one group’s version of it at the expense of everyone else’s.
The US Supreme Court last week outlawed university programs used to select student applicants on the basis of race that have given black and Hispanic Americans preferential admission treatment.
“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it. The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual – not on the basis of race,” said Chief Justice John Roberts.
“These (affirmative action) policies appear to be leading to a world in which everyone is defined by their skin colour, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis,” said Justice Clarence Thomas.
Writing in The Australian last weekend, historian Geoffrey Blainey described claims of “powerlessness” by Indigenous people as “a kind of crocodile tear”.
“In the past half-century, Aboriginal groups have been handsomely recognised by their acquisition – under the Fraser and Keating governments – of ownership or certain rights and interests in 55 per cent of the Australian land mass,” he wrote.
“Few Australian voters know this fact.
“It constitutes one of the largest peaceful transfers of land in the history of the world.”
As Blainey says, moves to create a special class of Australians would if successful break one of the golden rules of that democracy: one person, one vote.
There comes that moment at the end of a long holiday when you realise that the sunny shores of the Mediterranean are but a distant memory and that you are back home in dear old Brissie.
It came when I flicked on the telly to be greeted by an image of Premier Palaszczuk trying to defuse the latest government fiasco by announcing with outstretched palms: “I am an honest person. I answer questions as honestly as I can.”
Of course you do, Premier.
************************************
3 July, 2023
Everyone’s sick ... of over-regulation. It’s time to flip the script
Parnell Palme McGuinness misses the avaiability of codeine in cold medications. I must say I always wondered that it was freely available. Codeine is an opiate and prodrug of morphine. But the regulators have caught up with it. As usual, the many are hit to protect the few. My bathroom cabinet still contains some of the "old" medications but I find that Ibuprofen and paracetamol get me by. Eucalyptus lozenges help too
It’s flu season and there’s at least one nasty virus going around. If the overregulation bug hasn’t bowled you over yet, it will as soon as you get sick.
In my lifetime, the incredible advances of Western medicine have delivered the perfect preparation to ameliorate the worst symptoms of a cold or flu: a combination of paracetamol, which reduces fever, pseudoephedrine, which clears stuffy noses, and codeine, which treats the aches and can help suppress the body-wracking dry cough that makes it hard to rest and recover.
Except you can’t buy it anymore. In 2018, the government made codeine a prescription-only substance. So while you’ll still need to hand over your driver’s licence to buy cold and flu medication with pseudoephedrine (just in case you’re a gangster buzzing your Harley from chemist to chemist to get enough Codral to cook a minuscule amount of methamphetamine), it won’t contain codeine. You’d need a GP script for that.
For which you can thank the same instincts that have brought us lethargic speed limits on roads built for more (does anyone else itch to check their phone as they crawl along at 40 kilometres per hour on a wide and empty road?), laws against drinking alcohol in parks or by the beach on a warm summer evening, and laws that shut down Sydney’s all-night district because some lunkheads got violent and tragically punched and killed two young men at 9pm.
It is the Australian prison-warden spirit that prohibits people from eating in a pub’s designated smoking area and the intolerant egotism of people who move in next door to a pub and then campaign to shut down the noise.
Oh, believe me, I know that each of these things can be justified with some sanctimonious appeal to the health of the citizenry, but so often this spirit is really about imposing minority obsessions on everyone else. They make for great announcables – post-pandemic we can be under no illusion that Australians love councillors, governments and regulators which “keep them safe” – but as often as not, they make for terrible policy. Sometimes they can even lead to a different type of harm.
Like the hobbled Codral.
This winter’s ubiquitous cold is a doozy. The aches are bad. So let’s look at the options. If you’ve got some on hand, you could take Panadeine or some other paracetamol and codeine combination alongside your cold and flu tablets. But then you’d be exceeding the safe dose of paracetamol – and we’ll get back to what that does later.
Alternatively, you could schlep your sorry sick body to the doctor and get some ibuprofen with codeine – haha, jokes, with GP waiting times blown out to weeks, there’s not much chance of getting any in time. So just take straight ibuprofen alongside your cold and flu meds – this helps a bit. And then – because the body ache persists – make yourself a hot toddy. The lemon and honey are good for your throat. And the free pour of rum or whiskey really hits back at the general misery.
Now, while I’m all about a well-crafted cocktail, I have an inkling that consumers making their own medicine-and-booze cocktails to replace a lab-calibrated formula is probably not ideal. In fact, it’s one of those policy outcomes which are generally considered perverse.
The champions of prescription-only codeine will say that “upscheduling” codeine has led to a drop in codeine poisonings. In the year after the new regulation was introduced, Sydney University researchers found there was a 51 per cent drop in codeine poisonings overall – mostly from “low-strength preparations” which had previously been available without a prescription. That’s what you and I would call Panadeine.
That left paracetamol, which is not addictive, for non-prescription pain management. But here’s the thing – even at the time of the codeine upscheduling, research covering the preceding decade showed that paracetamol was the drug Australians most frequently overdosed on. Too much causes severe liver damage. It’s not good.
In acknowledgement of this fact, the regulator is now planning to reduce the pack sizes that paracetamol is available in at supermarkets and convenience stores by 2025.
Personally, I’m not fussed about smaller packs. I don’t feel any pain relief from it (maybe it’s not addictive because it doesn’t work). But I still end up having to take it because it always comes packed up with medicines that are more effective – the pseudoephedrine in cold and flu medicine is only sold packed with paracetamol, for instance, and low-dose codeine is only available to most of us with paracetamol or ibuprofen accompanying it.
Of course, the ibuprofen has side effects too. It can irritate the stomach lining and combining it with alcohol can make that effect worse.
Oh, and paracetamol interacts badly with too much alcohol as well – it can exacerbate liver damage – there goes another consolation because the “safe” painkillers conflict with it. So better go easy on the hot toddies above.
In fact, if you’ve got the flu, it looks like the regulator reckons it’d be best you just wallow in wretchedness and herbal remedies. But I’m sure we’re much better off now there’s no chance of getting addicted to a few milligrams of codeine in your cold and flu medicine.
It’s a great feeling to be protected by regulation, isn’t it. With so much protection against low-dose codeine, the ways left to manage pain can be downright dangerous.
Sometimes it seems that our overzealous regulators leave us with nothing left to fear but regulation itself.
*************************************************
Meet the Australian women making a stand for free speech
Some of Australia’s best emerging female leaders gathered in New South Wales last Thursday to formally protest the trans takeover of women’s spaces.
The high calibre demonstration of solidarity brought together nine diverse biological women, each of whom have taken up the battle for free speech, and female-only spaces.
Sall Grover, Kirralie Smith, Moira Deeming, Katherine Deves, Louis Elliot, Jasmine Sussex, Angela Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Dr Jillian Spencer, all spearheaded the event as keynote speakers.
Opposing the free speech marathon, LGBTQ+ forced speech activists rallied outside Sydney’s Parliament House, while a group of activists inside attempted to shut the forum down.
We keep hearing from various left-wing publications, that there is no need for a trans debate because ‘trans’ science is ‘settled’.
What does ‘settled,’ mean?
It means biological woman’s rights, vis a vis the right to freedom of speech, religion, and conscience, are not just anti-LGBTQ+ rights, they’re antiquated and ‘anti-science’.
Returning fire against this social commentary, lawyer, Katherine Deves, wrote:
‘We didn’t want this culture war either. Neither does anyone else, but when women were erased as a legal class, dissenters were punished, and the gender botherers came for our children, we would not be silent.’
The heat from haters didn’t sway the noteworthy nine from voicing their concerns during the Binary-backed event.
Headlined the ‘war on women, and sex-based rights’, the 1-hour parliamentary forum asked, ‘Why can’t women talk about sex?’
Speaking out against the weaponisation of ‘hate speech and vilification laws’, Deves said, ‘We all need to join together, and push back against it. My own experience galvanises me, and my resolve in maintaining a system of sex-based rights.’
‘[We are united] in the face of a society that is captured by a movement that is determined to erase [biological women] as a legal class.’
Deves continued, ‘Our society is legislating away the reality of biological sex, redefining women to include biological men; encoding legal fictions into law.’ It is also punishing those who refuse to comply.
‘The moment we favour gender identity rights over sex-based rights, is the moment we deny the basis of human existence. Sex-based rights must have primacy!’ she exclaimed.
Giggle owner, Sall Grover described, trans-enabling self-ID laws as ‘authoritarian’ saying, ‘…no government’ should dictate what people ‘think, see, and say.’
Right to slam self-ID legislation as forced speech laws, Grover said she’d researched the subject at length and found that the trans science wasn’t settled at all.
Men who identify as women, are not women, she argued.
Describing the trans attempt to takeover Giggle – a women’s only space – Grover called the human rights complaint, ‘misogyny on steroids’.
‘[This is like] psychological torture, every day I’m forced to feel like I’ve done something wrong, simply for acknowledging [biological] reality,’ Grover shared.
Newly elected Hobart city councillor, Louise Elliot, who is under investigation by the Tasmanian anti-discrimination Commissioner ‘for hate speech and vilification’, said:
In relation to the trans invasion of women’s spaces, Elliot said, ‘For me, this is a first. I’m being called a bigot, a TERF, and a clown, for daring to speak up.’
Elliot told the forum, even politicians have ‘screamed, spat on’ and defamed her, and other women for either attending, or hosting Let Women Speak events, and ‘stating facts’.
Binary director, Kirralie Smith, another woman held hostage by LGBTQ+ lawfare, spoke brazenly about how her, and women like her, will not be intimidated by ‘those who want to affirm lies’.
‘Not one police officer, judge, politician, journalist, or medical practitioner can ever prove a male has become a female. All they can do is appropriate stereotypes and use brute force, threats, or intimidation to try and force us to accept the lie. Regardless of how captured anyone else is, I will not bow down [before this] altar of lies. Truth matters. Sex is binary – male and female,’ she asserted.
Moira Deeming also spoke.
The exiled Liberal Party member, maligned, slandered, and denied due process, spoke briefly about her experiences.
Deeming recounted how opponents were quick to frame her as a neo-Nazi, after a small unaffiliated group of masked men hijacked a Let Women Speak peaceful protest, by performing a Nazi salute.
Instead of addressing the men responsible for disrupting the protest, legacy media, politicians, and the acronym activist army came after Deeming, and other female protesters.
‘No one in the media bothered to cover the violence directed at women on the day,’ she explained.
The clash between women’s rights and the LGBTQ+ isn’t a storm in a teacup, it’s a ‘cultural and political crisis’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/meet-the-australian-women-making-a-stand-for-free-speech/
***************************************************Shaky rule of law in Australia
Probably best represented by the statue of Lady Justice, the rule of law demands that it be applied impartially, objectively and transparently to ensure that everyone is equal before it, thereby not being able to be manipulated to serve the ends of a powerful few. As Margaret Thatcher once famously declared, when this does not occur, the rule of the mob is substituted for the rule of law.
The whole notion of the rule of law, and the fairness and transparency (i.e. justice) it demands, seem to have been the real casualties of the Brittany Higgins saga and the Calvary Hospital takeover.
These sordid affairs have seen their antagonists captured by identity politics and/or an ends justifies the means mentality, thereby junking long-held ideals of the presumption of innocence, freedom of belief, and even basic fairness.
As far as the Higgins matter is concerned, one would expect persons in government, and above all the prime minister, to do their utmost to uphold fundamental principles of our justice system.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison, under cover of parliamentary privilege, made a point of apologising to Brittany Higgins personally following the allegations she raised against Bruce Lehrmann, even though those allegations had yet to be proved in court. Morrison had no compunction in trashing the presumption of innocence to embrace toxic identity politics. Seemingly for him, the end justified the means.
So, too, can the same be said for Finance Minister Katy Gallagher and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Secret text messages published by the Australian showed Gallagher was involved in the story before Ms Higgins’ interview on Channel Ten’s The Project. The text messages also show Higgins’ boyfriend David Sharaz telling Ms Higgins that Anthony Albanese had inserted himself in the story a month after it became public. Seemingly, all this was done with the intention of bringing down a government, notwithstanding Gallagher’s holier-than-thou denials about what she knew and when in Senate hearings.
Then there is the disgraceful lack of due process and transparency in the awarding of taxpayer-funded compensation to Ms Higgins (rumoured to be around $3 million) to settle her claim against the federal government. This was despite no finding of wrongdoing being made against anyone and without the opportunity for those accused of wrongdoing, including former Liberal ministers, to test the allegations made against them. Add to that the fact that we taxpayers, who are footing the bill for this payout, are not allowed to know its amount.
And if that weren’t enough, the Sofronoff inquiry has revealed that the Director of Public Prosecutions for the ACT, Shane Drumgold SC, may well have strayed from acting as an objective ‘minister of justice’ to acting as Higgins’ lawyer, which is untenable, since it undermines the public’s trust in the criminal justice system.
As Janet Albrechtsen wrote, that trust is based on the notion that the administration of justice is committed to a fair trial and the search for truth. What emerged from Drumgold’s evidence was a recurring theme that he sought to protect the complainant – Ms Higgins – from harm while apparently unconcerned about the risk to the defendant – Mr Lehrmann. It appeared that Drumgold was prepared to get a conviction at any cost.
The attempt by the ACT government to compulsorily acquire the Calvary Hospital is a similarly sinister attack on the rule of law.
As the Archbishop of Canberra-Goulburn, Christopher Prowse, wrote, never before has a government – commonwealth, state or territory – sought to acquire the assets, operations, staff and clients of a church agency with the effect of ceasing its ministry.
This would have to be one of the greatest assaults on the principle of private property ever seen in Australia, and could set a very dangerous precedent. What prevents any government making a similar grab for education or welfare services to meet their own agendas?
The hard-left ACT government suspended usual parliamentary procedure to ram through special legislation for the compulsory acquisition of the hospital with no declared compensation.
Greg Craven put it best when he declared that this is the classic case where a so-called progressive government professes human rights while punishing the wrong sort of rights. Gender and equality freedoms are priceless, while religion and conscience are plain embarrassing.
According to the ACT government, your faith is a set of abstract ideas that you intellectually assent to and that’s it. Thus, schools should not reflect faith and hospitals should not follow conscience.
It is precisely because of the notion of Christian service that the Church has established hospitals, schools, aged-care facilities, and, in doing so, these institutions must therefore stick to fundamental tenets of belief, such as the sanctity of human life – which, by the way, is a belief not restricted to those of the Christian faith.
Whether you profess the Christian faith, any faith or none, it cannot be ignored that religions generally, and the Catholic church in particular, have worked throughout the centuries for the common good. The church for over two millennia has established hospitals, care facilities, schools, universities. The Christian faith and its principles have given us our legal system, with its notions of stability, fairness, equality and tolerance.
Therefore, in this country, in line with the ideal of freedom of belief, the state has supported religious works that benefit the public. Not any more, it seems. As Craven states, the Calvary saga illustrates that an anti-religious ‘progressive’ regime in the ACT will stop at nothing to destroy politically incorrect religious institutions of care, even if that means assaulting legal principle.
So can the rule of law be saved? The principle of equality before the law is under threat in the proposed indigenous Voice to parliament.
Voting No to that, in my opinion, is a good place to start
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/can-the-rule-of-law-be-saved/
***********************************************Love that gas!
Judith Sloan
I love our gas heater. In these cold months, there is nothing better than getting home, switching on the gas heater, backing in the derriere and suddenly feeling much better.
In the past, I loved the open fire place we had in our family home but, let’s face it, they are a bit of hassle – getting it started, waiting until the heat really begins to radiate and, of course, cleaning it out. And just as the environmental hysterics can’t abide gas heaters, they can’t abide open fire places either.
Call me cynical, but does anyone believe these new studies that seek to demonstrate that gas heating is very bad for a person’s health? Why is it that these studies are only now emerging? Could it be a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, with authors determined to establish yet another reason to demonise fossil fuels?
And if it were really the case, why are age-adjusted life expectancies not significantly lower in Victoria where gas heaters and appliances are much more common than in the other states?
Now while I’ve got you in the box, can I make another confession, two actually? I love our gas stove. To be sure, I don’t do a lot of cooking these days but when I do, I really appreciate the quick response time of the gas stove. Very high and very low – both settings work well. Compared with our induction stove at our other place – that’s my other confession – the gas cook-top is far superior.
Indeed our relatively new, very expensive and rarely used European induction stove at our other place had the temerity to conk out while we had guests. It turned out to be a defective motherboard, which seems a very sexist description for a component of a stove – only kidding. It cost an arm and leg to replace it, but it would have cost several arms and legs to replace the whole stove with a newer induction model.
Evidently, having a second house, indeed having a spare bedroom, is now regarded as equivalent to a mortal sin by progressive thinkers. According to their astonishing insights, if only everyone could just share what accommodation is available, there would be no housing shortage and rents wouldn’t be rising. And if these undeserving rich bastards can’t be forced to offer up their spare accommodation, then they should be taxed to high heaven. (Note here the religious theme).
Returning to the issue of gas, gas, gas –OK, just gas – the little darlings down at the Grattan Institute have been jumping on the anti-gas bandwagon, telling everyone that they should be replacing their gas appliances and instead relying on the unreliable electricity grid. You know it makes sense – or not.
To be sure, no immediate wholesale replacement of gas appliances is being suggested, although government subsidies to push the process along are seen as necessary. Needless to say, all new housing should be deprived of the benefits of gas connections, according to the great minds from Grattan.
But here’s one of the problems with the central recommendation: if some residents abandon their gas appliances, then the economics of the domestic reticulation of gas begin to falter. It’s not worth servicing some areas unless a high proportion of residents use their connections. At that point, many people might be forced into abandoning their much loved gas heaters, gas stoves and gas hot water services but won’t be in a positon to fund the conversion. It is also likely that there will be insufficient replacement appliances and qualified tradies to do the installation at the time. The politics don’t look great.
But here’s the thing: when we are talking about gas, which is widely regarded as the only feasible transition fuel, it’s not clear why you would bother nagging households about their appliances. The majority of natural gas is used by industry and power generation and, if anything, we need to sharpen the incentives to ensure we have an adequate gas supply into the future.
And isn’t there an irony as the gas supply in the Bass Strait dwindles and any further extraction of gas in Victoria is essentially prohibited, that Dan the Man complains about Queensland gas being exported? That’s right: he thinks the federal government should limit gas exports so Victorians can have a plentiful supply while banning gas extraction in his state. But I guess lying straight in bed has never been Dan’s long suit.
Talking more generally about how the energy transition is going, if B1 (Chris Bowen) really understood matters, he would be losing a lot of sleep. There is no way that we are getting to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 – the target in Victoria is 95 per cent by 2035 – and there is no way that electricity prices are coming down, let alone falling by $275 per year as promised by Labor during the last election campaign.
In Victoria, it has dawned on the political masterminds there that the state’s land mass is actually not large enough to accommodate the necessary onshore wind and solar installations. One study has estimated that 70 per cent of the state’s land currently used for agriculture would have to be repurposed to generate sufficient (intermittent) electricity to replace coal and gas. Let’s face it, that’s not going to happen, even with Dan in charge.
It’s one reason why offshore wind is seen as the answer, with Gippsland waters nominated as the place for a renewable energy zone. It’s just a pity that offshore installations are so expensive and have much shorter lifespans than onshore ones.
It’s dawning on pretty much everyone, including even B1, that even if renewable energy projects go ahead at the pace he dictates – they aren’t and they won’t – the delays in the construction of the additional transmission lines constitute the biggest and most expensive obstacle.
It has been estimated that 10,000 additional kilometres of transmission lines are needed between now and 2030 but we will be doing well to achieve 500 to 600 kilometres per year. Thankfully, the completely understandable resistance of farmers and regional communities will ensure a slow rollout. Why should they bear the external cost of having unsightly high voltage pylons cutting a swath through their landscapes so the inner-city luvvies can pretend that the planet is being saved?
Back to the drawing board or should that be the gas heater?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/in-the-confessional-box/
************************************2 July, 2023
Two standards of justice in Victoria
The director of public prosecutions in Victorie, Kerri Judd, is a KC, but his decisions would seem to have much to do with politics and little to do with law. The totally specious case against Cardinal Pell is a permanent disgrace to him but there is more
In the US there is increasing debate about the emergence of two standards of justice: a soft one for left-of-centre liberals (in the North American sense of the term) who vote for the Democrats and a harsh one for right-of-centre conservatives who vote Republican.
American lawyer Alan Dershowitz is a Democrat who voted against Donald J. Trump in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. However, he is concerned that there appears to be one law for high-profile Democrats and another for Republicans.
Meanwhile in Victoria, concern is emerging about a double standard within the Office of Public Prosecutions, which is presided over by Director of Public Prosecutions Kerri Judd KC. Writing in the Herald Sun on June 26, state politics editor Shannon Deery quoted someone whom he described as a seasoned Melbourne legal expert as saying: “The complete lack of judgment and objectivity down at the OPP gets plainer every week.”
The reference was to the refusal of Judd to lay charges against individuals involved in the Lawyer X case. This involved Victoria Police engaging a defence lawyer, Nicola Gobbo, as an informant to provide information about her clients that could lead to convictions in what was called the gangland wars of recent memory.
The engagement of Gobbo to inform on some of her clients to Victoria Police ran counter to the legal principle that everyone is entitled to a fair trial in which it is up to the prosecution to establish its case in a criminal trial beyond reasonable doubt. The actions of Victoria Police in this instance were effectively condemned by the High Court in a unanimous judgment on November 5, 2018.
Writing in these pages on June 22, Victoria editor Damon Johnston reported how Victoria Police spent millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to prevent Victorians from finding out about the scandal until the High Court’s decision to end the embargo. Johnston was editor of the Herald Sun newspaper at the time. The full story is told in Lawyer X (HarperCollins) by Andrew Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon.
In time, the Labor government in Victoria, led by Daniel Andrews, set up a royal commission to look into the matter. It recommended the establishment of the Office of the Special Investigator to examine whether there was sufficient evidence to prove that offences had been committed by Gobbo and/or by current or former police.
Geoffrey Nettle KC, a former High Court justice, was appointed to this position. Under the legislation covering the OSI, Nettle was prevented from filing a charge concerning alleged offences unless this was agreed by the DPP.
On June 20, Nettle wrote to the clerks of the Victorian Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly advising that he considered it “pointless” for the OSI to continue and that it should be wound up. He said there was sufficient evidence to lay charges against several individuals. However, his recommendation had been overruled by Judd. In time, the advice was accepted and the OSI was closed.
And so it came to pass that one of the greatest scandals in Australian criminal law has come to naught. As Johnston wrote, “it’s difficult not to conclude that the cover-up has worked for police”.
Nettle is widely regarded as one of the finest legal minds in Australia. Yet his view on the need to lay charges was finally dismissed in condescending correspondence by Judd dated May 26, 2023.
In this letter, the DPP went to the extent of suggesting the OSI might have been proposing what amounted to “an abuse of process” in this instance. This led to an emphatic repudiation by Nettle in correspondence dated May 29, 2023. He told the DPP that the strength of her arguments “do not improve with repetition”.
There is a side history here. Nettle was a member of the High Court, led by Justice Susan Kiefel, which on April 8, 2020, quashed the conviction of Catholic Cardinal George Pell for historical child sexual abuse. Judd appeared for the OPP before the High Court.
To those who watched the hearings or read the transcript, it is evident that Judd could not explain how the alleged offences could have taken place. Then there was the question of performance. Shortly before the judgment was delivered, Melbourne Law School professor Jeremy Gans tweeted that all seven judges “were really on top of the factual details … way more than … Judd”.
There was always a doubt that Pell should have been charged. In the event, Victoria Police laid 26 charges but only five made it to court. The first jury was hung and the second convicted Pell after four days of deliberations. Pell’s legal team filed a notice of discontinuance before the second trial, which was dismissed by Judd without reasons.
The Victorian Court of Appeal divided two to one in a hearing in which the OPP could not explain the prosecution’s case – as even journalist David Marr, a Pell antagonist, conceded. And, likewise, Judd failed to do so before the High Court, where she was criticised by the Chief Justice.
The OPP case had been subjected to devastating criticism by Justice Mark Weinberg’s dissent in the VCA. The High Court reached similar conclusions.
In a letter to Nettle dated March 16, 2023, Judd wrote that there was no reasonable prospect of conviction due to the shortage of evidence. This despite the fact the OSI submission ran for 5000 pages. As Weinberg pointed out in the VCA, there was no evidence whatsoever against Pell apart from the complainant’s allegation.
Writing to Nettle on March 26, 2023, Judd claimed the “passage of time … would have to be taken into account in determining whether it is in the public interest to proceed with a prosecution”. In fact, the passage of time was longer in the Pell case than with respect to the Lawyer X matter.
For his part, Andrews publicly sided with Judd. This stands in contrast with his decision to effectively criticise the High Court’s unanimous decision in George Pell v The Queen.
In the state of Victoria there appears to be a law for Victoria Police and another for the late Pell and some others.
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Labor’s Censorship Bill a threat to democracy
Who do you trust to determine what is true and what is false? To determine which news and opinion is allowed to be published, and which should be banned to ‘protect public health and safety’?
It’s a fair bet that Twitter, Facebook, the media, and the government aren’t at the top of your list. Yet last week, the Albanese government released a Bill gifting itself and Big Tech new powers to censor information it doesn’t want online. According to the Minister for Communications:
‘Mis and disinformation sows division within the community undermines trust and can threaten public health and safety. The Albanese government is committed to keeping Australians safe online.’
There are many red flags raised by this Bill. Perhaps the biggest is the fact that Albanese has exempted anything from his own government or the media from being considered ‘misinformation’.
Yet anything said in response to the government by the Opposition or another political party, or by any member of the public, can be considered misinformation and censored.
For example, if a Minister of the government made a clearly deceptive claim such as that the Voice would never campaign to change the date of Australia Day, and the media uncritically published stories about this on social media, that can’t be considered misinformation. But if you comment on that post and point out the Voice would be free to lobby government on any matter it chooses and that some of the government’s top advisers on the Voice have been denouncing Australia Day and calling to change the date for years, you may well find your post tagged as misinformation.
In the lead-up to this Orwellian ‘combating misinformation’ Bill being released, ‘misinformation’ suddenly became Labor’s new buzzword for any opposition to its divisive Voice referendum. In February this year, a carefully coordinated media drop from the Prime Minister’s Office to the Sydney Morning Herald read:
‘Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will link the growing international wave of misinformation to the campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, saying he is optimistic Australians will look past a confected culture war and support the referendum.
‘In an attempt to discredit his critics, Albanese will on Sunday claim that democracy is under threat…’
So on one hand, Labor says stopping misinformation is about ‘keeping Australians safe online’. On the other hand, the Prime Minister says misinformation is people who don’t agree with his divisive proposal to embed a new bureaucracy in our Constitution.
For left-wing governments and commentators, ‘misinformation’ has become the new ‘hate speech’ – terms used by the left to justify legal punishment against any opposing views.
Let’s not forget that social media companies have been happily censoring and banning those who criticise left-wing ideologies for years. It’s an ominous sign that the Albanese government demands still more censorship and wants to give itself powers to enforce it.
The inevitable result of the Labor government threatening massive fines against social media if they don’t censor content further is that those companies will block content and debates they know left-wing governments don’t like. Albanese’s government has cunningly drafted its legislation to ensure that when your posts are censored or your account is banned as a result of his laws, there will be no right of appeal to the government, and they’ll be able to blame the social media platforms.
Everybody knows that the internet is full of false information. A good government should trust the public they work for to process and critique what they read and see online accordingly. The best remedy to misinformation is free and open debate, supported by a fair media which doesn’t simply regurgitate the fashionable opinions of the day from social media because it’s cheap and easy journalism.
Instead of that liberal and democratic approach, the Albanese government is choosing the path of censorship and suppression. Government that appoints itself and fellow elites as the arbiters of truth is the worst possible response – one that authoritarian regimes have chosen since the beginning of recorded history.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/06/labors-censorship-bill-a-threat-to-democracy/
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In The Fog of War former United States secretary of defence, the late Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009), described how prior to nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the second world war, the US ran a fire-bombing campaign across Japanese cities. The civilian devastation was horrendous. McNamara and Airforce General Curtis LeMay concluded they’d be tried as war criminals if the US lost.
Fast forward to recent history and President Obama’s record in office was one of the most lethal for civilians out of any US President during the global war on terror (GWOT). Instead of facing war crimes, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. There is a perverse imbalance between what is acceptable for those in power compared to those deployed by that power when it comes to executing their task with extreme prejudice during times of war.
Under Obama, the US lowered the threshold for who could be regarded as a fighting-aged male in a strike zone and boys and men over the age of 16 became legitimate targets. And get this, only where evidence was brought to light after their death, were they determined to be innocent. This was conducted under the watch of Obama’s bitter CIA director John Brennan, and known as the ‘signature strikes policy’. He’s one of those intel guys who signed a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was ‘Russian disinformation’ during the 2020 US Presidential campaign.
UK-based rights group, Reprieve, argue lowering the threshold for who could be classed as a fighting-aged male allowed the Obama administration to claim low civilian casualty figures and a high number of militants killed. Reprieve’s analysis estimates between 2002 and 2014, US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan killed 1,147 unknown people in failed attempts to kill 41 named individuals. The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) estimates that 3,797 people were killed in drone strikes during Obama’s tenure, including 324 civilians. The figures are never going to be exact, but you get the picture. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama’s first airstrike in Yemen was a disaster. Instead of eliminating al-Qaeda with cluster munitions a tribal group was hit, killing 55 people. Twenty-one were children – ten of them under five. Twelve were women, five of them pregnant.
It was under Obama that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular leader and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in 2011. A US citizen was executed without trial. Despite all of this, in 2021 the US warned Australia’s Defence Chief that allegations Australian special forces soldiers killed prisoners and civilians in Afghanistan may trigger a law prohibiting assistance from the US. Which reminds me of a Pashto proverb, Da khra mina laghata da – Donkeys show their love by kicking you.
This is worth thinking about as we watch the crucifixion of Australian soldiers during their time in Afghanistan. It appears much of the controversy flows from conflicting eye-witness accounts; many who appear to be rivals. And yes, there are images that from the comfort of our safe spaces appear questionable. The most high-profile example is the defamation case involving Victoria Cross recipient and Special Air Service soldier Ben Roberts-Smith. US Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher is another high-profile example. In 2018 Gallagher was arrested and imprisoned, accused of war crimes in similar circumstances to Roberts-Smith. Eventually Gallagher was pardoned. The media pile-on was the same. How the media and politicians love glorifying these soldiers when it suits their purposes. Remember how ‘operator beards’ were all the rage during the GWOT.
And hey, do a search and you will find how the same mainstream media commentators carried the narrative of how painful and agonising it was for Obama to twist and turn through legalities. The same commentators did the opposite for Roberts-Smith and Gallagher. They were just ‘bad men’. Probably all that nasty ‘toxic masculinity’.
Former British prime minister Winston Churchill appreciated the moral dilemma of warfare when he approved the establishment of the Special Operations Executive – a courageous bunch of self-starters sent behind enemy lines often disguised as goat-herders, fishermen or even German soldiers – they were masters of sabotage. Yet Churchill was reprimanded by his own side. SOE members were criticised in the House of Commons for the ungentlemanly way they fought. Think about that. They were fighting the Nazis and still people wanted the fight to be fair.
In unconventional environments such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, war is fought by, with and through the population. It is an unnerving feeling when sipping tea with a group of villagers knowing some are planning right there and then to kill you on the way home. Even the people working for you could be plotting to do you in, given the right incentive. The green-on-blue attacks that saw Australian soldiers killed by local Afghans who worked for them was a tactic used by the Taleban.
So who is a legitimate target?
Road-side bombs or IEDs accounted for almost 50 per cent of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing symbolised these war zones like the IED. It made your skin crawl with fear driving down any road. Yet at which stage of involvement turns one into a legitimate target? How about the guys digging the hole to put them in; they are unarmed? What about the dude on the cell phone watching the vehicle go past the trigger point from which to key in the detonation number? What about the logistics line of jingo trucks, donkeys and skinny guys on bikes bringing in the equipment and components?
The reality is, as George Orwell wrote, ‘people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf’. Except there is a line that can be crossed by presidents. Given many in the West are gunning for a confrontation between the US and China, we might need a new generation of ‘rough men’.
When conducted with extreme prejudice, warfare is brutal and violent, and its bloody reality often offends. The last thing we want is for Australian soldiers, and our elite Special Air Service, to have the tips of their spears blunted.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/soldiers-of-misfortune/ ?
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The lies behind "Voice"
The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a vulnerable document. It is sometimes silent when Aboriginal failures are visible, but vocal in condemning Australian people for misdeeds that never happened.
Without doubt, the Indigenous people have had many legitimate grievances about their sufferings and slights ever since British convicts and marines arrived in 1788. Hosts of Aboriginal people were killed in frontier conflict, though the historians’ statistics of death tend to contradict each other. Most Indigenous people died from diseases to which they had no immunity, and such deaths far exceed those suffered in warfare since 1788.
Countless Aboriginal people died from the excessive consumption of alcohol: rum and brandy rather than beer and wine were their temptation. Moreover, most Aboriginal people preferred novel foods such as sugar, flour and mutton rather than the plants they had skilfully gathered during an ingenious way of life that also kept them fit. The sight of so many overweight Aboriginal people today would confound their lean ancestors, if by chance still alive.
The loss of their lands, their “dispossession”, of course created resentment. But Aboriginal leaders tend to think they were the world’s only such sufferers. In fact, the ancestors of most mainstream Australians painfully lost their lands in some faraway era and received no compensation.
Thus in 1066 the Norman Conquest of England and the actual killing or enslavement of so many people, and the raping or castration of others, was probably as devastating as the British conquest of Australia. In contrast, no Aboriginal people were turned into slaves. English people who suffered severely from the consequences of the Norman invasion in 1066 must have outnumbered the Aboriginal people who suffered severely from the conquest of Australia in, say, the 70 years after 1788.
Likewise, ancient Aboriginal people themselves were champions at dispossessing their neighbours, and one day that fact should be taught in Australian schools. In every known part of the world the semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers had been deadly in their tribal warfare.
Inside the Uluru statement, two major accusations are expressed in one pithy sentence: “In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.” The Aboriginal leaders who met at Uluru believed their kinsfolk were not even deemed worthy of being counted – until the referendum of 1967 raised their political status. Anthony Albanese himself, while understandably basking in his political honeymoon, affirmed this accusation, and continues to do so in parliament. If true, the accusation is a serious blemish on the Australian nation during the past century and a half. But it is not true.
In his many overseas trips Albanese has performed calmly and courteously. But at home, on the question that is now his very first priority, he seems sometimes to be at sea. It is fair to say he went overboard when in the Marrickville town hall on October 14 last year he told a packed gathering that Australia since 1788 had a “brutal” history, full stop. We all make unwise or sweeping statements from time to time.
Albanese’s favourite message is that Australia is “the world’s oldest living culture”. But New Guinea was occupied by human beings at about the same time as – or earlier than – Australia, and accordingly it also might be the world’s oldest living culture. Aboriginal people on the whole now have the higher quality of life, but wide is the gap between most city and big-town residents and that minority struggling in the outback communities. Closing the Gap has several meanings.
We learned how determined Albanese was when he affirmed, alongside the Uluru statement, that Aboriginal people were crippled by “powerlessness”. Now he is scaling the Mount Everest of Australian politics by seeking a drastic change to Australia’s Constitution. Thereby he will empower Indigenous people and simultaneously reduce the power of the great majority of Australians. But what if the Uluru statement, with its errors and omissions, does not justify an upheaval in Australia’s democratic system?
The Uluru statement is militant. It offers no sentence of respect or gratitude to the Australian people. Yet it is hailed by Albanese as warm hearted and generous. He even announced in a memorial lecture in Adelaide recently that it was an invitation extended “to every single Australian in love and grace and patience”.
A disciple of Bruce Pascoe, Albanese admires his nonsensical Dark Emu theory. Pascoe believes Aboriginal Australia was the first real democracy in the world and for 80,000 years a haven of peace and prosperity. Albanese believes this utopia – in fact, it never existed – can in some ways be honoured if Indigenous people are compensated with special powers and rights.
Parliament in its recent debate did nothing to validate the Uluru accusation that mainstream Australians had refused for generations even to count Aboriginal people. In fact, these proud people were being counted before any one of us was born.
We can appreciate the sense of hurt in young, politically active Aboriginal people when they hear the myth that they, their parents and grandparents had not been deemed worthy of being counted in a census. More insulting, the young are led to believe that the sheep had been counted regularly – as undoubtedly they were – but not the Aboriginal people.
In parliament last month Tanya Plibersek mistakenly announced, in an otherwise informative address, that in 1901 the “Aboriginal people weren’t counted in the census or commonly allowed to vote”. Her ministerial colleague Catherine King told parliament that Aboriginal people – in the words of one informant – were powerless “simply because we were never identified as humans”. That can’t be true.
Day by day, all shoppers at Coles supermarkets receive on their printed receipts a highly selective message based on Uluru. The directors of Coles Group do not seem to realise that, through the years, their own executives – in recommending places where the next dozen stores might or might not be opened – must have known where most Aboriginal people lived.
Linda Burney, born in a small Riverina township, is deservedly praised for making her way from a humble Aboriginal home to become a cabinet minister in Sydney and now in Canberra. But she has mistakenly insisted that as a young girl she was never in a census. “The notion that you weren’t worthy of being counted was very painful,” she exclaimed in July 2017. She once misinformed parliament that until the age of 10 she was not even a citizen. Instead, she claimed she was merely ranked under “the flora and fauna act” of NSW. Such a policy did not exist.
The first census to be conducted by commonwealth officers was in 1911, and the federal attorney-general instructed them to count “full-blood Aboriginals”. Understandably, the officers had to retreat when they reached remote areas where local inhabitants had seen no white person or heard a word of English. But tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were actually counted, often with enormous effort, in the accessible regions.
For a logical but slightly complicated reason, they were not – after the actual counting – included in the final tally of population. For instance, in apportioning a share of the federal customs revenue to each state, the smallish Aboriginal populations were not “reckoned” when finalising the payments to each state. Helen Irving’s book To Constitute a Nation neatly explains the reasons and the practice.
Today, visitors to the National Museum in Canberra are informed that not until 1971 were “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples counted in the Australian census”. On the contrary, they had been counted in every federal census since 1901, and counted moreover in the face of obstacles confronted by few other national statisticians. Thus the state officials then in charge of that 1901 census specifically counted them. They set up a special category that comprised “full blood Aboriginals” and those “nomadic half castes” who were living with them. In the five mainland states they totalled 41,389. An even larger number could not be counted, being nomadic and too far distant.
There were precise censuses even before 1901, thus contradicting Albanese and the Uluru leaders. For example, South Australia, holding a census on Sunday, April 2, 1871, recorded the exact districts and towns where more than 5000 Aboriginal men and women lived.
Eye-opening was the census held on the same Sunday in gold-rich Victoria, where 731,528 people of all races were counted. Conducted by Henry Hayter, the census commanded respect from leading overseas statisticians. The main results were in the hands of parliamentarians barely two months later – a feat that is unimaginable in the age of fast computers.
Of those Victorian officials who took part in the detailed census, 918 went on horseback and 650 on foot. They investigated remote townships, huts and tents where only one or two Aboriginal people could be found. That the tally of these people had fallen since Victoria’s previous census in 1861 was evident, and it would continue to fall.
Four out of every 10 of the Victorian Aboriginal men said they were following a paid occupation; and that was a higher proportion than can be found in many remote Aboriginal settlements today. In Victoria, two of every five Aboriginal children of school age could read but fewer could write. Five Aboriginal adults were recorded as blind, and seven were over the age of 70, according to the census teams.
Hayter was meticulous. In the big printed edition of the census report he added a minor correction to the tally of 61,000 “Chinese and Aborigines” who had been separately counted: please “take 1 from the males and add 1 to the females”. Generally, the Aboriginal populations had considerably more males than females.
Across the globe most people alive in 1871 had not yet been counted officially. It is therefore remarkable that Aboriginal people in various towns and regions of Australia were systematically counted.
Other of our censuses were held before 1871, the year Albanese’s own ancestral land of Italy held its first nationwide census. One generation later, in 1897, the initial census in Russia’s vast empire at last enumerated famous individuals such as Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Unfortunately, the allegation – “a people not worth counting” – is now endorsed by some of the biggest business houses, by the football leagues and even by universities that are world-ranked for their research.
The leaders at Uluru insisted that their people had been powerless for generations This lament is also far-fetched.
In stressing the “torment of our powerlessness”, they did not know that in the late 1850s, in the three populous Australian colonies, most Aboriginal men were allowed to vote. This was a momentous event: most of Europe’s tens of millions of men had not yet won the right to vote. Indeed, a forgotten man of Aboriginal and convict ancestry won the rural seat of Young in NSW in 1889.
Another landmark – unknown to Uluru – was a general election held in 1896 in South Australia. This was probably the first government in the world to allow women not only to vote but also to stand for parliament. New Zealand women already had the first right but not the second.
In this same 1896 election in South Australia, even more revolutionary was the sight of Aboriginal women attending the polling booth. Martin Luther King might well have shaken his head in surprise if he had known of it.
Just pause and ponder for one minute: South Australia’s innovation occurred when 99 per cent of the women in the world did not have a vote. In renowned cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, New York, St Petersburg, Tokyo and Beijing, not one woman had the privilege now exercised by female Aboriginal voters in South Australia. Five years later in the first federal election various Aboriginal women must have voted – an election in which no white woman in the four eastern states was entitled to vote. These triumphs contradict the Uluru manifesto.
Indigenous people hope to gain a major say in shaping a beneficial treaty with the Australian nation; they demand a truth-telling tribunal dominated by the Indigenous; and they call for the right at times to influence vital spheres such as foreign policy. They will also break the golden rule of democracy: one person, one vote.
Meanwhile, their cry of “powerlessness” is a kind of crocodile tear. In the past half-century Aboriginal groups have been handsomely recognised by their acquisition – under the Fraser and Keating governments – of ownership or certain rights and interests in 55 per cent of the Australian land mass. Few Australian voters know this fact. It constitutes one of the largest peaceful transfers of land in the history of the modern world.
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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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