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 December, 2023
Why new engine emission rules quietly introduced just before Christmas will change Australia's most popular utes, SUVs and 4WDs forever
This will cause outrage in the country. Country people need their large utes
Australia's bestselling cars like the Toyota HiLux ute, popular SUVs and giant American pick-up trucks will become a thing of the past under new laws mandating strict emission standards.
Transport Minister Catherine King last week announced new cars sold from December 2025 - including four-wheel drives and utes - would be required to comply with European 'noxious emissions standards'.
The pollution-slashing move could force manufacturers to sell European versions of their bestselling cars in Australia to comply with the new Euro 6d rules - meaning fully electric or hybrid versions.
Next generation light cars, SUVs and commercial vehicles being introduced in Australia from December 2025 will all have to comply with the Albanese government's strict climate change requirements.
Existing production models will be allowed to be sold until 2028, but would then be banned unless the petrol or diesel engines were replaced with modern versions that emitted less carbon.
In a statement, Minister King said: 'Following thorough consultation with industry and the community, new versions of new cars – including SUVs and light commercial vehicles – sold from December 2025 will need to comply with Euro 6d noxious emissions standards.'
Cars would pass this rule if they produced less than 162 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, based on the vehicles that have complied with the Euro 6d rules in the EU.
That would mean the Toyota HiLux, Australia's tradie favourite, would no longer be available as a just a petrol or diesel.
Australia's bestselling car overall in 2023 produces 210 grams for every kilometre.
The Ford Ranger - Australia's bestseller during six months of this year - emits 202 grams of CO2 per kilometre.
But next year, Toyota is introducing a hybrid HiLux in Australia while Ford from 2025 be selling a plug-in hybrid version of the Ranger.
Several SUVs fall foul of the Euro 6d rule, including even the small Mitsubishi ASX, with Australian Automobile Association testing showing it produced 186 grams of CO2 per kilometre.
The Hyundai Tucson produced 164g/km while the MG ZS, a regular in the monthly top ten, emitted 174g/km, the same test showed.
The Toyota LandCruiser's future would be in doubt as a large four-wheel drive without a hybrid version, because it puts out 253 grams of carbon per kilometre, a separate analysis by the National Transport Commission found.
The six-metre long Ford F-150 American pick-up truck emits 256 grams of carbon a kilometre, which means it would only survive if the fully-electric Lightning version was imported into Australia.
The EV versions of the Dodge RAM and Chevrolet Silverado would also have to come to Australia to continue being sold at dealerships.
Private imports of even larger pick-up trucks, like the Ford F-350, could also be in jeopardy under these new rules.
But medium hybrid cars like the Toyota RAV4 would pass for now, with this SUV emitting 111 grams per kilometre.
The 2.0 litre petrol version would also get through with Australian Automobile Association testing showing it emitted 155 grams of carbon per kilometre.
Some hatchbacks, however, could be in danger with a late model Hyundai i30 emitting 172 grams per kilometre.
The Toyota Corolla hybrid produced 97 grams per kilometre, compared with 139 grams for the petrol version.
The typical car sold just two years ago would fail to pass the new emission rules.
The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics estimated new vehicles sold in Australia in 2021 emitted 173.6 grams of carbon per kilometre on average, down from 181 grams in 2019.
By comparison, the typical new European car produced 115 grams of CO2/km compared with 169 grams in the US.
A National Strategy on Energy Efficiency in 2009 recommended the introduction of CO2 emission standards for light vehicles.
It is the second measure the Albanese government has introduced in a matter of weeks to crack down on hybrids and less fuel-efficient cars.
The government announced earlier this month that from July 1, 2025, a car selling for more than $76,950 will incur the luxury car tax unless it used less than 3.5 litres for every 100km.
That means a Lexus RX 350h front-wheel drive hybrid, priced from $87,500, would incur a 33 per cent for every dollar above the $76,950 threshold - adding up to $3,481.50 - because it used more than five litres per 100km.
The existing rule allows cars to escape the luxury car tax threshold if they use less than seven litres per 100 kilometres. The new measure is designed to push Australians to consider electric cars.
Like Australia, the EU has a net zero by 2050 target. But unlike Australia, the European Parliament in February passed a law banning the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035.
Even if Australia doesn't copy this approach, large four-wheel drives and utes face extinction within five years unless they are sold as hybrids or fully-electric cars.
From January to November, Australia's three bestsellers - the Toyota HiLux (55,968 sales), Ford Ranger (55,589 sales) and Isuzu D-Max (28,369 sales) - were all available as a diesel.
The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries data also had the LandCruiser at No.7 for the year to date with 24,055 sales.
The fully-electric Tesla Model Y, however, outsold it with 27,418 sales.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12905681/Ute-ban-Australia-engine-emission-rules.html
******************************************************‘Short-Sighted’: Peak Body Criticises Decision to Ban Oil, Gas Development in Lake Eyre Basin
A peak industry association representing Queensland’s minerals and energy producers has criticised the state government for banning new oil and gas development in the country’s largest drainage basin.
The ban came a few days after Queensland Premier Steven Miles assumed the position of the state's leader following the resignation of predecessor, Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Under the ban, the Queensland government will prohibit all future oil and gas production in the Lake Eyre Basin's rivers and floodplains.
However, the ban will not cover existing approved conventional gas developments, and holders of existing petroleum exploration permits can apply for a production lease until Aug. 30, 2024.
Lake Eyre Basin is one of the largest drainage basins in the world. It covers an area of 1.2 million square kilometres, including parts of Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.
Large tracts of the Basin is considered arid, supporting just 60,000 people, with the major land use (82 percent) being for low-density grazing.
It is also well-known for containing significant oil and gas resources.
Following the announcement, Queensland Resources Council CEO Ian Macfarlane criticised the state government for not considering the social and economic impact of preventing further expansion of Australia’s gas reserves.
“Reports this week indicate Australia’s East Coast is facing another gas shortage over the next few years and will rely on Queensland producers to ensure supply to millions of homes and businesses,” he said in a statement.
“Less supply means higher gas prices for Australians already struggling with cost-of-living pressures.
“Unless governments are prepared to allow and support new gas projects to be developed, not only will energy prices continue to climb, but southern states are going to run out of gas.”
The CEO noted that the decision was a blow to the energy sector, which had engaged in good faith with the Queensland government and other stakeholders and was willing to work with them to maintain the highest standards to protect the environment.
“The Queensland gas industry has developed alongside agriculture and other regional industries over the past six decades, supporting regional communities, and providing a benefit to all Queenslanders,” he said.
“There is no reason why the gas industry can’t continue along the same regulated and sustainable path that provides new opportunities for the communities of South West Queensland.”
Mr. Macfarlane also believed the ban would create more policy uncertainty for the resources sector and hinder new investments while impacting the livelihood of local communities relying on oil and gas extraction.
Mr. Macfarlane's remarks come after a June report by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission indicated that Australia’s southern states would likely experience a gas shortfall in 2024.
The consumer watchdog warned that the shortfall risk would remain unless there was considerable transport and storage capacity to deliver Queensland’s surplus gas to those states.
Queensland Government’s Response
Meanwhile, Mr. Miles said the new policy would protect the Lake Eyre Basin for future generations of Queenslanders.
“The changes strike a good balance in preserving the Queensland Lake Eyre Basin region while providing industry with the tools they need to grow and develop,” the premier said in a statement.
Echoing the sentiment, Queensland Environment Minister Leanne Linard highlighted the importance of preserving the Basin.
“Maintaining clean and uninterrupted flow of the waterways in the basin is critical to the survival of the wildlife and the businesses and communities in the region,” she said.
“The Miles government is committed to the ongoing preservation of the ecological and cultural values in the rivers, watercourses and floodplains of the Queensland Lake Eyre Basin and First Nations Peoples’ connection to the land.”
Environmentalist group Lock The Gate welcomed the ban and hoped to see more similar policies from the government.
“Unconventional oil and gas extraction can require thousands of wells to be drilled across a landscape, with each well requiring millions of litres of water for a single frack,” Lock the Gate Alliance national coordinator Ellen Roberts said.
“This sort of development would have decimated the fragile and unique rivers and floodplains of the Channel Country. It would have pushed out existing sustainable industries and wreaked havoc on cultural sites.”
**********************************************
Labor’s family law changes ‘go too far’, says Michaelia Cash
The Coalition is preparing to revamp the Family Law Act to undo Labor’s overhaul amid concern the changes “send a very disturbing message” to Australian families.
The Weekend Australian can reveal the opposition is looking to repeal Anthony Albanese’s changes to family law – including the removal of the presumption of shared parenting in court disputes – if it wins the next election.
Opposition workplace relations spokeswoman Michaelia Cash said Labor’s changes go too far and “simply do not make sense”.
“Labor’s changes to the presumption of equal shared parental responsibility simply do not make sense,” Senator Cash said.
“This was a rule which said that, unless it is unsafe, the starting point is to presume that children benefit where both parents are involved in major decisions about their lives.”
The government last month passed laws to abolish the presumption of shared parental responsibility, which direct a court to apply the presumption that it is in the best interests of a child for the parents to have equal shared responsibilities.
The new laws also slash from 15 to six the “best interest” considerations used by courts when deciding the best parenting arrangements for a child.
But Labor’s changes were criticised by some legal experts, who warned the amendments may take Australia back to a time when mothers were granted primacy in court battles.
Domestic violence advocates welcomed the move, saying the changes were long overdue to stop perpetrators using the family law system and parenting arrangements to prolong conflict and coercive control over shared decision-making.
However, a major 2019 inquiry by the Australian Law Reform Commission did not recommend removal of the presumption of shared responsibilities but proposed the clause be reworded to allow “joint decision-making about major long-term issues”.
Senator Cash said Labor had ignored the “explicit recommendations of Australia’s leading law reform body”, and warned the changes “send a message to the courts that parliament no longer considers it beneficial for both parents to be involved in decisions about their children’s lives”.
She also criticised Labor’s removal of the word “meaningful” from the Act, arguing the change sent a clear message to the courts that it was no longer important to look at the benefits of a meaningful relationship between a child and their parents.
The Weekend Australian understands the policy has not been taken to shadow cabinet but it is looking to overturn the changes to bring the laws in line with the ALRC review recommendations.
The opposition is concerned the changes will lead to more delays and higher rates of litigation for families, drawing out the cost and pain for separating couples.
Family law expert Patrick Parkinson said he welcomed the opposition’s interest in producing a better-balanced and fairer set of provisions for parents who have not engaged in serious violence.
Professor Parkinson, a key adviser to the Howard government that amended the Act in 2006 following lobbying from fathers’ groups, warned Labor’s changes were too heavily focused on dealing with violent perpetrators rather than serving the population as a whole.
“I think the law that the government has passed is very imbalanced and doesn’t adequately support the role of both parents in children's lives when it is beneficial for them,” he said. “It is very focused on the issue of violence to the detriment of other issues the courts should consider.”
But Griffith University Law School senior lecturer Zoe Rathus said the shared parental responsibility provision had created a lot of confusion and had been poorly understood in the community. She said the provision was highly problematic and caused significant difficulties for victims of family violence.
However, Ms Rathus expressed some concern that rigid guardrails within the law around equal responsibility had been removed and there may be an information vacuum as the courts and community adjusts to the change.
She also said it was impossible to know whether there would be more confusion but hoped judges could use innovative ways to ensure children have meaningful relationships with both parents in cases where it is safe to do so.
“There were previously very constrained pathways … judges had to follow and now it’s all gone, and there is no discussion for when you might make an order for joint decision-making and there’s no mention of equal time.”
***************************************
Labor tips scales in favour of plaintiffs and their lawyers with sexual harassment bill
The Australian Labor Party sure knows how to wish its friends a happy new year. If there were any doubt about Mark Dreyfus’s place in the plaintiff lawyers’ Hall of Fame, his latest gift to them puts it to rest.
Labor’s Attorney-General has introduced a bill giving employees who claim their employers have sexually harassed or discriminated against them a free pass to trot off to court. Under Dreyfus’s proposed bill, claimants who lose in court won’t have to pay their bosses’ legal bills unless the claim is so ridiculous that a judge labels it vexatious. And judges are not known for spotting even the most obvious vexatious claims.
Opposition legal affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash rightly points out that this straps a rocket booster to the litigation industry. The ALP’s old friends at firms such as Maurice Blackburn and Slater & Gordon will be licking their lips with new year glee. No more worries about meeting budgets or winning cases – if your billings are down, just find a claimant who has even the slightest sniff of a claim and bingo, billings are up.
Employers who thought the cult of disgruntled employees demanding “go away” money had at least arrived at a plateau will realise it is about to hit the sunlit uplands of litigation nirvana.
It’s not uncommon – indeed, it’s almost standard operating procedure – for employers to face fake claims of workplace harassment from an underperforming employee. It’s bad enough for big business, but what about small businesses or not-for-profits such as religious schools? They have little choice but to pay even a bogus claim as soon as it arrives in the inbox for fear of mountainous legal bills.
There are at least two rich veins of ALP policy history being mined here. The first is that old standby of Labor folklore – cash for policy. The second is a slighter newer tradition of trashing the legal fundamentals underlying the rule of law.
Cash for policy is the core of the ALP business model and works at many levels. We saw it in full swing from the outset of the Albanese government when Assistant Treasurer and Financial Services Minister Stephen Jones tried to sneak through regulations that would have concealed the amounts of money industry super funds paid to the unions.
The biggest policy thankyou to the unions that fund the ALP came in the form of industrial relations reforms such as redefining casual employment to the edge of extinction, the “same job, same pay” laws that aimed to gut the use of labour hire by BHP and Qantas and vastly increased powers and privileges for union delegates.
The Albanese government said an early thankyou to plaintiff law firms when, soon after being elected, it relaxed the rules governing litigation funding. Happily for class action law firms, Jones, early in his tenure, released litigation funders from the need to hold financial services licences. Prominent donors to the ALP such as Maurice Blackburn would no doubt have been suitably grateful.
Now comes this further boon to plaintiffs and their lawyers. It will indeed be a happy new year for them.
In some respects, the second trend is more worrying. In Australia, the usual expectation is that “costs follow the event”. In other words, the loser pays the winner’s costs. This rule creates in-built sanctions against bringing unworthy actions, offering society at least some protection from bottom-feeding lawyers.
Abolishing this rule, even in limited ways, guarantees that more disgruntled employees will try their luck at litigation lotto. Worse, the proposal to protect complainants against costs orders is evidence of something more – an increased desire by the Labor government to place a finger on the scales of justice to tilt them against unpopular defendants.
This government regards all employers with suspicion. Whether you are a family running a small business or BHP, this government wants to multiply claims against you as an instrument of policy.
BHP may be able to afford it – indeed, BHP’s army of lawyers, HR people and compliance officers will rejoice at the chance to engage in more empire building to deal with these rotten measures. BHP’s boneheaded embrace of the Albanese government is already coming back to bite it, but it is protected from the consequences of its board’s folly by the undeserved but seemingly endless rise of the iron ore price.
Small businesses do not have the buffer of such dumb luck. They already have to take a deep breath before hiring new staff, knowing what paperwork burdens await them, and will now have another category of claims and claimants to worry about. How does this help productivity – except at law firms?
The constant drip of measures reversing the onus of proof, measures making life tough for unpopular classes of defendant and measures encouraging speculative claims undermines confidence in our legal system.
When NSW judge Robert Newlinds recently called for an end to the “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” referral of baseless rape claims to courts, he touched a nerve already exposed by similar claims.
In August this year I wrote about the demonstrably false claims of domestic violence brought against boxer Harry Garside. Except that Garside had the good fortune, or foresight, to record a critical interaction with his accuser, this decent and somewhat quirky young man would have lost a promising career to a claim totally lacking in merit. Making it easier to launch legal actions is no guarantee of justice – indeed, the opposite may be true.
Dreyfus may argue, though he tabled no empirical evidence in support of this view, that measures to turbocharge claims of harassment and discrimination may help a claimant who would not otherwise get legal assistance.
Mind you, even Kate Jenkins, on whose Respect@Work report the Dreyfus proposal was based, did not go as far as the Dreyfus proposal. Jenkins recommended a hard cost-neutrality approach in line with the Fair Work Act where parties bear their own costs unless the claim was vexatious or unreasonable.
Given the voracious appetite of lawyers and litigation funders to find and run new claims on a no-win, no-fee basis, or similar, this now familiar Dreyfus overreach is even more dubious. There is no justice in turbocharging an inevitable torrent of “pay me to go away” claims and adding another Labor brake on productivity.
Centuries of legal experience have told us the right balance is to allow costs to follow the result. The Albanese government’s desire to ring in the new year by giving presents to its friends is no reason to ignore the wisdom of the ages.
Dreyfus’s ill-conceived changes are also a thankyou to big Australian companies and their boards for being stupid, for keeping their head down and thinking Labor wouldn’t come for them.
What fools these highly paid executives and board directors were – and are. Almost all of them signed on to Albanese’s signature policy of a constitutionally entrenched voice even before there was any wording around it. For months and months they flaunted their faux virtue over a policy that would not help them or their shareholders one iota – a policy that was overwhelmingly rejected at the referendum because ordinary Australians understood what was at stake. This stand of corporate Australia was the biggest single act of collective corporate negligence in many, many years.
It was made much worse by the fact that concurrently these same big companies ignored the larger and more real risk of Labor’s workplace policies being legislated with the help of the corporate-hating Greens – polices that directly hurt companies, big and small. Their negligence is economy destroying. And their public whinging now about Labor policies should be greeted by Peter Dutton with a cold shoulder.
The Opposition Leader should fashion himself as the saviour of small business and leave those people on big corporate boards to live with the consequences of misusing their power.
************************************
28 December, 2023
Left/Right policy switches
TIMOTHY LYNCH notes below that what were once conservative policies have become Leftist and vice versa. So is there any condistency in ideologies? There is but it is not at the policy level. The lasting Left/Right identities are at the psychological level. The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger. Applying those attitudes to differing life circumstances will produce different policy preferences
The first woman I ever loved was an eco-feminist. She was radicalised by the 1984 British miners’ strike, listened to Billy Bragg on a C90 cassette tape, marched for women’s rights, admired communist East Germany and refused on principle to visit the US. In the 33 years since she dumped me, I don’t think she ever has.
In those decades, the left of which she was a proud and, I thought, typical member has been transformed.
Barbara (name changed) would now march not to keep coalmines open but to close them. Bragg would be too old/white male/working class (and thus need decolonising). The women’s rights marches Barbara joined in the 1980s she would now condemn as anti-trans. Only her anti-Americanism – the second most durable hatred on the left, after anti-Semitism – would endure.
The right has switched, too. Not as completely as the left but in important ways we often elide. This transposition of left and right conditions much of our contemporary politics but goes mostly unremarked.
In the ’80s, the Conservatives effectively closed the British coal industry. Barbara sent the picketing men blankets and goodwill. Today, “beautiful, clean coal” (Donald Trump’s phrase) is deified by those on the right. It speaks to man’s independence from the forces of cold nature. Scott Morrison held aloft a lump in parliament.
In the 2020s, it is the left that has assumed the four-decade-old Conservative position.
In Australia, Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen vilify coal. Like Margaret Thatcher and Ian MacGregor, Thatcher’s head of the National Coal Board, Labor is plotting to throw every miner out of work.
Then, the right stood for middle-class values: marriage, family, low taxation, strong defences. Now, Australian Liberals trade on their working-class bona fides. In the US, Republicans tell defenestrated coalminers that they will be their voice. Democrats blame them for climate change. Barbara wept with the injustice of Thatcher’s assault on mining communities. Hillary Clinton now derides them as deplorables.
The right stood against the sexual revolution, free love and the consequences of the pill. Now it is the left that polices sex. Brittany Higgins, a young conservative woman (at least until Network Ten got to her), has become a poster child of the left’s obsession with sexual misconduct. The sex re-education programs on every university campus, warning of the perils of physical intimacy, are mandated by progressives, not by conservatives.
It used to be the religious right that told us to avoid sex. Now it is the cultural left. It was conservatives who criticised feminism. Now it is trans activists on the left. Indeed, it is Liberal women (such as Moira Deeming) who have paid the highest price for upholding a traditional conception of women’s rights. Many left-wing feminists have gone missing in action.
The left-right transposition is especially evident when it comes to race. It was small-C conservatives (often southern Democrats) in the US who wanted to maintain racial distinctions. Now it is the left that upholds race as the basic determinant of societal relations.
Conservative segregationists scoffed at Martin Luther King’s vision of a colourblind constitution. Now it is the left that condemns the reverend for his colour-blindness. We should hire, fire, promote and condemn based on race. MLK, left-wing anti-racists now tell us, was guilty of “content of character racism”.
Yes campaigners for the Indigenous voice wanted race written permanently into the Australian Constitution. No campaigners, representing most conservative voters, wanted it written out. When I was growing up near Leicester, then and still one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, the far right demanded rights for indigenous Brits. In modern-day Australia, it is the left that makes the equivalent claim for First Nations people.
In Britain, asserting “indigenous rights” is racist. Here it is anti-racist. I have never been able to hear an acknowledgment of country here without thinking how bizarre it would sound in the English Midlands. “Sovereignty was never ceded!” sounds like an anti-EU Brexit slogan.
Why this ideological transposition? Losing wars changes the loser. And the left lost the biggest in its history in 1989.
My year with Barbara began the night the Berlin Wall fell (the other 9/11: November 9). We drank Blue Smirnoff, she in bemused sorrow, me in joyous irony; vodka was one of the few things the Soviet Union did well.
That night, the left lost the key economic argument of the 20th century: command economies don’t work, free-market ones do. People crave the opportunities of the latter. They will flee the former when given the chance.
My bearded university lecturers spent the ensuing years in a state of deep agitation. For many, the fall of communism coincided with their own midlife crises. It was wonderful. Today, zealously held but weak arguments are protected by speech codes and de-platforming. Then, men and women who had backed the Soviet project were subject to debate. Many did not like it.
The game plan thereafter was to establish a leftist catechism, grounded in a cultural revolution, the challenging of which would be heresy.
This “long march through the institutions”, as Rudi Dutschke, the young disciple of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, described it, is reaching some sort of destination now. And what a scene of tedium and enervation it is.
Instead of debating big questions, we fly rainbow flags. Safe spaces have taken precedence over dangerous ideas.
When class war didn’t work, new kinds of oppression, to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones, were found.
Climate, race and gender have replaced class as the source of left-wing fervour. These wars have been waged much more effectively. Their dialecticism – you are with us or against us, anti-racist or racist, pro-trans or transphobic – has enabled their colonisation of social media.
Marx claimed class war was inevitable. It proved not so. But culture war may well be. The US has been in a protracted one since Roe v Wade in 1973. Australia is flirting with its own version because of the voice debacle.
Climate denialism, structural racism, rape culture and transphobia. Collectively, these progressive priorities now have the quality of crisis. They are spectres haunting the West, to again adapt Marx’s rhetoric. Their negation now mobilises whole campuses and workplaces. Denying their salience, let alone standing against them, is hard to impossible.
In the US, if you want a university job, you will likely have to affirm, in writing and at interview, your contribution to their fighting. Australia is not quite there but we are inching closer. It is one of the forms of American cultural imperialism to which we are most susceptible.
I don’t know what Barbara would make of this transformation of the left. Sadly, dear reader, finding out would be a research project too far for me. I suspect she would be in sympathy with some of it. But much of it she would not recognise as the natural evolution from her 1989 platform.
She did teach me something vital, a lesson too few on the right imbibe. Those on the left are not bad people. They are not evil. But they are naive. They insist on realities that are fantasies. They seek final solutions to problems insoluble. They imagine better worlds while creating worse ones.
************************************************
It’s an underdog eat underdog world in the Sunshine State
In a post-Christmas press conference on Tuesday, Queensland’s shiny new Premier, Steven Miles, ducked and dodged a few questions on polling before leaving to see a man about a dog. Not just any dog. An underdog.
Nine months out from an election, the 46-year-old has decided that he and his government are “underdogs”. Taken literally, this means Miles believes Labor is unlikely to win the state election on October 31.
A poll conducted by UComms for The Courier-Mail, the first of its kind since Miles became Premier, shows Labor’s dire position has not changed since Annastacia Palaszczuk tapped the mat on December 10.
Outside Brisbane where it has been raining cats and dogs, the Labor Party appears even more on the snout. Thus begins the Premier Miles’s vainglorious descent into mathematical probabilities and animal metaphors.
Almost anything can happen in a two-horse race but, by definition, only horses can win. Dogs cannot, but the underdog is somehow a chance against the odds.
Why the political obsession with underdog status? Why is there perceived value in politics entering a contest as the least likely candidate or party to win? What potential advantage might be gained by portraying oneself as the ugliest cur in the pet shop?
Is Miles barking up the wrong tree or did the underdog eat his homework? He is desperately hosing down expectations after enjoying another oft-used political metaphor, the honeymoon.
Miles’s honeymoon was so short it made Britney Spears and Jason Alexander, who entered into a state of holy matrimony for just 55 hours in 2004, look like a breeding pair of rainbow lorikeets.
Labor sources were saying as early as May that Palaszczuk would be gone by Christmas and so it proved. In August Labor kingmaker and United Workers Union secretary Gary Bullock gave a “no comment” response to a question on whether he believed Palaszczuk should take Labor to the next election, and the end for the three-time election winner was nigh.
By any measure it was unseemly, with the UWU and the Australian Manufacturers Workers Union not only calling the shots but being seen to call the shots. Labor’s Queensland caucus is little more than a rubber stamp. Bullock and others might argue they don’t run Queensland but it is evident they pick the people who do and tell them how to do it.
Obviously, winning four elections in a row in Queensland is a Himalayan task, but replacing a winning premier with one who classifies himself as an underdog is not exactly the gold standard in succession management.
In 2019, Scott Morrison said it was “fairly clear” he and the Coalition were the underdogs to win that year’s federal election and we all know what happened there. As the votes rolled in on election night, Morrison eschewed canine symbolism and pronounced his victory “a miracle”.
He laid claim to being the underdog again last year but found himself outdogged by Anthony Albanese, who spent much of the campaign referring to himself and his party as the one true underdog. The federal election last year was a battle not only for the hearts and minds of voters but also a dogfight to prove who was the mangiest, puniest mutt on the block.
It’s unsurprising therefore that the underdog won, but then it is equally obvious that another underdog lost. Therein lies a statistical anomaly that provides no strong evidence that underdogs, by sporting definition outgunned, outsmarted and outmuscled, find themselves by some weird trick of the universe standing atop the podium.
But wait. Ahead of the Aston by-election in April, deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley clamoured to assume underdog status despite the fact the last time an opposition had conceded a seat to a government in a by-election was 100 years ago.
“So the Liberal Party will start this (by) election race as the clear underdog, we know that,” Ley said.
The Libs lost the seat with a neat 6 per cent swing against them.
Political communications remain mired in coded euphemism. In political terms an underdog is a political party that believes it is about to be taken to the cleaners and its parliamentary members understand it at a deep, instinctive, cellular level but lack the honesty to say it out loud.
Assuming underdog status in politics is becoming tiresome, a hackneyed regurgitation of language that made little sense when it was first used and makes even less now.
Surely we can do better than underdog. Where are the dark horses, the longshots? What ever happened to the rank outsider battling the odds? Where are the Davids bringing Goliaths to their knees? Where are the Bradburians who triumph by being the last man standing at the finish line? Let’s hear some Cinderella stories – the former greenkeeper out of nowhere about to become the Masters champion etc.
Winning four elections would be a remarkable feat. But Premier Miles has no right to refer to himself as an underdog. He has the keys to the state Treasury, with all the largesse therein to spread around. Roll out the barrel. Put some pork on your fork. He has access to media and news coverage that his opponent can only dream of. He has the ability to drive a political agenda, to shape policy discussions in Queensland.
Instead he clings to a form of passive victimhood. By the look of his polling he seems not to understand one other less well known rule of politics – that every dog does not have its day.
Not to mention that there’s a fine line between an underdog and just a dog.
**************************************************
Industrial relations reforms will threaten jobs, says Kmart managing director Ian Bailey
Ian Bailey, the managing director of the nation’s largest department store chains Kmart and Target, says new industrial relations reforms will neither reduce complexity in the workplace nor deliver a kick to productivity in Australia.
Instead Mr Bailey says the federal government’s laws could threaten employment growth.
Participating in the The Australian’s 2024 CEO Survey, Mr Bailey said customers, from high-income earners to low-income households, were changing their shopping habits to reflect the rising cost of living.
He expected that in the year ahead the Australian economy would experience a small increase in unemployment and immigration would stabilise or even reduce slightly, which would offset the decline in individual spending levels and consumer expenditure tightening in 2024.
In the wake of the federal government just before Christmas winning legislative support for labour hire changes, new rights for union delegates and the criminalisation of wage theft following a surprise deal between the government and the Senate crossbench, Mr Bailey said other reforms on the agenda could do more harm than good.
“Much-needed industrial relations reforms are currently being contemplated. Unfortunately, the current proposed reforms will do little to reduce complexity in an already complex system, nor will they contribute to increased productivity in the wider economy – both of which are very much needed,” Mr Bailey told the survey.
“Undertaken correctly, we can return to an environment where effective bargaining between team members and employers delivers beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders, which should always be our starting point.
“As society and customer behaviour changes, this is important for businesses to evolve effectively.”
Mr Bailey underlined the importance of industrial relations reforms that also maintained flexibility in the workplace and for employers.
He said taking a casual job at Kmart or Target after school or while working through university or TAFE was how many Australians began their career – and it was a path that created economic opportunity for a diverse mix of people from across the full socio-economic spectrum.
“What we don’t want to see is reform that ends up resulting in fewer people being employed because we can’t offer the same flexibility or choice to team members,” he said.
“Casual positions are common in retail because they provide the flexibility needed for both the team member and the business.
“What’s important to us is ensuring that team members can still have the right to choose – at the same time as having clear and fair pathways for a team member to request a casual conversion to a permanent position. That balance is an important and constructive principle that is worth the investment of effort in getting right.”
Key Senate crossbenchers have declared the government’s changes to casual employment and the gig economy must not add more red tape for small business, as employers prepare to seek new amendments to Labor’s industrial relations bill.
Ahead of the government seeking to pass the second part of its Closing Loopholes Bill from February, Senator Jacqui Lambie said she would spend most of early January going over the workplace law changes “with a fine-tooth comb”.
“My worry with the more complex parts of the legislation is that our economy is fragile, and changes to casualisation and the ‘gig’ economy need to be carefully considered,” Senator Lambie said.
Turning to the broader economy, Mr Bailey said higher interest rates combined with inflation have had a “material impact on consumers” and many were experiencing these dynamics for the first time.
For these and other shoppers across the income spectrum they were focused on maintaining their lifestyles in the face of tougher economic conditions,” Mr Bailey said.
“With mortgage repayments and rent becoming a much larger cost, consumers are becoming increasingly creative to maintain the lifestyle they aspire to. In this context, value has become and will continue to be a critical driver for consumer spending. We are seeing this behaviour across all income levels in retail, which demonstrates that these same drivers are important for the vast majority of Australians.
“We are undoubtedly in a period of significant disruption due to the cost of living pressures facing Australian households, but with disruption comes the opportunity for significant innovation.
“New business models will emerge finding new ways to deliver value to customers and there is potential for material market share gains and losses.”
Of the national ambition to meet 2030 targets for a 43 per cent reduction in baseline emissions Mr Bailey said a successful energy transition would demand unprecedented levels of collaboration between governments, consumers and industry to meet commitments under the Paris Agreement.
“We all must play our part in that. We know this is an issue that matters to our customers, and our communities want to see real action on climate,” he said.
“Kmart is committed to achieving net-zero emission from our own operations from 2030, and 100 per cent of the electricity used in our own operations will be from renewable sources by July 2025.
“That will come from reducing energy use and using more energy efficient technologies across our stores and distribution centres, working with landlords to generate more energy from behind-the-metre solutions like solar panels, but also looking for ways to collaborate and create demand for greener services in our facilities, such as airconditioning systems with a lower emissions footprint.”
As for the contentious issue of staff working from home or requiring them to come back into the office, Kmart and Target was finding the right balance between flexibility and ensuring staff weren’t isolated at home, he said.
But Mr Bailey expected that workers would spend more time in the office in 2024.
“One of the positive things that came out of the pandemic was the opportunity to set a new operating rhythm – and facilitate greater flexibility amongst Australian workplaces,” Mr Bailey said.
“We also know that flexible work practices have a positive impact on diversity and inclusion, notably increasing engagement with female leaders and emerging talent. Equally, the isolation that can occur for those who work from home frequently is a real problem for mental health as well as the essential skill development required to progress careers.
“2024 will see an increase in the amount of time spent in the office and a greater clarity of the long-term ramifications of high levels of working from home for both individuals and businesses.”
**************************************************
Problematical aged care "reforms": Expensive "mandates"
The residential aged care sector has greatly increased its use of short-term contract workers in a bid to fulfil Anthony Albanese’s stringent staffing reforms, rapidly escalating the cost burden on aged care providers and threatening their viability.
Providers’ reliance on expensive agency workers has quadrupled, with externally contracted staff employed by a third party now delivering 7.5 per cent of total direct care hours worked, compared with just 1.8 per cent in 2019.
The aged care industry is warning Labor’s push to get more nurses into residential homes is a “farce” and has become a “multimillion-dollar burden” for large providers which is focused on box ticking rather than improving the livelihoods of elderly residents.
The new figures emerged as workplace relations expert Andrew Stewart warned providers could be disadvantaged under the proposed industrial relations reforms as they would have less flexibility in managing their workforce.
Under the bill expected to come before parliament next February, Mr Stewart said some of the temporary workforce would have to be hired permanently, leading to increased insurance costs and superannuation payments.
Despite the Prime Minister’s promise before the May 2022 election to fix the aged care sector, The Australian can reveal a University of Technology Sydney report found Labor’s nursing targets were worsening the sector’s financial viability, with providers forced to pay up to 34 per cent more to recruit nurses.
The research conducted by UTS Ageing Research Collaborative before Labor’s staffing requirements were brought in in July also found only 45 per cent of homes were meeting the rule, well below the government’s figures of 86 per cent. Only a fifth of residential aged care facilities were meeting the direct care minutes target at the end of last financial year, just three months before the laws’ came into effect in October.
The report noted differences between the Department of Health and Aged Care and UTS figures might be because the university based its figure on quarterly data while the government’s were based on monthly reports.
The sector is scrambling to implement a suite of reforms including mandated minutes of care per resident, quality and safety standards, and full-time nursing requirements as it adjusts to a new funding model brought in last year as recommended by the aged care royal commission.
The overhaul comes as financial troubles plague the sector, with the latest figures from the Quarterly Financial Snapshot of the Aged Care Sector revealing 66 per cent of private providers were operating at losses.
On average, the financial position of homes had deteriorated, with homes losing $19.56 per resident per day at the end of last financial year compared with earning $2.51 per resident per day in 2019.
Residential facilities’ expenses increased higher than forecast, with the report noting administration costs surged by 14 per cent as providers raced to comply with the government’s new rules.
The new figures have prompted providers to criticise the government’s push to get more nurses into aged care homes as “a farce”. Aged Care Industry Association chief executive Peter Hoppo warned Labor was “fixated on counting minutes rather than reporting on outcomes”.
“It is extremely disappointing that, despite so much thought and effort going into improving aged care, we now have organisations fixated on counting minutes rather than reporting on outcomes,” Mr Hoppo said.
“We know that thousands more registered nurses are needed for providers to be able to meet their mandatory targets, and that number is only going to grow, which makes the whole situation a farce.”
Aged care provider Whiddon’s chief executive, Chris Mamarelis, warned the sector was now largely dependent on labour hire arrangements to meet 24/7 nursing targets and mandated care minutes, as he questioned why providers had to pursue a legislated target rather than improved care outcomes for residents.
Mr Mamarelis said Whiddon, which runs 19 homes mostly across NSW, paid 50 per cent more for agency staff but could pay up to 80 per cent in regional centres.
“Continued use of agency staff places more pressure on already-stretched resources, requiring ongoing on-boarding and training,” Mr Mamarelis said.
“For large providers, this is a multi million-dollar burden, remembering that we are essentially 100 per cent funded by the federal government.”
A spokeswoman for Aged Care Minister Anika Wells said the government’s figures showed 88 per cent of facilities had a registered nurse on site at all times and that the UTS report was based only on a sample of providers rather than data from 97 per cent of aged care facilities. The government said it was committed to reducing the sector’s reliance on agency staff and believed its $11.3bn wage rise for aged care workers would help.
A government taskforce, chaired by Ms Wells, is scrutinising ways to make the sector more sustainable and has flagged support for making wealthier Australians pay more for their care. The UTS report welcomed the taskforce but warned “the transparency of its processes fell short of best practice”.
Opposition health and aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston called on the government to release a comprehensive care workforce strategy to address significant staffing challenges and help providers comply with tough regulations.
“Whilst this Labor government is on Christmas holidays, more and more aged care homes are going into the red despite providers desperately working around the clock to try and comply with expedited regulations that are forcing them into further financial difficulties,” Senator Ruston said. “This government promised to change the aged care sector, but over the past year we have seen 40 aged care homes forced to close, more than $2bn wiped from the aged care budget, home-care reforms pushed out to 2027 and a workforce shortage of 5122 registered nurses.”
Aged care expert Paul Sadler backed the figures produced by the University of Technology Sydney rather than the government’s targets. “We’ve seen a massive increase in agency workers in residential aged care and home care which has really been throughout the period of Covid then its continued to go up with the new staffing requirements,” Mr Sadler said.
************************************
27 December, 2023
P-plater loses license over little-known rule
A P-plater has lost her licence after being fined for using her mobile phone as a GPS.
Chiqui Eseque was pulled over by NSW Police on May 20, 2022, after officers noticed her car's headlights were not turned on. Officers noticed her phone was placed on a hands free phone holder inside her car showing a map on the screen.
Learner and provisional licence holders under NSW law, are not permitted to use their phone at all while driving - even if it's just for directions.
The law catches many drivers out because there are no restrictions on L and P-plate drivers using a dash board GPS device.
Eseque was charged with using a mobile phone while she was driving.
However she fought the charge arguing she was just using it for directions and that there was no SIM card in the phone. Magistrate Hugh Donnelly found Eseque not guilty of the charge as the phone could not make or receive calls because it wasn't connected to a mobile network.
'I find in this case that I am to accept that the definition of a mobile phone just cannot be anything, there has to be some limitation to what the expression means,' Magistrate Donnelly said. 'This is a case where the phone itself, there was evidence of having no SIM card.'
The ruling however was overturned after the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) appealed against the decision and brought the case before the NSW Supreme Court in December.
Justice Monica Schmidt ruled last week that Eseque broke the law despite the phone not having a SIM card.
'A communicative capacity is not required in order for a user to look at everything that can be displayed on such a phone, as the rules recognise,' Justice Schmidt said.
'It cannot sensibly be concluded that a mobile phone only becomes one when a SIM card is placed into it and ceases being one, whenever such a card is removed.'
Eseque was ordered to pay the DPP's costs.
Learner, P1 and P2 drivers are not permitted to use a mobile phone under any circumstances in most states and territories.
Motorists can only use a mobile phone if it's mounted to a phone holder or can be used hands free.
Drivers in NSW who have a full license can only use a mobile phone if it's hand free or in a phone holder.
Motorists in Victoria face a $545 fine and a loss of four demerit points for illegally using a mobile phone.
Those in Queensland face a massive $1,161 and a loss of four demerit points. Learner and P1 drivers under the age of 25 in the sunshine state are not permitted to use a mobile phone under any circumstances.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12900583/P-plater-mobile-phone-GPS.html
*******************************************After my mum’s death, I couldn’t believe what the bank did to my 93-year-old dad
My mother died recently, leaving my 93-year-old father, who had relied on her to do his internet banking, all alone. It’s not like he could easily pop into the bank either. His local branch has closed, and his nearest one is 38 kilometres away, and opens only on weekday mornings.
What’s more, without Mum to drive him to the station, the train journey is nigh-on impossible.
But Dad, ever keen to do the right thing, went all the way to the bank to tell them his wife had died. And what did they do as a result? A day later, without any warning, they locked him out of his online account.
There’ve been many people, over the years, who’ve described Australian banks as bastards. Today, they make it absolutely impossible not to agree.
We all know about the big four’s cash earnings hitting a record $32.5 billion this year. Meanwhile, staff cutbacks have reached a new high and phone helplines, the only route left to many customers, have extended to incredible wait times. I sat for two hours listening to dismal music on repeat before finally giving up on the attempt to have his access unlocked.
Indeed, the Australian Customer Experience Professionals Association found just in August that the performance of the bank call centres of our main retail banks was less than 26.7 per cent effective – the worst result of any business sector.
All this has a huge human cost. Go to any remaining bank branch in Australia, and the scene will be exactly the same: queues of forlorn elderly people, who haven’t been brought up with computers, waiting gloomily in line in understaffed offices to see stressed-out, overworked and impatient tellers.
As the banks race zealously towards a cut-price, online future, a big tranche of their loyal – yet not so technologically literate customers – are left behind; out-of-touch, voiceless and, as a result, often utterly stripped of power, confidence and the capacity for self-determination.
Dad is careful with his money, as people of that generation are, and he looks after it closely. But he paid dearly for his conscientiousness in telling the bank his joint account holder was no more.
Now, distressed that he can no longer have us show him his account on the internet, check the money going out and coming back in, he has no idea what to do. Hours on the helplines eventually yielded the advice that I should go physically into a bank branch.
So I went into the city, as my nearest branch has also closed, only to be told they couldn’t talk to me because my father wasn’t there – despite all my power of attorney documents. I explained he didn’t live in Sydney, but that also fell on deaf ears.
I was told to phone another number. When that was finally answered, I was told they couldn’t speak to me because my father’s account was private – forget those POA papers.
So what to do next? Who knows? Do we just wait and see and hope that one day they might sort out the mess and miraculously unlock his account, so he can reclaim a semblance of his independence?
Or do we keep bashing our heads against a brick wall in the hope that the sight of all the blood might stir someone, anyone, to action?
Every teller and phoneline person I’ve so far spoken to, always expresses their sympathy and regret that my mother, and his wife, has passed away. I struggle not to tell them, however, that we don’t want their sympathy. We just want them to stop being such bastards.
*********************************************
Treasury’s 2023 report card leaves little to boast about
Needless to say, the year has been a challenging one for many Australians, particularly those with large mortgages.
The Reserve Bank of Australia lifted the cash rate on five occasions, taking the cash rate to 4.35 per cent. This figure is still low compared with most developed economies. Note also that our cash rate is lower than the current inflation rate, which is 5.4 per cent – another international point of difference.
Notwithstanding the restrictive action of the RBA, there was no recorded recession affecting the Australian economy, defined as consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Having said this, there were three quarters of negative per capita GDP growth, which in turn reflected the relative anaemic growth in combination with strong population growth. Real retail sales also have been sluggish, recording three quarters of negative growth.
The extraordinarily high growth in the population, spurred almost entirely by migration, was a key element of economic developments this year. Annual net overseas migration to the year ending in June exceeded 500,000, with the net result being a population growth rate of 2.4 per cent. The actual NOM exceeded Treasury’s revised estimate by more than 100,000.
Parallels have been drawn with the post-war years of “populate or perish”, in particular the large migrant intakes that occurred during the 1950s. The truth is there is really no comparison because all the migrants in that earlier period were permanent and many of them initially were settled in already built migrant hostels. The vast bulk of these migrants were from Britain and Europe.
Most of the migrant intake now is made up of temporary entrants, mainly international students. The most common source countries are China and India, but recent rapid growth has come from Nepal, The Philippines and Colombia. The most common courses undertaken by international students are business and IT.
The failure of Treasury to anticipate this surge in the population is unforgivable. After the hiatus of the pandemic, there was always going to be a catch-up, with migrant arrivals vastly exceeding migrant departures. The modelling should have picked this up.
The pressures on the housing sector, in particular, and other infrastructure were easy to predict.
It was incumbent on Treasury to recommend action to ensure the migrant intake was manageable. Its ideological adherence to a big Australia and the supposed fiscal and demographic benefits of a large migrant intake seemingly prevented officials from offering this sage advice.
The fact is that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil dithered about the stance of migration policy for most of the year, swinging from endorsing the historically high migrant intake to finally taking some very modest measures to rein in arrivals. In particular, the delay in ditching the Covid visa was inexcusable.
One defining feature of the Australian economy during the year has been the strength and resilience of the labour market. By every measure – the unemployment rate, the rate of underemployment, the employment-to-population ratio, the participation rate – the labour market was extraordinarily buoyant.
Reflecting in part the financial pressures many households encountered, there was a leap in the first half of the year in the number of multiple jobholders. In September, 6.6 per cent of employed people were multiple jobholders, higher than the long-term average of between 5 and 6 per cent.
Another defining economic event of 2023 was the ongoing slump in productivity. It hasn’t been simply a case of slow growth; there have been actual falls in observed labour and multifactor productivity. In the year ending in the September quarter, for instance, labour productivity fell by 2 per cent across the year.
We are now back to levels of productivity experienced well before the pandemic.
The point is often made that poor productivity is an international phenomenon, with global factors the likely explanation. The remarkable growth in work from home often is cited as a common reason. The reality is more complex, with the US, in particular, experiencing quite strong growth in productivity whereas Australia has gone backwards.
According to research undertaken by the Reserve Bank, labour productivity in the US this year was nearly 5 per cent higher than in December 2019, whereas in Australia it was 3 per cent lower.
Indeed, the only other country to experience such poor productivity performance was Canada, which incidentally has a similar large migrant intake and rapid population growth.
The argument is that the influx of relatively unskilled migrants, given the dominance of international students, has allowed businesses to take on available staff rather than make labour-saving investments. Weak business investment seems to be a key factor holding back productivity in both countries.
Another defining event of the year was the blowout in the cost of major infrastructure projects, with higher labour and material costs putting paid to the original estimates.
This has been a significant issue in Victoria with the cost of the government’s so-called Big Build program increasing by between 30 and 50 per cent from the initial estimates. Just one project, the North East Link, has gone from its original cost estimate of $10bn to $26bn.
The Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project also has been dogged by huge cost overruns and delays. The same applies to the construction of the transmission lines that are needed to connect this project to the main grid.
This development has significant implications for the economy as well as the energy grid. It’s now clear that the proposed timeline for new renewable energy projects and transmission lines is way behind schedule and the costs have exploded.
Given the tight labour market, the completion of these enormously expensive infrastructure projects is draining workers from the more prosaic task of building new homes that are needed to accommodate the expanding population courtesy of migration.
Simply setting targets for new home completions as the Albanese government has done – 1.2 million new homes across five years – achieves nothing much by itself.
Towards the end of the year there were some emerging signs of slight economic weakness, including sluggish retail sales and home approvals as well as subdued consumer sentiment. While commodity prices eased somewhat, the terms of trade remained at historically high levels through the year.
Given ongoing strong population growth, it seems likely that Australia will avoid a technical recession. But the collapse in real household disposable income, which takes into account tax and mortgage payments, means many Australians have felt worse off during the year.
A central issue is now the speed at which inflation declines, paving the way for lower interest rates. In the US and Britain, inflation has fallen sharply and, in both cases, is within their target range.
The fear here is that services sector inflation may prove sticky, which would prevent us following suit. At this point it’s premature to predict cuts to interest rates next year, particularly given some of the damaging developments noted in this column.
************************************************
‘No credibility’: Northern Territory Chief Minister Eva Lawler lashed over schools
Two of the Northern Territory’s most experienced educators are calling on new Chief Minister Eva Lawler to fix the schools crisis she failed to resolve when she led the Education Department, warning she was seen as a “same horse, different jockey” leader and had “no credibility” with Indigenous teachers and parents.
The former schoolteacher surprised Territorians last week when she was elected unanimously as Chief Minister by the Labor caucus, after Natasha Fyles quit over undisclosed shares in a mining company.
But ?The Australian previously revealed, during her time as education minister, one in five children was effectively unfunded, the majority of students failed to meet minimum standards of literacy and numeracy, and attendance rates were as low as 18.7 per cent.
Yipirinya School principal Gavin Morris said there was a “real danger” in the new NT leadership promoting the “same message” on education, particularly nine months before an election when the government’s focus tended to become shortsighted.
“It feels like we’ve got the same horse but a different jockey with Eva Lawler as Chief Minister,” said Dr Morris, also a councillor at Alice Springs Town Council. “Don’t just throw a different jockey on there and expect a change in results, it’s not going to happen.
“Given the state of education in the Territory, what’s the problem with the horse and why aren’t we addressing the underlying problems with the education system?”
The Australian’s NT Schools in Crisis series revealed an annual funding shortfall of $214.8m for Territory schools, with less than half of the NT Education Department’s $1.2bn budget going directly into school spending.
Dr Morris pointed to the “total ballsing up” of the $40.4m federal funding in the 2023-24 budget to improve Central Australian school attendance and education outcomes, of which, he said, they had “not seen a single cent”.
“The minister for education was totally left out of that conversation, and there’s been a disconnect between the NT government and the commonwealth, and we’ve had a huge fallout in terms of education … There’s no respect and recognition for the voice on the ground,” he said.
“Now that we’ve got an ex-school teacher and ex-minister for education in the top job, that whole sector needs to be held to higher standard … Ms Lawler needs to ensure that doesn’t happen again.”
Dr Morris said there needed to be more innovation in Central Australian schools to deal with disengagement, anti-social behaviour and youth crime. “Go and talk to people on frontlines who are innovating – Yipirinya is humbly one of those – and address the barriers to education and why kids are refusing to go to school in Central Australia,” he said.
“Also, resource schools appropriately to deal with that. One school councillor for every 500 students 20 years ago was acceptable, today that’s negligence.”
Gary Fry, who spent 23 years as a principal in the Northern Territory before he moved into academia in Queensland, said he didn’t hold much hope that Ms Lawler could turn around the “depressingly sad state of affairs” in education as Chief Minister.
“Labor has no depth if it’s seeking to elevate someone to Chief Minister of the most underperforming jurisdiction and the most educationally backward system in Australia, who denies that there’s even a problem in the education system,” he said. “Someone who has not acknowledged the true state of First Nations children in both urban and remote areas around the Territory.”
He referred to an interview? on ABC Radio Darwin in September in which Ms Lawler, then education minister, said the Territory had a “very strong, very robust education system”. “Lawler doesn’t have any credibility for Aboriginal people in town, and people like me … She presided over the failed state of education and the economy,” Mr Fry said.
He said while one part of the story related to funding, the other was ideological. “How do you take children that are struggling and how can the education system liberate them so that they see the pathways in their life.”
Mr Fry, however, said appointing ?Mark Monaghan as Education Minister was positive and hoped he could “embark on an agenda of inclusive education, which means including Aboriginal people in decision-making, policy and program design”.
NT Opposition Leader Lia Finocchiaro said: “Eva Lawler’s mismanagement of the education system has resulted in an alarming decline in school attendance rates since 2016 under the Labor administration … The dire state of affairs continues with a concerning number of teacher injuries, unrecorded police callouts to schools, a high rate of student suspensions, and an alarming number of school break-ins.”
************************************
24 December, 2023
How much do the stories by Alice Duncan-Kemp tell us about Aborigines before white settlement?
The article below is rather hagiographic but considerable skepticism about it is warranted. The author claims that the stories concerned tell how the First Australians lived. But ignores the salient fact that Duncan-Kemp was a 20th century author, writing long after 1778. And there are many indications that her stories were romanticized and in part possibly imaginary
So her stories at best describe a late period in the influence of white settlement on Aborigines. They describe Aborigines who were the product of contact with whites. Were the activities she described white-adapted or "original"? "A bit of both" is the obvious verdict and disentangling them would be a very speculative enterprise. They tell us NOTHING certain about Aborigines before white settlement
It’s hard not to be enchanted by the lost books of Alice Duncan-Kemp when they resonate so deeply with the nation Australia would become. A photograph of her, on a winter’s day 90 years ago, shows her tapping out tales of her childhood on Mooraberrie station, a speck in the red dirt of southwest Queensland’s far-flung Channel Country. The story of boom and bust in the bush, of hope given over to despair, of cattle dying of thirst one day and drowning the next in a frothing flood, is as old as the Outback itself. We know it by heart.
What sets Duncan-Kemp apart – and why the rediscovery of her work is causing a stir in academe and out in the field where scientists use it like a “road map” to unlock the secrets of how the First Australians lived – is the detailed and partly disputed account she provides of the contact era. A voice like hers was rarely heard at the time: admiring of the tribal Aborigines she grew up with, heavy of heart for a way of life in its death throes. Recalling the Aboriginal nanny who helped raise her on the family beef run, 1200km west of Brisbane, she wrote in 1933:
The seed of my knowledge, of that corner of sand-hills, was implanted within me as a mere babe straddling Mary Ann’s hip, or toddling with little black mates after the billy-cart. In later youth the seed grew and fruited. The secret lay in a profound respect for the aborigines (sic) and their customs. In return, these trusty folk taught me to read, with wonder and pleasure, in Nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy, the reading of which was as simple as ABC to them.
Duncan-Kemp’s name and oeuvre – running to five out-of-print volumes and many more unpublished manuscripts – was forgotten by all but her family until a new generation of Australian historians dusted them off. Tom Griffiths, of the Australian National University, was 14 when he chanced across her second book, Where Strange Paths Go Down. He loved it, inspiring a lifelong passion for her work. Decades later the W.K. Hancock Professor of History would extol “the exciting truthfulness of her memoir – one tinged by innocence and nostalgia and prey to the glitches of memory, but faithfully told. A precious possibility emerges that Alice’s books comprise one of the richest ethnographic sources Australia possesses”.
University of Queensland archaeologist Michael Westaway began tracking down the scenes and places she described. There were dead-ends, of course. (“Alice was a bit airy-fairy on distances,” her grandson Will explains.) But in instance after instance, 21st-century technology and old-fashioned legwork confirmed her observations. Traces of sizeable Indigenous villages were found where she said they had been; a thriving trade in the narcotic pituri leaf did indeed span the length of the great inland rivers, from northwest Queensland to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, just as she described it; the jarra-jarra millstones she saw Aboriginal women sweat over to grind grass seed and other bush “grains” came from vast quarries dotted across the nearby desert; rare medicine plants continued to flourish in the out-of-the-way spots she had documented.
“It’s a bit like following the Iliad to find Troy,” says Westaway, referring to Heinrich Schliemann’s 1870 feat to unearth the ruins of the fabled city in Turkey through clues in Homer’s text. “You know … we’ve been able to go through what she wrote and test it as a hypothesis: here’s a site or activity or plant she mentions, so let’s go and find proof of it.”
But some things haven’t changed. The critics are still at it, chipping away at Duncan-Kemp’s credibility. Take this 1961 review of book three, Our Channel Country. “Mrs Duncan-Kemp proceeds to unfold improbable tales of her childhood which dwarf most previous ‘tall stories’ of the outback,” the Sydney Morning Herald’s man sniffed. “It is impossible to take many of them seriously.”
These days, the carping is couched in more academic terms. The revival of interest in Duncan-Kemp engaged serious people in serious research that underpinned a successful Native Title claim by the Mithaka people of southwest Queensland in 2015. At the same time she was quoted approvingly by Bruce Pascoe in his polemic Dark Emu, which challenged the orthodoxy that Aborigines were “hapless” hunter-gatherers prior to European settlement and argued that they had developed the makings of an agricultural society. That willing skirmish, as we will see, has spilled into the reappraisal of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s work and legacy and in turn the national debate over the Voice, with its denouement at today’s referendum.
Linguist Dr David Nash has picked apart her writing phrase by phrase. An honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University’s School of Literature, Language and Linguistics, Nash compiled dozens of examples of her appropriating Aboriginal vernacular and plagiarising text from other writers. “Users” of her work need to be wary, he cautions.
Will Duncan-Kemp is a keeper of the flame, carefully tended in a two-bedroom cottage in Toowoomba cluttered with his grandmother’s manuscripts, papers and family memorabilia. Bearded and full-bellied, the retired geologist, 66, wouldn’t look out of place in the sepia-tinged photos we’re looking through. He points to a faded image of Alice and her sister, Laura, as young women, standing beside a flooded river, backs to the camera, about the time she started on her debut book, Our Sandhill Country. “It was a hard life out there,” he says quietly.
Then as now, the vast chameleonic landscape on the edge of the Simpson Desert defied the efforts of mere mortals to tame it. The region, cut by intermittently-running rivers such as the Diamantina, Thomson, Barcoo and Cooper Creek, wasn’t even explored by Europeans until the 1860s; Burke and Wills would have approached the western boundary of Mooraberrie on their ill-fated trek through the interior. The pioneering Durack family settled there before embarking on a cross-continental cattle drive to open up the Kimberley in 1883. When Alice’s father, William Duncan, arrived eight years later to manage the 93,000ha station, violence with the Mithaka clans was still an ever-present threat. Native Mounted Police detachments – death squads in all but name, according to the ANU’s Griffiths, made up of Aborigines from outside tribal groups under the command of a white sergeant – would roam the Channel Country terrorising the black population.
Occasionally the young warriors would strike back and spear an unlucky squatter, unleashing a fresh round of bloodletting. The Mithaka refused to lie down. In her celebrated memoir Kings in Grass Castles, Mary Durack captured the raw brutality of late colonisation, citing the settlers’ belief that far southwest Queensland would only be made safe when the last of the Indigenous inhabitants had been killed off, “by bullet or by bait”.
Still, some graziers were sympathetic. What became known as the Debney Peace was brokered by a friend of William Duncan in 1889, ending the vicious frontier war. Scottish-born Duncan was himself an enlightened figure among the hard-nosed settlers, well-read and deeply interested in the emerging science of ethnography. After securing the leasehold to Mooraberrie, he would refer to the Aborigines as his “landlords”, making them welcome on the property. Alice, the second of the couple’s four children, became “twice born” at the age of two during a midwinter drama on a raging Bulloo River. Negotiating the flood in 1903, her father had slammed their horse-drawn buggy into a semi-submerged tree, nearly overturning the carriage. Then a heavy bough crashed down on where the infant lay swaddled, gravely injuring a harnessed colt. Somehow, Alice emerged unscathed. The astonished black stockmen accompanying them, Wooragai and Bogie, lit a ceremonial fire and started up a chant: from then on, she would be the reincarnation of a spirit sacred to the Aborigines.
In due course, she was initiated and given the name Pinningarra, or leaf spirit. But there were limits even for her open-minded parents. Duncan put his foot down after the red-hot stone tip of a naming spear was drawn across the little girl’s chest, leaving a welt. There would be no more ritual scarring, he insisted. But for the rest of her life, Alice wore the faded mark above her heart with immense pride, a visible link to the Mithaka.
The death of her father in a riding fall when she was six reinforced their role as her second family. Between showering her with affection, Mary Ann Coomindah – Bogie’s wife and the sisters’ nanny, who possibly breastfed them as infants – taught her to see the world through different eyes. Years later, Duncan-Kemp would write of the day Mary Ann took her on a long walk through the bush with Laura and little Beatrice. (Their older brother, David, had died of diphtheria aged four.) They were hours from the homestead when the sky clouded over. Mary Ann sniffed the air and told the children a wildfire was bearing down on them. Hurry! Their only chance was to get to Teeta Lake, 2km away. Running through the reed beds, they were overtaken by Indigenous families and wildlife fleeing to the shallow water. Mary Ann ushered the frightened girls into the deepest part of the lake, leaving only their heads exposed, shielded from the radiant heat and falling ash with strips of wet bark and sacking – and when that failed, with her own body. Leading the children home, testing every step to make sure the scorched ground was safe, the selfless woman said nothing of the second-degree burns she had incurred. Instead, she whispered to Alice: “This is our country, missee.”
You can only shake your head at how the settlers clung to their heavy British clothes and customs that were as out of place as could be in this remote corner of the Outback. One summer, Duncan-Kemp would write, the thermometer hovered between 123F and 125F (50.5-51.6C) for three endless days and nights. Her mother, now managing Mooraberrie on her own, hung blankets set in tubs of water across the doorways and windows in an attempt to cool the place down.
The homestead was built of pale anthill clay, the 60cm thick walls paired with 3.6m high ceilings. Drinking water was hand-drawn from an outside tank; what was needed for cooking, laundry and personal care came from the waterhole at the back, past the open-sided kitchen shack that was washed away the year Farrar’s Creek erupted. Regardless of the outside temperature, meals were prepared in enervating proximity to the wood-fired range; well into the 20th Century, carbide-powered lamps lit the living spaces after dark.
Young Alice would sit on the canegrass veranda listening to the stockmen talk of epic cattle drives and the characters they met along the way; for the women, life was a drudgery of caring for children, cooking and housework. The nearest town, Windorah, lay 210km away across the empty blacksoil plains. Yet where other Europeans saw arid desolation, Alice perceived beauty and the promise of renewal; when they complained about the heat and the interminable, all-consuming waiting for rain, she enthused about “one of the healthiest climates” going, dry and clear unlike the “clammy” coast, in the “great heart of Australia stretching away for hundreds of lonely miles beyond the Cooper, Diamantina, beyond Birdsville, Bedourie and Alice Springs; destined yet, with the advent of railways and population, to pour out through countless channels a hidden wealth that will command wonder and envy”.
Yet to the Mithaka, the world was held in Yamma-coona’s net, tethering every living thing by invisible silken threads to a mythical witch. Yamma-coona held court with the spirits of the trees and the air beneath a needle bush, while her left hand spun the lives of people. Those who strayed too far felt a tug at the heart that made them ache for home. Her net, the blue sky, was set in the morning; at night, the spirits drew it in and gathered the souls of the dead, Alice recounted.
At first the bush frightens and repels; the loneliness of the open spaces, lack of companionship, the hardships, dangers and privations, seem too big a price for so little a gain. Then by degrees the bush awakens interest; the open spaces begin to have a magnetic charm all of their own; the ‘bush sense’ develops. At last, it holds men’s souls in an iron clasp that relaxes only with death. The woman wizard makes magic and entangles them … spinning, spinning, always spinning her net until the strands of her captives’ lives run out.
Along with her sisters, she spent most of World War I at boarding school and then worked on another station as a governess. On returning home, she married a bank clerk, Fred Kemp, but was adamant she would preserve the family name to become Alice Duncan-Kemp. They moved from post to post in southwest Queensland with Fred’s bank, raising cattle and sheep on the side. But Duncan-Kemp, by now a softly-spoken woman in her thirties, busy with her own family, never let go of her childhood with the Mithaka. As a girl, she had always jotted her thoughts down in a notebook and now she began writing her memoir in longhand, typing and retyping drafts until she felt ready to approach a publisher, Griffiths discovered.
Our Sandhill Country, completed while she was staying at Mooraberrie with Laura, who’d taken over from their mother, was released in 1933 by Angus & Robertson and did well enough to be reprinted. But Duncan-Kemp wasn’t finished yet, not by a long way.
Scattered over the river-flats and highlands maybe seen the remains of humpies, circular impressions where a one-time humpy stood with earth scooped out and piled around the back and sides to form a moat or drain for river waters; yerndoos, or cracking stones, where they cracked their shell food before or after cooking; jara-jaras, or large sandstone grinding slabs, some with elaborate hieroglyphics and carvings upon them; stone chisels and bluestone tomahawks; burnt-out clay ovens; charcoal ridges in the soil that denote middens and the dead ashes of many campfires; a few battered wooden or flint weapons; old wooden coolamons and smaller pitches corroded by age and sands; mounds of red and yellow ochre, in chalky slices of lumps mixed ready for some long forgotten corroboree; glittering mounds of crab and mussel shells bleached white by sun and winds – are all that remain to record the passing of the original owners of this bushland. To anyone who troubles to read them, these mute records unfold a poignant story.
Michael Westaway made it his business to absorb just about every word Duncan-Kemp had published. The 52-year-old archaeologist reached out to Griffiths in 2017, keen to recruit him to what would become a multifaceted exploration of the region’s pre-colonial history. Supported and guided by Mithaka elders, field teams comprising dozens of scientists and support staff from three universities have been busy excavating sites and cataloguing native plants identified through her writings. What they found partly vindicates the Dark Emu theory that Aborigines developed village-like settlements and technology beyond that of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Westaway, however, stops short of Bruce Pascoe’s contentious conclusion that they were early agriculturalists who behaved much like subsistence farmers the world over to till the soil, sow crops, irrigate, and build dams and permanent stone homes, their lives rooted to a single spot.
The reality, he believes, was more nuanced. An ever-changing landscape, never far from those extremes of feast or famine, demanded mobility and quick-stepping adaptability for these people to survive, let alone thrive. In the absence of written records – rock art and artefacts such as stone tools or weapons can only say so much when there was no textual language, Westaway says – the observations of the explorers and first settlers are critical. Sadly, detailing their experiences, if any, with Indigenous populations wasn’t a priority for most of them. This is where Duncan-Kemp comes in. She grew up only a generation removed from the fraught contact period in the Channel Country, schooled by Mithaka teachers still steeped in the ancient ways. “She provided a diverse social history of these communities at a time when they were basically disintegrating, when all of this accumulated knowledge of the country, traditional practice and lore was being lost,” Westaway says. “You would never see any record of that in the archaeology alone; we could never hope to reconstruct it from the archaeology. So what we’ve done is go, ‘OK, Alice says people did this or that at a given place we can identify from her books’. We treat that as a hypothesis we can test – we go out on country and look for the proof. We’ve been doing this for seven years now and I feel we’re very much in the early stages. But … there’s nothing really that we’ve been able to detect to say that she was bullshitting. Nothing substantial at all.”
One eye-opening finding was that the Mithaka practised “industrial-scale mining” – Westaway’s words – for millstone. The quarry fields contained tens of thousands of pits, so vast their scope could only be seen with satellite imagery. The scale of the enterprise suggests the completed grindstones, typically weighing 6kg-7kg, and often elaborately carved, would have been traded up and down an Indigenous silk road tracking the great inland rivers. Nicotine-laced pituri leaf, prized for ceremonial use and as an everyday pick-me-up, was carried on human backs to destinations as far north as Arnhem Land and south to the red-rock Flinders Ranges. The footsore porters returned with rock axes, red ochre and razor-sharp stone knives.
Duncan-Kemp’s account of the Debney Peace is the only known record of the 1889 agreement to end the frontier war in the Channel Country. A ceremony to seal the deal brokered by George Debney, manager of Monkira station, was attended by more than 500 people from the local clans. ANU’s Tom Griffiths, who is writing a biography of Duncan-Kemp, says the colonial authorities kept the accord secret, probably to avoid having to acknowledge the standing it conferred on the Indigenous parties to the peace.
Clearly, Duncan-Kemp could not have been writing from first-hand knowledge. But her father kept a meticulous journal, which she had access to. (Griffiths believes the Debney Peace might have been one of the factors that drew William Duncan to Mooraberrie, after which he married Laura, the daughter of a Sydney solicitor. Her sister also wed a local grazier.) Duncan owned an impressive library filled with the books and journal articles of early Aboriginal anthropologists such as Walter Roth, one of the many unattributed sources Duncan-Kemp would later use and, in some cases, appropriate. This brings us to the thorny new question that hangs over her writing: how much of it was the work of others?
After the release of Our Sandhill Country, she struggled to find a publisher for the planned follow-up. In the event, life would have intruded on the busy young mother’s time: while she juggled family responsibilities with managing the cattle properties that she and Fred acquired, the 1930s devolved into the Great Depression and a Second World War. Her next book, Where Strange Paths Go Down, building on her experience of growing up with the Mithaka, didn’t come out until 1952, almost 20 years later. It was followed by Our Channel Country in 1961, Where Strange Gods Call in 1968 and People of the Grey Wind, published privately by the family after her death in 1988, a few months short of her 87th birthday.
The dismissive reviews continued. The commissioned historians of western Queensland’s Barcoo Shire scoffed that she had been “only a child or a very young woman” during the period she was writing of, and couldn’t possibly be taken seriously. It must have hurt. Yet Duncan-Kemp kept at it, typing and retyping drafts on her old Remington Rand.
More here
***********************************************
The feminist hatreds of Clementine Ford
By ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE
On December 16, The Weekend Australian published my review of Clementine Ford’s new book, I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage. My review was unflattering. I underscored the hatred Ford has exhibited toward men, the inconsistencies in her feminist scholarship, and her glaringly white, middle-class point-of-view.
“All men must die.”
“Have you killed any men today? If not, why not?”
“Honestly, the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough.”
These are some of the things Ford has published. As I wrote: “While there is no question that some of the points she makes in I Don’t are accurate, the degree of disgust she expresses for men is more than disturbing; it should be illegal.”
I also criticised Ford’s abusive attacks on Zionist women, many of whom have been waiting since the 7 October attack on Israel for a show of solidarity from Western feminists like Ford. It is not disputed that Hamas terrorists raped and shot Jewish girls attending a music festival, taking some hostage, and leaving others to die in the desert.
Ford has described Zionist women, most of whom are Jewish, as “enthusiastic supporters of a murderous regime that has been killing children for over 70 years’. She has also said: “I don’t care that you felt betrayed or let down, and I especially don’t care that you want to have a big crybaby rant ... You’re pathetic, you disgust me, and I pity you for being so basic and gross”. She has referred to Jews as “colonizers” — they have been worshipping in Israel since the time of King David — and she has said of their desire to remain in Israel: “Honestly, you actually can’t get any whiter than that.”
After my piece was shared online, Ford’s fans — mostly young, white Australian women – began to weigh in on my Instagram page. In the main, they ignored the points that I — a Catholic by birth; white, left-wing and unrelated to any Jew — had made about Ford’s inadequacies as a thinker, and focused instead on Ford’s campaign for a “free Palestine.”
An Instagrammer calling herself “Reanne” wrote: “For the record, people like ‘me’ couldn’t give two shits about the Jews ... Jew women are supposedly not centre of attention (because) the thousands of babies slaughtered are. Grow up you imbecile.”
Ford is not the only high-profile white mummy blogger figurehead abusing “Zionist women” while manipulating their predominantly female followers with emotive footage of dead or dying babies.
On December 11, Lauren Dubois, a 42-year-old mother of three and formerly of 2GB and the ABC, posted a video to Instagram in which she said: “If somebody touched my child ... I would be homicidal. I wouldn’t need an army. I would hunt them down myself. I would find them and I would tear them limb from limb with my bare hands” (a relatively unlikely threat?) After some tear-jerking melodrama about how she would never survive the death of her own child, Dubois carefully asks: “What kind of bloodthirsty, primeval creatures think this way?”
Why, the Jews, that’s who!
Historically, Dubois’s dehumanising adjectives – bloodthirsty, primeval, and so on – are, of course, resonant. As she stresses in her post, such monsters “don’t belong in a civilised society”.
In a November 13 post, Dubois was photographed wearing a keffiyeh, a Palestinian scarf, protesting with a placard at Parliament House. One side read, “ALBO WONG YOU WILL NEVER WASH THE BLOOD OF PALESTINIAN BABIES OFF YOUR HANDS”; and “BOMBING BABIES IS BAD”.
More here:
********************************************
Sperm donor issues
Bridgette Chesters had always longed for a house filled with children. But seven years ago there was a hitch: her husband John discovered he had a condition that made it difficult to conceive and he also carried the cystic fibrosis gene. A sperm donor would be their only hope of having a family.
So the couple got sperm from an Australian donor through an IVF clinic and Chesters fell pregnant with Lola, now four, on the first attempt. Settling on a donor through the clinic was easy, she says. Full blood tests and screening were done and she was matched with three compatible donors.
“There’s no photos and very basic information about them. We chose one that we thought from the description might look most like my husband,” the Sunshine Coast mum explains. “We must have chosen well because when our daughter was born people who didn’t know the situation said how much she looked like him.”
Eager to grow their family, they returned to the clinic in January 2019. But this time it was not so easy. Chesters endured three full rounds of IVF and suffered four miscarriages. “Each time I was left questioning myself and if it was something I was doing, if there was something wrong with me,” she recalls. “It was devastating.”
Over the following two years it cost the couple upwards of $60,000 for IVF, which included $900 to buy each package (known as a “straw”) of sperm as well as legal and counselling costs – mandatory when using donor sperm. With credit cards maxed out and superannuation depleted, Chesters decided a new approach was needed. In January 2021 she took a deep breath and put an ad on the Facebook group Sperm Donation Australia explaining her story.
“It was quite overwhelming at first and you feel very vulnerable, but there are so many men out there looking to help and expect absolutely nothing in return,” she says. “John was a bit apprehensive initially, but once we met our donor, he was fine. It cost us nothing aside from some road tolls and a bottle of scotch,” she laughs, cradling seven-month-old Lawrence who was born from this union.
“Using our donor through the group was hands down the easiest thing we’ve ever done. No invasive procedures, no medications, no pressure over numbers. It was relaxed and easy, done at home using a kit we bought for $50 from Sperm Donation Australia with an insemination cup and a syringe. Our donor was willing to go above and beyond for us.”
“Each time I was left questioning myself and if it was something I was doing, if there was something wrong with me. It was devastating”
Chesters, 37, says she and her husband drew up their own agreement with the donor, who from the outset made it clear he wouldn’t seek parental rights. Genetic testing was not undertaken but she was assured he had been tested for other diseases.
“Our donor has been open and honest with us, and if he wasn’t we wouldn’t have proceeded,” she says. What started as writing long missives to the donor before meeting has now blossomed into an ongoing, friendly relationship with him and his partner. “We gained a family when we made the decision to use a known donor, something we will always be grateful for.”
But although the Chesters’ experience was positive, others warn of the risks involved in private donor arrangements. The legal situation is murky. In the case of “prolific donors” there’s a risk of sexual relationships occurring between siblings.
Women and couples are turning to assisted fertility in ever increasing numbers, and demand for donor sperm has soared. In the first nine months of this year, Monash IVF received 60 per cent more inquiries for donor sperm than for all of 2021, and reported a 25 per cent increase in donor sperm inquiries in 2021 compared with the previous year.
As for those using private sperm donors or going overseas for egg donation, exact numbers are impossible to know – it’s unregulated, after all – but there is no question that more and more people are doing that, too. Professor Fiona Kelly, Dean of La Trobe University law school and an expert in family and health law, says lockdowns exacerbated existing low numbers of Australian sperm donors in clinics.
“We have seen an increase year on year of sperm and egg donors, but we’ve seen a bigger increase in demand, largely due to the increase in single women seeking treatment. Single women are the biggest users of donor sperm in Australia,” she says. “As demand outstrips supply in clinics, an increasing number of Australians are turning to the private online market for donors. Private donation has always existed, particularly in the lesbian and gay communities, but the scale of what’s happening now is new. Private sperm donors are donating to many women, easily brought together online through web pages that resemble online dating sites.”
A key player in the online boom is 37-year-old Adam Hooper, a father of two with more than 15 donor children throughout Australia and the world to his name – a number that deeply concerns regulators and some donor-conceived people. Hooper, from Perth, lives a nomadic life travelling around Australia and internationally on “sperm tours”, donating to women and recruiting men. He established Australia’s largest donor community, Sperm Donation Australia, in 2015. The group has more than 15,000 members, and a backlog of people waiting to join. Similar groups exist in the UK and the US.
Hooper began on this path after meeting a lesbian couple who explained how expensive it was for them to use a fertility clinic. “Everyone in my family lived until their 90s so I thought it was something I could do,” he says. He makes his money selling home insemination kits and says he’s motivated by helping others and becoming an “icon” in the donor world. His group allows donors and recipients to meet, connect and determine the type of ongoing relationship, if any, they wish to have. In contrast, with a clinic there’s a presumption of anonymity that cuts both ways. “If you donate in a clinic, you don’t have the peace of mind or fulfilment you get donating privately,” Hooper says. “Many men say they donated at a clinic and didn’t think about it, but four years on they wonder about the child.”
In cases where a clinic is used, there are laws regulating contact between donors and the recipient family – but they differ from state to state. Under Victorian law, recipients with minor children can apply at any time for the donor’s identity and, if the donor consents, the information will be released. Donors can also apply for identifying information which will be released if the recipient or donor-conceived offspring consents. If the donor-conceived child is over 18, the donor’s identifying information can be released without consent. In other states, children conceived after 2005 must wait until they are 18, except in Western Australia where it is 16. Parliamentary inquiries in South Australia and Western Australia have recommended legislation similar to the Victorian model and Queensland recently held a hearing covering early contact.
Hooper says his recipients are all connected through a private Facebook group and meet regularly, allowing the donor siblings, or “diblings”, to grow up knowing they are part of an extended family. “When I ask my own children if they want me to stop donating, they say, ‘No’,” he says. “They have a cool life getting to go out with their friends and hold babies and were brought up knowing they would have more siblings than normal.”
Hooper says he vets every member before they join Sperm Donation Australia, as well as enforcing procedures and moderating the group. “We want to see they are decent people,” he explains. “Sometimes I’ll even call them to get a feel for them. Many of the men are already fathers and appreciate the gift of life and how special it is to be a parent.” However, he won’t advise on the laws regarding donor family limits. “When we get enough donors, no donor will have to be relied on to help as many people,’’ he says.
Greta French-Kennedy is typical of many of the women searching online for a sperm donor. The 37-year-old yoga teacher and health coach from Adelaide spent her 20s focused on her career. When she began thinking about having a family in her 30s, the fairytale story of meeting a man, falling in love and having a baby didn’t happen. “I don’t want to put pressure on myself or a man to have a baby immediately. That’s not how love works,” she says. “Ninety-five per cent of men my age or older have had kids and don’t want any more. It’s the reality for me and a lot of women.”
Ready to go it alone, she went to a clinic – but as there were virtually no local donors, it was only able to offer her sperm from California at a price of about $2000, with the total cost rising to $10,000 when IVF fees were included. French-Kennedy looked at the overseas donor database. “I saw these photos of the men as babies. They were total strangers and I thought, ‘This little human [I will carry] is going to be a part of someone else and I have no idea who they are’,” she says. The reality of having to go through the highly medicalised process of IVF also hit home. “My whole business and life is built on natural health and even though my cycle was regular, I’d be injecting hormones into my body, going under a general anaesthetic and creating an embryo in a clinical setting, and it just didn’t sit right,” she says.
She’d been following a lesbian couple on Instagram, and through them she found Sperm Donation Australia. In March this year she put her ad up seeking a donor and 15 men replied. “Adam [Hooper] has very clear guidelines about what to put in a post about the method you want to use, artificial insemination or natural, ie sex, and whether you want to co-parent,” she explains.
French-Kennedy settled on a man who lived nearby and they chatted online before meeting. “He is married and has no children. We had some mutual friends on Facebook. He was fit and healthy, which was most important, and he is a part of a group which looks at the needs of the donor child,” she says. They drew up an agreement stating he was not liable for child support and didn’t want to co-parent but was happy for updates. Unfortunately, after trying for three cycles, she has not been successful. She plans to wait now until the summer and her donor gets more tests done.
The increasing use of overseas egg donation is also provoking an angry response from clinics. Natalie Hart, a 47-year-old from Melbourne, met Glenn, the man she wanted to marry, seven years ago; desperately wanting to start a family, she came off the pill – only to experience her first hot flush. Blood tests showed she was perimenopausal. “It was gut-wrenching. It’s not the news you want to hear when you are trying to start a family,” Hart says. “You know straight away you’re running an uphill battle.”
She began aggressive IVF, but her body didn’t respond to the medication and resulted in two cancelled cycles. Her doctor suggested donor eggs. Hart knew someone who’d used donor eggs in South Africa, so the process was not a complete mystery to her. “The specialist basically said don’t bother buying frozen eggs from the World Egg Bank [the main source of donor eggs at clinics in Australia]. You could try to find a donor here, but it could take some time. She advised us to just go overseas,” Hart explains.
“It was a journey Glenn and I had to research, and work out if that was the right path… when you are new into a world, you know nothing about it – it’s very overwhelming. You don’t know what to take as truth and you are dealing with the loss of your own genetics, but your desire to be a mum is so strong.”
After settling on South Africa, Hart went through an egg donor agency and was able to search its online database and see pictures of the donors as babies or young children, as well as a little biography. “It felt like online shopping in a weird way, but once you start reading the profiles you emotionally connect with them,” she says. Once she had chosen a donor, the agency advised the clinic. The donor underwent testing before Hart started IVF and the donated eggs were then fertilised with Glenn’s sperm.
As Jenson, now four, has grown, Hart has reflected on how much he looks like the donor from the pictures she’s seen of her as a toddler. “He has the donor’s nose and beautiful blue eyes,” she beams. “I feel he’s a very good mix of all three of us and I’m just happy because he’s a beautiful little boy. I do love seeing parts of the donor in him, because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t be here, and I couldn’t imagine life without him.”
********************************************
Was Calide C blown up?
There are some very destructive Greenies
Private investors in Queensland’s Callide C power station have launched legal action to force a fresh independent investigation into the explosion that crippled the Queensland grid in 2021, after the failure of its state-owned operator to deliver results from its own review of the debacle.
The explosion of the C4 turbine at Callide C in May 2021 forced the evacuation of the plant, and immediately stripped about 10 per cent of Queensland’s generating capacity out of the east coast grid.
The loss of the plant – which is still yet to return to the electricity market – helped push up household and business energy prices, and has indirectly contributed to the energy shortfall facing NSW amid soaring summer temperatures.
Callide C suffered a second mysterious catastrophe in October 2022, when part of the cooling towers collapsed. The generator is due to return to partial service on January 24, but on current estimates will not be able to deliver its full 990MW capacity into the grid until July 2024.
The plant was operated and half-owned by the Queensland government’s CS Energy, and half by the privately held Genuity Group – which in turn is 25 per cent-owned by Czech energy investor Sev.en, with China Huaneng Group and Guangdong Energy Group controlling the rest.
Genuity called in Deloitte as administrators in March 2023, after a dispute between its owners over funding for the estimated $390m cost of returning Callide C to service.
But, more than two and a half years on from the explosion at the coal-fired plant, an expert review of the incident – commissioned by CS Energy, and being conducted by forensic engineer Sean Brady – has still not been delivered, and Sev.en has headed to the Federal Court to demand answers, and potentially prepare the way for a damages claim against CS Energy and the Queensland government.
Sev.en’s lawsuit asks the Federal Court to appoint FTI Consulting’s John Park and Benjamin Campbell as special purpose administrators to Genuity subsidiary IG Power Callide (IGPC), giving them the power to “conduct investigations into the cause or causes of the two catastrophic incidents at the Callide C power station”.
Their powers would include the ability to hire independent technical experts to conduct an investigation, as well as significant powers to demand the production of documents related to the power plant failures, and seek court orders allowing compulsory examinations of witnesses – potentially including CS Energy executives – that had knowledge of the events.
Court documents show Sev.en is also seeking to give the special purpose administrators the power to “commence and prosecute any legal proceedings” on behalf of the collapsed company.
Deloitte is understood to be considering a number of potential offers for Genuity’s half of Callide C, after a process to take bids for the company closed in mid-December.
Documents filed by Deloitte with the corporate regulator in November show a CS Energy subsidiary had expressed an interest in taking full control of the plant, through pre-emptive rights triggered by Genuity’s collapse into administration.
Under the terms of the agreement, the documents show, CS Energy has the right to buy Genuity’s half of Callide at the lesser of either its fair value or book value – as set by independent valuers and auditors.
Energy market sources say Deloitte is also considering other offers to recapitalise Genuity through a deed of company arrangement, with Sev.en and its Chinese former partners seen as the most likely alternative bidders.
Deloitte declined to comment on Friday, as the matter is before the courts, and will not file its submissions in response to Sev.en’s application until early in January.
It indicated that it is likely to oppose the application, however, given it is still considering offers for the company and believes the imposition of special purpose administrators could delay its ability to put those offers to creditors.
But the court documents filed by Sev.en suggest the outcome of any investigation into the causes of the explosion and subsequent collapse of the cooling towers could also be a critical factor in any valuation of the Genuity group of companies.
If an investigation found that CS Energy was responsible, potential legal claims against the state-owned company could be a potentially significant avenue for returning cash to the company’s creditors – including Sev.en, which claims to be owed about $88m from the group, according to Deloitte filings to ASIC.
The claim by Sev.en also seeks to prevent Deloitte from agreeing to any sale terms which include provisions giving up the right to sue over the causes of the explosion or cooling tower collapse.
The report commissioned by CS Energy is still to be finalised. But an 2021 report into the incident by the Australian Energy Market Operator hinted at failures by the state-owned company, noting that maintenance to backup power supplies appeared to be a contributing factor in the disaster as it meant sensors and protection equipment at the plant were not operating.
In October 2023 the Australian Energy Market Regulator fined CS Energy $67,000 for running the Callide C power station without the proper regulatory registration required by market participants – which CS Energy dismissed at the time as an “apparent historical oversight”.
The chief executive of CS Energy at the time of the disaster, Andrew Bills, left the company in February to take up a role running SA Power Networks. Its chairman, former Brisbane lord mayor Jim Soorley, stepped down in July, shortly after CS Energy flagged further delays to the return of Callide to service. He was replaced by Adam Aspinall.
Queensland Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said on Friday he was “fully confident” in the leadership of CS Energy. “The newly appointed Chair of CS Energy is absolutely focused on rebuilding the Callide plant, as safely and quickly as possible,” he said.
************************************
21 December, 2023
Australia’s largest grid-forming battery green-lit
How is a battery that lasts only two hours any substitute for a power station that works 24/7?
Australia’s largest grid-forming battery will be built in the New South Wales Hunter region from early next year after a final investment decision was reached by AGL Energy on Tuesday.
AGL, the country’s largest electricity generator, is advancing its green energy ambitions with the construction of a 500MW/1,000MWh, two-hour duration battery on the site of its retired Liddell coal-fired power station.
The battery is twice the initially planned size and will support the proposed Hunter Energy Hub, which is expected to feature renewable hydrogen and ammonia production.
The project is backed by a $35 million conditional grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). It was one of eight projects awarded conditional funding through the $176 million Large-Scale Battery Storage Funding Round in December 2022.
When the funding was announced, the successful projects under the round represented a tenfold increase in grid-forming electricity storage capacity operating in the National Electricity Market, according to ARENA.
AGL is targeting mid-2026 for the commencement of operations on the Liddell battery and is expected to have an asset life of 20 years. It will cost an estimated $750 million to complete construction.
US-headquartered Fluence Energy has been selected as the preferred engineering, procurement, and construction provider.
Grid-forming inverter technology enables energy generators to set their own voltage and frequency which can be maintained without the need to be connected to other generators.
This will enable batteries to restart the grid following a blackout and provide grid stability by adjusting power output to maintain local voltage and frequency, a role historically fulfilled by synchronous power plants fired by coal or gas.
ARENA has previously committed $81 million to eight other grid-scale batteries, five of which had grid-forming capabilities, although they were smaller in scale.
ARENA chief executive Darren Miller welcomed the final investment decision announcement and highlighted the importance of the battery.
“As new solar and wind connects to our grids, we’re going to need increasing amounts of energy storage to continue to provide reliable electricity to our households and businesses,” he said.
“However, as coal and gas generators retire, or start to play a lesser role, we’ll also need these new batteries to provide the crucial system security services that are currently provided by these traditional generators.
“This is why it is important to fund batteries like AGL’s that are equipped with smart inverter technology which can help stabilise the grid as we transition to renewables.
“We look forward to the construction of AGL’s battery in Liddell and expect to see the other ARENA funded grid-forming batteries reach similar milestones in 2024.”
To support development of the green hydrogen facility at the Hunter Energy Hub, AGL has signed memorandums of understanding (MoU) with Fortescue, APA Group, INPEX Corporation, Jemena, and Osaka Gas Australia.
Earlier this month, AGL also signed a MoU with battery recycling startup Renewable Metals to work on a pre-feasibility study on the establishment of a lithium battery recycling facility at the Hunter Energy Hub.
https://www.innovationaus.com/australias-largest-grid-forming-battery-green-lit/
**************************************************Troop boost to Middle East but no ship to Red Sea
Australia is unlikely to send a warship to join a dangerous new mission in the Red Sea but is set to deploy more personnel to the Middle East, amid pressure on the Albanese government to respond to a US request for Australia to be involved.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin will announce details within days of Operation Prosperity Guardian – a new multinational task force to combat attacks on commercial shipping by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
The US Navy asked Australia to send a warship to join the operation, but after the Albanese government made it clear in initial talks that its primary focus was the Indo-Pacific, it is understood the US has decided to modify its request.
The growing number of attacks on ships, which forced a US warship to shoot down 14 drones on Saturday, has jeopardised transit through the Red Sea, prompting major shipping countries to suspend voyages through a waterway that carries 10 per cent of the world’s cargo.
Australian Defence officials will speak to US counterparts on Tuesday, when they are expected to be told that an Australian ship is no longer being sought for the operation. A modified request from the US will give political cover for the Albanese government, which was under increasing pressure to explain why it had not agreed to the US Navy request.
Instead of sending a warship, Australia is likely to agree to deploy more defence force personnel to shore-based roles with the US-led Combined Maritime Force in Bahrain. There are currently five ADF personnel working at CMF headquarters.
The Albanese government told US officials the Australian Navy’s priority was in the immediate region where it has been playing a role in securing freedom of navigation in the South China Sea at a time when Chinese navy harassment of foreign naval warships and planes is on the rise.
The initial request came just days before the US Congress gave the green light to the unprecedented transfer of three nuclear submarines to Australia under the AUKUS partnership. Anthony Albanese said on Monday his government was giving appropriate consideration to what was a “general request to a range of nations”.
“Of course, our first priority is in our own region, and certainly the United States understands the important role that we’re playing, including freedom of navigation and other issues in our region,” the Prime Minister said.
It’s understood that if the Red Sea security situation worsened and Mr Austin issued a direct appeal to Defence Minister Richard Marles to supply a warship for the operation, the government would prioritise the request.
****************************************************
"Believe the woman": Innocent men prosecuted as a result
The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions is a woman, Sally Dowling SC.
A third man accused of sexual assault by a woman who has made multiple “pattern” rape allegations will walk free after NSW’s Office of Public Prosecutions discontinued proceedings, just weeks after a damning court judgment called on prosecutors to re-examine her claims.
Charges against the accused – known as JM – are set to be formally withdrawn in court amid scrutiny on the ODPP, which has been accused of taking a “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” approach to prosecutorial decisions.
The prosecution of JM follows the acquittal of two other men who faced near-identical allegations they had sexually assaulted the complainant, who claimed she was too drunk to consent.
But a District Court judge earlier this month found the woman had an “idiosyncratic” and erroneous view of what constituted sexual assault which was not challenged by prosecutors, who put the cases before a jury in what was labelled a miscarriage of justice. The woman had earlier pursued other criminal complaints against a string of other men.
After confirming late on Monday that the case against JM was proceeding despite District Court judge Robert Newlinds calling on prosecutors to “join the dots” and critically analyse the woman’s claims, the ODPP has now confirmed the prosecution has been discontinued.
“The reasons for discontinuing an individual prosecution are privileged and will not be disclosed,” the office said in a statement. “The ODPP is not aware of further prosecutions currently on foot involving the same complainant.
“The decision to proceed with or terminate any prosecution is taken carefully and in accordance with the Prosecution Guidelines. Factors taken into account include matters relating to the victim, the accused and the offence.
“Factors which are irrelevant to the decision include political, individual or sectional interests, including media coverage or public sentiment.”
The discontinuance of the prosecution against JM comes after Judge Newlinds registered a “deep level of concern” over the abrogation of the prosecutor’s duty to interrogate complainants’ allegations amid concerns the ODPP was putting hopeless cases before juries and called upon prosectors to stop further prosecutions of men as a result of allegations levelled by the complainant who had gone to police about a string of men, at least six of whom faced charges in court.
“I think the prosecution took the lazy and perhaps politically expedient course of identifying that the complainant alleged she had been sexually assaulted and without properly considering the question of whether there was any evidence to support that allegation, and just prosecuted so as to let the jury decide,” he said in a costs judgment in the case of R v Martinez, which was dismissed by a jury after one hour of deliberation earlier this month.
“This must stop. Justice has not been served and will not be served by repeated cases being prosecuted based on obviously flawed evidence.”
In the Martinez case, the complainant had alleged she was sexually assaulted because she had been drunk and could not remember the evening in question. However, the court heard that she had initiated sex and enthusiastically consented.
Another case against a defendant dubbed AS also went before a jury in November, with that accused also acquitted. The case against AS involved a very similar scenario, and Judge Newlinds said the men could not receive a fair trial because the jury was prevented from hearing details of the complainant’s history of accusing multiple men.
NSW DPP Sally Dowling SC, responded angrily to the criticism levelled by Judge Newlinds, issuing a statement saying the ODPP would make a complaint to the Judicial Commission.
“The ODPP unequivocally rejects any suggestion that it makes prosecution decisions lazily or on the basis of political expedience, or that it operates according to ‘some sort of unwritten policy’, as the judge has speculated,” the ODPP said in a statement.
“Such remarks unfairly impugn the integrity of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the staff of the ODPP.”
*************************************************
Schools and the politics of envy
One of the defining moments of the 2004 federal election was Mark Latham’s hit list of wealthy non-government schools and John Howard’s success in describing the ALP policy as the politics of envy. Jason Clare, the Minister for Education, is making the same mistake.
In response to a recently released report titled Improving Outcomes For All commissioned by Clare, he argues, ‘The growing gap between the rich and poor, largely as a result of segregation, based on wealth into government and non-government schools was unacceptable.’
Based on the argument that poor students are always disadvantaged, Clare also argues ‘we have one of the most segregated school systems in the OECD. Not by the colour of your skin, but by the size of your parents’ pay packet’.
Based on the assumption that school choice, where parents have the right to decide where their children are educated, is inequitable and unjust, Clare’s report offers 10 interventions calculated to level the playing field and ensure all schools, especially non-government, embrace socio-economic diversity and difference.
Reforms include legislated quotas ‘with penalties for noncompliance’, stopping non-government schools from charging fees and forcing them into the state system, stopping schools from selecting students on academic ability, and offering incentives to ‘quality educators’ to teach in disadvantaged schools.
After admitting there is no one solution to solve the issue of segregation the report argues all schools, government and non-government, must be involved to ensure all students, regardless of postcode or wealth, ‘have pathways to enrol in high-quality schooling’.
While justified in terms of equity and fairness by forcing schools to enrol students from a diverse range of home backgrounds, the report denies school choice, reduces all schools to the one level of mediocrity and state control, and stops schools charging fees and controlling who they enrol.
Since the heady days of the late 1960s, schools have been a key target in the cultural-left’s long march through the institutions. Drawing on the sociology of education movement, the argument is schools are complicit in reproducing capitalist hierarchies and concepts like meritocracy are social constructs reinforcing privilege.
Drawing on cultural-Marxism, prominent academics argue schools must be captured if the socialist dream of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ is to be achieved.
Victoria’s Premier, Joan Kirner, argued at a Fabian meeting, schools must be ‘part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change rather than in instrument of the capitalist system’.
The Australian Education Union for decades has characterised Australian society as riven with social injustice and inequality, argued Catholic and independent schools don’t deserve funding, and government schools serving low socioeconomic communities must be given priority.
The flaws in Minister Clare’s attack on so-called wealthy and privileged parents who choose non-government schools are manifest. International covenants and agreements endorse parental choice and argue parents must not be discriminated against because of where they enrol their children.
Given the Woke, extreme secularist nature of government schools and education departments pushing neo-Marxist inspired gender and sexuality theories, climate alarmism, critical race and postcolonial theories, plus identity politics, it is especially vital religious parents are free to choose.
Underlying the billions of dollars wasted as a result of the Gonski funding review, proven by international and NAPLAN tests results either flatlining or going backwards, is the myth a student’s socioeconomic background is the key determinant explaining success or failure.
While promulgating the SES myth fits the socialist belief society is structurally classist and investing more in schools serving disadvantaged communities will remedy the problem, the reality is the opposite.
Research undertaken by one of Australia’s leading education experts and psychometricians Gary Marks concludes SES accounts for 10-16 per cent when explaining outcomes. Analysis undertaken as part of the PISA test makes the same point when concluding SES contributes 15 per cent to test results.
More important factors include disciplined classrooms and setting high expectations, having a rigorous and teacher friendly curriculum, ensuring what happens in the classroom is effective and that teachers are subject experts supported by parents.
Contrary to the myth parents’ wealth is the major factor, research proves student ability and motivation are also keys to educational success. Research puts the impact of genetic inheritance at between 50 to 67 per cent and explains why working-class students are not always destined to under achieving.
Attacking Catholic and independent schools also fails the financial literacy test. On average while government school students receive $20,940 in government funding the figure for students attending non-government schools is $12,442.
Parents paying non-government school fees save state, territory, and commonwealth governments billions each and every year plus their taxes also support government schools. Proven by year 12 results, it’s also true non-government schools, with the exception of selective schools, consistently outperform government schools.
The Albanese government’s record of electorally disastrous polices include the Indigenous Voice, rocketing energy prices caused by climate alarmism, unacceptable rates of immigration and holding small businesses to account with its union-friendly industrial relations regime. Add school choice and school funding to the list.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/the-politics-of-envy/
************************************20 December, 2023
Albanese is the highest-taxing Prime Minister of all time
Since taking office in May 2022, the average amount of tax raised in Australia is equivalent to 26.52 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This is the highest average level of any government since 1959, albeit not by much. In political speak, Albanese is the highest-taxing Prime Minister of all time.
Of course, Albanese has governed for just 18 months compared to some governments that ruled for more than a decade. However, on average, so far, he’s recorded the highest tax take as a percentage of GDP. That may change in the future, but he holds the trophy right now.
Given the gravity of my claim, it is important to explain the data.
Firstly, the statistic is a ratio of two numbers: tax revenue is the numerator, and GDP is the denominator. This allows comparison and enables comparison overtime.
Both of these data series are what’s called ‘seasonally adjusted’ and ‘original’, and are published every three months (quarterly) since 1959.
The ABS tax revenue data is close to but not the same as that published by the Federal government as part of its annual and mid-year budget processes.
The chief benefit of using the ABS national accounts data is that it is published on a quarterly basis. This helps is deciding where to allocate data points when government changes in the middle of a data period.
The GDP figure used in the denominator is a national figure, covering production in the whole of Australia. In contrast, the tax revenue figure excludes revenue from the main local and state-based taxes: land taxes, payroll tax, gambling taxes, and local government municipal rates.
Note however, even if these taxes are included in the total revenue figure, the conclusion is the same: Albanese still leads the highest taxing government on record.
Another important note relates to government debt. Government spending is financed from both taxation and debt. Debt is really just deferred tax, so some argue that total government spending is a better proxy for total tax. That’s a debate for another time.
What’s clear is that the current government is getting pretty nervous about the amount of tax being collected. Treasurer Jim Chalmers was quick to point out recently that it was important to give back ‘bracket creep’ – this is a term describing the higher take of tax as inflation pushes wages into higher brackets.
The record tax take also explains why Albanese and Chalmers have been steadfast in keeping the Stage 3 tax cuts, despite a big push back from special interest groups that are reliant on taxpayer funding.
My guess is that, for the current government, Stage 3 can’t come quick enough.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/albanese-government-highest-taxing-since-1959/
************************************************The incompatibility of farming and renewables projects
Perhaps the biggest mistruth about renewable energy infrastructure is that it can coexist with productive farming practices, such as grazing and cropping.
With recent research by the Institute of Public Affairs estimating that up to one-third of Australia’s prime agricultural farmland could be destroyed by the industrial-scale solar panels and wind turbines needed to meet irresponsible Net Zero mandates, establishing the facts around the ability to farm on land carpeted with renewables projects has never been more important.
It has been recently argued that ‘the practice of “solar grazing” is well established’. Based on two solar factories where an elevated layout has allowed for (some) grazing by sheep, it was asserted that ‘solar grazing’ meant agriculture and solar farms could coexist because sheep can graze around and under the solar panels.
This practice has also been discussed as a method of weed control, whereby livestock is used to weed out undesirable undergrowth beneath solar panels. The impact of weeds and vermin associated with solar factories on neighbouring farms has been a frequent complaint, and renewable industry proponents appear to be responding with an aggressive public relations campaign.
However, just as wind turbines damage native wildlife and the landscape, industrial-scale solar projects pose a real threat to animal welfare.
The BRE (European) National Solar Centre’s Agricultural Good Practice Guidance for Solar Farms states:
Larger farm animals such as horses and cattle are considered unsuitable [for solar grazing] since they have the weight and strength to dislodge standard mounting systems, while pigs or goats may cause damage to cabling.
Aside from the harm caused by their contact with exposed electrical wires, animals that graze on solar farms also risk exposure to transformer leakages, which can lead to electrical and fire hazards. There are also the dangers associated with toxic chemicals leaching out from solar panels.
Moreover, in severe weather conditions, any grazing livestock will be vulnerable to shards of broken glass and sharp flying debris. As the UK office of the insurance giant Allianz noted:
In 2021, Storm Arwen wreaked havoc at a solar farm near Wolviston [in the UK], smashing hundreds of glass solar panels and damaging rows and rows of photovoltaics. In extreme weather, solar panels can operate as lifting surfaces making the panels vulnerable to being blown away … Panels are in danger of being smashed by falling debris that’s carried by the wind. If solar farms are struck by lightning it can result in damage to modules, cables and electrical equipment.
This is not a scenario in which you would want sheep grazing under solar panels. Besides, there is the issue of sheep being able to chew through the cables that go from the solar panels to batteries, creating a serious hazard to animal welfare.
Even in ideal conditions, solar farms are harmful to animal welfare. Every year hundreds of thousands of birds are killed by solar farms across the globe. Many are water birds that fly into solar panels, deceived by the panels’ resemblance to the surface of water. This phenomenon is called the ‘Lake Effect’.
The brightness and intensity of the light coming from solar fields, both during the day and at night (because of night-time security lighting), interferes with the natural habitat of local wildlife.
The mitigation strategies needed to address the harmful effects of solar panels on wildlife and livestock only add to the already mounting cost of renewable energy and – in this case – have introduced additional risks to animal welfare.
Photovoltaic cells contain toxic materials like lead, cadmium, selenium and tellurium which can leach into the natural environment, particularly if damaged in such a way as occurs in a hailstorm or fire. They also need to be properly disposed of at the end of their lifecycles, yet up to 90 per cent of photovoltaic solar panels go straight into landfill at the end of their lives.
Unlike the disposal of nuclear waste, there is no well-established, time-tested, and scientifically informed method of disposing of solar waste in a safe and responsible manner.
Across Australia, local communities and fire brigades are deeply concerned about the limited ability to manage the fire risks associated with solar farms, citing international experience of co-located lithium-ion batteries catching fire and producing large amounts of toxic smoke.
Many of Australia’s largest solar projects are located on viable agricultural land. Shamefully, the value of pre-existing agricultural production of the land on which they sit is condescendingly brushed aside in their environmental impact statements. The list of solar farms and projects taking up agricultural land goes on and is set to grow further.
Across Australia, regional and rural communities are being forced to shoulder the burden of renewables projects demanded by the political class and the inner-city elites.
At a time when the federal government is seeking to ban live animal exports on the spurious grounds of animal welfare, there has been no discussion from policymakers how animals forced to coexist with renewable infrastructure will fare. Put simply this is yet another case of ideology trumping commonsense in the futile race to Net Zero.
******************************************************
Victoria Has 'Huge Spending Problem': Libertarian MP Calls for Cuts to Bureaucracy
Libertarian Party Member of the Legislative Council (MLC) David Limbrick believes Victoria has a "huge spending problem" saying current debt levels are unsustainable.
The libertarian suggested cutting back the size of government, pausing or cancelling major projects, and slashing expenditure should be the solution, rather than raising more revenue.
On Friday, a budget update released by Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas revealed net debt is projected to hit $135.5 billion (US$91 billion) by June 2024.
Further, by the year 2027, debt is set to reach $177.8 billion (US$119.5 billion), which is $6.4 billion (US$4.3 billion) higher than the estimate in the May state budget.
Outlining his vision to reduce the debt, Mr. Limbrick suggested the government should be cutting back spending, instead of increasing revenue through introducing a string of new taxes.
"It's not sustainable. We're running up debt higher and higher. And rather than figuring out how to raise more revenue, I think they should be figuring out how they can cut the expenditure because we're clearly spending unsustainable amounts of money at the moment," Mr. Limbrick told The Epoch Times.
"I mean, Victoria, it's got a huge spending problem. There are limits to what they can do with taxation. And I think that they're reaching those limits, and we've got a huge spending problem and we have to cut back the size of the government."
Mr. Pallas attributed part of the higher debt to interest rate rises, claiming 13 rate rises in the the past 18 months has "presented problems for everybody."
"The point I'm making is that there is a very substantial amount of debt the state is carrying that is also directly attributable to the movements in the cash rate," he said.
The multi-billion dollar Suburban Rail Loop project was not listed in the budget but is provisioned for in contingency funds, Mr. Pallas highlighted. The treasurer would not speculate on whether he expected the suburban rail loop costs to blow out too.
On Dec. 12, the government revealed it had awarded a $3.6 billion contract on tunnelling for Suburban Rail Loop East.
Meanwhile, the budget for Victoria's North East Link has risen by $10 billion and is now expected to to cost $26.1 billion.
Look for Savings
Mr. Limbrick said the Victorian government has a number of sources of revenue, including stamp duty, payroll tax, GST, and Commonwealth grants.
The politician suggested the government could pause or cancel some projects to find some savings.
"I'm not convinced of the cost benefit analysis of many of these projects that they are talking about, for example, the suburban rail loop," Mr. Limbrick said.
He also recommended asking all Victorian state government departments to find cost savings.
"I think that the government does a lot of things that it doesn't need to do ... really wasteful things. And I think that you could order all departments to come up with cost savings. And I think our policy that we went to the last election with was a 10 percent cut in non-frontline workforce expenditure."
Leader of the Opposition John Pesutto said the "dire state" of Victoria's finance is worsening under Premier Jacinta Allan.
“Labor’s nine-year trend of cost blowouts, greater debt, and higher taxes is going from bad to worse under Premier Jacinta Allan," he said.
Shadow Treasurer Brad Rowswell added that the budget update shows Labor's record debt is still growing, in spite of new taxes on schools, rents, holidays, and visits to the GP.
***************************************************
Special Forces’ face more danger, harm at home than Afghanistan battlefield, ‘secret inquiry’ hears
The nation’s Special Forces faced more harm and danger at home than the battlefields of Afghanistan with failures of the military’s office of Inspector General contributing to mental trauma and an army of timid and woke self doubters.
That’s according to evidence before a “secret inquiry” into the Inspector General of the ADF (IGADF) that for the first time in its 20-year history is having its operations, functions and leadership put under the spotlight.
Australian Special Forces soldiers in Southern Afghanistan. Picture: Australian Department of Defence
Australian Special Forces soldiers in Southern Afghanistan. Picture: Australian Department of Defence
The IGADF, appointed by the federal government to oversee the quality and fairness of the military justice system, was behind the 2020 Brereton Report inquiry into allegations of war crimes by Special Forces.
In its submission to the IGADF inquiry, to report by March next year, the Australian Special Air Service Association (ASASA) national chairman and former SAS officer Martin Hamilton-Smith has blasted the IGADF for the way it handled the Brereton report and created public hysteria of untested evidence.
SOLDIER 1 TESTIMONY
Edited testimony by Special Forces soldiers to the 2023 inquiry into the Office of the Inspector General ADF (20-year review).
I was subject to three interviews. The first interview was, I think, a general probe on a range of things. I think they were trying to get a feel for how operations were being conducted.
Whilst I was never directly accused of anything, I was made to feel like I was on trial. Intimating I had an awareness of alleged criminality or activity related to their investigations. I left the interview feeling more than a little confused.
The last (interview), I was made to feel like a criminal; again not accused of anything, but rather that I was somehow complicit in reported war crimes.
Then when the interview commenced and a continual stream of dead Afghans was displayed to me, I understood. I knew nothing of these men, I had not seen them, nor was I present when they were killed. All had suffered combat related wounds, often to the head.
Whilst I had seen enemy dead on the battlefield all the time, they were visions I work hard to suppress. To have them continually displayed, whilst being hounded for answers to circumstances I knew absolutely nothing of, left me emotionally drained. It took me days to get over that interview, and at times I am transported to that office and that place to see those men again.
“The office of the IGADF’s inability or failure to act on this point has crushed the lives of many innocent men and their families, it contributed to suicide ideation, it has broken up marriages and families leaving children hurt and confused and it has left hundreds of brave veterans and their loved ones feeling they should be ashamed of their service and their regiments or of their husbands, sons, brothers and fathers,” he blasted in a statement which included direct testimony from Special Forces troops.
“This outcome is inconsistent with the IGADF’s stated values and vision.”
Failure of justice due process should not be repeated, he said.
Former SAS officer and Australian SAS Association chief Martin Hamilton-Smith at his home in South Australia in March 2023. Picture Dean Martin
Former SAS officer and Australian SAS Association chief Martin Hamilton-Smith at his home in South Australia in March 2023. Picture Dean Martin
Hamilton-Smith said while war crimes allegations around 23 incidents needed to be investigated, the findings should have been passed to the police or special investigators rather than through the public.
He said 30,000 Australian soldiers served in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2014, conducting multiple operations against a ruthless irregular guerrilla enemy of an undeclared war and Special Forces alone were tasked by the government to kill 3000 enemy combatants.
SOLDIER 2 TESTIMONY
Edited testimony by Special Forces soldiers to the 2023 inquiry into the Office of the Inspector General ADF (20-year review).
From the outset, I would like to say that I don’t think I am or have ever been under investigation myself, but honestly, I don’t know. I was the (redacted) on one of the jobs being investigated. I believe I was ordered to appear and give evidence regarding a specific incident because Justice Brereton and his team thought I would agree with their opinions and act in favour of the prosecution.
Once I arrived at my interview, I was introduced to the inquiry team. I was then immediately shown photos of an incident. Instead of asking me what I thought about the incident, I was told what had happened and felt I was expected to agree. It didn’t appear they were wanting to understand the circumstances of the events but for me to agree with their opinion and support their already developed finding. When I indicated that I wasn’t present for the incident and couldn’t comment on what had happened in that location, I immediately felt hostility from the inquiry team.
Disappointingly, it was clear to me that there was no operational Afghanistan experience in the room. None of the panel understood the complexities of fighting a war there or the grey space in which war exists. After I didn’t agree with their theory immediately at my interview, the whole thing was wrapped up and I was asked to leave.
I am proud of my service and every one of my many deployments to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013 in the service of my country. I took my duty so seriously that I was willing to sacrifice my marriage, relationships with my children, and my life should it come to that.
Now post my service, my experience at the Brereton Inquiry and the random calls from the Office of the Special Investigator, while trying to deal with physical ongoing injuries from my time fighting in Afghanistan, have left the most bitter taste in me. This wasn’t an investigation into how the war was fought and what may have been done better, this was a witch hunt to prove soldiers were guilty murder.
“Though these (23) incidents represent a fraction of the ADF’s operations in that country during this difficult war, the content of the Report and more importantly the way in which it has been received and dealt with by government and the current Chief of the Defence Force (General Angus Campbell) has damaged the spirits of the 30,000 veterans who served there, crushed the physical and mental health of hundreds of Veterans and their families and delivered enormous harm,” his ASASA statement, which included testimony from current and serving soldiers’ experience with the IGADF.
Australian Special Forces Task Group (SFTG) members firing their vehicle mounted heavy weapons at night in Afghanistan.
Australian Special Forces Task Group (SFTG) members firing their vehicle mounted heavy weapons at night in Afghanistan.
It said many Special Forces felt they were tricked into giving evidence for the Brereton inquiry which in effect and with no legal standing contributed to a “show trial” of untested evidence and public hysteria. To date only one person has been actually charged.
The IGADF and CDF Gen. Campbell’s attempt to strip medals and pay compensation to some Afghan families, likely to have been former enemies, Mr Hamilton-Smith said compounded perceptions of guilt without proper police or Office of Special Investigator probing.
SOLDIER 3 TESTIMONY
Edited testimony by Special Forces soldiers to the 2023 inquiry into the Office of the Inspector General ADF (20-year review).
One afternoon, I was informed by the then Regimental Executive officer via phone call that I needed to watch the ABC program Four Corners (The Killing Field) that night because there were allegations in the program directed at me personally.
Based on these allegations, I was called before the IGADF to give evidence. I did find it difficult to recall some events that were put to me based on incidents that occurred 10 years prior, and at times it was amusing to me when they showed me imagery that I’d never seen before and they were perplexed why I didn’t have a recollection of the events.
I will not go into the content of the five-hour interview that followed nor try to defend myself against any of the allegations that fell out of it, which I might add were nothing less than ludicrous, but I found the conduct of the interview quite farcical, and the way (redacted) handled the questioning quite rude and at times aggressive. For example, if I could not recall a certain event, they became aggressive in their approach to the and, I believe, used a bullying tactic almost insinuating that I was lying, although I was brutally honest throughout the whole ordeal.
I was prominent in several allegations against other members of the unit, but I never witnessed any of the said allegations, but I felt at times they were looking to put words in my mouth to satisfy their line of questioning.
It added many veterans felt the Brereton inquiry was an abuse of power, subjecting them to a “medieval Star Chamber”.
More Coverage
New warning for Australian military
Special Forces under siege as covert police operation fails
Brereton’s findings that some patrol commanders and other soldiers became hardened, overbearing and ruthless could be made for any war.
“That the Office of the IGADF would make this point left many veterans bewildered and diminished the IGADF. That government and the CDF agreed with and accepted this recommendation is noteworthy even though many of these commanding officers were not interviewed.”
The ASASA said wars were not won with timidity or soldiers infused with self-doubt or woke self-righteousness but this was what had been accepted now.
************************************
19 December, 2023
Much to do before we close the gap
The gap will NEVER be closed. Tribal Aboriginals are just too different to adopt a white lifestyle. The nearest that was ever approaced was when missionaries managed the settlements. It has all been downhill since then. Being an old guy (aged 80) I have personally known Aborigines from the pre- and post-missionary eras and the difference is striking
The very low average IQ of Aborigines was rigorously established by McElwain and Kearney with the Queensland Test and IQ is a strong correlate of educational achievement.
In the aftermath of the divisive Voice referendum, advocates for both the Yes and No campaigns spoke about the need to continue to address the very real disadvantages faced by members of the Indigenous community.
It is important that the rejection of the constitutionally enshrined Indigenous advisory body was not seen as Australia turning its back on its first inhabitants, and is not used as an excuse to downgrade the importance of reconciliation.
The rejection of the Voice was more about the initial failure of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to explain his model, and the subsequent failure to convince a wary electorate that such a change should be constitutionally enshrined.
Thankfully, since 2008, Australia has had a mechanism to track efforts to reduce Indigenous disadvantage. The Closing the Gap strategy was introduced by prime minister Kevin Rudd’s government, in conjunction with his national apology for the forced removals of Indigenous children.
In his apology, Mr Rudd spoke of “a future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity”.
When expressed as pure data – life expectancy, education levels, incarceration – the gap was and is staggering. Targets have always been deliberately ambitious and as a result they are often missed.
The latest state government Closing the Gap report reveals we are likely to miss many major targets, but the one that has been met deserves to be celebrated.
Queensland set itself the goal of having 95 per cent of Indigenous children enrolled in preschool education by 2025. That has already been achieved, up from 82.2 per cent in 2016.
Hopefully, this one success will carry through to other targets.
At present, the following targets are on track – the proportion of Indigenous babies born with a healthy birth weight, the number of Indigenous adults in full-time employment, and increasing the total landmass controlled by Indigenous people.
However, the areas where we are lagging are shameful.
Life expectancy still lags behind the broader community – by 7.8 years for males and 6.8 for females.
Incarceration rates for adults are actually increasing, rising to 2047 per 100,000 in 2022 from 1815 per 100,000 in 2019, while the number of young people in detention has only decreased slightly.
Heartbreakingly, suicide rates are also increasing.
And year 12 or equivalent education, as well as tertiary education rates, continue to lag.
There are two things we must remember when dealing with such damning data.
Education is key. Once those targets are being met, others will inevitably follow suit over time.
And secondly, Closing the Gap is just data. It’s only through sensible policies that have the support of the broader community that this shame of Indigenous disadvantage will be erased.
***************************************************
Australian Scholar Picks Apart Study Justifying Risk-Benefit of mRNA COVID Vax--Points to Mistakes & Errors
Recently, a University of Sydney professor issued a refutation to an American Journal of Epidemiology (AJE) article declaring the COVID-19 vaccines being worth the risk in the omicron era. Why is this topic relevant? Because as the science unfolds it becomes clearer that the risks associated with the Omicron version of SARS-CoV-2 become less severe (although still quite transmissible) while more safety information becomes available about the COVID-19 vaccines. Not to mention the significant benefits of preexisting and hybrid immunity against Omicron. Will someone lose their job over this one as the author Down Under implies?
Recently Raphael Lataster, Ph.D. wrote “Revisiting a Risk Benefit Analysis of mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines during the Omicron Era” declaring in his blog as well that “Someone may well lose their job over this one.”
The Challenged Piece
Published by Oxford University Press, the AJE is one of the top epidemiology-focused journals. A Johns Hopkins study (Kitano et al.) pointed out that COVID-19 vaccines are still worth the risk in the Omicron era, across all groups. Source.
Ironically, or perhaps not so, Professor Lataster reports that much of the study’s funding came from industry—grants from Merck and Johnson & Johnson. Of course, this doesn’t mean bias on its face but it most certainly should be noted.
Professor Lataster, a supporter of TrialSite, pointed to our attention that the AJE published a follow-up article by Lataster, who informs the world he has zero funding industry. In his rebuttal the Australian academic points to numerous issues and errors with the study.
What’s wrong with Kitano et al.?
As Lataster delineates in this study and corresponding blog:
The study employs peculiar timeframes, such as “Less than 5 months (days 14–149) after the primary 2 doses versus no doses.” No explanation is given. Recall a recent series of journal articles on counting window issues, likely leading to exaggerated efficacy and safety estimates in clinical trials and observational studies, that I was involved with.
"I note that there can be no valid reason why adverse effects caused by the vaccine, in the several months between the 1st injection and 14 days after the 2nd injection, should be ignored”, pointing to an anaphylaxis death occurring very soon after vaccination.
“The authors themselves made reference in their article to a Japanese study, Suzuki et al., which concerns deaths “within seven days after COVID-19 vaccination”, including myocarditis deaths, and found that several of these deaths did “show a causal relationship to vaccination”. Not only are the authors inexplicably omitting relevant data from their analysis, but they knowingly do also so.”
It’s not just when the counting windows begin that is the problem, but their length as well. “The authors only consider vaccine effectiveness and safety up to around 5 months after the last injection. This is problematic with regards to effectiveness as the vaccine is known to rapidly decline in effectiveness around that time and can even become negatively effective. This is also problematic with regards to safety as the vaccine’s long-term safety profile is still, by definition, unknown. We do know that the vaccines can cause myocarditis, however, a potentially long-term and deadly issue. While the authors effectively assume no myocarditis deaths due to a lack of data, there are recent studies that do provide some data on myocarditis deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines, meriting a reanalysis.”
Even with the data as limited and selected as it is, “the stated net benefits of the vaccines are minute”, as “the smallest gain was found to be 18.7 QALY “per 100,000 vaccinees in the 4–5 months after vaccination” (5–11-year-old males with no comorbidities, third dose vs. no third dose, Pfizer vaccine), or less than 2 hours per person”. “And even these are subject to the uncertainties and estimations admitted to by Kitano et al, to say nothing of the aforementioned criticisms, all of which may well reduce these QALY gains to effectively zero, or even negative figures.” Read that again. By having very limited data, and by being very selective with that data (just ignoring highly relevant data, because why not…), their stated net benefits are almost nothing. The actual net benefit could be zero, or even less than zero. Worth potentially risking your life for?
Lataster comments, “While attempting to argue that COVID-19 vaccination is still worthwhile, the authors inadvertently demonstrate that in the omicron era, COVID-19 is now extremely benign and that the potential benefits to the vaccines are minimal at best, at least in the young and healthy.”
TrialSite emphasizes the importance of critical review of journal material during the COVID-19 period, and frankly all the time. Industry bias, ever so subtle, is real and must be identified, called out, and countered.
While it's up to the reader to determine the merits of (Kitano et al.) and the Lataster refutation, it’s unfortunate that more media channels don’t encourage this kind of unbiased, objective presentation for critical review.
********************************************************
It’s time for some honesty about the fall in our living standards
December is a big month for economic news, with the release of the quarterly National Accounts and the Mid-year Economic and Fiscal Outlook.
While living standards are clearly slipping, in many ways inflation is the government’s friend. In all likelihood, there will be a second budget surplus next year.
What the National Accounts clearly demonstrated is that the economy is flatlining, while GDP per capita continues to go backwards. Real household disposable income declined by 1.7 per cent over the September quarter, the fourth consecutive quarterly decline. Since its peak in the third quarter of 2021, real disposable income has fallen by over 8 per cent.
The principal reasons for this dismal outcome are: inflation, rising mortgage rates and a rising tax take. While inflation abated somewhat in the quarter, interest paid on mortgages rose by close to 8 per cent while income tax paid by households also rose by close to 8 per cent.
The insufficient growth in the economy, as well as the increase in the population due largely to immigration, has sealed this depressing result. It’s hardly surprising people are feeling grumpy, something that is being reflected in the surveys of consumer sentiment.
People are digging into their savings to staunch these negative influences. The recorded saving rate was a mere 1.1 per cent in the September quarter, the lowest rate since 2007. It had been 7 per cent last year. There is now very little left in the tank to provide further buffer for hard-pressed households. These were not the set of figures Treasurer Jim Chalmers would have wished for as an early Christmas present. An advocate of measuring what matters, he must surely acknowledge that real household disposable income, which includes the impact of the government’s cost-of-living measures such as energy and childcare subsidies, is a better measure of living standards than GDP.
But the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures clearly show these cost-of-living subsidies end up as additional government spending. The National Accounts note the “government sector increased spending on behalf of households. Indeed, government spending contributed 0.2 percentage points to GDP. State and federal government social benefit schemes for households, including the Energy Bill Relief Fund and expansion of the Child Care Subsidy, were the main contributors to the rise”.
This is the ongoing dilemma for Chalmers. While he likes to rattle off the list of relief measures the government has implemented – add in free TAFE, bulk-billing incentives, cheaper medicines and the like – there is a very real danger that any additional government spending will stall the transition to lower inflation and thereby increase the risk that interest rates will stay higher and for longer. It is the principal reason there were no further measures announced in the MYEFO.
The bigger picture here is that government measures to offset cost-of-living pressures must be paid for. The overpromising by governments to the public has built up expectations that living standards can be directly protected through government action. The combination of cheap money and historically high terms of trade assisted the federal government to maintain this fantasy for a while but, sadly, chickens have a habit of coming home to roost.
It was very significant that the National Accounts indicated the terms of trade – the ratio of export to import prices – had declined by 9 per cent over the year to the September quarter and that net exports made a negative contribution to GDP in the quarter. There is a possibility the good fortune of high terms of trade is coming to an end, an outcome that will place additional pressures on the federal and some state budgets.
The triumph Employment Minister Tony Burke exhibited as a result of the passing of the same job, same pay provisions of the Closing Loopholes legislation needs to be seen in this context. The stark reality is that the resources sector has underpinned much of the largesse handed out by federal governments over the past decade or more.
Absent the investment in the sector and the high prices the world has been prepared to pay for our commodities, managing budgets, both state and federal, would have been very different.
But by crimping labour hire arrangements that have been a means of ensuring a degree of cost competitiveness for a number of resource companies, including BHP, the direction of the effect is unambiguous – less mining activities, less investment in future projects. The resource industry is a global one and the major companies allocate capital on a competitive basis around the world.
Australia suddenly looks a lot less attractive, including for the new mining opportunities presented by the decarbonisation process and leading to us supposedly becoming a “renewable energy superpower”. It beggars belief that Jim Chalmers did not seek to intervene at least to water down these provisions, but it shows what a weak position he holds in cabinet.
This was similarly on view with the NDIS deal – some would call it a stitch-up. It’s all very well shifting expenditure out of the NDIS; but if the eligible non-participants receive the same level of assistance at a similar cost, the exercise is fiscally neutral, at best.
But it gets worse, because Chalmers was forced to extend the egregious GST deal that involves guaranteeing Western Australia a fixed share of its GST revenue – 70 per cent but rising to 75 per cent – as well as ensuring the other states are no worse off. The expensive deal was due to expire in the middle of the decade, but has now been extended until the end.
Add in the pledge for the federal government to lift its health funding contribution from 40 per cent to 45 per cent and it was obvious that Chalmers was completely rolled to get a deal across the line before Christmas.
Chalmers really needs to start telling the story that the fiscal salad days are over and real government spending needs to be returned to pre-pandemic levels. The tiny gains in real wages he has been highlighting don’t override the very real decline in average household living standards.
And without productivity growth – it fell by over 2 per cent in the year ending in the September quarter – we will need to get accustomed to much lower living standards. Just expect a fight in the meantime as various groups battle for their share of the shrinking pie.
********************************************
Brisbane home goes viral for ‘outrageous’ Christmas display
One of the biggest and brightest Christmas displays in Brisbane has now gone viral worldwide, with one video amassing nearly 190 million views on TikTok.
‘Merry Strickland’ in Burpengary East has become a favourite among the Christmas lights community, with the lights getting brighter, inflatables getting higher and a display you can apparently see from space.
David Strickland has decked out his home each Christmas for four years and he said the popularity of the display in 2023 has “gone next level”.
“Aside from all the sacrifice, time and money, it really is the joy it brings - I mean what else can you create that is so magical and brings in so many people,” he said.
‘Outrageous’, ‘extravagant’ and ‘absolutely bonkers’ are just some of the words used to describe the display on 12 Bedarra Crescent and now the residence has gone viral on social media.
“It’s pretty crazy, our Facebook page has nearly 10 thousand followers and there's been TikToks with millions of views. We’re building a bit of a profile now,” Mr Strickland said.
Just this year, Mr Strickland said the house gained an additional 10,000 lights to their already 50,000-strong display, as well as an 11m inflatable Santa, a 3D holographic fan and moving beam lights.
The family have also worked with their local council to create a safe parking area down the road from the property due to the amount of people flocking to the street.
“I’m pretty much out doing traffic control every night until Christmas Eve…I think it’s a small price to pay to bring thousands in and I’m happy to do it,” Mr Strickland said.
Mr Strickland even had to get approval from the Aviation Authority for his 380 watt moving head beam lights which shoot up approximately 600 metres into the sky.
“I mean, look, I think we’re closer to space than we were last year…definitely bigger and brighter, I’ll say that,” he said.
As a child, Mr Strickland said he loved to decorate his own parent’s home and continued to do so when he moved out for the first time and now with his own family.
“It’s always been a passion and it’s grown into something even bigger than I could have ever imagined,” he added.
The display is award-winning, taking out this year’s North Side winner for 97.3’s KISSMAS competition and is a contender for the people’s choice award.
The Strickland family describe the street as “crazy scenes”, with thousands of visitors flocking hours to witness the display.
Despite the craziness, Mr Strickland said he wouldn’t change it for the world. “Honestly, it’s four weeks of the year and just hearing the joy and the screams and the excitement...people are just blown away by the scale of it and it’s a lot of fun.
“People can definitely expect next year to be just as big, if not bigger - we want to take it to the next level,” he said.
************************************
18 December, 2023
New Leftist Premier guarantees future of Queensland coal mining, gas production
Steven Miles has guaranteed that new coalmines and natural gas wells will be allowed in Queensland, even though his recast Labor government aims to slash emissions by 75 per cent.
Mr Miles told The Australian new resource projects would continue to be assessed on a case-by-case basis and could be approved under the tightened climate settings.
In one of his first acts as Premier, he announced the government would legislate a revised emissions target of 75 per cent below 2005 levels by 2035.
“It means it’s unlikely we would have new coal-fired generators,” he said of the state’s ageing, publicly owned power-producing sector.
“But it doesn’t have an impact on the approvals process for extraction projects … each project will be judged on the individual merits. There was no blanket ban … required as part of 75 per cent.”
Under predecessor Annastacia Palaszczuk, hefty coal royalty hikes angered big miners and triggered an advertising campaign by the Queensland Resources Council against the Labor government.
But the controversial tax regime is forecast to pump $9.2bn into the state coffers, up $3.8bn in the 2023-24 budget update.
Mr Miles said fugitive emissions from coal and gas mining would be captured under the revised climate action target.
He said the scheme was an example of how he would bring together city and country in the nation’s most decentralised state.
“We will continue to export coal – particularly coking coal will have a longer future – and we will continue to use gas into the 2030s, and clearly we will continue to export gas as well,” he said. “This is based on modelling that says 75 per cent is achievable. This is really bringing what I’ve been doing in state development into the wider government.
“My focus has been the new industry development strategy, which is all about converting heavy industry to renewable energy … it’s a strong example of how I can bring together the regions and the city. People in the city are concerned about climate change, people in the regions are also concerned about climate change, but they want blue-collar jobs protected and new industries attracted.
“That’s what I want to do here, and legislating the 75 by 2035 target is an important signal.”
Mr Miles said the cabinet line-up he was finalising late on Sunday would demonstrate “renewal” of the government under his leadership, with five new ministers coming in. Controversy-plagued Transport Minister Mark Bailey and Sport and Tourism Minister Stirling Hinchliffe – blamed by some caucus colleagues for the recent RNA stadium debacle – are among those set to bow out.
Asked how the government would hit the formidable target of a 75 per cent emissions reduction over the coming decade, Mr Miles said state laws to limit land clearance outside the cities, and the federal government’s safeguard mechanism to reduce industrial emissions, would be important.
Anticipated technological advancements would also play a role, alongside the transition to renewable energy mandated at both federal and state levels. Queensland has committed to deliver 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030, 70 per cent by 2032 and 80 per cent by 2035, backed by a $500m Low Emissions Investment Partnerships Program and $200m investment in the state’s Regional Economic Futures Fund.
*************************************************
Who’s teaching the teachers?
At the height of the student protests in Melbourne, sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Ivy Bertram appeared on The Project to discuss her decision to help organise the pro-Palestinian rally. As Miss Bertram, an expert on Gaza and geo-politics, delivered pearl after pearl of wisdom, Mr Ali and his fellow hosts nodded in deference at the insight being proffered by this modern-day oracle of Delphi. Unfortunately, this new breed of political commentator currently gracing our screens typifies everything that is wrong with the education system in this country.
There is no doubt that Miss Bertram is simply repeating what she has been told by her teachers at school. But who is teaching the teachers, and what are they being taught at university? The Institute of Public Affair’s latest report, Who Teaches the Teachers? An Audit of Teaching Degrees at Australian Universities, answers these questions and confirms what we have long suspected: our education faculties have been completely beguiled by the forces of wokery, woke activism is deeply and irrevocably embedded into teacher training and universities are churning out legions of woke activist teachers.
Instead of being taught how to master core academic curricula such as reading, writing, mathematics, history and science, the report reveals that teachers are being trained by their university lecturers to be experts in critical social justice, identity politics, critical race theory, radical gender theory, social and emotional learning, and sustainability. Of the 3,713 subjects taught across 37 universities that offer teaching degrees, 1,169 are classified as woke, or as critical social justice. In contrast, a meagre 371 are devoted to teaching phonics, mathematics and grammar. It’s a wonder that children are able to spell ‘Climate Justice’ on their protest banners.’
Critical social justice and the accompanying theories now entrenched in Australian universities were pioneered by Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire (1921-1977) as a theory of teaching known as ‘critical pedagogy’. Built on Marxist foundations, this sought to turn children into politically conscious participants in a perpetual revolution. Tellingly, Freire’s other heroes were Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
By the early 1990s, Freire’s ideas were added to by the social theorists in North American universities who introduced critical race theory and post-colonial theory into the mix. The influence of Freire and his disciples on the teaching landscape in Australia has been far-reaching and profound. He even came to this country in 1974, giving lectures on ‘authority and authoritarianism, conscientisation (critical awareness), violence, class struggle and illusions of neutrality’. Freire’s audience clearly tuned out while he was talking about illusions of neutrality.
As recently as 2021, the Brazilian Marxist was being lauded as ‘one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century’ by Australian academics at a conference held at the University of South Australia.
Critical social justice requires teachers to be agents of change, a message which is drummed into them throughout their four-year degrees. At Monash University, a student taking ‘Theorising Social Justice’ is told that the unit ‘aims to develop in you a strong grasp of the concept of “cognitive justice”, and the associated notions of “epistemic” and “epistemological” justice which will support you to engage with and give value to, the diversity of thought and different “ways of knowing” that can be applied to the pursuit of social justice in local, national, and international contexts, in educational settings and beyond’.
It also teaches them to approach Aboriginal education through the lens of critical race theory and post-colonial theory. At the University of Melbourne, Masters students ‘will engage in critical discussions and activities that enable them to reflect on the impacts of settler colonialism, racism and unexamined bias on First Nations educational sovereignties as well as build their understanding and awareness of Indigenous knowledges and strategies for working towards decolonisation’.
In extreme cases, such as ‘Rethinking Indigenous Education’ offered by Macquarie University, students are not only taught that all Western knowledge must be decolonised, but that they must also be proficient in ‘abolitionist, futurist and Indigenist thinking’. Those taking ‘Leadership in Indigenous Education’ at the University of Canberra are being taught to monitor the ‘attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of other educators around them’. There must be no wrong think in the classroom!
Sustainability is of course, inextricably linked to critical social justice, and maintains that a sustainable world cannot be achieved without a socially just world. Sustainability education is not confined to secondary education but commences at an early age. For example, students studying a Bachelor of Education Early Childhood and Primary at the University of New England are taught how to introduce children aged between two and five to sustainability in the sciences. At the University of Notre Dame, lecturers ensure that ‘a key aim is to empower pre-service teachers to integrate effective advocacy for sustainability in their professional teaching role’ while ‘strategies will be explored to enable young children to participate as active citizens and agentic leaders in protecting the environment for a sustainable future’. Meanwhile, Federation University is concerned with equipping students with ‘tools to embed environment and sustainability practices into primary and/or junior secondary education using interdisciplinary teaching and learning strategies’.
With teaching like this, it is no wonder that anxious young Australians are out in the streets protesting about the government’s supposed inaction on climate change. Almost since birth, they have been indoctrinated by their woke teachers with the narrative that the world is on the verge of a climate apocalypse. And it is of course hardly a coincidence that one in three Australian students can barely read or write, with an average of 33 per cent performing below expectations, while almost one in ten students is not achieving the expected learning outcomes for literacy and numeracy at their year level.
Under the federal government’s ‘back to basics’ plan, there will be a new accreditation regime for teaching degrees, and it will be mandatory for universities to instruct trainee teachers in evidence-based reading, writing, arithmetic, and classroom management practices. While this might be a step in the right direction, it will not address the fact that teachers are being schooled in ideologies which are not only incompatible with the notion of traditional education but also seek to tear it down. As long as woke courses dominate teaching degrees, I fear we will have to endure being lectured to by activist schoolchildren.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/whos-teaching-the-teachers/
************************************************Appointment of far Leftist as Queensland’s top public servant has been labelled a “sick joke” by the LNP, which argues his appointment will hurt democracy
Premier Steven Miles will appoint Mr Kaiser Director-General of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, replacing Annastacia Palaszczuk’s appointment, Rachel Hunter.
Opposition Integrity spokeswoman Fiona Simpson raised concerns with Mr Kaiser – a former Labor MP, Labor state secretary and “self-confessed vote rorter” – now in charge of the apolitical public service.
“To put someone with these blatant ties to Labor and a history of vote rorting is a sick joke and is a terrible tone to set for Public Servants,” she said.
“This appointment, in the shadows of an election year, will have a chilling effect on our democracy.”
Mr Kaiser resigned from the Queensland parliament in 2001 after admitting to electoral fraud in the 1980s.
He rejoined the Queensland government in 2007, serving as Premier Anna Bligh’s chief of staff before quitting for the private sector.
He again returned in 2020 to lead the Department of Natural Resources and Mines before joining Mr Miles’ department in April 2022.
Ms Simpson said Peter Coaldrake’s 2022 integrity review spoke about the “importance of an independent Public Service” and said his appointment could hinder the Opposition’s efforts in holding the government to account.
“A former Labor MP, Labor State Secretary and Labor campaign director will be in charge of the resourcing of the Office of the Leader of the Opposition and maintain final approval over much of the messaging of the Opposition,” she said.
“Steven Miles is the unelected Premier because of a secret backroom deal with union bosses and now is attempting to politicise the public service.”
Mr Miles on Sunday denied Mr Kaiser’s appointment would politicise the public service.
“I think if you survey opinion, public service and the Queensland business sector, they will say that Mike Kaiser will be an excellent director-general in DPC,” he said.
“Others might want to disparage him but I think if you talk to engaged observers they will tell you that he’s doing a good job and that he’ll do a great job.
“He has proven himself in his role, both as director-general of resources and then as my director general in state development.”
***************************************************
Queensland budget rescued by coal levies
Treasurer Cameron Dick in a press release said the government was extending its $8.2bn suite of sweeteners from the most recent coal-showered budget to freezing public transport fees (did anyone tell the mayors?), ratifying the $30,000 home grant (which will not increase house prices, apparently) and putting the brakes on car registrations.
While not included on the press release, voters can still get the $6000 electric car rebate and be comforted by the fact those heathens who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are picking up the tab for their road usage.
Thank you again mining industry, who on some estimates are paying a million dollars per hour for the privilege of risking shareholder capital for multi-decade projects now being bequeathed on the union fiefdoms in George St and South Brisbane.
The latest financial update included no mention of freezing or at least trying to stem the flow of wages expenses that have in the past five years included $600m of discretionary bonuses for the state’s impoverished public sector workers (average earnings $100,000 according to Glassdoor.com.au).
After nine years, the government seems incapable of managing its expense line and relying heavily on a revenue one that has been gifted by way of an elevated metallurgical coal price.
Nick Jorss, the chairman of Bowen Coking Coal, said after the introduction of the royalty regimen last year that he felt like he had woken up in Argentina.
“Maybe I should have used another example, like Venezuela, or another dictatorship” was the follow-up quote.
Such quotes along with any mention of the Queensland Resources Council and its CEO, Ian Macfarlane, have hurt Labor’s mining credentials which, like the private sector experience of its MPs, now approaches net zero.
Coal royalties exceeded Queensland Treasury’s forecasts despite every credible trading house having a coal price at $US275 per metric ton in their reporting, meaning an upside surprise in the latest update (wow, never saw that coming!).
However, when royalties are stripped out, the cost blowouts given to the state by former transport minister Mark Bailey and the government’s unwavering commitment to spending suggest the state would struggle if the coal price went south, and quickly.
For the extreme example, former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez authored a set of populist policies that would end bankrupting the country due to his belief the country’s only export in oil would sell for a fixed price of $US150 per barrel. When the price of the black stuff hit $US30 per barrel, guess what happened?
Defending the mining industry may be unpopular, but it basically pays for everything. The broader point, and there is no getting away with it, Australia doesn’t have industries of the size and scale capable of making a material difference to the federal or state budget bottom line.
************************************
17 December, 2023
Anthony Albanese is deserted by the one group of voters he thought he could count on
Labor's traditional working class vote is deserting the Albanese government, according to a new poll.
In an even more concerning development for besieged Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, voters with vocational and TAFE educations are not defecting to progressive parties, such as the Greens or Teals, but directly to the Coalition.
The exodus was reported by Victorian-based pollster Redbridge, which found blue collar support for the government had slumped from 36 per cent to 30.
This sees the Government's two-party preferred support with this group drop from 57 down to 48 per cent.
More than half of those polled (53 per cent) said Labor is focused on the right priorities, with only 30 per cent thinking they the government had the right focus.
The dip in support from blue collared workers comes despite Mr Albanese's strong ties to the working class.
Mr Albanese continuously revisited stories from his childhood during his election campaign - recalling how he was raised by a single mother in commission housing.
The Prime Minister even labelled himself a 'working class boy from public housing'.
The cost-of-living crisis has turned many voters against Mr Albanese who was recently photographed enjoying a glass from a $500 bottle of wine - making him appear out of touch with his humble roots.
In another ominous sign for Labor, for the first time a majority of voters think Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Coalition are ready to govern.
RedBridge Director Tony Bary said the trends were not good for Labor.
'A lot of the lead indicator numbers in our polling is moving away from Albanese and will start to drag his vote down if he doesn't take strong remedial action,' he told the Daily Telegraph.
'The Albanese Government's capacity for navel gazing on issues that aren't personally relevant to most voters is starting to become a big political problem.'
*****************************************************
Granny flat rule changes come into effect in Victoria amid hopes it will cut red tape
Cherie Gaskin wanted to provide her elderly parents with a safe, comfortable and affordable place to live.
When she decided to construct a secondary building, or granny flat, in her Bendigo backyard, Ms Gaskin said she had not realised how tricky the process would be.
"It's complicated, it's difficult, it takes much longer than what you think, and it's expensive," she said.
Ms Gaskin has welcomed changes to Victorian planning laws that mean secondary dwellings under 60 square metres will no longer require a planning permit.
"It's a great option now for people and everybody wins," she said.
The single mother said her parents, who live on the pension, were becoming anxious about their housing options amid an increasingly competitive rental market.
"I kind of looked at the backyard and thought 'it's not a huge backyard, but it is big enough'," she said.
Ms Gaskin applied for a permit to build a dependent person's unit, which there were specific regulations for.
She found a local builder who specialised in building granny flats and understood the legislation.
After some delays and a horrible experience of being scammed out of almost $30,000, she said her parents were due to move into their new home before Christmas.
She said there were strengths to the arrangement beyond just the economic advantages.
"When I was a kid, my grandfather, my mum's father, he lived with us for a while. I've got very fond memories of that," she said.
It would be a "return to those sorts of traditional families".
"With this new legislation, that whole process will be a lot easier, and with a lot more economic benefit for everybody," Ms Gaskin said.
What can you build?
Under the new laws, a secondary building of up to 60sq m on a block of land measuring 300sq m or more can be built without the need for a planning permit.
The Victorian government says this is the case even in a "heritage or neighbourhood character area" when specified requirements like height and colouring are met.
Only two local government areas allow people to live permanently in tiny homes without council approval. Thousands of people around the country are doing it anyway.
Anyone is allowed to live in the building, whether family, friends, or a renter.
This ruling applies as long as environmental or flooding overlays do not affect the lot.
However, applicants will still require a building permit.
The buildings also must be self contained, requiring some kind of kitchen and bathroom, and there can only be one secondary home on a lot.
The secondary home cannot be connected to a reticulated natural gas supply, and it does not need to allow for car parking space.
In New South Wales, changes to legislation in 2009 made it easier to build a secondary dwelling without development approval if the property was considered compliant.
Rules can differ between local councils, but across the state, as long as the property owner has obtained an occupation certificate, the secondary dwelling can be lived in by family or rented to tenants.
In South Australia, the government is seeking to clarify rules around granny flats or ancillary dwellings and to streamline the approvals process.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-15/victoria-granny-flats-rule-changes/103108998
***************************************************SA parliamentary committee recommends stricter rules but no duck hunting ban
A parliamentary committee has recommended duck hunting remain legal in South Australia but with stricter regulations for hunters and harsher penalties for those who break laws aimed at preventing animal cruelty.
The Select Committee Report on Hunting Native Birds also recommends controls such as marshals for shooting on crown land and funding for compliance by staff from the Department for Environment and Water.
A similar committee recommended banning duck hunting in Victoria in August.
Most duck hunting in South Australia occurs in the Riverland and the South East, near the Victorian border, so the committee has recommended preferencing South Australians for hunting permits if a ban eventuates in Victoria.
The RSPCA says the inquiry failed to address the concerns of South Australians who want the sport banned.
RSPCA animal welfare advocate Rebekah Eyers said the report did nothing to protect declining native bird populations.
"There's less wetland habitat that's available and we're heading into a drier El Niño — this is really serious," Dr Eyers said. "We have five out of the eight species being hunted in long-term decline. "This is a native bird emergency and hunting should be stopped."
No 'epidemic' of bad behaviour
The Legislative Council committee was made up of two Labor MLCs, two Liberals, one Green, one One Nation member and the independent Frank Pangallo.
One of the Liberals — Ben Hood — said duck hunting was already highly regulated. "I don't think the evidence that was heard from the committee was showing an epidemic of bad behaviour by hunters," he said.
"A majority of hunters are doing the right thing every season, but we do of course need to strike a balance with these recommendations. "They're not going to please either side of the debate but if should someone be found in breach of the [National Parks and Wildlife] Act then more serious penalties should be considered, but hunters should also know what they need to abide by."
Environment Minister Susan Close said the government would consider the recommendations.
"The state government is committed to balancing the best available ecological science with the social and cultural values of the community on this issue," she said.
The Department for Environment and Water has separately proposed changing a series of lakes in the South East from crown land into conservation parks, which would prevent duck hunting on them.
The Wattle Range Council voted this week to formalise its opposition to the proposed changes to Lake George, near Beachport, under the South East Coastal Lakes Project.
"I wanted to put the motion to council so our ratepayers and the community could see that we supported their stance," councillor Sharon Cox said.
"We have to remember that as elected members we have to represent them."
************************************
Natural Lifestyle Homes fined $100,000 for illegal demolition of 135-year-old Brisbane cottage
A judge has slapped an inner-city luxury home builder with a massive fine for the illegal demolition of a 135-year-old Brisbane cottage during a $2.4m mansion build, stating that fines need to be high enough to deter developers who may see flouting laws “as simply a cost of doing business”.
District Court judge David Kent ruled that Natural Lifestyle Homes (NLH) must pay a $100,000 fine after it pleading guilty to two charges related to carrying out a development without a permit at a 1888-built cottage that “was one of, or the oldest” home on one of Paddington’s most prestigious streets.
This came after Brisbane City Council appealed against Chief Magistrate Janelle Brassington fining NLH just $20,000 in June. The maximum penalty for a company is $3,002,625.
Judge Kent ruled that the $20,000 fine was “manifestly inadequate” and “fails to create a financial cost that gives effect to general deterrence” and $100,000 better reflected the seriousness of the offence.
“It is so low that it does have a tendency to be potentially seen as simply a cost of doing business for developers in this area,” Judge Kent ruled of the initial penalty.
The total building cost of the redevelopment, at 41 Wilden St, was in the range of $2m to $2.4m which Judge Kent said “dwarfs the amount of the fine”.
NLH co-owner Clifford William Keane had previously applied to demolish the cottage and create a replica of it as part of the construction of his massive new family home.
This was refused by the council because of the cottage’s heritage.
Despite not having approval, NLH later demolished the protected building without referring to council, or the building certifier or the Planning and Environment Court.
Council had only given development approval for a new home to be built but stipulated the 1888-built cottage must be retained.
It was to be shifted to allow the new construction work at the front of the block, but NLH “at some stage reached a decision that moving it forward and up into location on the new residential build was no longer feasible”.
So NLH decided to demolish or “disassemble” the cottage and build a replica of it instead.
“The serious actions taken, not in emergent circumstances, had the effect of overturning the council’s refusal of demolition,” Judge Kent ruled.
“Rather the council was presented with the fait accompli of the total destruction of the 1888 cottage which was explicitly protected by the statutory scheme, and by the conditions of the development approval which, as outlined above, the respondent disregarded,” he stated in his decision.
“The only retaining artefacts are an original door and a portion of two original windows,” Judge Kent’s decision states.
“By committing the offences (NLH) avoided the costs of consultants to advise on whether the cottage could be moved and reinstated prior to the exercise being commenced as well as the associated costs of performing the entire operation effectively, which may well have been significant; it appears to have been a difficult and complex exercise,” he states in his decision.
“There is no explanation as to why structural engineers were not consulted by (NLH) as to the feasibility of this relocation plan either before the cottage was relocated to the back of the site or at the point when the time came to attempt to move it forwards and into position,” Judge Kent states.
The home just four kilometres from the central business district and is a short stroll from the cafes and boutiques of Latrobe Terrace, is owned by NLH shareholder Mr Keane and his wife Jacinda, who was not prosecuted by council.
The Keane’s paid $1.08m for the cottage on a 400sqm block in October 2018, property records show.
The construction of a new $2.4m home by NLH was for Mr Keane and his wife who were intending to live there, and it was not intended to be a profitable exercise for NLH, the court heard.
NLH’s shareholders at the time of the demolition, Mr Keane, 41, from Paddington and business partner Mathew Ralph Carrolll, 54, a registered builder from Bardon, were also prosecuted by council and were slapped with fines of $19,000 and $15,000 by Chief Magistrate Brassington, but the council did not appeal those orders.
Mr Keane and Mr Carroll, through NLH, been flipping inner city properties for many years and were experienced in the industry, the court heard.
Mr Keane is a carpenter and has a degree in built environment while Mr Carroll has been a builder since 1998.
***************************************
14 December, 2023
ATAR results 2023: Wake-up call for school leavers as the income gap between low and high achievers is revealed
This is an expected result but caution about causation is needed. School exam performance is highly correlated with IQ so the high ATAR scorers would be brighter -- and that alone tends to lead to economic success. ATAR scores will mainly be an indicator, not a cause of future success
Students who achieve a high ATAR score will earn up to $33,000 more than their peers by the time they reach their 30s, new research has revealed.
The findings, unveiled during the week when year 12 students receive their ATAR scores, indicate a strong correlation between the attained ATAR level and income levels by the age of 30.
'Individuals with a higher ATAR are more likely to earn a higher income,' said Dr Silvia Griselda from e61 Institute, one of the authors of a new study said.
The e61 paper 'What's in an ATAR? How can university admission scores predict future income?' used data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that draws a link between income levels taken from tax returns and ATAR scores.
At the age of 30, Australians with an ATAR below 70 will have a median annual income of approximately $70,000 in 2022 dollars.
Those with an ATAR between 70 and 80 earn slightly above $75,000.
A score in the 80-90 range correlates with a median salary just surpassing $80,000.
For ATARs falling between 90 and 95, the median salary increases to nearly $90,000, while scores in the 95-98 range leads to a median salary of almost $95,000. ATARs exceeding 98 are linked to a median salary close to $105,000.
In comparison, 30-year-old Aussie workers without a degree earn a median salary of just under $60,000 a year.
The research found people who choose not to pursue a university education and enter the workforce directly from high school typically see an initial rise in income.
However, these advantages tend to diminish by the age of 25.
Dr Griselda said school-leavers who achieve a high ATAR often receive priority admission to esteemed academic programs, particularly in fields such as medicine, finance, and law, boosting their earning potential compared to their peers.
Analysis by the e61 Institute found those who got an ATAR score over 98 will earn a median salary of $33,000 more by age 30 than those with a score below 70
She also noted that the careers of high achievers also benefited from networks they gained through their parents and expensive schooling.
While the link between a high ATAR and a high income is unmistakable, it's important to note a considerable income variation within each ATAR band.
For example, among 30-year-olds with ATARs above 95, the top 10 per cent of earn annual income surpassing $156,000, whereas the bottom 10 per cent in that band earn less than $30,000 per year.
This income disparity is also notable among 30-year-old workers without university degrees. Despite having a median income just under $60,000, the top 10 per cent in this group earn over $115,000 each year.
It comes as 67,234 high school graduates received their HSC marks via text at 6am on Thursday morning, with ATAR results following at 9am.
Year 12 applications through the University Admissions Centre are currently at the lowest level in a decade as fewer school leavers pursue a degree.
*************************************************
Kathleen Folbigg wins bid to quash her baby killing convictions
A great injustice rectified, finally
The woman who was once branded Australia’s worst female serial killer has been acquitted of killing her four children after a 20 year fight for justice.
Kathleen Folbigg spent two decades in prison after she was found guilty of causing the deaths of her four children before she was released in June after an inquiry found there was “reasonable doubt” about her guilt.
After she was pardoned and released, Ms Folbigg asked for her case to be referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal in a bid to overturn her convictions for three counts of murder, one count of manslaughter, and one count of maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm.
After a month of deliberation, the court on Thursday determined to overturn the convictions for the charges.
Chief Justice Andrew Bell, Justice Julie Ward and Chief Justice Ian Harrison said there was “now reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt”.
They quashed her convictions and acquitted her of the historic crimes.
A crowd of supporters burst into a round of applause after the verdict was delivered and an emotional Ms Folbigg wiped away tears.
Speaking to journalists outside court ahead of the ruling, a longtime supporter of Ms Folbigg said the decision was “a long time coming”.
It is the end of a long road to exoneration for the woman previously demonised over the deaths of her four children.
The mother was in 2003 jailed for 40 years for the murder of Patrick (eight months), Laura (10 months) and Sarah (19 months) as well as the manslaughter of her son Caleb (19 days).
All of her children died suddenly and none reached their second birthday.
Ms Folbigg steadfastly maintained her innocence throughout her two decades behind bars, and was supported by an inquiry into the children’s sudden deaths earlier this year.
The inquiry raised reasonable doubt that the Folbigg children could have died due to natural causes or a rare genetic mutation.
New expert medical evidence published in March 2021 revealed that Sarah and Laura Folbigg carried the CALM2 genetic mutation, which can cause cardiac problems, irregular heartbeats and lead to sudden death.
This fatal genetic variant would not have been investigated at the time of the children’s deaths because it was not discovered by medical scientists until years later, the inquiry was told.
Tom Bathurst KC, who led the inquiry, found in his report that Ms Folbigg shared the same genetic mutation as her daughters.
Experts concluded Patrick had likely died due to a brain injury suffered during an epileptic seizure, but they were unable to determine the cause of death for Caleb.
In his report, Mr Bathurst determined there was an “identifiable cause” of three of the children’s deaths and no direct evidence that Ms Folbigg killed her children.
Ms Folbigg had served 20 years of her 40-year sentence when she was pardoned and released from Clarence Correctional Centre in June.
**********************************************************
Townsville cops ‘helpless’, residents terrified as young crims wreak havoc
Kid-glove treatment of young Aboriginal offenders is the root of the problem
Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll will fly to Townsville after three weeks of unrelenting and violent youth crime leaving cops feeling “defeated” and locals terrified. SEE
On a single day last week in the space of six hours officers were called to 120 jobs, most involving stolen cars, as cops the North Queensland town battle the worst spate of crime many had ever seen.
One Townsville station has no police vehicles left, and is being forced to borrow cars from surrounding precincts. It’s understood eight of the region’s 139-car fleet are sidelined in Townsville.
In the last week alone more than 60 cars have been stolen and 150 homes broken into, with the young criminals turning on the police targeting their cars and the officers in them across multiple nights.
Townsville mum Melissa Young-Florence broke down in tears while talking about how she was chased and rammed by youths in a stolen car on December 7. Picture: Natasha Emeck
Townsville mum Melissa Young-Florence broke down in tears while talking about how she was chased and rammed by youths in a stolen car on December 7. Picture: Natasha Emeck
The conditions have become so bad, one officer speaking anonymously to The Courier-Mail said “it’s the worst it’s ever been in respect of the level of intended harm to emergency services,” a source said.
“Officers feel helpless and fear for their safety. They will keep turning up for work to keep the community safe, but they worry what is being done to keep them safe.”
Multiple police sources told The Courier-Mail how officers are afraid to go to work as juveniles target police cars – and now ambulances – night-after-night.
Sources say they are “fighting a losing battle” and were “torn apart” after a night of carnage last week where more than 120 jobs were called in over just six hours, most of those involving stolen cars.
So out of control has the issue become, officers from the specialist Public Safety Response Team (PSRT) have been flown into the city to catch the young criminals.
A terrified Townsville mum broke down in tears as she relived the terror she felt when a group of young criminals chased and rammed her across Townsville in a stolen car while she was out buying Christmas gifts.
Melissa Young-Florence has just left a Townsville shopping centre in her Land Cruiser when she was suddenly targeted by young car thieves in Aitkenvale last Thursday.
She said masked juveniles in a stolen Ford Everest — which also rammed two police cars last week — began ramming her car around 6.30pm and followed her through the streets of Aitkenvale as she desperately tried to lose them.
When she pulled up near a school to call triple-0, the youths rammed the driver’s side of her car, and one of them got out to confront her.
“He threatened me and said: ‘Don’t f**k with our gang, you f***ing b*ch,” she said.
“They took a weapon out and started smashing the glass of the back of my LandCruiser.”
The youths continued to tail her when she returned home to Vincent, and she began to scream at the top of her lungs as they rammed her again, pushing her car onto the kerb.
“Four kids hopped out of the car. My neighbour thinks one of them had a gun, and another came to my window with a wrench to hurt me,” she said.
“One of my amazing neighbours, Damien, chased them off.
“I’ve never been so scared in my life. You don’t know what it feels like. “They were ready to kill me.”
It’s understood the young criminals are a mix of seasoned juvenile offenders, and new crooks from places like Cairns and Palm Island who police hadn’t seen before.
“It’s a generation of kids who have no respect for anything,” a police officer said. “New kids, old kids, there’s no simple fix to a festering decline of parenting.”
On Monday night, sources say one police crew had three separate stolen cars drive at them. Another police car had their tyres slashed. “We feel useless and embarrassed,” another source said. “There’s nothing we can do after our pursuit powers were taken away.
“All you can do is just turn on your bodycam and record everything.”
While no officers had been seriously injured in the rammings, sources say the mental toll was more significant. “Mentally, we are f – ked.”
The Courier-Mail understands the Townsville Watchhouse was “chockers” on Tuesday, with staff calling for back-up and a “line of police cars” waiting outside to get in.
Townsville District Officer Chief Superintendent Chris Hodgman said they charged eight offenders on 138 charges within 24 hours on Monday, bringing the total arrests for Operation Victor Romney up to 20.
One of the recent arrests was a 13-year-old Wulguru boy allegedly linked to the stolen car ram raids on a number of businesses on Saturday.
The boy has been charged with 51 offences, including 13 counts of unlawful use of a motor vehicle, 11 counts of entering the dwelling, and one count each of robbery, arson and assault. He was refused bail and is due to appear in Townsville Children’s Court at a later date.
Chief Supt Hodgman said there were still “several” outstanding targets on their list that police would continue to target this week.
He said the level of offending had increased for many of the city’s high-risk youths. “When we talk about 13 and 15-year-olds out committing life imprisonment offences at night … It is absolutely terrible for the community,” he said.
Townsville Labor MPs Les Walker and Aaron Harper said they had raised the region’s crime issues with potential premier candidates this week.
Mr Harper – who supported Deputy Premier Steven Miles as the state’s new leader – said Mr Miles “understands the situation” in regards to youth crime in Townsville. “We know it’s a serious problem and we want it fixed.”
Police Minister Mark Ryan said the Commissioner would be in Townsville on Wednesday.
Commissioner Katarina Carroll said she was closely monitoring the situation in Townsville and is being briefed multiple times each day. She intended to visit police stations and the Operations Command Centre on her visit north.
**********************************************
In an inflation crisis, Labor is now squeezing Middle Australia for budget repair
Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers are now faced with a double-edged political dilemma.
Middle Australia is not only paying the price of the inflation problem through higher interest rates, it is now also doing the heavy lifting to repair the federal government’s balance sheet.
While most households are acutely aware of how much more they are paying for things, particularly their mortgages, they may be less aware of how much more tax they are paying now as well.
Wednesday’s mid-year Economic and Fiscal outlook reveals the fastest growing piece of the revenue pie is the income tax take.
The share of the tax upgrades coming out of people’s pockets is now equivalent to that of corporate Australia.
The mid-year update confirms what is already known.
There are three groups wearing the pain of the economic problem and the budget problem.
The first are wage earners who are paying more for things.
The second are borrowers who are paying more through higher interest rates.
And the third are taxpayers who are paying more tax — the price of bracket creep.
Middle Australia falls into all three categories.
Economists will say this is a good thing. A necessary evil to get inflation down.
But managing the politics of this is now Chalmers’ great challenge. While the budget position is improving, the position of households continues to deteriorate.
Notable in the MYEFO forecasts is a divergence between the Treasury and the central bank on the inflation problem.
Treasury is much more optimistic about the forecasts for inflation coming down.
Considering neither the RBA or the Treasury modellers saw the problem coming in the first place, predictions about when the country comes out of it are dubious.
Nevertheless, Chalmers can claim a significant improvement in the budget position. He is on track for a likely second surplus next year.
Having succeeded in resisting more cost-of-living spending, the government has been able to bank most of the revenue gains onto the budget bottom line.
This is the responsible approach. To do otherwise would have only added to the inflation problem.
“This budget update is all about responsible economic management,” says Chalmers.
But again, the politics are difficult, with people handing over more and more of their money to the government in taxes.
Chalmers knows that there is a long game here which the government hopes will eventually pay political dividends.
MYEFO was another downpayment on re-building the coffers for the May budget next year, the last May budget before the election, when politics and the polls will likely have a greater impact on where it all goes from there.
************************************
13 December, 2023
New Qld premier chosen by a deal between unions
No voice for individual party members? Democracy? Leftist authoritarianism at work again. Elite rule is instinctive to them
A secretive industrial deal between two unions over government-funded infrastructure projects has installed Steven Miles as Queensland’s next Labor premier.
Just days after Annastacia Palaszczuk resigned, union powerbrokers were quick to stitch up a factional agreement that would secure Mr Miles’s accession to the top job and avoid a drawn out battle that would have followed a contest for the leadership.
Treasurer Cameron Dick and his 18-member Right faction threw their support behind Mr Miles after the deal was struck late on Monday night, cruelling chances of Health Minister Shannon Fentiman who declared her plans to run for the leadership just hours earlier.
Multiple sources briefed on the negotiations said the agreement between United Workers’ Union boss Gary Bullock and Australian Workers Union leader Stacey Schinnerl was centred on the government’s Best Practice Industry Conditions Policy, which forces unions and contractors to negotiate agreements on government-funded civil construction projects worth more than $100m.
Ms Schinnerl had been unsuccessfully lobbying the government for months, anxious the policy gave the militant construction union the CFMEU and its members an advantage in civil construction and road-building projects. Both unions have been battling for industrial coverage on the lucrative taxpayer-funded projects, which traditionally fell into the AWU’s jurisdiction.
Ms Schinnerl finally had the upper-hand when Mr Bullock had to rely on the Right faction as kingmaker to give Mr Miles the numbers in caucus.
According to sources briefed on the negotiations, Mr Bullock offered to relinquish the Left’s hold on the transport and main roads portfolio – currently held by controversy-prone Left minister Mark Bailey – to the Right.
Along with that, there were concessions to the AWU on the BPIC policy that would sideline the factionally unaligned CFMEU and potentially other non-UWU Left unions which had fallen behind Ms Fentiman, including her own AMWU, as well as the ETU.
An AWU spokesman said the union supported best-practice industry conditions for workers engaged in the civil construction industry, and “we have been constructively engaging with multiple government departments for years to get the best possible outcome for our members”.
“It’s time for our party to stick together and focus on winning the next election – the stakes are too high for working people for our movement to be divided,” the spokesman said.
The Australian has been told the deal was done before Mr Dick – who has always pushed back against union influence over the parliamentary Labor Party – was in the room. He was saddled with it, and then had to take it to a two-hour telephone hook-up of his Right faction MPs last night.
A deep reshuffle of cabinet is expected later this week, with Mark Bailey, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Stirling Hinchliffe to depart from the ministry, along with potentially more, including Craig Crawford and Mark Furner.
***************************************************
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's brutal Christmas message for Anthony Albanese - as she calls on Aussies to celebrate Australia Day
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has hit out Anthony Albanese's government and called for a cancelled Australia Day event in Britain to be reinstated as she called for Australians to be 'proud' of their national day again.
During an interview with 2GB's Mark Levy, Senator Price urged Anthony Albanese to reverse the decision made by the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith, to cancel the annual Australia Day Gala.
Mr Smith cancelled the Australia Day Gala black-tie, run by the not-for-profit Australia Day Foundation to fund scholarships for Australians to study in Britain, citing the 'sensitivities' the event touches on 'for some Australians'.
Price said the move by Mr Smith, the former Labor MP who was hand-picked to the plum diplomatic posting by the Prime Minister, was 'unAustralian' and 'uncalled for'.
'I would like to understand where Mr Smith thinks he can make this determination all by himself. Who gave him permission to do so?' she asked.
Senator Price argued the result of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum showed that 'Australians are sick of being put down'.
'I think it is a put down to put an end to any celebrations of Australia Day,' she said.
She called on Australians to celebrate Australia Day next year.
'I think we have to get back to being proud of what it means to be Australian in this lucky country and appreciate what we do have.
'I think the Prime Minister should be overturning those (Mr Smith's) actions because they are uncalled for and unAustralian.'
She also accused Voice advocates of failing to come to terms with the real meaning of the measure's defeat at the October 14 referendum, which saw over 60 per cent of voters reject it.
On Monday UNSW Professor of Law Megan Davis argued the Voice lost because of Australians' 'hatred of politicians' who were 'too front and centre' of the Yes campaign.
Senator Price said this response 'demonstrated just how of touch' Yes advocates with everyday Australians who voted down the Voice 'because they didn't want Australia to be divided along the lines of race'.
'Every day Australians were sick of being called racist of being told they were on the wrong side of history if they voted no,' she said.
'They said yes to a united Australia where we recognise each and every one of us as Australian citizens equal, regardless of race gender or any other label.
'It’s just a pity there are still some supporters of the Voice who can’t come to terms with that.'
Senator Price also hit out at energy minister Chris Bowen, who began a speech at the Cop28 climate talks in Dubai with a modified Acknowledgment of Country, which normally is used to honour Aboriginal traditional owners.
'It has lost any meaning now if you are going to other parts of the world and suddenly this pops up in your address.'
As the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians Senator Price was scathing about her government counterpart Linda Burney.
Senator Price said Ms Burney, as Minister for Indigenous Australians, appeared 'lost for any ideas on how to move forward' other than going back 'for more discussions' with Voice advocates.
'It is time for action no more talk and if you don’t have many ideas than you are probably not the right person for the job, Senator Price said calling for an audit of how tax payer money is spent on Indigenous issues.
Senator Price was asked if she would consider running for Prime Minister but laughed off the suggestion.
'I need to sit back and get to know the job a little bit more,' she said seemingly about her own portfolio,' Senator Price said.
'It’s been a huge 18 months and there is a lot of work that has to be done but I am very grateful for all the support out there.'
************************************************
The universities set to lose millions of dollars in international student crackdown
Universities and private colleges considered at high risk of recruiting international students to Australia to work rather than study stand to lose tens of millions of dollars in revenue under the government’s new migration strategy.
Victoria University and Federation University in Victoria and Wollongong and Newcastle universities in NSW are among those whose ability to easily recruit international students is in jeopardy, according to confidential independent ratings seen by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Meanwhile, the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia, which represents hundreds of private colleges, described the new migration strategy as “reckless” and said Australia’s broken visa processing system was to blame – not students.
“There is a real risk that it will diminish Australia’s reputation as a high-quality [educator of] international students,” ITECA chief executive Troy Williams said on Tuesday.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles on Monday released the federal government’s migration strategy, which plans to halve immigration numbers within two years. Australia’s net migration reached a high of 510,000 in the year to June 2023.
The strategy is designed to weed out people using the student visa system as a back door to the job market, aiming to cut new arrivals by targeting universities and colleges considered the highest risk of accepting students coming to Australia to work rather than study.
A new process to be introduced before the end of the year by the Department of Home Affairs will result in swift processing of student visa applications only for low-risk providers.
A spokesman for O’Neil said it had been put in place to protect the integrity and quality of Australia’s international education sector. “If providers are doing the wrong thing, they will face slower processing times,” he said.
The strategy will leave Australia’s most established and richest universities such as the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney largely untouched, while other universities and private colleges with a track record of recruiting non-genuine students will be targeted.
“Higher risk providers will experience slower processing times as visa decision makers consider the integrity of a provider, as well as individual student applicants,” the strategy said.
A table of university risk ratings produced by a firm working in international education based on confidential Home Affairs data – seen by this masthead – placed Victoria’s Federation University as the riskiest university for students entering Australia to work rather than study.
Universities with the best record are ranked tier one. Federation University was the only institution rated at the worst level, tier three.
A Federation University spokeswoman said it had been “disproportionately impacted by a sharp increase in visa refusals from India by the Department of Home Affairs earlier this year, which has now been addressed”.
“We are confident that following ongoing consultation with the Department of Home Affairs that we will return to a tier two rating for 2024,” she said.
Private colleges with higher risk ratings will also have their student numbers cut by the strategy.
ITECA said in a statement that the new migration strategy was “highly problematic, based on broad and often inaccurate generalisations about quality [in private colleges], and data from a broken visa processing system”.
“The language in the migration strategy is reckless,” Williams said. He warned of a potential “massive overcorrection” that would hurt the entire international skills training sector.
Visa grant rates had already begun to fall in recent months amid controversy over visa rorting, students moving to lower-cost courses, ghost colleges that act as shopfronts for so-called students to access the jobs market, corrupt agents and the exploitation of students.
Among the measures to be put in place to reduce student numbers are a tougher English language test and a new “genuine student test” – although it is unclear how this will differ from the existing “genuine temporary entrant” statement that prospective students must complete now.
The strategy also stops international students who enrol at an Australian university from dropping out of that course after six months and switching to a cheaper vocational college.
And it winds back the post-study work rights available to tens of thousands of students, with temporary student visas available at present for stays of up to eight years.
Students who are working in Australia on a “temporary graduate visa” will also be blocked from staying in the country for years more by enrolling in a new course once their graduate visa ends.
Not everyone in the sector believes the new strategy will slash international student numbers.
Associate Professor Peter Hurley, a director of the Mitchell Institute policy research group within Victoria University, said it was unlikely the new migration strategy would drastically change things.
“There are 860,000 international students and their families now in the country,” he said. “The students I think the government is targeting in this migration strategy are those in private colleges, along with those who have finished their course [and who have post-study work rights].”
Hurley said the migration strategy would simply cut back the growth of student numbers, rather than actively reducing them.
“This is the story of international migration policy over the past two decades: we have a big boom, we change the settings so numbers fall a little, and then the increase starts again,” he said.
Hurley said that England and Canada were also reining in their growth in post-study work rights because “post-pandemic, student numbers just exploded in those countries as well”.
He said Australia’s growth in international students, though, had been remarkable since the emergency phase of the pandemic had ended. “In two years, we have added about 450,000 people to the population – about the same population as Canberra – as international students returned to Australia.”
********************************************
Livestock, aquaculture industries raise alarm amid illegal fishing surge off WA
Rubbish, abandoned campsites and reported sightings of illegal fishers off Western Australia's north coast have sparked concerns that serious animal diseases could slip into the state's $3-billion livestock industry.
Fishers working in remote waters off the Kimberley say illegal Indonesian fishers are regularly landing on the Australian mainland, harvesting sea cucumbers with trawl nets and leaving litter on beaches and the sea floor.
An Australian Fisheries Management Authority (AFMA) spokeswoman said the authority had recorded 211 foreign fishing vessels intercepted in WA waters since the beginning of the year, but many fishers who regularly work off the northern coast believe the number of arrivals could be much higher.
Vansittart Bay sea cucumber fisher Corrie Mcintosh said he was regularly finding noodle packets and water bottles with Indonesian writing strewn on the usually pristine beaches.
He said the amount of rubbish he was finding was increasing and led him to believe many fishers had regular contact with the Australian mainland.
"A lot of it is very new, and some of it is disintegrated — the effort has been widespread for quite a while out there," Mr Mcintosh said. "It's pretty daunting knowing that they can get in and land on Australia undetected.
"It's almost laughable now — it's been going on for a while, there's been reports put in. "Without pointing the finger, it's like it's fallen on deaf ears."
In April, 11 Indonesian fishers were rescued from the Rowley Shoals off the Kimberley coast after Cyclone Ilsa destroyed their boat. They were shipwrecked for six days without food or water.
AFMA said at the time it would not attempt to prosecute the men for illegally entering Australian waters.
Last month, 12 people were found in a remote part of WA after travelling by boat from Indonesia. It is not known at this stage if they were fishers or asylum seekers, but without proper controls both groups could pose a biosecurity threat.
On his most recent fishing trip to Vansittart Bay, Mr Mcintosh saw an illegal fishing crew. "Where they were fishing they were touching the mainland, they were working on the mainland," he said.
Mr Mcintosh and his crew followed the boat and were able to see dragnets that they suspected were used to catch sea cucumbers.
"There's lots of reports of a number of boats in one fishing operation, up to four or five boats fishing the mainland, walking the mud flats, camping and living ashore," he said.
"It's a lot more than we are hearing about. "[Border Force] are doing the best they can now that they're there. "There's probably not been enough resources thrown at this issue."
It is not just those involved in aquaculture who are concerned about the impacts of unregulated fishers.
The Kimberley Pilbara Cattlemen's Association (KPCA) said the biosecurity risk illegal fishers posed was cause for concern.
"We're very concerned particularly with the nearness of both foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) and lumpy skin disease (LSD) in our near-neighbours," chief executive Bron Christensen said.
FMD is extremely contagious in livestock and can be carried on footwear and clothing, as well as in food.
LSD is spread primarily via biting insects.
Indonesia is responding to widespread outbreaks of both diseases and an outbreak of either could cost Australia billions.
************************************
12 December, 2023
Major Australia Day event is cancelled over sensitivities around celebrating the national day
Anthony Albanese's high commissioner to the UK has scrapped the annual Australia Day fundraiser, citing 'sensitivities' over the controversial public holiday.
Stephen Smith, Australia's highest-ranking diplomat to the UK who previously served as defence minister and foreign affairs minister under the Rudd and Gillard governments before retiring from frontline politics in 2013, has put an end to the popular Australia Day Gala dinner.
It was held annually for the past 20 years in the marble-clad Exhibition Hall of the Australian High Commission on the Strand on the Saturday closest to January 26.
The black-tie evet, which is run by the not-for-profit Australia Day Foundation, has previously attracted some of Australia's biggest exports, including singers Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Tim Minchin and entertainer Barry Humphries and broadcaster Clive James.
A spokesman for the High Commission of Australia told The Sydney Morning Herald it was 'well known that Australia Day touches on sensitivities for some Australians'.
'The high commissioner is happy to acknowledge that was part of the decision-making process with respect to the various alternative dates suggested by the foundation,' the spokesman added.
Leader of the opposition Peter Dutton called on Mr Albanese to 'reverse this bad decision'. 'Australia Day is our national day and it shouldn’t be cancelled like this,' he said.
Mr Smith told the organisers that it would not be appropriate to hold the 2024 event around January 26, which marks the First Fleet's landing in Sydney in 1788.
The High Commission of Australia reportedly wanted to charge the charity £29,000 ($55,000), impose a curfew of 11pm and proposed the event be held in March instead.
Phil Aitken, founding member of the foundation told the paper, the lack of support for the event after 20 years was 'very sad'.
'I was very disappointed to be told that it was not appropriate to have a function around Australia Day that might be interpreted as insensitive back in Australia,' he said.
Advertising titan Bill Muirhead, who was also a founding member of the foundation, slammed the decision as 'un-Australian' .
'The last time I checked, January 26 was still Australia Day,' Mr Muirhead told the paper.
The event has turned a profit in recent years which has been used to fund scholarships for Australians to study in the UK.
Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham called on the federal government to overturn Mr Smith's decision.
'It's not a high commissioner's place to unilaterally change the date of Australia Day,' Mr Birmingham told the paper.
'Stephen Smith doesn't just look like a killjoy who's ashamed of Australian history but is also trashing a prime event that promotes investment, travel and trade with Australia.
'Penny Wong and Don Farrell should overrule this ridiculous decision that burns the goodwill and reputation of an event built up over many years by proud expats happy to give their time to promote our nation.'
Mr Smith was believed to be the Prime Minister's third choice for the ambassadorial role as the government struggled to fill the post for nearly a year.
Earlier this year, he stoked controversy when he said it was 'inevitable' that Australia will become a republic and remove King Charles as head of state.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12847861/Major-Australia-Day-event-cancelled.html
*************************************************Education destroyed by self-serving educrats
Such is the parlous and substandard state of Australia’s education system, if those in charge managed a major corporation like Qantas, Optus, or Woolworths they would either be investigated by the ACCC, be removed from the board, or have their salaries and bonuses docked.
Not so for those career educational bureaucrats, academics, subject experts, and carpetbaggers who have played a central role in the nation’s dismal collapse in educational standards over the last 30 to 40 years.
Whether we look at international tests like PISA – where today’s 15-year-old students are a year behind their year 2000 counterparts – university courses being dumbed down due to first year students being unable to cope, or employers complaining about illiteracy and innumeracy, Australian education is going down the gurgler.
Despite the additional billions of dollars invested as a result of the Gonski funding review, multiple national reform agreements over the last 30 years, and countless government-sponsored curriculum and assessment inquiries and reviews, generations of students have been, and still are, destined to failure.
There’s nothing new in the latest 2022 PISA results highlighting Australia’s descent into mediocrity. In 2004 I wrote about why our schools are failing and cited evidence from tests and surveys carried out in 1975, 1995, and 1996 concluding that nearly 30 per cent of primary students failed basic literacy tests.
When detailing why Australia under-performs and why standards have declined so dramatically, the usual suspects include ineffective classroom practice, a superficial, substandard curriculum, lack of discipline, failure to set high expectations, and parents abrogating their responsibilities.
Rarely identified is the major systemic problem infecting Australia’s education system. A problem centred on the fact those responsible over the last 30 to 40 years have failed dismally in their responsibility to provide students with a challenging, enriching, and worthwhile education.
Beginning in the early 1970s, those tasked with training teachers jettisoned the more traditional approach based on teacher authority and teacher-directed lessons, rote learning, and memorisation in favour of a range of progressive, new-age innovations and fads.
Open classrooms, community schools, student-centred learning, the whole word ‘look and guess’ approach to reading, as well as diagnostic, descriptive reporting, and assessment based on the belief ranking and failing students was bad for their self-esteem dominated.
Professional bodies, including the Australian Council for Educational Research, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, and the Deans of Education all imbibed the educational Kool-aid committing generations of students to failure.
The Australian Education Union, not surprising given its cultural-left leaning, argues the competitive, academic curriculum must be overthrown as it reinforced capitalist hierarchies. Ignored is that forsaking meritocracy especially punishes disadvantaged but bright working class students.
In 2005 the Head of the AEU boasted such had been the success of the union’s long march through the education system ‘the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum’.
The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also responsible for falling standards as measured by international tests. Drawing on the neo-Marxist-inspired concept of critical literacy, the AATE has long argued teachers should forsake teaching standard English and grammatically correct language in favour of empowering and liberating students by emphasising student agency and creativity.
Proven by the publication in 1998 of Going Public: Education policy and Public Education in Australia, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association is also responsible for Australia’s dumbed down, ineffective curriculum.
The book argues in favour of ‘social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education’ and argues fears about falling standards are ‘alarmist and negative’, spread by conservative politicians and a subservient media to undermine public education.
Against what is condemned as ‘reactionary policy development’ ACSA calls for schools and teachers to redouble their efforts to teach an emancipatory and liberating view of education calculated to indoctrinate students with its Woke ideology.
Commonwealth, state, and territory education departments and bodies like the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority cannot escape blame for turning Australia’s education system into an intellectual wasteland.
In addition to multiple national education reform agreements proving ineffective and costly, government and bureaucratic intervention has drowned school leaders and teachers in needless red-tape and mindless busy work contributing to burnout and high attrition rates.
Even more disturbing, based on the principle of promoting people to their least level of ability, those educrats responsible for destroying what was once a successful and rewarding education system are either promoted or recycled as members of yet another inquiry or review.
Like the old industrial relations club, those responsible for Australia’s educational decline are a self-serving, inward-looking coterie more concerned with power and prestige than raising educational standards.
The alternative is a market-driven system of education based on subsidiarity and parental choice represented by autonomous community schools and school vouchers.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/education-destroyed-by-self-serving-educrats/
******************************************************COP28 fantasy shows emission targets can’t be reduced to zero sum game
The COP28 summit in Dubai has provided marvellous entertainment. It has illustrated the complete fantasy of so much Australian climate policy and debate for the past 20 years.
Holding it in one of the main oil-producing regions meant a couple of disagreeable collisions with reality. For the big energy producers just laughed out loud at the idea that they were going to eliminate fossil fuels.
The only people who believe that are climate activists. I don’t even think governments that say it believe it.
According to the Energy Institute Statistical Review for 2023, fossil fuels provide about 82 per cent of the world’s energy, which is about where it has been for a decade or more.
But right back to the Gillard government years, we in Australia were constantly berated for what laggards we were and how the rest of the world was switching en masse to renewable energy.
In fact, far from the Coalition years costing the nation by delaying necessary change, they gave us another decade to accumulate wealth. Being a late adopter of technology is smart when the technology in fact has not yet been invented. It’s still true that when the Coalition ran on energy policy it won elections.
The rest of the world was not decarbonising. China is responsible for 30 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Sometime next decade its historic emissions will be so great it will be responsible for the lion’s share of historic emissions as well, so the essentially nonsense argument that the West caused the problem and therefore should pay disproportionately for its solution will not apply in any way.
But China has also dominated the market in manufacturing the hard objects of renewable energy – wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles. One reason China has such a price advantage in producing such products is that it uses cheap electricity generated by coal. That’s true, by the way, of all the consumer goods we buy from China too. The West deindustrialises to reduce emissions and all the same products are made by coal-fired electricity in China. China uses more coal than all other nations combined. China and India use two-thirds of all the coal used in the world.
Once on the ABC Insiders’ program I earned a passionate interjection by the normally well-mannered Annabel Crabb for saying a hi-tech coal-fired power plant would be a good idea in Australia (a position Malcolm Turnbull once advocated). No, she protested, coal was on the way out. The ABC audience was outraged at my pro-coal remark, as if I’d brought eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog to a Salem witch trial.
What of reality? In 2022, increased demand for thermal coal in China, India and Indonesia more than offset the decline in demand in the US, the EU and Japan. So consumption of coal in 2022 hit an all-time high. So, too, did greenhouse gas emissions.
The US Energy Information Administration reports that on all its realistic scenarios, it expects greenhouse gas emissions to rise until 2050 at least.
I’m not arguing that this is a good thing. But every so often it’s worth trying to think of policy in the framework of reality. If you accept more or less the anthropomorphic warming idea, then you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But if it’s absolutely clear that the rest of the world is going to massively increase emissions, and that anything Australia does one way or the other will have no discernible effect on global warming, then it’s only reasonable that you temper the urgency of your efforts a bit. Still reduce emissions by all means, but not at any cost.
If that’s what Australia really wanted to do, it would focus on gas in the short term and nuclear in the long term, with a chunk of renewables thrown in as well. Gas replacing coal does reduce emissions. And nuclear in the long run gives you reliable base-load power forever at more or less zero emissions, after accounting for the emissions involved in constructing the power stations.
All of our current policy is based on fantasy. For example, you can’t have net zero plus immigration, and I want immigration.
The world is not moving to net zero. Where big reductions have occurred it’s in rich nations which, until now, have been willing to pay the massive subsidies renewable energies still need, and, more important, to pay for the back-up capacity you have to have for when renewables don’t work. And yet there’s more. They also have to pay for vast work connecting renewables to electricity grids.
According to one calculation, achieving net zero through renewable energy would require 80 million kilometres of new power lines, or wrapping the Earth 2000 times.
The Economist, a great supporter of net zero and green actions, dolefully reports in its latest issue on the commercial disarray in green energy and finance. The projects are so expensive that they are falling over, in both the US and Europe.
The S&P global green energy index, it reports, has fallen by 32 per cent across the past year while global stockmarkets have risen by 11 per cent.
The Economist doesn’t say it but what those figures represent is that even in rich countries the gobsmacking cost of moving to renewables is such that they are running out of the money to spend on that type of energy.
The Wall Street Journal recently listed a swag of indicators that point to what it calls “the collapse of the net-zero agenda around the world”. Among these: the EU’s green deal has essentially collapsed, with key elements impossible to be implemented; Britain has abandoned an electric vehicle mandate and has also embarked on new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea; Geert Wilders, who repudiates climate action, won a slashing victory in the Dutch elections following regional election victory for a farmers’ party opposed to emissions restrictions in agriculture.
There are countless other straws in the wind. Argentina has just elected a president who rejects costly climate action. If Donald Trump becomes president he will do the same for the US, although even under Joe Biden the US is now the biggest producer and exporter of natural gas and in September produced 13.2 million barrels of crude oil a day, a record amount.
By all means reduce Australia’s emissions, but don’t send us bankrupt going at breakneck speed. And just occasionally acknowledge the reality in the big bad world.
********************************************************
China lifts restrictions on Australian abattoirs as trade tensions ease
China has lifted suspensions on three Australian abattoirs as it continues to ease trade restrictions on Australian goods.
Several other abattoirs remain on China's trade blacklist
Meat exports were suspended from two of the abattoirs in mid-2020, and from the third in early 2022, after COVID-19 cases were reported among workers at the plants.
But analysts said the protracted bans were part of a campaign of economic punishment conducted by China against Australia due to political tensions.
The decision means that Teys at Naracoorte, Australian Lamb Company at Colac and JBS at Brooklyn will once again be able to send their products to China.
Since May 2020, 10 Australian abattoirs have been suspended from trade with China.
Seven remain on China's trade blacklist, with Beijing alleging the exporters have wrongly labelled or contaminated meat.
Trade Minister Don Farrell told the ABC that Beijing's latest decision was "another positive step towards the stabilisation of our relationship with China".
"The Albanese government will keep pressing for the remaining trade impediments to be removed as soon as possible," he said.
China has already lifted trade barriers it placed on several Australian goods in 2020 and 2021, including crippling tariffs on barley.
Trade barriers remain on red wine, lobster and meat exporters.
Beijing agreed to "review" hefty tariffs on Australian wine, with a decision expected next year.
An economic sanction is intended to peacefully protect the world's citizens. Too often, they have the opposite effect.
Patrick Hutchinson from the Australian Meat Industry Council said hundreds of millions of dollars of trade with China had been lost due to the series of bans.
He welcomed the resumption of trade from the three meatworks.
"It's been a long haul, and we're certainly by no means over it yet, but it's a good start."
Victorian-based meat industry analyst and trader Simon Quilty said the export bans "had taken away one of the most important markets" and had had an enormous impact on the businesses.
China is Australia's biggest importer of lamb and mutton, and the second-biggest importer of Australian beef.
"Without doubt, this is welcomed by everyone," he said.
In 2019, before the suspensions Australia's red meat trade with China was about $3 billion.
Despite the trade bans, several Australian abattoirs have continued to trade throughout the diplomatic tensions.
Australian Country Choice, Kilcoy Pastoral, JBS-owned Beef City, JBS Dinmore, Northern Cooperative Meat Company, John Dee and Meramist meatworks remain suspended.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-12/china-lifts-restrictions-on-australian-abattoirs/103217502
************************************11 December, 2023
Diagnosis list for NDIS to be scrapped under five-year reboot plan
This sounds reasonable. "Autism" covers a wide spectum of disorders, with many manageable by the person afflicted. Taxpayer support should only be offered if the person's health is endangered
The list of medical diagnoses that guarantees access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme would be scrapped within five years under a set of reforms that seeks to ease pressure on the $42 billion scheme so that it does not buckle under its own weight.
It means a diagnosis of autism alone would no longer be enough for children to access individual support packages through the NDIS, which has become one of the scheme’s greatest pressure points.
More than 2.5 million Australians with a disability – including children with mild autism and developmental concerns – would instead receive services under a new system called “foundational supports” that will be established under a fresh agreement between state and federal governments so that the NDIS is no longer Australians’ only source of disability support.
That new layer of services will include home and community care supports, aids and equipment, early childhood support, psychosocial services, and help for adolescents and young adults – services that the reviewers do not think need to be delivered through individual NDIS packages.
The independent recommendations from scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady and former education department head Lisa Paul, published on Thursday, aim to improve people’s experiences of the NDIS while dampening its growth trajectory so that it does not blow out to $100 billion within a decade.
A new electronic payment system would help the government track who was getting paid for what – and more easily pick up fraud or overcharging – while providers would have to register under a new regulatory system.
A new role of “navigator” would be created to help connect people to the right services in an attempt to improve accessibility. The NDIS would also cover the cost of people’s application assessments, so they would not have to pay out-of-pocket.
But a significant piece of reform will be supporting children, who currently make up half of NDIS participants, outside the scheme by delivering stronger support in schools and childcare centres – places the reviewers say are more appropriate than clinical settings.
Access criteria will also be tightened to make sure the scheme is used most by Australians with significant and permanent disabilities.
Thousands of NDIS participants – in particular, children with autism level two or above – currently receive automatic access to the scheme through its diagnosis list, and remain on it for years.
“These lists were introduced during transition to the full scheme to accelerate access for some people... However, they have led to a focus on medical diagnosis rather than function and disability-related support needs,” the reviewers said.
“These lists can provide simple and transparent access to the scheme for some children. However, they also exacerbate inequity and delay support for children with similar levels of need who may not have a diagnosis on an access list, or lack the means to obtain a diagnosis if they don’t meet the age criteria for developmental delay.
“We recommend removing automatic access under the access lists.”
The reviewers said access to the NDIS should be based on the impact disability had on a person’s day-to-day life.
“It should not be based on a medical diagnosis alone or just your primary diagnosis... A focus on functional impairment will enable multiple disabilities to be considered - which when taken together, result in significant functional impairment.”
They said definitions in the NDIS legislation should be reset to link eligibility to the outcomes of a functional assessment process that can measure the impact of impairment and compare it to others.
“Reasonable and necessary” supports – another vague term that has created confusion in the NDIS legislation – would also be redefined, with people’s budgets instead based on a structured needs assessment.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday said enabling legislation would be introduced in the first half of next year, with phased in implementation.
Bonyhady and Paul said they wanted all Australians with disability to have better access to mainstream services as well as the new foundational supports within five years.
Participants would have two years before they were asked to meet any new access requirements, while children under seven should be able to stay on the scheme until they turn nine.
“Our recommendations will support more children in existing services, such as maternal and child health, integrated child and family centres, early childhood education and schools – reducing the need for families to access the NDIS and leading to better long-term outcomes for children,” the review said.
“Children with higher support needs would get additional, individualised support through the NDIS via an early intervention pathway.”
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten will address the recommendations at the National Press Club on Thursday.
************************************************
Labor’s migration strategy to focus on national-building people power
The universities will howl at the cutback to their overseas student income
The Albanese government will create a new “skills in demand” visa and raise English-language requirements for all international students, to restore border control and suppress the temporary migration boom that has put cities under tremendous strain, led to worker exploitation and left hundreds of thousands of young foreigners in limbo.
To be launched on Monday, Labor’s Migration Strategy will seek to cut the overall intake, restore the social licence of the failing visa system, for which community support has slumped amid a world-leading post-pandemic population boom, and reframe migration to its historic, nation-building role.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the nation could not sustain the migrant inflow of recent years, with almost 900,000 students, temporary workers and permanent settlers arriving in two years.
Ms O’Neil claimed the government’s policy tightening will now lead to a cumulative 185,000 fewer migrants over the budget’s four-year time frame.
The blueprint is built on five principles, with an emphasis on the skills Australia needs most to boost productivity and permanency to encourage social cohesion and cultural vibrancy, in line with the wide-ranging review led by former top civil servant Martin Parkinson.
Ms O’Neil said the road map “is a commitment to getting our system back on track and to returning migration levels back to normal and using that reduction in migration levels to move to the system we need for Australia’s future”.
“Australia’s migration system is not the nation building engine it once was,” she said.
“It often fails to identify and attract those people who are best placed to help build the skills base of Australia’s workforce, boost exports and raise living standards.”
The road map is built on eight drivers, including the delivery of existing visa and integrity reforms, new policy commitments over the coming 12 months, and longer-term changes to be developed in partnership with second-tier governments, businesses and unions.
Ms O’Neill vowed to abolish visa settings that drive long-term temporary stays (known as ‘permanent temporariness’), including through shortening graduate visas and ending settings that allow graduates to prolong their stay in Australia when they have fewer prospects of becoming permanent residents.
The Home Affairs Minister flagged an enhanced “points system” for permanent migrants, as well as updated occupation lists to better target the short-term needs of employers.
“The benefits of getting the points system for permanency right is massive,” she said.
The new strategy aims to simplify a complex system, which customarily deters the most talented young people, while expediting approval for the most desirable temporary workers to drive innovation and job creation.
These specialists must be paid at least $135,000 a year, placing them in the top 10 per cent of earners, and can be in any occupation, except trades workers, machinery operators and drivers, and labourers.
As well, the strategy aspires to properly allocate working holiday makers to regions and to implement better long-term population planning with the states, although the details of how this will occur are a work in progress.
At the end of October there were 2.3 million people in Australia on temporary visas with work rights. In 2000, the number of temporary migrants was around 700,000.
The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, to be released on Wednesday, will show net overseas migration peaking at 510,000 in the year to June, compared with the budget estimate of 401,700.
Sky News host Danica De Giorgio says migration has “always been a problem” for either side of the Australian… government. “We’ve got a tight rental market which is a key driver for inflation,” Ms De Giorgio said. “Migration’s always been a problem … I don’t think either side of government More
For the current financial year, the migrant inflow is projected to be 375,000, a one-fifth blowout on Treasury’s May forecast of 316,000.
Of this year’s estimated inflow, 190,000 places will be in the permanent program, with over 70 per cent designated for the skilled stream.
Writing for The Australian online, Ms O’Neil said the “first problem we have to solve is to get migration levels back to sustainable, normal levels”.
“Numbers were always going to surge post-pandemic, but we cannot sustain the levels of migration we have seen in recent years,” she writes.
“There is too much pressure on housing and infrastructure.
“Our migration program only works with community support and to retain that, we must make a significant correction.”
The new four-year skills in demand visa, with full mobility and clear pathways to permanent residence, will replace the complex single-employer-sponsored Temporary Skill Shortage visa that business and unions agree is not fit for purpose.
The visa will be backed by three pathways, adopting the Parkinson Review’s model of a risk-based approach to regulation, including specialist, core skills and a lower paid tiers, with legislated indexation of wage thresholds to maintain integrity.
“A key feature of this visa is an alternative approach to mobility, with new visa settings, streamlined applications and consideration of trailing employer fees that remove many onerous conditions that tie a migrant to a single employer,” the strategy said.
“These features will help design out elements that contribute to worker exploitation and reduce barriers to job switching in the labour market, which will lead to a more productive workforce.”
The government argues this new model allows for worker mobility across industries, which better reflects the nature of how skills are used, and how they will be increasingly used, in the labour market.
For example, the most common occupation in the current Temporary Skill Shortage visa is a software engineer; like most occupations, a software engineer’s skills can be used across industries, such as in manufacturing, transport and logistics or financial services.
The strategy says the specialist stream, with the aim for a median turnaround of seven days of visa processing, will help Australia attract highly skilled engineering managers who develop electrolysers to help with our transition to a net-zero economy, cyber specialists who assist banks to respond to cyber-attacks and software engineers who help Australia embrace the artificial intelligence transformation.
The core skills stream must be paid at least $70,000 and will reflect current needs identified by Jobs and Skills Australia, such as a Registered Nurse who is helping a regional hospital’s emergency department deal with acute workforce shortages or a Secondary School Teacher helping teach science in our public schools.
The strategy says more work is needed to develop how best to regulate migration for lower paid workers with essential skills.
Early next year, the government will consult with state and territory governments, unions, businesses and migrant workers to determine limits.
As well, the strategy hopes to streamline labour market testing to reduce complexity,
create a best practice service level agreement for processing times and establish a modernised accreditation pathway to better compete for talent.
Chief executive of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia Melinda Cilento said “for too long, our migration system has lacked a cohesive and long-term strategic direction”.
“Instead, we’ve had a revolving door of changes that caused uncertainty, unpredictability and confusion for anyone using or relying on the system – migrants, employers and the broader community alike,” Ms Cilento said.
“We must get the right skills in the right places, and the focus on this, as well as simplifying the system and more transparency, is the right way to go.”
**************************************************
Tax office gold bungle
ROBERT GOTTLIEBSEN
The seven-year cover-up of Australia’s largest non-cyber fraud ended this week when the Australian Taxation Office lost its final legal action to recover gold GST from bankrupted gold refiners.
In the five years to December 2016 the Australian states were defrauded of at least $2.5bn in GST arising from gold trading. Australia’s previous largest fraud – the John Friedrich fiasco between 1983 and 1988 – totalled around $1.3bn in 2023 dollars.
Material uncovered in the seven years of ATO legal cases since 2016 showed that the GST money was stolen and sent overseas by people with close Middle Eastern connections, and almost certainly went to terrorists.
The ATO originally incorrectly thought that the thieves were linked to the gold refiners. But instead of prosecuting them, the ATO began sending the refiners into insolvency by withholding GST refunds and other acts. Australia lost not only $2.5bn to the Middle East but large segments of what was once a thriving gold refining industry.
According to the Inspector-General of Taxation, the ATO had been concerned about weakness in its gold GST collection systems as far back as 2012. (The $2.5bn loss estimate is contained in an Inspector-General report.)
But the ATO rules were not changed to stop the $2.5bn theft until I publicly disclosed the scandal on December 6, 2016, under the heading “Crooks exploit legal loophole in multimillion-dollar gold scam”.
Within a month of that commentary the ATO finally took the blocking action it should have taken in 2012-13 or much earlier.
After the January 2017 blocking action, the ATO started court actions against refiners. Then followed seven years of legal cases where the ATO lost on all counts, apart from a few wins in lower jurisdictions which were overturned by higher courts.
The courts ruled the refiners were obeying the law and totally innocent and indeed had been warning the ATO that the thefts of GST were taking place.
The case that finally ended the cover-up went before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Deputy President Frank O’Loughlin KC.
The ATO tried to prove that the system of gold refining used around the world when applied to Australia was actually a section 165 avoidance scheme. In rejecting the ATO application the tribunal declared that applying Division 165 would have extraordinarily severe consequences on the refiner “who did not participate in the fraud, rather than the Fraudulent Suppliers who were the perpetrators that benefited directly from their fraud”.
Lawyers calculate that the ATO must have spent about $50m of taxpayer money hiring some of Australia’s best silks.
Had the ATO’s legal campaign succeeded in any of the cases the Commonwealth would not have received any money, because the defendants were insolvent – usually as a result of ATO actions.
Whether unintentionally or intentionally. the seven years of court cases chasing innocent people instead of the thieves concealed the fraud from the states and the public. Federal politicians asked ATO officials about the gold affair but were never told what happened.
Whether the states can claim the money from the Commonwealth will be a question of law.
Clearly they now have available all the evidence that was put forward in the seven years of legal cases to help sue the Commonwealth on the basis of improperly managing the collection of their money.
The saga starts when former treasurer Peter Costello introduced the GST in Australia in 2000. One of the problems he faced was deciding how gold should be handled, given that the yellow metal in pure gold bars was in fact currency.
Costello followed the British laws and declared that when people traded pure gold bars there should be no GST, but if they traded a gold bar that had been cut in half or where there were impurities that must be refined out, then GST would be payable on the transaction.
Three years after Australian GST was introduced, Britain discovered its system was vulnerable to fraud and suffered big losses. In 2003 Britain changed its rules, as did most other countries that had followed British practice.
While Australia had based its GST on the flawed British system, it did not follow the 2003 British changes and so was vulnerable. It took some years for global criminal syndicates to realise that Australia was still using the flawed system.
Around 2010 and 2011, the volume of gold being refined in Australia rose tenfold.
The investment market for gold is confined to bars of pure gold. Any pure gold that is made impure with the addition of impurities must be refined again in the same way as traditional scrap gold and gold from mines.
Impure or scrap gold was sold to refiners, who paid the sellers a price that was based on the gold price of the day plus 10 per cent GST.
The rogue sellers – the Middle Eastern-linked traders – were supposed to send the GST back to the government, but they disappeared, taking the GST money with them.
The refiners claimed back the GST they paid to the rogue traders in their next business activity statement. These amounts were required under Australian law to be paid to the refiners by the ATO, although the tax office never received the money from the rogue traders.
The Middle Eastern traders were sophisticated and had ABN numbers, bank accounts and other documentation. Once this material became part of court evidence it was easy to see a pattern, showing who was involved. There were no substantial prosecutions.
The states’ GST money ended up in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern centres.
Around 2013, the Australian Federal Police, tax officials and others raided a number of refineries. They stormed into the homes of executives as well as the offices of the refineries.
Some of actual culprits were also raided but they were not the key criminals, so the frauds continued.
Regularly, ATO tax auditors would come to the premises of refiners but found nothing.
The ATO began squeezing the refiners out of business by refusing to refund the GST that the refiners had paid to suppliers. Banks began tightening credit.
Without taking any court action to prove their incorrect belief that the refiners were “guilty”, the ATO used these techniques to put out of business almost every privately owned refining group in Australia.
The $2.5bn loss of state GST money might never have been discovered, but one of the early targets was a precious metals industry company now known as ACN 154 520 199, which was formerly known as EBS & Associates and had been a subsidiary of the Pallion Group, but had been demerged out of Pallion many years earlier.
The Pallion Group is privately owned and is the largest precious metals services group in Australia. It incudes ABC Bullion and is owned by interests associated with the Cochineas, Gregg and Simpson families.
The Pallion Group staked very large sums to fund the liquidators in the actions brought by the ATO. Pallion and their family owners wanted to clear the name of the refining industry in Australia and expose what the ATO had done to a large number if innocent people.
***************************************************
Journalists failing to report the unpalatable truths of energy and renewables industries
The failure of some journalists to report what is really happening globally in fossil fuel consumption and renewable energy generation is a scandal.
Why did so few environment reporters even mention the most important story in the lead-up to the COP28 conference being held in Dubai?
On November 30, the US Energy Information Administration reported global CO2 emissions would rise by up to 34 per cent between now and 2050. Its most optimistic estimate was a fall of less than 2 per cent.
Coal use would rise in electricity generation, particularly in India. Natural gas use in power generation would rise globally, as it would in chemical production.
The US would remain the biggest gas user while Middle East gas consumption would rise between 29 and 54 per cent between 2022 and 2050. Liquid fuel consumption would continue to rise until 2050.
Thank God our ABC 7.30 was able to confirm with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last Thursday week that Australia is on track to reduce emissions by 42 per cent by 2030.
With 1.1 per cent of global emissions, that will really make a difference. Not.
In various lead-up statements to the COP, senior ministers from Oman, Saudi Arabia, China and India all cast doubts on the global push to end fossil fuel use. Apart from Guardian Australia, much of the left media ignored those statements.
COP28 host country the United Arab Emirates has announced its state-owned oil firm, Adnoc, will increase oil output by 7 per cent over the next four years. The BBC reported last Monday that by 2050, UAE would still be producing 850 million barrels of oil per year, down slightly from its present 1 billion barrels annually.
COP president, UAE’s Sultan Al-Jaber, head of Adnoc, even claimed there was no science to prove a phase-out of oil was needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.
The Guardian on December 3 reported Al-Jaber saying a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back to the caves”.
Reuters on December 5 reported work from the independent data consortium Net Zero Tracker, which includes Oxford University. It shows that 69 of the world’s oil producers have pledged to reach net zero emissions but “only Denmark, Spain and France have set out plans to eventually stop drilling”.
While climate writers here often discuss expanding renewable power generation in India and China, the unarguable truth is both countries are increasing construction of coal-fired power plants and expanding their domestic thermal coal production.
India is now the world’s No. 3 emitter. Its Minister for Power, R. K. Singh, said on November 6: “Our point of view is that we are not going to compromise with the availability of power for growth.”
S & P Global reported on November 29 that India was generating 149.66 terawatt hours of electricity by the end of September, 73 per cent of it from coal. That figure would rise to 77 per cent by 2025 before falling to “71 per cent in 2030 and 52 per cent by 2050”. S & P said public power companies were building 27 gigawatts of extra thermal power, almost all coal. It quoted Singh saying that would need to rise to an extra 80gW.
China, recovering from Covid lockdowns, plans to lift coal and gas power production. OilPrice.com says China expects peak winter power demand this year to rise by 12.1 per cent, or 140gW.
During the first half of 2023, OilPrice says, China approved more than 50gW of new coal power, expanded domestic coal output by 3 per cent and lifted gas imports by 11 per cent.
So if the world is struggling to wean itself off fossil fuels, how is the transition to renewables going? It’s going well for China, which makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, but the prognosis is not so good in Europe and the US.
Germany’s Greens Party Minister for Economics, Robert Habeck, told Bild am Sonntag last week that Germany would have to delay phasing out coal. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government had planned to bring forward the end of coal from 2038 to 2030.
German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, from the Free Democrats Party, said now was not the time to be shutting down power plants. Lindner wants Germany to lean more heavily on domestic gas.
German industry has been hard hit by power price rises since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The industrial powerhouse of Europe risks deindustrialisation as large manufacturing and chemical companies move to China, or to the US to take advantage of environmental incentives there under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Germany’s biggest car marker, Volkswagen, has flagged a €10bn ($16.43bn) redundancy package with its workforce.
It is struggling to transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.
Bloomberg reported on August 29 that a third of German manufacturers are considering shifting their production offshore.
Domestic consumers are also facing cutbacks. Residential power grid operators, according to Euractive.com, will next year “be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers … to preserve the stability of the grid”.
Despite initial optimism in the US about Biden’s environmental package, things there are not rosy either.
Wrote Bloomberg on November 29: “Some of the nation’s most ambitious renewable power projects have been shelved, electric car sales are missing targets and investors are fleeing the sector in droves. The result is a $US30bn collapse in US clean energy stocks in the past six months.”
A quarter of the value of US companies “in the S&P Global Clean Energy Index’’ had evaporated in the six months to November 27.
The Daily Mail in London reported on November 29 that global ESG (environment, social and governance) assets had collapsed by $5 trillion in the past two years.
“In the US, where Republicans have railed against ESG funds … such assets plunged from more than $US17 trillion to $US8.4 trillion” in the period.
But in Australia, industry superannuation funds and the federal government are looking at changing superannuation rules to allow big funds – often dominated by former trade union officials and former Labor politicians – to invest more of members’ money in Australian renewable energy projects. It could be a disaster for retirees.
Finally, it’s worth looking at the economics of climate action.
Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal on November 29 discussed two new studies published in the journal Climate Change Economics.
A paper by Richard Tol says meeting 1.5C of warming would prevent the loss of 0.5 per cent of global annual GDP by 2050 and a loss of 3.1 per cent by 2100. But meeting the 1.5C Paris target would cost 4.5 per cent of GDP each year until mid-century and 5.5 per cent by 2100.
“This means the likely climate policy costs will be much higher than the likely benefits for every year throughout this century and into the next,” Lomborg wrote.
The prognosis in the second peer-reviewed study from economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was even more negative.
************************************
10 December, 2023
Same pay for same work to become law under Labor-crossbench industrial relations deal
This sounds fair but the catch is that casual and permanent jobs are often not comparable. Causual workers often put in more hours under worse conditions and thus get MORE pay than permanents. These laws are designed to PENALIZE casual work and make unionized workers feel better
First responders will have easier access to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compensation and contractors will receive the same pay as full-time employees in the same role within weeks, after the government agreed to crossbench demands to split its massive industrial relations bill.
The deal will see same pay for same work changes from next year
Crossbench senators David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie last month harpooned Labor's plans for workplace changes amid concerns the government was trying to rush the changes through the parliament.
At the time, the crossbenchers introduced their own bill that created a path for Labor to pass the non-controversial elements of its IR proposal, including the PTSD compensation.
The Senate passed the crossbench bill with the Coalition's support but the government has for weeks refused to pass that bill through the House of Representatives, insisting it wanted to proceed with its original plan.
In a deal struck ahead of the final sitting day, Labor agreed to split its plans in return for the crossbench supporting its same pay for same work provisions, which have been controversial among business groups.
Here is what is changing and what is not (for now).
Pay and condition changes
From next year, labour hire loopholes will be closed, in a move that will require contractors doing the same work as full-time employees of a company to be offered the same pay and conditions.
The new laws will also ensure employees will not miss out on their redundancy payments, regardless of the size of the business.
Under current laws, a small business is one that employs fewer than 15 people. Some small businesses do not have to offer a redundancy payment when making an employee redundant.
Supports for workers
The new laws will make it easier for first responders to gain workers compensation for PTSD from January 1.
Members of the Australian Border Force and the Australian Federal Police, ambulance officers, paramedics, emergency services communications operators and firefighters will be the beneficiaries.
The laws also seek to offer workplace protections for people experiencing family and domestic violence.
The Labor-crossbench agreement will also expand the remit of the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency to cover silica and silicosis, in an attempt to better protect workers who use the materials.
Making wage theft a crime
Employers caught deliberately underpaying workers could face jail time under new laws the federal government is proposing.
Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke has repeatedly said it was a criminal offence for an employee to steal money from the till, but not for an employer who withholds money from an employee's pay.
The proposed changes would see a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail and fines up to $7.8 million — or three times the amount that was underpaid if that amount exceeds the maximum fine.
The government insists criminal penalties would not apply for "honest mistakes".
Industrial manslaughter will also become a criminal offence.
Three elements of Labor's original industrial relations changes remain in limbo — at least until the new year.
They include minimum standards for gig workers, minimum standards for truck drivers and changing the definition of casual employment to provide a path to permanency.
These provisions, which have the support of the union movement, have faced fierce backlash from business groups.
A Senate committee is investigating those changes and will report back next year.
The Greens and unions want to give employees greater rights to disconnect from work and hope that will be considered next year.
Senators Pocock and Lambie have offered their commitment to consider the remaining parts of the legislation "in good faith early in the new year".
"It's clear that things like minimum standards for gig workers are necessary but we need to ensure we get the details of these big changes right," Senator Pocock said.
“Bringing forward changes that will better support first responders with PTSD will be life-changing and I thank the government for working with the crossbench to split the bill to get this done this year.”
Mr Burke thanked the senators for the discussions they have had and insisted the compromise would deliver for workers.
**************************************************
All set for the US to sell Australia three ‘apex predator’ submarines
Australia is set to acquire its first nuclear-powered submarine by 2032 after key members of the United States Congress agreed to fast-track legislation to advance the AUKUS pact.
Democratic congressman Joe Courtney, co-chair of the Congressional Friends of Australia Caucus, said the US was poised to “defy the odds” by transferring its top secret, nuclear-powered submarine technology to another nation for the first time in over 60 years.
“I’m very relieved,” said Courtney, who is regarded as one of US Congress’ top experts on shipbuilding and submarines. “This is a very significant accomplishment for all the parties involved. A lot of people have been holding their breath to see whether Congress takes this seriously.”
The AUKUS submarine plan hit trouble in July when 23 Republican senators, including Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, wrote to US President Joe Biden saying they did not support the proposal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia unless the US doubled its own domestic production capacity.
The Senate and House armed services committees on Friday unveiled the final version of the annual National Defence Authorisation Act, which includes a provision for Australia to acquire three nuclear-powered submarines from the United States.
The bill will also loosen defence export controls on Australia and the United Kingdom while allowing Australia to be treated as a domestic supplier of key materials such as rare earths.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said the federal government was “heartened and hopeful by the news coming out of the United States”.
“It’s obviously a matter for the US Congress, but we are hopeful of a good result,” he said, adding that the Royal Australian Navy was on the verge of a “once in a generation change”.
The first two Virginia-class submarines will be purchased from the US Navy’s existing fleet while the third submarine will be newly built. Courtney said he was hopeful the bill would pass both houses of Congress by the end of next week.
He said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s October visit had an “appreciable impact” in convincing members of Congress of the importance of AUKUS and that Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd had been a “relentless” advocate for the legislation.
The US has only provided one other nation with nuclear-powered submarine technology once before: the United Kingdom in 1958. Australia is scheduled to buy its first submarine in 2032, the second in 2035 and the third in 2038.
Australia will provide $3 billion to help expand the American industrial base to ensure its own submarine fleet is not depleted by the transfer.
Tom Corben, a research fellow in the foreign policy and defence program at the United States Studies Centre, said Australia was acquiring the “most advanced and deadly naval platform out there” in the form of the Virginia-class submarines – even if the first two boats are between five and 15 years old.
Unlike diesel-powered submarines, nuclear-powered submarines can travel vast distances without needing to rise to the surface.
The US has not revealed which submarines Australia will acquire, but USS North Carolina, which was launched in 2007, visited HMAS Stirling in Western Australia in August.
The legislation says that the US Secretary of State will be required to provide a regular and detailed assessment of “how Australia’s sovereign conventionally armed nuclear attack submarines contribute to United States defence and deterrence objectives in the Indo-Pacific region”.
Former White House advisor Michael Green said the progress in Congress showed that, despite widespread scepticism about the pact, AUKUS was “on track”.
He said he was confident the pact would survive a second Donald Trump administration despite the former president’s unpredictability because AUKUS was popular with the national security community in Washington, including leading Republicans.
**********************************************
University of Queensland-Led Study Finds Overweight Status Impedes SARS-CoV-2 Immune Response
University of Queensland-led research shows being overweight can impair the body’s antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 infection but not to the protection offered by vaccination.
Marcus Tong, with the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences and a Ph.D. candidate led the research reporting that the study’s finding built on the team’s existing research on how COVID-19 affects people who are overweight.
The research team collected blood samples from people who had recovered from COVID-19 and not been reinfected during the study period, approximately 3 months and 13 months post-infection.
“We’ve previously shown that being overweight – not just being obese – increases the severity of SARS-CoV-2,” Mr. Tong said.
“But this work shows that being overweight creates an impaired antibody response to SARS-CoV-2 infection but not to vaccination.”
“At 3 months post-infection, an elevated BMI was associated with reduced antibody levels,” Mr. Tong said.
“And at 13 months post-infection, an elevated BMI was associated with both reduced antibody activity and a reduced percentage of the relevant B cells, a type of cell that helps build these COVID-fighting antibodies.”
No Impact on Vaccination
Interestingly, an elevated BMI had no effect on the antibody response to COVID-19 vaccination at approximately 6 months after the second vaccine was administered.
Associate Professor Kirsty Short said the results should help shape health policy moving forward.
“If infection is associated with an increased risk of severe disease and an impaired immune response for the overweight, this group has a potentially increased risk of reinfection,” Dr Short said.
“It makes it more important than ever for this group to ensure they’re vaccinated.”
Dr Short said from a public health perspective, this data draws into question policies around boosters and lockdowns.
“We’d suggest that more personalized recommendations are needed for overweight people, both for ongoing COVID-19 management and future pandemics,” she said.
“Finally, the data provides an added impetus to improve SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in low-income countries, where there’s a high percentage of people who are overweight and are dependent on infection-induced immunity.”
*******************************************
Queer Theory in the public schools is anti-science mumbo-jumbo
John Gideon Hartnett
I have been reading through some training aid documents from ClickView titled Understanding Gender with various subtitles Talking about Gender and Identity and Gender and Stereotypes. These are teaching aids approved for Australian public schools. In my opinion, they could confuse the young with delusions. They create chaos in developing minds thus weakening society and priming it for Marxism.
What amazes me is how quickly a generation can be lost, in fact, destroyed with toxic propaganda which has no basis in science.
I recently attended a talk about the lunatics running this country’s power grid into oblivion because of ideological climate cultism. At that meeting it occurred to me how the younger generation are no longer taught any real science, especially physics. But now I would include biology as well.
Those running this country’s education system seem to be saying that they can determine truth, and it’s flexible. To them, there are no are absolutes!
The training aids gas-light the students with phrases such as:
‘People often use the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ as if they’re the same thing. While they’re related, there are some important differences.’
Tell an electrician or a farmer that sex and gender are different. If they believe you they may be soon dead, out of business, or both.
Biological sex and biological gender are exactly the same thing. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes containing at least 28,000 genes.
Sex or gender is well known to be determined by the X or Y chromosomes in the sex cells called gametes. In sexual reproduction, one X or Y chromosome of the 23 inherited from each parent is combined in the resulting zygote cell formed from the union of egg (X) and sperm (X or Y). That means the zygote cell ends up with either XY for a male or XX for a female. I could say there are no other combinations but that is not true.
Nevertheless, that is only one tiny component in the difference between males and females. About 8,000 of those 28,000 genes determine the different physiological characteristics of males and females. Surgically altering genitals changes nothing internally except in males when castrated.
In the training documents, the material acknowledges that sex is biological but it adds that gender is more than that. It is argued that there are biological human males and females, but there are also intersex humans who do not conform to the biology of male or female. Is that true?
It is true that when DNA replication occurs in the sex cells, particularly in the male sperm cells, a copying error may occur and on very rare occasions someone may get an extra X or Y chromosome in the gamete cells. Let’s look at two of the most common of those.
There is 47,XYY sex chromosomal abnormality where a male has an additional copy of the Y chromosome, with a prevalence of 1 in 1,000 live male births. This is extremely rare. The 47 means the person gets an extra chromosome over the normal 46 we otherwise all have as humans. They usually have few symptoms. But those they do have may include being taller than average and an increased risk of learning disabilities. The person is generally otherwise normal, including typical rates of fertility. Yet sex chromosome anomalies are more frequently associated with male infertility.
Then there is 47,XXY, a sex chromosomal abnormality where a male has an additional copy of the X chromosome. Although this is one of the most common chromosomal disorders, it occurs in about 1 or 2 in 1,000 live male births. The primary features are infertility and small, poorly functioning testicles. But often the symptoms are noticed only at puberty. They do not produce as much testosterone as other boys, and as a result develop a less muscular body, with less facial and body hair, but broader hips. They may even develop breast tissue in their teen years.
So look at this! The XYY males are still males and occur at a rate of 1 in 1,000. Most would never even know they are. The XXY males are still males and occur at a rate of 1 or 2 in 1,000. So that is the higher rate of occurrence. But most do not know they have the condition. For argument sake, since this is one of the most common chromosomal disorders, let’s assume this is the level they occur in the classrooms.
Schools may have as many as 2,000 students. Therefore in such a school we would expect about 2 to 4 such 47,XXY males. They are going to tell the students because there may be a few males in the school who are less vigorous producing less testosterone than the other males who are past puberty that we can assume there maybe several intersex persons in the classroom? And what about the prepubescent boys? It is gas-lighting on steroids; no pun intended.
So what has this to do with gender? Well, a lot.
‘Gender is a social construct that refers to ideas of how people should look, dress, and behave in a given society.’
The materials explains that this means a person learns from external stimuli what gender they are. It is completely malleable and never fixed. It ignores known history where billions of humans were born male or female and naturally lived according to traditional roles. Females get pregnant, males cannot. That is basic biology! Again!
These roles to some extent may be fashioned by cultural norms, but they are the fruit of the biochemistry inside the male and female bodies. Their hormone systems shape those bodies especially after puberty. Now we have a situation where children are being put on hormone blockers as young as they can get away with it. That is a tacit admission that gender is biological. It is a fact, it is not something you imagine in your head and the hormones shut off or change you to the opposite sex.
Behaviour is largely biological. Having a baby is biological. Normally a pregnant woman should not be on a battlefield fighting a war. Males are fuelled by testosterone and have body strength way greater than females. Gender does matter when it comes down to real life.
Let’s stop the anti-science indoctrination. The next thing they’ll be teaching the students is that the Earth is flat!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/queer-theory-in-the-public-schools-is-anti-science-mumbo-jumbo
************************************7 December, 2023
Donald Day Jr has been arrested in connection with the Wieambilla terror attack. Here's what we know
The religious aspect of this matter is interesting. Chiliastic religions are as old as the hills. Dire prophecies were widely made throughout Europe concerning the approach of the year ONE thousand. Modern day chiliatic religions best known are the Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's witnesses. They both believe that Christ will return in glory SOON to put the world to rights.
But followers of such religions are usually pacifist if anything, not violent. So the Wieambilla cultists were unusual. Their difference seemed to revolve around a suspicion of all governments as oppressive, with a concomitant right to "strike back" at oppressive authorities. That is not without scriptural warrant. Christ said:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matthew 10:34-36).
And from a conservative viewpoint it can indeed be said that we have a lot of oppression from governments these days. We are probably fortunate that the conservative view does not usually ally with chiliastic beliefs Wieambilla shows that that can be a very deadly alliance
An Arizonan extremist linked to the Wieambilla attack was a figure in the shooters' lives for more than two years before they murdered three people, a police investigation has revealed.
Donald Day Jr, 58, was arrested at Heber-Overgaard near Phoenix on December 1 and indicted on two charges. One relates to inciting violence online several days after the 2022 shooting in rural Queensland.
Constables Rachel McCrow and Matthew Arnold, and neighbour Alan Dare, were killed on December 12, in what police have described as a religiously-motivated terrorist attack.
The shooters — Stacey, Gareth and Nathaniel Train — also died.
Police said the Trains subscribed to a broad Christian fundamentalist belief system known as premillennialism.
Their online activity has been a key part of the investigation.
How was Donald Day Jr connected to the Trains?
Police said Gareth Train began following Mr Day's YouTube account in May 2020. A year later, the men began commenting on one another's videos.
"We have evidence to show the Trains subsequently accessed an older YouTube account created by the same man in 2014, and viewed that content," Queensland Police Service (QPS) Assistant Commissioner Cheryl Scanlon said at a joint press conference with the FBI on Wednesday.
Between May 2021 and the month of the attack, Mr Day "repeatedly" sent the Trains what police have described as "Christian, end-of-days ideological messages".
"The man repeatedly sent messages … to Gareth, and then later to Stacey," Assistant Commissioner Scanlon said.
What is he accused of doing?
Documents released by the US District Court in Arizona outline two charges against Mr Day.
Only the first charge is connected to the Wieambilla shooting. The second charge concerns an unrelated threat made to the head of the World Health Organization.
The first charge centres on a YouTube video that Mr Day allegedly posted on December 16 – four days after the shooting.
The video was titled 'Daniel and Jane'. These were pseudonyms used by Gareth and Stacey Train on YouTube, according to the court documents.
In the video, Mr Day allegedly said:
"It breaks my f***ing heart that there's nothing that I can do to help them. These are a people that are not armed, as we are in America, that at least have that one resort to fight against f***ing tyrants in this country. And here, my brave brother and sister, a son and a daughter of the Most High have done exactly what they were supposed to do, and that is to kill these f***ing devils."
He allegedly went on to say:
"Like my brother Daniel, like my sister Jane, it is no different for us. The devils come for us, they f***ing die. It's just that simple. We are free people, we are owned by no-one."
Prosecutors allege that last comment was a threat of violence towards any law enforcement officials who could come to Mr Day's home.
Assistant Commissioner Scanlon said evidence had been seized from a remote property about 30 kilometres north of Heber-Overgaard and was being analysed by the FBI.
"QPS will make formal requests to the FBI for any evidential material removed from the Arizona property for analysis," she said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-07/donald-day-jr-wieambilla-terror-attack-what-we-know/103197118
**************************************************Noise, chaos and disengagement: I was wrong about open-plan classrooms
As a principal, I got it wrong about open-plan classrooms. It’s an inconvenient truth for me to face, but the findings of the recently released Senate inquiry into teaching in Australia are too hard for me to ignore.
The inquiry was set up last year to examine why Australia was in 2018 ranked 69 out of 76 countries for “disciplinary climate” in classrooms based on Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys. Korea had the best disciplinary climate, while the United States was ranked 24th and the UK 28th.
It’s rare that I find myself agreeing with a Senate inquiry into education. And there’s plenty in its report released last week for me to disagree with, too.
For instance, the suggestion that we establish a “behaviour curriculum” where students are taught respect one more excruciating time by teachers already at their wits’ end squeezing in the complementary lessons on honesty, responsibility and empathy is just bonkers.
Only a staggeringly low level of consultation with actual teachers and a gaping gulf between what sounds like a good idea and what’s helpful could lead senators to suggest something so simplistic and preposterous.
So, let’s be clear on that one. Kids don’t become respectful via a mini-lesson on respect any more prevalently than they become serial killers when they read about Jack the Ripper.
All that said, the report’s assertion that we do away with the fad of open-plan learning environments, inspired by our unquenchable thirst to follow the lead of successful Scandinavian school systems, stands the test of logical scrutiny.
Many schools in perceived educational powerhouses, such as Finland, have removed the walls of the classrooms in an attempt to have teachers co-operate and collaborate more effectively.
It’s sound, in theory. Schools, for centuries, have been built like egg cartons and have denied teachers the very best professional learning they can access – seeing another teacher deploy the craft expertly.
And so, we removed the barriers in countless schools – like mine. I was the inaugural principal of a school built for co-teaching, a model where two teachers worked together with about 50 students.
We trained these teachers thoroughly using the work and guidance of international experts, even some from Finland. We paired the teachers for professional growth, rather than simply with their friends, and invested in healthy professional co-operation.
We certainly did more to prepare and train our teachers for a huge architectural transformation than many schools who knock the walls down with an “OK, let’s see how this goes” attitude.
The classrooms were fitted with acoustic paneling to mitigate the obvious risk of doubling the noise level of the students in a single space and the results weren’t entirely negative.
I paired one graduate teacher, who’d never taught a lesson before, with a brilliantly gifted and emerging leader. After 12 months, the grad had seen countless hours of exemplary classroom practice and his compatriot had won a promotion for her leadership and mentorship.
But were these gains worth it? I’d say no, firmly.
Despite our best efforts and the funky paneling, I witnessed noise levels above what I’d consider conducive to learning, thinking and problem-solving.
I watched problematic student behaviours become more difficult for teachers to identify and support. This was exacerbated by the square meterage of the classroom because the architects of the school had used the open-plan excuse to reduce the per-student space allocated to each classroom.
I saw panicked teachers revert to the senior of the pair delivering around 80 per cent of the student instruction while the more junior teacher waited nervously to come off the bench.
That’s not ideal. It’s really hard – like incredibly hard – to engage more than 50 students in how you multiply fractions when they’d rather be playing Xbox.
And I watched as our neurodiverse students and those affected by trauma struggled. In open-plan learning environments, these students too easily slip through the cracks while teacher attention takes a more group-than-individual focus.
Further, I’ve watched these students become genuinely disturbed by the noise levels. Nobody can learn, least of all these kids for whom education means everything to their future independence, when they’re freaked out by their environment.
So, I’ve concluded that my leadership of a school with a thoroughly open-plan intention was, on balance, a failure. And I don’t even feel bad about it.
Sure, I can be accused of succumbing to a little Finn-envy and agreeing to lead a school whose architecture would contribute to us learning a national lesson the hard way – by trial and error.
But that’s how so much great learning happens. Most adults reading this article didn’t learn that the stove is hot via parental insistence. Seared fingertips did that job for you, and it’s a lesson that taught you well.
Our schools should always seek opportunities to work differently and to help our rapidly evolving young people to engage effectively. But they should also be brave enough to admit it when their experiments and initiatives fail. Open plan is just such a failure.
We’ll discuss the absurd folly of respect mini-lessons another time.
*************************************************
Why isn’t the media challenging the $60 trillion Net Zero cult?
Those who believe renewable energy will save the planet generally have very little understanding about what the apocalypse is meant to look like … or the engineering reality of the proposed solution.
This is not a criticism.
Climate Change is a political movement. The renewable transition is a collection of opaque policies and corporate deals negotiated in secret. Their failures are a matter for complex engineering reviews and guesswork.
Expecting anyone to understand something that has been deliberately blurred from public view is unfair.
Those who are curious enough to ask questions quickly discover that politicians have no idea what their policies mean in the real world. MPs and Senators struggle to make it through cover speeches written by their advisers, tripping over the big words and mumbling their way in and out of statistics that look fabricated or, at the very least, incomplete.
Net Zero 2050? ‘Decarbonisation’? They are bits of nonsense that look good on a campaign banner.
Political parties, mining companies, and tech firms are pilfering a fortune in public and private money to ‘do things’ that sound ‘green’ – almost all of which are damaging the environment. Is there proof that anything is truly ‘net zero’? No. ‘Carbon neutral’? That is gibberish. But no one asked for proof, so it doesn’t matter.
Where are, for example, the total costings of a wind farm over a 100-year period including ripping it out of the ground and re-building it every 25 years concealed under the feel-good heading ‘re-powering’? What about the construction and maintenance of transmissions lines, the building of the battery backup, and the replacement of that backup at least four times during the life of the wind farm? We haven’t seen that on any of Chris Bowen’s glossy press releases. His department did not include those costs when formulating the ‘cheap energy’ narrative. I am not suggesting that the Minister for Climate Change and Energy (notice the priority order in that title) is hiding the figures, I am suggesting the government has not bothered figuring them out.
Green-tinged governments were either too dumb or lazy to check the detail before signing over billions. They were bamboozled by pitch meetings given by a hungry private sector chasing a piece of the tens of trillions on offer in the energy transition. This negligence in duty is almost more depressing than conspiracy.
That said, the public are starting to realise that having their pristine landscapes draped in wires, blades, solar panels, and batteries is not the environmentally-friendly Utopia they were promised. The industrialisation of our beaches, rainforests, and oceans feels wrong. It looks wrong. It is wrong.
Under Chris Bowen and state Labor Premiers, Australia is vandalising its natural assets in service of backroom handshakes at international talk-fests – the purpose of which is to make money and empower dangerous foreign governments. Ask why mining companies would support a Net Zero ideology that pretends to hate the industry. Ask how much money these companies are making from publicly-funded grants for ‘green’ solutions. Ask how much the price of previously worthless minerals has increased now that they are used for the renewable industry. Ask how much they are making on Lithium with global government policy mandating the market create unsustainable demand. Ask who is making a fortune while pretending to close down… Ask who is keeping their fossil fuel and nuclear assets in the back pocket for a time when all this green zealotry runs out of belief… Ask who profits from your good will.
Australia’s soft-press is refusing to ask these meaningful questions or to risk embarrassing politicians either because they are incapable or, more likely, they want to protect their seat on the press bus (and clicks for their network).
Politicians and the press have developed a sick dependency on each other. Politicians are frightened of the press and the press has grown lazy and ideologically obedient. Yes, those of us who ask uncomfortable questions get quickly cut out of the media circuit and there is no requirement for politicians to suffer the indignity of a tricky interview.
Meanwhile, the independent press, who are at the door with claws and teeth, are held at bay by Silicon Valley tech giants who would prefer to work with the easily-manipulated status quo. Whenever they want another billion-dollar tech contract out of the government, they send memos to the press. It’s win-win-win for them.
Big Tech has teamed up with the Climate Change movement, expanding the pool of potential revenue upward of $60 trillion worldwide. When we take into account the money to be made from Big Pharma’s global health passports, Digital Identity, ‘smart’ cities, fake food, and 15-minute surveillance towns – the cookie jar of corporate sin expands beyond description.
The public asks why there is a consensus of lies and the answer is: money.
This money doesn’t belong to politicians – it belongs to us – and because there are no consequences for this lightweight political class, they are more than happy to wedge the door open for Silicon Valley in exchange for a friendly press and zero push-back to their mistakes thanks to ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ social media guidelines.
Look what happened during Covid. The press, including allegedly conservative-friendly media around the world, took money to promote Covid health policies and then quietly refused to openly acknowledge mounting safety concerns. They laughed at accusations of social media censorship instead of demanding the truth from the Department of Home Affairs which later had to acknowledge leaning on Facebook and Twitter to remove factual information that harmed government message of vaccine safety when those vaccines were later revealed to be as the public had warned – potentially dangerous.
This is not a functioning society. It is a democracy crumbling with the consent of those who see anything with the word ‘free’ as a risk.
During Covid, the public allowed their fear to hold them back from asking questions.
Now, when it comes to the Green Era, ‘virtue’ and embarrassment are playing the role of duct-tape.
Start asking questions.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/why-isnt-the-media-challenging-the-60-trillion-net-zero-cult
******************************************************News Corp, ABC paid total of $445,000 to settle Lehrmann defamation claims
News Corp paid $295,000 to settle Bruce Lehrmann’s defamation case over an interview with Brittany Higgins while the ABC paid $150,000 to settle a separate case, documents tendered in his Federal Court defamation case against Network Ten reveal.
The former federal Liberal political staffer filed Federal Court defamation proceedings against News Corp in February over interviews with his former colleague Higgins published on February 15, 2021. The News Corp case was settled in May.
In April, Lehrmann filed separate proceedings against the ABC over a National Press Club address by Higgins on February 9 last year, which was televised by the ABC, and a related YouTube video.
The ABC case was due to be heard alongside Lehrmann’s defamation trial against Ten over an interview with Higgins broadcast on The Project on February 15, 2021. On the first day of the Ten trial last month, the court heard Lehrmann had discontinued his action against the ABC after the parties reached an out-of-court settlement.
A deed of settlement and release, tendered in evidence in the Ten case and released by the Federal Court on Wednesday, reveals the ABC agreed to pay a total of $150,000, including $143,000 as a contribution to Lehrmann’s legal costs.
The broadcaster agreed to pay a further $7000 to solicitors acting for the ABC’s Laura Tingle, the National Press Club president, to cover the costs incurred by Lehrmann relating to Tingle’s compliance with a subpoena to produce documents in the case.
As part of the deed, Lehrmann warranted that the settlement sum was “less than his actual legal costs” of the proceedings.
The ABC further agreed to publish a statement on its corrections and clarifications page; not to reinstate the YouTube video, which was removed on April 6; and to remove a Facebook video.
“The parties acknowledge and agree that the ABC makes no admission of liability,” the deed, signed on November 21, says.
Lehrmann had alleged the National Press Club broadcasts conveyed the defamatory meaning that he “raped Brittany Higgins on a couch in Parliament House”. He has strenuously denied the sexual assault allegation.
The News Corp settlement
Under the News Corp settlement, also released by the Federal Court on Wednesday, News Life Media agreed to pay Lehrmann $295,000 as a contribution towards his legal costs.
“Without admission of liability, the parties have reached a commercial resolution of the claim,” the deed says.
News Corp agreed to publish an editor’s note on two News.com.au articles by Samantha Maiden in the following terms: “Mr Lehrmann commenced defamation proceedings claiming that this article accused him of sexually assaulting Brittany Higgins.
“These proceedings were discontinued and settled on terms satisfactory to Mr Lehrmann and the publisher of this website. News.com.au notes that a criminal charge of sexual assault was brought against Mr Lehrmann and later dropped. News.com.au does not suggest that Mr Lehrmann was guilty of that charge.”
Lehrmann had claimed the News Corp articles, which did not hame him, wrongly alleged he raped Higgins.
Sexual assault denied
Lehrmann has denied sexually assaulting Higgins in Reynolds’ office in the early hours of March 23, 2019, and has told the court that there was no sexual contact between the pair at any stage.
Lehrmann’s ACT Supreme Court trial for sexual assault was aborted last year due to juror misconduct. The charge against Lehrmann was later dropped altogether owing to concerns about Higgins’ mental health. He has always maintained his innocence.
The Ten case
Lehrmann is suing Ten and journalist Lisa Wilkinson for defamation over an interview with Higgins, aired on The Project on February 15, 2021, that he alleges wrongly accuses him of sexually assaulting Higgins. He was not named in the broadcast and a preliminary issue in the case is whether he was identified via other means.
If the court finds he was identified, Ten and Wilkinson are seeking to rely on a range of defences including truth, which would require the court to be satisfied to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that he raped Higgins. In a criminal trial, the prosecution must prove a person is guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
************************************
6 December, 2023
‘Australia’s long-term slide’ in reading, maths and science, PISA results show
Being taught ideological rubbish instead of a real education shows
Australian teenagers have fallen almost two full academic years behind students who went to school in the early 2000s, with nearly half of pupils failing to reach national standards in maths and reading in the latest round of international tests.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results reveals the huge achievement gap between the richest and poorest students is continuing to expand after a $320 billion school funding deal was signed more than four years ago.
Despite the lacklustre results, Australia regained its place in the international top 10 for the first time since 2003, but testing authorities say that is largely due to the decline of other countries, rather than significant local improvement.
Singapore was the highest-performing country in all subject areas in 2022, with a mean score of 575 points in maths, 561 in science and 543 in reading, compared with Australia’s 487, 507 and 498.
In NSW, more than 20 per cent of students are now classified as low performers, meaning they do not have the skills and knowledge to allow them to adequately participate in the workforce.
Overall, the proportion of low performers in maths, reading and science has doubled since 2000, while at the same time the number of high-performing students has fallen.
The findings underscore glaring inequities in the nation’s education system: 15-year-olds from disadvantaged families lag their advantaged counterparts by five years of schooling. Indigenous students are around four years behind non-Indigenous students.
Lisa De Bortoli, a co-author of the Australian PISA report, said for NSW students there was no significant change in maths and reading results since 2015. However, science results improved across the state between 2018 and 2022.
Overall, the latest PISA results – the first since the COVID-19 pandemic – show the nation’s education system has stagnated since the last report was released in 2019.
Australia was now below only nine other countries in mathematics – compared with 22 in 2018 – and eight for science and reading, De Bortoli said. Those countries include Singapore, Macao, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Estonia and Canada.
It was above the OECD average for all subjects including maths after failing to exceed the figure in 2018. But De Bortoli said the OECD average for both maths and reading had fallen significantly.
“While it’s encouraging that Australia’s results have stabilised, it’s important to recognise that our position in the top 10 is largely due to the performance of other countries dropping below ours,” she said.
“We’ve got almost half of our 15-year-olds, they’re treading water … in terms of having those elementary skills that they’re expected to have at an age when they should be swimming.”
Andreas Schleicher, OECD director for education and skills, pointed to Ireland as one country that had outperformed Australia over time because teaching was a prestigious profession, and they had less focus on class size.
When it came to high performing Asian countries, Schleicher said there was less freedom for the teacher to interpret the curriculum, and parent involvement in education varied.
“One of the factors that may have contributed to Australia’s long-term slide is the loss in [the academic] demand on students … It’s become easier for students to be successful, and that’s not what you see in East Asia.”
“High performing systems … take [parents] as co-constructors of learning opportunity. They’re very active in making sure that parents do play their part.”
Schleicher said students who report feeling anxious without devices near them have lower maths results, and that school-wide bans on smartphones at school was the only effective way to reduce technology distraction in the classroom.
The latest results show more than 40 per cent of Australian students in the lowest socioeconomic quartile were low performers in maths. About 12 per cent of Australian students performed at a high level in mathematics, compared with Singapore’s 41 per cent.
“Students from the lowest socioeconomic background are six times more likely to be low performers than their more advantaged peers,” De Bortoli said. “We also have 10 per cent more low-performing students compared to when testing began in 2000.”
“Every child should have the right to develop strong literacy and numeracy skills, and the data shows we aren’t doing that,” she said.
Australia’s students are now the equivalent of about four school years behind in maths compared with students in the world’s top-performing country, Singapore, and almost three behind in science and more than two in reading.
PISA is normally held every three years to test the higher-order thinking skills of 15-year-olds. In 2022, tests were taken by about 690,000 students from 81 countries, including 13,437 from Australia.
Australian students’ performance has fallen over past two decades, with maths dropping 37 points since 2003, science falling 20 points since 2006 and reading down 30 points since 2000. De Bertoli said 20 points is roughly equal to one year of learning.
Australian girls suffered their biggest drop in reading, falling half an academic year behind compared to their peers who sat the test in 2018.
Just over half achieved the national proficient standard: 51 per cent in maths, 58 per cent in science and 57 per cent in reading.
Students of migrants and those born in other countries outperformed Australian-born students in maths and reading. In both those domains, there were fewer Australian-born than foreign-born children who achieved national proficient standard.
When school and student-level socioeconomic background is factored in, both independent and government schools perform better than Catholic schools in maths and science. For reading, results showed there was no advantage for independent students, but government students performed better than Catholic students.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the results highlighted the need to fix the funding and education gap in Australian schools.
“Students from poor families, Indigenous students and students from the regional areas are more likely to need additional support,” he said.
“The PISA assessment highlights that Australia has a good education system, but it can be a lot better and fairer.”
Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe said government funding for public schools had increased by 17 per cent between 2012 and 2021 but funding for private schools had risen by double that amount in the same time.
“Unacceptable achievement gaps between students from different backgrounds and locations are a clear reminder we don’t have an equitable education system that can meet the needs of every child,” Haythorpe said.
Glenn Fahey, research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, said the halt to a long-term slide in international rankings may “bring some relief, but there’s also no cause for a victory lap”.
“For all the talk of funding and equity as goals of the system, our approaches to these challenges don’t appear to be working.
“The best that can be said for one of the world’s biggest influxes of school funding is that results have flatlined. And, despite concern for lifting the system’s equity, the richer are getting smarter and the poor are falling further behind. For all the Gonski ‘good-feels’ about equity, we’re not making any headway in raising educational opportunity,” Fahey said.
**************************************************
Anthony Albanese under pressure to lift nuclear ban from senior Labor, union figures
Senior Labor and union figures are pushing the Albanese government to lift the ban on nuclear energy to help shield jobs and achieve net zero emissions, as new polling reveals urban voters support cheaper and reliable energy supply ahead of the renewables rollout.
After Emmanuel Macron and former Labor minister Joel Fitzgibbon called on the government to remove prohibitions on nuclear energy at the COP28 summit, Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Paul Farrow said nuclear energy must be on the table to protect heavy industry.
Ahead of Chris Bowen flying to Dubai for the UN climate change conference on Wednesday, Mr Farrow said “if you really believe climate change is a crisis you should be open minded to every single emission reduction option on the table”.
The AWU national secretary, who in July replaced long-time nuclear energy advocate Daniel Walton, said it is “better for the planet if Australia makes steel and aluminium and glass than if those products are made in less regulated countries”.
“But if we want those industries to stay standing we need to accept that some combination of coal, gas or nuclear power is necessary. If nuclear power doesn’t stack up on cost today, that’s one thing. But objecting because of outdated twentieth century ideology is another,” Mr Farrow told The Australian.
“Right now Australia cannot sustain, let alone grow, its heavy industry sector on renewables alone. One day we’ll get there, but anyone serious will tell you that day is a fair way off.”
Mr Fitzgibbon, a former defence and agriculture minister who represented the coalmining electorate of Hunter for 26 years, said the nuclear ban “makes no sense” because every option should be considered.
As the Coalition ramps-up pressure on the government over its renewables-only focus, Mr Fitzgibbon said the world won’t meet its net zero emissions aspirations without installing more nuclear plants.
Another senior Labor figure, who didn’t want to speak publicly, said there was an inevitability in the science community that there’d be a public debate on the uses of nuclear energy, which was only accentuated by the AUKUS agreement.
Mr Fitzgibbon, who led pushback inside Labor ranks following the 2019 election to present a more realistic climate change plan, warned too much faith in a few favoured technologies was a “recipe for failure and economic harm”.
“On the question of whether Australia should also embrace nuclear generation, that should be a matter for the market. Therefore, the prohibition on nuclear generation in Australia should be lifted. It simply makes no sense and every electricity generation option should be readily available to us,” Mr Fitzgibbon said.
“Having said that, if the ban was lifted, it would be a long time – if ever – before we saw a nuclear generator in Australia. It’s hard enough to secure an approval for gas extraction, let alone for a nuclear plant.”
Jim Chalmers, a member of the AWU, rejected any push to lift the moratorium on nuclear power, saying the economics didn’t stack up.
“Nuclear energy doesn’t make sense for Australia, it doesn’t make economic sense and even if it did, it would take too long. We have remarkable advantages here – geological, geographical meteorological – and we need to maximise those advantages,” Dr Chalmers said.
“That means getting more renewable energy into the system so that we can get cleaner and cheaper energy, and broaden and deepen our industrial base.”
The Coalition for Conservation group is hosting Liberal and Nationals MPs and senators at COP28 including opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien, Bridget McKenzie, Kevin Hogan, David Gillespie, Dean Smith, Andrew Bragg and Perin Davey.
The fight over nuclear power comes as new CT Group polling testing climate change and energy sentiment in capital cities across the globe reveals a majority of Sydney and Melbourne voters support more investment in combating climate change. However, the poll found support plunged if monthly taxes increased by $15 or $100 per month.
The Global Energy Insights survey found urban voters in the two capital cities ranked keeping energy prices down (40 per cent) as the top priority ahead of keeping energy supply reliable (31 per cent) and transitioning to renewables (29 per cent). The poll showed a +6 favourability towards nuclear, well behind solar, wind and hydro.
CT Group Australia managing-director Catherine Douglas said “costs are the prism through which Australians are measuring everything at the moment”.
“While some segments of the community are advocating for extreme solutions or for government to back winners like nuclear, solar, or wind farms, what the electorate is looking for is a sensible transition to lower emissions energy supply,” Ms Douglas said.
“The business community and voters are of one mind on the need for a pragmatic approach that is not captive to special interests or extremist advocacy at either end of the debate.”
A US-led pledge on the COP28 sidelines to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050, which the government shunned, was endorsed by more than 20 countries. Of the 22 countries who joined the pledge, 18 have existing nuclear energy industries. Fourteen countries with nuclear energy industries, including Germany, did not sign the pledge.
Investor Group on Climate Change chief executive Rebecca Mikula-Wright, who represents super funds and investors managing more than $30tn in assets, said investors were looking for the least-cost pathways for decarbonisation. The IGCC chief said there was “no interest right now” among investors about using nuclear energy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
“Comparatively, nuclear has project time blowouts of anything from seven to 15+ years and cost blowouts in the 10s of billions. It just means that, as a technology, it is much further down the field when you’ve got the lowest cost technologies, renewables, batteries and so on, that are available to deploy now, that are more on budget and more on time comparatively than nuclear,” Ms Mikula-Wright said.
Peter Dutton said it was sensible for Australia to embrace nuclear energy just as other developed countries had done, labelling Mr Macron’s call to revoke the nuclear power ban “a cry of common sense”.
****************************************************
Political backlash awaits Labor unless migration is tamed
As the end of the year approaches, the Albanese government faces several major policy challenges. If they are left unattended, there will be a range of adverse consequences, including political ones.
Immigration is a policy area that requires immediate attention lest the large numbers of migrants, both coming and staying, continue to fuel the housing crisis.
With the benefit of hindsight, the government made several missteps in the management of the immigration portfolio. This goes beyond the bungled handling of indefinite detention. Errors include sticking with migration targets set by the previous Coalition government; underestimating the effects of the so-called catch-up after the pandemic; and altering visa conditions to make Australia an even more attractive destination for less skilled migrants.
By throwing more resources at departmental visa processing, it was only several months after Labor was elected that the number of migrant arrivals began to swell.
The key here is net overseas migration: the difference between long-term arrivals and long-term departures. Before Covid, net overseas migration was averaging just more than 200,000 a year. According to the latest figure, NOM was more than 450,000 for the year ending in the March quarter. More recent figures point to annual NOM exceeding 500,000.
In addition to natural population increase – which is only about 120,000 a year – what this means is that close to 600,000 have been added to the population in a year. This is almost half the population of Adelaide and over 100,000 more than the population of Canberra. But migrants largely are heading for Melbourne and Sydney, not Adelaide or Canberra.
International students dominate NOM. According to the federal Department of Education, there were 726,000 international students studying in Australia in January-August, an increase of 31 per cent across the same period last year.
The proportion of university enrolments made up of international students is about one-third overall; it is more than 40 per cent in some cases. For those without direct exposure to higher education, these proportions may come as a surprise.
About 70 per cent of international students express a desire to stay in Australia permanently. To underpin these hopes, Labor has made post-graduation visas more generous, significantly increasing the time visa holders can stay in the country. This is contributing to fewer migrant departures than may have been expected.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil commissioned a panel chaired by Martin Parkinson to look into Australia’s migration system in 2022. The report was released in April. While the panel was not asked to look at migrant numbers, one of its principal findings was the lack of coherence between the permanent and temporary parts of the system.
With close to two million on temporary visas, the panel concluded: “It is hard to conceive of Australians willingly agreeing to the creation of a ‘permanently temporary’ cohort of workers, akin to guest workers seen in other countries.” The only substantive response to the report was the lifting of the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold from just under $54,000 to $70,000 a year from July. This means temporary workers must earn at least the higher figure to secure a visa. Temporary workers in areas of short supply also have been provided with favourable access to permanent residence.
So working on the basis that NOM is too high and will likely remain so, what are the policy options for government? While it’s likely NOM will fall next year of its own accord, the magnitude of the fall will be insufficient to deal with the economic and political downsides of the net migrant intake.
The options include imposing caps on the key temporary visa categories; levying a tax on international students; altering some visa conditions, including reducing the allowable period of stay for those on post-graduation visas; and further increasing the minimum salary payable to temporary workers. Imposing caps will involve logistical headaches. The rationed numbers would need to be allocated over the year and between applicants. It’s unlikely first come, first served would work.
Higher education institutions will jockey for favourable treatment. Expect the Group of Eight – the sandstone universities – to claim they enrol the best students and need special deals. Other institutions, including regional ones, may argue it’s time they got a higher share of international students and the allocation of visas should reflect this. The government should expect a bunfight among the educated elites working in higher education, some of which we have seen in these pages.
There is discussion of the case for a tax on international students to offset the external costs that migrants impose. Whether such a tax would dissuade many students is not clear, although the direction of the effect is clear. Whether the effect is big or small, there would be gains: fewer international students or a substantial source of new tax revenue to offset the costs.
While it is true the higher education system would lose some revenue that is used to fund research, there are serious question marks over the value of some of this research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
The expansion of international student numbers has led to a massive upsurge in research funding rather than being directed to better education for students, both domestic and international.
Jim Chalmers needs his department to undertake some more detailed analysis of the fiscal implications of different NOM levels. Using a set of unrealistic assumptions, Treasury asserts every NOM arrival essentially adds $100,000 a year to GDP, with about one-third being made up of tax revenue. According to this logic, a lower NOM necessarily means less tax revenue.
But the dominance of students in the NOM makes these estimates nonsensical. Most students won’t earn much above the tax-free threshold, so any tax take is trivial. There is also the issue of the costs that long-term arrivals impose, costs that are often picked up by state governments.
The migration system should serve our national interest rather than deliver narrow benefits to businesses and sectional interests.
We are witnessing a significant electoral backlash across several countries to the way in which migration programs have operated.
Unless the size of the migrant intake is scaled back and the system’s integrity improved, there is every reason to think this will happen here.
**********************************************
$2.3 million payout goes to the heart of Labor’s role in Brittany Higgins case
A lot of money to reward an accusation
It’s taken a defamation trial to discover the truth, but finally we know how much the Albanese government paid to settle Brittany Higgins’ untested claim that she would not be able to work for at least 40 years after allegedly being raped by Bruce Lehrmann.
If the figure itself is astounding – $2.3m – how much more extraordinary was the government’s determination to pay the money without challenging the veracity of the claim.
The payment went to the heart of Labor’s hopelessly conflicted role in this tawdry affair.
Leave aside the question of whether Higgins was raped by Lehrmann: Justice Michael Lee will answer that in due course when he hands down his decision on whether Network 10 was justified in reporting Higgins’ allegations.
Instead look at the supposed reason for the payment, as stated by Higgins in the witness box on Tuesday: that the commonwealth had admitted it had breached its duty of care to her and that “they didn’t go through proper processes, so that’s actually why they settled with me.”
The two women Higgins claimed had failed her were former ministers Linda Reynolds and Michaelia Cash, who were alleged to have exacerbated a “toxic and harmful” work environment, subjecting her to “victimisation, ostracism” and pressuring her not to discuss the assault or their response to it.
Each of those claims has been hotly disputed in the current defamation proceedings.
Indeed, on the evidence presented the only two people to encourage Higgins to go to the police were Reynolds and her then chief of staff Fiona Brown.
None of these women were asked to give evidence about what had occurred, before the commonwealth handed over $2.3m to Higgins, for what she claimed was 40 years of economic loss and the end of her pursuit of a future political career.
Reynolds was actively muzzled, as The Australian revealed a year ago, with the government threatening to tear up an agreement to pay her legal fees and any costs awarded unless she agreed not to attend a mediation.
The former Defence Industries minister was therefore unable to dispute any of Higgins’ allegations about a failure to support her or properly investigate the incident, a number of which were contested at Lehrmann’s criminal trial and again during these defamation proceedings.
The taxpayer-funded settlement was reached after a single sitting, astonishing lawyers familiar with such matters, and only revealed – without any details – in a late-night statement clearly designed to minimise media coverage.
The government has repeatedly refused to answer questions about its role in the settlement but has denied any involvement in the decision by Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who was central in pursuing the Brittany Higgins saga against the former Morrison government when she was in opposition.
Text messages between Higgins and her boyfriend David Sharaz revealed by The Australian show the pair planned to directly enlist the help of senior Labor figures to pursue Ms Higgins’ rape allegation and her claim the Coalition government covered it up.
Higgins’ role as the face of the #MeToo movement came into sharp focus at the defamation trial on Tuesday when Whybrow played in court the speech Higgins made after Lehrmann’s criminal trial ended in a mistrial.
In the speech Higgins claimed “this is the reality of how complainants in sexual assault cases are treated” and made remarks about Lehrmann and the justice system that many lawyers argued at the time were highly prejudicial to a future trial.
On Tuesday Whybrow went one step further, asking Higgins if the speech was “designed to blow up a retrial”, a suggestion she denied.
Whybrow put it to her that by then she had become the figurehead of the #MeToo movement. “Accidentally, but yes”, Higgins agreed.
Whybrow’s proposition was that Higgins was doing everything she could to ensure there would not be another criminal trial, with its high standard of proof – beyond reasonable doubt – and that instead she wanted a civil trial where standard of proof was on the balance of probabilities.
Whybrow pointed to media reports in the days after Drumgold’s announcement that Lehrmann would file defamation proceedings.
Higgins responded on the same day with a social media post saying: “Following recent developments, I feel the need to make it clear I am willing to defend the truth as a witness in any potential civil action brought about by Mr Lehrmann.”
When someone replied: “You had your chance”, Higgins responded: “Appears like I may be gifted another one in a slightly more favourable court.”
Higgins agreed on Tuesday that she had been referring to a court with a lower standard of proof but said she would also have been willing to go through a criminal trial again.
“I put myself through the criminal court once I was gonna keep going. And then when it looked like he wanted to make money off being a rapist, I of course put my hand up and said please put me back in – and here I am.”
Linda Reynolds has asked the National Anti-Corruption Commission to investigate the compensation payment to Higgins.
As more witnesses give evidence in the defamation case over the coming days about Higgins’ claim she was abandoned by those who should have protected her, that case may become more pressing.
************************************
5 December, 2023
There are three core issues that look likely to ensure that Albo has had his chips
Economic management, border protection and national security/defence; all three have now landed on the Prime Minister’s table with a thump.
As opposition leader Albanese fought to successfully neutralise all of these ahead of the last election. His promise of a safe pair of hands on the economic tiller and the pledge of a unity ticket with the Coalition on boats and defence – despite his own pedigree – were electorally accepted.
But this is now the nightmare before Christmas Albanese had been hoping he would not have to revisit. The political vulnerabilities for Labor that have always been its most acute have now returned to haunt him like ghosts of the Rudd/Gillard past.
Yet there appears to be no political strategy for how to deal with this perilous triumvirate.
Even more lacking is a unified message that would seek to convince the electorate Labor has command of any of them. The polls bear this out.
The memory of its 2013 election loss should be seared into the memories of the more senior members of the Labor caucus.
Internal disunity and the policy crisis over immigration – namely losing control of the nation’s borders – were defining issues.
Albanese has done everything within his power since becoming leader to avoid this topic ever becoming a problem again for Labor in government, even staring down his own left faction on boat turnbacks and offshore processing.
He gets the issue more than many in his caucus, having lived through it last time Labor was in government, and despite his previous ideological leanings.
But this has now been undermined by the complete mismanagement of the High Court’s decision on indefinite detention of criminally convicted non-citizens – a decision now extended by the Federal Court to apply to asylum-seekers. As a result, this issue is unlikely to end as a result of whatever legislation is passed this week. The risk of a repeat of the border disasters of the Rudd/Gillard government is as real as it is perceived.
And whatever political damage has been caused, or may present in the future, it has been entirely of the government’s own making.
While Albanese’s instinct was to look tough, this again was undermined by other ministers who overreached with their attacks on Peter Dutton. Somehow, the government turned a wedge against the Coalition into a wedge against itself. This was a major tactical error on a critical political issue.
On defence and broader national security, again, the government has of its own doing brought an issue back to the table that it had worked hard to politically defuse in opposition.
Albanese’s response to the Chinese aggression against Australian navy divers and Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s handling of the domestic messaging over the Israel-Hamas conflict have undone some of the kudos Albanese had worked hard to establish through his international engagements. Labor was building significant equity in this space. That has been unnecessarily put at risk.
On the economy, the government believes it has a sound story to tell. This narrative, however, has been consumed by the reality that the government presides over a dramatic fall in living standards.
Albanese is also captive to the reality that inflation as an economic problem is not well suited to Labor’s traditional policy toolkit.
And because inflation hurts everyone, Jim Chalmers is in a battle with well-established laws of economics on how to deal with it, which presents a policy dilemma for a traditional Labor government response.
The risk for the government is that it emerges in the new year with Australia having lost its economic pre-eminence among OECD countries, a status it has enjoyed for more than a decade, and being at the back of the pack on dealing with inflation.
This will go to the heart of the political contest over economic management, with Labor having also lost its political advantage over the Coalition on cost of living – aka, handouts – lest it risk adding to the inflation problem.
Albanese has at least one thing going for him. He still has the benefit of a degree of broader unity within the party, despite the recent displays of ill-discipline by members of the cabinet.
*******************************************************
Peak stupid? NSW Liberals back Greens and Labor on Net Zero target
In Parliament, the Liberals joined the Greens in the Lower House to push Labor to adopt a bolder target of 70 per cent reduction in emissions by 2035. That exceeds the previous Coalition target of 50 per cent by 2030 and moreover sets the target in legislation.
The usual suspects cheered from the sidelines.
Natalie Collard of Farmers for Climate Action said: ‘It’s fantastic that the government, the NSW Liberal Party, NSW Nationals, Greens, and crossbenchers worked together to get an excellent result.’
Georgina Woods, the former head of research at the Lock the Gate Alliance, reported that the speeches given were a ‘joy to read’.
The Nature Conservation Council of NSW and Farmers for Climate Action joined the chorus.
Some of us thought that Peak Stupid might have been achieved in the last few years but the latest move by Chris Bowen at the federal level and this state initiative have torpedoed that hope.
Nothing has been learned from the very clear evidence from Britain and Germany that legislating targets will not work. What happened to the lesson taught by King Canute (that used to be in every primary school syllabus) that even the King’s order can’t restrain the tide?
Sadly, the power system may have to fail comprehensively to wake up the punters and arouse them to send a rocket to their local members.
Across the road at the top of Martin Place, forces opposing ‘Reckless Renewables’ rallied to oppose the blight of wind and solar facilities across the regions and offshore. Alan Jones, Craig Kelly, and Barnaby Joyce led the speakers, with some other sitting members, backed up by a roster of local champions standing for their farms and the surrounds.
Passion was the order of the day. Some of the stories from the land were heart-breaking and the troops maintained morale with chanting and support from a folk singer with musical accompaniment.
There was power as well as passion, compelling arguments about the impossibility, the cost, the damage, and the security implications of enriching China who provide the hardware while we wreck our own economy and the countryside as well.
The numbers did not do justice to the cause. Many country folk are harvesting and fire-fighting. The mainstream media did not help with coverage although the usual suspects on our side did their bit.
The organisers were not dismayed by the turnout. This is just the start, never mind the lunacy on display across Macquarie Street ‘we are up for the fight and we are in this for the long haul’.
There will be a rally in Canberra next year with more lead time and most likely many more supporters from the land.
************************************************
Hydrogen hype
In a report published on Sunday, the Grattan Institute has called on the federal government to back hydrogen production but be realistic about its uses. The analysis from the think tank says incentivising the production of hydrogen could cost between $600m to $2bn a year.
Grattan Institute energy and climate change program director Tony Wood said hydrogen was not the only solution to the climate transition. “We need to dial down the hype about hydrogen – it’s now clear it will not be the sole clean fuel in a net-zero world,” Mr Wood said.
Across seven recommendations, the Melbourne-based institute calls on the government to be strategic about where hydrogen is used and incentivise its use for some industries while appreciating it was not a comparable replacement for fossil fuels in all circumstances.
The report finds Australia has the potential to be a hydrogen superpower as the country also has the resources and space to be a renewable energy heavyweight.
But the report warns hydrogen faces a “green premium”, with many materials cheaper to produce using fossil fuels.
The report calls on the government to close the cost gap, by ensuring cheap access to renewable energy which could be used to generate hydrogen, put in place barriers to goods from high-carbon polluting countries and support the production of hydrogen for select industries.
The Grattan Institute calls on the government to back hydrogen production through a contracts-for-difference scheme that would underwrite the risk of producing the gas.
The report notes a scheme that underwrote the replacement of all existing ammonia, alumina, and iron facilities in Australia would cost between $11.6bn and $36.8bn over an 18-year period.
Sydney’s WestConnex tunnels system, which connected the M4 and M8 motorways cost almost $20bn to build.
Ammonia, alumina, and iron production are key industries identified by the report for hydrogen to be used.
The report also warns governments must “get serious” about hydrogen and avoid subsidising its use in inefficient areas.
“For many applications, hydrogen is currently a second-best option, and future technological and economic developments could make hydrogen more or less competitive as a tool to decarbonise,” it notes.
“Using hydrogen for heating and cooking in homes and commercial buildings is unrealistic.”
The report also warns against subsidising hydrogen export, warning the costs on both sides of the trade were enormous.
“If such a buyer were to appear – one who wanted to buy Australian-produced hydrogen for export, and was willing to underwrite the capital for the supply chain – then Australia should welcome that investment,” the report note.
“But if governments are seeking the best return for effort, they should not go chasing after liquid hydrogen exports at the expense of domestic uses that could build a viable industry.”
********************************************************
Our governments must wake up to powder kegs they have created
Myopic decisions mean high interest rates and increasing costs of living are here to stay
The massive spending power of Australians not under mortgage or rent stress has stunned retailers during the Black Friday sales period, with many recording incredible sales increases of around 13 per cent.
In September many people did not believe me when I alerted readers to a significant change in the spending mindset among the 70 per cent of the population not in financial stress.
That mindset switch has exploded beyond my expectations, although the Christmas/Boxing Day spending is unlikely to maintain the Black Friday rate of increase.
But the latest spending boost means interest rate pain must continue for most of 2024 and perhaps longer, unless federal and state governments wake up to the powder kegs they are creating. But a severe downturn is not likely.
Meanwhile in the US, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is adamant he has no plans to reduce interest rates and may in fact increase them.
But, despite recent nervousness, the US bond markets this week bet on the most powerful central banker in the world being completely wrong and that US rates will fall. Gold and bitcoin skyrocketed. It’s a big market call.
Irrespective of what may happen to US interest rates, Australia’s underlining powder kegs will make it very difficult for the Reserve Bank to significantly reduce inflation and interest rates in 2024 and there is a clear danger rates may rise further.
What is taking place within our country is different to most other nations because we have created these dangerous powder kegs:
Powder keg 1: Governments are embarking on crazy infrastructure spending, where various arms of governments are pursuing projects which ignore what other arms are doing, therefore accelerating the construction costs of labour and raw material led by steel and concrete.
The cost increases for exploding renewable projects will be monumental and create high Australian power costs for a generation.
In non-energy infrastructure the worst rises look set for Queensland, where the estimates for the Olympic Games infrastructure costs are becoming far too low given the explosion in Queensland costs.
Victoria is not far behind, but its problem can be eased by pigeonholing the $125bn (real cost $300bn) South West rail link and the $12bn (real cost $25bn) airport rail link.
The biggest infrastructure need in all states is housing and unless the pet projects of the various politicians are cut back the cost of this housing will also explode.
However, most states can actually contain the cost of housing, but it requires the Commonwealth government to substantially cut back on grants to states unless they streamline their approval and permit processes to slash costs.
NSW is the worst so has the greatest potential. The cities that are best placed to overcome housing shortages have cheap inner-city land that is often on top of rail lines. Melbourne has huge quantities.
Powder keg 2: The most severe pain is not actually taking place in the mortgage area because banks are not exercising their mortgage security and evicting people when they fall behind in payments.
In most cases, if people make a fist of tailored regular payments, they will retain residency of their home.
Accordingly, while mortgage-stressed people’s spending is being squeezed hard they are surviving by cutting back and embracing casual jobs.
But there is no such payment protection in rental areas where appalling living conditions are sometimes required because of high rents.
To encourage investment in this area the states need to make their rental laws fair to landlords. But if the building approval process is made smooth and costs and skills shortages are not inflated by “infrastructure sprees“ the capital is available. If state governments don’t wake up to the disaster they are creating, the community revolt by the renters may get violent as they watch the ‘70 per cent’ go on a spending spree.
Powder keg 3: After almost two years of wage restraint, where the real income of Australians fell sharply, large parts of the nation are saying “enough is enough”. The wage rise pressures are now starting at around 4 per cent but often revolve around 5 per cent. If inflation keeps up those pressures will intensify and increase.
Even without wage pressure increases the cost of businesses, including skyrocketing power costs, a wide variety of other goods and services will rise sharply unless our high interest rates boost the dollar.
Businesses which cannot pass on these costs will suffer and will need to retrench staff which is exactly what the Reserve Bank is trying to achieve with its higher interest rates, but is being thwarted by the powder kegs, labour shortages and other factors.
If prices respond to the next round of wage, power and other cost rises then interest rates will certainly rise further.
Powder keg 4: The industrial relations bill has been prepared as a union agenda for a world that has dramatically changed. In overall terms productivity will fall and inflation will rise but in specific terms it will make it almost impossible for employers to hire casual workers, adding extreme pressure to mortgage and rent stress. Contracting services will be high risk.
Powder keg 5: In seven months’ time, the tax cuts legislated by the Morrison government will come into effect. They will greatly stimulate the economy. The biggest beneficiaries will be the 70 per cent of people not under rent and mortgage stress.
Finally, if the US bond market is right and American rates are about to fall and our rates are maintained or increased then the Australian dollar will rise further. This will certainly offset some of the power in the above powder kegs, but they are still issues which need to be tackled.
************************************
4 December, 2023
The male suicide problem
Toxic feminism at work
Australia’s suicide prevention policies are failing. We are falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to suicide prevention. From 2000-19 global suicide declined by 11 per cent. In Australia, rates increased by 31 per cent.
The reason? For many decades our health authorities have blatantly refused to target the group most at risk – men. Seven of the nine people who end their lives each day in Australia are male.
In 2019, the female suicide rate in Australia (5.6 per 100,000) while tragic, was similar to the rest of the world (5.4 per 100,000). However, male suicide rates in Australia (17.0 per 100,000) are now much higher than elsewhere (12.6 per 100,000).
The discrepancy is stark, and yet funding initiatives and bodies appear to fall short when it comes to targeting men who are most at risk.
Just look at the $1.8 billion of funding allocated in the 2022 National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Agreement. This includes:
$735 million for adult mental health services that generally reach twice as many women as men.
$300 million for youth mental health services, which generally reach twice as many young women as young men.
$465 million for aftercare support for people who attempt suicide, a model with a track record of helping more women than men.
$35 million for suicide postvention support providing suicide bereavement services that predominantly support women.
It is hardly surprising that men feel as if they are being left behind. And when these programs do manage to support vulnerable men as a priority, the tend to invoke the toxic masculinity model in which men are told it is their fault the system is failing them because they are too stoic to reach out for help with mental health issues.
Yet here too there is big news.
There’s now statistical data to show that mental health problems are no longer considered the key risk factor for one of our major groups of vulnerable men. For the first time, this year the Australian Bureau of Statistics published statistics based on coroners’ reports showing relationship/family breakdown is the major suicide trigger for family men – men in their peak child-raising years from 25-44.
Here’s what the ABS said:
‘The top risk factor for males aged 25-44 years was problems in spousal relationships circumstances, present in over one-third of suicides. Problems in spousal relationships overtook mood disorders as the top risk factor in this age group for the first time and can include separation and divorce as well as arguments and domestic violence situations.’
We’re talking family law issues, men under fire in our increasingly hostile family law system, facing the risk of losing their children, home, and assets. Men who are facing the stress of monstrous legal costs. Plus we have the sad reality that ‘domestic violence situations’ often include false allegations.
Last month there were 2,500 empty shoes on the lawn in front of Parliament House representing the men who have lost their lives by their own hand this year. This powerful memorial event was sponsored by the Zero Suicide Community Awareness program which aims to educate Australia about what needs to be done to reduce these shocking suicide numbers.
Here’s a brief video giving an overview of the memorial – produced by Dads4Kids, one of the many men’s groups who came together to make this all happen.
Listen to Mary O’Brien, who runs a rural suicide organisation called Are you Bogged, Mate? O’Brien started speaking out about the high suicide rate in rural areas many years ago, pointing out how many of these blokes were driven to take their lives by family law battles. She’s touring the country speaking about rural suicide – rural men are twice as likely to take their lives as metropolitan men. Five times more likely than metropolitan women.
We lose a farmer every ten days in this country – and this crisis has led O’Brien to give up her work as an agricultural scientist to devote herself to calling out the health authorities’ failure to tackle male suicide properly. ‘Everything I read was bullsh*t,’ she says, spelling out the misguided approach being taken to male suicide.
She’s also concerned about the way statistical bodies report male suicide. For example, the Australian Bureau of Statistics graph below clearly shows the glaring difference in male and female suicide rates.
The ABS highlighted this telling graph in their reports on suicide trends until 2020 when it suddenly disappeared, to be replaced with two separate graphs – one for men and the other for women. The net effect of this change in the display of data obscures the reality that suicide is overwhelmingly a male problem.
What’s left in a prominent position is this graph, where the gender split is no longer obvious.
The gender disparity has not gone away, it is obscured by the choice of display. Here, the suicide rate for 35-39-year-old males and females appears comparable when the reality is suicide rates for males are more than 3 times higher.
Instead, the suicide figures for each age group are shown as a proportion of total suicides in each gender, rather than for all suicides. Therefore, in the 35-39 age bracket, the figure of 9.2 per cent for women represents 73 individuals, while the figure of 9.2 per cent for men represents 227 individuals. The graph makes these figures look the same.
The Zero Suicide event attracted various Opposition and One Nation MPs and Senators, speaking out about the male suicide crisis. As usual mainstream media did a brilliant job ignoring the event – despite the organiser Paul Withall having sent over 1,000 emails to media groups seeking publicity.
Male suicides are 35 times as numerous as deaths from domestic violence.
How come we are willing to spend millions of dollars each year to try to protect women from domestic violence while working so hard to ignore the tragedy of all those dead men?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/the-tragic-story-of-2500-empty-shoes/
*******************************************************Mindfulness therapy does little for high-schoolers' mental health, research finds
When a group of teenagers was given eight weeks of therapy and mindfulness training, there was no improvement in their overall mental health, a study has shown.
The University of Sydney paper tracked more than 1,000 year 8 and year 9 high-schoolers, half of whom were given dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), while the other half were not.
DBT is a type of psychological intervention based on various emotional regulation skills centred primarily around mindfulness.
The DBT therapy group engaged in mindfulness and other emotional regulation exercises.
Lead author Lauren Harvey said the only improvements were seen among those students who continued their therapy exercises at home.
The clinical psychologist said these results suggested that participants needed a certain willingness for the therapy to be effective.
"What some of these findings are telling is we need that level of engagement and buy-in," Dr Harvey said.
"The research is starting to show that it's not about a particular strategy, it's actually about how we use certain strategies and in which context we apply them."
She said similar studies in the UK had also cast doubt over the efficacy of mindfulness meditation in classrooms.
Dr Harvey said, therefore, she did not advise these practices be imposed in classrooms or workplaces, since the evidence suggested it was not generally effective.
While companies such as Amazon have introduced mindfulness booths for staff, Dr Harvey said such enthusiasm for mindfulness activities may be misleading.
She said sometimes problems were "systemic", rather than internal. "With the rise of mindfulness in our society it's been branded as a panacea to fix all of our issues, but realistically it's probably not," Dr Harvey said.
Sarah Swannell, a director of Willow Oak Psychology, says DBT is generally not appropriate for children who show no real interest in it. As a DBT clinician, she says the therapy is traditionally used by people actively seeking help for depression, emotional dysregulation, and suicidality.
Dr Swannell also said time frames for the therapy also tended to be much longer than eight weeks, with training often continuing for 12 months.
She said DBT could be effective in a classroom setting, provided it was offered as an opt-in activity.
"The buy-in needs to be not just by the kids who are receiving the intervention, but the entire school," Dr Swannell said. "All of the teachers, the staff, and the administration need to be on board with it so that there's a really positive culture around learning skills."
**************************************************
Wind turbines in Queensland and NSW are killing rare Aussie wildlife - and wind farm operators are being trained to 'kill' koalas 'humanely'
It's the massacre of Australian wildlife no-one wants to talk about. But the reality is for every wind turbine that's built in Australia, there's a grim body count that follows.
It's almost a contradiction in terms; wind is at the centre of Australia's optimistic goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
But the unique wildlife Australians hope to protect by reducing emission and thereby slowing global warming, including wedge-tail eagles, falcons, magpies and other birds and animals, are falling victim to wind farms throughout the nation every day.
Meanwhile, other wind farms are being built in prime koala habitat, meaning some will starve and die.
The detail comes from the reports of billionaire Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest's Squadron Energy, the biggest provider of renewables in Australia, in which wild farm operators must provide the 'carcass reports' of dead wildlife.
Squadron has a portfolio of 11 wind farms throughout Victoria and NSW, as well as the Clarke Creek site in Queensland, which is up to the second stage of development.
And while the company has repeatedly expressed a commitment to protecting wildlife, compulsory carcass reports posted by each wind farm during the early stages of development indicate that is not always possible.
A biodiversity management plan for Clarke Creek notes the project may result in the destruction of up to 1,513 hectares of koala habitat.
In addition to habitat loss, there have already been mass bird and bat casualties on these wind farms due to collisions with turbine blades and throughout vegetation clearing processes, and that number is only expected to rise further.
Bango Wind Farm in south-west NSW detailed a carcass count from September 2022 to August 2023, during which six wedge-tailed eagles, one peregrine falcon, six magpies and 10 dead bats were found.
And at Crudine Ridge Wind Farm, in northwest NSW, 19 dead bats were found, along with five wedge-tailed eagles, two falcons and five kestrels.
Clarke Creek also had a 'fauna euthanasia' clause, which vividly detailed how 'blunt force trauma' should be administered to injured koalas which could not be saved.
Squadron Energy said in a statement they have 'a zero-harm policy for native animals and holds itself to the highest environmental standards.
'No koala has been injured or killed during construction of the Clarke Creek Wind Farm and clearing for stage one is 60 per cent complete.
'We have experienced wildlife officers on site who conduct assessments 24 hours before work starts and monitor and supervise work as it occurs, to prevent injury to fauna. They are qualified to respond to fauna encounters and relocate animals if required.
'In the unlikely event of injury—any animals encountered must be assessed for injury to determine whether the animal requires further treatment and care by a vet or wildlife carer.'
The biodiversity management report details how 'euthanasia' should be carried out using 'blunt force trauma' when a dying animal can't be saved.
'This is a hard, sharp blow to the base of the back of the skull with a blunt metal or heavy wooden bar,' the report stated.
The report was written prior to March 2022, when Mr Forrest's Squadron Energy acquired the project, and was signed off by the then Coalition government, under Scott Morrison.
Michelle Landry, the Liberal Party MP for Central Queensland electorate Capricornia, said she was 'horrified' by the Clarke Creek Wind Farm proposal.
'203 animal species have been identified in the region where these wind farms are being constructed. It is prime habitat for Koalas, Greater Gliders and Squatter Pigeon.'
She described the fauna euthanasia clause as 'absolutely sickening'.
Ms Landry said local grazier Glen Kelly warned 'there is going to be dozens upon dozens of animals killed and maimed in this process'.
'There is areas in the region where there is cleared land. Why is this not used instead of knocking down the habitat of our native animals?,' he argued.
Squadron has committed to providing a third of the clean energy the Labor government needs to hit the targeted 82 per cent renewables on the grid by 2030.
Australia has committed to growing its renewable energy sector, with more than 300 wind farm projects currently operating, under construction or proposed throughout the nation, according to the Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner.
Meanwhile the Coalition advocates an 'all of the above' approach which would combine the use of small doses of nuclear alongside renewable energy, to keep prices down.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is expected to take a nuclear energy policy to the next election.
Just last week, Energy Minister Chris Bowen slammed the nuclear proposal as 'a fantasy wrapped in a delusion, accompanied by a pipe dream'.
He said nuclear energy 'would not move the dial at all' on transitioning to renewables and described the support from the Coalition as 'an attempt at a distraction'.
**************************************************
Brisbane Racing Club tees off on green groups over affordable housing proposal
A Brisbane race club has teed off on green groups pushing for tracks to be sold off for affordable housing, saying they can’t afford to give an inch to anti-racing ideologies.
In a letter to members, Brisbane Racing Club chief executive Tony Partridge slammed Greens councillor and Brisbane Lord Mayor candidate Jonathan Sriranganathan after he proposed to turn Eagle Farm into 4000 apartments and green space as part of his election pitch.
Partridge also returned serve to sections of the media who questioned why Brisbane needed two racetracks, saying “they want to shut our sport down”.
“Let’s be frank about these comments – the Greens despise horse racing,” Partridge wrote.
“They are aided by some media outlets pitching for business from readers who share the Greens’ views.
“The Greens and these media outlets like to tell other people what to do with their property and with their leisure time. It’s their standard approach to public policy.”
Partridge said he was compelled to speak out to assure racing stakeholders and BRC members of their stance on the matter.
“The Greens and their media supporters who want to shut down Eagle Farm and Doomben don’t understand racing,” he said.
“They can’t comprehend why Brisbane has two racetracks next to each other. “The reason is simple – they create a precinct that enables the sport’s hundreds of daily participants to move between the courses easily and safely.
“Employees can live close to their place of employment. Resources can be shared between the courses.
“The two courses can withstand the workload that one course can’t handle — Brisbane has two metropolitan courses while Sydney and Melbourne each have four.”
Partridge said it was important for the racing industry to stand up to Green groups and be proud of their history in order to hold their ground.
“It’s not the job of sporting organisations to give up their traditions because others don’t approve of them,” he said.
“We are proud of the contribution, history and the future of Eagle Farm and Doomben.
“The BRC is not-for-profit and conducts 80 race meetings a year that generate tens of millions of dollars in revenue for the State Government.
“BRC and racing enjoy the support of both major political parties, continuing Government support for over 165 years.”
Under their plans, the Greens say they would house 10,000 people in publicly-owned rent-capped homes at Eagle Farm.
************************************
3 December, 2023
I'm raising my daughter to be 'traditional wife' one day - and that it is perfectly acceptable to serve and depend on a man
This mother is actually ensuring that her daughter has a balace of influences. Her daughter will get plently of feminist propaganda at school
My own experience of a traditional wife has been very good. When I married Jenny I told her to ditch her job and enabled her to become a full-time wife and mother. She was delighted at that and embraced the role enthusiastically. And just yesterday -- 40 years later -- she told me that I am her highest priority. Beat that!
An Australian stay-at-home mum has caused a stir by saying she is teaching her young daughter to 'serve' her family and 'depend' on her future husband.
Jasmine Dinis is a self described 'traditional wife' who is raising her daughter to want the same instead of getting a university education or career of her own.
Many were quick to criticise Jasmine's old-fashioned parenting style and pointed out while there is nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mum, the notion of a woman 'serving' her husband could be 'anti-feminist'.
'I'm teaching my daughter that it's perfectly acceptable to depend on a man and that serving her husband and bearing children will be her greatest joy,' the mum-of-one wrote in an online video.
Jasmine has more than 145,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram as she posts snippets of her life 'encouraging traditional motherhood and marriage'.
'In a world full of women teaching their children that their only goal is to go to university, get a good job and make money, I'm teaching my little girl to live a slow life, to be a biblical women that wants a husband and a beautiful family that she can serve daily,' she captioned the video.
'That joy comes from God and family, not from a career.'
The controversial video was seen more than 3.4million times with viewers quick to slam Jasmine for 'deciding' her daughter's future.
'I hope you will support her in other career options if she expresses she doesn't want what you wanted,' one woman said.
'Ah yes. What could go wrong here???' asked another.
'You don't know what her biggest joy will be. Let her decide on her own,' a third wrote.
'Girls - don't depend on anyone else but YOU! You are your own rock, your own foundation, your own future,' added a fourth.
But not everyone was outraged by Jasmine's sentiment.
'This is absolutely beautiful,' one woman said.
'You're an incredible mother and living this way is fulfilling in the deepest level,' a second agreed.
'She's teaching her daughter there is still empowerment in creating a home. If it doesn't apply to you that's fine,' another replied.
*********************************************
Elite universities loathe us
The Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne identifies its purpose as considering how Australia’s founding as a settler colony informs our capacity to engage with the central challenges of our time.
The opening salvo of the Centre’s November conference declared, ‘Global failure to understand and engage with the colonial roots of the impending climate catastrophe both constrains our collective capacities to untangle this wicked problem and simultaneously works to secure settler futurity and white supremacy.’
The academics heading up the Centre have affirmed their desire to tear down the political, legal and social framework of our nation to make way for a new, vaguely defined utopia. It is important to remember that what is discussed by the elites on university campuses today has a strange way of becoming government policy, generated by the political ruling class, tomorrow.
The Voice to parliament was one such Trojan horse, celebrated by universities and pushed by government. It sought to dismantle the constitution – the ultimate expression of ‘settler futurity and white supremacy’ – and rebuild it by means of a provision which would have divided Australians permanently on the basis of race. This was a clear attack on equality and our egalitarian way of life.
Next on the agenda is the Bill currently before parliament to amend the Climate Change Act 2022. The Bill significantly undermines Australia’s energy security and economic competitiveness and is a clear attack on the free market.
The title of the conference, ‘A Profound Reorganising of Things’, encapsulates what those on the centre right are up against: a narrative positing that the liberal-democratic system of government is fundamentally broken due to its colonial roots and is the primary cause of most of the world’s problems. Replete with a ‘welcome to country’, ‘smoking ceremony’ and ‘dance performance’, the conference flaunted its woke credentials through classic virtue-signalling.
The program brochure links a myriad of inequities and injustices to colonialism. The incarceration of indigenous people, the divide between rich and poor, the alleged mistreatment of refugees, and poor health outcomes are all traced back to ‘corrupt’ colonial land relations. For the academics at the Australian Centre, this is a moral problem. This is made abundantly clear by the use of words like ‘wicked’, ‘violent’ and ‘unjust’. Elite institutions and their globalist allies are waging a holy war against an evil system. The Marxist trappings of this agenda are plainly evident.
This leads to perhaps the most radical claim in the program brochure, ‘The incarceration of Indigenous peoples in so-called Australia is deeply implicated in the warming of the planet, is deeply implicated in the offshore detention of asylum seekers, and so on.’ What the links are between these apparently disconnected issues remains a mystery. Perhaps the conference proceedings enlightened attendees as to the connection. However, the statement lacks the academic rigour you would expect from an institution of Melbourne University’s standing.
Tertiary discourse should raise the intellectual culture of the nation. Yet this latest chapter appears to be nothing more than sloganeering, paid for with the taxpayers’ credit card.
Universities exist to impart knowledge, hone young minds and produce research that benefits society. They should not make wild speculations, unsupported by coherent argument, about highly political and ideological issues.
The Australian Centre’s latest initiative demonstrates just how out of touch universities are with the very real problems faced by mainstream Australians today. Those facing cost-of-living pressures, interest rate rises, soaring utility bills and record rental and housing prices should not be subsidising the mindless activism of cosseted academics.
According to a forthcoming survey commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs, lowering the cost of living is twice as important to Australians aged 16 to 25 than any other issue. In contrast, fewer than one in ten young Australians think reducing emissions should be a government priority.
As Australians’ financial circumstances deteriorate, it appears that such elite issues as climate catastrophism and colonialism are resonating less and less with the broader population. This is despite the narrative being shaped and promoted by our universities for decades. And the problem is not limited to universities, although it may start there. This is a sector-wide issue, with schools enthusiastically promoting a radical green agenda.
Just like the national curriculum, university teaching degrees focus on activism around highly political issues, such as sustainability, at the expense of core literacy and numeracy skills.
Recently released IPA research found that nearly one third of all teaching subjects relate to ideological issues, while fewer than one in ten teaching subjects focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy.
If you need further proof of the politicisation of schools, look no further than the recent climate rallies staged by students across Australia. Schoolchildren skipped class to protest alleged government inaction on climate change. Tens of thousands of students attended these events after being encouraged to use a ‘climate doctor’s certificate’ and take a sick day from school.
Highlighting the strong link between education and public policy, the Bill to amend the Climate Change Act 2022 would impose a statutory duty on decision-makers to consider the wellbeing of children when making ‘significant decisions’ in relation to the exploration and extraction of coal, oil and gas.
IPA research concludes such an amendment would provide clear grounds for activists to engage in green lawfare aimed at delaying and cancelling vital resources projects, further compromising energy security and undermining Australia’s economic competitiveness.
One might have been able to laugh off the wild and wacky ideas coming out of universities in the past, but there is nothing funny about such ideas being adopted and imposed as government policy. Such ideas then become costly and destructive. Taxpayers are entitled to expect governments to hold universities to account and to direct funding towards research that does not deliberately undermine Australian prosperity and our way of life.
The Australian Centre was right about one thing. A ‘profound reorganising of things’ is required. However, it is the universities – not our political system – that need a makeover.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/elite-universities-loathe-us/
**********************************************‘Carbon offsets are not credible’: the travel boss exposing the truth about the industry’s sustainability
Having dodged corporate jobs to find a way to keep travelling, Darrell Wade was, as he tells it, pretty pleased with life as his business took off. But the climate crisis wasn’t yet on his radar.
The Australian entrepreneur was on holiday in Botswana in 2005, fresh from winning an award for responsible travel, when he read The Weather Makers – a book by scientist Tim Flannery spelling out the causes and consequences of global heating. “I was feeling chuffed, and then I read that book. And I thought, holy shit, we’re a disaster – we’re doing the wrong thing.”
The co-founder and chair of Intrepid Travel – the world’s largest travel company to be accredited as a B Corporation for its social and environmental performance – Wade appears genial and self-deprecating, frequently laughing, but not pulling punches. Minutes earlier, he had told delegates attending the Abta convention, the UK travel industry’s annual get-together, that their record on climate was a clear “fail”, sparking a brief outbreak of self-flagellation in the conference hall in Bodrum, Turkey.
After spending years as an advocate for sustainability standards within the industry, Wade told them, he had found one in three travel firms were still “actively hostile” to policies aimed at reducing travel’s carbon footprint. Another third were ambivalent – and the better ones, well, they weren’t doing enough.
That includes his own company, he admits – even though Intrepid’s adventure travel holidays have been audited as climate neutral since 2010. “So in theory, we’re doing our bit, but, you know, the reality is, we weren’t doing enough.”
That carbon audit has, as Wade acknowledges, one very big caveat: Intrepid does not sell the flights that take its customers, mainly from the UK, US and Australia, to the starting point of their low-impact, sustainable tours. Is that not a bit like Heathrow proudly claiming to be net zero, if it wasn’t for all the pesky planes? “That’s right, it’s very similar,” he says. “Consumers want to take a holiday. Let’s say half of those holidays are taken with aviation – we’ve got to fix our industry.”
He believes there is a role for offsetting and, eventually, sustainable aviation fuels, when (or if) they are made on a large scale from green hydrogen. But, he says, travel has to move from relying on offsets to “definitely now reducing emissions per person per day”. “Offsets have to be credible,” he says. “And at the moment, they’re not. That’s the reality.”
There are good business incentives to go greener, Wade points out, not least cost savings in fuel bills. And despite there being no imminent answer to travel’s environmental footprint, he maintains: “You’ve just got to hold people’s feet to the fire, talk about it, [say] that hey, we do have a problem. And all the rhetoric in the world is not going to solve this problem. You need taxation, you need regulation, you need media pressure – you need litigation as a last resort.”
************************************
The present Australian government: Ideology, idiocy and incompetence
Peter Dutton has committed his party to a return to government at the next election. This development is welcome. The damage being inflicted upon this nation by the Albanese government, which we pointed out over a year ago comprises a core group of some of the least impressive individuals to ever run this country, is immense and needs to be stopped.
Mr Albanese presides over a government of the ‘three i’s’: every policy can be explained within the parameters of ideology, idiocy and incompetence.
Take climate change. This week Chris Bowen flies off at taxpayer’s expense along with 70,000 other globalist jet-setters to Dubai for the annual climate gabfest, Cop28. (Why any self-respecting politician would attend these events is beyond us – it was a Cop that heralded the beginning of the end for Kevin ‘rat-f-ckers’ Rudd and of course it was at Glasgow’s ignominious Cop26 that Scott ‘net zero’ Morrison sealed his own fate).
Mr Bowen’s trip is fuelled not only by an abundance of fossil fuel (of course) but also by Labor’s flawed and foolish climate ideology. In Mr Bowen, the climate zealots have a man of limited work experience outside of Labor party undergraduate politics and of limited ability who is the perfect patsy for implementing hugely expensive and almost certainly futile green climate measures at the behest of the renewables industrial complex. His career to date boasts a litany of failed and destructive policies in every portfolio he has been gifted, from the silliness of GroceryWatch to the deaths at sea during his time as immigration minister to the money-grabbing, vote-losing franking credits fiasco. Mr Bowen’s ideology is compounded by idiocy.
The fact that the USA and the UK at this climate meeting are pushing for nuclear to be a key component of reaching net zero means that instead of us being in lockstep with our most important Aukus allies, and instead of using Cop28 as the perfect launchpad for an Australian nuclear industry, Mr Bowen will be standing on the sidelines, a ‘nuclear Nigel no-friends’. The idiocy is then shrouded in incompetence.
Having vandalised vast swathes of agricultural land with his transmission-lines madness and touted offshore wind farms as the solution to his renewables quest, Mr Bowen has met stiff resistance from many of Labor’s natural constituency and is now running around proposing silliness like floating windmills miles out at sea or even greater taxpayer expenditure on solar farms. Future nuclear-powered generations will look back on his hare-brained follies, along with Snowy 2.0, green hydrogen, carbon capture and so on, with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.
Next, take Labor’s hapless immigration and home affairs ministers, both clearly floundering and out of their depth; hardly surprising from a party that brought us over a thousand deaths at sea and an endless flotilla of leaky people-smuggling boats. Following the chaos surrounding the release of long-term detainees (including rapists, murderers and pedophiles) by the increasingly activist left-wing High Court, the Albanese government is now voluntarily importing hundreds of Gazan refugees into this country, despite the fact hat a recent survey showed a terrifying 75 per cent of Palestinians support Hamas and the 7 October atrocities. How are Australians, and more specifically Australian Jews, meant to feel secure with Labor in power?
On the economy we clearly see the three i’s hard at work as well as on industrial relations and especially on Labor’s defence policy, which expert Greg Sheridan derides as ‘criminally negligent’.
Meanwhile, everyday Australians increasingly struggle to make ends meet as the Prime Minister jets around the globe with no discernible benefits to the nation. Back at home, emboldened by the absence of any moral leadership and moral clarity from the government, foolish youth (urged on by teachers and unions) and imbecilic actors don keffiyehs to parade their obscene ‘support for Palestine’, in the process terrifying Jewish communities and giving succour and encouragement to the vile rapists, torturers and murderers of Hamas and their acolytes.
From a purely political level, the self-evident failures of the Albanese government, including the huge own goal of the Voice referendum, make a change of government increasingly likely, as the trend in current polls suggests. But there is a long hard slog ahead and there is certainly no room for complacency.
Peter Dutton himself is an impressive opposition leader, exuding an air of common sense and mainstream values. The Voice victory and the way he stood back to allow Senator Jacinta Price to shine bodes well for his prime ministership.
Arguably, it is only the Liberals themselves who stand in the way of a Coalition victory at the next election. If the so-called ‘moderates’ – the Birmingham-Leeser-Bragg brigade – repeat the errors of the past and attempt to water down or ditch conservative policies, the Libs will lose.
Left to his own devices and political instincts and free of any stupidity or sabotage from the Teal-soaked bed-wetters, Peter Dutton will likely be our next prime minister. And it can’t come soon enough.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/the-three-is/
**********************************************1 December, 2023
My daughter’s planning an arts degree. I’m proud (and quietly terrified)
As an Arts graduate myself, I have a degree of sympathy with the lady below but I think she is out of touch with the modern world. Instead of introducing kids to great literature and ideas of the past, a modern Arts degree is more likely to be dominated by "theory" aka Marxism. Arts faculties these days are little more than Madrassas of Leftism. They close minds rather than open them.
I greatly enjoyed the introduction to the humanities that I got from my education but I am not sure where you could get anything comparable these days. Find below what a humanities education can be
https://memoirsjr.blogspot.com/2015/07/some-reflections-about-education.html
With year 12 exams now a sleep-in-filled month ago, my answer to the question of what my daughter’s plans are for next year is always given with a grimace and often followed by discussion about our society’s priorities. You see, my daughter is planning to do an arts degree.
I’m proud of her choice, despite all the jokes about highly qualified telemarketers or the core ability of an arts graduate to add the word “why” into the standard question: “Would you like fries with that?”
That’s because I deeply admire people whose motivation to study is to know more about history, language, culture and society, as well as to expand their critical thinking skills and understand our place in the world.
I’m also terrified she’s going to end up balancing on a see-saw with low career prospects at one end and a high HECS debt on the other. And yet, I read that current arts students are persevering with their course despite the soaring cost of their degree. I confess, I’m sticking my fingers in my ears and singing “la, la, la” when I think about how the 2020 Morrison government’s “job-ready graduates” scheme raised fees for arts courses by 117 per cent. (Yes, it more than doubled the cost.)
To be honest, I’d be quietly thrilled if my daughter was keen on one of the courses that had their fees lowered because they have a more direct link to a career. But the key word in that sentence is “if”.
The parents who are driving teachers out of the classroom
I’ve lived long enough to know that pursuing a course because of parental wishes or societal pressures will likely lead to drop-out or, like several people I know, to a completed degree but not a single day spent working in that field. And, let’s face it, many professions arising from courses for which HECS fees were cut by the Morrison government – to encourage participation – are not exactly inspiring at the moment. Teachers are leaving in droves, vets are experiencing high suicide rates and health workers are often overworked and underappreciated.
I’m heartened to discover that changes to HECS aren’t affecting students’ course choices nearly as much as the policy creators hoped. Research conducted in NSW (which, full disclosure, was led by my nephew Max Yong) showed that only 1.5 per cent of course choosers were influenced by price.
That’s good news because, while announcing free nursing courses makes for a great political soundbite, young people seem clever enough to know it’s a terrible idea to encourage uninterested and unsuitable people into a caring profession.
Frankly, it’s damn rude of a government to devalue those interested in bigger-picture thinking. I’d go as far as suggesting that increasing HECS fees for arts-based subjects is punishment for those not buying into neoliberal views. Especially when a HECS debt of about $45,000 (the rough figure my daughter’s facing, not including the costs of moving from a regional home to a city to study) might stretch out to a life-long burden.
Not only is it backwards logic to charge the highest prices for those courses that are less likely to set you up with a high-paying career (a point made by everyone from my nephew to the Productivity Commission), but surely we want to encourage deep and contextual thinking?
This is especially so in our era of quick-fire social media opinions and increasing mis- and disinformation. At a time when teachers are being told not to bring politics into the classroom, I reckon we need more people who understand the difference between political leanings and the complexities of history. For instance, introducing students to both the reasoning behind the creation of Israel and the impact on Palestine is not politics; it’s education.
If we cease to value thought and scholarship for scholarship’s sake, we might as well all give up and leave our world to AI businesses that are happily ripping off original thought in the name of profit.
We don’t always know what will come from study for study’s sake. When my father pursued a degree, then PhD, in the 1960s, pure maths was seen to have little real-world relevance, yet it is now appreciated for the transferable skills to fields such as computing and economics.
Who knows what jobs will be available by the time my daughter finishes her degree, which may or may not include history, English and Indonesian, subjects her amazing (public school) teachers inspired her to explore. Either way, as someone looking set to achieve a high ATAR, I think she should be celebrated for choosing arts over options that academic kids often feel pushed towards.
The truth is she has no idea what she wants to do when she grows up and, at 18, I reckon that’s OK. In fact, it aligns with the idea of studying humanities which, instead of being about concrete certainty and measurable outcomes, is about asking questions and probing possibilities.
I hope the current government reverses “job-ready graduates” as part of its review of the Australian Universities Accord, which is investigating the quality, accessibility, affordability and sustainability of higher education. Yes, that’s partly on a very selfish level as I don’t want my daughter to be burdened by study-related debt, but also because young people shouldn’t be punished for asking big questions about our world.
***********************************************
South Australia: Premier attacked for removing the words 'ANZAC Day' from list of annual public holidays
ANZAC day is when Australians remember their many war dead. It is the most solemn day there is in Australia -- embraced by young and old
A former liberal MP has slammed the South Australian government for removing Anzac Day, Christmas and the King's Birthday from the state's annual holiday list.
Nicolle Flint, now a Sky News Political Commentator, called premier Peter Malinauskas' Labor government 'un-Australian' because of the changes made in its Public Holidays Bill 2023.
The new bill replaces the old Holidays Act of 1910 and has controversially removed any reference to Anzac Day, Christmas and the King's Birthday.
Dates for each will instead be marked and the old listing for Anzac Day is now referred to as '25 April' a day 'fixed as a public holiday'.
Ms Flint is fearful that the subtle change will have the same snowball effect as the Gillard government's Sex Discrimination Amendment Act of 2013 which removed the definition of a woman.
'We did not put families through the trauma of losing loved ones, and coping with the life-long injuries of those who returned home, to have the day when we remember them reduced to a mere date on the calendar,' Ms Flint wrote.
'This is the history the South Australian Labor Party is deleting.
'Labor seem determined to erase not only the one day that brings all Australians together to commemorate our brave men and women and their families who fought for our freedom, but also Christmas Day, Australia Day and the King's Birthday.'
Removing references to these three holidays will lead to a cascading effect which 'pretends Western civilisation never existed' according to Ms Flint.
Ten years on from Ms Gillard's Sex Discrimination Amendment Act legal experts have debated the effect the law has had on formerly single-sex spaces.
The state Liberal party voted against the new bill and unsuccessfully tried adding the holiday's names back into the draft bill prior to legislation.
The Gillard government's decision to remove the definition of 'woman' from its legislation has come with several legislative headaches.
Ms Flint pointed towards instances that have stemmed from men who have been able to enter female bathrooms, jails, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12808415/Anzac-Day-South-Australia-Nicolle-Flint.html
*************************************Government rejects mandate for households to buy EVs or greener appliances
Households will be spared a national mandate to change their energy appliances or embrace electric vehicles after the federal government dismissed a call from its own climate advisor to set the new targets, amid a Labor debate on the need to cut the cost of living.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen dismissed the proposals from the Climate Change Authority to set the goals for the sale of cleaner cars and impose bans on gas connections to homes, saying the government was focused on “reliable and affordable” power.
The decision came as Labor MPs urged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to deliver new policies to put downward pressure on the cost of living, such as by making federal assistance more widely available to Australians who currently miss out on the help.
The moves are another sign of the pressure within the government for policies that deliver cost relief and avoid placing any new burden on households while Chalmers and other ministers devise new measures for the May budget.
Chalmers made no comment after meeting the Labor caucus members on Thursday, but one of the MPs in the talks, Jerome Laxale, told his constituents that he asked the treasurer to extend the eligibility for federal assistance.
“Many more of you have been telling me that you’re struggling,” said Laxale, the member for Bennelong in Sydney, in a Facebook post to voters. “Our cost-of-living relief to date has been targeted and measured. For those eligible, it has helped and has been welcome.”
“Today, I asked the treasurer to consider widening the eligibility of some of these effective policies through the budget process. As the impacts of interest rates linger, I believe more Australians will require access to targeted, measured and effective cost-of-living relief.”
Existing government assistance measures include the energy bill subsidies unveiled last December and opposed by the Coalition in parliament in a vote on whether to restrict coal and gas exports and increase local energy supply.
While the energy bill subsidies were targeted at people on the Age Pension and federal income support, Laxale’s call suggests these or other policies could be extended to more households.
The Climate Change Authority, an independent agency that provides expert advice to government, called on the Albanese government in its Annual Progress Report to do more to meet its emissions reduction targets.
It issued a total of 42 recommendations to boost climate action, 39 of which the government either agreed with, agreed in principle or merely noted.
Greens leader Adam Bandt backed the authority’s call for bans on petrol cars and gas connections.
“It’s very disappointing that Labor won’t listen to the Climate Change Authority and help homes get off gas and get into electric cars,” Bandt said.
Grattan Institute’s Getting Off Gas report, released in August, found rising gas use risked the nation’s climate goals. The 5 million houses with a gas connection account for about 17 per cent of Australia’s fossil fuel consumption.
Bowen defends ‘incremental’ climate progress but flags tougher curbs
A ban on gas connections will apply to new houses and apartments in Victoria and the ACT from next year. But other states have not indicated any plans to follow suit and the Albanese government said it would work with states to increase uptake of cleaner appliances, including through its $1.7 billion Energy Savings Package.
Bowen also dismissed the authority’s call for a binding target that drives uptake of electric vehicles to 100 per cent of new car sales by 2040.
The European Union, Canada, UK and Japan have pledged for 100 per cent of new passenger car sales to be electric by at least 2035.
Official figures released on Thursday showed Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose four million tonnes in the 12 months to June as the economy continued to bounce back from the COVID-19 contraction, hitting a total of 467 million tonnes.
While the rise is at odds with public claims about cutting emissions, the government insists greenhouse emissions are on track to fall 42 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 – just shy of Labor’s 43 per cent target.
Bowen and Transport Minister Catherine King have pledged to introduce a new electric vehicle policy that encourages carmakers to sell more electric vehicles. Consultation is under way on fuel efficiency standards to limit average emissions, measured in grams of CO2 per kilometre, produced by the overall fleet of vehicles sold into the market by a manufacturer, to encourage them to sell more EVs.
*********************************************
Councils fear roadworks cost increase as gravel pit permits change under Native Title Act
Western Queensland councils are scrambling to access gravel for roadworks after the state government changed its interpretation of the Native Title Act, a move which could cost ratepayers "millions".
Quilpie Shire Mayor Stuart Mackenzie called it a "governmental, legal conundrum" that could lead to a huge increase in the cost of roadworks.
"If you can't get gravel, you can't maintain your roads – it's as simple as that," he said.
The material from the quarries is used to patch up flood-damaged roads and reseal airstrips, vital to connecting isolated outback communities.
The state government, which manages the hundreds of quarries scattered across the outback, recently changed its interpretation of the federal Native Title Act 1993.
It means councils must form Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA) with the native title holders for each individual gravel pit.
That process can take more than 12 months, but many western and north-western councils have been notified that their current permits will expire within weeks.
According to the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF), the change was made in 2020 when native title interests conflicted with the Forestry Act 1959.
"As a result, the basis on which some sales permits were issued for state-owned quarry materials was examined and DAF decided to resolve these matters by agreement specifically by Indigenous Land Use Agreements (ILUA)," a department spokesperson said.
Quarry quarrels
Barcoo Shire Council was the first council in Queensland to have its gravel pit licences revoked.
Only 14 of its 88 gravel pits were renewed in September.
The council's chief executive, Mike Lollback, said the cost of roadworks would rise by 50 to 100 per cent due to the increased distance and labour required to access the available pits.
"Gravel is the lifeblood of a lot of the work that's conducted by local governments in western Queensland," he said.
"We have to get our gravel somewhere to keep our road programs and our road repairs current."
Barcoo Shire has since managed to reopen another 26 pits after forming agreements with local Aboriginal groups.
With Barcoo Shire ringing the alarm bell, other councils in western Queensland are preparing for how the quarry closures will impact their patch.
An analysis of a nearby council to the north-west, Boulia Shire, conducted by the Remote Area Planning and Development Board (RAPAD), found it would have to pay over $5 million more a year for gravel.
The shire is one of the most remote in Queensland and is facing the closure of 96 out of its 100 gravel pits.
The RAPAD report stated the rise in cost would lead to delays in road repairs, increased freight costs, and damage to existing roads as the gravel would need to be carted in from hundreds of kilometres away.
Boulia Shire Council was approached for comment.
Unclaimed and unresolved
An issue the councils raise is that much of the country where gravel pits lie are areas where no native title claimant has been established.
According to the National Native Title Tribunal, only a third of land in Queensland has a native title holder.
Quilpie Mayor Stuart Mackenzie said it was causing a "major headache" for councils trying to broker agreements.
He said 12 of the 110 gravel pits the council accessed were on land where there was no native title holder.
"So we've got an area there that has no native title claimant, which is actually the worst scenario," he said.
"If we can't access the pits that we would normally access, it makes the job really expensive and hard to tender on as well."
************************************
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
***************************************