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 October, 2023
Australian government effort to nip toxic masculinity in the bud.
I cannot even imagine how they might do that. Talk is cheap and kids are already preached at from dawn to dusk. To change behaviour you have to change the needs that drive it and that will rarely be possible.
Andrew Tate is a symptom, not a cause. Disrespect for women comes naturally to meny men and feminist preaching will only magnify that. Being constantly told that women are so much more admirable and worthy than men will usually provoke defiance and an attitude opposite to that desired.
The one faint hope of change would be to replace the currently pervasive valorization of women with a much more balanced message but that is not going to happen. The idea that men too have problems seems to stick in the throats of feminists
Even a heavy legal assault on domestic violence would achieve little. Bashing women is clearly something impulsive and done out of anger -- and laws are unlikely to restrain that.
The only preaching that might help would be to stop mindless praise of women and demonization of men and replace it with lessons about the needs that the respective sexes have. At its simplest, both sexes could be told that men have needs for adventure and women have a need for security. Men often say that they don't understand women at all but explanations of what drives female behaviour are posible and could be widely deployed.
I long ago wrote an explanation of female behaviour -- unlikely though that may seem. I have four women calling on me regularly these days despite my frail old age so maybe I do know something. My explanation below:
https://johnjayray.com/women.html
To end violence against women and children, the federal government aims to reshape young male attitudes toward healthy, respectful relationships as “extremist influencers” like Andrew Tate influence minds.
The initiative, known as the “Healthy Masculinities Project,” is poised to launch next year as a three-year trial, supported by $3.5 million in funding.
This innovative project will tackle the insidious impact of social media messaging targeting young men and boys, with the primary aim of eradicating gender stereotypes perpetuated online and promoting a culture of respect and supportive relationships among peers.
The project will engage the target school-age male audience through face-to-face interactions at sporting clubs, community organisations, and on social media.
Recent research has revealed 25 per cent of teenage boys in Australia look up to social media personalities who propagate harmful gender stereotypes and endorse violence against women.
The government has channelled funding through the First Action Plan Priorities Fund, an $11.9 million fund which is part of the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-32.
Minister for Social Services Amanda Rishworth said there is a need for young men to develop supportive relationships with their male peers and marked the project as a critical first step towards fostering healthy male attitudes.
Ms Rishworth cited the links between harmful forms of masculinity and the perpetration of violence against women.
“Research shows there are strong links between harmful forms of masculinity and the perpetration of violence against women,” she said.
“Educating boys about healthy masculinity and providing them with positive role models are important steps to ending cycles of violence.”
The grant round for this trial will open its doors in early 2024 and will offer an opportunity for organisations equipped with specialist expertise to sign on.
Ms Rishworth emphasised the necessity of addressing violent behaviour at its roots.
Andrew Tate is a controversial kickboxer and reality TV star turned content creator who has amassed billions of views among tens of millions of followers despite being de-platformed by most social media platforms.
He has been known to preach troubling views regarding women, including that rape victims “must bear some responsibility” for their attacks; or that women should be choked by their male partners and stopped from going out.
But Mr Tate, who often flaunts his lavish life, is seen by many young men as an authority on what it is to be successful.
In August, he was released from house arrest in Romania and placed under judicial control, a lighter restrictive measure, while he awaits trial on charges of human trafficking.
As National Director of White Ribbon Australia, Allan Ball, previously explained to news.com.au, “the use of gaming, extreme bravado and music [in the videos of Tate] overlays his deplorable actions with a filter of normalcy”.
“Impressionable young minds are drawn in by money, power and unwavering confidence to become part of a tribe,” he said.
Mr Tate created the Real World Portal in recent months, after closing his subscription-based “Hustler’s University”, an online academy for his fans, promising to assist them in making big money while helping his videos on social media go viral.
Real World, which bills itself as an anti-university, promises members will make over $10k a month online.
A joint statement from Dr Stephanie Wescott and Professor Steven Roberts, two leading experts in the education field from Monash University, broadly welcomed the government’s initiative while highlighting the hazardous influence of misogynistic influencers like Mr Tate on impressionable boys and young men.
The pair are currently conducting research on the impact of Mr Tate’s content on boys in Australian schools, and have already revealed its far-reaching consequences on girls and women in classrooms across the country.
The research further highlighted that boys consuming Mr Tate’s content were more likely to harbour unhealthy views on relationships — an alarming finding given the high rates of family violence in Australia.
Dr Wescott and Prof Roberts raised a critical concern about the potential pitfalls of implementing short-term, “quick-fix” programs and interventions that might lack the capacity for sustained engagement with young men.
They cited mixed evidence regarding the effectiveness of such approaches and emphasised the absence of a uniform strategy for evaluating their impact.
The experts recommended long-term, direct, and targeted initiatives that challenge detrimental social norms affecting boys’ mental health and emotions while adopting a “gender-transformative” approach based on best practices.
“We also challenge the assumption that boys need only to hear from other men about how to develop positive masculinity, and note that the inclusion of only male role models in healthy masculinity programs are not backed by robust evidence,” they wrote.
They argued boys benefit from interacting with individuals of diverse gender identities at all life stages.
The experts warned that featuring only male role models may reinforce negative aspects of healthy masculinity programs.
“The reasons boys and young men find extremist influencers like Andrew Tate appealing are complex and multifaceted, and so must be the approaches we use to address them,” they said.
The pair urged the federal government and the Minister for Social Services to consult widely with experts in the field and lean on established research.
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I'm American and I am so obsessed with Australian Weet-Bix I get it shipped to me: 'Why did no one tell me about it? It's like crack'
I am also a Weetbix tragic -- JR
The 24-year-old could no longer stand how much sugar was in American cereal and decided to try Weet-Bix on a whim - a decision that changed his life forever.
He shared that he has six bars of the whole-grain wheat cereal dissolved in milk and strawberry protein powder every morning, sometimes switching it up with the addition of Biscoff biscuits crumbled in.
'As an American, why did no one ever tell me about Weet-Bix?' he asked online. 'This sh*t is like crack and I love it. All American cereal is sugar, sugar, sugar, and Weet-Bix takes on whatever flavour I want and it gets mushy so easy.'
He added, 'Thank you for my new favourite breakfast. I've had Weet-Bix a few different ways but can't wait to try all the ways Australians eat it.'
Other foreigners have been similarly taken aback when tasting Australian food for the first time.
DJ duo Xavier Di Petta and Nick Iavarone, popularly known together as 'Party Shirt', recently took their first trip to a Bunnings Warehouse sausage sizzle while on tour Down Under.
The Australian staple snack typically consists of a sausage between a bun or white bread, with fried onion and sauce drizzled on top.'
Nick doused his sausage in tomato sauce and mustard and took a generous bite for his first impression.
The musician spent a few seconds processing before blurting out: 'F**k yeah!'
American travellers were also wowed by Australia's iconic coffee.
Australian Olympic water polo player Tilly Kearns said that she'd told her American boyfriend Justin Dedich that Australian coffee was 'much better' than what's served in the US, but he 'didn't believe her'.
After touching down in Sydney for a week, the US-based athlete decided to take Justin to try a cappuccino.
In a video, Justin stirs the velvety coffee before smelling it and taking a sip and giving his verdict. 'It's good s*** Matilda, it's good s***,' he said.
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‘Pure hate’: Jewish academics quit National Tertiary Education Union
A growing number of Jewish academics are quitting Australia’s major tertiary education union in protest at the union’s anti-Israel stance, while dozens of others have demanded the union withdraw what they describe as anti-Semitic statements.
In a resignation letter to the National Tertiary Education Union, one member wrote: ‘This decision by the union is unacceptable and shameful. It is a pure hate against Israelis and Jews. I am immediately withdrawing my membership from this anti-Semitic union.”
In a separate letter to the union sent on Tuesday, 18 Jewish academics from all of Australia’s major universities told the NTEU that it will “lose any moral authority” to speak on human rights if it does not address the crimes of Hamas.
The signatories, one of whom was lawyer and Canberra University professor Kim Rubenstein, pointed out that some individuals they had contacted to sign the letter explained they had already resigned their longstanding memberships of the NTEU “due to feeling disenfranchised by the NTEU’s position over the years on Israel and Palestine”.
Professor Rubenstein told The Australian she had not yet resigned from the union because it did valuable work in its core function, “but that’s an option for me going forward if I feel this is something that’s not resolvable”.
Last week, Sydney University academic Fiona Gill, a senior lecturer in social sciences, quit as branch secretary of the union because of its “refusal to publicly condemn war crimes”, understood to be a reference to the Hamas attack of 7 October.
“The seeping of external political factionalism and arguments into the branch has resulted in an increasingly dysfunctional, divided and conflictual environment which is detrimental to the achievement of the base goals of our union,” Dr Gill wrote in her resignation letter.
Dr Gill’s resignation came as the union’s Sydney University branch president Nick Riemer promoted anti-Israel material on X and condemned “our gutless political ‘leaders’ cowering behind Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’”.
Dr Riemer, a linguistics academic, is a leading member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to isolate Israel who has been active in recent pro-Palestinian protests in Sydney.
The signatories to Tuesday’s letter expressed dismay that the union leadership was advocating members attend protests that were “likely to agree with only one group of members’ perceptions and views (especially with chants of ‘free Palestine from the river to the sea’ – ie, the destruction of Israel”.
They asked that any further statements by the union should unequivocally condemn the massacre of civilians within Israel by Hamas. The signatories expressed their desire to meet NTEU national president Alison Barnes and ACT secretary Lachlan Clohesy via Zoom to discuss the issue, but Mr Clohesy wrote back saying Dr Barnes was at an overseas conference “and will not be available until 9 November 2023 – at that point, I will be able to discuss your letter with Alison”. Mr Clohesy did not respond to questions from The Australian about why Dr Barnes was unavailable for two weeks to discuss the issue.
A spokesman for the NTEU referred The Australian to the union’s official statement but declined to answer questions, including how many members had resigned over the union’s stance.
The Australian understands that at least four members of the Victoria University branch of the NTEU alone resigned from the union after it passed a motion expressing “unwavering solidarity with Palestine and … an immediate end to occupation and apartheid”. The same motion was passed by the RMIT and La Trobe NTEU branches. The union had also urged members to attend a Rally for Palestine event.
One Jewish academic wrote to the union submitting his resignation, saying: “A targeted murder of over 1000 civilians, the beheading of babies, the killing of babies, children, women, men and older people is terrorism, it is not fighting for freedom.”
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Do Covid vaccines meet the definition of gene therapy?
It seems like a lifetime ago that an enjoyable night in consisted of the couch, popcorn, and a feel-good movie. Not anymore. With the hotbed of post-pandemic questions filtering through Australia’s Parliament, I’ve discovered riveting viewing can be found in an evening of ‘Senate-estimates-live’ if you get the right participants. Nothing quite matches the drama and real-time manoeuvering between our elected representatives and the bureaucrats. The only comparable analogy is that of a high-level game of chess … with higher stakes.
We had such a night recently. The scheduled appearance of AHPRA, the TGA, and the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR), joined by Senators Rennick and Roberts promised to be popcorn-worthy viewing. And it was.
Five minutes before the closing of the session at 11 pm, the final question was handed to Senator Rennick. I was wakened from my somnolence as the Senator asked, ‘Have we got the Gene Technology Regulator here?’
The following conversation may well be the biggest bombshell drop in the Covid vaccine drama so far.
In the absence of the pending HANSARD transcript (ref. 27445), the conversation goes like this:
Senator Rennick: ‘I have a Pfizer document here from their own website. It says, “Gene therapies are delicate, intentional processes encapsulating the desired gene. Manufacturing gene therapies is challenging and it requires certain steps including transfection.” That is on Pfizer’s own website.
‘Then I had also from the website of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy “because the vaccine (it’s referring to the Covid mRNA vaccine) introduces new genetic material into cells for a short period of time to induce antibodies, it is a gene therapy” as defined by the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.
‘And then the TGA [in] its own Pfizer nonclinical report page 19 says the proposed commercial scale manufacturing process includes use of linearized plasmid DNA template for mRNA production. So, we’ve now got Pfizer themselves who admit that the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy, the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy admits the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy, and we’ve got the TGA themselves admit the DNA was used in the manufacturing process. Why wasn’t the actual mRNA vaccine tested for genotoxicity and why didn’t the (OGTR) look at it in terms of Gene Technology?’
Dr Raj Bula (Office of the Gene Technology Regulator):
‘Thank you for your question, Senator. I think the first part about the genotoxicity that question has been asked before. Because the Therapeutic Goods Administration was the approving authority for the vaccine products, that is a question for TGA on GMO toxicity.
‘In relation to your question around manufacturing, I think it’s useful to put a bit of context around that in that the committee is aware the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines were fully formulated and imported into Australia, which meant that there was actually no manufacture of the mRNA or the vaccine product itself here in Australia. If indeed the mRNA was being manufactured here, and it’s correct, that gene technology was used in the modification of the mRNA then under the Gene Technology Act an approval would have been required for that manufacturing step.’
Senator Rennick: ‘That contradicts what you’ve said previously. You’ve said previously gene therapy and gene technology wasn’t used. Now you’re saying because it was produced in another country, that you’re not responsible for checking the gene therapy.’
Dr Bhula: ‘So, the Gene Technology Act, it doesn’t reach into manufacturing in other countries.’
Senator Rennick: ‘But it still involves transfection here. It transfects cells of Australian citizens.’
Dr Bhula: ‘I disagree with that.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Well, that’s what Pfizer say. Even they admit transfection, is a part of gene therapy.’
Dr Bhula: ‘No senator.’
Senator Rennick: ‘So you’re disagreeing with Pfizer, the people who actually made the vaccine that transfection isn’t a part of gene therapy.’
Chair: ‘I think she’s disagreeing with you at the moment.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Well, it’s not my words. I’ll just read out what Pfizer said.’
Gallagher: ‘Welcome to my world.’
Dr Bhula: ‘I think it comes down to a definition of what is a gene therapy.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Yep, that’s right. And I’m relying on the manufacturer.’
This little exchange at the eleventh hour of Senate estimates had me wide-eyed and jaw dropped.
In my view, the OGTR has undermined their answers to Senator Rennick in Feb 2023 (as follows):
Senator Rennick: ‘Under section 30C of the Therapeutic Goods Act, the secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Health must seek advice from the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator on the safety and efficiency of any product that uses GMO as defined by the Gene Technology Act. Do you have evidence of where the secretary has written to you asking for advice on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines?’
Dr Bhula: ‘Thank you for your question, Senator. Where the particular vaccine involves a GMO, there’s a reciprocal arrangement, if you like, for OGTR to seek advice from the TGA in terms of a risk assessment around that GM vaccine and vice versa. The TGA may also request advice from the OGTR.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Do you have documentation of that?’
Dr Bhula: ‘For GM vaccines, yes.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Where they’ve written to you for the Pfizer one?’
Dr Bhula: ‘No, because the mRNA vaccines are not required to be regulated through the OGTR.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Did they write to you and actually ask you that question?’
Dr Bhula: ‘No, because they’re not required to be regulated through the OGTR.’
Senator Rennick: ‘But how would they know, because you’re the expert? And, by the way, gene technology involves both replication and transcription.’
Dr Bhula: ‘Yes.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Which is what the mRNA vaccine does.’
Dr Bhula: ‘But the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines did not involve any step of genetic modification…’
Senator Rennick: ‘They produce proteins.’
Dr Bhula: ‘Or a GMO…’
Chair: ‘Senator Rennick, would you allow Dr Bhula to finish her answers?’
Dr Bhula: ‘Which meant that that didn’t require regulatory oversight by the OGTR.’
Senator Rennick: ‘Well, I dispute that. Look up gene technology. But, anyway, thank you.’
In February 2023, the OGTR asserted that there was no documentation between the TGA and the OGTR regarding the mRNA vaccines. They say the mRNA vaccines were not required to be regulated through the OGTR because they did not involve a GMO or any step of genetic modification.
However, in October 2023, the OGTR says they don’t have oversight because the Gene Technology Act doesn’t reach into manufacturing in other countries and the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines were fully formulated outside of Australia.
Please bear with me while I explain the significance of this moment.
Senator Rennick has tabled several documents from Pfizer, the TGA, and the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy confirming that Covid-19 mRNA injections are indeed gene therapy products involving genetic modification during manufacture.
Importantly the OGTR concedes that if what Senator Rennick is saying is true, then the mRNA injections are GM products and should be regulated by the OGTR if they were manufactured in Australia, but they do not have oversight because the Covid-19 mRNA injections were manufactured overseas.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The Gene Technology Act 2000 requires that such gene technology products fall under the regulation of the OGTR as soon as they hit Australian shores, with GMO ‘dealings’ including manufacture, import, transport, and disposal. The OGTR’s response to Senator Rennick last week that the mRNA products were not regulated by them because they were manufactured outside of Australia appears to contradict what is written in the Gene Technology Act.
There’s something else. Let’s look at the concept of ‘manufacture’. Both the mRNA (Pfizer and Moderna) and viral vector (AZ) Covid-19 injections are pro-drugs, meaning they tell the body to ‘manufacture’ the final product. In this case, this final product is the spike protein. This means the final manufacturing step does indeed happen on Australian soil, in the bodies of injected Australians.
An (anonymous) Australian professor of science and medicine explains it this way:
‘…the concept of “manufacture” here is an interesting one as with the mRNA and also the adenoviral vector vaccines the final act of “manufacture” occurs in the body into which these products are injected.
‘This is because they are designed to induce the manufacture of spike protein production in vivo [in the human body] (the manufacture) as their final step. Without this final manufacturing step, they don’t work.
‘So, in effect when the products are injected into a human body in Australia, then the final act of genetic manufacture does indeed occur in Australia.
‘What the OGTR are proposing is thereby a nonsense. If they are redefining the Act in this way then it means we can create all manner of new genetic organisms and providing we do this in vivo (in living organisms) then it is now outside the purview of the OGTR – how wonderful – the virology community will be ecstatic that they can now do these things in vivo without going to the OGTR.’
‘So what?’ you may say.
Well this, dear reader, brings us to seriousness of the issue. A legal case filed in Australia’s Federal Court claims the Pfizer and Moderna products always met Australian legal definitions for being deemed genetically modified organisms and should therefore have obtained GMO licenses from the OGTR. They did not.
What, you may ask, is the penalty for dealing in GMOs without a license? You can read more about that here.
Even more serious is what this potentially means for the millions of Australians who were assured the mRNA vaccines were not gene therapy, making fully informed consent null and void. Not to mention their health in this ‘world’s largest experiment’.
One thing is certain, this isn’t the last we have heard about the OGTR.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/do-covid-vaccines-meet-the-definition-of-gene-therapy
************************************30 October, 2023
Is Australian multiculturalism failing?
The events described below are real but isolated. They do not well reflect everyday life in Australia. Let me tell another story: Most days I have my breakfast in a local suburban cafe that has a very good menu. And it is very popular and busy.
But as I sit there day after day I observe a minor miracle. There are usually only one or two other people with my Celtic coloring (freckles!) but everybody behaves in a manner that I see as proper. There are always some Chinese, some Indians and probably some people from Europe. The cafe was formerly run by an Italian and is now run by a Vietnaese. Both were superb managers
And there are no raised voices and no aggression of any sort. Everybody there remains polite at all times. I have not once seen an exception to that. There are even some apparent Middle-Easterners of probably Muslim persuasion who make no waves at all. They usually keep in their own groups but no harm comes of that.
So every day I sit in the middle of a very multicultural population and experience nothing that disturbs my Old Australian soul. I have no doubt that in Australia I live in a brilliantly successful multicultural society
In March 2022, Declan Cutler, a working-class 16-year-old, died after being stabbed over 50 times by a ‘gang of teenagers’ in a random attack in North Melbourne.
Hours after the incident, one of the attackers allegedly went home and searched the question, ‘Is hell guaranteed for a Muslim who commits murder?’
Earlier this year, Jason Langhans, 17, was killed when he tried to stop a fight between gatecrashers and partygoers at a get-together in the small coastal town of Tooradin.
The attacker, a 17-year-old Afghan who has not been named, moved to Australia as a refugee, drove a screwdriver 8cm into Jason’s brain. The judge noted that he had a ‘traumatic upbringing’, leaving Afghanistan for Pakistan, Indonesia, and then Australia by boat.
Earlier this month, hundreds of protesters gathered at the Sydney Opera House and called for the death of an entire race of people … the Jewish people.
Minister for Immigration Andrew Giles says that Australia’s multicultural diversity is ‘a source of national strength’.
But these increasingly common events, along with a changing conversation abroad, might give us pause to reflect.
Suella Braverman, Home Secretary for the United Kingdom, recently stood in front of a crowd last month and announced that ‘multiculturalism in Great Britain had failed’.
Her analysis of Britain’s handling of immigration and diversity was scathing, and perfectly reflected the way the debate around multiculturalism is changing.
‘Uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism have proven a toxic combination for Europe over the last few decades.
‘We are living with the consequence of that failure today. You can see it play out on the streets of cities all over Europe. From Malmo, to Paris, Brussels, to Leicester. It is 13 years since Merkel gave her speech, and I’m not sure that very much has changed since.’
Australia’s official policy of ‘Multiculturalism’ is celebrated in ministerial white papers and corporate boardrooms but its real-life consequences are starkly different.
In the streets of Melbourne’s CBD earlier this year, Sikh separatists attacked Hindu protesters with sticks while chanting ‘death to India’.
In Sydney, Hindu protesters were filmed allegedly menacing Muslim-run businesses in Harris Park, an area with a long history of ethnic-religious violence.
In Brisbane, during the Hong Kong independence protests at the University of Queensland, students were physically assaulted by a number of pro-Chinese students.
Fireworks and celebrations erupted in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba following the attack of Israel by Hamas.
The question has to be asked: How is the average Australian benefiting from this? And if we’re not benefiting, what are we doing to stop it?
Because as one British writer put it, the eruption of ethnic tensions in our cities doesn’t just reflect the complete failure of integration, it also reflects a complete repudiation of our systems, laws and way of life.
‘When you watch people have so little respect for British values and British laws they gleefully saunter around Britain’s streets saluting atrocities committed by ISIS-style terrorists then you know multiculturalism is failing.’
This has happened, he says, ‘Because of mass immigration into Britain, because of the total failure of our politicians to integrate old and new immigrants into British society, and because of their determination to continue to import more culturally and religiously distinctive migrants and tribal grievances from abroad.’
It isn’t just Britain changing their tune on multiculturalism.
Last year, the Sweden Prime Minister announced: ‘Integration has been too poor at the same time as we have had a large immigration. Society has been too weak, resources for the police and social services have been too weak.’
More than Sweden, the other paragon of Scandinavian progressive pragmatism, Denmark, instituted an abrupt turnaround on its previously generous immigration program, with Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen citing a multi-decade failure of its newcomers to integrate.
And just weeks ago, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview that ‘it was a grave mistake to let in so many people of totally different cultures, religions, and concepts’.
‘It creates a pressure group inside each country.’
Is it now time to admit that Australia also made a ‘grave mistake’? Do we have pressure groups inside our country, and if so, what are we going to do about it?
‘I think we are starting to realise there’s a difference between being an Australian and living in Australia,’ wrote one person in a viral tweet, following the Opera House incident.
Australian politicians like to claim we’re the ‘most successful multicultural nation on Earth’, but how much longer can they ignore the fraying edges that has become increasingly evident this month?
Opposition leader Peter Dutton is talking tough on the issue, saying that anyone on a visa at the protests who was breaking the law ‘should be deported’. But what of the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals coming in next year? What of the gangs roaming our streets, killing unsuspecting teenagers? There is simply no plan to deal with these multicultural clashes – governments are just throwing a Hail Mary and hoping it doesn’t explode on their watch.
With a record 450,000 migrants arriving in Australia this year alone – many of which not only from nations with which we share little culturally, but who are also adversaries to our allies – it can be assumed Labor isn’t heeding Braverman’s warning about ‘uncontrolled immigration, inadequate integration, and a misguided dogma of multiculturalism’.
Moreover, with Australia’s legitimacy increasingly attacked by the political left, and with the country referred to as a ‘coloniser state’ that disenfranchised indigenous people, it’s hard to see what the large numbers of people coming here will integrate into.
Our country is heading down a strange path. The roots that once held us together are increasingly weakened, while the rapidly rising number of people coming from other countries have no dominant culture or way of life to integrate into.
Until a stronger discussion is had around multiculturalism and immigration, these cultures will inevitably clash again, with increasingly tragic circumstances.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/is-multiculturalism-failing/
****************************************Crime is the issue that will decide the 2024 Qld election
Politicians trapped inside the George Street bubble often struggle to comprehend the issues facing Queenslanders, but right now there is no doubt.
Integrity, health, housing and financial management have been issues plaguing the Palaszczuk government these past three years.
Yet the single issue cutting through the most and striking fear into Queenslanders – and by default marginal seat Labor MPs – is crime.
It is the issue permeating the community and each person affected is likely to share their harrowing tale with a dozen others.
It leads to, as this poll clearly reveals, people barricading their homes – fuelled by a perception the tools and resources of the honourable Queensland Police Service are not enough to keep them safe.
It is a nightmare for the government.
Grainy CCTV images of knife-wielding intruders are striking fear into residents and building an entrenched perception Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has no answers on the ‘crime crises’.
In Townsville – a crime hotbed – three Labor MPs are at risk of being booted out.
Ms Palaszczuk will visit the regional city on Sunday when, despite hand-picking people to meet with – the community could show up unannounced to offer a piece of their collective mind.
That would be the first real indication of whether the LNP is on track to win the three seats, a must if it is to form government in 2024.
While the opposition has successfully prosecuted problems in the health system, not all Queenslanders will visit a hospital in the next 12 months – and those who do are likely to have an overwhelmingly positive experience thanks to the people that work in them.
Not all Queenslanders will be affected by crime either, but it’s likely they’ll know someone who has.
Politics is perception and the perception is the government has lost control.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/analysis-crime-is-the-issue-that-will-decide-the-2024-qld-election/news-story/d1ee520a94c49140968e0ee402d1a4e5 ?
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We need an audit of Aboriginal spending
Australians are being ripped off, and they know it. The stench of bureaucratic waste has been seeping out of Canberra like the acrid smoke from the Sistine Chapel upon the failed election of a pope. Fitting, because Canberra is a leaderless quagmire of squabbling factions seething against each other, mesmerised by the shine of public money.
While we may not clad our political palaces in gold, as the Saudis do, the obscenity of waste is such that we may as well. At least it would make the halls of power nicer to look at instead of the prison-esque corridors of Parliament House.
Senator Jacinta Price, the leader of the conservative movement in spirit if not name, was right to call for an audit of the Indigenous activist industry that somehow manages to vanish $40 billion a year in state and federal funding.
Her request was particularly dangerous. Price struck at the heart of the powerful Indigenous land councils who have been using race to acquire public land for personal profit. What they do with the rest is anyone’s guess. The Senator wanted to assess their ‘effectiveness, efficiency, and credibility’, which sounds pedestrian but the sacred ground upon which she walks is well-defended.
Anthony Albanese’s indulgent referendum was based upon a valid point, albeit not the one he intended. Government and its bureaucratic arms have failed to ‘close the gap’ in remote communities. If anything, the gap has widened to a chasm under their watch. The public are cross about the Prime Minister’s wasted $400 million on the referendum, but what they really want to know is where those tens of billions go each year.
It’s a financial crisis. Working-class and middle-class families are suffering. Why should they continue handing over nearly half their salary into the black hole of Canberra? No one is getting roads, or dams, or cheap energy… Every year Australia gets poorer while politicians fudge the numbers on Budget sheets by importing 500,000 mouths to feed against the wishes of citizens. Australians are being squished into a collapsing nation and bled-out by greedy politicians.
To call Price’s interest in an audit a political stunt and ‘personal vendetta’ against land councils is, at best, unreasonable. Labor Federal Member Lingiari Marion Scrymgour said that Price has a ‘responsibility as the Shadow Spokesperson for Indigenous Australians to talk to everyone’ and to ‘try and look at a pathway forward’ rather than a ‘political stunt that she’s done three times into the Senate to get a review into land councils’.
Since when was transparency and accountability considered a ‘political stunt’?
Labor, by the actions of their Prime Minister, has admitted that the existing structure has failed Indigenous people. It certainly hasn’t come up short because of lacklustre funding. As Price replied, ‘What do they [the land councils] have to hide?’
One might guess a few billion dollars, perhaps?
The squirrelling that has gone on since Price’s call resembles a leech recoiling from a light dusting of salt.
How much does it cost to look after a handful of remote communities that require basic services, none of which are particularly expensive to create? Surely the 2022-23 budget of $4.5 billion to the National Indigenous Australians Agency should have gone a long way to achieving this task? A hundred years ago, church groups and private charities did a better job with blackboards and bits of scrap metal.
You could build entire towns from scratch with the billions on offer – if you spent it wisely.
‘We’re going to do what we haven’t done yet. We’re going to find out where the billions of dollars are being spent. We are going to say, “Right, who else is accountable for this?” We know that governments have, you know, made mistakes in the past, absolutely. On both sides… We’ve got to do things better,’ said Price.
She is going to have a fight on her hands. The bureaucracy might seem sluggish in its mission to ‘close the gap’, but it will be nimble and ruthless in its efforts to protect the public money tree that feeds its idle hands.
Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine saved Australia from the Voice to Parliament – but they are going to need the full attention of the Coalition, federal and state, to unpick the waste from the activist community. No more, what did former Prime Minister John Howard call it? Pussy-footing around…
This is an election-winning cause. The numbers don’t lie.
Nothing irritates voters more than activists dripping in diamonds crying poor with their begging bowls out. It was sickening to watch the ‘Yes’ campaign haul Indigenous children in front of the camera and pretend they didn’t ‘have a future’ unless a new bureaucracy was installed. The shame belongs to the activist class and their decades of failure, self-interest, and waste – not to the hardworking citizens minding their own business and paying their taxes without complaint.
Jacinta Price as Minister for Indigenous Affairs would scare the hell out of land councils, but as Prime Minister she would gut the Labor Party from the inner-city seats to the Outback electorates. A voice with a unifying message rather than a carefully curated package of superficial identities.
She is not alone in her demands for transparency. As this publication’s Editor-in-Chief Rowan Dean said on his Sunday show, Outsiders, ‘Where has the money gone that has funded billions and billions of dollars in Indigenous welfare…? Where has the money gone? We need a full audit – down to every cent into every pocket. They are now saying that ‘the ‘No’ vote didn’t mean people had said no to treaties etc’… Sorry. The ‘No’ vote meant exactly that. It meant no to treaties. It meant no to welcome to country. It meant no to acknowledgements. It meant no to bits of burning bark around football stadiums. It was a ‘No’. A comprehensive, one-word ‘No’. And anyone who kids themselves into thinking that Australians ‘still want the treaty – they just didn’t want the Voice’ – rack off!’
The are thousands of examples of bureaucratic waste and failure, but last week the Albanese government – the government that is apparently prepared to offer up a blank cheque to the Voice – killed off plans to build two boarding schools in remote areas. They were intended to give Indigenous children a chance to live safely while receiving an education. It’s the kind of investment that makes a tangible difference to the lives of kids and the success of the next generation.
These boarding houses were a $74.9 million project fully-costed by the Coalition – already a generous and extraordinary amount of money for three boarding houses and an upgrade to a fourth. Labor has decided that two of these are not worth building. One, ironically, was situated near Albanese’s highly-publicised attendance at the Garma festival.
Apparently, Albanese had $400 million to burn on a referendum, but is now unable to justify the loose change needed to build a couple of schools for Indigenous kids.
And Labor wonders why Jacinta Price is calling for an audit.
The Labor government and its activist class are hypocrites, prepared to spend anything to enshrine power for themselves while refusing to tighten their belts for the kids. Disadvantaged Indigenous children have lost their value for Labor. They don’t need their pleading eyes for campaign posters or sadistic ad campaigns.
Giving kids the opportunity to go to school means closing the gap. When the gap is closed, we won’t need to spend $40 billion a year. The activist bureaucracy is hardly going to put itself out of business for the sake of Australia’s children and they certainly aren’t going to allow the taxpayer a peek at the books.
And hey, if Albo really is strapped for cash, maybe he can raid the $25 billion set aside for ‘green energy’?
It’s not like we’re gold-plating the pockets of foreign, multi-billion-dollar companies instead of building schools in the Outback.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/the-age-of-audits
***************************************************Farmers' president fires parting shot at Labor policies
The outgoing president of the National Farmers' Federation has taken a swipe at key federal government policies impacting agriculture during her final week in the job.
"History will not judge this government kindly if it continues to prosecute an agenda focused more on satisfying factions than facts," Fiona Simson told the National Press Club in Canberra.
While Ms Simson focused largely on the achievements of the federation during her seven-year tenure, she also highlighted the government's proposed ban on live sheep exports and the Murray Darling water buybacks as two key problem policies for farmers.
She said the proposed ban would be "a disaster for animal welfare, our ties in the Middle East and farmers across Australia".
Ms Simson, the first woman to lead the federation, said there were a wide range of policies across multiple portfolios that had the potential to impact agriculture.
"There are decisions being made on issues and on policies that could change the face of farming as we know it."
Areas where the government was failing farmers in Australia seemed to be part of "a broader epidemic that is raging worldwide".
She said policies such as restrictions on fertiliser use in the Netherlands, Sweden and Canada, and methane taxes in New Zealand, would push costs higher for consumers.
Ms Simson used her address to highlight agriculture's contribution to sustainability, including the sector's ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"We're entering the climate transition with our eyes wide open," she said.
"We're alive to the threats such as the impact of a changing climate, or poor planning of renewables, transmission infrastructure and carbon offsets on agricultural land."
Ms Simson said while producers were in favour of renewable energy it shouldn't be at the expense of farmers' rights.
The outgoing president said communities must be more involved in the early stages of planning for renewable projects.
"We must have respect for land holders, we need to have respect for the people who manage those lands," she said.
"The community is asking for better, the community wants more."
Ms Simson said one of the great disappointments of her tenure had been the Albanese government abandoning an agriculture visa, saying the sector was still struggling to attract workers.
She used the speech to reiterate the federation's position on the free trade agreement being negotiated with the European Union, which it has described as a "dud deal".
Ms Simson, who will hand over the reins on Wednesday, urged the government to keep negotiating.
"Make sure that we can get a better outcome for agriculture and a better outcome for both the EU customers and the Australian producers," she said.
"There is no sector in agriculture that is really getting any sort of a good deal in terms of the EU trade deal."
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29 October, 2023
Homelessness: An analysis
I am going to be very politically incorrect below. The Left will accuse me of being heartless and uncaring. But their indifference to the ghastly attacks on innocent Israelis from Gaza tells us what a hollow pretence their "caring" is
Conservatives do occasionally note that homelessness is mainly an outcome of poor decisions and I am going to elaborate on that but I also want to go bit deeper than that
Being a good academic, I will first define my terms. By "homeless" I mean street sleepers and people who live in their cars. I probably should also include "couch surfers" who live temporarily with friends. There is something of a continuum between those three groups but there is sufficient similarity to support the generalizations I wish to make.
The basic problem with the homeless is poor decision-making. The letting agents tell us that the unhousable usually have drug and alcohol problems or are welfare-dependent single mothers. No experienced landlord would have anything to do with such people. Offering them accommodation would be asking for trouble. Such people would all have higher priorities than paying their rent
Women who get their legs up outside a committed relationship and without contraception are undoubtedly making a risky decision and one that sometimes goes very wrong. How selective you are about your partners is an important decision. Single mothers have undoubtedly got it wrong
So let us look at the other extreme: cautious people. If a man is frugal, is abstemious with alcohol, takes no recreational drugs and goes to university to get a useful qualification, he is most unlikely to end up homeless. Ditto for a woman who is careful with her contraception.
A major and important difference between the cautious and incautious groups is frugality. I have expanded on that previously
https://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com/2023/10/poverty-is-behavioral-left-talk-about.html
So I think I have covered the major ways in which decisions affect homelessness. So the next step is to ask WHY some people make very bad decisionsSad to say, I think the two groups are actually born different, with impulsiveness and poor ability to think ahead being inborn in most of the homeless.
And IQ is perhaps the most important inborn difference of all. The people who go to university and the people who spend most of their money on beer and cigarettes are almost always going to be differentiated by IQ. A smart person can see when he is at a dead end and will find a way out of it.
So the homeless do deserve our pity and help. They are born unfortunate. They cannot help it. Whether it is incumbent on anyone to help them is another question, however. Governments sometimes attempt that task by providing "social" (welfare) housing but the cost of that ensures that it will only ever be a partial solution. There is no good alternative to self-help -- JR
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Parliament votes for more fatherless children
Bettina Arndt
October 19 was a dark day in Australia’s social history after our Parliament voted for more fatherless children… Labor’s draconian family law bill became law, removing almost every word from previous legislation which promoted children’s rights to care from both parents after divorce. This brave new law sets aside many decades of international evidence showing it is harmful for children to grow up without dads.
For almost two decades Australia has been a world leader in encouraging separated parents to share decisions about raising their kids. That achievement dates back to John Howard’s path-breaking 2006 reforms promoting ‘equal shared parental responsibility’ which resulted in a major increase in care from dads, more shared care, better relations between parents, and less litigation.
The result was improved children’s well-being, according to UNSW research, and the reforms were a big hit with the public, ‘overwhelmingly supported by parents, legal professionals, and family relationship service professionals’, according to research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
That mighty legal reform, which had bipartisan support, has now been swept aside. According to the eminent former family law professor Patrick Parkinson, the new divorce laws strip ‘almost all references which encourage the meaningful involvement of both parents in relation to the child after separation’. That means dads will be cut out of their children’s lives, he warned.
Labor hustled the bill through Parliament last week as Australia was distracted by the referendum results, after cutting short the usual extensive scrutiny required for such a massive change.
Watch fiery Michaela Cash in the Senate exposing Labor’s unseemly haste to get these changes into law and their refusal to answer questions about why they chose this treacherous betrayal of fathers.
The process was fuelled by comments from Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who I believe wrongly claimed the changes had the support of numerous previous inquiries.
In one example, the removal of the key ‘equal shared parental responsibility’ clause was done by claiming this deluded dads into thinking that they might just be entitled to equal time with their own kids. It’s true that various inquiries, including the Australian Law Reform Commission, had pointed out there was sometimes confusion, but they simply suggested changing the language, not tossing out the whole thing.
No committee suggested removing all mention of children’s right to know and be cared for by both parents, and their right to spend regular time with both parents and other significant people like grandparents, nor the provision that parenting plans should start by considering the option of equal or substantial time with both parents.
So how did they get away with it? For decades, feminist ideologues have been manipulating the family law system by claiming that all women and their children are at risk of attack by violent ex-partners. They’ve succeeded brilliantly in hushing up the key statistic that puts a lie to the claim that so many dads pose a risk to their children – namely that only 1.2 per cent of women are physically assaulted by their male partner or ex-parent each year in Australia, according to the most recent 2016 Personal Safety survey. Physical violence is blessedly rare.
Even though violence orders are commonplace for many of the tiny numbers (less than 5 per cent) of couples who actually appear before the Family Court, these families are not the norm. What matters most is the impact of family law legislation on decisions made about parenting by ordinary separating couples who don’t battle it out in court.
Now these couples are to be told the imperative is keeping children safe and that means putting care of children firmly back into female hands. Look at this press release from the Women’s Legal Services Australia, congratulating Attorney General Dreyfus on the bill, which was circulated within minutes of the vote going through.
‘We strongly support reform of the Family Law Act to make the law clearer and fairer, including the removal of the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility to improve safety.
‘When violence and abuse are factors, courts will be able to deal with them more easily and reduce the number of children and mothers forced into dangerous situations.
‘Removing this dangerous provision will give the courts the freedom to focus on safety and the genuine best interests of children and families.’
It’s another superb victory for the feminists, one more achievement for their mighty domestic violence juggernaut, which already works a treat tilting the family law system to favour women. Currently, all it takes is one vague claim that violence could occur, requiring zero supportive evidence, to set in train a sequence of events starting with dad being removed from the home, denied contact with children and, if he’s lucky, paying big money to see his children in our draconian supervised contact services.
No wonder Australia has become one of the world leaders when it comes to men suffering false allegations. Look at this fascinating new YouGov survey, involving 9,432 people across 8 countries. Australia came out as the worst country, after India, when people were asked if they had been falsely accused of abuse.
The YouGov survey showed false accusations in Australia are more likely to be made as part of a child custody dispute than anywhere else in the world – they are 41 per cent of such allegations in this country. Overall, the survey showed 80 per cent of victims of false allegations in this country are male and almost a third (30 per cent) of people surveyed know a victim of false allegations made in the last year.
It was Julia Gillard’s feminist government that set the scene for this state of affairs when they removed the 2006 penalties for perjury and placed violence accusations front and centre of decision-making about sharing of care of children. Her government also greatly expanded the definition of domestic ‘violence’ to include emotional and psychological abuse, threatening behaviour, etc. – adding enormously to the list of families precluded from court-approved shared care.
Magistrates’ courts have been overwhelmed with false violence accusations, which some magistrates have acknowledged are being used to gain strategic advantage in child custody matters. A survey of 38 magistrates in Queensland found 74 per cent agreed restraining orders are often used for tactical purposes. Similarly, 90 per cent of 68 NSW magistrates agreed restraining orders are often sought as tactical devices in family law disputes, ‘serving to deprive former partners of contact with their children’.
In a national survey of over 2,500 respondents, more than half agreed that ‘women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence in order to improve their case’.
People know this is happening – including police, who are starting to speak out about the enormous amount of their time consumed by false allegations. Two years ago, the Queensland Police Union made a submission to a family law inquiry pointing out that false allegations of domestic violence are sometimes used to gain advantage in family law disputes, with members of the police force sometimes finding themselves on the receiving end.
In some areas of Queensland, domestic violence takes up to 80 per cent of police time. Note that in NSW, domestic violence assaults make up only 4.8 per cent of major crimes but take up 50-70 per cent of police time.
That’s the current reality. But now, things are going to get far worse. Under the new Act, shared care is only to be considered ‘when it is safe to do so’, which means only a very brave judge would risk such an order if a mother claims to feel unsafe. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has also announced a new bill next year promising a greater share of the marital assets to victims of violence.
But getting the current bill through Parliament proved a breeze for the government. These momentous changes sailed through the lower house. Not a single word was spoken by MPs about false allegations. It was up to Pauline Hanson in the Senate to acknowledge the elephant in the room. She also introduced an amendment to reinstate the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility, which naturally failed.
The Opposition introduced some pretty feeble amendments, trying unsuccessfully to reintroduce some of the parenting sections of the bill. There were fine speeches warning about the impact of the bill on fathers and children by a number of key Senators, including Alex Antic, Matt Canavan, Linda Reynolds, Gerard Rennick, and Paul Scarr. And Michaela Cash did a great job dissecting key faults in the bill – do watch here to see how Labor utterly fails to justify what they are doing.
Yet, in the end, they sold us out. When it came to a vote, the bill went through, with the Greens, Pocock, and Jacqui Lambie’s group, all happily supporting Labor. Almost all the Opposition Senators abstained and then Michaela Cash turned around and voted for it.
Only three people voted against the legislation: Hanson and her One Nation colleague, Malcolm Roberts, along with United Australia Party Senator Ralph Babet.
The Opposition may well claim they’ll stand up and be counted when they get back in power – they just need to avoid attracting feminist wrath until then. But should we trust them after the endless kowtowing to the women’s lobby?
What’s really frightening is how effectively the feminists shut down any proper public discussion of this critical bill, which I would argue is one of the most critical social changes imposed on us for many decades.
People need to know what’s happened here. These changes to the law will bring poorer outcomes for children, a fresh flood of new accusations against fathers, more conflict between divorced parents, a huge surge in litigation as men pay out to try to see their children, and more suicides for men as they realise that their chances of a fair hearing in an already biased court system will now be further reduced. All bad news, unless you are a feminist.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/parliament-votes-for-more-fatherless-children/
********************************************Anti-Semitism at the ABC
The national broadcaster has not had a good war in Israel but on Tuesday, managing director David Anderson emerged defiant from his foxhole to defend his troops.
Anderson appeared before a Senate Estimates hearing and confirmed that the ABC had finally launched an investigation into the conduct of Tom Joyner, its Middle East correspondent who created an international media scandal when he callously dismissed eyewitness reports that Israeli babies had been beheaded in a text to hundreds of journalists in Israel. He claimed ‘the story about the babies is bullsh-t’.
Anderson told Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes that Joyner was just ‘trying to do what journalists were doing… trying to verify what sources could back up’ and he was ‘quite remorseful and apologetic for the words that he used’.
No, that’s not what Joyner did. He falsely claimed, with zero evidence, that Israeli first responders were lying about the murder of Israeli babies and equally erroneously claimed there had been no confirmation of their accounts. In fact, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office had confirmed the numerous eyewitness testimonies.
If Joyner wanted more evidence he could have contacted Dr Chen Kugel, the head of Israel’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, which is painstakingly identifying the victims. Dr Kugel has confirmed that numerous victims, including babies, were decapitated. Rather than establish the facts, Joyner assumed Israeli eyewitnesses were lying even though Hamas had just assaulted, butchered, or abducted thousands of Israelis and other civilians in the most brutal act of terror in the history of the Jewish state.
As one journalist asked Joyner, ‘Why are you picking this hill to be humiliated on?’ Why indeed?
Perhaps because the whole ABC is so steeped in anti-Semitism that it seemed natural to him to assume Israeli eyewitnesses to a national tragedy were ‘bullsh-ttng’.
You would think that having demonstrated an appalling lack of professionalism in such a senior role, Joyner would be sacked or at least sent home. But no, he was given a holiday and continues as a Middle East correspondent.
Why not? The ABC seems to have no problem with political reporter Nour Haydar retweeting a post complaining about Palestinians in Australia ‘being policed for their language, protests’ after Hamas supporters chanted ‘Gas the Jews’, and claiming that the Australian Jewish Association calling for the destruction of Hamas was openly calling for ‘genocide’. Who does she work for asked one dismayed Australian whose taxes pay her salary – the ABC or Al Jazeera?
Anderson also stood by the decision to give a national platform in prime time on 7.30 to Hamas’s head of international relations Dr Basem Naim even though Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation that had just engaged in an appalling act of terror.
Naim used the opportunity to lie through his teeth claiming that Hamas never intended to target civilians or take them hostage. He expects us to assume that the killing of at least 1,400 Israelis and other civilians, the injuring of 5,431 and the seizure of more than 200 hostages was unintentional but the terrorists were so proud of their accidental atrocities that they they posted them on Facebook.
Incredibly, Anderson claimed that it was ‘editorially justified’ to interview Naim ‘to challenge’ Hamas’s claims. Yet the article on the ABC website that reports the interview doesn’t challenge the Hamas narrative, it reads like an apologia.
According to Naim, ‘the chief commander of the Al Qassem Brigade, who initiated the operation… gave clear instructions not to target… (or) harm civilians’ and as if by accident, ‘in the middle of the confrontation, there was some civilians’. Naim claims, ‘We haven’t planned at any moment to take any civilian hostages. The plan was to take on the fight against soldiers and to take some soldiers as hostages’. He says Hamas is taking care of the civilian hostages, ‘based on our moral obligations’ and will release them ‘the moment the aggression is stopped’. He defends Hamas’s ‘instruction to civilians’ to remain in the conflict zone in Northern Gaza despite Israel warning them to go, claiming it is ‘too dangerous for civilians to leave and that for Palestinians, quitting their homes now would be a repeat of the “catastrophe” of 1948’.
Finally, he claims Hamas’s atrocities are ‘an act of defence’ and blames them on Israel claiming, ‘We are occupied people, we are defending our existence’.
This is a pack of obscene lies. Hamas filmed terrorists using hang-gliders to land in the middle of a dance party where they slaughtered hundreds of young people and took dozens hostage. Terrorists filmed themselves rampaging through kibbutzes, burning whole families alive, shooting children as they cowered under tables and posted the evidence on social media.
None of this is in the ABC article. Nor the fact that the Hamas charter commits not just to destroying the state of Israel but to murdering every Jew on the planet. Not once does it mention that Gaza is not occupied but self-governing and that Hamas came to power in a bloody coup in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed and political rivals were thrown off the tops of the tallest buildings. There is no mention of the thousands of rockets that have been launched from Gaza into Israel year after year targeting civilian areas.
Anderson said in Senate Estimates that he does not think that the article is ‘legitimising terrorism’ or that ‘the ABC is anti-Semitic in any way’. It’s presumably fair and balanced that the ABC reports that Hamas is taking good care of civilian hostages that they captured by chance while the Israelis are lying about beheaded babies.
It’s all part of Western media bias in which once respectable papers such as the New York Times rushed to believe Hamas’s version of events which blamed Israel for catastrophic damage to the al-Ahli hospital in northern Gaza when in fact the damage was done by a rocket launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad which crashed into the car park of the hospital.
Even a features writer for New York Magazine Intelligencer who is critical of the Left’s failure to condemn Hamas was so keen not to exaggerate Hamas’s barbarism that he criticised his own article writing it was an ‘overstatement’ to say that ‘babies were beheaded’ and he ‘should have said that the report established that babies were found headless, a fact that lends plausibility to claims of beheading, but which does not prove them’.
This is what the West has come to: its scribes parse the fate of headless Jewish babies, while the barbarians rally in the streets and clamour at the gates.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/parsing-the-headless
***************************************************Chasing idiocy: how subsidies power our energy price hikes
If we looked at the picture for Australia in the mid-90s, the electricity industry was massively overstaffed and the gas industry was dissipating the wealth that Exxon had discovered in Bass Strait.
In the case of electricity, Victoria led the way, and one simple figure illustrates the benefits brought about by privatisation and the introduction of competition. Generation Victoria was the monopoly supplier. Prior to reforms, which were ironically initiated by socialist Premier Joan Kirner, it employed 25,000 people; by the early 2000s, the numbers employed, including consultants and contractors, were under 3,000. At the same time the output, in terms of the power stations’ availabilities to run, had lifted from somewhere in the mid-70 per cent range to the mid-90s.
So, we had over 20,000 surplus personnel who only gummed up the work. Similar savings can be found in the distribution and transmission businesses, albeit to a lesser degree.
Australia was largely traversing the path that had been trailblazed by Margaret Thatcher’s administration in the UK and, less systematically in the US, where The Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland network (PJM) showed the way in which independent generator businesses could compete while cooperating thereby bringing about lower prices with considerable incentives to invest where investment would be profitable.
Within six or seven years of initiating the reforms, Australia had achieved what was probably the lowest electricity prices in the world and an electricity system, which was no longer plagued with downtime, strikes, and blackouts. We saw new investment responding to commercial, not political, incentives.
This was done as a result of profits-oriented businesses, in retail as well as generation – not all of them privately owned – competing for business within a known framework of rules. These as the very conditions under which capitalism generally has prevailed and brought the wealth of nations we enjoy today.
But the situation in the energy industry was always precarious. Even while the reforms were taking place, Victorian Treasurer Alan Stockdale felt obliged to introduce regulatory arrangements for pricing and for ombudsman arrangements that went far beyond those seen in other industries.
At the start of the 21st Century, and for the next few years, electricity prices (and to a lesser degree gas, having fallen immediately after the reforms), were increasing more or less in line with inflation.
But the germs of the present disaster were already starting to infect the industry – and the economy as a whole.
Spurred on by claims that carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming, and a fantasy that wind and solar energy would soon become cheaper than ‘dinosaur’ coal and gas and supposedly inherently dangerous nuclear, the first tentative steps were taken to favour renewable industries. Amusingly, we see agencies like CSIRO and others claiming even more stridently that wind and solar is cheaper and – often within the same sentence – adding that they therefore need to continue receiving the subsidies they enjoy.
In response to climate scares and skilful lobbying, John Howard introduced requirements for ‘2 per cent of additional energy’ to be supplied by wind and solar. The method of arranging, for this was through the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) whereby energy certificates, which provided a subsidy to wind and solar, equivalent in those days to about $30 per MWh (providing a 70 per cent premium on the commercial market price).
John Howard has since said that this 2 per cent additional energy policy was his greatest political error. He sought to cap the level of support and appointed an inquiry, chaired by former Senator Tamblyn, to advise on this. As is often the case, the inquiry was captured by the bureaucrats and recommended the expansion of the scheme from what had been quantified at 9,500 GWh to 16,000 GWh. To his credit, Howard rejected this but was quickly replaced by Australia’s new economic and political saviour, Kevin Rudd.
Under Rudd/Gillard, the MRET scheme and its roof-top sister scheme went into break-neck expansion until the Abbott victory in 2013. Abbott wanted to wind back the scheme but, fearing radical advice and conscious of political opposition to this, appointed the sensible Dick Warburton to head the inquiry, and the best he felt he could do was to cap the scheme.
So the subsidies have continued. They have transformed what was a supply comprising 85 per cent coal 10 per cent hydro and 5 per cent gas to the present output of 60 per cent coal 25 per cent solar/wind and 15 per cent hydro and gas. The present government seeks to eliminate coal altogether and, ostensibly at least, the Opposition is not far behind.
In terms of subsidies, the PC has put their effect as follows
In annualised dollar terms, the energy subsidies to renewables, the flip side of which is a tax-type penalty on fossil fuels come to over $9,800 (million):
LRET SRES ACCUs $3,980
RERT, FCAS and system security $400
Clean Energy Regulator $750
Expansion of transmission $510
CEFC $1,333
ARENA $100
Snowy 2 $1,333
State schemes $1,410
The subsidies do far more damage than a simple transfer of money from one party to another. Because wind is subsidised (and is favoured by the market operator’s dispatch algorithm that gives it preferred access), it can bid into the market at anything above negative $40-50 per MWh. This not only displaces coal but forces up its costs since the generators are capital-intensive and designed to operate for much of the day but are being forced to fill in when the wind/sun is not producing.
As a result, we see prices forced down as the coal generators meet the market pressures from wind and solar that will seek to run at anything over its (subsidised) break-even of about $50 per MWh. Prices then shoot up when those distorted market pressures add costs (by forcing the capital-intensive coal plant to operate part-time) and at the same time squeeze prices. That process forces a facility to close once a new lick of new capital is required to supply – not at the steady rate of the original design – but as a filler for when lack of wind and sun prevent intermittent renewables from generating. The pattern can be observed in prices depicted below.
This year’s closure of Liddell brought what the Australian Financial Review called a revelation, ‘Had Liddell’s capacity still been available, prices would have been lower.’ Chanticleer noted, that the average realised wholesale price increased 32 per cent in NSW, 27 per cent in Victoria, 100 per cent in SA and 14 per cent in Queensland.
The pressures on electricity have been increased by regulatory constraints on new developments and tax increases (called royalty increases) on coal and gas. For gas, Australia now has shortages due to regulatory restrictions that largely outlaw developments in all eastern states other than Queensland.
The outcome has seen Australia being transformed from its former position of enjoying very low-cost energy supply. Australian electricity prices are now twice those of China, Russia and Vietnam and much dearer than other nations following us down the climate energy wormhole, like Canada, the US, and Korea.
One solution according to our politicians and those who advise them is to re-nationalise the industry and double up on the subsidies to renewables.
Former Premier Andrews set renationalisation in train for Victoria. Fortunately, his government would be unable to raise sufficient funds to implement this.
The latest subsidy expansion is the Safeguard Mechanism but the Prime Minister has foreshadowed a new array of subsidies and regulatory impediments. And hydrogen is a popular elixir to fix the system but one that cannot conceivably work if only because it takes more energy to produce than if provides.
The further we go along this path of replacing coal with intermittent solar and wind supplies, the more expensive the firming operation becomes. With a 100 per cent renewables supply and no transmission constraints, Global Roam has put the firming costs as the equivalent of 25 Snowy 2’s or 70,000 Hornsdale batteries which would cost some $6 trillion and, even if amortised over a 15-year period would require one-third of annual GDP – and that is just for the batteries. Even larger costs are estimated by others like Francis Menton, who estimates that just to keep the lights on would require a backup of 25 days supply with 100 per cent wind supply. Pumped hydro might have a firming role alongside batteries but it cannot be a major one given Australia’s limited river flows.
One solution proposed by the Opposition is to adopt nuclear but this – at the present time – is nowhere near as economical for Australia as coal. It is even less so in the way Peter Dutton expressed it – as an adjunct and firming mechanism for renewables, a role that nuclear (like coal), with its high fixed costs, is intrinsically ill-placed to perform.
Of course, the real solution is that adopted by China, India, and others
But for the time being Prime Minister Albanese, reeling from the Voice debate, is preparing for a redoubled support for renewable energy. In doing so he is tacitly supported by the finance industry that is cowering from the ‘global boiling’ incandescents and refusing to finance energy sources other than those renewables requiring government subsidies. We therefore, at the very least, face a considerable increase in national misery before sensible energy economic policies are restored.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/chasing-idiocy-how-subsidies-power-our-energy-price-hikes/
************************************26 October, 2023
First peoples?
There has been a lot of indecision in recent years about what to call those people whom for many decades we have called "Aborigines". That word now seems to be taboo. "Indigenous" is a favourite replacement but the Canadian practice is increasingly creeping in. Canadians say "First Nations" for the early inhabitants of their country.
Using "first Nations" for early inhabitants of Australia is a however a substantial misfire. The many pre-white tribes of Australia had few of the characteristics of nations except perhaps informally understood borders. Making "nations" out of hundreds of tribes is quite a stretch. There was certainly no language or DNA common to them all and not much that we would recognize as governing bodies or a defence department.
Perhaps for that reason the angry article below refers to "first peoples" instead, a more defensible usage.
But both usages founder on the claim that the pre-white inhabitants of Australia were in any sense "first". They were not. It enrages the Left for anybody to mention it but it is well documented that the original inhabitants of what we now call Australia were a race of pygmies. And the pygmies concerned are far from a lost tribe. Some of them still survive in areas of the Atherton Tableland.
One of them walked right past me in 2004 as I was sitting in an open-air cafe in Kuranda. He was black but was only about 4'6" tall, a height commonly given for the Australian pygmies in early documents. There certainly are still some very short blacks in the mountainous areas behind Cairns
In the early days, anthropologists and explorers took photos of the pygmies which showed them as being about 4.6" (1.3 meters) tall
There is a long article by the irreverent historian Keith Windschuttle which gives the full story. See
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/history-wars/2002/06/the-extinction-of-the-australian-pygmies/
There were quite a lot of reports of contact with pygmies throughout the 20th century. See:https://www.mysteriousaustralia.com/our_lost_pygmy_tribe.html
There have been many attempts from the Left to debunk the story that there were a race of pygmies in Australia but have a look below and you will see one of them, 3"7" tall and still alive when the picture was taken by a news photographer in 2007.
She is pretty substantial to be a "myth". There is an article about her reprinted below
https://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com/2023/10/elder-faces-eviction-article-originally.html
It’s a measure of the confidence assimilationists now feel, not to mention their profound indecency, that they’ve wasted no time pushing to start rolling back what few gains have been made on Indigenous policy.
Tony Abbott immediately demanded that Indigenous flags no longer be flown and acknowledgements of Indigenous people be abandoned at official events — signs of separatism, he says. If even those most basic acknowledgements that First Peoples exist are now to be erased, then we are indeed seeing full-blown separatism. The LNP in Queensland abandoned support for a treaty process in that state. Peter Dutton, in the words of one of his own MPs, sought to “weaponise” claims of child abuse within Indigenous communities.
The mainstream media also wasted no time in trying to fit the result into a narrative that carefully avoided the core issues of the referendum. The Australian Financial Review echoed the argument of The Australian that it was all Anthony Albanese’s fault for his “failure to genuinely consult with Mr Dutton to try to secure bi-partisan support for the Voice,” arguing that it was down to Albanese’s “hubris”.
This is a self-serving lie that gets everyone — Dutton, the No campaign, racists, the media — off the hook. There is literally no referendum proposal that Dutton would have supported, as his goal was to damage Labor, not address the substance of either recognition or closing the gap. The AFR goes on to complain that Albanese has ruled out “pursuing other forms of constitutional recognition or legislating for an Indigenous advisory body”.
Let’s coin a name for this fiction: how about the White Man’s Recognition Myth? It’s one many No supporters, including Abbott and Dutton, cling to — that if only they’d been asked to support simple recognition without a Voice, they’d have backed it.
White Man’s Recognition found a full flowering in an extraordinary column by David Crowe last week. Normally the doyen of both-sidesist press gallery commentary, Crowe came alive during the campaign to lash the No campaign but lamented last Thursday “a Yes vote is only possible for leaders who compromise more than they would like. This is true for Indigenous leaders as much as party leaders. As late as June this year, there was a pathway to success for recognition without the Voice, something Dutton says he supports.”
That is, the failure of the referendum is on First Peoples and their inability to compromise, their unwillingness to accept a token White Man’s Recognition, their insistence that recognition actually be meaningful and involve a two-way interaction, not imposed on them like so much else has been imposed on them for more than two centuries.
Stop complaining, accept what you’re given, abandon any agency, it’s non-Indigenous people who’ve done all the compromising, why won’t you? Being recognised as actually existing should be enough. It’s not just Albanese, evidently, who is afflicted with hubris.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but after the ferocious and resentful dismissal of genuine recognition by non-Indigenous Australia, no non-Indigenous person is in a position to lecture First Peoples about what they should have done differently in order to please us.
It is non-Indigenous people who have killed off recognition and reconciliation in favour of maintaining a white fantasy in an occupied country. The next steps, whatever they are, must come from First Peoples. And if those steps are away from the rest of us, we’ve only ourselves to blame.
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Police truth-teller condemned
Queensland Police Union president Ian Leavers has responded to “vile” criticism directed at him from a senior minister after he said truth telling and treaty would give Indigenous people a free pass to commit crime.
The powerful union boss, who declared First Nations people were over represented in crime statistics, insisted he was sharing the views others were “too frightened” to share.
Those comments were slammed as “divisive and unhelpful” by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Government ministers on Wednesday lined up to distance themselves from the union boss’s claim that its Path to Treaty was a feel-good exercise that was anti-police.
Ms Palaszczuk said Mr Leavers’ comments about Indigenous people, published by The Courier-Mail, were wrong.
“Let me say I disagree with the comments the QPU president has said,” she said.
Mr Leavers doubled down on his comments on Wednesday, declaring he was saying the things “people want to”.
“There’s been Cabinet ministers have a go at me but that’s part of life, that’s water off a duck’s back to me, I’m used to that,” he said.
“A lot of people want to say things, but they are too frightened to because you’ve seen the vile and the personal attacks come my way today.
“The people I represent are on the front line. “Not like the latte sippers in inner Brisbane who’ve never been to communities and see the violence and the mayhem and the destruction of lives that takes place.”
Transport Minister Mark Bailey took aim at Mr Leavers, declaring his “ignorant and factually wrong diatribe is an embarrassment to the Queensland Police Union”.
“He should be working on rectifying the identified racism, misogyny and sexism in the force to make it an inclusive and lawful workplace,” Mr Bailey said.
Mr Leavers slammed the minister’s “vile” response. “I don’t take anything Mark Bailey says takes seriously at all,” the union boss said.
Mr Bailey’s input on the issue, particularly his comment about fixing problems within the Queensland Police Service, forced Ms Palaszczuk to declare the “minister is not anti-police”.
Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall said Mr Leavers comments would divert energy from work to close the gap.
“In the aftermath of a referendum debate which exposed Queensland’s First Nations communities to harmful levels of racist discourse, it is reprehensible to create further harm with such divisive and inflammatory language,” he said.
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The Greens get one thing right
The Greens candidate for Brisbane lord mayor, Jonathan Sriranganathan, says the party will go to next year’s election opposing the city’s 2032 Olympic Games unless organisers abandon plans for a $2.7bn redevelopment of the Gabba stadium.
Sriranganathan’s high-profile campaign seeks to build upon the Greens’ recent success in Brisbane, including capturing three inner-city seats at the last federal election.
He said the Greens “don’t want to be blockers” but would refuse to support the Olympics unless the plan for the Gabba, including the relocation of a primary school and the resumption of homes, was changed.
“The state government doesn’t have the operational capacity to deliver an Olympics without the support of the council,” Sriranganathan said.
“The Brisbane City Council does have a lot of leverage on this issue. The mayor of Brisbane is a signatory to the Olympics contracts and agreements. They’re not contingent on using the Gabba … [it] was not part of the Olympics bid.”
The Greens now represent the local, state and federal electorates covering Woolloongabba, which is home to the Gabba.
Sriranganathan said the Gabba redevelopment proposal was unpopular “right across” the city, including in the outer suburbs.
“We’ve been hearing from people who say it’s not a good use of money or construction resources,” he said.
“The further out you go, the more frustration there is that the investment from the Olympics isn’t flowing evenly across south-east Queensland.
“It’s hard to gauge how much support there is for the Olympics but … a lot of people draw a clear line between whether they support the Olympics and the Gabba proposal.”
The issue also helps the Greens establish clear battle lines against both Labor and the Liberal National party, in a campaign that will focus heavily on concerns about housing and the delivery of basic services. Last week the LNP-led council announced a 10% budget cut, scrapping promised city projects and sparking concern about job cuts.
“Both the major parties are continually telling us they don’t have the money and resources to do everything, and hard choices need to be made,” Sriranganathan said.
“They’re simultaneously saying we have money for this stadium, but we don’t have money for public housing or schools, and that is losing them votes across the city.”
The Gabba redevelopment has already been controversial, with the federal government rejecting Queensland’s request for commonwealth funding. In August, Australian Olympic Committee officials told a Senate hearing that the deal to stage the games in Brisbane was not contingent on the use of the Gabba.
The redevelopment plan would require the relocation of the East Brisbane state school, which neighbours the existing Brisbane Cricket Ground. Kath Angus, the Greens’ mayoral candidate in 2020 and a parent of children at the school, is running for the party in the neighbouring ward of Coorparoo. It is one of about a dozen council wards where the Greens believe they will be competitive.
Angus said the major parties were “more interested in a vanity project than caring for our school kids”.
“Residents deserve so much more from the council than they are getting right now – budget cuts, services being slashed, congested streets and handouts to wealthy property developers.”
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Coming soon: new tax to hurt property investors, farmers
An unprecedented move by the Albanese government to tax paper gains in superannuation is prompting consternation across the sector, where property investors and farmers look likely to be the first targets of the planned move.
After reviewing the draft legislation on the new extra 15 per cent tax to be applied on superfund earnings above $3m, industry leaders appear considerably more upset with the method of applying the new tax than the actual imposition of a higher tax bill.
Natasha Panagis, the head of superannuation and financial services at the Institute of Financial Professionals Australia, says no other country in the world taxes unrealised capital gains.
It seems very few in super circles had anticipated investors could be taxed upfront for profits that might never be realised.
The recently released draft legislation for super changes from Treasury also confirmed that the tax on gains would be charged annually.
“The problem is that super is not like any other business, and the new tax is aimed at individuals -but an individual may not live long enough to ever access the offsets,” said Ms Panagis.
The prospect of tax losses marooned indefinitely inside the tax office is just one of a range of potential outcomes of the new tax that advisers say will hit investors who may have little idea of what is coming down the line.
Industry experts, such as Peter Burgess at the Self Managed Super Funds Association, suggests investors who have most of their money inside ‘illiquid assets’ such as farmers or property investors are among the most exposed.
The new tax will also hit anyone who borrowed funds to finance their retirement because it will be applied on a person’s total super balance – that balance includes borrowed funds.
Once the new tax is introduced in 2025 it will work in a manner similar to the so-called Division 293 tax today – that is, it will be applied immediately and directly on an individual. Division 293 applies where you have to refund some of the tax concessions you received on super contributions because your annual income went over $250,000.
The new extra super tax will be called Division 296.
Also in common with the existing Division 293 tax, the draft legislation says individuals would have the option of paying their extra super tax liability by either releasing amounts from their superannuation or using amounts outside the superannuation system.
Advisers suggest taxing unrealised gains flouts all basic tax principles and may trap investors who only temporarily transcend the $3m ‘cap’ such as those who might have struck it lucky in a small cap share which soars briefly before coming back to earth with a thud.
Separately, advisers warn that valuations among unlisted assets will be under review in relation to the tax along with unit prices at big super funds.
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24 October, 2023
Inside the disastrous renewable energy project that's blown out in cost by $10BILLION after it was plagued by sinkholes, gas leaks and flooding
Pumped storage is an attractive idea in many ways but this project should be a warning about how it can go badly wrong in practice
The 'complex' Snowy Hydro 2.0 project continues to face delays, months after a sinkhole and a gas leak caused operational difficulties.
ABC's Four Corners program revealed on Monday the $2bn project, which has since blown out to $12bn, has faced a number of safety and operational delays.
The project's use of a $150m 400-tonne boring machine, called Florence, has caused chaos for workers and planners in recent months.
The tunnel project, which aims to dig the 15km journey below Kosciuszko National Park, was launched in March 2022.
Four Corners reported on Monday Florence has only completed 150m since the project began because of geotechnical issues the workers faced when they hit soft ground 100m into the dig.
The stalled project has added another $2bn to the budget blowout, according to Four Corners.
Despite the initial concerns, the project continued on when the machine became bogged due to water and soft ground.
'We would push forward 50cm then spend the next week clearing out all the mud and water from around the tunnel boring machine,' one worker told Four Corners.
'Sometimes there was 3 to 4 feet of water around the machine.'
To ensure the project could continue, so-called 'slurry system' equipment was ordered but it was designed on inappropriate modelling.
Snowy Hydro chief executive Dennis Barnes, who was appointed in February, told a Senate estimates hearing on Monday the Florence machine continued to operate despite the difficulties it had experienced.
'There's been no point since Florence experienced this soft ground in November 2022 that the machine has not been in some way been able to move forward,' Mr Barnes said. 'It's not bogged, it is able to move.'
Mr Barnes accepted he was naive when he took on the project earlier this year and informed a previous Senate inquiry that the project would be up and running sooner rather than later.
'I'm sorry to have understated the restarting of Florence ... it was far more complex than I anticipated,' he said.
The project also saw a sinkhole open up just before Christmas. Mr Barnes said this sinkhole was just outside the construction boundary.
The tunnel also filled up with toxic gas in July as the work was underway in an attempt to stabilise the ground around the Florence machine.
Mr Barnes told Senate estimates this was caused by a chemical reaction which caused isocyanate, a hazardous chemical.
SafeWork NSW told Four Corners the gas posed a 'serious imminent risk' to 'health and safety' and labelled the Snowy 2.0 project as having 'inadequate control measures ... to prevent exposure to a harmful substance'.
The project had also been issued a number of fines by the NSW Environment and Heritage Department.
Mr Barnes said the project was working with the state government to meet its compliance obligations and assured the Senate estimates hearing on Monday that the project is about 40 per cent complete.
Mr Barnes said while 'design immaturity and geotechnical issues' had initially added to the budget blowout, the project still was important for Australia.
'The market really does need this asset and I would characterise this as something good for the Australian market,' he said.
'We have taken third party modelling and determined that over and above the $12bn there's still a $3bn (estimated portfolio value).'
Snowy 2.0 has been pitched as a critical driver to the renewables transition and will aim to create enough clean energy to power half a million homes.
As of June, $4.3bn had been spent on the project, and is expected to be fully operational in late 2028.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12662139/Snowy-2-0-delays.html
*********************************************Labor’s business blueprint will make Peter Dutton PM
If the government’s 784-page “close the loopholes” blueprint for conducting business in Australia passes the Senate, Peter Dutton is highly likely to become the next prime minister.
Just like in the early days of the voice referendum proposal few, including most government politicians, have studied the detail and understand that the blueprint represents an unprecedented attack on the sort of people who dominate the less affluent electorates that voted No.
In the vicinity of 75 per cent of the ALP’s 77 seats in the House of Representatives voted No and a large number will simply not stand for their elected representatives again supporting actions favouring the views of the affluent rather than ordinary Australians.
The 784-page business blueprint is really a multitude of different actions, so people keep discovering new horrors as they study the pages, particularly the nasties hidden in the 500-page explanatory memorandum.
The latest horror to be revealed is that Australia’s 2.7 million casual workers are destined for a cash pay cut if the legislation passes.
I will explain the detail below.
Many of those using casual work, particularly in the No vote areas, have been able to keep up their mortgage payments because of the high cash rewards available in casual work.
The seven independents in the Senate have a unique decision to make. If two of them allow the “closing the loopholes” business blueprint to pass the Senate, then they will very likely have made Dutton prime minister.
In addition, the fury created in the nation when millions discover they are the “loopholes” will almost certainly cost some independents their Senate places. If all seven reject the bill then Anthony Albanese has a much better chance of having a second term as Prime Minister.
Casuals are not the only victims and my regular readers will be aware of some of the other targets.
The business blueprint confuses employment arrangements and commercial contracts. This means that enterprises like those providing regular gardening, electrical, plumbing, IT and many other services must prepare for years of legal chaos. And if they find that, unintentionally, they have broken these incredibly complex laws they may suffer enormous penalties.
Currently, as I explained under the heading “Lack of certainty as to whether firms are obeying or breaking the law,” we have clear laws as to whether a person is a contractor or an employee, thus enabling small enterprises to do their jobs without a legal morass.
Accordingly, the blueprint represents an unprecedented attack on the Australian small and medium-sized businesses that dominate economies in the “No” electorates.
But the legislation gets even more nasty as it attacks around 50,000 long-haul truck drivers who have borrowed to buy their truck — usually securing the loan against the family home.
Back in the Gillard government days the government set up one of the most feared anti-small business bodies ever conceived in Australia: the infamous so called Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, which set about putting independent truckies out of business.
Thanks to the courageous effort of the Senate independents in 2016 the truck owners were saved, but not before five took their own lives after being threatened with the tribunal brutality.
Now, once again, truck drivers are in danger of becoming a “loophole” that needs to be closed, so the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal will restored to do the job. Will the independents again save truckies from turmoil?
Around 60 per cent of residents in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Queensland electorate of Rankin voted No. As well as many casual workers, contractors and truckies, the electorate also has many pensioners who were delighted when their local member, as Treasurer, announced they would be able to earn more money without impacting their pension. They planned to accept his advice to use the vast number of gig platforms available to easily obtain suitable work.
If the business blueprint passes they will discover that the gig platforms are yet another “loophole” and must be destroyed. They will find it hard to get the extra revenue. While the attack on contractors, truckies, and pensioners is vicious, the attack on casual workers goes beyond belief
I can’t recall a government ever having the audacity to base a looming election campaign on reducing the cash income of 2.7 million battling Australians (mostly No voters) partly because of the government politicians’ desire to please its affluent friends, particularly union officials who live in prosperous Yes voting seats.
Step one is to virtually abolish casual work by making the definition so complex that no one can risk employing a casual because the fines for paying people extra via the casual employment classification can be up to $93,000. Accordingly the casual labour “loophole” is closed.
Most existing casuals will need to transfer to full-time employment, or, more likely, part-time employee status. That means 2.7 million will receive a lower income.
Casuals earn more money than full/part-time employees because they receive an extra “loading” of 25 per cent. The full/part-time employees of course receive holidays, long service leaved etc but those rewards are delayed and don’t come via much-needed cash.
But even if those full/part time extras are valued and superannuation included, casuals are still better off.
Bank economists expected mortgage stress to create many more forced home sales but they underestimated the power of the extra money casuals receive, which has substantially lessened the impact of higher interest rates.
According to the statistics almost all new jobs in the last six months were part time, almost certainly dominated by casuals, because of the desperate need to pay rent and mortgages.
There will be an riot when 2.7 million casuals discover they are a “loophole” and must have their cash pay cut.
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Rising taxes, interest rates and tightened tenancy laws. Here's why landlords say they're selling up
For Alison Dougherty, being a landlord was always a two-way street. "The tenants depended on me and I depended on the tenants," she said. "So it was always important to me to look after the tenants and no request unless it was unreasonable was ever knocked back. "And if I had a great tenant, which I often did, I wouldn't raise the rent."
But after more than a decade as an investment property owner, Ms Dougherty joined what industry groups warn is an exodus of landlords selling up.
Rising taxes, changing tenancy laws and biting interest rates are some of the reasons, according to one recent industry survey, that property investors are exiting the market in droves.
"Many are selling their properties. Many are selling all of their properties," Nicola McDougall from the Property Investment Professionals of Australia (PIPA) said.
"And what our survey also showed — a significant percentage have actually said they will never be an investor ever again."
The strength of the link between pro-renter regulations and property divestment has been questioned by one research body, which added that a booming market had offered property owners another strong incentive to sell.
"There's been good capital return for people who have the inclination to sell at this time," Michael Fotheringham from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute said.
But both research groups have warned the sale of homes that usually house a booming population of renters is having poor outcomes for tenants.
These landlords all contacted the ABC after it covered problems in the rental sector in recent months, wanting to tell their side of the story.
Loss of control a key theme for landlords
When Ms Dougherty returned from a stint living overseas about 15 years ago, she couldn't afford a house in Melbourne.
Piecing together a retirement plan, she bought a rundown house — what she called "the worst house in the best street" — in Bendigo, and began contributing rental returns to a self-managed super fund after she renovated and rented it.
A second Bendigo property followed, then good returns when the property market boomed.
They were still generating income when she decided a changing regulatory playing field meant the money could be invested elsewhere with less risk — and sold both.
The changes enacted in 2021 included new minimum standards, changes to rules around pets in rentals and mandatory regular inspections of things like gas appliances and smoke alarms.
"I was finding it was getting quite complicated with the new changes and, increasingly, there were more costs being put on the owner," she said.
"[The tenants] could do things without even asking me and in the longer term, it felt like I didn't have control over my property anymore."
The September survey of more than 1,700 investors found the exodus was particularly pronounced in Melbourne, where a quarter of property investors who responded sold at least one rental home in the past year.
'You can vote with your feet'
The wall of Dean Campion's home office is decorated with the framed listings of properties in his investment portfolio, which once spanned nine properties in four states.
These days, he sees property investment as a kind of hobby. But when he started out, it was a vessel for social mobility out of his working-class upbringing.
"My dad was always stressing on me about not ending up working in the factory," he said.
In the late 1980s, as a 24-year-old university graduate, he put down a $15,000 deposit on a three-bedroom, "fairly rough" flat beside a highway in Cheltenham.
The value of the $51,000 property rose by the price of the deposit in the space of 12 months, he said, and the capital gains allowed him to buy a house in Brunswick.
His portfolio grew to include three homes in Mt Gambier, one in Tasmania, one in Albury and three in Traralgon, where he would usually buy cheaper properties and use the income to offset the mortgage.
He acknowledges landlords "get a bad wrap" and that this kind of wealth-creating opportunity no longer exists for people like his daughter, 25, who has a large HECs debt and pays more rent than he used to.
But he says some states are more landlord-friendly than others, and Victoria isn't one of them.
He said he decided to sell his Traralgon properties after their value rose during a wave of COVID-era seachangers at the same time as the regular inspection requirements were slimming his rental returns.
"That was going to be at least $1200 per property. I thought it's getting too much," he said. "The government can change the rules, but they can't force you to keep being a landlord. "You can vote with your feet and that's what I've done."
Rising rents, land tax changes among pressures on landlords
For Branko Kovac the property industry is less like a hobby and more like a game of Monopoly. It started when he bought a second property in Sunbury for $54,000 with his wife in the late 1980s.
"When I had the equity in the other place, that let me, basically, play like Monopoly," he said. "I was buying one house up against the next house, the next house up against the next house, and so forth."
He said he had owned about eight properties along his property journey, which was helped by a $40,000 lottery dividend early on and hindered when rising interest rates put him in "danger of nearly losing everything" later in the 1990s.
Today, he owns a rental property, a holiday home and a farm in Sunbury.
At the rental home — a four-bedroom house leased to a single mother — he recently increased the rent from $345 to $400 per week, which he said was the first rent rise over her seven-year tenancy.
Pointing to rising rates and the upcoming lowering of the land tax threshold, introduced so the state can pay off its COVID-era debt, he said a second increase was on the table, even though he makes some income off the property because it's paid off.
Is it unfair for someone who owns property to increase the rent of someone who doesn't? When asked this question, Mr Kovac said he empathised with people locked out of property ownership. "At the same time, we're giving them a house to live in," he said. "Unfortunately the government of the day has made things so difficult that the tenant has to absorb the costs.
"I like to try to be a good person and not a bad person, but the government is pushing me to become a person I'm not happy to [be]."
Property churn 'unsettling for tenants'
What happens when those investors sell up? Pointing to survey statistics, PIPA says fewer properties are being bought by fellow investors year-on-year. "We can safely assume that those properties have been removed from the rental market," Nicola McDougall said.
This position is backed by the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, which says a historically high number of new sale listings are likely to have been rental properties.
AHURI's Michael Fotheringham said it was "simplistic" to assume the properties are passing from investors to owner-occupiers, given home ownership remains out of reach for many.
However, he warned of a "range of ways in which property churn is unsettling for tenants" even as properties are sold from one investor to the next.
That could include tenants being evicted as properties are sold, rents being raised as new leases begin, or homes being let on the short-term rental market, which reduces rental stock without increasing home ownership.
Dr Fotheringham said good policy would strike a balance between quality of life for tenants without being cost-prohibitive for landlords.
"This is the main game here — trying to find a balance of rental reforms that benefit the tenants without being punitive to landlords, and actually find outcomes that are good for both groups," he said.
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The Australian Border Force has confirmed it sent 11 asylum seekers to Nauru in September, the first transfer to immigration detention on the Pacific nation in nine years
The evidence to Senate estimates on Monday from the head of operation sovereign borders (OSB) confirms a report in Guardian Australia revealing the Albanese government sent asylum seekers to Nauru just months after the last people were removed from detention on the island.
Rear Adm Justin Jones, the head of OSB, told estimates the 11 people were transferred “from Australia to Nauru” on 7 September.
A whistleblower told Guardian Australia there is an enormous amount of “secrecy” surrounding the group of asylum seekers.
“How many more sad people are going to be stuck here for god knows how long,” they said. “I’ve been witness to so much heartache. It’s just so sad.”
At estimates, officials refused to say how many boats the 11 “unauthorised maritime arrivals” came on, where the boat or boats were intercepted, their country of origin, and whether there are any minors in the cohort.
The Greens senator Nick McKim accused the government of “outrageous secrecy” and “lack of transparency” for refusing to answer questions about “on-water matters”, in line with policies introduced by the Coalition.
Jones said these details were all “operationally sensitive” because they go “to the heart of relations with neighbouring countries across the region”.
Michael Thomas, the first assistant secretary of people smuggling policy in the home affairs department, said the cohort were in an “initial reception” phase in detention where they are identified and subject to health checks.
“At this stage providing more detail on the cohort may have an impact on relations with Nauru, as well as privacy and safety,” he said.
At one point McKim referred to Murray Watt, who was representing the home affairs minister, as “Mr [Scott] Morrison”, in reference to the former immigration minister who instituted the policy of refusing to comment on on-water matters. McKim withdrew the remark.
McKim complained that even under the Coalition officials answered questions about whether children had been detained. “That’s your narrative,” Watt replied.
McKim concurred, commenting the major parties’ policies were the “same rubbish, different bin” when it comes to offshore processing.
Asked why their boat wasn’t turned back, Jones replied: “If we are able to safely and lawfully turn or take back personnel we will do that. In this case we were not able to safely or lawfully conduct a take-back or turnback.”
Jones confirmed it would not be lawful to turn or take back a boat that had reached Australia’s migration zone.
Thomas said 13 asylum seekers on Nauru, including the 11 in the new cohort, were in detention, who he suggested could move to community accommodation after assessment by Nauru.
Jones said there had been seven ventures intercepted en route to Australia in 2022 and the vessels in all cases were rated not seaworthy.
He vowed that dangerous boat journeys “will not succeed”. “We will not allow the door to tragic loss of life and criminal exploitation to open again,” he said.
Jones said in one operation in 2022, marine crew spent 20 hours in “suboptimal sea conditions, transferring passengers and crew from their foundering vessel to safety”.
“The risk of life and safety of all involved is real. This is why we work so hard to protect people from the false promises of criminal people smugglers.”
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23 October, 2023
Our parasitical ruling class have revealed themselves to all
Their tantrum when for once they did not get their way is very revealing. They are nearly as entrenched as the Soviet Nomenklatura so it is good to see them lose one. A powerful new device for control of us all was wrenched from them
The tantrum of the ‘Yes’ campaign and its supporters following their referendum loss is symptomatic of a class of people suffering from a troublesome level of self-entitlement and a sense of moral superiority.
It reflects an attitude that can only emerge in a nation where people live in a group-think bubbles, indulging their lack of perspective which is reinforced daily by those around them.
Such is the Australian bureaucrat class.
This particular class of society tends to live and work in our inner-cities and lurk within government and corporate institutions.
They’re not tradies, or small businesspeople, or front-line emergency responders – they would never survive in an environment that requires daily performance measurement and instant accountability.
The ‘Yes’ class are the class that make all the rules. They stifle the productivity of the producers in our society, and make life more difficult for everyone else. Red tape and green tape are their tools of power.
They inhabit government department managerial offices, corporate HR, legal, PR departments, law firms, consulting firms, and training companies. In ancient Chinese society (and in modern China) these were the people who held the ‘chops’, the official government stamps needed to authorise and control.
They mirror the archetypes of the British civil service who delight in hindering, meddling, policing, and enforcing. Justifying their lack of productivity and true success with political gameplay and the wielding of arbitrary power.
Worse than the wealth they prevent individuals and the nation producing, is the wealth they take for themselves. The worst example of this post-referendum was the news that the Queensland state government of Labor’s Annastacia Palaszczuk was offering any public servant who felt they needed it, five days off with full pay to mourn the loss.
That such an idea could be floated with any level of seriousness, let alone be implemented, reveals how severe this gap between the rulers and the ruled has become. What small business person or tradie could afford such a personal self-indulgence? Further, what small or medium-sized business could afford to offer such a benefit to its employees and compete in the market for top talent?
What the Voice laid so plainly bare for all of us to see was that our country is roughly divided in two: those who know the cost of things and produce – and those who make the rules, and take.
The first and most glaring indication of this bureaucrat class being completely out of touch was the inverse nature of the Voice vote in the Australian Capital Territory: 61-39 vs 39-61.
That was obvious on election night and is perhaps all that needs to be said on the matter. But a deeper dive into the electorate-by-electorate vote unveils two clear dividing trends: tertiary educated vs non-tertiary educated; and high-income vs low-middle income. Of the 151 federal electorates, only 29 saw a ‘Yes’ victory – the inner-cities had the widest margins.
In my view, this proves the long-held perspective that, those of us with a tertiary education are not necessarily better at analytical thinking and reasoning but rather we have merely been exposed to a different ideological framework. The dominance of post-modern, neo-Marxist, identity politics (call it what you will – it’s the worldview of left) in academia has, with the boomer generations and their children, come to dominate the halls of power in this country. Covid proved the point when millions of producers were left at the mercy of the bureaucrat class.
Before I am accused of Marxist-style over-simplification of the world into classes, let me clarify that I believe there are many degrees and combinations of these factors lurking within wider society and perhaps even within individuals. Not all public servants sit in the bureaucrat class, especially those on the front line and those who contribute to the nation’s productivity rather than obstruct it. But the data from this referendum shows we have a worrying disconnect between the producers and the administrators. This isn’t sustainable.
There can be only one of two outcomes. Firstly, the bureaucrat class could double down in anger and heighten a push to further regulation and control, causing the producers to give up, retire to the beach, or move abroad. This would lead to stagnation in innovation, production and wealth, tax revenue will plummet, debt will rise and the bureaucrats will run out of other people’s money to spend.
Or, the bureaucrat class get the message, restrain themselves, unwind excessive regulation and control, drop identity-politics-related programs and seek to properly serve the producer class instead of ruling over them. This will cause producers to re-engage, build businesses and create employment, drive innovation, production and wealth, tax revenue will be adequate to sustain this trimmed-down bureaucracy and there will be enough left over to pay down the crippling debt.
If I were a betting man, I’d say the naïve response of the referendum’s losers and the subsequent push now for ‘misinformation’ laws, suggest the control freaks will stand triumphant atop a pile of ruins and rubble in a decade or so, and first scenario is sadly far more likely. But we live in hope, and those of us working for the second outcome must carry on fighting each battle as it arises.
Imagine though, how great our nation could be if we united behind true laissez-faire free market liberalism, low-tax, and minimal regulation. Alas, we suffer at the hands of those who believe they know what is best for us and think they have a monopoly on ‘good’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/we-have-a-big-problem
***********************************************From diagnosis to services and support: how Australia's long COVID response is falling short
Around 5-10% of people in Australia experience symptoms for more than three months after a COVID infection, termed long COVID.
So far, more than 200 different symptoms have been recorded, ranging from shortness of breath to fatigue and brain fog. The effects are far-reaching for those with the condition, often affecting their capacity to work and their quality of life for many months or even years.
With this in mind, we set out to examine Australia’s long COVID guidelines, services and public health information.
Our research found that compared to international standards, Australia is generally slow to recognise and investigate possible cases of long COVID. We also found the availability of multidisciplinary long COVID services was lacking in Australia, as was accessibility of trustworthy public health information.
From COVID to long COVID
Even with all the advancements in medical science, there’s not yet any simple blood test or scan that can definitively tell you if you have long COVID. A diagnosis is based on how long you’ve been dealing with symptoms. But the point at which you’ll receive that diagnosis can vary depending on where you live.
In our review, we examined international guidelines from the World Health Organization as well as national guidelines in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
Most countries, including Australia, wait 12 weeks after the initial infection to officially diagnose long COVID. The US, however, determines a person has long COVID after just four weeks of continued symptoms. This discrepancy can have significant implications for how much support the person will get from the health system.
Guidelines in Australia, the UK and the US do advocate for further investigation if symptoms persist for four weeks after contracting COVID. But we discovered this approach of early investigation is not consistently implemented in Australia.
On reviewing the eligibility criteria for long COVID services in Australia, we found that most of these services require a person to have had symptoms for 12 weeks or more to qualify for care.
Get help early
If your symptoms continue for four weeks or more after catching COVID, it’s important to act early by contacting your GP. They can investigate further and help you manage your symptoms.
Unfortunately not all GPs and health-care professionals are up to speed on long COVID. The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has called for better education for GPs.
All health-care professionals, especially those working in the community, should be educated about how to spot long COVID early. This will enable them to refer patients for specialised care when required.
Australian long COVID services cannot meet demand
Long COVID is a complicated health issue that can affect multiple parts of the body, and right now there are no specific treatments for the condition as a whole.
However, a mix of supports and services can help. This might include care from a cardiologist, neurologist and physiotherapist for different symptoms. Research has shown that a personalised, multidisciplinary rehabilitation program can have long-term benefits for people with long COVID. Long COVID clinics offer these sorts of programs.
When we conducted our research, we identified just 16 specialised long COVID clinics in Australia.
The vast majority of the Australian population has had COVID at least once. The current best estimate is 80-85%. If we do a conservative calculation and say out of 80% of Australians who have had COVID, 5% ended up with long COVID, that’s at least one million people.
Each long COVID clinic is then essentially tasked with serving more than 60,000 people. Even if we assume many have recovered and don’t need these services, it’s still an impossible task.
So it’s not surprising reports suggest people have had to wait several months to access these services.
Further, all of the 16 clinics were in big cities, and none in rural areas. There were also no long COVID clinics catering specifically to the unique needs of children, elderly people in aged care, or those with a disability.
Another gap we identified is that trustworthy public health information on long COVID, such as online resources, is either not readily available or not advertised. Where these resources exist, they are primarily in English, disadvantaging people with low health literacy or from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Integrating advice in multiple languages on diet, movement, energy conservation and mental health with clinical support will be of great value to many people who are on the wait list for long COVID clinics.
If your COVID symptoms last more than four weeks, or if new symptoms appear during that first month, affecting your life or work, you might be in for the long haul. Our key message is act early. Book yourself in with your GP or a GP-led specialist clinic.
With COVID cases continuing to accumulate, more and more people will find themselves with long COVID. As a society, we need to fast-track better services and work towards a deeper understanding of the condition.
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Education boss calls for doubling down on explicit teaching in schools
The head of the NSW public education system has called on schools to double down on the use of explicit instruction – a teaching method that gives students step-by-step and clear instructions – in a bid to boost results and close the stark achievement gap.
Murat Dizdar, who was appointed secretary of the NSW Education Department in June, told the Herald that evidence shows schools using explicit teaching practices have the most sustained improvements in academic outcomes.
The department will release a new public education plan on Monday that will outline six focus points, including plans to boost school staff numbers, raise attendance rates and lift the number of students completing year 12.
“Equity is also a big focus – we want to close the gaps for those students who are struggling,” Dizdar said.
The plan comes as 45 high-profile reading experts send an open letter to Australian education ministers, calling on governments to reduce the number of pupils leaving primary school without proficient reading skills.
The department’s four-year blueprint calls out the use of explicit instruction to help improve reading and maths results. The approach favours clear direction from teachers over student-led learning, and involves breaking down topics into small parts and regularly spot-checking to assess how students are doing.
“One of the reasons I believe in explicit teaching so much is because it does not discriminate,” Dizdar said. “It applies to all age levels and abilities when learning new or complex skills.”
“I’m going to be stronger around it, and I’m looking to reinforce that practice and drive our professional learning around that.”
But Dizdar said HSC and NAPLAN performance targets set for every school – benchmarks for the number of students achieving in the top two bands – will no longer be mandated. There will also be no individual phonics achievement targets for schools.
Instead, schools will have “improvement measures” in reading, numeracy, attendance and post-school pathways.
“We will start discussions with schools about improvement measures this term, and they will be set for every school by the end of term 1 next year,” Dizdar said. “They won’t be top down; rather they will be growth-based, discussed with schools and will consider their context and trajectory.”
Targets were outlined under the department’s School Success Model, an expansion of the 2016 Bump It Up strategy that aimed to boost the number of students achieving in the top performance bands.
Dizdar said feedback from teachers and principals was that “the top two band measures had inadvertent consequences, and that schools may not be focusing on all students”.
The ambassador schools program, which was designed to study the state’s best schools to work out the secrets of their success, will also be wound up.
Meanwhile, an open letter signed by reading experts and sent to education ministers has pushed for immediate action to tackle the achievement gap and set national targets for reading.
The letter, signed by cognitive science expert Anne Castles, Pam Snow and education expert Bill Louden, calls for urgent reforms to “set ambitious but achievable reading proficiency targets” and address the substantial achievement gaps between students from advantaged and disadvantaged families.
“The next National School Reform Agreement must clearly outline targets for reading based on the new NAPLAN proficiency benchmarks,” it says.
The latest NAPLAN data shows almost one-third of Australian students are failing to meet proficiency standards in reading, writing and maths, with a vast achievement gap between students in cities and regions.
“This means well over 1 million children in school today do not have the literacy skills to navigate the world with confidence, proficiency and dignity,” the letter says.
The head of the Australian Education Research Organisation, Jenny Donovan, said highlighting explicit instruction in the NSW public education plan was “commendable in its direction” but the department will “need to hold a line, and be clear about the practices that don’t work, such as over-reliance on inquiry-led learning”.
“You can use inquiry-led or student-led learning, but [it] can’t be the main approach,” she said.
The plan for public education involved an eight-week consultation period with thousands of teachers, principals, parents and stakeholder groups.
It outlines six key focus areas: ensuring high quality, evidence-based teaching; improving literacy and numeracy outcomes; lifting student wellbeing; increasing the proportion of children in preschool; strengthening respect for the teaching profession; and lifting the proportion of students going into university, training and work after school.
NSW Education Minister Prue Car said addressing teacher shortages and delivering high-quality, evidence-based learning was at the centre of the document.
“I am proud to deliver this blueprint for the next four years, which reflects the aspirations of teachers, parents and students,” Car said.
But opposition spokeswoman for education Sarah Mitchell said the plan contained no detail around how the goals within it would be achieved in NSW schools.
“Key policy areas like phonics, delivery of free universal pre-kindergarten and increasing the number of students in the top two NAPLAN bands for literacy and numeracy appear to have been dropped, which indicates the new Labor government is watering down transparency and accountability measures in schools.”
Federal education minister Jason Clare has commissioned a root-and-branch review that will examine targets and priorities for the next National School Reform Agreement, which will also look at transparency and accountability around public funding. A report is due by the end of the year.
The Productivity Commission has said targets should be developed to reduce the proportion of students who do not meet basic levels of literacy and numeracy.
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BHP warns same job same pay cost will exceed $1.3 billion
BHP has declared the cost to the mining giant of Labor’s industrial relations changes will be significantly higher than its previous estimate of $1.3 billion annually, warning the legislation threatens to make its $300 million apprentice and traineeship program “unfeasible”.
In a submission to the Senate inquiry into Labor’s Closing Loopholes Bill, BHP said it was strongly opposed to the same job same pay labour hire changes “because of the damage it threatens to do to our business as well as to Australia’s economy, to Australian jobs and to Australia’s productivity and international competitiveness”.
The government is not closing loopholes, “they are tieing businesses in knots, it says, introducing “significant new costs for the entire resources sector, both in terms of direct labour costs but also costs associated with lower productivity and less flexibility”.
“These are costs which cannot simply be absorbed and will create difficult decisions for the entire resources sector about making cuts to offset the impact of the bill, deferring or cancelling investments, or ultimately closing mines when the underlying cost base becomes uncompetitive,” BHP says
Calling the bill the “most significant and far-reaching change to Australian workplace relations since WorkChoices”, BHP says the legislation threatens the future of all forms of labour hire and the future of large, long-running service contractor businesses.
BHP has previously estimated the financial impact of the labour hire changes to its Australian operations would be up to A$1.3 billion annually, equivalent to the labour cost of approximately 5,000 full-time employees across its operational workforce.
The government has disputed the costings, while the company’s submission disputed commitments from Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke that service contractors would be exempt from the labour hire.
BHP says it has sought but not received further information from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations to allow the company to make fresh calculations about the financial impact of the labour hire changes.
“Clearly, SJSP (Same Job Same Pay) will have significant and material impacts across the whole sector and economy,” its submission says.
“Given it is now clear that the bill does not expressly exclude service contractors, which make up a significant part of the overall resources workforce, and given the bill provides no certainty as to how the Fair Work Commission will exercise its discretion, it must be assumed that they will be impacted by the SJSP provisions.
“We therefore expect a significant upward revision to our initial costing….the significant increased labour cost of SJSP will not be accompanied by any associated increase in productivity, indeed it will most likely decrease productivity.
“Our suppliers will most likely pass on their increased labour costs, and without any increased benefit to BHP. Ultimately, any increased costs are borne by a large majority of Australians, who are direct or indirect shareholders in BHP (and other Australian companies).”
BHP accused the government of wanting to use the legislation to stymie its mining services division, OS, claiming the government had mischaracterised OS as “internal labour hire”.
The company says the same job same pay changes will leave the future of BHP’s FutureFit training program highly uncertain.
FutureFit academies have been established in Western Australia and Queensland under the auspices of Operations Services.
The program promises to create 2,500 new traineeships and apprenticeships over five years, with entrants joining BHP in permanent roles upon graduation.
In 2022, 80 per cent of FutureFit students were female, 20 per cent Indigenous and retention was more than 83 per cent.
“As a result of the government’s legislation, BHP’s continued FutureFit investment, and the opportunities it is providing to a new wave of Australians to enter the resources industry, may become unfeasible,” it says..
It says BHP is the most held security by self-managed superannuation funds and managed funds. Over 600,000 Australians hold shares directly in BHP, and around 17 million Australians who indirectly hold shares in BHP via their superannuation.
“SJSP will directly impact these annual dividends and value of their BHP holdings,” the submission says. “When the impact to all Australian companies is taken into account, the government’s SJSP policy can be expected to have a materially negative impact on the value of the retirement savings of 17 million Australians.”
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22 October, 2023
Australians the most promiscuous?
There would seem to be a number of problems with the figures below. For a start, men and women are not separated out A lot of women do have few partners and a lot of men have many. I stopped counting when I had been with 50 women.
And the age of the people could matter too. I came of age in the 60s when "free love" was all the rage. I did participate in that culture to a degree. I have happy memories of it in fact. I gather that young people these days tend to be less promiscuous than their parents were at the same age.
But it is possible that the figures below have some accuracy. Australians do tend to be laid back and religion is not influential for the great majority of Australians
Despite the country’s Puritan past, the average US citizen has slept with more than 10 people, according to raunchy research into the world’s most promiscuous countries.
NapLab compiled data from various sources to come up with their list, looking at national sexually transmitted infection rates, a country’s attitudes toward premarital sex and the average number of sex partners, among other criteria.
America was declared the 15th most promiscuous country on the planet by NapLab, with the average resident sleeping with 10.7 people over the course of their lifetime.
That’s on par with Canada, as our naughty northern neighbors also notch up an average of 10.7 bedroom buddies.
However, Mexicans are less promiscuous than those in the US, with their average citizen sleeping with nine people.
Brits were also less likely to have as many sex partners (9.8 on average), as were the Spanish (6.1), the Polish (6) and the Chinese (3.1).
Meanwhile, Australia was named the most promiscuous country in the world, with the average citizen sleeping with 13.3 people and 81% of residents approving of sex before marriage.
Prostitution is also legalized Down Under, while the average Aussie loses their virginity at a younger age than the average American (17.8 years versus 18 years).
Despite their citizens seeming to sleep around more on average, Australia had lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases, also known as STDs, than the US.
The STD rate is 14,454 per 100,000 citizens in Australia, while it’s a far higher 19,900 per 100,000 people in the US.
India was named by NapLab as the least promiscuous of the 45 countries they examined. Just 19% of Indians thought premarital sex was acceptable, while the average citizen had had just three sex partners. India also had relatively low STD rates when compared to other countries on the list
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Increasing Recognition Of Vaccine Injuries
The push to increase vaccination rates comes amid an increasing recognition of vaccine injuries in Australia and overseas.
In Australia, the government operates a vaccine injury compensation scheme that has paid out over $7.3 million (US$4.87 million) to 137 claimants. It has received 3,501 applications and is progressing with 2,263, according to figures obtained by News.com.au in March this year.
The Department of Social Services has previously estimated the government could be liable for a payout of $77 million (US$49.35 million).
In the UK, the increasing number of vaccine adverse effects had resulted in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca, with families and patients arguing that their loved ones died or suffered severe reactions after taking its vaccine, according to their lawyers.
Meanwhile, multiple doctors and COVID-19 patients have also reported that their discussion of vaccine adverse effects has been labelled as misinformation.
The former president of the peak medical body, the Australian Medical Association, came out in December last year to say that discussion around vaccine injuries is being “censored” despite data confirming COVID-19 vaccines can cause adverse reactions.
Dr. Kerryn Phelps said she herself had suffered from a vaccine injury and that she faced “obstruction and resistance” to openly discuss the issue, according to a submission to the federal Parliament’s inquiry into Long COVID.
She said that while current COVID-19 vaccines may reduce the risk of developing Long COVID by an estimated 15 to 41 percent, recent data shows the risk remains for most people after immunisation, with some adverse events going on to cause “long-term illness and disability.”
Dr. Phelps also revealed in her case, that the vaccine injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia, and blood pressure fluctuations.
“I have spoken with other doctors who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event including cardiological, rheumatological, autoimmune reactions and neurological consequences,” she wrote in her submission.
She said while there is higher awareness about the unusual blood clotting from AstraZeneca, “less generally recognised are the reported adverse reactions after mRNA vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna beyond myocarditis and pericarditis.”
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Enslaved by the welfare state: the tragedy of Australian ‘kindness’
It is not unusual for laws and policies, although well-intentioned, to have the opposite effect as that allegedly contemplated. Arguably, Australia’s worst sufferings and deprivations in our alleged free society have been greatly caused by the continuing implementation of welfare state policies.
Since the second world war, the Australian government has maintained and nurtured a burgeoning and expensive bureaucracy focused on the alleged welfare of the community. However, welfare dependence has aggravated the conditions which have perpetuated poverty and dependence. Decades of federal, state, and territory policies have miserably failed to improve the lives of Australia’s most disadvantaged peoples. For example, more than half (53 per cent) of all the Indigenous Australians aged 16 and over are receiving some form of Centrelink income support payment, compared with 26 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians of this age.
Although government aid can do some good for those needing only a temporary boost to get back on their feet, nonetheless, it is effectively a band-aid for a broken bone. After all, government aid cannot eliminate the more pressing moral and spiritual needs that lie at the heart of every dysfunctional behaviour. Indeed, sometimes what the recipient of governmental assistance really needs is a stronger message of work and sobriety. In this context, writes American Christian author Nancy R. Pearcey:
Government aid can actually make things worse. By handing out welfare checks impersonally to all who qualify, without addressing the underlying behavioural problems, the government in essence ‘rewards’ antisocial and dysfunctional patterns. And any behaviour the government rewards will generally tend to increase. As one perceptive 19th Century critic noted, government assistance is a ‘might solvent to sunder the ties of kinship, to quench the affections of family, to suppress in the poor themselves the instinct of self-reliance and self-respect – to convert them into paupers.
To a great extent, any behaviour that a government rewards generally tends to increase. Accordingly, the prevalence of passive welfare dependence could be directly responsible for the scourge of drugs, pornography, child abuse, and the effects of ‘humbugging’. The point is that government programs to help welfare recipients tend to exacerbate these problems. By handing out welfare checks impersonally to all who potentially qualify, without addressing the underlying behavioural problems, the government in essence ‘rewards’ dysfunctional behaviour that affects not only the recipient but their community at large as well.
Perhaps nobody has better expressed the ‘evil results of a too excessive solicitude on the part of the State’ than Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). This German philosopher, linguist, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, was correctly described by Friedrich Hayek as ‘Germany’s greatest philosopher of freedom’. In Chapter III of The Limits of State Action, Humboldt teaches us a very important lesson that should be learned by every single Australian citizen, Aboriginal or not:
The evil results of a too extensive solicitude on the part of the State, are still more strikingly shown in the suppression of all active energy, and the necessary deterioration of the moral character. […] The idea of the first no longer inspires him; and the painful consciousness of the last assails him less frequently and forcibly, since he can more easily ascribe his shortcomings to this particular position, and leave them to the responsibility of those who have made it what it is.
If we add to this, that he may not, possibly, regard the designs of the State as perfectly pure in their objects or execution – that he may suspect that his own advantage only, but along with it some other additional purpose is intended, then, not only the force and energy, but also the purity of his moral nature suffers. He now conceives himself not only completely free from any duty which the State has not expressly imposed upon him, but exonerated at the same time from every personal effort to improve his own condition; and, even fears such an effort, as if it were likely to open out new opportunities, of which the State might take advantage…
Further, the pernicious influence of such a positive policy is no less evident in the behaviour of the citizens to each other. As each individual abandons himself to the solicitous aid of the State, so, and still more, he abandons to it the fate of his fellow citizens. This weakens sympathy and renders mutual assistance inactive: … and experience teaches us that oppressed classes of the community which are, as it were, overlooked by the government, are always bound together by the closest ties. But whether the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family towards the members of this household.
Theodore Dalrymple, who worked as a physician and psychiatrist in the poorest areas of London, says that poverty is often caused more by people’s worldview than their lack of material goods or money. Likewise, according to Peter Hitchens, ‘It is the decay of moral values and self-restraint … that has led to the misery of the modern poor.’
The increase of criminality over the years provides a good example. The idea that poverty or social conditions are sufficient causes of crime cannot be supported empirically in Australia. Indeed, the evidence shows that the highest levels of crime in memory, both in Australia and most of the so-called ‘Western democracies’, have occurred precisely at a time of unheard-of social welfare. As Hitchens points out:
‘This destroys the idea that increased welfare leads to a reduction in crime. On the contrary, it raises the possibility that well-meaning state intervention to improve the lot of the poor can actually lead to increased crime.’
The moral costs of the welfare state are, perhaps, in no other field more visible than in the field of family policy. Although the family serves as a primary means of acculturation and transmission of values from generation to generation, family ties in today’s societies are so weak that fewer people think they ought to help their family members. As a result, people in distress no longer expect to obtain much help this way.
Instead of addressing these problems, public policy seems to have further destabilised the family with disastrous consequences. For instance, the last few decades have seen the dramatic proliferation of laws allowing the unilateral dissolution of the marriage contract. By making divorce easily available and purely personal, the state transformed marriage into a legal absurdity that denies individual responsibility and holds no inducements to personal misconduct. And whenever and wherever the family breaks down the government will step in as a substitute for the family – hence the gradual increase of the state’s jurisdiction over the family.
We should also consider how in this country the welfare-state stymies the ability of individuals to provide charitable assistance. When assets are taken from individuals and their families – for example through taxation – this naturally leaves very little for them to donate to private charity. This oppressive regime of high taxation, which is inseparable from every government welfare, diminishes the sphere of free services by which free individuals engage in spontaneous social interactions, thus corroding the culture of civility that sustains a compassionate society. The inevitable result, of course, is the growing decrease in charitable activities coupled by the financial power acquired by the ruling political class to invest in the sort of ‘charitable service’ that such a class itself deems worthy to support.
Professor John Gray in an insightful preface to Bertrand de Jouvenel’s The Ethics of Redistribution, comments:
If, because of the confiscation of higher incomes, there are important social and cultural activities that can no longer be sustained privately, such as provision for high culture and the arts, then once again the state assumes responsibility for such activities through a program of subsidy. Inevitably, the state comes to exercise ever-increasing degree of control over them. The consequence of redistributionist policy, accordingly, is the curtailment of private initiative in many spheres of social life, the destruction of the man of independent means, and the weakening of civil society.
The very concept of a welfare ‘entitlement’ runs contrary to the natural understanding of aiding the poor. Helping others is a moral duty and is not essentially exercised through coercion or government mandates. However, as noted by the Rev Robert Sirico, ‘The modern, central state has proven itself incapable of distinguishing between the deserving and the underserving poor, and between aid that fosters independence and moral development from that which reinforces a dependency mindset and moral nihilism.’
In this context, welfare state policies eventually create a distortion of the natural order of liberty, because governments that claim to provide almost everything to their citizens will inevitably undermine private initiative and personal responsibility. The reason for limiting government power is simply that people should be free and have their individual rights protected.
Unfortunately, however, most of my fellow citizens are now inclined to look on government aid as a ‘right’ and an ‘entitlement’. They usually regard themselves as perfectly entitled to every form of government assistance, thus preventing them from making attempts to preserve their self-respect and consider their own self-worth.
Australia is rich in natural resources and raw materials. And yet, natural resources and raw materials, in and of themselves, are not productive. They require the application of human thought, ingenuity, and energy to make them useful. The production of wealth comes more from the creativity and hard work fostered by an economic system that encourages free individuals to invest their wealth in productive enterprises, thus making jobs, goods, and services available to others.
But who are the primary beneficiaries of the all-encompassing presence of an omnipotent Australian State? And what impact does this amassing of power in the hands of a few have on the common good?
Despite the seemingly good intentions, to a great extent excessive state intervention on society results in a re-distribution of power from the individual to the State. All that is achieved is a huge and expensive bureaucracy – an ‘elite’ of state-appointed people who are lavishly sustained by a permanent underclass of chronically poor individuals and their families. As a consequence, writes Tom G. Palmer in After the Welfare State (2012):
The poor suffer the worst, because a trickle of benefits may seem like a boom to them, when their very poverty is both perpetuated by the welfare state and deepened by the hidden transfers from the powerless to the powerful caused by protectionism, licensing, and other restriction on labour market freedoms, and all the other privileges and special deals the powerful, the educated, the articulated, and the empowered create for themselves at the expense of the weak, the uneducated, the voiceless, and the disempowered.
Economic freedoms and the right to private property are crucial in maintaining a wealthy and prosperous Australia. And yet, in an increasingly socialist economy, Australians have already relinquished a great deal of control over their personal lives to the Australian State, which requires considerable governmental control over the distribution of goods and services.
Because the present economic model relies on a powerful government to achieve its desired goals, the policies adopted by the ruling classes invariably multiply and perpetuate problems for the poor by creating needless bureaucracies and concentrating too much power in the hands of a few individuals, namely the illiberal politicians, CEOs of big corporations, and an ever-expanding bureaucratic caste responsible for sustaining a statist model that effectively enslaves the poorest and most disadvantaged members of our society.
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Anxiety, ADHD, ‘snowplough parents’: Behind our worsening school discipline crisis
With her booming voice, no-nonsense attitude and gaze that could wilt cactus, Megan*, a 30-something teacher, oozes authority. The untrained eye might see her as petite, but to students she’s towering. One day, as she walked down a corridor of her boxy, ageing Sydney public high school, she heard a six-foot, year 12 boy curse. “F---, you’re short!” he said in surprise. “It’s so weird. You don’t seem like that in front of the classroom.“
Megan is one of the lucky ones; a teacher born to run a room. Eyes in the back of her head. A look that stings. An instinct for weaponising silence. And yet even Megan, who is using a pseudonym because she would be fired for speaking out, is struggling to manage student behaviour. “When I first got to this school, I was like, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” she says. “I’m pretty strong, but it’s been so bad that I’ll sit at the front with my laptop and say, ‘Teach yourselves.’ “
There’s the occasional crisis – fights, knives, drugs – but there always has been. The pressing problem is disruption. In a high school such as Megan’s, it might be boys streaming cage fights in class or girls ignoring the teacher to chat among themselves. They swear at each other, harass peers, refuse to participate. “It’s getting worse, yes – a thousand per cent,” Megan says. “If the media really knew what happened inside schools, the places would be shut down.”
Students tell us themselves that Australian schools are among the most disorderly in the world. When 15-year-olds were last surveyed by the OECD in 2018 about noise and disruption in their classrooms alongside peers from 75 other countries, Australia was eight places from the bottom. Local studies also show teachers are struggling with behaviour, and a long-term, annual survey of principals suggests disrespect and aggression are getting worse.
The reasons are myriad. Complications of technology, such as social media fights and bullying spilling over into school; the lingering effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on social development; scant resources to deal with skyrocketing diagnoses of autism, anxiety and ADHD; a “crisis of adult authority”, as one expert described it; and a more diverse social landscape than ever before, in which children bring wildly differing family norms to the classroom.
Sceptics dismiss the behaviour crisis as a moral panic fuelled by reactionaries worried that a spared rod has left children spoilt. But there is a tangible problem at its heart: disorderly classrooms are bad for learning. Some believe this is why Australia’s academic results are falling. If disruption halts a lesson 10 times, even for just a minute on each occasion, that’s “10 minutes of teaching time you lose out of 50”, says Lisa Holt, the principal of Rosebud Secondary College in Victoria, whose students had forgotten “basic manners and courtesy” when they returned from lockdowns.
Lisa Holt, principal of Rosebud Secondary College. “If you’re not the boss of the room, someone else will be.”
Lisa Holt, principal of Rosebud Secondary College. “If you’re not the boss of the room, someone else will be.”CREDIT:JOSH ROBENSTONE
Many teachers don’t have Megan’s natural gifts. Controlling a classroom might seem like an educator’s core business, but they were never taught how to do it. Old-fashioned discipline, with its connotations of harsh, corporal punishment, has been replaced by a decades-old creed that behaviour is the language used by young people to communicate their needs and improves when those needs are met. With four million Australian students, each with their own needs, that puts a lot of pressure on teachers.
The backlash against the behaviour-as-language philosophy is gaining momentum across the English-speaking world. Proponents of what’s being called the “neo-strict” movement – rules and routines with the “neo” addition of positive reinforcement – say it misinterprets human nature. Misbehaviour is not a pathology nor a symptom of a more profound problem, says Tom Bennett, the adviser to England’s education department, who has been dubbed Britain’s behaviour tsar. Students, he says, “usually misbehave because they feel like it, and they think they can get away with it”.
Politicians admit there’s a problem. A Senate inquiry considering “the issue of increasing disruption in Australian school classrooms” is set to report next month, and a federal government-ordered report this year ruled that universities must include lessons in how to control classrooms in their education degrees. But those are longer-term fixes, and right now, many students are having their one shot at education curtailed by constant interruptions. Schools need to act, but they can’t agree on how: is the answer to toughen up – or try a little more tenderness? After decades in the doghouse, the discipline debate is back.
It’s late Monday afternoon, and three teachers from different primary schools slump, exhausted, over tea and biscuits in a suburban Sydney kitchen. They’re nervous because they are taking a risk; their employers’ ban on contact with journalists means they could be fired for speaking to Good Weekend. But they’re fed up. Not with the kids, but with what they say is a lack of help with the behavioural issues wearing them down.
Mondays can be difficult in schools. Students might have spent their weekend cooped up in units playing computer games and are full of pent-up energy when they arrive in the classroom. Some hate returning to class because they’re falling behind, and their shame manifests in aggression and defiance. For others, home is far more permissive than school, and they struggle to adjust to different expectations.
As he munches on a biscuit, one of the teachers around the kitchen table, a softly spoken, blond 30-something called Mike* recalls explaining to a puzzled father that it’s not okay for a student to yank down another’s shorts at school, even if it’s a favourite prank at home. “He looked at me like I was an extremist prude,” he says. Another teacher – Mary*, a pretty, studious 30-something who works in an underprivileged area – called one mother to say her primary-aged son had been in a fight; the mother responded with relief that her son wasn’t a wimp. “She’d told her child that if someone is disrespectful, you punch them.”
Dysregulation leads to big arguments over little things. “Disagreeing over the rules in footy ends in physical violence, rather than just working it out,” says Kate*, an empathetic and passionate young woman. “They’ll come into class very unsettled, to the point where oftentimes it’ll be yelling, screaming, swearing at staff.” (Some schools have restricted before-school play for this reason.) When such students arrive in the classroom, the teacher has to help them calm down. “Often they can’t self-regulate and you have to intervene, which takes you away from the rest of the class,” she says. “The others get restless. It snowballs.”
The restlessness, says Mary, manifests as chatter, rolling around on the floor and calling out. One child says, “I’m not doing that,” and their friends follow. They’re more likely to behave for their main teacher, who knows them better, than a casual or once-a-week art teacher. “Generally speaking, they wouldn’t say ‘F--- you’ to a classroom teacher – although some do,” Mary says. “It’s when they have [different] staff, with whom they don’t have as strong a relationship. They might see them twice a week but don’t, for some reason, want to show them any respect.“
Parents used to back schools when it came to discipline. Some still do. But others don’t and will believe their child’s version over the teacher’s, or complain about the unfairness of consequences – something teachers say is more common in wealthier areas where there’s more “snowplough parenting” (trying to remove obstacles facing their children). One principal tells of a mother who offered to sit her daughter’s detention. Another says students use their mobile phones to text Mum or Dad straight after a ticking-off and, within minutes, the parent calls the office. “It undermines school authority,” she says.
More here:
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20 October, 2023
Early days among the Aborigines
Alice Duncan-Kemp is a 20th century writer but her early experiences of Aborigines were extensive and go back to the beginning of the 20th century when much of the original Aboriginal life and customs were still alive.
Her memoirs are however much too late in time to constitute an account of pre-contact Aboriginal behaviour and customs. They are an ethnography of a time and place when white contact and influence were already extensive. Attempts to see therefore in her work confirmation of Bruce Pascoes's unusual claims about pre-white Aboriginal life are simply anachronistic. Her memoirs just cannot do that. They are simply sentimental tales of her own youth in the early 20th century
I must however sound a cynical note about the claim that one pre-settlement Aboriginal group manufactured grindstones by the thousands which they traded nationwide. That Aborigines traded with one-another is not in dispute but where are the findings of similar grindstones in thousands of former Aboriginal sites? They should have been very durable but seem to have vanished into thin air. There should be one in every museum if the claim were true
It’s hard not to be enchanted by the lost books of Alice Duncan-Kemp when they resonate so deeply with the nation Australia would become. A photograph of her, on a winter’s day 90 years ago, shows her tapping out tales of her childhood on Mooraberrie station, a speck in the red dirt of southwest Queensland’s far-flung Channel Country. The story of boom and bust in the bush, of hope given over to despair, of cattle dying of thirst one day and drowning the next in a frothing flood, is as old as the Outback itself. We know it by heart.
What sets Duncan-Kemp apart – and why the rediscovery of her work is causing a stir in academe and out in the field where scientists use it like a “road map” to unlock the secrets of how the First Australians lived – is the detailed and partly disputed account she provides of the contact era. A voice like hers was rarely heard at the time: admiring of the tribal Aborigines she grew up with, heavy of heart for a way of life in its death throes. Recalling the Aboriginal nanny who helped raise her on the family beef run, 1200km west of Brisbane, she wrote in 1933:
The seed of my knowledge, of that corner of sand-hills, was implanted within me as a mere babe straddling Mary Ann’s hip, or toddling with little black mates after the billy-cart. In later youth the seed grew and fruited. The secret lay in a profound respect for the aborigines (sic) and their customs. In return, these trusty folk taught me to read, with wonder and pleasure, in Nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy, the reading of which was as simple as ABC to them.
Duncan-Kemp’s name and oeuvre – running to five out-of-print volumes and many more unpublished manuscripts – was forgotten by all but her family until a new generation of Australian historians dusted them off. Tom Griffiths, of the Australian National University, was 14 when he chanced across her second book, Where Strange Paths Go Down. He loved it, inspiring a lifelong passion for her work. Decades later the W.K. Hancock Professor of History would extol “the exciting truthfulness of her memoir – one tinged by innocence and nostalgia and prey to the glitches of memory, but faithfully told. A precious possibility emerges that Alice’s books comprise one of the richest ethnographic sources Australia possesses”.
University of Queensland archaeologist Michael Westaway began tracking down the scenes and places she described. There were dead-ends, of course. (“Alice was a bit airy-fairy on distances,” her grandson Will explains.) But in instance after instance, 21st-century technology and old-fashioned legwork confirmed her observations. Traces of sizeable Indigenous villages were found where she said they had been; a thriving trade in the narcotic pituri leaf did indeed span the length of the great inland rivers, from northwest Queensland to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, just as she described it; the jarra-jarra millstones she saw Aboriginal women sweat over to grind grass seed and other bush “grains” came from vast quarries dotted across the nearby desert; rare medicine plants continued to flourish in the out-of-the-way spots she had documented.
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News flash: not everyone who voted No to an Indigenous voice to parliament was a racist
Albo tried to pull a swifty but the people smelled a rat
By STEVE WATERSON (Steve Waterson is a senior writer at The Australian)
As the 20th century was drawing to a close, an elderly Jaru man guided me deep into the desert of the East Kimberley, where his people had lived for hundreds of generations.
His English wasn’t fluent, but it was good enough to give a curious reporter a glimpse of the bounty he saw in what was to my dull eye a flat, featureless and inhospitable spinifex landscape.
While he pointed out useful plants and animal tracks, the places where water might be found and the subtle signs that marked safe passage across the land, I remember being struck, unexpectedly and quite shockingly, by the realisation that he and his descendants could have prospered there, unaided, for another 10,000 years, whereas everyone I had ever known, no matter how tough or savvy, would have been dead by the weekend.
The lesson has stayed with me ever since, a humbling reminder that our Western civilisation doesn’t always know as much as we think it does; although it does know democracy.
That Jaru elder is dead now, as is, sadly, much of his ancient lore. I’m grateful for my brief contact with both, and lament their passing. He was very different, but not alien, to me; go back far enough and our heritage merges: all our ancestors had similar knowledge until it was supplanted, for good or ill, by what we define as progress.
I recount this memory not to pretend I have some mystical communion with our Indigenous compatriots, because I don’t, but to explain where my respect and admiration for them, bolstered by numerous subsequent encounters, was first inspired.
It’s not something I would normally think to mention, but the vitriolic accusations of casual racism that have been, and continue to be, directed at those of us who have popped our heads above the parapet warrant a word in our defence.
Your skin is thickened over decades in journalism, particularly if you’re impertinent enough to comment on current affairs. But underneath, some of us remain delicate flowers who are wounded to be told a dispassionate objection to a constitutional amendment signifies the poisonous rejection of a whole section of the population.
Many on the Yes side of the ledger insisted this was a matter that needed to go above parliament to be decided by the unmediated vote of the Australian people.
Regrettable and ever so slightly hypocritical, then, that they were so swift to fire up their social media accounts last Sunday morning to express their shame and disgust at living in a country where those same people turned out to be a bunch of benighted troglodytes who had the audacity to disagree with them.
There was no concession that some of their neighbours might have given the matter conscientious consideration; no acknowledgment of the shrewd, articulate advocates who questioned the lack of detail on the reach, composition or mechanism of the proposal: just a petulant refusal to accept the verdict without ascribing sinister motives to actions that didn’t align with their blinkered world view.
Even our miserable politicians seem intent on ignoring the electorate, but I suppose if you regard 32 per cent at the federal election as giving you a mandate, 39 per cent must feel like a stonking great majority.
Short of conducting another exhaustive series of referendums (perhaps including one on whether that should be referenda), it’s impossible to explain what determined people’s votes on the voice last Saturday.
‘I’ll concede I might be stupid, but it was hurtful to have my reading of a million words on this topic so casually dismissed.’
No one can speak on behalf of the 60+ per cent who voted against it, but I am confident most of them share the nation’s goodwill towards Indigenous people and reject the suggestion that their objections to the voice were born of contempt for them.
Of course there are buffoons who have paid no attention to the elevated discussions and disagreements over the past year or so, but we can’t really complain about them; unlike most countries on earth we compel them to turn up at the polling stations where they cast their ballot without a moment’s reflection.
Doubtless too there was among the No voters a vile cohort of racists and white supremacists who really do harbour anti-Indigenous hatred and resentment; but remember, in a referendum there are no lunatic-fringe political parties for them to support, so they have to end up on one side or the other. It doesn’t mean the No camp wanted them there.
For myself, I outlined my reasons in some (OK, too much) detail two weeks ago; but essentially I feared the constitutional change risked unanticipated harm out of proportion to its promised benefits, including, if not especially, to those it was designed to help.
Some of the disappointed Yes advocates wilfully refuse to comprehend how any decent person could have said No to what they insisted was a modest, respectful, generous invitation. But saying something doesn’t make it so.
As a starting point, changing the Constitution is self-evidently not a modest step. It is a momentous action but was never acknowledged as such, nor treated with the gravity it warranted.
Instead it felt like a rigged competition, where many of the potential winners didn’t look like they needed any more prizes. The average person doesn’t see angry professors, condescending MPs, insulting TV personalities, musicians, writers and film stars, Aboriginal or otherwise, and view them as victims.
People are suspicious when they are shown something whose description doesn’t match the reality in front of them. Those contradictions accumulated as the campaign progressed, the shrillness of the activists daily more disconcerting. If it’s nothing for us to worry about, why are you making such a fuss? Why are you losing your tempers – in some cases, your minds – over it?
Rather than engage with and attempt to disarm the serious and troubling arguments against the voice, in their arrogance many of the “elites” (I’ll be delighted to retire that word from my vocabulary later today) defaulted, with complacent laziness, to allegations of bovine stupidity against thoughtful, concerned people who were not persuaded by an amorphous appeal to their better natures.
I have some friends (the old contact book might be in need of revision) who, despite knowing my position, were pleased to inform me that a No vote was indisputably a product of ignorance, the province of the uneducated.
I’ll concede I might be stupid, but it was hurtful to have my reading of a million words on this topic so casually dismissed. I was put in mind of legendary English barrister FE Smith, who was famously chided by a judge who complained after Smith’s lengthy closing argument that he was “none the wiser”.
“No, my lord,” said Smith, “but you are certainly better informed.”
The readers of this newspaper have been kept better informed than most Australians about this debate, whatever the kneejerk whining from the dress circle about “the Murdoch press”.
I was impressed by our diligence in presenting all sides of a sometimes rancorous debate. No doubt someone sulking out there will make a dubious “gotcha!” accounting of the articles we ran and thereby condemn us; but as one of the editors who managed the enormous influx of submissions I don’t believe there was anyone of substance in either camp whose opinion pieces we declined to publish. Indeed the most vicious criticism I’ve received for some time came from a leading No campaigner unhappy with our supposedly “racist” bias towards the Yes camp. I will treasure that phone call as a foul-mouthed testimonial to our even-handedness.
For those who can’t relinquish the idea that the No voters acted out of ignorance, it’s worth considering that one of the most precious attributes of the glorious democracy that underpins our political system is its simplicity.
The result shows you don’t need to be blessed with a sophisticated formal education to grasp the principles of fairness and equality that govern (or should govern) our society, however imperfectly they are sometimes applied; nor do you have to be a constitutional lawyer to sense when those principles are being circumvented or diluted, regardless of the nobility of the reasons advanced for doing so.
For despite the squawking of the embittered few, I do believe most Yes voters were driven by genuinely noble ideals. It’s now vital to convince all those decent and honourable citizens that even though the voice to parliament is lost, its purpose is not.
I hope once their disappointment subsides they will agree to join forces with the other side, who should have the good grace not to gloat about the result.
After months of division, there was no real victory to be celebrated last weekend. That will come when we have conquered the inequity that inspired this unnecessary referendum, and that long battle needs to start now.
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Audit reveals that Australia's universities are now little more than Madrassas for the Left
The century of spin has arrived. Today, the battle for the minds of the people is a battle for control of the narrative.
Universities have been at the forefront of this battle, and free speech on campus is a significant but overlooked casualty.
By 2016, a censorious culture was already evident on university campuses, undermining the battle of ideas. In 2023, the social and political narrative on campus is increasingly being controlled by universities that are adopting ideological positions as institutional goals.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023, over the last six years, Australian universities' hostility towards free speech on campus has more than doubled.
It is no coincidence that the rise of the “activist university” has occurred simultaneously. Right across the tertiary sector, there has been a marked shift in focus away from education and towards ideology.
Activism and hostility towards free speech usually go hand in hand. The former tends to give rise to the latter
This shift in the debate recalls George Orwell’s famous words, “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
Spinning the narrative one way will redefine, influence, and ultimately limit thought and speech.
Of Australia’s elite Group of Eight universities, seven received the lowest rating for free speech on campus due to having hostile policies.
The total hostility score across all institutions, as measured by the number and severity of university policies that are hostile to free speech, increased by 117 percent between 2016 and 2023.
Just How Controlled Is Speech?
The 2023 audit found that Western Sydney University (WSU) was the tertiary institution most hostile to free speech in Australia.
From a policy perspective, WSU epitomises the activist university perfectly. Its bureaucratic web of policies infiltrates every aspect of university life. No problem is too great, or too small.
This is a university with tentacles in both the minutiae and the overarching meta-narrative.
WSU has policies on “Indigenous Australian Education,” “Indigenous Australian Employment,” “Environmental Management,” “Gender Equality,” and “Respect and Inclusion.”
The University’s Bullying Prevention Guidelines define bullying as “name-calling,” “sarcasm,” and “teasing.”
Its Environmental Management Policy requires the university to promote an “understanding of and responsibility for environmental issues both within the University and the community.”
While Western Sydney University represents the worst of its kind from a policy perspective, most other Australian universities are not far behind.
The IPA’s 2023 audit shows across all of Australia’s 42 universities, there are now 77 policies pledging allegiance to one of three ideologies: sustainability, indigenous issues, and gender equality.
The activist university is inherently opposed to debate because it promotes only one side of an issue, attaching a value judgment to it and suggesting it is the superior position to hold. This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity.
Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at New York University, noted that a university cannot be dedicated to an ideology and simultaneously open to challenging perspectives.
Excessive policies, guidelines, and regulations contribute to this culture by censoring speech or undermining viewpoint diversity.
Some examples include the University of Wollongong’s Inclusive Language Guideline which instructs students to avoid words like “man,” “ladies,” “mothering/fathering,” and “wife.”
Central Queensland University's protocol for Engaging and Communicating with First Nations People says, that “direct verbal confrontation” and “expressing disagreement” with Indigenous people should be avoided, in order to “preserve consensus.”
Bond University forbids posts that “can be interpreted to portray” content that is “injurious or objectionable” to the university.
Previous Attempts at Guaranteeing Free Speech Have Fallen Flat
The federal government's attempts to strengthen protections for free speech by requiring universities to adopt a free speech policy have been relatively ineffective.
In the case of the University of New England (UNE), the new policy arguably hindered rather than helped free speech on campus.
Not only did UNE leave out key provisions in the free speech template policy provided by the government, known as the French Model Code, but it also included provisions that detract from free speech, such as the humiliation provision.
This provision was included within the French Model Code’s definition of “the duty to foster the wellbeing of staff and students” which includes “speech which a reasonable person would regard, in the circumstances, as likely to humiliate or intimidate.”
Humiliation is an inherently subjective term that can be interpreted broadly. This caveat ironically means the code restricts the very speech it was designed to protect.
While all 42 universities have managed to produce a free speech policy, only a third have adopted the six essential pro-free speech criteria identified by the IPA in the French Model Code.
The only way universities can appropriately protect free speech is to acknowledge that the only legitimate restrictions are those that apply generally to all people and institutions; namely laws relating to defamation, the incitement of violence, and racial vilification.
There is no basis for universities to limit free speech beyond this.
The bottom line is when the feelings of others, no matter how misguided or fragile, can put a stop to the dissemination of facts or genuinely held opinions, there is no meaningful right to free speech.
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Don't blame capitalism for Australia's economic dysfunction
A lot of young Australians have become disenfranchised by the economic status quo and understandably so. It has become all too easy to get your proverbial pitchforks out when home ownership has become more out of reach than ever, inflation doesn’t seem like it’s departing us any time soon, and an increasingly precarious job market has become the norm.
A survey of 18,000 Australians aged 15-19 by Mission Australia revealed that half view their futures in a negative light. Testament to these attitudes is the especially worrying response of 27.7 per cent of respondents reporting elevated levels of anxiety and depression.
As a 20-year-old university student, I’ve witnessed too many of my contemporaries externalise their frustrations by subscribing to radical movements aiming to tear the system down in its entirety instead of making greater efforts to better understand current circumstances.
Yes, there are structural flaws embedded within our current market composition, but more often than not people will attribute these issues to the ostensible failures of free markets. Misguided advocates of free enterprise don’t respond accordingly and will instantly equate an anti-corporate stance with one interested in deposing capitalism altogether.
The truth is that we no longer live in a free and open-functioning marketplace. Our generation is characterised by a private sector filled with operatives who are not at all in favour of competition and who would traditionally have been described as anti-capitalists.
In fact, the so-called father of capitalism, Adam Smith, extensively warned of the dangers of allowing anti-competitive sentiments to fester and negate the ability of the invisible hand to deliver the best outcomes for society.
‘A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufacturers.’
Australia’s economy, along with many other Western economies, is now ridden with what can be overtly perceived as conduct that is anti-capitalist in nature.
Take Qantas for example. The national carrier’s stakeholders were no doubt overjoyed at the revelation that Qatar Airways was unsuccessful in its application to fly an extra 21 services into Australia’s major airports. Former CEO Alan Joyce himself proclaimed the application’s success would ‘distort the market’.
The Qantas-Virgin duopoly controls 95 per cent of the Australian airline market. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in June said the duopoly has made the sector ‘one of the most highly concentrated industries in Australia’.
‘The lack of effective competition over the last decade has resulted in underwhelming outcomes for consumers in terms of airfares, reliability of services and customer service.’
Indeed.
In no esteemed capitalist manifestos or doctrines exists the idea of government-induced monopolies as a characterisation of free enterprise.
The banking sector is another example of one rife with anti-competitive sentiments disseminated by incumbents. For decades, the Western World’s largest banks and financial institutions have enjoyed an oligopoly on the supply of credit up until very recently when the credit market started to proliferate with companies like Afterpay and Wisr stealing their fair slice of consumers.
A ‘Global FinTech Survey’ conducted by PWC in 2016 found that the financial technology industry alone may have the potential to steal up to 70 per cent of the banking sector’s share of the credit market.
This is of course great news for everyday consumers. Neo-lenders base their business models on undercutting their nations’ biggest commercial banks, placing tremendous downward pressure on interest rates for you and me. According to a recent Mozo survey, six in ten Australian borrowers would now consider neo-lenders over banks.
Yet, some aren’t so chuffed with the trend. Have a guess who.
In an interview with CNBC in August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon chastised efforts from US regulators to level the playing field and proliferate his sector, warning that the industry would cede more products to nonbank players. This is of course not really a warning. It’s terrific for the average punter, just not so great for JP Morgan.
Another unique characteristic of today’s private sector and another reason the prevalence of ‘capitalism’ can be called into question is the trend of common ownership. Research undertaken by the Institute of Labour Economics in 2021 found that around 31 per cent of firms now share a substantial owner with a rival company. This is borne out by the sharp trajectory in M&A deals experienced since the start of the 21st Century, allowing countless entities to usurp one another.
This wasn’t the case in earlier generations when firms didn’t fall under the same network of conglomerates and truly did compete with one another.
My overarching point is that it is a puerile stance to lump all private enterprise into the same category of ‘oppressive capitalist overlords’. A very clear distinction must be made between the big and small ends of town. It is too shallow an analysis to classify one economic system as good and another bad. We must carefully identify the flaws and trends evident within today’s private sector to maximise societal welfare
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/economic-status-woe/
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Yes campaign was backed by the rich who are never, ever told no
The catastrophic defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be an existential reckoning not just for the disastrous campaign itself but for the entire left as a whole.
The referendum results prove beyond any reasonable person’s doubt that the left in Australia is now utterly co-opted by, and captive to, elite, affluent and — if you want to drag race into it as they so love doing — white interests.
Indeed, perhaps the greatest irony as Yes activists were already crying racism after Saturday’s landslide loss was that it was the most multicultural working-class suburbs that voted against it in droves while the only metropolitan areas the Voice could find any support were, not to put too fine a point on it, rich white electorates.
The most tragic counterpoint to this is that the greatest levels of support for the Voice was in remote Indigenous communities — the very people the Voice was supposed to represent — and yet their voices were barely heard throughout the campaign.
Why? Because they were drowned out and crushed by the avalanche of CEOs and celebrities who — immune to the cost-of-living nightmare front of mind for the rest of us — wanted to make this yet another hectoring, nation-shaming, virtue signalling crusade like so many others before it.
The heartbreaking thing is that this time the cause was actually a worthy one, but ordinary people were so sick of moralising from on high that nobody listened.
Indeed, this was literally the case when the last-ditch batch of flyers were stuck in letterboxes in the final week of the campaign. I reached into mine hoping for a miracle message that might turn the tide.
Instead, in a barrage of confused fonts, the primary message was it was our moral duty to listen to Indigenous people.
What a vague, formless, morally superior and practically useless last pitch to financially stressed and time-poor voters for whom the Voice was a 17th order issue — yes, they counted them.
Something that could and should have been driven home throughout the campaign is that as bad as things were for the rest of us, for Indigenous Australians, especially in remote communities, they were far worse and that the Voice was a practical instrument to remedy that — nothing more, nothing less.
But this was too difficult a U-turn for trendy social media crusaders who wanted to make it a guilt trip for historical wrongs or who for years had blamed domestic violence levels simply on men rather than crippling socio-economic disadvantage and even if they got to the latter simply blamed that on racism.
And if the campaign wasn’t in enough trouble already, the increasingly angry and hectoring tsunami of activity on social media made sure it the Voice would be dead on arrival come Saturday.
One video that went particularly viral featured an activist literally sneering at no voters for being hopelessly stupid. What a masterstroke!
In the final days of the campaign a mate of mine in Yes HQ marvelled to me how many people had watched it.
“How many do you reckon were undecided voters?” I asked.
He paused. “Good point.”
While I felt momentarily guilty about snuffing out his last ember of hope, it is a lesson the left must learn if it is to survive. Indeed it is difficult to even know what the left is anymore.
As the ABC’s Antony Green stated again and again on the night of the count, the divide between inner metropolitan seats that voted Yes and the outer suburbs and regions that voted No was chasmic.
Indeed, if you superimposed the handful of electorates that voted Yes onto Teal seats you would find an almost 100 per cent correlation, which tells you everything you need to know about what went wrong.
Meanwhile working-class, migrant heavy seats — strong Labor seats — were voting No at a rate of almost two-to-one. These are hardworking, generous people, often religious and socially conservative.
If the Voice was cast as an act of charity and goodwill I have no doubt they would have supported it but to cast it as a form of reparation for past wrongs or compensation for their privilege? You can kiss that vote goodbye before it walks in the door.
And this is the terrifying thing: The new left is more about the moralising Teals than it is about the struggling working class and, if you want to buy into its obsession with race, it is whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm.
As a result their actions, their tactics, their endless lecturing and constant accusations of racism have completely alienated ordinary Australians and now shafted the most disadvantaged Australians.
So maybe it’s they who should shut up and listen.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/joe-hildebrand-yes-campaign-was-backed-by-the-rich-who-are-never-ever-told-no/news-story/4176102637f790ff7f866af484f3407d \
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A self-righteous Queensland bigshot
Just looking good is all that matters to her
Polling shows the voice just did not rate highly in the concerns of financially struggling Australians, not because they are unconcerned about Indigenous people but because they are too busy keeping their families fed and a roof over their heads. It was the inner-city elites who appeared obsessed with something that was badly argued and legally risky.
But even after the result was clear the hectoring from the corporate end of town continued. City Beat spies previously have alerted us to Sydney-based Catherina Behan, who holds the title of Suncorp’s diversity and inclusion leader.
Earlier this year she was involved in running Suncorp’s compulsory gender diversity training, which instructed staff to address colleagues as “folks” and “team” instead of “guys” and to add pronouns to their email and social media.
But Behan’s idea of inclusion does not appear to extend to the 70 per cent of us rednecks north of Cooloongatta who voted no at the weekend’s voice referendum.
Suncorp, Queensland’s biggest company, is supposed to a Queensland-based icon built on the backs of hardworking men and women of all races.
But Behan appears to have nothing short of contempt for the majority of us who just happened not to agree with her opinion on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
“In less than 24 hours post the referendum result, First Nations people in support of the Voice to Parliament have again graciously told us what they need. Please listen,” Behan thundered in a post on LinkedIn.
Behan later updated her post to say it was her personal opinion. Nevermind that her title is clearly displayed on her LinkedIn profile and that she is a leader “committed to assisting organisations to reach the full inclusive workplace potential.”
While most of us thought long and hard before voting on the weekend, Behan called it “a very loud message of rejection, the overt refusal to even come to the same table.... the symbolism of which could have helped to restore even the smallest amount of trust in the people and systems that have inflicted ongoing trauma and violence for centuries.”
“It is my opinion only, not representative of Suncorp. I do not, and am not authorised to, speak on behalf of Suncorp,” she said when contacted by your diarist..
Similarly a spokesman for Suncorp said the LinkedIn post was Behan’s personal view and not that of the company.
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Fossil folly
Whitehaven – unapologetically – Coal has scored a $500m-$1bn coup, courtesy of a BHP board of directors determined on its bizarre journey into a fantasy future.
BHP wants to get out of fossil fuels. It sold its oil and gas assets to Woodside, and has now sold a big chunk of its coal operations to Whitehaven.
The rest, and especially, the really wicked – in the very woke eyes of a BHP board and senior management – energy coal are on the market, even if BHP might vociferously deny it.
After all, if you believe oil and gas and coal and most especially energy coal are killing the planet, how could a board of directors of good individual and merged conscience continue to draw some portion of their incomes from it.
Beyond of course, the most reasonable of period of transition. Lord make me pure, but just not too quickly; and all that.
The timing of BHP’s decidedly ‘the final die is cast’ exit from coal could not have been more exquisite.
Just as even Europe, even Dark-Green Germany, have finally woken up to the brutal reality of TINA, as the great Maggie Thatcher used to put it.
Simply, that, There Is No Alternative to fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. Not that is, if you want to have a functioning economy and indeed society.
For all the trillions of dollars – nay, correction, tens of trillions of dollars – that have been poured into subsidising the, surprisingly expensive, for want of a better word, generation of ‘free’ energy from wind (when it is blowing) and sun (when it’s shining), the world still relies almost totally on, cough, cough, fossil fuels.
In 2019, according to the IEA, over 80 percent of global energy still came from, cough, cough, oil, gas and coal.
Well, gee, so-called renewables must therefore have leapt into double digits?
Well, actually, no.
The next biggest chunk, nearly 10 per cent, came from biofuels.
This is, bluntly, the burning of wood and waste and pumping out even more CO2 than coal.
That’s the burning of wood and waste in developing countries because they have no choice. And the burning of it in developed countries in a mindless charge towards an 18th century future.
After that came nuclear at 5 per cent and hydro – the ‘original’ renewable, now hated by Greens- around 2.5 per cent.
Bottom line: tens, tens of trillions of dollars got the world up to all of around 2-3 per cent from wind and solar.
And now, indirectly the shareholders of Whitehaven are the beneficiaries.
It’s paying $US3.2bn ($5bn) – and a possible further $US900m, depending on profits generated by the mines - to BHP, for two of its major metallurgical mines in Queensland’s coal regions.
Investors quickly pinged who got the better side of the deal, adding more than 10 per cent to Whitehaven’s share price and depositing nearly $600m into shareholder pockets.
One can only conclude by saying that one day a future BHP board will wake up to reality.
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Big news. Australia has become one of the world leaders when it comes to men suffering false allegations
A new YouGov survey, involving 9432 people across eight countries, found Australia was the worst country, after India, when people were asked if they had been falsely accused of abuse.
What’s going on here? The answer is simple. It’s the feminist capture of our family law system.
The YouGov survey showed false accusations in Australia are more likely to be made as part of a child custody dispute than anywhere else in the world – they are 41 per cent of such allegations in this country.
Overall, the survey showed 80 per cent of victims of false allegations in this country are male and almost a third (30 per cent) of people surveyed know a victim of false allegations made in the last year.
For decades, feminist ideologues have been manipulating the family law system by claiming that all women and their children are at risk of attack by violent ex-partners.
This sets the scene for women to make false violence allegations — a tactic which works a treat to give women control of the divorce process, denying men any real role in their children’s lives.
It’s a brilliant ploy, which feminists have been systematically cementing in place. Soon their ship will come in.
Labor’s draconian new family law bill is about to sail through the Senate, with the Greens joining forces with Labor to enshrine women’s absolute power to use false allegations to destroy men’s relationships with their children.
Having long been internationally celebrated for protecting the right of children to care from both divorced parents, this new Act will mean Australia will return to the grim days of mostly sole mother custody.
This is the most significant social change in recent history, impacting millions of families across the country. Current estimates suggest there will be more than 300,000 family breakups involving children in the next decade.
It is just astonishing that this is all passing unchallenged, indeed almost unnoticed.
Well, perhaps not. Given Australian feminists’ brilliantly orchestrated march through our institutions, we shouldn’t be surprised that these powerful ideologues have cowed most of our parliament and media into silence.
Silence, that is, about the truth of what is happening here, which is nothing to do with the feminist narrative that the new bill is about keeping children safe.
Their critical goal has been to set aside the many decades of international evidence showing it is harmful for children to grow up without dads.
That was the message enshrined in the Howard government’s landmark 2006 law act promoting joint parental responsibility.
It was passed with bipartisan support and proved a real hit with the public — “overwhelmingly supported by parents, legal professionals and family relationship service professionals,” according to research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Feminist scholars were determined to resist this recognition of the vital role of dads in the family. They leapt into action pouring out articles claiming sharing care risked exposing children to violence.
This set the scene for Julia Gillard’s proudly feminist government to remove the 2006 penalties for perjury and place violence accusations front and centre of decision-making about sharing of care of children.
Her government also greatly expanded the definition of domestic “violence” to include emotional and psychological abuse, threatening behaviour etc, adding enormously to the list of families precluded from court-approved shared care.
Now the war was on, with magistrates’ courts overwhelmed with false violence accusations which most magistrates have acknowledged are being used to gain strategic advantage in child custody matters.
A survey of 38 magistrates in Queensland found 74 per cent agreed restraining orders are often used for tactical purposes.
Similarly, 90 per cent of 68 NSW magistrates agreed restraining orders are often sought as tactical devices in family law disputes, “serving to deprive former partners of contact with their children”.
In a national survey of over 2500 respondents, more than half agreed that “women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence in order to improve their case”.
People know this is happening — even police are speaking out about the enormous amount of their time consumed by false allegations.
Two years ago the Queensland Police Union made a submission to a family law inquiry pointing out that false allegations of domestic violence are regularly used to gain advantage in family law disputes, with members of the police force sometimes finding themselves on the receiving end.
In some areas of Queensland, domestic violence takes up to 80 per cent of police time. Note that in NSW, domestic violence assaults make up only 4.8 per cent of major crimes but take up 50-70 per cent of police time.
That’s the current reality. But now, without any mandate from the electorate and ignoring recommendations from a series of inquiries, this Labor government is taking matters a huge leap further.
They are wiping out any mention in the law of children’s rights to two parents in their lives, watering down the joint presumption of shared parental responsibility and ditching the requirement to consider shared or substantial care in parenting plans — the key elements which promote the sharing of parenting.
Under the new Act shared care is only to be considered “when it is safe to do so”.
What’s absolutely shocking is that these momentous changes passed largely unnoticed through the lower house of parliament, with remarkably little protest.
It wasn’t until the legislation came under fire this week with questions in the Senate that Michaelia Cash let fly with a devastating attack on Labor for stripping away the key parenting sections of the bill. Labor was caught with their pants down but the press gallery chose not to notice.
And no one dared mention the war — except for brave Pauline Hanson, a lone voice daring to speak about false allegations.
Everyone else ignored the elephant in the room, knowing our feminist-led media would attack anyone who told the truth about what is going on here. The domestic violence card worked brilliantly to silence all proper debate about the bill.
Hanson was the only one with the guts to point out what every judge, magistrate, lawyer and police officer knows to be the case — that these changes to the law will bring poorer outcomes for children, a fresh flood of new accusations against fathers, more conflict between divorced parents, a huge surge in litigation as men pay out to try to see their children and more suicides for men as they realise that their chances of a fair hearing in an already biased court system will now be further reduced.
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18 October, 2023
Two "Teals" have just self-destructed
They are so far out of line with the country that they will go down in a heap next election
Goldstein MP Zoe Daniel has added her voice to growing condemnation of teal MPs Kylea Tink and Sophie Scamps, saying she disagrees “emphatically” with her teal parliamentary colleague’s support of the Greens.
Ms Daniel suggested the Greens amendment to Labor's motion on Israel – which sought to accuse the Jewish homeland of war crimes – inappropriately sought to remove support for Israel's right to self-defence.
“I disagree emphatically with those who supported the amendment,” Ms Daniel told The Australian. “I was elected by the Goldstein community to represent their interests and in doing so I unreservedly voted for the bipartisan resolution and spoke in its favour unconditionally.
“Among other things, the effect of the amendment would have been to remove support for Israel’s right to self defence.
“As I said in the chamber yesterday Israel has a right to self defence in line with the rules of war, which would include protection of civilians in Gaza, reiterating what I have said publicly, repeatedly and emphatically.”
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Superannuation: New and costly bureaucratic horror coming up
Recently releasing the draft legislation to double the tax rate on higher-balance superannuation accounts, Treasurer Jim Chalmers described the change as a ‘modest adjustment… (that) will affect only a handful of people’. This is far from the case and unfortunately, this change will have significant implications and is far from ‘modest’.
In legislating to double the tax rate on superannuants with a balance greater than $3 million, the government has been at pains to emphasise that this change would affect only affect 0.5 per cent of people with super. This will not be the case. The cost of complying with this tax change will impact all superannuation funds and accounts (industry, retail and self-managed) and consequentially all superannuants irrespective of their account balance.
That loud noise heard when Treasurer Jim Chalmers originally announced this proposal was not the sound of jaws dropping but rather the sound of champagne corks popping in the offices of accountants, lawyers, consultants and service providers who will be tasked with implementing this change. To effect the necessary changes, the Australian Taxation Office, Apra and superannuation funds will need to develop new systems, technologies, policies and processes, and they will need to engage armies of advisors and consultants at great expense.
A key virtue of a flat 15-per-cent superannuation tax rate is its administrative simplicity. To implement a second tax rate tier based not on income but instead on wealth (in superannuation) will result in significant and costly changes to the way all superannuation is administered and taxed. This includes increasingly frequent asset revaluations, identifying superannuants with multiple accounts across funds, and changed liquidity management strategies to ensure sufficient funds are available to meet tax liabilities. (As an aside, if there is to be a discussion on productivity-enhancing tax reform, consideration should be also given to implementing a flat income tax rate.)
Despite claims to the contrary, it is not just the large-balance self-managed superannuation funds who will feel the costly administrative sting. Even the largest industry super funds will need to develop systems to satisfy themselves that this regulatory risk is effectively managed, just in case a single member has a high balance or potentially a high balance across multiple accounts. Despite the Treasurer’s claims, all superannuants, large- and small-balance, will pay in some way to implement and support this change. And these costs will constantly compound to eat away at retirement resources.
Treasury has estimated that some $30 billion of fees were extracted from superannuants in 2020 alone. When Australia’s superannuation system is described as the envy of the world, perhaps this is because it is envied by the card-carrying members of the International Association of Ticket Clippers who covet the rivers of administration fee gold that flow from it. Yet while government frequently highlights the high cost of administering superannuation, it conveniently ignores the administrative costs it imposes through burdensome and constantly changing regulation.
Constant regulatory changes only increase administration cost and complexity, and unfortunately, in the halls of government, the direct and indirect costs of regulation and regulatory changes are seldom considered. Regulation imposes two significant but under-appreciated costs. The first is the direct cost of implementing and complying with regulation, including the cost of regulators and compliance officials. The second is the productivity loss when ever more resources are transferred from production into government and quasi-government activity. This does not mean there should be zero regulation, but until the total costs of regulation are traded off against the benefits of regulation, economic and productivity damage will continue.
When the US government was implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca), the claimed purpose was to ‘better combat cross-border tax avoidance’ and it was expected to generate an additional US$8.5 billion of tax over ten years. The Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, however, estimated that the global cost to implement Fatca, including for Australian banks, would be well in excess of US$500 billion with ongoing annual costs of US$10-30 billion. This sadly did not stop the US government imposing compliance costs on banks, and ultimately bank customers, including Australians.
Earlier this year, following the release of his Monthly essay, Treasurer Chalmers said, ‘If I had a little more room, I could have done more on competition because I do believe that competition is a progressive force in our economy’. On the virtues of competition, Chalmers is of course correct.
Treasury and the Productivity Commission have commented that a lack of competition contributes to higher administration fees. But it is government policy, implemented through Apra, to reduce competition and create an oligopolistic industry structure by forcing superannuation funds to merge so to create a system with just a few mega-funds. Fund mergers have significant transaction costs themselves and are borne by superannuants.
It is also unclear whether forced fund mergers will deliver better returns to superannuants, but it will undoubtedly simplify the lives of Apra officials.
There is also a regulatory interplay between Asic and Apra. For example, Asic through its regulatory guide, defines performance fees as an administrative cost. That means that if a superannuation fund makes a well-judged and risk-managed investment that outperforms, then Apra uses the higher performance fee to bludgeon the fund trustee for having too high costs. This despite the net investment return being strong. Such adverse regulatory outcomes reduce accountability and incentivise performance mediocrity.
When it comes to financing retirement, the essential objective is to optimise a retiree’s purchasing power when they cease working. This is a function of the pension safety net and the amount of (compulsory and voluntary) savings, but also, the net investment return on savings. The cost of regulation and compliance is just another tax which reduces investment returns, a tax on all superannuants and not just high balance ones.
If the government were genuinely concerned about optimising the retirement savings and the general economic welfare of all Australians, it would give serious consideration to undertaking a broad program of regulatory reform to address costs it imposes. After all, a dignified retirement is owed to all Australians and not just the members of the administration and regulation industrial complex.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/nothing-modest-about-chalmers-changes/
********************************************************Queensland teachers quitting in droves
Will the government ever walk back the wishy-washy discipline policies that are driving them away?
The number of new teachers and teacher aides starting at Queensland schools is barely bridging the gap left by the thousands who are deserting classrooms, despite Education Queensland's celebration of “exceeding” recruitment targets.
In 2½ years, the state school system has hired more than 6600 new teachers and teacher aides. But in the past 18 months, more than 5700 have left the workforce.
There are about 55,000 teachers and almost 19,000 teacher aides employed across the state, which means it lost 7.2 per cent of its teacher workforce in 18 months, and 9.2 per cent of its overall teacher aide numbers.
The Courier-Mail obtained a region-by-region breakdown from the Education Department that showed South East Queensland was topping the teacher and teacher aide losses.
Further afield, Central Queensland and the Darling Downs also recorded comparatively high turnover, while the Sunshine Coast and Mackay-Whitsunday regions were comparatively low.
The new data comes after an alarming two-year surge in the rate of overall Education Department staff packing in their jobs, reaching a five-year peak of 6.61 per cent.
The department’s 2023 annual report said the state government was on track to meet its 2020 election promise to recruit more than 6100 new teachers and more than 1100 new teacher aides in 2021-24.
About 1000 unqualified university students will have taught in Queensland classrooms by the end of this year, recruited before graduating to help desperate principals unable to fill vacancies with qualified staff.
Ms Grace said Queensland was below the 9.5 per cent national education staff turnover rate, and teaching vacancies in the state remained steady at about 2 per cent.
“With a workforce of around 97,000 people, there will always be people leaving and joining, but I am proud of our 95 per cent retention rate among our teachers – one of the highest in Australia and higher than the workforce more generally,” she said.
“There’s nearly 6000 more teachers and 1500 more teacher aides since we came to government in 2015.
“And even as enrolments have fallen through the last few atypical years, our teacher numbers have gone up, meaning our ratios continue to improve.
“But we will never rest on our laurels – we want more of the brightest and best coming to work in our classrooms and staying there.
“That’s why our excellent EBAs, nation-leading programs like Turn to Teaching and Trade to Teach, our new supported pathway for teacher aides, and support for our staff including our new Education Futures Institute, are so important.”
Opposition education spokesman Dr Christian Rowan said Queensland students were falling short of key targets and the state government was failing to deliver teachers to turn this around.
“The government promised 6190 additional teachers and 1139 teacher aides at the last election, but three years on, they’ve delivered less than 10 per cent of what they promised,” he said.
“The latest Queensland Workforce Profile figures from March 2023 revealed there has been an increase of only 578 teachers since September 2020.”
Queensland Teachers’ Union president Cresta Richardson said addressing the current teacher shortage would take time, but the union would continue to work with all levels of government.
“Attraction and retention of teachers to the profession hinges on providing adequate resourcing to state schools along with a focus on the reduction of teacher and school leader workload and student engagement,” she said.
“Quality internships also play an important role and the QTU calls on the state government to expand the Turn to Teach and Trade to Teach programs and to consider a range of other multifaceted solutions.”
The $19.8m Turn to Teaching program – providing aspiring teachers with financial support, paid internships, and a guaranteed permanent role in a state school – had 39 interns in schools in 2023, and a second cohort of 99 due to do their internships next year.
The $9.88m Trade to Teach program – aiming to boost technology teachers by turning tradies into teachers – has 38 registered participants at the University of Southern Queensland or Central Queensland University due to start their internships next year.
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Corporate heads must roll over reckless voice advocacy
Whether you were a Yes or No voter, this referendum has been so divisive and bitter that it must not be allowed to pass into history without learning its lessons.
The next few weeks and months will allow much of the necessary analysis to be done. However, there is no time like the present for key players in this dismal affair to take accountability and begin reform.
There is white-hot anger directed towards some of our big corporate entities – BHP, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers, the big four banks and others – which, without consultation or consent from their shareholders, dived into the middle of a bitterly contested political dispute and poured millions of dollars of their shareholders’ money into partisan warfare.
It is bad enough that millions of dollars were wasted on a flawed campaign and misconceived voice model that was grossly unpopular with the overwhelming majority of Australians.
The participation of these big corporations was a significant factor in ensuring the Yes campaign was a resounding failure – voters hate being lectured at. That this money was effectively an appropriation of shareholders’ money in pursuit of the private political views of some dominant company directors is also aggravating in the extreme. This aggravation is compounded by the fact the big end of town has been completely outplayed by the government and its union paymasters in the policy areas they do have a legitimate interest in, especially industrial relations.
Worst of all, though, was the sheer negligence and incompetence of these big companies and their boards. This is what demands accountability – meaning heads should roll – and reform for the future.
As long ago as January 2021, Rio Tinto and BHP signalled their support for the voice. “A referendum not only demands political courage, it demands courage from all of us,” BHP’s Mike Henry said. Courage? What about due diligence?
By May 2021 more companies and professional services firms had put their names to advertisements in national newspapers stridently committing themselves to supporting the voice. Almost two dozen chief executives and chairmen from investment banks and super funds including John Wylie, Hamish Douglass, Geoff Wilson, Ben Gray and Ian Silk got on board early, too.
Not one of these very smart people had any idea at that point what model the voice would take. Eighteen of the nation’s leading law firms, including my old law firm Freehills, jumped aboard the voice train. Again, well before there were any actual words for them to interpret by applying their brilliant legal skills.
And that was the problem with all these firms, companies, chief executives and chairmen – they were signing on entirely blind to the final proposed wording to the Constitution. What on earth were these corporate masters of the universe thinking? Is this how they evaluate proposals in their day job? Is this how lawyers practised law at the office?
At that time there was no indication from the then federal government about the intended legal form of the voice, let alone its powers, composition, procedures, term, resources, intended outcomes or objectives or any relevant limitations.
All of these companies, firms and other entities had signed up to the voice on the basis of emotion and the vibe. They had done no due diligence and got no expert advice on any aspect of the voice for the simple reason that at that time not even the slightest details or even conceptual framework of the voice was known. It was the ultimate pig in a poke. Yet these corporations had signed up to it – whatever it turned out to be.
This was not only a dereliction of directors’ fiduciary duties of care and skill (how can directors sign blank cheques in advance for unknown entities with unknown powers?) but would prove to be a disastrous contributor to the form of ridiculously overreaching model of the voice that was put to the referendum.
The Albanese government knew, even before releasing wording, that it had corporate Australia in its pocket. These companies had abdicated the ability to influence the design of the voice in any way. They had in effect told the activists who would ultimately draft the language of the constitutional amendment: “Go your hardest, we will support whatever you come up with.”
This folly was exactly the same as the blunder committed by Julian Leeser and Greg Craven. Leeser and Craven were the self-styled “constitutional conservatives” who helped come up with the idea of the voice and allowed themselves to be used by the activists who would dictate the final form of the constitutional amendment.
Leeser and Craven were ultimately critical of the final form of the amendment – Craven in particularly colourful language. But both swallowed their pride and the flawed words, and still supported the Yes side, with Leeser walking the streets drumming up support for Yes23.
The surrender by Leeser and Craven, and by the corporations and law firms that signed on to the voice before words were settled, meant any chance of negotiating a more moderate form of proposed amendment was lost.
There would be no compromise by having a non-justiciability clause or removing the reference to executive government or narrowing the remit of the voice to matters affecting Indigenous persons only or any of the large number of ways in which the ultimately proposed constitutional language could have been made more palatable. The possibility for any reasonable compromise of any kind went out the window as far back as 2021.
To be clear, these “fixes” would not have made the voice acceptable in principle. I would still have opposed it and believe it would still have failed because it violated the principle of equal civic rights in the Constitution.
However, adopting a process that ensured the proposed amendment would be the most absurdly overreaching possibility available certainly made referendum success impossible and made the whole campaign much more divisive than it needed to be.
The Albanese government and its departmental advisers were every bit as supine in negotiating reasonable wording as the alleged constitutional conservatives and the corporations, but the lessons for the government must await another day. Others too are on remand, awaiting judgment for another day.
Right now, corporate Australia is in the dock. What form of accountability should await the boards of our big companies?
They deserve to be on the wrong end of class-action lawsuits for negligence and breach of duty but, sadly, the legal industry was so complicit in their failures this is unlikely.
However, there should be significant board resignations to atone for the diversion of shareholder funds to personal political objectives and for rampant negligence.
Boards should be prepared to forgo directors’ fees until shareholders are compensated for the loss of funds wasted by directors tilting at their personal political windmills. In an ideal world shareholders would enforce that result but, again, the big union-controlled industry fund shareholders are likely to have been so complicit in directors’ actions this is unlikely.
Ultimately there needs to be a sea change in the level of politicisation of our big companies. This should be started by the Australian Institute of Company Directors, which is effectively the standard setter for company directors. That, too, faces barriers as the AICD itself has become significantly politicised and its own board was a prominent and one-sided supporter of the voice. However, one can only live in hope.
If the board of the AICD collectively fell on its sword and brought in some change agents to depoliticise it, this might be the catalyst, and the example, that returns Australian corporations to a focus on shareholder interests and genuine corporate purpose rather than personal political goals.
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17 October, 2023
The moral vacuum that is the Left
Their claim to care is revealed as mere pretence. Just as they once excused Soviet slaughter, they now excuse Muslim slaughter
Recent events in the Middle East and the limp-wristed response by some of our most senior elected representatives to the slaughter of the innocents that took place in Israel at the hands of Hamas show that
The response by Labor frontbenchers such as Tony Burke and Chris Bowen was muted at best and fell well short of outright condemnation.
It’s no coincidence that their electorates contain a significant Muslim population, so was it with an eye of the next election and their political survival that they failed to denounce the atrocity in the strongest possible terms lest it cost them votes?
The response of the Greens and teals was just as odious, with some hiding metaphorically under their desks and declining to offer any comment at all when asked.
We have as a nation just emerged from one of the darker periods of modern times with millions of us accused either directly or indirectly of being racists.
We shredded these accusations at the ballot box by declaring that we regard all Australians as equal, thus ensuring that in the words of Bob Hawke that “in Australia there is no hierarchy of descent; there must be no privilege of origin.
“The commitment is all. The commitment to Australia is the only thing needful to be a true Australian.”
Why is it then that while people will swear that they have never entertained a racist thought and denounce racism as one of the great evils, when it comes to calling the cold-blooded massacre of people murdered on account of their race and religion out for what it is, there are those among us who would look the other way?
Events in Sydney, with pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “gas the Jews” and preaching genocide have revealed that there are malevolent elements in our society that have no respect for our rule of law and who applaud wholesale bloodshed in the name of their religion or political beliefs.
These are the people who are not true Australians. They have no commitment to our country.
They abuse the freedom of speech and assembly our democracy grants them.
Civil libertarians have been quick to claim that the demonstrators have a right to protest, but when you incite people to murder Australian citizens – and it is absolutely clear that this what happened – you lose that freedom.
Can you imagine the outcry if a mob was to start yelling “kill the Poms”, “kill the Italians” or “kill the Catholics”?
The members of our political class would trample each other underfoot in their stampede to demand that the offenders be dealt with harshly, but when it comes to anti-Semitism and calls to kill Jews, be they be living in Australia or elsewhere, the outrage is filtered.
In Sydney, to their eternal shame, the police stood by and did nothing.
In Germany in the 1930s, the police stood by and watched as Adolf Hitler’s Brownshirts smashed and burnt Jewish businesses, dragged their owners into the street and beat them. Much worse was to follow.
Those who fail to denounce anti-Semitism are either blind to history or choose to ignore it.
Wokeism, alas, does not extend to anti-Semitism. It is not seen as worthy of attention by the virtue-seekers.
Will Qantas paint an Israeli flag on the tails of its aircraft to signal its abhorrence of anti-Semitism or will the corporate elites, who in the light of last Saturday’s result have gone strangely quiet, denounce it? Never.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was fond of warning us that if we did not pass the referendum, the world would think less of us.
I can assure him that images of crowds referring to the gas chambers of the Holocaust and the systematic murder of more than six million people will have well and truly damned us in the eyes of many in the international community.
It’s easy to dismiss those responsible as a bunch of ignorant clowns, but it would be dangerous to do so.
The Jews have an expression that encapsulates the horrors that they suffered in Europe 80 years ago. It is “Never again.”
It falls to those of us who regard ourselves as true Australians to make sure it never does.
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Australian Medical Society Investigating Excess Deaths—Suspects the Population Faces a doctor-caused Crisis
The Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS) recently launched an inquiry into Australia’s excess mortality: Unveiling an overlooked crisis. Throughout the medical system, the political system and the media, the fact that there are too many Australian people dying is being ignored. And the group of providers seeks to change that. The group has commissioned studies and expressed concern that mass COVID-19 countermeasures have led to excess mortality.
Recently, the society was in touch with TrialSite, sharing updates on imminent activity and events involving the controversial, but important topic.
This Wednesday, October 18, in Parliament House, Canberra, the AMPS holds an inquiry, addressing the alarming rise in excess mortality in Australia since 2021. This timing is of deep concern given the mass vaccination scheme occurred right at this time.
This inquiry aims to uncover the most pressing question: What is causing Australians to die at unprecedented rates? Why has the death rate rocketed? In response to the Senate's extraordinary decision on 23 March 2023, against investigating this sudden excess mortality, a committed group of Australians, in collaboration with international colleagues, has undertaken the investigation that, unfortunately, Australian political and medical authorities thus far have refused to pursue.
Delving deeper into the regulatory failures hindering the proper analysis of preclinical data concerning experimental COVID-19 vaccines, the Australian Medical Society reports serious shortcomings, potential data discrepancies, and alarming signals of harm being overlooked.
It is hoped that this investigation will in fact shed light on the inadequacies within the Therapeutic Goods Administration's (TGA) pharmacovigilance systems. The TGA regulates drugs and vaccines in Australia.
The analysis conducted by AMPS indicates that Australia is facing an iatrogenic crisis – one that has resulted from policies based on insufficient evidence. A bombshell of an allegation, AMPS alleges that the COVID-19 mass countermeasure response is likely linked to the death signals.
Conclusions from AMPS are documented in a book due for release titled, Too Many Dead – An Inquiry into Australia’s Excess Mortality. In collaboration with peers around the world, the group calls for an immediate suspension of the vaccination rollout, pending a full and transparent investigation.
Invitations have been issued to hundreds of politicians especially ministers; and to health authorities, medical colleges and associations Australia-wide including all members of ATAGI, the TGA, and academics in the health fields.
As a society committed to the well-being of all Australians, AMPS shares its commitment to ensuring accountability, transparency and justice, even when the facts may be unpalatable.
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Leftist NSW Premier wary of Indigenous treaty after Voice rejection
Premier Chris Minns says no timeline exists for promised consultation on a treaty with the state’s Indigenous population, warning there were no easy answers following the referendum loss.
He said his government remained committed to a treaty process, which he promised to begin before winning the March election, but conceded “we need to go back to the table” after NSW joined the rest of the states in overwhelmingly rejecting the Voice.
Minns campaigned with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney during the build-up to Saturday’s referendum, and in his first comments since the vote he said he was “really upset” by the result.
But, the premier said, he “respects the judgment of the people of NSW”, and while he stressed he did not want to dictate the way forward to Indigenous leaders, indicated the idea of a state-based Voice, something he has been open to, could now be unlikely.
“There’s no easy answer because we have to make progress, but obviously the majority of Australians did not support that change,” he said.
“I don’t want to front run those discussions, but there are many different models that can show progress, whether it’s a legislative Voice, whether it’s a constitutional change.”
Focus has turned to state-based treaty processes following the referendum defeat, with South Australia insisting it remained committed to its own Voice to parliament. Victoria is also advanced in its own treaty negotiations.
In NSW, Labor promised to spend $5 million on a year-long consultation on a treaty process in the lead up to the March election.
“It’s important to note that a treaty in NSW will require a treaty with 150 different nations in this state. So it’s not a straightforward process,” Minns said on Monday.
“We made that clear in the election that some states had begun the treaty process nine years prior and still hadn’t completed or begun the process, but it was important for New South Wales to start.
“Now I’m starting our process in the full knowledge that it’s going to be complex and difficult. What I’m saying in the aftermath of the referendum vote and the decision by Australians not to support it means that we have to go back to the First Nations people and talk to them [about the process].
“There’s no easy answers when it comes to next steps. I don’t have easy answers.”
Minns cast his vote on Saturday with Burney, whose own southern Sydney seat of Barton sided with the No campaign by 56.4 per cent to 43.6 per cent. The seat overlaps Minns’ state electorate of Kogarah, and when asked if the result showed he was out of step with the community he conceded he might be.
“But politics shouldn’t work that way,” he said.
“And I promise you, my constituents don’t want me or the prime minister or any politician just to hold a poll, and then work out what you believe.”
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Judge slams ABC ‘culture war’ mentality in Heston Russell defamation case
And no doubt what side they are on
The ABC Investigations team operates under a siege mentality and approaches investigations into alleged war crimes as members of a culture war, according to a Federal Court judge in issuing a landmark judgment finding that the broadcaster defamed former commando Heston Russell.
Judge Michael Lee on Monday awarded Mr Russell $390,000 in damages after the former soldier sued the ABC and journalists Josh Robertson and Mark Willacy over two articles that he claimed, through the use of links and his photograph, implied he was complicit in the execution of an Afghan prisoner.
The first article, published in October 2020, relied on the evidence of “ear witness” Josh – a US marine who heard a “pop” over a radio and asserted that Australian soldiers had killed the prisoner.
The second article, published in November 2021, said the Defence Department had revealed there was an active criminal investigation into the conduct of an Australian commando platoon in Afghanistan in 2012.
Justice Lee found Willacy and ABC head of investigations Jo Puccini became increasingly “defensive” about any criticism of their war crimes reporting, especially after Mr Russell outed himself as the subject of the first article and began doing media interviews with rival organisations.
“Mr Willacy and Ms Puccini had become defensive about any criticism of the October article and considered such criticism was emblematic of a broader culture war attack on all the other war crimes reporting of ABC Investigations,” he said.
Justice Lee criticised Puccini for cutting part of Mr Russell’s response from the second article due to her “perception of being part of a culture war”.
He also criticised the ABC Investigations team for getting defensive when the ABC’s own Media Watch program began scrutinising their reporting, instead of undergoing “mature reflection upon whether the reporting was fair”.
In December, Media Watch sent the team questions, including “Why didn’t you interview and quote another US crew member to corroborate Josh’s account?” and “Why didn’t you interview Heston Russell once he outed himself as the commander of November platoon?”
“One might have thought these well-directed questions may have resulted in some introspection and mature reflection upon whether the reporting was open to fair and legitimate criticism,” Justice Lee said.
“After all, these queries were not emanating from sections of the media that could be dismissed by those within ABC Investigations as ‘bottom feeders’ or protagonists in a culture war.
“But the internal communications in evidence reveal defensiveness and a perception that any questioning of the October article or November article undermined the important war reporting of ABC Investigations generally.”
Justice Lee’s ruling on Monday marked the first time the public interest defence, introduced in most states and territories in July 2021, was tested.
Throughout the trial, the ABC argued that even if the articles were not wholly true, they were a matter of such high public interest that they were worth reporting.
However, in reading out a summary of his judgment, Justice Lee partially rejected this assertion.
“On one level, this is obviously correct,” he said. “But it is important to understand that there is not some sliding scale which means the greater the public interest in the matter, the greater the margin for error of what is published.”
Justice Lee said while Willacy was genuinely reporting a matter he believed to be in the public interest, “taking his conduct as a whole, his belief was not reasonable in the circumstances.”
He found Robertson had acted “unreasonably” in his interactions with Mr Russell, having failed to “procure all the information he could have reasonably obtained to assess whether what he proposed to publish … was sufficiently accurate.”
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16 October, 2023
Make no mistake, the No result was an act of insurrection
If there were ever any doubts Australia had made the right decision on Saturday, they were quickly put to rest by a group of Indigenous leaders who released a statement later that evening.
The statement blamed “newcomers” who had refused to acknowledge “that the brutal dispossession of our people underwrote their every advantage in this country”.
“That people who have only been on this continent for 235 years would refuse to recognise those whose home this land has been for 60,000 and more years is beyond reason.”
The oldest person in Australia is Catherina van der Linden, who celebrated her 111th birthday in August. She arrived as a hardworking migrant from The Netherlands in 1958 and has never dispossessed anyone or anything, as far as we know. The prosaic truth that no one currently alive occupied this continent much more than a century ago explains why many Australians regarded the voice as unjust. Saturday’s result was a repudiation of the black-armband approach to history.
Australians outside the Tesla zone have told the elite they’ve had enough of the national guilt trip. They’re sick of the self-flagellating speeches, national apologies, welcome to country and all the other politically correct performances.
It is a call to let bygones be bygones, recognising the pursuit of historical grievances springs from the same unforgiving logic that justifies the Palestinian cause.
Above all, it is a rejection of the insufferable arrogance of the anointed and their presumption of superior wisdom and morality. The No vote amounts to an act of insurrection by outsiders against the progressive establishment.
That much is evident from the wide variation between comfortable inner metropolitan electorates and outer metropolitan and regional seats. As a rule of thumb, the higher the support for the referendum proposal, the harder it is to find a tradie. In the seat of Flynn, which centres on Gladstone in central Queensland, almost one in five people has a trade certificate. In the seat of Melbourne, on the other hand, the tradies make up just 5 per cent of the population. The latest counting shows that 78 per cent of voters in Melbourne voted yes while 84 per cent in Flynn voted no.
The pattern is reversed for university graduates. In the 33 electorates where the vote was running in favour of the voice at the close of Saturday night’s count, one in three residents has a graduate or higher degree. In the No seats, it is one in six.
At its heart, the voice was an intellectual project framed around an abstract concept of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians rather than a practical measure designed to improve everyday lives. People declaring themselves Indigenous account for 1.5 per cent of the population in the Yes seats. In the No seats, it is 4.8 per cent.
The five seats with the largest proportion of Indigenous residents – Lingiari (40.3 per cent), Parkes (16.4 per cent), Leichhardt (16.3 per cent), Durack (15.2 per cent) and Kennedy (14.8 per cent) – voted no by an average of 71 per cent. The results in the five electorates with the smallest Indigenous population – Goldstein (0.2 per cent), Chisholm (0.3 per cent), Bradfield (0.3 per cent), Kooyong (0.3 per cent) and Higgins (0.3 per cent) – averaged 56 per cent in favour.
That doesn’t mean all Aboriginal people were against the voice any more than we can assume every tradie voted no. Indigenous people were split, despite the hubris of the Indigenous elite in their references to “our people”.
The intelligentsia may find it impossible to concede defeat on anything more than a technical amendment to the Constitution. The Indigenous leaders’ unsigned statement on Saturday hinted darkly at “the role of racism and prejudice against Indigenous people”. They said Australians who voted no should “reflect hard on this question”.
Pointing the finger at the “dinosaurs” and “dickheads” who populate the morally bankrupt land on the other side of the argument offers an easy way out for the voice crusaders. They will not have to dwell on the uncomfortable truth that the result is a rejection of their entire vision of the world, in which Indigenous Australians sit on a higher moral plane, as people who have been wronged by others, who deserve to be redressed.
The Sydney Morning Herald got it badly wrong in a headline on Sunday. “Devastating verdict,” it read. “Australia tells First Nations people ‘you are not special’.” The overwhelming sentiment among No voters was the very opposite.
“They have said no to grievance and the push from activists to suggest that we are a racist country when we are absolutely not a racist country,” Jacinta Nampijinpa Price said on Saturday. “We are all part of the fabric of this nation.”
The founding philosophy of modern Australia, 19th-century liberalism rooted in Christianity, holds that every person is unique, just as all lives matter. No one, however, is more special than anyone else.
On Saturday, Anthony Albanese finally hit the right tone in a speech expressing optimism and a “new national purpose”. The referendum offers a mandate for just that, should the PM have the courage to take it.
Albanese should recognise the result as a call for the end to the policy of separatism that began under Gough Whitlam and has yet to be challenged. The self-determination policy, as it was called, was intended to empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by granting them control of settlements where they might practice their traditional customs.
The descent of these Rousseauean-inspired idylls into welfare sinkholes riddled with social dysfunction was immediate and is now all but irreversible. The most tragic mistake was the assumption that Aboriginal people held abnormally strong communal values that rose above the wishes of any individual. The free market barely operates across much of central and northern Australia.
Adopting capitalism may have brought a couple of billion people out of poverty in the last 30 years, but in large parts of remote Australia, it is effectively banned.
Saturday’s result provides an opportunity to liberate Aboriginal Australians from the debilitating assumption that they are victims from birth. It is a chance to break the tyranny of low expectations. Every Indigenous citizen should be able to exercise their full rights as citizens to alter the course of their lives for good or ill.
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Failed Voice could force corporate Australia to rethink position on divisive issues
Companies could potentially think twice about backing divisive social issues, according to key business leaders, after many high-profile firms poured millions of dollars into supporting the failed Indigenous voice referendum.
Most of Australia’s 20 biggest companies – including BHP, the big four banks, Telstra and Woolworths – backed the Yes campaign, despite more than 60 per cent of Australians rejecting the proposal.
While not all businesses donated cash, the result of the referendum reveals a gulf between Australian boardrooms and the broader population, a move experts say has the potential to alienate customers, staff and wound brands.
Marcus Blackmore a prominent supporter of the No campaign - said the failed referendum has the potential to halt the wave of companies virtue signalling.
“They will really have to think long and hard about social issues,” Mr Blackmore said, adding he expected investors to ask executives tough questions at annual shareholder meetings, which begin this month.
“Some of the companies came out and said ‘Well, we‘ve got a responsibility to have a say in these sorts of things on behalf of our staff’. But I bet none of them did it on behalf of the staff. None of them.
“I think what will happen in the boardroom, before they come up with a similar sort of thing again, is the board would want to see the views of the staff. Because if the staff are all opposed to it, or even if 60 per cent of them are opposed to it, then you don‘t want to alienate your staff.”
The outcome of the referendum has already quietened the voices of some of its loudest supporters, with ANZ - which donated $2m to the Yes campaign - declining to comment on Sunday. Meanwhile, Qantas - which held a joint media conference with Anthony Albanese to promote the Yes campaign in August - issued a two sentence statement on Sunday, saying it would continue to push for recognition and reconciliation with indigenous Australians.
It adds to a growing list of corporations misjudging the broader community’s mood. Anheuser-Busch InBev, brewers of Bud Light, placed two on leave following a furore around its use of a transgender advocate in a US marketing campaign, while Adelaide-born Peter Flavel resigned as Coutts chief executive following the backlash around the bank’s decision to close the accounts of polarising pro-Brexit figure Nigel Farage.
Don Argus - doyen of Australian company directors, former NAB chief executive and BHP chairman - warned in August that business which supported the “Yes” case without checking the details in the Uluru statement could trigger a “challenge” to their fiduciary duties.
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Ex-commando win in war crime fight against ABC
A former special forces commando has won his defamation case against the ABC after a Federal Court judge ruled the public broadcaster could not prove articles that alleged war crimes were reported in the public interest.
Heston Russell sued the ABC and journalists Josh Robertson and Mark Willacy over two articles that, he claimed, through the use of links and his photograph implied he was complicit in the execution of a prisoner captured during a joint drug enforcement operation between Australia and the US.
He will be awarded $390,000 in damages.
The first article, published in October 2020, relied on the evidence of “ear witness” Josh, a US Marine, who heard a “pop” over a radio and asserted Australian soldiers had killed an Afghan prisoner.
The second article, published in November 2021, stated the Defence Department had revealed there was an active criminal investigation into the conduct of an Australian commando platoon in Afghanistan in 2012.
The story evolved after Defence refused to answer a Freedom of Information request lodged by the ABC, saying there was an active investigation into the conduct of Mr Russell’s November platoon.
On Monday, Justice Michael Lee ruled in favour of Mr Russell, finding the broadcaster caused him serious harm and could not prove the articles were reported in the public interest.
The public interest defence was tested for the first time in this case.
Throughout the trial, the ABC argued even if the articles were not wholly true, they were a matter of such high public interest that they were worth reporting.
However, in reading out a summary of his judgment, Justice Lee partially rejected this assertion, and said: “On one level this is obviously correct, but it is important to understand that there is not some sliding scale which means the greater the public interest in the matter, the greater the margin for error of what is published.”
“To embrace this notion would distort and oversimplify the requirement to make a value judgement about whether the impugn publication was in the public interest by reference to call relevant circumstances,” he said.
Justice Lee said while Willacy was genuinely reporting a matter he believed to be in the public interest, “taking his conduct as a whole, his belief was not reasonable in the circumstances.”
Justice Lee also found Robertson had acted “unreasonably” in his interactions with Mr Russell, having failed to obtain a response from him prior to the publication of the November article.
“Mr Robertson did not procures all the information he could have reasonably obtained to assess whether what he proposed to publish serious as it was was sufficiently accurate,” he said.
During the trial, Justice Lee criticised the broadcaster for grandstanding and failing to accept fault in the matter.
“(They were) trying to suggest the court was making them reveal their sources, when they’ve got a statutory protected privilege which they couldn’t invoke because of their own conduct,” he said.
“That was notably absent from the press releases, which was this self-congratulatory (statement) to make them look like great fellas to the journalistic community.”
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The nightmare from Geelong West
How would you like to be confronted by this one afternoon as you walked along a Melbourne street? Another triumph of Australia's immigration system
A 'thug' punched a stranger in the Melbourne CBD before his friend allegedly partially cut off the man's earlobe with a knife when he refused to hand over his wallet and phone in a robbery.
Jok Gar, 20, fronted Melbourne's County Court on Friday where he pleaded guilty to robbery and reckless causing injury
Judge Frances Hogan unleashed on Gar, from Geelong West, saying the behaviour was 'cowardly' and that he showed a complete 'lack of empathy'.
'It is appalling offending that strikes at the heart of the security of people in our community to walk alone at night on the streets, it's just awful,' she said, reports The Geelong Advertiser.
The court heard Gar and his co-accused Tyler Da Silva walked up to the complete stranger at the intersection of Spring St and Victoria Pde in the centre of Melbourne on September 6, 2022.
When the man refused to hand over his wallet and phone the two men allegedly attacked him.
'During the attack the complainant was cut with a knife, causing a slash wound across his right cheek, and partially amputating his right earlobe,' Crown Prosecutor Matthew Cookson said.
Gar is not accused of having the knife or being complicit in using the blade in the attack.
But the court heard the victim was knocked out when punched by Gar, who is was born in Egypt and migrated to Australia with his family as a six-year-old.
The pair then took the man's phone and left him lying in the street bleeding.
Police later found the two about 4.30am in the bathrooms of the Southern Cross train station with Gar's defence lawyer claiming he was under the influence of drugs on the night.
Co-accused Da Silva will appear in court next week on to enter his plea on charges of armed robbery and intentionally causing injury.
Gar will reappear for sentencing at a later date.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12626961/Jok-Gar-Melbourne-CBD-robbery.html
************************************15 October, 2023
A day to remember -- 14 October
Yesterday was much happiness for antipodean conservatives
The Labor Party's racist referendum was defeated in every Australian state with the biggest "no" vote coming of course from Queensland, my ancestral and present home.
And on the same day the Left got decisively tossed out on their ear in New Zealand. Jacinda Ardern was the darling of the interntional Left but had predictably made a big mess in NZ and most Kiwis were aghast at it -- which they showed with their votes.
One of the messes Ardern left for her hapless successor was to give Maori representatives a power of veto over everything the government did -- the sort of racist horror Albo obviously had in mind for Australia with his ambiguous referendum. We dodged a bullet
And despite being riddled with cancer, I went to bed pain-free last night. I have got some amazing medications working for me. How many other 80year-olds went to bed pain-free last night? Rather few, I suspect. So yesterday was a good day for me personally as well as politically. And, no, I am not taking morphine or any other opiates. Just a a monoclonal antibody and ibuprofen
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All through this debacle, Albanese wouldn’t compromise or mind his language
Andrew Bolt
Thank God Australians voted against this racist Voice, but the damage is still done and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese should resign.
He has failed Australia in his catastrophic campaign to divide us by race, to give one race extra political rights under our constitution.
It’s not just that Albanese wasted $365m of taxpayers’ money and months of his time, growing distracted and emotional, on a failed campaign that’s already set neighbour against neighbour.
And what a catastrophic failure. Early figures suggest the Voice will be thrashed in every state, and even in some towns with big Aboriginal populations.
Worse than this failure and waste is that Albanese kept smearing No voters as mean to Aboriginals.
I doubt he can ever unsay that poisonous message to our young, especially young Aboriginals, or fix the harm to our image.
Yes, he’ll now talk about coming together, but up to polling day he sold this referendum as a test of our niceness to Aboriginals. Of our racism.
We had to go “to the booth to improve the lives of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people”, Albanese insisted, implying No voters didn’t want to help.
“Thinking of others costs nothing,” he cried, implying No voters were selfish.
“We have an opportunity for Australians … to show respect for the First Australians,” he said, implying No voters had none.
His planned Voice was “a hand outstretched for us to grasp in friendship”, implying No voters wanted no Aboriginal friends. Didn’t Albanese realise the racial grievances he was stoking would fester long after the votes were counted?
Didn’t he realise he was also talking himself out of a job by claiming that without a Voice to advise him we’ll just get “the same failures”?
Well, he’ll get no Voice now, so should hand over to someone smart enough not to repeat “the same failures”.
But all through this debacle, Albanese wouldn’t compromise or mind his language.
A month ago the polls were so terrible for the Voice that I said it was dead. That was Albanese’s last chance to put Australia above his ego, and change his message so defeat of the Voice wouldn’t be sold as proof Australians were racist.
Again he failed us.
That failure will cost because a second war over the Voice starts now: how to interpret this result. If the Yes campaign wins by blaming racism, the consequences will be devastating.
Even before the vote, Professor Marcia Langton, one of the Voice architects, vilified No voters as “racists” and warned of an “intifada” from some Aboriginals.
Professor Tom Calma, her Voice co-designer, likewise declared “the referendum process taps into a deep well of historical racism”, and the Financial Review published a cartoon likening No leaders Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine, plus Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, to Nazis. We can’t now let them turn their defeat into Australia’s shame, or even civil unrest.
* Australians racist? Nonsense; they voted against racism. *
Besides, no country spending twice per head on Aboriginals than on other Australians can fairly be called racist.
Nor did No campaigners want Aboriginals to have fewer rights than anyone else. Instead, Price and Mundine – both with Aboriginal ancestry – insisted Aboriginals have exactly the same rights as other Australians. It was the Yes campaigners who didn’t.
But most telling is that a year ago polls showed two thirds of Australians supported the Voice. So were they racist then, or did they suddenly become racist now?
Albanese blames “misinformation” for losing all that support, but how could the Yes campaign lose an information battle when it was backed by every government in this country, 13 of our biggest companies, every major sporting code, many universities, big faith groups, and a circus of celebrities?
It also had a war-chest estimated at more than $50m, so could run a blitz of TV ads in the last weeks that drowned out the nickel-and-dime No side.
No, the truth is the simplest explanation: the more people learnt about the Voice, the more they thought it wrong.
The polls agree on what changed their minds, too. The Voice divided us by race, and there was no detail on how it would work.
So ignore those self-serving excuses from Yes campaigners, who can’t admit Australians simply didn’t want the racial division of their country.
Be inspired that Australians just said No to racism, despite all the bullying and all the corporate cash, in one of the finest moments of our democracy.
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Voice to climate: Can you hear me?
Judith Sloan
The Prime Minister has flagged that, post the Voice referendum, his government will turn its full attention to the decarbonisation of the economy and the prospect of Australia becoming an renewable energy superpower.
You really have to wonder whether Albo is smoking something if he thinks that moving from the toxic and divisive issue of the Voice to the fantasy world of climate action is a good idea. But if you live in the world of the vibe, one vibe is as good as another.
By contrast, most of us are living in the real world, wondering how we can cover the mortgage and the bills, getting the kids to school on time and thinking about what’s for dinner. Prosaic stuff to be sure, but beautiful thoughts about identity politics and climate change are generally back of mind, if at all.
To be sure, surveys tell us that people are concerned about climate change, which is not altogether surprising given the unrelenting and misleading conflation of weather and climate change perpetrated by all the mainstream media outlets. Several hot days in Sydney – climate change. Limited flooding in parts of Victoria – climate change. Bushfire warnings for parts of the east coast – climate change.
The implicit message is that Australia alone – or should that be NSW or the city of Sydney – can affect the pace of climate change and therefore reduce the incidence of unwelcome weather events. Most school students – OK, some, OK a few – would realise that this is a complete non sequitur as only global action counts.
But what the surveys also reveal is that, notwithstanding people’s concerns about climate change – economists call this elicitation bias or wanting to sound worthy – when it comes to bearing any additional financial burden to act on climate change, there is a marked reluctance to pay any significant price at all. The recent 20-per-cent rise in electricity prices, for instance, is well above the rate of increase that people are happy to pay for the sake of doing something about the climate.
The real paradox is why Albo thinks it’s an attractive political idea to emphasise the energy transition and the exciting world that lies ahead. Let’s face it, it hasn’t been going well, what with delays in the commissioning of new renewable projects, the growing opposition to the construction of new transmission lines and, let’s not forget, the disastrous Snowy 2.0 project. If I were to run a book on when Snowy 2.0 will be fully up and running, I’m not sure I would have too many bets on this decade.
I could do a similar thing with offshore wind installations, as the economics of these projects overseas deteriorate to the point that most investment is currently stalled. Rising costs, worker and equipment shortages and higher interest rates are an uncongenial mix. The UK government ran a tender for new offshore wind projects recently and there was not a single bid because the strike price was set too low.
The rent-seekers in this space in the US have declared that a doubling of the prices they receive is now necessary to make offshore wind a viable investment. This is another counter to the ludicrous proposition that renewables are the cheapest way to generate electricity, something to which Albo still clings.
The one bright light in the energy transition has been the rapid growth in rooftop solar by households and some businesses. This is seen as one means to save on electricity bills in the context of very limited options. According to the Clean Energy Regulator, ‘Australian households and businesses continue to install rooftop solar at world leading rates. 1.6 gigawatts of capacity from almost 160,000 rooftop systems were added in the first half of 2023. Three gigawatts would bring the amount of rooftop solar capacity added to the grid close to the 2021 record of 3.2 GW’.
There are two reasons for mentioning this. The first is that households’ fondness for their rooftop solar panels often morphs into their support for renewable energy more generally – something recognised by state politicians, in particular. The continued subsidisation of rooftop solar installations, albeit at reduced levels, is partly explained by the ability to cadge additional votes.
Secondly, the unexpected rise in rooftop solar is playing havoc with the economics of large-scale solar installations. For several hours during the day, electricity prices can be deeply negative. Those large-scale solar installations are in effect competing with rooftop solar.
To be sure, most of the large-scale installations have been backed by power purchase agreements or similar (mainly from state governments) which guarantee the investors/operators certain prices. But the reality is that large-scale solar is looking like a particularly bad investment bet at the moment save a substantial step-up in the prices being offered. It is already clear that the expected roll-out of new projects has significantly slowed this year.
Again as the Clean Energy Regulator notes, ‘it was a quiet first half of the year for new large-scale renewable energy investment (including wind) commitments. We’ve downgraded out expectations and now expect 2023 investment may not reach three gigawatts’.
Even the deep-green Australian Energy Market Operator doesn’t expect the 82 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 to be met. No doubt, Albo will have to downplay these real world realities.
And he definitely won’t want to mention the fact that the Victorian government is now propping up not one, but two coal-fired power stations in the anticipation that its energy transition plans are in tatters. The only feasible alternative is to hand out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars – although precise figures are kept under wraps – so they don’t close down. The NSW government will start handing out big bucks to the owner of Eraring to keep that plant going.
Let’s not forget that the cost curve for these plants resembles a bathtub. Towards the end of their lifespans, the costs increase dramatically particularly when they are used to back up intermittent renewable energy, something for which they are not designed.
He might also want to avoid talking too much about the much-vaunted green hydrogen revolution, something for which other rent-seekers are keen to hoover up as much government money as possible. It’s becoming clear that, at best, hydrogen will play a niche role in the energy transition.
Using intermittent energy to power electrolysers to produce hydrogen is inherently inefficient and the problems of transport and bespoke infrastructure just add to the costs. The winners are likely to be close to the demand and blue hydrogen (made from gas) has much more going for it in terms of costs than green hydrogen.
The idea that Australia will become an energy superpower on the basis of green hydrogen is fanciful notwithstanding the ongoing enthusiasm of Twiggy. It’s a bit like the underground electricity cable from the Northern Territory to Singapore – ain’t going to happen.
Albo may need to move onto another vibe – it’s just not clear what it will be.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/voice-to-climate
**********************************************We can only hope the ‘descent from civility’ dissipates quickly
Gerard Henderson
Former Australian prime minister John Howard has a good turn of phrase. His description of the anti-Israel protest that took place in Sydney on Monday as “a catastrophic descent from civility” is precisely accurate.
The unauthorised protest march took place from the Town Hall to the Opera House. I watched hundreds of protesters – men and women with children – march down Phillip Street chanting loudly: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” At the rear of the protest was a large number of NSW police vehicles, including members of the riot squad. The contingent gave the impression that this was a movement that required a police escort.
I did not know at the time that the march was unauthorised or that the police had instructed Jewish Australian supporters of Israel to remain at home.
Or that the only person arrested on the day was a man peacefully carrying an Israeli flag – he was subsequently released without charges laid. But he did not receive a police escort home.
When the protesters reached the Opera House, there were audible cries of “F..k the Jews” and “Gas the Jews”. The former is racially motivated abuse, the latter an incitement to murder, even genocide. No arrests were made on the night – not even when demonstrators threw lighted flares at the feet of police on the Opera House steps and burned Israeli flags in a public place.
On Wednesday morning, NSW Premier Chris Minns apologised to the Jewish community on behalf of the government and himself for what had occurred. He pointed out that the intention “to light up the Opera House” in Israeli colours had been to “create a place and a space for that community to come together to commemorate (following) these terrible events in the Middle East”. But he added that the Opera House forecourt “was obviously overrun with people that were spewing racial epithets and hatred on the streets of Sydney”.
In fact, the spewing of hate had begun the previous Sunday evening outside Lakemba station in southwest Sydney. At the time it was known that the Hamas terrorist group based in the Gaza Strip, and supported by Iran, had indiscriminately fired thousands of rockets into southern Israel and was attacking civilians on the Israeli side of the border as well as that part of the Israel Defence Forces that was in the vicinity.
Sheik Ibrahim Dadoun, an imam from United Muslims of Australia, said he was elated at the events, declaring this to be “a day of pride, a day of victory”. The next day pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched through Sydney.
We now know that Hamas terrorists, who like to be called militants, involved themselves in war crimes as they attacked and murdered children and babies, men and women (some of whom were raped). It wasn’t a day of pride and it’s unlikely to be a day of victory following the war that Hamas initiated.
There is not much that unites the extreme left and the extreme right in Western nations – apart from hostility towards Israel. The protesters marching through Sydney consisted not only of individuals with a Middle Eastern background but some white Australians of a green-left bent.
The chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means only one thing: that the Jewish presence should be driven out of the land that exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. That is, the elimination of Israel (in which a large Muslim minority lives peacefully) that was formally recognised by the UN in 1948.
As Daniel Mandel documented in his book "HV Evatt and the Establishment of Israel" (Routledge, 2004), Australia’s external affairs minister at the time, Bert Evatt, played an important role in the creation of Israel.
On Sunday evening, John Lyons, the ABC’s Sydney-based global affairs editor, told viewers of ABC TV news the Israeli public faced this “big question”: namely, whether “the cost of maintaining its occupation over three million Palestinians in the West Bank and its blockade over the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza is worth the price that it pays”.
It’s true that Israel occupied the West Bank after the success in its defensive war of 1967. But the area in southern Israel that Hamas attacked has been part of Israel for ages. The Gaza Strip is currently blockaded by Israel to an extent as a means of a democratic nation defending itself from Hamas, which is intent on destroying it. In any event, there is an exit from Gaza into Muslim-majority Egypt.
On ABC TV News Breakfast on Friday, Ebony Bennett, the deputy director of the left-wing Australia Institute, described Gaza as “occupied” by Israel. There have been no Israelis living freely in Gaza for more than a decade.
It is possible that Israel and the Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah on the West Bank (which has limited autonomy) can eventually bring about a situation in which Israel can exist within secure borders as part of a two-state solution. But there will be no deals between Israel and Hamas.
The key political opposition to Australia’s support for Israel comes from the left. On Monday, Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi put out a post declaring “One colonial government supporting another – what a disgrace”.
This overlooks the fact Pakistan-born Faruqi willingly settled in what she terms a colonial society, in which she has achieved much success.
Many of the Muslim Lebanese who criticise Australia’s support for Israel overlook that they or their immediate ancestors became Australian citizens due to the decision of the Coalition government in 1976 to accept those affected by the Lebanese civil war despite the fact they were not formally refugees. I wrote about this in these pages on November 24, 2016.
The success of modern Australia is that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others live freely in a democratic society – despite differences.
However, right now some Jewish Australians – including students – do not feel safe. We can only hope that this week’s descent from civility as identified by Howard dissipates quickly and that relative peace returns to the Middle East.
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13 October, 2023
Jewish students have safety fears over campus support for Hamas
Jewish students say anti-Israel material being distributed on university campuses following the Hamas attacks is deeply distressing and has led to students hiding their Jewish identity, as one of Australia’s biggest student bodies declared it “stands in solidarity with Palestine”.
The University of Sydney Student Representative Council on Wednesday urged students to “stand against oppression … until Palestine is free”.
Earlier this week, the SRC promoted the Sydney Rally for a Free Palestine, where protesters marched on the Sydney Opera House as it was lit in the national colours of Israel, chanting violent anti-Semitic slogans.
“The Israeli state has waged a war on Palestinians for 75 years,” the SRC said in a statement.
“Palestinians have faced ethnic cleansing, torture, bombing and violence against civilians.
Gaza has been under a blockade for 16 years and all Palestinians live under an occupied apartheid state, which is the root cause of violence.
“The movement for Free Palestine is not anti-Semitic, and rally organisers strongly share this belief,” the SRC added.
A spokesperson for the University of Sydney said the vice-chancellor had written to staff and students “acknowledging many hold strong views on this conflict and encouraging them to express themselves in a way that considers the impact on other members of our campus community”.
Paris Enten, a Monash University student who is vice-president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students, said many students had family in Israel and felt the impact of the attacks very strongly. “Whilst we in no way want to limit anyone’s freedom of speech, walking through campus and seeing people celebrating the attacks that have impacted them so personally is really upsetting,” Ms Enten said.
“We’ve heard of students who are avoiding campus out of concern for their safety,” she said, adding other students were deeply angry at seeing support for Hamas on campus.
“They’re saying ‘How dare you talk about my dead relatives that way’,” she said.
Association being handed out this week says the Hamas attack was an “attempt to reclaim Palestinian land”. The flyer, which was also distributed at Macquarie University, does not mention the many innocent civilians – including babies and young children – killed or wounded by Hamas, nor the civilian hostages who were forcibly removed to Gaza.
Since Saturday, the AUJS has helped submit more than 400 special consideration requests for students who have fallen behind in their studies because of the stress brought on by the recent events.
Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson called on the Albanese government and universities to take steps to protect Jewish students on university campuses.
She pointed to a recent survey of Jewish students which found 64 per cent had experienced anti-Semitism on campus and 57 per cent had hidden their Jewish identity in order to avoid it.
Senator Henderson said she had written to Education Minister Jason Clare asking him to say how the government would protect Jewish students in universities and schools. She has also written to umbrella body Universities Australia urging universities “to have much better measures in place so that student safety and wellbeing is of the highest priority”.
Universities Australia CEO Catriona Jackson said there was no place for racism or any form of discrimination on campus. She said universities had “zero tolerance for attitudes and behaviours which create unsafe learning and working environments”.
The Palestine Action Group, which was behind Monday’s rally in Sydney, has organised another rally in Canberra on Friday, which office bearers from the Student Association of Australian National University spruiked through their council agenda.
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Darwin to become major freight port
Offering faster shipping times for goods to and from China and Japan. The Adelaide to Darwin railway may be not such a white elephant after all. John Howard's vision may pay off
Aurizon managing director Andrew Harding told the company’s annual general meeting in Brisbane that the $1.4bn acquisition of the 2200km Tarcoola to Darwin railway in 2021 would allow it to tap into the closest port to Australia’s largest trading partners in Asia. Aurizon said the “landbridge” strategy outlined this year would allow the company to diversify away from its mainstay coal haulage business.
“Aurizon will leverage these new assets as we look to develop land bridging solutions for customers,” Mr Harding said. “The cranes we are installing at Darwin Port represent a significant milestone in realising land bridging solutions for customers.”
Aurizon is banking on new ways to carry cargo, including investments in the freight “landbridge” to offset reliance on transporting coal wagons to east-coast ports.
Brisbane-based Aurizon reported a 37 per cent drop in profit to $324m in the year to June 30 as its coal business was hit by wet weather.
The investment in rolling stock includes more than 30 new heavy-haul locomotives, more than 500 container wagons as well as mobile harbour cranes and reach stackers for the movement of stackers. Aurizon has a long-term lease through to 2054 at the Port of Darwin and is now able to offer stevedoring services. Aurizon shares rose 0.5 per cent to $3.69 on Thursday.
“Our initial target is 100,000 TEUs – 20-foot equivalent containers – per year,” Mr Harding said. “That’s within a market of some eight million TEUs of throughputs at Australian ports annually.”
He said the landbridge route would be up to 40 per cent quicker compared to key shipping routes into Australia.
“We are taking a staged approach to land-bridging to effectively manage business and investment risk,” he said. “Limited additional rolling stock is required for stage one and it is the exact same rolling stock that we currently use across our other freight lines.”
Aurizon has already signed its largest ever non-coal contract – an 11-year agreement with Team Global Express (TGE) for national linehaul services.
Aurizon chairman Tim Poole said the move into bulk and containerised freight created greater growth opportunities for Aurizon that its traditional haulage commodities, where growth could be more muted.
“We are seeing increasing demand for high-quality Australian food and agricultural products for export such as grains and phosphates,” Mr Poole said.
Aurizon says it can deliver a container from Shanghai to Melbourne quicker via the Darwin rail link than traditional shipping to metropolitan ports. Aurizon’s landbridge strategy could more than double the company’s shipping container business by the end of the decade, reducing Aurizon’s reliance on coal haulage in Queensland and NSW.
Mr Poole said that although he was confident the new business would perform well, in the eventuality that things do not go to plan, the new rolling stock and other equipment could be used elsewhere across the company’s network.
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Qld housing crisis: Red tape cut for new developments
Some sanity at last
It will be easier to build homes in Queensland as the state government moves to cut red tape for new developments.
In sweeping reforms, the government will seek new powers to access land for housing and incentivise developers to build affordable homes by overhauling the state’s planning framework.
The legislative changes are aimed at making it easier and faster for developers to build affordable homes as the state battles a housing crisis.
The Courier-Mail can reveal exclusive details of the revamp of planning laws, which will boost the planning minister’s powers to approve building homes on under-utilised land and cut barriers to provide affordable housing.
The proposed laws, to be introduced to parliament on Wednesday, will include the creation of a new zone – dubbed the urban investigation zone – to allow councils to deliver infrastructure earlier by streamlining development in growth areas.
It will also establish a new assessment pathway for developers, where building on infill areas and boosting affordable housing stock will be classified as a state priority.
Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Steven Miles said the legislative reform was aimed at ensuring the planning system was working as efficiently as possible.
Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Steven Miles in parliament on Tuesday. Picture: Tertius Pickard/NCA NewsWire
Deputy Premier and Planning Minister Steven Miles in parliament on Tuesday. Picture: Tertius Pickard/NCA NewsWire
“As the fastest-growing state, we need to be able to pull new levers in the planning and development system to deliver more homes, faster,” he said.
“This Bill will support the implementation of ShapingSEQ 2023 – our blueprint for delivering 900,000 new homes needed in the southeast corner by 2046 to accommodate 2.2 million new residents.
“To address housing supply constraints, the new laws will give the state powers to manage fragmented land holdings, approve affordable developments and take control of easements for water, power and sewerage.”
The housing availability and affordability bill, which amends the planning act, will give the state power to acquire or purchase land or create an easement to build critical infrastructure to unlock development, such as water infrastructure, transport infrastructure and parks.
Meanwhile, the creation of the development assessment pathway will allow building on previously undeveloped land to benefit the state by providing increased housing options.
Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon said the proposed reforms will allow more homes to get off the ground sooner.
“Nobody can tackle the housing challenges alone, and that’s why we have been listening to stakeholders on what changes we can make to deliver more housing in the private market,” she said. “We can ensure our planning system is responsive, efficient and effective in unlocking development, with quick and targeted intervention where needed.
“It marks a critical step in a future where available and affordable housing is not beyond any Queenslander’s reach.”
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Dutton should copy Poilievre: Learn from the re-booted Conservatives in Canada
Historically Canada’s main right-of-centre political party, the Conservative party, has been pretty electorally woeful. The left-wing Liberal party was in power for 70 years of the 20th century and Justin Trudeau has been the Liberal Prime Minister now for the past eight years. (And yep, in Canada the Liberals have always been an overtly left-of-centre party; an alignment many of our Australian Liberal MPs, especially at the state level, are clearly aiming to ape.) In the Great White North it’s not inapt to describe the Conservatives as ‘incompetent’ throughout much of my native Canada’s history.
But things have changed of late and the party up there offers big lessons to the mori-bund Liberals here in Australia. So what has the Conservative party done in Canada? Well, some years ago, after a series of mergers and splits, the party got rid of the word ‘progressive’ from its name. No longer were they the ‘Progressive Conservatives’; instead they became just the ‘Conservatives’. Then they changed the way in which the party leaders were chosen.
I know. I know. There is a widespread view here in Australia that this ‘who should be leader?’ decision should rest with the parliamentary wing of the party, with the elected MPs in the party room. Maybe that was true forty years ago when politicians tended to have real-life experience before entering parliament but Canada shows that view to be seriously open to doubt today.
You see in Canada the ‘who will be the leader’ decision now rests with the party members. Join the party. Wait three months. And you have an equal say in picking the leader to everyone else, MPs included. Remembering that Canada has about 50 per cent more population than Australia consider this: the Canadian Conservative party today has well over 700,000 party members. They pick the leader. They also pick who runs in their constituency. No Michael Photios-types with outsized influence.
By contrast the Liberal party here in Australia has somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 members, the exact numbers are not released for obvious reasons. Quite a massive difference to Canada isn’t it? Ask yourself what say you get in today’s Liberal party if you join. If you are in NSW the answer rhymes with the fifth Roman Emperor, the pyromaniac. These are catastrophically low numbers for a political party.
And notice that in Canada the party membership picks leaders that the party room, the elected MPs, would never choose in a million years. In Alberta last year, with the party trailing in the polls, the party membership even chose a woman who was not even in the provincial legislature. She was the most right-wing candidate and she went on to win a by-election and then won this year’s provincial election with a comfortable majority. The party membership does not buy the ‘park yourself an inch to the right of the lefties’ mantra.
Meanwhile at the federal level the Conservative party membership chose what by Canadian standards is an actual, real conservative, Pierre Poilievre. As I said, most of the party MPs would have opted to walk over broken glass before picking an actual values-based solid conservative like this man. Poilievre has been opposition leader for just over a year now.
When he was chosen the CBC and the usual left-leaning legacy media said he was unelectable. (The same sort of press talking heads, you’ll recall, who said Tony Abbott was unelectable until he won a massive majority, only for his own MPs to roll him and set the party on a downwards trajectory it’s still on.)
Poilievre then set out an actual set of policies – supporting the oil and gas industry; real scepticism on net zero and an unwillingness to do much of anything on that front; a pledge to cut (yes cut) one billion dollars from the CBC’s (Canada’s equivalent to our ABC) annual budget – yes, you read that correctly; restore the military to its Nato-promised level of funding; the list goes on.
You can imagine what the usual suspects in Canada’s equivalent of our Fairfax press and ABC think of him. Know what? The party room cannot remove Poilievre because only the party membership can do that. And notice that when the public broadcaster attacks him (because they always attack all conservative politicians) he can put it down to raw monetary self-interest.
How has this worked out? Well, Poilievre and the Conservatives are currently up in the polls somewhere between 10 and 14 points. Poilievre has gone from being far less popular than Justin Trudeau to being 15 points ahead in the preferred PM stakes. And get this result from the latest Angus Reid poll: Poilievre is now by far the most popular politician in Canada amongst young people (18 to 27 years old). In fact, he’s far more popular with the young than with the over-60 crowd. I would never have imagined that possibility in Canada, a country with a political centre of gravity a good deal to the left of Australia.
You see Poilievre ignores all the usual platitudes about how conservatives have to hoe to the middle and appease the Teal-type voters and try to win inner-city seats. He argues based on convictions. Heck, he was asked if he knew what a woman was and he did, giving the sort of non-woke answer 80 per cent of the population was dying to hear from a politician. Think of it this way. When the Albanese pledge to hold the Voice referendum was first announced the Yes side was polling upwards of 70 per cent. If you only decide what to do as a party based on focus groups you cave in from the start. But if you have values and principles (so we’re ruling out ScoMo) you argue for your views and aim to win over the punters – the polls now showing the No side has every chance of garnering 60-plus per cent of the national vote.
In a way Poilievre is reminiscent of Florida’s Ron DeSantis (and not just because Poilievre also disliked the government thuggery, heavy-handedness and regulatory over-reach of the Covid years). You see Poilievre knows the bureaucratic caste, as a whole, is not particularly sympathetic to right-of-centre views. So he learns his brief. He can defend his values and positions in an articulate way. He is prepared, regularly, to call out the legacy press for its patent left-leaning bias. And he is optimistic about the future. The next Canadian election need not be for almost two years. But if an election were held today it would likely deliver a big Conservative majority.
You might think that all of this would be a powerful lesson to our Liberal party in this country. But it hasn’t been. At the state level the Liberal brand is in total disarray because its elected MPs are barely distinguishable from Labor and hold the party membership in seeming contempt. And federally that appears to be true too of a good-sized chunk of the partyroom (aka ‘the moderates’).
The received wisdom that the best strategy is for the Libs to park themselves a centimetre to the right of Labor has failed repeatedly. Were it not for our virtually unique preferential voting system (that forces voters at some point to pick between the two established parties and that only one other country in the world mimics) this dessicated strategy would long ago have been exposed for its worthlessness.
Come on, Liberal party. Cast an eye on what’s going on in Canada and start to make some changes.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/dutts-should-copy-poilievre/
************************************12 October, 2023
Housing policy built on dodgy foundations: Government hasn’t got a clue about the economics of renting
It is an unfortunate reality that modern Australian government has become an enterprise in search of instant political self-gratification; in delivering reams of announcements and volumes of spending while producing very little in the way of sustainable positive outcomes.
The bleak state of housing, where too many Australians are experiencing a genuine rental and accommodation crisis, is borne not of a lack of government action, but rather consistently wrong action and of decades of bad policy across all tiers of government. This is a situation that cannot be quickly remedied, especially through yet another cash-splash.
Following the recent agreement between the Albanese government and the Australian Greens to pass the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) legislation, Greens leader Adam Bandt said that ‘the Greens are the party of renters’. Bandt is more correct than he realises because this policy and the concessions extracted, will lead to ever more Australians being locked out of home ownership and trapped into perpetual renting.
Eminent US economist Thomas Sowell frequently counselled that there are no solutions and only trade-offs. This is advice Australian governments consistently refuse to heed, regularly announcing new policies with accompanying billions in spending, all while failing to properly account for the associated costs and consequences. This latest housing announcement, coupled with Prime Minister Albanese’s earlier New Homes Bonus (NHB) announcement just demonstrates that our political leaders are prepared do anything to address Australia’s housing and rental crisis – anything except undertaking the necessary reforms to address underlying causes.
A significant driver of Australia’s housing problems is a policy-driven supply squeeze caused by a toxic cocktail of bad planning, tax, energy and industrial relations policies. It should not surprise that a political and bureaucratic ecosystem driven by ‘announceables’ and not results has increased the cost of housing for Australians. The effects of this toxic policy cocktail is further exacerbated by the Commonwealth’s large immigration intake.
Australians experiencing housing price stress should genuinely question whether they will be better off following all the recent announcements.
As a case in point, the most recent $3billion committed by the government to mollify the Greens to pass the HAFF legislation and the earlier $3bn for the NHB to provide ‘performance-based funding for states and territories’ will need to be funded from somewhere. And that somewhere will be from taxes imposed, directly and indirectly, on those these policies claim to benefit. All these claimed supply enhancement announcements are however more reflective of an episode of Yes, Minister with the government proposing to increase housing supply by destroying housing supply. Invariably, the principal beneficiaries of these new schemes will be the public servants hired to administer them.
The most recent Commonwealth budget papers that showed that over the past thirty years, inflation-adjusted per capita Commonwealth spending has nearly doubled, and taxing has more than doubled. Our governments have taken ever more from Australians, including by borrowing from the future, and given it back less a ‘handling’ fee, all while asking to be thanked.
Not satisfied with the economic damage caused by the current policy mix, the Greens have indicated that they will continue to fight for ‘a freeze and cap on rent increases’. This is the bedrock of the Greens housing policy and they even produced analysis suggesting that, were a rental freeze implemented last year, two million renting households could have saved $3.1bn in 2022-23 and $4.9bn in 2023-24.
Such a rent freeze would just result in a temporary transfer of economic pain from one group to another. According to Treasury’s most recent Tax Expenditures and Insights Statement, almost half the 2.6m taxpayers who claimed rental deductions in 2022 experienced rental tax losses. These losses summed to $10.2bn and provided $3.6bn of negative gearing offsets. These losses were before interest rates started rising and before inflation driven increases on council rates, insurance and property maintenance set in. A rental freeze would just further increase the pain on landlords and the Commonwealth budget, a pain that will ultimately be transferred back to renters including via higher taxes for longer.
Landlords would also likely respond by either selling, withdrawing rental stock, or reducing maintenance, and the Commonwealth would just need to collect more taxes from other sectors of the economy. The net effect would be further harm to renters and the broader economy.
The Greens even equated their rental cap proposal to the gas price cap agreed to by National cabinet. However, gas industry expert Saul Kavonic noted that the price cap is already being unwound and that, ‘It will go down as one of the most anti-market, poorly planned and economically damaging policies Australia has seen in recent memory, with no discernible benefit to show for it.’ Kavonic added that, ‘The goal of the (gas price cap) policy, to lower prices for end users, has not been achieved. Unfortunately, even with the policy now being walked back, the economic harm may prove lasting.’
To address Australia’s housing and rental issues requires not a cash splash but rather a comprehensive productivity and supply side reform program including through reduced government spending, taxing, and regulation.
Some 150 years ago, Leo Tolstoy wrote describing the Russian government of his day. This description could aptly describe contemporary Australian government: ‘I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.’
If Australian policymakers want to ease the economic pain of Australians, whether in housing or general cost of living, they should first get off our backs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/housing-policy-built-on-dodgy-foundations/
*********************************************Academic hits out at own university over its pro-Voice branding but they say if you don't like it you can 'unfollow' them
An outspoken academic has slammed her university for using its social media accounts and job listings to 'virtue signal' in support of a Yes vote - but the institution says people can like it or lump it.
Sydney's University of New South Wales (UNSW) has placed a yellow graphic on its social media and LinkedIn profiles that features the words 'UNSW says Yes' in a yellow circle around a red love heart with Indigenous motifs.
UNSW Economics Professor Gigi Foster says the blatant advocacy is inappropriate for a publicly funded body that should be keeping out of political activism.
However, the university defended the branding, which was designed by UNSW Fine Arts student and Wiradjuri woman Lua Pellegrini, as being 'aligned with [its] values' and even suggested those who don't like it should unfollow them.
The artwork is displayed on the university's Facebook page alongside a boast that UNSW 'proudly supports the First Nations Voice to Parliament'.
The image 'depicts the coming together to discuss the Voice and highlights the vibrancy and diversity of community and perspective', the page states.
The UNSW spokesperson said the decision to brand social media and other messaging 'was taken after significant consultation, which included the University’s Indigenous leadership'.
It pointed out that UNSW has previously 'co-opted' its social media profile image for causes such as NAIDOC Week and Sydney Mardi Gras.
'The profile pictures are temporary and will revert back after the referendum,' the spokesperson said.
'Followers and LinkedIn users who feel strongly about any temporary change are welcome to temporarily unfollow or unlink the UNSW page from their profile.'
However, Professor Foster told Daily Mail Australia she didn't 'think it is the place of any publicly funded institutions to take positions on political matters'.
'The university has an obligation to promote an environment so that people are not feeling ideologically compelled because of the association of the university with a particular political position,' she said.
'Universities are supposed to be the places, if there are any places left, in civil society where one can explore freely different potential positions, philosophical positions, policy positions.
'When there is advocacy for one particular political position, or political party for that matter, that undermines the provision of that kind of environment for staff and students and even alumni.'
Professor Foster said by branding job ads with a pro-Voice message the university stance might deter potential applicants.
'It is concerning that this advocacy is appearing in the recruitment messages of the university because if I were an applicant I would see that and think, "Gee, I guess you can only have certain beliefs to work at UNSW,"' she said.
'It's a cold shower to people who are seeking an open and critical and inquisitive environment to implicitly communicate to them, even before they start work, that a particular belief that they might hold is not welcome.
'I really would hope that's not true for any university.'
The UNSW spokesperson denied pushing the Yes vote would alienate staff and students of a different view.
'UNSW is wholeheartedly committed to free speech and our position on this issue does not compel any member of our community to vote one way or the other,' the spokesperson said.
Professor Foster accused universities of indulging in 'virtue signalling' by backing the Yes campaign.
She pointed to the Canadian parliament giving a standing ovation last month to 98-year-old former Ukrainian solider Yaroslav Hunka as an example of how this might backfire.
Canadian MPs were left red-faced when it emerged Hunka had served in the Waffen-SS, an elite Nazi force that committed numerous WWII atrocities.
'That kind of huge gaffe is emblematic of the consequences when we start signaling virtue without acting virtuously,' Professor Foster said.
'To vote yes on the Voice is being promoted as the thing to do if you care about Aboriginal people and if you care about giving voice to people and all these sorts of positive, kind of unarguable objectives,' she said.
'But that’s just a surface-level association, which is accepted by some people who might not think very deeply about what is being proposed but it's certainly not the only way to view a Yes vote on the Voice refere
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How one simple word ruined the career of a children's gymnastics coach and turned his life upside down
A gymnastic coach's reputation is in ruins after he was accused of sexually objectifying teenage girls in an email because he used the word 'beautiful'.
Lindsay Nylund, 65, was sacked from his role as a coach at the City of Canada Bay Council's Five Dock Leisure Centre, in Sydney 's inner west, in May.
The renowned Aussie gymnast, who competed in the 1980 Summer Olympics and won medals at the 1978 Commonwealth Games, had worked at the centre for about two-and-half-years.
But Mr Nylund landed in hot water when he sent an email about his gymnastics team following a competition win.
'Hi all, Our beautiful FDLC Level 8 Women's Artistic Gymnasts,' he wrote in the email dated February 19.
'All achieved a top six apparatus placing in their respective divisions at the first state trial competition of the year.'
The director of community, culture & leisure, Russell Wolfe, said in a follow-up email: 'Thanks for the update Lindsay - congratulations to everyone involved.'
But that same email resulted in Mr Nylund's termination as he was being accused of sexually objectifying his team because he used the word 'beautiful'.
Mr Nylund is now unemployed and has struggled to come to terms with the accusation.
'It's traumatic because for a children's gymnastic coach, that's probably the worst thing someone could accuse you of doing,' he told A Current Affair.
The father-of-three believed at the time that it was a 'terrible mistake'.
When asked about his thoughts on those who might consider his comment inappropriate, Mr Nylund said it was 'political correctness gone a bit too far'.
'I mean, I think the word beautiful could be used in a wrong context, absolutely,' he said. 'But when you look at the context in the way it was used, no normal person would read that and think that's inappropriate.'
During an interview with broadcaster Ben Fordham on Sydney 2GB radio earlier this month, Mr Nylund said he was 'traumatised' when he was notified of the accusation via a letter.
'For a children's gymnastic coach, it's probably the kiss of death for your professional reputation and character,' he said.
The City of Canada Bay Council also accused My Nylund of showing a 'lack of respect towards centre management' when he allegedly permitted a one-week membership fee freeze when it was supposed to be two weeks.
He was also accused of having an 'unapproved dinner' with the parents of his gymnasts and transporting his team in a car without parent approval to a social event at a local club, which the council said broke Child Safe Practice guidelines.
Mr Nylund has rejected the allegations made by the council.
The council wouldn't comment specifically on the matter. 'The City of Canada Bay does not comment on staffing matters,' a spokesperson said in a statement.
'Additionally, as this matter is subject to legal proceedings the City of Canada Bay is unable to provide comment and will continue to treat all information as confidential.'
Mr Nylund has taken the case to the Industrial Relations Commission. A four-day hearing will be held in mid-November.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12618729/gymnastics-coach-beautiful.html
***********************************************Soil carbon and its magic credits another offset industry fantasy
Australia’s carbon credit system has a new and rapidly growing source of flawed Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs). The “soil carbon” industry is small in scale, but it features the same problems as the increasingly discredited human-induced regeneration (HIR) industry which has produced tens of millions of carbon credits for carbon sequestration that there’s no evidence has taken place.
Soil carbon refers to increasing the storage of carbon in the soil, usually via increasing crop or pasture yields, and keeping the amount of carbon released from soil via decomposition to a minimum. Almost 480 soil carbon projects have been accredited under the government’s ACCU scheme, nearly two-thirds of which have commenced in the past two years, so the industry is in relative infancy, with only a few hundred thousand ACCUs issued.
But from later this decade, it will begin producing millions of ACCUs to be used as offset by heavy CO2 polluters continuing business-as-usual emissions.
A who’s who of Australian primary industries scientists recently outlined four critical failings of the current soil carbon methodology used by the Clean Energy Regulator.
Like HIR projects, changes in soil carbon levels are more likely to reflect external factors such as rainfall or drought than human interventions, which are the basis of crediting ACCUs. And when soil carbon levels fall due to drought or fire, for example, as with HIR projects, there is no requirement to hand back the generated ACCUs — unlike the emissions the ACCUs “offset”, which will remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years. The only recognition of soil carbon variability is a temporary 25% buffer that initially — but not permanently — reduces the number of ACCUs issued.
But in some ways, soil carbon is even riskier as a form of sequestration than HIR.
Independent measurement of soil carbon levels is far harder than assessing HIR, with project proponents able to pick the best samples from within projects to maximise results without detection, compared with satellite imagery that can identify tree regeneration for HIR projects. And assessment of soil carbon levels isn’t merely dependent on place but on time — projects commenced during drought will naturally record a significant increase in soil carbon levels after the end of drought and subsequent increases in rainfall.
As a long roster of scientists pointed out recently, some soil carbon projects have recorded increases in soil carbon far beyond those suggested as credible in scientific literature, including at unlikely soil depths. As the scientists note, the key problem is transparency, or its lack — just as with HIR.
“Scientists should be granted access to project data. Data could be used to improve models in order to distinguish between climate and management effects. This would ensure the method is fit for purpose,” they conclude.
As with HIR, however, there is minimal access to project data (the “voluntary” additional data provided by HIR proponents in response to criticism of those projects is nearly worthless) and efforts to provide rigorous independent verification meet with hostility from the Clean Energy Regulator and the industry.
The dismissal of strong evidence of the lack of integrity of HIR projects, and the lack of interest in identified and significant flaws in the soil carbon methodology suggests that the goal of the Clean Energy Regulator — acting under direction from successive governments — is less about the quality of ACCUs than the quantity, that the priority is producing a high volume of credits with a pretence of rigour that will be available to heavy emitters to continue polluting.
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11 October, 2023
A festival of hate from "Yes" voters
The Albanian should be ashamed at what he has unleashed in Australia by his racist proposal. A caring national leader would want his people to live in harmony with one another and Australians have been pretty good that way. Albo has instead unleashed hatred between people in his pre-occupation with race and his desire to favour forever one particular race
My only consolation is that the reports below seem isolated. When and where I voted recently (No!) everything was peaceful. The only holdup was that I had to wait a bit for my democracy sausage. And I enjoyed it undisturbed
Wild footage has captured the moment a Yes and No supporter clashed as tensions continue to flare over the Voice to Parliament referendum.
The pair scuffled at an information booth on Maryland Street at Stanthorpe, in the Southern Downs Region of Queensland, on September 30.
Footage showed a male Yes voter striking up a threatening pose as he towered over an elderly female No campaigner while children walked in the background.
The No supporter was wearing a board with the words: 'Reject racism. Vote No.'
The Yes voter nonsensically tells the woman that he is over a century old and has died numerous times.
'I'm over 110. I've died nine times in a row,' he claims before noticing that he is being filmed by another man.
The Yes supporter then turns on the camera man and tries to slap the camera out of the man's hand.
The cameraman warned: 'I'll deck you.' 'So this is what the Yes voters do,' he continued.
The footage was shared to Facebook where social media users were quick to condemn the Yes supporter.
'It's sad to see how some people behave, just because it doesn't sit with you the way others think and vote doesn't give you the right to behave like that,' one wrote.
In another video filmed at a Tawoomba pre-polling place, in Southern Queensland, MP Garth Hamilton is approached by an elderly man who proceeds to swear at him.
Mr Hamilton, who was campaigning for the No vote at the time, wishes the man a good day after he is sworn at, only for the man to turn around and continue shouting.
'I can't have a good day mate, I've already had a f***ing bad day and coming here to vote in something that is only a matter for First Australians is b***** wrong,' he snaps.
The elderly man walks away while continues to shout obscenities as Mr Hamilton calmly turns his back.
Other instances of violence have been reported around the country which have stemmed from the Voice.
A heated confrontation between Yes and No supporters at an early voting centre in Ipswich resulted in one man being hospitalised and another arrested.
The confrontation, initially a shouting match, escalated into a violent incident at the North Ipswich early voting centre in inner Brisbane.
Police claim that at around 11:30 am on October 3rd, a 30-year-old man engaged in a verbal argument with a 65-year-old man, which later turned physical when the younger man assaulted the older individual.
The 65-year-old man was taken to Ipswich Hospital for treatment.
The elderly man is understood to have suffered serious head injuries.
Another incident occurred when an Aboriginal man who went to vote early in Rockhampton, in Central Queensland, was humiliated by Yes campaigners in front of his wife and daughter.
'I went to vote early and as I'm going to the voting place, I was abused because I took a pamphlet from the No vote and I didn't take a pamphlet from the Yes vote,' he told Brisbane 4BC host Sofie Formica.
Three weeks ago, more than 1,000 No supporters visited the Adelaide Convention Centre to hear Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and other No campaigners speak at the Fair Australia rally.
But the event was gatecrashed by Yes campaigners who called attendees 'racist'.
Liberal senator Alex Antic filmed a crowd of protesters who screamed at him as he walked into the event.
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Reason record numbers of migrants are flooding into Australia is exposed by top government official
One of Australia's most powerful public servants has used predictions about an ageing population and a falling birth rate to justify record-high immigration.
Steven Kennedy, the secretary of the Treasury who also sits on the Reserve Bank board, slammed the notion a rapidly ageing population would be temporary.
'There is sometimes a perception that the ageing of population is a temporary phenomenon particularly as the baby boomers age,' he told the Committee for Economic Development of Australia think tank on Monday.
'However, this is not the case.'
Dr Kennedy quoted from Treasury's Intergenerational Report predicting the proportion of people aged 65 and over would climb to 23.4 per cent by 2062-63, up from 17.3 per cent during the last financial year.
The share of those aged 85 and over was predicted to surge to five per cent, up from 2.9 per cent.
This is occurring as Australia's fertility rate falls, where couples are on average having less than two children, or below replacement level.
'So long as the fertility rate is below replacement, successive generations will be smaller,' Dr Kennedy said.
Australia's cost of living crisis is set to worsen as the terrorist attacks on Israel push up crude oil prices - potentially sparking another rate rise with the local currency at the weakest level in a year.
Australia's fertility rate has been below 2.1 since the 1970s, with the 1.98 level of 2008-09 a temporary high point in recent years.
Higher immigration over recent decades has failed to stop Australia's population getting older, with Treasury's Centre for Population calculating the nation had a median age of 38 years and six months in mid-2022, up from 32 years and eight months three decades earlier.
Nonetheless, Dr Kennedy said Australia's population would be even older without the immigration surge of the past two decades.
'Higher migration has been the primary driver of the larger and younger population,' he said. 'Our population growth has been higher than all the G7 nations reflecting higher migration.'
A record 454,400 migrants moved to Australia in the year to March, with this figure including both the permanent intake of skilled migrants and long-term international students.
Australia's net overseas migration rate, based on arrivals minus permanent departures, is quadruple the 110,104 level of two decades ago.
An immigration surge, to make up for Australia's border closure in 2020 and 2021, has also coincided with a productivity plunge, where output for every worker is falling.
Productivity, based on gross domestic product per hour, fell by 3.6 per cent in 2022-23.
During the past decade, when 200,000 migrants have been moving to Australia a year, productivity growth has been stuck below one per cent.
This is a far cry from the two per cent pace of the 1990s, when annual immigration was mainly below 100,000.
But Dr Kennedy said an ageing population would mean weaker-than-average economic growth in decades to come.
'The lower growth reflects slower productivity and population growth, and reduced participation due to ageing,' he said.
'Projected slower productivity, population growth and lower participation is not unique to Australia. 'These outcomes are anticipated for most developed countries.'
Australia's population grew by 2.2 per cent in the year to March with immigration making up 80.7 per cent of the increase.
But Treasury is expecting that to slow to 1.1 per cent over the next 40 years, putting it below the 1.4 per cent level of the past four decades, as Australia's population grows from 26.5million to 40.5million by 2062–?63.
Treasury advocates higher immigration so it can reap more taxation revenue.
The Business Council of Australia, which represents big corporations, has lobbied for higher immigration since the borders were reopened in late 2021.
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‘Amplified pain syndrome’: Eleven-year-old boy’s horror diagnosis after Covid vaccine
The mother of an 11-year-old boy who suffered such a severe reaction to his Covid vaccine that he was sent home from hospital with highly addictive painkillers including oxycodone has slammed the “disgusting” treatment of her family by the government.
Alex, who asked not to use her real name to protect her son’s identity, says she was left “alone and isolated” caring for him for 18 months after he developed excruciating pain all over his body — which grew so intense he could barely walk or sleep and sometimes had to be carried to bed “screaming” — following his Pfizer vaccination in January last year.
Local GPs and doctors at their hospital in regional Victoria as well as specialists in Melbourne were left at a loss, unable to find the source of the boy’s symptoms, which would not respond even to powerful painkillers including oxycodone, gabapentin — used to treat nerve pain — and ketamine.
“The rheumatologist gave it an overall diagnosis of ‘diffuse amplified pain syndrome’, which is basically pain in the absence of causation or trauma — just blanket, unexplained pain,” Alex said.
“We stayed [in Melbourne] for a week while they ran so many tests — blood tests, pain specialists, rheumatologists, cardiac paediatricians, everything. He was put on so many drugs, so many painkillers. He was put on the highest dose of nerve medicine that he could have. He’s had two ketamine infusions. They gave him stuff to sleep at night because he’s got insomnia because he’s in so much constant pain.”
Discharge summaries provided to news.com.au show the boy, who was previously fit and healthy and enjoyed playing sports, was sent home from a Melbourne hospital last February on a cocktail of powerful medications.
“[Eleven-year-old male] presenting with diffuse pain post Covid vaccine on 21st January,” the notes read. “Reviewed by multiple GPs and ED — normal baseline bloods, normal troponins, normal ECGs and echo, no cardiac abnormality.”
The notes show he was reviewed by a pain consultant and started on medications, but the following day showed “little improvement” so the dosages were increased.
“Impression that ongoing physio will be beneficial to improve symptoms,” the summary said.
His symptoms barely improved for the rest of the year.
“It was nearly 12 months before he could walk like a normal person,” Alex said. “He didn’t go to school for the entirety of last year. He’s only now finally started to get better.”
Alex, who was ineligible for compensation under the federal government’s Covid Vaccine Claims Scheme, conceded “I haven’t got a letter that says this was caused by the vaccine”.
But she has no doubt it was linked. “He had the injection at 2.30pm,” she said.
“I’ve got two other kids, they were both fine. By 5.30pm he had chest pain, headache, said he was dizzy and felt kind of sick. We’d been told that was kind of normal, to give him some Panadol and Nurofen. By the time he woke up the next day he was in a lot more pain, his joints were hurting, he was struggling to be physically upright because he felt so dizzy and nauseated, his chest pain was unbearable.”
Over the next few days he was hospitalised twice due to the unrelenting pain. The second time he was given “the painkiller that goes up your nose” — fentanyl spray — which “calmed him down”.
“They sent a 10-year old home with Endone [oxycodone] because he was in so much pain,” Alex said.
Alex said her family has spent thousands of dollars on medical bills “trying to fix him”, but did not qualify for National Disability Insurance Scheme funding or carer’s payments because he “technically wasn’t sick enough”.
She wrote to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese about her situation and in July last year received a letter back from a senior Health Department official. “At this stage, a causal link between Amplified Pain Syndrome and the Covid-19 vaccines has not been established and it is not listed in the Product Information document for the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination,” the official wrote.
“As a result, Amplified Pain Syndrome is not a claimable condition under the Scheme.”
Alex has reported her son’s reaction both to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and to Pfizer’s vaccine safety division, but has heard little back. “[When] you have a bad reaction they’re like, oh no, you don’t exist, and that’s the end of it,” she said.
“No one cares. You don’t exist. My child who was crippled doesn’t exist, his pain doesn’t exist. It’s disgusting.”
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What's Gone Wrong With Arts Degrees?
What David Daintree remembers below is very similar to what I remember when I did my Arts degree in the '60s. And my regrets about what has been lost nowadays are similar. I wrote something similar to his comments in 2015
“If you had your time over again, would you do an arts degree?” That’s the question my wife put to me, and it got me thinking. It wasn’t easy to answer.
I really loved my degree in the late 60s and early 70s. It was such a joy to read what I wanted to read across such a wide range of topics.
Sure, there was a syllabus to follow and some of the material you’d prefer to avoid if you had your druthers, but there was also that feeling that disciplined and structured study was a good thing and that mental training was no less important than physical exercise.
It wasn’t just externally imposed discipline, either: true, your teachers chose the contents of your courses, but it was your choice to accept their challenge and enrol.
But things are different now. Arts faculties in universities throughout the world have strayed into the crazy world of identity. Gender and race now define us, and there’s almost no escaping from a focus on certain big-ticket issues such as Colour (black lives matter, colonialism), Gender (toxic masculinity, women’s studies), Sex (choose your own), Politics (left good, right very, very bad).
United, in partnership with this identity focus, is the post-modernist notion that rejects hierarchies of any kind. Shakespeare is not intrinsically better than Mickey Mouse, rap is as good as anything Mozart wrote (he was a white male, after all, even if he didn’t make old age), and stone-age art is right up there with Michelangelo.
These two modes of thinking (and I use the term pretty loosely) make a dangerous combination. Dangerous, that is, if you think that the major achievements of world culture have no special value and that our greatest literary and scientific achievements as a human race are of negligible worth.
Then and Now
I recall that as undergrads doing English I, we were expected to read the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (in Middle English, too, not in translation), four Shakespeare plays, a range of novels by authors male and female from Fielding and Richardson up to the mid-20th century, and a good selection of poetry from across the range, though focusing on the romantics.
In later years, the gaps were filled in: more Shakespeare (of course), Milton, the metaphysical poets, Pope and Dryden, and lots more novels. It was a wonderful spread.
The idea was that after three years, you would have sampled and tested for yourself the lofty peaks of English literature and many of the less exalted but important foothills as well.
Nowadays, you can do three years of undergraduate English without more than a glance at Shakespeare and the others who were once thought great. You can specialise before you can generalise. You can even do a degree in Music in some universities now without it being thought necessary to read Western notation.
In general, this deplorable tendency to deny greatness and exalt mediocrity has so far been limited to the arts faculties.
If your goal is to read Medicine or Engineering, then universities are still the best or the only places to go, though we are now starting to hear stories of architecture departments focusing on indigenous design, whatever that can mean, and Law faculties de-emphasising the study of jurisprudence and the philosophical underpinnings of law.
How many law students nowadays, I wonder, would appreciate the Christian basis of the Common Law?
I had the very good fortune to serve for several years as president of Sydney’s Campion College, Australia’s first dedicated liberal arts college.
Campion offered only one bachelor’s degree at that time, focusing on what was described as the “core” subjects—literature, history, philosophy, and theology. There were few choices within the degree—all students studied all four subjects diachronically.
This meant that Plato, Aristotle, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Tacitus were studied at depth in year one; the second year focused on the Middle Ages, third year centred on the moderns. I thought and still think that it was the best arts degree in the country.
By contrast, art students at mainstream universities are embarrassed by the awesomely wide choice of subjects—but how do they choose? There are so many options now, some tightly focused on women’s issues, race relations, or colonialism. Some apparently frivolous, such as rock music studies (I guess somebody has to do them) or tourism.
Are these worthy of a university? Or is it that universities have to offer them to educate or entertain throngs of people who have been told that everyone is entitled to a university degree in something or other?
Choosing more or less randomly from disparate subjects means that the broad overview is impossible unless one has the wit or is very well advised to choose wisely.
Usually, there is often no connectivity or context. History units are studied in isolation. How can you understand Australian history without a background in British history? How can you understand British History without some reckoning with Greece and Rome? How can you do any of these things without first learning to read, write, and think?
The big lie is that standards haven’t dropped. They have.
In a world obsessed with false notions of “equality”, there are now too many sociologists and criminologists and far too few apprentices and tradies to do the real work of running the country.
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson once said that the arts faculties of the mega-universities are no longer fit for purpose. He thought that the humane arts would survive and thrive only in small organisations, such as the liberal arts colleges, specialised institutes, and “classical” high schools that are now springing up all over the world. Every little bit counts.
I treasure a remark of Edmund Burke: “No man ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-gone-wrong-with-arts-degrees-5485769
************************************10 October, 2023
Angry Leftist assaults elderly man over "Voice"
There has been a huge outpouring of hate and abuse from the Left against "No" voters, so this was probably inevitable. It is a vivid illustration of how hate-motivated Leftists are. I note that as the hate-speech has ramped up, the lower the "Yes" vote has become. As the Left revealed what they really are, normal people became repulsed. Much of the "No" vote was probably produced by the angry Leftists themselves. By their obnoxious words and behaviour they discredited their cause.
A man has been charged with serious assault and another taken to hospital after a shouting match between Yes and No voters at the Ipswich early voting centre descended into violence.
It comes as thousands of Queenslanders descend on pre-polling booths across the state ahead of Saturday’s referendum.
The Courier-Mail can reveal the serious incident at the North Ipswich early voting centre led to Queensland Police charging a 30-year-old Raceview man.
Police allege about 11.30am on October 3 the 30-year-old man entered into a verbal altercation with a 65-year-old man, before he physically assaulted him.
“It will be further alleged the Raceview man initially left the scene before returning a short time later, where he was taken into police custody,” a police spokesman said.
He has since been charged with serious assault and is due to appear in Ipswich Magistrates Court on November 17.
The 65-year-old man was taken to Ipswich Hospital for treatment. It is understood the man suffered injuries to his skull.
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Reflections of an old ‘No’ voter
Lindsay Brien below claims that he is an "indigenous" Australian because he and his recent forebears were born in Australia. He has the Latin on his side. The word is from the Latin and literally means "born inside". He was clearly born inside Australia. I too think that where you are born should usually be a critical identifier
Initially, I would like to acknowledge the contributions, however unwitting, to the ‘No’ campaign of Pearson, Burney, Davis, and Langton.
I am a septuagenarian and my ancestors were Caucasian of Northern European Origin even though I am at least 3rd generation indigenous born, meaning that my children are 4th generation indigenous and my grandchildren 5th generation indigenous Australians.
I remember 1963 and how moved and supportive I was (and still am) of Martin Luther King Junior’s I Have a Dream speech which included the classic line: ‘…that one day my children will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.’
Apart from the ‘Yes’ campaign’s assertion that I must be either racist and/or stupid, the reasons I intend to vote ‘No’ at the Voice referendum on October 14 are as follows.
If passed, the Voice to Parliament will create a race-based institution that will grant some people more power than other Australian citizens.
If the new body is not consulted before the Parliament or Executive Government pass laws or make decisions, those laws and decisions could be overruled by the High Court.
A ‘Voice’ institution could be created by Parliament right now, without the detrimental problems referred to in above.
If the referendum question was altered, as it easily could be, to purely acknowledge in the preamble of the Constitution that the Aboriginal people were the first inhabitants of the continent for tens of thousands of years it would, I believe, have overwhelming support and easily pass.
There are already 11 Aboriginal members of Parliament. As has been pointed out elsewhere that means in relation to their percentage of the population they are over-represented in Parliament. Memo to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the ‘Yes’ vibe crowd, to paraphrase Johnny Farnham: ‘They’re the Voice, try to understand it, we’re all Australian no matter where our forbears come from.’
In addition to their parliamentary representatives, Close the Gap bodies, and the National Indigenous Australians Agency, government websites reveal that there are 3,278 Aboriginal corporations, 243 Native Title bodies, 48 Land Councils, 35 Regional Councils, 145 health organisations, and 12 culturally important Indigenous days.
Government records also reveal that Australian government expenditure per person is twice as much for Aboriginal Australians as it is for other Australians.
There does not appear to be unanimous support for the Voice from all Aboriginal groups. The elite Aboriginal spokespersons are all in favour of the ‘Yes’ campaign, but others like Anthony Dillon from Victoria, Warren Mundine from NSW, and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price all intend to vote ‘No’. I have also recently seen interviewed on Sky News Australia elders from Uluru, Western Australia, and South Australia who all say that they will vote ‘No’, as will their peoples.
It could open a Pandora’s box and be the next step to what a number of the Aboriginal elite have said are their ultimate goals; a treaty, sovereignty, and reparations.
Despite the recent protestations of the Prime Minister that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is just a one-page good vibe recognition, it has become quite apparent, from the media revelations about past statements from the drafters, that the accompanying pages to the one-page summary, whether those pages be 15, 16 or 25, that the Voice is the first step towards a Treaty, a Makaratta truth-telling commission and then reparations as a percentage of GDP being paid to Aboriginal Australians by other Australians.
Albo hasn’t read the attachments, why would he?
With Treaty and reparations, the Pandora’s Box really explodes. Who is eligible to receive the reparations and who must pay them? Do we have self-identification as the criteria or will there need to be mandatory DNA tests to determine Aboriginality?
The calculations of reparations becomes even more difficult when we factor in the majority of Aboriginal people being of mixed racial descent.
It was somewhat ironic that the Prime Minister described the ‘No’ campaign to be fearmongers and Chicken Littles and that they should be more respectful. In early April in the Weekend Australian Marcia Langton warned, ‘Vote ‘No’ and you won’t get a welcome to country again.’ Surely, joked many, that is an offer too good to refuse?
Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop, and Matt Kean, those staunch conservative members of the Liberal Party, are hopping on the ‘Yes’ bandwagon. I am sure their virtue signalling has convinced a lot of undecided voters to vote ‘Yes’, especially seeing the photographs in the press the day after the Prime Minister’s announcement in Adelaide confirming the Referendum date as October 14. We had Ms Bishop marching down the main street of Perth, proudly wearing a ‘Yes’ T-Shirt beaming a grin from ear to ear.
Finally, the clincher for me was the brilliant presentation by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price at the National Press Club on September 14 when a journalist from The Guardian asked, ‘Do you believe colonisation continues to have an impact on some Indigenous Australians?’
Jacinta replied, ‘No I don’t think so… To be honest with you, a positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, and readily available food. Everything that my grandfather had when he was growing up, when he first met white fellas in his adolescence, we now have. Otherwise he would have had to live off the land… Aboriginal Australians, many of us, have the same opportunities as all other Australians and probably one of the greatest systems in the world, in terms of democratic structure, in comparison to other countries. It is why migrants flock to Australia, to call Australia home, because the opportunity exists for all Australians. But if we keep telling Aboriginal people they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency and giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being, to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that is what I refuse to do.’
Not surprisingly, the room full of Woke left-wing journalists were bowled over. The Moderator channelled the famous line from the Life of Brian ‘…all right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the freshwater system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’ when he tried to cross-examine Ms Price with the following question:
‘I have talked to Indigenous people and I am sure others have too who talk about generations of trauma among Indigenous Australians as a result of colonisation, whether that means colonisation continues now is probably a separate question. Would you accept now that there have been generations of that trauma as a result of that history?’
Jacinta hit that juicy waist-high full toss for six with the following reply, ‘Well I guess that would mean that those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought here in chains as convicts were also suffering from intergenerational trauma, so I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma.’
Checkmate.
It was interesting to observe that Linda Burney’s appearance, not long before Jacinta’s, was held in the main auditorium. Jacinta’s was held in a small and cramped annex because of renovations being carried out in the main auditorium.
About two weeks later, Warren Mundine appeared at the National Press Club, also in the cramped annex. Mundine pointed out that over 50 per cent of Australia is already under Native Title and that if pending claims were successful then over 70 per cent would be under Native Title.
My dream is that my grandchildren will grow up in a nation that all citizens rights, including voting rights, are determined not by the colour of their skin but by their Australian citizenship. So for all of the above reasons that is why I will be voting ‘No’ on October 14.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/reflections-of-an-old-no-voter
**************************************The girl from Sderot
A heartfelt comment from Rowan Dean that I wholly applaud
Israel is at war. In 2014 I visited Israel, thanks to the NSW Board of Deputies and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), on a trip with a group of fellow journalists from a variety of media outlets.
The trip was wonderful, as well as extremely informative. We saw the most incredible sites and travelled the length and breadth of this amazing land.
We floated aloft in the Dead Sea. We flew in a light aircraft over Tel Aviv and the Sea of Galilee, and even towards the Golan Heights. We went to the militarised zones and the border with Lebanon overlooking the Bekaa Valley. We went into Romolo. We dined in the home of a Druze widow. We went to the deeply moving Holocaust Remembrance Centre at Yad Vashem, and spent an hilarious afternoon with a firebrand member of the Knesset. We saw so much that makes the land of Israel special. We saw the settlements, the wall, spent a morning with the PLA in Ramallah and of course visited Bethlehem, Jerusalem, wandered into the desert, visited the Australian memorial at Beersheba, and traversed much of the Holy Land.
But the one thing that touched me more than anything else, that has stayed with me ever since, was our trip to the small town of Sderot in Southern Israel, only a stone’s throw, forgive the pun, from the heavily fortified border with Gaza.
The young woman we met there, a student whose name I don’t remember, showed us around. In fact, when we returned to Australia I wrote an article about the girl from Sderot.
This young student who, at a moment’s notice had taken the day off her studies to show us around her town because our guide was ill, started off by taking us to the unusual and somewhat disquieting re-enforced children’s playground that doubles as a bomb shelter.
Often these kids and families only have 15 seconds to seek shelter between the sound of sirens and rockets from Hamas crashing down on them. She showed us the massive collection of shells from deadly rockets that have been sent over from Gaza in the intervening years aiming to terrify and terrorise the population.
One of this girl’s best friends died when she threw herself on top of her younger brother to protect him from one of those shells.
As a child, she had grown up in Gaza – an area completely out of bounds to her despite being only a few miles away. She told us how, as a child, her best friends were the local Arab kids. But when Israel handed Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 – foolishly, in my opinion – her family was amongst the nearly 10,000 Jewish settlers expelled from 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank where they had made their homes and livelihoods – never to return.
As the girl from Sderot took us around the town of Sderot, including to the very spot – and indeed the very sofa – that featured in a disgracefully antisemitic cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald that year… The girl from Sderot talked passionately and endlessly about her great dream to devote her life to studying Arabic and learning the ways of Palestinian culture so that she could help bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians and reunite herself with the friends of her childhood in Gaza.
She herself did not hate those who made life in Sderot terrifying every single day because she passionately believed that peace would prevail if enough people wanted it to.
Last night I thought of the girl from Sderot for the first time in many years. I have no idea what she is doing now – whether she graduated or if she got the job she wanted.
I thought about her on Saturday night when we witnessed the horror of the atrocities being perpetuated by the evil butchers of Hamas on elderly Jews, on children, and above all on women and girls in southern Israel, around and in Sderot.
For decades now the left in Australia, the left in Britain, the left in America and throughout Europe have relentlessly sought to demonise the Jews and delegitimise the state of Israel. They have pretended that there is some kind of moral equivalency between terrorism and self-defence and grotesquely distorted the history of the region in order to do so.
The left has falsely claimed that Israel is some kind of imperialist occupier and the Palestinians are the victims of colonial oppression.
Let me be perfectly blunt – and I apologise if I offend you – but all of you who have indulged in that sort of grotesque, dinner party antisemitism. Who have slyly denigrated Israel and the Jews. Who have prattled on about the ‘noble Palestinian cause’. Who have dismissively sneered at Donald Trump’s amazing Abraham Accords which brought peace for the first time. And those who celebrated the election of the obnoxious Biden regime with its repugnant dealings with Iran. Those of you who applauded Biden’s sick surrender to the Taliban and the total betrayal of the women and girls of Afghanistan. And all of you snivelling Australian Labor and Greens politicians and left-wing activists with your pro-Palestinian flags who have allowed Australian taxpayer money to be poured into the coffers of Palestinian terror organisations. And all you media outlets – both here and abroad – including ‘our’ ABC – who have always twisted the headlines so that Israel appears to be the aggressor. They have emboldened the terrorists by making excuses for their depraved actions.
Jewish blood is on your hands. You have encouraged American and Western weakness and denigrated a great democratic country. You have literally hung Israel out to dry for decades.
Donald Trump warned only a few weeks ago that the $6 billion Biden gave to Iran would be used to fund Palestinian terrorism. Looks like, as usual, Trump was right.
We have witnessed some of the most horrific and barbaric scenes of our lifetimes as Palestinian terrorists butcher innocent civilians. Kidnap and torture innocent Jews. Desecrate young Jewish bodies in macabre evil celebrations in the streets of Gaza. It is horrific, yet this is what the West has been encouraging for decades with the boycott movements, with endless antisemitic actions, dehumanising Jews, demonising Israel, and leaving Hamas and the Iranian-backed terrorists to believe they can get away with murder.
You can have your political differences, of course. But Palestinian terror is evil, pure and simple. Yet they have – for decades – been indulged and I would argue even been encouraged by the leftwing political parties of the West including our current Labor government. To their eternal shame. Penny Wong urged the Israeli government to ‘show restraint’ at this time where maximum retaliation is required, yet she showed no restraint whatsoever when she restored $10 million of Australian taxpayer funds – your money – going to the Palestinian authorities.
Let me be clear. There is no two-state solution. You are fantasists and fools if you think there is. And your stupidity costs lives. There never was the remotest genuine possibility of a two-state solution.
I have sat in the bowels of the Palestinian authority in Ramallah on that very same journalist trip with a group of Australian journalists where an answer to my question about how many Jews would exist in the two-states – we were told by a Palestinian authority that the Palestinian cause requires the removal of all Jews from Palestine and the removal of all but ‘a handful of Jews’ from whatever you want to call Israel. Their words. The Palestinian authorities. Not mine. And I have a dozen journalists who sat there next to me who heard them but didn’t report them. I did, in The Spectator Australia.
Well, eradicating Jews is clearly what the Gaza terrorists have in mind today.
Let’s pray for all the people of Israel. Pray that Jewish children will not grow up permanently scarred by the horror they are now witnessing. Pray that Netanyahu can restore a sense of peace as swiftly as possible with a minimum amount of bloodshed. But I also urge the Israelis to do what they should have done long ago – ignore the hand-wringing of the West’s pathetic liberals and leftists. Take back Gaza and destroy, once and for all, the evil entity that is Hamas. Crush those individuals who wish you nothing but harm. For the safety of your people. For the young women, the children, the elderly – for the survival of the Jewish race – they must beat these terrorists.
I pray for Israel, and I pray for the girl from Sderot.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/the-girl-from-sderot/
*********************************************Flocks of Sheep Roam Our University Campuses
Australian universities are now decidedly devoted to passing as many students as possible.
Passing is relatively easy, considering students typically only have to satisfy 50 percent of the requirements on their exams or assignments to pass. Of course, this is a very low benchmark.
If students are allocated a mark of 49, 48, or even 47, they are bound to use the ubiquitous appeal processes to get over the line.
They have access to a swath of bureaucratic solutions, ranging from essay or assignment resubmission to supplementary, or deferred examinations to achieve success.
Many students ask for preferential treatment, examination concessions, or apply for extensions. They may also request an acknowledgment of a “disability,” and some might even resort to illegal means.
It is not uncommon for academics to pass those who should fail because it saves them the unpleasantness associated with appeals procedures and form filling.
To obviate the need for a long drawn-out, and often acrimonious, appeals procedure, it is often convenient for academics to give their failing students a 45.
Yet hard evidence, for example in the form of directions from the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee, confirms that universities will also lean over backward to pass students who clearly shouldn't be in tertiary education in the first place.
This is a consequence of increased government oversight and novel legislative requirements for universities to reduce the rate of failure for students.
In a sobering article, Emeritus Professor Steven Schwartz argues that our politicians and universities “look forward to offering voters a world where failure ceases to exist and success requires no effort. A world in which every student gets a degree just for showing up.”
It is an impassioned plea for society to recognise the salutary impact of “failure” because successful people are those who are able to learn from and outlast failure.
Indeed, how is it possible for people to face the harsh realities of life, if they have never learned to live with, confront, and conquer failure?
Professor Andrew Norton argues that, although the government has correctly identified the university student failure rate as a real problem, “its heavy-handed regulation would create unnecessary red tape for universities.”
Nevertheless, the universities’ response to the rate of student failure (and attrition) is often merely a band-aid solution.
Thinking for Yourself Denied on Campus
The reality is that some students might not really be able to read or write English well enough to benefit from, or contribute to, their education because they lack “critical thinking” skills.
Although some of these students are undoubtedly devoted and hard-working, their inability to think critically unfavourably impacts their studies.
While some universities pride themselves on teaching such skills, these efforts are in vain if students lack the capacity or the interest to benefit from it.
Critical thinking is a disciplined way of reasoning. It involves analysis, evaluation, and reflection.
However, on most campuses, critical thinking, which endures only in an unrestricted and uncensored free speech environment, is frequently curtailed by university administrations that impose conformist behaviour, supposedly to preserve “diversity.”
For example, on Australian campuses, students are afraid to criticise The Voice (and other social engineering developments).
Critical thinking is thus often seen as the natural enemy of the kind of “diversity” that universities impose on students.
In this context, it is useful to remember the words of John Stuart Mill, the 19th-century philosopher and politician, who wrote in his celebrated essay “On Liberty”:
"The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint … and as the power is not declining, but growing unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase."
Mill’s analysis also aptly describes the precarious world of our universities.
He derides the sheep-like conformity, which now enables university academics, administrative apparatchiks, and indoctrinated students to impose their freedom-unfriendly views and arbitrary rules on people.
According to Mill, “The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
Surely, there should be an attitude of “openness” that fosters free speech, which is a pre-condition for critical thinking to flourish on our campuses, even if the dark forces of oppression seek to impose a preferred ideology on students.
Undoubtedly, the promotion of critical thinking is the right recipe to combat the ogre of students’ failure and to restore a sense of pride and achievement in those who are seeking knowledge and skills to enhance their lives.
It is a way to overcome an over-reliance on fuzzy feelings or emotions, to avoid conforming dogma and peer pressure, and blatant indoctrination of young impressionable minds on Australian campuses.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/flocks-of-sheep-roam-our-university-campuses-5502834
************************************9 October, 2023
Will the independents again save truckies from turmoil?
One of the most feared anti-small business bodies ever conceived in Australia, the infamous so called Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal is being brought back to life in the ALP’s proposed new industrial relations legislation.
Around 2016 in its first incarnation the tribunal threatened to ruin 35,000 people, mostly men, who drove their own long-haul trucks.
They had borrowed around $15bn from Australian banks and other financiers to fund their vehicles. Most of the loans were also secured on the family home.
The tribunal set about destroying them including making it necessary to sell the family home to pay bank debts.
Fast forward to 2023 and there are now around 50,000 long-haul truck owners who will owe twice the 2016 amount on their trucks, again secured on family homes.
As I describe below, thanks to the courageous effort of the Senate independents in 2016 the 35,000 truck owners were saved. But not before five took their own lives after being subjected to the tribunal brutality.
Now in 2023, a revamped Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal has even wider powers and once again it will take courageous action by the independents in the Senate to protect current truck owners homes and livelihoods plus the total Australian community from the higher transport costs that will be part of the tribunal’s agenda.
My 2016 commentaries and those of Katrina Grace Kelly (she was then called Grace Collier) exposed the appalling acts of the tribunal and, with others, we played a role in having it abolished thus limiting the impacts of its destructive acts which not only would have exploded truck owner bankruptcies (and suicides) but would have boosted Australian transport costs by 30-40 per cent.
We don’t know how a 2023 Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal will act but given it is set to have even wider powers and carries the same name as the previous tribunal, its highly likely that we can expect either a repeat of its 2016 actions or different actions that have the same impact.
To understand how the tribunal persecuted truckies in 2016 I need describe the structure of parts of the long-haul road transport industry.
Owner drivers contract for major transport operators but they also work on their own and for a multitude of smaller transport companies. This mixture has given Australia one of the most efficient and safe road transport networks in the world and has helped make our mining and agriculture industries world leaders.
But the Transport Workers Union was unhappy in 2016 (and remains unhappy in 2023) because too many owner drivers are not members of the union.
It was alleged that some owner drivers were taking drugs and driving their vehicles for long periods without a break.
And so, in around 2012 the Gillard government set up the Road Transport Remuneration Tribunal. It took a few years for the administrative structures to be put in place and for the “right” people to be selected to run the system.
Meanwhile new technologies and systems had been developed to make sure people were not driving for too long and were not taking substances.
The 2016 tribunal was totally unnecessary for that function.
Its aim was to gain TWU members and boost the margins of the large trucking operators – it was planning a union-employer anti-competitive cartel.
Rather than embrace technologies, the tribunal decided the best way to “stop” owner drivers from driving too long and taking drugs was to make them charge more for their services.
But no such charging instructions were given to companies using TWU employees enabling the majors, with their TWU employees, to undercut the owner drivers and put them out of business.
Katrina Grace Kelly explained how “farmer Keith” was paying $175 for an owner driver to pick up a few head of cattle.
After April 4, 2016 that owner driver was legally forced to charge $784 to pick up the cattle – more than four times the original “fair” price.
And if owner drivers and non TWU members did not charge $784 they could be prosecuted by the Fair Work ombudsman and be fined up to $54,000.
But if the farmer hired a company using TWU member drivers then that transport operator had no such price restrictions and could charge the old “fair” price of $175 but was more likely to charge twice that level at $350 which was still less than half the tribunal required rate for non TWU owner drivers.
It was absolutely outrageous and was clearly aimed to force the owner drivers out of business or at least make them part of the TWU.
And of course the above 2016 plan was set to be replicated around the nation, meaning skyrocketing transport costs in agriculture, mining and manufacturing throughout most of the land.
Naturally, in 2023 there are lots of assurances and mutterings that such actions will never be repeated by the new version of the tribunal.
But a version, albeit different, will happen again. That’s why the tribunal as been set up.
In 2016 the truckies realised that if thousands of truckies were sent to the wall by the tribunal’s actions, the market for trucks would slump forcing them to sell family homes.
But luck saved them. The Coalition came to power and Malcolm Turnbull was PM.
Urgent legislation passed the Lower House to abolish the tribunal but it required support of the independents in the Senate.
The nation (and the truckies) are indebted to the 2016 independents (alphabetical order): Bob Day, Jacqui Lambie, Glenn Lazarus, David Leyonhjelm, John Madigan, Dio Wang, and Nick Xenophon. They saved many lives and enhanced Australia.
Now it is set to happen all over again.
At this stage very few truckies realise the Albanese government is setting them up for slaughter.
Once again the nation (and the truckies) will depend on a new group independents for help and we need to hope that, like their predecessors, they will not let Australia down.
Jacqui Lambie was part of the 2016 greats so knows what is at stake. The other 2023-24 potential heroes are Ralph Babet, Pauline Hanson, David Pocock, Malcolm Roberts, Lidia Thorpe, and Tammy Tyrell.
They have vastly different views on many issues but as in 2016 independents can be united in the national interest.
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Victorian Bar divided over constitutional diversity clause
Discord has erupted in the Victorian Bar over proposed constitutional amendments to include a “diversity clause” in its governing document, with dozens of barristers fearing the move would make gender and race quotas inevitable, and members financially liable for employment discrimination claims.
The amendments would make it so the defined purpose of the Bar was no longer to promote the administration of justice, uphold the rule of law and manage the state’s Bar Roll, but also “actively promote and foster a diverse and inclusive membership that reflects the society it serves”.
It would also make it the purpose of the Bar “to promote and support the physical and mental wellbeing of barristers, including by preventing and redressing discrimination on the basis of legally protected attributes and unlawful harassment”.
Lana Collaris, a barrister of 15 years, said the amendments were “underpinned by the political philosophy of victimhood, and the belief that the Bar is a hateful place were discrimination is rife, systemic and incurable”.
“The purposes define why we exist,” she said. “Once you start tinkering with that, that is a big deal. These are not purposes of the Bar. The Bar exists to serve the administration of justice in Victoria and create a body of competent barristers.”
Ms Collaris said the amendments would “ground an argument” for quotas to be embedded in the Reader’s Course – the exam barristers must take to join the Bar.
“Not just the Reader’s Course, but the silk selection process,” she said. “They’re taking everything away from merit.
“Another barrister … said members of society have their liberty at stake. They might have their life savings in a barrister, they should be able to have the best. Barristers should be appointed on merit.
“These kind of amendments can change that.”
The proposition comes weeks after a mock notice was pinned to a lift in Melbourne’s Owen Dixon Chambers advertising the sham “Men in Law Awards” which included categories for “most woke counsel” and “best virtue-signalling counsel”.
At the time, the Women’s Barristers Association panned the notice as an attack on female members, saying “while the Bar has taken great strides towards equality and inclusion, challenges remain”.
In May, the Victorian Bar was divided over whether to support the Indigenous voice to parliament, leading to an all-in vote. Nearly 60 per cent of the barristers agreed to support the voice.
All 2200 Victorian Bar members were last week sent an email announcing an annual general meeting would be held this Wednesday to vote on proposed diversity amendments, which need 75 per cent support to get over the line.
Following that announcement, Ms Collaris sent an email to many Bar members urging them to vote down the proposition, and saying barristers could become financially liable for members’ discrimination claims if the changes were waved through.
Barristers pay a fee to be part of the association, and Ms Collaris fears that money could be used to fight off financial compensation claims that could arise if the new diversity clause is not properly complied with.
“The proposed amendments are divisive and will only serve to divide a Bar that is already inclusive,” she wrote. “The constitution is a contract between the Bar and its members.
“The proposed amendments create a new contractual obligation binding upon the Bar that could be sued upon by any member, with ensuing litigation being funded from the pockets of all members, including those who are completely removed from the circumstances of the litigation.”
Ms Collaris said she received more than 50 positive responses to her email. Bar Council president Sam Hay KC, in his weekly In Brief newsletter circulated to barristers, said the amendments had come from the association’s equality and diversity committee.
He said the Bar Council had made the decision to put the proposed amendments to a vote.
“Whatever your position on the proposed amendment, I urge you to have your say by attending the AGM or completing a proxy form,” he said.
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Conservative think tank chief slams claims Australia will be seen as racist in the event of a No vote
Over a week out from voting day, a leader of a right-wing think tank has rejected claims Australia will be seen as a racist nation if the Voice referendum fails.
Tom Switzer, Executive Director of the Centre of Independent Studies, has argued a No vote at the October 14 referendum won’t result in any lasting reputational damage to the country, suggesting Australia will remain a “tolerant” society.
“If the people reject the Voice, it’s a fair bet this nation will remain a tolerant, welcoming liberal democracy and civilised society, where the rule of law applies equally to every citizen,” he said in a video shared to social media.
“Imperfect as we certainly are, Australia is one of the world’s most successful nations … It requires a great deal of something – self-hatred, guilt, sense of inferiority or just fashionable foolishness – not to recognise that fact.”
Mr Switzer also said the world is preoccupied with its own “far more serious problems” to concern itself with Australia’s referendum.
“When we do attract attention abroad, more often than not it is for some natural calamity, a sporting, cultural or entertainment achievement, or for our charms as a holiday destination.”
It comes after Mr Switzer earlier disputed claims by barrister Geoffrey Robertson that “if No wins, the world will see us as racist and ignorant”.
In a piece for the Sydney Morning Heraldlast month, Mr Roberston wrote: “If Australians vote No, we will appear to outside observers as racist, in the sense of denying to an ethnic minority an opportunity for advancement to which they are entitled.”
Rejecting the assertion, Mr Switzer said it was both “desperate” and a “little short of disgraceful” to “vilify decent people as racist and ignorant, clouding the issue in the hope that the nation will vote according to emotion and not reason”.
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Another good reason to vote No: Imams to preach Yes in mosques across Australia
Hundreds of Islamic leaders will tell their communities to vote for the Voice as a way to bring Australia closer to peace and justice, launching the message after calls from other faith groups and ethnic communities to back the change.
The move steps up the Yes campaign in a key community ahead of the final week of early voting, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expected to attend a mosque in western Sydney on Friday to hear the message.
The Australian National Imams Council has agreed on the message and asked all imams and other speakers to dedicate their Friday address, or khutbah, to the call to support the recognition of First Australians and setting up the Voice.
The Voice has formal support from many peak groups, ranging from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to the Anglican Church, the Uniting Church, the Hindu Council and the National Sikh Council of Australia, although there have been tensions over some church stances.
The message to be delivered at mosques on Friday has the support of the Grand Mufti of Australia, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, as well as the president of the Australian National Imams Council, Sheikh Shadi Alsuleiman.
The latest census found there were more than 800,000 followers of Islam in Australia, about 3 per cent of the population. The imams’ council expects the new message to be preached at 80 per cent or more of the nation’s 250 mosques.
“The Voice will contribute to shaping a positive future for all Australians, and Australian Muslims should be a part of this significant change,” says the message, which is recommended to imams to include in their sermons.
“It is essential to acknowledge that the First Nations people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes, were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands for thousands of years.”
Linking the issue to the Islamic faith, the sermon says the Prophet Muhammad had a key message for followers about “supporting the weak, helping the oppressed, and spreading peace” and this meant advocating for those who needed and deserved help.
With polls showing majority support for a No vote, the Yes23 campaign has been seeking to mobilise local groups to swing support towards change before ballots are counted on October 14, with faith and ethnic groups seen as key to this outcome.
But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has also made a direct plea to Australians from migrant backgrounds to vote against the Voice, saying it would divide people by their ancestry and undermine equality for multicultural communities.
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8 October, 2023
Landlord's surprisingly direct response to a tenant after finding out about their complaints on a rental property
I can heartily endorse this story. I once owned property interstate so relied on agents to look after them. The agents were shockers. On one occasion a storm blew a hole in a garage roof. The agent collected the insurance money to fix it but did nothing to the roof. It was only when I visited months later that I found the hole still there. Agents are lazy !@##$%$%s in my experience
A landlord has given a surprisingly direct response after finding out about their tenants' complaints about a rental property, saying he didn't know about the problems.
The East Melbourne house's multiple defects - the leaks started four days after the tenants moved in - were revealed in a video by tenants' advocate Jordie van den Berg.
But the owner saw the video and replied under the posting that 'Funny enough I'm the landlord that owns this property, before you go blaming me for everything please listen to my side.
'I'm very sorry for everything that has happened but I'm currently rectifying all the issues on the house now, I honestly didn't know about this.'
The infuriated owner later added that he 'Will not be using [the agent] anymore and will be making sure my brothers, family and friends don't use them either for their investments.'
Mr van den Berg said that 'This is what's wrong with the real estate industry. Turns out the landlord didn't know about the issues...
'How is a landlord supposed to rectify issues they don't know about because an agency isn't doing their job?'
The tenants' rights activist, who is also a lawyer, is so passionate about the housing issue that he has set up a website to expose terrible rentals called s***rentals.org.
'It's not the first time that the landlord has become aware of issues at a property due to a video that I've made, the real estate agency hasn't told them,' Mr van den Berg told Daily Mail Australia.
'I suspect it's going to happen a lot more now with the new website, because (of agencies that) don't do their jobs.'
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Teaching in Australia has become a refuge for the least able
Why? Because anybody with options would not want to spend their days in front of an unruly mob
Problems with the Australian school system are a favourite topic for our newspapers, especially around the time of the final examinations for school leavers. The Sydney Morning Herald in particular publishes the notorious leagues tables on which many parents rely in making school choices, but at the same time loves to expose scandals and extravagant spending at big private schools and regularly gives a forum to writers demanding an end to funding for private education.
The problems are real, and it is wrong that parents should have to pay so much for a good education; it would obviously be preferable to have a high-quality public educational network such as the French lycée system in which I spent the first four years of my own schooling. But that is not going to happen in Australia; we are too resentful of excellence. Our education system, meanwhile, is dominated by bureaucrats and pseudo-academics with little idea of the real purpose of education.
Mediocrity starts with the abysmally low entry requirements for teacher training courses; individuals can be admitted with low ATARs. A report from the University of Sydney a few years ago showed that half the student intake into teaching degrees in NSW and the ACT in 2015 had ATARs below 50. Can we be surprised then if the performance of our schools in international rankings has been in steady decline in recent years? Or is it any wonder that the profession of teaching, so vital to a successful society, is no longer held in the high regard it once enjoyed?
But the poor quality of the intake is just part of the problem. Equally to blame is the training students get once they are admitted to teaching courses, which ostensibly emphasises techniques of teaching rather than subject content, and yet seems to leave young teachers unprepared for the realities of classroom management. And all of this is based on a body of academic theory that is in reality an intellectual pyramid scheme, in which each vacuous and jargon-ridden piece of writing cites 10 others of the same kind and quality.
Finally there is the educational bureaucracy. As school standards have declined, these bodies have relentlessly increased the demands they make on teachers, from tabulations of so-called educational “standards” to regular “professional development” and annual “professional reflection” forms – all of which are frustrating and distracting to good teachers and of course incapable of making the bad ones any better than they are. The fact that the increase in bureaucratic demands has coincided with an even more dramatic decline in educational outcomes should tell us something; but the response of the “academics” and the bureaucrats is always to do more of what doesn’t work.
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Greenies silent on planned bulldozing of ‘koala central’ for huge wind farm
Koala habitats will be ripped apart to build wind farms in central Queensland so state and federal Labor governments can chase their fantasy of meeting useless, costly and unobtainable renewable energy targets.
If you need any more evidence that green zealotry has entered the delusional phase, this is it in my opinion.
Federal and state environment ministers Tanya Plibersek and Leanne Linard and previous enviro minister Meaghan Scanlon have, perhaps unwittingly, paved the way for koalas to be sacrificed on the renewable energy altar to appease the green evangelists.
Here I have to say I am on the side of the koalas. And I remind Plibersek and Linard that in 2022 the status of the koala was changed from vulnerable to endangered in Queensland and NSW.
Linard said the Palaszczuk Government was strongly committed to protecting and conserving koalas and their habitat.
Not strong enough, it seems, to dissuade Plibersek from using her ministerial powers to approve Lotus Creek wind farm on the Nebo-Connors Range 175km northwest of Rockhampton.
Earlier this year The Courier-Mail reported the project by the South Korean-owned Ark Energy will have 55 wind turbines able to generate 1.7 million megawatt hours of renewable energy a year – enough to power 305,000 homes.
In approving the project, Plibersek overturned a decision by her Coalition predecessor Sussan Ley, who in 2020 said the wind farm was as “clearly unacceptable” and in breach of federal environment laws, partly because the site was home to koalas and other species afflicted by the previous summer’s catastrophic bushfires.
The Plibersek approval of the Lotus Creek project gave the green light to the bulldozing of old-growth forest containing 341ha of known koala habitat, The Australian reported.
However, The Australian said that figure was likely to be underestimated.
The national daily quoted renowned nature photographer Steven Nowakowski describing the forest as “koala central”.
There are more threats to our beloved koalas. I noticed protesters outside The Courier-Mail’s Bush Summit in Rockhampton waving Save the Koala placards when objecting to state government approval of the Moah Creek wind turbine development on untouched native bushland 30km west of Rockhampton. The project put 380ha of koala habitat at the mercy of the bulldozers, The Courier-Mail reported.
It seems absurd to me that the Labor government refuses to approve dams, coal and gas projects on environmental grounds while approving wind turbines that are clearly a direct threat to an endangered species.
And I haven’t heard a word of protest from animal rights activists, the Queensland Greens, or the Australian Conservation Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund or Friends of the Earth. Why?
More pain may be coming for the endangered koala. Plibersek has now been asked to approve 88 giant turbines in the middle of an upland tropical forest at Chalumbin on the Atherton Tableland, where 844ha of koala habitat were identified in the original plan.
The developer is the same corporation backing Lotus Creek.
The ABC reported the controversial $1 billion wind farm was adjacent to World Heritage-protected rainforests. And that the project was scaled back from the original 200 turbines in an effort to appease conservationists and some traditional owners.
Conservationists opposed to the Chalumbin wind farm, two hours southwest of Cairns, say it would pose a threat to a number of animals including the northern greater glider, the red goshawk, the magnificent brood frog, the masked owl and the spectacled flying fox. I haven’t heard a peep out of Linard or Palaszczuk about this.
Alarm bells are ringing. Documents tabled by federal parliament Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young show the federal Environment Department is assessing 140 proposals with the potential to have a detrimental impact on koalas.
Plibersek is the ultimate decision- maker on developments that affect threatened species.
In state parliament Shane Knuth from Katter’s Australia Party gave a valuable perspective.
“This wind farm will comprise some of the tallest turbines in the Southern Hemisphere which will destroy forest and threaten endangered species,” he told the House.
“To further highlight the renewable fantasy to achieve the government’s 50 per cent renewable target by 2030, this will require an additional 2,200 megawatts of new renewables, which means 540,000 hectares of land has to be cleared for wind farms, excluding transmission lines.
“As long as it is a wind farm, foreign-owned companies can clear whatever they like.
“Governments continue to knock back any new water project proposed while at the same time wind farms are given a free pass to completely destroy natural habitat.’’
Knuth specifically referred to the abandoned Tully-Millstream hydro-electric Scheme that was “a clean, green approved project” that would have powered 100,000 homes.
“It was abandoned in 1988 due to the declaration of the Wet Tropics World Heritage area,” he said.
Knuth is right.
It is clear to me that state and federal Labor environmental ministers are ignoring the serious threats posed by renewable energy projects.
So are the Greens as they continue their long march to gain control of federal, state and local governments.
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Would Australians have consented to vaccinations if they knew the potential risks?
Julie Sladden
The bombshell discovery of DNA contamination in mRNA Covid shots has shocked and alarmed scientists around the globe. They are calling on regulators to urgently stop the injections and conduct a full safety evaluation.
Following Kevin McKernan’s initial discovery earlier in 2023, his findings have been independently verified by several internationally recognised labs around the world including Dr Philip Buckhaults and Dr Sin Lee. These results were again confirmed most recently in Germany when biologist Dr Jurgen Kirchner tested various batches of the Pfizer product (Comirnaty) at his laboratory in Magdeburg and discovered DNA contamination that he claims exceeds regulatory levels by a factor of 200-350. Dr Kirchner followed up with a letter to Health Minister Karl Lauterbach on 20 August 2023, attaching the results of the findings. The official reply from the ministerial office was unimpressive, to say the least:
’(…) the Federal Ministry of Health has no evidence of possible DNA contamination in the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty (BioNTech/Pfizer) that has been marketed in Europe and Germany (…) From a local perspective, there is therefore no need for further action.’
This lack of alarm has frustrated members of the scientific community who ask, ‘Under what regulatory system doesn’t this lead to immediate withdrawal from market?’
In the US, testimonies from Dr McKernan to the FDA, Dr Phillip Buckhaults, and Dr Janci Lindsay to the South Carolina Senate seem to raise alarm from all except the therapeutic regulator, the FDA.
You might think ‘well this is all overseas’ and therefore not relevant to Australia. Well, dear reader, you may change your mind when you learn that the Covid mRNA injections are manufactured in just a handful of facilities around the world, and none of them in Australia. This concerns us too.
Many worry that DNA contamination in the mRNA vaccines could bring with it a truckload of serious risks and potential adverse outcomes, including the possibility of genomic integration. That is, the DNA in the injection becomes a part of the DNA of a person’s cells.
The repeated and verified finding of DNA contamination has alarmed scientists from different disciplines and, as McKernan notes, ‘It is important for readers to see where various divergent voices agree.’ Despite being a proponent for the mRNA platform, Buckhaults describes his alarm at the finding, ‘…and the possible consequences of this both in terms of human health and biology.’ In testifying to the Senate he adds, ‘But you should be alarmed at the regulatory process that allowed it to get there.’
World-renowned Professor Wafik El-Deiry, Director of the Cancer Centre at Brown University and known for his work in identifying genes associated with cancer, added his voice to the conversation stating Buckhaults’ testimony was ‘good science raising concerns about contamination of Covid mRNA vaccines with DNA’. He adds:
‘[Buckhaults] explains how pieces of naked DNA allowed in protein vaccines at a certain threshold was not so problematic in a different era but that with encapsulation in liposomes they can now easily get into cells. If they get into cells they can integrate into the genome which is permanent, heritable, and has a theoretical risk of causing cancer depending on where in the genome they integrate. There is a need for more research into what happens in stem cells and I would add germ-line, heart, (and) brain. I am also concerned about prolonged production of spike for months with the pseudouridine in the more stable RNA.’
‘Blood clots, myocarditis, cardiac arrests, and other adverse effects are documented,’ adds El-Deiry. Many believe there’s an urgent need to quantify this problem as DNA is itself prothrombotic and could be the cause of some of the rare but serious side effects like sudden death from cardiac arrest.
Dr Janci Lindsay, a biochemist and molecular biologist, agrees with these concerns and has spent months calling for the shots to be suspended. Alongside the identified risks of genomic integration, autoimmunity, and cancer, Lindsay says other possibilities include gut bacteria (E. coli) taking up DNA plasmids and becoming ‘perpetual spike factories’ or incorporating the antibiotic resistance gene. There is another potential issue Lindsay highlights, ‘If there’s that much (DNA) plasmid in the shots, there’s a very good chance that there’s bacterial endotoxin in the shots… bacterial proteins which can cause anaphylaxis and even death.’
You may wonder, how the DNA and other potential contaminants got into some of these products. Well, it all comes down to the manufacturing process, as discussed in a recent BMJ article. The clinical trials involving around 40,000 people were conducted using injections manufactured via ‘Process 1’ which involved in vitro transcription of synthetic DNA. This is essentially a ‘clean’ process. However, this process is not viable for mass production, so the manufacturers switched to ‘Process 2’ which involves using E. coli bacteria to replicate the plasmids. Getting the plasmids out of the E. coli. can be challenging and may result in residual plasmids, and possibly bacterial endotoxin, in the vaccines. Australian Professor Geoff Pain provides extensive details on these endotoxins.
With the highest rates of adverse events and injuries we’ve ever seen for a ’provisionally approved’ product, you would think any regulator worth their salt would be jumping in to ensure that what has been discovered overseas isn’t so in Australia. But it seems the burden of proof is falling on everyone but the regulator.
From the very start, countless medical and legal professionals have called out the ethical disaster of ‘un-informed’ consent and these experimental injections. Informed consent requires a full discussion of the known and potentially unknown risks of any medication or treatment. This, and the coercion, manipulation, and mandates applied to the Australian people, made informed consent impossible.
How many Australians, I wonder, would have agreed to receive an injection that potentially contained DNA with all the inherent risks described?
None, is my guess.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/what-the-shot/
************************************5 October, 2023
Aged care being regulated out of existence
Government ostriches think they can make the system work by importing workers. But it is registered nurses who are in short supply and any of those who immigrate would have better options
One in seven nursing home beds sits empty across Australia, despite long waiting lists, because there are too few workers to service older people needing care, a new report warns.
The staffing shortage means too many people who should be in residential aged care are stuck in hospital, with no safe alternative accommodation, it says.
The situation is worse in the regions, where some aged-care homes are running at 50 per cent capacity as they struggle to attract workers, a Committee for Economic Development Australia report finds.
The CEDA paper, “Duty of care: Aged care sector running on empty”, concludes that increased mandatory staffing hours requirements from October 1 this year are contributing to the sector’s precarious financial situation, with more than half the nation’s nursing homes operating at a loss.
To free up the bed block, it proposes accelerating the recruitment of migrant workers into the care economy through an “essential skills visa” to allow workers to migrate with long-term residency opportunities.
This visa category would be available only for areas of critical need such as aged care, childcare, disability and healthcare.
“Data from March 2023 shows that the average occupancy rate across all residential aged-care places was 86 per cent,” the report says. “But there is no lack of demand. In fact most providers report having long waiting lists.
‘Consultation with industry suggests the key reason for these low occupancy rates is workforce shortages, which means facilities cannot operate at full capacity.”
The report also says the federal government must find ways to better financially support the aged-care sector, including considering new laws to make older people who can afford it contribute more to the cost of their care.
The Albanese government has commissioned a taskforce to examine the issues faced in aged care, including funding and workforce. It will report by the end of the year.
The taskforce chair, Aged Care Minister Anika Wells, has flagged it is considering a proposal from aged-care providers for older people to use superannuation to cover some of the costs of care.
CEDA chief economist Cassandra Winzar, author of the new report, said the new mandatory staffing requirements were behind the empty beds. “These staffing changes are important to increase the quality of care for older Australians, but they are adding pressure on providers already struggling to maintain their workforces and come on top of growing demand for home-care services.”
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Red tape, crime and rising costs a ‘perfect storm’ building against Australian small business
Business leaders have warned that small business in Australia is being hit with an increasing regulatory burden at a time when it is having to deal with rising interest rates, higher costs and cyber crime.
Council of Small Business Organisations Australia chief executive Luke Achterstraat said small businesses in Australia were facing a “perfect storm” of increasing compliance costs at a time when they could least afford it.
A combination of the stricter new industrial relations regulation and other measures such as the expansion of privacy legislation to small business as well as the challenges of dealing with cyber crime have hit the sector hard at a time when it is facing rising interest rates and costs, told The Australian.
“External shocks have driven up some costs such as energy, but the federal government is internalising the problem through more red tape and a layer cake of regulation,” he said.
Mr Achterstraat said a recent survey of COSBOA members had shown that the government’s new changes to industrial relations were seen as the number one risk facing small business in the coming months.
“To think the government’s workplace policy in a country like Australia is now perceived as a greater risk to small business than the threat of cyber attacks, natural disasters, oil and energy price shocks and even interest rates costs is truly remarkable,” he said. “It shows how dramatic the cost of compliance can be for a small business.”
Mr Achterstraat said compliance costs from the proposed changes to industrial relations legislation could add as much as 20 per cent to a small business’s annual operating costs. He said the new industrial relations laws would be the “most significant rewriting of our industrial relations system in living memory.”
Proposed changes included “throwing out the window well-understood definitions of casual workers and independent contractors that apply to over three million Australians”.
Mr Achterstraat said 90 per cent of businesses surveyed by COSBOA said the changes would mean they were less likely to employ more staff.
Small businesses were also concerned at the extent of the changes including prison time of up to 10 years in jail for employers found to be engaged in wage theft and a threat to the right of independent contactors, including tradies, to be their own boss.
Meanwhile, the introduction of the new laws meant small businesses were having to spend time and money on getting advice that they were doing the right thing at a time “when owners of labour-intensive sectors like hairdressing, beauty salons and restaurants are literally run off their feet”.
“Almost 43 per cent of small businesses are not breaking even and the majority of owners are working longer hours than average and paying themselves less than the average wage to protect their business,” he said.
Mr Achterstraat said small businesses had faced a raft of higher costs since July 1, including a 5.75 per cent increase in pay rates in more than 110 industry awards, and the 0.5 per cent increase in the superannuation guarantee paid by employers on top of their base salary.
These two changes combined meant a small business with 15 staff would see a total cost increase of $84,375 per year plus an additional $4285 in payroll tax.
Mr Achterstraat said small businesses looking to employ skilled labour from overseas, such as cooks and hairdressers, were finding it more difficult because of the 30 per cent increase in the base rate required to access a skilled migrant, from $53,900 to $70,000.
“This has completely priced out many in the hair salon and beauty salon owners from sourcing workers from overseas and, for a restaurant with four cooks, their costs will increase by $1240 per week.”
Mr Achterstraat said small businesses with turnovers below $3m a year were also having to cope with the requirements of the Privacy Act, which they had previously been exempt from.
“The latest data from the ABS showed that in the June quarter over 100,000 businesses exited the economy – that is over 1000 businesses closing per day, and they are the ones we know about,” he said. “Without policies that support small business growth and reduce red tape, this figure risks increasing and stifling the next wave of entrepreneurs from starting small businesses.”
Joseph Healy, chief executive of Judo Bank, which specialises in lending to small businesses, said small businesses were having to cope with an increasing amount of regulation at a time when interest rates were rising and costs were increasing as a result of inflation.
“The propensity of governments to add additional regulatory burdens at this time is very unhelpful and is not empathetic to the challenges that small businesses are facing at the moment,” he said.
While Mr Healy said some businesses were struggling more than others, the problems from increasing regulations by governments was a general problem facing small business. “The burden has increasingly worsened over years which is particularly tough on small businesses.”
Policy makers were looking at each piece of new regulation in isolation and not seeing the big picture of how it affected small business, Mr Healy said. The increasing pressure of regulation on small business could become more evident over the next year as the impact of higher interest rates took its toll on the economy.
He said the impact of increased regulation was discouraging new investments by small businesses as they struggled to cope. “The combination of increasing interest rates and inflationary pressures and regulatory pressures is causing a lot of small businesses to press pause on decisions to expand and invest.
“That is not a good thing. “We are going into a challenging period for small business as the economy slows.
“The additional regulation adds more of a burden on what is an already overburdened small business sector.”
NAB business and private banking group executive Andrew Irvine said small businesses were having to deal with increasing red tape and regulation.
“The importance of SMEs to a healthy and thriving Australian economy cannot be overstated,” he said. “They are the backbone of our economy, employ two in every three Australian workers and are the ultimate drivers of economic growth.
“I talk to thousands of small business owners each year and the themes are common: red tape and regulation, being paid promptly, finding and paying staff, and increasingly fraud and scams.”
Australian Retailers Association chief executive Paul Zahra said small retailers were concerned at the compounding nature of regulatory change in Australia.
“All businesses are being impacted by an increase in red tape but small businesses are disproportionately impacted because they have to invest the same effort into managing their compliance obligations as a much larger business without the resources,” he said.
“It’s not just industrial relations, or sustainability measures or changes to the Privacy Act – it’s the combined and compounding impact of all these changes happening in quick succession and sometimes at the same time.”
Mr Zahra said Australia was only ranked 14th in the World Bank’s rankings for ease of doing business. “The complexity of doing business looks set to amplify if the federal government’s ‘Closing the Loopholes’ legislation passes next year,” he said.
“We need to be extremely careful with any policy changes that could potentially drive price increases or result in added complexity for businesses – many of whom already struggle to comprehend the existing regulatory framework.”
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Tearing open cover-up of DNA lab’s Project 13
The John Tonge centre has been notorious for 20 years
A new commission of inquiry will be launched into a catastrophically flawed DNA extraction method that has been blamed for samples failing to identify Shandee Blackburn’s killer in 2013 and that may have denied Queensland victims of crime crucial evidence for nine years.
Health Minister Shannon Fentiman has commissioned a short and sharp public inquiry after weeks of revelations in The Australian that have raised doubts about test results in thousands more criminal cases, and that have rocked the new management of the state’s DNA lab.
New and serious allegations against the lab have emerged since the end of retired judge Walter Sofronoff’s landmark commission of inquiry last year, triggered by painstaking investigations by forensic biologist Kirsty Wright and The Australian’s podcast Shandee’s Story.
Ms Fentiman said on Wednesday that she had appointed retired Federal Court judge Annabelle Bennett SC to conduct the inquiry, amid concerns about conflicts of interest in a high-powered advisory board that has only just been set up to watch over the lab.
“This new inquiry will ensure a transparent and comprehensive review of matters raised after the original inquiry and is in line with the Queensland Government’s commitment to rebuilding the state’s forensic and DNA testing processes,” Ms Fentiman told The Australian.
Dr Bennett is the former president of the Australian Academy of Forensic Sciences, and was a commissioner on the National Natural Disaster Arrangements inquiry.
She will hold public hearings and be able to call witnesses to give evidence under oath.
Her final report and recommendations from the new DNA inquiry are due to be completed by November 17 this year.
The inquiry’s terms of reference will include reviewing recent public statements and other documents about a flawed automated DNA extraction method introduced in the lab in 2007, and whether recommendations from the previous inquiry are sufficient to address the matter.
The Australian last month revealed the lab implemented the extraction method despite knowing it was catastrophically failing to recover DNA, and that it may have missed crucial evidence in serious crimes for nine years.
About 100,000 crime scene samples would have been processed using variations of the automated method, which saved the lab time and was implemented in a period of intense pressure from the courts, government and public to deal with testing delays and backlogs, Dr Wright said.
The method has been blamed by Dr Wright for the failure to recover evidence in, and to solve, Blackburn’s brutal stabbing murder as she walked home from work in Mackay in central Queensland.
The new scientist in charge of the lab, Linzi Wilson-Wilde, has been drawn into the scandal because she examined the extraction method for the Sofronoff inquiry and failed in her expert report to detail the serious problems it was having in recovering DNA.
In her work for the inquiry, Professor Wilson-Wilde reviewed a “Project 13” report from August 2008 that showed the automated method was recovering up to 92 per cent less DNA than a manual method.
The Project 13 report’s abstract recommended the automated method be introduced after falsely claiming results were “comparable” to the manual method.
Dr Wright on Wednesday night said she “welcomed the government’s announcement to open an independent inquiry into Project 13”.
“I believe it is the only way to get to the truth behind the original decision in 2007 to implement the failed method, to correctly identify all cases that were affected by the failed method, and to ensure they are properly reviewed and tested,” Dr Wright said.
“The enormity of this issue is still hard to comprehend for the average Queenslander.
“The inquiry’s findings may lead to tens of thousands of victims getting another chance of justice, and tens of thousands of violent offenders being removed from our streets. It really is that serious.”
Blackburn’s mother, Vicki, and Dr Wright say they have lost confidence in Professor Wilson-Wilde and have called for her to quit.
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Editorial: State government housing policy on the fly as crisis continues
Women and children are having to shelter in tent villages in Brisbane and workers with jobs are forced to live out of their cars – such is the dire nature of the housing crisis.
It is one of the most serious issues facing the state and deserves a level of attention commensurate with that fact. This is why it is saddening to reveal the seemingly cavalier approach taken by the Palaszczuk government to this crisis in the lead-up to last year’s Housing roundtable – convened as a direct result of The Courier-Mail’s reporting on the issue.
As we report today, a Right to Information search reveals that in the 24 hours before the roundtable, the government was rushing to cobble together a plan so it had a project to announce on the day.
The plan was to refurbish vacant student accommodation at Griffith University’s Mount Gravatt campus into 200 crisis accommodation beds – with the Premier saying in the accompanying press release that “the stories of people without secure housing are heartbreaking”.
But as the months dragged on nothing happened – other than $2.1m being spent on early works – before the plan was ultimately dumped in April. The reason was the accommodation could not be brought up to fire safety codes, a basic requirement.
The shambolic nature of the planning is revealed in the text messages disclosed by the RTI release between director-general of the state development department Mike Kaiser, university staff, and Griffith Chancellor Andrew Fraser – a former Labor state treasurer.
They show a scheme seemingly being concocted without planning, investigation or due diligence.
The government may seek to argue that it was the university which approached them with the plan some time earlier, but the now-public text messages blow this argument out of the water. In fact, there was palpable shock from one Griffith University staffer when told the day before the summit that the state intended to take control of the accommodation the next week.
One staff member noted that the government had previously been “lukewarm” on the idea, before the whole project appeared to be locked in via a flurry of texts and emails between 1pm on September 15 and 8am on September 16 – when Griffith University agreed to the terms of the agreement.
That was just five hours before the announcement was made.
People’s very lives and safety were and are at stake, yet the government was seemingly cramming its homework at the last minute on its big announcement out of the summit.
It was rushed and then resources wasted on it which could have been better used developing real plans.
The $2.1m spend, while relatively small in the scheme of the budget, was a complete waste.
Think of the good that money could have done for a charity organisation actually on the front lines of helping people going through homelessness.
The RTI release shows the events which took place in this sorry saga would have been more at home in a satire, rather than the actions of a third-term government.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was right when she said the stories of people’s struggles were heartbreaking.
Yet the actions, or lack thereof, taken by the government do not show the proper consideration that this issue deserves.
And the biggest shame is that the government appears to still think this is a crisis that will just go away.
The lack of a plan of any real substance a year on from that first housing summit is striking. It is simply not good enough.
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4 October, 2023
The do-gooder hate keeps flowing
Albanese's bright idea has been a disaster. It has injected hate into Australian race relations. He has done huge damage and will be held to account for it one way or another, probably at the next Federal election. He has divided Australians instead of uniting them. But Leftists love destroying what they can of existing society so he is a great success by Leftist standards
The do-gooder fool below thinks "Voice" will solve Aboriginal problems but there is no mechanism for it to do so. Millions are already being spent to solve the problems of Aborigines but nothing governments have tried works. A huge problem among Aborigines is domestic violence. I have seen it in action myself. But since when has any government been able to do anything about domestic violence?
Ever since the missionaries were booted out of Aboriginal settlements, Aboriginal life has gone steadily downhill. I have known Aborigines from both the missionary era and the post-missionary era and the difference is stark
Television icon Ray Martin has labelled No voters as 'dinosaurs and d***heads' in a scathing speech to a cheering crowd of Voice supporters.
The veteran journalist and presenter ripped into No voters during the Yes rally at Marrickville's Factory Theatre in Sydney's inner west on September 28.
Video obtained by Daily Mail Australia shows Martin taking aim at the No side's 'If you don't know, vote No' slogan, saying: 'If you don't know, find out what you don't know.
'What that slogan is saying is if you're a dinosaur or d***head who can't be bothered reading, then vote No.'
Martin then went on to slam the No campaign's primary argument that there is not enough information on how the Voice will operate, arguing such detail 'simply don't matter'.
'They never did matter. Honestly, they're irrelevant,' he said.
'Over the next 10, 20 or 30 years, no matter who is in government, the details will change, as will the members of the Voice delegation according to the needs and priorities and policies that are meant to close that bloody gap.
'You can't write all that into the constitution.'
The speech was given in front of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and was held in his electorate of Grayndler.
'What we've done for 235 years, often with the best of intentions and spending billions of your taxpayer dollars, is leave Indigenous Australians as the poorest, sickest, most suicidal, most imprisoned, jobless homeless people in our rich society.
'With poverty and third-world diseases like scabies, for God's sake, that rubs their skin raw and trachoma that sends them blind five times the rate of white Australians, and rheumatic heart disease that kills so many Aboriginal children, guesstimate of two kids a week. And an overall life expectancy which is 20 years less than the rest of Australians.
'This referendum is clearly not about dividing Australia. It's about caring.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12590907/Ray-Martin-Voice-spray.html
*******************************************Leftist ban thwarted by Christians
The Left are always wanting to ban something. Homosexuals must be prevented from getting help with their unwanted inclinations, apparently. No freedom of choice for them!
Independent MP Alex Greenwich has urged the Minns government to support his bill to outlaw gay conversion amid fears among LGBTIQ+ groups that Labor’s promise to ban the practice has been stalled following a targeted campaign by religious groups.
The NSW government is consulting on legislation to ban so-called gay conversion therapy, after promising before the March election it would follow Victoria in ending the practice.
But the Australian Christian Lobby told its members last week the laws “have been put on pause, no doubt influenced by our phone campaign”.
The ACL has promised to campaign against the bill, and recently appointed a NSW state director, Joshua Rowe, to spearhead its fight against the legislation.
In an email to members seen by the Herald, ACL managing director Michelle Pearse said the group had made more than 8000 calls “explaining their concerns and asking MPs to consider the negative consequences for our children”.
The ACL did not respond to a request for comment.
The government has denied it paused the bill, saying consultation is ongoing and legislation will be finalised “in due course”. But despite not giving any timeline on when it might introduce the bill, there was an expectation it would be finalised before the end of this year.
That is now extremely unlikely, with a bill not expected to surface until the first half of next year at the earliest.
Premier Chris Minns announced Labor would introduce a bill banning gay conversion therapy before the election after Greenwich said he would make it a priority in this term.
Rather than support Greenwich’s bill, which has already been drafted and introduced into the parliament, the government has insisted on drafting its own bill.
But concerns about pushback from religious groups, and the prospect of delays to the reform, have prompted Greenwich and others to urge Labor to drop its bill and support his legislation before the end of 2023.
This week the heads of three peak gay conversion survivor groups wrote to NSW Attorney-General Michael Daley urging the government to support Greenwich’s bill, saying it “strikes the right balance and is sensitive to the needs of all affected stakeholders”.
“The focus of the bill is to protect LGBTQ people from harmful attempts to change who they are and who they love in a way that keeps communities of faith together and allows them to practice their doctrine. The bill takes the least punitive approach to prevent conflict between parties,” the letter stated.
“We are especially concerned that the Australian Christian Lobby has now claimed credit for delaying progress on reforms. Banning conversion practices should be about protecting the health and welfare of LGBTQ people first and foremost, not appeasing those who seek to perpetrate those practices at the expense of the health and welfare of LGBTQ people.”
‘There is no other form of abuse where consultation with the perpetrators of that abuse would lead to a pause in reform.’
Greenwich has worked closely with the government seeking support for his landmark equality bill in the new parliament, but urged Labor to support a bill he said had been drafted in consultation with survivors.
“The bill is ready to go, supported by survivors, and consistent with schemes already adopted in Victoria and New Zealand. There is enough time to debate and pass the reform this year through the parliament,” he said.
“There is no other form of abuse where consultation with the perpetrators of that abuse would lead to a pause in reform, and I urge the government and parliament to make NSW safer for LGBTQ people and prohibit this harmful practice that tragically leads to suicide in too many cases.”
Gay conversion law would ban suppression of gender identity
Victoria, Queensland and the ACT all have bans on gay conversion practices, though they vary in scope. The Victorian model faced a fierce pushback from conservative groups when it passed in 2021.
While the NSW government has not explained why it would not support Greenwich’s legislation, senior Labor sources indicated that their bill was unlikely to go as far as Victoria’s.
However, Greenwich said that while his bill was based on the Victorian model, it made a number of key changes to ensure things such as prayer or parents referring children to psychologists were not captured by the law.
A spokeswoman for the premier’s office said the government had consulted with more than 130 stakeholders on its bill, including LGBTQI+ groups and religious organisations to “develop a model that is right for NSW”.
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Australian Medical Doctors May Need to Arm Themselves with a Law Degree
Australian doctors have expressed displeasure with medical regulatory bodies like Ahpra and the TGA, stating that doctors with different views are being targeted and suspended. TrialSite interviewed some doctors who served in the system and who were suspended unfairly for expressing differing opinions. They emphasized that to be fully protected in the Australian health system, doctors may need to be well-versed in the law before they start practicing.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra) regulates medical practice in Australia. Some doctors fear that people anonymously use Ahpra as a weapon against them. There are also concerns that external bodies in the United States like the Federation of State Medical Board (FSMB) may influence the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities (IAMRA). The IAMRA is responsible for effective medical regulation worldwide. They achieve this by providing guidance to the medical profession and bolstering scientific, educational and collaborative activities in the field.
What does the FSMB do?
Founded in 1912, the FSMB is a body or association representing state medical licensing in the U.S. Its CEO, Dr. Humayun Chaudhry, is regarded as one of the most influential physicians in the U.S. He released healthcare policies that were approved by the American Medical Association and authored research papers on how to boost vaccine usage. In April 2022, the FSMB adopted a misinformation policy and released a manifesto to be heavy-handed with doctors spreading misinformation. This raised suspicions, especially among vaccine-hesitant doctors, as there appeared to be a seeming connection between Dr. Chaudhry's effort to influence the vaccine-hesitant and “boost vaccine usage” and his strict approach towards doctors expressing hesitancy or spreading opposing information about the vaccines.
Pressured by regulatory bodies
Interestingly, medical authorities from different countries, including Australia, formed an international arm in September 2000, IAMRA. The IAMRA– a non-profit–supports medical regulatory bodies globally. In June 2004, the IAMRA said that it was separate from the FSMB. However, Chaudhry was IAMRA secretary and FSMB CEO at the same time in 2020.
Before the FSMB's adoption of the misinformation policy, the IAMRA had hosted webinars in 2020, to address ethical concerns among doctors and educate them on ways to combat COVID-19 misinformation. An Australian doctor, who would prefer to stay anonymous, said, "... in 2021, as I said, their agenda was to be heavy-handed with all doctors who spread misinformation."
Ahpra wields a strong authority in Australia. As such, a few doctors were concerned that the FSMB may have influenced decisions at Ahpra because its current CEO, Martin Fletcher, was a director at the IAMRA until the end of 2022. He was one of the panelists in a global webinar educating regulators on how to respond to the challenge of vaccine-hesitant doctors.
Were these concerns justified?
The Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) and Ahpra are at the forefront of fighting COVID-19 misinformation, and they continually advocate for the dissemination of the right information on vaccine safety.
In 2023, Ahpra released a 2021 survey result reflecting the distrust among doctors of its regulatory services. Doctors in Australia had the most negative views compared with other health practitioners, and only 35% of doctors had positive reviews of Ahpra.
Part of the result said, "Distrust was undercut by practitioners’ personal views of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, but also related to perceived unfairness and injustice of Ahpra and the Boards’ processes."
In October 2021, the TGA suspended a medical doctor for using ivermectin on a patient with severe COVID-19 symptoms. The patient had initially sought treatment at another hospital but had only been told to wear a mask and isolate, without receiving any early treatment. As the patient’s condition had worsened after returning home, they had sought treatment from the doctor instead of going back home due to concerns about being unable to say goodbye to their family if they were to pass away.
A junior doctor in that hospital then made a complaint, stating that there was a case of polypharmacy and encephalopathy.
Speaking with TrialSite, she said, "I wanted to find out what happened to my patient, so I called this doctor up… She basically said to me that she didn't know why she made a complaint against me and that her boss was the one who actually told her to make the complaint."
The junior doctor’s supervisor was Associate Professor Naren Gunja, a toxicologist at the Westmead Hospital. She mentioned that she’d tried speaking to him, but he didn’t listen to her.
"So, I did a bit of research and discovered that he actually went to the media and spoke about a case of ivermectin overdose in a patient that he had treated at casualty," she continued.
“I couldn’t understand why Dr. Gunja, a toxicologist, chose to warn the public about the risk of ivermectin. It is well known that taking ivermectin in combination with other medications can effectively treat COVID-19, and the occurrence of ivermectin overdose is rare.”
The ivermectin overdose case went viral from September 1 to September 3, 2021, after Gunja had spoken to the media, advising the public to ignore online claims that ivermectin was a cure for COVID-19. And on September 10, 2021, the TGA banned ivermectin as an off-label treatment for COVID-19.
According to our source, a second complaint came from an anonymous source with the pseudonym – John Smith. Eventually, the evidence presented in the complaint was traced back to Ahpra. All these contributed to her suspension in October 2021.
Additionally, in February 2021, the COVID Medical Network came under intense scrutiny from the TGA for endorsing the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine in treating COVID-19 infection.
The COVID Medical Network (CMN) is a group of doctors in Australia who have reservations about COVID-19 vaccines and have voiced their dissatisfaction with the government's pandemic response. Instead of recommending vaccines, they prescribe alternative medications like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to address and curb the effects of COVID-19 infection.
This may explain why a doctor had to publicly renounce and dis-endorse the group within seven days to regain medical registration after being urgently suspended for having a link on her website to the CMN website.
A case of corruption among regulatory bodies
In October 2022, the Australian government made over 30 changes to the national law guiding the regulation and registration of doctors. This also included disciplinary action against doctors who had broken the law. It was called the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2022.
This law gave Ahpra the power to release a public statement regarding a practitioner who is under assessment or investigation if there was a "reasonable belief" that the practitioner's behavior, performance or health could seriously endanger public safety. Some doctors fear that Ahpra or the TGA could use this law as a means of bullying.
According to our first anonymous source, Ahpra weaponized the reasonable belief concept to take down medical doctors with different beliefs.
She implied that Ahpra could influence the subjective state of mind of the medical board by making statements about a doctor with no medical basis. "It has so much power. They can target any doctor they like. All it needs to do is to have an anonymous complaint against a particular doctor, and that doctor could be urgently suspended without verification of the facts."
People have complained that Ahpra bullies and has numerous scandals. After three Senate, a state inquiry into Ahpra’s conduct and according to recent polls, many doctors, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) and the Australian Medical Association (AMA) remain unhappy with Ahpra’s framework. Ahpra is an agency with a five-year contract with the National Board to carry out administrative duties like notifications and collection of subscriptions.
The regulatory power lies with the Board, not Ahpra, and one anonymous doctor said that the Board was negligent in renewing its contract with Ahpra, knowing the level of incompetence of Ahpra officials. She added that perhaps the Board liked this arrangement, as most complaints are deflected away from the Board and directed against Ahpra.
The TGA was also accused of hiding vaccine side effects like myocarditis from the public, making people doubt its authenticity. They also allegedly concealed the death of several previously healthy children from vaccine side effects, as they were afraid it would promote vaccine hesitancy.
To curb corruption among regulatory bodies like the TGA, the Australian government introduced the National Anti-corruption Commission (NACC) in July 2023. Ahpra and the Medical Board are not answerable to either the state, federal parliament or the NACC. Many doctors believe they should be accountable.
Do doctors need a law degree for protection?
During TrialSite's conversation with the sources, they hinted that the insurance company lawyers meant to protect doctors were actually supporting the medical council and Ahpra. If this is true, doctors may need to become experts in law to make the right choices when getting advice from lawyers, especially if they end up in such a situation.
When TrialSite inquired if the medical board's actions would make doctors anxious about reporting adverse effects and other related matters, they firmly responded that the board's actions had caused underreporting. Apparently, doctors were afraid of saying or doing anything that would earn them a suspension.
Even so, some doctors have challenged the system and are legally smart about it. An example is Dr. William Bay, an Australian doctor in Queensland and the leader of the Queensland People’s Protest (QPP). TrialSite has previously reported on Dr. Bay's protests against the COVID-19 vaccines in Australia. He had previously received a suspension for disrupting an Australian Medical Association conference. He then took legal action against the medical board and Ahpra, aiming to have the suspension revoked. At the time of authoring this article, Dr. Bay was still waiting for the final verdict from the Court.
Dr. Gary Fettke, an orthopedic surgeon, also faced a four-and-a-half-year legal case initiated by Ahpra starting in 2014 for giving nutritional and weight loss advice to his patients. The case was challenged along legal and procedural grounds, and then, using the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman’s Intervention (NHPO), was reviewed independently.
Speaking to TrialSite, Fettke said, “Nonetheless, we had to become 'expert' in the National Law, as the Indemnifiers are not supportive of preserving your practicing rights, nor reputation.” Additionally, he added that because these insurance company lawyers were mainly responsible for financial liability, they found it safer and cheaper to side with Ahpra.
These are examples of people who may have understood their legal rights as doctors.
Final thoughts
To treat patients in the best way possible, doctors in Australia may need to learn to navigate the legal system strategically. While this may not apply universally, Ahpra's survey indicates decreased confidence in the system among practitioners. So, beyond relying solely on medical defense insurance providers in Australia, doctors may require additional safeguards to function effectively within the healthcare system. Of course, from another perspective—the top down, government and medical establishment’s point of view doctors should simply line up and follow the guidance.
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3 October, 2023
The disability commission was split on special schools. Some with lived experience want them closed
Some disablement is pretty severe. Where are you going to put those students? Putting them into mainstream schools will require a lot of teacher attention and hamper the education of other students
It has long been fashionable to get handicapped students into regular schools. It is part of the idiotic Leftist dogma that all men are equal. But in practice such transfers are oftem problematical to both the handicapped student and other students in his/her class. So the experiment has often had to be abandoned and the handicapped student moved to a school better equipped to meet their needs. But Leftists resist learning from experience, of course. They just KNOW! And we see that obduracy in some of the opinions described below
Disability Royal Commissioner Dr Rhonda Galbally said governments should give significant weight to her own and two colleagues’ lived experience with disabilities when deciding whether to back their call for all special schools to be shut within 30 years, after the commission split over the future of segregated education.
The division among the six commissioners about the future of special schools was a key feature of the landmark 12-volume final report of the Disability Royal Commission, with a three-three split among the experts leaving governments without a clear authority on the issue and facing a choice about the best way forward.
In an interview following the public release of the report on Friday, Galbally acknowledged that the lack of consensus on segregated education had diluted the commission’s influence on the matter, as she stressed that the three commissioners urging the closure of special schools had direct experience with disabilities.
“But on the other hand, the two commissioners with disability are recommending this and the other commissioner who is recommending it is a parent of a grown woman with a disability,” Galbally, a former board member of the National Disability Insurance Agency, said.
“I think governments will give really significant weight to lived experience, to the expertise of people with disabilities. I think that will really be very weighty for them.”
Over the course of the 4½-year commission – which cost $600 million and received evidence from more than 9000 people with disabilities, their families, carers and advocates – no dedicated public hearings were held on special schools.
Hinting at friction among the commissioners on this issue, Galbally said this aspect was “very disappointing”, adding: “some of us raised it many times and would have wished it was different.”
Galbally and commissioner Alastair McEwin, who both live with a disability, joined with commissioner Barbara Bennett in recommending that no new special schools be built from 2025 and that all existing schools be closed by 2051. Bennett’s daughter was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 12 years old.
In a joint position, they concluded that “segregated education stems from, and contributes to, the devaluing of people with disability” and the continued maintenance of segregation in education settings was “incompatible” with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
But their position diverged with that advocated by the commission’s chair, Ronald Sackville, and commissioners John Ryan and Andrea Mason, who found that separate settings did not need to – and should not – involve people with a disability being isolated from their peers or the general community. They recommended a range of measures aimed at ensuring there was regular interaction between students at special schools and those at mainstream schools.
But Galbally said this approach risked being tokenistic and would not drive the attitude change needed for people with disabilities to be seen as equal to able-bodied people.
“Students having contact that’s not gritty and day-to-day and in the process of doing what one does at school, which is learning and playing, it can become a little token,” Galbally said.
She said it was clear that the dual system of education was “failing” children with disabilities, pointing to modelling done by the commission.
“If you go to a special school, you’re 85 per cent more likely to end up in a sheltered workshop and with very limited living options as an adult,” Galbally said.
The three commissioners’ proposal to phase out special schools was welcomed by peak body Children and Young People with Disability Australia, and Down Syndrome Australia, but they also expressed disappointment at the long timeline to 2051.
Galbally said that she understood the dismay from those groups, but said it was driven by a need to ensure there was as much consensus as possible and encourage governments to embrace it.
“If governments feel they could do this sooner, that would be really great. We were aware that out of all the settings we’ve addressed … this schooling one is the one governments would probably find most difficult and so it was an attempt to really try and allow them time to get this done,” she said.
However, some experts have questioned the feasibility of closing all non-mainstream schools and removing choice for parents, while others say the lack of unanimity from the royal commission could erode the political will and substantial funding commitments required to overhaul the education sector to remove segregation.
Former NDIS board member Martin Lavery, chief executive of one of Australia’s largest charitable providers, said he was “really concerned that the royal commission has outlined a destination that we as a society haven’t yet grappled with how to pay for”.
“If we see the end of special schools too, the end of group homes too suddenly, and supported employment being turned off too suddenly, our society hasn’t yet got the mechanism to meet those costs,” he said.
Laverty said the taskforce established by the federal government in response to the commission’s findings needed to hear the message that segregation must end, and determine the “pace at which the taxpayer, the families, the charitable organisations, but most importantly, the people with disabilities want that transition to occur.”
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Children’s Health Defense Australia: saving our kids after Covid lockdowns
Julie Sladden
Few would disagree that the health of the children today foreshadows the health of the population tomorrow. With that in mind, the past three years of pandemic fear and dystopia have upset any preconceived ideas that the health of the people is on solid ground. In a worldwide response that saw nations lockdown, mask up, and mass vaccinate – ‘to protect grandma’ – it seems scant regard was paid to the cost incurred on the future generation.
Australia was ground zero for many of the more tyrannical restrictions of freedom and it didn’t go unnoticed. ‘The whole world is alarmed by what’s happening in Australia,’ said Robert F. Kennedy Jnr., founder of Children’s Health Defense US. With many states enforcing closed schools, masking of children, social distancing, and mandates, it will be years before the full impact of these actions is known.
As early data emerges on the impact on education, health, and social development it seems those who might pay the greatest price are the next generation. It is timely then that the Australian Chapter of the Children’s Health Defense was officially launched on August 26 this year.
With a board packed with expertise – Professor Robyn Cosford, Emeritus Professor Ramesh Thakur, lawyers Julian Gillespie and Peter Fam, Dr Astrid Lefringhausen, AMPS secretary and registered nurse Kara Thomas, and medical freedom advocate Cloi Geddes – Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Australia is well placed to bring light to, and stand against, the incursions on children’s health over the Covid years. But the story doesn’t begin there. The Covid response may simply be the catalyst, in Australia at least, for a light to be shone on the deterioration in the health of children over recent decades.
‘What we’re seeing in our children now … is an epidemic of chronic disease,’ explains Professor Cosford. ‘The sorts of things that we used to be seeing in older adults, in our grandparents, and our great aunts and uncles. We don’t expect to be seeing them in our children. We’re seeing an epidemic of immunological disorders where nearly half of the children have some kind of allergic-type disease, and we have autoimmune diseases occurring in our children which never have been seen before… We have an epidemic of mental health … (with) some 40 per cent (suffering) with depression, anxiety, OCD, panic disorders, and so on.’
‘And then there’s a big epidemic we’re seeing of neurodevelopmental disorders … one in ten diagnosed with ADHD, one in five with learning disorders, (and) one in 36 with autism. These (figures) have increased dramatically over the last 20-30 years and were unheard of before now.’
With a mission to ‘end childhood health epidemics’ the road ahead looks long. These alarming trends in the health of our children have been brewing for years and now may well have been exacerbated by the additional insult inflicted by the Covid response.
‘I ask as a grandparent: Why did we use children and adolescents as human shields to protect the supposed grown-ups and elderly?’ asks Ramesh Thakur, in his presentation titled Our Enemy the Government. ‘A major study recently concluded that lockdown harmed the emotional development of almost half of all British children.’ With lockdowns, closing of schools, restricted socialising, and masking it seems the price was paid by the young, who were least at risk, ‘…for a few more months of existing without living by the elderly most at risk,’ concludes Thakur.
More concerning and down-right disturbing, information is delivered during the launch by fellow presenters including the adverse effects of the Covid injections, censorship of free speech in science and medicine, DNA contamination in the Pfizer Covid injections, and legal cases in process which aim to protect our future generations.
Julian Gillespie described the heartache of ‘being belted by a judiciary that’s not acting like a judiciary’ in the recent AVN Babies case. Despite this, an unexpected benefit was the growth in support as the story spread around the nation.
‘Even though we didn’t get the correct and proper decision from the High Court, there was a massive outpouring of donors who told their friends who watched our videos with Maria Z, or Graham Hood, Health Alliance Australia, and AMPS. Parents would (start to) question (as) those videos… were pushed out across the country.’
Speaking to supporters Gillespie is clear, ‘It is correct to feel good that you participated. It did make a difference. You’ve enabled us to get the message out which is just the most important thing to allow the court of public opinion to make its mind up. (And) there are millions of us who can share the information and (help) save lives.’
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The niche, elitist research of universities: a waste of money
Each year more than $12 billion disappears into the abyss vaguely described as ‘research and development’ in the higher education sector. By way of return on this ‘investment’, there has been a steady flow of research projects demonstrating an unhealthy fixation on the niche, the ideological, and the political.
Hardworking Australians would be justified in asking where their money goes and who oversees its dispersal.
The allocation of grant largesse is decided by the team of bureaucrats at the Australian Research Council (ARC). The fate of the intellectual culture of our nation rests in their hands.
Yet, research released by the Institute of Public Affairs in 2019 confirmed the extent to which university grants are focused on class, race, and gender and just how much Australians are paying for it. The IPA report Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the ARC had distributed $1.34 billion in funding to humanities research between 2002 and 2019. The dominance of identity politics in successful grant applications raises questions about the objectivity of the allocation process.
The ARC claims its mission is ‘to grow knowledge and innovation’ for the benefit of the Australian community. However, the audit found that ‘identity politics’ and ‘Indigenous history’ were the two most common themes in successful grant applications. In contrast, the ‘rule of law’ and ‘free speech’ were among the least common themes. This more than suggests that post-modernist themes are being promoted at the expense of the values, culture and history of Western Civilisation.
In fact, tertiary research that fails to pay tribute to postmodern thought is disadvantaged on two fronts. Not only is it less likely to secure a grant, but it is further undermined by the funded postmodern research which attacks rather than promotes Western thought.
When the IPA first released its research there was a justified outcry, but the caravan moved on quickly and to this day taxpayers continue to receive a very poor return on their money.
One of the most glaring examples is that of the Sydney Environment Institute’s (SEI) 2024 collaborative grants. From calculating the carbon footprint of medical procedures to interrogating the environmental narrative around the Botany Wetlands, SEI grants highlight the decline of research into a process of propaganda production.
The first grant tackles the theme ‘environmental justices’ which is part of the SEI’s broader goal to ‘reconceptualise justice’ itself. ‘What would justice across the human-more-than-human world look like and entail?’ SEI researchers ask. It must be ‘sufficiently capacious’ to accommodate ‘climate change, Indigenous rights, resource depletion, and industrial farming.’ This leads them to conclude, conveniently, that the solution to injustice is more collaboration between academics like themselves, artists and activists.
A second grant examines the theme of ‘biocultural diversities’ which focuses on finding ‘inclusive solutions’ to issues like biodiversity loss and social inequality. ‘This theme champions and values biological and cultural diversities by elevating Indigenous knowledges and exploring diverse ways of engaging with our living world,’ SEI researchers explain. ‘We aim to better understand and cultivate appreciation for diverse human and non-human lives, knowledges and cultures.’
A third grant falls under the theme of ‘climate disaster and adaptation’. SEI researchers note that ‘communities and ecosystems are increasingly threatened, disrupted, and displaced’. They continue: ‘Mitigation and resilience are no longer sufficient and new climate realities require adaptation, and radical shifts in how diverse communities respond to disasters.’
These research themes raise a few important questions. First, in the case of ‘environmental justices’ has the SEI manufactured a problem and then a solution? If justice is not reconceptualised, the problems they discovered disappear rather quickly. Second, why does the ‘biocultural diversities’ theme emphasise ‘Indigenous knowledges’? Is there a hidden political agenda at play here? Third, why does the SEI’s description of ‘climate disaster and adaption’ use language like ‘radical shift’ and ‘disaster’? The apocalyptic language and sense of urgency evoked does not appear to suit the tone of a research institute.
According to the SEI, based at Sydney University, its research addresses ‘some of the greatest challenges of our time’. However, designing a ‘carbon footprint calculator’ or the ‘implications for justice’ linked to mangroves would be considered a top priority by very few.
These vanity projects highlight the gulf between mainstream Australians and those individuals who hold positions of power in governments and the tertiary sector. Ultimately, the millions spent on research and development each year do little to serve the public interest.
Mainstream Australians have every right to ask why they should fund projects which, far from benefiting society, are designed to undermine the values, principles and knowledge that made the West as free, prosperous and successful as it has been.
What is more, Australian universities are established by government legislation, built on public property and largely backed by government grants and state-subsidised loans. Consequently, universities are effectively public institutions dependent upon and, therefore responsible to, taxpayers.
Finally, IPA research reveals a two-fold problem. Firstly, with the prioritisation of certain research themes in the grant allocation process. Secondly, with the flow-on effects on researchers who are likely aware there is a higher chance of being awarded a grant if they focus on issues of class, race and gender. The evident bias represents a profound problem for the integrity of tertiary research in Australia.
It is clear the system requires comprehensive reform. With the future of higher education hanging in the balance, mainstream Australians need to exert pressure on politicians to demand more from universities, and to hold them to a higher standard and deliver research that benefits us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/the-niche-elitist-research-of-universities-a-waste-of-money
*****************************************************Welcome to country: the racism of ‘arrivalism’
Recently, I attended an outdoor painting festival. At the opening of the exhibition, the white Caucasian blonde MC did the usual ‘Welcome to Country’. That, in itself, was insane because from my observations there was not a single Aboriginal person in the audience of more than 200 artists and guests. Later the mayor came to the podium and did another ‘Welcome to Country’, but this time in a dialect of the local Aboriginal tribe. Almost no one understood what was being said.
The concept of a Welcome to Country for residents is offensive. Most of the audience were Australians, so the mayor was essentially welcoming us to our own country.
What, after 183 years since my namesake John Hartnett landed in Busselton, as a convict from Ireland, courtesy of His Majesty’s UK government, I need to be welcomed to the country I was born in and all my ancestors before me? And what about all the newly arrived migrants? Isn’t this their country too? Why is it important to incessantly welcome non-Indigenous Australians to their own country?
The mayor also talked about how the Indigenous people had to walk up and down the coast from the North West of Western Australia down to Mandurah over the past 60,000 years. More total nonsense!
The 60,000-year figure claimed by the mayor, as well as some activists and academics, is a ludicrous one. A few even say Aboriginals first arrived in Australia 80,000 years ago. Age-dating methods for the oldest evidence of occupation of the continent are highly debatable. The primary method used for dating rock art is thermoluminescence.
Age dating using thermoluminescence on silica grains (sand) is about as flawed a process as you might imagine. It involves unprovable assumptions and is largely driven by the belief that Aboriginal rock art is at least 20,000 years old.
‘The major source of error in establishing dates from thermoluminescence is a consequence of inaccurate measurements of the radiation acting on a specimen. The complex history of radioactive force on a sample can be difficult to estimate.’ Thermoluminescence Dating
I would say ‘impossible to estimate’ is more accurate.
The past history of radiation acting on the specimen cannot be known. It must be guessed and that guess is based on how old you think the specimen is. The specimen could be sand dug up from beneath the rock art under investigation, or a sample of rock inside a rock face or wall. The big assumption is that the specimen under investigation has been buried, or shielded, from external radiation (the sun for example), for its entire history until the researcher uncovered it. The method works well when you know the radiation history of the sample but that doesn’t help in measuring the age of an unknown sample, especially one believed to be more than 20,000 years old.
Then there is the carbon-14 dating method. This could be used to date the burnt charcoal found in old Aboriginal fireplaces. But carbon-14 dating also involves unprovable assumptions about the past unknown history of the sample. More circular reasoning. But it is worse than that.
For many decades scientists have searched the Earth for carbon bearing minerals, formed either from past living creatures like limestone, or from non-organic origin like graphite, which contain no carbon-14. They have never found any. This is a big problem because it means all carbon-bearing fossils, rocks and charcoals contain carbon-14. And using standard assumptions, the amount of carbon-14 in those samples never gives an age greater than 45,000 years. There is too much carbon-14 in the samples. But the technology exists to date a sample out to 90,000 years old, so it is not a limitation on the equipment. That means any Aboriginal site with burnt wood could never accurately yield an age of 60,000 years or more.
Thus, considering the uncertainty in these dating methods, it is unreasonable to hold claims of 60,000 years and beyond as certain or accurate. These figures are then used to solidify a privileged status for Indigenous Australians over others. I can imagine how this would be enhanced even more if the ‘Voice to Parliament’ referendum succeeds and installs some unelected bureaucrats to lord it over the rest of us.
It is nothing short of racism! Call it ‘arrivalism’ and argue over who arrived first. Just like kids playing on the street might argue over the rules of the game because of who first thought of playing a certain game, or who was the first one out on the street.
The ‘Welcome to Country’ is not a welcome to this country. It is propaganda designed to undermine the cohesiveness of the community. It is used for political gain, to bring in a communist agenda. Even many of the Indigenous people can see it. They don’t want to create division but live as equals with whoever calls Australia home.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/welcome-to-country-the-racism-of-arrivalism/
************************************2 October, 2023
Why no one goes to church anymore in Australia
A sad story but it is true that Australia is a very secular society. It's our convict origins. 20% of Australians claim to be churchgoers but as the lovely lady below says, that is often mere tokenism
An old friend of mine brought up in High Anglicanism converted in later life to Roman Catholicism but he has to withstand a lot of mockery over it
Maida Pineda
I grew up in the Philippines, where we 86 per cent of the population is Roman Catholic. During my first stint in Australia, I lived in a Catholic dorm at my university in Perth. Each block segregated males from females. I never really asked the priests why that was the case. That was nearly 29 years ago.
When I attended graduate school in Adelaide, one of my tutorial lecturers said: “The families that play together, stay together.” I giggled, thinking she had made a mistake. All my life, I heard the phrase by Fr Patrick Peyton, saying, “The family that PRAYS together, stays together.” My family took it to heart, attending mass religiously every Sunday.
Fast-forward to now, and I have called Melbourne home for four years. I’m back in Australia after living in the Philippines, the US, Singapore and Hong Kong. I am still a Catholic. But I am finding attending mass in Australia to be a challenge.
Growing up in the Philippines, my parish had 10 different mass options from 6am to 7pm on a Sunday. Here in Australia, most parishes have just one. You’d be lucky to find an anticipated mass on Saturday.
Catholic churches in the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and even Vietnam were overflowing with attendees. Here, you’re likely to find churches in the suburbs half full. I miss singing joyful hymns at mass and listening to younger priests giving homilies I could relate to.
While Melbourne’s CBD churches still pack in a crowd, most Catholic churches in the suburbs have a small, ageing congregation.
I find myself drifting away as the priest rambles on. I try to find friends to go to church with, but most no longer go. When I mention to a guy I’m starting to date that I go to church, I am met with a baffled look.
For many Christians I’ve met, church going means attending once a year during Christmas or Easter, or it’s an activity reserved for their mums in retirement years.
While it is tempting to blame the priest’s homily as being boring or masses being too early, is it really the reason for the lack of attendance? I feel the most compelling reason is the loss of connection. Church is about coming together and celebrating our faith as a community. Yet, for many of us, we can attend church regularly for months and still not know anyone in church.
There is no doubt sports and exercise are an important facet of the Australian lifestyle. For months, I attended a Sunday Yin yoga class. My instructor, Emma, would greet me with a hug. She knows my name, as well as my aches and pains. I feel seen, heard and understood.
While I don’t expect hugs when I go to church, I do crave a sense of connection and community, something we deeply long for these days.
Maybe my grad school instructor was right. The saying “The family that plays together, stays together” is apt in Australia. Sport and fitness seems to be the glue that binds this society more than church does.
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Indigenous Australians split over voice vote despite memory of colonial horror
This "aboriginal" woman is clearly white. They all are in Tasmania
Patsy Cameron stands in her dining room in Tomahawk – a small fishing village on the north-east coast of Tasmania, Australia. She tells a story – a few decades old – of how she boarded a plane back from Darwin, her hands full of cultural objects she had bought. The man next to her turned and said: “They should have shot them all like they did to the Tasmanians.” She started crying. He responded by offering her a piece of cake, and an apology.
Behind her is a cabinet full of shell necklaces and drawings of her ancestors. The home she shares with her husband, Graham, is filled with cultural artefacts that the historian learned to make by reading diaries and anthologies of colonisers. Piece by piece she has put history back together. Piece by piece she is reviving her culture.
The reason she is having to do this is because of the persistent myth that haunts Tasmanian Aboriginal people – that they no longer exist.
It has its roots in the murderous colonial project that tried to wipe out the original inhabitants of the island in the 19th century, and the framing of the Nuenonne woman Truganini as “the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race” before her death in 1876. The myth spread across history books and in classrooms, carving a place in the minds of many Australians.
This is the usual Leftist lie. There was something of a war between blacks and whites in the early days. The Aborigines had attacked and killed isolated white settlers so were reviled. So the white Tasmanian authorities did mount a sweep aimed at catching and killing all Tasmanian Aborigines. But the sweep did nothing. Tha Aborigines easily evaded it.
What eventually wiped out the full-blood Aborigines was the "help" that do-gooder missionaries gave them. They were being rapidly wiped out by white disases so the do-gooders herded them all together onto Flinders Is. to "protect" them. None survived. During that time some Aboriginal women had however given birth to the children of white men. It is remote descendants of those part-Aboriginal childen who sometimes claim to be Aboriginal
All of this helps to explain why 14 October is so important, not just to Cameron but to many other Indigenous people across Australia. This is the day the country will go to the polls to vote on whether to establish in the constitution the principle of an Indigenous voice – an elected body to advise the national parliament on policies that affect the lives of Indigenous people.
The proposal is backed by the government, many businesses, the national sporting leagues and other institutions, and supported by a large majority of Indigenous people, according to the polls. But it has come under sustained attack from, among others, the leadership of the Liberal and National opposition parties.
It has been a bitter and unedifying campaign, with accusations of racism, misinformation, bad faith arguments and divisiveness. Referendums to change the constitution need a simple majority of all voters, but also a majority of the six states to vote in favour. Polls showed initial enthusiasm for the voice, with more than 60% in favour, but as the weeks have passed the no side has taken large chunks out of that vote and the proposal seems destined to fail.
But in Tasmania things are different
There, the polls show the yes campaign still in the lead – it is the only state where that has been the case for the past month and more.
Politics among some of the Aboriginal groups on the island is fraught. There are long-held tensions over who can identify. The largest group, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (Tac), questions the authenticity of the regional organisation, the Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation (Chac).
Highfield House sits within the local government area of Circular Head, where 17% of the region’s 8,000 people now identify as Aboriginal – a figure that has become a source of contention between the two groups – compared with 5.4% across the whole state.
Adding to the tension is Preminghana – a heritage site on the north-west coast that is managed by Tac rangers. Chac sees the site as culturally significant but has no access to it.
But on the voice the two groups are united – they are advocating for a no vote, though for very different reasons.
Tac sees it as a toothless tiger. Its spokesperson, Nala Mansell, says they haven’t fought to be advisers.
The chair of Chac, Selina Maguire-Colgrave, was a yes supporter at first, but now says Chac will vote no. She says the organisation already has access to parliament through the local MP, Gavin Pearce (he did not reply to a request for an interview), and is worried it might lose that access if the referendum were successful – that the voice would leave them with no voice.
“I don’t think we would have such an issue with the voice if we knew [it] would be fair and equitable,” Maguire-Colgrave says. “They [Tac] are not recognising our communities as Aboriginal yet. So it’s kind of the cart before the horse for us. We don’t have a seat at the table.”
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University of Sydney law professor wins court fight against NSW Police thugs
A University of Sydney law professor has won a lawsuit against the state after NSW Police arrested him on the sidelines of a student protest, swept his legs out from under him and pushed him to the ground.
Professor Simon Rice, the university’s chair of law and social justice, launched a District Court suit against the state of NSW this year after he was violently arrested and fined under COVID-related health orders in October 2020.
Judgment was entered in Rice’s favour in the civil suit on September 21, with the consent of the parties. The terms are otherwise confidential.
“I successfully sued the NSW Police for assault and battery, and for false imprisonment,” Rice said.
“That is conduct that police must avoid, and many do. Police have a challenging job, but that is not licence to assault and falsely imprison, as some do.”
Rice had already contested the $1000 fine issued to him for an alleged breach of public health orders by pleading not guilty in court to an offence under the state’s Public Health Act. Police subsequently dropped the charge.
Video footage captured by student newspaper Honi Soit, posted online, shows part of the incident when Rice was forced to the ground by a group of police officers after he tried to get back on his feet.
Rice had been peacefully observing the protest against tertiary education policy with some of his students, who were working on a project relating to protest law reform. During most of the action, he stood about five to 10 metres away from the protesters.
Rice was walking through part of the crowd when he observed police officers standing around a young woman. One of the officers took a megaphone out of her hand and Rice asked them why they were doing that. Shortly afterwards, police arrested him and swept his legs out from under him.
Rice said there was a “large gap in police accountability in NSW” because the NSW Ombudsman no longer has oversight of police conduct and the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) can investigate only serious or systemic misconduct.
“For complaints of ‘ordinary’ misconduct, you can complain to the NSW Police, who investigate themselves,” Rice said.
“The only way to make the NSW Police stop and think about how they overstepped the mark is to sue them. That is a slow, costly and risky path ... and not one that most people who encounter the NSW Police can undertake.
“I felt obliged to run the risk of suing the NSW Police because I am better able to take that risk than are most victims, and everything that can be done should be done to limit the excessive use of force by the police.”
Rice said there was “no excuse for police using force to suppress peaceful protest and participation in political debate”.
“Their role is to keep the peace. If force is necessary – and it was not at all necessary in the protest I was observing – it must be proportionate. Peaceful protest demands respectful policing.”
Redfern Legal Centre, acting for Rice, made a complaint to the LECC last year in an attempt to have the incident investigated as part of a wider examination of NSW Police response to protest action. It argued police used excessive force and there was no lawful reason to arrest Rice because he had a work-related exemption from restrictions on gatherings. The commission decided not to investigate.
Rice said that “there is a lot in a name; the role of police in society would be better described – as it once was in NSW – as a ‘service’, not a ‘force’, perhaps with a corresponding change in behaviour”.
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Albanese just spent $364 million to make Jacinta Price PM
By Parnell Palme McGuinness
When Malcolm Fraser’s granddaughter got out her ouija board this week to tell us that her grandfather, had he still been alive, would have voted yes in the Voice to parliament referendum, the conceit became an instant meme in the chat channels. Henceforth, “they’re really rolling out Malcolm Fraser’s granddaughter on this one” will be shorthand for the desperate and bizarre arguments made by the losing side of a public discussion.
But there is a silver lining: the referendum may be lost, but the process could deliver Australia its first female, Indigenous prime minister.
Despite repeated assurances that the real Yes campaign was about to launch, it seemingly never has. The much-vaunted TV ad is a fizzer, which leaves people with the same questions they started asking after Garma last year. Anthony Albanese is showing signs that he’s finally accepted the polling which indicates Yes is in a losing position. This week, the prime minister began rolling out the line that his referendum will have been worthwhile, even if rejected by voters, because the process “has brought Indigenous disadvantage front and centre in the national conversation”.
Bringing the disadvantage in Indigenous communities to the attention of the nation is vital. There was a time when, in combination with a constitutional convention on the structure of a Voice and the words to be inserted in our Constitution, it could have made a powerful case for Yes. In September last year, I pointed out that our annual ritual of debating Australia Day had allowed the comfortable classes to ignore the complexity of the Indigenous condition, in which, as Marcia Langton has argued, intra-community violence is too often excused or confused for Indigenous culture.
Since the prime minister has done nothing to lead or foreground the discussion on Indigenous disadvantage himself, his words have a hollow tone of defeat. But he’s not wrong: the referendum process has created a national forum for newly elected Northern Territory senator Jacinta Yangapi Nampijinpa Price to tell the heartbreaking story of her community.
Price has been travelling the country for the No campaign, telling her story to anyone who will listen. It includes, as she said in her first speech to parliament, that “direct family members have been violently murdered, or died of alcohol abuse, suicide, or alcohol-related accidents” and laments a justice system which is broken because it “serves perpetrators exceptionally better than victims”.
An increasing number of people are listening to the eloquent senator, who couples her focus on the terrible disadvantage in Indigenous communities with a message of empowerment, that Indigenous people can choose their destiny in modern Australia. She made headlines at the National Press Club for her claim that colonisation has been good for Indigenous Australians – a shocking and presumptuous claim to those trapped in the cycle of intergenerational trauma, but a truism in the context in which she put it: running water, readily available food.
Sanitation and nutrition are two fundamental measures of wellbeing that, together with Western-style housing, still dominate conversations over quality of life in remote Indigenous townships. Hearing it said plainly and publicly by an Indigenous woman who is still very much part of her own community as well as part of Canberra is revolutionary. Price is cutting through because her vision of what Australia can and could be for Indigenous people is unashamedly upbeat.
The effect she is having has been widely noted. This masthead recently called her a “conservative rockstar”, but there is evidence she is moving hearts and minds beyond conservative politics.
“The striking increase in the No vote suggests that Price, as campaign figurehead, has played a big part in winning people over,” says Resolve pollster Jim Reed. “Even progressives, who may not welcome her message in the same way conservatives would, cannot deny the authentic views of a black woman with hard-won experience.”
James Baillieu, part of the No campaign’s network of supporters and strategists, calls Price the X-factor of the campaign. He recently wrote that she argues to “give people more agency, opportunities, and legs up”. And “most important of all, she brings a positive message of hope”.
The Yes campaign accuses the No campaign of creating division. But perhaps the most uncomfortable thought for Yes campaigners is that far from dividing the country, Price is unifying it around an aspiration for Australia that Yes doesn’t share.
Her stocks within the Coalition have rocketed, generating serious discussion of Price as prime minister material. Nicolle Flint, the retired member for Boothby who is now being touted as a potential state Liberal leader in South Australia, has outlined the considerations involved.
Flint notes that Price is, from a practical perspective, in the wrong house and the wrong party. But the senator could run for a seat in the House of Representatives, which traditionally furnishes the prime minister and, potentially, shift to the Liberal Party. Price would, realistically, also need to work on the way she delivers her messages. She is already capable of inspiring, but to be prime minister she would need to become more persuasive. These are small things, given the enormous impact she has had in her first year of federal politics. For the time being, she is perfectly positioned to cut her teeth as deputy prime minister. Eventually, though, her fans want more for her.
The government budgeted $364.6 million over three years to deliver the referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples in the Constitution through a Voice to parliament. As the referendum campaign draws into its final days, it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that Anthony Albanese has run a $360 million campaign to elect our first female Indigenous prime minister. And she’s not from his side of politics
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1 October, 2023
‘Selfish society’: Tradwife says marriage must be protected ‘at all costs’
The article below tends to portray Tradwives as if they are a rarity totally out of step with modern society. I doubt that they are actually rare. My impression is that many mothers would gladly embrace a full-time wife and mother role if family finances permitted it.
I am admittedly harking back 40 years but I once had a Tradwife -- long before it was called that. When I met my third wife she was a working mother with three small kids. And I was already affluent. So I told her to ditch her job and I would support her to be a full-time mother. She jumped at it. The traditional female role had always seemed a good one to her.
She was not housebound. I gave her a small car so when the kids were at school, she would shop, visit friends and explore her other interests. She still buzzes around at a great rate to this day but always has time to look after me in my frail old age
I think that adds up to a good recommendation for tradwifery. Any man who can afford it should have one. Many single mothers would volunteer. It sure beats spending your money on boats, planes and other toys
Tradwife and influencer Estee Williams says being a traditional homemaker doesn’t necessarily have to be associated with the 1950s and 60s. Ms Williams said traditionalism is putting “family before yourself”. “I think it is having those traditional values that were once definitely more in place in God, family and love,” she told Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan.
Ms Williams said we now live in a “very selfish” society. “You see self-love promoted everywhere – women are leaving marriage far more easily than men and are doing it because they think there is something better out there for them," she said. “Marriage is a bond and it’s a sacred bond – you have to protect that at all costs, and I think part of that is putting your partner’s needs before your own every single day.”
“I think it is having those traditional values that were once definitely more in place in God, family and love,” she told Sky News Australia host Piers Morgan.
Ms Williams said we now live in a “very selfish” society.
“You see self-love promoted everywhere – women are leaving marriage far more easily than men and are doing it because they think there is something better out there for them," she said.
“Marriage is a bond and it’s a sacred bond – you have to protect that at all costs, and I think part of that is putting your partner’s needs before your own every single day.”
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Daniel Andrews locked down on politics of fear as Covid madness raged
If the boffins in the Wuhan lab engineered Covid-19 to suit a particular kind of leader, Daniel Andrews would have been the one they had in mind.
The retiring premier of Victoria played the politics of fear with panache, locking down the state’s 6.5 million citizens until their noses bled and waited for them to thank him.
To describe Andrews as Teflon-coated is to overstate the durability of thermoplastic polymer-layered pans. It also understates Andrews’ mastery of his craft, for he is beyond doubt the most skilful Australian political operator of the modern age.
His decision to step down comes 10 months after he won a second successive landslide win, claiming 56 of the 88 lower house seats against a demoralised and dishevelled conservative opposition.
Andrews’ transition from chief minister in the Westminster tradition to Dictator Dan was straight out of the autocrat playbook. Alfred Hitchcock could have learned a thing or two by tuning in to Andrews’ daily press conferences. “I know this is scary,” Andrews said, announcing the state’s first lockdown, “but if we don’t slow this thing down, we’ll have people waiting in line for machines to help them breathe.”
Andrews grabbed a lazily written provision in Victoria’s Public Health and Wellbeing Act to declare a state of emergency in March 2020, saying it would be in place for four weeks. It remained in place for 903 days, allowing Andrews to rule with unchallenged authority.
The police force was transformed overnight from the keepers of law and order to the enforcers of state diktats. While some police officers were to resign in disgust, most merely followed orders, while others appeared to relish the additional power.
With a night curfew in force, police arrested peaceful citizens for crossing the threshold of their property to put out the bins. The incitement to protest became a serious offence and the police resorted to monitoring Facebook, leading to the notorious arrest of a pregnant woman in her pyjamas in her own home.
In response to growing protests, police deployed the most potent sub-lethal weaponry in the world, including the PepperBall VKS semiautomatic rifle modelled on the M4 carbine, which was fired at retreating protesters’ backs.
The soundtrack to the TV news was as confronting as the images. The yells and jeers we had heard before but the crack-crack-crack of semiautomatic rifle fire was new to the domestic news.
Andrews’ six lockdowns, totalling 262 days, set the record for the longest in the world. They were more draconian than those in any liberal democracy.
His administration distinguished itself in other ways, too. Victoria has Australia’s largest per capita state debt and the highest per capita number of Covid deaths in Australia, 160 per million residents. The next highest is NSW at 94 per million.
Andrews’ Victoria serves as the crash-test dummy for lockdowns. The results strongly suggest they are expensive and don’t save lives. Since 85 per cent of Victorian Covid deaths occurred since the vaccines arrived, they also may tell us something about the effectiveness of vaccination. Yet these and more important lessons will not be learned if the state and federal governments prevail. Last week, the Labor federal government announced an inquiry into pandemic management. The terms of reference expressly ruled out examination of unilateral actions by premiers such as Andrews.
Andrews understood better than anyone that few voters cared much about debt after a decade and a half of increasing prosperity and low interest rates. He recognised that younger voters cared even less and that medical science wouldn’t keep the baby boomers alive forever.
His government employed 286 ministerial advisers and media managers independent from the public service, according to data released last year under Freedom of Information. Some 86 of them reported directly to the premier. By comparison, the Prime Minister of Australia has fewer than 60.
His media unit mastered social media, its principal channel of communication. Andrews has a million followers on Facebook and 442,000 followers on X (Twitter).
He straddled the political divide between educated inner-metropolitan elites and suburban and regional Australia better than any of his contemporaries. Labor faces a growing challenge in keeping university-educated electorates out of the hands of the Greens. Andrews secured green-leaning voters by implementing radical, wokeish policies without frightening blue-collar conservatives.
He was the first premier to introduce so-called anti-gay conversion legislation, a Trojan horse for transgender activism of the most insidious kind. Applying the laws of biology when counselling gender-questioning teenagers is a criminal act in Victoria. The state reduced the role of doctors, psychiatrists, priests and parents to rubber stamps. A teenager’s decision to transition is final. A minor still needs the approval of a responsible adult to get a tattoo in Victoria but not to change their gender.
Victoria under Andrews was the first to make euthanasia legal. It has been zealous in the pursuit of renewable energy. The Constitution made drilling for unconventional gas illegal and gas connections to new homes were banned.
Andrews had the intuition to understand that politics was downstream from culture and that Victorians made up the most progressively minded constituency in Australia, as different from Queenslanders and West Australians as Californians were from Texans.
Unlike other progressive-left leaders, however, Andrews retained the common touch. While the state Labor governments in Queensland and Western Australia infuriated recreational fishers with regulations and quotas, Andrews recognised the size and influence of the outdoor recreation vote by dispatching numerous small grants to upgrade boat ramps.
Andrews deserves much credit for weakening and dividing his state’s conservative opposition. His moral authority dragged Victoria’s Liberal Party-Nationals Coalition further to the left. The opposition offered token resistance, at best, to the radical legislation passed under its nose.
The opposition’s deficit of moral courage came to a head in March with the suspension from the party room of Moira Deeming for speaking at an anti-trans rally infiltrated by neo-Nazis. Opposition Leader John Pesutto is fighting a defamation writ issued by Deeming.
Such is the cult of Andrews that the transition of leadership won’t be easy. On top of uncontrolled, rising debt, he leaves behind the stink of withdrawing as the host of the 2026 Commonwealth Games, burdening taxpayers with a $380m cancellation fee.
Conventional political wisdom would tell you that Labor’s third term, which ends in 2026, will be its last for a while. After Andrews, however, the old laws of politics no longer apply. Barring injections of charisma, wit and principle into Labor’s opponents, Andrews’ most important legacy may be turning Victoria into a one-party state.
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Immigration system crackdown to target dodgy international student visas and bogus asylum seekers
About time
Dodgy international student visas and bogus asylum seekers will be targeted by the Albanese government as it aims to end rorts in Australia’s immigration system.
The growing rental crisis has the government increasingly worried about the public’s attitude to immigration.
So this week a number of announcements will be unveiled by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neill, Education Minister Jason Clare, Skills and Training Minister Brendan O’Connor and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles.
Government sources were keen to blame the problems in immigration on the previous Coalition government.
They pointed out that in the past financial year visa refusal rates for international students roughly doubled, with 94,000 applicants turned down, roughly half of them from the VET sector.
The rise was largely driven by increased detection of fraudulent documentation from students seeking to enter Australia to work.
The government is concerned that since 2017 more than half the growth in international VET student enrolments have come from new colleges, and colleges with fewer than 100 students.
The crackdown, to be announced this week, is expected to focus on students coming to colleges the government suspects are bogus.
This week will also finally see the release of the review into the visa system by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon which, according to copies leaked to the media, has found widespread cases of sexual exploitation, human trafficking and other organised crime activities.
Nixon has recommended temporary migrants should be barred from the sex industry.
Australians who employ temporary workers in the sex industry could also be disqualified from directing a company and their name published on a register.
Nixon has also recommended a crackdown on migration agents, including character tests.
Next week will also see an overhaul of the way applications for protection visas made on shore are handled.
Changes under consideration include tightening the restrictions on work rights for people making asylum claims, and a streamlining of the appeals process.
The number of people claiming asylum in Australia has been trending up since the borders were reopened post-pandemic — from 26,443 in 2021-2022 to 28,556 in 2022-2023.
The government is keen to avoid this number getting back to the almost 48,000 people who claimed asylum in 2018-2019.
The government is frustrated it is possible for people claiming asylum to stay for as long as 11 years on bridging visas, until their cases are finally dealt with, all the time with full work rights.
At present it takes an average of 866 days for Home Affairs to process an application, 1330 days for the AAT to review that and 1872 days for the courts to review it.
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Credlin: Why loudest Yes Voices have always had a big say
The people pushing the Voice are anything but outsiders, even though the whole point of the Voice is to end the supposed marginalisation of Aboriginal people.
Yes, many Aboriginal people are doing it tough, especially in remote areas, but the idea that people like Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, Megan Davis and Pat Anderson haven’t been listened to is simply ridiculous. If these powerful leaders, who’ve been influential on governments for decades, had spent less time fostering views that lead to a sense of grievance and separatism, and more time encouraging Aboriginal people to make the most of their opportunities as Australians, all of us – black, white and everyone in between – would be so much better off.
To the extent that there’s a gap we need to close, these Indigenous activists are arguably just as responsible as government for the fact it’s still there despite the billions spent by taxpayers.
Take Pearson, whose National Press Club speech this week was the big final pitch to vote “Yes”. It was the Coalition, at Pearson’s insistence, that provided tens of millions for his laudable “good to great schools” brainchild, designed to help average teachers give indifferent learners a high-quality education through highly disciplined classrooms and carefully structured teaching. Its palpable success in the remote schools where it was implemented has been a part of the reluctant acceptance by the education establishment of at least a partial return to phonics.
It was largely through Pearson that Tony Abbott spent a week a year as prime minister in remote Australia. Earlier, Pearson helped to make the case for constitutional recognition to John Howard. Before that, he’d been a key part of the team negotiating land rights legislation with the Keating government. According to the local MP, over the years, Pearson’s Cape York Partnerships organisation has received over $500 million from various governments to improve the lives of local Indigenous people.
Marginal and dispossessed he’s not, nor has he suffered from any lack of governmental support, as shown by his ranking in the top ten of last week’s Australian Financial Review Power List.
In recent years, though, Pearson is no longer the activist who once declared that welfare is “the poison that’s killing our people”, instead, his focus has been on persuading government to adopt the Voice, even though the Voice, inevitably, seems to focus on promoting grievance, victimhood, group rights, and dependence on government. As its backers insist, it’s: “Voice, Treaty, Truth”, which is the Uluru Statement that the Prime Minister says he’s committed to implementing “in full”.
At the National Press Club last week, Pearson urged us to vote “yes” from “the love of country that joins all of us as Australians”. But he couldn’t help suggesting that Aboriginal people are still treated with “contempt and disdain” and saying “we were victims of history but our victimhood ends with our empowerment”, as if power hasn’t been something Pearson has exercised all his life.
As a campaigner, I have noticed the recent shift in language from the Yes camp to refer to the Voice as an “advisory body”. In interviews, the PM says the phrase over and over again. And yet when my referendum postal ballot paper arrived four days ago, the word “advisory” was nowhere on it. But that’s how disingenuous the pro-Voice campaign has been from the start.
It’s precisely because the actual argument for the Voice is so thin-to-non-existent that the Yes campaign so often resorts to moral pressure, aggressive protests, and the suggestion that voting No is somehow contemptible.
Thank God for the very different leadership provided by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine, who are proud of their Indigenous heritage but no less proud of being Australian. In a very different Press Club address this week, Mundine said that the imminent referendum is a “choice about what kind of nation we want to be … a liberal democracy where all people are equal … or a country where people are divided by race, and permanently in conflict with each other over facts of history that cannot be altered”.
It’s telling that the football codes that rushed to embrace the Voice months ago won’t be pushing it this grand finals weekend. Perhaps they’ve finally realised Australians are sick of being hectored and are on the verge of saying a resounding No not just to the PM’s Voice but also to the identity politics that’s been forced down our throats.
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