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 August, 2023
Tyrannical childcare regulator blasted
Determined to make childcare unaffordable
A HUNTER child care service facing up to $50,000 in fines for failing to comply with "inequitable and impractical" Department of Education regulations has hit back, and won.
St Nicholas Early Education services, which operates 33 out-of-school-hours OOSH services for children at Catholic schools in the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese, as well as 12 early childhood learning centres, caters to about 5,200 children.
The service was taken to task over allegations it failed to properly manage children with asthma at six of its OOSH centres in Abermain, Branxton, Lochinvar, Maitland, Rutherford and Scone.
However, Supreme Court Justice Des Fagan criticised the department for inflicting "impractical burdens" on St Nicholas rather than adopting a sector-wide standard.
He described the laws regulating the industry as a "superstructure of minute regulation" which comes at "significant cost, and with considerable burden and absorption of resources - for government, for approved providers, and for the users of their services".
"The burden of heavy regulation is illustrated in this case by evidence of the manner in which authorised officers of the secretary have scrutinised the operation of some of the plaintiff's centres and by the documentary evidence of the plaintiff's painstaking and protracted efforts to reason with departmental offices about the impracticability of their enforcement directions," Justice Fagan said.
As it was, the centres operated on a not-for-profit basis, and there was evidence before the court that many of the clients of the business are "families wherein both parents work".
"There is a strong inference that the scope for the plaintiff to increase its charges, in order to cover additional operating expenses including the cost of complying with statutory requirements and departmental directions, is very constrained," he said.
In this case, the department was seeking for St Nicholas to keep on the premises asthma-related drugs which were only required to be taken once per day, at home.
"It appears unsatisfactory, to say the least, that medically untrained personnel should, in the name of the secretary, formally allege on medical grounds that an offence has been committed ... carrying a $50,000 fine, and issue a statutory notice for which non-compliance attracts a $30,000 fine ... (when) 'online research' was considered (upon review) sufficient to show that by following parental instructions, which accorded with the nature of the medication, the plaintiff (St Nicholas) took 'every reasonable precaution' as required by the Law," Justice fagan said.
"It is difficult to see why the inspector and (department) should not have been sufficiently trained either to refrain from making medical judgments beyond their expertise or to make the online inquiry themselves, before imposing upon an authorised provider the risk and burden of dealing with a compliance notice that was unjustified in this material particular."
The department's requirements were outside of accepted industry practise, medical advice and community standards.
Being forced to approach parents for updated asthma plans in an effort to appease the department, St Nicholas reported that four families withdrew their child's asthma plans saying they had outgrown them, and two families left the service citing the requirement of a new asthma plan where it was not a requirement at other services.
"A significant number of parents have expressed concerns around the cost and availability of accessing their GP/specialist to request a further update to the plan and whether this accessibility issue will threaten the ability of their child/children to continue attending care," the department's legal counsel said.
"Out of the responses received, less than 14 per cent have been able to provide updated plans that [meet] the requirements [the department] have outlined. We believe this to be further evidence that the department's current approach with the approved provider's services is outside of accepted industry practice, medical advice and community standards."
Justice Fagan ordered the department to pay St Nicholas's costs, saying the money it had spent on its approach to enforcement could probably have funded "an appropriately qualified medical specialist" to advise on standardised directions to all approved operators, taking into account the autonomy of parents to choose the extent to which they will authorise or require childcare staff to administer medication.
"The department's relationship with this provider has been one of enforcement, penalisation and legal disputation rather than guidance and support," he said.
***************************************************
Cyber Attack Cost Medibank $46.4 Million
Australia's largest insurer Medibank has sustained a $46.4 million (US$30 million) loss due to a cyber attack, according to the company's 2023 financial year (FY) results.
Last year, Russian cybercriminals launched a hacking saga against Medibank, stealing personal data from nearly 10 million Australians and posting them on the dark web.
In the results released on Aug. 24, the insurer revealed it incurred $46.4 million of costs associated with cybercrime, largely related to its incident response and the customer support package.
They added that it was expected to cost another $30 million to $35 million in FY24 for an IT security uplift, as well as legal and other costs related to regulatory investigations and litigation.
This, however, does not include the impacts of any potential findings or outcomes from regulatory investigations or litigation.
Following the cyber attack, Medibank lost nearly 13,000 out of about four million policyholders in the December quarter.
However, the company is swiftly recovering, with reported net resident policyholders increasing by almost 11,000 (0.6 percent) and net non-resident policy holders increasing by 78,400 (39.9 percent) in FY23.
The growth mainly came from families, younger people, and those taking out cover for the first time.
“In what was a very challenging year for our customers and our people, policyholder growth is back on track following the cybercrime event," Medibank CEO David Kiczkar said.
"Health insurance customers have surpassed 4 million for the first time in our 47-year history, and they continue to prioritise their health and wellbeing by using their cover more than in recent years."
Mr. Kiczkar said while many Australians were scaling back spending in many areas, health has not taken the same hit.
“People are still opting for private health insurance in record numbers," he said.
“We expect further policyholder growth in FY24 in what will continue to be a highly competitive market.
“We recorded our largest increase in non-resident policyholders in seven years, with policy unit growth of almost 40 percent bringing the total number to nearly 275,000."
Medibank also reported a net profit after tax of $511.1 million.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/cyber-attack-cost-medibank-46-4-million-5479815
*************************************************Minns warns giant overhead cables only way to deliver renewable energy future
Premier Chris Minns has vowed to push ahead with the construction of gigantic overhead power cables across the state, warning a delayed rollout of transmission lines could undermine the renewable energy transition and threaten supply and prices.
In an unusually blunt intervention into the fraught debate over how to connect regional wind and solar projects to the east coast grid, Minns said burying the cables below ground as some landholders have demanded could triple the cost and delay the government’s urgent effort to plug a looming hole in the state’s power supply caused by the retirement of coal-fired power stations.
Labor will have to consider how to resolve a stand-off with vocal community groups – including farmers and environmentalists – who strongly oppose overhead powerlines. This could see new policy measures to give more state control over local planning.
Speaking at a Business Sydney event, Minns acknowledged that regulatory and planning changes would be needed to accommodate above-ground transmission, but overhead powerlines were the only cost-effective option available to the government.
He warned that delays in connecting renewable energy projects in regional NSW to the eastern seaboard through new transmission could threaten energy supply and the cost of power bills.
Minns said the government could not “pretend that the difficulties of renewable energy can be just wished away, we gotta get on with those projects”.
The NSW Labor government has warned of delays and increased costs to many renewable energy zones.
The NSW Labor government has warned of delays and increased costs to many renewable energy zones.CREDIT:JANIE BARRETT
“Part of that is us looking at the impact and cost of underground cabling to get renewable energy projects to the eastern seaboard,” Minns said.
“Unfortunately, we’re going to have to go overland and the reason for that is it is three times the cost. If you do it underground, that’s going to add cost [and] is going to add delay.”
Minns and energy experts are increasingly worried that time is running out to build the thousands of kilometres of high-voltage transmission lines needed to connect renewable energy zones in regional areas to major cities.
Time to accelerate the development of renewable alternatives
The federal government wants to reach 82 per cent renewables by 2030 and to hit net zero by 2050. The Australian Energy Market Operator calculates the grid needs to grow by 10,000 kilometres.
However, transmission methods have been hugely divisive in NSW amid concerns from some groups that overhead powerlines would have negative impacts on property values, the environment and the landscape.
Those concerns prompted an upper house parliamentary inquiry into the feasibility of transmission infrastructure being built underground. A report from the Labor-controlled committee is due to be released on Thursday.
“We’ve got renewable energy zones in regional NSW, we have to transmit that power onto the east coast energy grid, which is largely hugging the eastern seaboard,” Minns said.
“The best way we can execute the renewable energy revolution while keeping prices as low as possible and ensuring supply is ensuring we get those connection points.”
The renewable zones were the brainchild of the former NSW Coalition government as part of its ambitious energy road map but costs and timetables of some projects have blown out.
The Labor government has said the capital costs for the zones are estimated to be about $9.3 billion, and warned some of those projects are likely to be delayed.
Costs for the Orana renewable energy zone in the state’s Central West have increased from $650 million to $3.2 billion, while the Hunter Transmission Project has risen from $880 million to $990 million.
As well as boosting supply to the grid by fast-tracking transmission infrastructure from the renewable zones, the government may be forced to intervene to help keep Australia’s biggest coal-fired power station open beyond 2025.
The government’s electricity network review is being finalised, but Minns has previously indicated extending Eraring’s shelf-life might be necessary because “the pace of renewable energy coming online in NSW has been so slow”.
****************************************************
Meta ends partnership with RMIT FactLab amid voice referendum bias claims
Slippery "facts"
Sky News presenter Peta Credlin says Meta’s decision to suspend its partnership with RMIT’s fact-checking program amid complaints of voice referendum bias has exposed the “sinister use of so-called fact-checking to deny legitimate debate”.
On Tuesday, the tech giant distanced itself from RMIT’s FactLab amid a furore after a “false information” label from “independent fact checkers” was slapped on Credlin’s reports about the Uluru statement posted on Facebook.
Her editorial stated that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was not a single-page document but 26 pages long.
Meta executives said they had suspended their partnership with RMIT FactLab, “effective immediately”, after receiving complaints about bias and unfairness relating to the voice to parliament referendum.
The FactLab’s failure to have a current certification by the International Fact-Checking Network was also blamed for Meta’s decision to suspend ties with FactLab.
Credlin, a columnist at The Australian, said: “It is a vindication of my concerns about a lack of transparency from the Prime Minister and Yes proponents about what a vote for the voice really means, given what we now know is contained in the full Uluru statement.
“It is simply not credible for Uluru co-authors, like Professor Megan Davis and Pat Anderson, to have tried to deny the breadth of the document’s Aboriginal sovereignty ambitions when they have been on the record so comprehensively for over six years.”
She also said this applied to journalists, including ABC host Leigh Sales, who last week said in an email to staff at the public broadcaster that the Uluru statement was a one-page document and they should refute any arguments contrary to this.
The FactLab, which said it worked “hand in hand” with RMIT ABC Fact Check. claimed this month that Credlin’s reporting and commentary about the Uluru statement’s length were incorrect, despite Credlin, receiving a response to a Freedom of Information request from the National Indigenous Australians Agency confirming its length as 26 pages.
Meta’s regional director of policy, Mia Garlick, responded on Tuesday to an inquiry sent by Liberal senator James Paterson questioning the FactLab’s conduct.
“We have recently become aware that one of our Australian fact-checking partners – RMIT – did not have current IFCN accreditation and that there have been complaints made to the IFCN about possible bias or unfairness in some of the fact checks being applied by RMIT with respect to content relating to the upcoming referendum on the voice to parliament,” she said in the correspondence.
“In light of these allegations and the upcoming vote on the voice referendum, we are suspending RMIT as a partner in our fact checking program, effective immediately.”
************************************
30 August, 2023
Wrongly jailed father successfully sues judge for false imprisonment in landmark case
Vasta finally went too far
A father who was wrongly jailed by a judge for an alleged contempt of court in a family law case has been awarded more than $300,000 in damages after he took the rare step of suing the judge personally.
In a landmark decision on Wednesday, Federal Court Justice Michael Wigney held Federal Circuit and Family Court Judge Salvatore Vasta could not rely on a judicial immunity and was personally liable for the man’s false imprisonment. The Commonwealth and the state of Queensland were also held liable.
The father of two, given the pseudonym Mr Stradford, was awarded a total of $309,450 in damages.
Vasta alone was ordered to pay $50,000 of the total sum in exemplary damages for false imprisonment and deprivation of liberty. Exemplary damages, which are punitive rather than compensatory, are awarded in rare cases.
Each of Vasta, the Commonwealth and the state of Queensland were ordered to pay a combined $59,450 of the total to cover Stradford’s personal injury and loss of earning capacity.
Vasta and the Commonwealth were also ordered to pay $35,000 for false imprisonment and deprivation of liberty, while Vasta and the state of Queensland were ordered to pay $165,000 for false imprisonment.
Stradford launched proceedings against Vasta, the Commonwealth and the state of Queensland in the Federal Court in 2020 after the Full Court of the Family Court overturned Vasta’s 2018 order imprisoning him in that state.
The Full Court said in a scathing judgment in 2019 that it would be “an affront to justice” to leave in place the declaration that Stradford had committed a contempt of court and the order imprisoning him for a maximum of 12 months.
“What occurred here ... constituted a gross miscarriage of justice,” the Full Court said at the time. It said Vasta had no power to make the declaration or order and no factual basis for doing so.
Vasta has been the subject of a series of excoriating appeal judgments, and is facing a second lawsuit brought by another man he jailed for an alleged contempt of court. That case was paused pending the outcome of the Stradford case.
The Federal Court heard Vasta told Stradford, whose former wife strenuously opposed him going to jail, to “bring your toothbrush” after he allegedly failed to hand over all his financial records in the family law case.
Neither Stradford nor his former wife had lawyers acting for them in the property dispute and the man insisted he had “in good faith tried to provide every aspect of my financial life”.
“Don’t tell me ‘I tried’,” Vasta told the man. “Rubbish ... I didn’t come down in the last shower.
“And that’s the strange thing, is you really don’t think that the court ever will jail you for contempt. You’re about to find that lesson is going to be a very hard one for you to learn.”
Stradford was held for seven days in police custody and prison, during which he said he was bashed in prison, became suicidal and woke up to his cellmate strangling him. He was eventually released from custody after obtaining a stay to prevent the order jailing him taking effect pending his court challenge.
Under the doctrine of judicial immunity, judges cannot ordinarily be sued for decisions they make, and Vasta sought to rely on this immunity in the Stradford case.
Wigney found this immunity did not protect Vasta. He said Vasta had engaged in a “gross and obvious irregularity of procedure” and denied Stradford “any modicum” of natural justice or procedural fairness.
Vasta was a Federal Circuit Court judge at the time he imprisoned Stradford and is now a judge of the Federal Circuit and Family Court, after the two courts were merged.
**********************************************
Who’s the Coalkeeper now? The renewables disaster rolls on...
‘Victoria joins NSW in saying no to “Coalkeeper,” ran the headline in Renew Economy in September 2021. ‘Coalkeeper’ was the disparaging name that Big Renewables and their political champions gave to a proposal to pay fossil fuel generators not just for the energy that they supplied but the critical backup they provided to highly subsidised renewables. Without that backup, Australians face blackouts and businesses face being pressured to load shed to help keep the lights on.
The plan was devised by the Energy Security Board (ESB) and backed by the then-federal Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor. The proposed mechanism was a capacity market to provide a stream of income to power companies that guarantee to provide energy which can backup renewables.
Capacity markets are commonplace in energy markets but the fact that the companies providing the backup were coal or gas-fired power stations infuriated the renewable-obsessed state governments of NSW and Victoria.
In September 2021 NSW Minister for Energy Matt Kean claimed there was no need for a capacity market or to ensure the continued operation of fossil-fuelled backup. In response to a call by the UN for wealthy countries to phase out coal by 2030, Kean said ending coal-fired generation by 2030 was entirely feasible. It was quite a boast given that NSW has the biggest coal-fired fleet in Australia, with more than 10GW of capacity. Kean put his faith in his legislated renewable energy plan – the biggest in the nation’s history – with five renewable energy zones to provide 12GW of renewable energy and 2GW of energy storage. He was also counting on the federally-backed Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project. By offering generous contracts guaranteeing that the state would purchase energy, NSW received expressions of interest to produce 34 GW of energy in New England and 27 GW in the Central West Orana zone.
Victorian energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio followed Kean’s lead. She claimed she wasn’t opposed to a capacity mechanism provided there were ‘no payments to incumbent fossil fuels generators’. This is absurd given that fossil fuel generators are the only energy suppliers in Victoria capable of backing up a grid supplied by 95 per cent renewable energy – the Victorian target for 2035.
In December 2022, a headline in Renew Economy gloated ‘Coalkeeper killed off as Labor states embrace Matt Kean’s auction and underwriting plan’. ‘Coalkeeper is dead,’ wrote Queensland energy minister Mick de Brenni whose state owns more coal-fired power stations than any other entity in Australia and has committed to closing them all by 2035.
But it’s one thing to legislate targets. It’s another thing for them to deliver reliable power in sufficient quantity. Renew Economy reported the gloomy news this week. Just 188MW of new capacity was approved in July and 1.2GW this year. That’s less than half the amount needed to reach Labor’s target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030 to fill the gap created by closing coal plants.
D’Ambrosio has been mugged by reality. She was forced to do a deal with AGL to keep open the Loy Yang A coal-fired power station which supplies a third of the state’s electricity until 2035. It was scheduled to close in 2048 but announced in February 2022 that it would close between 2040 and 2045. D’Ambrosio refused to disclose the cost of the deal. She also declined to disclose the cost of subsidies to keep open the Portland aluminium smelter – with power from Loy Yang – until 2035.
When AGL announced last September that the plant would close in 2035, federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said, ‘The reason that this is happening is because the cheapest form of energy in Australia and globally now is renewable energy.’ In reality, it is because renewable energy is the most heavily subsidised and fossil fuels the most heavily penalised. In addition, the energy shortages created by renewables create greater profits.
Each year, the CSIRO and AEMO work with the industry on the NextGen report which gives an updated cost estimate for large-scale electricity generation. It supposedly shows that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy, however the report substantially overestimates the low capacity factor of renewables and underestimates the cost of additional transmission, battery and pumped hydro storage, land, and backup.
We can get an idea of the gap by comparing federal Labor’s estimate of the cost of its 2030 renewable electricity target of 82 per cent which it claimed was $78 billion before the last election whereas Australia’s former chief scientist Robin Batterham put it this year at $1.5 trillion.
NextGen also overestimates the cost of nuclear energy which it says is more expensive than wind and solar. Compare Ontario, which gets around almost 60 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, with South Australia which has the highest level of wind and solar in Australia. The cost of electricity in South Australia is more than three times higher than in Ontario.
In the NSW election in March, Kean suffered a 12 per cent swing against him in the primary vote and the government lost office so he didn’t have to face the embarrassment of negotiating with Origin to keep the Eraring power station open. It was originally slated to close in 2032 but last year its retirement was bought forward to 2025 because it was deemed unprofitable.
An independent report commissioned by the new NSW Labor government recommended the state keep Eraring open with the establishment of a mechanism to manage the orderly retirement of fossil fuel generators. That sounds like the establishment of a capacity market. Last year AEMO, which was managing the auctioning of Kean’s renewable energy contracts, warned that NSW would experience shortfalls in electricity if Eraring was retired in 2025.
Kean said in December 2020 that building new coal-fired plants was like going back to Blockbuster video after getting Netflix. That hasn’t worried China. Chinese imports of coal from Australia surged to their highest levels in three years in July after bans imposed in 2020 were lifted on 18 May. It approved the construction of an additional 106 gigawatts of coal-fired power in 2022, four times higher than in 2021.
Unlike in Australia, these projects are being built in a matter of months. For the foreseeable future, it seems we are all Coalkeepers now.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/whos-the-coalkeeper-now/ ?
*****************************************************
Vacant land shame: 100k blocks sit idle as housing crisis deepens
Almost 100,000 blocks of land are sitting idle across Queensland – including 879 owned by the government for social housing – as the state sinks further into its housing crisis.
Data held by Queensland Treasury reveals that of the 97,845 blocks waiting to be built on, 59,750 of those are in South East Queensland.
And new figures show that while the average wait time for social housing is 19 months some of the 879 owned by the Department of Housing have been vacant for more than a decade.
Shockingly, two blocks in Mt Gravatt East have been left barren since back in 2013 when fire destroyed the homes.
Opposition spokesman for housing Tim Mander said Queenslanders living in tents and cars, without a roof over their head would find it inconceivable the Palaszczuk Government has done nothing with the idle land.
“As the Queensland Housing Crisis deepens, the Palaszczuk Government has been sitting on 879 vacant blocks,” he said.
But the Housing Minister Meaghan Scanlon defended the hundreds of empty blocks saying “More than 57 per cent of that land is now programmed for construction”.
“There are a number of historic parcels owned by the department, in many cases for decades, that are simply unsuitable because they’re flood-prone, are contaminated or been impacted by historic mining,” she said.
Single father Greg Fellows said there wasn’t enough being done to give incentives to private investors to create housing for average Australians.
Mr Fellows has moved multiple times in the past few years while trying to budget and looking after three boys.
“It’s a challenge not only to locate something but to qualify for something,” he said. “As a single parent with a single income, it’s hard to be favourable to get a property. “That’s why I’ve had to pay three months rent to secure a property.
Mr Fellows said his last rent increase was $50 in April this year, which was a year after he had already moved from another place which increased their rent more than $60.
Mr Fellows also works as a program coordinator for youth service programs and says he sees the struggles for youth up to 25.
“It’s very difficult for them to get a start. They simply do not get enough money to pay their high rent,” he said.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles said his government would be “working closely” with council and industry in coming months to see more homes built.
“Market conditions are also a key factor in vacant lots with the residential construction industry in Queensland facing significant challenges due to supply chain disruptions and shortages and lack of suitably qualified labour,” he said.
Urban Development Institute of Australia Queensland chief executive Kirsty Chessher-Brown said there had “always been an excess of approvals over delivery”.
“There are many reasons why some dwellings don’t get completed, or built,” she said. “This has been exacerbated by the current difficulties in the property development and construction industry.
“A recent survey undertaken by the institute found that the top five reasons that were currently hindering or preventing project delivery were: increased construction costs, insufficient or unavailable contractors or consultants to undertake the work, delays in approvals, skills shortages, and market uncertainty.”
The large swathes of land left undeveloped in South East Queensland has sparked three major councils to lash the State Government over its inadequate funding of vital infrastructure to better support current and future large-scale housing developments.
Ipswich Mayor Teresa Harding said developers were pushing for certainty around the location and timing of public transport links so they could bring forward affordable housing.
Ms Harding said her city’s population was expected to more than double in the coming decades.
“The critical factor for Ipswich to reach these growth targets and support affordable housing coming to market is certainty and access around the delivery of public transport to support this growth,” she said.
“Housing is not affordable if a family needs to own and maintain two cars in order to get to work, school and services, and this is why public transport connections for growing areas are so important.”
Redland City Council Mayor Karen Williams said she believed some developers were “land banking” in but supply chain issues and the huge increases in building costs were also factors in the large number of vacant blocks.
Ms Williams said her region had not been given enough infrastructure, such as public transport or road upgrades, to sustain the growth it has already experienced, let alone to make way for the extra 50,000 people projected under the recently released Southeast Queensland Regional Plan.
Ms Williams called for more transparency around how the government planned to support the projected population growth
“Really, the State Government hasn’t planned anything in regards to policing, to education, to connectivity to public transport to go with the plan and if they if they were local government, we would be requiring them to say every time someone builds a house, you need to tell us how you’re going to support that particular dwelling with the infrastructure required to maintain a sustainable lifestyle,” she said.
***********************************************************
Schools force Anglican backdown on statement opposing same-sex marriage
Principals at Sydney’s Anglican schools will no longer be forced to sign a document affirming they believe marriage should only be between a man and a woman under a new proposal by the church that is set to abolish the controversial requirement.
In a draft policy statement, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney says incoming school heads must instead show they are of Christian faith and character, be actively involved in a Bible-based church and sign “a personal commitment to organisational faithfulness”.
The plan to scrap the clause opposing gay marriage – which was inserted into a general statement of faith in 2019 – comes after the matter sparked an outpouring of anger and frustration among Anglican school leaders and provoked intense backlash from parents.
The review of the rule forms part of a major governance overhaul of all Sydney Anglican diocese-run organisations, including more than 30 schools across the state.
In a report to be presented at its Synod next month, the diocese says the marriage clause has become a lightning rod for concerns about how the church imposes rules on schools.
“Feedback has focused on the relational difficulties it has created in school contexts ... with communities and alumni who are deeply influenced by a modern culture hostile to traditional Christian beliefs and practices,” the report says.
“This may create a barrier for the recruitment of governors and leaders, who, while personally agreeing with the statement, may face sanctions from their employer or be prevented from taking up these voluntary roles.”
The conservative Sydney diocese oversees a number of high-fee Sydney schools, including Shore, King’s, Barker College, Abbotsleigh, Trinity Grammar and St Catherine’s. Their councils are made up of volunteers, and are dominated by representatives of the diocese.
The extra clause, which surprised principals and councils when it was added by the Sydney diocese in 2019, said: “faith produces obedience in accordance with God’s word, including sexual faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman, and abstinence in all other circumstances”. New school heads and board members were forced to sign the statement as a condition of their employment.
Last year, parents at Australia’s oldest private girls’ school, St Catherine’s, lobbied its council to scrap the rule after it was revealed that its next principal could only accept the job if they agreed to the terms. Former Abbotsleigh head Judith Poole was brought out of retirement to serve as interim principal at the $40,000-a-year school until the end of 2024.
A similar backlash followed at Illawarra Grammar, where frustrated parents took the matter to its school council to raise their concerns the edict fails to “align with the values of mainstream Australia”. Parents at both schools say the communities were not consulted on the statement.
This month, Illawarra Grammar appointed a new principal, Julie Greenhalgh, who had recently retired after 16 years as head of inner west private girls’ school Meriden. In a letter to parents, the school said Greenhalgh was originally a member of the selection panel for the role but stepped down from the panel so that she could apply for the head position.
The school had previously told parents that more than 220 “educational leaders” had expressed interest in the principal role.
A spokesman for the Sydney diocese said while it had received feedback on the clause, it had “already been discussing ways in which the policy could be improved”.
“The review of the governance policy is ongoing. A school’s executive leadership will need to be Christian in faith and character, following the teachings of Jesus and beliefs and tenets of the diocese, but the commitment they make will be a commitment to organisational faithfulness,” he said.
School board members appointed by the diocese, and new principals, must be of “Christian faith and character” and “attend regularly and be actively involved in a Bible-based Christian church”.
************************************
29 August, 2023
UN corrects 40-year error claiming Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction
This "correction" can only be made because Australian law says that just one drop of Aboriginal blood makes you an Aborigine. The last full-bloods died out over a century ago. None of the alleged Tasmanian Aborigines these days even have dark skin. Mansell (below) is a blue-eyed blond
A United Nations (UN) agency has rectified a longstanding historical inaccuracy that had claimed Tasmanian Aboriginal people to be extinct for more than four decades.
The erroneous statement was discovered in a document related to the nomination process for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area declaration in 1982.
The document, which carried the inaccurate claim that “Tasmanians are now an extinct race of humans,” has finally been removed.
The flawed reference came to light during the technical evaluation of the temperate wilderness area by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a part of the process to secure its place on the World Heritage List.
The IUCN report also suggested the thylacine’s survival, a creature believed to have vanished in 1936.
The reference to the extinction of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and the potential existence of the thylacine were tied to the uniqueness of the wilderness area.
In May, it was reported by The Australian that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) had initially declined to remove the inaccurate reference.
However, UNESCO later clarified that it had not been approached regarding the matter and promptly removed the document from its World Heritage website upon being informed of the issue.
A spokesperson from UNESCO confirmed that the document had been removed for revision by IUCN, the advisory body responsible for producing the document in 1982.
UNESCO emphasised its commitment to recognising and respecting Indigenous populations in the context of protecting world heritage sites.
The organisation acknowledged that it had agreed with IUCN to amend the 1982 report in order to incorporate scientific data collected since then, which validates the ongoing existence of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
The inaccuracy in the document has been seen as a reflection of the historical mistreatment of Aboriginal people.
Rodney Dillon, a Palawa elder and the chair of Tasmania’s Aboriginal Heritage Council, expressed his people’s sadness and hurt due to this misrepresentation.
Dillon criticised the need for more sensitivity displayed by organisations like the UN and questioned how such institutions can effectively represent Indigenous communities.
“Our people feel the sadness, the hurt. It’s pretty typical of people in these positions … they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years,” he told Guardian Australia.
Michael Mansell, chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, stressed the need for the original inscription to be revised to acknowledge the insult and correct the historical record.
In May, he asserted in The Australian’s report that “World Heritage listing needs to be overhauled to acknowledge that the 1.5 million-hectare area is substantially World-Heritage listed because of its Aboriginal cultural values.”
ALCT manager Rebecca Digney told ABC the 1982 document was “dehumanising” and an example of “racist rhetoric” that exists today, though news of UNESCO’s amendment was welcomed.
“Denying somebody’s existence is probably the cruellest thing you can do to a class of people, particularly a class of people who are the survivors of genocide,” she said.
Ms Digney added Indigenous Tasmanians have been fighting the myth of extinction since the death of Truganini in 1876.
Truganini was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman documented as one of the last native speakers of the Tasmanian languages and solely of Aboriginal Tasmanian descent.
“The quickest way to undermine Aboriginal people, particularly in Tasmania, is to tell them that they don’t exist,” she said.
“It silences their voices on a political and social level. It denies them their claims on any sort of legal or economic level.”
Tanya Plibersek, the federal environmental minister, expressed her shock at the initial claim of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction and welcomed UNESCO’s corrective action.
“Generations of Australians were taught the wrong thing at school. They were taught a history that isn’t true,” she told the ABC.
The corrected version of the UNESCO statement, known as the Retrospective Statement of Outstanding Universal Value for the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, is expected to be adopted in September.
***********************************************
First COVID Deaths Were Fully Jabbed, Australian State Records Reveal
In light of a court case launched by a group of doctors challenging the Queensland government's COVID-19 vaccination mandates, records have revealed that the first deaths in the Australian state were individuals who were fully vaccinated.
A list of the state’s first 183 COVID-19 deaths from the pandemic's start on March 13, 2020, until Jan. 27, 2022, produced by Queensland’s chief health officer in an affidavit, indicates it was known to authorities as early as Jan. 2022 that the vaccines may not be preventing deaths.
The list shows that the first locally acquired COVID-19 death was one in their 80s and another in their 30s, with both having received two doses of the vaccine in December 2021 and January 2022, respectively.
While Queensland recorded seven deaths early in the pandemic, these cases were acquired outside of the state and before vaccine rollouts began.
Queensland's border opened in December 2021 after 80 percent of the state population vaccination was reached. By Dec. 31, 2021, nearly 90 percent of the population over 16 were fully vaccinated.
The case, which was launched against the state, calls for the September 2021 directive requiring employees in public health and aged-care facilities to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to be revoked.
A specialist from the case, psychiatrist Peter Parry, said that in the three decades of his career, he had never been subject to disciplinary action until now.
“I graduated from medical school 40 years ago and in all that time have never had a single complaint about me presented to a medical board or AHPRA,” he said.
The reason he chose to decline the COVID-19 vaccines was because these are “not normal vaccines.”
“We hope, by bringing evidentiary material and expert witness testimonies before the Supreme Court, that the Justices will look at the evidence and rule in our favour. If successful, large numbers of experienced nurses, allied health, and doctors will be able to return to assist an overstretched Queensland public health system,” he added.
In addition to enforced work mandates, Premier Annastacia Palazczuk barred the unvaccinated from accessing services and freedoms such as hospitals, disability services, aged care, libraries, and hospitality venues.
This was enforced by proof of vaccination requirements at venues, which the Queensland government said was to keep Queenslanders safe.
Messaging Shifts to Reducing Severe Illness
Initially, in 2021, the Queensland Government closed the state's borders and encouraged people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. They aimed to reopen the borders once 80 percent of the population was vaccinated, with the goal of stopping the virus's spread and safeguarding vulnerable citizens.
However, when the borders reopened after reaching the target, COVID-19 cases surged instead of decreasing. When it became clear that the vaccines didn't entirely prevent infection or transmission, the focus of the messaging shifted to highlight the vaccines' effectiveness in reducing severe illness and death.
It is still a condition today for most Queensland health staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to ensure the ongoing safety of employees, patients, visitors and the wider community.
“The overwhelming benefits of COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the potential risks, and this is substantiated by enormous amounts of safety data based on billions of doses worldwide,” a spokesperson for the TGA told The Epoch Times in an email.
Pfizer Dismisses Concerns Over Vaccine Mandates
The news of the deaths follows a parliamentary inquiry into the COVID-19 mandates heard from the Australian heads of Pfizer Australia that the vaccine mandates coerced Australians into getting vaccinated for COVID-19, saying they had a choice.
Appearing before an Australian senate inquiry into the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, Pfizer Country Medical Director Dr. Krishan Thiru and Dr. Brian Hewitt, the head of Regulatory Sciences for Pfizer, dismissed concerns of senators that Australians had been coerced into getting the COVID-19 vaccine.
"I believe firmly that nobody was forced to have a vaccine," Dr. Thiru said.
"Mandates for vaccine requirements are determined by governments and health authorities. I believe everybody was offered an opportunity to get a vaccine or not get a vaccine. I don't believe that anybody was forced to take a vaccine."
Meanwhile, Dr. Hewitt, when asked if he believed Australians in states that were subject to large-scale mandates—like Western Australia or Victoria—were not forced into getting the shot even when they found they were unable to earn a living without receiving a vaccination, replied he did not believe mandates compelled individuals into vaccinating.
"The mandates for vaccine requirements are determined by governments and health authorities. I don't believe that the mandates actually forced individuals to get vaccinations," he said.
***********************************************
Old-school teaching styles make struggling students successful
Seated in rows, the young students at St Vincent’s Primary School are watching their teacher, all eyes on the prize of learning something new. “A verb is a doing and action word,” the teacher says, and the entire class chimes in repetition before each child turns to repeat the words to a classmate. Every student writes a verb on a small whiteboard to show the teacher, who calls on them at random to describe a verb.
“It does sound old school,” says Monique Egan, acting principal of the Canberra Catholic school. “But there’s no doubt it helps children focus. There’s less opportunity for kids to hide and not engage. There are no long teacher explanations – students have to listen, and they’re responding, thinking, doing, making, showing and writing. I’ve never seen the school do this well.”
St Vincent’s school has embraced a teaching method known as direct or explicit instruction, derided for decades as “drill and kill”. It involves teaching children to read by phonics, sounding out words instead of memorising or guessing words from pictures. Homework is minimal but students are encouraged to read books at home and recite their times tables, the foundation of mathematics.
The method is gaining momentum as it dawns on schooling systems that quality teaching may be the solution to Australia’s ever-declining educational outcomes. Progressive ideology, the inquiry-based learning that sets tasks for students to discover facts and skills using their own initiative, has failed a generation of the most vulnerable children who stand to gain the most from a sound education.
St Vincent’s Primary School is part of the nation’s biggest experiment in using explicit instruction to lift student results.
It is one of 56 schools in the Catholic Education Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, whose director Ross Fox has transformed teaching styles through a program called Catalyst.
No longer do children sit around tables where they must bend their necks to see the teacher, and are easily distracted by a cheeky classmate pulling a face or snapping a pencil. Now they sit in rows, with plenty of space for teachers to walk and check on progress. Any children struggling with their schoolwork are placed upfront, and taken out for small-group remedial instruction if they fall behind.
Based on the scientific concept of cognitive load, lessons are delivered with clear instructions from the teacher and constant questioning of students to test their understanding. Concepts are repeated and practised, then reviewed regularly, to help children remember. Teaching materials are shown on smartboards, stripped of any distracting animations that stop kids concentrating.
Catholic Education has spent $3000 to $4000 training each teacher in the explicit instruction methods, including phonics, that universities failed to teach them in a four-year degree.
Lessons are far from dull because teachers don’t drone on at the front of the classroom but keep kids constantly involved.
“There’s so much repetition, but the skill of the teachers is to make that repetition enjoyable in an engaging lesson,” Fox says. “There’s a benefit to sitting in rows and facing the teacher because attention during that precious instructional time is so important. If you want a child to learn new knowledge, the most effective way is to tell them clearly and precisely what you want them to learn.”
The improvements are eye-opening. An Equity Economics analysis shows that in reading, 42 per cent of year 3 students in Catholic schools in Canberra and Goulburn were behind kids in similar schools across Australia in 2019. Last year, just three years after Catalyst transformed classrooms, only 4 per cent of year 3s were underperforming.
Inspired by this success, Catholic schools in Tasmania and Melbourne also are adopting the Catalyst model, the brainchild of Knowledge Society chief executive Elena Douglas, a self-described evangelist of explicit instruction.
“There are 9500 schools in Australia and 6500 are primary schools – every single one of them has to be changed,” she tells Inquirer. “We are getting close to influence over 1000. Once every state has 50 or so schools doing it there will be a systemic effect, and it is looking likely that Catholic systems will be the vector (for change). The first step is to teach the teachers.”
Shocking results from this year’s national literacy and numeracy tests reveal how children are falling off the escalator of education. One in 10 students is defined as requiring additional support to catch up with classmates. One in four students is described as developing their skills – a polite way of saying they have failed to meet the minimum standards set in NAPLAN.
All up, one in three students is below the benchmark set by the nation’s education ministers. Half the nation’s students fall into the strong category, meaning they meet the standards, but only one in six students exceeds them. Boys are likelier than girls to need support. First Nations students underperform at three times the rate of their classmates and a quarter of children require remedial support if their own parents had dropped out of high school.
What has gone wrong? Taxpayers have poured $662bn into schools since Labor prime minister Julia Gillard faced down education unions by mandating the national testing of every student in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Apart from a slight lift in literacy standards in years 3 and 5 following the uptake of phonics-based reading instruction in more schools in recent years, the results remain dire. Australian students are now more likely to fail than to excel in the basics of reading, writing, mathematics, spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds – First Nations students, kids in regional and remote areas, those with unemployed or poorly educated parent – have fallen behind the furthest. If NAPLAN results are extrapolated across all four million school students, 1.3 million children are failing to meet minimum standards for the basic subjects of English and maths.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has declared the results “make it blisteringly clear that we need serious reform in education”. As he prepares to broker a long-term funding deal with the states and territories next year, Clare has insisted the federal government will no longer write blank cheques. In December, education ministers will consider a review of key targets and specific reforms to be tied to spending on schools, after a review headed by Australian Education Research Organisation chairwoman Lisa O’Brien, a former chief executive of The Smith Family educational charity.
Catch-up tutoring for struggling students – individually or in small groups – is emerging as Clare’s favoured solution to help school strugglers. The minister has seen small group tutoring succeed at Chullora Public School in his western Sydney electorate of Blaxland.
“If you fall behind in third grade, it’s very hard to catch up by the time you’re in year 9,” he said this week, citing an AERO study that tracked the performance of 185,000 students across seven years of NAPLAN testing and found only one in five managed to catch up in high school. “If you take them out of the class – one teacher, a couple of kids – they can learn as much in 18 weeks as you would normally expect to learn in 12 months.” Clare provided federal funding to central Australian schools this year to pay for phonics-based reading instruction and catch-up tutoring for some of the nation’s most disadvantaged children.
Catching up is essential, but so is turning off the pipeline of failure by stopping kids from falling behind in the first place. Educational success begins at home. Children who don’t attend preschool or whose parents spend more on beer than on food – let alone books – are starting from behind. Kids are less likely to learn if their families are blighted by domestic violence, disability, homelessness, addiction or mental illness. Children can’t choose their parents and have no control over the choices of adults. Society and schools mustn’t blame the victims of disadvantage and dysfunction.
*************************************************
Net Zero is a revolutionary idea, but not all revolutions are a good idea
There is a saying that revolutionary ideas are first heretical, then they become interesting and controversial, until suddenly they are old hat. Or as Rowan Dean put it, ‘Today’s denounced conspiracy is tomorrow’s undisputed truth.’
So let’s get interesting and controversial about Net Zero.
Net Zero is not necessary, it’s not happening, and it’s not possible until nuclear power is in the mix. In the meantime, why don’t we burn our beautiful black and brown coal that generates the cheapest power in the world?
The push for Net Zero is driven by two propositions. The first is that the increase in global temperatures has to be kept below 1.5 or at most 2 degrees Celsius, and the second is that this warming is being driven by human activities that produce emissions of (mostly) CO2.
From there, everything follows down the chain of Net Zero policies to reduce the production of airborne plant food and a few other things, like animal farts.
What if we test the foundational assumptions? Among critical rationalists inspired by Karl Popper and Bill Bartley, this is called ‘the check on the problem’. Essentially, this check is undertaken to confirm the problem is real and alternative responses (including doing nothing) are on the table for cost-benefit analysis and due diligence.
We want to avoid the process that Roger James observed when the postwar British Labor government was building a New Jerusalem by central planning.
James coined the term ‘solutioneering’ for the process of jumping straight from a perceived problem, usually described as a crisis, to a solution before investigating the problem (if indeed there is one at all), and exploring a range of possible solutions.
Jumping to a solution before clearly formulating what the problem is (or indeed if there is one at all) or how success or failure are to be judged. Achievement of the solution then becomes the goal; and, when opposition develops, the problem becomes how to get the solution accepted, while the question of how best to solve the original problem, if there was one, never gets discussed at all. I call this mistake solutioneering
Anticipated benefits are over-estimated, the costs are under-estimated, everything is urgent, time is of the essence, it will cost more later on if it is delayed.
If all else fails, someone might decide to describe the costs as investments in a ‘glorious future’.
This process is now standard procedure for left-wing and conservative administrations, as though Key Performance Indicators are the number of new programs and the pages of legislation and regulations added to the books.
Running a check on the global warming problem and Net Zero solution reveals some concerning realities.
The first question we have to ask is, has the planet been warming?
If the answer is ‘no’, then go on with business as usual.
If ‘yes’, we require the follow up questions of how much has it warmed and is this a problem?
Some will say the planet has warmed by 1.3 degrees over the last 120 years and this has been a good thing. It may have stopped warming already and another degree or two more in the next century will most likely do more good than harm.
So again, if this is the case, the sensible thing for humanity would be to go on with business as usual, including genuine research in the field of climate science.
Others say that this warming period represents an existential threat and, because it’s our fault, the onus is on Australia to do everything we can to reduce our 1 per cent share of the world’s emissions. Never mind what China, India, and the developing nations are doing.
The next question is a no-brainer, knowing that our efforts will make no measurable difference to the climate of the world. (Alan Finkel told us as much when he was the Chief Scientist.)
Why would we spend a single dollar of public money, let alone a trillion, to press on boldly with decarbonisation?
Admittedly, we have produced a lot of remarkable achievements even at this early stage of the long march.
We have doubled, maybe tripled the cost of power with a lot more to come as we rewire the nation.
Billions of dollars of investment have gone offshore (think balance of payments, jobs, tax revenue, local skills development).
Would anyone dare to add up the cost of the new public entities in Canberra and elsewhere to mastermind and supervise and report on our Net Zero strategies? Would anyone count the new state and federal agencies, the special units in universities, or the grants handed out for new initiatives like carbon capture and pumped hydro? Not to mention hydrogen and green aviation fuel…
Look at the work big consultancies have picked up to advise firms across the nation to implement the data collection and reporting systems to satisfy the demands from every regulatory agency to consider ‘climate risks’ and ESG protocols.
All of the above add to the cost of doing business. They undermine the productivity of the private sector which is the goose that lays the golden tax eggs to pay the bills for government spending.
And there is more. We have seen the corruption of scientific research. The trashing of education from kindergarten to Year 12 and beyond. Then we have the travesty of reporting standards by stenographers and commentators in the mainstream media, especially in the public broadcaster. All this comes as the public starts to lose faith in the CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology.
Is there any need to go on? All we can do is look forward to the time when everyone says ‘we were always climate and energy realists’.
************************************
28 August, 2023
A real estate agent has turned heads after claiming bad tenants are partly to blame for increasing the rates of homelessness
Ashleigh Goodchild, who is a director at Perth-based company Soco Realty, made the shock claim as Australia is crippled by a housing crisis.
Long queues have become a common sight at rental inspections with residents forced into a fierce bidding war as they compete for vacant rooms.
Families are among the growing number of Australians that have been forced to take drastic measures and live out of caravans, tents or even their cars.
Mission Australia recently claimed over 122,000 Australians experience homelessness on any given night and that demand for its housing help services has spiked 26 per cent since 2020.
Ms Goodchild, whose company bio boasts she 'worked her way from the reception desk to business ownership', said there is another side to the homelessness picture that the media is missing.
'I know that no-one deserves homelessness, I get that, but there's a big fact that the media is missing that is contributing to these people being homeless,' she said in a TikTok video. 'And it is that they have done the wrong thing by landlords.
'The pool of tenants that are applying for properties at the moment in the Perth residential market are way below standard.
'We're talking tenants that have done the wrong thing. They have trashed properties, they lie on their application, they don't pay rent and these are the people that are more at risk of being homeless.'
Ms Goodchild posted the clip to TikTok after reading an article about homelessness. 'This fired me up this morning,' the video title read.
Perth's rental market is among the tightest in the country, with prospective tenants taking to social media to share images and videos of queues with up to 100 people waiting to inspect the city's few vacant properties.
Last month Perth's rental vacancy rate - the percentage of all rental properties that are vacant or unoccupied - was at 0.5 per cent.
Nationally the rate is just 1.3 per cent. The lower the rate, the more difficult it is to find a home.
Ms Goodchild's opinions received a mixed response, though many people working in real estate agreed with her. 'OMG this! I work as a leasing agent and this is exactly what I'm dealing with in day in and day out!' one said.
However two mums did not and firmly disagreed with Ms Goodchild's claims bad tenants were partly to blame.
'You're wrong,' a mother of six children said. 'There are so many dual income families, with A+ rental record [who] cannot get homes.'
Another Queensland woman, who is currently looking for a home, chimed into the debate. 'Sorry but I have always paid rent on time never trashed a house yet good references I have a dog and 3 adults and 3 kids and we still miss out,' she said.
Ms Goodchild responded if the woman was in Perth and could provide a rental ledger 'and a copy of your last inspection report' she would have found her a property
**********************************************************
The newly elected Labor Minns government has commissioned a report to provide a handy excuse to try and slow down the currently manic net zero transition.
What is it about the relentless pursuit of so-called renewable energy by our leaders that they overlook the need to provide affordable and reliable electricity supply to Australians?
Especially at a time when the cost of living is front of mind.
In a first-world country blessed with huge energy resources, the unreliability and cost of energy is a national scandal.
Even if one accepts the need to "transition" from fossil fuels to other forms of energy there is the foundational requirement to keep the lights on and our factories and farms producing at an affordable price.
Time and again warnings have been provided that inherent in the word "transitioning" is the imperative that energy supply and affordability need to be maintained.
Those who have correctly sounded those warnings of commonsense have been decried as "deniers" and economic vandals along with all sorts of other descriptors to avoid the discussion.
In that scenario leaders of all stripes have virtue signalled how quickly they can decommission coal-fired power stations and set zero emission targets.
Decommissioning and net zero targets can be achieved overnight by simply turning off all the power stations.
But the hugely more difficult task, with its accompanying cost factors, is the provision of alternate, affordable, and reliable energy.
An unwelcome reminder of this monumental task is the concern around the slated closure of the Eraring power station in New South Wales in 2025.
The newly elected Labor Minns government commissioned a report to provide a handy excuse to try and slow down the currently manic net zero transition.
Why a report was needed is obvious. It was to cover the government’s proverbial backside from being kicked by the citizens who feel betrayed by the hype and propaganda associated with "transitioning."
In a completely unsurprising finding the recommendation has been made to extend the life of Eraring.
Apart from that there was also the "groundbreaking" insightful suggestion that a mechanism to orderly manage the retirement of coal-fired power stations be established.
Who would have thought it necessary? Order. Management. These two previously quite foreign concepts to the renewable energy pushers and political leadership have finally mugged them and not before time.
The Eraring inquiry suggested that negotiations be entered into with the owners of the power station to prolong its life to prevent reliability gaps and guarantee no adverse price impact.
That such an inquiry was at all necessary is a complete exposure of the manic nature of the irresponsible renewable push.
Where was the leadership willing to state the bleeding obvious—we need reliability and affordability in any transition.
The false narratives are being slowly but relentlessly exposed as the predictable chickens called reliability and affordability are coming home to roost.
All this is happening at a time when speculation is rife that the Australian Energy Market Operator will soon alert the unsuspecting public that all the promised essential infrastructure and up-grading of the grid to cope is falling way behind schedule.
The management debacle of the renewable energy transition is now being witnessed on a daily basis.
A debacle that could have been easily avoided by true and responsible leadership willing to level with their citizenry about timelines, capital costs, and power bills.
The owners of Eraring will undoubtedly rub their organisational hands in glee knowing that the commodity which they were being pressured to close is now all of a sudden in demand.
The shortfall cannot be made up from elsewhere so Eraring's owner, Origin Energy, has some sway and negotiating cards with which to play.
The public is at the mercy of the provider.
This lack of foresight and deliberate denigrating of those providing the warnings by the leadership of our country is at best negligence writ large.
The fact similar stories flooding out of Europe were ignored to the detriment of Australia’s family budgets, jobs, and national well-being requires a national apology and for the responsible people to be brought to account.
The realistic fear for Australians is that Eraring will be one of many more cases to emerge over the next few years.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/australian-state-has-its-damascus-moment-on-net-zero-5480545
*********************************************************On campus, there is no room for dissenting views on Indigenous voice to parliament
JAMES ALLAN
Some readers may harbour a sneaking suspicion that Australia’s universities have a serious problem with collapsing viewpoint diversity among their professors and lecturers, to the extent that whole departments on campus have become conservative-free zones. They also may suspect that many university students, as well as academics, self-censor and keep their dissenting views to themselves. Spoiler alert: these suspicions are well founded.
Let me use the upcoming constitutional referendum on the voice to illustrate. Recent polls show the No side has a considerable lead. I mention these polls of the wider public’s view simply to contrast it with the very different world on our campuses. Many Australian universities officially have come out in favour of the Yes side and have done so despite the two main political parties taking opposite sides in the referendum – thereby making this a party-political matter and so the taking of sides by any publicly funded university, in part, a choosing by them and their governing boards between the political positioning of the two main parties. The University of NSW even has lit up one of its main buildings with a big “Yes”, emblematically transmogrifying the institution’s name into “UNYesW”.
It’s bad enough when big corporations use shareholder money to support one side in this referendum (virtually always the Yes side, and to the tune of tens of millions of dollars), and likewise when charities do so (arguably calling into serious question whether they are straying outside their charitable purposes, and also huge amounts of money virtually all to the pro side). But when taxpayer-funded universities use your tax dollars to take a side on a crucial constitutional referendum issue that splits the country, well, that’s even worse. It’s not just a form of virtue signalling with other people’s money; it comes close to being an improper use of taxpayer money.
Now, truth be told, some of our universities have opted not to support the Yes side. They’ve opted to stay officially neutral. Needless to say, neutrality is the best we can hope for. You see, I don’t know of a single Australian university, not one, that has come out for No. And this despite plenty of our tertiary institutions breaking cover to support the Yes side. Heck, it’s despite the majority of polled voters being against this proposal.
Now move down to a more granular level, to what things are like on campus. As a longtime out-of-the-closet political conservative (and cards on the table here, an outspoken No proponent from day one), I get a fair few people calling me to tell me what things are like on campuses around the country. Get this: most universities seem to have decided to put on “information sessions” about the voice.
I do not know of a single university that is putting on one of these events where there are the same number of No speakers as those for Yes on these panels. By contrast, I do know of a good few where every single speaker is (or, if you look up the resume, sure seems likely to be) a Yes speaker.
Let that sink in for a moment. It’s wall-to-wall supporters of the voice supposedly giving students some sort of balanced information about the voice. It would be laughable, if it weren’t. And if you query this you get this sort of basic answer: “We’ve briefed one of the speakers to give the No side.” Got that? Because the great free-speech philosopher John Stuart Mill is rolling in his grave.
No one can seriously believe that a person strongly committed to one side of a highly contentious and moralised issue can do even a half-decent job of giving the other side’s case.
Moreover, when a university purports to be giving a disinterested information session to faculty and students where the views expressed cover the whole range of outlooks from A all the way still to A (“Getting to Yes”, as it were), students and faculty notice. Many will say nothing; they’ll self-censor; they’ll think about what is most prudential given the upcoming promotion application or essay to hand in. And they’ll keep shtum.
I’m going to be blunt. Today’s universities are not overly congenial places for those with conservative political views. There are myriad studies out of the US and Britain showing that viewpoint diversity is collapsing on university campuses – because maybe, for a start, those with right-of-centre views would prefer we flew just the national flag, that there be some respite from the incessant acknowledgments of country, and to see the paring back of the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy that forces everything to be seen through the prism of identity politics.
US author Jonathan Haidt, himself of the centre-left, details this loss of diverging outlooks on campus chapter and verse, and greatly laments it. Because universities aren’t meant to be factories of monolithic orthodoxy and groupthink. But more and more that is exactly what we’re seeing. If you doubt me, maybe because your memory of university life goes back three decades or more, go and find out how your old university is handling the voice referendum issue. And realise just how much of the Yes case is being run by employees of universities (second spoiler alert: nearly all of it).
Of course, when the progressive-left orthodoxies become held by the preponderance of academics and near-on all the senior managers, that also affects free speech on campus. You won’t see it by looking at university codes of conduct, policies, statutory frameworks and the like. The collapse of viewpoint diversity works more indirectly and insidiously. Many dissenters and apostates from the university orthodoxy (students included) learn to self-censor, to keep quiet, to ride out the one-sided indoctrination sessions (aka, on occasion, voice “information sessions”). Or they quit and do something else. In the context of institutions supposedly dedicated to the free flow and competition of ideas it’s a sad state of affairs.
*****************************************************
Gary Banks: falling living standards risk triggering ‘electoral backlash’
A failure to pursue meaningful economic reform by both major parties is driving down living standards and could trigger an “electoral backlash”, according to a new warning from the nation’s inaugural Productivity Commission chair.
Delivering the annual Shann Memorial Lecture in Perth on Wednesday, Gary Banks critiqued plans to transform Australia into a renewable energy superpower and develop a sovereign manufacturing capability as risking a return to “old think” industry protectionism.
He argued the clean energy transformation was not delivering a more productive economy – arguing there was “not even the consolation that we are at least making a difference to the climate” – and rejected government assurances its workplace changes would enhance enterprise dynamics.
Professor Banks instead argued that an “anti-productivity bias” had infected policy development and a backlash was now possible.
“If there is to be reform of a kind that would make a difference to Australia’s productivity performance, it will require a change in the politics,” he said. “Governments follow or anticipate public opinion more than leading it.”
“How the public reacts to the stagnation or decline in living standards ... remains to be seen. But an electoral backlash cannot be ruled out – as we have just seen here in WA against the ill-conceived ‘heritage’ legislation,” he said.
Professor Banks said that governments were now “spending more over regulating better” and the pay-off from public investments was diminishing, pointing to the NDIS and Gonski education reforms.
He said the established relationship between productivity and non-inflationary wage growth had also been “brought into question” and took aim at Anthony Albanese’s claim the recent 15 per cent pay rise for age-care workers “would not be inflationary and would actually serve to increase productivity.”
“Given that the majority of workers to receive the wage rise are the existing ones, an overall increase in productivity is unlikely,” he said. “Indeed, with the introduction of a new visa category for migrants committing to a union-linked stint in aged care, it may decrease.”
Professor Banks said it was “hard to see” either major party embracing a real pro-productivity agenda. He warned that Coalition reforms had been stymied in the Senate while, under Labor, “devotion to big government, a suspicion of market forces and strong union influence are proving even more challenging.”
Echoing the Productivity Commission’s recent trade and assistance review, Professor Banks expressed concern over plans to turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower”, arguing the goal had been conflated with the post-Covid push to develop a sovereign manufacturing capability.
“Though portrayed as a new, forward-looking approach to industry policy, there is much that is ‘old-think’ about it,” Professor Banks said. “For example, a ‘local content’ scheme, a form of non-tariff protection ... is being contemplated to promote battery manufacturing.”
The PC review found that total industry assistance increased 3.4 per cent to $13.8bn in 2021-22 and that a domestic processing capacity was “unlikely to create an appreciable cost advantage” for the local battery-making industry.
Ahead of ALP national conference, Professor Banks criticised a union push to change the way free trade agreements were negotiated and the suggestion Australia could impose new green tariffs on products from countries with weaker climate policies.
But his most serious criticism was reserved for policy failures in the areas of workplace relations and energy policy.
“In the case of energy, the determination to meet overly ambitious emission targets while suppressing our only base-load energy sources will inevitably mean further price increases and less reliability,” he said.
Unless there was a change of mindset, the government would need to resort to further “price controls and other regulatory interventions that can only exacerbate supply-side problems.”
Professor Banks said subsidies for intensive electricity users to ‘stand down’ at times of inadequate supply and subsidies to enable coal-fired power stations to remain on call resulted in an energy system requiring “far more capital to produce less reliable power — the antithesis of a pro-productivity approach.”
“Indeed, to the extent that production activity shifts offshore, global emissions are more likely to rise,” he said.
On industrial relations, Professor Banks noted the government’s agenda “aligns closely with the ACTU’s own wish list” and that Labor’s workplace changes meant industry deals could be forced on individual firms – undermining flexibility.
“To the extent that the current government’s policies continue to be influenced by union concerns, we could expect to see further measures to increase union coverage and ‘say’, and limit the ability of management to secure productivity-enhancing changes,” he said.
Since Labor won office, Professor Banks observed “successive waves of regulation have emerged with the ostensible purpose of ‘getting wages moving’ or achieving greater ‘job security.’”
“Looking beneath these aspirational headings, much of what is proposed appears more likely to impede than promote the enterprise dynamic on which, as Treasury has stressed, productivity growth and well-paid jobs depend.”
*****************************************************
Harry Garside: Justice, lies and a knockout videotape
False accusations from angry women can be very dangerous
When star boxer Harry Garside locked himself in the spare room of a Sydney apartment and hit “send” on his phone, launching off to his mum a 33-second video of an argument with his girlfriend, he couldn’t know he’d just saved his boxing career.
Not that it would spare him being very publicly arrested and shamed for the “assault” he had just filmed; not that it would stop Boxing Australia suspending him from competition; and not that he will ever recoup much of the $500,000 he lost in sponsorships.
But the cautionary tale of how Garside came so close to losing everything – including his freedom – is the latest of many that raise uncomfortable questions about whether police and prosecutors are properly investigating allegations before pursuing charges.
As the now 25-year-old boxer discovered, even a petty argument – in the hands of a skilled liar – can be manipulated to destroy a career.
The colourful, heart-on-sleeve athlete was on the ascent, both in and out of the ring, when his trajectory was suddenly and stunningly derailed.
Garside turned up at the GQ Men of the Year Awards last year dressed in a pleated grey skirt, long black boots and bare-chested under a formal black jacket.
On that occasion Garside was arm in arm with his then girlfriend, Ashley Ruscoe.
Ruscoe is a wellness coach and fitness expert, with more than 26,000 followers on Instagram, thanks to a role on the 2019 season of Ten Network’s The Amazing Race. The now 35-year-old martial arts expert – with a black belt in karate – runs a self-defence business called Hit Like a Girl.
A fixture on Sydney’s social scene, Ruscoe had been in relationships with a number of high-profile men, including Sidney Pierucci, her partner in The Amazing Race.
But when she and then 23-year-old Garside met on Instagram in early 2021, it seemed to be love at first sight, despite the nine-year age gap. When the boxer left for the Tokyo Olympics, they spoke every day on FaceTime.
The pair met up again in Sydney, and in March last year Garside moved into Ruscoe’s Bellevue Hill apartment.
Earlier this year, Garside decided he was going to devote himself to winning gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Ruscoe was unhappy. They’d talked about having children, but for Garside that was much further down the track. He had a dream and was intent on pursuing it.
The couple announced they were splitting up but continued to meet – and have sex.
On March 1 this year, when Garside returned from a month-long trip to Europe, Ruscoe sent him a text saying: “Ok, let’s try really rough sex, Like semi bash me hahaha, Like maybe a slight black eye.” Garside declined. Later that day they met at the apartment to discuss their relationship. They had an argument. It started outside the flat, continued inside and became increasingly heated.
Garside won’t discuss the incident while court proceedings are afoot, but the details are now all on record.
Ruscoe grabbed a suitcase Garside hadn’t unpacked from his trip and threatened to take it outside and burn some of his things. Garside, concerned things were getting out of hand, recorded two short video clips on his phone. Garside says he made these recordings because he was worried Ruscoe would try to suggest he was the aggressor.
The first video shows Ruscoe coming out of a room towards Garside holding the suitcase, then dropping it when she realises he is filming her. After Garside retreated into the bathroom the second clip, which runs for 33 seconds, shows Ruscoe lunging to grab his phone as he pleads with her to stop.
“You’re psychotic,” Garside says, “stop f..king touching me like that … stop, stop, stop, leave me alone, leave me alone.”
When Garside tried to leave the apartment, an increasingly aggressive Ruscoe shut the front door and told him he couldn’t leave until he deleted the videos of her.
Garside headed for the spare room, locked the door, and quickly sent the videos to his mother via Facebook.
When he unlocked the door and came out, Garside showed Ruscoe he was deleting the videos. Only then did she let him leave the apartment.
Garside left for South Africa three weeks after the incident, on March 25, to film I’m a Celebrity.
Ruscoe went to the police the same day.
Kate Garside has no doubts why she did it.
“I think she was in such fear that Harry would say something that it would ruin her reputation, that she sort of thought, well, I’ll throw the first punch here and go to the police.”
Much more here:
************************************
27 August, 2023
Spinning the myth of Global Warming for corporate gain
The myth of human-induced global warming has always been a mixture of scientific chicanery and businesses, seeking to leverage a competitive advantage over their rivals.
For scientists – at least those in the public sector – global warming provided the opportunity to be listened to by politicians and the public, to attend international gatherings, and be shown the respect they felt was previously lacking.
For businesses, the possibility of subsidies and imposts on rival suppliers was irresistible. Indeed, the nuclear industry was among the early proponents of the greenhouse myth, seeing it as an opportunity to ride renewable energy’s coattails and gain regulatory advantages over its fossil fuel competitors.
But the main commercial impetus came from the renewable industry, which was confident that the declining costs of the energy produced from wind farms and solar systems would fall over time, and eventually be cheaper than energy derived from coal and gas. All that was needed was a bit of a nudge from the government to get the technology over the edge.
That competitive price parity never came about. Agencies like CSIRO produce data, which indicates wind might be as cheap as coal. However, this can only be so if others build the transmission lines to get that wind power into the market, provide the balancing mechanisms within the electricity system to allow it to avoid disrupting the entire network, and, above all, supply the means by which it could be ‘firmed up’ by energy supplies not dependent on the wind and sun.
These costs rise exponentially with the forced increased penetration of renewables. A full renewable system is unfeasible at any cost.
The Australian Energy Market Operator, long supportive of the Net Zero agenda, is now alarmed by it and is calling for subsidies for transmission, subsidies that would increase the cost of the network from its current $23 billion to $100 billion. Similarly, to shore up supply the Victorian government is taking steps to subsidise coal generation that is becoming insolvent as a result of the subsidies to wind/solar that it supports.
An early estimate of the direct costs imposed by regulations and by budgetary support to renewables was a 2014 submission from the IPA to the 2014 Warburton review. This projected the annual costs by 2020 at $6-7 billion. The assessment was refined for the Australian Environment Foundation’s (AEF) response to the 2017 Finkel Review.
In his 2017 report, Finkel claimed that the transition to wind and solar PV ‘is reflected in a fall in their costs’ – even though wholesale prices doubled that year. The AEF compiled the support costs for 2016 at $4.9 billion.
The costs were updated to $6.9 billion for 2019, in a report commissioned by Senator Malcolm Roberts; that estimate was also published in Chapter 22 of Pinto et al Local Electricity Markets, Elsevier 2021.
Updated for price and budget changes, annual current renewable program costs are now over $10 billion
Initially greeted with hostility by vested interests, who recognised such analysis as a threat to their ongoing subsidies, recent reaction has been subdued. The methodology is followed by the Productivity Commission in its latest Trade and Assistance Review, though the Commission declines to put an aggregate value on the subsidies.
This cost is imposed at various points of the economy: on taxpayers and on electricity consumers but the major impact is upon the generation component – overwhelmingly on coal that formerly comprised 85 per cent of supply (and now comprises 63 per cent). Before the policies started to bite, national electricity generation cost less than $11 billion a year or about $40 per Megawatt hour. Contrary to ministerial statements, the coal supplying this remains both abundant and largely non-tradeable, while plant costs are fundamentally unchanged. Hence without government interference, coal-based generation supply would be less than half the $100 plus we pay today and to deliver it to customers, we could dispense with many of the additional system, subsidy, and transmission costs that we are incurring.
How have the costs and implications of policies designed to replace low-cost, controllable coal-generated electricity by high-cost intermittent wind and solar taken so long to be recognised and even now are officially judged to be affordable? More than anything else reversion to policies that provide cheap energy could drive the cost reductions and productivity increases are vital for increased wages. But while both the Business Council and Treasury, in its Intergenerational Report claim to understand this, their prescriptions involve subsidising energy sources (renewables, green hydrogen) that will raise costs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/spinning-the-myth-of-global-warming-for-corporate-gain
*************************************************The Aboriginalisation of Australia
Very Left-driven
Isn’t it about time we start demanding of our taxpayer media why they are subtly driving the Aboriginalisation of this country?
SBS shows weather maps with name changes to all our capital cities. Radio National is calling us from Gadigal country. Place names such as Fraser Island are being changed to Aboriginal names. Why? With whose permission?
This is straight out of the Marxist-Leninist handbook where you tear down statues, change familiar place names, and rewrite the past.
Many claiming Aboriginal ancestry include a tribal origin in their name. People are ‘proud’ Indigenous men and women. But where does that leave us? Are non-Indigenous Australians allowed to be proud of their heritage? Why proclaim it? The insinuation is divisive.
It creates a situation where ethnicity permeates every crevice of Australia’s social fabric.
We are forced to listen to ‘Welcome to Country’ messaging on every flight, every gathering, every sporting match, and at every government event. Smoking ceremonies are conducted at every formal opening, for a charge, of course. Tributes are made to elders past and present. They are described as custodians of the land where we work and play. It is a story presented to Australians as though we are being granted a privilege to be here despite all of us being equal citizens.
There are over 3,700 registered Aboriginal corporations embedded in the social fabric of this country. The multiplier effect of their influence is vastly out of proportion to the citizens of Aboriginal descent.
Why is there any special treatment based upon heritage (instead of need)? Why are the majority made to feel as if they are aliens in their homeland?
For over 230 years, Australians of all creeds sacrificed their lives to fight off foreign tyranny. They did their best to develop the nation for the benefit of all, regardless of race.
Pre-colonial Australia was not a peaceful Utopia, nor was it a coherent, unified nation. To suggest so is to re-write the past for political interest. It was a land with over 500 tribes speaking different languages, largely engaged in constant conflict with each other which is evident from the vast array of Aboriginal weaponry and first-contact accounts from those who travelled with peaceful tribes.
Despite brand new claims to the contrary, there was no evidence for agriculture or permanent settlement. They were not in perfect harmony with the land but rather used it to their advantage the same as any other human settlement. Animals went extinct under their watch, others are still hunted toward their doom today, such as the dugong, for cultural reasons. Much of the animal killing is what we modern sensibilities would call brutal and cruel. Aboriginal culture was, and used to be valued as, a preserved hunter-gatherer society. A piece of history.
If anyone questions the re-invented Utopian version of Aboriginal history, they are decried as racist. This is an attempt to misuse a fictional version of history for political power.
And what of Aboriginality? How is it assessed and upon what criteria? As it stands, if the ‘mob’ accepts you, you are in. But with no genuine definition, the number of people claiming Aboriginal heritage has expanded well beyond believable levels to the point Aboriginal communities are concerned it is being used to gain access to special rights and opportunities that were meant to be reserved for those in need. Which is why it is always a terrible idea to use race as a qualification.
Why is Prime Minister Albanese supporting a voice that is potentially undermining the Australian democracy? Is he that foolish? Or is this a negotiation with a powerful bureaucracy for mutual benefit between what Labor wants and want a small panel of selected activists are prepared to give?
When it comes to the question of this new type of Aboriginality, isn’t it about time our politicians call out what amounts to state-sanctioned racial privilege?
It was W Edwards Deming, the architect of the post-war Japanese economic miracle, who said create a system that is open to abuse and abused it will be.
Where is our wise and honest leadership?
The Voice does not pass the pub test, yet there seems no will to address its serious flaws. Is it because Australia doesn’t have an identifiable culture and the Indigenous activists have taken the opportunity to fill the void? It is a huge irony that the very people who seek retribution have got to that position through the benefits of Western Civilisation, yet now turn on the very institutions that provided their education and prosperity. But logic does not register with the activist class.
****************************************************
Reparation and apology nonsense
People are starting to wake up to not only The Voice, but the philosophical reasoning behind it, which is ironically, deeply racist. Douglas Murray, in a stand-out article for The Australian, persuasively argues: ‘Australia feels like it is stuck in an apology loop because it is. And the reason that it doesn’t seem to be getting the country anywhere is because it never could – however many cycles of this you want to go around for.’
As an Englishman – and descendant of those dreaded ‘colonisers’ – Murray has the benefit of the outsider’s perspective as well as the uncanny ability and courage of speaking truth to power, especially when he observes that the emperor has no clothes. And as such, his insight into our cultural malaise really does bell the cat. As Murray writes:
As I have found when travelling the country, the typical Australian no longer seems to me to be that striding, sensible, happy-go-lucky figure of old. They seem – in my experience – to be guilt-ridden people, forever caveating their thoughts and self-conscious to an often excruciating degree.
Why? Because if you browbeat any group of people for long enough you will get that result. A cringing, creeping-through life person, who subdues their thoughts and distrusts their own speech and actions.
What’s happened to us as a nation? We used to be internationally known for our larrikin spirit which delighted to call out authoritarianism and its associated pomposity. Just think, Crocodile Dundee. But if Covid showed us anything, it’s that we now want Big Brother to tell us what to do. We’re okay for the government to take away our freedoms. And we’re more than willing to say ‘Sorry’ to people we haven’t personally offended. And not just once, but again and again and again and again.
This is where Murray really puts his finger on the heart of the issue. As Murray argues in his book The War on the West, there is a profound ethical problem with current generations apologising from the mistakes of the previous generation. And that is, they themselves are not responsible. This also means that it’s disingenuous of those who are benefiting from the confession to even ask for it. As Murray writes:
As a number of the most serious and profound ethicists of the last century have agreed, an apology can work only when it comes from someone who has done a wrong and is accepted by someone who has been wronged. If it comes from someone who has themselves done no wrong and goes to someone who has not actually been wronged, then the deal is a fraud. If such an apology is offered and accepted it is a fraud on both sides. Someone who has done no wrong is pretending to be speaking for the dead and people who have suffered no direct wrong are pretending to be able to accept an apology on behalf of people they did not know.
Sadly, even my fellow Christian brothers and sisters have fallen into this self-flagellating apology loop. Which is particularly strange – as well as more than a little troubling – when the Bible itself says that only the soul who is guilty of sin should be punished (i.e. Ezekiel 18:20).
What’s more, if reparations are to be paid, then just how many nations will be expected to financially contribute? What’s more, should we set up a genetic database to discern who is in fact eligible? This ever-diminishing inherited guilt is almost impossible to calculate and if attempted, the potential consequences would be disastrous. As Murray rightly points out:
The issue of reparations now comes down not to descendants of one group paying money to descendants of another group. Rather, it comes down to people who look like the people to whom a wrong was done in history receiving money from people who look like the people who may have done wrong. It is hard to imagine anything more likely to rip apart a society than attempting a wealth transfer based on this principle.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/douglas-murray-bells-the-cat/
********************************************Destructive Leftist influence on Australian education
One in three Australian school children, according to the latest Naplan results, are falling well behind in literacy and numeracy. A cynic might be tempted to compare that number with the approximately one in three Australians who voted for Labor at the last election. For sure, it’s a facetious comparison, but, alas, not an inaccurate one. There is no question that now, fifty years on from the Whitlam government and its disastrous experiments in corrupting young peoples’ minds with socialist claptrap, we can safely conclude that the modern Australian left has wilfully damaged the intellectual development of two generations of Australian children.
That is not to say there aren’t any bright kids out there. There most certainly are. Australian ingenuity, resilience, optimism, determination, entrepreneurialism and go-getter qualities still thrive amongst many of our great youth. But they have been egregiously betrayed by an academic system that has starved them of the great minds and works that should be their birthright. Denied them the critical thinking and academic robustness that is essential to living a positive and productive, not to mention an intellectually fulfilling, life.
Even those kids who do thrive academically and achieve good results have been seriously damaged thanks to a shockingly low standard of education built largely upon leftist ideology and Labor/Greens dogma. Gay propaganda fills the walls, anti-white racist theories abound and our extraordinary academic traditions are wilfully ignored. Only this week we learned of a school in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire where pre-school kids are forced to write essays apologising for British colonialism. This is intellectual child abuse; Marxism’s ‘long march’ at its most pernicious.
As with everything the left touches, and pours money into, the results are invariably the same: failure. So more money is poured in. And the failures continue to mount.
The reason is simple. The entire modern leftist approach of ‘we know what is best for you’ is wrong. They don’t know and never did know. Individuals must be free to make mistakes, be free to bounce back, be free to explore unorthodox ideas, be free to challenge and be free to dream of a better way. Sadly, the entrepreneurial flame of so many of our youth is now being wasted in the dead ends of eco-alarmism and woke ideology. Schools and universities teach unrelenting propaganda and ‘consensus’ rather than the free thinking that is critical to genuine progress and insight.
Bedwetters of the Liberal party fool themselves that the ‘times have changed’ and that in order to attract younger ‘more progressive’ voters the right needs to adopt left-leaning policies and priorities. The opposite is true. Having marinated in a sludge of toxic environmentalism and grievance politics throughout their entire childhood, what young intellectually-deprived minds desperately require is alternative stimulation, not more of the same.
For sure, many kids will lazily hang on to the dreary, soul-sapping self-loathing of wokeness, complete with its climate doom-mongering and sinister Malthusian ideology. But exposed to the tantalising and forbidden spark of an alternative, positive, optimistic, freedom-loving, modern conservatism, many young minds are capable of being inspired. Having spent most of their childhoods being brainwashed into believing there is no future worth striving for because the planet is doomed to disappear in an imaginary climate inferno sometime in the next (5? 12? 20? 50? It keeps changing) years, and having been convinced that their ancestors were either blood-thirsty racists or imprisoned slaves, it must surely be wonderfully refreshing to hear the alternative conservative perspective: climate change is at best a hoax, at worst a manageable phenomenon, we are not doomed, we have all the available technology already to hand to reduce emissions to zero if we are so inclined, not that we necessarily need to, and our ancestors, black and white, were extraordinarily gifted and caring people, many of whom gave up their own lives to ensure we get to enjoy the nourishing fruits of our culture and our history.
Indeed, what is needed from the Liberal leadership is not more pandering to the left, but quite the opposite: a determination to vociferously and energetically oppose the left’s fraudulent agenda wherever and whenever it pops its ugly head up.
Youth and rebelliousness have always gone hand in hand. The cunning trick of the modern left has been, through our education system, to convince these adolescents that ‘climate activism’ and ‘being an ally to LGBTQ+’ or ‘supporting the Voice’ is somehow a rebellious action. It is not. It is as mainstream and as boringly unimaginative as you can possibly get. These gullible kids have been hoodwinked into supporting the big, pampered, all-powerful, elitist and monied end of town.
During the late 1970s, the rebellious rock ’n’ roll culture had itself become bloated, pampered, self-indulgent and lazy, unrecognisable to the original rebels of the early 1960s. Appalled that these cocaine-addled, squillionaire LA rock stars somehow represented them, angry kids found their own way to rebel, as punks.
The only credible radicalism and anti-authoritarianism on offer to today’s youth is to oppose woke intolerance and the left’s brainwashing and racist grievance ideology. Call it ‘punk conservatism’ if you will.
Let’s hope the indomitable Aussie spirit can once again rise to defeat the freedom-hating socialists ruining our children’s future prospects and prosperity.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/intellectual-child-abuse/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************
25 August, 2023
Class grievance has failed. Other grievances needed
Grievances is what the Left do. Now that defending "the worker" makes little sense, some other group -- any group -- is needed to be defended. Gays are also now old hat so they have lost their steam. And blacks are not as good as they were. Amid affirmative action it is takes imagination to brand their treatment as oppressive. So transsexuals are a godsend from Marx. They support doing ghastly things to young people so that needs a lot of defending
At the end of the second world war, socialists around the world still believed in the inevitable overthrow of capitalism and the emergence of a workers utopia. Today capitalism is alive and well and, every socialist government that has been attempted, has failed utterly. There were varying degrees of failure from the Marxist nightmare of Cambodia to the relatively painless collapse of the Soviet Union. The astonishing economic success of the Peoples Republic of China only occurred when it abandoned all pretence at socialism and embraced state capitalism.
This left the millions of socialists around the world in a position which Amir Taheri has termed ‘ideological bankruptcy’. He argues the ‘the European left has developed a grievance based discourse… to form a coalition of real or imagined victims’. The class struggle beloved of 1950s socialists has been replaced by constant reference to historic sins such as slavery, colonialism and racism. The replacement of traditional Marxist ideology began in European universities but has infected education systems throughout the West in the past seventy years and has spread into state-owned media such as the ABC here, and the BBC in the UK.
This trend has also led the publishing industry to create a market for books which tell us how awful white people are. Dark Emu is one of the most successful of locally produced books in this genre but there are dozens, and most of them can be found on university reading lists, and HSC set text lists. My own particular favourite is White Fragility by the American academic, Robin DiAngelo, which, according to my Penguin edition, is, ‘A vital, necessary and beautiful book’.
Dr DiAngelo tells me that I am a racist of the worst kind as I don’t believe that I am a racist. There is something reminiscent of the witch-finder-general in Professor Dr DiAngelo’s tone. The fact that I don’t believe I am a racist is not something to be debated. Rather, it is proof of the depth of my moral and social blindness. She argues that, ‘Being perceived as white, carries more than a mere racial classification; it is a social and institutional status… imbued with legal, political, economic and social rights and privileges that are denied to others’. The problem with this sort of generalisation is that we can substitute the word ‘Aboriginal’ for ‘white’ and it till holds true. The legal and economic rights that apply to Aboriginals include mining royalties running into the billions, the right to deny non-Aboriginals access to ‘sacred sites’, free education and health care, the right to appear on The Drum and Q&A to tell white people how racist they are, and so on.
No one denies that there is a substantial gap between the life-chances of the 3.8 per cent of the population that is Aboriginal and the rest us. Everyone agrees that this situation must be addressed. But the latest great idea, the Voice, is doomed to failure because, like all its predecessors, it is based on establishing more government intervention through the creation of yet another bureaucracy. The great irony is that the Marxists and socialists who, half a century ago argued that capitalist governments were established to suppress the proletariat and ensure that the bourgeoisie remained in power, now argue for the establishment of yet another taxpayer funded bunch of government ‘advisers’.
The Pascoes and DiAngelos of the publishing world, cashing in on a gullible public, may not see themselves as Marxists or socialists. They may not subscribe to most of the central pillars of Marxist ideology, and they may not believe in the inevitable overthrow of capitalism. But they would all subscribe to the belief that the state and the white population today conspire to oppress a black population in exactly the same way that, in the 19th century, the state and the bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat. In other words they would both subscribe to a Marxist analysis of the distribution of power within the state.
The political tradition of classical liberalism holds that a free market and laissez-faire economics, along with civil liberties under the rule of law, provide the best form of government. Economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech represent classical liberal ideals and they are all under attack today. In particular, freedom of speech is contested across the Western world. As John Roskam recently noted, ‘Bill Leak, Archbishihop Julian Porteous, Israel Folau… and Calum Thwaites are just some of the Australians either persecuted or prosecuted… because of what they said or believed’ (‘Live not by lies’ The Spectator Australian 22 July). The same trend is flourishing in the UK where J.K. Rowling who, because of her unremarkable views about gender, is only one of many people subjected to abuse which, a few decades ago, would have been unimaginable.
The economic freedom which is central to liberal values is also under attack on many fronts. One current example it the recent debacle in WA concerning the legislation impinging on the right of farmers to put up fences on their own properties. This was a restriction of the economic freedom of the landholders and is also an example of how the WA government’s policy of appeasement of the various Aboriginal lobby groups was always doomed to failure.
And on it goes. A relentless list of injustices and atrocities perpetrated on a victimised Aboriginal population by white oppressors supported by a racist police force and justice system. One problem with this viewpoint is the growing number of Australians from a non-white background. Are the millions of people of Chinese, Indian and Arabic descent, who choose to live here, part of the victimised non-white minority, or are they also involved in perpetuating the discrimination against the Aboriginal population? Are they oppressed or oppressors? This is a question in the left’s too hard basket.
A century ago there was a genuine distinction between working and middle classes in the Western industrialised economies and Marxist ideas of class struggle were relevant. While the structure of modern economies has completely changed, the ideologies which supported the Marxists and socialists have not. The diminishing number of people parading outside government offices in support of ‘voice, truth, treaty’ are a vestigial remnant of a once important movement. The ABC is their life support mechanism – a sort of artificial tongue.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/aussie-life-129/
*********************************************************Australia-California: A climate partnership made in la-la land
Last week, Australian ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd and California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a memorandum of understanding in Sacramento on climate change. It should have been called a memorandum of waffle, as both governments jointly promised to do precisely nothing.
In what seemed like a classic Freudian slip, Governor Newsom expressed shock at the level of interest in the MOU. “This is a hell of a turnout – we are not used to this many people, particularly for something like this,” he said. Of course, he was right.
After ploughing through 1600 words of waffle, the reader learns the MOU “does not create any legally binding rights or obligations and creates no legally recognisable or enforceable rights or remedies, legal or equitable, in any forum whatsoever”.
“This MOU may be modified at any time by mutual consent,” it concluded unnecessarily, given neither party agreed to do anything. The high point of the small section on “specific activities” was “organising joint symposiums, seminars, workshops … hosting trade and investment missions”, which in practice translates to more taxpayer-funded business-class flights across the Pacific.
Sky News host Chris Kenny says Australians are poised to learn a lot from California after Ambassador to the US Kevin Rudd was seen in a conversation with Governor Gavin Newsom which focused on a climate change deal. “It's a marriage made in heaven this climate deal, because California More
A better MOU would have spelled out how California’s and Australia’s energy policies have produced among the highest electricity prices in the world at the same time as their leaders have promised to reduce them, although even Newsom hasn’t had the audacity to promise household power bills would fall by $275 a year by 2025, as Labor did at the federal election last year.
California’s power prices are now the highest in the US, except for far-flung Hawaii and Alaska. In Los Angeles residents paid an average of 28c a kilowatt hour for electricity last month, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.
Statewide prices are more than 77 per cent above the national average, up from 37 per cent above in 2012. But, unlike Australians, at least Californians can move to states with lower prices. Despite California’s salubrious weather and natural beauty, residents have been leaving the nation’s most populous state in droves – at first pushed out by extreme Covid-19 measures, but increasingly by a cost-of-living and a broader socio-economic crisis.
The state’s population, according to the government’s own figures, has declined three years in a row, to 39 million. In total that’s almost 600,000 people, more than the population of Tasmania or Wyoming, between April 2020 and January this year.
The MOU also promised to convene “policy dialogues” with “suitable government administrators, regulators, legislators and thought leaders”. It’s uncertain whether renowned Swedish climate expert Greta Thunberg, who once derided nuclear power as “extremely dangerous”, will make the cut. Last year Thunberg acknowledged turning off nuclear power stations in Europe was a mistake given the huge increases in fossil fuel power generation that had led to.
Indeed, the word nuclear isn’t mentioned once in the MOU, which advocated instead for “participation and leadership of Indigenous peoples in climate action” and “nature-based solutions and climate-smart land management” – what on earth these mean is anybody’s guess. Solar and wind generated abut 25 per cent of electricity in both Australia and California last year, and each are near equally ambitious.
Despite the obvious advantages in reliable and emissions-free power, Australia has ruled out any nuclear energy generation (except in submarines) while holding fast to its 82 per cent renewable power target by 2030.
California has legislated 90 per cent by 2035, although the Golden State has one big advantage over Australia achieving its goal: nuclear energy. Unreliable power evangelists aren’t stupid enough to plunge their economies into darkness just yet, knowing that could turn voters against their utopian project. In January, California rescinded an earlier decision to shut down its last nuclear power station at Diablo, a 2.2-gigawatt facility that is the state’s single biggest source of power, providing a little more than 10 per cent energy.
In the similarly strong Democrat state of Illinois – which maintains a similar brand of Democrat politics as California – 11 nuclear power plants generate about 50 per cent of the state’s electricity and the average electricity price was about half of California’s in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
A more honest MOU would have included a pledge to ignore scientific and economic reality. In France, which generates around 75 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power and has the among the lowest carbon dioxide emissions in the world per capita, a law was passed in May to pave the way for the construction of another six to eight nuclear reactors, rather than plaster the French countryside with hideous solar panels and gigantic windmills.
“I’ve been around for a long time on the climate change debate,” Rudd said at the Sacramento launch. “Way back when I pronounced in Australia that climate change was the greatest economic, environmental and moral challenge of our generation I was ridiculed. I make no apology for saying it then. And I make no apology for repeating it now.”
California’s departing residents may disagree, pointing to other more pressing challenges. San Francisco’s social decline has become so egregious that tour guides have started offering “doom loop” tours. Major department stores are leaving the state or locking up their products. Parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco look increasingly like an open-air asylum.
Even as California’s population shrinks, violent crime and property crime have increased since 2020 by 11 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively, according to the state attorney-general’s latest 2022 crime statistics.
Whatever agreements California and Australia make won’t make a scrap of difference to the global climate, given the near entirety of additional increases in carbon dioxide emissions now arise in India and China.
The idea of modern economies being powered entirely by wind and solar is a fantasy, technologically and economically, yet one that holds powerful sway among a very rich virtue-signalling elite, often living in gated communities, for whom California’s rising prices and crime mean relatively little.
California dreaming for the few, not the many.
***************************************************
Murdoch Children’s Bombshell: Medicinal Value of COVID-19 Vaccines Now Questionable Among Healthy Children
According to researchers at Australia’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, COVID-19 vaccines have demonstrated efficacy against severe incidence of SARS-CoV-2 in children and adolescents, but their value proposition as a mass medical tool becomes questionable considering the unfolding dynamics of today: high pre-existing infection and low risk when infected.
Researchers led by John Hart from the academic medical center for young people Down Under acknowledge that most children now have been infected by SARS-CoV-2, meaning they have built up immunity, and the vaccine’s benefit in healthy children is minimal. They argue any energies and attention placed on COVID-19 vaccination campaigns should be used to advocate for vaccines known to offer higher medical value, such as the measles vaccine. The ramifications of this recent set of findings are substantial.
Published in the BMJ Pediatrics Open, the international review was led by medical researchers from the Australian medical institute. They explored the challenges and considerations of COVID-19 vaccination, especially in low-and middle-income countries with high levels of community transmission and infection-derived immunity.
The team’s review, led by Hart, a medical epidemiologist, suggests that any COVID-19 vaccination scheme moving forward, especially in low-and middle-income countries should be coupled with routine childhood vaccination program that the researchers acknowledge “have greater impact on illness and death, including for measles, pneumonia and diarrheal disease.”
Mild for most
The Australian team found that about two-thirds of all young people that had COVIS-19 and were hospitalized in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic did not require medical intervention. Deaths, the investigators reported, “were extremely rare in children.”
Closing in on child herd immunity?
The researchers also point out that the vast majority of children have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. As immunity has increased over time, the disease continues to evolve. Prior research led by Murdoch Children’s found that croup, triggered by the novel coronavirus, declined in 2022 despite the rise of new variants.
Also, data from the Pediatric Active Enhanced Disease Surveillance (PAEDS) network in America found that rates of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome (PIMS-TS), what was a major driver for childhood vaccination, were “Substantially lower during the Omicron COVID-19 variant period.” TrialSite reported on similar findings in the UK.
Net takeaway
While there are still cases where COVID-19 vaccination is recommended, the Australian researchers are clear—they value of these vaccines for children has markedly diminished. In fact, they use the COVID-19 vaccination push as a primary means of promoting more substantive medical vaccination, such as measles. Reading between the lines, and on the face of the piece, the investigators are more concerned about standard vaccination rates, especially in low-and moderate-income countries.
One takeaway called out by this independent media, children achieved herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2 by infection, not vaccination.
********************************************
Seaweed farming
It was September 2017, and Elsom attended a lecture by renowned environmentalist Tim Flannery. In his speech, Flannery discussed the potential of seaweed to store quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It instantly inspired Elsom. He would farm seaweed and help save the planet.
But there was another twist. Elsom’s commitment coincided with recent research out of the CSIRO and James Cook University in Townsville, north Queensland – that some compounds in seaweed had the ability to dramatically reduce methane production in cows and sheep. They would discover that two species of a particular Australian red seaweed – the Asparagopsis taxiformis (found in warm Queensland waters), and the Asparagopsis armata – (common in the cooler waters of Tasmania) – reduced livestock methane production by up to 90 per cent if added to the animals’ diet.
Given that 11 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions came from ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats), Elsom saw an opportunity. He would grow commercial quantities of Asparagopsis and take a significant chunk out of the world’s, greenhouse gas emissions. (The planet’s 1.5 billion cows and 1.1 billion sheep contribute roughly 6 per cent to all global emissions.)
Elsom’s Tasmanian-based company Sea Forest was born. The challenge was to grow enough seaweed to actually make a lasting difference.
By 2021, Sea Forest had attracted more than $40m in investment funds, and it continues to expand. By late last year it was producing 7000 tonnes of Asparagopsis per year, or enough to feed 300,000 cattle.
Sea Forest is not alone in the seaweed farming industry, which is rapidly developing into a multibillion-dollar global industry. In August 2021, an Australian Seaweed Institute report predicted the domestic industry could potentially generate $1.5bn annually by 2040, while reducing greenhouse emissions by 10 per cent. And that’s all thanks to a native Australian red seaweed, and visionaries like Sea Forest chief executive Elsom. He told The Australian last year: “Australia is one of the most biodiverse places on the planet and there’s a tremendous opportunity to better understand the life of seaweed and its many uses.”
************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************
24 August, 2023
Pre-school children in Sutherland Shire, Sydney forced to make 'sorry' cards about Australia's colonisation by Europeans
A class of four-year-old children were forced to make 'sorry' cards about the colonisation of Australia by Europeans in what their families have slammed as 'indoctrination'.
Kim, a grandmother, told 2GB's Chris O'Keefe her twin grandchildren brought home the 'sorry' cards on National Sorry Day, May 26, from their pre-school in the Sutherland Shire in the Sydney's south.
One card read: 'Sorry for hurting you. Sorry for hurting your land.' The other card read: 'Sorry for hurting the Dharawal people. We will be kind now.'
The cards were written by pre-school teachers and decorated by the kids.
However, the children weren't taught what the cards meant and were instead encouraged to discuss the history of Sorry Day with their parents.
Kim said both her grandchildren were 'very upset' and felt 'very guilty'. 'As a grandma, I said, "You've done nothing wrong, it's all in the past, you have nothing to worry about, you're kind little children",' she told O'Keefe on Tuesday.
She said her son and daughter-in-law were 'not impressed' by the lesson because it wasn't an age-appropriate topic for pre-schoolers.
'It's something for them [the parents] to talk about, they don't have to be indoctrinated at pre-school,' she said. 'If this is what's happening at pre-school, I'm worried what will happen next year at kindy.'
National Sorry Day is held every year on May 26 to remember the children who were forcibly taken from their parents under Australia's assimilation policy, now known as the Stolen Generations.
Kim said while it cannot be disputed that wrongs were committed, parents should have the chance to discuss historical injustice with their kids before it's taught in classrooms.
'I'm shocked, it's certainly not for them [the teachers] to talk about these things,' she said. 'I don't know why we have to make our little children feel guilty for the sins of our fathers. 'It's nothing they've done wrong.'
How Australia's colonial history is taught to young children has been hotly debated in recent weeks. Many parents say they don't believe young kids should be exposed to the complicated and violent topic until they can properly understand it.
Several worried mums and dads told O'Keefe how the current approach has failed.
'My children attended a beautiful little preschool, both came home at different times saying they'd learned that "white men came here and took away the Aboriginals' children",' one parent said. 'They chopped down all the trees and poisoned the waterways and then they asked me, "Are all white men bad?".'
One Indigenous family said their daughter learnt about the Stolen Generations in Year One, before they'd had the chance to talk with her about it.
'She had to learn it at a very young age because her great grandfather and grandmother were taken from their families which is a huge horrible concept to teach to her at any point,' they said.
************************************************
Eraring poised to remain open beyond 2025
The Hunter's peak business advocacy group has urged the state government to extend the operating life of Eraring power station beyond mid-2025 to shore up energy reliability during the energy transition.
It follows a recommendation from the government-commissioned O'Reilly Review that it strike a deal with Origin Energy to keep the 2880 megawatt plan running beyond the scheduled closure date.
The Minns government is expected to formally announce its intention regarding the future of Eraring in the coming days.
"There has been immense trepidation in the business community as traditional energy assets are turned off, with no renewables arriving to replace them," Business Hunter acting chief executive Sheena Martin said.
"Shortfall in the marketplace drives pricing increases. We know energy bills are an acute source of pain for business, with double digit cost increases directly quelling growth and expansion plans, or in more extreme instances, impacting their ability to maintain current operations
"We must also be live to our future energy demand curve, which is imminently expected to hike as we build new industries in wind, green hydrogen, battery manufacturing and more, all hungry for vast amounts of energy."
Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria said last week that, while Eraring remained on track to close in 2025, the company would continue to assess market conditions before making a final decision.
It is likely that government intervention to keep the plant open would cost between $200 million and $400 million a year. However, the government has little option given the slow pace of the clean energy roll-out
"If the Eraring power station closes as planned in 2025 it would be catastrophic for consumers and destabilise our entire electricity grid," Institute of Public Affairs executive director Scott Hargreaves said.
The Australian Energy Regulator found the closure of Liddell power station earlier this year eliminated surplus capacity from the grid. It also resulted in a spike in wholesale prices and reduced grid reliability.
"Liddell was the line in the sand moment for the nation's energy grid as any further closures of stations like Eraring or Bayswater would mean energy security would be terminally comprised, with households and businesses paying the cost in higher prices and reduced reliability," Mr Hargreaves said.
But NSW Nature Conservation Policy and Advocacy director Brad Smith warned the state would fail to meet already weak climate targets if the decision to subsidise Australia's biggest coal plant goes ahead.
"This recommendation is an absolute disaster for the climate, energy affordability and the credibility of the NSW government when it comes to emissions reductions," Dr Smith said.
"This is despite mounting evidence that such an extension is unnecessary, will cost consumers more, and make it impossible for us to meet our emissions targets."
Dr Smith said it appeared that the government was determined to "forge ahead with the absurd waste of taxpayer money", despite recent reports that demonstrated that the Eraring could be closed on schedule.
"NSW climate targets rely heavily on closing coal, and for good reason - it's the largest source of climate pollution, and the easiest to phase out.
"We cannot imagine a scenario where the NSW government reaches its own inadequate climate targets if they choose to extend the life of Eraring by even one or two years"
It was a sentiment shared by Tim Buckley, who is the director of the think tank Climate Energy Finance.
"Leaked reports today that the NSW Electricity Supply and Reliability Review will recommend taxpayer subsidies to extend the life of Eraring coal power station beyond its closure date phased over 2025 would be a massive retrograde step when the exact opposite is needed - implementation of an accelerated transition to firmed renewables, Dr Buckley, who wrote the The Lights will Stay On report, said.
"There is no case to delay the planned closure of Eraring and pay its operator the estimated $200-400m in public subsidies to do so. This money should be invested in NSW' energy transition.
"We call on Energy Minister Penny Sharpe to flood the market with distributed energy and infill utility scale renewables firmed by accelerated deployment of batteries, to drive more capacity. This will ensure supply and reduce wholesale electricity prices, putting permanent downward pressure on energy bills whilst also better aligning our decarbonisation pathway with the climate science.
https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8318390/eraring-poised-to-remain-open-beyond-2025/
***********************************************Victoria to pay AGL to keep Loy Yang open
Victoria will pay AGL Energy to keep the state’s largest electricity generator open until 2035 if Australia has not yet developed enough renewables, but the power station is enduring financial losses.
Victoria has legislated Australia’s most aggressive energy transition policy that sees the state commit to cutting emissions by between 75 and 80 per cent by 2035, and bring forward its net-zero target by five years to 2045. To achieve this, Victoria will prohibit coal power generation in the state by 2035.
While Victoria has taken a hard line, there is widespread scepticism about the capacity of the state to deal with loss of coal generation, especially if one of the dominant electricity generators were to retire earlier than scheduled.
In a move that will temper market concern but evaluate the political discomfort for the state government that was one of the key opponents to coal being included in a so-called capacity mechanism, AGL said it has entered a deal that will manage the retirement of its Loy Yang A coal power station.
AGL chief operating officer Markus Brokhof and Climate Action, Energy and Resources Minister Lily D'Ambrosio refused to be drawn on the details of the risk sharing mechanism agreement the government has entered into with the company.
“This will ensure that Loy Yang will continue to provide power to Victoria until 2035, keeping the lights on while we build renewables and storage capacity to reach our government’s target of 95 per cent renewable electricity generation by 2035,” Ms D’Ambrosio said at a press conference at the power station in Gippsland, in Victoria’s east.
“The structured transition agreement does not provide payments to keep the power station open, nor does it provide payments to close it early. Rather, it provides a framework of certainty that is agreed between the Victorian government and AGL: certainty for workforce, certainty for community, certainty for the renewable energy investors, knowing that they can build with confidence.”
Sources familiar with the agreement said payments would not be paid directly to AGL Instead, Victoria has agreed to share the financial risk burden that should it eventuate would make Loy Yang uneconomic and would encourage AGL to shutter the plant early.
Victoria in 2022 opposed efforts by the former federal Coalition government to develop a capacity mechanism, which would have paid generators – irrespective of the energy source – to ensure sufficient capacity. Victoria and other opponents dubbed the policy coal-keeper.
AGL last year said it would shutter its Loy Yang coal power station in 2035, a decade earlier than previously planned, after sustained pressure from investors — including the company’s largest shareholder billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes.
Australian energy market authorities believe Loy Yang is vital for Australia’s energy security until 2035, but coal power stations are under mounting economic pressure.
Typical coal power stations are inflexible and generate electricity throughout the day with little variance in output. But a rise of solar and wind generation has sent the wholesale price of electricity to zero or even in negative territory, meaning many coal generators are often making losses during daylight hours.
Losses are pared later in the day when the sun sets, but a rise of batteries threatens to exacerbate the financial losses of coal generators
AGL chief executive Damien Nicks earlier this month said the company had invested significant sums to ensure its coal fleet has flexibility and therefore less susceptible to the economic pressures,
Still, the rise of renewables threatens the economics of even the most flexible of fossil fuel generators.
In a deal that ensures AGL does not close Loy Yang prematurely when the broader National Electricity Market requires the generation capacity, Victoria has agreed to share any future financial pain with the retailer until 2035 – effectively safeguarding the future of a generator that produces about 30 per cent of the state’s electricity.
Mr Brokhof refused to detail the financial terms of the arrangement.
“The risk sharing mechanism is of a commercial nature, and we are not disclosing any details of the risk sharing mechanism,” he said.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Gordon Ramsay said the guaranteed revenues would aid the retailer’s capacity to invest in renewables.
“We view this agreement positively as we believe it provides additional certainty for future cash flows for the Loy Yang A power station,” said Mr Ramsay.
AGL said last year it will spend $20bn to develop a pipeline of renewables to replace coal, which it will exit with the mothballing of Loy Yang.
While some investors will cheer the earnings insurance of the deal with the Victorian government, it remains to be seen the reaction of Mr Cannon-Brookes who has vowed to continue pressuring the retailer that he dubbed earlier this month “one of the most toxic companies on the planet”
If Australia has developed enough renewable energy generation capacity before 2035 and Loy Yang is enduring financial losses, AGL and Victoria could jointly agree for the early exit of the generator, but it will require endorsement from Australia’s energy market operator that there is sufficient capacity to compensate, The Australian understands.
However, Australia is struggling to build enough renewable energy generation sources to replace the fossil fuel capacity leaving the system already, so an early exit on the current trajectory remains unlikely.
*******************************************************
Teacher made to apologise for giving child ‘improvement strategies’ (!!)
A teacher who had recently started at a new school was asked to give one student some improvement strategies. The child went home and complained. The principal asked that teacher to apologise to the parents for making that student feel “stressed”.
Australia’s classrooms are ranked among the worst in the world when it comes to discipline and the responsibility for that should not fall solely on teachers, education experts have told a federal senate inquiry into disruptive classrooms.
The story of the teacher asked to apologise was recounted to the inquiry by Dr Paul Kidson, senior lecturer in educational leadership at the Australian Catholic University, who said parents and students had too often been given a free pass in the schooling system.
“There is no likelihood that there is going to be significant improvement in the achievement of a community where that behaviour is characterised as normal,” he said
Kidson said a combination of poorer mental health of students, a nationwide teacher shortage and schools’ inability to give high-need students adequate support meant behaviour had become a “wicked problem”.
However, he said there had also been an increase in the “overmedicalising of the normal human condition”. Last year there was a 30 per cent jump in prescriptions for drugs used to treat anxiety in children, the biggest annual increase seen in a decade.
‘[Young people] will expect things just to go their way. And if it doesn’t go their way, somebody else is to blame.’
“Facing academic challenges, an increasing number of students are claiming anxiety disorders or trauma in ways that minimise the seriousness of clinical, medical or psychological conditions experienced, sadly, by too many,” he said.
“That suggests to me that we are not building the resilience for a number of young people and, when they move into more independence, they will expect things just to go their way. And if it doesn’t go their way, somebody else is to blame.”
An OECD report earlier this year said the disciplinary climate in Australia was among the least favourable compared to other member nations while Australian teachers felt less capable when it came to dealing with disruptive students.
Literacy instruction provider Multilit chief executive Robyn Wheldall said simply creating engaging lessons would not resolve behaviour problems. The physical environment of the classroom had an effect on behaviour: she said arranging desks so students faced one another in small groups in primary school might seem to create a “nice” collaborative environment but was not always conducive to learning.
“If you wanted someone to do something social, like have a dinner party, you would sit around a table and chat. But if you’re in a classroom and you want kids to pay attention to you, the teacher, first of all, you don’t want half of them with their backs to you,” she said.
Her research had shown that teachers gave positive feedback when it came to a student’s academic progress – they are three times more approving rather than disapproving of students’ progress with schoolwork– but that ratio was reversed when it came to behaviour.
“They are more than three times disapproving of social behaviour than of approving. That means the teacher is talking a lot about, ‘Don’t do that, sit down, concentrate, don’t disturb’. All of these things are not going to change the world in terms of disruption or violence, but they create interruptions to what the teacher is trying to do and disturb other kids,” she said.
Ensuring teachers provide specific praise for behaviour like they did academic work coupled with the creation of consistent disciplinary environments within schools and educating teaching graduates at university about behaviour management could counter disruption in classrooms.
“There is a wealth of evidence from research and practice that we can draw on to bring about positive changes in classrooms, with relatively simple but effective methods,” she said.
************************************
23 August, 2023
More protest needed
Judith Sloan
I find myself doing a lot of head-shaking these days. Does anyone really believe that governments know best? Why do people put up with being bossed around even when they know the rationales for the directives are false? (OK, losing your job, massive fines, being arrested – these things do matter.)
I am just staggered by the extent of illiberal policies that are now put forward and, in far too many cases, actually implemented by governments and other bodies. These policies ride roughshod over the legitimate preferences of ordinary folk and seek to impose actions or behavioural changes that sensible people object to. In most cases, they are highly regressive, placing the greatest burden on people who already find it hard to make ends meet.
I first went to university in the 1970s. Looking back on those days, I realise that it was a nirvana of free thought and anti-authoritarianism. People seriously objected to being told what to do. There were demonstrations against compulsory military conscription. People were free to choose their living arrangements – marriage was not the only option. They smoked if they wanted to and took other substances if they were available. Censorious judgement was out; live and let live was the guiding principle.
It was such a contrast with my earlier years of growing up in narrow-minded, straight-laced, sectarian Melbourne. Societal norms were strictly enforced and ostracism, at best, befell those who tried to buck the trend.
Sadly, those days of free-thinking rebelliousness of the 1970s, and for a while longer, seem so far away. Maybe I should take up protest song-writing? Now, plenty of the citizenry simply accept the avalanche of restrictions and rules thrown at them by governments and big companies, in particular.
Of course, it was on neon-highlighted display during Covid, even though most people surely knew that most of the restrictions were rubbish and simply made up to ensure a compliant population.
How did it ever make any sense to close down playgrounds? Why restrict people to travelling five kilometres from their home? What about the absurd curfews, something which the police had never sought? And what about close-to-compulsory vaccines and mask-wearing, again not supported by the evidence?
But too many politicians, as well as business leaders, have developed a taste for high-handed bossiness and are very keen to stick to the formula. To be sure, false rationales will be still given such as saving the planet or ensuring the safety of citizens.
Take the example of the attack on the use of cash. The big banks, in particular, have decided that allowing their customers to withdraw some of their own cash is beneath them. Many branches – there are far fewer now – will not now allow customers to take out cash. These same banks are also withdrawing from providing ATMs, finding that they are costly albeit highly convenient for their customers.
Try transferring a sizeable amount of money to another account – say of a relative – and the bank will start asking all sorts of questions. Who is this other person? Why are you transferring the money?
To be fair, one of the reasons that banks engage in this intrusive and annoying process is the suite of government regulations designed to rid of us of the scourge of money laundering – as if. But the bank executives will also mention reducing the risk of scamming, although it’s not clear that this is the most effective way to reduce its incidence.
Let’s be clear: the government has an interest in eliminating cash as far as possible in part because it will provide a comprehensive data base of what the citizens are getting up to. You know the sort of thing: what you are buying, when you are buying it, where you are buying it.
There will be a bit of blather about reducing tax avoidance, but the beauty of a cashless society is obvious: it offers the scope to ban or limit certain types of spending while enforcing others. It’s China’s social credit system rolled out in a country that is ‘one and free’.
It’s clear where this is all heading. Take three interstate flights this year and you will get a message that you are exceeding your carbon budget. Pay a gas bill and get another message suggesting you switch to electricity. Spend a truckload down at Dan Murphy’s and who knows what will happen.
In addition to turning their backs on cash, the banks have also been getting up to all sorts of other invasive tricks. I recently received multiple messages from a bank where I have an online account. It was necessary to confirm my details, evidently.
When I logged in, there were some weird questions, including where I had got my money from. I did the obvious thing and transferred all my funds out of the account. None of their business.
And what about this latest wheeze from the major banks that runs along the following lines: ‘In addition to any other limit which may apply, we may in our discretion limit the amount each user may transfer or pay from all accounts to accounts and/or merchants which we reasonably believe may be owned or controlled by a cryptocurrency or digital asset exchange or being used to purchase cryptocurrency or digital assets to no more than AUD$10,000 in a calendar month’.
Right-oh – it’s your money but you are not allowed to transfer more than a set amount to accounts associated with cryptocurrency or digital asset exchange – in the bank’s opinion, of course. Evidently, the bank thinks it’s OK to behave like some sort of overbearing parent.
Don’t get me onto the federal government’s proposed Digital ID where all your records such as driver’s licence, passport and Medicare number will be assembled – for your own convenience. And to think that people actually fought hard to prevent the Australia Card from being introduced. How soon will it be before you are required to provide your Digital ID to leave home?
There are far too many examples of autocratic behaviour by governments and big business hell-bent on telling us what we can and can’t do. Have a second house? You should pay double taxes on that. Thinking of installing gas heating in your new house? You won’t be allowed to do that in Victoria. Thinking of giving a vaccine a miss? Watch out, you may be punished.
The end result is more head-shaking around here as too few objections are raised about magisterial directives linked to a view of the world where government knows best and it’s necessary to protect vulnerable citizens. Tears of laughter will be accompanied by the head-shaking – as well as paying for things by cash; so there.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/getting-grumpy-should-i-buy-a-guitar/
************************************************Our schools are failing – this is why
Kevin Donnelly
The news earlier this year that the Labor government in Victoria will use schools to promote a ‘Yes’ case for the Voice to Parliament should not surprise. Neither should it surprise that some Australian school students, instead of saluting the Australian flag and taking the oath of allegiance, are told to memorise the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
There is nothing new or unusual about schools being used as vehicles to indoctrinate students with neo-Marxist-inspired cultural-left ideology. It’s been happening over the last 30 to 40 years. As I wrote in Why our schools are failing (2004), instead of viewing education as something objective and impartial, Australian schools have been pressured to adopt ‘an ideologically driven approach that defines education as an instrument to radically change society and turn students into politically correct, new-age warriors’.
While the expression ‘the long march through the institutions’ has become clichéd, it does not alter the fact the phrase, attributed to the German student radical Rudi Dutschke and before him to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, very much describes what has occurred in education since the late 1970s.
At a Fabian Society meeting held in Melbourne in 1983, Joan Kirner, who later became Victoria’s Minister for Education and then Premier, argued education had to be reshaped as ‘part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation, and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system’. In the same speech, Kirner argued schools must be used as ‘a catalyst for system change rather than the legitimisation of system maintenance’.
Kirner’s socialist beliefs explain her mantra of ‘equality of outcomes’ instead of ‘equality of opportunity’ and her campaign to replace the then Higher School Certificate with the Victorian Certificate of Education. Given its academic focus and competitive end-of-year examinations where students are ranked in terms of performance, Kirner argued the HSC unfairly favoured privileged students attending wealthy non-government schools.
The Australian Education Union (previously named the Australian Teachers Federation) has, over the last 40 years, argued that Australian society is riven with inequality and injustice and that teachers, in the words of a teacher training resource popular at the time, must decide whose side they are on.
The union’s 1985 curriculum policy paper condemns Australian society for its ‘pronounced inequality in the distribution of social, economic, cultural and political resources and power between social groups, which restricts the life development of many’. Teachers were told the purpose of education was to reveal to students ‘the role of the economy, the sexual division of labour, the dominant culture and the education system in reproducing inequality’.
In order to improve equity and overcome disadvantage, the Australian Education Union has consistently spoken against Year 12 certificates, standardised tests like the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and what is described as the competitive, academic curriculum. This curriculum is apparently guilty of reinforcing capitalist hierarchies and disadvantaging at-risk, low socio-economic status (SES) students.
The Union’s 1998 curriculum policy paper states:
‘Reliance on competition is a primary cause of inequalities of educational outcome because students from certain social groups are advantaged by competitive selection methods. Competitive selection also sets students against each other rather than encouraging co-operative learning methods.’
Once again, the primary target are Catholic and Independent schools that generally achieve the strongest academic results as measured by the Year 12 Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank (ATAR).
Other examples illustrating the wider cultural-left’s ideology and opposition to the belief education should be impartial and unbiased include denouncing the Howard government’s involvement in the Iraqi war and suggesting students are entitled to strike in protest; arguing it’s okay for students to wag school to attend climate change demonstrations; telling teachers they must embrace a neo-Marxist inspired LGBTQ+ agenda, and arguing non-government schools should not be funded.
Given the AEU’s history of cultural-left activism, it should not surprise that the teacher union is a strong supporter of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. In its submission to the ‘Indigenous Voice Co-Design process’ the union argues:
‘The AEU strongly supports The Uluru Statement and Voice. Treaty. Truth. Specifically, the AEU wishes to emphasise the importance of Truth-telling in schools through and in the curriculum and in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.’
As I detail in the chapter on school education in Cancel Culture And The Left’s Long March, subject associations have also been instrumental in radically reshaping the curriculum and what happens in the classroom. Some of these groups also oppose standardised tests like NAPLAN (in relation to literacy) on the basis such tests stifle creativity by privileging correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and standardised English instead of the language students bring to the classroom.
Drawing on the work of the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, who toured Australia in 1974, and the concept of critical literacy, one teaching association argues that the purpose of teaching English is to liberate and empower students by enabling them to critique texts and to discover how language is employed to reinforce what Louis Althusser terms capitalist society’s ideological state apparatus.
In an editorial in the 2004 edition of English in Australia published by the AATE, it is argued that the re-election of the Howard-led government demonstrated teachers had failed to properly teach critical literacy and, as a result, they had to redouble their efforts as so many young people had voted the wrong way. ‘What does it mean for us and our ability to create a questioning, critical generation that those who brought us balaclava-clad security guards, Alsatians, and Patrick’s Stevedoring could declare themselves the representatives of the workers and be supported by the electorate?’
Critical literacy and a rainbow alliance of cultural-left theories including postmodernism, deconstructionism, radical feminist gender, and post-colonial theories have also had a profound impact on how literature is taught in the English classroom. Australia contains teaching associations that condemn the concept of a literary canon involving those enduring works that are well crafted and have something profound to say about the human condition. Instead of acknowledging the moral, emotional, and aesthetic value of literature students are made to deconstruct texts in terms of power relationships and how the voices of marginalised groups, including women, people of colour, and LGBQ+ people, are ignored and silenced.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/our-schools-are-failing-this-is-why/
***********************************************Some awkward truths about the white settlement of Australia
There’s a wonderful scene in the movie A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson loses his cool and exclaims: ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ Everyone who has seen this film remembers that dramatic courtroom segment when a young and relatively inexperienced lawyer played by Tom Cruise verbally challenges a high-ranking US Army veteran played by Jack Nicholson. Great acting!
I wonder whether the ‘First Nations’ activists who claim to represent all 300+ Indigenous groups in Australia will be able to handle the truth if we eventually meet their demand to implement the Makarrata Commission (as cited in the Uluru Statement from the Heart) which is planning to undertake the supposed ‘truth-telling’ of Australian history?
Presumably, their aim is to establish a similar body to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed the democratic election of President Nelson Mandela in 1994. This body was created to investigate gross human rights violations perpetrated during the period of the Apartheid regime in South Africa – and it did a great job of exposing the evil of Apartheid.
The stated objective of the Australian version will be ‘…to bring to light colonial conflict and dispossession, and also to acknowledge the strength and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and cultures.’
In other words, how they suffered – nothing about how the settlers, who arrived starting in 1788, also suffered at the hands of aggressive and often warlike Indigenous people.
Firstly, I hope no one seriously believes that the Indigenous people in Australia suffered to the same extent experienced by South African peoples during the Apartheid years, because that would be a gross distortion of the truth. I’ve experienced Apartheid firsthand and fought against it, so I know what its perpetrators did to so many innocent people.
Given that, I also really hope that the Makarrata Commission will include in its ‘truth-telling’ the following facts so that a balanced and genuinely truthful outcome will be achieved:
1. According to one survey, 48 per cent of Australians believe that James Cook arrived in Australia in 1788 with the First Fleet and was therefore, in their view, a member of the white colonial force that supposedly ‘invaded’ this continent. As a result, Cook’s statues have been attacked and his memory defiled. Moreover, the landing of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788 has been named ‘Invasion Day’ by these same people.
The truth is James Cook arrived in Botany Bay on 29th April 1770 and was not involved in any activity that could be even remotely called an ‘invasion’. Cook and approximately 40 members of his crew stepped ashore – hardly an invasion force. He was under strict instructions from the British government to: ‘…endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship with them…shewing (sic) them every Civility and Regard.’
Unfortunately, the Aboriginal people who met them on that day were aggressive and threw stones and spears at Cook and his crew. They in turn fired muskets to scare them away. The shot used was a light, non-lethal load and meant only to ‘sting’ and scare. No one on either side was seriously injured. Even when Cook offered small gifts there was no positive response, unlike that provided by other local people in several of the Pacific islands that Cook visited and was used to trading with.
In summary, James Cook was not only a great mariner and cartographer, but also a good, humane, and prudent man. He deserves to be remembered as such.
2. When the First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson nearly two decades later on 26th January 1788, much the same applied in terms of the British government’s instructions to Governor Arthur Phillip. He was ordered ‘…to endeavour, by every possible means to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruptions in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence.’
These are hardly the words that could be attributed to an ‘invasion’. Moreover, if the British government was truly intent on invading this newly discovered continent, there would likely be very few Indigenous people alive today. And that would certainly have applied if other European nations such as Spain, Portugal, Germany, or Belgium had colonised this continent instead of the British. Look at their track record as colonisers!
3. The First Fleet comprised many nationalities and at least 12 were black people from Africa, West Indies and America. In total, there were approximately 1,400 people who arrived with the purpose of establishing the British colony that is now called Australia.
At that time there were approximately 750,000 Indigenous people distributed over some 500+ different groups comprising many clans. There was no overarching Aboriginal ‘nation’ as such. There was clearly room for a much larger population. During this time, both groups could have learned more from each other than they did – with the settlers offering leaps in technology while the Aboriginal people had knowledge regarding how to survive and manage on the land.
4. The arrival of settlers certainly brought death to thousands of Indigenous people, primarily as a result of diseases such as smallpox – there’s no denying that. But does anyone believe that this vast continent would have remained isolated for 200+ years? Of course not, it was only a question of time before one nation or another discovered this amazing place and chose to have its people settle here. Whilst death from disease and conflict came with that settlement, it certainly wasn’t all bad. It is claimed by some that Indigenous people now enjoy the benefits of modernity since British settlers have arrived. Improved health leading to longer life-spans, education, rule of law, and all the facilities of modern life have all been positive outcomes of British colonisation – but none of this is ever acknowledged by left-wing activists, it’s all doom and gloom as far as they’re concerned and they love to portray themselves as victims, even those who have become successful!
And many Indigenous people have been highly successful, including the current 11 elected federal MPs and numerous others from all sectors of the community such as government, business, art, and sport. The opportunities are there for all Indigenous people, not just a few. It’s hardly anyone else’s fault if some choose not to take full advantage of those opportunities and the vast sums of money that are invested every year by taxpayers aimed at improving Indigenous people’s lives. In excess of $30 billion is being spent annually and many people are asking where exactly does that money get spent? It’s pretty clear that those out in the bush certainly don’t see much of it. There are a large number of Indigenous bodies already established to help their people at the grassroots level – perhaps they should be asked that question and also required to account for it?
5. Much has also been said of the ‘stolen generation’. The truth of the matter is far more complex, with many of the so-called stolen children being taken into care by well-meaning and caring settlers who were horrified by the living conditions experienced by the children. As is the case to some extent even now, there was a high level of domestic violence perpetrated largely by family members as well as frequent conflict between the various clans.
Having said that, there is no doubt that government policies were poorly implemented and monitored and much unnecessary suffering eventuated as a result. It was devastating to many Indigenous families. And the same is happening today.
It is hoped that a balanced outcome will be achieved as a result of any truth-telling process that takes place and that settlers won’t be seen to be entirely to blame because that would simply be untrue.
6. Finally, in relation to the Voice, truth-telling by the Federal government would be well-received by those amongst us who value truthfulness. The Albanese Labor government and ‘Yes’ supporters have stated that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people asked for the Voice in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. What they did not point out is that the Uluru Statement was adopted at a convention that was attended by only 250 delegates, hand-picked from about a dozen community Dialogues. Moreover, a number of convention delegates rejected it and walked out! The two leading Indigenous ‘No’ campaigners Nyunggai Warren Mundine AO and Senator Nampijinpa Jacinta Price both criticised the process and the outcome. Many Indigenous people agree with them.
It should also be noted that there are currently 300-plus so-called ‘First Nations’ traditional owners groups in Australia. Surely this means 300-plus ‘voices’ need to be heard by the government; one national Indigenous Voice comprising selected (i.e. unelected) representatives should clearly not be allowed to speak for all of them just because left-wing activists and the Australian Labor government wants it to.
Deception by our federal government and its supporters has provided a false picture to those of us who will be voting in the referendum. Hopefully enough voters will recognise this and vote ‘No’.
The facts are very clear: the proposed Voice is racially divisive. It will lead to decades of litigation through High Court activism. It has the power to challenge every government decision because all government matters affect Indigenous people – not just those few named by the government. It violates the sacred democratic principle of one person, one vote. And it will lead to the allocation of critical social and economic resources being based on race, rather than need, as has happened in New Zealand.
Professor Ramesh Thakur from ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy and former UN Assistant Secretary-General stated recently that: ‘Permanently codifying racial grievance into the Constitution will guarantee it is weaponised and monetised by activists … it will be the beginning of fresh claims for co-sovereignty, treaty, and reparations, using the Constitution’s authority as the enabling mechanism.’
Prime Minister Albanese would be wise to reflect on all the above as well as consider the words of his acknowledged hero, former Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who stated that in this country there must be ‘no hierarchy of descent’ and ‘no privilege of origin’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/you-cant-handle-the-truth/ ?
***************************************************
A very Leftist government
‘Should Israel refer to Australia as occupied Aboriginal territory?’ asked Stephen Flatow in the Jerusalem Post on 13 August.Flatow asked the question because the Albanese government has announced that it will resume using the term ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories’.
Flatow points out that Jerusalem, which the Albanese government ceased to recognise as the capital of Israel last October, has been the holiest city of the Jews since the 10th century BC. Palestine was a name imposed by the Roman conquerors after the Jewish-Roman wars (66-136AD) to efface the Jewish identity of Judea which dated back to the Kingdom of Judah established in the 6th century BC.
‘If you want to find some genuinely occupied territory, look no further than the country of Australia,’ argues Flatow. ‘“Occupied Territories?” “Illegal settlers?” Australia’s Labor party government ought to take a look in the mirror before hurling false and insulting accusations at Israel,’ he writes.
Flatow’s only error is imagining that his accusation that Australia is illegally occupied would insult or surprise Australia’s Prime Minister or his comrades.
Albanese presides over the most left-wing government in Australia in a generation. It is largely because the Western world has shifted so dramatically to the left and become so authoritarian and intolerant of free speech that the political orientation of the Australian government has escaped greater comment.
While the timing of the slap in the face to our ally is conveniently calculated to still be smarting by the time Labor’s National Conference convenes on Thursday, it is wrong to imagine that it is the advent of the conference that is driving the charge left.
Albanese has always been a stalwart of the left faction but he is loyally supported by the right faction which has always supported the leader. The right wing of the Labor party has always been driven by the sort of pragmatism best summed up by Graham Richardson’s motto, ‘Whatever it takes’.
With a left-wing prime minister and a world where pandemic panic and climate catastrophism have been used to justify economically ruinous policies, authoritarianism and censorship, the right wing of the Labor party has pragmatically adjusted to the policy parameters of the times.
Labor’s 2021 National Platform proves the point. For example, on the Voice, the Prime Minister is doing his best to say different things to different people but the National Platform is unequivocal – ‘Labor supports all elements of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, including a constitutionally enshrined Voice to parliament, a Makarrata Commission for agreement-making and a national process of truth-telling.’
The Voice is anti-democratic, empowering a tiny group to speak for all Aboriginal people including to negotiate reparations and a treaty, but that should surprise no one because Marxists scorn bourgeois democracy as a deception of the ruling class. That’s why co-architect of the Voice, Thomas Mayo paid his respects to ‘the elders of the Communist party who I think without a doubt have played a very important role in our activism’.
The whole point of creating a Voice to parliament is to create a partner with whom Albanese can negotiate a treaty and to whom he can hand over an Aboriginal sovereign state. And if the ‘partners’ in this project give any indication of the future character of this state it will probably recognise China before it recognises either Australia or Israel.
What is interesting about the government is not just that it is attempting to mainstream the ideas of communists but that so many erstwhile stalwarts of the party’s right-wing are channelling their inner-lefties.
Most people become more hardheaded and right-wing as they age and take on greater financial and social responsibilities but some people who reach the pinnacle of power and then move on become more leftist in their twilight years.
On Israel, with a few notable exceptions, Labor has been shifting leftwards. Former NSW premier Bob Carr, also of the NSW right, long ago moved from a pro-Israel to a pro-Palestinian position. Former foreign minister Gareth Evans, of the Victorian Centre Unity faction, has been pro-Palestine for a long time. Tony Burke, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and for the Arts, also of the NSW Right, is pro-Palestine.
Former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who led the NSW Right in his day, has become increasingly shrill in his anti-American and pro-Chinese stances and is leading the charge against Aukus. As a result, the conference will be a Keating-free zone. It is Labor’s commitment to this Morrison government initiative that gives the government a mainstream appearance. But in almost all other policy areas it has veered sharply to the left.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has adopted a national wellbeing framework, the first step in the transition to a ‘wellbeing economy’, an economic approach endorsed by the Club of Rome and expounded in an updated version of The Limits to Growth called Earth4All. This is the view that resources are finite and their consumption is unsustainable. It has been discredited by economists such as Julian Simon who point out that what is considered a resource changes over time. No one should be surprised that former NSW treasurer Matt Kean also adopted a ‘wellbeing’ approach.
One thing Labor doesn’t worry about exhausting is taxpayer dollars. Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen, also of the NSW Right, has adopted a pursuit of renewable energy that is clobbering the economy and the environment at huge cost.
Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, also from the NSW Right, has introduced the Misinformation Bill that will pressure social media companies to censor speech that runs counter to government policy for fear of facing massive fines. It is essentially the bill tabled by her predecessor, but worse.
Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler is a member of the left faction so there is little surprise that he is comfortable allowing the World Health Organisation to take a dictatorial role in pandemic management.
Given how far to the left the Liberal party moved while it was in government adopting a net-zero goal and tabling a Misinformation bill it is hardly surprising that Labor is dishing out more of the same.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/left-right-left
************************************21 August, 2023
Left-led Qantas gets a reward
Qatar is a low price carrier
The Albanese Federal Government’s decision to refuse Qatar Airways’ application to land another 21 flights a week into Australian airports because “it’s not in the national interest” raises some serious questions.
Qantas is the major economic winner from this decision.
This at a time when we need to see more tourists coming into this country and spending their money at small Australian tourism businesses that are recovering from the pandemic.
One has to wonder why this airline, which is not Government owned - yet is increasingly politically active in pushing the social causes that CEO Alan Joyce holds so dear - keeps getting given so many free kicks by this Government?
Qantas under Alan Joyce, is a major cheer leader for the YES campaign in the upcoming Voice Referendum. So much so that they are redecorating 3 planes to advocate the YES vote.
Qantas is also providing free airline travel to key members of the Yes23 campaign and the Uluru Dialogue to help them spread the message in the regions.
The blurring of the lines between the Federal Government, its politics and major Australian corporates poses an existential threat to our democracy.
With support for the YES vote tanking across Australia - what other favours will be exchanged between companies like Qantas and the Albanese Government for ongoing and increasing mutual support?
Meanwhile Australian tourism businesses and the Australian travelling public will suffer, while Qantas is shielded from extra competition in our skies.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/big-tech-yes-camp-censors-will-only-reinforce-no-vote/news-story/b4d58fd295a9cc8ad3f87dcaad49ea5a
*********************************************Construction Qld: Insiders claim costs up, productivity down as a result of ‘CFMEU tax’ govt policy
Whistleblowers have claimed multi-millions of taxpayer dollars are being wasted due to the government’s Best Practice Industry Conditions policy – which forces contractors and unions to negotiate agreements on state civil construction projects worth more than $100m – pointing the blame at Public Works and Procurement Minister Mick de Brenni.
Under the union-centric conditions – dubbed the “CFMEU tax” – the industry warns state-funded projects were being driven up as much as 30 per cent, with traffic controllers and labourers paid up to $200,000 on some sites.
Transport Minister Mark Bailey has also copped flack over his support of the policy, with major transport projects including the Coomera Connector, Gold Coast Light Rail and the Rockhampton Ring Road all impacted.
Multiple high-ranking industry insiders have told The Sunday Mail the policy was akin to the state government “interfering in the free market”, that it had crippled productivity and was having “gobsmacking ramifications” for smaller projects and subcontractors.
“We’re seeing our state government operating in spaces where they legitimately shouldn’t be,” one said, asking for anonymity due to potential backlash from the unions and the state government. “This is not value for money – it’s the opposite. We are very happy to pay our workers good wages, but these deals are so bad for productivity we are paying much more, for less.”
Another top insider said it would be disingenuous to blame all cost increases on state government projects on BPICs, but it was a case of the “state government interfering in the free market”.
The Best Practice Industry Conditions policy forces contractors and unions to negotiate agreements on state civil construction projects worth more than $100m.
WHAT’S THE ISSUE?
Construction industry insiders say the policy is designed to benefit unions and has driven up the cost of public projects by up to 30 per cent. They claim workers such as traffic controllers and labourers can be paid salaries of up to $200,000 on some state government projects.
PROJECTS ‘IMPACTED’
* Coomera Connector
* Gold Coast Light Rail
* Rockhampton Ring Road
“A big issue is on those major projects, $300m plus, because for every $100m added there’s an extra increase, about $5 to $7 per hour,” he said.
“That’s the reason why a project such as the Coomera Connector (about $600m more than first budgeted) will be under more cost pressure than what the economic conditions would have otherwise caused.”
The policy pushes contractors to the bargaining table with unions who had previously had little impact in the civil construction space – such as the CFMEU – who the industry fears is pushing to become the dominant union above the longstanding AWU.
“It’s clearly a push from inside cabinet of certain ministers giving the unions a leg up,” an insider said.
But the CFMEU pushed back, saying the alternative to BPICs was a “Hunger Games-style race to the bottom resulting in poor build quality, unsafe work practices and exploitation of workers”.
“It is pretty bloody rich for the executives of major private sector companies to whine about “competition” for a finite pool of labour,” a spokesman said.
“Is that not how ‘free enterprise’ and open markets are supposed to work?
“Find me this mythical traffic controller earning $200k a year. Yes, construction workers can earn good money. If you’re working 50-60 hours a week in an itinerant and intermittent industry and pulling weekend and night shifts in a dangerous job you deserve to be paid properly.”
Insiders said the claim BPICs were limited to the largest projects was “bull”.
“You cannot limit its effect to only projects over $100m, you’ve redirected the market to have to compete with those forces to attract labour – so the state government has moved the whole industry,” one said. “They’ve trampled the award – you cannot blame any worker for leaving a council job to earn twice as much on a BPIC job.”
Civil Contractors Federation Queensland chief Damian Long said “we have always said it is a bad policy”.
“I’ve never seen a situation where the client is involved in the enterprise bargaining,” he said.
“The state has stepped in and is doing the bidding on the behalf of the union – which is just bizarre.”
But Mr de Brenni backed the policy, and said “quality conditions are crucial to attracting quality tradies during what is nationally recognised as an ongoing infrastructure workforce shortage”. “Queenslanders expect their schools and hospitals to be built to the highest standards – by workers who are well-trained, fairly compensated, and safe while on the job,” he said.
Mr de Brenni did not answer questions about what the average cost implication of a BPIC was on a state-funded project.
***************************************************
The Aboriginal reality
This week, Aboriginal children will walk into the store at Warburton in Western Australia and purchase the typical fare of an Aboriginal diet. On the same latitude as the border of Northern Territory and South Australia, Warburton is as remote as it gets. But cake, Coca-Cola, and energy bars are all available, and expensive. For adults, throw in smokes. These are typical purchases. Week in and week out. Eating and drinking junk foods, not working, and having no purpose in life other than consumption, is a death sentence.
And then there is the violence by children, women, and men.
My mate in Warburton texted this: –
8pm at night here and 6-year-olds are wandering the streets throwing fireworks into our and others yards. Why? Because the 6-year-olds today told us to Get F….d because we were F…..g white trash C…s. 6-years-olds. What hope is for them?
Another day in Paradise. Two women fist-fighting and hitting each other over the head with Coke bottles. Roll on my plane on Tuesday please.
Shop was open for an hour today, before a local man ran in with an iron bar, and started smashing the shelves and walls, calling us f…..g white trash c….s.
Closed now for the day. We fly out in an hour…
No Voice, no committee, no treaty, no ‘truth-telling’, no Makarrata can save these people.
Aboriginal people are a modern people. In Warburton, mobile phones are commonplace. Electricity keeps the food and drink cool. Without the paraphernalia of the modern world there would be no Warburton, it would have closed decades ago. Aboriginal people rely on modern means to survive. Most have no idea how it is made. This is cruel.
And yet, too many legal professional associations are for the Voice, medical professional associations are for the Voice, the Australian Academy of Science is for the Voice. Why is it that these professional associations would cast their lot with an industry that refuses to release its own most vulnerable people into the open society? What is it that keeps these poor souls locked into an ancient and ignorant world? The very antithesis of the professionals, the brilliant and trained minds, condemn their objects of concern to a life of ignorance and violence.
Not only professionals are being taken for a ride, but shareholders are also being taken for a ride, as are donors, trade unionists, sports fans and taxpayers. Egotistical professional leaders, CEOs, charity leaders, trade union leaders, sports administrators, and politicians, foolish enough to forsake their duty and send other people’s money to the referendum Yes case, are doing harm. A majority of their members and funders are against the proposition. They are not as foolish as their leaders.
Leaders who think that a solution to Aboriginal despair lies in permanent government intervention in the lives of those few Aborigines who are failing in this modern society should think again. It is not all about government. Changing the constitution does not change behaviour. Changing the constitution will not get children to attend school. Changing the constitution will not stop the grog, or the abuse, or the awful habits that cause early death.
The task of leaders is to have every child understand how it is that the mobile phone and electricity that makes their food and shelter available comes into being. Government may be the provider, but it is not the maker. Government makes nothing, it merely covers the indignity of woeful ignorance. Why do governments refuse to teach their citizens how their lives have been degraded to the point of begging? This referendum proposal is no gracious gift; it is stealing the future of these people. It is an abandonment of leadership. Recognition via the Voice is not reconciliation.
Aboriginal parents face an awful dilemma. To keep children ‘safe’ on country, away from the worst of modern life, grog and drugs, but in doing so, condemn their children to live restricted lives, with poor education, few prospects and a poor diet. The great lie of this referendum is that choices can be avoided. Somehow, 24 select delegates in Canberra will solve the parents’ dilemma. They will not. They will continue to mask the choice and, in default, make the choice for them. A slow death on country, rather than to break free, with the help of their families and guidance from outsiders on how to handle the wider world.
There is no love for Aborigines in this referendum proposal, just ego. The Aboriginal people at Warburton are radically disabled. They are self-determining alright, sitting on country, speaking language, and dying early. And CEOs and the Prime Minister think that this is a good idea. They must do, because their solution is to change nothing. Not to learn how to create value, not to adapt, but to wait. Government monies as a permanent way of life are poison.
Some thousands of naive supporters of the Yes campaign think it’s a good idea. Think again. Emotion and faux morality are no substitute for a steely focus on what a person needs to make it in this world. A world not of their making, but one they inherited. Wishing it were otherwise is no substitute for action. Would any leader in the eastern and southern capitals tolerate the behaviour tolerated in Warburton, and a hundred other failing communities in northern and Western Australia, in their backyard?
Leaders beware, this referendum has already failed, it has failed to unite Australia. A razor-thin win would be failure. A razor-thin loss would cause resentment. A huge loss, which is in prospect, will create an opportunity to reconsider known paths to success. Leaders, put your ego aside and think, what did it take to raise my child? You know the answer – mentoring, discipline and love. This referendum disdains all three.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/vote-yes-for-cake-and-coke/
************************************20 August, 2023
Why food prices could surge as farms are forced to close by 2030 under a plan by Labor Party activists
This policy is unlikely to get up but we have seen where Green attacks on orthodox farming have led in SriLanka -- to some real starvation. In Australia the effect would probably be just to jack up food prices. As if we haven't already had enough of that! It would be a great election-loser. It's a good comment on the unrealistic thinking of the Left that they are advocating a policy that would lose them the next election.
Food prices could surge as farms are forced to close by 2030 - leading to mass job losses - if radical Labor Party environmental activists get their way.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government is already committed to reducing carbon emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, with support from the Greens.
But the Labor Environment Action Network (LEAN) wants carbon emissions slashed by an even more dramatic 50 per cent within six-and-a-half years as part of its 'climate, clearing and cows' campaign.
LEAN has support from 350 Labor Party branches and is urging them to push that motion at Labor's national conference being held in Brisbane this week.
With federal Labor under threat from the Greens in Byron Bay and inner-city areas of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, there are fears middle-class, left-wing activists within the party could prevail.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, whose gentrified electorate of Sydney overlaps with the Greens-held state seat of Newtown, was photographed at a LEAN event in 2016 holding a sign touting 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.
While 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 is less contentious, it is part of LEAN's '50/50 branch motion' campaign to cut carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030.
National Farmers Federation president Fiona Simson said the push to halve carbon pollution in little more than six years could result in much higher food prices as farms are forced to close by 2030.
'This motion is about taking farms out of production, killing jobs and pushing up food prices,' she said. 'This is not a sensible policy for a mainstream political party.
'Voting this through would be an open-armed embrace of fringe views that are anti-science and anti-farming. It's as simple as that.'
LEAN describes land use as one of two major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, along with energy consumption, and is campaigning to halve agricultural carbon pollution describing it as 'cows; their burps and farts'.
'Around 51 per cent of Australia's methane emissions come from agriculture, primarily as a by-product of the way cows and sheep digest food,' it said. 'They burp and fart methane into the atmosphere.'
Ms Simson said truck drivers and port stevedores would also be out of work as a result of these policies.
'We're not just talking about farming jobs, but also in trucking, in stevedoring and of course in meat processing – our largest manufacturing industry.'
This would threaten unionised jobs and affect members of the left-wing Maritime Union of Australia who work on the ports, along with truck drivers with the Transport Workers Union and meat processors belonging to the Australian Workers Union.
Ms Simson said Labor Party delegates needed to keep jobs in mind as the party of trade unions.
'Delegates need to be clearheaded about what really matters to Australians and what the ALP stands for,' she said.
'Is it protecting jobs and tackling the cost of living?
'Or pleasing environmental outliers who have turned their back on science and common sense?'
************************************************
As 400,000 new migrants arrive in Australia, one expert argues high immigration makes us less productive, prevents home ownership and fuels inflation
Record-high immigration is fuelling inflation by making Australians less productive at work and stopping them from owning a house, an economist says.
Treasury is expecting a record 400,000 new migrants to have arrived in Australia in the year to June.
Close to 1.5 million migrants, on a net basis, are expected to arrive in the five years as the likes of the Business Council of Australia, the lobby group for millionaire chief executives, pushes for high immigration.
Australia's population last year grew by 1.9 per cent, among the highest in the developed world.
AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said immigration-driven population growth was in fact making Australians less productive at work, because they often had to travel long distances to the office.
'Very strong population growth with an inadequate infrastructure and housing supply response has led to urban congestion and poor housing affordability which contribute to poor productivity growth,' he said.
Weak productivity means companies are more likely to pass on costs to consumers to pay for higher wages, in turn keeping inflation well above the Reserve Bank's two to three per cent target.
'If wages go up four per cent and productivity growth is zero, business costs go up four per cent and they will pass this on to their customers likely resulting in inflation above the RBA's target,' Dr Oliver said.
He also argued that high population growth meant investors were buying homes for capital gain instead of ploughing their money into new business ventures or shares.
'Increased speculative activity around housing diverts resources from more productive uses,' he said.
Sydney's median house price of $1.334million is beyond the reach of an average, full-time worker earning $94,000.
That's because a million-dollar loan with a 20 per cent mortgage deposit would give someone a debt-to-income ratio of 11 - a level well beyond the banking regulator's 'six' threshold for mortgage stress.
Australia's wage price index grew by 3.6 per cent in June, down from an annual pace of 3.7 per cent in the March, marking the first annual drop since 2020.
It remained well below the 6 per cent inflation rate and the 9.6 per cent increase in employee living costs, as calculated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
How Australia's population growth compares
SINGAPORE: Up 3.4 per cent in 2022
CANADA: Up 2.7 per cent in 2022
AUSTRALIA: Up 1.9 per cent in 2022
NEW ZEALAND: Up 0.7 per cent in 2022
UNITED STATES: Up 0.4 per cent in 2022
Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Stats NZ, U.S. Census Bureau, Statistics Canada, Singapore Department of Statistics
This meant workers were effectively suffering a six per cent cut in real wages.
Productivity growth has been stuck below one per cent for the past decade, a level well below the two per cent pace of the 1990s.
Australia's annual net overseas migration level has consistently been in the six-figure range since 1999, excluding the Covid pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when skilled migrants and international students were included.
Dr Oliver said unless productivity growth returned to 1990s levels, inflation would stay higher for longer, but feared both major political parties were reluctant to liberalise labour laws.
'After nearly two decades of policy drift, declining productivity growth is weighing on growth in living standards and sustainable real wages growth,' he said.
'The political will for the sort of economic reforms necessary (particularly around taxation and labour markets) for another 1990s style rebound in productivity growth looks unlikely.
'This in turn makes the RBA's job in getting inflation down a little bit harder and will constrain medium term investment returns.'
The Department of Home Affairs has revealed how many applications were finalised during the first nine months of the 2022-23 financial year, compared with the same period to the end of March in 2021-22.
The skilled migration category saw a 111.7 per cent increase, with the permanent intake rising to 144,040, up from 68,055.
Student visa approvals, classified as temporary but long-term arrivals, increased by 154.4 per cent to 511,149, up from 200,941.
Another set of data from the Australia Bureau of Statistics showed a net overseas migration pace of 387,000 last year, following the reopening of the border to migrants in December 2021.
When 109,800 births were added, minus deaths, Australia's population grew by 496,800 to 26,268,359.
Australia surpassed the 25million milestone in 2018 - 24 years earlier than predicted in Treasury's inaugural Intergenerational report of 2002.
The 1.9 per cent population growth pace in 2022 was significantly higher than the American level of 0.4 per cent.
Dr Oliver said the political pendulum had swung in a left-wing direction, away from market-based solutions, blaming 'the perceived failure of the baby boomer generation to do much about climate change and housing affordability'.
*************************************************
‘Handed over’: Ten Victorian councils blindsided by sweeping Aboriginal land rights deal
Ten Victorian councils covering an area half the size of Tasmania have been blindsided by a settlement agreement that includes a list of proposals that would hand Indigenous groups sweeping powers to rename all roads, bridges and public spaces, co-manage waterways and biosecurity, as well as “preferential” access to council procurement contracts and jobs.
However, the government insists the deal “does not contain legal obligations” or impact current laws and regulations, and instead is an “aspirational” list of ways the traditional owners would like to work with councils, with the help of state authorities.
“We’re not allowed to name roads anymore,” said West Wimmera mayor Tim Meyer, commenting on the proposals in the agreement.
“The land council has to tell us what the road names are going to be from now on. [Legendary AFL coach] Alastair Clarkson’s a local boy here – there’s no chance of ever getting a road named after him now.”
Some local mayors fear that, similar to the experience of the shambolic rollout of Western Australia’s controversial new cultural heritage laws, the agreement will give Indigenous groups effective “veto” power to halt a wide range of activities without approval.
“The land council has to be consulted on everything and you’ve got to pay for that consultation,” said Cr Meyer. “We don’t know [how much it will cost]. They might say it’s 20 bucks an hour, they might say it’s 1000 bucks an hour. We don’t know.”
Victorian Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes signed the “expanded settlement package” with the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagulk (WJJWJ) Peoples last October, but the affected councils claim they were not included in the negotiations and were only made aware of the deal just over a month ago when it was presented to them as a “fait accompli”.
The agreement, which will be administered by the Barengi Gadjin Land Council (BGLC), covers 10 council areas in Victoria’s northwest – Mildura, West Wimmera, Northern Grampians, Southern Grampians, Buloke, Hindmarsh, Pyrenees, Yarriambiack, Horsham and Ararat – a total area of nearly 36,000 square kilometres.
The agreement “builds on our existing native title recognition” and is a “significant and respectful further step towards redressing the devastation and destruction that was brought about by the unjust dispossession of our family, country and lifeblood by the colonising Europeans”, the document reads.
Regional newspaper The Weekly Times first reported on the details of the agreement in early July, at which time the full document had yet to be made public, more than eight months after it was signed.
It was uploaded to the Victorian government’s First Peoples – State Relations website on July 21.
“The agreement will help pave the way for a future for our people that is founded on principles of justice and self-determination,” it reads.
“It will provide the means to provide for our economic self-determination and for our culture, traditional practices, and unique relationship to country to be recognised, strengthened, protected and promoted, for us and for all Victorians, now and into the future.”
The agreement states that the affected councils “have the means to offer significant on-ground and practical opportunities by which to improve the economic and social standing of Aboriginal people and communities within their municipal boundaries”.
Under a set of 39 “proposed actions”, councils are advised to engage the BGLC to recommend Indigenous names for “new local roads, bridges and public spaces”, “existing local roads, bridges and public spaces on WJJWJ land … with particular priority given to those local roads, bridges and public spaces that cause hurt or offence to the WJJWJ People”, and “establish a process for implementation of those recommendations, including payment of fees to BGLC for providing this service”.
Councils have been requested to install “appropriate signage”, fly the Aboriginal flag on council buildings, and attach plaques in public spaces acknowledging the traditional owners.
The agreement also proposes that councils consult or partner with the BGLC on nearly all aspects of local government business including planning applications, water and roads management, fire prevention, health and wellbeing services, local laws, rates and levies.
Councils should “consult with the BGLC in preparation of any new rating policy or strategy and commit to minimising rates and levies charged to the BGLC, or other entities wholly owned or controlled by the WJJWJ People”, one paragraph reads.
Another section calls for the development of a “framework for involvement of the BGLC in management of council controlled lands and waters”, adding that “recognition of the aspiration of WJJWJ People to be sole managers of their lands and waters should be a cornerstone of any such framework”.
A series of “business support” proposals suggest councils should “establish a preferential contracting and procurement process under which council agrees to preferentially source goods and services from BGLC or other WJJWJ entities or businesses”, including in relation to natural resources management, cultural awareness training, equipment or machinery hire, and “other goods or services for which BGLC and/or its subsidiaries or members have relevant supply capability or expertise”.
Councils are also requested to “commit to preferentially employ appropriately skilled WJJWJ people”.
But mayors in the affected shires say they have grave concerns about being kept in the dark by the Andrews government, the potential costs and lack of funding to implement any of the proposals.
“The agreement was signed off just prior to the state election last year without any consultation or knowledge of the councils,” said Northern Grampians mayor Kevin Erwin.
“We only found out probably about a month ago now.”
Cr Erwin said it was still “early days” as there was no clarity on if and when the proposals would be implemented, but he feared the agreement could grind ordinary council business to a halt.
**************************************************
Gas bans ignite culture war, battery bonus is better, says Liberal Party senator
Bans on household gas use risk opening up a fresh culture war over climate policy, moderate Coalition senator Andrew Bragg has warned, adding that the derailing of households’ use of electrical appliances could stop Australia reaching its climate targets.
Bragg said the federal government should instead offer tax breaks for household batteries, which he said would drive the uptake of systems that will be crucial to harnessing Australia’s vast supply of rooftop solar energy to continue cutting the nation’s carbon footprint.
“If we lose electrification to a culture war, we may never get to net zero,” Bragg will say in a speech to the Coalition for Conservation group on Friday.
The Victorian state government announced in July that gas connections to all new homes would be banned at the start of next year.
Bragg told this masthead that moves to remove the right to choose energy sources had sparked a damaging backlash in the US and said he believed it would likewise harm public support for climate action in Australia.
“During debates in the US Congress, the following is standard fare: ‘If the maniacs in the White House come for my stove, they can pry it from my cold dead hands’,” Bragg will say.
“Australia can do a lot better than that. If we lose electrification to a culture war, we may never get to net zero.”
Household emissions including electricity use and personal vehicles account for more than 40 per cent of Australia’s annual emissions. However, there are fewer than 50,000 household batteries installed across the country.
Installing electrical appliances backed with household batteries to lower gas use, such as induction cooktops, water heaters and reverse cycle air conditioners, is widely viewed as a crucial way to cut emissions and reduce power bills.
Bragg asked the Parliamentary Budget Office to model a tax deduction for home batteries.
It found a tax deduction of 50 per cent, capped at $3500, on the installation of a new home battery would deliver a 10 per cent increase in uptake by the middle of 2033. This scheme would cost the budget $375 million over the next 10 years.
The Parliamentary Budget Office also modelled a tax deduction of up to 75 per cent, capped at $5250, which it found would result in a 15 per cent increase in uptake by mid-2033 and cost the budget $584 million.
However, some experts say a ban on gas, coupled with subsidised loans for new appliances, is the best policy to drive household emissions reduction.
The Grattan Institute’s Getting Off Gas report urged governments to impose bans on new household gas connections and said low-interest loans to home owners were also needed to spur the uptake of appliances.
Grattan found that by switching from gas to electric appliances, an average household in Melbourne could save between $12,000 and $14,000 over 10 years based on their energy consumption, while an average household in Sydney could save between $2000 and $7000.
Bragg told this masthead that experts had failed to factor in the community division that would be caused by banning new households from gas connections.
“Household electrification is an absolute no-brainer and I don’t want to see it lost in a political bun fight,” he said.
************************************
18 August, 2023
Voice referendum question likely ‘misleading, unconstitutional’, legal experts warn
What lies behind all the vagueness is that Albo is quietly aiming at something very big and controversial. He wants the body of "advisers" formed by the bill as someone he can negotiate a "treaty" with, following the very damaging NZ example. It is all about a creating a treaty with Aborigines, nothing else. And there is no knowing what a treaty will do. Some extreme ideas have been put forward. It is dangerous racism
The wording of the Voice referendum question being put to Australian voters could be fundamentally “misleading” and unconstitutional because it fails to state the core function of the proposed body, according to one of the nation’s leading silks.
At the upcoming referendum, likely to be held in October or November, Australians will be asked to vote yes or no on a single question, “A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
Victorian barrister and constitutional law expert Stuart Wood KC, in a legal opinion for the conservative Institute of Public Affairs think tank published on Thursday, argued that the question “misleads and misinforms voters” and has a “serious deficiency” as it “fails to state the core function of the Voice”, and would be “open to challenge in the High Court of Australia”.
“In our view, the government’s proposed question misleads and misinforms voters about what they are being asked to approve at this year’s referendum,” Mr Wood said in the opinion, jointly written with barristers Paul Jeffreys and Jakub Patela.
“The central issue with the question is that, although it mimics the long title of the Bill, it fails to state the core function of the Voice, being to make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”
The question “instead, as presently framed, emphasises the notion of constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, with the establishing of the new body being only a symbolic step to achieve that aim”, they wrote.
“This is significant in circumstances where there is differential support amongst electors as to the concept of constitutional recognition, and the concept of a new constitutionally entrenched body,” the opinion said.
Assuming the proposed question remains deficient, they argue it would be “open to challenge by seeking relevant relief, such as a High Court declaration that an answer to the proposed question can not be taken to constitute approval of the proposed law, or an injunction preventing it being put to electors”.
The barristers suggested an alternative referendum question that could be put to voters instead.
“A Proposed Law: To alter the Constitution by establishing a body to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that, despite any Act of Parliament to the contrary, may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Do you approve this proposed alteration?”
Daniel Wild, the IPA’s deputy executive director, said in a statement that the legal opinion showed “fundamental questions now hang over the constitutional validity of the Voice to Parliament referendum”.
“The federal government has sought to prevent the release of detail on the Voice to Parliament proposal at all costs,” Mr Wild said.
“Mr Wood KC’s advice demonstrates the attempts to shroud the danger and divisiveness of the proposal have created a questionable and contestable legal scenario. Every step of the way, the Prime Minister, and Voice to Parliament advocates, have sought to deny Australians basic details, to stack the deck in favour of the Yes case, refused to answer rudimentary questions, and have admitted to not fully reading critical documentation on key legal matters.”
The IPA has called on the government to revise the question before the vote is held.
The legal opinion comes after Mr Wood earlier this year claimed that the “gravy train” of government work created a “big incentive” for barristers to support the Voice to Parliament.
“If you’re a sensible person making decisions about wanting to get onto the gravy train of government work, you’re not going to put sand in the gears,” he told Sky News.
“You’re going to tend to do the sort of things that make you more attractive to the biggest client in town.”
*******************************************************
Australia's Matildas are named 'one of the gayest teams at the World Cup' by leading LGBTQ news site
I had been told that female footballers are mostly butch Lesbians but I follow no sport so wondered if that was correct. Looks like it was. It may explain why play in their most recent match was pretty rough. It must be a first that a team of homosexuals received great public praise but one must wonder if many fans knew the full score about the team
The Matildas have been named one of the 'gayest' teams in the Women's World Cup, having the equal highest representations of lesbian players of all teams in the competition.
Pink News made the assessment ahead of Australia's semifinal against England on Wednesday night which the Matildas lost 3-1.
The UK-based news site said the Matildas had nine first-team players and three reserves who were in same-sex relationships, tying the squad with the Brazil team for the most openly lesbian players in the 2023 World Cup.
**************************************************
Top Voice No campaigner under fire for suggesting indigenous broadcaster Stan Grant has darkened his skin doubles down on his claim: 'There are many people who have said that'
Of course Grant uses fake tan. But he does have real aboriginal ancestry so not sure why he bothers
A prominent figure who opposes the Voice to Parliament has been slammed for suggesting indigenous journalist Stan Grant artificially darkens his skin in a series of vile tweets.
David Adler, who is head of the Australian Jewish Association, uploaded photos of Grant on social media in May - just days after he stepped down from his role as host of ABC panel program Q&A due to ongoing racial abuse.
Dr Adler is also on the advisory board for the right-wing lobby group, Advance - which runs a major 'No' campaign against the Voice.
The tweets, which were still on Dr Adler's Twitter profile on Tuesday morning, comprise photos of Grant throughout his career.
'Stan Grant's complexion seems to have changed,' he captioned the post.
'Look at the 3 pics. Can anyone explain?'
In March, Dr Adler posted the same images with the caption: 'Is Stan Grant doing black face? If so, why?'
He also raised questions about independent indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe's Aboriginal heritage on four occasions last year, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
In March 2022, he said: 'What % Aboriginal are you? You appear quite white.'
'Not so sure she's Blak (or Black).'
In January, he tweeted: 'What is 'racist' is allowing people to drink themselves to death they bash/rape/murder the women/children & turning a blind eye to it because they are Aboriginal!'
Referring to the ABC, he wrote: 'If you self-identify as a black lesbian you'll get the job'.
In another tweet on Tuesday morning, Dr Adler stood by his comments about Grant and Thorpe - insisting they were 'not racist'.
'Both these people have put race as central to their political statements,' he wrote.
'So raising questions, even uncomfortable non PC questions, is legitimate, not racist.'
He also told the SMH he did not recall the comments directed at Thorpe, and did not apologise for the comments about Grant.
'I asked a question; I haven't made any accusations. I was given material and there are many people who hae said that (Grant's) complexion has changed,' he told the publication.
'I am 100 per cent zero racism. I have Aboriginal friends, the most prominent being Warren Mundine, and you'll see photos of me with him,'.
Mr Mundine, a highly-influential indigenous businessman and No campaigner, told Radio National on Tuesday morning that Dr Adler's comments about Grant's complexion were 'bizarre'.
'Stan Grant and I went to university together, we've been mates for over 30 years - brothers, in fact, we consider ourselves - so there is no question about where he comes from and no question about his Aboriginality at all,' he said.
'Over the years, I have seen silly tweets saying he got dark skin or he's pale - that is absolute nonsense.'
Mr Mundine acknowledged both he and Dr Adler are united in their opposition to the Voice, but pointed out they do not belong to the same lobby groups: 'He's not at my board meetings, he's not at our campaign meetings'.
He said it was 'disgusting' that anyone would question the percentage of someone's indigenous heritage - slamming it as a 'racist attack'
Thorpe, who also opposes the Voice, told the publication the No campaign should be ashamed to work with Advance.
'I called it out early that there is a racist No campaign that is encouraging racists and hurting our people,' she said.
'The government created this space for them and has failed in its responsibility to deal with the rise in racism.'
Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council chairman, Mark Leibler, slammed Dr Adler as an 'unrepresented extremist' whose comments were 'grotesque'.
'The notion that someone who leads a so-called 'Jewish organisation' could post such disgusting comments about anyone from another minority group, in this case the highly regarded journalist and author Stan Grant, is nothing short of grotesque,' he told the newspaper.
***************************************************
A mushroom cook and her killer family lunch that left three dead: The mysterious case gripping Australia
Not sure why this is a mystery. It was clearly an attempted murder of her ex -- who wisely stayed away after previous bad experience of her cookery. The fact that she herself was alone unaffected is also grounds for grave suspicion
It was supposed to be a family meal where differences could be reconciled and future plans made for the sake of the estranged couple’s children.
Instead, it kicked off events that could have come straight out of a murder mystery novel or the board game Clue.
Four of the five people sat around the table fell gravely ill, three of them later dying with the fourth left fighting for his life.
The fifth, meanwhile, appeared to escape unscathed – curiously the very same person who prepared and cooked the meal for the other four guests.
What has since emerged is a bizarre case that continues to enthrall people all across the globe – involving mushroom poisoning, a series of deaths, a tearful interview and now reports of a past mystery illness.
It all began one fateful day on 29 July, when Erin Patterson prepared a special meal of beef Wellington with “lots of mushrooms” for lunch at her home in Leongatha, a rural town in the Australian state of Victoria.
Present at the church-mediated lunch — set up to sort out visitation rights for her two children — were her in-laws Gail and Don Patterson, both 70, Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson, 66, and her husband Ian, 68.
All four of her elderly in-laws fell violently ill that night from suspected mushroom poisoning.
Gail, Don and Heather, all teachers, died in hospital days later, while Ian, a local pastor, has been left fighting for his life.
Erin’s estranged husband Simon Patterson had skipped out on the meal at the last moment, while the couple’s two children had also left their mother’s home to see a movie just before the meat and pastry dish was served.
Victoria Police have since launched a homicide investigation, and at a press conference last week confirmed Ms Patterson is a suspect in the killings.
Erin, an experienced wild mushroom forager, reportedly told investigators she used dried fungi that she had purchased months earlier from an Asian grocery store and a fresh button variety bought recently from a local supermarket.
She later admitted lying to investigators about dumping a food dehydrator used to prepare the meal in a local refuse site after the deaths, according to the ABC.
In a statement obtained by the Australian public broadcaster, she said she was at the hospital with her children “discussing the food dehydrator” when her former husband asked: “Is that what you used to poison them?”
The 48-year-old mother-of-two has vehemently maintained her innocence, and in an interview this week claimed she is unfairly being painted as an “evil witch”.
As the poisoning mystery has shaken the small rural community 136kms southeast of Melbourne, and gripped Australian and international media, more disturbing details continue to emerge – with Simon Patterson now claiming that he once spent 16 days in an induced coma from a mystery gastro illness after eating food prepared by his wife.
Deadly dinner party
In a police statement obtained by the ABC, Erin reportedly told investigators that she had prepared a meal of beef Wellington with a “lot of mushrooms”.
Erin claimed she had purchased dried mushrooms from an Asian grocer several months ago, and button mushrooms from a local supermarket recently – using both in the dish.
Yet she reportedly could not remember exactly where she had bought them, according to the ABC.
She stated that she stored the dried mushrooms at a home she owns in Melbourne, before bringing them to the home in Leongatha.
“I used the dried mushrooms as they been in my cupboard for some time and I wanted to use them up. I rehydrated them and put them into the dish with the mushrooms that I had bought at [the supermarket],” according to the ABC.
Don and Gail Patterson died after eating poisoned mushrooms at Erin Patterson’s home in Victoria, Australia, on 29 July.
— (Supplied)
Erin said she served the others and allowed them to select their own plates, before taking the last plate.
**********************************************
The Barrier reef: A very expensive false alarm
In 2018, the Coalition government gifted $444 million of other people’s money to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. The money was apparently not even asked for by the foundation, but the Decider in Chief, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his profligate offsider Josh Frydenberg, signed off on ‘… the record funding agreement without an open tender.’ Said Turnbull at the time: ‘So this is a wonderful investment in ensuring that we maintain the health of the Great Barrier Reef.’
The purpose of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, according to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation is to: ‘To find and grow the best solutions to protect the world’s greatest reef.’
Meanwhile, reported this week from the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition: ‘In 2022, the GBR (Great Barrier Reef) continues to recover, registering the highest levels of coral cover yet recorded in the Northern and Central regions over the past 36 years of monitoring.’
To repeat. The highest level of coral cover in 36 years of monitoring across two-thirds of the reef.
This begs the question… For what was $444 million of public money provided by the Coalition government? Either the Great Barrier Reef Foundation was absolutely brilliant at saving the reef or it achieved very little and the reef repaired itself. Was this another Coalition waste of money? Looks like the latter rather than the former.
According to Peter Ridd, someone with some familiarity of the subject: ‘The reef now has twice as much coral as in 2012 when it hit a low point after being smashed by major cyclones.’ Then Ridd added: ‘The truth is we have been scammed for decades, and the perpetrators have been caught out. Once-trusted science institutions have become untrustworthy. It is time they are subjected to serious scrutiny.’
Over 4 years, we have burned through approximately $245 million to achieve … what? Whatever it is, it is difficult to quantify. With this spending you’d think this project was part of the Department of Defence!
The final and most important question to ask then is … can we have the money back?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/can-we-have-that-444-million-back/
************************************17 August, 2023
Westpac customer calls out bank after teller's alarming question and claims they are 'punishing' him for using cash
Cautions used to prevent scams make sense but it is hard to see how the actions described below help anyone or anything. Bureaucratic stupidity would seem to be the best descriptions of them. Banks should clearly have a better appeal process for such instances
In the circumstances, I am mildly surprised that when I recently transferred a sum in excess of $10,000 to someone else I experienced no friction at all from CBA. But I did put in the note field "school fees" so that was probably calming. Expensive private school fees are well-known
An outspoken bank critic claims Westpac froze his accounts when he tried to withdraw $2,000 and would not allow the transaction until he told them what the money was for.
Author Crispin Rovere said it was only by showing the branch manager the publicity his previous run-in with Westpac generated that he was allowed access to his money.
'She then visibly panicked,' Mr Rovere told Daily Mail Australia.
However, he said he still had to wait 45 minutes before the manager came out and said the accounts were unfrozen.
'There is no conceivable explanation for this continued trespass other than seeking punish me for using cash,' Mr Rovere said.
A little more than a year ago Westpac froze his accounts when he tried to make a substantial cash deposit that was considerably less than the $10,000 threshold banks must report to the federal government.
Mr Rovere said Westpac's 'anti-fraud team' were the stumbling block on both occasions and acted dismissively when he challenged them on their right to stop him using his funds the way he wanted.
'The teller was in communication with the Westpac fraud team to get an explanation,' Mr Rovere said about the more recent funds denial.
'The fraud team demanded to know what the money was for.
'When I said it wasn't any of their business the fraud team simply replied "if you are not willing to disclose what you want the money for we will not unfreeze you accounts. Thank you for contacting us, goodbye".'
It was then that Mr Rovere had to call in the manager.
'I have since submitted another internal complaint regarding this incident but have yet to receive Westpac's reply,' Mr Rovere said.
'Last time Westpac said that it was because the deposit was made from a state other than where it was opened. 'However, this time the freezing occurred when I was physically standing in a branch in the same state as the account was opened.'
Mr Rovere accused the bank of not being truthful when it issued him a statement about the block which read 'we've detected unusual online activity on your account'.
'Westpac are straight liars,' he said. 'There was no "online activity" - I was literally standing in the branch in-person.'
Mr Rovere is promoting a petition to federal Parliament that declares 'access to banking is a human right'.
'Banks must not be allowed to deny financial services to customers unless explicitly required by law,' the petition states.
Westpac said that 'due to confidentiality obligations we are unable to comment on individual customer matters'.
'In response to the high number of scams and fraud cases, we apply extra care to ensure the safety and security of customers,' a spokesperson said.
'This might include temporarily blocking an account when unusual activity is observed so relevant checks can be carried out.'
Last week TV personality Prue MacSween told Daily Mail Australia she had a similar experience where her 100-year-old mother was denied a substantial withdrawal unless she could answer questions on what she would be doing with the money.
'It's none of their God-damn business what she wants to do with it!' MacSween said.
'It's the Spanish Inquisition if you want to go in and take out a few grand you need a letter from your blasted mother telling you why you should be allowed to have the money.
'It's just disgusting. It's your money and they are using it to make these huge profits and you have to justify why you are spending your money.
'I am offended we are all treated like we are money launderers for the simple act of wanting to take out money out.'
As further evidence of the control banks are asserting over their customers money last week Daily Mail Australia reported the Commonwealth Bank will limit customers from transferring more than $10,000 to crypto exchanges and associated websites.
A CBA spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the move is to protect customers from scam risks by reducing the amount of money lost by customers.
The spokesperson said the bank was trying to find a balance between keeping customers safe and minimising inconvenience.
Other banks have used the same justification to impose similar blocks on certain sites, although without blanket transfer limits, and this has enraged Australia's crypto community.
Digital currency enthusiasts accused the banks of 'running scared' from a competitor that threatens to muscle in on the traditional financial industry.
'How does this actually help stop crypto scams? Blanket rules don't help anyone. Disgraceful,' crypto trader Ben Simpson posted online.
Daily Mail Australia also reported in June that the Commonwealth Bank reserves the right to stop transactions 'that in our opinion' are 'offensive, harassing or threatening to any person' or 'promotes or encourages physical or mental harm of any person'.
A bank spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the terms were to prevent 'to address the issue of financial abuse in the context of domestic and family violence'.
*******************************************************
‘M’ is for Marxism: schools get an ‘F’ for fail
Senator Ralph Babet
Australian schools are failing our children. Instead of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, schools have become centres for brainwashing. From kindergarten up, children are not being educated they are being indoctrinated with the toxic lies of identity politics, Critical Race Theory, and climate alarmism.
This is due to the long march of cultural Marxists through our institutions. Unable to bring about a communist revolution in the West, cultural Marxists have slowly gained control of our universities including the teaching faculties. They have written textbooks, converted teachers, and now they are reaping the fruits of their labour with educators throughout Australia brainwashing their students.
But it’s not just our schools that are suffering. University-educated students with their neo-Marxist values make their way into the media, into the professions, and the human resource departments of corporations. Everywhere you look our institutions – the ABC, the big sporting organisations, big businesses, libraries, museums, and art galleries – are all marching to the beat of the same drum.
This is a disaster for our society. Our schools are no longer places where young Australians acquire the skills to become productive members of society and critical thinkers, they are taught to feel guilty and to be ashamed of our country.
Students are taught that Australia is a racist, sexist, white supremacist nation. They do not learn about the great achievements of Western Civilisation. Instead, they are taught that the economic, social, and environmental practices of the West are destroying life on Earth.
It’s no wonder that young Australians are so pessimistic about the future after 13 years of relentless negativity in schools.
Some are suffering from a brand new psychological disorder called ‘eco-anxiety’.
Some don’t want to have children because they believe that the world is such a terrible place.
Some are driven to drop out and start taking drugs.
Some succumb to deaths of despair.
A call is made to the Kids Helpline every 80 seconds in Australia, equating to a devastating 330,000 cries for help from children around the country every year.
Yet despite the obvious demand, most of these calls are not answered due to a lack of funding.
It’s a dire situation, according to mental health experts. Of the 328,424 young people who tried to contact the Kids Helpline in 2022, only 145,000 were connected to a counsellor. That’s just two calls connected out of every five that are received.
This is truly a tragedy. We have to stop the barrage of lies and negativity that are poisoning young people’s minds. More than one hundred thousand people choose to migrate to Australia every year because it is a beacon of freedom, democracy, and economic opportunity in a world where far too many people face poverty and oppression.
Is it any wonder that homeschooling is booming in Australia? It’s not just because of Covid. School lockdowns were an eye-opener for a lot of parents.
Supervising their children at home, parents became aware of some of the toxic or time-wasting content in the school curriculum.
As a result, registrations for home education took off in 2020.
There was a 20 per cent increase in NSW and Victoria and a 26 per cent increase in Queensland compared with the previous year.
But the trend has been on the rise in every state and territory over the last decade.
In 2011, just over 9,000 children were being educated at home. Ten years later, in 2021 there were 26,000 children registered for home education.
Young Australians need an education system that fills them with pride in this country and gives them the skills to thrive in modern Australia. It’s time that people with conservative family values demanded better in all walks of life, starting with our schools.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/m-is-for-marxism-schools-get-an-f-for-fail/
**************************************************Why we should be worried about the thought police
ROBERT GOTTLIEBSEN
Prepare yourself for the danger of an Australian 1984-style ‘thought police’ masquerading as ‘truth police’. Sadly, we need a truth disclosing force because we have entered an era where public servants, politicians and those in the private sector are embracing the habit of making misleading or untrue statements.
In recent times, misleading information has emerged via the Uluru statement summary which we discover is very different from the actual statement; renewable energy cost concealment, PwC, and so on. Accordingly, the proposed outlawing of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on social media looks reasonable.
But we already have a form of so-called ‘fact checking’ operating on Facebook and other parts of social media, and its performance is sending out alert signals that apply to the proposed legislation.
I emphasise that I have not conducted detailed research into the outcomes of the current ‘fact checking’ exercise, but an incident hit my desk where I was familiar with the actual facts and the so-called ‘fact checking’ looked dangerously like an exercise in political correctness.
If fact checking becomes opinion vetting then we will experience a very serious curb on public opinion via social media as ‘fact checking’ becomes a form of ‘thought police’ designed to stifle views that the government does not like or that are ‘politically incorrect’.
For example, on social media, both the ‘yes’ and the ‘no’ campaigns will be very active and presenting two entirely different set of facts.
A fully operational ‘thought police’ on social media might block opinions based on the full Uluru statement or even blocking the full statement itself, given it has been so damaging to the government supported ‘yes’ case.
My long-term readers will remember the coverage of the case brought against WorkSafe Victoria by Independent Contractors of Australia, which had asked WorkSafe to investigate 27 individuals and entities – including Victoria’s premier, former ministers, the chief health officer and the health department – for alleged breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety that allegedly led to the deaths of 801 people.
The case came before the Supreme Court and the hearings lasted almost the entire 2022.
In December, the Victorian court rejected the cases against the defendants, partly on the basis that early in the hearings, a particular document was lodged later than the court claimed it should have been. The decision was handed down just after the state election returned the Andrews government.
The declaration on timing was legally very controversial because it meant that issues raised by the case were not addressed, and had the opinion been reached early in the case, expensive legal bills would have been avoided.
The judge declared that if Independent Contractors of Australia “is not granted an extension of time, the individuals … will be freed from the not insignificant stress of potentially being subjected to prosecution for serious criminal offences which may carry lengthy terms of imprisonment”.
He added that the 20 individuals “may suffer considerable prejudice” if Independent Contractors of Australia are granted an extension of time.
Australia has WorkSafe laws that carry lengthy jail terms if the courts find there has been a breach of the act.
Although stress was not the reason why the case failed, the fact that a judge declared that in a WorkSafe case the stress of the people being sued was an issue, opens a whole new set of legal issues that may be used to block cases that carry large penalties and stress for those on trial.
On Facebook, a long debate was posted that canvassed the multitude of issues being debated. It was about opinions on the issues raised by judgement. The so-called fact-checkers shifted the opinion entry to the fact-checking section of Facebook, and then superimposed an introduction before the link.
Given this was a discussion about legal opinions, for it to be declared the subject of a fact check on political issues sets a dangerous precedent. Then to make matters worse, the so called ‘factual’ introduction contained statements that were factually incorrect, but were politically correct.
And what is of further concern is that AAP Factcheck that undertook the manoeuvre is a reputable organisation. Australian Associated Press aims to be an independent, nonpartisan Australian not-for-profit organisation.
Again it is unfair to reach conclusions on one example, but non-profit organisations need income to pay salaries and while this may simply be a mistake of judgement, it is a warning that when a fact checking organisation becomes involved in opinions, a 1984-style ‘thought police’ can emerge.
****************************************************
Stuck in a (Covid) time warp: End of the pandemic? Or just Intermission?
Supposedly, the pandemic is over. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it ended on 5 May. Yet the persecution of the unvaccinated continues.
Dazelle Peters, only 16 years old, has been denied a lung transplant. She suffers from an auto-immune condition and such people were excluded from the Covid vaccine trials so there is no data to support her immunisation. Indeed, at least two vaccine deaths in Australia occurred in healthy people with auto-immune conditions that were fatally exacerbated – Natalie Boyce who had antiphospholipid syndrome died after a Moderna vaccine and Roberto Garin who had cardiac sarcoidosis died after a Pfizer vaccine.
The hospital’s policy is not to perform transplants on unvaccinated people and Dazelle says she was told that if she didn’t get the jabs and caught the virus she would be a ‘major threat to everyone (in the hospital) who has done the right thing’.
Yet a report from the University of Freiburg by Reeg et al. shows ‘an impaired T cell response in solid organ transfers (SOT) following Sars-CoV-2 vaccination, with a potentially less robust development, compared to natural infection.’
Vicky Derderian, a slim 46-year-old mother of two, is trying to raise the money to get a heart transplant in India because she is being refused one in Australia. Vicky has been exempted by Australia’s Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation because she already has heart scarring from myocarditis but that’s not good enough for the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne which is denying her a transplant.
Never mind that a peer-reviewed Swiss study published on 20 July shows that 1-in-35 people who received the Moderna Covid booster had detectable heart injuries and women were almost five times as likely to be injured. The group tested was a healthy cohort with few preexisting heart problems and an average age of 37. How much worse would it be for Vicky?
Another study released this month by Marchand et al. showed that ‘Covid-19 vaccination may be associated with a small increase in cardiac-related mortality’. A study that came out in June from the prestigious US Cleveland Clinic shows that, ‘The risk of Covid-19 was lower in the “not up-to-date” group as compared to the “up-to-date” group.’ Put the two together and they show that a Covid jab makes you more likely to get Covid and more likely to die of heart trouble.
Unvaccinated people are encouraged to donate organs to others even though they are denied transplants. The wife of Garnet Harper, a 35-year-old Canadian man who died last month after he was denied a kidney transplant because he was unvaccinated was asked to donate his organs to a vaccinated person. She says the woman who made the request had no idea her husband was dying because he had been refused a transplant. Canadians opposed to persecuting the unvaccinated are calling on all Canadians to refuse to donate organs until the government ends its fatal discrimination.
But that’s not the end of the punishment in Australia. In South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland, healthcare workers are still not allowed to work unless they get vaccinated. (They are not the only ones.) In NSW, a case against vaccine mandates was lost in 2021, in Queensland, a case was heard in 2022 but no ruling has been delivered in more than 12 months. In South Australia, healthcare workers took their case to the employment tribunal in late June.
That was after the secretary of the federal Department of Health, Professor Brendan Murphy said in a parliamentary committee on 1 June, that in his view, as a clinician rather than as a public servant, Covid vaccine mandates were no longer justified.
But South Australia’s Chief Health Officer Nicola Spurrier – famous for claiming you could catch Covid from a football or a pizza box – is not for turning. Her indifference to evidence is breathtaking. The South Australian health department was forced to reveal in response to a freedom of information request from Liberal Senator Alex Antic that cardiac presentations in 18 to 44-year-old people in South Australia which remained steady at 1,100 per month from January 2018 to June 2021, drastically spiked from July 2021 to November 2021 when vaccines were rolled out to that age group, peaking at 2,172 presentations, with another spike in February when boosters were mandated. She doesn’t care. The laid-off workers, the heroes who faced Covid in 2020, are zero today.
Instead, the states that still ban unvaccinated staff are in a bidding war to attract vaccinated staff from interstate and abroad. They face dramatic shortfalls due to the thousands who have been laid off, while vaccinated workers and the general public have increased illnesses. In 2023, excess mortality is still running at 12 per cent above the baseline average.
Meanwhile, almost a thousand people have joined a class action suing the head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and Professor Murphy for negligence or misfeasance in approving the vaccines which resulted in personal injury or the death of a loved one. The case which is being funded through donations is still open to be joined and will be heard next year.
The TGA’s own database shows that there have been 996 deaths reported which it is suspected were caused by the vaccine and 139,052 reports of injury. That’s one-third of all deaths reported to the TGA since the vaccines were rolled out and three-quarters of all injuries.
Meanwhile, despite promising a royal commission into the pandemic before coming to office, Labor refused to support a motion in the Senate this week by Senator Ralph Babet of the United Australia Party, to get one underway. The Liberals helped Labor out by offering pairs so that the motion was narrowly defeated. The guilty protecting each other?
Why do state and federal governments refuse to acknowledge what even Bill Gates admitted in January, that Covid jabs are ‘not infection-blocking, they’re not broad, so when new variants come up you lose protection, and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter who are old people’. Is it because they have entered into a partnership with Moderna giving them a massive conflict of interest? Is it because the WHO is already predicting with its spooky clairvoyance that the next pandemic bonanza is on the way? Perhaps the pandemic isn’t over, perhaps this is just intermission.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/stuck-in-a-covid-time-warp
************************************16 August, 2023
What if there’s a simple way to close the gap?
It is one of the ironies of life that those who need high quality education the least are also the ones most likely to get it. Private schools undoubtedly help kids to learn and develop more effectively than do government schools. Yet the kids in private schools usually come from wealthy homes where talent is passed on both genetically and via a more learning-oriented environment So it is a rather obvious idea to turn that on its head and give a quality education for the bottom rather than the top end of the social scale. And the example below would seem to have reaped rich rewards from that approach. It is likely however that the kids selected to benefit from the program were a carefully selected bunch and you can always get better results from selective admissions. The success of the strategy might in other words be limited to a small subset of poor students who were capable of using expanded opportunities. Poor students can in some cases be quite bright. I was one myself
Andrew Penfold’s ears pricked up last week when he heard federal Education Minister Jason Clare observing young Indigenous men are more likely to go to jail than university.
Clare said university costs taxpayers about $11,000 per year on average, per student. Jail costs taxpayers $148,000 per prisoner, per year. For juvenile justice, it‘s $1 million a year, per kid.
Penfold got out his calculator.
To send an Indigenous child to one of the nation’s most prestigious schools costs his Australian Indigenous Education Foundation approximately $150,000.
That’s for six years – the entirety of high school.
And the 1200 students who’ve won an AIEF scholarship over the organisation’s 15-year history have an average 90 per cent school completion rate. This year it’s 93 per cent, with 50 bright young things to be celebrated at a graduation celebration on Monday night.
“Every single kid who goes to school, completes Year 12 and goes on to do something productive with their life, they then become an incredible role model in their family. And each time you change your family one by one, you change your whole community. The ripple effect of that is you actually are changing the country,” Penfold says.
That brings Penfold – who has a gift for making big things seem simple – to some intimidating numbers.
The Closing The Gap targets for education are that by 2031, 96 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people should have completed Year 12, and 70 per cent should have a tertiary qualification.
“We know from evidence that where Indigenous people are well-educated, including university and 12 completion, there really is no gap,” says Penfold, who with his wife Michelle quit a finance career in the late 2000s to devote himself to Indigenous education.
But, he says, “there needs to be an upstream supply”.
“If you don‘t have more kids completing year 12, you’re not going to be having the kids to go to university. Some years ago I saw some data that said to achieve the Year 12 Closing The Gap target only involves educating to Year 12 an additional 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids.
“So when you move away from talking in percentages and start talking about the number of students, it actually feels quite achievable. Of course we (AIEF) can’t do 10,000 on our own. But collectively there’s enough organisations out there that have got the track record to demonstrate that if there was further investment given, they would be able to close that gap.
“And literally the only thing holding that back is the funding.”
Indigenous graduates are now working as police officers, teachers, lawyers, doctors and academics.
And, like Brianna Dennis, community leaders. Now 36, Dennis left Walgett, in NSW’s central west, in 1999 for St Scholastica’s in Sydney‘s Glebe.
“I was really, really excited, actually, for this new opportunity. I was only 11 years old.
“If I’d stayed back home – our family really struggled. I was lucky enough to grow up in a loving home. But the exposure from the educational opportunities presented to me have been critical.”
Dennis went to university and travelled the world after school – and was the first in her family to buy a home. She now lives in Dubbo as the district manager for MacKillop Family Service.
Dennis takes immense pride in seeing opportunity light up her girls Orani, eight and Nhalara, three.
“Both my daughters participate in gymnastics, something I always wanted to do as a child but didn’t have the opportunity locally, plus my family wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I am glad my children get to experience what I never could.”
Dennis knows sometimes parents are reluctant to let children leave home, for fear they may never return, but firmly believes connection to country cannot be extinguished.
“These educational opportunities are not something for communities to fear.
“Some kids will go away and then come back, and some will stay home and take other opportunities. And both are now enriching community life – in their own ways.”
Kodie Mason is one AIEF grad who has come home.
After St Vincent’s College in Sydney’s Potts Point, and a degree at UNSW, Mason is back in the vibrant Dharawal community around La Perouse, on Botany Bay’s northern edge.
She has started her own business, Malima, teaching traditional weaving techniques passed down in her family’s direct descent from the Dharawal people who first came into contact with the Endeavour‘s crew.
Through her community work, Mason was invited to write the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for her distant great-grandmother Biyarung ‘Biddy’ Giles, an expert fisherwoman and hunter who also founded her own business.
“She had a couple of boats, she was running fishing and hunting tours around Botany Bay, having her own business at a time when Aboriginal people were thought incapable.
“So looking at my life – I’ve got my own business, practising my culture, and sharing my knowledge.”
Between these two lives, two centuries apart, came the NSW Aborigines Protection Act, which allowed wholesale child removal and the dislocation of communities from traditional lands.
“We still feel those impacts today,” Mason says. “So to be able to go out and get a great education, and finish high school, go to university; I just feel so privileged.”
Mason is excited about the possibility of an Indigenous voice to parliament, and recently got to meet Anthony Albanese at the Garma festival in Arnhem Land.
“Our grandparents and great-grandparents; they’ve all been fighting to have a say in what happens and how they’re treated. I definitely think it will make a huge impact in Aboriginal communities across Australia, and we’ll start to see more positive outcomes for our people.”
If Andrew Penfold is the father of AIEF, Paul Hough is its godfather. The Marist brother was strongly influenced by Shirley ‘Mum Shirl’ Smith, the famous Redfern matriarch and prisoner advocate who raised scores of children in her own home, and reconciliation activist and priest Ted Kennedy.
In the 1970s Kennedy asked Hough to come and work with him in Redfern. “I remember one night Father Ted looked across the table at me and said: ‘Why don’t you give all that (teaching) stuff away and come and work with us?’ “And I said ‘Ted, I appreciate your confidence but as Marists, we do it through education.”
That remark rang through Hough’s career for the next five decades as he pioneered Indigenous education programs from St Augustine’s in Cairns to St Gregory’s in Campbelltown.
He was leading St Joseph’s in Sydney’s Hunters Hill in the 2000s when Andrew Penfold, a Joey’s old boy, approached him with the wild idea to give up his job and volunteer at St Joseph’s in a bid to grow Indigenous enrolment.
“He came up with the idea of setting up a fund which would be $8 million,” Hough says. “We thought that was probably the last we’d see of him for a while. Anyway, he came back in about 15 months’ time and said: ‘Guess what? I’ve got it.’ He went straight to the big end of town. “He’s got the business brain, and he’s got the head that knows how to work it.”
Penfold is confident AIEF, which presently takes 350 students per annum, could grow to take 1000 a year on its present model of seeking Government funding which is matched dollar-for-dollar by fundraising.
Penfold is unashamedly “interested in scale”. “It’s not because we are trying to be famous,“ Penfold says. The more students we have, the more impact we make on changing the country.“
*************************************************
Environment can’t afford cost to save the planet
JUDITH SLOAN
It is slowly dawning on more people that destroying the environment to save the environment doesn’t really make any sense. The people living in rural and regional Australia have known this for some time, but more city folk are waking up to the fact that the process of decarbonisation imposes some hefty costs that are not evenly distributed.
Absent any zealous devotion to net zero by 2050, and recognising that the world’s top emitters are not on board – think here particularly China, but there are others – it’s hard to warm to the vision of Alan Finkel, former chief scientist. “Think forests of wind farms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky. Think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert. What we have now has to be scaled up by a factor of 20.”
While we might forgive him for his flowery prose – he is a scientist, after all – the harsh reality is that many of us are not keen to see our landscapes plundered and ruined by the intrusion of monstrous turbines measuring up to 250 metres in height (nearly three times the height of the Statue of Liberty) and fields of unattractive solar panels generating unwanted ambient heat for the surrounding district.
Would the residents of the seats of Kooyong, Warringah or Wentworth be happy to have their parks, empty land and adjoining water ways – perhaps some big backyards? – handed over to mainly overseas-owned renewable energy developers to construct intrusive and sometimes noisy installations in the quest of decarbonisation?
We all know the answer to that question. But the members for these seats (and others) are more than happy to impose the external costs on their country cousins and create unfortunate divisions within previously harmonious rural communities.
It is worth going through some facts here because facts are often missing in the emotional debate about saving the planet. The first thing to note is the large amount of land needed to accommodate renewable energy relative to high-energy-density fossil fuels and nuclear energy. For every megawatt hour produced, wind needs seven times more land than coal-fired plants and 10 times more than gas-fired plants, for example.
The second is the low-capacity efficiency of both wind and solar. The average output of wind installations is just over one-third of the nameplate capacities; it’s one-quarter for solar. This is an important point because the proponents of new renewable energy projects often quote the nameplate capacities and then spuriously claim they will power a given number of thousands of homes while ignoring the necessary and costly in-fill and back-up sources of electricity generation.
Another important point is the life cycles of renewable energy installations and how these compare with coal/gas plants and nuclear. The lifespan of onshore turbines ranges from 15 to 25 years; it’s shorter for offshore ones. Solar panels don’t generally last more than 20 years and their efficiency falls every year. There is virtually no scope to recycle either turbines or solar panels, which raises the tricky issue of their ultimate disposal. Coal, gas and nuclear plants can last five decades or longer.
One feature of the renewable energy landscape Finkel missed in his florid description is the kilometre upon kilometre of new transmission lines required to hook up wind and solar installations to the grid. Think here huge steel pylons up to 100 metres in height requiring easements of up to 50 metres on each side.
The point here is that no one would regard these unsightly new transmission lines weaving their way through agricultural land, national parks and regional communities as enhancing the environment. They may also constitute an extra fire risk. For those affected, it is a perfectly rational response to oppose their construction, to seek alternative paths or to advocate for underground transmission.
We know the good burghers of Kooyong, Warringah and Wentworth would do so. Attempting to bribe those affected with substantial annual annuities – they are currently more than $200,000 per kilometre – runs the risk of dividing communities as those who miss out on any compensation can still be adversely impacted.
The potential environmental damage caused by renewable energy projects has been highlighted by number of recent cases. A proposed wind farm north of Point Fairy in western Victoria has been approved subject to strict restrictions, including reducing the number of turbines from 59 to 18. This is because of the sensitive nature of the land for nesting brolgas and bent-wing bats. Construction will also be banned from July through to November. In all likelihood, this project will now not proceed.
A wind project on Robbins Island off the northwest coast of Tasmania has been approved to operate for only seven months of the year because of the threat to the orange-bellied parrots that live on the island. Again, this project is unlikely to go ahead.
Much controversy surrounds the Chalumbin wind farm development in far north Queensland where large tracts of land – up to 1200 hectares – will be cleared adjacent to a World Heritage-listed rainforest, west of Cairns. An earlier small-scale wind farm has resulted in a number of disused turbines simply rusting on the land. It’s hard to square this development with genuine concern for the environment, particularly as there are serious doubts about the windiness of the area.
Just in case you think offshore turbines are the solution to this dilemma, the reality is very different. Turbines as far out as 10 to 15 kilometres from the coast can still be seen from land. Again, the rational response from those who live nearby, including retired sea-changers, is to oppose these developments. Moreover, there is mounting evidence these turbines, which require enormous amounts of concrete to fix them in place, can interfere with marine life, including migrating whales.
The opposition to offshore wind farms may prove to be irrelevant as the economics of these projects massively deteriorate. The large Swedish renewable energy firm, Vattenfall, has recently stopped two major projects – one in the UK – citing higher inflation and capital costs. The huge losses incurred by the wind division of Siemen Energy are also noteworthy. The only way offshore projects will proceed in Australia is if the operators are given even more subsidies than are currently on the table, which will translate into even higher consumer prices.
It is now crunch time for Energy Minister Chris Bowen and a number of state governments. It’s clear the dream of more renewable energy, lower emissions and lower electricity prices is unattainable, if it ever was. The ditching of the Marinus Link between Tasmania and Victoria has finally put paid to the vision of the Apple Isle being the battery of the nation; indeed, it is now running short of power itself.
Plan B can’t come quickly enough, including the nuclear option – think of the environment.
**********************************************************
Tribal Aboriginal woman reveals why she hates Australia's Welcome to Country
A tribal Aboriginal woman has revealed why she hates Australia's 'Welcome to Country' acknowledgement being read out before public events.
Aunty Narelle McRobbie spoke about her view in a video question on ABC's Q+A program on Monday night, broadcast from the Garma Festival in the Northern Territory's Arnhem Land.
'I am a tribal Aboriginal woman and I hate the Welcome to Country,' she said.
'As a tribal person, why? Welcome every other b*****d on country when I, as an Aboriginal person have never felt welcomed on my ground. 'On my own dirt, never been felt welcomed.'
'Welcome everyone in to continue to take, take, take, take. What do you reckon?' she asked.
Indigenous journalist and writer, Ben Abbatangelo, who was one of the panelists on the show, noted that the acknowledgement has been embraced in Parliament.
'We see welcome to countries in Canberra for policymakers then to go and institute rations cards, or to finance fossil fuel companies against the wishes of Indigenous peoples,' he said.
He used an example of the Santos gas project, which has seen opposition from the Larrakia and Tiwi traditional owners in the Northern Territory.
'I love the way that she's reframed it and I think it causes paucity in the thinking. Maybe it's time we stopped being so welcoming,' he added.
Voice architect and Indigenous Studies professor, Marcia Langton, who was another panellist, referred to the discrimination Aboriginal people face.
'I think many Aboriginal people around the country who do not have their land rights and face the kind of racism that our interlocutor would face in North Queensland...I imagine she feel she can't welcome people to her country until she has formal rights in her own country,' she said.
Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, said there was a 'much bigger message' in Aunty Narelle's question.
'If First Nations people do not wish to welcome, they have a choice to say no when invited or asked to do so,' she said.
Mr Abbatangelo agreed with the point that Indigenous people did not need to welcome if they did not wish to do so.
'I mean how undignifying is that, to think that you are obliged to provide safe passage, to welcome people, when you don't even feel safe or sound on your own soils, when you are trampled on?' he added.
A Welcome to Country can only be conducted by traditional owners or custodians of the land on which an event is taking place. In circumstances where a traditional owner is unavailable, an Acknowledgement of Country can instead be performed.
According to Reconciliation Australia, an Acknowledgement of Country 'should be delivered at significant/large internal meetings or meetings with external participants'.
It is intended to highlight the significance of the area for First Nations people.
There has been a significant uptick in Welcome to Country practices over the past decade, everywhere from the workplace and seminars to national sporting events
***************************************************
Police careers destroyed by ACT DPP Shane Drumgold’s false claims
Many senior and junior police involved in the investigation of Brittany Higgins’s rape claims have lost their jobs or gone on long-term sick leave and will never return to policing in the wake of baseless accusations against them by ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold.
Thirteen Australian Federal Police officers involved in the investigation of the claims, including Detective Superintendent Scott Moller, have told The Australian of catastrophic damage to their lives and careers from the inquiry he demanded.
“It must not be understated exactly what harm these baseless allegations have caused to individual police officers,” said lawyer Calvin Gnech, on behalf of his clients. “Careers have been lost and reputations severely damaged, all of which was entirely unnecessary.”
The Sofronoff inquiry found that although mistakes were made by police, none had engaged in misconduct and investigators “performed their duties in absolute good faith, with great determination although faced with obstacles, and put together a sound case”.
The Australian understands there may be claims for compensation made by police arising from the psychological impact on them from the investigation and inquiry.
Mr Gnech said the 13 officers he represented, who include Detective Inspector Marcus Boorman and Commander Michael Chew, had never claimed to be perfect “but they certainly claimed to have conducted a comprehensive investigation without any element of corruption or conspiracy. Senior and junior police officers have accessed long-term sick leave directly because of this matter.”
Mr Gnech added: “Highly experienced career police officers involved in this matter are likely never going to return to policing directly because of this matter and there are also young aspiring officers who have now transferred out of sex crimes never to return.
“There has been further unmeasurable personal and professional detriment caused which will never be undone and which, again, was all entirely unnecessary and needless.”
The ACT Bar Association said on Tuesday that Mr Drumgold’s certificate to practise law in the territory was valid only while he was working as DPP and would expire when he left office on September 1.
“The Bar Council notes with grave concern the findings of misconduct in the (Sofronoff) report regarding the person with primary carriage of the prosecution of Mr (Bruce) Lehrmann, Mr Shane Drumgold SC, the ACT Director of Public Prosecutions,” ACT Bar Council president Marcus Hassall said. “Those findings are patently serious and will receive careful consideration by the ACT Bar Council in the context of its role as the professional regulator of the ACT Bar.” The council said any application by Mr Drumgold for a new or unrestricted practising certificate would need the bar council’s approval.
Giving evidence to the Sofronoff inquiry, Superintendent Moller said many detectives went on stress leave because they were under so much pressure to progress the case, despite their having a professional belief that there was not enough evidence to charge Mr Lehrmann over the alleged rape of Ms Higgins.
Mr Lehrmann’s defence lawyer told the inquiry Inspector Boorman had said he would quit if the former Liberal staffer was found guilty and he appeared to be experiencing a “moral trauma” at the time.
Inspector Boorman seemed “anxious and agitated” when they arranged to meet, barrister Steven Whybrow said.
He was “quite distressed” about the prosecution, and thought Mr Lehrmann was innocent, Mr Whybrow said.
It is understood Inspector Boorman’s mental health has deteriorated to the point where he is unlikely ever to return to policing and those mental health issues explain why he did not give evidence in person at the inquiry.
The inquiry was sparked by a letter Mr Drumgold wrote to ACT police chief Neil Gaughan alleging “clear investigator interference in the criminal justice process” in the Lehrmann case.
He said Superintendent Moller had tried to persuade him that Mr Lehrmann should not be charged and that the policeman had prepared a document that “contained blatant misrepresentations of evidence”.
Giving evidence at the inquiry, Superintendent Moller rejected the claims, revealing at one point that he was himself a sexual assault survivor.
“I lived with that for 45 years, and that has driven my desire to work with police and to work with victims.”
He said he found it offensive that Mr Drumgold had alleged police held “rape myths” and outdated stereotypes about victim behaviour that made them reluctant to charge suspects “because I’ve lived with that, and it’s difficult”.
“The team that work on sexual assault investigations are a dedicated, professional group of investigators,” he said.
Mr Drumgold denigrated the police in court during the Lehrmann trial, remarking that the quality of the police interview with Ms Higgins “is determined by the skillsets of those police officers asking the questions … which in this case was not high.”
The Sofronoff inquiry heard that during a break in the trial, Mr Drumgold had called the investigating police “boofheads”.
Mr Drumgold claimed that Superintendent Moller, Inspector Boorman and a number of other current and former SACAT members had been attending key parts of the trial, and “I have noted they have also been regularly conferencing with the defence team during the breaks”.
Mr Sofronoff found that Mr Drumgold “advanced nothing resembling evidence to support the serious allegations of impropriety that he levelled against the police”.
“This inquiry has thoroughly examined the allegations in Mr Drumgold’s letter. Each allegation has been exposed to be baseless. Late in giving his oral evidence, Mr Drumgold finally resiled from his scandalous allegations.
“The frankly stated opinions of police to the DPP about the weakness of the prosecution case were incapable of supporting a conclusion that they had acted in breach of their duty,” Mr Sofronoff said.
“Their association with defence during the trial was capable of demonstrating nothing more than their strong antipathy towards the DPP, something that was not surprising given that the feeling was mutual. Mr Drumgold did not seem to appreciate that mutual trust is a two-way street.
“It was he who, at the first opportunity, formed the baseless opinion that the investigators were improperly trying to thwart a prosecution.
“The allegation of political interference was particularly wicked because it was an allegation that had a tendency to lessen community confidence in the system of administration of justice and was made without the slightest evidence to support it.”
************************************
15 August, 2023
Community upheaval as great Australian home ownership dream dies
Gottliebson rightly notes below that in Australia from here-on, it is going to be impossible from many young people to leave home. I and my contemporaries back in the '60s left home at age 16. Why? Because we could. Affordable rental accommodation was available -- even if only in a boarding house. That liberty is gone. The ever-growing power of ham-fisted governments has destroyed housing availability
For young people who do not have accommodating parents or available parents of any sort the only alternative is going to be shared accommodation, and that can be a difficult experience. So the aristocracy of the future is going to be those who have wise parents. If your parents worked and saved during their lifetime and were then able to buy and pay off a comfortable home, you too will be able to live in comfort and may inherit that home when they die.
But there will be many outside that aristocracy. There are always many people who become parents while poor who remain poor. They will have no advantage to offer their children. And even if you are lucky enough to get into social housing, your problems may not be over. Both the the quality of the housing and the quality of your neigbours will often be a problem. Welfare housing can be hell: Drugs, crime, violence, noise etc
So privilege in society will be more and more a function of your housing. If you have inherited comfortable and secure housing, you will be sitting pretty. If not you will face perennial difficulties. You may in some cases be capable enough to earn a high income and thus be able to break out of your inherited trap by buying a house of your own but that will be rare
The national concentration on issues like interest rates, inflation and the referendum is obscuring the fact that the Australian community of 2024 will be different to anything we have seen in the post WWII era.
Bankers tell me that in most cases couples on average incomes cannot obtain the finance to buy a capital city dwelling unless it is rundown or very small.
Renters aged in their late 40s find the finance door has been shut and they can no longer buy the most valuable asset they can have for retirement – a dwelling.
Accordingly, they must live with their family, rent and later get themselves into an aged care facility. The social ramifications of these fundamental changes are only just emerging.
Another fundamental change is also taking place. The affluent people in the community have cut back their spending partly because they fear a significant downturn and partly as almost a social contribution to help the Reserve Bank. Perhaps they know their children/grandchildren will need help.
In part the politicians of both major parties plus the regulator APRA have been key contributors to this state of affairs and so altering the environment will require them to change their policies.
In the case of home loans the “risk buffer” APRA requires banks to calculate over and above the interest rate being charged means that the interest rate calculations for loan eligibility are now around 10 per cent.
That means few people on average incomes can pass the test.
Meanwhile, partly as a result, we are set to experience a build for rent boom in our major cities, although in Sydney the bureaucracy mess which delays approvals and contributes to higher building costs will need to be first dismantled.
And to all that we can add higher power prices because of the renewables cost miscalculations.
In recent weeks I have been writing about the components of this social change on an individual event basis, but it is now time to stand back and look at what is happening overall.
We went through a period of unlimited bank credit to buy dwellings and a great many people purchased dwellings on loans that they now are having difficulty servicing.
After the banking royal commission and when rates were low, APRA set interest rate rules for home lending that are now making it impossible for ordinary Australians with good jobs to buy dwellings.
In normal times that would cause the dwellings to fall in price to bring those people back into the market. But a series of events including the crashes of building companies and difficulties in getting approvals has cut back supply and at the same time there has been a huge rise in migration.
Accordingly, dwelling prices have not fallen and indeed in recent times the prices have risen slightly. The banks want to lend more for housing but are not able to do so.
Unless the rules are changed bank profits are going to be tightened because their past great driver of profitability – home loans – particularly in Sydney – will be a low growth earner. Non bank lenders with higher funding costs will fill some of the gap.
But we will become much more of rental a society.
Accordingly, first overseas institutions and later our local institutions will build large complexes on a ‘build for rent’ basis so creating a very different Australian society to anything we have seen post war.
The process of course may be delayed if politicians make more mistakes by trying to artificially push down rents rather than foster greater supply. .
One of the great drivers of the Australian nation has been the belief that if a couple had reasonable jobs, they would be able to buy a house or an apartment. In turn that has been a major force in the aspirations of Australians. I fear that if it is removed then Australia will be a far less aspirational nation and that will reduce the productivity in smaller enterprises, large companies and of course the public service. That’s an assumption that will be legitimately debated.
Leaving that aside, clearly, we need more rental stock, and we will also need to make a decision as to whether we want to reserve home ownership to the affluent. And if that happens then don’t be surprised by further rises in the sort of community upheavals we are now starting to see particularly among males. (of course, the reason for those upheavals extends beyond housing issues).
But the group of people that I really feel sorry for are individuals and they can be couples but are often single females who suddenly discover that banks are not allowed to lend to them because they are too old to take out a 30-year loan.
And that leads us to a pillar that may be required to change if we want to restore a situation where people with reasonable jobs can buy a house. We established our superannuation movement in an era where people could buy dwellings. In my view the superannuation movement must now be adjusted to help members buy dwellings because superannuation has always been a secondary aid in retirement. The first essential is a dwelling. In future commentaries I will look at ways that this might be done.
Last month the retail network explained to me that their affluent customers had money but were holding back spending. That has now been confirmed in the banking figures --- the affluent are increasing their savings rate. They maybe be back in the market either late this year or in 2024.
********************************************
Sofronoff's revelations about the crooked Drumgold nearly got censored
It is worth considering why Andrew Barr, the chief minister of the ACT, is so cross with Walter Sofronoff.
Is it because Sofronoff breached protocol by providing his report on the Brittany Higgins-Bruce Lehrmann rape trial to journalists on an embargoed basis?
Or could it have something to do with the fact that this former judge made it impossible for Barr’s government to censor a report outlining serious misconduct at the heart of the ACT justice system?
Before receiving this report, Barr had made no secret of the fact that he was considering withholding certain sections from the public.
He issued a statement to this effect that was published in this newspaper on July 29. It said that subject to the contents of the report, and any legal implications, he intended to table all or part of the report this month.
The key words were “or part”.
There is no way of knowing whether this is what prompted Sofronoff to provide selected journalists with his full report on an embargoed basis.
Janet Albrechtsen and Stephen Rice, who have written extensively on this affair, have not revealed where they received their advance copy of the report, but they have insisted they did not breach an embargo.
It is worth considering what might have happened but for Sofronoff, Albrechtsen and Rice.
If Barr’s plan had gone ahead, and those parts of the report with legal implications had been redacted, that would almost certainly have affected those sections that focus on Shane Drumgold, the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions.
The nation might have been kept in the dark about the full extent of what Sofronoff described as Drumgold’s malpractice and grossly unethical conduct during the Higgins-Lehrmann trial.
It is understandable that Barr might feel aggrieved. He was considering censoring Sofronoff’s report and Sofronoff, Albrechtsen and Rice made that impossible.
But Barr was wrong to accuse Sofronoff, an immensely experienced former judge, of breaking the law by giving the report to the media.
Barr made that accusation at an emotional press conference on August 7 during which he departed from the measured approach of his formal joint statement with Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury.
When asked if Sofronoff’s actions amounted to a breach of the Inquiries Act, Barr said he was seeking advice on whether there had been a breach and if further action was required.
That’s when he should have stopped talking. Instead, he added: “A reasonably straight reading of section 17 of the Act would clearly indicate that it is. The question of whether there are any mitigating circumstances remains to be seen.”
This assessment is hard to reconcile with the plain words of the statute. It also seems odd when compared to what Barr said in his formal statement with Rattenbury.
The formal statement recognises that the Inquiries Act might need to be changed in order to ensure the release of future reports must be approved by the government.
Just consider that for a moment. If the statute needs to be changed to achieve that purpose, that means the current wording of the statute does not achieve that purpose.
And that means Sofronoff is off the hook.
This is what Barr and Rattenbury said in their formal statement: “The government will also consider changes to the Inquiries Act to strengthen provisions relating to the obligation of nondisclosure of information in section 17 prior to the formal release of an inquiry report.
“The intent of any changes will be to provide the ACT government and the Canberra community with assurance that the unapproved release that occurred on this occasion will not occur for any inquiry that may be commissioned in the future,” their statement said.
The problem for Barr is that section 17 was clearly designed to prevent the unauthorised disclosure of information “acquired by” boards of inquiry, such as documents obtained under subpoena.
It was not designed to impose penalties for the unauthorised disclosure of an inquiry’s report.
There is no mention in section 17 of reports produced by a board of inquiry.
If the Inquiries Act was intended to impose penalties for the unauthorised disclosure of reports it would not have done so in section 17 which seeks to prevent disclosure of documents and other information received by an inquiry.
Such a penalty would be found in the provision that deals with the question of what happens to completed reports.
That provision, section 14, says reports must be submitted to the chief minister. It does not say they must only be submitted to the chief minister.
That might explain why Barr’s careful joint statement with Rattenbury flagged the need for legislative change.
Sofronoff did not break the law when he provided embargoed copies of his report to the media. He broke protocol and angered the chief minister of the ACT.
But that seems a small price to pay compared to what was at stake. Barr had made it clear he was considering redacting this report, even before he received it.
That meant there was a real risk that the full extent of Drumgold’s misconduct might have remained hidden.
*******************************************************
Jacinta Price says ‘Australians don’t need to be welcomed to their own country’
Opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman, Jacinta Price, has called for an end to welcome to country acknowledgments before every sporting event and public gathering because the practice is “wrong” and dividing the nation.
The attack comes after former prime minister Tony Abbott last week conceded he was “getting a little bit sick” of welcome to country, arguing the nation “belongs to all of us, not just to some of us.”
Senator Price, a Warlpiri-Celtic woman who grew up in Alice Springs and the leading campaign spokeswoman against Anthony Albanese’s constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament, said “Australians don’t need to be welcomed to their own country”.
“There is no problem with acknowledging our history, but rolling out these performances before every sporting event or public gathering is definitely divisive,” Senator Price told The Australian.
“It’s not welcoming, it’s telling non-Indigenous Australians ‘this isn’t your country’ and that’s wrong. We are all Australians and we share this great land.”
Peter Dutton last week said he thought that welcome to country was a “respectful way to acknowledge the Indigenous heritage of our country” but argued the practice was overdone and often used as an exercise in virtue signalling.
“I do get the point that when you go to a function and there’s an MC who I think appropriately can do recognition, you then get the next five or 10 speakers who each do their own acknowledgment to country, and frankly, I think it detracts from the significance of the statement that’s being made,” he told 2GB. “I think there are a lot of corporates that just do it because they think it’s what people want to hear.”
An acknowledgment of country is made every sitting day alongside the Lord’s Prayer in both the Senate and House of Representatives – a practice that was introduced in 2010.
A number of Coalition MPs on Sunday supported the substance of Senator Price’s comments, with Nationals Leader David Littleproud saying that welcome to country had “just gone over the top.”
“I think unfortunately what’s happened – it’s not just sporting events – you can go to a meeting and everyone makes an acknowledgment,” Mr Littleproud said. “I think it’s gone overboard. It’s gone too far. Is it necessary? I think it’s a reasonable question to ask.”
MP Keith Pitt said the welcome to country was supposed to be “culturally significant.”
“If that’s the case they should be treated as such, not thrown around on T-shirts, email signatures, video conferences and aircraft arrivals,” he said. “I think sensible management would be widely welcomed.”
South Australian Liberal senator Alex Antic said the idea a “welcome” should be “constantly extended for Australians to be in their own country is tiresome and divisive”.
“Endless acknowledgments of country performed by white middle class professionals before meetings do little more than brick in their credentials in front of an imaginary court of wokeness approval,” he said.
“These clashes against Western values only subside when courage culture triumphs over cancel culture and the use of these gestures ceases.”
LNP senator Gerard Rennick said the welcome to country should be reserved for special occasions, arguing it was now an example of “virtue signalling that’s gone mad”.
“It’s overkill,” he said. “You feel like they are shoving it down your throat.”
In a piece for The Australian last November, Senator Price said welcome to country had become “a standard ritual practice before events, meetings and social gatherings” but argued she had received “more than my fill of being symbolically recognised”.
“It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not simply defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character,” she said.
When he was prime minister, Scott Morrison adopted the practice of giving Australia’s veterans equal billing with Indigenous elders “past, present and emerging” when speaking at formal events and ceremonies.
***************************************************
Albo’s fake truth-telling about "Voice"
As this magazine has pointed out, and not always tongue-in-cheek, wait long enough and today’s vehemently denounced conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s undisputed truth. This process reached epic proportions throughout and following the Covid years. Reading back-copies of The Spectator Australia from 2020 to 2022 is like an out-of-body experience as you stumble from one article to another that more or less accurately predicts what is now, belatedly, admitted to be the truth.
Foolishly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese suggested a ‘conspiracy theory’ in parliament this week pertaining to his precious Voice. Or more particularly, pertaining to the stunning revelations by host Peta Credlin on Sky News Australia that rather than being a benign-looking one-page document covered in pretty patterns and signatures, the much-vaunted ‘symbolic’ Uluru Statement from the Heart actually runs to some 26 pages of detailed planning for a major restructure of this nation’s polity to bring about a self-governing Aboriginal nation. Moreover, this has to all intents and purposes been hidden from the public’s gaze until recently revealed under a freedom of information request. Why is this additional detail important? Because the Prime Minister has on some 30-plus occasions committed to implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart ‘in full’. Therefore the public should have been shown the Uluru Statement ‘in full’.
Instead, the PM sought to belittle Ms Credlin’s revelations as conspiracy theory.
‘Nothing exposes the falseness of the arguments being put by the No campaign than this conspiracy theory….’ Mr Albanese said, before going for the gag. ‘I mean, what role did Marcia Langton play in the faking of the moon landing? There’s a whole lot of projection going on here, Mr Speaker, more projection than a film festival.’ And again: ‘That is a conspiracy in search of a theory… like the QAnon theories, we have all sorts of conspiracy stuff out there, but this is a ripper.’
Meanwhile, over at Sky News itself, host Chris Kenny, rather than congratulating his colleague Ms Credlin on a newsworthy story, opted to join in the prime ministerial denials. ‘I need to correct this furphy that the Uluru Statement is actually 26 pages long… it is simply not true,’ insisted an irate Mr Kenny, a zealous advocate for the Yes campaign. A furphy, of course, is Aussie slang for a ‘false rumour’, or ‘scuttlebutt’.
Within 24 hours Ms Credlin substantiated her claims. The full Uluru Statement from the Heart is 26 pages long and can be found as ‘Document 14’ on the NIAA website, she said, citing Megan Davis, one of the statement’s architects, who repeatedly insisted in public that the statement isn’t just one page but is ‘lengthy… around 18 to 20 pages’, as well as the government’s FOI lawyers who confirmed that Document 14 is the full Uluru Statement from the Heart. Presumably at the insistence of Labor heavies, certain individuals are now frantically back-tracking.
Has the Yes campaign been caught faking its own moon landing, at the behest of the Prime Minister? Have those being accused of peddling a ‘conspiracy theory’ in fact simply exposed a hidden truth?
The idea that the extra 25 pages are simply irrelevant bureaucratic note-taking is a nonsense, given that for months No campaigners have been demanding detail on many issues surrounding the functioning and purpose of the Voice and the literal relationship between ‘voice’, ‘treaty’, ‘makaratta’, ‘truth-telling’ (see Kel Richards revelatory piece in this week’s issue) and so on. Repeatedly the answer to these questions has been, ‘no one knows, we’ll work that out later’. Yet the answers to those questions are in black and white in Document 14, detailing the mechanisms and intentions of the framers of the Uluru Statement, of which the Voice is the all-important first step and legal mechanism to achieving everything else. Such as:
‘A constitutionally entrenched Voice to Parliament was… considered as a way by which the right to self-determination could be achieved.’
‘There was a concern that the proposed body would have insufficient power if its constitutional function was “advisory” only….’
‘Any Voice to Parliament should be designed so that it could support and promote a treaty-making process.’
‘A treaty could include a proper say in decision-making, the establishment of a truth commission, reparations, a financial settlement (such as seeking a percentage of GDP), the resolution of land, water and resources issues, recognition of authority and customary law, and determination, autonomy and self-government.’
‘The true history of colonisation must be told: the genocides, the massacres, the wars and the ongoing injustices and discrimination… [and] how First Nations Peoples have contributed to protecting and building this country.’
‘Treaty would be the vehicle to achieve self-determination, autonomy and self-government.’
‘…creation of a “Black Parliament”.’
On p. 26, ‘Road Map 3’ sees the Voice literally turn into a self-governing First Nation within its own borders. So is the Voice actually the precursor to a massive transfer of sovereignty, wealth and power?
Naah. That’s just a conspiracy theory
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/albos-fake-truth-telling
************************************7 August, 2023
Drumgold: The rise and fall of the boy from Mt Druitt
Shane Drumgold was born into welfare housing in Mt Druitt, a poor and often violent suburb of Sydney. Unlike most Senior Counsel, he never we went to private school but slowly made his way upwards via a a range of less prestigious paths. And I think his downfall can be attributed to that background
One thing that a private school background instils in its pupils is self confidence and that is an important trait if you are going to go against the flow. And that is what Drumgold failed to do. There was tremendous media pressure to believe Brittany Higgins and discredit Bruce Lehrmann. You had to go along with that to be on the side of the angels. Drumgold didn't have the mental fortitude to resist that. He was so desperate to be among the good guys that he lied in an effort to support the mob belief. He had none of the confidence that would have enabled him to go against the flow
His gaunt visage never did look right under a barrister's wig and he was in the end unfit for that distinction
ACT chief prosecutor Shane Drumgold has resigned in the wake of the damning findings of the Sofronoff Inquiry and is expected to retire.
On Sunday ACT Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury confirmed that he had spoken to Mr Drumgold last Thursday and “in light of the commentary in the report” the pair had “agreed that his position as Director of Public Prosecutions was no longer tenable”.
“On Friday, Mr Drumgold sent a letter advising me that he would be vacating his position as ACT Director of Public Prosecutions,” Mr Rattenbury said.
The Sofronoff Inquiry found Mr Drumgold knowingly lied to the Supreme Court, engaged in serious malpractice and grossly unethical conduct, “preyed on a junior lawyer’s inexperience”, betrayed that junior lawyer who trusted him, and treated criminal litigation as “a poker game in which a prosecutor can hide the cards”.
In the report, Mr Sofronoff found that Mr Drumgold had lost objectivity during the prosecution of Bruce Lehrmann for the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins and “did not act with fairness and detachment as was required by his role”.
Those findings were considered by legal experts as certain to end Mr Drumgold’s career as DPP and may lead to criminal prosecution against him for perverting the course of justice.
Inquiry head Walter Sofronoff KC ruled that every one of the allegations made by Mr Drumgold that sparked the inquiry was baseless.
The ACT government had earlier said it would not release the report until the end of August but back-flipped last week following publication of the findings in The Australian.
Mr Rattenbury said on Sunday the government would make a detailed statement in response to the Sofronoff Report early in the coming week.
The government is under growing pressure to conduct an inquiry into previous criminal cases prosecuted by Mr Drumgold.
******************************************************
Albanese still issuing Covid permits to facilitate immigration
Almost 66,000 international students and temporary workers are having their stays in Australia extended under a special Covid-era permit, fuelling claims that the surge in visa approvals is creating a “Big Australia” by stealth.
The Australian can reveal new figures showing Labor has granted more pandemic event visas in its first 10 months than were given when international borders were shut.
The Albanese government has processed more Covid-19 special work visas than the Coalition granted over the 20 months before international borders began reopening in November 2021.
Visa processing data provided by the Department of Home Affairs to Liberal senator James Paterson shows a surge in Labor’s use of the pandemic event visa to the end of March.
Despite calls from the international education industry to end the pandemic permit, the government issued 65,859 special Covid-19 visas between June and March – including almost 27,000 in the first three months of 2023.
Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said the jump in arrivals was “worsening housing shortages, driving record rent increases, adding to congestion, putting upward pressure on interest rates and impacting the environment”.
“The Covid-19 pandemic event visa is still open despite the fact the pandemic is over,” Mr Tehan told The Australian.
“Labor claim they don’t want a big Australia but judge them by their actions, not their words. Labor is bringing 1.5 million people to Australia over five years and they have no answers for where they will live, what this will do to congestion or how it will impact the environment and quality of life.”
About 23,900 Covid work visas were granted to international students by the government, eclipsing the 11,885 permits approved by the Coalition during the pandemic.
In February and March this year, more than 10,700 pandemic event visas for international students were processed. Since the special Covid working permit was established in April 2020, almost 160,000 pandemic event visas have been approved.
Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said Labor had inherited a migration system “with backlog after backlog, delays and waitlists” and the government “hadn’t wasted a day in cleaning up the mess left by the former Liberal government”.
“Under the Liberals, our migration system wasn’t working for anyone,” Mr Giles said.
“We had a pile of almost one million visa applications left in the in tray and no plan to deal with workforce shortages when the borders reopened.
“We’ve brought wait times down, and we’re working to make sure our migration system is working again for all Australians after a decade of mess and mismanagement under the Liberals.”
Amid severe labour shortages and employers struggling to find workers, the Covid-19 pandemic event visa (subclass 408) allows people to work if employed or if they have an offer of employment in any sector of the economy.
The Home Affairs website says temporary graduate visa holders can “apply for and be granted a pandemic event visa with a two-year period of stay”.
The pandemic event visa allows holders to remain in Australia for 12 months and include “members of the family unit in your application”.
In March, The Australian revealed that the international education industry was urging the government to end special pandemic work visas over fears it was being rorted by people who were in Australia to find a job rather than study.
International Education Association of Australia chief executive Phil Honeywood said the temporary visa must be abolished as it was being exploited as a backroom way for international students to get full work rights.
*****************************************************
Australia's woke-ready students: Affirmative action dressed up as higher education reform
Education Minister Jason Clare began well earlier this year when he made it compulsory for universities when training teachers to teach reading, writing and mathematics using evidence-based practices.
However, his foray into the teaching wars has, unsurprisingly, culminated in a series of policies focused on improving equity while seriously compromising academic standards. Worse still, the federal government has turned its back on racial equality by implementing recommendations designed to usher in a new age of identity politics at our universities.
As part of the higher education shake-up, all academically qualified indigenous students will be guaranteed a Commonwealth-funded place at university and the 50 per cent pass rule for students to continue to receive funding will be abolished.
The Minister for Education claims this is ‘not about lowering standards’. However, continuing to fund students who fail more than half their courses will, by definition, do exactly that. Needless to say, the Minister provided no evidence to back up his statement. While nine Australian universities are among the top 100 globally, the Productivity Commission’s five-year inquiry found highly variable and poor-quality teaching was failing students who entered the workplace unequipped to meet real world demands.
Academic standards in Australian universities are already in crisis. Students finish their degrees woke-ready rather than work-ready. Yet the federal government’s response to the interim review into higher education does nothing to arrest this decline. In fact, the removal of the 50 per cent pass rule will further exacerbate falling standards by transferring responsibility for student performance from the student to the university.
The Minister for Education stated, ‘Instead of forcing them to quit, we should be helping them to pass,’ adding that universities will be required ‘to improve support to students who need it and to report on the outcomes for the student following that intervention’. This effectively relieves the student of any obligation to take personal responsibility for their performance.
Under the guise of helping disadvantaged students, the government is now throwing money at universities. While such largesse may benefit minority groups, it ultimately betrays the interests of hardworking Australians who must fund the exercise but derive no benefit from it.
The core purpose of a university is to impart knowledge and to hone the mind through the development, consideration and the contest of ideas. A tertiary education means nothing if universities discourage debate and intellectual challenge. And suppressing freedom of thought has a knock-on effect; the contest of ideas is not only the essence of university life, but the essence of a flourishing liberal democracy.
Instead of pursuing academic excellence and free speech, the federal government seems committed to making our universities a further arm of Australia’s already extensive social welfare program.
While there is merit in implementing policies to help disadvantaged groups and reduce poverty, this should not be done at the expense of tertiary education standards. Perhaps there are far greater returns for governments to be found in funding programs that encourage school attendance rather than boosting university enrolments. Without a secondary education, disadvantaged students will never attain a university qualification.
Embracing affirmative action in university admissions undermines the principle of equality of opportunity. This was the finding of the US Supreme Court which declared in June that race-based preferencing in admissions violated the constitution. US Chief Justice John Roberts said universities had ‘concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.’
Australia is running in the opposite direction, moving to permanently embed identity politics in our university admissions processes.
There is already a widespread and growing tendency for Australian universities to adopt formal ideological positions, contributing to a culture of censorship on campus. Every Australian university has signed up to one or more policies or strategic commitments which pledge their institution to woke ideologies. These generally fall into three categories: indigenous issues, gender inequality, and sustainability. The rise of the ‘social justice university’ signals a new focus on activism over education.
The University Accord reforms as they stand will entrench these woke priorities while exacerbating the fundamental failure of our academic institutions to be places of open learning and intellectual freedom.
Worryingly, the interim review will do nothing to address the erosion of free speech on campus. Forthcoming IPA research shows 90 per cent of Australian universities have policies that are hostile to free speech. The total hostility score across all institutions, as measured by the number and severity of university policies which are hostile to free speech, increased by 117 per cent between 2016 and 2023.
Previous IPA research has shown that the culture of censorship on campus has already been advanced by university policies that purport to protect free speech on campus. In 2020, the federal government introduced a new requirement forcing universities to develop free speech policies based on the French Model Code – a template written by former Australian chief justice Robert French. However, analysis shows only a third adopted the six essential pro-free speech criteria.
A case in point is Newcastle University’s Code for the Protection of Freedom and Academic Freedom, which states, ‘The principles outlined in this Code do not have overriding legal status nor overriding status to the University’s institutional values or strategic commitments.’ Newcastle University’s Strategic Plan 2020-2025 outlines ‘equity’ and ‘sustainability’ as key values, meaning the university could arguably prohibit speech in opposition to the proposed Voice to parliament or views not aligned with the zeitgeist on climate change.
According to Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at New York University, a social justice institution cannot also protect free speech. By promoting one side of an issue, universities attach a value judgment to it and suggest it is the superior position to hold. This closes debate and crushes viewpoint diversity.
Affirmative action is antithetical to the principles of individual liberty, equal opportunity and the pursuit of academic excellence – all cornerstones of strong democracies. Excellence in education and equity-based policies are mutually exclusive goals. Pursuing one will always come at the expense of the other.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/clares-woke-ready-students/ ?
************************************************
NSW gay conversion opponents may have to be careful what they say under new anti-discrimination law
Opponents of gay conversion practices may need to be careful about criticising its promoters under new anti-discrimination laws passed in New South Wales parliament on Thursday, legal experts have said.
The Minns government’s religious vilification bill, which with backing from the opposition, amended the existing Anti-Discrimination Act to make it unlawful to vilify people or organisations on the grounds of their religion.
Alistair Lawrie, an expert in anti-discrimination law at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, said he supported, in principle, reforms that protected people from vilification for their religious expression or affiliation.
But he said ahead of the bill being passed changes were broader than religious vilification laws enacted in other state and territories, leaving the door open to restrictions to freedom of speech.
“It would be disappointing if this bill passes in its current form,” he said.
Lawrie said this could see people or organisations who engage in gay conversion practices bring forward complaints of vilification if criticised for engaging in the activity.
The Minns government, with backing from the opposition, has vowed to ban gay conversion practices.
But Lawrie said religious people or groups who continued to engage in the activity after it was banned would still be protected from vilification under the laws, given it protects criticisms against unlawful religious practices.
Prof Simon Rice, a University of Sydney expert in anti-discrimination law, said the bill would not restrict people from advocating against the practice, but it draws the line at anything said or done that risks “engendering hatred towards promoters of gay therapy”.
“They’d have to be careful about what they said so that they didn’t incite hatred against that religious view, but they’re certainly still free to attack the [practice],” he said.
Labor promised to introduce the religious vilification bill in the lead-up to the election. But given the government recently referred the act for review under the NSW Law Reform Commission, Rice said the government should have waited to introduce the religious vilification laws until that review was complete.
“We’ve got an [anti-discrimination] act which is almost unworkable. It’s so old and dated and cobbled together,” he said. “And then we go and add another little bit to it at the same time that we’re acknowledging that it’s a problem and we’re going to review it, I just think that’s bad policy.”
Dr Haroon Kasim, of the Coalition Against Caste Discrimination, had also written to the NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, ahead of the bill passing calling for more protections for people who experience discrimination on the basis of their caste.
As migration from south Asia rises, Kasim said the communities were experiencing escalating discrimination on the basis of their caste – a hierarchical system assigned at birth that determines occupations and social status.
“It affects every part of a person’s life,” he said. “People of the so-called ‘lower caste’ are refused houses and jobs because of that status.”
Kasim said people deemed to be from “lower” castes who speak out about caste discrimination were often harassed by others deemed part of the “higher” caste groups. He was concerned the new laws would give licence to religious groups to accuse those who speak up about caste discrimination of religious vilification.
“We just want to be seen and heard,” he said.
An amendment to the bill proposed by the Greens spokesperson for anti-discrimination, Jenny Leong, that would have excluded protections for unlawful activity and organisations was rejected by the lower house on Thursday.
Leong said the government should prioritise holistic reforms to the bill rather than “putting protections first”.
“At a time when there has been a disturbing increase in anti-trans and anti-LGBTQIA+ aggression online and on the streets, what message does this send to the LGBTQIA+ community?,” she said.
The president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Josh Pallas, said the group also opposed the new laws. .
“We want an Anti-Discrimination Act that does not discriminate,” he said. “To move on one part without moving on other glaring deficiencies sends a bad message to the community about whose rights and interests are privileged over others.”
************************************
6 August, 2023
Queensland sales of investor-owned property are ballooning as interest rates rise and landlords flee
The interest rate bills that landlords have to pay on their mortgages are shooting up so rents have to go up too in order to make landlording affordable. So what is the government response to that? Forbidding landlords to put up their rents! Only a government would think it was a good idea to chase landlords out of the business during a shortage of rental accomodation
Property investors in one state are 'over it' as they bow out of the market in droves amid rising interest rates and higher land taxes.
Sales of Queensland investor-owned property increased to almost a third of all homes sold in June, according to PropTrack research.
It comes as owners across Australia face skyrocketing property taxes and rental price cap speculation - adding pressure to their high mortgage repayments.
Sales of owner-investor properties in Queensland grew by eight per cent in just one month - up to 29.5 per cent of all house sales, higher than other state.
PropTrack statistics also revealed more than 21 per cent of landlords have been exiting the market after the introduction of land tax legislation in the state.
Jett Jones of Ray White Marsden in Logan told News Corp three clients have called her this week wanting to offload their investment properties saying, 'I quote unquote; "We're over it, interest rates are too high".'
She added that within the last month landlords have been asking about listing their properties - with many of them being long-term investors.
PropTrack senior economist Paul Ryan said statistics showed investors are responding to the current market.
'It's starting to suggest, perhaps, now with interest rates increasing significantly... that financial pressures on investors, or even expected cash flow over the coming period, is pushing them to exit their investments,' Mr Ryan said.
'What's concerning is investor sentiment is very poor. Investors are a big pathway to building homes, and the long-term solution to the rental crisis. We need a really strong investor component in the market to facilitate new supply to come in.'
But he said the amount of new stock on the market could be good opportunities for other wanna-be investors to buy up.
'Because investors and owner-occupiers often compete for the same properties, that could be a positive for buyers over the coming period,' Mr Ryan said.
There are other factors blindsiding landlords like concerns over the rental crisis and land tax hikes.
The Queensland government put in new legislation forbidding landlords to increase rent by more than once a year.
It also brought in new land legislation in June 2022 that taxed landlords based on their entire Australian property portfolio rather than what they owned in Queensland.
But the government abandoned the proposals in September after strong backlash.
MCG Quantity Surveyors managing director Mike Mortlock said the government's actions have been forcing investors to get rid of their stock.
He said the government should focus more on the value of investors who provide housing for renters.
***********************************************
Farmer advised of $100,000 cost for cultural heritage survey
Shane Kelliher knows first-hand the confusion caused by Western Australia’s new cultural heritage laws and says there must be a “better way forward” to preserve Indigenous sites.
Mr Kelliher, 58, has received preliminary written advice organised through his legal firm saying that, under the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act, which took effect on July 1, he could be forced to pay between $30,000 and $100,000 for a cultural heritage assessment.
He told The Australian he wanted to extract high-quality building sand from his 85ha property in North Dandalup about an hour south of Perth. But this plan was thrown into doubt when the site was found to be close to possible historic camping areas for Indigenous Australians.
While he supported protecting Aboriginal cultural heritage, Mr Kelliher argued that “it should not be at the cost of the individual landowner”.
“If it incurs cost to the individual landowner, then they should be compensated,” he said. “I’ve got a significant connection to the land myself. It’s been in the family for three generations.”
Federal Nationals leader David Littleproud told The Australian most people already respected cultural heritage sites, but warned the WA laws could backfire and “see that respect taken away”.
“And instead of people coming forward in a co-operative and proactive way, we see people on freehold land hiding and destroying things they previously wouldn’t,” Mr Littleproud said.
He argued the destruction by Rio Tinto in May 2020 of the caves at Juukan Gorge containing evidence of human life dating back 46,000 years was an “abhorrent act”, but warned that the WA laws were a case study in government overreach.
The warning comes ahead of a protest at WA parliament next Tuesday, with farmers from across the state planning to present a series of demands to the government, including their push for freehold property rights to extinguish any cultural heritage claim.
Mr Kelliher said the land where he proposed to develop the sandpit had been in the family since 1935. His plan was to cart the sand to a second property about 15km away where it could be used to provide “house pads” for buildings.
He said the second property was about 3km long and 200m wide which had been rezoned for the purpose of being subdivided into blocks of between 1ha and 1.ha. But he said the second property was also found to be close to Indigenous sites of cultural significance.
“With all the talk about cultural heritage I had my lawyers just have a look at what was proposed. My legal team made inquiries,” he said.
Mr Kelliher organised to receive this preliminary advice through Cornerstone Legal and was informed the property containing the sand was home to four potential Aboriginal sites “where there could be suggested artefacts or possibly even bones”.
“They are suggesting there could have been possible camping areas for Aboriginal people at some stage in the past,” he said. “I am confused about what my obligations are. I am confused about what the cost is going to be … It’s all up in the air.
“My legal firm that’s handling the subdivision and the sand extracting licence engaged a consultant who specialises in site management plans for these particular types of activities. And his view … is that I would need to complete an ethnographic and archaeological survey to put in with the application. And that could cost from $30,000 up to $100,000.
“And then what I’ve been told is that … it is quite possible that I would need a cultural representative to be there with every shovel-load of sand that went out, just in case artefacts or some bones or whatever else are found.”
The new WA laws apply to properties of more than 1100sq m and introduce a three-tiered system imposing obligations on landholders. Cultural assessments can be required for ground excavation of up to a depth of 0.5m (a tier one activity), but permits and land management plans are required for ground excavation of up a depth of 1m, which covers tier two and three activities.
A spokesman for the West Australian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Tony Buti, urged Mr Kelliher to contact the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage for help identify where the specific sites containing Aboriginal cultural heritage were located.
“If sites can be avoided, then no approval is required,” the spokesman said. “The minister is listening and working with all stakeholders.”
Speaking last week in Port Hedland, WA Premier Roger Cook suggested the government was prepared “to make changes where (Aboriginal heritage laws) need to change” in a sign the legislation could be reworked.
The backlash to the laws from farmers comes as the federal government mulls an options paper for a legislated federal framework for cultural heritage protections. One option includes the creation of another national body which would “appoint and empower local First Nations groups to make decisions about their cultural heritage”.
****************************************************
West Australia government to scrap controversial ‘botched’ Aboriginal cultural heritage laws within days
The controversial Aboriginal cultural heritage laws that prompted an army of outraged farmers to rally in an outback hall last month are set to be scrapped, according to new reports.
Western Australian Premier Roger Cook and the state’s Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Tony Buti are expected to make an announcement on the divisive Aboriginal cultural heritage laws early next week, the ABC reports.
The backflip comes after months of confusion and controversy over the new laws, which took effect on July 1 and imposed harsh penalties for damaging sites of traditional significance.
Opposition was led by farmers groups, including WA Farmers and the Pastoralists and Graziers Association, as well as WA’s opposition Coalition, and federal Nationals leader David Littleproud.
It is understood, the ABC reports, that WA will revert to operating under the former 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act.
The new laws were introduced after “extensive consultation” and to heighten protection of cultural sites following the destruction of the ancient Juukan Gorge by Rio Tinto in May 2020.
The updated laws required some landholders to undertake detailed and expensive assessments through a new Local Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Service (LACHS) to determine whether a project will cause “harm” to cultural heritage.
Under a complex three-tiered system, any maintenance or demolition that involves removing more than four kilograms of material, disturbing more than 10 square metres of ground or excavating to a depth of more than 50 centimetres may require a permit from the LACHS.
An exemption would apply for all residential properties under 1100 square metres and for maintenance and “like-for-like” activities – such as planting crops, running livestock or replacing a fence.
The landowner would be required to pay the LACHS to assess their application – which requires specific consultants that can charge hundreds of dollars per hour.
Penalties for damaging a cultural heritage site range from $25,000 to $1 million for individuals and $250,000 to $10 million for corporations, as well as jail time.
But despite insisting there were exemptions, WA farmers were quick to criticise the laws, saying the new system was too confusing, too time consuming, too expensive, and possibly open to abuse.
Weeks after the laws came into effect, hundreds of farmers and landowners packed a hall in Katanning, about 277 kilometres southeast of Perth, to voice these concerns at the meeting attended by high-profile politicians and industry representatives including federal Nationals leader David Littleproud.
Mr Littleproud told news.com.au after the meeting that the “anxiety in the west is palpable” and criticised laws for creating a “point of tension and division [farmers and local Indigenous people] haven’t had before”.
He described the laws as a “government overreach” by the WA leadership, and warned of a potential copycat laws to be introduced at a federal level.
WA Labor MP Darren West was the only representative of his party to attend the Katanning meeting, and conceded to the farmers the government had “botched” the messaging about the laws.
Despite the laws passed in 2021 with support from WA’s Nationals and Liberal parties, the opposition parties say it is a move they have come to regret.
WA Liberal leader Libby Mettam said the state Labor government’s potential backflip on the divisive laws was a “great win for landowners”, calling them “shambolic from the start”.
“We understand the Labor government will backflip on the Aboriginal cultural heritage act laws that they introduced earlier in the year,” Ms Mettam told the ABC.
“We‘ve always committed to scrapping the cultural heritage act and going back to the drawing board.
“They were quite clearly an overreach on private property rights. They went way too far.”
*******************************************************
Smell of gas blowing in the wind: Even the luvvies say NSW wind farms don’t add up
How long does it take for a wind farm to become carbon neutral in some of the best wind conditions in Queensland? If you guessed never, you are right.
State modelling purports to show that Mount Emerald, near the World Heritage rainforests of Far North Queensland, gets some of the strongest wind. If that’s the strongest, wind power in the Sunshine State it’s a dud.
The Mount Emerald wind farm has 53 turbines that are meant to be able to generate up to 180.5 megawatts (MW) of power.
Wildlife photographer Steven Nowakowski of Rainforest Reserves Australia crunched the National Energy Market (NEM) data for the Mount Emerald wind farm for 2022 and sent it to state and federal politicians.
It shows that on 63 days, more than two months of the year, the turbines generated no energy at all. On 107 days, they generated 10 MW or less. So, for almost a third of the year at one of the best-located wind farms in Queensland, power was about half of one per cent of the maximum so-called nameplate capacity.
On 36 days the capacity factor (actual power as a percentage of maximum capacity) was a piddling 12 per cent or less. On another 32 days, the capacity factor was 17 per cent or less. That accounts for almost six months of the year.
The maximum achieved at any time was 100 to 110MW, less than 62 per cent of the nameplate capacity, and that was only achieved on a paltry 12 days of the year. The average capacity factor was 27 per cent and the median, the most accurate measure in a skewed data set, was only 18 per cent.
Mount Emerald is meant to generate 63 MW per year (an implied capacity factor of 35 per cent) but for six months each year it generates less than 16 MW, and on average less than 49 MW a year.
This is not surprising. The further south you travel in Australia the better the wind. The best wind is in the south and offshore, coming from the Roaring Forties.
Given these facts, why are 15 onshore wind farms being considered or under construction in Queensland? Perhaps because wind farms receive generous subsidies. How much are the subsidies? There is zero transparency. One whistleblower claims it is as much as $600,000 to $900,000 per year. Who knows?
The six offshore wind zones announced by federal Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen late last year mostly take advantage of southern exposure but they will also be subsidised. They are located on the Gippsland coast, in Victoria’s southeast, the Hunter Valley and Illawarra in New South Wales, Portland in Victoria, Northern Tasmania, and Perth and Bunbury in Western Australia.
‘We know Australia’s the world’s largest island, but we have no offshore wind,’ Bowen said at a press conference in the Port of Newcastle in NSW on July 12.
‘That is craziness, and we’re fixing it,’ he continued, declaring the Hunter Australia’s second offshore wind zone.
The area that the Minister declared an offshore wind zone is intended to generate more than five gigawatts of power.
‘Five gigawatts, for those of you who don’t work in energy, is a lot of gigawatts. That’s a lot of power that will come from offshore wind.’
But is it sensible to declare an offshore wind zone anywhere off the coast of NSW?
By accident or design, on the same day that Bowen announced the Hunter as Australia’s second offshore wind zone, Net Zero Australia (NZAu), a partnership between the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, Princeton University, and international management consultancy Nous Group launched its ‘Mobilisation report: How to make net zero happen’.
The NZAu report modelled six scenarios with differing energy mixes, costs, and other constraints using a method developed by Princeton University and Evolved Energy Research for its 2020 Net-Zero America study. The report specifically asks which net- zero options Australia should accelerate.
The critical point is that in no scenario did it make sense to develop offshore wind projects off the coast of NSW.
They write: ‘Offshore wind faces the highest barriers due to the need for large subsidies and long lead times to develop initial projects, establish supply chains, and provide grid access. No NZAu scenarios chose NSW projects because of the high cost of floating platform technologies and moderate winds, an additional risk to pipeline realisation.’
When they say ‘large subsidies’ they mean larger than for onshore wind. Despite these barriers, they note that about half of the announced NEM pipeline is off the coast of NSW.
No one could accuse the authors of the NZAu report of being anything but true believers in renewable energy and yet even for them NSW offshore wind farms made no sense.
And if this is true for offshore wind in NSW, it is all the more true for onshore wind in Queensland, so much farther removed from the unobstructed Roaring Forties.
As for how long it takes for a wind farm to become carbon neutral, the NZAu report also has an answer.
Carbon neutrality is achieved when all the carbon dioxide released to clear the forests and build the roads, turbines, new transmission lines and lithium batteries has been paid off by carbon dioxide-free energy. In addition, it has to cover massive duplication of resources because the actual capacity is so much lower than the deceptive nameplate capacity.
But apart from all that, the NZAu report states that all its scenarios require a new large fleet of gas-fired peaking power plants to back up wind and solar plants, with at least 6 gigawatts added each year between 2035 and 2040, compared with the current pipeline of 3.5 gigawatts, and with carbon capture and storage used to reduce emissions.
In other words, as far as we can see into the future wind will have not just its own carbon footprint and that of all the associated duplication, transmission, and batteries, but that of the gas on which it relies.
So why are we threatening our precious World Heritage Rainforests in Far North Queensland with heavily subsidised, low-level wind farms that have to be backed up by gas?
Perhaps the answer is blowing in the wind. It isn’t apparent anywhere else.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/smell-of-gas-blowing-in-the-wind/
****************************************************Penny Wong announces major win for Aussie farmers as China lifts punitive tariffs on Australian barley exports
China will lift punitive tariffs on Australian barley exports from Saturday.
The Chinese government imposed the tariffs on barley imports in May 2020, over what it claims were concerns over the dumping of cheap grain.
'The Ministry of Commerce ruled that, in view of the changes in the market situation of barley in China, it is no longer necessary to continue to impose anti-dumping duties and countervailing duties on the imported barley originating in Australia,' the Chinese government said.
Australia said it would suspend a World Trade Organisation dispute against China in exchange for Beijing agreeing to review its tariffs.
The decision comes before the August 11 deadline for Canberra to reinstate the dispute.
Trade Minister Don Farrell, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said in a joint statement the decision would benefit Australian producers and Chinese consumers.
'It affirms the calm and consistent approach that the Albanese government has taken,' the ministers said.
Since May 2020, China's duties on Australian barley have effectively blocked $916 million in exports to the world's biggest beer market.
'The removal of these duties means that Australia will now discontinue legal proceedings at the WTO,' the ministers said.
'This outcome demonstrates the importance of the WTO dispute mechanism in defending the interests of Australia's world-class producers and farmers.'
The Australian government will continue to pursue its wine dispute in the WTO and remained confident of a positive outcome, they said.\
************************************
3 August, 2023
Sydney teacher found to have racially vilified Indian student
This report rather grieves me. I have been to India 3 times and have always admired Indian people for their patience and good nature amid adversity. And a very important person in my life at the moment is of wholly Indian descent. I admire her greatly. See her below:
The Department of Education has been ordered to make an official apology to a former Cronulla High School student after a teacher allegedly described Indian people as “Uber drivers and Deliveroo people” during a Year 12 business studies class.
The teacher – James Anderson – played an educational YouTube video for the class entitled Elements Of Marketing which featured a presenter of Indian descent.
During the video, Anderson is alleged to have mocked the presenter before saying “all Indians are Uber drivers and Deliveroo people, and their service is bad”.
The incident, which happened on March 3, 2021, was complained about by a student who was of Indian descent.
The student and her parents met with the principal following the incident, but filed a complaint with NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal after being unsatisfied with the school’s response.
“As the video was playing, I saw Mr Anderson, while smiling, glance at me a few times and continue to mockingly giggle at the lady and her accent,” the student said during her evidence at the tribunal.
“During the playing of the video which ran for over twenty minutes, I recall a girl in the class asking for the video to be turned off a few times ... but Mr Anderson did not do so.
“I was distressed and uncomfortable that Mr Anderson was looking at me during the video and mocked the Indian presenter, knowing that I am of Indian race. It was embarrassing and hurtful.”
During his evidence, Anderson denied mocking the presenter, but admitted he said something to the effect of: “Don’t assume because she is Indian that she is an Uber driver or works at 7-Eleven”, before complaining about the quality of service provided by Uber and food delivery providers.
He admitted his statements were “inappropriate” and “racial in nature”.
“At the time there was nothing in the nature of any reactions by the students in the class that day to cause me to think that one or more of the students was upset,” he told the tribunal.
On Tuesday, the Tribunal handed down its decision finding the student’s complaint of racial vilification substantiated.
The Tribunal ordered the Department of Education – the first respondent in the case – to issue the student with a written apology which acknowledged the Tribunal’s findings of racial vilification and the harm caused to her.
The teacher remains at the school but received a disciplinary warning and training.
In a statement provided to the Herald, a spokesman for the Department of Education commended other students in the class who spoke up during the incident.
“We reject all forms of racism and are committed to the elimination of racial discrimination in NSW public schools,” he said.
“The matter was reported to the Professional and Ethical Standards Directorate in 2021 and appropriate action was taken.”
***************************************************
Growing doubts over whether troubled Taipan helicopters will return to duty
These European-made contraptions were always problematical. They should have been returned to their manufacturer years ago. Calling them Taipans was a joke. In 2022 Norway terminated their purchase of them and demanded a full refund.
As someone who has worn my country's uniform, I am always particularly perturbed when the lives of servicemen are put at risk by government incompetence
Future flying operations for Australia's troubled Taipan helicopter fleet are increasingly uncertain, as the painstaking and difficult recovery operation from last week's tragic MRH-90 crash continues in Queensland.
For several days navy divers and a Royal Australian Navy Minehunter vessel have taken part in a multi-agency search for wreckage of the army helicopter, which is scattered across hundreds of square metres of the ocean floor.
"It's clear the helicopter hit the water with a hard impact and it's a difficult job to gather all the debris for the investigation," one figure familiar with the recovery operation told the ABC.
Inside the army community there is also growing anger over Friday's tragedy and speculation the troubled MRH-90 fleet may never return to full operations ahead of the helicopter's scheduled retirement next year.
"The Army Aviation community isn't just merely saddened and grieving so much as f***ing furious," one 5th Aviation Regiment army veteran told the ABC.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity the aviator, who previously worked on the MRH-90 Capability Assurance Program (CAP), claimed successive governments and military leaders ignored increasing risks with the multi-role helicopter.
"The myriad of contributing factors associated are so voluminous that a catastrophic incident such as Friday night not occurring before is actually the true testament to the professionalism and capabilities of the people that fly, maintain, operate and directly support them."
Senior Defence and government figures have declined to comment this week on whether the planned 2024 introduction of new American-made Black Hawks could be expedited.
Earlier this week the ABC reported on concerns that the grounding of the Airbus manufactured multi-role Taipans could limit the ability of Australian special forces to respond to critical incidents.
The ABC understands private civilian contractors are continuing to provide some air services for the military while the MRH-90 fleet remains grounded.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/will-taipan-helicopters-return-to-duty/102678508
************************************************ACT’s system of justice hangs in the balance over crooked prosecutor
There is a dark cloud hanging over the proper administration of justice in the ACT. The Sofronoff report, handed to the ACT Chief Minister on Monday, will go some way to lifting that cloud. But only a series of resolute responses to that report can reset justice in the nation’s capital territory.
One of the most serious issues aired during the May public hearings concerned evidence that ACT Director of Public Prosecutions Shane Drumgold instructed a very junior solicitor to draft an affidavit asserting that legal professional privilege attached to police documents known as the Investigative Review Documents.
These documents, sought by Bruce Lehrmann’s lawyers but withheld by Drumgold, revealed inconsistencies in evidence provided by Brittany Higgins about her allegation of rape and questions about her credibility.
When Lehrmann’s legal team made an application to the court for disclosure, Drumgold instructed solicitors in his office to draft an affidavit to support nondisclosure on the basis that the documents were protected by legal professional privilege. Drumgold gave evidence that it was for the Australian Federal Police, not him, to assert legal privilege over the documents.
Therefore, an affidavit would need to cite the AFP was the source of information about privilege. Drumgold emailed two solicitors in his office about drafting the affidavit. The more senior of the two solicitors asked Drumgold, by return email, what the source of the information about legal privilege would be.
Drumgold did not respond to that question. Instead, he told the more senior solicitor that he would instruct the junior solicitor to deal with this part of the affidavit. Drumgold sent the young solicitor suggested wording for the critical part of the affidavit that claimed the police documents sought by the defence were privileged.
That wording was included in the affidavit sworn by the junior solicitor at the DPP’s direction. It created a falsehood, when presented to the court and to the ACT Chief Justice, that police had claimed privilege over the investigation documents. In fact, the AFP had not claimed privilege over these internal investigation documents. Evidence presented to the inquiry revealed that police believed these documents should have been disclosed to defence.
If Walter Sofronoff KC finds the DPP was knowingly involved in presenting a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, Drumgold’s demand for this inquiry last year will rate as the biggest legal own goal since Oscar Wilde brought a defamation suit against the Marquess of Queensberry.
The ACT government’s response will be critical to the administration of justice in the ACT. Consider what was at stake. A young man was on trial for rape. If he was found guilty, he would, in all likelihood, go to jail. If the DPP tried to withhold evidence on false grounds, and if he presented that falsehood to the court, the DPP’s removal from high office is the easy decision. So is his removal from the roll of legal practitioners.
The most important decision will be to investigate whether the DPP knowingly attempted to pervert the course of justice.
The information that the DPP potentially tried to withhold from Lehrmann’s lawyers may have assisted them in formulating their client’s defence. The information may have revealed material that could have given rise to trains of inquiry for Lehrmann’s lawyers to pursue. Any attempt to withhold that information would interfere with those avenues of defence, and potentially it would keep information hidden that should probably have gone to the jury.
As was revealed during the Sofronoff inquiry, even if the material was not admissible in court, it was still material that should have been disclosed to the defence. It is a serious crime if Joe Citizen makes a false statement with the intent to pervert the course of justice. It is another level of seriousness if done by a person charged with upholding the administration of justice.
A prosecutor, entrusted with the enormous powers of the state over citizens, must behave as a minister of justice at all times: searching for the truth in an objective, impartial and fair manner.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr had better start consulting numerous sections of the ACT Criminal Code. First, under section 703(1), a person commits perjury if they make a sworn statement in a legal proceeding that is false and the person making it is reckless about the statement being false.
It becomes aggravated perjury, under section 702, if a person makes a false statement in a legal proceeding with the intention of procuring a person’s conviction for an offence. If the DPP knowingly presented a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, section 708(b) is also relevant. It makes it an offence if a person deceives someone else so that this other person gives false or misleading evidence in a legal proceeding.
Consider, too, section 713, which makes it a criminal offence if a person, by his or her conduct, intentionally perverts the course of justice. It won’t matter that the affidavit was sworn by the junior solicitor and not by Drumgold. Under section 46 of the ACT Criminal Code, a person is taken to have committed an offence if they procured someone else to engage in the conduct. That means if the DPP was knowingly involved in presenting a false affidavit to the ACT Supreme Court for the purposes of withholding information from the defence, he could face multiple charges, each charge giving rise to maximum jail terms of seven years.
Let us be emphatic about this: in any criminal prosecution, should it come to that, Drumgold is entitled to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, just as Lehrmann was, and may have been denied that by Drumgold. The rule of law applies equally to all.
Barr and his Attorney-General, Shane Rattenbury, will need to refresh their memories about Marcus Einfeld, the federal court judge who was sentenced to two years in jail in 2009 for lying about a speeding fine. The judge completed a false statutory declaration that stated he was not driving his car at the time his silver Lexus was clocked for doing 60km/h in 50km/h zone. The potential fine was $75 and the loss of three demerit points. Einfeld claimed his friend, an American academic, Teresa Brennan, was driving his car. This was a gross lie. Brennan had died three years earlier and Einfeld knew it.
When sentencing Einfeld to jail, NSW Supreme Court judge Bruce James said the judge’s lies struck “at the heart of the administration of justice”.
Outside court that day, the head of the police fraud squad, Detective Superintendent Colin Dyson said there were “no winners today but justice has been served”.
If Drumgold is found to have knowingly lied to try to keep police investigation material from a defendant who faced jail if found guilty of rape, it enters a different realm of gravity.
A decision to launch an investigation into a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice will fall squarely on the shoulders of three institutions: first, the ACT Chief Minister, as the first recipient of the Sofronoff report; second, ACT Policing, the unit within the AFP responsible for investigating criminal offences in the ACT; and, third, the ACT Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the body charged with carriage of prosecutions.
This raises obvious challenges. The ACT government appointed Drumgold. The AFP had a fractious relationship with Drumgold, as laid out over many weeks in public during the Sofronoff inquiry. And a new minister of justice who heads up the ODPP in the ACT won’t relish the prospect of having, as one of their first jobs, the prosecution of the previous director.
That said, if any of these powerful institutions of state turn a blind eye to a possible attempt to pervert the course of justice, then they will be responsible for the darkest chapter in this saga, one that will do the most harm to the administration of justice in the nation’s capital territory.
*************************************************
Global boiling. Ouch!
It’s been quite the week for overblown climate hyperbole and preposterous exaggerations, so we thought we may as well join in the fun: ‘New Ice Age to arrive by summer 2023. Australia prepares for a White Christmas.’ In reality, our own far-fetched prediction is probably more credible than the nonsensical ‘the era of global boiling has begun’ trotted out by the clownish and increasingly toad-like Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Every politician rightly dreads the moment the public stops fearing them or taking them seriously and instead starts laughing at them, and Senhor Guterres certainly toppled over that particular tipping point this week. Sadly, however, his is not a democratically elected position, so it is unlikely he will disappear from our TV screens any time soon. Thus, we must take his prediction seriously, not so much for what damage our ‘boiling’ planet may do to us all, but rather, the incredible damage such asinine rhetoric is doing and will carry on doing to our economic outlook and future prosperity.
You didn’t have to be a climate-denier or even a climate-sceptic to find the Guterres rant risible. But the problem is that such inflammatory climate language is then regurgitated through all channels of the media and fed directly into our schoolchildren’s daily diet of woke disinformation. Most well-meaning but less-politically engaged people and hard-pressed parents tend to presume that the truth about subjects like climate change ‘lies somewhere in the middle’ and are quite happy for others invested in the culture wars to battle it out. However, by constantly ramping up the extremist language, the left wilfully and deceptively shifted the ‘sensible centre’ further and further away from reality. Even one of the head honchos at the IPCC was forced to admit that Guterres’ ‘global boiling’ was wide of the mark. But of course such cautionary notes gain nowhere near the publicity of hysterical fear-mongering.
Full marks as always to Speccie contributor and South Australian Senator Alex Antic for his suggested future alarmist expressions for the UN to excitedly promote when ‘global boiling’ loses its scare factor, which it shall, including ‘Global Climate Inferno’, ‘Mega Universe Heat Death’ and ‘Super Global Spine Chillingly Hot’.
Equally absurd, and linked, was the claim by both Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that their government had ‘saved’ the Great Barrier Reef. Hilaire Belloc would have adored the twisted logic that has the United Nations not declaring the Great Barrier Reef to be in mortal danger as they had been feverishly plotting to thanks entirely to the one-and-a-bit-year-old Labor government having increased the cost of your electricity bills. Or something like that. Here’s a wildly radical and heretical thought: perhaps it was never in danger to begin with. Because maybe the oceans aren’t actually boiling.
In this week’s magazine, Michael Baume exposes just one tiny but incredibly disturbing aspect of where all this madness is leading us to. It was Alan Jones who used to speak of the ‘national suicide note’ that is net zero. But our foolish Energy Minister seems hell-bent on living up to that promise, as he jeopardises our critical relationship with Japan courtesy of his climate dogma and renewables fantasies. As Michael writes, ‘[Our new emissions laws] are of such major concern that not only have Japanese senior ministers already requested flexible measures under the safeguard mechanism for LNG projects supplying Japan, but PM Kishida has made a similar approach to PM Albanese.’
At the same time, Rebecca Weisser reveals that even the net-zero luvvies have added up the carbon numbers and come to the conclusion that offshore wind farms in NSW are a flat no-no.
No hyperbole there.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/global-boiling-ouch/
*****************************************************2 August, 2023
A Greenie who puts his trust in hysteria
He's certainly drunk the Kool-Aid. He really seems to think that one degree of warming over the last century is dangerous change
A Greens senator unleashed on a climate sceptic Liberal National Party rival with a no-holds-barred attack in the Senate on Tuesday night.
In a wild night in Canberra, Nick McKim told Matt Canavan: 'Shut your mouth - people are dying because of... sociopaths like you.'
The angry exchange of views came during a speech where Mr McKim noted: 'This planet has just experienced the three hottest days on record.'
The Tasmanian senator said: 'I'm usually an optimistic person but I just want to say...' - prompting Queenslander Mr Canavan to interject, quipping: 'You hide it well'.
That outraged Mr McKim, who lashed out with an extraordinary verbal assault, erupting: 'Mate, you can shut your mouth.'
That earned Senator McKim a rebuke from Senator Jess Walsh, the acting deputy president of the Senate.
'Senator McKim,' she shouted, as Mr Canavan also interjected using words not clearly picked up by microphones in the chamber.
But Mr McKim was not deterred, and repeated his call for his rival to keep quiet.
'You can shut your mouth... People are dying because of you and sociopaths like you.'
At this point, the chamber exploded into a cacophony of sound, with Dr Walsh struggling to keep control.
'Senator McKim! Order. I have a number of senators on their feet. I don't really need you to be on your feet for me to say that you,' she said, before the ruckus drowned her out.
Moments later, she tried again, saying: 'Senator Canavan! Senator McKim! Order! This is disgraceful behaviour in the chamber. It is disgraceful.
'Now, Senator McKim, I ask you to withdraw your comments about Senator Canavan and resume your speech and, Senator Canavan, I ask that you cease interjecting across the chamber.'
The Greens senator withdrew his initial comments - but then doubled down.
He said: 'I withdraw, and I'm not going to cop interjections from sociopaths like Senator Canavan. I will not cop it and I won't...'
His halfhearted withdrawal earned him another slapdown from Dr Walsh, who told him 'resume your seat' and then asked him again to withdraw his comments.
'I will withdraw, and I will say... that the sociopaths who run fossil fuel corporations on this planet who are literally destroying the lives and the futures of billions of people,' Mr McKim said.
He added that people on both houses of parliament 'have got a lot to answer for (including) death, disease, displacement, starvation, people dying of thirst'.
'Arable farming lands turning into desert and, most likely, billions of people dead by the end of this century and the collapse of the ecosystems that actually support all human life on this planet,' he said.
**********************************************
The ABC is under pressure to explain why one of its camera crews was outside the home of Woodside Energy boss Meg O’Neill just as a group of extremist climate protesters invaded her property in the early hours of the morning
Ms O’Neill on Wednesday called the protest a deliberate attempt to threaten her and her family, as her company said the protesters came with camera crews ready to film the attack on her Perth home.
Police attended Ms O’Neill’s home in the City Beach at 6.45am on Tuesday, with reports indicating two men aged 34 and 31 and a 19-year-old woman had been arrested.
Labor moved swiftly to condemn the protests, with Resources Minister Madeleine King calling the invasion of the energy chief’s home an “extreme act” and not a legitimate protest.
A source has told The Australian that the camera crew was not one of the usual ABC news crews, and there were suspicions it was a team shooting footage for investigative program Four Corners.
A spokeswoman for the public broadcaster did not say why the crew was at the property so early and what prior knowledge it had of the climate extremists' intentions.
The ABC denied any “collusion” with the people who targeted Ms O’Neill and her family.
“A TV crew filmed the protest for a story,’’ the ABC said in a statement. “Any notion that the TV crew was colluding with the protesters is false.’’
The Australian has asked a follow-up question as to whether the crew was collecting footage for Four Corners.
Woodside on Tuesday pointed to the camera crew’s presence to show the home invasion was “an organised and deliberate act designed to intimidate Ms O’Neill and her family’’.
“This is an unacceptable escalation in activity designed to threaten and intimidate by an extremist group which has no interest in engaging in respectful and constructive debate about Woodside’s role in the transition towards a lower-carbon world,’’ a Woodside spokesman said.
“Illegal activity like this only serves to distract from the real work being undertaken to achieve decarbonisation,’’ he added.
Ms O’Neill thanked West Australian police for their swift response in acting to ensure the safety of her family members.
“This was not a ‘harmless protest’,’’ she said. “It was designed to threaten me, my partner and our daughter in our home.
“Such acts by extremists should be condemned by anyone who respects the law and believes people should be safe to go about their business at home and at work.’’
In a statement, the federal Resources Minister said “seeking to intimidate someone in their home or workplace is intolerable”.
“Extreme acts like this are not legitimate protest activity,” Ms King said. “Such acts are violent and intimidating and I condemn it entirely.
“It would be a loss for all of us if Australia were to become the kind of place where public figures needed to surround themselves with security at all times.’’
WA police have not publicly identified those arrested.
Woodside has been targeted in recent times by the Disrupt Burrup Hub group. A member of the group was arrested in June for allegedly setting off a “stench gas” bomb at the company’s Perth headquarters, necessitating evacuation of the building.
The group is protesting the expansion of energy projects on the Burrup Peninsula in WA’s Pilbara region, with Woodside’s Scarborough and Pluto Train 2 projects targeting eight million tonnes a year of new gas from offshore wells starting in 2026.
************************************************
Farmers battle prospect of high-voltage electricity lines on properties as expert's alternative plan rejected
A prominent energy expert has joined landholders in calling for the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Victorian government to scrap plans to build the controversial VNI West transmission line and Western Renewables Link (WRL).
Across the country, landholders are battling the prospect of new above-ground high-voltage transmission lines that authorities say are critical to transporting the influx of renewable energy coming online around the nation.
The Victoria Energy Policy Centre's (VEPC) Professor Bruce Mountain and retired transmission expert Simon Bartlett's report 'No Longer in Transmission' puts forward an alternative plan for transmission in the state.
"I think if VNI West goes ahead, it will be a giant public policy failure," Professor Mountain told 7.30.
"This will be a very grave mistake."
VNI West and WRL are critical parts of the Australian Energy Market Operator's plan to rewire the nation to help transport energy between states as more renewables come online.
The projects would see 500-kilovolt high-voltage transmission lines cut through mostly farmland over a total of 400 kilometres from outer-suburban Melbourne to the New South Wales border with towers as high as 85 metres dotted along the route.
Professor Mountain recently resigned from an advisory role with the Victorian government's rebooted State Electricity Commission.
He told 7.30 the VEPC's alternative to AEMO's transmission plan for Victoria could deliver more renewables cheaper with less impact on landowners.
Professor Mountain's report estimates the total price tag for AEMO's Extended VNI West Plan (which includes the WRL and smaller related projects) could blow out to $11 billion.
According to official figures, the total price for VNI West and WRL is expected to be about $7 billion in total.
The VEPC's report also estimates transmission charge costs in electricity bills could increase by 15 per cent for households and 35 per cent for industrial energy users under AEMO's transmission plan for Victoria.
A map outlining a transmission project in Victoria.
The current transmission line's proposed route.(Supplied)
Under Professor Mountain's proposal, the increase could be limited to 5 per cent for households and 15 per cent for industrial users.
"Essentially, our plan uses the existing Victorian grid upgrades rather than building a whole new trunk line through new territory at a much higher voltage than is commonly used in the state," Professor Mountain said.
"We will have a decentralised electricity supply, we'll have wind and solar production around the state, not just concentrated in one part of the state."
The report also states AEMO's VNI West project would require 1,600 kilometres of new power lines compared to Plan B which is using mostly existing lines.
Professor Mountain said AEMO's transmission plan for the state impacts more than four times as much new land as the alternative solution.
"The only big winner is the developer and owner of the transmission infrastructure, who gets a regulated charge for the assets that they'll build. Everyone else is paying a price. And that is surely not acceptable."
The Victoria Energy Policy Centre's report also argues AEMO's Extended VNI West Plan won't do enough to help Victoria reach its target of 95 per cent renewable energy generation by 2035.
It states its Plan B would carry more renewables.
"If we do not get the new wind and solar capacity to displace coal, we will not be able to close the coal-fired power stations down. It's as simple as that."
The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) rejects the criticisms and alternatives provided by the Victoria Energy Policy Centre's report.
In a statement, AEMO said it maintains the proposed Western Renewables Link and VNI West projects are required to deliver renewable energy to Victorian electricity consumers and across the National Electricity Market at the lowest cost.
"Compared to our proposed projects, Plan B would have detrimental outcomes for more landholders, regional and rural communities and renewable generation investment required to provide reliable and affordable power for all Victorians."
AEMO said VNI West was linked to several transmission projects already underway which included input from 1,500 stakeholders and energy professionals.
"AEMO's initial review of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre report confirms that many of the claims were already addressed using detailed engineering and economic analysis with the authors last year and again more recently remain. This creates ongoing confusion and concern for landholders and communities," the statement said.
AMEO also said Plan B won't sufficiently support renewable generation development in north-west Victoria and would require the demolition of people's home to widen the 1,040km of existing easements and threaten power supply to major regional and rural towns during construction.
AEMO did not reveal how many homes would need to be demolished and in which locations.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-02/calls-to-scrap-vni-west-transmission-line-730/102675146
*************************************************Qld schools’ ban on religious knives deemed by Supreme Court to be racial discrimination and invalid
An old controversy.
Queensland’s weapons legislation barring Sikhs from carrying religious knives on school grounds is racial discrimination and is therefore invalid, the state’s highest court has found.
Sikh man Kamaljit Kaur Athwal has won a fight against the State of Queensland over a provision in the weapons act prohibiting the possession of a knife on school grounds for genuine religious purposes.
Initiated Sikhs are required to wear or possess five articles of faith at all times, including a ceremonial sword known as a kirpan, typically worn sheathed and concealed beneath clothing.
Under Queensland law, there is a reasonable excuse to possess a knife for genuine religious purposes, such as the Sikh faith.
But that does not extend to schools, with the legislation stating: “however, it is not a reasonable excuse to physically possess a knife in a school for genuine religious purposes”.
In 2021, Mr Athwal made an application to the Supreme Court seeking a declaration that the Weapons Act was inconsistent with the Racial Discrimination Act and was therefore invalid.
In September last year, Justice Sue Brown dismissed his application.
But the Court of Appeal has this week overturned the decision, finding the provision directed at Sikhs affected “their exercise of freedom of movement and freedom of religion in a significant way”.
“An initiated Sikh, who may be a student, a parent of a student or a teacher, is given the choice of committing an offence against (the weapons act), never entering a school or contravening the tenets of their religious belief by entering a school without physical possession of their kirpan,” the appeal judges wrote.
“By making provision that is directed at their religion, s 51(5) in its substantive operation provides for Sikhs to enjoy the rights to freedom of movement and freedom of religion to a more limited extent than persons of other ethnic groups.
“No other group finds their freedom of religion or freedom of movement limited in that way, by a law directed to a unique feature of the ethnic group’s religious beliefs.”
The appeal judges set aside the earlier order dismissing Mr Athwal’s application.
A declaration was made that section 51(5) of the Weapons Act 1990 is inconsistent with the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and was therefore invalid under the Commonwealth Constitution.
************************************
1 August, 2023
Cutting off your thumbs to spite your country
This is an important article. It notes the constant nagging attacks on our society from the Left and asks will those criticisms cause young people to think our country is not worth defending? It is clearly a possibility
The truth is that our country is a great triumph of civilization but no media will say that. They would be condemned as "racist" if they did.
The Trump phenomenon shows that at least half of the American population have not bought the negative view of their country preached by the media. One can only hope that there are similar large numbers of unblinded people in Australia
Wallace Breem’s 1970 novel Eagle in the Snow is a really excellent read that I couldn’t recommend more highly, and the work upon which the 2000 film Gladiator was loosely based. This Maximus, a Roman general holding the Rhine before the barbarian migrations of the late fourth century, must shoulder the heavy duty of protecting a civilisation that has lost any conception of itself. He faces young men who have cut off their thumbs to avoid conscription, middle-aged bureaucrats who impede him at every turn seeking to enrich themselves, and old priests who extol the brotherhood of man. ‘Cross the river,’ says Maximus, ‘and find out what your brothers are like.’ I won’t spoil the ending for you; pick it up if you can.
The image of young men severing their own thumbs, rendering themselves incapable of wielding gladius or pilum, left a lasting impression on me, one that was brought recently to mind by an apocryphal story regarding the Ukrainian ambassador. This worthy was asking local high school students who would join the Australian military, should the need arise, and was disappointed by the spattering of hands that appeared. It would seem his concern is well documented: the ADF report that they are struggling to gain recruits and retain soldiers. This is not unique to us down under, as the United States army expects to be twenty thousand recruits short next year. There’s something in these sorts of stories, apocryphal or otherwise, as there are in all the stories we tell ourselves, and we ought to be perhaps a little careful what those stories are. We might consider a little more Thucydides and a little less, well, whatever you receive when you tune in to what our culture presently manufactures.
None of this should cause any eyebrows to rise among those who’ve been paying attention. The schools are the right place to start asking questions and investigating stories, not because the young have any special claim to wisdom – they absolutely do not – but because if you want to know what Australia will look like in the future, that’s where you should look. Those who aren’t here today, as Mark Steyn said, won’t be here tomorrow. Those that are here today are manifestly very different from those who made up the schools even thirty years ago, courtesy of our ill-thought-out and entirely flippant leap into multiculturalism. And as all multiculturalism is premised on the belief, now all but mandatory, that the state of affairs that pre-existed it was irredeemably evil, it’s unsurprising that few want to fight for it, and fewer still want to die for it. Those who do are typically Anglo-Celtic males, whose very existence appears a little problematic according to certain narratives presently in vogue.
We, a nation increasingly propositional in ideation and multicultural in composition, don’t tell the right stories to make the hands fly skyward. All that’s left to love, for the everyman, is ease of living and money to be made, and it doesn’t seem like those are a given anymore, either. On the other hand, the only Australia our elites seem to think matters is the Australia that doesn’t exist yet, an Australia severed from the past and couched in banal progressive sentiments, the Australia imagined by the most fervent university professor, ABC journalist, or member for the Greens. It’s an Australia that could never be born, and even if it could be created, wouldn’t be one worth dying for. The young know this, and this is why their hands do not shoot upwards when asked – why they have, in equivalent terms, cut off their thumbs.
As we tend to address collapsing birthrates, shortfalls in labour or consumption, and the ever-upward valuation of property via opening the valves of endless migration, it’s not unfair to assume answers to our military problems might come from the same source; hence a recent proposal to reimport kanakas, with Austeyr rifles instead of machetes, despite how poorly that went down last time. Hoping for a reimagined version of the foederati – those tribes that were bound to defend Rome but weren’t citizens – to fight our wars might seem a sound plan. After all, Stilicho was a barbarian, and Honorius a Roman. Many Australians from various backgrounds fought bravely in the past, like Billy Sing in Gallipoli, to name only one. But we live in different times now, and the age of the citizen-soldier is gone. The difference then was not merely numbers, but that we gave those characters – as Rome gave Stilicho, even in those darkening days – something to love and aspire to. The ‘citizen’ part of the equation is important, and robust citizenship cannot spring from contempt for a nation’s past.
The truth is that we think we can hold onto the status quo, a status quo that has been predicated on the Anglosphere’s overwhelming advantages, without being prepared to make sacrifices. The fate of those who espouse naive principles in the face of power is that of the Melians in the Peloponnesian War, who badly needed their Dorian brothers across the sea rather than a ‘great mass of words nobody would believe’. That is no argument against principles; rather, an exhortation that we ought to be careful our body politic is composed of strong ones, and not prey to bad ones.
The funeral oration by Pericles, where Thucydides relates that the men of Athens meet danger with a light heart but laborious training, has been thrown about as the best defence of democracy from the ancient world. If one thing could be said of the Athenians, it was that they loved their flawed city-state, and were unselfconscious about it. Even the metics, for whom they threw open their city, were expected to serve, if they could never be citizens by simple matter of course, nor form the mainstay of the trireme crew or the hoplite phalanx. The franchise was alive, and mattered, and we take the word ‘idiot’ from the Ancient Greek for he who was willing to let politics wash over him.
The value of such a spirit is not to be expressed in words, as Pericles exhorted; and we must wonder if our modern spirit, a motley collection of bad principles with no purchase among the young, is worth anything at all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/cutting-off-your-thumbs-to-spite-your-country/
**************************************************Mike O’Connor: I’ve had a gutful of being told by governments what’s good for me
As a child, I would sit for hours with my grandmother on the wooden bench seats circling the main arena at the Ekka and watch the sheepdog trials.
Occasionally, an errant sheep would prop and stubbornly refuse to be intimidated by the dog’s constant urging and cajoling, but in the end, the dog always won and the flock would allow itself to be herded into the pen.
We’ve become like the sheep at the Ekka – constantly herded, urged and cajoled into accepting positions that governments tell us are good for us without bothering to ask us what we think.
The latest victims of herding are Victorians, who with Dodgy Dan Andrews snapping at their heels, have been told that they can’t have a gas stove in their new house.
Anyone with an IQ exceeding their shoe size knows that this will have zero effect on the world’s environment – but don’t argue. Just do as you are told.
Farmers throughout the eastern states are being herded into submission by power companies threatening to compulsorily acquire sections of their land holdings to allow the construction of giant transmission towers on their properties.
The lines could be run underground but this would be more expensive, so sorry, we’re going to trash the value of your property because it’s cheaper for us that way.
Don’t argue. Just get out of the way as we march towards net zero.
Net zero will never happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this but the sheepdogs have worked themselves into an absolute frenzy, racing from one side of the paddock to the other as they herd us into the belief that we can attain the unattainable.
All that is required is a blind acceptance of the absurd.
In the cities and suburbs, we are being herded into the belief that we need taller and taller apartment buildings, crammed wall to wall in defiance of the planning restrictions imposed by neighbourhood development plans to solve the “housing crisis”.
Can you recall a city council election in which the parties campaigned on a platform of promising to ignore planning restrictions, cram as many apartments as possible into any given space and comprehensively ignore any effect on the quality of life of ratepayers so that developers could make lots more money and the council could rake in extra fees and rates?
Neither can I.
Don’t argue. Just roll over and cop it with the council safe in the knowledge that any sheep that refuse to budge will be forced into the pen by the massive expense involved in challenging these decisions in the courts.
The sheepdogs had a great time during Covid, police officers and health officials snapping and snarling at our heels as they herded us into our homes, threatening dire consequences for those sheep who refused to go into the pen in a blatant, nationwide abuse of power.
We are now being gradually herded towards an acceptance of converting place names from English to Indigenous dialects.
Why? Is that what the majority of the population wants? I can’t recall being asked.
The sheep dogs have also barked and wheedled us into enduring and accepting endless welcome-to-country ceremonies.
Why? It’s my country. I don’t need to be welcomed to it. I was born here. My parents were born here. It’s mine and I object to being treated as a stranger in my own home.
The Voice campaign stands out as one of the greatest herding scenarios since the first sheepdog trotted down a gangplank in Old Sydney Town and started harassing terrified sheep way back when.
Much to the surprise of the dogs, however, more than one sheep has stood its ground and refused to be herded into the Yes pen.
This was not supposed to happen. When the dogs snapped at their hind quarters, the flock was supposed to trot into the pen without question.
For daring to stare down the dogs, holding their ground and refusing to be cajoled and bullied, they have been branded as very bad un-Australian sheep.
The extension of government power into our lives, the presumption that we will meekly submit to being told what we must accept without question has been incremental.
We are snowed with faux science, directed to “do the right thing”, toe the line, feel the “vibe”, whatever that is and generally cop whatever Big Brother says is good for us.
Quite frankly, I’ve had a gutful of it.
*************************************************
The ABC is sticking to its wrong call
No admission that they could have got it wrong. They are Leftists and Leftists have a soft spot for Communist regimes so they are still trying to protect China
New claims that America’s leading infectious diseases adviser Anthony Fauci downplayed concerns that Covid-19 originated from a laboratory will not be acknowledged by the ABC’s Media Watch program and its host Paul Barry until a lab leak “proves to be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak”.
Since the pandemic began, the TV presenter has on numerous occasions been highly critical of Sky News host Sharri Markson’s reporting, including concerns in the science and intelligence community that a lab leak was plausible.
A world exclusive by Markson published in The Weekend Australian on Saturday included her interview with Robert Kadlec, former assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the US Department of Health.
Dr Kadlec said that he, Dr Fauci and National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins had discussed how they could “turn down the temperature” on accusations against China during the early days of the pandemic.
Dr Kadlec, in his first ever interview, told Markson that they tried to encourage a group of leading international scientists to reduce speculation about the origins of the virus. In a phone call on February 1, 2020, the scientists discussed concerns that SARS-CoV-2 looked like it might have been genetically engineered.
“When we talked about this in advance of that call, he (Fauci) would just try and see if he could get the scientists to take the temperature down, turn the rhetoric down, to at least find, we’re going to look into this, but we don’t know,” Dr Kadlec told Markson.
The Australian contacted Barry about the latest revelations on the weekend, but he did not respond. However, Media Watch executive producer Timothy Latham responded on his behalf in an email: “As Paul has previously said, if the Wuhan lab proves to be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak, we will update viewers and apologise to Ms Markson for our criticism.”
He included a link to an article The Australian published in 2021 asking Barry if he would acknowledge fresh allegations that were revealed in a Sky News documentary, What Really Happened in Wuhan, presented by Markson.
In a Media Watch segment on May 5, 2020, Barry dismissed Markson’s initial reporting on the origins of Covid-19 and repeatedly used the phrases “conspiracy theories” and “conspiracy theorists”, finishing his segment by saying: “Conspiracy theories like this are so hard to kill.”
He told viewers in the same report: “So how likely is it that the virus escaped from that Chinese lab? Well in short, it’s not.”
Among those to initially refute claims the virus could have originated from a lab leak was the ABC’s health expert Dr Norman Swan who in 2020 said he had “looked into this and other journalists have looked into this as well as scientists and there really is very little evidence”. “It’s on the outer bounds of possibility, but really so unlikely that you could say … it’s not the case,” he said.
However in May 2021 he said “in recent weeks alternate views of the sequencing have emerged which are quite compelling and a growing number of respected scientists are making a good argument”.
An ABC spokesman would not comment on the criticisms of Markson’s reporting and there was no response from chair Ita Buttrose.
It has also been revealed on the weekend, by The Wall Street Journal, that Facebook removed content relating to Covid-19 in response to pressure it received from the Biden administration.
The newspaper’s report included revelations about internal company communications, including emails divulging details of executives of Facebook (whose parent company is Meta) discussing how they handled users’ posts about the origin of a pandemic and the administration was seeking to control the narrative. “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more,” responded a Facebook vice-president in charge of content policy, speaking of the Biden administration. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
****************************************************
New bid to stop killing roos for shoes
The roos will be shot anyways as part of routine culling so what is gained by not using them? They reach plague proportions at times
American politicians are taking another shot at banning shoes made with kangaroo leather after Nike and Puma buckled to animal activists and scrapped using it in its soccer boots.
The Australian government has been fighting back against legislative crackdowns in several US states, based on what it says is the myth that kangaroo harvesting is threatening the iconic native species.
But a bipartisan group of US politicians has now reintroduced their proposed federal ban on the commercial use of kangaroo products, two years after their first effort fell flat.
Republican congressman Brian Fitzpatrick – who has previously predicted the bill would “pass overwhelmingly” in Congress – said it would ensure “that those who exploit these animals in the United States are held accountable”.
His Democratic colleague Jan Schakowsky added: “Over two million kangaroos are killed for commercial purposes each year. As a staunch animal rights advocate, I believe we owe it to these majestic creatures to protect their welfare.”
But the Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia, backed by the federal government, argues that humane and sustainable harvesting is necessary to conserve kangaroo populations and maintain agricultural land.
Nike abandoned using kangaroo leather in March – shortly after rival shoe giant Puma took similar action – as politicians in the company’s home state of Oregon sought to ban it.
While that bill did not proceed, Australian government officials have also been lobbying against similar moves in New Jersey, Arizona and Connecticut.
The state and federal legislation has been spearheaded by Animal Wellness Action and other animal welfare groups, who recently held protests at Adidas stores in Sydney and New York to force the German apparel giant to follow suit.
“In America, we don’t allow this kind of mass commercial slaughter of our native wildlife, and neither should we import wildlife parts and outsource these killing sprees,” Animal Wellness Action president Wayne Pacelle said in a statement.
“The Kangaroo Protection Act will cut off the US market for Australian commercial shooters and global major athletic shoe companies whose supply-and-demand relationship has been driving the slaughter of as many as two million kangaroos a year, including hundreds of thousands of joeys orphaned after their mothers are shot.”
Importing kangaroo products has been illegal in California since 1970 but other states are yet to follow suit.
It was revealed in March that the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry boss Andrew Metcalfe held talks with US officials to reinforce the “sustainability, quality and welfare standards” in the industry.
“The government is tackling misconceptions that harvesting of kangaroos in Australia is inhumane, noting the importance of sustainable, humane management of kangaroos to prevent ecosystem damage and crop loss,” a department spokeswoman said at the time.
************************************
Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
***************************************